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Trump's "leak" to Russia

Just my two cent's worth:  General McMaster is a most impressive man so his swingeing rejection of the "leak" story is persuasive.  The theologians of Leftism say that he did not answer the exact allegations but that is a stretch.  He was pretty comprehensive in what he said.

Be that as it may, the coverup is brilliant. Saying the information came from Israel is both believable and harmless.  Everybody knows that Israeli intelligence is brilliant and that Israel shares intelligence with the USA, so the whole thing has become: "Move along.  Nothing to see here".

And Trump can't win over Russia.  If he is hostile to Russia, he is a warmonger and if he is friendly to prominent Russians, he is "in cahoots" with Vlad the impaler.  And I have long ago lost count of the number of times the media have declared Trump "finished" over some minor matter.

UPDATE:  More media madness. The Media Research Center’s recent all-day study of CNN’s coverage found that they spent a whopping 13 hours and 27 minutes in just one day covering President Trump. Furthermore, a full 92% of the coverage was negative.


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Memo to President Trump – don't lose focus; after 100 days you are making a difference

Not that you would read it in the "attack Trump media" but the president is making good on some of his campaign promises, and it appears some of his early efforts are paying off.  But with forces against traditional America, and the Trump agenda, and the omnipresent attacks designed to derail his policies, this is a dangerous time for POTUS, and for America.

From an objective perspective, President Trump has done some pretty strong actions to protect the United States, and in the process has sent a very clear message to friends and foes alike. Of course the message came with a sonic boom, at least 50 of them in response to Syrian chemical weapons use. And I would bet some of the bad guys in Afghanistan who survived the MOAB still have a Mecca sized case of tinnitus.

As for China, the Donald's subtle announcement between dinner and dessert that he's just launched a bunch of missiles into Syria without having to get global consensus or provide the silly preamble of Obama and his useless lines in the sand. China immediately took notice, and the diplomat took an antacid. In case the cruise missiles and threatening NATO to step up or we step out weren't enough, MOAB (big bomb go boom) should have sent the message that the US is no longer being run by a globalist, a weakling, or an apologist. For those activities alone, Trump should get at least an A- for his first 100 days. And God forbid we ever get another ‘weaken the US, globalist POTUS.' A new sheriff is in town. Will that make us safer? Well at least the bad guys know there is more than 1 bullet in Trumps gun!

NATO

Speaking of NATO apparently some of our Euro allies may let the moths out of their wallets as well as start looking under the sofa cushions to start paying more towards their fair share of NATO.  Germany has lagged well behind several nations, and yet is financially capable of ponying up the cash.  The media will say those plans were in the works for years; referencing Obama years no doubt. If that's the case, Obama didn't have much to show for it! Call that a small potential win for Trump.  

Migration

Shortly after President Trump took the oath of office, there has been a demonstrable slowing in the flood of illegal aliens across our Southern border; it has been significant, important, and shock of shocks, underreported or misreported in the media. From a variety of sources the tide of folks crossing our borders has slowed exponentially from the days of Tammany Hall Obama, where every illegal was merely an undocumented Democrat. Let's be clear - we are an immigrant nation. But illegal aliens by definition are not immigrants, and the hijacking of language from authentic to obfuscating is what makes difficult a legitimate discussion of immigration policy.

No one wants to harm kids or separate families. But no one should be so naïve as to think the massive influx of mostly illiterate aliens is beneficial to the communities they enter (overcrowding of schools, with strains on police, public services, housing, emergency departments), unless you think the US is one big global ATM for any and all takers. Do some illegals contribute to society? Yes, of course. But communities have a culture, and a right to foster the social consciousness that multigenerational efforts have created. That's why we have managed immigration. No one can argue against the fact that many immigrants, from the Italians, Irish, Jews, Germans, Chinese, Polish, Armenians (and the list goes on) have made the US a better nation. And, they came in the front door, got jobs, learned the language, put their kids through school, and in a short time had contributed greatly to the national landscape.

That is the right way for immigration. Not a leave the back door open policy where everyone from the illiterate to the criminal - almost all of whom will go on welfare - come in, and become a massive dependency class, and place where drugs, crime and human trafficking are more likely to occur. Should we help people? Yes. Should we implement societal suicidal? No! Trump is correct - come in the front door where there is a big welcome mat with a generous nation awaiting you.

Gangs

From the perspective of a security professional, the targeting and arresting of members of MS13 is a strong first move! Many of my colleagues and I have argued for years that gangs such as MS 13 should be categorized as terrorist organizations, and treated accordingly, using the full weight of federal laws against them, and against all who support their activities, including politicians. We'll talk more on that in another article.

Gang activities are also enhanced by illegal alien migration, and often involve crossing state and international lines.

Having chaired a transnational crime council it is evident that large gangs in the United States are in fact terrorist support groups (criminals of the world uniting) as well as transnational corporations with ties to terrorism, non-state enterprises, and in some cases work with and for sovereign states, including our own politicians in the US. Gangs such as MS13 are merchants of death, dealing in human misery. Gangs earn their living, and it is often in the millions of dollars per week, from human trafficking, weapons, drugs, transportation of illegal goods, and running various forms of protection shakedowns to innocent businesspeople.

Trump is correct - gangs have to be weakened. Local police can't fully handle the load often because political cover is provided to gangs, or because the "R" (racist) card gets levied at them, in spite of the fact most residents in poor urban regions would be better off without gangs. Doubt me? Check out Chicago. Gangs and gang violence wouldn't exist if the local politicians weren't providing some political cover, and getting something in return.  And residents in those communities die because of it. Yet they still support the politicians. It boggles the mind! A federal response is needed. Go get them Trump!

Too early for a report card?

From a foreign policy and domestic security perspective, Trump is making progress. He must avoid losing focus because of the media, the attacks on his campaign, and the concerted efforts of democrats (and some republicans), professional protestor groups and others aligned to derail his America First promise to those who elected him.

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Is America becoming a nation of parasites -- people who want everything at the expense of others?

Americans and our society, by and large progressives of both parties and independents, have become a wilting, withering mass of weak, needy cry-babies, who have departed far and away from the strength of back, intellect and character of America's Founders, who created a system that none other has ever equaled. Rather than follow along the path that made America a strong, economically thriving and prosperous nation, many Americans, especially Millennials, pursue petty and paltry pleasures, as would a sloth and a glutton, and claim their slightest whim to be a "right".

Some things like food, shelter, clothing, water and healthcare are critical to our life, however, they are not "rights". Even if they were made rights, this would set in motion a confiscatory requirement to satisfy that right at the expense of others, much as America currently chafes against our current welfare system.

Just as many of us witnessed Tennessee's House Democrats release a collection of fifty bills called "The People's Bill of Rights" in February 2017, more and more, America hears a clamor from their progressive countrymen of all rank and file, for wants and desires to be provided through government funds, the taxpayers' dollars. Now, not only do many across the nation demand healthcare as a right, they also demand a $15 per hour minimum wage and free university educations among other items.

My good friend, retired U.S. Army Colonel Kurt Schlicter, editor for Townhall, tweeted back: "Guns are in the Bill of Rights, but they aren't one [according to Democrats]. The right to have one pay for your healthcare is not [in the Bill of Rights], but it's a right?"

In a study published by the Heritage Foundation, Robert Rector and Rachel Sheffield found  in the ranks of America's contemporary poor, that eighty percent have air-conditioning, fifty percent own a personal computer and can access the internet and two-thirds have cable TV. A household receiving $50,000 in welfare benefits is still considered poor, if its pre-welfare income falls below the poverty line, even though they are living, in many respects, better than the middle class of 1964.

According to Rector and Sheffield, our government has spent $22 trillion of U.S. taxpayer dollars fighting poverty, since 1964 and President Johnson's Great Society. The study also documented and charted $1 trillion spent annually on 90 means-tested welfare programs.

Over one hundred years of Marxist propaganda, the kind found in President Woodrow Wilson's treatise entitled 'Constitutional Government in the United States' and President Franklin Roosevelt's 1944 'Second Bill of Rights', seems to have done its mischief well. Arguing for corrupting the Constitution, Wilson saw it as a vessel to further the progressives' agenda, while FDR viewed it as a means to assure equality, "economic security" and the pursuit of happiness. Wilson spoke of our rights as "privilege", and FDR framed them as "political rights".

Our rights are God-given and natural, and they exist simultaneously among all people. The rights of free speech, freedom of religion, trial by jury, freedom from unreasonable searches and seizures -- to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness -- are inalienable rights;and, they are not privileges to be granted or rescinded, in the manner some past presidents, Obama included, would transform them. And in the pursuit of "true individual freedom" through "economic security", Roosevelt and Obama offered the antithesis of the right to one's own private property.

A true right does not impose any obligation on another. One's rights to free speech, religious liberty, self-defense and assembly. among others, impose no obligations on anyone else, except to allow each other to use these rights without interference.

Ayn Rand wrote in 1961 ['Man's Rights']; "If some men are entitled by right to the product of the work of others, it means that those others are deprived of rights and condemned to slave labor."

In the meantime, Americans rename privilege and benefits "their right", while ignoring their own misguided lifestyle and poor choices. Too many Americans spend more than they save, and too many prefer the government security blanket over the pride of one's own independence.

Some Americans bemoan the public corruption our country is suffering and the associated moral and constitutional crises. However, the country on the whole has failed to promote the values that would have prevented it. Corrupt leaders continue to advocate and implement measures that negatively impact businesses and families, that also limit individual liberty and true free-market capitalism, expanding government in the process.

Other Americans have become fanatics for their various causes. They are in the streets ironically, demanding their own demise, as they protest against their own self-determination and for ever more autocracy and authoritarianism. When they vote, they vote to enslave not only their fellow countrymen but themselves, however unwittingly. They accept the collectivization of rights, and soon they will accept the collectivization of property.

Sadly, this trend towards fascism, this malaise, has permeated the ranks of our country's future leaders, our children, and it has left them with false expectations. Outside family, churches and communities, the marketplace is the vanguard for moral truths in a free market society, and positively influencing the community through clear decent and moral principles, Judeo-Christian principles, improves businesses and betters people's lives. In asking the next generation to return to a true capitalist value-based society, America's conservatives ask for something that has not existed in their lifetime, but it is necessary to avoid self-induced destruction, and to ask is righteous.

Freedom and moral truths and the strength of men's will in a free society, unfettered by superfluous regulations, enabled America to succeed. They are the facilitators that fuel innovation, support free-thinkers and encourage people worldwide to become who they choose to be, not who the state demands they must be. When government guarantees equality and "economic security", it suppresses creativity, ingenuity and reward systems that enable people and nations to grow and prosper. Have Americans learned nothing from history?

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

Email me  here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or  here (Pictorial) or  here (Personal)

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The Trump Juggernaut and the Jerks

Since President Trump was inaugurated on January 20, 2017, a number of people have scrupulously monitored his accomplishments. They include Sean Hannity's producer Sweet Baby James, Gateway Pundit founder Jim Hoft, conservative commentator and former presidential candidate Gary Bauer, and Jeff Dunetz, creator of the blog The Lid, among others. The listing below was compiled by the above-mentioned people and represents many but not all of the non-stop accomplishments of President Trump--the juggernaut--during his first three months in office.

But the list does not elaborate on the accomplishments of the first three weeks of the fourth month, which include, among other things, the completion of his cabinet appointments, signing a cybersecurity executive order for a sweeping review of the federal government's digital vulnerabilities and the adoption of specific security practices; an unprecedented trade deal with China involving certain foods, natural gas, and biotech products; creating a voter-fraud commission to clean up the system; preparation for a devastating cyberattack against America's electric grid; and the firing of FBI Director James Comey.

Nor is there any mention of the hundreds if not thousands of personal phone calls the president has made to shakers and movers in the U.S. as well as world leaders.

If these accomplishments are not familiar, that's because 99 percent of the media--the jerks--are a de facto arm of the Democratic National Committee and the far-left fringe, and are so terminally distressed by the fact that Mr. Trump won the presidency that they obstinately refuse to report what by any objective standards is the news. This is because:

They've been pushing leftist values for well over a half century and are unable to admit that their anti-Trump, pro-Hillary message was an utter and complete failure.

They are part and parcel of the vast, contaminated, rancid, crooked, pay-for-play, corrupt swamp that candidate Trump promised to drain, and President Trump is now draining.

The man they mock--for his syntax and phrasing, style of governing, unpredictability, and so-called contradictions--has both confounded and trumped them at every turn.

This is why they remain fixated on the fairy tale of a Trump-Russian connection. They have nothing else--as in nothing!

LIGHTNING

After Pres. Trump's first month in office:

235,000 jobs were added to our economy in February, 100,000 more than expected; 40 percent fewer illegal immigrants crossed our border; $3 trillion was added to the stock market; Judge Gorsuch, a constitutionalist worthy of Justice Scalia's seat, was nominated to the Supreme Court.

In his first 100 days:

appointments of Vice President Mike Pence, pro-life conservative;
Justice Neil Gorsuch, an originalist committed to the Constitution;

Attorney General Jeff Sessions, staunch conservative committed to the rule of law;

Defense Secretary James Mattis, a warrior committed to restoring America's military;

Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly, a former general committed to border security;

Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, a former CEO who understands how the real world works;

Housing and Urban Development Secretary Dr. Ben Carson, a brain surgeon from a humble background;

Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price, a doctor who understands health care;

Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, an advocate of school choice and educational reform;

Energy Secretary Rick Perry, former governor of Texas and expert on the energy industry;

Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, former CEO who understands the business world;

EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt, a conservative committed to reining in big government;

U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley, a fearless advocate for American values;

U.S. Ambassador to Israel David Friedman, a true friend of Israel;

White House Chief Strategist Steve Bannon, a conservative warrior against crony capitalism and the left;

National Security Adviser Lt. Gen. H. R. McMaster, an accomplished military commander;

and White House Counterterrorism Adviser Sebastian Gorka, committed to defeating radical Islam.

President Trump:

restored the U.S. alliance with Israel and welcomed Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to the White House;

restored U.S. leadership in the world;

enforced red lines against the use of chemical weapons in Syria;
dropped the Mother of All Bombs (MOAB) on ISIS, sending a clear message to Iran and North Korea;

secured the Chinese cooperation in pressuring North Korea and the release of Aya Hijazi, American charity worker held in Egypt since 2014;

imposed a five-year ban on lobbying the government by former White House officials and a lifetime ban on lobbying for foreign governments by former White House officials;

repeatedly called out the liberal media for "fake news";

repealed Obama mandate that forced states to fund Planned Parenthood;

signed executive order reinstating Reagan policy against taxpayer funding of overseas abortions;

stopped U.S. funding to the United Nations Population Fund, which promotes abortions.

signed the following Executive Orders: to mandate a comprehensive plan to defeat ISIS, to begin construction of the border wall and hire additional 5,000 border agents, to order the Justice Department to cut funding to sanctuary cities, to institute a temporary federal hiring freeze, to institute a travel ban on individuals from a select number of countries embroiled in terrorist atrocities; to withdraw from the Transpacific Partnership trade deal, to mandate that two regulations will be repealed for every new one issued, to institute a comprehensive approach to illegal immigration and crime; et al.

