DISSECTING LEFTISM MIRROR

This document is part of an archive of postings on Dissecting Leftism, a blog hosted by Blogspot who are in turn owned by Google. The index to the archive is available here or here. Indexes to my other blogs can be located here or here. Archives do accompany my original postings but, given the animus towards conservative writing on Google and other internet institutions, their permanence is uncertain. These alternative archives help ensure a more permanent record of what I have written. My Home Page. My Recipes. My alternative Wikipedia. My Blogroll. Email me (John Ray) here. NOTE: The short comments that I have in the side column of the primary site for this blog are now given at the foot of this document.

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31 October, 2019

New York Times Confirms: It's Trump Versus the Deep State

Even the Gray Lady admits the president is up against a powerful bureaucracy that wants him sunk

The New York Times on Thursday published a remarkable piece that essentially acknowledged the existence of an American “deep state” and its implacable hostility to Donald Trump. The Times writers (fully five on the byline: Peter Baker, Lara Jakes, Julian E. Barnes, Sharon LaFraniere, and Edward Wong) certainly don’t decry the existence of this deep state, as so many conservatives and Trump supporters do. Nor do they refrain from the kinds of value-charged digs and asides against Trump that have illuminated the paper’s consistent bias against the president from the beginning.

But they do portray the current impeachment drama as the likely denouement of a struggle between the outsider Trump and the insider administrative forces of government. In so doing, they implicitly give support to those who have argued that American foreign policy has become the almost exclusive domain of unelected bureaucrats impervious to the views of elected officials—even presidents—who may harbor outlooks different from their own.

This is a big deal because, even in today’s highly charged political environment, with a sitting president under constant guerrilla attack, few have been willing to acknowledge any such deep state phenomenon. When in the spring of 2018, The National Interest asked 12 presumed experts—historians, writers, former government officials, and think tank mavens—to weigh in on whether there was in fact such a thing as a deep state, eight said no, two waffled with a “sort of” response, and only two said yes. Former Colorado senator Gary Hart made fun of the whole concept, warning of “sly devils meeting in the furnace room after hours, passing out assignments for subverting the current administration.”

But now the Times’ Baker et al weigh in with an analysis saying that, yes, Trump has been battling something that some see as a deep state, and the deep state is winning. The headline: “Trump’s War on the ‘Deep State’ Turns Against Him.” There’s an explanatory subhed that reads: “The impeachment inquiry is in some ways the culmination of a battle between the president and the government institutions he distrusted and disparaged.”

As the Times reporters put it in the story text, “The House impeachment inquiry into Mr.Trump’s efforts to force Ukraine to investigate Democrats is the climax of a 33-month scorched-earth struggle between a president with no record of public service and the government he inherited but never trusted.” Leaving aside the requisite rapier thrust at the president (“with no record of public service”), this is a pretty good summation of the Trump presidency—the story of entrenched government bureaucrats and a president who sought to curb their power. Or, put another way, the story of a president who sought to rein in the deep state and a deep state that sought to destroy his presidency.

Baker and his colleagues clearly think the president is on the ropes. They quote Virginia’s Democratic Representative Gerald Connolly as saying the nation is headed toward a kind of “karmic justice,” with the House impeachment inquiry now giving opportunity to once-anonymous officials to “speak out, speak up, testify about and against.”

Connolly and the Times reporters are probably right. The House seems headed inexorably toward impeachment. The president’s struggle against the deep state appears now to be a lost cause. To prevail, he needed to marshal far more public support for his agenda—including curtailment of the deep state—than he proved capable of doing. He is a beleaguered president and is likely to remain so throughout the remainder of his term.

The reporters note that Trump sought from the beginning to minimize the role of career officials. He gave more ambassadorships to political appointees—”the highest rate in history,” say the reporters (without noting that Franklin Roosevelt, John Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, and Ronald Reagan weren’t far behind). The result, they write, has been “an exodus from public service.” They quote a “nonpartisan organization” saying the Trump administration lost nearly 1,200 senior career service employees in its first 18 months—roughly 40 percent more than during President Barack Obama’s first year and a half in office.

The reporters reveal a letter from 36 former foreign service officers to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo complaining that he had “failed to protect civil servants from political retaliation” and citing the removal of U.S. ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch. Another letter signed by more than 270 former employees of the U.S. Agency for International Development expressed anger at the treatment of public servants and the president’s “cavalier (and quite possibly corrupt) approach to making foreign policy.”

The tone of the Times piece seems to suggest these expressions and actions constitute a kind of indictment of Trump. But a more objective appraisal would be that it is merely the outward manifestation of that “33-month scorched-earth struggle” the Times was talking about. Does a president have a right to fire an ambassador? How serious an offense is it when he appoints political figures to ambassadorships at a rate slightly higher than some previous presidents? If foreign policy careerists decide to leave the government because they don’t like the president’s effort to rein in foreign policy careerists, is that a black mark on the president—or merely the natural result of a fundamental intragovernmental struggle?

But the Times reporters give the game away more explicitly in cataloguing a list of instances where those careerists sought to undermine the president because they found his policy decisions contemptible. “While many career employees have left,” writes the Times, “some of those who stayed have resisted some of Mr. Trump’s initiatives.” When the president canceled large war games with South Korea, the military held them anyway—only on a smaller scale and without fanfare. Diplomats negotiated an agreement before a NATO summit to foreclose any Trump action based on a different outlook. When the White House ordered foreign aid frozen this year, agency officials quietly worked with Congress to get it restored. State Department officials enlisted congressional allies to hinder Trump’s efforts to initiate weapons sales to Saudi Arabia and other nations.

Further, as the Times writes, “When transcripts of [Trump’s] telephone calls with the leaders of Mexico and Australia were leaked, it convinced him that he could not trust the career staff and so records of subsequent call were stashed away in a classified database.” And that was very early in his presidency, about the time Trump also learned there was a nasty dossier out there that was designed to provide grist for anyone interested in undermining or destroying his presidency.

And of course, now governmental officials are lining up before the House impeachment panel to slam the president over his effort to get Ukraine to investigate his Democratic rival Joe Biden and Biden’s son, Hunter, and his apparently related decision to hold up $391 million in security aid to Ukraine. As I have written in this space previously, this outlandish action by Trump constituted a profound lapse in judgment that was a kind of dare for opposition Democrats to fire off the impeachment cannon. And fire it off they have. “Now,” writes the Times, “[Trump] faces the counteroffensive.”

But that doesn’t take away from the central point of the Times story—that Trump and the deep state have been in mortal combat since the beginning of his administration. And the stakes are huge.

Trump wanted to restore at least somewhat cordial relations with Russia, whereas the deep state considered that the height of folly.

Trump wanted to get out of Afghanistan, whereas the deep state totally opposed such a move.

Trump viewed America’s role in Syria as focused on defeating ISIS, whereas the deep state wanted to continue favoring the overthrow of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

Trump was wary of letting events in Ukraine draw America into a direct confrontation with Russia, whereas the deep state wants to wrest Ukraine out of Russia’s sphere of influence even if it means opening tensions with the Bear.

Trump wanted to bring China to account for its widespread abuse of normal trading practices, whereas the deep state clung to “free trade’’ even in the face of such abuse.

These are big issues facing America. And the question hovering over the country as the impeachment drama proceeds is: are these matters open to debate in America? Or will the deep state suppress any such debate? And can a president—any president—pursue the Trump policy options without being subjected to the powerful yet subtle machinations of a wily bureaucracy bent on preserving its status and outlook?

SOURCE

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Why Not Try Free Market Health Care?

John C. Goodman

I’m often asked if the free market can work in health care. My quick answer is: that’s the only thing that does work.

Show me a health care sector where there is no Medicare, no Blue Cross and no employer and I bet that’s a market that works very well.

Lasik surgery is one example. Patients get a package price and they know what they are going to pay in advance. There are no “surprise medical bills.” As my colleague Devon Herrick has shown, there is price and quality competition here – unlike other health care markets.

Competition works. Over the past decade, the real price of Lasik surgery fell 25%, despite a huge increase in the number of procedures and all manner of technological change – the type of change we are told leads to cost increases everywhere else in medicine.

A similar story can be told about cosmetic surgery – another sector where the third-party payers have no role to play.

What about conventional procedures – like knee and hip replacements? Can the market work there? Where patients pay with their own money, it already is working. Canadian patients routinely come to the United States for these procedures (in order to avoid lengthy waits for surgery in their own country). They get package prices and they pay about the same amount that Medicare pays. That’s about one-half to one fourth of what employer plans typically pay.

By the way, there is nothing the Canadians are doing that you can’t do. There are three requirements: (1) you must be willing to travel, (2) you must pay in advance and (3) you can’t have an insurance company step in after the fact and argue about whether the entire procedure was really necessary.

MediBid is a company that puts patients and doctors together for all manner of procedures. It has created an online competitive market. Patients submit data and their need for a procedure. Providers bid on price. Patients can also check out quality information about the providers.

Then there is the international market for medical tourism. You can shave one-third off the cost of surgical procedures and maybe more by traveling to Health City Cayman Islands. The center posts quality information online (infection rates, readmission rates and mortality rates) and I suspect that their numbers easily beat comparable figures at the hospital nearest you.

It’s also worth noting that most of the cost-saving innovations in health care have emerged outside the third-party payer system – initially catering to people paying with their own money, even if the third-party payers eventually came around.

Walk-in clinics emerged for patients who bought primary care with their own health care dollars.

Firms like Teladoc began providing phone and email doctor consultations – completely outside the third-party payer system.
If the idea of letting employees participate in a free medical marketplace seems too radical for some employers, I have a more modest suggestion. Liberate primary care.

That is, put two or three thousand dollars in an account for the employee every year and let the employee be completely responsible for all primary care, all diagnostics tests and maybe even all generic drugs.

Who is ready to serve these employees? Walmart, for one. Beginning this month, Sam's Club is offering customers packages of healthcare services, including discounted dental care, free prescription drugs, and telephone health consultations in Michigan, Pennsylvania and North Carolina.

Also, Walmart has opened its first Health Center in Dallas Georgia, following its business model of “everyday low prices.” A dental cleaning costs $25, a doctor’s visit $40. A test for a urinary-tract infection is $10; a pap smear $50; a vitamin B-12 injection $18; and a flu shot $39.84.

Then there is concierge care. At one time only available to the very rich, a model of what is now called “direct primary care” has been developed by Atlas MD in Wichita and is rapidly spreading across the country.

The cost is $50 a month for an adult and $10 for a child. For that the family gets 24/7 access to a physician (including by phone and email), who provides all the services people traditionally expect from a family doctor. The family also gets access to generic drugs for prices lower than what Medicaid pays.

Ameriflex is a Dallas-based company that helps employers set up a platform for employees to connect with direct primary care doctors – bypassing insurance companies altogether.

A market for primary care is fast developing. Employers are foolish if they don’t take advantage of it.

SOURCE

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IN BRIEF

"SWINDLING FUTURITY ON A LARGE SCALE": Senate rejects Rand Paul's latest effort to cut spending (The Hill)

FOR THE RECORD: Confiscating the wealth of all billionaires wouldn't pay for three average years of Medicare for All (Washington Examiner)

DEFAMATION SUIT REOPENED: Judge reopens Covington Catholic High student's defamation suit against The Washington Post (Fox News)

TPS EXTENDED: U.S. to extend temporary protections for El Salvadorans for at least another year (CNN)

BREXIT: Britain set for an early election

INNOVATION, NOT REGULATION: MIT engineers develop a new way to remove carbon dioxide from the air (MIT News)

POLICY: Why millions are still uninsured despite government intervention (The Daily Signal)

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For more blog postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated), A Coral reef compendium and an IQ compendium. (Both updated as news items come in). GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten. I also put up occasional updates on my Personal blog and each day I gather together my most substantial current writings on THE PSYCHOLOGIST.

Email me here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or here (Personal). My annual picture page is here

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30 October, 2019

A big win for America — terminating al-Baghdadi

Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the self-proclaimed "caliph" of the Islamic State, is dead after a U.S. military raid of his compound in northwest Syria. Al-Baghdadi was corned in a dead-end tunnel underneath the compound, where he detonated a suicide vest, killing himself and three of his children. There were no serious casualties for Americans, and U.S. forces recovered his remains from the rubble of the collapsed tunnel to confirm his demise. Far from a profile in courage, al-Baghdadi died as the same cowardly thug he played in life.

"He was vicious and violent, and he died in a vicious and violent way, as a coward, running and crying," President Donald Trump declared in a White House speech. "Baghdadi's demise demonstrates America's relentless pursuit of terrorist leaders, and our commitment to the enduring and total defeat of ISIS."

This win substantially answers criticism of his recent decision regarding troop movements in Syria. The Middle East is a chessboard.

The operation that killed al-Baghdadi was named for Kayla Mueller, the American medical-relief worker who was captured by ISIS in 2013 and then spent two years being tortured and raped by al-Baghdadi himself before she was murdered in 2015.

The reason Trump said he did not give any advance notice to the House Intel Committee? "Adam Schiff is the biggest leaker in Washington," he said. "You know that, I know that, we all know that."

Importantly, The Wall Street Journal notes, "The raid also shows the importance of intelligence gathered from prisoners. Iraqi officials say their interrogation of captured ISIS fighters in recent months provided news about Baghdadi's location. The American left has tried to discredit interrogation since the Iraq war, but it remains crucial to preventing future attacks and killing terror leaders."

"Baghdadi's death is significant," says Thomas Joscelyn, an analyst on Islamic terrorism. "He was the supposed caliph, to whom thousands of followers around the globe pledged their allegiance. [But now the] caliphate controls little to no ground, and the self-declared caliph is dead."

That's true, but as the termination of Osama bin Laden proved, however weakened, the Islamic State threat will endure for years as part of the larger asymmetric threat from Jihadistan.

SOURCE

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President Trump reaches 157 judges appointed, thanks to GOP Senate

With the support of Senate Republicans, President Trump has appointed 157 judges to the federal bench in less than three years. This means that Trump has filled 18 percent of the 870 Article III judgeships in the country. (Article III judges are the ones defined in Article III of the U.S. Constitution and have lifetime appointments.) Furthermore, Trump has now had more judges confirmed than any of his recent predecessors at the same point in their presidencies.

While many are aware that Trump has appointed two fine Supreme Court justices, it is less well-known that Trump has made significant progress in remaking the federal appeals courts, the 13 powerful courts one level beneath the Supreme Court. Of the judges confirmed under Trump, 43 are appeals court judges — a very impressive number. In fact, this is 14 more appeals court judges than George W. Bush, 16 more than Clinton, and 22 more than Obama had confirmed at the same point in their presidencies.

Additionally, Trump has flipped the Third Circuit Court of Appeals (which covers Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Delaware, and the Virgin Islands). For those unfamiliar with the term, “flipping a circuit” means creating a majority of judges on a circuit court who were nominated by presidents from the same party. Trump is also on the cusp of flipping the Second Circuit of Appeals (which covers New York, Vermont, and Connecticut) and the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals (which covers Georgia, Florida, and Alabama). Trump has even made notable gains on the notoriously liberal Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals (which covers Alaska, Washington, Idaho, Montana, Oregon, California, Nevada, Arizona, Hawaii, Guam, and the Northern Mariana Islands) where there are now 16 Democrat-appointed judges and 12 Republican-appointed judges with one vacancy.

Nor are these gains just academic; Trump’s appointees are making a difference. For example, Neil Gorsuch, Trump’s first Supreme Court nominee, provided the key fifth vote in the Janus case, which established that all government workers have the right to work and cannot be compelled to pay union fees. This was a huge victory for conservative government employees who had previously been compelled to support liberal public employee unions. In addition, as Adam Feldman wrote on SCOTUS Blog, “The Supreme Court with Kavanaugh is distinctly different from the court with Kennedy. There is no longer a clear swing vote.” As evidence of this fact, both Gorsuch and Kavanaugh joined the other conservatives on the Court in a 5-4 decision allowing construction of the border wall to continue.

To try to stop this progress, Senate Democrats continue to obstruct judicial confirmations. They are simply terrified of the thought that they might not be able to use the courts to impose their will on the people as they have done so many times in the past. This fear has even led some Democrats to openly support packing the Supreme Court.

In spite of the great work Senate Republicans have done so far, much work remains to be done. Overall, there is still a small majority of Democrat-appointed judges among all active Article III judges. However, there are 120 current and future judicial vacancies, and nearly 50 judicial nominees are awaiting hearings or confirmation votes. By simply filling current vacancies, Republicans can create a majority of Republican-appointed judges. At the current pace, the Senate would confirm about 70 more judges by the end of Trump’s first term.

Many people voted for President Trump and Senate Republicans because they wanted to see conservatives appointed to the federal bench; and Trump and Senate Republicans have delivered for those voters. Long after the President leaves office, his appointees to the courts should still be working to protect our rights from the leftists who would take them away.

SOURCE

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Elijah Cummings and the Little Sisters

Peggy Noonan

I was writing a rather stern column about the mess in Washington, but I got kind of swept Thursday by the beautiful bipartisan tribute to Democratic Rep. Elijah Cummings, in Congress’s Statuary Hall, a ceremony held just before his burial back in Baltimore.

I want to get beyond the merely sentimental. Everyone seems to have liked him a lot; I knew him slightly and liked him too. I would only add to his enumerated virtues the power of his warmth. I met him at an event five or so years ago and when we were introduced I went to shake his hand. He’d have none of that and enveloped me in a hug. I don’t remember what we talked about but it seemed important to the two of us, in one of those nice moments that sometimes happen, that we show a mutual appreciation for who the other was. We did, and held hands. I just found to my shock that remembering this leaves me a little choked.

There was something not sentimental but poignant and half-grasped in the tribute to him. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell spoke movingly about how Cummings came to Washington not to be a big man but to do big things. Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said, “He was strong, very strong when necessary… . His voice could … stir the most cynical hearts.” Cummings’s friend Republican Rep. Mark Meadows said he had “eyes that would pierce through anybody standing in his way,” and like the others read Scripture. It was nice to hear the Bible read in Statuary Hall; the religiosity had a great sweetness to it. “In my father’s house are many mansions,” Mr. Meadows read, and suggested the Baltimore boy was in a grand new home.

What was poignant was how much the speakers enjoyed being their best selves. Congress knows how hapless it looks, how riven by partisanship and skins-vs.-shirts dumbness. For many of them it takes the tang out of things. They know it lowers their standing in America. They grieve it. It embarrasses them. They’d like to be part of something that works, something respected.

It wouldn’t be lost on the brighter of them that they were enacting in the Cummings ceremony a unity and respect, a shared purpose, that they wish they could sustain but are unable to.

They believe they are forced into their partisan positions by several things, among them that America is badly divided and the politically active on both sides, in their mutual loathing, pull toward the extremes.

As I watched the ceremony I thought of a dinner two weeks ago with a close friend. It was just the two of us and we found ourselves going deep about how we feel about everything. She is a spirited lefty, a longtime Democratic donor, I am a righty, a conservative as I define it, but neither of us has ever cared much about that because the essence of friendship is … essence. Who you are, which fairly enough includes politics but is not limited to politics. We’ve had 30 years of teasing and occasional sparring but this night we went to the thoughts behind our views. She asked me how I see my own political views; am I more lefty than I was? I found myself saying something I’d never said, that all my political thinking comes down to this: I am for whatever will hold America together, full stop. I see it breaking in a million pieces and my every political impulse has to do with wanting it to hold together, to endure, to go forward in history and the world. If that means compromise, fine. She thought about this, nodded and said softly that that makes complete sense right now. “That’s a program.”

But don’t most of us kind of think like this? Even if we haven’t articulated it or even noticed it’s what we think. But isn’t it the right primary intention?

A deep impediment is the air of political maximalism that careless people who never know the implications of things encourage. Years ago Rep. Bella Abzug of New York would point out that her father was a butcher, who owned the Live and Let Live Meat Market. I always liked that. Nobody says that phrase anymore, live and let live, but long ago everybody did. Now it’s part of what’s missing — a sense of give. So many people feel bullied, pushed around by vague and implacable forces. They fear the erosion of central freedoms.

Here is the first example that springs to mind. It reflects my cultural views and indignations, but I ask you to take it on its own terms.

In early October CNN had a town hall on LGBTQ issues for the Democratic presidential candidates. They said the sort of things they say, you can imagine them, you don’t need your neighborhood pundit to tell you. But at one point the essential nature of the new progressivism jumped out.

Don Lemon asked Beto O'Rourke: “Do you think religious institutions like colleges, churches, charities, should they lose their tax exempt status if they oppose same-sex marriage?”

“Yes,” said Mr. O'Rourke, not missing a beat. “There can be no reward, no benefit, no tax break for anyone or any institution, any organization in America that denies the full human rights and the full civil rights of every single one of us. So as president we’re going to make that a priority and we are going to stop those who are infringing upon the human rights of our fellow Americans.”

Regular readers know we do not especially admire Mr. O'Rourke, that we believe the past year he has been having not a campaign but a manic episode. But he said what he said because he wanted to please a significant part of the Democratic base, and he received big applause.

Can we agree his is a radical, maximalist stand? Under his standard the Catholic Church would be ruined, and with it a whole world of charities, schools, hospitals, orphanages, other agencies, all of which help those with limited resources. Let’s just posit without bothering to defend the proposition that an America without the Catholic church would be a poorer, sicker, colder place, and one less likely to continue.

At almost the same time as the CNN town hall, the Little Sisters of the Poor, who serve the elderly and impoverished, were again in court asking for protection from the ObamaCare mandate that tells them they must include contraceptive coverage in their employee health plans. It’s been a long legal journey: The Supreme Court has already been involved. So has the Trump administration, whose directives regarding religious protection have been challenged by certain states, which got injunctions, which have been upheld by the appellate courts. The Sisters are forced to appeal to the high court again, which will, please God, affirm, with clarity and force, the constitutional rights without which they cannot exist.

Oh, progressives, if you only had the wisdom to back off, to see your demands as maximalist, extreme, damaging to the fabric, the opposite of live and let live. When you push in this way to control the culture of the country, do you ever ask, “When I win, will there be a country left?” [They don't care, Peggy]

SOURCE

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IN BRIEF

OUT OF OPTIONS: Rep. Katie Hill resigns amid allegations of sexual relationships with staffers (The Hill)

JUDICIAL ACTIVISM: Obama judge orders DOJ to turn over Mueller grand-jury material for Democrats' impeachment probe (The Washington Times)

NEWS FROM THE SWAMP: Trump showered with boos, chants of "lock him up" at World Series game in Washington, DC (NBC News)

TOPSY-TURVY: Biologically male NCAA runner named conference "female" athlete of the week (The Daily Caller)

INFERNO: California declares state of emergency as wildfires spread (National Review)

POLICY: Missile defense needs Trump's attention (Hudson Institute)

POLICY: Why Bernie Sanders' universal jobs guarantee is not a worthy goal (Foundation for Economic Education)

LEFTIST LOGIC: Motorcyclist who identifies as a bicyclist sets cycling world record (The Babylon Bee)

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For more blog postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated), A Coral reef compendium and an IQ compendium. (Both updated as news items come in). GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten. I also put up occasional updates on my Personal blog and each day I gather together my most substantial current writings on THE PSYCHOLOGIST.

Email me here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or here (Personal). My annual picture page is here

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29 October, 2019

If Elizabeth Warren really understood Native Americans, she'd know socialism doesn’t work

Executive Director of the New Mexico Alliance for Life Elisa Martinez argues socialism is not what America needs

Gallup, N.M., is known as “the heart of Indian country.” It’s sadly one of the poorest areas in the nation and has an important lesson for all Americans about our nation’s future.

My grandparents owned one of the first trading posts in Gallup. I grew up working in my dad’s small business.

I’m a Latina with New Mexico roots over 15 generations deep on dad’s side of the family and on my mother’s side we’re Zuni and Navajo. I’m an enrolled member of the Navajo Nation and … I’m a Republican.

My life experience made me a Republican. Growing up I witnessed first-hand the poverty and destruction government policies had on my people and my peoples’ land -- the Indian reservation.

Overlapping, paternalistic federal and state programs, including fully funded and inefficient healthcare, dominate the reservations’ economies. The restrictions the government places on land use, ownership and business development are microcosms of socialist failure in its purest form.

The government “help” has never encouraged financial self-sufficiency. If anything, the programs have been a disincentive to economic freedom and prosperity.

While I firmly believe all Americans should benefit from a safety net, I also know government handouts are never as powerful as a hand up. The federal government set up the reservations more than 100 years ago and, just like liberal democrats today, created these subsidized economies because they think they know what’s best for us.

The result of more than 100 years of government assistance is Indian Reservations drowning in poverty. These well-intended programs have made our people the poorest Americans. Some reservations have unemployment rates close to 85 percent, and 29 percent of employed Native Americans nationwide live below the poverty level.

As a Native American woman, when I heard Sen. Elizabeth Warren speak of her heritage, I was intrigued. Then the tragic irony became apparent. Her policies proved she knew nothing about us.

As a Native American woman, when I heard Sen. Elizabeth Warren speak of her heritage, I was intrigued. Then the tragic irony became apparent. While she claimed to be one of us, her policies proved she knew nothing about us.

She’s never experienced firsthand how big government programs fail our people. In fact, she now advocates those failed policies for all Americans.

Over 10 years "Medicare-for-All" will cost $32 trillion. Green New Deal? $93 trillion. Her Green Manufacturing Deal; $2 trillion. In total about $127 trillion.

Economists say the new taxes she has proposed would generate only $3 trillion over 10 years. So where will she find the missing $124 trillion? Warren doesn’t explain that it will require raising taxes on all Americans.

To improve peoples’ lives we can’t force them to rely on the government. Tax cuts and the free-market economy foster growth and opportunity, creating jobs and lifting the poor out of poverty.

Is it a perfect system? No, but to see more families prosper and have better opportunities, free-market economic policies, especially tax cuts, are proven to work. Socialist government-controlled economies, with handouts and higher taxes, only lead to poverty and misery.

Today, the U.S. unemployment rate is at its the lowest point in 50 years. The jobless rate for Hispanics hit a record low of 3.9 percent in September. African Americans maintained their lowest rate ever at 5.5 percent and adult women came in at 3.1 percent.

Our incredibly strong economy came about in no small part from President Trump’s tax cuts and deregulation of business. We need to preserve the working families’ tax cuts and expand them.

That’s what will help all of America’s families and that is one of the biggest reasons I am considering running for U.S. Senate in New Mexico. I’ve seen socialism, up close and personal. It’s not what America needs.

SOURCE

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In the Heartland, Impeachment Isn't Very Popular

Despite impeachment hysteria suffusing every nook and cranny of the media, despite scare headlines that tell us Trump is on his way out the door, and despite being instructed what to believe by arrogant pundits on TV, it may surprise you to know that in several heartland states, a majority of people don't support impeachment.

CNN:

In the context of the 2020 presidential election, we need to be looking to swing state polling to see how impeachment may play out on the campaign trail. The polls indicate that impeaching and removing Trump in these pivotal states is far from a slam dunk.
Wisconsin, of course, was the most infamous swing state of 2016. It was the tipping point state (i.e. the one that put Trump over the top in the electoral college). When the most accurate pollster in Wisconsin (Marquette) in 2018 reveals that impeaching and removing Trump is not popular, it's a critical finding.

Importantly, it's not just this Marquette poll that show that impeaching and remove Trump could be an electoral loser for Democrats (and potential winner for Trump) in the swing states.

Florida is one of the most important swing states in the nation. Trump won there by only a point in 2016. With 29 electoral votes, Democrats would likely take back the presidency with a win there in 2020. A poll of Florida voters conducted by the University of North Florida out this week shows the divide at 46% in support of impeaching and removing Trump and 48% opposed to it.

It gets worse for Democrats. The same states that helped Trump to a win in the Electoral College in 2016 are resistant to impeaching him.

Indeed, take an examination of the battleground states that Democrats almost certainly need to make inroads into in 2020. The New York Times and Siena College, 2018's most accurate pollster, took a poll of voters in Pennsylvania, Michigan, Florida, North Carolina, Wisconsin and Arizona. These were closest states in the country that cast their electoral votes for Trump in 2016.
Just 43% of voters in these six states want to impeach and remove from office at this point. The majority, 53%, do not. This means that the margin for not impeaching and removing Trump in these states (+10 points) is running well ahead of Trump's margin in these states of about 1.5 points. Put another way, impeaching and removing Trump from office in these states is not a popular position.

SOURCE

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Hey Bernie, it's 'Medicare for all' that would be 'cruel' and 'dysfunctional'

by Sally Pipes

During last week's Democratic presidential debate, Sen. Bernie Sanders called the current U.S. healthcare system "dysfunctional" and "cruel."

Words like that are more appropriate descriptors of the government-run healthcare systems abroad that Sanders would like to import to the United States.

Take Canada, the closest analog to Sanders's vision of "Medicare for all." Canadians face some of the longest waits for medical care on the planet. Last year, the median wait for treatment from a specialist following referral from a general practitioner was nearly 20 weeks. Things were even worse in certain provinces. The median wait in New Brunswick, for example, was 45 weeks — just shy of a year.

Patients in the United Kingdom's government-run system, the National Health Service, also struggle to access timely care. At the end of August, 4.4 million Brits were waiting to start medical treatment after a referral. In September, more than 282,000 people waited longer than 4 hours in the emergency room to be seen.

Britons with cancer have it particularly bad. In 2017, about 115,000 patients received a diagnosis too late to give them the best chance of getting effective treatment, according to Cancer Research UK. Many patients don't receive care fast enough.

That poor care has devastating consequences. Only 81% of breast cancer patients in the U.K. survive five years after diagnosis, compared to 89% in the United States. U.S. lung cancer patients have five-year survival rates that are nearly twice as long as those in the U.K.

Long waits for substandard care — that's the "cruel" and "dysfunctional" reality of government-run healthcare.

SOURCE

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Capitalism on trial: Profit is a good thing — except to the political left

Businesses thrive by offering people a better deal on goods and services. That is a huge social benefit, one no government can emulate

Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s (D-Mass.) Accountable Capitalism Act would oblige large corporations to obtain a federal charter requiring directors to consider the interests of all stakeholders — not only shareholders and customers, but also groups representing society as a whole, such as their employees, local communities and civil society, including non-representative, anti-business NGOs.

The chief justice of the supreme court of Delaware – where more than two-thirds of Fortune 500 corporations have their legal home – has written a book arguing that corporations should be run for the benefit of their workers. The Financial Times has launched a “new agenda” campaign that intones: “Capitalism. Time for a reset. Business must make a profit but should serve a purpose too.”

None of this would have come as a surprise to Joseph Schumpeter, one of the 20th century’s great economists. No one understood better the dynamic, propulsive nature of capitalism. But, unlike most economists, Schumpeter also had a deep, subtle appreciation of capitalism’s cultural effects — that, while a system of free enterprise creates successful and prosperous societies, it also plants seeds that can lead to its own demise. “Unlike any other type of society,” Schumpeter wrote “capitalism inevitably and by virtue of the very logic of its civilization creates, educates and subsidizes a vested interest in social unrest.”

And, as Schumpeter saw it, the publicly traded corporation, lacking the visceral allegiance of private property, was capitalism’s weak point: “Defenseless fortresses invite aggression especially if there is rich booty in them.” It’s a prophecy that we’re seeing come to pass.

Recently, in a letter to the Business Roundtable,181 corporate CEOs disavowed the profit motive and corporate directors’ accountability to shareholders. The CEOs championed a view now widely held: that profit could only be justified for virtuous conduct, that profit should merely be a byproduct of making certain contributions to society. It’s a position that the Business Roundtable already implicitly accepts.

It’s entirely wrong. In fact, the profit that a business earns is a pretty good approximation of its contribution to society. One might think of it in terms of a simple equation:

Revenue (what people will pay in a competitive market) minus cost (the value of resources used to provide a product or service) equals profit (a first-order indicator of a business’s contribution to society).

Profit is one of the most powerful signaling devices in a free market. In their search for profit, businesses create the dynamic for economic growth — and rising living standards. Is this not a contribution to society, of the most dramatic kind imaginable?

The point is beautifully made in Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen’s “The Prosperity Paradox.” Christensen writes of poor, developing nations: “It may sound counter-intuitive, but enduring prosperity for many countries will not come from fixing poverty. By investing in market-creating innovations, investors and entrepreneurs inadvertently engage in nation-building.” Entrepreneurs and businesses don’t have to set out to improve the world — through their collective efforts of making useful goods and services, an improved world is the outcome.

Yet today, the publicly traded corporation is perhaps under greater threat than at any time since the 1930s. Corporations are blamed for the world’s ills: inequality and stagnant income growth, poverty in poor countries, environmental degradation and, of course, climate change. Using business as tools to tackle these problems highlights a deep confusion about the proper domains of democratic politics and of business. Last year, voters rejected climate initiatives in Arizona, Colorado and, for a second time, Washington State. Failing at politics, activists seek to politicize business — which, so the argument goes, must be accountable to vast networks of “stakeholders.”

American advocates of “stakeholder accountability” miss the implications of their proposals. Shareholders – whatever their nationality – share the same interest in a business’s economic success. In contrast, stakeholders, by definition hugely diverse, have correspondingly diverse and conflicting interests. America has more multinational corporations than any other nation. Around 45 percent of Amazon’s workforce is outside America; 61 percent of Exxon Mobil’s $234 billion operating capital is located outside the United States. Suppose the European Union passes its version of Sen. Warren’s legislation, requiring that American multinationals be held accountable to European stakeholders. Forget trade wars: We could soon have wars over corporate control.

Already, Warren has written to ten CEOs demanding they back her Accountable Capitalism Act. “Commitments are hollow if they are not accompanied by tangible action that provides real benefits to workers and other stakeholders,” she told them.

One of the primary grounds on which those “real benefits” will be evaluated is environmental practices. Though environmentalism has its roots in a wholesale rejection of the Industrial Revolution and capitalism, business leaders have a long history of subscribing to its core tenets — including the premise that resource-fueled economic growth is unsustainable. Robert Anderson, chairman of Atlantic Richfield, helped finance the first Earth Day in 1970 and provided the seed funding for Friends of the Earth, which is no friend of capitalism.

In the late 1960s, the Aspen Institute, which Anderson also chaired, ran programs on the threat of climate change and the steps needed to avoid a planetary catastrophe. A two-day workshop in 1970 concluded that business-as-usual threatened the future of a decent, civilized world. “All insist,” the New York Times reported, “that the human family is approaching a historic crisis which will require fundamental revisions in the organization of society.”

Sound familiar? The world managed to survive that purported ecological emergency by ignoring it. We would be well served to ignore the similarly pitched appeals being made now. Otherwise, the attempt to solve global warming by intimidating American corporations could bring about Schumpeter’s grim prognosis of capitalism’s downfall.

SOURCE

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For more blog postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated), A Coral reef compendium and an IQ compendium. (Both updated as news items come in). GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten. I also put up occasional updates on my Personal blog and each day I gather together my most substantial current writings on THE PSYCHOLOGIST.

Email me here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or here (Personal). My annual picture page is here

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28 October, 2019

Britain's Entrapment by the French: The Triple Anniversary of 2004

Professor Christie Davies sets out some history you are not normally told. The article is from 2004

2004 is a year of three sad anniversaries in the unhappy relationship between Britain and France. Ninety years ago in August 1914 Britain was dragged into a war between France and Germany for which France was largely to blame. It was that French war that fatally undermined British power and thus Britain's ability and willingness to withstand the Nazi and Soviet threats that were the very consequence of the war that France began.

Not for the first time France had reduced Europe to ruins with her insane and criminal aggression. There ought to be a monument in English in Compiègne pointing this out. Britain's real folly though took place ten years earlier, one hundred years ago in 1904, when we agreed to the Entente Cordiale. The fact that it is always referred to in French tells us exactly who the beneficiary was. Without it Britain might well have prevaricated over and merely blustered about the German decision to send its troops through Belgium to get to France after war had broken out in 1914. More to the point the French might have had the sense not to go to war with their more powerful neighbour, Germany, if they had been fearful of what an unpredictable Britain might do.

France had been determined to go to war with Germany since her humiliating defeat in the Franco-Prussian war of 1870 when Germany annexed the German speaking provinces of Alsace and Lorraine which had been acquired in France's long creeping expansion on her eastern frontier. Indeed the history of France from the Thirty Years War to Louis XIV to Napoleon consists largely of aggression against her German neighbours . Napoleon III may have been tricked into going to war in 1870 but his bellicose response was entirely consistent with France's tradition of militarism and expansion. Napoleon III was after all the man who had meddled in Mexico during the American Civil War and fought against Austria alongside the Italians in order to acquire Nice and Savoy. He had also tried to obtain Belgium by subterfuge and behaved in a sufficiently threatening way towards Britain to cause us to improve our coastal fortifications. Bismarck merely sought the unification of Germany; there was no limit to Napoleon III's ambitions.

The French defeat in 1870 decisively confirmed France's decline from being the most powerful nation in Continental Europe to that of a feeble and unimportant country rapidly falling behind Germany in population, economic importance and military strength. A decent and sensible country would have accepted that its relegation to the second division was inevitable but the French now tried to drag every country they could find into fighting the Germans. The French threw enormous sums of money into the economic development and thus military strengthening of Russia, then lost it all and nearly ruined themselves. The French shamelessly manipulated the guileless British into thinking they ought to be at the heart of Europe even though they never got further than the Somme. This delusion of an enfeebled France that it somehow had a historic right to dominate Europe, if not by force then by chicanery, is still the source of many of our more recent problems.

The most tangible expression of the French obsession to reassert themselves was their determination to re-conquer Alsace-Lorraine, even though it was clear that this could only be achieved through a war of great destructiveness. The French had become that most dangerous of nations, a dissatisfied power seeking revenge and revanche, too weak to achieve its aims with ease yet strong enough to threaten the peace of Europe. By chance I have in front of me a textbook for French primary schools dated 3st May, 1902 called Mes Premieres Lectures, Historiettes Morales by M. A. Chalamet, member du conseil superieur de l'instruction publique. Much of it consists of fables about animals and sententious stories about bad but subsequently repentant children. It has the feel of a Sunday School prize given for regular attendance except that all reference to religion has been eliminated by the dogmatic state authorities in charge of French education. Sandwiched in the middle is a patriotic account of Alsace-Lorraine concluding, "Les Alsaciens-Lorrains n'ont pas oublie la France. La France ne doit pas les oublier". [The people of Alsace-Lorraine have not forgotten France. France must not forget them]. It is followed by the story of the trial of 'Un Patriote', Jerome Brunner tried by a German court for seditiously flying the French flag in Alsace. A childishly romantic little illustration shows Herr Brunner standing in the dock between two seated uniformed Germans in spiked helmets gesturing defiantly at the judge and boasting that his twenty year old son left Germany last month to join the French army. Here is the road map to the First World War in which many of the school-children fed on this twaddle would have been slaughtered. Even before the war they might well as teenagers during France's three year long period of conscription have been taken on an exercise into the hills above Colmar to look down on the spires of that German town and promise their officer that one day France would seize it back.

It is unfortunate that it has become customary to depict Imperial Germany as the great source of the worship of the uniform to the neglect of the red trousered French militarists who persecuted Dreyfus and coveted Colmar. Kaiser Wilhelm II was so shocked at the fanaticism, injustice and anti-Semitism of the French army in the trials of Captain Dreyfus that he offered to hand over German intelligence documents to prove the man's innocence. There are still historians in the French army who think Dreyfus was guilty. The sheer crackpot irrationality of the anti-Drefusards was the product of a militaristic revenge-seeking society desperate to believe in the infallibility of its anachronistic army.

By contrast the Germans had no designs on French territory. After all it was they who had chosen where the frontier should be. Their ambitions and their fears lay elsewhere. It was the French who sought the western front on which they were to be decimated. It was the British who in the end held the line on this front and the Americans who saved the day. The Anglo-Saxons whom the French so much resent had been manipulated into propping up an ungrateful France. In their simple-minded idealism the British and the Americans thought they had been fighting for democracy in the war to end war. They had not. They had merely been used as an instrument in the cynical power politics of the French. 1904 and 1914 led inevitably to the third anniversary remembered in 2004 , D-Day 1944 when the British, the Canadians and the Americans once again saved the French. This time the Anglo-Saxons really were fighting for democracy. The French were not. A large proportion of them had been enthusiasts for Petain and another massive segment were loyal only to the Soviet Union. It is no wonder that they subsequently both fought vicious colonial wars in Indo-China and Algeria and were feeble and unreliable allies in NATO.

"Why ", some readers may ask "are you telling us all these unpleasant truths about the wretched French?" Even those who do not doubt the facts may feel that to deploy these arguments in a modern context will only exacerbate our already difficult and adversary relationship with them. Why then does their argument not apply to the Germans? German political leaders are rightly annoyed at the way history is taught in British schools, what has been termed the Hitlerisation of British history teaching. In Britain German history is taught badly and tendentiously to seventeen year olds who have no knowledge of the German language by concentrating on the twelve quite atypical disaster years of National Socialism, 1933-1945. I have taught such students after they had entered the university where I have been appalled at their lack of analytical skills and their inability to think their way outside the interpretations that they had been fed. Those who designed the school syllabuses should be ashamed of themselves; they went for cheap popularity not true learning and have unfairly villainised an entire people by concentrating on a tiny segment of its history. It verges on Vansittartism. The idea that is put in their heads is one that in its extreme version was propounded by Sir Robert Vansittart in his pamphlet Black Record. German history becomes a tale of almost continuous brutal aggression from Arminius' (Hermann) ambush of Varus' legions in the Teutoburgerwald through to the Teutonic knights and the Prussian army, to blood and iron under Bismarck, to the Schlieffen plan, to the shooting of francs-tireurs and Edith Cavelle in Belgium, to the " unfair" waging of war by U-boats and Zeppelins. Everything that doesn't fit is left out and the aggressive episodes in the history of Germany's neighbours are not mentioned, particularly those that have involved repeated invasions and devastation of Germany. In this way all German history has evolved inevitably towards the Third Reich. In a world where everyone else was becoming benign and democratic, Germany was an "exception" and somehow this is the fault of certain inherent aspects of the German character that constitutes the very essence of the German people. If it were said about anyone else it would be immediately denounced as racist nonsense but it is still open season on the Hun. Vansittartism is alive and well.

National Socialism should be studied as sociology not as history. It is part of a wider set of vicious phenomena that are not limited to Germany - a continent wide anti-Semitism that was to be found from Paris to Odessa, the rise of stratification by militant parties which later became Continental Europe's deadly export to China, Cambodia and Iraq, the worship of force and collectivism as an antidote to Anglo-American "materialism". None of these things are peculiar to Germany. That they triumphed together in a singularly horrible form under National Socialism is due to defeat , reparations, the rise of Communism and the failure of the American economy in 1929 rather than anything specifically German. It could not have happened in Britain because we are not part of that Continental world but it could easily have happened in France if that country had been defeated early on in World War I, crushed with reparations and forced to cede core French-speaking areas of France to Germany along with Morrocco and bits of central Africa. There would soon have arisen a National Socialist French workers party with a screaming anti-semitic fanatic to lead it. All the elements to build a Nazi party in France had long been present.

In particular, we should not forget the anti-Semitism of the condemners of Dreyfus, Action Française and the Croix de Feu (the party Mitterand's first joined) which found in its final expression in the rounding up of Jews for deportation by the Milice. During the second world war, after the French defeat, Marshal Pétain, the legitimate ruler of France, placed in his high office by a free vote of the French parliament and an overwhelming majority of those votes would sit and glumly contemplate the ruin of France. After much thought he would say "C'est les Juifs" to a former President of the Senate from Martinique who would reply "Oui c'est les Juifs". At the end of the war when Charles Maurras the anti-Semitic leader of Action Française was expelled from the Academie Française he commented " Dreyfus has won". Fanatical anti-Semitism was not a German monopoly.

We have also already seen the rage for revanche and the blind militarism of the French after 1870. How much more enraged would they have been if they had been forced to surrender yet again in 1914? "Ancient combatants" and red trousered fascists would have brawled in the streets with treasonable communists taking their orders from the Soviet Union. The guilty men who had stabbed France in the back and signed a demeaning peace treaty would have been execrated and even assassinated. Hyper-inflation would have destroyed the savings under the mattress of every peasant in France. The collapse of the banks would have been blamed on the Jews as it had been before.

If a remilitarised National Socialist France had set out to assert itself in Europe there would have been no lack of atrocities for the heirs of Goya to paint. One of the best hidden scandals of World War II is the way the Free French army raped and pillaged its way through Italy. For the inhabitants of Elba there was only one thing worse than being occupied by the Germans and that was being liberated by the French. The horrors of the Epuration [purification; anti-Nazi purge] in France at the end of the war, the brutal reoccupation of Vietnam, the systematic use of torture in Algeria are all indications that the French would have been quite capable of sustaining a regime of truly Nazi brutality once it had been brought into existence.

The moral of the story is that neither in 1904 nor in 1914 should we have shown or have any sympathy with France's fear of being dominated by Germany , nor should we have any in 2004. A Europe dominated by Hitler would have been horrendous but a Kaiserly Europe would have been better than a war in which over a million British and Imperial troops were killed. What would it have mattered if the Germans had come to dominate the Balkans and run Baghdad for the Turks? As countries like Germany grow in wealth and power they have to be accommodated much as Britain chose to cultivate the growing United States after the Civil War and settle grievances on American terms. For Britain to ally itself with a nation on the way out like France was inane. It was also undemocratic. The conversations and implicit agreements between the British and French General Staffs after the Entente Cordiale were kept secret from the British people because of their traditional distrust and dislike of the French. Edward VII's direct discussions with the French were unconstitutional and his Francophilia was probably based on nothing more than his gratitude to a nation that had invented devices to raise and lower that corpulent king or his two female partners during innovative forms of sexual congress on a specially designed chair. How much better it would have been for the world if Edward VII had been gay! He could have taken his holidays with Krupp in Capri and established a rapport with Wilhelm through the camarilla led by Prince Philip zu Eulenberg, a shrewd, far-sighted and restraining influence on his Kaiser . Better Gomorrah than Armentières [A big battle of WWI]

In recent decades we have gone on making the same mistake. It is taken for granted that the French still have a legitimate interest in reining Germany in, in tying Germany ever tighter in a European Union lest it become too powerful. Many in France opposed and were fearful of German reunification precisely because it recreated a populous and powerful nation in the heart of Europe that will once again overshadow France. Yet why should a democratic and peaceful Germany not dominate Europe and not impose its commercial and agricultural interests on France. It should be Britain's policy to encourage such a development, much as we should have done in 1904-14. It would be better for Britain than the present unnatural Franco-German alliance in which the French, once again struggling to maintain the delusion of their own importance, exercise an influence out of all proportion to their real power. If Germany were to gain her rightful position at the heart of Europe, the French would soon discover the necessity for treating the Americans with a suitable degree of deference or even fawning. It is time for Britain slowly to disentangle itself from Europe and leave the French to their fate and the Germans to their inheritance

SOURCE
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IN BRIEF

DECEMBER TARGET: Democrats set December impeachment target, but obstacles abound — like the fact the whole thing's a charade (Reuters)

ADVERSE SOCIETY: Soros-funded group Open Society Policy Center eclipses $70 million spent on lobbying since Trump took office (The Washington Free Beacon)

COMMON GROUND, PART I: Bipartisan bill would streamline path to citizenship for children of U.S. military (The Washington Times)

COMMON GROUND, PART II: House unanimously passes bipartisan bill to make animal cruelty a federal crime (USA Today)

NEEDLES IN A HAYSTACK: State Department says 100+ ISIS prisoners missing after Turkish invasion of Syria (National Review)

IDIOCRACY: Majority of Americans want First Amendment rewritten; 51% of Millennials want fines or jail time for "hate speech" (The Washington Free Beacon)

GOOD RIDDANCE: Florida Senate votes to permanently oust Broward Sheriff Scott Israel (Fox News)

POLICY: Refugee policy reforms — enduring or ephemeral? (National Review)

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For more blog postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated), A Coral reef compendium and an IQ compendium. (Both updated as news items come in). GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten. I also put up occasional updates on my Personal blog and each day I gather together my most substantial current writings on THE PSYCHOLOGIST.

Email me here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or here (Personal). My annual picture page is here

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27 October, 2019

'Time to Accept Failure': Why Republicans Are Losing the Battle for America

BY ROBERT SPENCER

Recently I had an experience that brought home to me why the Left is so decisively winning the culture war. It involved local politics, but the same kind of thing is happening all over the country.

A few weeks ago I spoke up in New Hampshire at the invitation of the Sullivan County Republican Party, and the whole incident showed in microcosm how the far left has gained control of the media, the educational system, and the culture in general, without any significant pushback from those who are supposedly committed to the freedom of speech and a free society.

My appearance led to what has now become the usual firestorm that ensues whenever someone who challenges the prevailing leftist narrative speaks anywhere. I was smeared by "journalists" Kevin Landrigan of the New Hampshire Union Leader and John Gregg of the Valley News, neither of whom bothered to ask me for comment while printing as unquestioned fact defamatory and false charges about me. Raymond Buckley, chair of the New Hampshire Democratic Party, president of the Association of State Democratic Chairs, and vice chair of the Democratic National Committee, called me a "white supremacist," apparently having confused me with Richard Spencer, and refused to retract when repeatedly asked to do so. Democrat State Senator Martha Hennessey, after the manner of Nazi Brownshirts in the early 1930s, led a smear campaign on Twitter.

Two venues, the Eastman Community Center in Grantham and the Elks Club in Claremont, caved in to this and canceled the event; the Elks, at least, were directly pressured to cancel by Hennessey.

The event went on in a third venue. Here is the video. You can see for yourself if it's full of "hate."

Buckley is a liar and Hennessey is a fascist, so neither should be in positions of public service, but they're typical in the Democrat Party these days. What was far worse was the cowardly response on the Republican side. Instead of investigating the false charges being made about me, discovering I wasn't really any of the things that were being said, and standing up for the freedom of speech, all too many Republicans were ready to kowtow and do everything the Democrats wanted.