THUNDER

Further:

Pres. Trump issued orders to seek increased penalties for crimes against police; to promote energy independence; to put American companies and workers first; to review federal regulations in education; to investigate national security impact of foreign steel imports; to require an audit of executive branch agencies;
to order every agency to create a regulatory reform task force; to roll back Obama environmental infringements on private property.

In addition:

Pres. Trump issued orders to prevent future taxpayer-funded bailouts; to reverse Obama restrictions on offshore energy development; for a major review of national monument designations on federal lands; to establish a new office to reform the Veterans Administration bureaucracy; to address concerns of Rural America; to establish a White House Initiative on historically Black Colleges and Universities; to create a commission on drug addiction and the opioid crisis; to combat transnational criminal organizations and international trafficking; to repeal the following:

Obama's transgender public school bathroom mandate, Obama's "Stream Protection Rule" that has hurt the coal industry, Obama's Social Security Administration's gun ban, Obama's Labor "blacklisting" rule with $500 million in regulatory costs, Obama's Interior rule that restricted state and local authority in land use decisions, Obama's unfunded education mandate that created new standards for teachers, Obama's education rule that undermined state and local control, Obama's regulation that prevented drug testing for unemployment compensation, Obama's rule that banned some hunting in Alaska, Obama's regulation that created vastly more paperwork and reporting of worker injuries,  Obama's regulations on Internet Service Providers, Obama's rule that allowed states to force workers into government-run savings plans, and the Dodd-Frank regulations that disadvantaged domestic companies.

Going further:

Pres. Trump Imposed sanctions on Iran for its ballistic missile violations and human rights violations; Ordered review of the Iranian nuclear deal; Produced a budget that cut $54 billion from bloated federal bureaucracies, that would eliminate 50 programs and more than 3,000 federal jobs, and that boosted spending for defense, homeland security and veterans; produced a tax-reform plan that simplifies the tax code and reduces taxes for businesses and families; Approved construction of the Keystone XL pipeline and the Dakota Access pipeline; shut down illegal  immigrant advocacy program at Department of Justice; Established Victims of Immigration Crime Engagement (VOICE) office; Reduced illegal immigration at the border by 61 percent;
Called for "major investigation" of voter fraud led by Vice President Mike Pence; Called for repeal of the Johnson Amendment, which limits free speech of pastors and churches; Called for 50 percent cut in funding to the United Nations; supported English as official language by dropping Spanish version of the White House website; Purged "climate change" alarmism from White House website; Returned bust of Winston Churchill to the Oval Office;
Succeeded in getting NATO nations to boost defense spending by $10 billion; Halted $180 billion in Obama regulations; Signed legislation expanding private healthcare options for veterans;
Relaxed Rules of Engagement in the fight against ISIS; Imposed sanctions on Venezuelan vice president for international drug trafficking.

UP, UP & AWAY

At this early point:

Consumer confidence is the highest in 17 years; Small business confidence highest in 11 years; Stock market is up 10 percent since inauguration, up 15 percent since election; Exxon Mobil announced $20 billion-45,000 job expansion in U.S.; Charter Communications announced $25 billion expansion, creating 20,000 jobs in U.S.; Accenture announced $1.4 billion expansion, creating 15,000 jobs in U.S.; Intel announced $7 billion expansion, creating 10,000 jobs in the U.S. Pres. Trump ordered renegotiation of North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) with Canada and Mexico; Named former Congressman Scott Garrett, an outspoken critic of the Export-Import Bank to the bank's Board of Directors

Today, U.S. unemployment is at its lowest level since 1988!  The U.S. debt decreased by $100 billion during Pres. Trump's first hundred days; the U.S. Manufacturing Index soared to a 33-year high! In the first month alone, he added 298,000 jobs; housing sales are off the charts right now...in 2011, the average time a house was on the market was 84 days, now, it's just 45 days; illegal immigration is down 67% since the Inauguration; NATO announced Allied spending is up $10 billion.

This Mt. Everest of accomplishments belongs to a man who is straight out of central casting. Every day, he looks like a million dollars and is stunningly successful in his dealings with everyone from heads of state to manual laborers to ardent fans to entrenched skeptics. Every day, he brings both ebullience and laser-like focus to a job he clearly relishes, displays admirable courage in making hard choices, and is zooming along at warp speed to Make America Great Again!

All this while never hesitating to take on the sacred cows of the leftist jerks among us --political correctness and global warming rank high--and to illuminate the public about the widespread scourge of the fake news and fake polls that those same leftist jerks tried but failed to foist upon us in the November election.

It was easy for the media when all they had to do was pretend that 94-million unemployed citizens, a weakened military, alienated allies, a genocidal Iran deal, and unprecedented escalation of Muslim Brotherhood operatives implanted in the highest reaches of our government, and an increase in the national debt by $9 trillion to almost $20 trillion, were nothing to worry about--all while they asked the guy in the Oval Office what his favorite ice-cream flavor was!

Now there's a grown-up in charge and the children among us (Democrats, leftists, progressives, whatever they're calling themselves these days) are as ineffectual--indeed, impotent--as they were when Donald J. Trump announced for the presidency in June of 2015.

Wanna see Democrats and media hacks weep? Hand them this list!

SOURCE

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

Email me  here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or  here (Pictorial) or  here (Personal)

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The debt

Under Obama, the quantity of U.S. dollars on issue grew exponentially. If all holders of dollars tried to spend them, however, the result would not be pretty. The quantity of goods and services available would remain largely unaltered but with trillions of dollars competing to buy them, the value of a dollar would fall dramatically -- as far as one cent in terms of today's purchasing power. Virtually all savings would be wiped out -- as has happened in many places in the past, Weimar Germany, modern Venezuela etc.

So the USA is essentially bankrupt. It cannot give value for what it owes. Fortunately, all that huge overhang of money is at present stashed in financial institutions and overseas debt, with China being a big holder of U.S. dollars, so the money is not being spent and the buying power of the dollars has remained fairly stable.

China, however saw some years ago what was happening and has taken steps to rid itself of its possibly worthless dollars. It resists taking in any new dollars and has gone on a worldwide spending spree to unload the dollars it already holds. It is buying up real estate, farmland and profitable companies worldwide. Basically the Chinese government encourages its companies and people to buy up anything overseas that moves and some things that don't.

What could happen, however, is that all that money locked away in banks and company reserves could start to be spent. Mr Trump has engendered a feeling of optimism in business and many businesses are going to feel encouraged enough to start expanding. And they will go to the banks and make good cases for borrowing. And the banks will see what looks like good uses for their money. They will see that they could start to earn interest on their otherwise unused money. So they will lend on the applications to them and business will get a big new pile of money in their hands. And what will business do with that pile of money? Spend it!

And then comes the crunch, a whole heap of new money will be added to the money already in circulation and that will greatly increase the demand for goods and services. But the available goods and services will not increase significantly so the only way anybody can now grab what is available will be to offer more money for it. Prices will soar and the buying power of everybody's dollar will drop. America will have roaring inflation and all that money you spent years saving will become near-worthless.  What you can buy today for $100.00 will in future cost you $1,000.00 or more. You will have been comprehensivey robbed of your savings. You will suddenly be poor.

What happens then is the question. What normally happens in response to roaring inflation is that the existing currency is scrapped and new money is issued. You might get one new dollar for a million old dollars. America will have walked away from its debts. The nation will be effectively bankrupt

Is that going to happen? I am not alone in expecting it. All the gold bugs expect it and I see that some wiseheads expect it soon. Below is an email just received:

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

Dear Reader,

I just got wind that the people in charge of "the Fed" are scrambling to keep America's money system alive...

According to my source, Fed members just wrapped up a special "behind-closed-doors" meeting to discuss one of the most dramatic changes to the U.S. dollar in the last 100 years.

A change that not only affects how we spend, save, and earn...

But that will also transform the very nature of "money" itself.

To uncover the story, I flew down to Aspen, Colorado to meet with NY Times Best-Selling author, currency expert and multi-millionaire speculator Doug Casey.

Casey is one of the most connected men in the financial world.

He was Bill Clinton's classmate at Georgetown... He's debated presidential candidates... He's met with former Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan... And he's also been invited by the leaders of twelve different countries to discuss monetary reform.

Some even credit Casey with introducing the concept of "economic citizenship," where individuals can become citizens of a country simply by making an investment.

In my interview with Casey, you'll hear his warning to Americans regarding the consequences of a new potential money plan by the Fed that could start in the next 6 months.

You'll also hear the four steps he's personally taking today to prepare himself and protect his savings.

To watch my exclusive interview with Casey, click here.

Regards,

Bob Irish
Retirement Insider

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

How should the government handle the problem when it comes?

With close co-operation between Congress and the administration, the crisis could in fact be handled very constructively -- so should be handled while one party controls both the administration and the legislature, as it does at the moment.

The first step should be a total abolition of the old currency, meaning that debts owed in that currency cease to exist. People laboring under student debt, people who have borrowed big to buy a house and businesses labouring under huge borrowings would suddenly find themselves debt free and owing nobody anything. A great cry of joy would arise across the fruited plain.

Cities and states owing huge retirement benefits extorted by strong labor unions would also feel their budgets freed up for urgent roadworks etc. The retired unionists would have to get by with social security, like everybody else.

As soon as the old currency is abolished a new currency should be issued, called (say) "Federal Notes", abbreviated as "Feds". And the distribution of the new money could be used first and foremost to benefit the little guy. All dollar savings deposits in the banks could be transformed into deposits of Feds on a one-to-one basis up to a maximum of 5 million. That should keep 95% of the population happy immediately.

Businesses actually making things like cars and machinery could be given Feds to the value of 6 months of their turnover. Service business are not usually very capital intensive so could get the equivalent of one month's turnover. Their ongoing revenues should keep them going after that. Freed of debt, American business should roar ahead.

So who would be the losers? Basically China and Wall St. And I can't see many Americans crying over that. Wall Street is basically a parasitic tumor on American productivity anyway so would hopefully die out at that point. And China has its own currency so is in no way dependent on U.S. dollars.

It would all generate lots of uproar to be dealt with so everybody would be in agreement that such a disruption should never be repeated. People would agree that the cause of Obama's excess money issue should be addressed. And the cause is plain: The great expansion of the Federal bureaucracy under Obama. Obama spent three dollars for every two he raised in taxes. And he mostly spent it on useless bureaucrats whose main job was to hold America back in various ways.

So the bureaucracy would have to be drastically trimmed. And there is an easy way to do that. All Federal departments that overlap with State government departments could be abolished. There are extensive State departments dealing with the environment, healthcare, education etc so there is no need for Federal activity in such fields. In effect America would be re-Federalized, with most functions going to the States. And that is how America was during its great period of growth so nobody could plausibly say that that would not work. America would be returning to its healthy roots instead of becoming just another version of a corrupt and overweening European state.

And such a big shrinkage could enable useful Federal tax cuts. Company taxes and death taxes could be abolished, freeing up big constructive energies. The whole world would want to set up business in America, with the result that all those unemployed Federal bureaucrats could get jobs doing something useful.

So there would be something for just about everyone. Even the Democrats might like to see the worker liberated from his debts -- if they do really still care about the worker. And the Left worldwide has traditionally been hostile to Wall St.  Again, however, we could not rely on the Democrats for that. Big Wall St contributions to their campaign coffers seem to have "bought" just about all of them by now.

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Trump presses more countries take back U.S. deportees in immigration success

Between cajoling, threats and actual punishments, Homeland Security has managed to drastically cut the number of countries that habitually refuse to take back immigrants whom the U.S. is trying to deport, officials said Tuesday, notching an early immigration success for President Trump.

The number of recalcitrant countries has dropped from 20 to 12 over the months since the presidential election, and some longtime offenders — including Iraq and Somalia — have earned their way off the naughty list. The list of countries is the shortest this decade.

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials couldn’t immediately say how many people have been deported because of the changes, but Somalia has taken back 259 just seven months into the fiscal year. That is far more than the 198 it took back in all of 2016 and the 17 it took in 2015.

Marlen Pineiro, assistant director for removal operations at ICE, said the efforts began under the Obama administration but that Mr. Trump has created a determined focus at the Homeland Security and State departments, which are both involved in speeding up deportations.

“The wind being at our wings is really driving us forward,” she said.

In many cases, that means criminals who otherwise would have been released onto the streets are now being sent to their home countries.


Recalcitrant countries have long been among the serious issues that didn’t get much attention, though the consequences can be extreme. In one notorious case, Haiti refused to take back an illegal immigrant who had served time for attempted murder, and U.S. officials were forced to release him. He killed a young woman in Connecticut just months after his release.

Another illegal immigrant, Thong Vang, was released from prison in 2014 after serving time for rape convictions, and his home country of Laos refused to take him back. He was sent to a California prison last year and shot two guards, police said.

Armed with those kinds of cases, Mr. Trump made recalcitrant countries a part of his presidential campaign. He vowed to begin putting pressure on countries to take back their deportees.

One of his first executive orders instructed Homeland Security to take steps to pressure other countries, including potentially stopping the issuance of visas to governments that refuse to cooperate.

Jessica Vaughan, policy studies director at the Center for Immigration Studies, said Mr. Trump and his Homeland Security Department should get most of the credit for the changes for ramping up pressure beyond the diplomatic “demarche” letters that the Obama administration used.

“On matters like this, the Trump administration is speaking not so softly and waving the sharp stick of visa sanctions,” she said. “That’s a lot more effective than apologetically delivered demarches.”

Still on the naughty list are Cuba and China — the two biggest offenders over the years. As of last year, the U.S. was trying to deport some 35,000 Cubans with criminal records. The number of criminal migrants awaiting deportation to China stood at 1,900.

Even there, progress is being made, Ms. Piniero said. After the Obama administration’s diplomatic outreach, Cuba signed a deal to begin taking back any new migrants — though it is still reluctant to eat into the backlog.

“They are accepting all the removals under the joint statement that have come in after Jan. 12,” Ms. Piniero said.

China remains a tougher situation, despite Mr. Trump’s efforts to advance relations with Chinese President Xi Jinping.
“We are working on China. We’re preparing our recommendations,” Ms. Piniero said.

Other countries still on the recalcitrant list are Burma, Cambodia, Eritrea, Guinea, Iran, Laos, Morocco, South Sudan and Vietnam. Hong Kong was added into the list this month because its repatriation policy is controlled by China.

The countries that dropped off the list, in addition to Somalia and Iraq, were Afghanistan, Algeria, Burkina Faso, the Gambia, Mali, Senegal and Sierra Leone. Iraq earned its way off the list after it promised better cooperation in the wake of Mr. Trump’s first extreme vetting executive order.

SOURCE

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

Email me  here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or  here (Pictorial) or  here (Personal)

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Even in the West, Leftist hate is becoming very dangerous

Icelandic Leftist Poisons Robert Spencer/i>

Last Thursday, I gave a lecture on the jihad threat at the Grand Hotel in Reykjavik, Iceland. Shortly thereafter, a young Icelandic Leftist registered his disapproval of what I said by poisoning me.

It happened after the event, when my security chief, the organizers of the event, and Jihad Watch writer Christine Williams, who had also been invited to speak, went with me to a local restaurant to celebrate the success of the evening.

At this crowded Reykjavik establishment, I was quickly recognized. A young Icelander called me by name, shook my hand, and said he was a big fan. Shortly after that, another citizen of that famously genteel and courteous land also called me by name, shook my hand, and said “F**k you.”

We took that marvelous Icelandic greeting as a cue to leave. But the damage had already been done. About fifteen minutes later, when I got back in my hotel room, I began to feel numbness in my face, hands, and feet. I began trembling and vomiting. My heart was racing dangerously. I spent the night in a Reykjavik hospital.

What had happened quickly became clear, and was soon confirmed by a hospital test: one of these local Icelanders who had approached me (probably the one who said he was a big fan, as he was much closer to me than the “F**k you” guy) had dropped drugs into my drink. I wasn’t and am not on any other medication, and so there wasn’t any other explanation of how these things had gotten into my bloodstream.

For several days thereafter I was ill, but I did get to Reykjavik’s police station and gave them a bigger case than they have seen in good awhile. The police official with whom I spoke took immediate steps to identify and locate the principal suspects and obtain the restaurant’s surveillance video.

Iceland is a small country. Everyone knows everyone else. And so as it happened, I was quickly able to discover the identity, phone number, and Facebook page of the primary suspect, the young man who claimed he was a “big fan.” I don’t intend to call him.  Icelandic police will be contacting him soon enough, if they haven’t done so already.

However, I did look at his Facebook page, and as I expected, I saw nothing that might indicate that he really was a “big fan” of my work, or that he held any views out of the mainstream -- which is, courtesy of Iceland’s political and media elites, dominated entirely by the Left.

The most likely scenario is that this young man, or whoever drugged me, heard that a notorious “racist” was coming to Reykjavik, by chance saw me in the restaurant, and decided to teach me a lesson with some of the illegal drugs that are as plentiful in Reykjavik as they are anywhere else.

I should have seen it coming. After all, my visit had triggered a firestorm of abuse in the Icelandic press, all based on American Leftist talking points. Every story about my visit had the same elements: the notice that the SPLC claims that I purvey “hate speech,” which is a subjective judgment used to shut down dissent from the establishment line; the fact that I am banned from Britain, with no mention of the key detail that I was banned for saying that Islam has doctrines of violence (which is like being banned for saying water is wet) and for the crime of supporting Israel; and the false claim that I incited the Norwegian mass murderer Anders Breivik to kill (in reality, I’m no more responsible for Breivik’s murders than the Beatles are for Charles Manson’s). After the event, one article even featured a big photo of Breivik, but quoted nary a thing I said that evening.

Not a single Icelandic media outlet that ran a story about my coming or about the event itself contacted me for comment, much less for rebuttal to the charges they made against me. One TV station did air an interview with me in which the interviewer refused to believe that I did not feel responsible for the Breivik murders, and asked me about them again and again.

After the event, articles in the Icelandic press included quotes from the 50 protesters, but none included even a single quotation or description of anything we had actually said. None quoted any of the 500 brave Icelanders who braved the hatred of the politically correct elites to come to the Grand Hotel to hear me and Ms. Williams – a staggeringly large number in a country of 300,000 people.

It’s clear: jihad and Islamization are not subjects that Icelandic politicians and media opinion-makers want Icelanders to discuss. That’s all the more reason why it must be discussed.

But meanwhile, I learned my lesson. The lesson I learned was that media demonization of those who dissent from the Leftist line is direct incitement to violence. By portraying me and others who raise legitimate questions about jihad terror and Sharia oppression as racist, bigoted Islamophobes, without allowing us a fair hearing, the media in Iceland and elsewhere in the West is actively endangering those who dare to dissent. The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), the Center for American Progress and the rest who devote so much money, time and attention to demonizing “Islamophobes” are painting huge targets on our backs.

Of course, they think they’re doing something noble. Not only does the Left fill those whom it brainwashes with hate, but it does so while portraying its enemies as the hatemongers, such that violent Leftists such as the young man who drugged me feel righteous even as they victimize and brutalize conservatives.

There is no doubt about it: I’m certain that whoever poisoned me in Iceland went away feeling happy over what he had done. If he told anyone what he did, I’m sure he was hailed as a hero. I’m also aware that many who read this will be thrilled at the fact that I became seriously ill. That in itself is a sign of how degenerate and evil the Left has become.

All over the West, as Leftist students riot and physically menace conservative speakers and Leftist spokesmen indulge in the most hysterical rhetoric to defame their foes, politicians cower in fear and decline to discuss these issues, only ensuring that the problems I identified when I spoke in Reykjavik will continue to grow in Iceland and elsewhere.

As they were rising to power in Germany, the Nazis indoctrinated their young followers with the same message: those who oppose us are evil. Those who brutalize them are doing a great thing. The Left’s demonization of its opponents today will lead to exactly the same thing. It already has for me, in beautiful Reykjavik.

SOURCE

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Saudis pump $200bn into rust belt in new American alliance

This could be for real.  It would help the Saudis to reduce their stash of greenbacks

Saudi Arabia is offering President Trump investment in America’s decaying infrastructure and industry worth tens of billions of dollars as a sweetener for arms deals and better relations between the two countries.

Mohammed bin Salman, the deputy crown prince and in effect the prime minister, made the offer during a visit to Washington this year, sources said. Mr Trump is hoping that the money will be invested in the “rust belt” states whose support helped to propel him to the White House.

Estimates of the sums involved range from $40 billion to $200 billion — in addition to current and future arms deals valued at $300 billion, which will be announced during Mr Trump’s visit to Saudi Arabia, which starts today.

SOURCE

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Trump: 'Walls Work. Just Ask Israel'

In a joint press conference with Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos, President Donald Trump issued a short direct answer to whether his proposal to build a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border will be a positive step towards stopping the flow of drugs across the border - "Walls work. Just ask Israel."

Trump's response followed that of Santos, who said, "I believe that the best way to fight the drug trafficking is by collaborating."

"This is not a problem of Colombia only or a problem of the United States only. It's a world problem, and we have to all work together. We declared the war on drugs 40 years ago. The world declared war on drugs, and it's a war that had not been won, so we must be more effective and more efficient," Santos said.

Santos said the U.S. and Colombia must work together to fight drug trafficking. He said his country has already made great strides in this effort - destroying 22,000 laboratories in the Colombian jungles and seizing cocaine in transit.

"We have destroyed 22,000 laboratories  in the Colombian jungles, seizing the cocaine in the transit. We have seized record amounts of tons last year, and this year, we're doing even better than last year. So by working together, we can be much more effective, and that is a commitment we just made or ratified this afternoon," Santos said.

"That was a long and very diplomatic answer to your question," Trump said. "I will say a little bit shorter:  Walls work. Just ask Israel. They work. Believe me, they work, and we have no choice."

SOURCE

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Chris Brand

Many readers here enjoyed the explosions of political incorrectnes that came once a week from Chris Brand.  Sadly, some months ago he had a major health crisis and has been in hospital  ever since.  Below is the latest bulletin on his health from Dr. Fang, his art-historian wife:

"After having stayed and 'offered much blood, toil, tears and sweat' in the Royal Infirmary for half a year, Chris has just moved in St Margarets Care Home, just near Mayfield which is 15 minutes' walk from our home. I have viewed so many nursing homes. This is the one that I immediately liked when I went in (feeling like 'love at the first sight'). The room he is staying is at the middle floor which catches plenty of sunshine. Through a large window, he could see children playing around in the nursery if looking out. The staff seems very kind, thoughtful, and attentive. It's a nice place for a respite.

So far, having had the peg tube's help for nearly two weeks, he is able to absorb good nutrition. I am glad to say that he now gains some weight and looks a little brighter (compare with the condition of recent months). Eating and drinking by mouth is not entirely forbidden. At least he can still have some degree of soft food and drinks (apparently, he dislikes the thickened drinks and calls it as 'mud'.). I have been told that his liver condition has improved and in one month's time, the consultant will discuss the possibility of the procedure "shrinking the TIPS" (reducing his confusion). We will wait and see....

Having been worried about Chris, I use spare time to continue writing my column articles every month and doing some book projects. Now I am listening to Wagner's Tristan und Isolde and writing to you both. Content and emotional, I am happy in a way in which we are moving on to the next stage.

Since thinking Chris is now settled in nice surroundings (St Margarets') and knowing his birthday is coming (the 1st of June), I mentioned to his friend Henry (an economic historian who Paul has met) about the idea of throwing a party for Chris. Henry immediately reminded me of "Glorious June" (the battle in 1794 [during which the Royal Navy destroyed the navy of revolutionary France]) whereas I was thinking about a famous painting "Flaming June" (Frederic Leighton's)."


Flaming June

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

Email me  here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or  here (Pictorial) or  here (Personal)

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When the mask comes off the evil that is Leftism: Stalin's heirs are among us

This happened in Houston when I was visiting.

It was the night after Donald Trump had won the general election, there were like I knew was going to happen be protests in the streets. I didn't mind people have a right to voice there opinion its in the constitution, what happened though was to far. The people who were protesting were blocking the streets at a generallyy busy time so there were some cars trying to go home from work and they had to go though the crowd. The people were yelling and waving signs normally when things went bad, a man around his late twenties was in his pickup trying to pass through the crowd. About half way someone yelled something “Hey, that dudes a Trump supporter!” he had a bumper sticker that said make America great again. The crowd turned and started approaching the car.

The people started banging on the windows calling him a racist and a bigot, then one guy started hitting his car with a bat. He dented his bumper and continued to hit it, then things got crazy they opened his door and pulled him out. That's when I noticed something, he was a veteran. He was wearing a camp jacket and had I'm pretty sure a Purple Heart on. They then began to beat him up, the veteran, who served his country. They didn't hit him with the bat or in the face but they were hurting him. That's when some guy. From. The side started yelling to stop.

The man was clearly a Chinese immigrant, he had a really strong accent. He started yelling saying his kids were trying to sleep or something, then somebody yelled from the mod “Go back to Beijing you yellow fuck!”. The bad part was that they were protesting racism and saying lets protect our veterans. They clearly didn't mean it, the man had crawled from his car and was getting away. The mod focused away from him and onto his car.

They bena to smash all the windows and dent it, then they started looting it. The guy didn't seem to have much money no it wasn't really an expensive car. The veteran who served his country, came back broke, and then was beaten up by people who said they wanted to “help” the country.

This shit pisses me off honestly, all these young brats think theyre the difference. That there the generation to stop war, poverty, racism. Yet they don't try to do shit, they think there helping by going on social media rants. This is not about politics, this is about our society.

SOURCE

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Thanks to deregulation, Trump is starting to drain the swamp

Recent headlines out of Washington paint a depressing picture. Of course, this isn't anything new, just different names and reversed roles. However there is something different going on these days and Americans ought to look beyond the salacious headlines. If they do, they'll see swamp water beginning to swirl down the drain, as the Trump administration and Congress are making historic progress against decades of job-killing regulations.

The Code of Federal Regulations is currently well more than 175,000 pages long. To put that in perspective, if the pages in the CFR were laid out end-to-end, it would stretch nearly 25 miles. Just imagine how long it would take to read each page of legalese.

Since the 1930s, thousands of new rules and pages have been added to the Code of Federal Regulation from the annual Federal Registers. These documents contain all sorts of notices, rules, and other announcements from the endless list of three-letter agencies in the federal government, but the Federal Register is generally regarded as a good barometer for how busy regulators have been creating new rules to micromanage Americans' lives and businesses each year.

Last year, the Federal Register was a staggering 95,894 pages, the longest it has ever been. In fact, the Obama administration holds the record for the top four page counts and seven out of the top 10, with the remaining three belonging to President George W. Bush. In short, the pace of new regulations has been accelerating.

It is counterintuitive that as Americans live longer and safer lives the pace and number of regulations would increase, but I digress.

This year however, the change is dramatic. The Federal Register, which also includes notices of deregulation, currently stands at just more than 20,000 pages—putting it on track for 62,000 pages by year's end. While still a staggering amount of needless red tape, that page count stands in stark contrast to the historical trend.

The last time it was that low? Twenty-five years ago in 1992. We've had balanced budgets more recently than that!

The Trump administration and Congress are on an unprecedented, and sorely needed, deregulatory push. In five months, Congress has invoked the Congressional Review Act more than a dozen times to eliminate rules passed in the twilight of the Obama administration. The CRA had been used only once by all previous Congresses.

The Trump administration continues to do its part by freezing regulations, tying new rules to the elimination of existing ones, and ordering all agencies to take a good hard look at the stack of rules they've imposed on the American people and come up with a way to shorten and lighten it.

Of course, some are decrying these efforts as reckless. I'd challenge them to look at our founding documents. The Constitution makes clear that the power to legislate resides with Congress and the power to adjudicate rests with the courts. Yet we have dozens of agencies that have been acting like legislators, judges, juries, and executioners for decades with little to no oversight.

Look at the blighted cities of the Midwest and Appalachia, where once-thriving industries have been shuttered and millions of workers have been displaced not by the market, but by diktats from Washington.

Look to your imagination. Imagine what world-changing inventions, businesses, and entrepreneurs have never even had the chance because they simply couldn't afford to climb America's mountain of regulations while at the same time pursue their dreams and ideas.

Economic studies peg the cumulative cost of federal regulation alone at nearly $2 trillion every year. If the amount of money we spend complying with Washington's rules were its own national economy, it would be the ninth-largest economy in the world, just below India and above Russia. And none of this includes the forgone value of entrepreneurs, inventions, and businesses smothered before their inception.

There's still a long way to go. Congress needs to reassert its legislative authority and stop delegating so much power to the executive branch. Thousands of outdated, duplicative, and burdensome regulations still await review. However, for the first time in a long time, there is actual evidence to hope for beneficial change in Washington.

SOURCE

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Here’s What Former Spooks Say About The ‘Damage Assessment’ On Trump’s Russia Disclosures

President Donald Trump is under fire for allegedly “leaking” classified information to the Russians, but former intelligence officials downplayed the damage caused by the president’s revelations in interviews with The Daily Caller News Foundation and other outlets.

The intelligence community will not conduct a damage assessment, Foreign Policy reported Tuesday, arguing, “Authorized or not, disclosures of classified intelligence are usually examined, [but] not this time.”

“I do not think you would do a damage assessment, certainly not for a president,” Joseph Wippl, a former CIA officer, told TheDCNF, “There would certainly never be a damage assessment if the president passed information like that.”

Under the provisions of the Intelligence Community Directive 732, when there is an “unauthorized disclosure or compromise of classified national intelligence,” a damage assessment to “evaluate actual or potential damage” should be conducted, but “the president has the ultimate classification authority,” former CIA analyst Fred Fleitz told TheDCNF. “There is nothing to assess here … This is not an unauthorized disclosure,” he added.

“I do not see what Trump gave as a leak,” Air Force Colonel James Waurishuk, a former senior intelligence officer, told TheDCNF. “That is part of a foreign policy capability and process to share information with other countries for whatever reason.”