Sullivan County Republican Committee Chairman Keith Hanson, who invited me in the first place, stood firm and kept finding new venues when one would cancel, but some prominent local Republicans just stood. Hanson picked me up at the airport and drove me to the venue, and on the way told me about how the Democrats had gerrymandered themselves into total control of Vermont and were trying to do the same thing in New Hampshire; in response, Republicans are doing nothing. They don't seem to realize or care what is happening, and have ceded all the initiative and control of the narrative to the Democrats.

In the face of the left’s smear campaign against me, some of the Republicans showed this again, demonstrating that they were totally cowed and ready to surrender, happy to allow the left to dictate what they can do or can’t do. They don’t even seem to realize what is wrong with this.

James “Jim” Beard is the former Sullivan County Republican Committee Chairman and failed candidate for New Hampshire Executive Council. The night before the event, he wrote this in an email to Hanson:

"Time to accept failure....Keith, it is time to send a email blast to everyone who responded, everyone who bought tickets with 100% refunds and accept your mis-management for bringing this event to Sullivan County. Tomorrow evening, you will be alone with 10-20 people inside the VFW Hall in Claremont with a group of maybe 50 protestors outside. This is not how SCGOP candidates wish to be portrayed, nor how they will win elections.

This entire charade is an embarrassment for the SCGOP and I suggest you step aside. Let us return to good ole' [sic] fashioned hot dog roasts on the Newport Common where people came together from all works of life in the community, socialize and build common understanding. That is how we Republicans solicit votes...interaction with the public.

You can write your own resignation..."

Yes, that's right, "let us return to good ole' fashioned hot dog roasts." Facedown the protestors? Stand on principle? Not good ol' James "Jim" Beard. The Democrats are at open war against the freedom of speech. They're stigmatizing and silencing all opposition to jihad mass murder and Sharia oppression of women and others. They are forcing a radical socialist agenda on the country. And this clown thinks he is going to beat them with hot dog roasts. Or rather, he is happy to lose, as long as he gets his with mustard.

Then there is Representative Steven Smith, senior Republican advisor in the NH House and chairman of the Sullivan County delegation, Sullivan County District 11. Nadir Ahmed, an Islamic apologist whom I bested in debate years ago, wrote to Smith, apparently offering to speak in Sullivan County and spread some soothing lies where I had told uncomfortable truths. Smith's response to him, which Ahmed then gleefully sent to me, couldn't have been friendlier (in sharp contrast to his rude and arrogant tone with me when I wrote him after this), and shows where Smith stands.

"I saw your messages to the SCGOP Facebook page and did not want you to think you were being ignored. Thanks for your offer. I am currently trying to sweep up Mr. Hanson's mess. He may not be with the organization much longer and he is not responding to messages. Your offer is interesting, but the timing is terrible. Let me think about it once this all dies down. I watched the video. The think [sic] is, I am losing faith that minds can be changed these days."

Did Smith attend my event? He did not. Does he have the first foggiest idea of what I actually say? Almost certainly not. But he knows the Democrats and the establishment media don't like it, so he is ready to carry water for them and help further their agenda. Rep. Smith, I'd be glad to come back to New Hampshire at my own expense and debate your friend, or anyone else you choose. But somehow I doubt you have either the courage or the goodwill to sponsor such an event.

Why do jellyfish on the order of Beard and Smith rule in the Republican Party? The Democrats are fighting a war, and the Republicans are playing jacks. Where are the men with spines? Where are people standing up to this totalitarian agenda of the left, and affirming that opposition to jihad terror is not morally wrong or evil, and that such opposition should be allowed a platform? Not, for the most part, in the Republican Party, not just in Sullivan County, New Hampshire, but all over the country. Instead, Republicans keep roasting their hot dogs, and hoping that their leftist masters won't demand too very much of them.

SOURCE

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Lynching Hypocrisy

"Lynching" is a provocative word, given America's history of an estimated 4,400 blacks murdered in lynchings over a roughly 70-year span. Being provocative is what animates Donald Trump, so it's no surprise that he chose the word to describe what Democrats are doing with impeachment. "So some day, if a Democrat becomes President and the Republicans win the House, even by a tiny margin, they can impeach the President, without due process or fairness or any legal rights," Trump said. "All Republicans must remember what they are witnessing here — a lynching. But we will WIN!"

There are times when Trump takes to social media with reactionary, petty, vindictive, and ridiculous things. This is not one of those times.

We're going to go out on a limb and speculate that, before Trump's thumbs got to typing his tweet, he already knew what media outlets were soon forced to report: A slew of Democrats — led by Joe Biden — used the word "lynching" to describe Bill Clinton's impeachment in 1998. We don't recall a flood of Leftmedia stories back then slamming Democrats for that deliberate word choice or giving historical lectures about the awful history of lynching. But here we are, swamped with such stories now. Of course, these sanctimonious lectures leave out the inconvenient truth that actual lynchings were perpetrated mostly by Democrats.

Biden provided the most humorous "gotcha" for Trump. "Impeachment is not 'lynching,' it is part of our Constitution," Biden huffed. "Our country has a dark, shameful history with lynching, and to even think about making this comparison is abhorrent. It's despicable."

But then CNN grudgingly went to the 1998 tape of Biden telling Wolf Blitzer, "Even if the president should be impeached, history will question whether or not this was a partisan lynching."

Confronted with his own words, Biden was forced to apologize, saying, "This wasn't the right word to use and I'm sorry about that." But, he insisted, Trump is the real sinner because he "chose his words deliberately" (as if Biden hadn't) and "continues to stoke racial divides in this country daily."

Poppycock. Trump isn't "stoking racial divides"; Democrats are.

The Wall Street Journal editorial board argues, "No President should use the word in the off-hand and self-indulgent way that Mr. Trump did in his tweet." The Journal adds, "The more he forces Republicans to defend words or actions that don't deserve defending, the more their resentment will build and the more political trouble he will be in."

That may be true, but it's also Beltway-New York echo-chamber pablum. Trump was elected precisely because he wouldn't behave like other presidents and because voters were fed up with other Republicans refusing to stand up to Democrats. In any case, his "trolling" consistently provides one important service to the country: revealing the shameless hypocrisy of Democrats and the Leftmedia.

SOURCE

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Elizabeth Warren's Health Care Pickle

From the beginning, the 2020 Democratic race has been a different kind of contest. Candidates aren’t competing to see who can run America the most efficiently. That’s the old politics. Instead, they’re pledging to remake this country entirely: rip out the old America — irredeemably tainted by racism, sexism and free enterprise — and replace it with something completely new and different. At the heart of this effort is the promise of Medicare for All. You may have heard the phrase. The most popular Democratic candidates, Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders, have both endorsed it. But what exactly does “Medicare for All” mean?

You should know. It’s not a tweak to some regulation. It’s not even Obamacare, which, once upon a time, Republicans denounced as “socialism.” Medicare for All is actual socialism. Health care spending amounts to about a fifth of the entire U.S. economy. Warren is demanding total control of all of it immediately. If Medicare for All became law, it would amount to the biggest expansion of government since World War II, by far. So, it’s worth asking how exactly this would work and who would pay for it. Warren has been asked that question repeatedly. Each time, she has refused to answer.

No matter how hard she’s been pressed — and even some fairly strident Democratic partisans have asked her — Warren has refused to explain what it would cost or who would pay for it. We now have a credible estimate.

According to a study by the Urban Institute, in just its first 10 years, Warren’s Medicare for All plan would cost an additional $34 trillion. Keep in mind that the Congressional Budget Office anticipates that the United States will collect just $46 trillion in taxes over the same period. In other words, Warren’s health care plan alone will consume the overwhelming majority of all tax dollars in the United States. That’s before we spend a single dollar on Social Security, education, national defense and everything else.

The Urban Institute has no motive to attack Warren. It’s a progressive think tank. They likely didn’t even account for the cost of Warren’s pledge to give free health care to every illegal alien who sneaks into the country. Who’s going to pay for all this? Divide $3.4 trillion a year by 320 million Americans and you get more than $10,000 per person. Not per taxpayer. Per person. That includes every child, every retiree, every prison inmate. That would be the largest tax ever assessed in American history, by far. It would change everything. An awful lot of people would just leave the country.

How do you pay for Medicare for All? That’s not a minor detail that can be settled later. It’s the single most important question. Under pressure from the other Democrats in the field, Warren has now promised an answer: “I plan over the next few weeks to put out a plan that talks about, specifically, the cost of ‘Medicare for all’ and, specifically, how we pay for it,” she said last week at a town hall event.

At some point in the last few years, Warren stopped functioning as a conventional senator and became a kind of messiah. Details like what things cost, whether something is constitutional, whether the majority of Americans even want it — none of that seems to interest her anymore. Warren has seen the future, and in that future, she has complete and unquestioned control of America; she is the most powerful person in the world. You can almost hear her repeating the phrase to herself: “the most powerful person in the world.” It’s intoxicating. And scary.

Warren is to be commended for issuing highly detailed policy proposals in a number of areas. This ironically makes her refusal to provide details on Medicare for All that much more noteworthy. She details the little stuff but thought she could get away with proposing to fundamentally change our country without explaining who would pay the price. Her bluff has been called, and she’s now on the line to explain her way out of this jam.

She hasn’t provided a date for the new details she’s promising. Given the costs involved, we can’t imagine any funding proposal that wouldn’t destroy our economy. As far as the election goes, it’s also hard to imagine how any honest funding proposal of the scale needed to meet Warren’s ambitions would not destroy her political candidacy, at least in a general election. We’re waiting on the edge of our seats for this one.

SOURCE

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For more blog postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated), A Coral reef compendium and an IQ compendium. (Both updated as news items come in). GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten. I also put up occasional updates on my Personal blog and each day I gather together my most substantial current writings on THE PSYCHOLOGIST.

Email me here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or here (Personal). My annual picture page is here

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25 October, 2019

Elizabeth Warren needs some serious policy repairs

On an issue as significant as health care, vague assurances aren’t enough

Elizabeth Warren didn’t spend long leading the Democratic presidential race before being forced to pull in for a policy pit stop. The serious problem that needs attention: Her adopted health care plan. That is, the single-payer scheme that Democratic socialist Bernie Sanders has offered up.

For Warren, the policy issue right now is, how do you pay for a plan credibly estimated to cost $34 trillion over 10 years? As Sanders himself has acknowledged, that’s exceedingly difficult to do without hitting some members of the middle class with higher taxes.

Warren has tried to steer around that blazing hazard by saying that she won’t sign into law a government-run health care plan that doesn’t lower overall costs for middle class families. That’s another way of saying, yes, your federal taxes may go up, but because you will no longer pay insurance premiums or out-of-pocket health-care expenses, your total costs will be lower.

But on something this significant, vague assurances aren’t enough. So why doesn’t the woman with the plenitude of plans already have a financing framework? Because it’s hard to develop one that doesn’t put an “I’ll-tax-the-middle-class” bullseye on her back.

That’s hardly the only problem with single-payer, or “Medicare for All,” by its folksier name. Another: Voters’ natural preference to choose for themselves rather than be forced off their private insurance and into a government-dictated plan. Running on the latter approach is akin to dressing up as a piñata — and handing the GOP a general election club.

“The Republicans will run ads warning the voters that the Democrats are going to take away their health insurance,” says Phil Johnston, former New England regional administrator of Health and Human Services and a fervent Warren supporter. “We have seen that movie before.”

Johnston is talking about the insurance-industry-funded attack on the health care plan Hillary Clinton designed back during husband Bill’s first term; the Clintons’ effort eventually foundered. We also saw the damage Democrats suffered with President Obama’s assurance that “if you like your health care plan, you can keep it,” which didn’t prove to be true for those whose plans failed to meet the Affordable Care Act’s minimum standards.

Political optimists expect voters to sort through the health care financing debate and conclude single-payer will be a better deal overall. Hmm. Remember the poll from 2017 showing that, almost seven years after it became law, 35 percent of Americans didn’t realize Obamacare and the Affordable Care Act were the same thing?

Which is to say, health care policy and politics are complex, and many voters don’t do complexity well.

Now consider some Kaiser Family Foundation polling. Adding a Medicare-like public option for the Affordable Care Act is supported by three-quarters of Americans. Medicare for All earns a bare majority of 51 percent — and when people learn it would mean eliminating private insurance, 58 percent then say they would oppose such a plan.

There’s another poorly understood policy matter lurking here. In arguing that single-payer would allow the United States to reduce its health care spending to a European-like percentage of gross domestic product, its advocates are assuming the government would compel doctors and hospitals to accept payments significantly lower than they would otherwise get.

Problem: The prices private insurers pay in effect cross-subsidize Medicare (and Medicaid), whose rates are at least 10 percent lower than provider costs. Using Medicare rates would push some marginal hospitals into financial jeopardy.

And put a squeeze on physicians’ income. No one will weep for highly paid specialists, but primary care physicians aren’t making a killing. Expect single-payer to incur fierce opposition from those who went into serious debt to earn a medical degree.

“Nobody is more lefty than I am, but I think a public option should be the Democrats’ position,” says Johnston. Another highly credentialed lefty, New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, is essentially arguing the same thing.

SOURCE

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Acting OMB Director Russ Vought: Trump keeps promise to tame bureaucracy that runs roughshod over Americans

White House Budget Office acting director Russ Vought breaks down President Trump's spending plan

When President Trump took office in 2017, he promised the American people that he would clean up Washington’s regulatory overreach. He pledged to make government accountable to the people. And he has made good on his promises by driving the largest deregulation effort since President Reagan took office over 30 years ago.

This has supported an unprecedented economic comeback—with over 6.4 million jobs created since President Trump’s election, the lowest unemployment rate in half of a century, and nearly 2.5 million people raising themselves out of poverty since 2016.

This week, the president will build on his success by signing two Executive Orders that will level the playing field for American families and small businesses and shine a light on the Federal bureaucracy that runs roughshod over American citizens.

President Trump’s “Transparency and Fairness” Executive Order protects Americans against secret or unlawful bureaucratic interpretations of rules and guards against unfair or unexpected penalties for non-compliance. American families and entrepreneurs are not the enemy, and it is long past time D.C. stopped treating them as such.

Take this example: After one family started construction on a home in a subdivision in Idaho, the Environmental Protection Agency declared their property a federally protected wetland. The government ordered the family to restore the land or face a daily fine of up to $75,000. The family’s request for a hearing was rejected and the agency claimed its order could not even be challenged in court.

They were denied due process and threatened with fines of millions of dollars. This is not only un-American; it just does not make sense. American families and small businesses should not need law degrees to live their daily lives. They should be afforded the opportunity to understand and comply with a rule, and to have their side of the story considered by the agency, not get hauled into court with a costly surprise lawsuit.

Americans should expect that government of, by, and for the people will respect those very same people. This administration is committed to making government agencies transparent and accountable to the taxpayers. It is not only the right thing to do—it is a big boost to the economy, too.

President Trump’s “Bringing Guidance out of the Darkness” Executive Order stops agencies from skirting the laws that let the American public provide input on government rules that can limit their freedom. Too many agencies have found it easier to impose costly and excessive mandates through informal interpretations buried on their websites instead of going through the regular public review process Congress requires for agency rules.

Put simply, large government agencies often allow political agendas to improperly influence their interpretation of the law and how it applies to you. Worse still, they deny you a seat at the table when they do it.

These “guidance” documents and materials bypass the basic rights of Americans to have input into rules that impact their livelihoods. Rogue agencies have for too long used innocuous-sounding “guidance documents” to curtail the freedoms of American farmers, homeowners, and small businesses, to name only a few impacted groups.

In 2015, for example, the Department of Labor issued a blog post that reclassified many independent contractors as employees under the Fair Labor Standards Act.

This so-called guidance created confusion, raised costs, and drastically multiplied legal liability for businesses. But the agency did not give businesses or the independent contractors with whom they work the opportunity to provide comment. The agency forced them to comply or face serious reprisal. Thankfully, this ill-conceived guidance was rescinded by the Trump Administration in June 2017.

The Trump administration wants to prevent such abuses of authority from happening again. Americans should expect that government of, by, and for the people will respect those very same people. This administration is committed to making government agencies transparent and accountable to the taxpayers. It is not only the right thing to do—it is a big boost to the economy, too.

Deregulation has real-dollar consequences for American families. Government-wide regulatory reform actions will save the average American household $3,100 in coming years. And benefits are already being felt across the economy—the Trump administration reduced regulatory costs by $33 billion in its first two years alone. In stark contrast, the Obama-Biden administration *increased* regulatory costs by more than $245 billion during its first two years.

This is money that entrepreneurs and small businesses can use to create jobs, raise wages, and invest in important capital improvements. It is money that families can use on their priorities, whether that is buying a first home or saving for their children’s education.

Thanks to President Trump’s vision and leadership, this administration has been laser-focused on rolling back the abuses and high cost of the regulatory deep state.

From his first week in office, President Trump challenged the government to roll back two old regulations for every new one. In Fiscal Year 2017, we far surpassed his goal and rolled back 22 regulations for every new one. In FY 2018, we rolled back 12 rules for every new rule.

The impact of these two new Executive Orders will massively multiply the work President Trump has already done to drain the D.C. swamp.

President Trump is not only returning control over the government to the people and state and local governments, he is revitalizing the economy so Americans from all walks of life, and from every state, have the opportunity to prosper. He is making the federal government work for Americans again.

SOURCE

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AOC on the Turkey problem

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IN BRIEF

IRAQ REBUFFS: Iraq says U.S. forces withdrawing from Syria have no approval to stay (Reuters)

TRUDEAU'S POTPOURRI: Canada's Justin Trudeau wins second term but loses majority (Associated Press)

NETANYAHU YIELDS: Israel's long-standing Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has said he cannot form a government, handing the opportunity to his political rival (BBC News)

DOUBLE STANDARDS: Democrat congresswoman allegedly has affair with young female staffer. Media completely ignores. (The Daily Wire)

HIGH-COURT SHOWDOWN: Manhattan DA, Trump lawyers strike deal to speed fight over Trump tax returns to Supreme Court (NBC News)

PARKLAND SHOOTING FALLOUT: Florida Senate committee upholds Sheriff Scott Israel suspension (The Daily Caller)

POLICY: Why LBJ's Great Society gets a failing grade in improving education (The Daily Signal)

POLICY: A tuition-free, purpose-driven, coat-and-tie trade school (American Enterprise Institute)

MIDDLE EAST PUZZLEMENT: The Associated Press reports that "Defense Secretary Mark Esper says he is discussing an option that would keep a small residual U.S. military force in northeast Syria." Furthermore, "While Trump has insisted he's bringing home Americans from 'endless wars' in the Mideast, Esper said all U.S. troops leaving Syria will go to western Iraq."

HILLARY'S MALFEASANCE: State Department concludes Clinton email review, says it found nearly 600 security violations (The Daily Wire)

ILLEGAL-IMMIGRANT PROSECUTIONS: Record 110,000 illegal border crossers and smugglers prosecuted in 2019 fiscal year (Washington Examiner)

BOEING'S IMBROGLIO WORSENS: FAA asks Boeing why it hid test pilot's discovery of "egregious" 737 Max issues (USA Today)

WICKED BEDFELLOWS: "Russia and Turkey have agreed to ensure Kurdish forces withdraw from areas close to Syria's border with Turkey and to launch joint patrols, in a deal hailed as 'historic' by President Recep Tayyip Erdogan." (Agence France-Presse)

COLLUSION DELUSION: "Do-nothing Congress": Pelosi, Democrats produce more subpoenas than laws (The Washington Times)

NINTH CIRCUS: Ninth Circuit upholds block on birth-control exemption for religious employers (National Review)

NURTURING COMPETITION: Senate Republican Josh Hawley introduces bipartisan bill empowering users to withdraw their data from social-media giants (National Review)

MEANWHILE... For the first time, there are fewer wealthy Americans than Chinese (CBS News)

HOT AIR: California governor who wanted higher gas prices wants investigation of high gas prices (Associated Press)

CONCESSION: "The Hong Kong government on Wednesday withdrew the controversial extradition bill that sparked months of violent protests, but that is only one of the five demands that continue to drive protesters to the streets." (Fox News)

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For more blog postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated), A Coral reef compendium and an IQ compendium. (Both updated as news items come in). GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten. I also put up occasional updates on my Personal blog and each day I gather together my most substantial current writings on THE PSYCHOLOGIST.

Email me here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or here (Personal). My annual picture page is here

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24 October, 2019

The Principles of Conservatism

The Heritage Foundation has issued what it sees as the principles of American conservatism today. Below is their list of 14 points:

The federal government exists to preserve life, liberty and property, and it is instituted to protect the rights of individuals according to natural law. Among these rights are the sanctity of life; the freedom of speech, religion, the press, and assembly; the right to bear arms; the right of individuals to be treated equally and justly under the law; and to enjoy the fruits of ones labor.

The federal government’s powers are limited to those named in the Constitution and should be exercised solely to protect the rights of its citizens. As Thomas Jefferson said, “The government closest to the people serves the people best.” Powers not delegated to the federal government, nor prohibited by the Constitution, are reserved to the states or to the people.

Judges should interpret and apply our laws and the Constitution based on their original meaning, not upon judges’ personal and political predispositions.

Individuals and families—not government—make the best decisions regarding their and their children’s health, education, jobs, and welfare.

The family is the essential foundation of civil society, and traditional marriage serves as the cornerstone of the family.
The federal deficit and debt must not place unreasonable financial burdens on future generations.

Tax policies should raise only the minimum revenue necessary to fund constitutionally appropriate functions of government.
America’s economy and the prosperity of individual citizens are best served by a system of free enterprise, with special emphasis on economic freedom, private property rights, and the rule of law. This system is best sustained by policies promoting free trade and deregulation, and opposing government interventions in the economy that distort markets and impair innovation.

Regulations must not breach constitutional principles of limited government and the separation of powers.

America must be a welcoming nation—one that promotes patriotic assimilation and is governed by laws that are fair, humane, and enforced to protect its citizens.

Justice requires an efficient, fair, and effective criminal justice system—one that gives defendants adequate due process and requires an appropriate degree of criminal intent to merit punishment.

International agreements and international organizations should not infringe on American’s constitutional rights, nor should they diminish American sovereignty.

America is strongest when our policies protect our national interests, preserve our alliances of free peoples, vigorously counter threats to our security, and advance prosperity through economic freedom at home and abroad.

The best way to ensure peace is through a strong national defense.

SOURCE

It seems a fair list but it should be acknowledged that it is an expression of conservatism in a particular time and place.

The idea that one's country MUST welcome immigrants would certainly not get universal assent among conservatives. Conservatives in Britain and Europe quite commonly claim that their country is "full up".

And conservatives outside America have some ideas that would not be much reflected in America. British conservatives, for instance, see an important constitutional role for the monarchy, a view with only eccentric support in America.

And conservatives of the fairly recent past saw the gold standard as the proper basis of the currency -- also a view having only eccentric support today.

So rather than the label "principles", it would be more accurate to describe the list above as "current expressions" of conservatism. Conservatisn is a cautious psychological disposition, not an ideology

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Why the Right Fails to Change Culture

Larry Schweikart Gets it:

No one in conservative circles denies we are getting crushed in the culture wars. Yes, key conservatives have been banned from major social media. Yes, Facebook, Twitter, Google are biased. But the broader question should be, “Why were conservatives relegated to predominantly social media in the first place?” Why are there virtually no conservative television shows? Why is Fox (other than One America News Network—which has trouble getting in major delivery packages) the only “conservative” news network, and even then, one whose “conservatism” is fading rapidly? Why are there no conservative graphic novels?

Of course, Andrew Breitbart was the John the Baptist of this element of our culture. The creation of (at first) Drudge Report, then later Breitbart News, was essential to broadening a conservative alternative. But it wasn’t nearly sufficient.

So what has been the problem? Since A Patriot’s History of the United States came in 2004, I have been working to move that story into video form, which brought me into contact with Andrew, then, through Andrew, to a host of other Hollywood Conservatives. Yes, there are quite a few. One well-known actor told me, “When you go on a production site, at lunch time all the trucks where the stage construction workers and set designers are having lunch have Rush Limbaugh on. But if the director comes by, they turn it down.” Another director told me of a conversation two of his producer friends had with an Amazon Prime executive as they pitched their children’s show. “We don’t take material from white males,” they were instructed. “The era of Aryan supremacy is dead.” Realize these two men had several successes in the field already, and possessed a track record of profits.

Without turning into a “poor me” sob story, I can only report from my own efforts. I think however, they are quite representative of the experiences of others.

When I first began taking the idea of turning Patriot’s History into video form to conservative organizations in 2005, I thought the rationale was obvious. Video was the future for young people, who have essentially stopped reading. Virtually all new learning is occurring on phones and digital devices, not from books. My own theory was that younger people could be hooked on a short video (under four minutes), but that anything longer would, at least initially, turn them off. However, if captivated by a short video, kids will watch a longer (15 minute) video, and if that satisfies then, they will log into one hour videos or longer.

Prager U. caught onto the first part of my formula relatively quickly. Their four-minute videos are masterpieces of hard-hitting, well-scripted commentary with a minimum of production added. Prager’s reach is immense. I have done two videos for Prager U. (“America’s Socialist Origins” and “Religious Toleration”) and each has had over a million views. Bigger name personalities than I, such as Ben Shapiro, can draw over five times that many views.

Prager’s work is incredible and provides key issue discussions for the “skulls full of mush” who are today’s youth. It does suffer, however, from two weaknesses. First, because the videos draw from diverse conservative voices who in general support each other’s fundamental assumptions, the gaps between each are enormous and the small differences between, say, a monetarist and an Art Laffer Trump supporter can be confusing to the point of fraying all commonalities. This is why college classes are usually taught by one professor, and why team teaching tends to break down without rigid control.

The other weakness of Prager U. videos is that they are, by design, focused on a niche market, namely those people interested in short takes on a particular issue. Again, without minimizing in the least the tremendous value of addressing this niche market, it does not take the place of thousands of hours of more subtle brainwashing on the part of what passes for “entertainment.” And it’s not just movies and television, but music and graphic novels as well.

Indeed, I would argue that the single most cost-efficient vehicle for conservatives is graphic novels, because for a couple of hundred thousand dollars, one can fund the storyboard for a movie. Everything from “Watchmen” to “300" came from graphic novels, because they present a visual story for a producer and director -- and they have become easy sources for movies. By financing three to four solid (and popular) graphic novels, conservative money-men would be financing the next generation of film as well.

But beyond that, conservatives must fight their way back into Hollywood. This is where the real struggle begins. As I began my “tour” of conservative think tanks, I was asking for what (in Hollywood terms) was a catering budget—about $450,000 per episode to make a six-hour series based on A Patriot’s History. The intent was to have the impact of Milton Friedman’s “Free to Choose” series from the 1970s—but with history instead of economics—but with a newer, higher production level product that would be similar to the “Sons of Liberty” or “John Adams,” both of which were considered successes. I had enlisted solid Hollywood talent, from a director who had worked with Tom Selleck and Jon Voight, to the top cameramen in the industry, to casting editors. All were willing to work below scale to meet the budget. Grammy winning Christian artist Michael W. Smith had agreed to provide what turned out to be a powerful and moving score.

I was not surprised at the first response from Heritage Foundation, which was simply, “We don’t do videos.” This pretty much ended all discussion. “What do you fund?” I asked. “We fund panel discussions, speakers, white papers.” “Do you realize,” I countered, “that none of those will reach youths, let alone significantly influence them?” I received a blank stare. Finally, the person I spoke with said again, “Well, we just don’t do videos.” Going in, I had expected that we would not meet with success immediately, but that at last one of the conservative organizations would understand that the print medium and speakers’ series were leaving them behind.

Was I wrong.

Over the next several years, I met with virtually all of the conservative organizations and think tanks. Almost to a word, they repeated the “We-don’t-do-video” response I got at Heritage. By the time I had made the rounds (over several years), I learned that Heritage had in fact started a web-based side that included video, but it still was far from the “John Adams” level of impacting youth. My final, most depressing, meeting, was with the head of student outreach for the Koch Brothers foundation. Once again, I laid out the numbers, the challenge, and our approach. Once again, I heard, “Koch doesn’t do videos.” Again I asked what they did. “Well we are trying to start chapters on every university to bring in speakers like Ann Coulter and Ben Shapiro.” “OK,” I replied, “have you watched the news in the past two years? Do you realize that many colleges already won’t even let them speak, or demand such outrageous security deposits that they are effectively banned? Do you know that a Christian college, Grand Canyon College in Phoenix, cancelled Shapiro because of complaints by leftists?” (Later they reversed course on this and he appeared). In exasperation, I asked, “Do you realize that in five years you may not be able to book a conservative on any major campus?” His answer shocked me. “I think you’re right.”

“SO?” I thought I had won.

“We just talked about this at a board meeting,” he said, almost sighing in resignation. “We don’t do videos.”

My little experiences are nothing compared to those in Hollywood who are conservative directors and producers, some of them B-list, some A-list. One acquaintance had five different film projects fail to get sufficient investment to make, all in a period of a few years. He is more or less out of the industry now. In 2016, Clint Eastwood and Tom Hanks—an Academy Award winning director and one of the most bankable stars in the business—told a Sundance audience that “Sully” was turned down by every studio until Ratpack Dune (with Trump’s Treasury Secretary Steven Mnunchin) finally funded it. “Sully” was hardly a “conservative” movie. It’s main values were cooperation, heroism, and humility.

So what’s the problem? One of the biggest problems is that “our” monied men see the world in vastly different terms than those on the left with money. Lefitsts are willing to hurl money into project after project, hoping for a profit, but understanding that even if their films don’t make a penny, sooner or later kids watch them. There were no fewer than five anti-Iraq war movies that failed to recover their budgets (in real terms, after accounting for advertising). Yet they kept coming out. In the space of five years, we have had an ongoing series (“Madame Secretary”) offering a Hillary stand-in; had a series slamming Fox’s Roger Ailes; had “The Circus” on the 2016 campaign featuring anti-Trump zealots as “journalists”; “The Post,” where heroic reporters battle Richard Nixon; and had a movie on a villainous Dick Cheney. Yet it is something of a myth that conservative movies don’t sell: “Darkest Hour” grossed $150 million worldwide on a $30 million budget; a badly flawed “Dunkirk” still managed three Academy Awards and a worldwide gross of $526 million, and “Chernobyl,” the 2019 miniseries, was widely praised despite its clear damning depiction of communism.

While a few of these manage to poke through the rock-hard leftist surface, most simply aren’t made. Consider the fact that not one major film depicting the life and/or challenges of Ronald Reagan has been made. A picture about Ronald Reagan, with Dennis Quaid attached to play Reagan, has languished for over a year. Pretty soon, Quaid will be too old to play the Gipper. At least one other Reagan script, somewhat more imaginary—but positive nonetheless—has yet to gain financial traction. Reagan’s life in Hollywood alone would make terrific storytelling, from the threats to have acid thrown in his face for his role as head of SAG to his epic battles with the communists inside the Screen Actor’s Guild (which he won). But from the filmmakers and financiers in Hollywood? Crickets.

It is time our side gets it. Easy for me to say—I’m not a billionaire. But until a number of people of substance make up their minds that no matter what the cost, we need to take back the culture, they will continue to fight delaying actions at the ballot box.

SOURCE

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For more blog postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated), A Coral reef compendium and an IQ compendium. (Both updated as news items come in). GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten. I also put up occasional updates on my Personal blog and each day I gather together my most substantial current writings on THE PSYCHOLOGIST.

Email me here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or here (Personal). My annual picture page is here

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23 October, 2019

Rand Paul Makes The Case Against Socialism

As self-proclaimed “democratic socialists” continue to rant and rave against capitalism, the need for principled, liberty-minded leaders is more imperative now than ever. Rather than being assailed from without by communist foreign powers, American liberalism — defined by its belief in the power of personal liberty and economic freedom – is being infiltrated from within.

Fortunately, the battle for the soul of America is not yet lost. Though few and far between, there still remain dedicated men and women willing to wade into the intellectual fog-of-war that is American politics and stand resolutely for those our nation’s founding principles. Chief among these champions for liberty is Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.).

In his latest book, “The Case Against Socialism,” Paul — in typical fashion — refuses to pull any punches. Rather than kowtow to the prevailing winds of revisionism seeking to paint world history in broad, red strokes, Paul directly challenges proponents of new-wave socialism like Independent Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders and freshman Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.). What’s more, he unabashedly demolishes the Oliver Stone-esque perception that socialism “really isn’t that bad.”

Before even concluding the introduction, Paul jumps straight to the heart of the matter, informing the reader that “[t]his is the story of an evil well documented and yet somehow still enticing … of socialism in all its drab and dreary machinelike destruction of individual thought, creativity, and ambition.” He continues, “This is the story of socialism in all its violence, bloodshed, and tyranny. It is a cautionary tale of how America has so far eluded the siren call of something for nothing … but also of how close we still are to succumbing to socialism.”

To begin his unvarnished look into the history of socialism, Paul wastes no time in attacking the misinformed “Hollywood socialists” who praise the likes of Hugo Chavez, Nicolás Maduro, and Fidel Castro. He reminds us that, not very long ago, important American figures like Noam Chomsky and then-Representative Bernie Sanders praised the election of Hugo Chavez, pointing to poverty statistics as evidence of socialism’s virtue.

Yet, as history has consistently proven time and time again, the fruits of socialism quickly give way to oppressive violence, food shortages, and utter devastation. Contrary to what “democratic” socialists in Congress might have you believe, in the words of Venezuelan professor Daniel Lahoud; “I have known the reality of the failure of socialism in my own flesh. And as I live in Venezuela, I want to show that this is an absolute failure always and everywhere.”

Simply pointing out the failures of despotic socialist regimes is not sufficient for Paul to fully discredit socialism. For this, he addresses the common misconception of Scandinavian socialism. Countries like Denmark, Sweden, and Norway are often used as props that American socialists can point to as evidence of socialism’s success. Unfortunately for them, this assertion falls flat once it gets beyond a sound bite. So strong is this misconception that the Prime Minister of Denmark reprimanded Sanders “and asked him to stop insulting his country as ‘socialist.’”

According to Paul, the apparent successes of Scandinavian socialism are leftover byproducts from pre-socialist policies. For example, longitudinal analysis of Sweden’s economic development shows consistently strong growth from the 1870s until the rise of socialism in Sweden in the 1970s.

Since then, Sweden has seen massive increases in government spending as a percentage of GDP that correlates with a faltering economy as a direct result of socialist policies. In deriding the left’s obsession with Scandinavia, Paul correctly points out that Scandinavian countries have been moving further away from socialism as they have begun to feel the long term effects of such policies.

Socialism is a scourge on the human condition. Time and time again, elites and intellectuals have sought to remold society only to fail miserably. What’s more, the centralized planning of men like Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot resulted in some of the worst atrocities in human history. Yet, democratic socialists in Congress continue to believe that things will be different this time. This time socialism will work. Such a belief is not only foolhardy and ill-informed but downright dangerous. To make matters worse, this notion is once again being promoted from the ivory tower by political elites and intellectuals, not everyday Americans.

In an essay published in 1967, “The Intellectuals and Socialism,” Friedrich Hayek tackled a similar rise of socialist intellectualism in the United States; pointing out that the move towards socialism has always started with the elites and intellectuals. At the conclusion of this essay, Hayek cuts to the heart of the issue:

“We must make the building of a free society once more an intellectual adventure, a deed of courage … We need intellectual leaders who are willing to work for an ideal, however small may be the prospects of its early realization. They must be men who are willing to stick to principles and to fight for their full realization, however remote.”

The case against socialism is simple; it has never worked and it never will work. No amount of flowery campaign speeches or enraged table-thumping will change this. For this reason, it is important that, in such a divisive time as this, we support those “who are willing to work for an ideal … [those] who are willing to stick to principles,” which are, the principles of liberty. It is just as important that we support those who are willing to stick up for the truth of history against the revisionism of political elites. Paul is each of these things, and I am proud to consider him such a strong ally in the battle against socialism.

SOURCE

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How Trump’s New Executive Orders Protect the Public Against the Administrative State

Washington may be burning with talk of impeachment, but President Donald Trump is not fiddling.

He’s continuing to deliver valuable results on regulatory reform. On Oct. 9, he issued two executive orders (here and here) that protect the public—the people, their employers, and their communities—against unknown agency interpretations of the law that could cost them their money or their jobs, or that could land them in prison.

These new orders go beyond deregulation and cutting red tape. They help to secure individual liberty through the advancement of timeless, nonpartisan principles, such as fair notice, due process, transparency, accountability, and rigorous, analytical decision-making.

The orders are a win-win—a win for good government and a win for the American people.

The goal of the orders is to fix the regulatory process by returning it to its original design. The president isn’t burning down the house; he’s restoring it.

The orders start with a discussion of constitutional principles and the 73-year-old statute designed to protect them during the regulatory process (the Administrative Procedure Act).

The orders then note that agencies have at times circumvented those principles, with the results that the public doesn’t always receive the notice it needs, the opportunity to participate that it deserves, and the complete analysis (including an assessment of benefits, costs, and alternatives, including non-regulatory ones) that it wants.

People of good will across the philosophical or political spectrum agree on the problem and much of the solution. See, for example, recommendations from the Administrative Conference of the United States. The president’s new executive orders are important steps toward addressing this persistent problem.

One of those orders requires each agency to create a user-friendly database of all guidance documents that the agency has issued and intends to keep. All others must be rescinded.

The second order prohibits agencies from bringing enforcement actions against private parties for violating standards announced solely in guidance documents, not in acts of Congress or regulations issued through the Administrative Procedure Act notice-and-comment process.

Together, the two orders allow agencies to use guidance documents for their original purpose; namely, explaining what the agency does or thinks a law or regulation means—without putting the public at risk of being accused of violating a secret agency “law.”

What does that mean going forward? Significant new guidance will have to be proposed, not just issued. The public will have an opportunity to comment and object during that proposal period.

Agencies cannot issue “significant” guidance memoranda—generally, ones with economic effects of $100 million or more, ones that raise important legal or policy issues, or ones that create inconsistency with other government programs—until the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs within the White House’s Office of Management and Budget has the opportunity to review them.

The Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs has long reviewed those memoranda under Executive Order 12866, but the new executive orders operate as a belt-and-suspenders measure to ensure that no significant guidance documents evade review.

They also give a private party an additional basis for challenging a government enforcement action due to an agency’s failure to comply with the new orders.

The orders complement other recent nonpartisan reforms. For example, they build on prior efforts to ensure that the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs can analyze rules (including guidance memoranda) to determine whether rules are “significant” for purposes of the Congressional Review Act.

They complement efforts to improve the quality of information used in regulatory decision-making and to incorporate the regulatory actions of the U.S. Treasury Department into the ordinary regulatory-review process at the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs.

The Trump administration has successfully protected the public against regulatory overreach. According to the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, the administration imposed, on net, zero new regulatory costs during its first two years.

The administration has met its two-for-one goals even by the very conservative standard of comparing significant regulatory actions with significant deregulatory actions.

Trump and Congress also nullified more than a dozen agency rules via the Congressional Review Act, which allows Congress to “fast track” the repeal of rules. Finally, at last count, the administration removed or delayed some 1,500 unnecessary new regulations that were in the pipeline.

The president’s new executive orders are important additions to the substantive and procedural reforms already accomplished.

These actions aren’t about deregulation or cutting red tape, but are about reforming the regulatory process itself to make it fairer and more accountable to the people. These good government reforms are necessary, important, and worthy of celebration.

SOURCE

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SCOTUS to Hear Case Challenging the Constitutionality of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau

Ever since it came into existence in 2011, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) has been imperiled by its structure. Now, the Supreme Court is set to hear a case that challenges that structure and may force the agency to go out of business.

At issue is the unique independence of the head of the agency, who can only be removed for “inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance in office.”

On the surface, this is a clear violation of the separation of powers. To constrain the executive's power arbitrarily was not something Congress can do.

The Trump administration has allowed the Justice Department to take the unusual position of arguing against a federal law -- something it rarely does.

Daily Caller:

“Vesting such power in a single person not answerable to the president represents a stark departure from the Constitution’s framework,” the Trump administration told the justices in court filings.

In a short Friday order, the justices also asked the parties to address whether the contested removal provision can be severed from the rest of the Dodd-Frank law. That gives the justices a path to strike down the removal position without imperiling the landmark Dodd-Frank law.

The bureau may have stopped some predatory lending practices, but it has also put a stranglehold on credit availability for the middle class. Its mandate is "to regulate mortgage servicing, pay-day lending, and stop predatory scams."

The CFPB has severely damaged the payday lending industry, although many financial experts believe it should have been more tightly regulated in the first place. But the CFPB's rules have also negatively affected other lending institutions that service high-risk borrowers. There's such a thing as overkill and the CFPB does it regularly.

Since Trump became president, the Republicans have tried to roll back some of the more onerous rules. But until the agency is consigned to the dustbin of history, it will continue to micromanage the nation's financial institutions.

That's why this case could be a landmark decision that actually restrains the government.

The case now before the court involves a California law firm called Seila Law the bureau investigated for allegedly unscrupulous debt relief practices. In turn, the firm challenged the constitutionality of the bureau’s structure.
As a professor at Harvard Law School, [Sen. Elizabeth] Warren agitated for the creation of a consumer protection agency. Though former President Barack Obama tapped her to set up the agency following passage of Dodd-Frank, she was ultimately passed over for the directorship due to protracted opposition to her appointment in the Senate.

Like the CFPB, some federal agencies are chartered to operate with a degree of independence from the political branches. In the past, the Supreme Court has allowed independent multi-member panels like the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) or investigatory independent counsels. The administration argues those precedents don’t apply here, however, because the CFPB director exercises executive power alone with no accountability to the president.

If there were a clearer example of government overreach, I haven't seen it. While it's likely that the provision in question will be struck down, how the agency as a whole fares is anyone's guess.

SOURCE

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For more blog postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated), A Coral reef compendium and an IQ compendium. (Both updated as news items come in). GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten. I also put up occasional updates on my Personal blog and each day I gather together my most substantial current writings on THE PSYCHOLOGIST.

Email me here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or here (Personal). My annual picture page is here

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22 October, 2019

Image hosting blues

For years now there have been image hosting services that have offered a convenient way of hosting images that you want to display on your blogs or other sites. I used Photobucket for a while, then Tinypic, then Imgur. Imgur was so convenient that it seems to have sent Tinypic out of business. I used Tinypic mainly between 2006 and 2010.

As well as convenience, Imgur offered an explicit guarantee that an image hosted by them would remain there "forever". Once posted there it would stay there. Given that for various reasons one could not always stay subscribed to the same ISP, that was particularly appealing. One might chop and change the host for your blog, home page etc, but the availability of your images would remain unchanged.

But that has now come to an end, Images hosted on both Tinypic and imgur are now no longer securely hosted, In the case of Imgur, political correctness has raised its head. Images connected to forbidden topics are now de-hosted. They are no longer where you put them. So much for the offer of permanence.

I must be one of the most incorrect people on the net. I routinely put up scholarly comments about race, social class and IQ! That's three forbidden topics. So it was to be expected that some of my pictures would vanish from where they were previously held. The social media generally are hostile to conservative content. And that now includes Imgur.

As long as you keep comprehensive backup files -- which I do -- there is no great drama in reposting deleted images elsewhere. It takes me only a couple of minutes per image to do so. A rather objectionable feature of the current situation, however is that Imgur are not satisfied simply to dehost a picture but post instead of the deleted image a brightly colored and unpleasant-looking image whih presumably represents a troll. It certainly motivates you to rehost your image pronto.

But here's the interesting thing: EVERY image ever hosted on Tinypic is now replaced by the same troll. Imgur seems to have taken over what remains of Tinypic and proceeded to blow a raspberry at each and every one of Tinypic's former users. They seem to be penalizing anybody who once used Tinypic. It is at least juvenile behaviour. Why they could not simply let Tinypic vanish into the night is a puzzle.

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Hillary's Attacks on Tulsi Gabbard Appear to be Backfiring

Gabbard is a much more attractive personality than Clinton so it was always Gabbard who would be believed

Hillary Clinton's bizarre accusation that the Russians are "grooming" Democratic presidential candidate Tulsi Gabbard for a third party run at the White House appears to be having the exact opposite effect she intended. “She’s the favorite of the Russians. They have a bunch of sites and bots and other ways of supporting her so far,” Clinton said on a recent podcast.

That comment has led to an outpouring of support for Gabbard and harsh criticism of Clinton. In fact, Gabbard, who is barely registering in polls, is now fundraising off of the comment.

The Hill:

"Hillary Clinton accused Tulsi Gabbard — a combat veteran, soldier and Major in the Army National Guard — of being 'groomed' to be a 'Russian asset,'" reads a fundraising email sent by Gabbard's campaign on Saturday. "Tulsi fights back and demands Hillary join the race and face her directly," it continues.

Gabbard in the email said Clinton "finally came out from behind the curtain yesterday, accusing me of being a Russian asset" while asking supporters to pitch in $25 to her campaign.

"If this a fight she wants to have, one that has implications for all of us and the future of our democracy, then I challenge her to come out from behind her proxies and powerful allies in the corporate media, and face me directly," Gabbard added.

Clinton didn't reply directly. Instead, she politely cancelled an appearance at "The Most Powerful Women" summit in Washington where Gabbard is scheduled to speak.

Townhall:

Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on Friday backed out of Fortune's Most Powerful Women Summit in Washington, D.C. because Democratic presidential candidate Tulsi Gabbard and former Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen are also scheduled to speak, Fox News reported. Her team, however, said it was because of "scheduling conflicts."
I guess she prefers hiding behind her proxies.

All of this has led to a surprising turn of events. Tulsi Gabbard is rising in Iowa.

Bloomberg:

On Saturday, Gabbard found fans among the many Clinton skeptics across Iowa, where Clinton barely won the 2016 Democratic caucuses against Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders.
"What is this horrible thing that Hillary said about you?" one person asked Gabbard at a house party in West Branch.

Gabbard responded that "it revealed the truth that I have been experiencing for a long time now — which is that, because I have been trying to bring about an end to our country's long-held foreign policy of waging one regime-change war after the next . [sic] I am labeled as a traitor."

"This is a message that is being sent to every single American . [sic] who speaks out for peace," she said.

Donald Trump gleefully fanned the flames of Democratic discord by jumping into the fray with both feet.

"So now Crooked Hillary is at it again! She is calling Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard “a Russian favorite,” and Jill Stein “a Russian asset.” As you may have heard, I was called a big Russia lover also (actually, I do like Russian people. I like all people!). Hillary’s gone Crazy!"

SOURCE

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Soak the rich with taxes and everyone will get clobbered

Not that long ago there was a broad political consensus that a fair and efficient tax system has a broad tax base and low tax rates. The grand bargain was no special interest loopholes and low tax rates to boost the economy and jobs. As recently as the 1980s, Democrats and Republicans joined together to pass a tax reform that lowered income tax rates to 28 percent, while eliminating deductions and carve outs. Nearly every Senate Democrat, including Ted Kennedy, Al Gore, Joe Biden, Bill Bradley, and Howard Metzenbaum, voted for this new system.

The tax reform worked. Economist Dale Jorgenson, then the chairman of the Harvard economics department, estimated that the net present value of the 1986 Tax Reform Act was well above $1 trillion to the economy because of lower tax rate penalties across the board. Politicians and the American voters had experienced the wreckage to the economy in the 1970s when tax rates stood as high as 70 percent.

The result was one of the worst decades for real middle class incomes since the Great Depression, skyrocketing unemployment, and a stock market that lost more than 60 percent of its value after inflation from 1968 to 1982. Working class Americans saw their retirement savings liquidated right before their eyes. High tax rates were not the only economic malady of that malaise decade, but they played a big part.

There was another practical reason for chopping tax rates down, as the rich found all sorts of clever and legal ways around paying those high tax rates. When the highest tax rate was between 70 percent and 90 percent, the wealthiest 1 percent of Americans paid less than 20 percent of the income tax burden. Today, with a tax rate of 37 percent, the rich pay almost 40 percent of the income tax burden. High tax rates failed to soak the rich because they sheltered their income from taxes.

After both the Kennedy and Reagan tax cuts, reported taxable income by those in the highest income tax bracket almost doubled in less than a decade. All of this recorded history has been lost among current liberal politicians and academics. Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, and many others are longing for a return to the era of punitive tax rates on the rich as a way to reduce income inequality. Economist Emmanuel Saez of the University of California argues we should go back to 70 percent tax rates since they worked so well the last time we imposed them.

In the 1950s and 1960s, when tax rates were as high as 90 percent, the economy was mostly prosperous. But the rich never paid those tax rates. Effective tax rates were actually much lower. This was also an era before the birth of the $2 trillion modern welfare and regulatory state and the taxes to pay for it. Medicare, Medicaid, and the payroll taxes to pay for them did not even exist back then in those glory days.

When President Kennedy cut the tax rate from 90 percent to 70 percent, the economy soared during the 1960s. Growth rates zoomed to 6 percent. When President Reagan chopped rates from 70 percent to 50 percent to 28 percent, the economy saw another burst of prosperity that former Wall Street Journal editor Robert Bartley dubbed the “seven fat years.”

The business tax cuts under President Trump have contributed to the lowest unemployment rate in 50 years and the biggest middle income gains in at least two decades. High tax rates did not work in the 1970s, but they will be even more harmful in the 21st century. What is different today from 50 years ago is globalization, with jobs, businesses, and investment capital flow to places in the world where after tax returns are highest. If we raise the income tax rate to above 50 percent, businesses and investment capital will flee to lower tax jurisdictions. Ask nations like France or Greece or Venezuela what happened to their economies when they devised new wealth tax systems to “soak the rich.”

Or look at the massive losses of people and income from high income tax states like New York, New Jersey, Rhode Island, Connecticut, Illinois, and even California. These states are bleeding wealth as residents relocate to low tax haven states like Tennessee, Arizona, Florida, Texas, and Utah. Does Senator Sanders really want to make us look like Connecticut, where localities are banning homeowners from posting “for sale” signs because the mad rush to leave is crushing real estate values?

An even worse idea is higher estate and wealth taxes. This has never worked. The United States has an estate tax of roughly 40 percent to extract money from the Bill Gates, Warren Buffets, and Tom Bradys of the country. However, it generates only about 1 percent of federal tax receipts and many studies find that the deadweight loss to the economy far exceeds the value of the tax collected. Even communist and socialist countries like Russia and Sweden have given up and repealed their estate taxes because they were harming their economies so noticeably.