He also suggested that another reason the intelligence community may not be carrying out reviews and damage assessments is that “there is no reason to do that because there was really no damage done.”

“The only damage assessments I know of is when there has been some kind of compromise for an operation,” he further explained.

TheDCNF reached out to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) and the CIA, but neither were willing to comment on whether or not a damage assessment is in the works. Three Democratic senators sent a letter Thursday to ODNI requesting a review or a damage assessment. Former intelligence officials, however, revealed that it would be unusual to conduct a damage assessment for presidential revelations.

Trump does appear to have either intentionally or unintentionally shared classified information with Russian officials, specifically the general nature of an ISIS plot and the town in which the plot originated. However, the media with the help of leakers, published not only the information the president divulged but additional sensitive information as well.

For instance, The New York Times revealed that the close ally which provided the information Trump shared is Israel. Multiple outlets exposed that the ISIS terror plot was one to bring down a commercial airliner with an advanced laptop bomb, and CBS News reported the weapons were built and tested at Mosul University.

The Washington Post, filled in by anonymous officials, was the first to claim that Trump “leaked” classified information.

The various media reports indicate that government officials revealed highly-classified information to the press — information that was then published for the world to see. Multiple media outlets revealed sensitive information while simultaneously criticizing the president for putting national security at risk.

“I think a lot of things are political these days,” Wippl offered as an explanation for the leaks to the media.

“The left is trying to hurt the president,” Fleitz said. “These people committed felonies. They must be identified and prosecuted,” he explained in a recent article, referring to the leakers in the government who are running to the press.

“It damages our national security interests when officials feel compelled to leak classified information in a misguided effort to protect it,” argued former CIA officer Rolf Mowatt-Larssen, “In this regard, the damage caused by leaks and the resulting media speculation may well be more damaging than the original disclosure by President Trump.”

There was a lot of shock and awe surrounding the president’s revelations, but disclosures of sensitive or classified information, for one reason or another, are quite common.

“A lot of things have been leaked in the past because it was politically expedient for us to do it,” explained Wippl. “I’ve never heard of a damage assessment being rendered on that.”

“The Obama administration couldn’t keep anything a secret,” Fleitz said, pointing to the outing of a CIA station chief to the press, the Stuxnet revelations, and the leaked details of the Osama bin Laden raids.

While it is unclear why Trump disclosed the information, when it comes to terror plots, there is a clear and justifiable reason to inform other countries, even our adversaries, of potential threats.

Michael Hayden, a former director of the NSA and the CIA and a four-star general, told ABC News recently that the U.S has “a responsibility to warn” foreign countries if there is a threat of “impending danger for someone else, even if we didn’t like the someone else.” He added that Trump’s action was not a crime because declassification authority “is totally within his purview.”

“When dealing with laptops that may be turned into bombs, we don’t want any airliner blown out of the sky. We don’t care if its a Syrian airliner or an Iranian airliner. There’s innocent people on board, and you do everything you can to keep that from happening,” said Waurishuk. “That’s why, perhaps, there is no need to do a damage report.”

“If the president felt moved to divulge this information to the Russians out of personal concern for the elevated threats to civil aviation globally, it should be acknowledged that this is a laudable objective,” Mowatt-Larssen explained. “The president’s hand would have been strengthened if he had relied on coordinated, carefully crafted language from the intelligence community that conveyed the urgency of the threat, while doing everything necessary to protect sources and methods.”

More HERE

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

Email me  here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or  here (Pictorial) or  here (Personal)

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Trump and Israel: Their enemies

The United States is sailing in uncharted waters today as the intelligence-security community wages an all-but-declared rebellion against President Donald Trump.

Deputy Attorney-General Rod Rosenstein’s decision on Wednesday to appoint former FBI director Robert Mueller to serve as a special counsel charged with investigating allegations of “any links and/or coordination between the Russian government and individuals associated with the campaign of President Donald Trump,” is the latest and so far most significant development in this grave saga.

Who are the people seeking to unseat Trump? This week we learned that the powers at play are deeply familiar. Trump’s nameless opponents are some of Israel’s greatest antagonists in the US security establishment.

This reality was exposed this week with intelligence leaks related to Trump’s meeting with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov. To understand what happened, let’s start with the facts that are undisputed about that meeting.

The main thing that is not in dispute is that during his meeting with Lavrov, Trump discussed Islamic State’s plan to blow up passenger flights with bombs hidden in laptop computers.

It’s hard to find fault with Trump’s actions. First of all, the ISIS plot has been public knowledge for several weeks.

Second, the Russians are enemies of ISIS. Moreover, Russia has a specific interest in diminishing ISIS’s capacity to harm civilian air traffic. In October 2015, ISIS terrorists in Egypt downed a Moscow-bound jetliner, killing all 254 people on board with a bomb smuggled on board in a soda can.

And now on to the issues that are in dispute.

Hours after the Trump-Lavrov meeting, The Washington Post reported that in sharing information about ISIS’s plans, Trump exposed intelligence sources and methods to Russia and in so doing, he imperiled ongoing intelligence operations carried out by a foreign government.

The next day, The New York Times reported that the sources and methods involved were Israeli. In sharing information about the ISIS plot with Lavrov, the media reported, Trump endangered Israel.

There are two problems with this narrative.

First, Trump’s National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster insisted that there was no way that Trump could have exposed sources and methods, because he didn’t know where the information on the ISIS plot that he discussed with Lavrov originated.

Second, if McMaster’s version is true – and it’s hard to imagine that McMaster would effectively say that his boss is an ignoramus if it weren’t true – then the people who harmed Israel’s security were the leakers, not Trump.

Now who are these leakers? According to the Washington Post, the leakers are members of the US intelligence community and former members of the US intelligence community, (the latter, presumably were political appointees in senior intelligence positions during the Obama administration who resigned when Trump came into office).

Israel is no stranger to this sort of operation. Throughout the Obama administration, US officials illegally leaked top secret information about Israeli operations to the media.

In 2010, a senior defense source exposed the Stuxnet computer worm to the New York Times. Stuxnet was reportedly a cyber weapon developed jointly by the US and Israel. It was infiltrated into the computer system at Iran’s Bushehr nuclear reactor. It reportedly sabotaged a large quantity of centrifuges at the installation.

The revelation of Stuxnet’s existence and purpose ended the operation. Moreover, much of Iran’s significant cyber capabilities were reportedly developed by reverse engineering the Stuxnet.

Obama made his support for the leak clear three days before he left office. On January 17, 2017, Obama pardoned Marine Gen. James Cartwright for his role in illegally divulging the Stuxnet program to the Times.

In 2012, US officials told the media that Israel had struck targets in Syria. The leak, which was repeated several times in subsequent years, made it more dangerous for Israel to operate against Iranian and Hezbollah forces in Syria.

Also in 2012, ahead of the presidential election, US officials informed journalists that Israel was operating in air bases in Azerbaijan with the purpose of attacking Iran’s nuclear sites in air strikes originating from those bases.

Israel’s alleged plan to attack Iran was abruptly canceled.

In all of these cases, the goal of the leak was to harm Israel.

In contrast, the goal of this week’s leaks was to harm Trump. Israel was collateral damage.

The key point is that the leaks are coming from the same places in both cases.

All of them are members of the US intelligence community with exceedingly high security clearances. And all of them willingly committed felony offenses when they shared top secret information with reporters.

That is, all of them believe that it is perfectly all right to make political use of intelligence to advance a political goal. In the case of the anti-Israel leaks under Obama, their purpose was to prevent Israel from degrading Iran’s nuclear capacity and military power at a time that Obama was working to empower Iran at Israel’s expense.

In the case of the Trump-Lavrov leak, the purpose was to undermine Israel’s security as a means of harming Trump politically.

What happened to the US intelligence community? How did its members come to believe that they have the right to abuse the knowledge they gained as intelligence officers in order to advance a partisan agenda? As former CIA station chief Scott Uehlinger explained in an article published in March in The Hill, the Obama administration oversaw a program of deliberate politicization of the US intelligence community.

The first major step toward this end was initiated by then-US attorney general Eric Holder in August 2009.

Holder announced then that he intended to appoint a special counsel to investigate claims that CIA officers tortured terrorists while interrogating them.

The purpose of Holder’s announcement wasn’t to secure indictments. The points was to transform the CIA politically and culturally.

And it worked.

Shortly after Holder’s announcement, an exodus began of the CIA’s best operations officers. Men and women with years of experience operating in enemy territory resigned.

Uehlinger’s article related that during the Obama years, intelligence officers were required to abide by strict rules of political correctness.

In his words, “In this PC world, all diversity is embraced – except diversity of thought. Federal workers have been partisan for years, but combined with the rigid Obama PC mindset, it has created a Frankenstein of politicization that has never been seen before.”

Over the years, US intelligence officers at all levels have come to view themselves as soldiers in an army with its own agenda – which largely overlapped Obama’s.

Trump’s agenda on the other hand is viewed as anathema by members of this powerful group. Likewise, the notion of a strong Israel capable of defending its interests without American help and permission is more dangerous than the notion of Iran armed with nuclear weapons.

Given these convictions, it is no surprise that unnamed intelligence sources are leaking a tsunami of selective and deceptive intelligence against Trump and his advisers.

The sense of entitlement that prevails in the intelligence community was on prominent display in an astounding interview that Evelyn Farkas, a former deputy assistant secretary of defense, gave to MSNBS in early March.

Farkas, who resigned her position in late 2015 to work on Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign, admitted to her interviewer that the intelligence community was spying on Trump and his associates and that ahead of Obama’s departure from office, they were transferring massive amounts of intelligence information about Trump and his associates to Democratic lawmakers on Capitol Hill in order to ensure that those Democratic politicians would use the information gathered to harm Trump.

In her words, “The Trump folks, if they found out how we knew what we knew about the Trump staff’s dealings with Russians… would try to compromise those sources and methods, meaning we would no longer have access to that information.”

Farkas then explained that the constant leaks of Trump’s actions to the media were part of the initiative that she had urged her counterparts to undertake.

And Farkas was proud of what her colleagues had done and were doing.

Two days after Farkas’s interview, Trump published his tweet accusing former president Barack Obama of spying on him.

Although the media and the intelligence community angrily and contemptuously denied Trump’s assertion, the fact is that both Farkas’s statement and information that became public both before and since Trump’s inauguration lends credence to his claim.

In the days ahead of the inauguration we learned that in the summer of 2016, Obama’s Justice Department conducted a criminal probe into suspicions that Trump’s senior aides had committed crimes in their dealings with Russian banks. Those suspicions, upon investigation, were dismissed. In other words, the criminal probe led nowhere.

Rather than drop the matter, Obama’s Justice Department decided to continue the probe but transform it into a national security investigation.

After a failed attempt in July 2016, in October 2016, a FISA (Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act) court approved a Justice Department request to monitor the communications of Trump’s senior advisers. Since the subjects of the probe were working from Trump’s office and communicating with him by phone and email, the warrant requested – which the FISA court granted – also subjected Trump’s direct communications to incidental collection.

So from at least October 2016 through Trump’s inauguration, the US intelligence community was spying on Trump and his advisers, despite the fact that they were not suspected of committing any crimes.

This brings us back to this week’s Russia story which together with the media hysteria following Trump’s firing of FBI director James Comey, precipitated Rosenstein’s decision to appoint Mueller to serve as a special counsel charged with investigating the allegations that Trump and or his advisers acted unlawfully or in a manner that endangered the US in their dealings with Russia.

It is too early to judge how Mueller will conduct his investigation. But if the past is any guide, he is liable to keep the investigation going indefinitely, paralyzing Trump’s ability to conduct foreign policy in relation to Russia and a host of other issues.

This then brings us to Trump and Israel – the twin targets of the US intelligence community’s felonious and injurious leaks.

The fact that Trump hass come to Israel now may be a bit of fortuitous timing. Given the stakes involved for Trump, for Israel and for US national security, perhaps Trump and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu can develop a method of fighting this cabal of faceless, lawless foes together.

How such a fight would look and what it would involve is not immediately apparent and anyways should never be openly discussed. But the fact is that working together, Israel and Trump may accomplish more than either can accomplish on their own. And with so much hanging in the balance, it makes sense to at least try.

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

Email me  here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or  here (Pictorial) or  here (Personal)

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More genes linked to IQ

Because IQ is linked to so much else, psychometricians have long expected it to be polygenetic: Many genes have an input into it.  I have always favoured the view that a high IQ is simply one aspect of general biological good functioning.  The brain is just another organ of the body, after all. So if that is the case, the number of genes linked to IQ should be very large indeed.  So the work below is just a first step.

Various reports of this study distort its results --  with the NYT in the lead on that.  So let me answer them here:

The NYT says: "These genes do not determine intelligence, however. Their combined influence is minuscule".  That is exactly the opposite of what the study found.  I append the journal abstract below so readers can check for themselves.  The authors found that their 52 genes explained 5% of the variance in IQ.  That per cent of variance explained is about normal in psychological research and has been used to support many claims of causality.  And the 5% will rise as more genes are analysed.

Other reports misunderstood the links to Alzheimers and Schizophrenia.  The study found that people with high IQ genes had LESS Alzheimers and Schizophrenia, not more.  It is interesting, however, that high IQ genes are associated with autism.  As is well known, autistic people often have extreme mental abilities in some fields, so the finding is not too surprising.  Most high IQ people are not autistic, however.

I liked the finding that high IQ people are tall, thin and unlikely to smoke. I am an example of that.  I am 5'10", was very skinny in my early life and have never smoked. 5'10" is not that tall these days but when I was born 73 years ago it was. The average male height in Australia has increased 3" in the last 50 years.


Intelligence is one of the most investigated traits in humans, but so far, only a handful of genes have been associated with the trait.

Now, researchers have made a major advance in understanding the genetic underpinnings of intelligence, uncovering 52 genes for the trait, 40 of which are new discoveries.

In particular they found that many people with these genes are more likely to have other traits, including being tall, thin and unlikely to smoke.

Scientists hope the findings could provide new biological insights into brain function and understanding, and help to define the genetic component of IQ.

The findings also turned up a surprising connection between intelligence and autism that could one day help shed light on the condition's origins.

"For the first time, we were able to detect a substantial amount of genetic effects in IQ," said Danielle Posthuma, a researcher at the Center for Neurogenomics and Cognitive Research in Amsterdam, and the main architect of the study. "Our findings provide insight into the biological underpinnings of intelligence," she told AFP.

An international research team led by Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam studied genetic data from over 78,000 individuals. The data included information on DNA genotypes and intelligence scores, which led the team to discover new genes and biological routes for intelligence.

Despite high heritability estimates of 45 per cent in childhood and 80 per cent in adulthood, until now, only a few genes had been associated with. But the new study uncovered 40 new genes, most of which are mainly expressed in brain tissue.

Professor Posthuma said: 'These results are very exciting as they provide very robust associations with intelligence. 'The genes we detect are involved in the regulation of cell development, and are specifically important in synapse formation, axon guidance and neuronal differentiation.

'These findings for the first time provide clear clues towards the underlying biological mechanisms of intelligence.'