SOURCE

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Fake news or disinformation?

Journalism isn't just dead — it's decomposed.

When Chris Wallace — in all Deep State unctuousness — asked Mick Mulvaney on Fox News Sunday to comment on a "well-connected Republican" who allegedly told Wallace there was a 20 percent chance the GOP would vote to remove the president from office, he not only was aiding in that decomposition, he was picking up a shovel and helping dig its grave.

Wallace didn't identify who this "well-connected Republican" is or what he actually said in context, just the tidbit the host wanted to tell us. What Wallace was doing was engaging in propaganda, creating a smear based on the flimsiest hearsay.

But, as we all know, he's not alone. This was only one of a myriad of cases and far from the worst. The employment of anonymous sources by media has been debated (and attacked) for years but since Trump was elected, their use has escalated into the stratosphere. Barely a day goes by that we don't hear something from some "source close to someone or other" or a "person in position to know" about things we learn, sooner or later, to be lies or, at best, half truths. Other times we read "experts agree" or other such terms of non-art. What we are really getting are leaks that are supposedly illegal but almost never prosecuted.

Almost all of our leading newspapers and networks engage in this activity, some pretending to have checks and balances that are inscrutable from the outside and likely conveniently fudged from the inside. To name a few outlets that come immediately to mind, the New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal (in its front section), NBC, CBS, ABC and, of course, CNN are frequent culprits in this reliance on the anonymous. They do this repeatedly and win Pulitzers for the ensuing lies and misrepresentations. It's an old tradition, stemming back to the days when Walter Duranty lied about Stalin in the New York Times.

Trump made a mistake in labeling this "fake news." Besides being too colloquial, the term is too generic and allows for the possibility that in some cases at least this dishonesty may be an accident. People make mistakes, after all. Yes, but it's hardly ever true in these cases. It's usually quite deliberate deception. A much, much more accurate term would be disinformation, a technique frequently employed by intelligence agencies. It's a safe bet that many of these leaks arrived from ours. In that, our intelligence agencies were following in a grand tradition. The Soviets were experts at it. They wrote the book on disinformation.

Now the disinformation that is being put out is that Trump is on the rocks with Republicans. Mitt Romney may vote to impeach. Both The Washington Post and theWSJ have new stories warning of — or more properly "concern trolling" about — this disaffection. The word must be out. Chris Wallace was echoing the same narrative. The newly-minted NeverTrumper Matt Drudge is linking all this.

But is it true or is it disinfo? I'll go with the latter. In fact, given Trump's popularity with the Republican rank-and-file, it would be suicidal for incumbent Republican politicians to vote him out. They'd be out themselves at the next primary. And reporters at the WaPo and WSJ know that, unless they've been living under the proverbial rock or are willfully disregarding last week's Trump rally in Dallas that had more supporters standing outside the venue than any political candidate in recent memory has had inside. (I know--the polls say he's in trouble. Have you ever done a poll yourself? I have, several, for this website years ago, and learned some interesting things. Just as freedom of the press belongs to the man who owns one, the results of a poll belong to the man who sets it up, i. e. asks the questions.)

What our media is doing is lying unabashedly as it has been doing since the outset of the Russia probe. Every one of the respected outlets listed above repeatedly reported the existence or the imminent proof of Trump-Russia collusion based on anonymous leaks. None of it ever happened. It would be interesting to know what percentage of those leaks came from members of intelligence agencies. I suspect it would be a scary number.

SOURCE

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For more blog postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated), A Coral reef compendium and an IQ compendium. (Both updated as news items come in). GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten. I also put up occasional updates on my Personal blog and each day I gather together my most substantial current writings on THE PSYCHOLOGIST.

Email me here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or here (Personal). My annual picture page is here

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21 October, 2019

Amid rising anti-Semitism, the People of the Book rejoice with the Law

by Jeff Jacoby

ON OCTOBER 14, 1663, the English civil servant Samuel Pepys decided to pay a visit to the Jewish synagogue in London's Creechurch Lane. Jews were a novelty in Restoration England. They had been expelled from the realm nearly four centuries earlier, and it was only in 1656 that they had once again been permitted to live on English soil. Pepys, knowing nothing of Judaism, wasn't aware that his excursion happened to coincide with the most euphoric day in the Jewish calendar — the festival of Simchat Torah, or "rejoicing with the law."

What he saw bewildered him.

"But, Lord!" he recorded in his famous diary, "to see the disorder, laughing, sporting, and no attention, but confusion in all their service, more like brutes than people knowing the true God, would make a man forswear ever seeing them more and indeed I never did see so much, or could have imagined there had been any religion in the whole world so absurdly performed as this."

What Pepys had unwittingly walked in on was a celebration of the oldest love affair in history — the infatuation of the Jewish people with the Torah. In Judaism, there are no saints to adore or icons to venerate. Rather, there is a book to study and teach: the scroll of the law, the Torah given by God to Moses and the Israelites at Mount Sinai, the essential text with which Jews have engaged intellectually and been sustained emotionally for more than three millennia.

That book is "our most cherished possession," writes Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, the noted British theologian and member of the House of Lords. "We stand in its presence as if it were a king. We dance with it as if it were a bride. We kiss it as if it were a friend. If, God forbid, one is damaged beyond repair, we mourn it as if it were a member of the family." If a Torah scroll is accidentally dropped, everyone who witnesses it is expected to fast in penance. When a synagogue is burned, whether by accident or by arson, there is an immediate, palpable anxiety to know whether the Torah scrolls were saved or lost.

Simchat Torah occurs on the last day of a three-week sequence of fall holidays. It follows Rosh Hashana (the Jewish New Year), Yom Kippur (the Day of Atonement), and Sukkot (the feast of Tabernacles). Unlike those holidays, however, Simchat Torah is not biblically ordained. It was not imposed by religious authorities from the top down, but grew organically from the bottom up. Its roots reach back 15 centuries to the ancient Jewish community of Babylonia, which formalized the practice of publicly reading the entire Torah — from the beginning of Genesis to the end of Deuteronomy — over the course of a year. The completion of the annual cycle became an occasion of joy, marked by singing and dancing around the synagogue with the Torah scrolls. Adults and children alike take part in the festivities. And as soon as the final verses of Deuteronomy are chanted from the end of one scroll, another is opened and the first chapter of Genesis is chanted: "In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth." The Jewish engagement with the Torah never ends; as soon as we finish, we start again.

The "people of the book," Jews are called. The phrase comes from the Koran, where it appears 31 times — an apt emphasis, for no nation has ever been as closely identified with a book as have Jews with the Torah. Sacks notes that by the time Simchat Torah had spread throughout the Jewish world, Jews had lost everything that would seem indispensable to national survival: land, sovereignty, political freedom, a military. Yet they still had their book to study and teach and rejoice with. Somehow, through the centuries of wandering and exile, that was enough to keep Jewish peoplehood alive.

Three centuries after Pepys made his diary entry, another renowned writer encountered Jews celebrating Simchat Torah. In 1965, Elie Wiesel traveled to the Soviet Union, where Jews lived in fear and religion was repressed. And yet, he discovered, on one day of the year — Simchat Torah — throngs of young Jews streamed to the remaining synagogue in Moscow, bravely defying the KGB to openly celebrate their Jewishness.

For centuries, in communities all over the world, Jews have danced on Simchat Torah. Above: Solomon Alexander Hart's 1850 painting "The Feast of the Rejoicing of the Law at the Synagogue in Leghorn, Italy"

Wiesel was astonished.

"Where did they all come from?" he marveled. "Who told them that tens of thousands of boys and girls would gather here to sing and dance and rejoice in the joy of the Torah? They who barely know each other and know even less of Judaism — how did they know that? I spent hours among them, dazed and excited, agitated by an ancient dream." It was a harbinger of the coming struggle to save Soviet Jewry, which would eventually crack open the Iron Curtain and change the trajectory of the Cold War.

Simchat Torah returns this week amid a rising global tide of antisemitism. One year after the Tree of Life massacre in Pittsburgh and just days after the Yom Kippur shooting in Halle, Germany, Jews increasingly require police protection when they gather in prayer. Nevertheless, synagogues the world over will be filled anew with the same euphoria that so startled Pepys and amazed Wiesel. The People of the Book will once again rejoice with the Law, dancing with the scrolls that have been, for 33 centuries, the ultimate source of their identity and strength.

SOURCE

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CIVIL WAR: Marianne Williamson and Bernie Sanders' Campaign Co-Chair Support Tulsi Gabbard

Three outside campaigns are joining forces against The Queen of Darkness. And it's quite a sight.

When Hillary Clinton launched a vicious attack against Democratic congresswoman and presidential candidate Tulsi Gabbard, she undoubtedly thought that doing so could destroy Tulsi's campaign... and possibly even her career. The reason for Hillary's hatred towards Tulsi was clear from the get-go. As Tulsi herself explained on Tucker Carlson Tonight, she is against everything Hillary represents. She's against regime-change wars. She's against a new arms race. She's an outsider -- a veteran -- rather than a career politician. What's more, she seems to be incorruptible and honest.

In other words, she's basically the anti-Hillary.

Although it was quite shocking to see just how viciously Hillary attacked Tulsi, there's some good news for the congresswoman/former soldier: other presidential candidates and/or their campaigns are publicly taking her side.

Here is Marianne Williamson, another outsider and Democratic presidential candidate who criticized her fellow liberals earlier for treating her less fairly than conservatives. And not only does Williamson clearly stand by Tulsi, she also blasts her own party in the process:

"The Democratic establishment has got to stop smearing women it finds inconvenient! The character assassination of women who don’t toe the party line will backfire," Williamson writes on Twitter. "Stay strong @TulsiGabbard. You deserve respect and you have mine."

This is quite a sight to behold. Democratic women are -- correctly and rightfully! -- pointing out that the supposed "feminism" of the Democratic Party is nothing but a sham. They aren't women-friendly, they're establishment-friendly. And "feminism" is nothing but a tool for them to get some extra votes. It isn't heartfelt, it isn't something they actually believe in.

Williamson isn't the only prominent Democratic outsider who is publicly taking a stand in favor of Tulsi. The same goes for Nina Turner, national co-chair of the Bernie Sanders campaign.

"Good morning Sister [Tulsi Gabbard]," Turner writes on Twitter. "I'm just catching up with the foolery that's going on. I'm SMDH [Shaking My Damn Head] hard. Four words: Keep. Your. Head. Up."

The surprise support from Turner and Williamson for Tulsi is very telling. They are all outsiders; they're all up against the same machine... and they've all experienced the same bullying Tulsi is experiencing now. Still, it requires courage for them to publicly take a stand.

I disagree strongly with most of their views with regard to politics, but I have to admit: you don't often see this kind of courage in politics. Good on you, ladies. Stay strong. Stand tall. And keep your head up. Don't let the Clinton Machine put you down.

SOURCE

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Tulsi Goes Nuclear on Hillary: 'Queen of Warmongers, Embodiment of Corruption'

As we reported yesterday, Hillary Clinton recently opened the attack on both Tulsi Gabbard and Jill Stein, accusing them of being Vladimir Putin's little puppets.

Sadly for Mrs. Clinton, Tulsi doesn't take such accusations lying down. Neither should she, of course. After all, unlike Hillary, Tulsi has actually served her country as a soldier. She has literally put her life on the line for America. Being accused of being a "Russian tool," then, is a very serious accusation in her eyes; one that she isn't willing to tolerate.

"Great! Thank you Hillary Clinton," Tulsi writes on Twitter. "You, the queen of warmongers, embodiment of corruption, and personification of the rot that has sickened the Democratic Party for so long, have finally come out from behind the curtain. From the day I announced my candidacy, there has been a concerted campaign to destroy my reputation. We wondered who was behind it and why. Now we know -- it was always you, through your proxies and powerful allies in the corporate media and war machine, afraid of the threat I pose."

Next, Tulsi correctly concludes that, from her perspective, the primary really is between her and Hillary. "Don't cowardly hide behind your proxies," she tells Hillary. "Join the race directly."

It is hard to exaggerate the evil that is Hillary "Corruption" Clinton. This woman is literally willing to destroy lives to further her own career -- of that of her allies. Note that I didn't write "friends," but "allies." A person with as rotten a heart as Hillary doesn't have friends.

Other politicians, who have at least something resembling a heart, often attack opponents for being weak or the exact opposite (an aggressive, out-of-control bugaboo). Such lines of attack don't go nearly far enough for The Queen of Darkness, however. Oh no, when she sets her eye on a prey, she goes in for the kill by accusing the victim of literally betraying America. She doesn't care one bit if that victim happens to be a retired soldier who saw her friends die on the battlefields of the Middle East. They stand in her way. That is enough for them to warrant destruction.

Thankfully, Tulsi is a veteran, which means that she's not exactly afraid to fight. She's right to point out the incredible corruption that is Hillary Clinton, and the American Empire-ideology she has been pushing through Americans' throats for so long. Sure, this is unlikely to make her more popular among her party's leaders, but it will almost certainly do wonders for her popularity among millennials and Gen Z. After all, if those two generations hate one thing, it's Clintonite politics.

SOURCE

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IN BRIEF

ABC'S FAKE NEWS: "ABC News aired footage claiming to show a Turkish attack on a Syrian border town that was actually from a 2017 video of an American shooting range," The Washington Free Beacon reveals. Regardless of anyone's position on Trump's Syria policy, engineering a crisis is way beyond the pale.

WHO'D A THUNK IT? Target cuts workers' hours after vowing to raise minimum wage to $15 by 2020 (National Review)

HELPING THE LITTLE GUY: Blue-collar employment thriving under Trump — hits 50-year high (The New American)

SWING AND A MISS: Tribal chiefs urge Atlanta Braves to end the "tomahawk chop" (New York Post)

MORE DALLAS-AREA FALLOUT: Ex-Fort Worth police officer charged with murder after shooting black woman in her home; occurred less than two weeks after Amber Guyger's sentencing (USA Today)

SCHUMER THWARTED: Chuck Schumer's bid to rebuke Trump over Syria fails in Senate (The Washington Times)

FREE SPEECH: Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg says he fears "erosion of truth" but defends allowing politicians to lie in ads (The Washington Post)

SNUBBING NEARLY HALF THE UNION: San Francisco blacklists 22 states over pro-life laws (National Review)

TARIFF FALLOUT: China's GDP growth grinds to near 30-year low as tariffs hit production (Reuters)

"ABSURD, IMMORAL, AND OFFENSIVE": UN member states hand Venezuela's brutal Maduro regime a seat on the Human Rights Council (CNSNews.com)

POLICY: Why Mexico is cooperating with us on immigration (National Review)

SATIRE: Congress votes to protect Syria's border but not the U.S. border (Genesius Times) Satire or reality?

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For more blog postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated), A Coral reef compendium and an IQ compendium. (Both updated as news items come in). GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten. I also put up occasional updates on my Personal blog and each day I gather together my most substantial current writings on THE PSYCHOLOGIST.

Email me here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or here (Personal). My annual picture page is here

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20 October, 2019

Wealth taxes

Even her fellow Democrats are challenging Elizabeth Warren on how she will pay for her big spending proposals. Her answer to that relies very heavily on her proposed wealth tax. She clearly thinks it will be a goldmine. There have already been some good comments on why such a tax will be very destructive but I just want to set out the kernel arguments about why such a tax will raise little if anything.

For a start, great wealth is not usually held in the form of bank deposits. It is almost all in the form of real estate, shares and other tangible assets -- so liquidating even a small part of that would depress asset prices generally. And that will depress spending and investments across the board. It will affect the wealth of large sections of the population, leading to very negative feeling among job creators. Unemployment would shoot up and income tax receipts would be reduced.

And the second effect would be large scale emigration among the wealthy. Some nearby Caribbean islands are pleasant places to live in the sun and many have very low tax rates. To escape the tentacles of Uncle Sam, the emigrants would also have to renounce their American citizenship but many retirees do that already. And You only have to bring a few million with you to be granted residence in Australia or New Zealand and you can definitely drink the water there. And there is never any need to press 1 for English. A lot of rich people have well-appointed bolt-holes in NZ already.

And when the rich move out, they take their income taxes with them -- as well as escaping a wealth tax. And the rich pay a big proportion of income tax so, once again, tax revenue would FALL.

Even if she can't tax the departed rich Warren might have the bright idea of taxing any assets left behind in the USA. But that would lead to a mass liquidation of assets, with the proceeds of that going to purchase assets elsewhere.

High taxing Leftist governments have encountered that problem before and their response is to make the currency not convertible -- so you can't use greenbacks to buy (say) New Zealand dollars. But that drives away all foreign investments, which are a major source of jobs in America. So Warren's "clever" proposal would lead to lower revenues and higher unemployment.

She seems a smart sort of woman so she probably knows all that. As a Leftist, the thought of destroying American prosperity probably turns her on

Warren would apply a 2% tax on every dollar of net worth for households worth $50 million or more, and a 3% tax on every dollar of net worth beyond $1 billion.

According to tables in a recent paper by Saez and Zucman, this would apply to around $11 trillion of holdings this year, producing revenue of at least $220 billion.

Sanders’ “extreme wealth tax” would levy a 1% tax on the first dollar of net worth above $32 million. That tax would rise in increments, to 2% on net worth between $50 million to $250 million all the way up to 8% on wealth above $10 billion.

Sanders’ campaign estimated the plan, which would tax just the top 0.1% of U.S. households, would raise an estimated $4.35 trillion over the next decade.

Saez and Zucman say their research points to the wealth tax as an effective way to equalize the amount of tax paid by people with massive fortunes like investor Warren Buffett and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos with the middle-class, and then seed the proceeds through the economy.

Had the Warren proposal been in place since 1982, the share of wealth held by the top 400 would still have risen - but only to 2%. A higher tax rate of 10% on holdings above $1 billion, meanwhile, would have kept that group’s share of national wealth stable.

In more individual terms, the 3% rate on holdings above a billion would mean Bezos would be worth just $86 billion this year, versus $160 billion. At the bottom of the top 15, casino mogul Sheldon Adelson would have $18 billion, versus $35 billion.

A dozen European nations used to have wealth taxes but most have done away with them. France, one of the last, abolished its wealth tax in late 2017, after thousands of millionaires relocated to neighboring, lower-tax countries.

Saez and Zucman argue that Europe’s history with wealth taxes is not relevant to the United States because those countries set their wealth tax bar too low, and because it is easier to relocate within the continent for favorable tax laws.

The U.S. tax system, on the other hand, essentially taxes all citizens, no matter where they live.

SOURCE

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The Totalitarian American Left

BY DAVID LIMBAUGH

The left is becoming more unapologetically totalitarian every day. Every freedom-loving American should be alarmed.

From hounding conservatives out of restaurants to spitting on Trump supporters at rallies, from firing employees for politically incorrect statements to fining people for "misgendering" a person, the left is on a path toward absolutism.

Even some former and current leftists have recognized this intolerant trend and broken from their colleagues, lamenting their intolerance of opposing ideas and disturbing mission to suppress dissenting opinion.

Just the other day, three incidents typifying the left's authoritarianism popped out at me as I was surveying the morning news.

The Federalist reported that venues in three North American cities -- Toronto, Brooklyn, and Portland -- canceled screenings of a movie about Canadian psychologist and author Jordan Peterson because of leftist criticism. Peterson exploded onto the scene in recent years with his no-nonsense, brilliant, and clear-eyed critique of insane cultural trends, especially those concerning gender.

Peterson's book "12 Rules for Life" is wildly popular, and there are countless viral videos featuring his encounters with various leftist interviewers, panelists and audience members who have tried and failed to entrap him on a number of issues, and been reduced -- in every case -- to blundering, ineffectual bullies.

If you haven't partaken of these videos, you owe it to yourself to witness one arrogant leftist after another being gobsmacked by the simple weapon of unadulterated logic. These videos are irresistibly contagious and imminently satisfying for those longing to see intellectually defenseless, virtue-signaling finger waggers brought to their knees through the medium of polite debate.

Peterson, you see, won't kowtow to the leftists' demand that we embrace the tenets of gender ideology, which teaches that gender is less about biology and more about personal identification. He refuses to support laws that criminalize one's failure to use a person's preferred pronouns, such as "they" instead of "she."

Peterson has the temerity to say that men and women are biologically different, and that gender is not a fluid, human construct. That doesn't sit well with the left, which not only insists that we accept its cockeyed ideas as normal but also advocates imposing them on us by force of law.

Can you get your mind around the irony of the left banning a movie about Peterson because he's dangerous? Who is more dangerous: a person who peaceably expresses an opinion that happens to be supported by thousands of years of human experience and common sense, or those who try to ban his voice or even a movie about it? This is "1984"-level scary, and it's getting worse by the hour.

Jordan Peterson and Dave Rubin Ditch Patreon Over SPLC, Credit Card Censorship

On what possible grounds is the left arguing that Peterson's views are dangerous? He doesn't advocate violence; he isn't a rabble-rouser or revolutionary. He simply states his opinion instead of genuflecting to the despotic left.

But they claim that if Peterson's views are openly expressed, he might convince other people that he's right, and that could lead to the proliferation of conservative thought. Peterson's "conservative perspectives on feminism and gender," according to an opinion piece in The New York Times, "are very popular among young men and often are a path to more extreme content and ideologies." Think about this. Conservative speech is dangerous because it is a slippery slope to the adoption of conservative ideas? This must be satire. Do these clueless cranks know how ridiculous they sound?

Again, who is more extreme and dangerous: Jordan Peterson, who advocates the silencing of no one and expresses mainstream opinions, or leftists, who are actively trying to censor Peterson?

Please don't make the reckless mistake of dismissing this crusade against Peterson as exceptional. This is the left's pattern, and it is becoming more aggressive all the time.

The second and third incidents I came across are further proof that the left is increasingly Stalinist. In the most recent Democratic presidential debate, Sen. Kamala Harris pushed for the suspension of President Trump's Twitter, speciously alleging that he is trying to obstruct justice and intimidate and threaten witnesses. You see, the left always has some urgent rationale to smother conservative speech -- whether it's to prevent the incitement of violence or obstruction of justice. But it just wants to shut us up.

Those who would silence the other side are the very definition of dangerous. Don't take Harris' musings lightly, even if she is mostly posturing to gin up more support from the Trump-hating Democratic base. It is instructive that efforts to muzzle speech almost always come from the left, not the right, because the left is insecure about the popularity of its kooky ideas.

The third incident involved demagogue and former Rep. Beto O'Rourke, who said in a CNN forum on LGBT issues that churches and religious organizations should lose their tax-exempt status if they oppose same-sex marriage. If I have to explain how outrageous this is, the country is in even greater danger than I imagined.

I found these examples in 15 minutes of reading this week. They are everywhere. America was founded on the idea of claiming and preserving our God-given liberties. The illiberal left, which believes our rights and freedoms come from government, is hell-bent on destroying our liberties and forcibly imposing its thoughts and ideas on all of us.

God save us.

SOURCE

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Why They Hate Tulsi Gabbard

She's the only decent candidate they've got, as far as I can see. She actually seems susceptable to reason

Note to Democrats: If you want to win your party’s presidential nomination in 2020, make sure you march as far to the left as possible — preferably off the cliff.

These days, any politician who doesn’t embrace the most radical elements of the Left’s agenda is disparaged and denounced. Democrats and their media brethren have been doing this to Donald Trump since he became a Republican, and now they’re going after one of their own.

Tulsi Gabbard, a Democrat presidential candidate, Hawaii congresswoman, National Guard major, Samoan American, and Hindu is being portrayed as — get this — a Russian ally and a bedfellow of white nationalists. Why? Because she’s taken old-school Democrat stances on issues of foreign policy, drugs, and abortion.

That’s how far left the Democrat Party has moved.

Gabbard’s views on a range of issues certainly aren’t to be mistaken for Reagan-style conservatism. But compared to the rest of the Democrat field, she’s as American as Normal Rockwell. And this has apparently caused the media to smear Gabbard as a politician more at home on the alt-right than in the Democrat Party.

Swallow your drink first, but Hillary Clinton likewise chimed in, “I think they’ve got their eye on someone who’s currently in the Democratic primary and are grooming her to be the third-party candidate. She’s the favorite of the Russians. They have a bunch of sites and bots and other ways of supporting her so far.”

Gabbard called such smears “completely despicable.”

Earlier this month, The New York Times lamented, “On podcasts and online videos, in interviews and Twitter feeds, alt-right internet stars, white nationalists, libertarian activists and some of the biggest boosters of Mr. Trump heap praise on Ms. Gabbard. They like the Hawaiian congresswoman’s isolationist foreign policy views. They like her support for drug decriminalization. They like what she sees as censorship by big technology platforms.”

Wait a minute. Haven’t Democrats always been big supporters of drug decriminalization? When did that become a right-wing issue? And leftists have proudly marched against every U.S. military endeavor since Vietnam, but now we’re supposed to believe they’re foreign-policy hawks ready to defend American interventionism abroad?

Of course, it’s not about principle. It’s all about President Trump. Whatever he supports, Democrats must reflexively oppose.

“Regime change wars are just fine with most 2020 Democrats, so long as it allows them to oppose Trump,” Jack Hunter writes at the Washington Examiner. “The president’s recent policy in Syria is not unlike the anti-regime change stance Obama promoted as a candidate in 2008. The Obama-Biden ticket won the White House by opposing Bush’s regime change war in Iraq and promising not to repeat that mistake (although they eventually did).”

Republicans aren’t going to storm Gabbard’s Capitol Hill office and ask her to switch parties, but there’s a dose of decency and common sense in what she says. And she’s not afraid to step out of line, which is no doubt why Trump supporters often like what she has to say. In fact, that characteristic is part of why Trump was elected in 2016. Like the president, Gabbard marches to the beat of her own drummer.

Reason’s Robby Soave writes of Gabbard’s Libertarian appeal, “Indeed, Gabbard was the only candidate on the stage Tuesday night to advocate a unilateral, immediate end to the disastrous policy of intervening in every conflict in the Middle East with the goal of changing the regimes. As she wisely noted, such schemes have backfired in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya, and likely would have backfired in Syria if undertaken there as well. Refreshingly, Gabbard called out both parties and the mainstream media for their complicity in the U.S.‘s foolish foreign policy interventionism.”

But she didn’t stop there. During the Ohio debate, Gabbard took a position that’s certainly to the left of most Republicans but still considered unacceptable by every other Democrat candidate. Responding to a question about states restricting abortion, Gabbard replied, “There should be some restrictions in place. I support codifying Roe v. Wade — while making sure that, during the third trimester, abortion is not an option unless the life or severe health consequences of a woman are at risk.”

Uh-oh, Tulsi. There goes the nomination.

In the minds of Democrats, taking the wrong stance on the military or drug enforcement is bad enough, but utter anything other than prostrate praise for the holy sacrament of “choice,” including government-funded abortion-on-demand, and you’re toast as a viable Democrat political candidate.

It’s sad to see one of our two major political parties destroy anyone who dares challenge their status quo. In the end, Tulsi Gabbard doesn’t have a chance of securing her party’s nomination, but her campaign has served America well by reminding the rest of us just how extreme the Democrat Party has become. And that’s good news for Trump in 2020

SOURCE

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Mexico has deported over 300 Indian nationals to New Delhi, the National Migration Institute (INM) said late on Wednesday, in what it described as an unprecedented transatlantic deportation

The 310 men and one woman that INM said were in Mexico illegally were sent on a chartered flight, accompanied by federal immigration agents and Mexico’s National Guard.

The people had been scattered in eight states around the country, INM said, including in southern Mexico where many Indian migrants enter the country, hoping to transit to the U.S. border.

“It is unprecedented in INM’s history - in either form or the number of people - for a transatlantic air transport like the one carried out on this day,” INM said in a statement.

The Mexican government in June struck a deal with the United States, vowing to significantly curb U.S.-bound migration in exchange for averting U.S. tariffs on Mexican exports.

Caitlyn Yates, a research coordinator at IBI Consultants who has studied increasing numbers of U.S.-bound Asian and African migrants arriving in Mexico, said the backlog of migrants in southern Mexico has grown as officials have stopped issuing permits for them to cross the country.

“This type of deportation in Mexico is the first of its kind but likely to continue,” Yates said.

SOURCE

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For more blog postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated), A Coral reef compendium and an IQ compendium. (Both updated as news items come in). GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten. I also put up occasional updates on my Personal blog and each day I gather together my most substantial current writings on THE PSYCHOLOGIST.

Email me here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or here (Personal). My annual picture page is here

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18 October, 2019

The Not So Special Relationship: How Trump Has Bewildered the United Kingdom

There is a long article in "Foreign Affairs" under the above heading. It makes clear that the UK bureaucracy and elite generally are regularly flummoxed by Trump. They seem unaware that Trump also regularly flummoxes the American bureaucracy and elite.

But the question the article raises is whether Trump has eroded the "special relationship' that has long existed between the USA and the UK? It's an odd question to ask when you note that Mr Trump is in fact half British by birth, has significant investments in Britain and has often made positive comments about Britain. And there is an undoubted warmth between Prime Minister Johnson and President Trump. Each clearly sees the other as similar to himself. That all sounds special to me. And I don't mind predicting that the longevity of the Johnson Prime Ministership will be considerable.

What is undoubted however is that Mr Trump upsets the British bureaucracy. They suddenly find that their customary policies and positions no longer work reliably. Good! one might be inclined to exclaim. Perhaps their customary policies and positions are in need of a spring cleaning!

Clearly, however, Trump is a "one off". It's unimaginable that we will ever see another President like him. Though subsequent Presidents will undoubtedly learn from him.

But Trump has revealed important truths: That culltivating personal relationship with heads of opponent governments can lead to important advances towards peace: That patroitism is a powerful force for conservatives to draw upon and that deregulation is as poweful a force for prosperity as regulation is a force for economic stagnation. Nobody foresaw 3.5% unemployment or Mr Kim's clear eagerness for a rapprochement. So the plain truth is that both the American and British establishments need to stop whining and instead learn from Mr Trump that his overturning of established customs and pieties is something to learn from.

Like Ronald Reagan before him, he is a very radical conservative. The Left, by contrast have learned nothing since the 19th century. "Let the government do it" must be just about the most moronic policy ever devised.

Perhaps the most amusing thing about this whole matter is that Obama and his cohorts really did disrespect the special relationship. His critics are accusing Trump of what Obama did. But Obama was the spearhead of the steady Leftist advance through society so everything he did could be understood.-- JR

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In Trump Fact Check, CNN Fact-Checker Leaves Out …the Facts

CNN’s fact-checking unit reached out last week to The Heritage Foundation for analysis of President Donald Trump’s recent comments about the U.S. military’s munitions stockpile at the time he took office.

Bewilderingly, the fact-checker for the cable news pioneer then ignored those facts.

Some 24 hours and multiple emails after the initial request, CNN published its “fact check,” claiming Trump severely exaggerated the sad state of the munitions stockpile when he became president, and also his impact on the rebuild since.

Just one problem: CNN completely omitted the wealth of data provided by a Heritage Foundation defense analyst demonstrating exactly the opposite to be true.

This episode highlights an important question—every reporter is a fact-checker. But what’s the response when someone, especially someone with “fact-checker” in his title, just … gets the fact checks wrong?

Based on research provided to CNN, Col. John “JV” Venable, Heritage’s senior research fellow for defense programs, laid out how the U.S. military was indeed facing a munitions shortage in the waning years of the Obama administration. Venable is a retired Air Force pilot with 25 years of service.

Using publicly available data from U.S. Central Command and the secretary of the Air Force’s Financial Management website, Venable showed that the joint force dropped more than twice as many precision-guided munitions (PGMs)—think “smart bombs,” like the JDAM (Joint Direct Attack Munition)—in just the last three years of the Obama administration than the Air Force could purchase during the full eight years of President Barack Obama’s tenure.

While Navy numbers were not included in the analysis to CNN, Venable did note that Air Force acquisition of precision-guided munitions dwarfs that of the Navy—analysis the numbers also showed to be true.

According to a 2018 Defense Department Selective Acquisition Report, the service purchased a total of 4,485 JDAM guidance kits during the eight years of the Obama presidency. When added to the 45,198 the Air Force purchased during the same years, the joint force collectively acquired 49,963 precision munitions, while it dropped around 96,000 in just the three years preceding Trump’s inauguration.

Not only was the force dropping far more bombs than it was taking in—the delay between getting munitions from the checkout line to the flight line was also a compounding factor.

“[I]t takes 2-3 years from purchase order to delivery of these munitions,” Venable wrote to CNN, adding that, “Currently the Trump administration is rebuilding the PGM stockpile by purchasing as many munitions as current production capacity allows.”

The bottom line, he wrote, “is that the Obama administration effectively gutted the munitions stockpile.”

Trump’s leadership has reversed that trend markedly, however.

“By the end of fiscal year 2020, the Trump administration will have acquired more than four times the number of GPS-guided munitions than were acquired during the eight years of the Obama administration—years when expenditures [munitions dropped] were very high,” Venable told CNN.

At current rates for the Air Force, the total will come to more than 192,000 munitions by next October.

The evidence is overwhelming: The U.S. military was facing a dwindling precision munitions stockpile as Obama left the White House, and, all bluster aside, Trump has begun to erase it.

Unfortunately, CNN’s piece, which should have evaluated those very numbers, included none of them. Instead, the piece (“Fact check: Trump exaggerates on munitions shortage”) found Trump’s claim to be “a severe exaggeration.”

Despite having Venable’s analysis in hand, the author, Daniel Dale, wrote: “It has never been clear how dire or how unusual the perceived shortage was, since the military does not release comprehensive data about ammunition levels.”

When asked why such important details, which should have markedly changed the outcome of the fact check itself, were omitted, the fact-checker replied: “I very much do not think that JV’s data … was itself even remotely close to assess the extent of the shortage.”

To make matters worse, the piece used vague, data-less commentary from other analysts downplaying any possible munitions shortage, while omitting the numbers-based data from Venable that showed Trump’s comments may have been correct.

He also claimed the numbers irrelevant to the “military’s concern” about specific “possible contingencies.”

Yet, Venable wrote in his analysis: “Estimates for the monthly expenditure of munitions in a war with China or Russia dwarf the 5,000 PGM munitions/month the U.S. endured at the height of the GWOT [Global War on Terror].”

In other words, the shortage was even more drastic, not less, if tied to a specific conflict with Russia, China, North Korea, or Iran, because the military would need even more munitions to successfully engage in such a conflict.

What this instance illustrates is the importance of unbiased fact-checking, and a pursuit of narrative based on the facts, not the other way around.

I have worked with a wide variety of reporters for nearly a decade, and let me tell you—it’s not mere lip-service to say that the overwhelming majority, whether official “fact-checkers” or not, take their responsibility to uncover and report the truth seriously.

And, they do this despite what some at the highest levels of government today might say.

However, sometimes individuals get the story wrong. When that happens, those involved in helping tell it should correct the record, especially about a topic as vital as the strength of our military.

Indeed, downplaying this facet of the readiness crisis serves only to hurt the military most of all. If the public is not aware of the military’s needs, how can they be expected to support the actions necessary to meet those needs?

Ultimately, it is critical that those tasked with evaluating statements of fact do everything in their power to take all the evidence into account before making statements of fact of their own.

That is the right standard for all of us.

SOURCE

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It's a Middle-Class Boom

How much of the monetary gains from the Trump economic speedup have gone to the middle class? If you ask Democratic senators and presidential candidates Elizabeth Warren, Kamala Harris and Bernie Sanders, the answer to that question is … almost none.

“(Donald) Trump’s economy is great for billionaires, not for working people,” Sanders likes to say. Meanwhile, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi grouses that under the Trump agenda, “the rich get richer, and everyone else is stuck paying the bill.”

Uh-huh. That’s been the standard liberal riff for the last couple of years as they try to explain how a president who they said would create a second Great Depression has created boom times with the lowest inflation and unemployment in half a century.

But not a word of this is true, according to new Census Bureau data on the incomes of America’s middle class. This study by former Census Bureau researchers and now statisticians at Sentier Research has found gigantic income gains for the middle class under Trump. The median or average-income family has seen a gain of $5,003 since Trump came into office. Median family income is now (August 2019) $65,976, up from about $61,000 when he entered office (January 2017).

Under George W. Bush, the household income gains were a little over $400 in eight years, and under Barack Obama the gains were $1,043. That was in eight years for each. Under Trump, in less than three years, the extra income is about three times larger.

These gains under Trump are so large in such a short period of time that I asked the Sentier Research team to triple-check the numbers. Sure enough, on each occasion, the income swing was $5,000.

This is a bonanza for the middle class, and the extra income in tens of millions of Americans’ pockets is getting spent. Consumers are king in America today, and fatter wallets translate into more store sales. Home Depot and Lowe’s recently recorded huge sales surges.

The tax cut also added an additional $2,500 to a typical family of four’s after-tax incomes. So after taking account of taxes owed, the income of most middle-class families is up closer to $6,000 in the Trump era.

Memo to Pelosi: That ain’t crumbs.

Ronald Reagan used to talk about the importance of real take-home pay. He asked voters in 1980, “Are you better off than you were four years ago?” (when Jimmy Carter was elected). Thanks to high taxes, high inflation and high unemployment in the late 1970s, the answer to that question was clearly no. Reagan won and Carter lost.

Trump should begin asking Americans if they are better off than they were four years ago. Today, the answer to that question is clearly yes. It’s the economy, stupid. Everyone — especially the middle class — is sharing in the fruits of the Trump boom.

SOURCE

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Drugs: A Grim Prognosis for Seniors and Families

Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s recently introduced drug pricing bill, deceptively crafted to appear as a compromise, in reality amounts to a poison pill for America’s patients, taxpayers and innovators: a down payment on socialized medicine in America.

Pelosi’s plan is a far-left liberal’s dream — socialist price controls, crippling new taxes and bigger government. But far from a dream, its side effects would amount to a collective nightmare for seniors, families and taxpayers.

Ever the astute political tactician, Pelosi knows full-well that an immediate, full-scale government takeover of health care and the imposition of socialized medicine through the so-called “Medicare for All” legislation supported by the majority of House Democrats, stands little chance of becoming law once its true effects on Americans are known to patients and voters. So she has chosen a craftier route, opting for socialists’ tools of choice: setting prices in America based on those set by foreign bureaucrats, imposing market-distorting inflationary caps, and crippling new taxes on innovators.

To set prices, Pelosi’s plan would force a “voluntary negotiation process” between the government and drug manufacturers on what it calls a “maximum fair price” — a price determined by foreign bureaucrats. Pelosi would then subject manufacturers that do not participate in the negotiations or do not reach an agreement suitable to the government to a “non-compliance” fee — a tax as high as 95 percent of sales.

Far from “voluntary,” the Pelosi plan is more akin to government extortion. As former Speaker Newt Gingrich observed, the system she envisions is more akin to negotiating with Don Corleone after he’s made “an offer you can’t refuse.”

These socialist price control schemes, forced arbitration and crippling taxes would have a smothering effect on medical innovation, ultimately leading to fewer cutting-edge treatments and cures for patients. As in any industry, when government sets prices, there is little incentive to produce a product — especially those that require a significant investment of time and resources on the front end such as pharmaceuticals. Pelosi’s big-government plan would force innovators to accept prices that would make it nearly impossible to recoup the cost of their investments, with the threat of being taxed out of existence for non-compliance.

Further, as has been shown time and again around the world, price controls, when implemented, lead to shortages and rationing. Unfortunately for patients, in health care that translates into access restrictions and faceless government bureaucrats making critical decisions about care rather than patients and their selected doctors.

Like other far-left politicians and presidential candidates, Pelosi masks the realities of her health care takeover in soft-sounding names and soundbites. This makes it all the more critical that America’s patients know the truth about the profound consequences her price control scheme would have on their treatments and care.

The stakes for our health care system, and ultimately to patients and families, are too high not to act. That’s why the organization I help run, the Coalition Against Socialized Medicine, is working to make sure that the real-world effects of Pelosi’s proposals are known to patients — and policymakers — before it’s too late. To this end, we’ve recently launched a significant educational campaign highlighting its dangers to patients, innovation and the economy.

We’re working to make sure that patients, and particularly seniors, for whom access restrictions and rationing would have disproportionate and immediate effect, are armed with the facts to hold politicians and policymakers accountable.

We hope that as patients and voters around the country see and hear our messages on their televisions, in newspapers, and online in the coming weeks, they will join us in our effort to protect our health care system from the creep of socialism. Because while her drug pricing plan may masquerade as a compromise, given a closer look, the tools Pelosi wants to use to remake America’s drug pricing system look increasingly like the hammer and sickle.

SOURCE

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IN BRIEF

DOUR EXPECTATIONS FOR MIKE PENCE VISIT: Recep Tayyip Erdogan vows never to declare a ceasefire in northern Syria despite U.S. backlash: "We are not worried about any sanctions" (National Review)

MEANWHILE... "Officials are reviewing plans to evacuate up to 50 U.S. nuclear bombs that have long been stored at Incirlik Air Base in Turkey in the wake of Ankara's military offensive in northern Syria." (Fox News)

CONSCIENTIOUS PROTECTIONS: Federal court strikes down Obama administration "transgender mandate" for doctors (Fox News)

POLITICAL FUTURES: Hispanics become the largest voting-eligible minority group in the country (National Review)

APPEASING THE LAWLESS: California will allow illegal aliens to serve on government boards (Hot Air)

SWEEPING TOLL: "The opioid crisis cost the U.S. economy $631 billion from 2015 through last year — and it may keep getting more expensive, according to a study released Tuesday by the Society of Actuaries." (Associated Press)

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For more blog postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated), A Coral reef compendium and an IQ compendium. (Both updated as news items come in). GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten. I also put up occasional updates on my Personal blog and each day I gather together my most substantial current writings on THE PSYCHOLOGIST.

Email me here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or here (Personal). My annual picture page is here

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17 October, 2019

A Striking Contrast: Conservative gratitude versus Leftist hate

President Trump delivered a rousing pro-America speech at his rally in Minneapolis Thursday night!

He presented the 2020 election as a stark choice, and correctly so in my view, between those who want to preserve religious liberty, free markets, the sanctity of life, our Second Amendment rights, and our national sovereignty against those demanding open borders, abortion-on-demand, socialism, and gun control.

I was particularly struck by how the president talked at length about what it is like to be commander-in-chief. It involves regular trips to Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, which are rarely covered by the media. On those visits, the president sees firsthand the horrific wounds our soldiers endure.

It involves going to Dover Air Force Base to receive the bodies of fallen heroes. It involves writing personal letters, not form letters, to every family who loses a loved one serving in the military.

It was a side of the president people don’t see very often. When I am at the White House, I see him in a very different mood than what is presented by the media. He is a much more compassionate man than the left would like you to believe.

Sadly, there was violence after the rally ended. MAGA hats were burned. Trump supporters were assaulted. Leftists waved the flag of communist China. Police officers had to create a path for cars to leave because demonstrators were attacking vehicles in the parking garage.

It was a striking contrast. Inside the Target Center, Trump praised our brave men and women in uniform, our soldiers, and police officers. He defended our flag and our country.

Outside, the left-wing radicals, the activist base of the Democrat Party, were attacking cops, burning flags, yelling their hatred for America, and assaulting conservatives.

I’m not suggesting that Joe Biden or Elizabeth Warren would be part of that crowd. But there’s no question which candidate that crowd would vote for come November, and it won’t be Donald Trump. Nor is that crowd ever denounced by the leadership of the Democrat Party.

On Fox News Thursday night, a Democrat consultant was asked about the violence at the rally. Of course, he insisted it was wrong, but then proceeded to justify the violence by suggesting it was a natural reaction to Trump!

If, after any speech by a leading Democrat, a mob formed outside and began punching people and attacking cars, every network would be running the footage non-stop. Every Republican would be forced to condemn it on the record.

But no elected Democrat today will be asked to condemn what happened on the streets of Minneapolis Thursday night. And I won’t hold my breath waiting for any progressives to voluntarily distance themselves from the protests.

SOURCE

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Elections Watchdog Seeks Answers in Michigan Voter Fraud Case

A Michigan municipal election official being charged with six felonies in the discarding of nearly 200 votes is not likely an indication of voting problems nationally, election experts say. But an election integrity watchdog still wants to get to the bottom of the matter.

“Whether it changed the outcome is not really an issue when you are talking about civil rights. What does matter is canceling votes,” J. Christian Adams, president of the Public Interest Legal Foundation, told The Daily Signal. “The Justice Department needs to carefully scrutinize what votes were canceled and why she would have improperly discarded those 193 [votes].”

Michigan State Police arrested Southfield City Clerk Sherikia Hawkins in late September on charges related to altering or throwing away 193 absentee ballots.

The nonprofit Public Interest Legal Foundation made a public records request to find out what happened to the absentee ballots, from the time the voters applied for them through the time the ballots were discarded and altered to the time the ballots were reinstated and counted.

This type of election fraud is not likely widespread, because it was fairly simple to unravel, Adams said.

“This was caught because the votes cast did not equal the ballot tallies,” Adams said.

Hawkins was charged with falsifying election returns, which carries a maximum five-year sentence and a $1,000 fine. She also was charged with forgery of a public record, which carries a maximum 14-year sentence; misconduct in office, which carries a maximum five-year penalty; and three counts of using a computer to commit a crime, each with a maximum seven-year sentence.

After posting a $15,000 bond, Hawkins is set for another court hearing on Oct. 15.

Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel announced the charges against Hawkins, a fellow Democrat, at a late September press conference.

In May, at the Michigan Democratic Party’s Legacy Dinner, the party gave Hawkins its Dingell-Levin Award. The award is named for two former longtime Democratic members of Congress.

There are “only two possibilities,” Adams said. “Either this Michigan city had an incompetent election official, or two, she didn’t like those 193 voters for some reason and decided to cancel them out.”

Michigan state officials said all votes were ultimately counted and that no election results were altered.

Election Officials and Fraud

Most jurisdictions have safeguards in place to prevent this type of fraud by election officials, said Susannah Goodman, director of the election security program at Common Cause, a government watchdog group.

“You don’t see [election official fraud] very often,” Goodman told The Daily Signal. “If a person knows how the system works, they know they will be caught. Reconciliation is pretty basic. If someone is a sophisticated fraudster, why would they do the one thing they should know will be checked and cross-checked?”

Since 2013, there have been three criminal convictions of election officials trying to alter vote counts, according to The Heritage Foundation’s voter fraud database.

A Miami-Dade County, Florida, elections department official pleaded guilty to filling out the mail-in ballots of other voters in favor of a Republican mayoral candidate in the November 2016 election. An Canton, Mississippi, elections committee member was convicted in 2013 of stealing a ballot box. A Clackamas County, Oregon, election official pleaded guilty to altering a ballot in 2013.

In 2007, the Justice Department brought a civil penalty against Ike Brown, a former superintendent of Democratic primary elections in Noxubee County, Mississippi, for manipulating ballots for race-based reasons.

“The kind of post-election audit we are pushing for has to do with vote tabulation and providing a statistically significant number of paper ballots for the audit to limit the risk of electing the wrong person,” said Common Cause’s Goodman.

The city of Southfield, a suburb of Detroit, put Hawkins on administrative leave after her Sept. 23 arrest.

“The City does not have all of the facts at this time, and there will be no rush to judgment,” said a public statement released by city spokesman Michael Manion. “The City will also be conducting a thorough internal investigation and review of these charges. After the City has examined the underlying facts of this matter, we will explore all appropriate and legal avenues to protect the voting process and rights of the Southfield citizenry. Mrs. Hawkins will be on administrative leave with pay at this time.”

Southfield Deputy City Clerk Nicole Humphries said, “The city clerk’s office is still functioning.”

“If they submitted a [Freedom of Information Act] request, we will be responding,” she told The Daily Signal regarding the Public Interest Legal Foundation’s records request.

‘Noticeably Silent’

Adams, of the Public Interest Legal Foundation, said actions occurred that, had they not been corrected, would have meant votes didn’t count. So, he said, it’s puzzling that groups that typically speak out against voter suppression have not spoken out in this case.

“Voter suppression is a fake term. It’s not in the law. The proper term is vote denial,” Adams said. “The voting rights groups are noticeably silent on this case. They don’t show up talking about an actual case of voting denial.”

The Daily Signal contacted several organizations that have opposed policies they labeled as “voter suppression” about concerns over the Michigan case.

One of the newest such groups is Fair Fight Action, which was started by former Georgia state Rep. Stacey Abrams after her narrow loss in the 2018 Georgia governor’s race.

The group’s website says, “Efforts to discourage and disenfranchise voters—in voter registration, ballot access, or counting of votes—have a catastrophic effect on our democracy and our communities.”

The League of Women Voters says, “We work year-round to combat voter suppression through advocacy, grassroots organizing, legal action, and public education.”

Project Vote warns against “illegal and cynical attempts to suppress the vote and manipulate voters,” adding that “[a]mong the strategies used are voter intimidation and voter challenges.”

Brennan Center for Justice spokesman Derek Rosenfeld said the organization had no comment. But its website says, “Vote suppression has a long and ugly history in the U.S., and over the last two decades, it has resurfaced with a vengeance. Through research, lawsuits, and advocacy, we are fighting vote suppression on every front.”

The silence could be that some of these groups don’t want to acknowledge election fraud, said Hans von Spakovsky, manager of the election law reform initiative at The Heritage Foundation. Or, he said, it could be because Hawkins is a registered Democrat.

“Those 193 votes ultimately counted only because this clerk was caught. Why did the clerk do this? Did she know who they were?” von Spakovsky asked. “Most election officials are honest people who do the right thing, but sometimes election officials do bad things and break the law.”

SOURCE

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Hillary in form

From Vince Foster and Seth Rich to Jeffrey Epstein, a large number of Clinton associates have died sudden deaths

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Democrats Embrace Cultural Devolution

CNN’s forum for 2020 Democrat presidential candidates to opine on “LGBTQ” issues was yet another in-kind campaign contribution to the DNC. The primacy and promotion of people with various types of gender disorientation in family entertainment is about emotion-based indoctrination. In politics, it’s about appealing to women voters.

So what did the Democrats talk about on CNN? Space won’t permit us to dissect every tendentious twisting of fact or tyrannical policy pronouncement. But here are a few key moments.

Elizabeth Warren literally applauded child abuse. After being introduced along with her mother, billed as “an advocate for transgender youth,” a young girl dressed up as a boy announced, “My name’s Jacob, and I’m a nine-year-old transgender American.” Warren immediately applauded and cheered, “All right, Jacob!” The girl then asked Warren a softball question about her issues in school — a question fed to her by her adult handlers.

A couple of things. First, and again, enabling and encouraging a kid to embrace gender dysphoria — to the point of dressing and “identifying” as the opposite sex, taking hormone-altering drugs that can do permanent damage, or sometimes even having body-altering surgery — is child abuse, plain and simple. If a child identified as a fire truck and wanted to play in the street, running through busy intersections while screaming like a siren, no one would tolerate it. Yet when it comes to innate biology, these “advocates” aid and abet fantasy, including deeply wounding self-harm, in the name of “tolerance.” With incredibly rare exception, all people are born with the “hardware” for one of two genders. That’s the way God made them. “Transgender” is a phony alternate reality that should not be encouraged, especially in kids who haven’t even hit puberty yet, and Warren and every other Democrat should be ashamed for exploiting these kids.

Warren wasn’t done. She also declared that “people who are transgender” — even inmates — are “entitled to medical care,” including sex-reassignment surgery. And of course, “entitled” means American taxpayers would be forced to foot the bill.

Other moments included blatant attacks on Christians who actually believe what the Bible teaches about sex and marriage. Warren bemoaned the “hatefulness” of such Christians. Pete Buttigieg sermonized that Christians who hold to biblical teaching actually make “God smaller.” Says the man who seemingly will only “worship” a god created in his image. Cory Booker complained that people “use religion as a justification for discrimination.” And Beto O'Rourke, who claims to be Catholic, declared that he’d be the one doing the discriminating: “Yes,” he would strip churches of their tax-exempt status for holding to millennia of biblically based Christian doctrine on marriage. We’re just surprised he didn’t say, “Hell yes.”

On a final note, Warren was asked what her response would be to “a supporter [who] says, ‘Senator, I’m old-fashioned, and my faith teaches me that marriage is between one man and one woman.’” Warren gave a very misandrist response: “Well, I’m going to assume it’s a guy who said that. And I’m gonna say, ‘Then just marry one woman. … Assuming you can find one.’”

That insult is quite illustrative of how Democrats look at Americans who hold to traditional values: To them, we’re mouth-breathing Neanderthals who aren’t just wrong, we’re bigoted and hateful — all for holding positions they themselves maintained until the last few years. The hypocritical intolerance is astounding, even if it is par for the course with leftists.

SOURCE

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IN BRIEF

TALIBAN PEACE TALKS: "U.S. officials and representatives of the Afghan Taliban have begun discussing ways to revive a peace process after talks fell apart last month." (The Wall Street Journal)

GETTING ITS ACT TOGETHER: Mexico halts caravan of 2,000 migrants bound for U.S. (Fox News)

NANNY-STATE COURTS — COMING SOON TO AMERICA? Canadian court strips father of rights, allowing teen to transition against his wishes (The Daily Signal)

"NEXT!" "Democratic House committee chairmen Elijah Cummings, Eliot Engel, and Adam Schiff sent a letter Thursday to Energy Secretary Rick Perry alerting him to a subpoena demanding documents related to their impeachment inquiry into President Trump's dealings in Ukraine — the ninth subpoena issued so far." (National Review)

BIRDS OF A FEATHER: Ronan Farrow book claims Hillary Clinton pressured Farrow to drop Harvey Weinstein investigation (The Daily Wire)

"PUBLIC CHARGE" RULE BLOCKED: "Under the rule," The Hill reports, "any immigrant who receives at least one designated public benefit — including Medicaid, food stamps, welfare or public housing vouchers — for more than 12 months within any three-year period will be considered a 'public charge' and will be more likely to be denied a green card by immigration officials." Federal Judge George Daniels "said the Trump administration likely exceeded its authority."

GOWDY PRECLUDED: As a corollary of lobbying rules, "a deal that [Trump's legal team] had reached with former South Carolina Republican Representative Trey Gowdy fell through," The Daily Wire reports.

DUBIOUS TIMING: Hunter Biden stepping down from Chinese firm, vows no foreign work if father wins in 2020 (The Hill)

SYRIA UPDATE: "Defense Secretary Mark Esper confirmed Sunday that President Trump has ordered a larger withdrawal of U.S. forces from northeastern Syria than was previously indicated," according to The Hill. Meanwhile, Fox News says, "Fresh airstrikes from Turkey reportedly targeted civilians and a group of foreign reporters in the Syrian border town of Ras al-Ayn."

POWER RESTORED: "PG&E Corp. crews have restored power to more than 700,000 homes and businesses in California that had been subjected to a deliberate blackout," The Sacramento Bee reports. Ironically, many Californians are discovering that solar panels don't work in blackouts.

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For more blog postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated), A Coral reef compendium and an IQ compendium. (Both updated as news items come in). GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten. I also put up occasional updates on my Personal blog and each day I gather together my most substantial current writings on THE PSYCHOLOGIST.

Email me here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or here (Personal). My annual picture page is here

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16 October, 2019

"Diversity" is a snark

"Time" magazine has a long-winded article under the heading: Diversity has become a booming business. So where are the results? It goes on to set out the great efforts and large sums that have been devoted to the cause. One might summarize their message as: "Never in the field of human endeavor has so much been done by so many for so little".

And they are perfectly right. Any psychometrician could explain it to you. As the old proverb says: "You can't make a silk purse out of a sow's ear". Blacks, Hispanics and whites all have their own characteristics and fields of expertise and you can't shoehorn the minority groups into white characteristics and fields of expertise. Seldom the twain shall meet.

There is a dreaded two letter word I could mention here but I think it suffices that conservatives have for over a century opposed Leftist claims of human malleability by the counter-claim that much in human behavior is genetically determined -- and therefore immutable: "Human nature". And the research in behavior genetics has resoundingly supported the conservative contention. It's truly amazing how much of our behavior is genetically inherited.

One simply has to apply that knowledge to the "diversity" efforts to understand what is going on. Diversity efforts are undoubtedly an attempt to impose some of the characteristic behaviours of whites onto the minorities. It was bound to fail. To put it as succinctly as I can: You will rarely make a white man out of a black.

And why should we make that racist attempt? Members of all the groups have liberty to behave as they want so let them go on doing what they want to do and stop trying to shoehorn them into a mould that doesn't fit. Try liberty instead of racism.

But the "Time" magazine solution to the problem that the Left have created is typical Leftist brainlessness: The failure of diversity efforts is due to evil men. I quote: It is due to "a willful negation of our shared humanity". In other words, "We're all racists, you know". A prime example of the pot calling the kettle black -- JR.

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Portugal’s socialist miracle? Pull the other one

The newly re-elected centre left has presided over austerity and privatisation.

Portuguese voters went to the polls on Sunday and returned the incumbent Socialist Party – and prime minister Antonio Costa – with an increased share of the vote, much as commentators expected.

In late 2015, the centre-left Socialist Party formed a minority government with the support of the Portuguese Communist Party and the Ecologist Party. Since then, sections of the international media have been singing the praises of Portugal’s government. The Financial Times, Der Spiegel, the Atlantic, the New Statesman and many others have hailed Europe’s supposedly ‘socialist success story’. Some left-wing Remainers see it as a model for the UK to emulate or see it as an antidote to right-wing populism. But is Portugal really a success story? And what exactly is socialist about it?

Portugal’s economic performance certainly looks good on paper. GDP, GDP per capita and GDP growth are all up. Inflation is also under control and unemployment and government debt are both down. However, while some media outlets credit the government’s ostensibly left-wing policies for these results, all of these figures (apart from government debt) actually started improving under the previous centre-right administration. (Portuguese voters duly rewarded the then-incumbent centre-right Social Democratic Party with the highest vote share in 2015, but it was unable to form a government, leading the Socialists to take the reins in a leftish alliance.)

So what are the Socialist Party’s achievements in government? It certainly has pursued some traditionally left-wing policies, including raising the minimum wage, pensions and some social benefits. But it has also embarked on or maintained a range of measures that are positively anti-socialist.

The government has committed itself to the EU’s tight rules on spending. Contrary to the international narrative that Portugal has ‘cast aside austerity’ – which is impossible as a Eurozone member – Portugal has actually embraced ‘austerity lite’. Rises in wages and benefits have come at the cost of public investment. According to an article in the Nation, Portugal had the lowest level of public investment in the Eurozone in 2018. As a result, its universities are almost bankrupt, the health system is understaffed and underfunded, and over half of its railways are in a bad or mediocre condition.

The government’s lack of investment in the fire and forest services has also been criticised by unions, particularly in the wake of the June 2017 wildfires, which killed 66 people and injured 204 – the deadliest fires in the country to date. Earlier this year, public funds were, however, found to bail out a private bank, Novo Banco, at a cost of €1.6 billion.

The Socialist Party has also opted to keep and extend a number of the previous centre-right government’s policies. Privatisation, rampant under the previous administration, has continued apace. The Socialists have sold a number of publicly owned companies and assets to foreign buyers from China and elsewhere. The current government has also refused to scrap the golden-visa programme. The programme, which allows wealthy foreigners essentially to jump the immigration queue, has failed to deliver the levels of job creation its advocates promised. Instead, it has helped to push up property prices.

In fact, property speculation has been a key driver of Portugal’s rising GDP. As a result, evictions have skyrocketed as landlords take advantage of soaring house prices. Between one and three families are reportedly being evicted every day. In ‘socialist’ Portugal, social housing accounts for just two per cent of the country’s housing stock, compared to 17 per cent in the UK.

While unemployment is down in the official figures, a 2018 report from the University Institute of Lisbon suggests the real figure may be almost 10 percentage points higher. Furthermore, employment conditions have continued to worsen since the Euro crisis, with the proliferation of short-term, low-wage and insecure contracts.

It is no surprise, then, that in his bid for re-election, prime minister António Costa largely sold himself to the Portuguese public as a fiscal conservative rather than a socialist radical. While Costa’s party performed best in Sunday’s elections, it fell short of the majority it had worked for and turnout was the lowest in a General Election since the country’s return to democracy in 1974.

Costa has said he will once again seek the support of one or both parties involved in the previous confidence-and-supply pact. But he also said that he might also hold talks with the PAN (People-Animals-Nature) Party, a minor animal-rights party focused on animal-welfare issues. Such a pact would likely combine the Socialists’ own ‘austerity lite’ with eco-austerity and animal rights (an ideology traditionally treated with scepticism by socialists). All the while, any truly ‘socialist’ programme, should Costa even want to implement one, would be impossible under EU rules.

Whether Portugal’s past few years can be described as a success is up for debate. Portuguese voters have at least given it their lukewarm approval. But there is very little that is socialist in this centre-left, ‘austerity lite’ government.

SOURCE

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McConnell Slams Dems Over Banana Republic-Style Impeachment Inquiry

Congressional Republican leaders laid into House Democrats over their illegitimate so-called impeachment inquiry that is designed to deprive President Trump of basic procedural fairness and boot him from office at bullet-train speed.

“Overturning the results of an American election requires the highest level of fairness and due process, as it strikes at the core of our democratic process,” Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) wrote on Twitter Oct. 8, as reported by The Hill.

“So far, the House has fallen far short by failing to follow the same basic procedures that it has followed for every other President in our history,” he added.

House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) also weighed in the same day on Twitter.

McCarthy wrote that the president “is right to call out this rushed process because Democrats refuse to protect the transparency and basic fairness that have been integral to previous impeachment proceedings.”

“House Democrats have wanted to undo the results of the 2016 election for three years, and now they’re rushing a sham impeachment process,” he added.

The statements from McConnell and McCarthy came as White House counsel Pat Cipollone sent a letter to Democrat leaders in the House accusing them of working to “overturn the results of the 2016 election” and violating the Constitution with “legally unsupported demands” for evidence from Trump administration officials.

“Given that your inquiry lacks any legitimate constitutional foundation, any pretense of fairness, or even the most elementary due process protections, the Executive Branch cannot be expected to participate in it,” Cipollone wrote.

“Because participating in this inquiry under the current unconstitutional posture would inflict lasting institutional harm on the Executive Branch and lasting damage to the separation of powers, you have left the President no choice,” he added.

Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) replied in histrionic fashion.

“For a while, the President has tried to normalize lawlessness. Now, he is trying to make lawlessness a virtue,” she said. “The White House letter is only the latest attempt to cover up his betrayal of our democracy, and to insist that the President is above the law.”

It was Sept. 24 that Pelosi purported to launch “an official impeachment inquiry” by the House as news spread that President Trump asked the president of Ukraine to assist in a probe into the leftist plot to remove him office, as well as to investigate former Vice President Joe Biden and his son’s shady dealings in that country.

This “official impeachment inquiry” is unprecedented in the annals of presidential impeachment sagas.

Pelosi was in such a frenzied rush to oust Trump she didn’t bother asking the House of Representatives, whose constitutionally-specified duty is to consider impeachment, to go on record on the matter. Even though the House had a recorded vote all three previous times it considered impeaching a U.S. president, Pelosi discarded 151 years of precedent.

Bill Clinton, who was impeached but not convicted in the Senate, went through it.

On Oct. 8, 1998, the House voted 258-176 to approve what is called a “simple resolution” (meaning it affects only one chamber of Congress) authorizing “the House Committee on the Judiciary, acting as a whole or by any subcommittee thereof appointed by the chairman for the purposes hereof and in accordance with the rules of the Committee, to investigate fully and completely whether sufficient grounds exist for the House to exercise its constitutional power to impeach President Clinton.”

Richard Nixon, who probably would have been impeached if he hadn’t resigned, also went through it.

On Feb. 6, 1974, the House voted 410-4 to approve a resolution authorizing “the House Committee on the Judiciary to investigate fully and completely whether sufficient grounds exist for the House of Representatives to impeach President Richard M. Nixon.”

Even a widely disliked post-Civil War president went through the process. In the end he was impeached but his enemies fell one vote short of convicting him in the Senate.

Abraham Lincoln’s successor, President Andrew Johnson, was afforded due process by the House which voted to initiate the impeachment process. “The Joint Committee on Reconstruction rapidly drafted a resolution of impeachment, which passed the House on February 24, 1868, by a vote of 126 to 47,” according to the U.S. Senate’s history pages. “Immediately, the House proceeded to establish an impeachment committee, appoint managers, and draft articles of impeachment.”

Moving measures through the House at breakneck speed, Americans learned during the Obamacare legislative saga, is a Pelosi specialty. She infamously said during that process that reading the massive bill wasn’t realistic. “We have to pass the bill so you can find out what’s in it,” she said.

As this writer argued previously, the only reason not to go through a formal vote on opening an impeachment inquiry is to railroad the president and eliminate the possibility of lawmakers being held accountable by Americans. All Americans, no matter their views on our president, deserve to know where their representatives stand on this all-important issue.

But Democrats don’t care about fairness, or democracy, for that matter.

They are creating “a Star Chamber ‘impeachment’ process fueled by anonymous whistleblowers and selective leaks that is not so much designed to remove the president, though they would if they could, but to manipulate the 2020 election,” William A. Jacobson writes at Legal Insurrection.

Since even before Donald Trump was elected president the Left has been trying to make the normal presidential job-related things he has been doing look abnormal. There were anti-Trump protesters outside the Trump International Hotel in the nation’s capital in the dark wee hours of Nov. 9, 2016, not long after the media called the race for Trump. The manufactured, media-driven mass hysteria directed against Trump has grown exponentially over time.

All the tricks the Democrat-media complex have attempted to force Trump from the White House have failed.

We now know that the plot to use fake intelligence from Russia from a dossier compiled by a Trump-hating British spy to surveil Trump’s campaign and transition team was ordered by then-President Barack Hussein Obama. That phony dossier paid for by Hillary Clinton and the Democratic National Committee was used to fraudulently obtain surveillance warrants from the secret U.S. Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.

On Oct. 2 former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper admitted to CNN’s Anderson Cooper that Obama directed the intelligence community to spy on Trump, a move that “set off a whole sequence of events” that led to semi-senile former Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s anticlimactic report on the Left’s beloved Russian electoral collusion conspiracy theory, the Washington Sentinel reports.

“One point I’d like to make, Anderson, that I don’t think has come up very much before, and I’m alluding now to the president’s criticism of President Obama for all that he did or didn’t do before he left office with respect to the Russian meddling. If it weren’t for President Obama, we might not have done the intelligence community assessment that we did that set off a whole sequence of events which are still unfolding today, notably, Special Counsel Mueller’s investigation.”

The rest of the media ignored this damning admission from Clapper so they could continue bashing Trump.

And the phony impeachment process continues.

SOURCE

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IN BRIEF

LEGAL TEAM: The Washington Times reports, "Former Republican Rep. Trey Gowdy has been tapped to serve as outside counsel to President Donald Trump as the House impeachment inquiry expands."

PROFILES OF THE AMERICAN SPIRIT: Trump awards Presidential Medal of Freedom to former Attorney General Edwin Meese (CNSNews.com)

TERRORISM REAWAKENED: After a lull, Islamist terrorism in Europe returns with a vengeance (The Daily Signal)

DISTRICT OF CONFORMITY: "Is this the last time we can celebrate Columbus Day? A wave of cities have decided to remove the holiday from the calendar and replace it with 'Indigenous Peoples' Day," reports The Daily Signal's Jarrett Stepman. That now includes Washington, DC, which was named after ... Christopher Columbus.

JUST TAKE MY WORD FOR IT: "Lawyers for the CIA officer whose whistleblower complaint helped ignite an impeachment inquiry into President Trump have asked Congress whether their client could submit testimony in writing instead of appearing in person." (The Wall Street Journal)

FELON VOTES: The Hill reports that 22,000 felony convicts have had their voting rights restored by Gov. Ralph Northam, which Democrats hope will turn the state supremely blue.

MORE PLANNED PARENTHOOD DECEPTION: "An arson attack on a Planned Parenthood facility that was reported as a hate crime inspired by undercover videos was actually an incident of domestic violence, a senior executive of the organization has been forced to admit in a San Francisco court room." (The Daily Wire)

PRIORITIES: California Gov. Gavin Newsom signs ban on small plastic bottles in hotels — as blackouts batter that state's economy (National Review)

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For more blog postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated), A Coral reef compendium and an IQ compendium. (Both updated as news items come in). GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten. I also put up occasional updates on my Personal blog and each day I gather together my most substantial current writings on THE PSYCHOLOGIST.

Email me here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or here (Personal). My annual picture page is here

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15 October, 2019

Contrived generational wars disguise the failure of the American Dream

The Leftist lady writing below has an interesting point. She says that naming and describing "generations" (generation X, generation Y etc) serves to deflect attention away from the fact that incomes have been static for many years in real terms. She is also undoubtedlty right that assigning characteristics to a whole generation of people is a vast over-generalization.

She takes a few potshots at Trump along the way, as one expects of almost any American Leftist, but she misses the big picture. Trump has actually solved the problem she complains of. In the Trump economy wages are rising at long last.

So why were incomes so static for so long?   They were in fact less static than it seems. There have been large qualitative improvenments in most products. A car today will for instance be a lot safer, more economical and more reliable than the rattletrap you might have bought in 1950. So your money buys better even if it does not buy more.

Nonetheless, Trump shows us what can be done and we need to ask why did that not happen sooner.   The answer is perfectly clear. The destructive Left have been in power quite a lot since WWII and they have succeeded in their destructive aims. They have hobbled the wealth creators -- business -- in all sorts of ways, destroying jobs and keeping prices high. And the intervening Repiublican administrations have not been radical enough to destroy much of what the Left have put in place.

So it needed a truly radical reformer to take the shackles off business and get business activity roaring. Trump is that reformer. Businessmen have been so encouraged by Trump that they have regularly created hundreds of thousands of new jobs -- to the point that they have difficulty getting the employees they need for their enterprises. There is a abor shortage. And when there is a labor shortage employers offer higher wages to ensure they get the workers they need. Trump unleashed capitalism, which is the only way of getting rising incomes across the board.

Bill Gates was born in 1955. That makes him what is commonly called a boomer. Rene Lavoie was also born in 1955. The Globe recently recounted the problems that led this white Army vet to spend time in Boston’s homeless shelters. According to the principal investigator of a recent study, Dennis Culhane, many people of Lavoie’s age are indeed part of a boom — “a boom in aging homeless people.” They were “less well educated people who faced economic challenges in their youth — falling wages and rising housing costs — and never recovered financially. . . . Now in their 50s and 60s, they are biologically older than most people their age. . . . The average lifespan for a homeless person is 64.”

Unlike Gates’s co-billionaires in the .01 percent, 29 percent of people 55 and over have nothing at all saved for retirement, according to the Government Accountability Office, and many of the rest have little. Ageism in the workforce is one reason they lose a job and then can’t find an equally good one — or find any work at all. Boomers are often treated as “deadwood.” Corporations drop them by the thousands. Even Xers are now old enough to be at risk of having their resumes discarded. When people suffering from middle ageism stop looking for work they are omitted from the unemployment data. At midlife, some submit to deaths of despair.

Succeeding cohorts (all containing the same disparities — of class, race, gender, and education) have also been treated as if they were a single human with a character flaw. During the 1990s recessions, when the so-called Xers couldn’t find work, they too were branded with a slur — “slackers” — while boomers were represented as the horde bullies who held onto all the good jobs.

The baleful technique is still at work today. Given the same problem — lack of decent jobs for all ages, especially people without college degrees and people over 50 — it’s the turn of the millennials. One of them complains about the stereotypes, defensively, in Vox: “We demand participation trophies, can’t find jobs, and live with our parents until we’re 30.” His response is to bash — you guessed it — the boomers, who “have a ton of maladaptive personality characteristics.”

In the Atlantic, pundits Niall Ferguson, from the Hoover Institution, and Eyck Freymann defend millennials because their “early working lives were blighted by the financial crisis” — but ignore how home foreclosures, sluggish growth, and job losses also blighted people around Ferguson’s own age (55).

Millennials are supposed to be so ignorant and cruel that they would dismiss old people’s needs because of the boomers’ alleged wealth. “Cutting old-age benefits for boomers would be an easy call if millennials are anywhere on the line of fire,” write the original concoctors of the age-war distraction, Neil Howe and William Strauss, in their latest pandering assault, “Millennials Rising: The Next Great Generation.”

We frequently hear that our elders’ retirement needs will “break the bank” despite their lifelong pay-ins. If Republicans manage to destroy the whole system of social trust, cutting Social Security could indeed be one of the dire outcomes of the lies of generational warfare. Otherwise, experts say, its financial failure is not remotely in the cards. For families it has always been the most popular government program, because it provides a measure of dignified independence for older people and a measure of relief for their adult children.

Younger people should support the expansion of Social Security for another reason, writes one millennial who doesn’t take the bait. Nick Guthman argues in The Hill that because of student debt, “Millennials and Generation Z will need Social Security even more than our parents and grandparents do.”

The 2100 Act, now before Congress, would raise the cap on taxable-wage contributions. Conservatives reject this easy fix, but it is overwhelmingly popular with the public.

Manipulating cohort characteristics damages far more than attitudes toward Social Security, bad as the effect of that contrived skepticism could be. Blaming an older generation that is already maligned allows many real perpetrators to smugly hide from their irresponsibility. Will the climate movement find youngsters blaming the boomers for ecological destruction, because some drove big cars? Wouldn’t it be better to turn on the CEOs of Exxon, who hid the dangers of burning fossil fuels that their scientists discovered so thoroughly that few of us knew to stop flying?

Persistent precarity is indeed the historical issue that is obscured by these discourses. The fact of American decline is this: Most people in each generation have had it worse than their parents. According to a report on The State of Working America, the United States lags behind its peer countries in the OECD (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development) in measurements of father-son mobility. In the United States, the “sons” have been receiving stagnant wages, fewer benefits, jobs in the insecure gig economy. Many women too have lost the progress narrative of rising expectations. That progress narrative, when upward mobility was more widespread, supported the American Dream. It gave hope that democracy would work for increasing numbers.

Don’t blame your parents. Every article manipulating cohort stereotypes lets the government and corporations off the hook for outsourcing abroad, the crash of rust-belt industries, de-unionization, and the decades of cascading downward mobility we now endure. You can’t even want to get justice until you know the true sources of injustice.

HOW DO IMAGINARY reputations and hostile emotions get nailed onto struggling groups, decade after decade, in this pernicious way? Naming each imagined age cohort makes it possible. The process is called reification. Naming makes vague temporal proximity into a thing.

Only the name baby boomers had an adequate demographic and historical reason to exist. These millions were born (from 1946 to 1964) of the relative affluence that spread after World War II. Their numbers did give them unifying experiences as they grew up — made their elders build new schools for them, made their working lives more competitive. Now they are confronted by a president who, after promising not to, is cutting their security and health care in devious ways.

But, even undergoing historical events together, age-peers don’t build the same memories, share the same beliefs, behave uniformly. During Vietnam, some young men were conscripted into the war while others fought to end it. Stark differences likewise mark the current group of young people (unimaginatively called “post-millennials”). Some of them are woke and ready to take on racism, sexism, homophobia, gun control, global warming. At the same age, neo-Nazis are setting fire to synagogues.

Once cohorts are reified by name, the labels become dog-whistles. Envy and fear can divide a nation and abet destructive political changes. Malice can turn one generation against another.

We could mitigate the divisiveness. Editors could stop soliciting age-war articles by second-rate phrasemakers. We ordinary people need to defy the lies, and build intergenerational bonds. Let us understand that capitalist and neoliberal choices have worsened life, for decades, for every later, unequal subculture. And a comforting, unifying cross-age coalition should eject politicians unwilling to maintain and repair our precious communal institutions.

SOURCE

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The Left to America's Children: Your Past Is Terrible, and Your Future Is Terrible

A rule of life is that everything the left touches it ruins: art, music, Christianity, Judaism, race relations, male-female relations, universities, high schools, elementary schools, late-night comedy, sports, liberty, journalism, the Boy Scouts, national economies, language and everything else it influences.

The left, not liberalism. (I have written a column and done a PragerU video on the differences between liberalism and leftism.)

To this list, we can now add childhood and children.

1. The left robs children of their innocence and has helped produce an unprecedented number of anxious and depressed young people.

Most of us are aware of how the left prematurely introduced sexuality into young children's lives under the guise of "sex education." That was just the beginning. Then the left changed same-sex college dorms, which had been the norm throughout American history, into coed dorms on virtually every American campus. Then came coed bathrooms. And just in case college students were not thinking about -- or having enough -- sex, the left introduced sex columns in college newspapers and "sex week" on virtually every college campus. One is more graphic than the other. After reading a college newspaper sex column or experiencing the college's sex week, a student could easily conclude that without having experienced a menage a trois and mastering cunnilingus or fellatio techniques, life is neither exciting nor fulfilling.

There are many reasons a greater percentage of college students are more depressed than ever before. But the immersion in loveless and romance-less sex is undoubtedly one of them. That is what contributes to the especially high rate of female depression on campuses.

The left hypersexualized colleges and now laments that colleges are all filled with a "rape culture."

It's Disgusting What the Climate Panic Brigade Is Doing to Greta Thunberg

2. The left has devalued marriage.

An unprecedentedly large percentage of young Americans are not married, and more of them than ever do not consider marriage important. The left has indoctrinated a generation (or two) of young Americans into believing that marriage is unimportant -- career alone is the road to a meaningful life for both men and women. Throughout American history, until the left took over the culture and universities beginning in the 1960s, it was a given, as Frank Sinatra sang, that "love and marriage ... go together like a horse and carriage."

3. The left has devalued having children.

The left is ambivalent and often hostile to people having children. That's why people on the left have the fewest children of all political and religious groups.

The latest reason not to have children is that much of humanity is doomed if global warming is not immediately reversed. But since the 1970s, the left has offered other reasons not to have children including that the world would not produce nearly enough food and other basic resources to sustain the growing world population. Thus began the zero population growth (ZPG) movement.

But the left's ambivalence over having children isn't just hysteria over too many people, lack of food or global warming. Many people on the left (again, unlike liberals or conservatives) just don't particularly want kids. Children are a nuisance: They interfere with one's career; they cost too much; and dogs and cats are perfectly acceptable substitutes.

In sum, the left doesn't particularly like children.

4. The left is ruining the childhood of many children by depriving them of the joys and excitement of growing into men and women.

The left has invented a new idea in history: that human beings are not born male or female but are "assigned" their sex at birth by sexist parents, physicians and a society that is not yet "woke" to this "fact." In schools throughout America, teachers are told to no longer call their students "boys" and "girls," just "students," lest they impose a gender identity on them. Mattel has released a doll that has no gender. A New York Times columnist whose photo shows him with a beard has requested that his readers refer to him only as "they," as he believes gender is useless. Teenage girls who declare themselves boys are allowed to have their breasts surgically removed without their parents' permission. Divorced parents who tell their 5-year-old male child who feels he is a girl that he is a boy risk losing custody or parental rights if the other parent affirms the child is a girl. Girls who compete in sports against boys who identify as females and complain that they lose unfairly are attacked as "transphobic."

5. The left has convinced innumerable young Americans that their past is terrible and their future is terrible.

The left tells American children that their past -- the American past -- is shameful and their future is even worse: They will likely die prematurely as a result of global warming.

Whatever the left touches it ruins. The latest example is children.

SOURCE

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The Washington Post circles the wagons for its favorite candidate, Elizabeth Warren

On Tuesday, our Thomas Gallatin noted Elizabeth Warren’s latest “victim status” lie — her claim that she was let go from a teaching job in 1971 because she was pregnant. Her oft-told stump story is meant to pull the heart strings of women voters by casting herself as some sort of “Handmaid’s Tale” victim of the patriarchy, but it’s demonstrably not true. She even told the story differently herself before she launched her presidential campaign.

The Washington Free Beacon exposed her lie by obtaining the actual documented records of Warren’s tenure and voluntary resignation from the Riverdale Board of Education. Bottom line: She’s now lying.

Well, The Washington Post couldn’t stand it. The Warren sycophants at the Post wrote not one but two articles attacking the Free Beacon for publishing news that isn’t fake.

“A news report can be narrowly factual and still plenty unfair,” huffed Margaret Sullian in the first article about the Free Beacon’s “smear.” She complained, “Narrowly presented facts without sufficient context can do unfair harm. They can and will be weaponized, falsely regurgitated and twisted beyond recognition.” What does that even mean? The only one falsely regurgitating and twisting is Warren.

The Post’s second article is all about how “Women reality-checked [Warren’s detractors] on social media.” How did they do that? By saying that some woman somewhere in 1971 could have been let go over a pregnancy. Some told their own stories of it happening to them. Never mind that it didn’t happen to Warren.

It’s no wonder the Post stands accused of peddling fake news when the paper reacts like this toward actual, true news.

SOURCE

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IN BRIEF

FROM FRAUD TO FLING: Ilhan Omar — who allegedly married her own brother to circumvent immigrant laws — files for divorce from second husband amid rumors of an affair (The Daily Wire)

POLLAGANDA: Survey reveals nearly six in 10 Americans think most gun deaths are murders — they're not (The Washington Free Beacon)

NUCLEAR THEATER: Iran to sue U.S. over breach of nuclear deal; lawsuit will go to International Court of Justice (The Washington Free Beacon)

BIPARTISAN REPRIMAND: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez joins Ted Cruz, Ben Sasse, and others in letter to NBA condemning league for "betrayal of American values" (National Review)

WOKE PLATITUDES: ESPN bows to China, posts illegitimate propaganda map of communist Asian nation (The Daily Wire)

THE REAL DEM PROBLEM: Democrats’ basic problem as 2020 approaches rapidly is that if they’re betting on events like a recession hitting, they’re running out of time. Unemployment is at a 50-year low at 3.5 percent and 6.1 million jobs have been created since Jan. 2017. At this point in the Obama administration, not a single job had been created. So while economic news remains great, it makes attempts at impeachment look even more politically motivated as voters start to wonder if the push to remove Trump from office before the election is because with the economy and labor markets so strong Democrats don’t think they can beat him at the ballot box and probably don’t deserve to. -- Daily Torch

JUSTICE FOR KAVANAUGH: "Republican senators are pressing the Justice Department to pursue criminal charges against women who made false rape accusations against Supreme Court Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh during his confirmation hearing last year." (The Washington Times)

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For more blog postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated), A Coral reef compendium and an IQ compendium. (Both updated as news items come in). GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten. I also put up occasional updates on my Personal blog and each day I gather together my most substantial current writings on THE PSYCHOLOGIST.

Email me here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or here (Personal). My annual picture page is here

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14 October, 2019

What does Kamala Harris stand for? Brown skin?

She's a shape-shifter

After a promising start in January, her campaign has stalled. While she is in the competition for the nomination, she’s stuck in the mid– single digits in most national and early-state polls and draws modest crowds. Perhaps three dozen people showed up to see her in Waterloo, where they were packed into a few rows in front of the stage so that the large room—an ornate century-old former department store—wouldn’t look so empty.

People like Harris; they just can’t quite place her. Like the acquaintance you recognize but can’t recall how you met, she seems both familiar and yet mysterious. Is she a liberal or a moderate, establishment or populist, reformer or radical? Critics point out that she has flip- flopped or obfuscated her positions on important policy issues, like health care and immigration, and the speeches she could use to define herself often devolve into paeans to unity.

For all that, however, Harris remains in the hunt. She consistently polls among the top five candidates in the jumbled Democratic field, and she has the financial resources to remain viable. Her campaign raised $11.6 million in the quarter ending Sept. 30—a respectable haul, although far short of what some other front runners pulled in. As more long-shot candidates bow out of the race, campaign officials expect Harris to benefit from voters’ renewed focus. With a little luck, they say, she still has a fairly clear path to the nomination.

Among the top-polling Democrats, some churn seems inevitable. Former Vice President Joe Biden remains the apparent front runner, but his unsteady debate performances and shambling campaign have many insiders convinced he’s on the brink of collapse. When and if that happens, the next leading candidates, Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders, could face a rebellion from mainstream Democrats who see them as too left-wing. In such a world, Harris would be well positioned as the alternative: a practical idealist with undeniable political skills and a respected track record of problem solving rather than grandstanding. As a 54-year-old black woman, she also offers a compelling profile for Democrats hungry for diversity and fresh faces. Among the top-tier candidates, who also include Pete Buttigieg, she is one of two women and the only person of color. And she’s younger than the three septuagenarian front runners by a decade and a half.

Criminal-justice reformers charge that Harris is cautious at best and hypocritical at worst, an ambitious pol who wants to have it both ways and lacks the guts to pursue bold reforms. A new wave of progressive DAs like Philadelphia’s Larry Krasner has gone much further than Harris ever did, with initiatives like restricting the use of cash bail, which reformers say unfairly penalizes the poor while allowing the rich to buy their way out of jail. “There’s sort of a laundry list for what it means to be a progressive prosecutor, and she doesn’t check a single one of the boxes,” says Lara Bazelon, a professor at the University of San Francisco School of Law. “At least she didn’t when she was an actual prosecutor and she was in a position to do something to make the system more fair.”

Harris, Bazelon notes, dismissed the idea of legalizing marijuana as recently as 2014, but now that it’s popular she supports it. “That seems to be a theme: once she’s not in any sort of political risk, and there’s a consensus that a reform is a good thing, she’s behind it,” Bazelon said. “But when it’s time to be bold and do the right thing, she doesn’t.”

Since her election to the Senate in 2016, Harris has thrilled liberal audiences with her punishing interrogations of Trump Administration officials. She made former Attorney General Jeff Sessions blanch and Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh squirm. And in May, she deftly filleted the current Attorney General, William Barr, asking him, “Has the President or anyone at the White House ever asked or suggested that you open an investigation of anyone?” Barr was reduced to stuttering. He wouldn’t or couldn’t answer. In recent weeks, the clip has gone viral again as new questions have arisen about Barr’s involvement in the President’s political pressuring of foreign governments.

Sitting in the office in Los Angeles, Harris says she asked that question on a prosecutor’s hunch. “It has become clear to me that these are the kinds of questions you have to ask members of this Administration,” she says. “What kind of unethical requests has this President made of you? I knew by instinct and by example that it is not beyond him to think that America’s justice system is his personal apparatus for political gain. He’s made that quite clear.”

Various commentators have found Harris elusive, and she can be hard to pin down on policy positions. Early in her presidential campaign she called for abolishing private health insurance, then took it back, then later released a health care plan that would be government- run but allow for both public and private health insurance. In the first debate, Harris scored a clean hit on Biden with her attack on his opposition to federally mandated busing in the 1970s, and surged in the polls. But in the ensuing days she couldn’t definitively describe her own position on busing. When I asked her what ought to be done about the ongoing segregation of public schools, she spent several minutes discussing the need to “speak the truth about all of this,” before finally settling on a prescription: “To deal with this issue,” she said, “we need to collect the data and then we need to expose it.”

By upbringing and orientation, Harris seems to have a strong sense of right and wrong and a fierce drive to fight injustice, coupled with virtually no largescale policy instincts. Presented with a problem, she looks for ways to solve it, starting with data, guided by few firm ideological convictions. “All these grand ideas that academics and so many have about how you’re going to transform the world,” she says. “But, you know, pay attention to the basics.”

Perhaps, in these days of brutal ideological combat, that kind of pragmatism could be sold as refreshing. But in Harris’ case it seems to be having the opposite effect. Some of the attendees at her events in Iowa told me they don’t think she’s progressive enough; others said she strikes them as too far left. “She hasn’t gone far enough to get the activists behind her, but she’s gone too far for some of the moderates,” says Larry Gerston, a professor emeritus of political science at San Jose State University. “So she’s in kind of a no-person’s-land in terms of having a good base.” And yet, polls indicate that Democratic voters still want to like her—if only they can figure out what she’s about.

More HERE

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Reactions to My Tweet Reveal the Ignorant Brutality of Young Socialists and Communists

Mike Gonzalez

An eye-opening social experiment unfolded on my Twitter feed over the past several days that reveals a lot about America’s new brand of young communists and socialists.

Not to bury the lede: Yes, they are still as repugnantly brutal as their predecessors in St. Petersburg and Phnom Penh—but today they add ignorance and infantilism to the toxic mix.

In other words, it is their professors who are to be blamed. Our young socialists are simply the puppies that Napoleon took away in the beginning of George Orwell’s novella “Animal Farm” and then unleashed on Snowball later on in the book.

Our beef is with today’s Napoleon—that is, the former 1960s radicals who have taken over America’s faculties and indoctrinated America’s youth.

Platforms such as Tumblr and Twitter have amplified the problem by becoming breeding grounds where misinformation and socialist propaganda flourish. Far from keeping to their own dark corners of the internet, the young Marxists also have learned how to weaponize their collective power to bully and harass users who dare disagree.

Here’s what happened. On Oct. 1, the 70th anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic of China, that is, the day communist rule was formalized over the planet’s most populous country, I sent out this tweet:

"A landlord murdered at the start of the People’s Republic of China. Nothing to celebrate in 70 years of communism"

The tweet, as you can see, depicts the cruelty that communists visit upon the societies they take over. It has always been thus, from the cold-blooded murder of the Russian tsar’s young children, the massacre of kulaks in Russia, the man-made Holomodor famine in Ukraine, Mao’s disastrous Great Leap Forward collectivization, the paredon firing squads of Cuba, the Killing Fields of Cambodia, the Vietnamese boatpeople, Hungary in 1956, Prague in 1966, Tiananmen Square in 1989, and so on.

At first, I got supportive retweets. Some were from friends who have suffered personally from Marxism and lived to tell about it. One was from Rose Tang, a brave journalist who survived Tiananmen Square and whom I met in Hong Kong in the ’90s. Others were Cuban Americans and Russian Americans. They cover the political gamut. Rose can’t stand President Donald Trump, others like him.

Then something began happening that initially left me puzzled and bemused—then a little bit sad when I realized what it meant about some members of our present generation of youth.

Thousands—no exaggeration, thousands—of retweets and mentions began to pour in from young socialists and communists celebrating the murdering of landlords, bemoaning that a good bullet was wasted when rocks abounded, and even some telling me I was next.

My notifications began to blow up with these chilling messages throughout the day—and it hasn’t stopped yet. Just when I think the users have finished, a new cycle will pick up in the middle of the night and continue through the early morning and afternoon. It’s from around the globe, too.

One reason I was initially bemused is that most of the tweets are utter drivel—the memes these socialists employed were infantile, like this one with the little dog dancing because landlords were murdered—revealing a generation that has spent way too much time in front of video games and not enough reading good books, like “Animal Farm,” or better yet, “Lord of the Flies.”

They celebrated that they had “owned” me, because, you know, “ratio.”

Their responses not only revealed an alarming disregard for human life—they were also utterly ignorant of economics. An important theme was the supposed parasitic nature of landowners. This exposes yet again that they have not been taught the useful function of people who own and upkeep property so that those who cannot own it can have a place to live.

Or perhaps it exposed that far too many socialists have never met a landlord because they are living in their mother’s basement? Hard to say for sure.

But, of course, they never would have concluded that the very nature of owning anything was good, because they oppose the very concept of ownership to begin with. That was another of the themes that emerged in this exercise: To many of our hipster socialists, all “property” is “theft.”

Another theme was that capitalism has produced evils and suffering for the past 300 years, including slavery. I explained here last week how The New York Times has now joined that effort to indoctrinate our youth with this lie with its 1619 Project, which takes off where Howard Zinn and others have led.

And that’s just it. These kids have these views about property not because they’re Neolithic hunter-gatherers with no possessions, but because they have been taught these things by their professors.

The Martin Center explains here how schools of education have been radicalized. Parents have handed their bundles of joy over to ideologues who have reared them in these beliefs. Like the puppies that nearly killed Snowball.

It could be, of course, that some of my critics are Chinese or Russian bots—but the users I looked into seemed authentic. Social media expert Lyndsey Fifield, who manages the social media activities of The Heritage Foundation and The Daily Signal, tells me these events often are coordinated subtly but intentionally appear organic:

“Users know Twitter’s rules for abusive behavior—so instead of sending multiple tweets, prominent users will retweet content to mark it for attack,” Fifield explains, adding:

[D]ozens or hundreds of users who’d otherwise never see your content will begin spontaneously replying with mockery, liking other abusive tweets in the replies—all with the hope that they’re annoying you and making you think your views are in the minority. And if you respond in any way they will delight in doubling down.

So I was glad to ignore it, but many people noticed and were horrified. Users such as Rod Dreher and Amy Alkon, both of whom I respect, retweeted my tweet and urged others to simply read my replies to see what socialists in 2018 are really about.

Fifield says we should take heart—these tweets, she says, are not at all representative of what most Americans think. Although the rising popularity of socialism with young Americans is real, Twitter is where the most extreme spend their time.

Data suggests Fifield is right—Joe Berkowitz recently pointed out in Fast Company that surveys show that “Twitter users are younger, more likely to identify as Democrats, more highly educated, and have higher incomes than U.S. adults overall. Twitter users also differ from the broader population on some key social issues.”

So the woke minority is just that, a minority, as the Hidden Tribes of America project made clear here in 2018. They are mostly white, supercredentialed (not actually educated, though, obviously), and deeply entrenched in the culture.

It’s hard to believe such a coddled bunch represents a threat.

SOURCE

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Democrats are wrong. Middle-class incomes surging – thanks to Trump policies

By Steve Moore

Democrats downplaying Trump's economic success
Reaction from University of Chicago economics professor Austan Goolsbee and Heritage Foundation economist Steve Moore.

The latest Census Bureau Current Population Survey data now show that middle-class incomes, after adjusting for inflation, have surged by $5,003 since Donald Trump became president in January 2017. Median household income has now reached $65,976 – an all-time high and up more than 8 percent in 2019 dollars under the Trump presidency.

This data was compiled by the statisticians at Sentier Research, an economic research group whose founders have more than 30 years of experience at the Census Bureau in analyzing the monthly income numbers.

I reported last week in the Wall Street Journal that real median family income had soared by $4,146 under Trump through July 2019. The just-released August numbers from Sentier show a huge monthly gain of $857 in income per household.

These numbers contrast sharply with the 16 years prior to Trump’s presidency. In the eight years that George W. Bush was president, median income barely showed any gain, up just $401 thanks to the deep recession of 2008.

In the seven and a half years that Barack Obama was president, and not including the end of the recession, which Obama inherited, incomes inched up by $1,043 (June 2009 – January 2019). This means that in the 16 years before the Trump presidency, incomes rose by about $1,500 while in less than three years middle incomes have risen three times faster.

The contrast is even sharper when measured on a monthy basis. The monthly rise in incomes under Bush was $4. That number was $11 under Obama and $161 under Trump.

These income numbers are PRE-TAX, so they do NOT include the impact of the Trump tax cut. The Heritage Foundation estimates that the average household has saved $1,400 a year on their federal taxes from the 2017 Trump tax cut. This means many working-class families now have a $6,000 higher after-tax, and after-inflation paycheck today.

These surges in income, especially in the last several months, have occurred at exactly the time when many liberal economists and media talking heads were shouting “recession.” In reality middle-class families were enjoying a near-unprecedented income windfall and “the gains in income levels in recent months,” Sentier reports, “have been accelerating.“

These surges in income, especially in the last several months, have occurred at exactly the time when many liberal economists and media talking heads were shouting “recession.”

These higher wage and salary incomes are no doubt related to the very tight labor market, which has given workers new bargaining power to ask for higher pay. Today there are more than seven million unfilled jobs in America – the highest number of surplus jobs in American history.

These latest income numbers also squarely contradict the claims by Democratic presidential candidates, such as former Vice President Joe Biden and Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders, who claim that all the gains from the Trump economy have gone to the rich and large corporations. Warren claimed earlier this year that workers had to work "two or three or four jobs" just to keep their incomes from falling.

No, this has been one of the biggest middle-class success stories in modern times, and it is a testament to the success of the Trump tax, regulatory and energy policies.

SOURCE

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For more blog postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated), A Coral reef compendium and an IQ compendium. (Both updated as news items come in). GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten. I also put up occasional updates on my Personal blog and each day I gather together my most substantial current writings on THE PSYCHOLOGIST.

Email me here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or here (Personal). My annual picture page is here

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13 October, 2019

A YUGE win for Trump

Who else could have got ANY concession out of China? It's not as extensive as many would like but it is real progress -- 100% more progress than anyone else has delivered. It also keeps faith with the US farm sector. Farmers mostly voted for Trump but have patiently borne losses from his trade war in hope of long term gains. The US agricultural sector has almost unlimited capacity so the huge new quotas will be a goldmine for them. American farmers will be saying: "I told you so".

Washington and Beijing have agreed to a ‘substantial’ interim trade deal, averting a tariff increase on Chinese goods that had been planned for October 15 and auguring an export windfall for US farmers, President Donald Trump said.

New York Post reports, the president’s announcement came during a meeting with Chinese trade negotiators in the Oval Office.

“Lots of respect for President Xi,” Trump told reporters of China’s leader, Xi Jinping. “We’ve had a tremendous negotiation, a very complex negotiation, but something that’s going to be great for both countries,” Trump said.

Ultimately, the deal is “a great thing for world peace,” he said at the end of his meeting with Beijing’s lead trade envoy, Vice Premier Liu He.

“You know there was a lot of friction between the United States and China and now it’s a love fest.”

Although the details still need to be committed to paper over the next four weeks — and then signed by both countries — the “phase one” agreement so far represents key concessions from Beijing.

It requires that over the next two years, Chinese imports from US farms will grow to an annual rate of US$40 billion (A$59 billion) to $50 billion. That’s more than double the previous high-point of $16 to $17 billion. Currently annual US farm exports to China are at $8 billion, Trump said.

“I’d suggest the farmers have to immediately go and buy more land, and get bigger tractors,” the president joked. He added, “I’m very excited for the farmer. There’s never been a deal of this magnitude for the American farmer.”

Liu also praised the accord. “We very much agreed to get to the China-US economic relationship right. It is something good for China, for the United States and for the whole world,” he told reporters at the White House. “We are making progress towards a positive direction.”

However, some observers said the deal was underwhelming. Greg Daco of Oxford Economics called it an “itsy-bitsy-teeny-weeny handshake deal.”

Though it lays the foundation for a broader accord later, “behind the hype, this is nothing more than partial and ostensibly unsustainable deal lacking in real enforcement mechanisms,” he said in an analysis. “For businesses this will mean less damage, not greater certainty.”

The National Retail Federation said it was encouraged by the progress, adding, however: “Although this is a step in the right direction, the uncertainty continues.”

Trump also said the deal would make some steps toward protecting American technology, a major focus of the trade frictions.

An agreement has also been struck concerning currency and China opening its market to American financial services firms, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said.

Intellectual property protections for US companies that do business with China have also been agreed upon. “We have come to a deal on intellectual property,” Trump said.

SOURCE

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Trump Moves to Increase Transparency in Government Regulations

Kevin Lunny and his family ran Drakes Bay Oyster Company for about 50 years on the Northern California coastline before the federal government shut down the business over regulations he wasn’t aware of.

“We produced nearly half of all the sustainable oysters in Northern California,” Lunny said Wednesday at the White House, before President Donald Trump signed two executive orders to prevent federal agencies from regulatory abuse.

“The National Park Service forced our oyster farm out of business,” Lunny said. “If that wasn’t enough for our family and our community, today the rest of agriculture, which includes another 24 ranchers and family farm businesses within the National Seashore, are facing the exact same process.”

In 2011, the Interior Department rejected a permit for the business to continue operation, despite action by Congress to grandfather protection for aquaculture companies in the Point Reyes Wilderness Act.

The agency argued in court that it had wide discretion to grant or deny permits.

Lunny’s battle to save the family’s oyster business ended in 2014, when the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals sided with the government.

One of Trump’s executive orders, titled “Bringing Guidance Out of the Darkness,” prohibits federal agencies from bypassing the cost-benefit analysis and avoiding public comment—both required when agencies adopt a regulation.

Another executive order, titled “Transparency and Fairness,” protects Americans from unlawful interpretations of existing regulations, or from unexpected penalties. Agencies would be required to proactively educate the public before imposing costly fines.