The results showed that people with the genes were more likely to have high educational achievements, and were also likely to be taller, not to smoke, and to have autism spectrum disorder.

In contrast, people with the intelligence genes were less likely to have Alzheimer's disease, depressive symptoms, smoking history, schizophrenia, high body mass index, or obesity.

Dr Suzanne Sniekers, who also worked on the study, said: 'These genetic correlations shed light on common biological pathways for intelligence and other traits.

'Seven genes for intelligence are also associated with schizophrenia; nine genes also with body mass index, and four genes were also associated with obesity. 'These three traits show a negative correlation with intelligence.

'So, a variant of gene with a positive effect on intelligence, has a negative effect on schizophrenia, body mass index or obesity.'

The researchers stress that future studies will be needed to clarify the exact role of these genes in intelligence in order to gain a more complete picture of how genetic differences lead to differences in intelligence.

Professor Posthuma added: 'The current genetic results explain up to five per cent of the total variance in intelligence.

'Although this is quite a large amount of variance for a trait as intelligence, there is still a long road to go: given the high heritability of intelligence, many more genetic effects are expected to be important, and these can only be detected in even larger samples.'

SOURCE

Genome-wide association meta-analysis of 78,308 individuals identifies new loci and genes influencing human intelligence

Suzanne Sniekers et al.

Intelligence is associated with important economic and health-related life outcomes1. Despite intelligence having substantial heritability2 (0.54) and a confirmed polygenic nature, initial genetic studies were mostly underpowered3, 4, 5. Here we report a meta-analysis for intelligence of 78,308 individuals. We identify 336 associated SNPs (METAL P < 5 × 10−8) in 18 genomic loci, of which 15 are new. Around half of the SNPs are located inside a gene, implicating 22 genes, of which 11 are new findings. Gene-based analyses identified an additional 30 genes (MAGMA P < 2.73 × 10−6), of which all but one had not been implicated previously. We show that the identified genes are predominantly expressed in brain tissue, and pathway analysis indicates the involvement of genes regulating cell development (MAGMA competitive P = 3.5 × 10−6). Despite the well-known difference in twin-based heratiblity2 for intelligence in childhood (0.45) and adulthood (0.80), we show substantial genetic correlation (rg = 0.89, LD score regression P = 5.4 × 10−29). These findings provide new insight into the genetic architecture of intelligence.

Nature Genetics. (2017) doi:10.1038/ng.3869

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Morally Challenged: Attitudes Liberals Promote Engender Behaviors They Deplore

Two fascinating Gallup polls have been released this month on the subject of morality. I will address the sexual issues that were surveyed.

Americans believe the following are morally acceptable: birth control (91%); divorce (73%); sex between an unmarried man and woman (69%); gay or lesbian relations (63%); having a baby outside of marriage (62%); abortion (43%); sex between teenagers (36%); pornography (36%); polygamy (17%); extramarital affairs (9%). These findings were posted May 11.

These percentages were never higher for birth control, divorce, gay or lesbian relations, having a baby out of wedlock, pornography, and polygamy. The one piece of good news is on abortion: 49 percent say it is morally wrong.

Findings from May 22 show that 81 percent of the public says the state of moral values is "only fair" or "poor." Is the state of moral values getting worse? According to 77 percent of the public, the answer is yes.

"Even liberals," Gallup says, "who seemingly should be pleased with the growing number of Americans who agree with their point of view on the morality of prominent social issues, are more likely to say things are getting worse than getting better."

There are a number of things going on here that command our attention.

Americans are increasingly non-judgmental about sexual relations between consenting adults, but they are not happy with the state of moral values. This paradox suggests that more Americans are morally challenged than ever before.

To cite one issue, it is one thing to say that having a baby outside of marriage is morally acceptable, quite another to say it is a good thing. There's the rub: Most Americans know someone who is in that situation and don't want to appear condemnatory, but they also recognize that this is not a good condition to be in, either for the mother or the child.

We need to be mature about this. If we want more of something, we offer rewards and incentives; if we want less, we employ negative sanctions and stigmatize. This is a sociological truism.

For example, we don't have a problem stigmatizing smokers, and as a result fewer are smoking today than was true a half century ago when smoking was socially acceptable. We want to reduce out-of-wedlock births, but we don't want to stigmatize the mother or the child (the father usually escapes sanctions). The result is we have a higher rate of out-of-wedlock births than we did a half century ago when such a condition was socially unacceptable.

It is our immaturity that accounts for our morally challenged condition. As long as we reject the stick of stigma to curb conditions that we deplore, there will be little progress in stemming them.

Liberals are the most morally confused of any segment of the population. They are delighted that their "tolerant" views on sexuality have caught on with most Americans, but they are nonetheless unhappy with the state of moral values.

They want to have it both ways—more liberal attitudes on sexuality and less moral problems—but they cannot. Not until they connect the dots and realize that the attitudes which they promote engender the behaviors  that they deplore, will progress be made. As usual, liberals get it wrong.

SOURCE

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Exposing Obamacare’s Big Lie

In a recent op-ed at Forbes, Independent Institute Senior Fellow John C. Goodman and co-author Linda Gorman take on the latest Big Lie put forth by advocates of Obamacare: the notion that repealing the 2010 health law would kill 24,000 to 43,000 people a year. The claim has been made by various pundits, but it comes from a few studies that have repeated a mistake first made in a medical journal article published almost 25 years ago, Goodman and Gorman explain.

The false equation of health coverage and health outcomes has a long pedigree. In 1993, the Journal of the American Medical Association published an article that compared results from a survey in 1987 with those of a survey of the same people conducted in the early 1970s, and came to an ominous conclusion about the relationship between health coverage and death. The authors concluded that being uninsured raises the likelihood of death by 25 percent. But their inference was erroneous; they carelessly assumed that auto fatalities, suicides, and gun deaths resulted from the coverage status of the deceased. A 2002 report from the Institute of Medicine took the erroneous 25 percent rate and used it to calculate a new estimate of deaths-by-absence-of-coverage. A 2008 study by the Urban League made the same mistake, and so on.

In contrast, a careful estimate from the respected economists June and David O’Neill “concluded that uninsured people with lower incomes were only 3 percent more likely to die over a 14-year period than those with health insurance,” Goodman and Gorman writes. The uninsured in other income groups had no statistically significant greater chance of dying than the insured. “Later studies support this finding,” Goodman and Gorman write. The 2008 Oregon Health Experiment, for example, found no differences in common clinical health outcomes between low-income people who won access to Medicaid through a state lottery and those who did not.

SOURCE

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

Email me  here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or  here (Pictorial) or  here (Personal)

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Muscular men less likely to support social and economic equality, study suggests

So conservatives are muscle-bound bullies?  That is what the authors would undoubtedly wish us to believe.  But as for proving it: Nice try but no cigar.  Their measurement of physical strength etc. was carefully done but their measurement of attitudes was naive.

They used two sets of questions ('scales') to measure attitudes.  The first was the Social Dominance Orientation scale principally associated with Jim Sidanius. It is rubbish, hopelessly multifactorial. So scores on it could mean many things or nothing.  See here for a detailed rundown of that scale.

The second scale is about redistribution of the wealth but I could find no answers to the things that psychometricians normally want to know about a scale:  Reliability, validity, internal consistency, factor loadings etc.  For present purposes however it suffices to assume that it was a well-constructed scale.

So the only findings of interest in the research are the correlations between the socialism scale and other variables. The academic journal article is "Is sociopolitical egalitarianism related to bodily and facial formidability in men?" and the research findings are in their Table 1. And we see there only a barely significant correlation of .19 between bodily formidability and support for redistribution.  That means that bodily formidability was only the most minor contributor to anti-socialist attitudes.

And when we note that the research was not conducted on any kind of representative sample but was based on an available group of students, we have to conclude that no generalizations from it at all can be justified.  The study proves nothing


Physically stronger men are less in favour of social and economic equality than weaker men, new research from Brunel University London indicates.

Dr Michael Price and colleagues assessed 171 men aged 18-40, collecting information on height, weight, waist size, flexed and relaxed muscle circumference, hand grip, and arm and chest strength.

They also surveyed participants on how often they go to the gym, their wealth, whether they support the redistribution of wealth, and whether they approve of the idea that some social groups should have dominance over others (‘social dominance orientation’).

As well as focusing on bodily signs of perceived dominance, the researchers also focused on facial appearance: they had groups of independent raters view participants’ faces and rate whether they saw the men as dominant and attractive. They also used software to analyse faces in terms of the masculinity of their shape.

Prior research has shown several aspects of face shape and appearance, such as height-to-width ratio, are linked to ability to compete for resources in the modern world.

The results showed a significant correlation between those with higher bodily formidability and the belief that some social groups should dominate others. These men were also much less likely to support redistribution of wealth.

But contrary to predictions, there was no correlation between being considered attractive, as measured by waist-to-chest ratio and various facial measures, and whether or not the men supported ‘social dominance orientation’ or redistribution.

The study showed that more muscular men were less egalitarian, and the number of hours actually spent in the gym was also linked to having less egalitarian socioeconomic beliefs.

SOURCE

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Good policy favors the small property-owner

MARTIN HUTCHINSON

The Financial Times and the Economist have recently taken to issuing fatwas against the Trump Administration’s economic policy, indulging in repeated bouts of “Two Minutes Hate” against the man himself, combined with denunciations of “populism.” Yet “populism” is a term that covers a multitude of sins. In pandering to the prejudices of their journalists and readership, both publications have lost sight of the bedrock of sound economics: strengthening and furthering the interests of the small property-owner.

As I discussed a few months ago, the meaning of “liberalism” as defined and lauded in the FT and the Economist, has shifted in the last quarter-century. Immediately after the fall of Communism, when it appeared that history had indeed ended, a “Washington Consensus” grew up that relatively unfettered free markets worked best, and that policies should be set to give such markets as much play as possible.

The Washington Consensus was not truly liberal in the 19th Century sense; it failed in two respects. First, it was silent on the size of government, although it suggested that deregulation was optimal – hence the reforming governments of Central and Eastern Europe were not sufficiently slimmed down (except in a few countries like Estonia that went beyond the Consensus). Second, the Consensus paid insufficient attention to private property rights and the well-being of small property-owners, the bedrock of any capitalist system. Being determined by governments, international institutions and Establishment opinion-formers, the Washington Consensus was always too kind to the big battalions and the special interests, as well as to government itself.

After 2000, the Washington Consensus was attacked from two sides. From the emerging markets themselves, it was denounced as “neo-liberalism” as statists like Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez rejected its market orientation. In this respect, it was unfortunate that the Consensus had been imposed during a period of low commodity prices, so that commodity-based emerging markets in Latin America derived little benefit from it, their populations growing even more impoverished. Conversely, when commodity prices rose after 2000, the benefit of the rise was received and wasted by thoroughly unpleasant statist regimes in Venezuela, Argentina and Brazil.

The attack from emerging market leftists was perhaps to be expected. What was less forgivable was a movement in the world’s rich countries away from even the Washington Consensus version of free markets, beginning with the 2000-02 downturn and becoming more intense with the 2008 financial crisis. Balanced budgets were abandoned in favor of permanent Keynesian “stimulus,” while monetary policy prohibitions against central banks buying government bonds and against negative real interest rates were abandoned in an orgy of money printing.

Extraordinarily, the international institutions, the FT and the Economist, which would rightly have condemned such economic apostasy as recently as 1995, fell in completely with the new consensus and urged on the money-printers and budget-busters. What is more, instead of the mild support for free markets they had previously given, they instead favored an orgy of regulation, especially in finance and environmental areas, where they were seduced by the chimaera of global warming. Against all the evidence, they claimed that lack of regulation rather than misguided monetary policy and uncalled-for social engineering in the housing sector had been responsible for the 2008 financial crisis. Against all the evidence, they claimed that the planet was warming uncontrollably, so that infinite numbers of wasteful regulations and boondoggles must be imposed on the global economy to stop it.

Now the rise of Donald Trump and the British vote to leave the EU have led the usual suspects to condemn “populism” and to call for a return to the degraded leftist policy consensus they have been pushing since 2008. This is a clever piece of mis-labeling. Intellectually, one is inclined to reject anything called “populism,” remembering the half-baked socialism of the 1890s populists and the populist impulses behind such genuinely dangerous movements as Nazism. Yet when the new movement is examined closely, it bears only a modest resemblance to historic populism. Instead, it is mostly a long-overdue corrective to the follies of the Washington Consensus and its loathsome offspring, pushing us back much closer to true free-market capitalism.

Classical economics, as propounded by Adam Smith in 1776, depended on the individual, operating on a limited scale. By matching small-scale providers of goods with individual buyers, the market optimized the performance of the economy. By matching individual savings and resources with small-scale needs for capital, the resources of the economy were directed in an optimal direction. Smith was deeply suspicious, not only of government, but also of large scale enterprises like the East India Company; he regarded them as cesspits of corruption and resource misallocation.

Smith would also have been deeply suspicious of large investment institutions, had there been any in his time (even the Bank of England was tiny in the context of the overall economy.) He would have seen them as vulnerable to subornation of their officers by those seeking funding, and as very unlikely to allocate their capital optimally.

For Smith, therefore, the keys to a successful market economy were the small business and the small property owner. Capitalism could only work properly if their property rights were protected, and if they were given a fully equal chance against larger competitors on the playing field of the economy. Government’s principal function was to protect the rights of small investors and small businessmen against the politically well-connected.

The genesis of the Industrial Revolution showed the Adam Smith version of capitalism at its finest. Jean-Baptiste Say, visiting Britain in late 1814, was astonished at the prevalence of steam engines in the economy, each of them replacing the hard manual labor of a dozen or more workers. These new machines were mostly owned by businesses that were tiny in a modern context, with capital in the low thousands of pounds and under 100 employees.

Economic growth was further boosted after Say wrote by the profits to small savers, about 70% of GDP, from the rise in British government “Consols” in the decade after 1813, as peacetime capital market conditions were restored. (During the war, 3% Consols had been issued at a big discount, rather than issuing higher-interest bonds at par, so savers got a big capital gain when peace returned.) In real terms, given the deflation surrounding the 1819 return to the Gold Standard, savers who held on and reinvested income quadrupled their money in the decade 1813-23. This flood of new capital combined with technological innovation to produce a step-up in economic growth rates to levels never before seen, forming the self-sustaining “take-off” of the Industrial Revolution.

After Smith, technological progress seemed to make some of his prescriptions obsolete. While factories in Britain remained relatively small in the nineteenth century, in the United States over 1850-1950 giant corporate behemoths grew up. In the first three quarters of the twentieth century, giant investment institutions also increasingly came to dominate capital markets. When I went through business school in the 1970s, we were taught that the giant multi-divisional corporation was the most efficient form of capitalism and that funded final-salary pension schemes were becoming by far the most important players in the capital markets, dominating corporate governance.