As Lunny began to walk away from the lectern, Trump asked: “Is the business gone now?”

Lunny answered: “The business is gone, 20 million oysters destroyed.”

“No American should ever face such persecution from their own government, except for the president,” Trump said. “Don’t feel bad, Kevin. They treated you better than they treat me.”

The president said the White House would monitor enforcement of the new orders.

“Americans will no longer be subject to the hidden games that are played on the public,” he said.

During the Obama administration, federal agencies imposed thousands of mandates through blog posts, letters, brochures, and thousands of other publications, according to the White House.

Also speaking at the event was Andy Johnson, a Wyoming rancher whom the Environmental Protection Agency threatened with a $16 million fine for trying to build a pond on his own property.

After the story made national news, the EPA settled, agreeing not to fine the rancher and allowing him to keep the pond without obtaining a permit.

Trump had noted the case in 2017 when he ordered the EPA to reform the Obama administration’s Waters of the United States regulation.

“Today we are making a major step forward in the effort to drain the swamp and to get our arms wrapped around the administrative state,” Russ Vought, acting director of the White House Office of Management and Budget, said at the event.

Vought added:

We can’t do that until we know all the dark, regulatory, stealth regulation that is out there. That is one of the reasons we are asking all of the agencies to put on their website, in a searchable way, all of these regulations so that we can understand what [the situation] is. Anything that is not put up there is rescinded. Secondly, we want to make sure the American people, families and small businesses, are not bullied by their government.

The Army Corps of Engineers determined in 2016 that permafrost covering about one-third of the state of Alaska met the definition of “navigable waters,” which prevented the planned expansion of Tin Cup, LLC, a small, family-owned pipe fabrication business in Fairbanks, Alaska.

Tin Cup owner Richard Schok spoke about his situation, in which the Army Corps relied on the “Alaska Supplement” to the agency’s 1987 Wetlands Manual.

However, the supplemental material never was delivered to Congress as required by the Congressional Review Act. The pipe company argued in court that the rule was never in effect.

However, the 9th Circuit sided with the government and the Supreme Court this year declined to take the case.

“President Trump is achieving more on regulatory reform than many thought possible,” Anthony Campau, a visiting fellow in regulatory policy at The Heritage Foundation, said in a written statement.

Campau previously oversaw many Trump administration regulatory reforms as chief of staff for the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, a division of OMB.

“The president is demonstrating that regulatory reform in the Trump administration isn’t just about dollars and cents; it is also about securing liberty through the continued advancement of good government principles like fair notice, transparency, accountability, and decision-making grounded in analysis,” Campou added.

SOURCE

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Bernie Sanders And Elizabeth Warren Mistake Money For Wealth

It’s often said about 1960s and 70s Wall Street that a stockbroker could leave for lunch heavily in debt, only to return an hour later rolling in cash. Such was life in the financial world of a few decades ago. So high were commissions on stock trades that a big order placed with a licensed sales assistant or colleague manning the desk could make the stockbroker’s day, and sometimes year.

No doubt stories like that were traded between Wall Street veterans and newbies this past week. With the announcement that Charles Schwab and Ameritrade would no longer charge commissions on stock trades, yet another formerly expensive act was essentially reduced to zero.

Notable about Schwab’s decision was that it in a very real sense was inevitable. In a capitalistic society, the capitalists get rich by mass producing former luxuries, and relentlessly pushing down the prices of everything. Along similar lines, airplane flying was prohibitively expensive at the same time that buying and selling shares was. This rates mention since in the same week that Schwab and Ameritrade made their announcements, so did Southwest Airlines promote $49/one way sales. The Southwest fare sale is a reminder that within ten years private flight will be increasingly enjoyed by everyday Americans. Within twenty years, it will be very much the norm thanks to enterprising individuals who will earn billions for freeing us all from the TSA frustration. Bank on it.

All of this came to mind while reading a front page New York Times story by Alan Rappeport and Thomas Kaplan about Democratic presidential candidates Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, and their proposed wealth tax. The Times writers explained it this way:

"As they compete for the Democratic presidential nomination, Senators Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and Bernie Sanders of Vermont have proposed wealth taxes that would shrink the fortunes of the richest Americans. Their plans envision an enormous transfer of money from the wealthy to ordinary people, with revenue from the wealth tax used to finance new social programs like tuition-free college, universal child care and 'Medicare for all.'"

The Dems’ error is in presuming that money and wealth are one and the same. No, they’re not. Money is just an agreement about value that facilitates the exchange of actual wealth. Money is what governments can produce, while wealth is what we produce. If money were wealth, as opposed to a certain consequence of wealth, poverty could be stamped out with ease.

Warren, Sanders, and others vying for the favor of Democratic voters forget that a dollar in the hands of Nancy Pelosi and Mitch McConnell is nothing like a dollar in the hands of Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, and Warren Buffett; the three richest Americans the individuals who would likely pay the most if a wealth tax were instituted. And while imposing a tax and collecting on it are two entirely different things (much as money and wealth are), that’s a column for another day.

For now, it’s worth thinking about people like Bezos and Gates, along with what someone like Buffett does when allocating capital. While it used to be that only the richest of the rich had access to the world’s production, and only after incredibly expansive travel around the world, Bezos democratized access. Nowadays anyone can purchase the world’s plenty, at prices that continue to fall, all with a click of a mouse.

In Gates’s case, he attended elite Lakeside School in Seattle. This rates mention because Seattle’s fanciest school had incredibly primitive (by today’s standards) computers that students could utilize. Gates was an eager user. Readers can rest assured that computers weren’t the norm in Seattle schools back in the late ‘70s, or anywhere else for that matter. And that’s the point.

Gates, Steve Jobs, Michael Dell and others turned nose-bleed expensive computers and the software that gives them life into common goods. Getting into specifics, all three grew incredibly rich by virtue of mass producing former luxuries that once could only be found in the vicinity of the rich and their offspring.

Buffett comes in as the investor whose capital allocations made and make all this possible. Investment is all about the production of more and more goods and services at costs that continuously shrink. Without investors willing to back dreamers like Gates, Jobs and Dell, economic advance grounds to a halt.

So with it hopefully established that individuals get rich by virtue of them democratizing access to formerly unattainable goods and services, while cheapening others (that Charles Schwab is a billionaire is a major-league redundancy), it’s useful to pivot back to the Dems’ tax plan. They want to take money from the rich in order to give it to those who aren’t.

The problem is that no one wants money, they only want what money can be exchanged for. Think about it. Crucial here is that a dollar today is exchangeable for exponentially more goods and services versus decades ago, not to mention that it commands goods and services that very few (rich or poor) could have imagined decades ago. Translated, Sanders, Warren et al want to take from the very people who got rich by powerfully improving the living standards of the poor and middle class through copious production of what was formerly out-of-reach for those same individuals. You can’t make this up!

To be clear, this is not a piece about incentives, and taxes blunting incentives. With the entrepreneurial, there’s an argument that tax rates don’t much inform what they do. But availability of capital most certainly does inform what they do.

This is important as Dems’ wax rhapsodical about the $2.6 trillion that economists Emmanual Saez and Gabriel Zucman promise a wealth tax will raise. Ok, but so what? It’s not the $2.6 trillion that matters, it’s once again what it can be exchanged for. And in shrinking the amount of capital that could be directed toward innovators (what can inheritors or producers of great wealth do but thankfully invest it?), the Dems will slow the process whereby the poor and middle class will be able to attain goods and services previously unattainable for anyone.

Translated, the Democrats in their parallel universe are bragging about plans to shrink by trillions the investment that would vastly improve the lives of the presumed "have nots." All to give them “money.” Except that money has exponentially fewer uses minus the genius of the individuals (and yes, heirs) they choose to neuter. Something to think about.

SOURCE

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IN BRIEF

PRIVACY ABUSE: "Some of the Federal Bureau of Investigation's electronic surveillance activities violated the constitutional privacy rights of Americans swept up in a controversial foreign intelligence program, a secretive surveillance court has ruled." (The Wall Street Journal)

MORON: "The CEO of Dick's Sporting Goods told CBS News this weekend that his decisions to stop selling certain guns and hire lobbyists to push for new gun bans have cost his company roughly $250 million. ... [Ed] Stack also said the company destroyed $5 million worth of rifle inventory because Stack believed no one should be allowed to own them." (The Washington Free Beacon)

DEBAUCHERY: The U.S. saw a record 2.4 million reported cases of chlamydia, gonorrhea, and syphilis in 2018, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (U.S. News & World Report)

MIGRANT ARRESTS: Most illegal crossings in 12 years: Border Patrol took 851,000 into custody during fiscal 2019 (Washington Examiner)

MASS. HEALTH COSTS: Statewide health care spending grew to an estimated $60.9 billion in 2018, or $8,827 per person, according to the study from the state Center for Health Information and Analysis. That’s a 3.1 percent increase from the previous year and in line with the state benchmark for controlling spending. But costs for patients and consumers rose more quickly. For individuals with private insurance, out-of-pocket costs increased 6.1 percent and premiums rose 5.2 percent over the past two years, outpacing wages and inflation. In addition, more Massachusetts residents signed up for high-deductible health plans. -- Boston Globe

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For more blog postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated), A Coral reef compendium and an IQ compendium. (Both updated as news items come in). GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten. I also put up occasional updates on my Personal blog and each day I gather together my most substantial current writings on THE PSYCHOLOGIST.

Email me here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or here (Personal). My annual picture page is here

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11 October, 2019

Study: Dem Tax Policy Driven by Hatred for Rich

Envy and retribution are poor foundations for crafting public policy

“Hatred is like drinking poison and then waiting for it to kill your enemy.” —quote attributed to South African anti-apartheid leader Nelson Mandela

Last month, the Cato Institute released its 2019 Welfare, Work, and Wealth National Survey, and it offers a fascinating insight into the motives of those demanding ever higher taxes on the productive class in America.

The study surveyed 1,700 Americans to determine why some support socialism, tax increases on the wealthy, and wealth redistribution; is it compassion or resentment?

To determine compassion, they were asked if they agreed or disagreed with statements like “I suffer from others’ sorrows,” or “I feel sympathy for those who are worse off than myself.” To measure resentment toward successful people, they were asked if they agreed/disagreed with statements like “Very successful people sometimes need to be brought down a peg or two even if they’ve done nothing wrong,” or “It’s good to see very successful people fail occasionally.”

The study found resentment toward successful people is a far stronger motivator than compassion for the poor when it comes to support for raising taxes on high earners.

This philosophy of hatred for high achievers is rampant within the modern Democrat Party, evidenced by how the frontrunners for the 2020 presidential nomination are eagerly promising to punish the wealthy.

Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren has called for an additional 2% tax on the wealth of all households with incomes over $50 million. To be clear, this is not a tax on new income, but on all wealth accumulated over a lifetime — investments, savings, assets, inheritance, etc., which has already been subject to income taxes, payroll taxes, capital gains taxes, property taxes, etc.

The 16th Amendment was ratified on the promise that it would only punish the ultra-rich, but today it impacts every American. Warren promises her new tax will only hurt the very wealthy, but past experience shows us it won’t be long before government agents are digging through our homes, assessing the value of the wedding ring grandma passed down so we can be taxed on it.

Not to be outdone, cranky septuagenarian socialist Senator Bernie Sanders (who owns three homes in upscale areas of Vermont and DC) is calling for even more Americans to be taxed at higher rates, with a 1% tax on net worth above $32 million, topping out at 8% for those with assets over $8 billion. He has also proposed a new tax on corporations based on the wage gap between CEO pay and that of the median worker.

This is wrong as a matter of sound tax policy, and it is morally reprehensible.

As a matter of tax policy, it has been tried and it has failed. Higher taxes lead to lower productivity, a shrinking economy, and less prosperity. Those most in need suffer the most because the wealthy have plenty of ways to shield their money from confiscatory tax rates, including simply moving, as New York Governor Andrew Cuomo discovered the hard way.

For Democrats, taxes aren’t about raising revenue for the legitimate functions of government. For them, taxes are about “leveling the playing field,” ending “income inequality,” and making the rich “pay their fair share.”

Barack Obama was a master at stoking class hatred, inciting poor and middle-income Americans to support punishing the “rich,” even if that meant hurting themselves.

In 2008, ABC’s Charlie Gibson noted that Obama was calling for a doubling of the capital-gains tax rate, but pointed out that “in each instance, when the rate dropped, revenues from the tax increased; the government took in more money. And in the 1980s, when the tax was increased to 28 percent, the revenues went down… So why raise it at all, especially given the fact that 100 million people in this country own stock and would be affected?”

Obama refused to back down, declaring that (even if it meant less tax revenue to fund programs for the poor and needy) he would do it “for purposes of fairness.”

Fairness for whom? The more than five million small-business owners who risked their life savings to start a business, worked 70-80 hour weeks for years to make it successful, employing tens of millions of their fellow Americans in the process, only to be hammered by taxes as a “reward” for their hard work, dedication, and sacrifice? How is it “fair” or moral to punish someone for working harder, working smarter, being more innovative, sacrificing more, and risking more than their neighbor?

The beauty of the free market is that, in order for someone to become a millionaire or billionaire, they must provide a good or service that millions of people desire. In a true free market, you simply can’t get wealthy without improving the lives of countless others.

Bernie Sanders declares his view that “There should be no billionaires.” But would Americans truly be better off if Sam Walton had not revolutionized commerce with his high-volume, low-margin model that allows tens of millions of Americans to afford goods previously out of reach? Would Americans today be happier without iPhones? Would we be better off without the millions of jobs created thanks to Bill Gates and his Windows software?

Would we be better off without these millionaires and billionaires?

No. So why punish them, and ourselves in the process?

SOURCE

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Trump Declines Dems' Invitation to Impeachment Hoax

President Donald Trump is done playing the Democrats' impeachment game. On Tuesday, the White House sent an eight-page letter to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Reps. Adam Schiff, Eliot Engel, and Elijah Cummings essentially telling them to put up or shut up. The letter highlighted the fact that Pelosi and Democrats have violated the Constitution, "the rule of law, and every past precedent" in their politically partisan quest to see Trump impeached. The letter, written by Trump attorney Pat Cipollone, bluntly exposes the Democrats' true political motivation:

Put simply, you seek to overturn the results of the 2016 election and deprive the American people of the President they have freely chosen. Many Democrats now apparently view impeachment not only as a means to undo the democratic results of the last election, but as a strategy to influence the next election, which is barely more than a year away. As one member of Congress explained, he is "concerned that if we don't impeach the President, he will get reelected." Your highly partisan and unconstitutional effort threatens grave and lasting damage to our democratic institutions, to our system of free elections, and to the American people.

Cipollone asserts that Pelosi and company's impeachment inquiry is invalid because no vote was held in the House or even in a House committee to initiate the current inquiry. Instead, Pelosi unilaterally "announced an 'official impeachment inquiry.'" Cipollone writes, "Your contrived process is unprecedented in the history of the Nation, and lacks the necessary authorization for a valid impeachment proceeding."

As a result of Pelosi's invalid initiation of an impeachment inquiry, Cipollone points out that Trump's due-process rights have been violated. While Democrat-led committees subpoena White House officials demanding compliance under threats of obstruction charges, Trump on the other hand is denied the right to confront witnesses against him, to call his own witnesses, and "to have the assistance of counsel." All of those things would be afforded him if Pelosi were to actually hold a House vote to officially launch an impeachment inquiry.

The letter concludes, "The President cannot allow your constitutionally illegitimate proceedings to distract him and those in the Executive Branch from their work on behalf of the American people."

Predictably, Pelosi responded with her own letter alleging that Trump is the one guilty of trying "to normalize lawlessness," ridiculously adding that "he is trying to make lawlessness a virtue." And once again Pelosi vacuously asserts that Trump's "actions threaten our national security, violate our Constitution and undermine the integrity of our elections." She further asserts that the White House is engaged in a "cover-up" of Trump's "betrayal of our democracy." It will be interesting to see if Pelosi moves forward with an impeachment vote, or if she continues to drag out her lawless charade.

SOURCE

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McConnell Turning Tables on Democrat Impeachers

"The way that impeachment stops is with a Senate majority with me as majority leader."

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell sees it for what it is, and the upper chamber of Congress, which will try President Donald Trump if and when the House ever gets around to impeaching him, will prove to be the sane chamber. In a campaign video, McConnell says that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is “in the clutches of a left-wing mob that finally convinced her to impeach the president.” However, he adds. “The way that impeachment stops is with a Senate majority with me as majority leader.”

McConnell must firmly believe that there is not enough evidence to oust Trump or he wouldn’t assert this far in advance that the Senate will kill the effort. He’s also clearly hanging this political charade around Democrat necks.

On a final note, Democrats have, for effect, compared the proposed Trump impeachment with that of Richard Nixon — but there is a BIG difference and it betrays a remarkable double standard.

Nixon was rightly impeached and resigned because he attempted to conceal the fact that operatives within his administration used FBI and CIA personnel to uncover what they believed were communist influencers in the Democrat Party. That was exposed with the botched attempt to steal DNC files from its office in the Watergate building — though, notably, Nixon was not orchestrating these tactics.

However, in the case of both the 2016 Russia-collusion hoax and the current Ukraine quid-pro-quo hoax, Democrats are the ones using deep-state operatives within the FBI and CIA to frame a sitting president to obstruct his agenda across the board. Don’t wait on The Washington Post to devote six months of headlines to the Democrat deep-state conspiracy.

SOURCE

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Ten Hours of Testimony for nothing

Kurt Volker, the former U.S. envoy to Ukraine, testified on Capitol Hill Thursday for nearly 10 hours. He was one of the first witnesses deposed in the House Democrats’ impeachment inquiry.

I’m pretty sure that if our brave men and women at Gitmo interrogated a jihadist for ten hours, the left would be yelling that it was torture. But that didn’t stop Democrats from interrogating Volker for ten hours.

And, of course, they did it behind closed doors, presumably because they were touching on classified subjects. Or maybe they just didn’t want the American people to hear what Volker had to say. I suspect it was the latter because Republicans came out of the hearing unfazed.

Rep. Jim Jordan, the ranking Republican on the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, told reporters that “not one thing [Volker] said comports with any of the Democrats’ impeachment narrative. Not one thing.”

Rep. Adam Schiff left the hearing and told reporters that he had no comment. Schiff’s silence speaks volumes. If Volker’s testimony had been damaging to Trump, Schiff would have had plenty to say.

SOURCE

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Surprise Medical Billing Must Be Stopped

Have you ever had this happen to you? You or a loved one gets sick, you check and double-check your insurance and find a provider in your insurance network, make an appointment and see that provider. You pay the co-pays and pick up the drugs the doctor prescribed. All seems fine until weeks later, you get an unexpected, and very expensive, bill for services you thought your insurance provider covered. This is called surprise medical billing, and if it has happened to you, you’re far from alone.

Here’s how it works: People go into facilities that are in their insurance network. In fact, if you’re like me you’ll call your insurance provider or at least check its website to make sure the facility is in-network so you won’t get slapped with charges above and beyond the premiums, co-pays, deductibles and out-of-pocket maximums, which already add up to a lot of money.

Even when patients are told that yes, this facility is in-network, they often get a surprise bill after the fact. The bill says that while the facility was covered, one of the medical providers was not, and patients are expected to make up the difference. How was the patient even supposed to know that? Medical insurance companies want to pretend they’re entirely innocent in the shady practice known as surprise medical billing. They’re not.

This happens far more often than you might imagine. According to a study by Stanford University, almost 40 percent of American patients have been hit by surprise medical billing.

This may technically be legal, but it is unfair and unjust and in extreme cases can turn even fairly routine illness into a financial crisis. It’s not an overstatement to say that the existence of widespread practices like this one call the entire American medical system’s legitimacy into question.

America’s health insurance companies say that this is not their fault. They point out that equity firms have bought up a lot of medical practices and have driven billing costs up. The message is: blame the other guy.

They’re not wrong and this is a problem, but it’s not the whole story. American insurance companies are Goliaths who want to pretend to be Davids. The five largest insurance companies will generate more revenue in 2019 than the five biggest tech companies according to Axios.

In forging their agreements with medical facilities, American insurance companies have created a problem for us, known as “skinny networks.” These are networks that are not broad enough to meet the needs of all of their clients.

To a certain extent, this is understandable. People come to doctors and other medical specialists with a wide variety of problems. Even a diligent insurance company can only foresee so many problems and thus only strike a deal with so many problem-solvers.

But really, when, let’s say, most anesthesiologists or many emergency room doctors are not covered by a network agreement, whose fault is that? It’s clear that while equity firms are not making the problem any better, health insurance companies share a portion of the blame for surprise billing as well. Patients really have no way of anticipating the after-doctor sticker shock.

The best solution would be to make sure, first of all, that this is not the patients’ problem and, second, that no party – not insurance companies, not private practitioners, not medical facilities, not equity firms – has the power to lord it over the others.

A bill in Congress called the STOP Surprise Medical Bills Act would stop surprise medical billing. Rather than arguing about blame for what has gone wrong, it would simply force all the parties to fix the problem and not trouble patients about it.

When bills come to the insurance company that are out of network, rather than pass that bill on to you, the insurance company would be required to enter into binding arbitration with that provider, and hammer out a deal.

This approach has been tried in New York and it has already saved thousands and thousands of people from the national plague of surprise medical billing. Congress should replicate this success story for all American patients.

SOURCE

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IN BRIEF

UKRAINE PROBE: "A newly unearthed document shows that Ukrainian officials had opened a new probe into the firm linked to Hunter Biden months before President Trump's phone call with that country's leader." (Fox News)

COSTLY INSURANCE UNDER OBAMACARE: "Health insurance now costs the average American family over $20,000 annually, according to a recent survey conducted by the Kaiser Family Foundation. The foundation’s chief executive, Drew Altman, noted, “It’s as much as buying a basic economy car, but buying it every year.” Bloomberg reports, “While employers pay most of the cost of coverage, according to the survey, workers’ average contribution is now $6,000 for a family plan. That’s just their share of upfront premiums, and doesn’t include co-payments, deductibles and other forms of cost-sharing once they need care.” -- Patriot Post

NOKO STATUS QUO: "Working-level nuclear talks in Sweden between officials from Pyongyang and Washington have broken off, North Korea's top negotiator said late on Saturday, dashing prospects for an end to months of stalemate." (Reuters)

NARRATIVE BUSTER: Women and minorities are fueling an increase in concealed-handgun permits (John Lott)

TOO LITTLE TOO LATE: Bloomberg Law finally retracts its false and misleading "anti-Semitic" story involving Department of Labor official Leif Olson (The Volokh Conspiracy)

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For more blog postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated), A Coral reef compendium and an IQ compendium. (Both updated as news items come in). GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten. I also put up occasional updates on my Personal blog and each day I gather together my most substantial current writings on THE PSYCHOLOGIST.

Email me here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or here (Personal). My annual picture page is here

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10 October, 2019

Democrats Issue Ominous Warning to Supreme Court

For all the claims about President Donald Trump’s dangerous erosion of institutional norms, it is prominent Democrats who are ramping up their threats to pack the Supreme Court unless it starts producing different outcomes on pet issues.

Rule differently on gun control or face restructuring, several Democratic senators warned in a brief filed August 12. Sens. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI), Richard Blumenthal (D-CT), Mazie Hirono (D-HI), Richard Durbin (D-IL), and Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY), issued the threat in response to the court’s consideration of the constitutionality of a New York City law strictly limiting the transport of guns by their law-abiding owners.

“The Supreme Court is not well. And the people know it. Perhaps the Court can heal itself before the public demands it be ‘restructured in order to reduce the influence of politics,’” the liberal senators wrote, quoting a Quinnipiac University poll showing that 69 percent of Democrats support court packing. The message from the Democratic senators was not subtle: That’s a nice court you have there. It would be a shame if something happened to it.

Contrary to what the senators are implying, the issue isn’t that the public at large is frustrated with the court. The issue is Democrats. Another recent poll shows that, while 62 percent of Americans have a favorable view of the Supreme Court, that percentage drops to 49 percent for Democrats, according to a recent Pew Research Center survey—the lowest percentage in decades.

Democratic politicians appear to be letting these polls dictate their policy proposals. South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg proposed limiting justices’ lifetime terms on the bench, while several other Democratic candidates for the 2020 presidential nomination have already spoken in favor of adding justices to the court.
As the progressive magazine Mother Jones put it: “Court-Packing Went from a Fringe Idea to a Serious Democratic Proposal.”

It’s not the first time Democratic politicians have tried to regain control of the Court by court packing. The Constitution doesn’t fix the number of justices on the court. It ranged from five to ten in the early years of the republic before being codified at nine in the Judiciary Act of 1869.

President Franklin Roosevelt, frustrated that the court had declared key provisions of his New Deal unconstitutional, proposed the Judicial Procedures Reform Bill in 1937. It would have allowed him to appoint as many as six additional justices. Even the Democrats who controlled Congress and his own Vice President opposed the plan.

But while Roosevelt’s plan to increase the number of justices failed, ultimately the pressure Roosevelt brought to bear achieved the desired result. Congress passed a bill that allowed justices who retired to receive full, rather than one-half, pensions. Four justices stepped down within the next four years and another two died, giving him six of the eight justices he eventually appointed. Another justice, Owen Robert, began voting to uphold Roosevelt’s agenda in what has been dubbed the famous “switch in time that saved nine,” on the assumption that his conversion was an attempt to stave off the president’s attempt to reconfigure the court.

Democrat threats to pack the court may be another attempt to threaten justices into changing their votes. Unfortunately, the tactic occasionally works. In 2012, the initial vote of the court regarding President Obama’s signature legislative accomplishment, the Affordable Care Act, was to strike down the law for violating the Commerce Clause. The media, senators and even President Obama began previewing arguments they would use if the court so ruled, calling the court partisan, activist, and illegitimate.

Chief Justice Roberts, worried about the blowback on the court, negotiated a deal with Justices Kagan and Breyer. They voted to overturn the law’s expansion of Medicaid in exchange for him voting to uphold the individual mandate as a tax. Both inside and outside the court, the view was that the chief justice had changed his legal position not on principle but due to public pressure.

However, the Court’s true legitimacy derives from its freedom to make decisions in accordance with law, not in its reaching decisions that will win favor with powerful politicians or media elite. A justice who allows the president or other politicians to change his or her vote does not show independence.

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg surprised some recently when she strongly decried court packing for political gain in an interview with NPR’s Nina Totenberg. Noting that the Constitution doesn’t require nine justices, she said it was a bad idea when FDR proposed it, and it’s a bad idea now.

“You mentioned before the court appearing partisan. Well if anything would make the court appear partisan, it would be that. One side saying when we’re in power, we’re going to enlarge the number of judges so we will have more people who will vote the way we want them to. So, I’m not at all in favor of that solution to what I see as a temporary situation,” she said.

The best solution for depoliticizing the Supreme Court is for it to have a smaller role in America’s social, economic, and political life. The high court should determine whether legislation is Constitutional. It should not correct, rewrite, update, or amend statutes, much less tinker with the Constitution itself.

A less political Supreme Court is more probable when Congress legislates clearly and utilizes the Constitution’s amendment process. Much of the temptation for courts to overreach into the political arena arises from the perception that change through the proper channels is not feasible. Democratic senators demanding the Supreme Court take on an activist role is really a declaration of their own incompetence as legislators.

Over the last 30 years, and at several critical junctures, nominations and advise and consent responsibilities have become increasingly politicized. As always, the Constitution’s independent and limited judiciary remains preferable to a hyper political court that is legislating from the bench and subject to the same base political pressures as members of Congress pandering for votes. Similarly, as voters we need to take our responsibility as guardians of the Constitution seriously and elect presidents and senators who demonstrate integrity in dealing with the court.

SOURCE

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How Rent Control Threatens the American Dream

It’s no secret that many parts of the country are experiencing a housing affordability crisis. Homelessness is on the rise in high-cost urban areas and skyrocketing rental prices mean that families have an increasingly tough time making ends meet. This dismal state of affairs is concerning for those who live in these areas already, but a potentially much larger problem, and one that could have effects for generations to come, is the disappearing ability for families across the country to move into these dynamic areas in the first place.

To address these problems, policymakers in California and Oregon (among the worst states for housing affordability) have decided on the one policy choice that is almost universally despised among economists: rent control. The idea has also received support from Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT), who has made national rent control a key part of his presidential campaign. The quintessential “sounds-good-but-doesn’t-work” policy, rent control is a government-imposed limit on how much landlords can increase rents for property they own. Once signed by Governor Newsom, the California legislation will limit increases in rent to five percent, plus the rate of inflation. Oregon lawmakers passed a statewide rent control law in February that limits rent increases to seven percent, plus the rate of inflation.

Even economists who typically favor government intervention in the economy generally don’t like rent controls because they simply fail to achieve their intended goal of controlling rental costs. Instead of being forced to rent units at below-market rates, landlords facing rent controls often respond by converting their units into condos that can be sold or business properties that are not subject to rent control laws. This ultimately shrinks the supply of units available to rent, driving up the cost of renting for everyone. According to recent research from Stanford University, this is exactly what happened when San Francisco implemented rent control laws in the 1990s—stabilizing rent for a few while reducing the supply of units available for rent by 15 percent and increasing rental costs across the city by 5.1 percent.

Even more concerning is the effect that such policies will have on the ability for families to move into the places where they have a better chance at finding work, moving up the income ladder, and providing their children with the best opportunities to succeed. Although it has been more than a decade since the great recession, America’s economic recovery has been decidedly geographically unequal. Research from the Economic Innovation Group (EIG) has documented a growing divide, since the great recession, between prosperous (typically urban) and distressed (typically rural) communities. For example, employment in prosperous zip codes fully recovered from the recession by 2013 and by 2016 these areas had 3.6 million more jobs than in 2007. Distressed zip codes, meanwhile, by 2016 had 1.4 million fewer jobs than in 2007 and are not expected to ever fully recover. The researchers also note that, “highly populous counties—those with more than 500,000 residents—were far more likely to add businesses above and beyond 2007 levels than their smaller peers.” Between 2007 and 2016, nearly 60 percent of large counties added businesses on net, while only about 20 percent of small counties did so.

Furthermore, recent research from the Equality of Opportunity Project is clear that place matters for the ability of Americans to move up the income distribution across generations as well. For children in poor families, growing up in a county with less concentrated poverty, lower crime rates, a larger share of two-parent families, less income inequality, and better schools has a significant positive effect on future adult income. But despite these disparities in opportunity, Americans are less geographically mobile than ever. In the 1950s, about 20 percent of the population moved every year, but by 2017 only about 10 percent did. Long-distance moves are often job related and the percentage of job seekers relocating for a new position was 41.8 percent in 1986, but just 10.1 percent in 2018. Certainly, there are multiple causes for the decline in geographic mobility, from state-specific occupational licensing requirements to a decline in job switching, but the towering “cost-of-living” barrier is certainly a piece of the puzzle.

Geographic mobility is a crucial part of the economic dynamism that enables the American Dream. There is a very real shortage of affordable housing across America’s most dynamic areas, but rent control is an ineffective solution to this problem. Instead, policymakers should address the root of this problem, the lack of housing supply, by reforming zoning rules, eliminating onerous mandates on new construction, and allowing housing supply to meet demand. Rent control is a band-aid style solution imposed from the top down, it will not address the housing affordability crisis and is almost certain to make housing even less affordable for Americans seeking opportunity.

SOURCE

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Walmart Reforms Healthcare

Most of the current debate over healthcare focuses on which third party will pay for healthcare, instead of focusing on increasing access, improving quality, or decreasing costs for patients. Surprisingly, Walmart has stepped up to help change the conversation by opening a new type of health clinic in one of their stores.

The delivery of high-quality care requires the combination of several components, among them, access to healthcare providers. For those living in impoverished urban or rural areas, access to healthcare providers can be limited. With the closure of 64 rural hospitals between 2013 and 2017, only 82 percent of Americans now live within 10 miles of the nearest hospital.

On the other hand, over 90 percent of Americans live within 10 miles of a Walmart. Walmart has begun the process of rolling out healthcare clinics in stores that would offer patients low cost medical, dental, vision, and mental healthcare.

Walmart’s innovation is to clearly list and compete on prices, something currently missing from the healthcare industry in America. This transparency helps uninsured and low-income patients that are concerned about out of pocket healthcare costs. They currently have prices listed on their website offering $20 flu tests, $30 annual adult checkups, and $45 vision exams. They will be staffed by licensed medical professionals trained to handle a wide array of treatments.

It can feel weird to treat healthcare like just another transaction. For many in the healthcare industry, treating diseases is a form of service for others. Many professionals treat it as a calling rather than just another job—and with people’s health and lives in their hands, that perception is tough to argue. However, consumers shopping around for which services best meets their needs, with both a price and quality comparison, is healthy for competition. Competitive pressure helps incentivize firms to reduce costs, employ new technologies or management techniques, and pass those lower prices on to consumers even as quality improves. This graph from the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) demonstrates how in industries that face stronger competitive pressure, products like automobiles, clothing, TVs, and toys have fallen in price compared to wages, unlike hospital services and medical care which face little price competition.

As the costs of healthcare continue to rise, this transparent pricing will help put downward pressure on prices, now that patients can see them before scheduling an appointment. By removing individuals from the decision-making process through opaque pricing, third-party payers face no pressure to reduce prices for consumers. The bureaucracy of third-party payers adds more people to the payment process, which naturally increases costs as more people are involved in handling the money. While insurance is important for unexpected and expensive procedures, for predicable, routine procedures it simply adds costs. Walmart’s transparent pricing can help fix this.

In healthcare, innovation can take many forms and even new practices that seem impractical to us before implementation can be a valuable test of new management techniques and industrial organization. Countless inventors or business leaders were told their ideas were crazy before they revolutionized their field. Ford laughed at Lee Iacocca’s Minivan idea, and James Dyson was told his idea for a new type of vacuum was ludicrous, but both became incredibly successful.

This experiment by Walmart is a new way to focus on convenient healthcare delivery in a cost-conscious way. Obviously, experimentation in healthcare treatments themselves pose risks for the patient. But rather than experimenting on people, this innovation is an attempt to develop a better method of delivering care. This type of low risk innovation should be encouraged as a means to develop more efficient methods of delivering healthcare.

In addition to helping lower prices, offering healthcare services in a Walmart location could help improve healthcare utilization. How many times have you or your friend gone into a Walmart or Target “just to get one thing” and ended up spending an hour buying things you didn’t come in for? Offering healthcare services in this location could help encourage people who feel a little sick, but wouldn’t make the trip just to the doctor’s office, to stop in for a quick appointment.

Another way that Walmart could encourage healthcare utilization is if their clinics reduced wait times. Long wait times deter patients from scheduling a visit until their symptoms worsen, which can result in serious complications. The expansion of telehealth services provides a poignant example of how more convenient care helps encourage patients to use healthcare services. For instance, when veterans were offered telepsychiatry as an option to treat PTSD, their usage of the services were much greater than when they were forced to schedule a face to face appointment with a psychiatrist during the day.

Walmart’s innovation is not the first of its kind; outside of the U.S., the Narayana hospital system has experienced success with a similar model. Narayana has succeeded by employing different management techniques than those used in the U.S. healthcare system, which has helped them reduce the cost of healthcare services significantly. For instance, a heart bypass surgery that costs $100,000 in the U.S. costs between $1,000-2,000 for Narayana. Like Walmart, they also view medicine as a business, making the prices clear for patients and focusing on reducing costs so that more patients are able to receive medical care.

The thought of low-cost or budget healthcare carries a stigma of low quality to match the reduced price tag. However, when gains in productivity due to innovation are passed on to consumers, lower costs do not translate to lower quality.

By focusing on low, transparent prices, Walmart’s new health clinics have the potential to help slow runaway healthcare costs, which continue to increase. Providing a convenient, low-cost alternative can only help patients. Patients have varying needs, budgets, and locations, and healthcare should reflect that. Walmart’s innovation is a potential welcome disruption that could help bring competition to healthcare, and increase access to the care patients need.

SOURCE

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IN BRIEF

TAX-RETURN FISHING EXPEDITION: "President Donald Trump lost his bid Monday to shield his tax returns from the Manhattan District Attorney's office, which subpoenaed them as part of an investigation into 'hush payments' to Stormy Daniels and Karen McDougal." (ABC News)

SCOTUS RECONVENES: "The justices are returning to the Supreme Court bench for the start of an election year term that includes high-profile cases about abortions, protections for young immigrants and LGBT rights," the Associated Press reports. Be sure to check out The Heritage Foundation's comprehensive overview.

NEW WHISTLEBLOWER: The Associated Press reports, "A second whistleblower has come forward with information about President Donald Trump's dealings with Ukraine." The report further reveals, "Crucially, the new whistleblower works in the intelligence field and has 'firsthand knowledge' of key events." According to Sen. Lindsey Graham, "This is Kavanaugh all over again."

IMMIGRATION PROCLAMATION: Trump signs order to prevent taxpayers from subsidizing healthcare for legal immigrants (The Daily Wire)

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For more blog postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated), A Coral reef compendium and an IQ compendium. (Both updated as news items come in). GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten. I also put up occasional updates on my Personal blog and each day I gather together my most substantial current writings on THE PSYCHOLOGIST.

Email me here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or here (Personal). My annual picture page is here

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9 October, 2019

Donald Trump threatens to 'obliterate' Turkish economy if it goes too far with Syria invasion

Turks are attacking the heroic Kurds. Trump thought he had a deal with Turkey to protect the Kurds which would allow US troops to withdraw safely

US President Donald Trump warned Turkey against going too far in Syria, after giving Ankara a green light to invade its southern neighbour.

Mr Trump said on Monday he was done with "ridiculous endless war" as he stood aside to allow a long-threatened Turkish assault on Kurdish-held Syria, effectively abandoning its allies who fought Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (Isil).

The US had for months been working with Turkey to try to create a buffer zone along its border with northern Syria between the Turkish military and Kurdish forces which Ankara sees as terrorists.

But amid an outcry from the region and strong opposition at home from both Democratic and Republican lawmakers, the US leader appeared to reverse himself, though without drawing any specific red lines that might protect Kurdish allies.

"If Turkey does anything that I, in my great and unmatched wisdom, consider to be off limits, I will totally destroy and obliterate the Economy of Turkey (I've done before!)," Mr Trump tweeted.

Other US officials, apparently surprised by Trump's Sunday announcement, stressed that Washington will not actively support the long-threated Turkish action, warning of destabilizing blowback to the region.

"The Department of Defense made clear to Turkey - as did the president - that we do not endorse a Turkish operation in Northern Syria," said Pentagon spokesperson Jonathan Hoffman.

Turkey has repeatedly criticised the slow implementation of the buffer zone and threatened a unilateral assault, but until Monday the US had refused to stand aside.

"The Kurds fought with us, but were paid massive amounts of money and equipment to do so. They have been fighting Turkey for decades," Mr Trump said in an earlier series of tweets.

"Turkey, Europe, Syria, Iran, Iraq, Russia and the Kurds will now have to figure the situation out."

US Republican and Democrats had warned such an offensive on the Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG), which lost 11,000 troops in the battle against Isil, could lead to a massacre of Kurds and send a worrying message to American allies across the world.

The US began pulling back some of its 1,000 troops from border towns Tel Abyad and Ras al-Ayn on Monday, and has said it will potentially depart the country should widespread fighting break out.

The announcement, first made by the White House overnight on Sunday, appeared to take both the Kurds and US coalition forces, which had been carrying out joint patrols with Turkey on the ground, completely by surprise.

Kurdish sources say they were acting in good faith trying to establish a security mechanism with the US to placate Turkey, but now felt that Ankara had been using it as a cover for reconnaisance.

Mustafa Bali, spokesman for the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), tweeted: "We are not expecting the US to protect NE #Syria. But people here are owed an explanation regarding security mechanism deal, destruction of fortifications and failure of US to fulfill their commitments."

The White House statement was released after a phonecall between US President Donald Trump and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Sunday night.

Mr Erdogan had reportedly assured the US president that Ankara would take over the detention of Isil militants captured by the SDF, on the battlefield.

The Kurds have been holding thousands of Syrian and thousands more foreign Isil suspects in prisons and camps across the north of the country.

Mr Trump has repeatedly asked countries under the US-led coalition against Isil to repatriate their citizens. However, the UK, France, Germany, and other allies have so far refused.

“The United States will not hold them for what could be many years and great cost to the United States taxpayer,” the White House statement said. “Turkey will now be responsible for all ISIS fighters in the area captured over the past two years in the wake of the defeat of the territorial “Caliphate” by the United States.”

The decision is a massive blow to the Kurds, who not only helped hold back Isil but have for years been building an autonomous statelet in the northeast of Syria.

Turkey claims its planned “safe zone” is to purge the border of YPG forces, which it sees as a terrorist offshoot of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), which has fought an insurgency inside its territory for the past 35 years.

The proposed corridor would have an initial depth of 18 miles and a length of 300 miles and includes the Kurds’ biggest urban centres, including the city of Qamishli which has an estimated 250,000 population.

Turkey on Monday night carried out air strikes on the Iraqi side of the Iraq-Syria border crossing, in what was thought to be an attack on the YPG's supply line.

Western diplomats told the Telegraph they are working on the theory that Mr Erdogan will begin by attempting to take a smaller sliver between the towns of Tel Abyad and Ras al-Ain on the border, but the Turkish president himself has previously hinted at much wider ambitions.

Mr Erdogan has said he wants to return two million of the mostly Sunni Arab Syrian refugees Turkey is hosting to the buffer zone, which some have said would amount to an ethnic repopulation.

The Kurds fear many of the Syrians that might be placed in the zone are not native to north-east Syria, and might displace the Kurdish culture and rights.

The UN said that it was "preparing for the worst", fearing an assault would send large numbers of civilians fleeing.

“This Turkish military operation in northern and eastern Syria will have a significant negative impact on our war on ISIS and will destroy everything that has been achieved from the state of stability over the past years,” the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces said in a statement.

They said they would defend themselves against “Turkish aggression” and called on all sects, including Kurds, Arabs, Syriacs and Assyrians to join them.

Defending its Kurdish allies would have seen the US come against its Nato partner Turkey, which Washington was keen to avoid.

President Donald Trump has since taking office attempted to disentangle the US from drawn-out wars in the Middle East.

His goal of swift withdrawals in Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan have been stymied by concerns from US officials and American allies about the dangerous voids that would remain.

SOURCE

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America’s top CEOs say they are no longer putting shareholders before everyone else

This a joke. CEOs have NEVER put shareholders first. Their own prestige, power and income have always been their first priority and that will not change. Shareholders just get the scraps

For the past two decades, the official stance of America’s top corporate executives has been that the interests of shareholders came before the interests of all others—workers, consumers, the cities and towns in which their companies operated, and society as a whole.

Today, that changes.

The Business Roundtable, a lobbying group composed of the nation’s leading CEOs, just announced that its members “share a fundamental commitment to all of our stakeholders”—each of whom “is essential”—while pledging “to deliver value to all of them, for the future success of our companies, our communities, and our country.”

With its “Statement on the Purpose of a Corporation,” the Roundtable has affirmed the need for “meeting or exceeding customer expectations”; “investing in our employees,” including by “compensating them fairly and providing important benefits,” as well as offering training and education so that they can “develop new skills for a rapidly changing world”; “dealing fairly and ethically with our suppliers”; “supporting the communities in which we work”; and “generating long-term value for shareholders.”

Jamie Dimon, the CEO of JPMorgan Chase and the Roundtable’s chairman, says he hopes that this declaration “will help to set a new standard for corporate leadership.”

It is, without question, a huge deal.

As I’ve detailed before, through the 1980s and most of the ’90s, the Roundtable held that companies had a responsibility to “carefully weigh the interests of all stakeholders,” as the organization described it, and that “the thrust of history and law” buttressed this kind of broad assessment.

In 1997, the Roundtable switched course. Suddenly, it proclaimed that “the paramount duty of management and of boards of directors is to the corporation’s stockholders” and that “the interests of other stakeholders are relevant as a derivative of the duty to stockholders.” (The Roundtable echoed that message in 2016.)

The Roundtable’s shift to a shareholder-first posture has been widely cited as a significant marker in the evolution of corporate America—both a reflection and reinforcement of an ideology that has thrilled investors, gripped executives, and knocked out a more enlightened form of capitalism that had emerged in the era after World War II.

Yet since then—and especially over the past 5 to 10 years—serving shareholders first and foremost has come under increasing attack. An expanding chorus of critics has made the case that this predilection has contributed to a short-term mindset among far too many executives, fostering a culture of indiscriminate cost-cutting and financial engineering, and has been a central reason for the explosion in income inequality.

“I read the Roundtable’s statement as a return to common-sense principles of management and the recognition that employees need a bigger share of the pie to assure a healthy economy,” says Judy Samuelson, executive director of the Aspen Institute’s Business and Society Program.

The pressure for business to put an end to shareholder primacy has been building from a variety of quarters. Younger workers, in particular, are looking for employers that have a loftier purpose than merely maximizing their profits. More and more, customers are paying attention to which companies seem to be doing right by their people and the environment—and punishing brands that fall short. Socially conscious investors have started putting vast sums of money into financial products that use a “sustainable, responsible, and impact” lens.

Politicians have also taken up the cause. The Accountable Capitalism Act, proposed by Elizabeth Warren, the Massachusetts senator and Democratic presidential candidate, would require very large companies to obtain a new federal charter under which directors would have to “consider the interests of all corporate stakeholders.”

Meanwhile, the basic tenets of shareholder capitalism have been questioned by scholars such as the late Lynn Stout, a Cornell law professor and author of The Shareholder Value Myth, who cogently argued that executives and directors have wide latitude in deciding what is best for a company and don’t have any obligation—legal or otherwise—to elevate shareholders above everyone else. Journalists and think-tank types have weighed in along these lines, too.

MY DINNER WITH DIMON

Among them has been me. As Fortune’s Alan Murray recounts, the Roundtable began to reevaluate its views on the relationship between shareholders and other stakeholders after a “testy, off-the-record dinner” last fall that I participated in. Dimon had invited four of us—including the Washington Post‘s Steve Pearlstein, Bloomberg’s Joe Nocera, and Samuelson of the Aspen Institute—to JPMorgan headquarters to better understand why we kept insisting that corporate America had become overly obsessed with shareholder value and, as a result, was damaging society.

Dimon’s perspective—then and now—is that most big companies already take good care of their various stakeholders. “We relentlessly invest in employees, communities, and innovation,” he told me.

If that were true, of course, the new Roundtable statement would simply be codifying the current state of affairs. But with all due respect to Dimon, who deserves great credit for engaging with us and then guiding the Roundtable to recast its position, the numbers don’t back him up.

Sure, no company completely ignores all of its constituents save for its shareholders. If it did, it would soon be out of business. But as a study published last week by the Center for American Progress makes clear, things are terribly out of balance.

Wages for the majority of the American workforce have been stagnant for 40 years, while their health coverage and retirement security have eroded. At the same time, corporate profits—high by historical standards—are mainly being used to reward shareholders, including CEOs themselves. Their compensation has gone up 940% since 1978; typical worker compensation has risen 12% during that time, according to the Economic Policy Institute.

For the Roundtable’s statement to mean something—and not stand as empty rhetoric—this picture can’t be allowed to continue.

With that in mind, I asked a half-dozen colleagues who’ve been at the fore of fighting shareholder primacy what would it take for them to be convinced that CEOs across the business landscape had genuinely embraced stakeholder capitalism.

For starters, several say, companies must curtail stock buybacks, if not stop them altogether. These repurchases have become a financial narcotic, with a record volume of shares being snapped up, largely in an attempt to pump up their price.

Some, including Roundtable President Joshua Bolten, defend the practice as an efficient way to deploy capital and help the economy grow. But buybacks plainly favor shareholders (including, again, CEOs), and every dollar of profit spent on them means one less dollar that can go directly to bolster worker pay, training, R&D, and other areas.

“I would make it the primary obligation of all business corporations to ‘retain-and-reinvest’: retain profits and reinvest in the productive capabilities of employees,” says economist Bill Lazonick, who is perhaps the country’s most outspoken detractor of buybacks. “I would place constraints on ‘downsize-and-distribute’: downsizing the company’s labor force and distributing corporate cash to shareholders.”

Environmental stewardship is another proving ground. Some big companies score high marks in this arena right now. But with climate change posing an existential crisis, it’s crucial that corporations do far more.

“Why I’m passionate about ending shareholder primacy is that I truly think the future of the entire human race depends on it, and I’m not trying to exaggerate,” says Lenore Palladino, an economist at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. “For corporate leaders to show they are committed to stakeholder capitalism, we need to see a commitment to the health of the environment as a business priority . . . a dramatic strategic reorientation towards reversing the current damage and reengineering businesses to be productive for the long term.”

For sustainability pioneer John Elkington, another sign that a stakeholder model hadreally taken root would be for companies to no longer speak with two voices: one from the C-suite and another via the Washington influencers representing them.

“They would resign from all trade and industry groups which lobby to slow or stall necessary systemic changes” that would enhance the simultaneous creation of economic, social, and environmental value, says Elkington, who coined the term “triple bottom line.” Then they would turn around, he adds, and “forcefully and publicly lobby for a meaningful price on carbon and for the breakup of monopolies and oligopolies.”

To give the Roundtable statement some teeth, they’d also take a fresh approach to organized labor. “Welcoming, rather than fighting, a union would be a big one,” says Andy Green, managing director of economic policy at the Center for American Progress. Research shows that nearly half of all workers not in a union want to join one. Yet many companies do all they can to keep this from happening.

Samuelson, for her part, would be impressed by companies “dampening down the intense focus on stock price in CEO pay.” More than half of CEO compensation is share-based these days, much of it tied to short-term financial measures. Instead, executives should be paid—and to a meaningful degree—on a mix of environmental, social, and governance metrics.

The University of Toronto’s Roger Martin, who has been recognized as the world’s number-one management thinker, wants to see a reversal of something that, for many of the most senior executives, is even more deep-seated.

Rather than concentrate on stock price, he says, they should expressly concentrate on serving customers or developing employees or tackling some social need through innovation. Ultimately, Martin has maintained, that’s the best means of taking care of shareholders anyway.

“For me, the key would be to view shareholder value creation as the logical consequence of other things, not something that you can directly pursue,” he says. “It is like Aristotle who pointed out that if a person sets out to be happy, the person is unlikely to end up happy. However, if the person sets out to lead a virtuous life, the person will probably end up happy. If I could only have one thing, it would be that.”

Others made additional suggestions: Companies should guarantee a living wage for all workers, including contractors. Stakeholders of different stripes (employees, sustainability experts, even everyday taxpayers) should be given seats on corporate boards. Executives should lean on business schools to stop teaching that shareholder value is the be-all and end-all of capitalism.

Much of this agenda may be dismissed as unrealistic. Certainly, none of it will be easy to achieve. And none of it is meant to imply that the Roundtable’s statement isn’t, in and of itself, a monumental step.

Words matter. The words of the Roundtable—a Who’s Who of those at the helm of the largest U.S. corporations, from Abbott to Zebra Technologies—matter a lot. In the end, though, it is the actions of Roundtable members that will matter the most.

SOURCE

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For more blog postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated), A Coral reef compendium and an IQ compendium. (Both updated as news items come in). GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten. I also put up occasional updates on my Personal blog and each day I gather together my most substantial current writings on THE PSYCHOLOGIST.

Email me here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or here (Personal). My annual picture page is here

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8 October, 2019

Do medical X-rays give you cancer?

It would be very surprising if they did. They have been in use for about a century so one would think that any adverse effects would have been noticed long ago. Yet the article below says they do cause cancer -- in South Korea.

But the article is inconclusive. WHO were the people who had many X-rays? Probably the poor as the poor are always shown to have worse health. So the greater incidence of cancer among X-ray recipients was entirely as expected -- as a normal correlate of poverty.

There is so much crap in epidemiological research. Inconclusive articles like this are a big pain to me as I repeatedly feel obliged to point out the obvious flaws in them

Association of Exposure to Diagnostic Low-Dose Ionizing Radiation With Risk of Cancer Among Youths in South Korea

Jae-Young Hong et al.

Abstract

Importance: Diagnostic low-dose ionizing radiation has great medical benefits; however, its increasing use has raised concerns about possible cancer risks.

Objective: To examine the risk of cancer after diagnostic low-dose radiation exposure.

Design, Setting, and Participants This population-based cohort study included youths aged 0 to 19 years at baseline from South Korean National Health Insurance System claim records from January 1, 2006, to December 31, 2015. Exposure to diagnostic low-dose ionizing radiation was classified as any that occurred on or after the entry date, when the participant was aged 0 to 19 years, on or before the exit date, and at least 2 years before any cancer diagnosis. Cancer diagnoses were based on International Statistical Classification of Diseases and Related Health Problems, Tenth Revision codes. Data were analyzed from March 2018 to September 2018.

Main Outcomes and Measures: The primary analysis assessed the incidence rate ratios (IRRs) for exposed vs nonexposed individuals using the number of person-years as an offset.

Results: The cohort included a total of 12?068?821 individuals (6?339?782 [52.5%] boys). There were 2?309?841 individuals (19.1%) aged 0 to 4 years, 2?951?679 individuals (24.5%) aged 5 to 9 years, 3?489?709 individuals (28.9%) aged 10 to 14 years, and 3?317?593 individuals (27.5%) aged 15 to 19 years. Of these, 1?275?829 individuals (10.6%) were exposed to diagnostic low-dose ionizing radiation between 2006 and 2015, and 10?792?992 individuals (89.4%) were not exposed. By December 31, 2015, 21?912 cancers were recorded. Among individuals who had been exposed, 1444 individuals (0.1%) received a cancer diagnosis. The overall cancer incidence was greater among exposed individuals than among nonexposed individuals after adjusting for age and sex (IRR, 1.64 [95% CI, 1.56-1.73]; P?<?.001). Among individuals who had undergone computed tomography scans in particular, the overall cancer incidence was greater among exposed individuals than among nonexposed individuals after adjusting for age and sex (IRR, 1.54 [95% CI, 1.45-1.63]; P?<?.001). The incidence of cancer increased significantly for many types of lymphoid, hematopoietic, and solid cancers after exposure to diagnostic low-dose ionizing radiation. Among lymphoid and hematopoietic cancers, incidence of cancer increased the most for other myeloid leukemias (IRR, 2.14 [95% CI, 1.86-2.46]) and myelodysplasia (IRR, 2.48 [95% CI, 1.77-3.47]). Among solid cancers, incidence of cancer increased the most for breast (IRR, 2.32 [95% CI, 1.35-3.99]) and thyroid (IRR, 2.19 [95% CI, 1.97-2.20]) cancers.

Conclusions and Relevance: This study found an association of increased incidence of cancer with exposure to diagnostic low-dose ionizing radiation in a large cohort. Given this risk, diagnostic low-dose ionizing radiation should be limited to situations in which there is a definite clinical indication.

JAMA Netw Open. 2019;2(9):e1910584. doi:10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2019.10584

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A new map by a Houston-based nonprofit shows clear disparities in life expectancy on either side of a line along Interstate 35 in Travis County, with those in the west living often more than a decade longer than in areas in the east.

In case anybody accuses me of unsubstantiated generalizations, I am reproducing here one of the thousands of articles that show the poor to have worse health. The discussion below is about Austin, Texas and some of the disparities reported are extreme

The map, released Monday by the Episcopal Health Foundation, relied on six years of mortality data from the National Center for Health Statistics and drills down to the neighborhood-level by looking at census tracts. It found huge differences in life expectancy in neighborhoods sometimes only a few miles apart.

In the Rosewood area in East Austin, near East 12th Street and Pleasant Valley Road, for example, a person can expect to live to about 72, the map shows. About 5 miles away near Enfield Road in West Austin — on the other side of I-35 — life expectancy is 83, or 11 years longer.

Poverty levels and demographics also vary widely in the two areas.

Rosewood is largely black and Hispanic, with nearly 50% of residents living below the federal poverty line. The West Austin neighborhood is 88% white, with only 10% considered in poverty.

The area with the shortest life expectancy in Travis County is in Oak Hill near Sunset Valley, where people can expect to live to age 68. Just about a mile to the west is the area with the longest life expectancy, near Barton Creek Boulevard and Southwest Parkway, where a person can expect to live to age 88, or 20 years longer.

The median life expectancy in Texas is 77.8 years.

Austin Public Health has found similar disparities in health outcomes between eastern and western Travis County. The department said it regularly uses its own data to decide where to target its efforts, often on the east side. Cassandra DeLeon, assistant director for disease prevention, said this includes providing job training, education campaigns and access to healthy food.

SOURCE

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Another lie from Pocohontas

This is typical psychopathic behavior. She tells lies to suit the moment with no thought of it coming back to bite her later on

U.S. presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren is coming under scrutiny after resurfaced video from 2008 appears to contradict a claim she is now making on her campaign trail.

The Democratic hopeful, 70, told a town hall audience in Nevada on Wednesday that she lost her job teaching special needs students in the early 1970s because she was 'visibly pregnant'.

'By the end of the first year, I was visibly pregnant, and the principal did what principals did in those days - wish me luck and hire someone else for the job,' she told the crowd in Carson City.

However, a YouTube clip posted in January 2008 shows Warren giving a different explanation as to why she left that school.

In the video, she tells interviewer Harry Kreisler that her undergraduate degree was in speech pathology and audiology, and, as such, she didn't have the necessary educational requirements to continue on at the school.

According to her Wikipedia page, Warren was teaching at the school on an 'emergency certificate' and was required to return to graduate school to take extra courses in education.

Several viewers of the 2008 clip have left comments beneath the video wondering why there are now apparent discrepancies between her two stories.

'She needs to explain why she is now saying "principal did what principals do" and they fired her. Beyond her other fabrications, is this really someone we want for president?' one asked.

SOURCE

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Trump shows what government is

Since the Democratic Party leadership and the mainstream mass media went into apoplectic disbelief that Trump won the presidential election in November 2016, they have been in a deep state of denial and determination.

Their denial is because they still cannot believe that someone like Trump could have been elected president of the United States. And they have been determined to reverse the outcome of the election, since “really” he was not the winner; after all, Hillary Clinton had more of the popular vote, while Trump “only” had won the electoral college majority. Besides, if not for those hacking Russian meddlers, the minds of American voters would not have been twisted in the wrong direction. History has to be undone in the name of “social justice” and democracy.

Mueller’s Failure Overcome by a Whistleblower’s Claim
The Mueller Report failed to provide the legal leverage to move forward with impeachment. There had not been demonstrable collusion between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin’s government to influence the 2016 presidential election; and the Russian hacking and attempted social media manipulation could not be shown to have affected the outcome of the election. The Democrats had pinned so much hope on Robert Mueller, and, damn it, he let them down.

But, now, a whistleblower’s accusations seemed to give them the smoking gun the Democrats had been hoping for in their political dreams. Oh no! An American president attempted to influence a foreign government to investigate possible political corruption connecting the son of Trump’s leading potential Democratic Party rival for the presidency in the 2020 election. Hunter Biden may have been earning $50,000 a month as a board member of a Ukrainian energy company due to the influence of his father, Joe, while his father was vice president of the United States.

Plus, Trump seemed to use congressionally funded military aid to Ukraine as a “carrot” to get the Ukrainian government to dig up and provide the dirt to bolster “The Donald’s” chances for re-election in November 2020. Oh, the horror! Donald Trump may have used the office of the presidency to influence a foreign government with taxpayers’ money to gain a political advantage for himself.

The Nature of Politics: Power, Plunder, and Privilege for Some
Let us remember the nature of politics: it is the use of government power for plunder and privilege so some may gain at the expense of others in society through regulation or redistribution. It does not matter whether an absolute monarch, a totalitarian state, or a functioning democracy does this. It is the reason why those who are concerned with liberty and prosperity have insisted that governments always must be restrained and restricted to a limited and narrow set of functions and responsibilities for the protection of individual freedom, without becoming its destroyer.

If Donald Trump has one redeeming quality, it is his refreshing honesty. He rarely hides behind the rarified rhetoric of altruist promise-making typically heard in political discourse. He tells you who he is and what he wants. He knows where American businesses should invest to make what he considers “America great again,” and they better or there will be consequences. He knows which are the “bad” nations and trading partners, and he is going to teach them a lesson through either trade sanctions or import tariffs to get them to give Trump what he wants. And he will punish other countries that don’t go along with his executive ordering dictates and demands, because America comes first and he knows what America both needs and wants.

Like many other successful demagogues of the past, Donald Trump knows how to play to an audience. The words, the phrases, the short and repeated slogans and name callings that stick in the minds of those enticed by his assurances that all their problems will go away, if only he is in charge to set it all right. Anyone who does not agree with and fawn over his every word and deed is an enemy — an enemy of him and therefore to America. (See my article “The U.S. Revives the Personal State.”)

Modern Democratic Politics Is Trading Votes for Favors
But what has Donald Trump done — even if it is found to be technically against the law — that has not been done by politicians of both major political parties over the decades in both domestic policy and foreign affairs? Which politician does not offer a quid pro quo to voters that if they will only cast their ballot for him come Election Day, he will use taxpayers’ money to give them an unending stream of government-funded programs, subsidies, protections, and privileges?

That is the nature of the political arena of exchange in modern democratic society. Government is not primarily a protector of people’s individual rights; it is a huge and intricate tax-funded pumping machine that transfers wealth and income from certain groups and sectors of the society to others through a complex and interconnected network of federal, state, and municipal bureaucracies. Any freedoms preserved or any freedoms extended are the secondary effects of a political system operating with purposes in mind having little or nothing to do, per se, with human liberty anymore.

In foreign affairs, every U.S. administration in modern times, from Franklin Roosevelt’s to Donald Trump’s, has used political, military, and financial promises and pressures to get foreign governments to do what the president of that time wanted and considered “good for America” and the world. Whether or not some previous occupant of the Oval Office was as transparent as President Trump in making plain how self-serving it is, it was always considered good for the political future of that earlier chief executive, either for winning reelection into the Oval Office or influencing what would be his hoped-for legacy and “place in history.” (See my article “A Call for ‘Do-Nothing’ Presidents Without Legacies.”)

U.S. tax dollars have been used to support or overthrow foreign governments; tax-funded dollars have been used to arm dictators considered “friendly” to America, who often used that military aid to brutalize their own people; those tax dollars have been applied to influence elections and public opinion in other lands considered to be part of America’s “national interest.”

Mafia Bosses and Politicians Both Try to Eliminate Opposition
It often seems as if politicians think and act like a mafia boss. The godfather rarely says directly, “Get rid of ‘Vito the Knife’ tonight.” He says things more indirectly, like, “You know, life would be so much easier if only Vito stopped bothering me.” And his mafia lieutenants know exactly what he wants, just in case the FBI is bugging his office. Trump basically just says to the Ukrainian president, “Joe Biden and his son, Hunter, seem to have been part of Ukraine’s corruption problems. Why don’t you look into it and share any information you get with some representatives of mine? By the way, the U.S. has been a really good diplomatic and financial friend of the Ukraine compared to those misguided and financially stingy Europeans.”

Trump has simply personalized it more than most other former presidents before him, who tended to couch it in the rhetoric of the “common good,” the “general welfare,” and the “safety of the free world.” It is an inevitable part of any American foreign interventionist policy, just as its counterpart in domestic interventionist policies. Interventionism is the politics of regulation and redistribution. Virtually nothing that government touches in a world of interventionism fails to benefit some at others’ expense, given that all interventions inescapably divert the course of social and economic events from the patterns they would have followed if left free from government interference.

You want to eliminate Trump-like actions and policies? There is, ultimately, only one means and method to do so: End the interventionist-welfare state. Restore and relegate government to the limited and narrow protection of each individual’s right to his life, liberty, and honestly acquired property. Then there is nothing for government to sell and supply to Peter at Paul’s expense. But that is not the politics that either Democrats or Republicans want, as reflected in their campaign promises and policy deeds. Thus, the political circus will continue, regardless of who wins the White House or the congressional elections in 2020.

SOURCE

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For more blog postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated), A Coral reef compendium and an IQ compendium. (Both updated as news items come in). GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten. I also put up occasional updates on my Personal blog and each day I gather together my most substantial current writings on THE PSYCHOLOGIST.

Email me here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or here (Personal). My annual picture page is here

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7 October, 2019

Democrats’ Health Care Plan Would ‘Totally Obliterate Medicare,’ Trump Says

Charles McLaughlin, a 71-year-old Marine veteran of the Vietnam War, recalls how useful Medicare and Medicare Advantage were when he was fighting another battle, this one with cancer.

“I know a lot about Medicare and the supplement. I used it for breathing tubes, feeding tubes, stitches, staples, MRIs, CAT scans, blood tests, hydration shots, chemo treatments, radiation treatments,” the Lighthouse Point, Florida, resident said during a rally with President Donald Trump on Thursday in The Villages, Florida, a retirement community near Orlando.

Trump invited him to the stage to speak at an event that culminated in the president signing an executive order to strengthen Medicare and Medicare Advantage, the health care program for people 65 and older, at a time when many Democrats support a “Medicare for All” plan to expand the program to everyone.

“I also want to say: My family, financially, would have been destroyed without Medicare,” the retired Marine said, adding:

The politicians on the left are pushing Medicare for All. I say, the result would be no Medicare at all. It will collapse under the load of the system. It will overload it. The lines would be incredible.

Who knows, I probably wouldn’t be here. There’s no such thing as “free,” period.

Trump said, “They like you.” McLaughlin answered, “What’s not to like?”

Declaring Medicare “under siege,” Trump signed an executive order after an hourlong speech.

“We are making your Medicare even better, and we are not letting anyone take it away from you,” Trump said. “These people on the other side are totally crazy. They want to take it away and give you lousy health care.”

He added: “Medicare is under threat like never before.” “Almost every major Democrat in Washington has backed a massive government health care takeover that would totally obliterate Medicare,” the president said.

The executive order aims to model traditional Medicare’s fee-for-service program in line with the payments for Medicare Advantage. Under traditional Medicare, the government pays for medical care. Private companies offer Medicare Advantage plans, which the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services approves. About 24 million people, or more than one-third of Medicare recipients, have Medicare Advantage plans.

The Medicare for All proposal would do away with Medicare Advantage plans by eliminating private health care plans.

Trump also invited Socorra “Corey” Spangler, of Summerfield, Florida, to speak. She noted her family came from Mexico to the United States legally when she was 5-years-old. At age 65, she began having heart problems.

“I went to the doctor. They scheduled me with a cardiologist. He scheduled me for a stress test. I failed that test. So, he scheduled me for a heart test the next day. I failed that,” Spangler recalled, adding:

The following Monday, I was in surgery with my five bypasses, and I went home the following Friday. This would never happen with Medicare for All.

I love my Medicare Advantage plan because I can choose the doctor when I need it and get the care I need in a [quick] manner. It wouldn’t happen with Medicare for All.

Thank you, Mr. President, for saving my health care.

Over the past two years of his presidency, Trump said, 1,200 more Medicare Advantage plans have been created. He added that premiums have plummeted by 28% and are at their lowest level in more than a decade.

That’s in sharp contrast to the average of 54% rise in premiums for Obamacare plans since 2014, said Robert Moffit, a senior fellow at The Heritage Foundation.

“The president wants to build on the success they have had managing Medicare Advantage,” Moffit told The Daily Signal. “They have used the administrative authority to increase the plans for chronically ill people, such as people with congestive heart failure or diabetes.”

The executive order also further promotes using medical telehealth services to be delivered by telephone or online. That would, in theory, reduce expensive emergency room visits for minor or easily treatable ailments.

SOURCE

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Rashida Tlaib Comes Out for Jim Crow-Style Laws, Arrests of Her Political Foes

Typical Muslim authoritarianism

Wait long enough, and everything comes around again. Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.), one of the wokest womyn in the world, has this week blazed bold new trails by calling for the revival of not one, but two tried-and-true practices that have inexplicably fallen into neglect in American politics: Jim Crow segregation laws and the arrest of one’s political opponents.

This brave leader said in a Detroit speech that if Trump Cabinet members failed to comply with congressional subpoenas, “they’re trying to figure out, no joke, is it the D.C. police that goes and gets them? We don’t know. Where do we hold them?” Tlaib added: “This is the first time we've ever had a situation like this,” and that consequently, she and other Democrat leaders were “trying to tread carefully” into this “uncharted territory.” She volunteered her own district for this noble undertaking: “I will tell them they can hold all those people right here in Detroit.”

Oh, but this territory is amply charted. Tlaib’s vision for America’s future apparently looks a great deal like the past – and present – of authoritarian regimes the world over. The new diverse, inclusive America of Tlaib and her colleagues apparently includes the 2 a.m. pounding on the door and the hustling of a bewildered, pajama-clad conservative by jackbooted stormtroopers into a waiting police van. Then they get hustled off to Detroit, the name of which will take on an air of menace and foreboding, like “Treblinka” and “Kolyma.” And why not? We already have telescreens all over airports and other public spaces pumping CNN propaganda into an unwitting populace 24/7 now; arrests and, presumably, camps for dissenters is the logical next step. After all, that’s what happened in Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, and still happens in North Korea and Communist China. The wise Tlaib knows that our future is their past.

Nor is that all. Tlaib Tuesday toured Detroit’s Public Safety Headquarters and told Detroit police Chief James Craig that facial recognition analysts “need to be African Americans, not people that are not. I think non-African Americans think African Americans all look the same.”

That meant, of course, that Tlaib herself, since she is not African American, thinks all African Americans look the same, but she can be forgiven for being so overwhelmed by her passion for justice that she got a bit confused. Here again, the visionary Tlaib knows that William Faulkner, despite being a white male Southerner and hence obviously racist and manifestly evil, was actually right when he said, “The past isn’t dead. It is not even past.” The old Jim Crow laws of the South in Faulkner’s time are Tlaib’s new vision for America: if she gets her way, you won’t be judged by the content of your character, but by the color of your skin.

This is already happening, of course. Back in the old South, some light-skinned blacks tried to pass for white in an attempt to avoid the discrimination, harassment, and ostracism that came to blacks all too often in those days. Nowadays, our society is so post-racial that it’s racial again: Elizabeth Warren, as white a white person as you’ll ever find, for years passed as Native American for social approval and career advancement. She was even hailed as the first “woman of color” on Harvard’s faculty. What color? A light peach, apparently.

Warren is just a more sophisticated version of Rachel Dolezal, the former NAACP official who famously turned out not to be a person of color at all, and Shaun King, aka Talcum X, who strenuously insists that he isn’t white despite photographic evidence of his being a light-haired white child before he was woke. Muslim “feminist” activist Linda Sarsour is also passing: in a Vox video published in January 2017, she revealed: “When I wasn’t wearing hijab I was just some ordinary white girl from New York City.” But in an April 2017 interview, Sarsour referred to “people of color like me.” All it took was a hijab to enable Sarsour to change races. Maybe Warren should try that.

Warren, Dolezal, King, and Sarsour are the vanguard of the society Tlaib envisions, one in which being white carries so much of a social stigma that it results in job discrimination and more, and those who are clever and audacious enough to pull it off avoid this opprobrium by passing as being a “person of color.” Meanwhile, those who dare to disagree with Tlaib’s political agenda will find themselves arrested and incarcerated in Detroit, where all-black facial recognition teams will map their every move. Meet the future: it’s the same as the past.

SOURCE

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Sen. Rand Paul: Experience is the best teacher -- But that's not how I want my kids to learn about socialism

What is it about socialism that casts such a spell that people refuse to acknowledge history? Time and time again socialism leads to the impoverishment of nations. Perhaps it is the allure of equality or fairness. Surveys in America alarmingly show about half of today’s youth have a favorable opinion of socialism.

When I was researching my forthcoming book, “The Case Against Socialism,” I was horrified to discover a Gallup poll finding that only 45 percent of young American adults (age 18–29) have a positive view of capitalism, while 51 percent of this same group see socialism positively. These surveys link approval of socialism to a corresponding desire among young Americans to live in a “fair” world. Blasi and Kruse of Rutgers University write that “today’s youth reject capitalism; what they really want is fairness.”

They cite a “2016 Harvard University survey that found that 51 percent of American youth age 18 to 29 no longer support capitalism,” and another 2015 poll by “conservative-leaning Reason-Rupe, [which] found that young adults age 18 to 24 have a slightly more favorable view of socialism than capitalism.”

When asked to explain their answers in the Harvard Study, participants in a focus group reported feeling that “capitalism was unfair and left people out despite their hard work.”

The mantra of fairness is one that is inculcated from a young age. The assumption is that in order for one person to become rich someone else must suffer. Leftists preach that the economy is a zero-sum game where the rich enrich themselves on the backs of the poor, a claim that is revealed to be false when you examine the facts.

The mantra of fairness is one that is inculcated from a young age. The assumption is that in order for one person to become rich someone else must suffer. Leftists preach that the economy is a zero-sum game where the rich enrich themselves on the backs of the poor, a claim that is revealed to be false when you examine the facts.

The great industrialists of the nineteenth century are often tagged as robber barons. Yet as Andrew Carnegie’s wealth grew so did the economy. According to Our World in Data, a group of researchers based at the University of Oxford, poverty declined from over 90 percent of people living in extreme poverty worldwide in 1820 to around 75 percent of people living in extreme poverty in 1910. By the time the industrial revolution was in full swing, wages were rising and the standard of living known previously only to kings was becoming far more accessible.

From the time of Carnegie’s death in 1919 until the present, the number of people living in extreme poverty declined to less than 10 percent.11 As much of the world embraced capitalism in the twentieth century, childhood mortality plummeted from nearly a third of children dying before the age of five to less than 1 percent in wealthy countries and 4.3 percent worldwide.

And still, American youth mistakenly are attracted to socialism.

We must be teaching history in all the wrong ways.

Blasi and Kruse warn us that “the share of the overall population that questions capitalism’s core precepts is around the highest in at least 80 years of polling on the topic.” Gallup, in a 2016 poll, records 55 percent of millennials as favoring socialism. Yet, when millennials say they are for socialism, do they have any idea what socialism is in a historical sense? How many of them are even aware of the famines under Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot? Reason Foundation asked millennials to define socialism and discovered that only 16 percent could identify socialism as government ownership of the means of production.

The only good news about these surveys of young people is that they were overwhelmingly canceled out by the views of older people.

A study published in sciencemag.org concluded that although “children start off like Karl Marx, . . . they eventually become more like a member of the International Olympic Committee. The study ‘finds that children’s views on fairness change from egalitarian to merit-based as they grow older.’

The question is—will this next generation follow the path of previous generations? Will today’s youth, when they leave their parents’ basements and begin to earn a living, discover that their success depends on their merit and hard work, or will they succumb like Venezuela to the allure of something for nothing?

The future of our nation depends on the answer.

SOURCE

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The desperate idiocy of the modern Left

This is from a few years back but is well worth recalling

Recovering Leftie, Ron Rosenbaum, is appalled at the words of a Leftist film-reviewer:

Reviewer
"Still, if "Road to Perdition" ultimately fails as entertainment, it offers rich material for allegory. Maybe it was because I attended a screening on Sept. 11, but I couldn't help seeing Hanks as an American everyman, a pure-hearted killer who will commit no end of mayhem to ensure a better life for his children. Imagine Willie Loman with a tommy gun, and you'll see what I mean. 'You dirty rats! Attention must be paid.'"

Rosenbaum
But of course! What a BRILLIANT point he's making in the course of preening his anti-Americanism before his audience of U.K. intellectuals. What does Sept. 11 remind him of? The way AMERICANS are killers. Sept. 11 becomes, in his lovely leap of logic, really about Americans being pure-hearted killers capable of "no end of mayhem," infinite evil deeds. Doesn't EVERYBODY think that way? (Everybody in his little circle, I imagine). Sept. 11 reminds them that Americans are first and foremost murderers, so let's not spend a moment acknowledging that little matter of Sept. 11 being a day on which 3,000 AMERICANS were murdered by the "pure-hearted killers" of Al Qaeda. Who, when not committing mass murder, stone women as punishment, torture gays, crush free thought by executing dissidents. No, THEY get a pass (and the 3,000 become non-persons). Because they hate America.

SOURCE

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IN BRIEF

FACEBOOK LEGAL BLOW: "Facebook on Wednesday was dealt a major blow in the EU's top court, which ruled that national courts in Europe can order online platforms to remove defamatory content worldwide." (Agence France-Presse)

MIGRANT TSUNAMI: More than 500,000 Central Americans illegally enter Mexico in first half of 2019 on their way to the U.S. (The Daily Caller)

FRANCE JIHAD: Paris knife attacker who killed four law-enforcement colleagues converted to Islam 18 months ago (National Review)

NARRATIVE BUSTER: North Carolina energy company finds solar power actually increases pollution (The Federalist)

VEGAS SETTLEMENT: Las Vegas massacre shooting victims, family members to get up to $800 million to settle lawsuits (Fox News)

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For more blog postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated), A Coral reef compendium and an IQ compendium. (Both updated as news items come in). GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten. I also put up occasional updates on my Personal blog and each day I gather together my most substantial current writings on THE PSYCHOLOGIST.

Email me here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or here (Personal). My annual picture page is here

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6 October, 2019

Can we now vaccinate against lung cancer?

Not so fast. The report below suggests that we can but it is misleading.

The story starts with a remarkable product that originated in the early 20th century: BCG vaccine. Some patient French scientists produced a weakened bacillus from the form of tuberculosis that cattle get. They used their product as an effective vaccine against TB for humans. It is actually a live bacterium that they and their successors inject into you as a vaccination. But it is a real life-saver. Once injected with it, you mostly don't get TB at all and you mostly recover well in a worst case scenario. It is very widely used so it keeps a large lot of Third-worlders alive.

So is it itself dangerous to your health? The studies of that differ in their conclusions but the general conclusion is that it is pretty safe. The study below aimed to settle that for once and for all. And it did. With a follow-up of thousands of people across a remarkable 60 year period, people who had been given the vaccine were no more likely to die than anyone else. You seldom get conclusions as solid as that.

While analysing their data however the authors noticed something interesting. There were a lot fewer lung cancer deaths among those who had received the BCG vaccine. They cried Eureka and said we now know how to prevent lung cancer. They were able to show statistical significance for their findings so that is that!

But it isn't. The effect they found is exceptionally small statistically (a hazard ratio of 0.38) and was shown as statistically significant only because of the large sample size. It has no precedent so is clearly one of those adventitious findings that you often get when analysing a large and complex body of data: Findings that will never emerge again.

Because you can do it so easily, it is actually regarded as bad science to report such adventitious findings. You are supposed to report the significance or not of only those correlations you have predicted from theory. A lot of last minute theory revisions happen of course.

So all the work behind that study was well-justified by the findings that BCG -- as predicted -- is very safe but the "findings" about lung cancer should be ignored.

Association of BCG Vaccination in Childhood With Subsequent Cancer Diagnoses: A 60-Year Follow-up of a Clinical Trial

Nicholas T. Usher et al.

Abstract

Importance: The BCG vaccine is currently the only approved tuberculosis vaccine and is widely administered worldwide, usually during infancy. Previous studies found increased rates of lymphoma and leukemia in BCG-vaccinated populations.

Objective: To determine whether BCG vaccination was associated with cancer rates in a secondary analysis of a BCG vaccine trial.

Design, Setting, and Participants Retrospective review (60-year follow-up) of a clinical trial in which participants were assigned to the vaccine group by systematic stratification by school district, age, and sex, then randomized by alternation. The original study was conducted at 9 sites in 5 US states between December 1935 and December 1998. Participants were 2963 American Indian and Alaska Native schoolchildren younger than 20 years with no evidence of previous tuberculosis infection. Statistical analysis was conducted between August 2018 and July 2019.

Interventions: Single intradermal injection of either BCG vaccine or saline placebo.

Main Outcomes and Measures: The primary outcome was diagnosis of cancer after BCG vaccination. Data on participant interval health and risk factors, including smoking, tuberculosis infection, isoniazid use, and other basic demographic information, were also collected.

Results: A total of 2963 participants, including 1540 in the BCG vaccine group and 1423 in the placebo group, remained after exclusions. Vaccination occurred at a median (interquartile range) age of 8 (5-11) years; 805 participants (52%) in the BCG group and 710 (50%) in the placebo group were female. At the time of follow-up, 97 participants (7%) in the placebo group and 106 participants (7%) in the BCG vaccine group could not be located; total mortality was 633 participants (44%) in the placebo group and 632 participants (41%) in the BCG group. The overall rate of cancer diagnosis was not significantly different in BCG vaccine vs placebo recipients (hazard ratio, 0.82; 95% CI, 0.66-1.02), including for lymphoma and leukemia. The rate of lung cancer was significantly lower in BCG vs placebo recipients (18.2 vs 45.4 cases per 100?000 person-years; hazard ratio, 0.38; 95% CI, 0.20-0.74; P = less than .005), controlling for sex, region, alcohol overuse, smoking, and tuberculosis.

Conclusions and Relevance: Childhood BCG vaccination was associated with a lower risk of lung cancer development in American Indian and Alaska Native populations. This finding has potentially important health implications given the high mortality rate associated with lung cancer and the availability of low-cost BCG vaccines.

JAMA Netw Open. 2019;2(9):e1912014. doi:10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2019.12014

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U.S. unemployment falls to 50 year low of 3.5% with 136,000 jobs added in September, Donald Trump takes sarcastic victory lap

President Donald Trump gloated on Friday after the Labor Department released a rosy summary of America's employment picture during the month of September, tweeting a sarcastic jab about Democrats' desire to impeach him despite the nation's economic health.

'Breaking News: Unemployment Rate, at 3.5%, drops to a 50 YEAR LOW,' the president tweeted. 'Wow America, lets impeach your President (even though he did nothing wrong!).'

U.S. employers added a modest 136,000 jobs in September, but it was enough to help lower the unemployment rate to a new five-decade low of 3.5 per cent.

President Donald Trump gloated on Friday after the Labor Department released a rosy summary of America's employment picture during the month of September

Hiring has slowed this year as the U.S.-China trade war has intensified, global growth has slowed and businesses have cut back on their investment spending. Even so, hiring has averaged 157,000 in the past three months, enough to absorb new job seekers and lower unemployment over time.

Despite the ultra-low unemployment rate, which dropped from 3.7 per cent in August, average hourly wages slipped by a penny, the Labor Department said Friday in its monthly jobs report. Hourly pay rose just 2.9 per cent from a year earlier, below the 3.4 per cent year-over-year gain at the beginning of the year.

The unemployment rate for Latinos fell to 3.9 per cent, the lowest on records dating from 1973.

With the U.S. economic expansion in its 11th year and unemployment low, many businesses have struggled to find the workers they need. That is likely one reason why hiring has slowed since last year.

But it's likely not the only reason. The jobs figures carry more weight than usual because worries about the health of the U.S. economy are mounting. Manufacturers have essentially fallen into recession as U.S. businesses have cut spending on industrial machinery, computers and other factory goods.

And overseas demand for U.S. exports has fallen sharply as President Donald Trump's trade conflicts with China and Europe have triggered retaliatory tariffs.

A measure of factory activity fell in September to its lowest level in more than a decade. And new orders for manufactured items slipped last month, the government reported.

Persistent uncertainties about the economy in the face of Trump's trade conflicts and a global economic slump are also affecting hotels, restaurants and other service industries.

A trade group's measure of growth in the economy's vast services sector slowed sharply in September to its lowest point in three years, suggesting that the trade conflicts and rising uncertainty are weakening the bulk of the economy.

The job market is the economy's main bulwark. As long as hiring is solid enough to keep the unemployment rate from rising, most Americans will likely remain confident enough to spend, offsetting other drags and propelling the economy forward.

But a slump in hiring or a rise in the unemployment rate in coming months could discourage consumers from spending as freely as they otherwise might during the holiday shopping season.

Consumers are still mostly optimistic, and their spending has kept the economy afloat this year. But they may be growing more cautious. Consumer confidence dropped sharply in September, according to the Conference Board, a business research group, although it remains at a high level.

Americans also reined in their spending in August after several months of healthy gains. The 0.1 per cent increase in consumer spending that month was the weakest in six months.

Other parts of the U.S. economy are still holding up well. Home sales, for example, have rebounded as mortgage rates have fallen, helped in part by the Federal Reserve's two interest rate cuts this year. Sales of existing homes reached their highest level in nearly 18 months in August. And new home sales soared.

Americans are also buying cars at a still-healthy pace. Consumers would typically be reluctant to make such major purchases if they were fearful of a downturn.

SOURCE

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Young Snowflakes observed

by Elisa David. She writes from Germany but what she says is recognizable elsewhere

When I was studying in gymnasium [academic High School], I got into a “strings” class. That means my class had an extra two hours when we learned to play a string instrument. Today I know I will definitely not be another Anne-Sophie Mutter.[2]. Those years were not useless, however, for I learned something quite different. Since the idea of extra strings practice did not appeal to many boys, we had a rather unusual gender division, with three boys and twenty girls. So for five years in my class, a collective of puberty-driven teenage girls set the tone — for my own self at the time, it was an absolute horror. But now I know what the consequences can be when women gain the upper hand.

I am no longer amazed at any political movement. My time in school has, to a certain extent, prepared me perfectly for Fridays for Future, #MeToo, and all these trends which my generation has absorbed, because they are tailor-made for them. Generation Snowflake is sensitive, does not wish to be confronted by unfamiliar opinions, is united in “otherness”. Because that is the point — being “other” but “belonging” to it; a certain uncertainty, coupled with the habit of considering oneself important; the need to be seen and simultaneously to conform. My observation is that these completely new views, this strange, contradictory behavior — which major portions of society and above all my generation display — depend on it.

One result seems to be the inflationary increase of psychic illnesses. Not being quite right in the head seems to be the first and decisive step to welcoming otherness. In my class, it was a proven method in the constant battle for sympathy. Passing through distinct stages of puberty is normal, but many took this to a higher level. I still remember how we discussed eating disorders like anorexia in biology class, and shortly thereafter, half the class was anorexic. The imaginary ill predictably announced their new suffering loudly to the world.

The Cutting Trend

Our teacher showed us pictures of an anorexic patient and explained that it is definitely unhealthy for the rib cage and the spine to show so clearly, and that help is needed urgently. Before the very next sports hour, a bunch of girls were standing in front of the mirror, lamenting loudly that their bones were not showing, so they must be overweight and would eat nothing for the entire rest of the day.

Our teacher explained the food pyramid and why a balanced diet is important for the body. My fellow female students were already planning what foods they would avoid to reach the desired weight loss through deficient nutrition. At some point, the attention they received for these actions was no longer enough. When, every hour on the hour, somebody runs out to throw up, it is no longer anything special.

Then, as if by divine will, there came a conference day on the explanation and recognition of depression. There is no denying how important it is to recognize depression. But a side effect of presentations which explain in detail what the symptoms of these illnesses are is that these symptoms are served to young attention-needy girls on a silver platter. All they have to do is write it down and act it out. And in fact, even writing it down isn’t necessary, since glossy brochures are passed out at the end.

If you think a mob of supposedly anorexic girls is bad, just wait until you see what artificially depressed girls can do. It started when half of them had bandages on their arms and because of that, wore short sleeves in winter, so everyone would ask what had happened. “I cut myself” was the answer, and that was the beginning of the cutting trend. Later, the bandages came off and countess scars appeared. Still in short or rolled-up sleeves, they bore the scars proudly, until they noticed someone looking at them, then they theatrically hid them behind their backs. I felt like I was in a madhouse, and there was no other time that deadened me to this junk pile of feelings like this one did.

Otherness Through Sympathy

Biology wasn’t the only dangerous class for us. One of the most important studies was geography. Before that, we led a dull existence, and ate what tasted good. Then, in geography, we saw a film about the meat industry and my little snowflakes realized that even the gelatin in gummy bears did not grow on trees, but came from sweet little piggies. At a stroke, all of them were vegetarians. And it is not enough to just be a vegetarian, you have to live it. To the shock of how cute cutlets were when alive came a second, more important one — that almost no one was a vegetarian at the time.

The situation was brilliant for my classmates. They were special again with their new insight and could set themselves off from the masses, see themselves as better, more enlightened. What I find comforting is that, of those where prepared to go under the axe with every dead piglet, hardly any of them today will give up her schnitzel. Not eating meat has become quite normal, and nobody wants to be that conformist. The little bit of attention is not enough reward for the sacrifice. So, either go right to being vegan, or forget food altogether, and declare yourself a non-binary, pansexual, rainbow person. Since there are now over sixty genders, there is not much competition.

So what can be learned from my classmates? First and foremost, that they would do anything for attention, whatever the price. Approximately following Madonna’s byword: “Even bad publicity is publicity”, they take what they can get. They get this attention through otherness. Apparently, my classmates wanted sympathy above all. At any rate, group pressure must be factored in. We are, after all, herd animals. Aside from that, the tone of the Snowflake Generation is set by girls, and it isn’t just going to the powder room that they don’t like to do alone — they don’t become anorexic, depressed or bisexual alone. They always like to have like-minded people around them. Just so long as they are not those who are considered normal and boring.

The question remains: why is something like this happening now? In the 21st century, we are living in a time when technical, medical and scientific advances — at least in the West — have secured prosperity. We have never had it so good. I am not one of twenty children, of whom only three have survived. I have had my shots and have grown to the age of eighteen without fear or problems. My grandmother is not worshipped as the oldest in the tribe, although she can no longer light candles on her birthday cake. It would look like the Atlanta fire. That is, many people nowadays grow “old” (quotation marks because of her vanity). I did not write this article on a typewriter and so did not have to start fresh after every mistake.

The ability to read is not a privilege, but normal. Almost all of us carry small devices that give us access to boundless knowledge. But not all of us use this knowledge. Our quality of life has never been so good, yet some cultivate starvation and conjure up psychic disturbances that we would not wish on our worst enemy. And how contemptuous this behavior is of those who actually suffer from these illnesses, the seekers of attention do not care.

But where does this sudden self-destructive urge come from? Why is it striking the very generation that has everything? I think the lack of responsibility and challenge has made us incapable of living. We no longer have to worry about ourselves, there are no expectations of us, and if we have no real problems or don’t even care to see them, then we make some up for ourselves.

SOURCE

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IN BRIEF

IRS WHISTLEBLOWER: The Washington Post claims, "An Internal Revenue Service official has filed a whistleblower complaint reporting that he was told that at least one Treasury Department political appointee attempted to improperly interfere with the annual audit of the president's or vice president's tax returns."

MCCARTHY COUNTERATTACKS: "Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R., Calif.) on Thursday called for Speaker Nancy Pelosi to halt the House's impeachment inquiry into President Trump 'until transparent and equitable rules and procedures are established to govern the inquiry, as is customary,'" National Review reports, while Trump is issuing his own floor-vote dare.

SAN FRAN ADMONISHED: "The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency on Wednesday sent a notice that San Francisco is violating the federal Clean Water Act." (NBC Los Angeles)

THANKS, OBAMA: Survey: Family health insurance now averages more than $20,000 a year (The Federalist)

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For more blog postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated), A Coral reef compendium and an IQ compendium. (Both updated as news items come in). GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten. I also put up occasional updates on my Personal blog and each day I gather together my most substantial current writings on THE PSYCHOLOGIST.

Email me here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or here (Personal). My annual picture page is here

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4 October, 2019

What Happens When Top Rival American Politicians Compete to Jail Each Other?

It's been more than two years since the Belmont Club article predicting a political showdown after the election of Donald Trump was written. Since then, its scenario of top rival American politicians trying to jail each other has become an actual possibility. "Will impeaching Trump lead to indictments of Obama and Biden over Ukraine?" says an article in the Spectator. Rudy Giuliani asks: 'Shouldn't Biden be investigated over Ukraine if Trump can be impeached over it?' Hillary's in the mix too:

As President Donald Trump's presidency is threatened by an impeachment inquiry, the Republican chairmen of two Senate committees, Ron Johnson and Chuck Grassley, are asking Attorney General William Barr to investigate any ties between Ukraine and Hillary Clinton's 2016 campaign.

To use a World War II analogy there are torpedoes in the water going in opposite directions at each fleet's battlewagons. If all strike home, a lot of damage will ensue as the different parts of the bureaucracy act against rival leaders. Not surprisingly, the term "civil war" actually began trending on Twitter. CBS News reported: "'Civil War 2' trends on Twitter after Trump quotes speculation that impeachment would spark 'civil war.'"

The very mention of the term is itself an impeachable offense according to Harvard Law professor John Coates. "This tweet is itself an independent basis for impeachment - a sitting president threatening civil war if Congress exercises its constitutionally authorized power." The fact that it was Pastor Robert Jeffress who said the offending words on a TV program -- Trump was merely quoting him -- is of no moment. The impeachment devil who no one professed to believe in has appeared at Nancy Pelosi's prayers.

Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi said Saturday that she is heartbroken and prayerful as House Democrats move forward with their impeachment inquiry and that President Donald Trump's actions left her no other choice.

There is frank hostility. "Joe Biden's campaign wrote to executives at ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN and Fox News to 'demand' that Rudy Giuliani not be invited on the air to discuss Ukraine and President Trump because of what they called his misleading comments about the Biden family," according to the New York Times. Giuliani responded indignantly: "Think of the Biden arrogance and entitlement to protection. They believe they own the media and they are demanding that they silence me. They know I have incriminating facts, not hearsay, because they know what they did in selling Joe’s office to a Ukrainian crook."

Politicians could be psyching themselves into the very thing they purport to abhor. If they sincerely want to step back from the brink now's the time. Otherwise, their actions may at some point unleash a runaway train. As a Harvard symposium noted, World War I started by miscalculation.

SOURCE

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Dems Target Mike Pompeo

With the whistleblower's complaint coming up short, Dems aim for "corrupt" officials.

In an effort to prop up their “whistleblower’s” false allegations, House Democrats have lashed out at Secretary of State Mike Pompeo over his refusal to submit to their subpoena demands. Following Pompeo’s statement that he would not let State Department staff be bullied by Democrats into testifying, three Democrat committee chairmen led by Rep. Adam “B Movie” Schiff cried foul, disingenuously claiming that this was evidence that Pompeo was the one who was “intimidat[ing] witnesses.” They warned, “Any effort to intimidate witnesses or prevent them from talking with Congress — including State Department employees — is illegal and will constitute evidence of obstruction of the impeachment inquiry.”

Naturally, the mainstream media is taking cues from Democrats and is now framing the normal job-related actions of high-ranking White House officials like Pompeo and Attorney General William Barr as somehow being evidence of corruption. For example, Pompeo is alleged to have engaged in misconduct for simply listening to President Donald Trump’s infamous July 25th phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. Why would this be wrong? As The Wall Street Journal notes, “Shouldn’t a Secretary of State be on a call to the new President of an important country? U.S. foreign policy is the secretary’s job.”

Why are Democrats playing this vilification game? Because their “smoking gun” whistleblower complaint failed to expose any impeachable offense. In all likelihood the Democrats knew that going in, but with a friendly press they calculated that it would serve to provide just enough of a cover story to justify acting on their long-running impeachment obsession. However, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and company know they don’t have any actual evidence of a crime, so they’re vilifying anyone near Trump to create the air of corruption around any action. Even innocuous job-related activities can be said to have been done with corrupt motivations to cover up Trump’s crimes. This is an effort to keep the narrative alive through the election.

Trump sees this, which is why he’s calling it what it is: “a coup.” On Tuesday, he asserted, “As I learn more and more each day, I am coming to the conclusion that what is taking place is not an impeachment, it is a COUP, intended to take away the Power of the People, their Vote, their Freedoms, their Second Amendment, Religion, Military, Border Wall, and their God-given rights as a Citizen of The United States of America!” He’s right.

There may be another motive for the Democrats’ vilification of Pompeo and Barr — they don’t want them investigating the origins of the 2016 Russia-collusion hoax. In fact, The Washington Post suggests as much in an article titled, “Democrats’ worst fears about William Barr are proving correct.”

SOURCE

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Trump Reshaping Ninth Circuit Will Be Felt for Decades

In May 2016, Donald Trump was close to securing the Republican presidential nomination but needed to shore up his support among skeptical conservatives to have even a remote chance of defeating Hillary Clinton in the general election. In an unexpected but brilliant move, candidate Trump released a list of judges that he promised to choose from in selecting a replacement for the late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, beloved by conservatives.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell had infuriated Democrats by refusing to hold hearings on Barack Obama’s nominee, Merrick Garland, so the next president would fill that vacancy. Trump’s list had been compiled with heavy input from the conservative Heritage Foundation and Federalist Society. Proving him right, conservatives rallied to Trump’s banner (even if cautiously), based on this promise.

The result has been far better that conservatives could have imagined. As president, Donald Trump has nominated two solid conservatives (an originalist/textualist in Neil Gorsuch, and a conservative institutionalist in Brett Kavanaugh) to the Supreme Court, and recently passed an impressive milestone — more than 150 nominees confirmed to the federal bench. The positive repercussions of this will be felt for decades to come.

Arguably, even more impactful than Trump’s Supreme Court appointments (replacing originalist Scalia with originalist Gorsuch, and moderate Kennedy with conservative Kavanaugh) has been his reshaping of the notorious Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, nicknamed the “Ninth Circus” because of its penchant for ultra-leftist rulings.

A week and a half ago, President Trump nominated Patrick Bumatay and Lawrence VanDyke to fill vacancies on the Ninth Circuit. This was the second time Bumatay has been nominated to that court. Trump nominated Bumatay — a Filipino-American federal prosecutor from San Diego and former counselor to the U.S. attorney general — in October 2018, but after strenuous objections by California Senators Dianne Feinstein and Kamala Harris, the nomination lapsed without action.

VanDyke is an attorney with the Justice Department’s Environmental and Natural Resources Division, having served previously as the solicitor general of both Nevada and Montana, where he incurred the wrath of Democrats and radical environmentalists for litigating against Obama’s abusive land- and water-use policies.

If these nominees are confirmed, it will make the ninth and tenth Trump-nominated judges confirmed to the Ninth Circuit, meaning Trump will have appointed more than a third (10 of 29) of the judges on that bench.

The long-term benefits are enormous.

First, the Ninth Circuit is the nation’s largest circuit court, with a jurisdiction covering nine states and two island territories (40% of U.S. land mass). Its rulings impact more than 60 million Americans (roughly 20% of the U.S. population).

The importance of placing Trump’s nominees on the Ninth Circuit — judges who understand their proper role is to interpret the law as written, not twist it into what they want it to be — cannot be overstated.

Of the 7,000-8,000 cases appealed to the Supreme Court each year, only about 80 receive plenary review and are heard by the nation’s highest court.

By contrast, the Ninth Circuit last year received nearly 11,000 filings and “terminated” (rendered final judgments on) nearly 12,000 cases. Meaning, no matter how obviously unfair, ludicrous, or unconstitutional a ruling of the Ninth Circuit may be, the ruling stands and applies to 20% of the American population unless it is one of the precious few taken up by the Supreme Court.

Of its cases reviewed by the Supreme Court, the Ninth Circuit is reversed a staggering 82% of the time. Yet only a tiny fraction of those cases will ever be reviewed by the Supreme Court, so the lunatic rulings stand in the vast majority of cases.

And the Ninth Circuit judges are well aware of that, and take advantage of it.

Stephen Reinhardt, appointed by President Jimmy Carter to the Ninth Circuit in 1979, served until his death in 2018. Known as one of the most leftist judges in the nation, Reinhardt once said of his high reversal rate at the Supreme Court that he would keep issuing leftist rulings because the Supreme Court “can’t catch ‘em all.” It was Reinhardt’s Ninth Circuit Court that ruled in 2002 that the Pledge of Allegiance was unconstitutional because of the words “under God,” a ridiculous ruling unanimously overturned by the Supreme Court.

There have been calls over the years to split the Ninth Circuit into two courts, a position supported by most of the members of the Supreme Court. Aside from its far-left rulings, the Ninth is simply too big and unmanageable.

Until then though, it is undeniable that President Trump’s efforts are significantly impacting the structure and leanings of the Ninth Circuit. With a third of its judges now Trump appointees, it greatly improves the odds that a panel of Ninth Circuit judges will include those with a more conservative, originalist philosophy.