Since 1990, undetected by the Washington Consensus believers, we have returned to a more Smithian economy. The behemoth corporations increasingly seem like dinosaurs, as their size and bureaucratic spread stifle innovation. Instead, new technology is produced in much younger and smaller companies, akin to the innovators of 1800-50. The big pension funds never came to dominate the capital markets, as final-salary pensions disappeared; instead, capital is provided mostly by wealthy individuals, often through small hedge funds and private equity funds, with institutional capital increasingly sidelined.

In such an environment. Adam Smith’s version of capitalism is again the model we should follow. The nexus of cozy arrangements between Wall Street, the corporate behemoths and the government must be broken up, to clear the way for new and more innovative companies and to restore Smith’s desired “level playing field.” Above all the private savers must be nurtured, not punished, which requires a revolution in both monetary and fiscal policy.

In monetary policy, interest rates must be raised well above the inflation rate, to provide decent real returns for savers and small capitalists. In fiscal policy, the government deficit, both visible and invisible through entitlements must be eliminated, to reduce the government’s drain on the economy. Taxes on capital must be slashed, in particular the death tax, which prevents the accumulation of wealth over multiple generations. Conversely the corporate tax, reducing which favors corporate behemoths over new and innovative businesses, can remain as it is, and must be applied on a worldwide basis so that the behemoths cannot simply evade tax by parking money offshore.

President Trump has not proposed an Adam Smithian capitalist economic program; his current proposals are an amalgam between his populism and traditional corporatist Republicanism. However, the focus of his policy, on the individual saver and small businessman, ignored by previous post-Reagan administrations both Republican and Democratic, is highly salutary. The pro-government pro-regulation quasi-Socialism of the Financial Times and the Economist is no longer a viable economic policy, and should be swept away in favor of a brighter populist future.

SOURCE

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

Email me  here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or  here (Pictorial) or  here (Personal)

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Was Hitler right?  Are Germans a Herrenvolk?

My heading above is of course exceptionally and deliberately provocative so I think I had better go into damage-control mode straight away.

Anybody who shows any awareness of racial, ethnic or national differences is normally excoriated by the Left as a "white supremacist".  So I think I should point out that I am in fact a N.E. Asian supremacist.  We now have an abundance of evidence that the N.E. Asians (Japan, Korea, China) are on average roughly a third of a standard deviation more intelligent than the average European.  And a third of a standard deviation is a lot, particularly at the upper end of the distribution.  See here for full details on that.

And we don't need IQ scores to conclude that this century will be the century of China.  The economic strides they have already made in recent decades make that an obvious inference, I think.

And although my own ancestry is wholly British, I am quite happy about all that. I see N.E. Asians as patient, hard-working family-oriented people who already have a huge influence on the world so we can know pretty well what the world will be like once they realize their full potential.  I am even prepared to concede to China their nine-dash line. I would object if a N.E. Asian nation showed signs of wanting to conquer some other nation but I think that the dreadful events of WWII have convincingly shown both Europeans and Asians the great folly in that.

With that bit of throat-clearing, I think I can now go on to what I initially wanted to say here.

There is here an extensive article accompanied by a profusion of maps which locates the main sources of economic, cultural, scientific and technological advances in recent centuries.  And it shows something that every schoolkid once knew: That the evolution of modern industrial civilization traces back to innovations made in N.W. Europe, principally in  Britain and Germany.  Other European nations have contributed -- France, Italy and Russia -- but their influence has been nothing like the influence of N.W. Europe.

The article I refer to above is from an anonymous author on an anonymous site.  And you can see why.  N.W. Europe is in fact a euphemism.  What is in fact being referred to is the Germanic countries.  The author has shown not that the Germans are a master race but that the Germanic people generally are a master race of sorts.  They have given us the modern world and the rest of the world has hastened to follow in their steps.

Hitler's term Herrenvolk is  not ideally translated as "master race".  A "race of masters" or a race of Lords would be  better translations.  And that is what Hitler had in mind -- a people who lorded it over a great mass of inferior people.  Each German would be the master of an estate worked by inferior races.  And as a libertarian, that whole idea is anathema to me.

But in English, "master" has another meaning -- meaning someone who is very good at something, a master craftsman, for instance.  And I think it is very clear that Germans, broadly speaking, continue to be master innovators.  There is actually more German ancestry among Americans than there is British ancestry so the combination of those two Germanic nationalities makes the USA still a largely Germanic nation despite the large movement of other peoples into the USA. And the fact that Yiddish is a German dialect is evidence of how strongly Jews have been absorbed into Germanic culture and continue to participate in it.

And that makes Israel a Germanic country too -- bitter though that thought may be. And Israel is not only Germanic culturally but to an important extent also ancestrally.  You don't have to walk for long among the Ashkenazim to see a lot of people who look distinctly Northern European. Ever since Ruth, Jews have always been only weakly endogamous, much to the grief of many a Yiddisher Momma in NYC.  The tendency of Irvings and Sheldons to get into bed with "shicksas" is often deplored by the mothers of the Irvings and Sheldons concerned.  The strength of the feelings involved may perhaps be revealed if I disclose something not normally disclosed:  The literal German meaning of "shicksa".  It means "prostitute".

So I reject Hitler's claim that Germans ("Deutschen") are a master race.  But I think a similar-sounding claim is true:  That Germanic people ("die Germanischen") are master innovators. And combine a Germanic culture with the high IQ of the Ashkenazim and it becomes plain why Israel is a hugely innovative society in scientific and technological matters.

I think that everything I have said so far is entirely factual but no doubt some Leftist will find in it some reason to call me a racist. They called a sentimental Christian gentleman named George W. Bush a Nazi so they live in a world of the borderline insane.  The classic test of insanity is loss of reality contact and that seems pervasive in the words of the American Left.

Now we come to the interesting part, the speculative part:  WHY are Germans innovative? The anonymous author I refer to above has an elaborate answer to that but I think I can give a much simpler answer.  But to do that I think we first have to look at some history.  We have to go back to the time when the Saxons  were a South Baltic people.  They were a very hardy people who normally won their battles with the Scandinavians -- and the Scandinavians were no pushover.  Vikings anyone?  So the Scandinavians got the less hospitable lands North of the Baltic while the Saxons and their allies got the more hospitable and promising land South of the Baltic.

But the Baltic Germans, the Saxons, were restless. Germans always were.  They struck South right down into Italy even during the days of the Roman Republic.  And the Romans had the Devil of a job repelling them. The expansion of the Roman empire stopped at the Rhine. Strikes across the Rhine ended in disaster.

But the Romans had a sort of revenge on the Germans.  They civilized them. The only way the Empire could effectively guard its borders was to co-opt the German tribes adjacent to those borders.  The Romans made Germans into "limitanei", border guards.  And they incentivized that by giving the Germans land for farming.  So Roman ideas spread gradually North to the extent that most Germans took up farming and abandoned their previous lifestyles as hunter-gatherers.

And note that the great Roman defeat at the Teutoburger Wald was at the hands of German tribes led by a ROMANIZED German. Arminius was actually a Roman citizen.  So there had long been a Roman influence on Germans near the borders of the empire.

But the further North and East you went, the less was the civilizing effect.  And when you got to the Baltic, the Germans there, the Saxons, were the genuine originals, not at all softened by civilization. And, like other Germans before them, they too got itchy feet.

So they moved  into lands already occupied by others.  To the South were lands occupied by a mix of Celts and "softened" Germans and to the West was Britannia, the land of the Romanized Celts which we now know as England.  And they came to dominate both those places.  To this day we speak of the predominant people of England as "Anglo-Saxons" and a large and rich part of central Germany today is Saxony. Many people reading this are probably descendants of Saxons. I am.

So it is striking that the two great fountainheads of modern civilization, modern Germany and Britain, both came to be dominated by South Baltic German tribes.  It is to those original South Baltic Germans that we have to look if we want to understand the rise of modern civilization.  It was their descendants who created modern day civilization.

At this point however we can only move into speculation.  We can prove nothing.  Arguments can be more or less plausible only.  So I offer an argument that is much simpler than the one offered by our anonymous friend above.  And under Occams razor that argument has preference.

I think the starting point for an explanation is that the Saxons remained primitive culturally for thousands of years after the beginnings of civilization in the near East.  The ancient civilizations of the Near East required a high degree of group effort for the purposes of irrigation and that fostered a very group-oriented civilization.  And that was copied by others. The Indo-Europeans were originally hunter gatherers but gradually adopted a Near Eastern lifestyle.

But that near-Eastern lifestyle had very important political consequences.  We need to understand what was lost by that. The hunter-gatherer lifestyle was one that did NOT require much co-operation for survival.  The hunter fed himself and his family without being accountable to anyone.  It fostered a very independent frame of mind.  There were occasional needs for co-operation but getting such people to co-operate could not successfully be done except by consultation and agreement. Hence among such people there were frequent consultative assemblies where decisions were made by consensus. It was democracy, in short.

The tribe was governed as much by a "witangemot" or assembly as by a king.  If there was a king he could even be deposed, usually without bloodshed.  Ultimate authority resided in the whole people, as led by their elders.  We do much the same today.

Interestingly, though, sparks of the old hunter-gatherer lifestyle did survive in Europe for a while.  The various city states of ancient Greece and the early Roman republic were substantially democratic, which means that ultimate respect was given to the whole of the people, not to a king-emperor.

So the whole of the European people were originally hunter gatherers with a democratic method of government.  But the Eastern model of government gradually encroached to cover much of Europe, with even the holdouts of democracy in Greece and Rome eventually coming under the control of tyrants.

But up near the Baltic the Near East is not so near and the Saxons were among the few representatives of the old way. The personal independence fostered by a hunter-gatherer lifestyle lived on there.  But the fact that it survived there suggests that the South Baltic was a sort of "goldilocks" environment for supporting the old ways.  It was midway between the crushing winters of Scandinavia and Russia but not lush enough for an agricultural lifestyle.  There were enough juicy animals to hunt and kill for food but never enough for much of a surplus.  The hunt had to be almost daily but it was enough.

So we come to an independence of mind as the key feature of the Saxons.  The whole of Europe had it once but it never succumbed in them.  They were the last survivors of the old ways but it was enough to give rise to something remarkable under the right circumstances.

And what those circumstances were is not very mysterious.  They moved to rich agricultural lands and the easier lifestyle that implies. And being the fierce warriors that they were, nobody could either resist them or push them out.  So they retained their old culture of respect for the individual and the independence of mind that comes from that.  And because they were now prosperous they had time to think. And independent thinking has enormous potential, as we see from that time on.

The process of asserting independence was however hampered by the attractions of civilization.  City life had much to entice one and from top to bottom Europe gradually became civilized. But civilizations has its burdens too -- particularly the need for some form of permanent government.  So the Saxons and other Germans did accept the rule of Kings but it was not to their liking.  Something that helped such acceptance was the church.  The church was itself a heavily centralized institution and it supported the rule of Europe's kings and emperors.

So along comes Luther.  Luther was not the first man to lead a movement hostile to the church.  Predecessors such as John Huss, Giordano Bruno and Savonarola come to mind.  But all the European rebels before Luther were eventually put to death and their movements erased.  So how come Luther survived?  He survived -- wait for it -- because he was a Saxon.  The people of Saxony loved his message of independence.  Even the King was on his side. And that was crucial.  When the whole of Europe was out for Luther's head King Frederick "The Wise" of Saxony hid Luther in his remote Wartburg castle.

So the Germanic spirit of independence emerged in a form of Christianity that suited Northern Germans, a form that put power and responsibility for salvation right back on to the individual, with no intervening priest needed.  We call it Protestantism.  The emergence of Protestantism is proof that the old Germanic independence of mind survived into relatively modern times -- initially in Saxony and fairly rapidly in all the Northern German lands.

And something similar happened in England, that other  great home of Saxon genes.  I refer of course to Wycliffe and the Lollards.  Wycliffe was over a century before Luther in fact. Luther wrote his "Ninety-five Theses" in 1517 whereas Wycliffe  was officially condemned in 1377 by Pope Gregory XI.  Wycliffe  was a great critic of the church and advocated most of the things that we would now recognize as Protestantism.  But he never left the church.  He wanted to reform the church not destroy it.  But his criticisms were swingeing and the church hated him for it. They would have loved to have killed him.  But, again, it was the people and their king who mattered.  Wycliffe was very popular not only with the common people but even with the King and his court.  So Wycliffe survived.  He eventually collapsed in church while saying a mass and died a couple of days later.

Wycliffe did not give rise to a movement that long survived him but he had awakened the old rebellious spirit and that spirit was the principal support for the actions of King Henry VIII.  When Henry dispossessed the priests, the people loved him for it.  They supported their King, not their priests.  Wycliffe had lit a slow-burning fuse that eventually gave rise to an explosion. And that fuse kept burning for so long because it was founded on a Saxon independence of mind among the people.  Wycliffe died in 1384, Henry became king in 1509.

I have more or less come to the end of my tale here.  The next question is why was there a considerable latency between the Protestant reformation and the Industrial revolution?  Why did not one lead directly into the other?  There is much to be said on that topic but I will have to leave that for another day.

But it seems clear that independence of mind, not only in the individual but also in the society as a whole, is the major precondition for continuing innovation. So the respect for the individual that has always been part and parcel of that is both a normal part of daily life and an instinctive driver of political thinking among Germanic people  -- still to this day most noticeably in Britain, Germany and the USA.

The centralizing tendencies that characterize most of the rest of the world are always there too and ready to horn in but it seems unlikely that they will eventually take over

My big article on Anglo-Saxon conservatism includes an extensive history of respect for the individual, starting with my notes about Disraeli -- JR

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

Email me  here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or  here (Pictorial) or  here (Personal)

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Another blow to the Statin religion

A study of nearly 3,000 older adults found that giving them statins did not extend their lifespans nor did they get fewer  heart attacks.  Since old people are the high risk group, we have to ask if they do not benefit from statins, who would?

Effect of Statin Treatment vs Usual Care on Primary Cardiovascular Prevention Among Older Adults

Benjamin H. Han et al.

Abstract

Importance:  While statin therapy for primary cardiovascular prevention has been associated with reductions in cardiovascular morbidity, the effect on all-cause mortality has been variable. There is little evidence to guide the use of statins for primary prevention in adults 75 years and older.

Objectives:  To examine statin treatment among adults aged 65 to 74 years and 75 years and older when used for primary prevention in the Lipid-Lowering Trial (LLT) component of the Antihypertensive and Lipid-Lowering Treatment to Prevent Heart Attack Trial (ALLHAT-LLT).

Design, Setting, and Participants:  Post hoc secondary data analyses were conducted of participants 65 years and older without evidence of atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease; 2867 ambulatory adults with hypertension and without baseline atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease were included. The ALLHAT-LLT was conducted from February 1994 to March 2002 at 513 clinical sites.

Interventions:  Pravastatin sodium (40 mg/d) vs usual care (UC).

Main Outcomes and Measures:  The primary outcome in the ALLHAT-LLT was all-cause mortality. Secondary outcomes included cause-specific mortality and nonfatal myocardial infarction or fatal coronary heart disease combined (coronary heart disease events).

Results:  There were 1467 participants (mean [SD] age, 71.3 [5.2] years) in the pravastatin group (48.0% [n = 704] female) and 1400 participants (mean [SD] age, 71.2 [5.2] years) in the UC group (50.8% [n = 711] female). The baseline mean (SD) low-density lipoprotein cholesterol levels were 147.7 (19.8) mg/dL in the pravastatin group and 147.6 (19.4) mg/dL in the UC group; by year 6, the mean (SD) low-density lipoprotein cholesterol levels were 109.1 (35.4) mg/dL in the pravastatin group and 128.8 (27.5) mg/dL in the UC group. At year 6, of the participants assigned to pravastatin, 42 of 253 (16.6%) were not taking any statin; 71.0% in the UC group were not taking any statin.

The hazard ratios for all-cause mortality in the pravastatin group vs the UC group were 1.18 (95% CI, 0.97-1.42; P = .09) for all adults 65 years and older, 1.08 (95% CI, 0.85-1.37; P = .55) for adults aged 65 to 74 years, and 1.34 (95% CI, 0.98-1.84; P = .07) for adults 75 years and older. Coronary heart disease event rates were not significantly different among the groups. In multivariable regression, the results remained nonsignificant, and there was no significant interaction between treatment group and age.

Conclusions and Relevance:  No benefit was found when pravastatin was given for primary prevention to older adults with moderate hyperlipidemia and hypertension, and a nonsignificant direction toward increased all-cause mortality with pravastatin was observed among adults 75 years and older.

JAMA Intern Med. Published online May 22, 2017. doi:10.1001/jamainternmed.2017.1442

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The Best Trump Budget Cuts, Part V: Less Foreign Aid

President Trump’s new budget is getting attacked by politicians and interest groups in Washington. These critics say the budget cuts are too severe and draconian.

My main reaction is to wonder whether these people are illiterate and/or innumerate. After all, even a cursory examination of Trump’s proposal shows that the federal government will expand over the next decade by an average of 3.46 percent every year, considerably faster than inflation.

For what it’s worth, I’m sure most of the critics actually do understand that government will continue growing under Trump’s budget. But they find it politically advantageous to engage in “Washington math,” which is when you get to claim a program is being cut if it doesn’t get a sufficiently large increase. I’m not joking.

That being said, while the overall federal budget will get bigger, there are some very good proposals in the President’s budget to terminate or reduce a few specific programs. I don’t know if the White House is actually serious about any of these ideas, but some of them are very desirable.

* Shutting down the wasteful National Endowment for the Arts.
* Defunding National Public Radio and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.
* Terminating the scandal-plagued Community Development Block Grant program.
* Block-granting Medicaid and reducing central government funding and control.

Today, let’s add a fifth idea to our list. The Trump budget proposes a substantial reduction in foreign aid (for numbers, see line 18 of this OMB excel file).

I hope these cuts are implemented. In part, I want to save money for American taxpayers, but I’m even more motivated by a desire to help the rest of the world. Simply stated, foreign aid is counterproductive.

The great paradox of government-to-government aid transfers is that they won’t work if recipient nations have bad policy. Yet we also know that nations with good policy don’t need handouts.

In other words, there’s no substitute for free markets and small government. That recipe works wherever it’s tried.

My colleague at the Cato Institute, Marian Tupy, embraces the idea of less foreign aid in a Reason column.

President Donald Trump is said to be considering large cuts to foreign aid. Those cuts cannot come soon enough. And he explains why in the article. Here’s the passage that caught my eye.

Graham Hancock’s 1994 book, The Lords of Poverty: The Power, Prestige, and Corruption of the International Aid Business, is still worth reading. As the author explains, much of foreign aid is used to subsidize opulent lifestyles within the aid establishment. “Only a small portion of [aid money],” Hancock writes, “is ever translated into direct assistance. Thanks to bureaucratic inefficiency, misguided policies, large executive salaries, political corruption, and the self-perpetuating ‘overhead’ of the administrative agencies, much of this tremendous wealth is frittered away.”

The problems are not specific to the United States. Foreign aid also is used as a scam to line the pockets of contractors in the United Kingdom.

The British aid contracting industry has more than doubled in value from £540 million in 2012 to £1.34 billion last year. The proportion of every pound of taxpayers’ aid money that is spent on consultants has risen from 12p in 2011 to 22p. …Budget breakdowns showed the public being charged twice the going rate for workers. One contractor on a project had a margin of 141 per cent between staffing costs charged to Dfid and the cost at market rates.

By the way, one study even found that foreign aid undermines democracy.

Foreign aid provides a windfall of resources to recipient countries and may result in the same rent seeking behavior as documented in the “curse of natural resources” literature. …Using data for 108 recipient countries in the period 1960 to 1999, we find that foreign aid has a negative impact on democracy. In particular, if the foreign aid over GDP that a country receives over a period of five years reaches the 75th percentile in the sample, then a 10-point index of democracy is reduced between 0.6 and one point, a large effect.

Last but not least, Professor William Easterly explains in the Washington Post that foreign aid does not fight terrorism.

President Trump’s proposed budget includes steep cuts in foreign assistance. Aid proponents such as Bill Gates are eloquently fighting back. …The counter-terrorism argument for foreign aid after 9/11 indeed succeeded for a long time at increasing and then sustaining the U.S. foreign aid budget. …the link from aid to counter-terrorism never had any evidence behind it. As it became ever less plausible as terrorism continued, it set up aid for a fall. …the evidence for a link from poverty to terrorism never showed up. …studies since 9/11 have consistently shown that terrorists tend to have above-average income and education. Even if there had been a link from poverty to terrorism, the “aid as counter-terrorism” argument also required the assumption that aid has a dramatic effect on the poverty of entire aid-receiving nations. Today’s proponents of aid no longer make the grandiose claims of aid lifting whole societies out of poverty.
Heck, foreign aid keeps societies in poverty by enabling bigger government.

Yet international bureaucracies such as the United Nations keep peddling the discredited notion that developing nations should have more money to finance ever-bigger government.

The bottom line is that people who care about the world’s poor people should be advocating for freedom rather than handouts.

SOURCE 

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Secular Ecclesiology
   
Ecclesiology is the study of the church. That includes the forms of church government, its leadership, how it worships, its relationship to the people of God and even its sacraments. In modern American evangelicalism, ecclesiology is needed more than ever. With fly-by-night churches built around a single charismatic leader, corruption of church leaders, and community churches spreading like Southern kudzu, evangelicals are losing perspective on the role of churches, their relation to churches and the proper oversight of both church leaders and laity. The lack of sound ecclesiology in many Protestant churches is one of the big reasons many conservatives are migrating towards Catholicism and the Greek Orthodox Church.

Meanwhile, on the political Left, a secular ecclesiology is cementing. In an age where members of the Democratic Party could boo the inclusion of God in their platform and Barack Obama could proclaim the state is the only thing to which we all belong, government is replacing God, abortion is becoming the chief sacrament and tax paying is tithing. The Left is sorting out how government will stand in for the church and, like the Spanish Inquisition, the left-wing Torquemadas will burn at the stake any who dissent. Conservatives are the new heretics.

This is on full display with President Trump’s budget. Under Barack Obama, Congress never actually passed a budget. Through a series of continuing resolutions, the Congress just adjusted funding. President Trump wants to actually govern as intended by preparing a budget and submitting it to Congress for passage. He is dealing with several realities inconvenient for left-wing orthodoxy.

The nation’s debt now exceeds $20 trillion. Barack Obama raised the national debt. If Republicans were to give Democrats all the tax increases they ever wanted, there would still be a deficit and the national debt would continue to grow. Interest payments will continue increasing, depleting money for other things.

Something has to be cut. Waste, fraud and abuse along — presuming they could be eradicated — would not close the deficit. Programs must be cut. The left-wing desire to cut the military is an increasingly irresponsible aspiration considering events like the suicide bombing in Manchester, England. Something, though, must be cut.

As secularism takes on the form of religion in this country, one religious tenet is that the more people dependent on government, the better life is. Mick Mulvaney, the Director of the Office of Management and Budget, is challenging that religious tenet. He thinks the appropriate measure for a government program is how many people the government can elevate out of poverty and off government dependence.

Jesus said, “The poor you shall always have with you.” Mick Mulvaney and conservatives believe that means we will always have a class of poor people who must be helped. Secular progressives believe it means we will always have the exact same people poor who will never be elevated out of government dependence. The idea of getting people off welfare and decreasing dependence on government is anathema to people who have come to believe dependence on government is akin to dependence on God.

As a result, there is a newfound hysteria among secular progressives. They are convinced Republicans are going to kill people by consolidating, eliminating and streamlining government programs. If one is convinced greater government means more salvation, a reduction in government means more damnation. This is akin to Christian concerns about saving and losing souls.

Likewise, as abortion becomes the chief sacrament of the Left, letting government cut Planned Parenthood is akin to denying a church of its funding. Conservative areas of the country give more to charity because they have maintained a distinction between charitable aid and government program. Liberal areas of the country are the least charitable because secular ecclesiology has eliminated that distinction and any reduction in funding to any program is an attack on the liberal church.

This leaves us, as a nation, unable to proceed with civility. If one really believes Republicans want to starve old people and throw grandma off the cliff, hysteria and violence are the logical outcome. So too is bankruptcy. The president’s budget is a compassionate budget because it seeks to elevate the poor into the middle class, not keep them dependent. But to the Left, that is heresy.

SOURCE 

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

Email me  here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or  here (Pictorial) or  here (Personal)

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IN MEMORIAM: CHRIS BRAND

The last 12 hours have been very tearful for me. After a long battle, Chris Brand has just passed away.  Chris and I were born on opposite parts of the world but we could well have been twins. We were the same age, we both had a classical education (though Chris acquired his in  circumstances much more distinguished than mine) and both of us were very self-confident and independent and thought very similarly.  To defy all the nonsense that is taught in our society we had to be very self-confident and independent.  Both Chris and I waged an unrelenting war on political correctness.

Sadly, I never met Chris in person but I am pleased I had a proxy with him up to the end. My stepson Paul and I had always got on exceptionally well.  Paul too is very independent and there was a time in his teens and early 20s when I was the only person Paul would listen to if any kind of advice was being offered.  So when Paul moved to Edinburgh for business reasons I was greatly pleased that I could send him a friend very much like myself.  And Paul did indeed develop a great friendship with Chris.

Something that upsets me about Chris's death is that I could have prevented it if I had known earlier what I know now.  He died in an NHS (government) hospital of hospital-borne infections. He got one after another, progressively weakening him until he had nothing left to fight with.  NHS hospitals are riddled with hospital borne infections and Scottish NHS hospitals are said to be worse even than English ones.  Private British hospitals are however usually free of such infections.  With the benefit of hindsight I would have asked Paul to put Chris in a private hospital very early on.  I could have funded it and he would be with us today.

Curse and goddam the NHS!

It is however a comfort that Chris's wife, Dr. Shiou-Yun Fang [nataliasyfang1974@gmail.com] sat with him to the end.  Perhaps in deference to a Chinese custom she even sat with him for some time after he died.  She is from Taiwan and is a distinguished art historian. Those who enjoyed Chris's thoughts in life may wish to comfort her in her great loss by sending her your condolences and prayers and recollections of Chris's wisdom. I will leave his blog in place for as long as Google permits it. It is IQ & PC.

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Trump and the Prime Minister of Montenegro

A report below.  The media made much of this incident, portraying Trump as a rude boor and as a childish seeker of attention.  When I first heard of what Trump had done, my reaction was: "He must think he is President of the United States".

And that really is the nub of the incident. Trump's manners probably were poor in the incident but he reminded us, probably inadvertently, that we don't have to abide by the Leftist gospel that all  men are equal.  It is quite reasonable for the President of the United States to expect special treatment and special priority.

Other Presidents would undoubtedly have abided by the Leftist convention that you avoid any references to inequality. You should pretend where possible that all men are equal.  Other Presidents would undoubtedly have treated other national leaders at the meeting as if all leaders there were equal.  In other words, Leftist assumptions have become good manners.  But now Trump has called that into question as he has called into question many other Leftist assumptions. He has made visible an invisible assumption.

It would probably get Trump further in the short run if he did observe conventional manners and I am, I suppose, regretful that he is not always "Presidential", but his implicit and explicit violation of so many conventional assumptions is a real lesson in how much our culture has become a Left-dominated one. JR


The prime minister of Montenegro, who became the inadvertent star of a viral video of President Trump pushing him aside during a gathering of world leaders, called the incident "inoffensive."

“This was an inoffensive situation,” Montenegro's Dusko Markovic told reporters, according to the Washington Post. “I do not see it in any other way.”

The moment, which shows Trump appearing to shove Markovic while the group of North Atlantic Treaty Organization leaders were getting together for the "family photo," made quite a stir on Thursday. Trump spokesman Sean Spicer said he did not see video of the incident, but explained the president was getting into his pre-determined position.

SOURCE

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The Biggest Revelations From New Obamacare Study

A report released Tuesday by the Department of Health and Human Services shows a significant hike in the average cost of individual plans since 2013 in 39 states.

In 2013, the average annual cost of a premium for an individual health care plan was $2,784. By 2017, the average annual cost for a premium for an individual health care plan on HealthCare.gov was $5,712. Thirty-nine states use HealthCare.gov.

Twenty-four states had Obamacare premiums in 2017 that were double the average individual premium in 2013.

In three states, the Obamacare premiums are now triple the average individual premium in 2013.

President Barack Obama promised premiums would go down under Obamacare.

“You should know that once we [have Obamacare] fully implemented, you’re going to be able to buy insurance through a pool so that you can get the same good rates as a group that if you’re an employee at a big company you can get right now—which means your premiums will go down,” Obama said in 2012.

Grace-Marie Turner, president of the Galen Institute, a public policy research organization, told The Daily Signal in an email that Obamacare is flawed.

“The key promise the Obama administration made to Americans in the health reform debate was that their premium and health costs would go down,” Turner said, adding:

But year after year, families have seen their premiums soar. This new HHS study, looking at premium costs before and after Obamacare, proves that the law has failed dramatically to fulfill its promise.

Ronna McDaniel, chairwoman of the Republican National Committee, said in a statement that “This report proves what Republicans have been saying for years—Obamacare was sold on lies that failed to deliver for the American people.”

Bob Moffit, a senior fellow and health care expert at The Heritage Foundation, told The Daily Signal in an email that he is not surprised by the findings of the study.

“Obamacare has literally wrecked the individual market with skyrocketing premiums, crazy deductibles, restrictive physician networks, and a radical decline in plan participation and competition,” Moffit said. “The roots of the current crisis were baked into the law from the beginning, [along with] costly benefit mandates and inflexible insurance regulations.”

Drew Gonshorowski, a senior policy analyst at The Heritage Foundation, who studies Medicare and Medicaid, said he is also unsurprised.

“This study shows something that we’ve already known about the exchanges for some time now–that premiums have and continue to rise drastically,” Gonshorowski said in an email to The Daily Signal.

House Speaker Paul Ryan said the law cannot sustain itself.

In a report released Wednesday, the Congressional Budget Office estimates that the Republican Obamacare replacement plan, the American Health Care Act, will reduce budget deficits by $119 billion from 2017-2026.