Just this year, in what would have previously been unfathomable, the Ninth Circuit handed Trump major victories in a border-wall battle with environmentalists and in upholding his “remain in Mexico” policy of dealing with asylum seekers.

Decades from now we may very well look back and see that Trump’s influence on reshaping the federal judiciary, especially the Ninth Circuit, did more than anything else to save the Constitution and uphold the Rule of Law.

SOURCE

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IN BRIEF

ANTI-NRA U-TURN: "Remember last month when San Francisco's Board of Supervisors passed a resolution declaring the National Rifle Association a domestic terrorist organization and ordered city employees to 'take every reasonable step to limit' business interactions with the NRA and its supporters?" asks Jim Geraghty of National Review. "... The NRA sued, and lo and behold, San Francisco is backing down, before the suit even went to court." The mayor in a new memo states, "No [municipal] department will take steps to restrict any contractor from doing business with the NRA or to restrict City contracting opportunities for any business that has any relationship with the NRA." Meanwhile, says Geraghty, "The NRA is challenging a similar law passed by the Los Angeles city council that requiring city contractors to disclose any ties they have to the gun-rights group."

DEATH AND TAXES: "Americans on average spent more on taxes in 2018 than they did on the basic necessities of food, clothing and health care combined, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics Consumer Expenditure Survey. ... The $14,758.11 that the average American consumer unit paid for food, clothing and health care was $3,859.82 less than the $18,617.93 it paid in federal, state and local income taxes, property taxes, Social Security taxes and 'other taxes.'" (Terence Jeffrey)

NET-NEUTRALITY REPEAL UPHELD: "The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit ruled Tuesday that the Federal Communications Commission was mostly lawful in its rollback of Obama-era 'net neutrality' guidelines, while offering a glimmer of hope to proponents of the guidelines. In a 2–1 ruling, the court said the FCC had acted lawfully in its decision to stop regulating broadband like a utility or a 'common carrier' such as a phone service. But it said the FCC had exceeded its authority in attempting to block states from passing their own rules in contradiction of the net-neutrality repeal, as California did in 2018." (National Review)

TANTAMOUNT TO A WARREN ENDORSEMENT: "Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in July that an Elizabeth Warren presidency would pose an 'existential' threat to the company, according to over two hours of leaked audio published by The Verge." (National Review)

PRO-LIFE SETBACK: "A federal judge handed an early win to abortion rights activists Tuesday by blocking Georgia's restrictive law from going into effect — but it is only the first step as a lawsuit makes its way through the court system. District Judge Steve C. Jones' ruling stops House Bill 481 from taking effect Jan. 1 while the case plays out. Anti-abortion activists are hoping the case winds up in the U.S. Supreme Court." (Atlanta Journal-Constitution)

MURDERS DECLINE: "Murder is on the decline in America, according to a new FBI report. The nation's top federal law enforcement agency found that homicides fell by 6 percent in 2018. The decline in homicides is part of a 3 percent drop in the violent crime rate, according to the Uniform Crime Report, the FBI's annual tally of crimes reported to local police departments. The 2018 decline follows several years of slight increases in homicide and violent crime, driven largely by spikes in major cities such as Chicago and Washington, D.C." (The Washington Free Beacon)

FAIRFAX FOLLY: The Daily Caller reports: "A county police department in Virginia announced Tuesday that one of their officers was suspended for turning an illegal alien over to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) after determining the individual had dodged a deportation hearing. Fairfax County Police Chief Edwin C. Roessler Jr. said the officer in question had a 'lapse in judgment' when he called ICE about the illegal alien. ... Fairfax County has a policy that limits the police department's cooperation with ICE." The "lapse in judgment" here is being directed at the wrong person.

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For more blog postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated), A Coral reef compendium and an IQ compendium. (Both updated as news items come in). GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten. I also put up occasional updates on my Personal blog and each day I gather together my most substantial current writings on THE PSYCHOLOGIST.

Email me here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or here (Personal). My annual picture page is here

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3 October, 2019

The Deep State

From the time of the campaign all the way until now, the president has been under repeated attacks from elements of America’s intelligence agencies, including the CIA and FBI. Many of the people, like Brennan, Clapper, Comey, McCabe, and Strzok, have been removed. But there are still many more who have not been identified and “weeded out.”

The president has appointed various people he was told would clean house. Former Indiana Sen. Dan Coats, an old friend of mine, was named director of national intelligence. But he quickly became a mouthpiece for the agency he was running rather than a reformer of the agency. Thanks for nothing, Dan.

Early in his administration, a CIA official resigned and wrote an op-ed in The Washington Post lambasting the president. He was promptly hired to be a commentator for NBC News. More recently, an intelligence analyst at the State Department used his resignation to make a big splash in the news.

The current controversy reportedly originated with an employee at the CIA. The current head of the CIA is Gina Haspel, a career officer and the first woman to lead the CIA.

The president was told, and we were all told, that she was the ultimate professional who would not tolerate any nonsense. Clearly, she needs to call in all agency supervisors and review the rules regarding their involvement in partisan politics.

It is worth remembering that even before the inauguration, then President-elect Trump was expressing his frustration with the intelligence community. At the time, Senate Democrat Leader Chuck Schumer bragged to Rachel Maddow, “Let me tell you: You take on the intelligence community — they have six ways from Sunday at getting back at you.”

If this abuse of our intelligence agencies cannot be ended, then the globalists have won and we have lost the country. I pray and still believe that is not true. But the jury is still out.

SOURCE

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Why Cats Pay a Lower Price for CAT Scans

Once a year, I bring my ill-tempered three-legged tabby cat (named Hopper) to the veterinarian. No one ever has a good time or particularly enjoys the cacophony of hisses, growls, and whiny meows. All the same, I can’t help but feel an “Alice in Wonderland” sort of feeling while talking to my feline’s healthcare providers. Most procedures and medical tests for our furry friends are the same as ours. But unlike the human healthcare system, prices are transparent and upfront in pet care. While no one likes hearing that Fifi’s surgery will cost $600, having costs out in the open keeps prices tethered to reality and under control. Lawmakers can throw patients everywhere a (figurative) bone by opening healthcare markets to competition and encouraging price transparency.

When most owners bring their furry nincompoops to the veterinarian, insurance simply isn’t a part of the conversation because nearly 2 million cats and dogs are covered by insurance policies in the U.S., compared to more than 180 million cats and dogs owned in total.

Compare this less-than-2 percent coverage rate for our pets to the predominance of human health insurance. Around 90 percent of Americans have health insurance, with most plans covering at least some routine doctors’ visits and predictable expenses such as medications. Americans pay even less money out-of-pocket for medical care (as a percentage of expenditures) than most of their Canadian and European (i.e. Germany, United Kingdom, Sweden) counterparts.

When the government and/or insurers are footing the bill, providers have little reason to disclose prices. Patients asking a doctor’s office or hospital for the price of, say, a CAT scan or an appendectomy will probably be stonewalled. With no price transparency and other people paying the bills, costs skyrocket out of control and healthcare expenditures climb far in excess of the rate of inflation. From 2008 to 2018, healthcare prices in the U.S. climbed 21.6 percent while prices for goods and services overall grew by 17.3 percent (measured by GDP deflator).

But not so in the pet healthcare sector, where consumers are exposed to price and veterinarians have a real incentive to keep costs low. Because pet insurance accounts for such a tiny sliver of the veterinary healthcare market, the prices that they pay for claims reflects prices that consumers are willing to pay rather than the third-party driven “prices” of the human healthcare market. For the past several years, Nationwide’s pet health insurance division has partnered with Purdue University researchers to track trends in pet insurance payouts. The researchers track a “basket” of the most commonly-utilized procedures to see how the typical veterinary visit has changed in price over time. According to their research, these ordinary expenses declined by 6 percent from January 2009 to December 2017 after adjusting for inflation.

This decrease is corroborated by less reliable sources, such as the American Pet Products Association (APPA) annual consumer spending surveys. For virtually every year tracked (accessible via web archive), cat and dog owners reported spending less money on average routine and surgical visits. The data is jumpier than the Nationwide and Purdue rigorous analysis of 30 million insurance claims but confirms an interesting – and counterintuitive – trend. In a system where consumers and patients’ “representatives” have enough skin in the game, healthcare prices behave like they would in most other markets.

There are, of course, differences between pet and human healthcare. Owners are far less likely to spend money treating Fluffy for cancer than they would for their own chemotherapy treatments. All the same, prices continue to decline in real terms as a rapidly growing percentage of pet owners regard their companions as members of the family and worthy of medical care. As these numbers increase further, policymakers should take notice and keep tabs on price trends. Perhaps increasing consumer exposure to prices and empowering them to pay medical expenses directly via Health Savings Accounts would lead to the same declining prices seen in the veterinary world.

I’m not sure what medical surprises await Hopper in the next few years, but prices are all but guaranteed to come up for discussion in future vet visits. This norm may be unpleasant, but it sure seems to keep costs under control. Humans and their pets can benefit from a price structure that encourages competition and cost control.

SOURCE

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Enough with Existential Crises

BY STEPHEN KRUISER

I think we can trace most of modern American society's ills back to when men decided to start hugging. OK, a lot of it can go back to when women began watching football too, but I'll try to maintain some focus here.

I remember the first time I got a man hug and I wasn't at a funeral, which used to be the only events at which they were acceptable. I knew that some sort of testosterone-based Pandora's box had been opened.

The next thing I knew, everyone had feelings and the Super Bowl became less about football and more about making the womenfolk happy with seven-hour-long halftime concerts.

Now I hug a lot, but only because people don't expect it from me and I know it makes them uncomfortable.

Back in 2015 and 2016 when I was -- to put very mildly -- a Trump skeptic, I did keep telling people that I didn't think he posed an existential threat to the Republic. I'm a grown-up who has been through too many false apocalyptic political narratives to fall for them anymore.

In yesterday's Briefing, we looked at the first installment of a full-court press by the media to woo Republicans to getting behind impeachment. The plea was a predictable one: Trump must be removed from office or the country that survived a civil war, the Soviet Union, and the heresy of New Coke will cease to exist.

That press picked up speed on Monday, with various "save the country" pleas to Republicans -- specifically GOP senators -- to save the country.

When they're not making their prom pitches to Republicans with grandiose visions of saving the country, the MSM and Democrats are concern trolling for the future of the GOP.

Jeff Flake -- my least favorite former senator -- wrote an op-ed for The Washington Post that worried about Republicans' "souls."

Nobody's soul is at stake, especially the GOP's.

The future of the United States is most certainly not in danger because of anything the president is doing. The hysteria is more boring than agitation-inducing at this point.

Look around you. The world isn't ending. The United States isn't in its death throes. The baseball season is ending and that is sad, but we can work through it.

I'm dismissive of my political opponents these days because they're more in need of diapers than careful consideration of their opinions.

My good friend, Ricochet Editor-In-Chief Jon Gabriel, summed it up rather nicely on Monday:

Impeachment has been the left’s goal since December 2016 — before Trump took office. Ukraine is just another bite of the apple after the Mueller report failed so spectacularly.
The media hysteria over Ukraine feels a lot like the recent Greta hysteria. There’s no time to absorb facts, discuss options, or weigh pros and cons. We need to act now or else!

Hysteria is a poor strategy. It didn’t work for climate change or Kavanaugh or the many other panics we’ve been subjected to since Trump took office. How Trump’s detractors think this will end well is beyond me.

That's just it: they don't think. They feel. When that's all you do, everything is the end of the world.

And when everything is the apocalypse, nothing is the apocalypse.

SOURCE

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Feds paid $1 billion in Social Security benefits to individuals without a SSN

The Social Security Administration paid $1 billion in benefits to individuals who did not have a Social Security Number (SSN), according to a new audit.

The agency’s inspector general found errors in the government’s documentation for representative payees, otherwise known as individuals who receive retirement or disability payments on behalf of another person who is incapable of managing the benefits themselves.

The audit released Friday found thousands of cases where there was no SSN on file.

Over the last decade, the agency paid $1 billion to 22,426 representative payees who "did not have an SSN, and SSA had not followed its policy to retain the paper application."

“Furthermore, unless it takes corrective action, we estimate SSA will pay about $182.5 million in benefits, annually, to representative payees who do not have an SSN or paper application supporting their selection,” the inspector general said.

The inspector general also found the agency paid $853.1 million in benefits since 2004 to individuals who had been terminated as representative payees by the agency.

SOURCE

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Impeachment Coup and Civil War?

Donald Trump shared a warning from Pastor Robert Jeffress about a "Civil War-like fracture" given that Democrats are, again, undertaking what has all the markings of a coup d'état to remove him from office. The point was to assert that using deep-state operatives to overthrow a presidency is tantamount to insurrection.

Jeffress said, "Nancy Pelosi and the Democrats can't put down the impeachment match. They know they couldn't beat [Trump] in 2016 against Hillary Clinton, and they're increasingly aware of the fact that they won't win against him in 2020, and impeachment is the only tool they have to get rid of Donald Trump. And the Democrats don't care if they burn down and destroy this nation in the process."

In fact, he continued, "I don't pretend to speak for all Evangelicals, but this week I have been traveling the country and I've literally spoken to thousands and thousands of evangelical Christians. I have never seen them more angry over any issue than this attempt to illegitimately remove this president from office — overturn the 2016 election and negate the votes of millions of evangelicals in the process. And they know that the only impeachable offense President Trump has committed was beating Hillary Clinton in 2016. That's the unpardonable sin for which the Democrats will never forgive him." Jeffress predicted, "If the Democrats are successful in removing the president from office, I'm afraid it will cause a Civil War-like fracture in this nation from which this country will never heal."

Democrats have only two things to offer in 2020: socialist redistribution of wealth by way of an endless list of "free" stuff in return for votes, and impeachment to appeal for votes from those suffering severe Trump Derangement Syndrome. And, on top of that, they are openly proposing to confiscate guns. Unfortunately, these combined threats to Liberty make the reference to "civil war" relevant.

SOURCE

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Australia Foreign Minister says helping White House probe in national interest

Australia’s offer to help U.S. President Donald Trump investigate a report into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election was in the national interest, Australian Foreign Minister Marise Payne said on Wednesday.

The New York Times on Monday reported Trump had asked Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison for help investigating the origins of what became Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russia’s efforts to aid Trump in the 2016 national elections.

A spokesperson for Morrison on Tuesday said the prime minister had agreed to help, drawing criticism from Australia’s opposition Labor party.

But Payne said cooperating with Australia’s closest ally was prudent. “We are working in Australia’s interests and we are working with our closest and most important ally,” Payne told the Australian Broadcasting Corp. “We should assist them as we can, we should ensure that assistance is appropriate and that’s what we’re doing.”

Trump is under mounting pressure amid an impeachment investigation by the U.S. House of Representatives into reports that he sought to influence foreign governments to go after his political adversaries.

The Democratic-led House began the inquiry last week after a whistleblower raised concerns that Trump tried to leverage nearly $400 million in proposed aid for Ukraine in exchange for an investigation of former U.S. Vice President Joe Biden.

Biden is seeking the Democratic nomination to run against Trump in the 2020 election.

The Mueller report was triggered in part by former Australian foreign minister Alexander Downer.

Downer was allegedly told in 2016 by George Papadopoulos, a Trump campaign aide, that Russia had damaging information about Hillary Clinton.

Downer reported the details of the conversation, which Papadopoulos denies, to the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation.

SOURCE

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IN BRIEF

GIULIANI SUBPOENAED: "Democrats on Monday subpoenaed Rudy Giuliani, the president's personal lawyer who was at the heart of Trump's efforts to get Ukraine to investigate political rival Joe Biden's family. ... With Congress out of session for observance of the Jewish holidays, Democrats moved aggressively against Giuliani, requesting by Oct. 15 'text messages, phone records and other communications' that they referred to as possible evidence. They also requested documents and depositions from three of his business associates." (Associated Press)

HONG KONG BATTLEFIELD: "Hong Kong police fired tear gas and rubber bullets at pro-democracy protesters throwing petrol bombs in the Asian financial hub on Tuesday as its Chinese rulers celebrated the 70th anniversary of the founding of the People's Republic. ... The South China Morning Post and television reports said at least one person was wounded in the chest by police firing live rounds." (Reuters)

MANUFACTURING CONTRACTION CONTINUES: "A gauge of U.S. manufacturing slumped to the lowest level in more than 10 years in September as exports dived amid the escalated trade war. The U.S. manufacturing Purchasing Managers' Index from the Institute for Supply Management plunged to 47.8% in September, the lowest since June 2009, marking the second consecutive month of contraction. Any figure below 50% signals a contraction." (CNBC)

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For more blog postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated), A Coral reef compendium and an IQ compendium. (Both updated as news items come in). GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten. I also put up occasional updates on my Personal blog and each day I gather together my most substantial current writings on THE PSYCHOLOGIST.

Email me here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or here (Personal). My annual picture page is here

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2 October, 2019

Hitler: Reply to an anonymous critic

It has become pretty well known now among conservative commentators that Hitler was a socialist. The old Soviet disinformation that Hitler was a Rightist is slowly losing its grip. The plain fact is that the ideas Hitler is most famous for -- eugenics and antisemitism -- were mainstream Leftist ideas in the 1920s and 1930s. Leftism is a many-headed beast so not all Leftists subscribed to such ideas but many did. August Bebel summarized it well when he said that antisemitism is der Sozialismus des bloeden Mannes. Leftist intellectuals sometimes rejected it but it was popular among ordinary Leftists. Antisemitism was even a common belief among the Russian Communists of Lenin's day.

I have set out the evidence for all that in my monograph on Hitler but others, such as Jonah Goldberg, have made the same point. Even Louder with Crowder has had a swipe at it

And there is of course online now a large number of articles furiously denying that Hitler was a Leftist, none of which is of any scholarly worth that I can see. A curious exception, however, is a temporary blog from 2011 which is genuinely well informed. It is anonymous and almost entirely devoted to going through my article on Hitler and questioning it detail by detail.

I must say that I am fascinated by by its anonymity. And how come that it is in such an obscure source? I was unaware of it and came across it only by chance a couple of days ago. And if I was unaware of it for 8 years, who else would be aware of it? The author has obviously put a lot of work into it. It took him several months to put it all up. What is the point of that if nobody knows of it? The fact that it is a blogspot blog means that Google knew of it but nobody else seems to. Google owns Blogspot and all Blogspot posts appear to be held on Google's main servers.

From the level of detailed historical knowledge displayed, it seems very likely that the writer is a historian of some standing so the best I can make of it is that he is aware that his opus is little more than a series of quibbles but wants to record his quibbles without anybody being able to hold him responsible for them. His modus operandi is to admit that I am right about something but then to expand the point so as to weaken it in his view. I suppose his admissions that I am right in various ways might be another reason why he wants to remain anonymous

To reply to each and every one of his quibbles would be a book-length enterprise and I have neither the time nor the energy to do that. At age 76 my energies are low so I have to reserve them for what I see as important things. So I will go straight to what I see as his central objection to my thesis. It is in his post of 5 June, 2011

I won't quote any of it as the link leads you straight to it but his objection is to the Nazis being called "brown Bolsheviks", an expression that was commonly applied to them in Germany in the pre-war era. I explained that expression by saying that "Marxism was class-based and Nazism was nationally based but otherwise they were very similar". That is of course the headline point of my article on Hitler: That the Nazis were socialists, nearly as Leftist as the Communists

How well our erudite author gets around that is surely central to his whole argument that Hitler was not a Leftist so he needs a very strong comeback to keep his argument afloat. His comeback is pathetic. He says that the Nazi party had "wings" and Hitler did not belong to the most extreme wing.

So what? All political parties have wings to my knowledge but they also have important things in common or they would not be one party. And the policies they fought elections on in the 1930s were very reminiscent of the U.S. Democratic party in the Soviet era: Slogans such as: "With Hitler against the armaments madness of the world" and "The Marshall and the corporal fight alongside us for peace and equal rights". Regardless of what Hitler personally believed, he campaigned as a strong socialist. The Nazi party won power as a Leftist party. It also had other appeals, such as its nationalism, but its Leftist identity was unmistakeable. How is equality not a Leftist shibboleth?

I can't resist quoting something further from our opinionated author:

First, a quote from what I wrote:

In German, not only the word "Socialism" (Sozialismus) but also the word "Victory" (Sieg) begins with an "S". So he said that the two letters "S" in the hooked-cross (swastika) also stood for the victory of Aryan man and the victory of the idea that the "worker" was a creative force: Nationalism plus socialism again, in other words.

Our erudite author's comment on that:

No evidence for this at all, The only SS one can find stood for "Schutzstaffel", Not "Sieg Sozialismus" or whatever.

Now that's a real lulu. I was quoting Hitler himself -- in Mein Kampf -- as to what the Swastika stood for and our author says: "no evidence for this at all." So Hitler himself didn't know what the swastika stood for???

I don't think I need to go on. That's the most egregious example but his accuracy of statement is at many points very poor.

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Blumenthal's Bluster

A symphony of mindless hate

As the impeachment of President Trump begins, the battle lines are hardening. Sen. Lindsey Graham dismissed the allegations against the president as “a nothing burger.” Sen. Richard Blumenthal had a visceral reaction to Graham’s quip, saying:

Donald Trump is going to choke on this supposed nothing burger. He will go down with this supposed nothing burger in his throat because what it shows is repeated, concerted, premeditated criminal conduct.

I found Blumenthal’s statement very revealing. Like much of Hollywood’s “art” (here and here), it reveals the degree of hatred festering on the left toward Donald Trump.

My old friend Bill Bennett, commenting on this raw hatred, said it reminded him of the animosity Inspector Javert had for Jean Valjean in Les Miserables, which had tragic results.

Sadly, I suspect the left has given little thought as to how it might heal the wounds caused by impeachment or how it might begin to help reunite the country that has been so divided by its extreme policies and growing anti-Americanism.

But let me remind you, my friends, that the left’s hatred isn’t just about Donald Trump. It’s about you. It’s about me. It’s about all the 63 million “deplorable and irredeemable” people who voted for Donald Trump. They tell us that all the time.

The left’s rage didn’t begin with Donald Trump. It smeared Ronald Reagan, Robert Bork, Clarence Thomas, George W. Bush, John McCain, and even Mitt Romney. The left viciously attacked Brett Kavanaugh and it is still attacking him.

Friday was the anniversary of Christine Blasey Ford’s Senate hearing. And Kamala Harris is still demanding Kavanaugh’s impeachment.

Where We Stand

It is hard for anyone to keep up with all the nuances of this dispute and the developments that have taken place at such a rapid pace. Of course, that’s the left’s goal — to confuse and demoralize conservatives. But let me just summarize where we are:

An anonymous CIA employee, with an identified anti-Trump bias, has filed a complaint about a presidential phone call to another head of state.

The employee was not on the call.

His identity, and those of anyone he worked with, is being hidden.

What he alleged has been shown from the transcript to be false, and there are numerous inconsistencies in the complaint.

On this basis, we’re being told by virtually every Democrat and reporter in America that the president must be removed from office.

That’s it.

SOURCE

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With USMCA, Japan, Brazil and South Korea trade deals, President Trump is very bad at being an isolationist

President Donald Trump is very bad at being an isolationist, in fact, he is probably one of the worse isolationists in American history.

Think about it. President Trump is pushing Congress to pass the USMCA, which tears up the 40 year old NAFTA agreement and replaces it with one which protects our national sovereignty while expanding trade between the three countries on a more favorable footing for U.S. workers.

President Trump has talked to India’s Prime Minister Modi about building a bi-lateral trade relationship between our two nations. He is similarly working with the President of Brazil along the same lines. He has already rewritten the South Korean trade deal to better accommodate U.S. interests, and has expanded trade relations with Japan creating a massive corn and technology purchase. He is also negotiating deals with the United Kingdom (post-Brexit), and the European Union.

And all the while, his trade team continues to hammer away at the China trade challenge.

Rather than being anti-trade, President Trump is probably the most trade focused U.S. leader in modern history. But his goal is different than many in the past.

The current world trading system was based upon a need to win the Cold War with the Soviet Union by spreading capitalism across the globe. At its core, it was a transfer of wealth from the United States to the rest of the world in the guise of allowing foreign products to be sold in the U.S. with relatively low tariffs, while leaving tariffs on U.S. exports to these developing countries high — the essence of non-reciprocity. This had the effect of allowing those countries to not face U.S. competition in their markets so their domestic economies could thrive from the trade imbalance cash infusion that followed.

For America’s part, we received less expensive items in our stores as major parts of industries like our domestic electronics manufacturing got outsourced to Asia. When China entered the world market in a big way and was granted Permanent National Trade Relations status by the U.S. in 2000 and entered the World Trade Organization in 2001, the entire world shifted.

U.S. and other foreign multi-national businesses took the certainty that Chinese goods would have inexpensive access to the U.S. markets and invested heavily in the Chinese economy, building factories knowing that they would benefit from cheap Chinese labor while exporting the once U.S.-made toys and other goods to American consumers.

What was a giant sucking sound of U.S. jobs heading south to Mexico from the Bill Clinton negotiated North American Free Trade Agreement became a tsunami as manufacturers flocked to make products in China with the promise of not only having access to U.S. markets but also being able to sell to Chinese consumers.

With China targeting key industries like steel, aluminum, rare earth mining, electronics, autos and high tech chip manufacturing, more and more blue collar jobs were exported around the globe.

A system originally designed to help get the post-World War II world back on its feet was now sucking the life blood out of America, while still delivering low cost electronics for its trouble. The ugly truth is that, as a result, the U.S. Gross Domestic Product has not exceeded 4 percent since 2000, with what used to be the expected normal growth rate of 3 percent beyond reach since 2005.

This is why President Trump is realigning our trade relationships around the world.

By emphasizing intellectual property protections, the President is ensuring that America’s ingenuity and problem solving is not stolen by foreign countries like China and then sold back to U.S. consumers at ten cents on the dollar.

By emphasizing ending currency manipulation, the President is ensuring that deliberate, foreign government created inflationary tariffs are not imposed on U.S. products. Currently, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that the trade war with China has NOT resulted in increased costs to U.S. consumers or producers, while generating more than $30 billion in new tax revenue from the Chinese.

How is this possible? The Chinese have forced their wholesalers to eat some of the increased tariff costs while making the Yuan even less valuable than the dollar to keep the costs of Chinese products low.

But this only serves to emphasize the importance of the entirety of the Trump trade agenda. Passing the USMCA, and continuing to create new agreements built upon the inviolability of intellectual property rights puts up an economic wall around China, either trapping them in their anti-property Marxist doctrine or forcing them to accept private property rights for their own economic survival.

The USMCA is the first shoe to drop in this paradigm shifting strategy, and it is why it needs to be voted through the House and Senate. Yes, more, fantastic jobs are projected to be created in the United States, and quite frankly in Canada and Mexico as well. But the language of USMCA on private property and currency manipulation will serve as the models for the entirety of a series of bilateral trade deals.

Trade deals that will encompass the largest economies in the world, except China, and which will create a freedom economic noose around Beijing’s neck.

Isolationist? No, President Trump is an American President looking out for American economic interests while putting together a new international trade regime to replace the broken one that was crippling our nation’s economic future.

SOURCE

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IN BRIEF

WHISTLEBLOWER ARRANGEMENTS: "House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff announced Sunday that the whistleblower who filed a complaint regarding President Donald Trump's call with Ukraine's president has agreed to testify before the committee, adding that it will likely happen 'very soon,'" The Daily Caller reports. News of the arrangement came two days after Secretary of State Mike Pompeo was subpoenaed. Meanwhile, President Trump on Sunday fumed: "Like every American, I deserve to meet my accuser, especially when this accuser, the so-called 'Whistleblower,' represented a perfect conversation with a foreign leader in a totally inaccurate and fraudulent way." In the same vein as fraud, The Federalist's Sean Davis reveals, "Federal records show that the intelligence community secretly revised the formal whistleblower complaint form in August 2019 to eliminate the requirement of direct, first-hand knowledge of wrongdoing." No wonder Joe Biden's campaign is trying to coerce the Leftmedia into silencing Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani, which sounds suspiciously like ... collusion.

CLINTON PROBE: "The Trump administration is investigating the email records of dozens of current and former senior State Department officials who sent messages to then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's private email. ... Those targeted were notified that emails they sent years ago have been retroactively classified and now constitute potential security violations, according to letters reviewed by The Washington Post. In virtually all of the cases, potentially sensitive information, now recategorized as 'classified,' was sent to Clinton's unsecure inbox." (The Washington Post)

JUDICIAL OBSTRUCTION & ACTIVISM: "A federal judge in California ruled Friday against the Trump administration's plan to detain illegal immigrant families longer than 20 days, undercutting the president's attempt to close the chief 'loophole' that caused this year's border surge. Judge Dolly M. Gee, an Obama appointee, has long been a stumbling block for Homeland Security and its immigration plans, and the ruling was expected. The administration is likely to quickly appeal." (The Washington Times)

A 'MEDICARE FOR ALL' HARBINGER: "Federal authorities on Friday charged more than 30 individuals in connection with an alleged Medicare-fraud scheme that took as much as $2 billion out of the pockets of taxpayers before it was detected. The scheme revolved around tricking seniors into getting their cheeks swabbed for unnecessary DNA tests that would supposedly tell them whether they were genetically predisposed to serious diseases, including cancer. The defendants would then charge Medicare for the swabs. In total, they are alleged to have collected $2 billion in reimbursements, with the typical bill running between $7,000 and $12,000." (National Review)

NORTH CAROLINA GERRYMANDERING: "Democrats are headed back to court to challenge the validity of North Carolina's 13 congressional districts, just weeks after the state's highest court ruled that the Republican-controlled legislature unconstitutionally gerrymandered state-level maps. A new lawsuit filed Friday on behalf of 14 North Carolina voters challenges Republican-drawn maps that first went into effect ahead of the 2016 elections, after a court threw out a previous set of maps that were drawn after the 2010 census." (The Hill)

A TALE OF TWO SEASONS "One week after summer's end, a 'winter' storm began blasting parts of the West with up to 3 feet of snow, smashing records with low temperatures, heavy snow, strong winds and blizzard conditions forecast into Monday," USA Today reports. On the other hand, "Temperatures will soar to 10 to 25 degrees above average through much of this week across the Deep South and into the Ohio Valley, mid-Atlantic and Northeast," according to The Weather Channel. For those wondering about the implications of global warming, keep in mind that extreme weather — both of the hot and cold variety — has been and always will be Mother Nature's way of finding equilibrium.

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For more blog postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated), A Coral reef compendium and an IQ compendium. (Both updated as news items come in). GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten. I also put up occasional updates on my Personal blog and each day I gather together my most substantial current writings on THE PSYCHOLOGIST.

Email me here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or here (Personal). My annual picture page is here

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1 October, 2019

Exclusive Excerpt—Charles Hurt: ‘Still Winning: Why America Went All In on Donald Trump—And Why We Must Do It Again’

When Trump jumped into the presidential race in 2015, he was a well-known figure. He had been in the hot glare of the New York tabloid media for decades. Everything from the unveiling of golden buildings that bore his name to raunchy details about his various divorces made headlines. His business accomplishments in the real estate world and his success as a reality television star put him on par with a tiny handful of stars known around the world by one name.

But when Trump descended the escalator in Trump Tower that day, he had made political headlines more recently for something entirely different.

Four years earlier, Trump shocked the political world by launching a campaign questioning whether President Barack Obama was born in the United States. For the entire political-media establishment inside Washington, D.C., this merely proved that Donald Trump was some kind of crazy conspiracy loon. For these establishment people, it also proved Trump was a racist. […] But outside Washington, Trump simply proved he was willing to talk about things and ask questions about things that the entire political establishment had deemed unmentionable—even racist.

Having already demonstrated his unflinching willingness to go crashing wildly into the choppy waters of political incorrectness, Donald Trump was ready to announce his campaign for the presidency. From the first words, it was clear this would be a different kind of candidate running a different kind of campaign.

“Wow. Whoa,” he said, admiring the crowd cheering him from all sides and the balcony above. “That is some group of people. Thousands,” he said.

That line still gets me. Literally, within the first ten words of Trump’s campaign—even before he actually announced his intentions—Trump was focused on crowd size. Much more on that later. But suffice it to say that in the years since Trump uttered those words, he has talked a great deal about crowd sizes, and it has driven his enemies absolutely out of their minds. Which, in turn, brings wild, lusty cheers from audiences who pack monster truck arenas to see their president perform.

After admiring the assembled crowd, he thanked them. He called it “an honor” to have them in “Trump Tower.”

Never. Stop. Selling.

I think it was along about that moment in his speech that I said to myself, This guy could be our next president.

His message was simple. Clear. Pro-American. He was selling something. He was telling a story. After seven years of bitter disappointment and the wasted opportunities of Barack Obama’s nerdy, professorial, lecture-some presidency, this guy could be just what America needs, I thought.

Quickly, Trump got back to the size of his crowd.

“This is beyond anybody’s expectations,” he beamed. “There’s been no crowd like this.”

Then he attacked. Ferociously.

Some of the Republicans who had already announced for president botched their kickoffs. The air conditioner didn’t work, or something. “They sweated like dogs,” Trump sneered.

Worse, their crowds were too small for the rooms they hired.

And then the kill shot: “How are they going to beat ISIS?” he asked.

“I don’t think it’s gonna happen. Our country is in serious trouble.”

It’s a fair point. If you cannot pull off a simple announcement speech on television, then how on earth can you possibly be expected to destroy the most diabolical and determined jihad of our time?

There is a larger point here as well. It has to do with language.

In the very first moments of his announcement speech, Donald Trump was declaring a pact with American voters. Earlier, he had proved his willingness to go wildly off script from establishment officialdom when he brazenly questioned Obama’s birth certificate.

Now he was promising to use the same scalding rhetoric and blunt honesty to expose and fix a whole host of grievous maladies facing regular Americans across the country.

Maladies that had crept into American society over the decades under the blind—or, often, encouraging—eye of political leaders in both parties.

Terrorism, globalism, “free” trade, illegal immigration, legal immigration. Trump was willing to be as belligerent as he needed to be in order to finally stand up to ISIS, China, Japan, Mexico, and the entire global world order.

Trump shrewdly understood in that moment that if political candidates were incapable of speaking bluntly about thorny issues, or if they shied away from harshly identifying America’s enemies, then there would be no hope for anything ever getting better.

Standing there in my office, watching this amazing spectacle unfold, it was that different way of talking that most gripped my attention. A wildly fresh vocabulary with sharp notes of brazenly impolitic honesty.

“The U.S. has become a dumping ground for everybody else’s problem,” Trump said, just a few lines into the speech.

My goodness, I thought. Nobody in Washington talks like this. But it sounds like exactly what you hear just about anywhere if you leave Washington, D.C., or New York City.

“When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best. They’re not sending you. They’re not sending you,” he said, karate chopping the air.

“They’re sending people that have lots of problems and they’re bringing those problems to us. They’re bringing drugs, they’re bringing crime, they’re rapists, and some, I assume, are good people.”

On its face, this statement is technically true. Illegals from Mexico (and other places south of the border) come into the United States. They smuggle drugs into the country. They certainly commit crimes (including illegally crossing our border). And some of them are indeed rapists.

Trump was highlighting a real, destructive and expensive problem that a lot of American voters care deeply about. Yet almost nobody in Washington cares about fixing it.

Democrats are desperate to change the voting electorate. So, they want every warm body they can get into the country to hustle to the voting booth. Republicans, being more business friendly, are delighted to turn a blind eye on a process that floods our country with cheap labor.

The only group without a voice in this debate were millions of regular American voters. Until Trump announced his campaign.

Donald Trump’s furious assault on the political establishment brought condemnations from every corner of it. Sure, those people were perfectly content letting political sleeping dogs lie. China ripping off America was no big deal for them. Free trade was going gangbusters for the stock market and Wall Street. Everybody who was anybody was making a killing off illegal immigration. Cheap nannies for all!

But the seething rebukes of Trump and his announcement speech were about so much more than just those issues. They were about Trump’s language, his rough-and-tumble demeanor, and his willingness to court such political upheaval.

In her memoir, former first lady Michelle Obama eviscerated the man who followed her husband into the White House for just this. Trump’s questioning of Obama’s birth certificate, she wrote, “was crazy and mean-spirited, of course, its underlying bigotry and xenophobia hardly concealed.”

Again, any hint of questioning Obama’s American loyalty was deemed racist. Such a questioner was not just called out as dishonest or stupid or uninformed. They were flat-out racist for questioning Obama’s alliances.

That was not all Michele Obama had to say about Trump and his style of politics. Trump’s birth certificate inquiry “was also dangerous, deliberately meant to stir up the wingnuts and kooks,” she wrote. “What if someone with an unstable mind loaded a gun and drove to Washington? What if that person went looking for our girls? Donald Trump, with his loud and reckless innuendos, was putting my family’s safety at risk. And for this I’d never forgive him.”

Wow. Perhaps Michelle Obama spoke too soon when she said that she was finally proud of her country once her husband got elected.

But I have to ask: What is more incendiary? Asking questions about where a political opponent was born? Or accusing a political opponent of deliberately and willfully trying to inspire “wingnuts and kooks” to assassinate the daughters of a president?

While we’re at it, what about a president who wades into local police issues around the country and his only contribution is to inject race into them? What about a president who goes around the world apologizing for America and giving long lectures about how America is exceptional, you know, like every other country on the planet is exceptional in its own way. In other words, nothing exceptional whatsoever about America. What about a president who belittles Americans for their “guns” and their “religion”?

After eight years of insufferable academia out of the White House, it should have been little surprise that American voters would be in the mood for something very different. They would be looking for a guy who speaks bluntly and paints vivid pictures. A guy who spent years savoring his time talking to the workers and tradesmen who built his buildings, and learned to talk like them. Above all, he was listening and listening and taking to heart what he was hearing.

Every now and then, some reporter churns a Trump speech through some word program on the Internet that calculates the grade level the speech was written at. As in sixth-grade level, meaning a sixth grader could understand it. And these simpering, obnoxious, arrogant asses somehow think that speaking so plainly is an insult, when Trump—along with American voters—knows it is actually the highest, most honest achievement there is.

Independent Authenticity Voter

Strangely, this was a counterintuitive gambit for some of the very same voters who wound up stunning the political establishment by voting for Trump—after having voted for Barack Obama. Twice! I call them the independent authenticity voters. They don’t much care about parties and don’t particularly like Washington politics. But every four years they generally turn out and vote. And when the noise of the campaign gets as loud as it does every four years, they are reminded of how much they despise politics and most politicians. But they mostly turn out and vote.

Overwhelmingly, they choose the lesser bastard. The least dishonest one. The one they think comes closest to being genuine and authentic. In 2008, that was obviously Barack Obama. His hopeful campaign about neither red America nor blue America but one red, white, and blue America resonated with these voters. Funnily enough, the late senator John McCain would have appealed to these very voters eight years earlier when he was still a true political “maverick” and before he got co-opted by Democrats and the media (I repeat myself) to kneecap Republicans at every turn. As bad as things were in 2012, President Obama still had enough authenticity left in the tank to beat the hopelessly repackaged Mitt Romney.

These voters yearned for someone authentic to be president. Most horrifying to mainstream political observers is the number of voters who voted for President Barack Obama—twice!—because they thought he was that authentic nonpolitician. Oh, how they were betrayed!

The accepted language of politics is defended by those who practice it as merely polite and responsible. And this is often true. I know many decent politicians and staffers and journalists who embrace polite language. And they are disgusted by anything else in the political arena.

If the 2016 election proved anything, it proved that Donald Trump was exactly right. There was, after all, a tremendous thirst out there for something different. Something new. Above all, something authentic.

So, from the very first lines of his announcement speech that day at the foot of his glass escalator, Mr. Trump proved to be impolitic. Unpolished. Dripping with authenticity. That guy you know who talks rough, who doesn’t own a set of church clothes but would be the first person you would call if you found yourself in a life-threatening situation and needed some really dirty work handled.

Trump knew at that moment that he had to break through all the soft, white noise of modern American politics. All the fake niceties of acceptable political speech. After all, it was a lie and had been for a very long time. Behind all those fake niceties were the raw, brutal realities of vicious politics played by the nastiest of operatives going back decades. They peddled in the most dishonest, soul-crushing, character-destroying sewage that you could imagine—but then wore nice seersucker suits at garden parties, talking all sorts of high-minded pleasantries.

Yuck!

Donald Trump saw all of this for exactly what it was. It was a fraud. Whether it was trade, immigration, wars, spending, or taxes—it was all a fraud. The American people were getting taken to the cleaner’s financially, and the American people were getting sold out as losers.

And Trump wasn’t even president yet! He was still just one of sixteen people vying for the Republican nomination. If you polled the media that day, every single reporter in all of politics would have given Trump a zero percent chance of winning the nomination, let alone the presidency.

After the speech was over, I called my office at the Washington Times and told my editor to scrap the column I had filed—that a new one was on the way. I endorsed Donald Trump, something I had never done before in a newspaper column. Because, after all, who gives a crap what I think about anything? But this was clearly something different. The speech was brilliant. It was daring, to be sure, but it also reflected an enormous amount of intentional thought. Trump had been listening very closely to voters. He had also been talking to some very smart people who clearly follow politics closely and understood the political landscape far better than any of the self-anointed geniuses inside the Beltway.

So I picked up the phone and called Steve Bannon, a friend who I knew liked to dabble in the more contrarian world of counterpolitics. We agreed the speech was great and, of course, Bannon told me he had been talking to Trump. A speech had been written. Bannon had seen it as late as the night before, he said. But the speech Trump delivered on live television to the country was entirely different than the one that had been prepared.

“Yeah, he didn’t read the speech,” Bannon marveled. “He got up there and just decided to wing it!”

Even at that point, Trump was not to be handled or scripted or managed or staffed. He was going on nothing but his own raw political instincts. And in the end, voters trusted Donald J. Trump to remain in character more than they trusted any politician to keep his campaign promises.

That turned out to be a pretty smart bet.

SOURCE

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Dems Vote To Enhance Med Care for Illegals Now, Vote Down Vets Waiting 10 Years for Same Service

House Democrats voted Thursday to fast-track an electronic medical records system that would serve illegal immigrants, something America’s veterans have been seeking for years.

The House passed the bill on a largely party line vote of 230-184, American Military News reported. Only two Republican congressmen supported the bill — Brian Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania and Fred Upton of Michigan.

The proposal has yet to be considered by the Republican-controlled Senate.

The Democratic proposal would require the Department of Homeland Security and U.S. Customs and Border Patrol to create an Electronic Health Records system.

Part of that system’s job will be to provide information to Congress on the health of migrants who enter the country illegally, according to The Hill.

The bill gives the DHS 90 days after the bill receives final approval to get the job done. In contrast, the Veterans Administration has been working for years to implement an EHR system for veterans.

Democratic Rep. Lauren Underwood of Illinois said it is important for Congress to ensure that workers at the border are doing their jobs.

“As DHS works to improve its medical screening of children and migrants at the border to ensure there is a minimum standard of care, the need for proper record keeping on those screenings will only increase,” she said.

Underwood said that the bill was based on her experiences touring America’s southern Border.

“When I was at the border I saw busy, overworked Border Patrol officials having to keep health records on paper. I also saw how these records don’t follow migrants between facilities and transfers of custody,” she said.

But critics wondered how adding more responsibilities to overworked Border Patrol officials would fix anything

“I oppose this bill because it is poorly conceived, erroneously drafted and extremely risky,” Republican Rep. Jim Banks of Indiana said.

SOURCE

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For more blog postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated), A Coral reef compendium and an IQ compendium. (Both updated as news items come in). GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten. I also put up occasional updates on my Personal blog and each day I gather together my most substantial current writings on THE PSYCHOLOGIST.

Email me here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or here (Personal). My annual picture page is here

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Postings from Brisbane, Australia by John J. Ray (M.A.; Ph.D.) -- former member of the Australia-Soviet Friendship Society, former anarcho-capitalist and former member of the British Conservative party. And now a "Deplorable"

Social justice is injustice. What is just about taking money off people who have earned it and giving it to people who have not earned it? You can call it many things but justice it is not

But it is the aim of all Leftist governments to take money off people who have earned it and give it to people who have not earned it

At the most basic (psychological) level, conservatives are the contented people and Leftists are the discontented people. Conservatives don't think the world is perfect but they can happily live with it. And both those attitudes are largely dispositional, inborn -- which is why they so rarely change

As a good academic, I define my terms: A Leftist is a person who is so dissatisfied with the way things naturally are that he/she is prepared to use force to make people behave in ways that they otherwise would not.

So an essential feature of Leftism is that they think they have the right to tell other people what to do. They see things in the world that are not ideal and conclude therefore that they have the right to change those things by force. Conservative explanations of why things are not ideal -- and never can be -- fall on deaf ears

The fundamental aim of Leftist policy in a democracy is to deliver dismay and disruption into the lives other people -- whom they regard as "complacent" -- and they are good at achieving that.

As usual, however, it is actually they who are complacent, with a conviction of the rightness and virtue of their own beliefs that merges into arrogance. They regard anyone who disagrees with them with contempt.

Leftists are wolves in sheep's clothing

Liberals are people who don't believe in liberty

Because they claim to have all the answers to society's ills, Communists often seem "cool" to young people

German has a word that describes most Leftists well: "Scheinheilig" - A person who appears to be very kind, soft natured, and filled with pure goodness but behind the facade, has a vile nature. He is seemingly holy but is an unscrupulous person on the inside.

The new faith is very oppressive: Leftist orthodoxy is the new dominant religion of the Western world and it is every bit as bigoted and oppressive as Christianity was at its worst

There are two varieties of authoritarian Leftism. Fascists are soft Leftists, preaching one big happy family -- "Better together" in other words. Communists are hard Leftists, preaching class war.

Equality: The nonsensical and incoherent claim that underlies so much Leftist discourse is "all men are equal". And that is the envier's gospel. It makes not a scrap of sense and shows no contact with reality but it is something that enviers resort to as a way of soothing their envious feelings. They deny the very differences that give them so much heartburn. "Denial" was long ago identified by Freud as a maladaptive psychological defence mechanism and "All men are equal" is a prize example of that. Whatever one thinks of his theories, Freud was undoubtedly an acute observer of people and very few psychologists today would doubt the maladaptive nature of denial as described by Freud.

Socialism is the most evil malady ever to afflict the human brain. The death toll in WWII alone tells you that

American conservatives have to struggle to hold their country together against Leftist attempts to destroy it. Maduro's Venezuela is a graphic example of how extremely destructive socialism in government can be

The standard response from Marxist apologists for Stalin and other Communist dictators is to say you can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs. To which Orwell retorted, ‘Where’s the omelette?’

You do still occasionally see some mention of the old idea that Leftist parties represent the worker. In the case of the U.S. Democrats that is long gone. Now they want to REFORM the worker. No wonder most working class Americans these days vote Republican. Democrats are the party of the minorities and the smug

"The tendency of liberals is to create bodies of men and women — of all classes — detached from tradition, alienated from religion, and susceptible to mass suggestion — mob rule. And a mob will be no less a mob if it is well fed, well clothed, well housed, and well disciplined." —T.S. Eliot

We live in a country where the people own the Government and not in a country where the Government owns the people -- Churchill

"Gratitude is not only the greatest of virtues, but the parent of all others" -- Cicero. See here

The Left have a lot in common with tortoises. They have a thick mental shell that protects them from the reality of the world about them

Definition of a Socialist: Someone who wants everything you have...except your job.

ABOUT: Postings here from Brisbane, Australia by John J. Ray (M.A.; Ph.D.) -- former member of the Australia-Soviet Friendship Society, former anarcho-capitalist and former member of the British Conservative party. And now a "Deplorable"

When it comes to political incorrectness, I hit the trifecta. I talk about race, IQ and social class. I have an academic background in all three subjects but that wins me no forgiveness

Let's now have some thought-provoking graphics

Israel: A great powerhouse of the human spirit

The difference in practice

The United Nations: A great ideal but a sordid reality

Alfred Dreyfus, a reminder of French antisemitism still relevant today

Eugenio Pacelli, a righteous Gentile, a true man of God and a brilliant Pope

Leftism in one picture:

The "steamroller" above who got steamrollered by his own hubris. Spitzer is a warning of how self-destructive a vast ego can be -- and also of how destructive of others it can be.

R.I.P. Augusto Pinochet. Pinochet deposed a law-defying Marxist President at the express and desperate invitation of the Chilean parliament. Allende had just burnt the electoral rolls so it wasn't hard to see what was coming. Pinochet pioneered the free-market reforms which Reagan and Thatcher later unleashed to world-changing effect. That he used far-Leftist methods to suppress far-Leftist violence is reasonable if not ideal. The Leftist view that they should have a monopoly of violence and that others should follow the law is a total absurdity which shows only that their hate overcomes their reason

Leftist writers usually seem quite reasonable and persuasive at first glance. The problem is not what they say but what they don't say. Leftist beliefs are so counterfactual ("all men are equal", "all men are brothers" etc.) that to be a Leftist you have to have a talent for blotting out from your mind facts that don't suit you. And that is what you see in Leftist writing: A very selective view of reality. Facts that disrupt a Leftist story are simply ignored. Leftist writing is cherrypicking on a grand scale

So if ever you read something written by a Leftist that sounds totally reasonable, you have an urgent need to find out what other people say on that topic. The Leftist will almost certainly have told only half the story

We conservatives have the facts on our side, which is why Leftists never want to debate us and do their best to shut us up. It's very revealing the way they go to great lengths to suppress conservative speech at universities. Universities should be where the best and brightest Leftists are to be found but even they cannot stand the intellectual challenge that conservatism poses for them. It is clearly a great threat to them. If what we say were ridiculous or wrong, they would grab every opportunity to let us know it

A conservative does not hanker after the new; He hankers after the good. Leftists hanker after the untested

Just one thing is sufficient to tell all and sundry what an unamerican lamebrain Obama is. He pronounced an army corps as an army "corpse" Link here. Can you imagine any previous American president doing that? Many were men with significant personal experience in the armed forces in their youth.

'Gay Pride' parades: You know you live in a great country when "oppressed" people have big, colorful parades.

A favorite Leftist saying sums up the whole of Leftism: "To make an omelette, you've got to break eggs". They want to change some state of affairs and don't care who or what they destroy or damage in the process. They think their alleged good intentions are sufficient to absolve them from all blame for even the most evil deeds

In practical politics, the art of Leftism is to sound good while proposing something destructive

Leftists are the "we know best" people, meaning that they are intrinsically arrogant. Matthew chapter 6 would not be for them. And arrogance leads directly into authoritarianism

Leftism is fundamentally authoritarian. Whether by revolution or by legislation, Leftists aim to change what people can and must do. When in 2008 Obama said that he wanted to "fundamentally transform" America, he was not talking about America's geography or topography but rather about American people. He wanted them to stop doing things that they wanted to do and make them do things that they did not want to do. Can you get a better definition of authoritarianism than that?

And note that an American President is elected to administer the law, not make it. That seems to have escaped Mr Obama

That Leftism is intrinsically authoritarian is not a new insight. It was well understood by none other than Friedrich Engels (Yes. THAT Engels). His clever short essay On authority was written as a reproof to the dreamy Anarchist Left of his day. It concludes: "A revolution is certainly the most authoritarian thing there is; it is the act whereby one part of the population imposes its will upon the other part by means of rifles, bayonets and cannon — authoritarian means"

Inside Every Liberal is a Totalitarian Screaming to Get Out

Insight: "A man's admiration for absolute government is proportionate to the contempt he feels for those around him." —Alexis de Tocqueville (1805-1859)

Leftists think of themselves as the new nobility

Many people in literary and academic circles today who once supported Stalin and his heirs are generally held blameless and may even still be admired whereas anybody who gave the slightest hint of support for the similarly brutal Hitler regime is an utter polecat and pariah. Why? Because Hitler's enemies were "only" the Jews whereas Stalin's enemies were those the modern day Left still hates -- people who are doing well for themselves materially. Modern day Leftists understand and excuse Stalin and his supporters because Stalin's hates are their hates.

"Those who see hate everywhere think they're looking thru a window when actually they're looking at a mirror"

Hatred has long been a central pillar of leftist ideologies, premised as they are on trampling individual rights for the sake of a collectivist plan. Karl Marx boasted that he was “the greatest hater of the so-called positive.” In 1923, V.I. Lenin chillingly declared to the Soviet Commissars of Education, “We must teach our children to hate. Hatred is the basis of communism.” In his tract “Left-Wing Communism,” Lenin went so far as to assert that hatred was “the basis of every socialist and Communist movement.”

If you understand that Leftism is hate, everything falls into place.

The strongest way of influencing people is to convince them that you will do them some good. Leftists and con-men misuse that

Leftists believe only what they want to believe. So presenting evidence contradicting their beliefs simply enrages them. They do not learn from it

Psychological defence mechanisms such as projection play a large part in Leftist thinking and discourse. So their frantic search for evil in the words and deeds of others is easily understandable. The evil is in themselves.

Leftists who think that they can conjure up paradise out of their own limited brains are simply fools -- arrogant and dangerous fools. They essentially know nothing. Conservatives learn from the thousands of years of human brains that have preceded us -- including the Bible, the ancient Greeks and much else. The death of Socrates is, for instance, an amazing prefiguration of the intolerant 21st century. Ask any conservative stranded in academe about his freedom of speech

Thomas Sowell: “There are no solutions, only trade-offs.” Leftists don't understand that -- which is a major factor behind their simplistic thinking. They just never see the trade-offs. But implementing any Leftist idea will hit us all with the trade-offs

Chesteron's fence -- good conservative thinking

"The best laid plans of mice and men gang aft agley"[go oft astray] is a well known line from a famous poem by the great Scottish poet, Robert Burns. But the next line is even wiser: "And leave us nought but grief and pain for promised joy". Burns was a Leftist of sorts so he knew how often their theories fail badly.

Mostly, luck happens when opportunity meets preparation.

Most Leftist claims are simply propaganda. Those who utter such claims must know that they are not telling the whole story. Hitler described his Marxist adversaries as "lying with a virtuosity that would bend iron beams". At the risk of ad hominem shrieks, I think that image is too good to remain disused.

Conservatives adapt to the world they live in. Leftists want to change the world to suit themselves

Given their dislike of the world they live in, it would be a surprise if Leftists were patriotic and loved their own people. Prominent English Leftist politician Jack Straw probably said it best: "The English as a race are not worth saving"

In his 1888 book, The Anti-Christ Friedrich Nietzsche argues that we should treat the common man well and kindly because he is the backdrop against which the exceptional man can be seen. So Nietzsche deplores those who agitate the common man: "Whom do I hate most among the rabble of today? The socialist rabble, the chandala [outcast] apostles, who undermine the instinct, the pleasure, the worker's sense of satisfaction with his small existence—who make him envious, who teach him revenge. The source of wrong is never unequal rights but the claim of “equal” rights"

Why do conservatives respect tradition and rely on the past in many ways? Because they want to know what works and the past is the chief source of evidence on that. Leftists are more faith-based. They cling to their theories (e.g. global warming) with religious fervour, even though theories are often wrong

Thinking that you "know best" is an intrinsically precarious and foolish stance -- because nobody does. Reality is so complex and unpredictable that it can rarely be predicted far ahead. Conservatives can see that and that is why conservatives always want change to be done gradually, in a step by step way. So the Leftist often finds the things he "knows" to be out of step with reality, which challenges him and his ego. Sadly, rather than abandoning the things he "knows", he usually resorts to psychological defence mechanisms such as denial and projection. He is largely impervious to argument because he has to be. He can't afford to let reality in.

A prize example of the Leftist tendency to projection (seeing your own faults in others) is the absurd Robert "Bob" Altemeyer, an acclaimed psychologist and father of a Canadian Leftist politician. Altemeyer claims that there is no such thing as Leftist authoritarianism and that it is conservatives who are "Enemies of Freedom". That Leftists (e.g. Mrs Obama) are such enemies of freedom that they even want to dictate what people eat has apparently passed Altemeyer by. Even Stalin did not go that far. And there is the little fact that all the great authoritarian regimes of the 20th century (Stalin, Hitler and Mao) were socialist. Freud saw reliance on defence mechanisms such as projection as being maladjusted. It is difficult to dispute that. Altemeyer is too illiterate to realize it but he is actually a good Hegelian. Hegel thought that "true" freedom was marching in step with a Left-led herd.

What libertarian said this? “The bureaucracy is a parasite on the body of society, a parasite which ‘chokes’ all its vital pores…The state is a parasitic organism”. It was VI Lenin, in August 1917, before he set up his own vastly bureaucratic state. He could see the problem but had no clue about how to solve it.

It was Democrat John F Kennedy who cut taxes and declared that “a rising tide lifts all boats"

Leftist stupidity is a special class of stupidity. The people concerned are mostly not stupid in general but they have a character defect (mostly arrogance) that makes them impatient with complexity and unwilling to study it. So in their policies they repeatedly shoot themselves in the foot; They fail to attain their objectives. The world IS complex so a simplistic approach to it CANNOT work.

Seminal Leftist philosopher, G.W.F. Hegel said something that certainly applies to his fellow Leftists: "We learn from history that we do not learn from history". And he captured the Left in this saying too: "Evil resides in the very gaze which perceives Evil all around itself".

"A man who is not a socialist at age 20 has no heart; A man who is still a socialist at age 30 has no head". Who said that? Most people attribute it to Winston but as far as I can tell it was first said by Georges Clemenceau, French Premier in WWI -- whose own career approximated the transition concerned. And he in turn was probably updating an earlier saying about monarchy versus Republicanism by Guizot. Other attributions here. There is in fact a normal drift from Left to Right as people get older. Both Reagan and Churchill started out as liberals

Funny how to the Leftist intelligentsia poor blacks are 'oppressed' and poor whites are 'trash'. Racism, anyone?

MESSAGE to Leftists: Even if you killed all conservatives tomorrow, you would just end up in another Soviet Union. Conservatives are all that stand between you and that dismal fate. And you may not even survive at all. Stalin killed off all the old Bolsheviks.

A Conservative manifesto from England -- The inimitable Jacob Rees-Mogg

MYTH BUSTING:

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

Just the name of Hitler's political party should be sufficient to reject the claim that Hitler was "Right wing" but Leftists sometimes retort that the name "Democratic People's Republic of Korea" is not informative, in that it is the name of a dismal Stalinist tyranny. But "People's Republic" is a normal name for a Communist country whereas I know of no conservative political party that calls itself a "Socialist Worker's Party". Such parties are in fact usually of the extreme Left (Trotskyite etc.)

Most people find the viciousness of the Nazis to be incomprehensible -- for instance what they did in their concentration camps. But you just have to read a little of the vileness that pours out from modern-day "liberals" in their Twitter and blog comments to understand it all very well. Leftists haven't changed. They are still boiling with hate

Hatred as a motivating force for political strategy leads to misguided decisions. “Hatred is blind,” as Alexandre Dumas warned, “rage carries you away; and he who pours out vengeance runs the risk of tasting a bitter draught.”

Who said this in 1968? "I am not, and never have been, a man of the right. My position was on the Left and is now in the centre of politics". It was Sir Oswald Mosley, founder and leader of the British Union of Fascists

The term "Fascism" is mostly used by the Left as a brainless term of abuse. But when they do make a serious attempt to define it, they produce very complex and elaborate definitions -- e.g. here and here. In fact, Fascism is simply extreme socialism plus nationalism. But great gyrations are needed to avoid mentioning the first part of that recipe, of course.

Three examples of Leftist racism below (much more here and here):

Jesse Owens, the African-American hero of the 1936 Berlin Olympic Games, said "Hitler didn't snub me – it was our president who snubbed me. The president didn't even send me a telegram." Democrat Franklin D. Roosevelt never even invited the quadruple gold medal-winner to the White House

Beatrice Webb, a founder of the London School of Economics and the Fabian Society, and married to a Labour MP, mused in 1922 on whether when English children were "dying from lack of milk", one should extend "the charitable impulse" to Russian and Chinese children who, if saved this year, might anyway die next. Besides, she continued, there was "the larger question of whether those races are desirable inhabitants" and "obviously" one wouldn't "spend one's available income" on "a Central African negro".

Hugh Dalton, offered the Colonial Office during Attlee's 1945-51 Labour government, turned it down because "I had a horrid vision of pullulating, poverty stricken, diseased nigger communities, for whom one can do nothing in the short run and who, the more one tries to help them, are querulous and ungrateful."

The Zimmerman case is an excellent proof that the Left is deep-down racist

Defensible and indefensible usages of the term "racism"

The book, The authoritarian personality, authored by T.W. Adorno et al. in 1950, has been massively popular among psychologists. It claims that a set of ideas that were popular in the "Progressive"-dominated America of the prewar era were "authoritarian". Leftist regimes always are authoritarian so that claim was not a big problem. What was quite amazing however is that Adorno et al. identified such ideas as "conservative". They were in fact simply popular ideas of the day but ones that had been most heavily promoted by the Left right up until the then-recent WWII. See here for details of prewar "Progressive" thinking.

Leftist psychologists have an amusingly simplistic conception of military organizations and military men. They seem to base it on occasions they have seen troops marching together on parade rather than any real knowledge of military men and the military life. They think that military men are "rigid" -- automatons who are unable to adjust to new challenges or think for themselves. What is incomprehensible to them is that being kadaver gehorsam (to use the extreme Prussian term for following orders) actually requires great flexibility -- enough flexibility to put your own ideas and wishes aside and do something very difficult. Ask any soldier if all commands are easy to obey.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt was a war criminal. Both British and American codebreakers had cracked the Japanese naval code so FDR knew what was coming at Pearl Harbor. But for his own political reasons he warned no-one there. So responsibility for the civilian and military deaths at Pearl Harbor lies with FDR as well as with the Japanese. The huge firepower available at Pearl Harbor, both aboard ship and on land, could have largely neutered the attack. Can you imagine 8 battleships and various lesser craft firing all their AA batteries as the Japanese came in? The Japanese naval airforce would have been annihilated and the war would have been over before it began.

FDR prolonged the Depression. He certainly didn't cure it.

WWII did NOT end the Great Depression. It just concealed it. It in fact made living standards worse

FDR appointed a known KKK member, Hugo Black, to the Supreme Court

Joe McCarthy was eventually proved right after the fall of the Soviet Union. To accuse anyone of McCarthyism is to accuse them of accuracy!

The KKK was intimately associated with the Democratic party. They ATTACKED Republicans!

High Level of Welfare Use by Legal and Illegal Immigrants in the USA. Low skill immigrants receive 4 to 5 dollars of benefits for every dollar in taxes paid

People who mention differences in black vs. white IQ are these days almost universally howled down and subjected to the most extreme abuse. I am a psychometrician, however, so I feel obliged to defend the scientific truth of the matter: The average African adult has about the same IQ as an average white 11-year-old and African Americans (who are partly white in ancestry) average out at a mental age of 14. The American Psychological Association is generally Left-leaning but it is the world's most prestigious body of academic psychologists. And even they (under the chairmanship of Ulric Neisser) have had to concede that sort of gap (one SD) in black vs. white average IQ. 11-year olds can do a lot of things but they also have their limits and there are times when such limits need to be allowed for.

The heritability of general cognitive ability increases linearly from childhood to young adulthood

The association between high IQ and long life is overwhelmingly genetic: "In the combined sample the genetic contribution to the covariance was 95%"

The Dark Ages were not dark

Judged by his deeds, Abraham Lincoln was one of the bloodiest villains ever to walk the Earth. See here. And: America's uncivil war was caused by trade protectionism. The slavery issue was just camouflage, as Abraham Lincoln himself admitted. See also here

At the beginning of the North/South War, Confederate general Robert E. Lee did not own any slaves. Union General Ulysses L. Grant did.

Was slavery already washed up by the tides of history before Lincoln took it on? Eric Williams in his book "Capitalism and Slavery" tells us: “The commercial capitalism of the eighteenth century developed the wealth of Europe by means of slavery and monopoly. But in so doing it helped to create the industrial capitalism of the nineteenth century, which turned round and destroyed the power of commercial capitalism, slavery, and all its works. Without a grasp of these economic changes the history of the period is meaningless.”

Revolutionary terrorists in Russia killed Tsar Alexander II in 1881 (after three prior assassination attempts). Alexander II was a great reformer who abolished serfdom one year before the US abolished slavery. If his democratic and economic reforms had continued, Russia may have been much less radical politically a couple of decades later, when Nicholas II was overthrown.

Did William Zantzinger kill poor Hattie Carroll?

Did Bismarck predict where WWI would start or was it just a "free" translation by Churchill?

Conrad Black on the Declaration of Independence

Some rare Leftist realism: "God forbid if the rich leave" NY Governor Cuomo February 04, 2019

Malcolm Gladwell: "There is more of reality and wisdom in a Chinese fortune cookie than can be found anywhere in Gladwell’s pages"

Some people are born bad -- confirmed by genetics research

The dark side of American exceptionalism: America could well be seen as the land of folly. It fought two unnecessary civil wars, would have done well to keep out of two world wars, endured the extraordinary folly of Prohibition and twice elected a traitor President -- Barack Obama. That America remains a good place to be is a tribute to the energy and hard work of individual Americans.

“From the fact that people are very different it follows that, if we treat them equally, the result must be inequality in their actual position, and that the only way to place them in an equal position would be to treat them differently. Equality before the law and material equality are therefore not only different but are in conflict with each other; and we can achieve either one or the other, but not both at the same time.” ? Friedrich Hayek, The Constitution Of Liberty

IN BRIEF:

The 10 "cannots" (By William J. H. Boetcker) that Leftist politicians ignore:
*You cannot bring about prosperity by discouraging thrift.
* You cannot strengthen the weak by weakening the strong.
* You cannot help little men by tearing down big men.
* You cannot lift the wage earner by pulling down the wage payer.
* You cannot help the poor by destroying the rich.
* You cannot establish sound security on borrowed money.
* You cannot further the brotherhood of man by inciting class hatred.
* You cannot keep out of trouble by spending more than you earn.
* You cannot build character and courage by destroying men's initiative and independence.
* And you cannot help men permanently by doing for them what they can and should do for themselves.

A good short definition of conservative: "One who wants you to keep your hand out of his pocket."

Beware of good intentions. They mostly lead to coercion

A gargantuan case of hubris, coupled with stunning level of ignorance about how the real world works, is the essence of progressivism.

The U.S. Constitution is neither "living" nor dead. It is fixed until it is amended. But amending it is the privilege of the people, not of politicians or judges

It is hard to imagine a more stupid or more dangerous way of making decisions than by putting those decisions in the hands of people who pay no price for being wrong - Thomas Sowell

Leftists think that utopia can be coerced into existence -- so no dishonesty or brutality is beyond them in pursuit of that "noble" goal

"England is perhaps the only great country whose intellectuals are ashamed of their own nationality. In left-wing circles it is always felt that there is something slightly disgraceful in being an Englishman and that it is a duty to snigger at every English institution" -- George Orwell

Was 16th century science pioneer Paracelsus a libertarian? His motto was "Alterius non sit qui suus esse potest" which means "Let no man belong to another who can belong to himself."

"When using today's model of society as a rule, most of history will be found to be full of oppression, bias, and bigotry." What today's arrogant judges of history fail to realize is that they, too, will be judged. What will Americans of 100 years from now make of, say, speech codes, political correctness, and zero tolerance - to name only three? Assuming, of course, there will still be an America that we, today, would recognize. Given the rogue Federal government spy apparatus, I am not at all sure of that. -- Paul Havemann

Economist Ludwig von Mises (1881-1973): "The champions of socialism call themselves progressives, but they recommend a system which is characterized by rigid observance of routine and by a resistance to every kind of improvement. They call themselves liberals, but they are intent upon abolishing liberty. They call themselves democrats, but they yearn for dictatorship. They call themselves revolutionaries, but they want to make the government omnipotent. They promise the blessings of the Garden of Eden, but they plan to transform the world into a gigantic post office."

It's the shared hatred of the rest of us that unites Islamists and the Left.

American liberals don't love America. They despise it. All they love is their own fantasy of what America could become. They are false patriots.

The Democratic Party: Con-men elected by the ignorant and the arrogant

The Democratic Party is a strange amalgam of elites, would-be elites and minorities. No wonder their policies are so confused and irrational

Why are conservatives more at ease with religion? Because it is basic to conservatism that some things are unknowable, and religious people have to accept that too. Leftists think that they know it all and feel threatened by any exceptions to that. Thinking that you know it all is however the pride that comes before a fall.

The characteristic emotion of the Leftist is not envy. It's rage

Leftists are committed to grievance, not truth

The British Left poured out a torrent of hate for Margaret Thatcher on the occasion of her death. She rescued Britain from chaos and restored Britain's prosperity. What's not to hate about that?

Something you didn't know about Margaret Thatcher

The world's dumbest investor? Without doubt it is Uncle Sam. Nobody anywhere could rival the scale of the losses on "investments" made under the Obama administration

"Behind the honeyed but patently absurd pleas for equality is a ruthless drive for placing themselves (the elites) at the top of a new hierarchy of power" -- Murray Rothbard - Egalitarianism and the Elites (1995)

A liberal is someone who feels a great debt to his fellow man, which debt he proposes to pay off with your money. -- G. Gordon Liddy

"World socialism as a whole, and all the figures associated with it, are shrouded in legend; its contradictions are forgotten or concealed; it does not respond to arguments but continually ignores them--all this stems from the mist of irrationality that surrounds socialism and from its instinctive aversion to scientific analysis... The doctrines of socialism seethe with contradictions, its theories are at constant odds with its practice, yet due to a powerful instinct these contradictions do not in the least hinder the unending propaganda of socialism. Indeed, no precise, distinct socialism even exists; instead there is only a vague, rosy notion of something noble and good, of equality, communal ownership, and justice: the advent of these things will bring instant euphoria and a social order beyond reproach." -- Solzhenitsyn

"The heart of the wise inclines to the right, but the heart of the fool to the left." -- Ecclesiastes 10:2 (NIV)

My reading of history convinces me that most bad government results from too much government. -- Thomas Jefferson

"Much that passes as idealism is disguised hatred or disguised love of power" -- Bertrand Russell

Evan Sayet: The Left sides "...invariably with evil over good, wrong over right, and the behaviors that lead to failure over those that lead to success." (t=5:35+ on video)

The Republicans are the gracious side of American politics. It is the Democrats who are the nasty party, the haters

Wanting to stay out of the quarrels of other nations is conservative -- but conservatives will fight if attacked or seriously endangered. Anglo/Irish statesman Lord Castlereagh (1769-1822), who led the political coalition that defeated Napoleon, was an isolationist, as were traditional American conservatives.

Some wisdom from the past: "The bosom of America is open to receive not only the opulent and respectable stranger, but the oppressed and persecuted of all nations and religions; whom we shall welcome to a participation of all our rights and privileges, if by decency and propriety of conduct they appear to merit the enjoyment." —George Washington, 1783

Some useful definitions:

If a conservative doesn't like guns, he doesn't buy one. If a liberal doesn't like guns, he wants all guns outlawed.
If a conservative is a vegetarian, he doesn't eat meat. If a liberal is a vegetarian, he wants all meat products banned for everyone.
If a conservative is down-and-out, he thinks about how to better his situation. A liberal wonders who is going to take care of him.
If a conservative doesn't like a talk show host, he switches channels. Liberals demand that those they don't like be shut down.
If a conservative is a non-believer, he doesn't go to church. A liberal non-believer wants any mention of God and religion silenced. (Unless it's a foreign religion, of course!)
If a conservative decides he needs health care, he goes about shopping for it, or may choose a job that provides it. A liberal demands that the rest of us pay for his.

There is better evidence for creation than there is for the Leftist claim that “gender” is a “social construct”. Most Leftist claims seem to be faith-based rather than founded on the facts

Leftists are classic weak characters. They dish out abuse by the bucketload but cannot take it when they get it back. Witness the Loughner hysteria.

Death taxes: You would expect a conscientious person, of whatever degree of intelligence, to reflect on the strange contradiction involved in denying people the right to unearned wealth, while supporting programs that give people unearned wealth.

America is no longer the land of the free. It is now the land of the regulated -- though it is not alone in that, of course

The Leftist motto: "I love humanity. It's just people I can't stand"

Why are Leftists always talking about hate? Because it fills their own hearts

Envy is a strong and widespread human emotion so there has alway been widespread support for policies of economic "levelling". Both the USA and the modern-day State of Israel were founded by communists but reality taught both societies that respect for the individual gave much better outcomes than levelling ideas. Sadly, there are many people in both societies in whom hatred for others is so strong that they are incapable of respect for the individual. The destructiveness of what they support causes them to call themselves many names in different times and places but they are the backbone of the political Left

Gore Vidal: "Every time a friend succeeds, I die a little". Vidal was of course a Leftist

The large number of rich Leftists suggests that, for them, envy is secondary. They are directly driven by hatred and scorn for many of the other people that they see about them. Hatred of others can be rooted in many things, not only in envy. But the haters come together as the Left. Some evidence here showing that envy is not what defines the Left

Leftists hate the world around them and want to change it: the people in it most particularly. Conservatives just want to be left alone to make their own decisions and follow their own values.

The failure of the Soviet experiment has definitely made the American Left more vicious and hate-filled than they were. The plain failure of what passed for ideas among them has enraged rather than humbled them.

Ronald Reagan famously observed that the status quo is Latin for “the mess we’re in.” So much for the vacant Leftist claim that conservatives are simply defenders of the status quo. They think that conservatives are as lacking in principles as they are.

Was Confucius a conservative? The following saying would seem to reflect good conservative caution: "The superior man, when resting in safety, does not forget that danger may come. When in a state of security he does not forget the possibility of ruin. When all is orderly, he does not forget that disorder may come. Thus his person is not endangered, and his States and all their clans are preserved."

The shallow thinkers of the Left sometimes claim that conservatives want to impose their own will on others in the matter of abortion. To make that claim is however to confuse religion with politics. Conservatives are in fact divided about their response to abortion. The REAL opposition to abortion is religious rather than political. And the church which has historically tended to support the LEFT -- the Roman Catholic church -- is the most fervent in the anti-abortion cause. Conservatives are indeed the one side of politics to have moral qualms on the issue but they tend to seek a middle road in dealing with it. Taking the issue to the point of legal prohibitions is a religious doctrine rather than a conservative one -- and the religion concerned may or may not be characteristically conservative. More on that here

Some Leftist hatred arises from the fact that they blame "society" for their own personal problems and inadequacies

The Leftist hunger for change to the society that they hate leads to a hunger for control over other people. And they will do and say anything to get that control: "Power at any price". Leftist politicians are mostly self-aggrandizing crooks who gain power by deceiving the uninformed with snake-oil promises -- power which they invariably use to destroy. Destruction is all that they are good at. Destruction is what haters do.

Leftists are consistent only in their hate. They don't have principles. How can they when "there is no such thing as right and wrong"? All they have is postures, pretend-principles that can be changed as easily as one changes one's shirt

A Leftist assumption: Making money doesn't entitle you to it, but wanting money does.

"Politicians never accuse you of 'greed' for wanting other people's money -- only for wanting to keep your own money." --columnist Joe Sobran (1946-2010)

Leftist policies are candy-coated rat poison that may appear appealing at first, but inevitably do a lot of damage to everyone impacted by them.

A tribute and thanks to Mary Jo Kopechne. Her death was reprehensible but she probably did more by her death that she ever would have in life: She spared the world a President Ted Kennedy. That the heap of corruption that was Ted Kennedy died peacefully in his bed is one of the clearest demonstrations that we do not live in a just world. Even Joe Stalin seems to have been smothered to death by Nikita Khrushchev

I often wonder why Leftists refer to conservatives as "wingnuts". A wingnut is a very useful device that adds versatility wherever it is used. Clearly, Leftists are not even good at abuse. Once they have accused their opponents of racism and Nazism, their cupboard is bare. Similarly, Leftists seem to think it is a devastating critique to refer to "Worldnet Daily" as "Worldnut Daily". The poverty of their argumentation is truly pitiful

The Leftist assertion that there is no such thing as right and wrong has a distinguished history. It was Pontius Pilate who said "What is truth?" (John 18:38). From a Christian viewpoint, the assertion is undoubtedly the Devil's gospel

Even in the Old Testament they knew about "Postmodernism": "Woe unto them that call evil good, and good evil; that put darkness for light, and light for darkness; that put bitter for sweet, and sweet for bitter!" - Isaiah 5:20 (KJV)

Was Solomon the first conservative? "The hearts of men are full of evil and madness is in their hearts" -- Ecclesiastes: 9:3 (RSV). He could almost have been talking about Global Warming.

Leftist hatred of Christianity goes back as far as the massacre of the Carmelite nuns during the French revolution. Yancey has written a whole book tabulating modern Leftist hatred of Christians. It is a rival religion to Leftism.

"If one rejects laissez faire on account of man's fallibility and moral weakness, one must for the same reason also reject every kind of government action." - Ludwig von Mises

The naive scholar who searches for a consistent Leftist program will not find it. What there is consists only in the negation of the present.

Because of their need to be different from the mainstream, Leftists are very good at pretending that sow's ears are silk purses

Among intelligent people, Leftism is a character defect. Leftists HATE success in others -- which is why notably successful societies such as the USA and Israel are hated and failures such as the Palestinians can do no wrong.

A Leftist's beliefs are all designed to pander to his ego. So when you have an argument with a Leftist, you are not really discussing the facts. You are threatening his self esteem. Which is why the normal Leftist response to challenge is mere abuse.

Because of the fragility of a Leftist's ego, anything that threatens it is intolerable and provokes rage. So most Leftist blogs can be summarized in one sentence: "How DARE anybody question what I believe!". Rage and abuse substitute for an appeal to facts and reason.

Because their beliefs serve their ego rather than reality, Leftists just KNOW what is good for us. Conservatives need evidence.

Absolute certainty is the privilege of uneducated men and fanatics. -- C.J. Keyser

Hell is paved with good intentions" -- Boswell's Life of Johnson of 1775

"Almost all professors of the arts and sciences are egregiously conceited, and derive their happiness from their conceit" -- Erasmus

THE FALSIFICATION OF HISTORY HAS DONE MORE TO IMPEDE HUMAN DEVELOPMENT THAN ANY ONE THING KNOWN TO MANKIND -- ROUSSEAU

"Seest thou a man wise in his own conceit? there is more hope of a fool than of him" (Proverbs 26: 12). I think that sums up Leftists pretty well.

Eminent British astrophysicist Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington is often quoted as saying: "Not only is the universe stranger than we imagine, it is stranger than we can imagine." It was probably in fact said by his contemporary, J.B.S. Haldane. But regardless of authorship, it could well be a conservative credo not only about the cosmos but also about human beings and human society. Mankind is too complex to be summed up by simple rules and even complex rules are only approximations with many exceptions.

Politics is the only thing Leftists know about. They know nothing of economics, history or business. Their only expertise is in promoting feelings of grievance

Socialism makes the individual the slave of the state -- capitalism frees them.

Many readers here will have noticed that what I say about Leftists sometimes sounds reminiscent of what Leftists say about conservatives. There is an excellent reason for that. Leftists are great "projectors" (people who see their own faults in others). So a good first step in finding out what is true of Leftists is to look at what they say about conservatives! They even accuse conservatives of projection (of course).

The research shows clearly that one's Left/Right stance is strongly genetically inherited but nobody knows just what specifically is inherited. What is inherited that makes people Leftist or Rightist? There is any amount of evidence that personality traits are strongly genetically inherited so my proposal is that hard-core Leftists are people who tend to let their emotions (including hatred and envy) run away with them and who are much more in need of seeing themselves as better than others -- two attributes that are probably related to one another. Such Leftists may be an evolutionary leftover from a more primitive past.

Leftists seem to believe that if someone like Al Gore says it, it must be right. They obviously have a strong need for an authority figure. The fact that the two most authoritarian regimes of the 20th century (Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia) were socialist is thus no surprise. Leftists often accuse conservatives of being "authoritarian" but that is just part of their usual "projective" strategy -- seeing in others what is really true of themselves.

"With their infernal racial set-asides, racial quotas, and race norming, liberals share many of the Klan's premises. The Klan sees the world in terms of race and ethnicity. So do liberals! Indeed, liberals and white supremacists are the only people left in America who are neurotically obsessed with race. Conservatives champion a color-blind society" -- Ann Coulter

Politicians are in general only a little above average in intelligence so the idea that they can make better decisions for us that we can make ourselves is laughable

A quote from the late Dr. Adrian Rogers: "You cannot legislate the poor into freedom by legislating the wealthy out of freedom. What one person receives without working for, another person must work for without receiving. The government cannot give to anybody anything that the government does not first take from somebody else. When half of the people get the idea that they do not have to work because the other half is going to take care of them, and when the other half gets the idea that it does no good to work because somebody else is going to get what they work for, that my dear friend, is about the end of any nation. You cannot multiply wealth by dividing it."

The Supreme Court of the United States is now and always has been a judicial abomination. Its guiding principles have always been political rather than judicial. It is not as political as Stalin's courts but its respect for the constitution is little better. Some recent abuses: The "equal treatment" provision of the 14th amendment was specifically written to outlaw racial discrimination yet the court has allowed various forms of "affirmative action" for decades -- when all such policies should have been completely stuck down immediately. The 2nd. amendment says that the right to bear arms shall not be infringed yet gun control laws infringe it in every State in the union. The 1st amendment provides that speech shall be freely exercised yet the court has upheld various restrictions on the financing and display of political advertising. The court has found a right to abortion in the constitution when the word abortion is not even mentioned there. The court invents rights that do not exist and denies rights that do.

"Some action that is unconstitutional has much to recommend it" -- Elena Kagan, nominated to SCOTUS by Obama

Frank Sulloway, the anti-scientist

The basic aim of all bureaucrats is to maximize their funding and minimize their workload

A lesson in Australian: When an Australian calls someone a "big-noter", he is saying that the person is a chronic and rather pathetic seeker of admiration -- as in someone who often pulls out "big notes" (e.g. $100.00 bills) to pay for things, thus endeavouring to create the impression that he is rich. The term describes the mentality rather than the actual behavior with money and it aptly describes many Leftists. When they purport to show "compassion" by advocating things that cost themselves nothing (e.g. advocating more taxes on "the rich" to help "the poor"), an Australian might say that the Leftist is "big-noting himself". There is an example of the usage here. The term conveys contempt. There is a wise description of Australians generally here

Some ancient wisdom for Leftists: "Be not righteous overmuch; neither make thyself over wise: Why shouldest thou die before thy time?" -- Ecclesiastes 7:16

"Foreign aid is the process by which money is taken from poor people in rich countries and given to rich people in poor countries." -- Peter Bauer

Jesse Jackson: "There is nothing more painful to me at this stage in my life than to walk down the street and hear footsteps and start thinking about robbery -- then look around and see somebody white and feel relieved." There ARE important racial differences.

Some Jimmy Carter wisdom: "I think it's inevitable that there will be a lower standard of living than what everybody had always anticipated," he told advisers in 1979. "there's going to be a downward turning."

Heritage is what survives death: Very rare and hence very valuable

Big business is not your friend. As Adam Smith said: "People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices. It is impossible indeed to prevent such meetings, by any law which either could be executed, or would be consistent with liberty or justice. But though the law cannot hinder people of the same trade from sometimes assembling together, it ought to do nothing to facilitate such assemblies; much less to render them necessary

How can I accept the Communist doctrine, which sets up as its bible, above and beyond criticism, an obsolete textbook which I know not only to be scientifically erroneous but without interest or application to the modern world? How can I adopt a creed which, preferring the mud to the fish, exalts the boorish proletariat above the bourgeoisie and the intelligentsia, who with all their faults, are the quality of life and surely carry the seeds of all human achievement? Even if we need a religion, how can we find it in the turbid rubbish of the red bookshop? It is hard for an educated, decent, intelligent son of Western Europe to find his ideals here, unless he has first suffered some strange and horrid process of conversion which has changed all his values. -- John Maynard Keynes

Some wisdom from "Bron" Waugh: "The purpose of politics is to help them [politicians] overcome these feelings of inferiority and compensate for their personal inadequacies in the pursuit of power"

"There are countless horrible things happening all over the country, and horrible people prospering, but we must never allow them to disturb our equanimity or deflect us from our sacred duty to sabotage and annoy them whenever possible"

The urge to pass new laws must be seen as an illness, not much different from the urge to bite old women. Anyone suspected of suffering from it should either be treated with the appropriate pills or, if it is too late for that, elected to Parliament [or Congress, as the case may be] and paid a huge salary with endless holidays, to do nothing whatever"

"It is my settled opinion, after some years as a political correspondent, that no one is attracted to a political career in the first place unless he is socially or emotionally crippled"

Two lines below of a famous hymn that would be incomprehensible to Leftists today ("honor"? "right"? "freedom?" Freedom to agree with them is the only freedom they believe in)

First to fight for right and freedom,
And to keep our honor clean

It is of course the hymn of the USMC -- still today the relentless warriors that they always were. Freedom needs a soldier

If any of the short observations above about Leftism seem wrong, note that they do not stand alone. The evidence for them is set out at great length in my MONOGRAPH on Leftism.

3 memoirs of "Supermac", a 20th century Disraeli (Aristocratic British Conservative Prime Minister -- 1957 to 1963 -- Harold Macmillan):

"It breaks my heart to see (I can't interfere or do anything at my age) what is happening in our country today - this terrible strike of the best men in the world, who beat the Kaiser's army and beat Hitler's army, and never gave in. Pointless, endless. We can't afford that kind of thing. And then this growing division which the noble Lord who has just spoken mentioned, of a comparatively prosperous south, and an ailing north and midlands. That can't go on." -- Mac on the British working class: "the best men in the world" (From his Maiden speech in the House of Lords, 13 November 1984)

"As a Conservative, I am naturally in favour of returning into private ownership and private management all those means of production and distribution which are now controlled by state capitalism"

During Macmillan's time as prime minister, average living standards steadily rose while numerous social reforms were carried out

"Talent hits a target no one else can hit; Genius hits a target no one else can see." --?Arthur Schopenhauer

JEWS AND ISRAEL

The Bible is an Israeli book

There is a view on both Left and Right that Jews are "too" influential. And it is true that they are more influential than their numbers would indicate. But they are exactly as influential as their IQs would indicate

To me, hostility to the Jews is a terrible tragedy. I weep for them at times. And I do literally put my money where my mouth is. I do at times send money to Israeli charities

My (Gentile) opinion of antisemitism: The Jews are the best we've got so killing them is killing us.

It’s a strange paradox when anti-Zionists argue that Jews should suffer and wander without a homeland while urging that Palestinians ought to have security and territory.

"And I will bless them that bless thee, and curse him that curseth thee: and in thee shall all families of the earth be blessed" -- Genesis 12:3

"O pray for the peace of Jerusalem: They shall prosper that love thee" Psalm 122:6.

If I forget you, Jerusalem, may my right hand forget its skill. May my tongue cling to the roof of my mouth if I do not remember you, if I do not consider Jerusalem my highest joy -- Psalm 137 (NIV)

Israel, like the Jews throughout history, is hated not for her vices but her virtues. Israel is hated, as the United States is hated, because Israel is successful, because Israel is free, and because Israel is good. As Maxim Gorky put it: “Whatever nonsense the anti-Semites may talk, they dislike the Jew only because he is obviously better, more adroit, and more willing and capable of work than they are.” Whether driven by culture or genes—or like most behavior, an inextricable mix—the fact of Jewish genius is demonstrable." -- George Gilder

To Leftist haters, all the basic rules of liberal society — rejection of hate speech, commitment to academic freedom, rooting out racism, the absolute commitment to human dignity — go out the window when the subject is Israel.

I have always liked the story of Gideon (See Judges chapters 6 to 8) and it is surely no surprise that in the present age Israel is the Gideon of nations: Few in numbers but big in power and impact.

Is the Israel Defence Force the most effective military force per capita since Genghis Khan? They probably are but they are also the most ethically advanced military force that the world has ever seen

If I were not an atheist, I would believe that God had a sense of humour. He gave his chosen people (the Jews) enormous advantages -- high intelligence and high drive -- but to keep it fair he deprived them of something hugely important too: Political sense. So Jews to this day tend very strongly to be Leftist -- even though the chief source of antisemitism for roughly the last 200 years has been the political Left!

And the other side of the coin is that Jews tend to despise conservatives and Christians. Yet American fundamentalist Christians are the bedrock of the vital American support for Israel, the ultimate bolthole for all Jews. So Jewish political irrationality seems to be a rather good example of the saying that "The LORD giveth and the LORD taketh away". There are many other examples of such perversity (or "balance"). The sometimes severe side-effects of most pharmaceutical drugs is an obvious one but there is another ethnic example too, a rather amusing one. Chinese people are in general smart and patient people but their rate of traffic accidents in China is about 10 times higher than what prevails in Western societies. They are brilliant mathematicians and fearless business entrepreneurs but at the same time bad drivers!

Conservatives, on the other hand, could be antisemitic on entirely rational grounds: Namely, the overwhelming Leftism of the Diaspora Jewish population as a whole. Because they judge the individual, however, only a tiny minority of conservative-oriented people make such general judgments. The longer Jews continue on their "stiff-necked" course, however, the more that is in danger of changing. The children of Israel have been a stiff necked people since the days of Moses, however, so they will no doubt continue to vote with their emotions rather than their reason.

I despair of the ADL. Jews have enough problems already and yet in the ADL one has a prominent Jewish organization that does its best to make itself offensive to Christians. Their Leftism is more important to them than the welfare of Jewry -- which is the exact opposite of what they ostensibly stand for! Jewish cleverness seems to vanish when politics are involved. Fortunately, Christians are true to their saviour and have loving hearts. Jewish dissatisfaction with the myopia of the ADL is outlined here. Note that Foxy was too grand to reply to it.

Fortunately for America, though, liberal Jews there are rapidly dying out through intermarriage and failure to reproduce. And the quite poisonous liberal Jews of Israel are not much better off. Judaism is slowly returning to Orthodoxy and the Orthodox tend to be conservative.

The above is good testimony to the accuracy of the basic conservative insight that almost anything in human life is too complex to be reduced to any simple rule and too complex to be reduced to any rule at all without allowance for important exceptions to the rule concerned

Amid their many virtues, one virtue is often lacking among Jews in general and Israelis in particular: Humility. And that's an antisemitic comment only if Hashem is antisemitic. From Moses on, the Hebrew prophets repeatedy accused the Israelites of being "stiff-necked" and urged them to repent. So it's no wonder that the greatest Jewish prophet of all -- Jesus -- not only urged humility but exemplified it in his life and death

"Why should the German be interested in the liberation of the Jew, if the Jew is not interested in the liberation of the German?... We recognize in Judaism, therefore, a general anti-social element of the present time... In the final analysis, the emancipation of the Jews is the emancipation of mankind from Judaism.... Indeed, in North America, the practical domination of Judaism over the Christian world has achieved as its unambiguous and normal expression that the preaching of the Gospel itself and the Christian ministry have become articles of trade... Money is the jealous god of Israel, in face of which no other god may exist". Who said that? Hitler? No. It was Karl Marx. See also here and here and here. For roughly two centuries now, antisemitism has, throughout the Western world, been principally associated with Leftism (including the socialist Hitler) -- as it is to this day. See here.

Karl Marx hated just about everyone. Even his father, the kindly Heinrich Marx, thought Karl was not much of a human being

Leftists call their hatred of Israel "Anti-Zionism" but Zionists are only a small minority in Israel

Some of the Leftist hatred of Israel is motivated by old-fashioned antisemitism (beliefs in Jewish "control" etc.) but most of it is just the regular Leftist hatred of success in others. And because the societies they inhabit do not give them the vast amount of recognition that their large but weak egos need, some of the most virulent haters of Israel and America live in those countries. So the hatred is the product of pathologically high self-esteem.

Their threatened egos sometimes drive Leftists into quite desperate flights from reality. For instance, they often call Israel an "Apartheid state" -- when it is in fact the Arab states that practice Apartheid -- witness the severe restrictions on Christians in Saudi Arabia. There are no such restrictions in Israel.

If the Palestinians put down their weapons, there'd be peace. If the Israelis put down their weapons, there'd be genocide.

Leftists are usually just anxious little people trying to pretend that they are significant. No doubt there are some Leftists who are genuinely concerned about inequities in our society but their arrogance lies in thinking that they understand it without close enquiry

ABOUT

Many people hunger and thirst after righteousness. Some find it in the hatreds of the Left. Others find it in the love of Christ. I don't hunger and thirst after righteousness at all. I hunger and thirst after truth. How old-fashioned can you get?

The kneejerk response of the Green/Left to people who challenge them is to say that the challenger is in the pay of "Big Oil", "Big Business", "Big Pharma", "Exxon-Mobil", "The Pioneer Fund" or some other entity that they see, in their childish way, as a boogeyman. So I think it might be useful for me to point out that I have NEVER received one cent from anybody by way of support for what I write. As a retired person, I live entirely on my own investments. I do not work for anybody and I am not beholden to anybody. And I have NO investments in oil companies, mining companies or "Big Pharma"

UPDATE: Despite my (statistical) aversion to mining stocks, I have recently bought a few shares in BHP -- the world's biggest miner, I gather. I run the grave risk of becoming a speaker of famous last words for saying this but I suspect that BHP is now so big as to be largely immune from the risks that plague most mining companies. I also know of no issue affecting BHP where my writings would have any relevance. The Left seem to have a visceral hatred of miners. I have never quite figured out why.

I imagine that few of my readers will understand it, but I am an unabashed monarchist. And, as someone who was born and bred in a monarchy and who still lives there (i.e. Australia), that gives me no conflicts at all. In theory, one's respect for the monarchy does not depend on who wears the crown but the impeccable behaviour of the present Queen does of course help perpetuate that respect. Aside from my huge respect for the Queen, however, my favourite member of the Royal family is the redheaded Prince Harry. The Royal family is of course a military family and Prince Harry is a great example of that. As one of the world's most privileged people, he could well be an idle layabout but instead he loves his life in the army. When his girlfriend Chelsy ditched him because he was so often away, Prince Harry said: "I love Chelsy but the army comes first". A perfect military man! I doubt that many women would understand or approve of his attitude but perhaps my own small army background powers my approval of that attitude.

I imagine that most Americans might find this rather mad -- but I believe that a constitutional Monarchy is the best form of government presently available. Can a libertarian be a Monarchist? I think so -- and prominent British libertarian Sean Gabb seems to think so too! Long live the Queen! (And note that Australia ranks well above the USA on the Index of Economic freedom. Heh!)

The Australian flag with the Union Jack quartered in it

Throughout Europe there is an association between monarchism and conservatism. It is a little sad that American conservatives do not have access to that satisfaction. So even though Australia is much more distant from Europe (geographically) than the USA is, Australia is in some ways more of an outpost of Europe than America is! Mind you: Australia is not very atypical of its region. Australia lies just South of Asia -- and both Japan and Thailand have greatly respected monarchies. And the demise of the Cambodian monarchy was disastrous for Cambodia

Throughout the world today, possession of a U.S. or U.K. passport is greatly valued. I once shared that view. Developments in recent years have however made me profoundly grateful that I am a 5th generation Australian. My Australian passport is a door into a much less oppressive and much less messed-up place than either the USA or Britain

Following the Sotomayor precedent, I would hope that a wise older white man such as myself with the richness of that experience would more often than not reach a better conclusion than someone who hasn’t lived that life.

"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

Some personal 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

In my teenage years, however, I was fortunate to be immersed (literally) in a very fundamentalist Christian religion. And the heavy Bible study I did at that time left me with lessons for life that have stood me in good stead ever since

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

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.

A small personal note: I have always been very self-confident. I inherited it from my mother, along with my skeptical nature. So I don't need to feed my self-esteem by claiming that I am wiser than others -- which is what Leftists do.

As with conservatives generally, it bothers me not a bit to admit to large gaps in my knowledge and understanding. For instance, I don't know if the slight global warming of the 20th century will resume in the 21st, though I suspect not. And I don't know what a "healthy" diet is, if there is one. Constantly-changing official advice on the matter suggests that nobody knows

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.

It would be very easy for me to say that I am too much of an individual for the army but I did in fact join the army and enjoy it greatly, as most men do. In my observation, ALL army men are individuals. It is just that they accept discipline in order to be militarily efficient -- which is the whole point of the exercise. But that's too complex for simplistic Leftist thinking, of course

A real army story here

It's amusing that my army service gives me honour among conservatives but contempt from Leftists. I don't weep at all about the latter. I am still in touch with some of the fine people I served with over 50 years ago. The army is like that

This is just a bit of romanticism but I do have permanently located by the head of my bed a genuine century-old British army cavalry sword. It is still a real weapon. I was not in the cavalry but I see that sword as a symbol of many things. I want it to be beside my bed when I die

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

And something that was perceptive comes from the same chapter. Hitler said that the doctrines of the interwar Social Democrats (mainstream leftists) of Vienna were "comprised of egotism and hate". Not much has changed

I have used many sites to post my writings over the years and many have gone bad on me for various reasons. So if you click on a link here to my other writings you may get a "page not found" response if the link was put up some time before the present. All is not lost, however. All my writings have been reposted elsewhere. If you do strike a failed link, just take the filename (the last part of the link) and add it to the address of any of my current home pages and -- Voila! -- you should find the article concerned.

COMMENTS: I have gradually added comments facilities to all my blogs. The comments I get are interesting. They are mostly from Leftists and most consist either of abuse or mere assertions. Reasoned arguments backed up by references to supporting evidence are almost unheard of from Leftists. Needless to say, I just delete such useless comments.

You can email me here (Hotmail address). In emailing me, you can address me as "John", "Jon", "Dr. Ray" or "JR" and that will be fine -- but my preference is for "JR" -- and that preference has NOTHING to do with an American soap opera that featured a character who was referred to in that way

DETAILS OF REGULARLY UPDATED BLOGS BY JOHN RAY:

"Tongue Tied"
"Dissecting Leftism"
"Australian Politics"
"Education Watch International"
"Political Correctness Watch"
"Greenie Watch"
Western Heart

BLOGS OCCASIONALLY UPDATED:

"Marx & Engels in their own words"
"A scripture blog"
"Recipes"
"Some memoirs"
To be continued ....
Coral reef compendium.
Queensland Police
Australian Police News
Paralipomena (3)
Of Interest
Dagmar Schellenberger
My alternative Wikipedia

BLOGS NO LONGER BEING UPDATED

"Food & Health Skeptic"
"Eye on Britain"
"Immigration Watch International".
"Leftists as Elitists"
Socialized Medicine
OF INTEREST (2)
QANTAS -- A dying octopus
BRIAN LEITER (Ladderman)
Obama Watch
Obama Watch (2)
Dissecting Leftism -- Large font site
Michael Darby
Paralipomena (2)
AGL -- A bumbling monster
Telstra/Bigpond follies
Optus bungling
Vodafrauds (vodafone)
Bank of Queensland blues

There are also two blogspot blogs which record what I think are my main recent articles here and here. Similar content can be more conveniently accessed via my subject-indexed list of short articles here or here (I rarely write long articles these days)

Some more useful links

Alt archives for "Dissecting Leftism" here or here
Longer Academic Papers
Johnray links
Academic home page
Academic Backup Page
General Backup
General Backup 2

Selected reading

MONOGRAPH ON LEFTISM

CONSERVATISM AS HERESY

Rightism defined
Leftist Churches
Leftist Racism
Fascism is Leftist
Hitler a socialist
Leftism is authoritarian
James on Leftism
Irbe on Leftism
Beltt on Leftism
Lakoff
Van Hiel
Sidanius
Kruglanski
Pyszczynski et al.

Cautionary blogs about big Australian organizations:

TELSTRA
OPTUS
AGL
Bank of Queensland
Queensland Police
Australian police news
QANTAS, a dying octopus

Main academic menu
Menu of recent writings
basic home page
Pictorial Home Page
Selected pictures from blogs (Backup here)
Another picture page (Rarely updated)

Note: If the link to one of my articles is not working, the article concerned can generally be viewed by prefixing to the filename the following:
http://pandora.nla.gov.au/pan/42197/20151027-0014/jonjayray.com/

OR: (After 2015)
https://web.archive.org/web/20160322114550/http://jonjayray.com/