Under Obamacare, the number of uninsured is estimated to be 28 million in 2026, according to the report, which estimates that number would rise to 51 million the same year if the American Health Care Act became law.

SOURCE

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Trump Is Not Pro-Russia, Despite What the Media Says

Politically, no story is hotter than the one about President Donald Trump and the Russians.

Last week’s appointment of a special counsel to investigate Russian interference in the election keeps the story alive.

But abroad, Trump hasn’t helped the Russians. In fact, he’s opposed them.

Like many Americans, I completely rejected candidate Trump’s praise for Russian autocrat Vladimir Putin. The fact that President George W. Bush, President Barack Obama, and Hillary Clinton had also sought to get on Putin’s good side didn’t make Trump any less wrong.

Americans need an alternative to the mainstream media. But this can't be done alone. Find out more >>

By and large, Trump ran as an opponent of recent U.S. military interventions, including those in Iraq and Libya.

But he made an exception for U.S. action against the Islamic State, also known as ISIS, and he appeared to believe that the Russians were intervening in Syria to join that battle on the U.S. side.

That was a serious error. Russia’s goals in Syria were to prop up Bashar Assad’s regime and to support Assad’s regional patrons, the Iranians.

Putin’s airstrikes didn’t target ISIS. They targeted the rebels that we were ineffectively trying to support.

And that leads to the phony scandal about Trump’s sharing of intelligence with the Russians.

First, all the Americans in the room have rejected the claim that any secrets were shared.

But even if they were, this isn’t a crime. The collection and sharing of intelligence is an executive branch job, and the president has the right to make his own decisions in this realm.

Yet the fact that something’s not illegal doesn’t make it a good policy decision. Intelligence sharing with allies is smart, and we do it all the time.

The Russians, though, aren’t our allies, no matter how much Trump believes we’re both opposing ISIS. Even if we’re not giving them any secrets, we’re not going to get them to play ball by giving them Oval Office meetings.

But look at what the Trump administration has done in the rest of the world. It hasn’t acted like it believes in being buddies with Russia. Not at all.

There were concerns that Trump would try to buy Russian cooperation against ISIS by lifting the sanctions imposed on Russia for its invasion of Ukraine. Those sanctions have remained in place.

What’s more, the Trump administration has done what the Obama administration wouldn’t do: launch a cruise missile strike on the Russian-supported Syrian regime.

It also called out Russia for arming the Taliban and got Montenegro into NATO—a move the Russians opposed.

Earlier this month, Trump signed a bill prohibiting any U.S. funds from being used to support the Russian occupation of portions of the nation of Georgia.

He also offered “full support” for Georgia’s territorial integrity in a cordial meeting with Georgian Prime Minister Giorgi Kvirikashvili, while Vice President Mike Pence backed Georgia’s accession to NATO, defended its sovereignty, and supported its economic reforms.

The Obama administration’s ill-fated “reset” with Russia in 2009 was an effort to back away from the Bush administration’s belated recognition, after Russia’s invasion of Georgia in 2008, that Putin wasn’t a good guy.

So Trump’s support for Georgia isn’t just about opposing Russia. It’s a rejection of Obama’s effort to sidle up to Moscow.

If the Trump administration is supposed to be colluding with the Russians, they’re doing a terrible job of it.

They’ve opposed Russia in Europe, Afghanistan, Georgia, and Syria, while trying—and this is where the Oval Office meeting comes in—to get Moscow to oppose ISIS.

Trump’s effort to win over the Russians testifies to the emphasis the administration is placing on the war against the Islamists. That effort isn’t going to go anywhere: The Russians will play their own game in the Middle East.

I wish the Trump administration would recognize this. But I’d rather have an administration that tries to cooperate with the Russians on ISIS alone than one—like Obama’s—which tries to cooperate with them everywhere.

SOURCE

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

Email me  here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or  here (Pictorial) or  here (Personal)

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American patriotism versus German patriotism

There is a large Quora thread on the above comparison  here. It says just about all that could be said on the subject but I was rather fascinated by a rather cutting comment from Jens Böttiger.  I reproduce it below:

"In America you show patriotism by attaching a full size US flag on your pickup truck (Or confederate flag for alternative patriotism), singing the anthem before every baseball game, and sending 18 year olds to Iraq so you can later thank them for their service when they roll by you in their wheelchair in Walmart.

"In Germany we show patriotism by voting for higher taxes on ourselves to make healthcare and college tuition universally accessible to our less fortunate fellow citizens, and by picking up after one another to keep public spaces clean and nice for everyone."


Has he got a point?  He might have if it is patriotism that motivates German acceptance of high taxes.  But is it?  Might it not be that Germans have a high need for security and predictability?  A welfare state does provide that. So I think that Jens Böttiger is kidding himself about patriotism being the motive.

His second point is that Germans look after their public spaces better. But might not that be the result of a very German need for order?  I think a need for order is a good thing but let us not confuse it with patriotism.

His point about American patriotism being very public is undoubtedly true.  There is nothing like that in Australia or Britain.  But I see it as being just one example of a much more extroverted society.  Compared with other countries Americans are much more open and "out there".  Americans even talk to one-another in elevators!  Though maybe not in NYC. In Britain NOBODY talks in elevators. And I see the American way as a rather joyous way to live.  Americans greatly ENJOY their patriotic displays.

Australians and British people tend by contrast to be rather embarrassed by patriotic expressions.  Which way is better? Where do the different ways lead?  I don't think they lead in different directions at all.  The obvious comment is that American patriotism is behind America's many wars.  Yet there is not a single major American war in the 20th century that Australia did not participate in too.  Compared to American exuberance the Australian style is laconic but I suspect that the inhabitants of both countries are equally proud of what their country has achieved and become.

Jens Böttiger's final point about America refers to the suffering that America's troops often undergo.  He implies that the suffering is inflicted by patriotism.  But is it? Most of America's wars abroad are indeed a product of American exuberance but that is not exuberance about America so much as an exuberant conviction that America can help other nations with their problems.  Americans have a conviction not that they can conquer but that they can do good. I think that is rather admirable even if it is sometimes misguided.

So I can understand that Jens Böttiger is out of sympathy with American patriotism but I think his arguments are fallacious.  They have a Goebbels-like plausibility but in the end are just propaganda.  It is clear however that he is himself a patriotic German.  He even defends the reputation of Hitler's Luftwaffe in another post.  So it is amusing that he actually lives in America -- JR.


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A sad choice for the British general election

By Sean Gabb (an English libertarian)

For the avoidance of doubt, I still intend to vote Conservative in this dreadful election. And, if Labour seems to be catching up in the opinion polls, so, I suspect, will enough people to give the Conservatives a decent majority. The general election is a rerun of last year’s Referendum. There is no other consideration that ought to sway anyone who is looking beyond our present circumstances. We vote Conservative. We leave the European Union. We hope and work for a realignment in British politics. Except for this, however, I would be dithering between another vote for UKIP and a spoiled ballot. Except for Europe, the contest is between an authoritarian hag and a Fenian scumbag.

Theresa May and Jeremy Corbyn have made their responses to the Manchester Bombings. According to the BBC,

Theresa May has urged world leaders to do more to combat online extremism, saying the fight against so-called Islamic State is “moving from the battlefield to the internet.”

What she has in mind is outlined in the Conservative Manifesto:

[W]e  will  establish  a  regulatory  framework  in  law  to  underpin  our  digital  charter  and to  ensure  that  digital  companies,  social  media  platforms  and  content  providers  abide by  these  principles.  We  will  introduce  a  sanctions  regime  to  ensure  compliance, giving regulators the ability to fine or prosecute those companies that fail in their legal duties, and to order the removal of content where it clearly breaches UK law. We will also create a  power  in  law  for  government  to  introduce  an  industry-wide  levy  from  social  media companies and communication service providers to support awareness and preventative activity to counter internet harms, just as is already the case with the gambling industry.

If this hardly needs translating into Plain English, I will make the effort. The Conservatives are proposing to censor the Internet. Anyone who, in this country, publishes opinions or alleged facts the authorities dislike will be prosecuted. If these are published abroad, access to the relevant websites will be blocked. Internet companies will be taxed to pay for a Ministry of Propaganda to go beyond anything now provided by the BBC.

We are supposed to think the main targets of censorship will be the radical Moslems. I have no doubt some effort will be made to shut them up. The main targets, however, will be on the nationalist right. These are the ones who will be harried and prosecuted and generally threatened into silence. The only person so far to have lost a job on account of the bombings is the LBC presenter Katie Hopkins. She made a sharp comment on air about the Moslems, and was out. Other than that, we have had a continual spray of propaganda about the Religion of Peace, and how its core texts have nothing to do with suicide bombings or mass-rape or disorder.

In Britain, in Europe, in America, there are powerful interests that are itching to censor the Internet. It is the Internet that has made us cynical. It is the Internet that is giving us the probable truth. It is because of the Internet that the authorities are being held to account. Never let a good atrocity go to waste. Get the people ready for censorship while the bodies are still being reassembled.

Jeremy Corbyn, I grant, has been slightly better. He sees Islamic terrorism as a response to our endless wars of aggression in the Islamic World. He says:

[M]any experts, including professionals in our intelligence and security services, have pointed out the connections between wars that we have been involved in, or supported, or fought, in other countries and terrorism here at home.

There is some truth in this. I will not quote the relevant news releases from the Islamic State. But their consistent line is that, so long as we drop bombs on their women and children, they will blow themselves up among ours. Bearing in mind the scale of the chaos and bloodshed they have unleashed since 2001 in the Islamic world, our leaders are in a weak position to complain.

Even so, if they have been at least unwise, these wars cannot be regarded as the whole cause of what is being done to us. There have been major terrorist attacks in Spain and Germany and Sweden, countries that have not been to war in the Islamic World. There have been attacks in Thailand and India and the Philippines, and in many other countries that stayed neutral. I believe that we should withdraw all our forces from Iraq and Libya and Afghanistan. We should leave the Syrians to sort out their civil war. We should, so far as possible, vacate those parts of the world. I believe we should do this for our sake and for theirs. But I do not believe this would stop the terrorists from blowing our people up or from running them down. Remove one excuse – another would be found.

There is a weak correlation between Islamic terrorism and whether a country targeted has been to war in the Islamic World. There is a very strong correlation between Islamic terrorism and the presence of a large Moslem population. Thailand had no part in the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. It has Moslems. It has had terrorism. Slovakia was in the “Coalition of the Willing.” It has almost no Moslems, It has had no terrorism.

Let us suppose Tony Blair had found the common sense to tell the Americans to invade Iraq on their own. There might have been less Islamic terrorism in this country. But do not suppose there would have been none. The wars we fought in Iraq and elsewhere were wrong in themselves. They failed in their stated ends. But the true cause of the mess we are in is unlimited immigration of people who mostly cannot be assimilated, and who have been allowed to establish a demographic and cultural hegemony in large parts of the country. When our ancestors turned up in North America, they formed exclusive enclaves, and felt no obligation to conform to the ways of the aborigines. They thought they were better, and they would have been scandalised by any advice to paint their faces and join in the tomahawk dance. Once their initial colonies were secure, and once their population had sufficiently grown, they took over. Why should it be very different when we are the colonised? Terrorist violence is connected with what we have done to their countries. Much more, it is part of marking new territory and pre-empting opposition.

I could move to discussing what solutions may be available to this problem. But I will not. Instead, I will return to the May solution. If every terrorist outrage we have known in this country during the present century was committed by Moslems, terrorism is not the worst problem we face. I do not wish in any sense to minimise the horror of what was done earlier this week in Manchester. I am not saying this for form. It was a shocking and a disgusting act. But I will quote the words of Lord Justice Hoffman when he struck down an anti-terrorism law in 2004:

In my opinion, such a power in any form is not compatible with our constitution. The real threat to the life of the nation, in the sense of a people living in accordance with its traditional laws and political values, comes not from terrorism but from laws such as these. That is the true measure of what terrorism may achieve.

Terrorist violence, on whatever scale, affects those individuals who suffer it directly. A police state harms the nation as a whole. It may be said that we need a police state to fight terrorism. It is better said that terrorism is presently seen by the authorities as an excuse for the police state they have long wanted. There was no Islamic terrorism in this country before the beginning of the present century. There had been a declining level of Irish terrorism before then. There was no credible reason to suppose that any terrorists were using the Internet to further their ends. All the same, the 1990s saw a steady drumbeat of claims that the Internet needed to be censored, and that the normal rules of justice should be replaced by the rules of a police state. The excuse then was drugs and child pornography. At the end of the 1980s, I recall Margaret Thatcher’s claim that we needed identity cards to deal with violence at football matches. I believe that, if every Moslem were to leave this country tomorrow, the authorities would pause to draw breath, and, the day after that, continue demanding censorship, and detention without trial, and identity cards, and mass-surveillance – this time to save us from global warming, or Russian spies, or an impending asteroid impact.

And now to my final words on Mr Corbyn. If our present rulers are in a weak position to complain about terrorism, Mr Corbyn is in a very weak position to call himself a man of peace. I carry no torch for Israel, but Mr Corbyn has, throughout his time in politics, openly sided with the enemies of Israel – which, whatever can be said against it, is a liberal democracy of sorts. It is reasonable to presume that he opposed our wars in the Islamic world less because they were wars than because they were with his friends. Far worse than this, he has been a consistent supporter of Sinn Fein/IRA. I shall think better of his opposition to our wars in the Islamic World when he finally denounces the campaign of armed terror directed by his late friend Martin McGuiness.

But Mr Corbyn will almost certainly not be asked to form a government the week after next. Mrs May will keep the one she has. I will vote to keep her in office. But I take no pride in this. We live in a country with a more degraded public life than the average dystopian novel of forty years ago was likely to imagine.

Yes, I will pinch my nose again the Thursday after next, and vote Conservative – in the hope, and perhaps in the belief, that I shall have a better choice in 2022.

SOURCE

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

Email me  here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or  here (Pictorial) or  here (Personal)

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Clinton wisdom?

Bill Clinton is undoubtedly a clever man.  And his presidency was not terribly ideological.  His good-natured "triangulating" (compromise) is a stark contrast with the unbending righteous Leftism of Obama.  So it is possible that he did have some wise things to say. One that has a certain plausibility is something he said at the opening of his library:

“The Left at its best tears down walls that shouldn’t have been there, and the right at its best stops the left from tearing down walls that should be there.”

It may not have been original to him but it is a pretty good bit of triangulating, whatever else it is. The key is the expression "At its best".  When is the Left at its best?  I imagine that what would mostly spring to mind in that connection would be the succour that the Left gives to the poor.  It could be argued that welfare measures are needed to keep social peace.  If the poor were left to starve they might be more criminal, more likely to mount an armed rebellion etc.

But here's the catch:  Social welfare measures such as old-age pensions, workers' compensation, limited working hours etc were NOT Leftist initiatives.  They were first introduced by Otto von Bismarck in Germany, the reactionary "Iron Chancellor" of Prussia.  And he was followed not long after that by Benjamin Disraeli, the much respected Conservative  Prime Minister of Great Britain and Ireland at the height of the British empire in the late 19th century. And there has been a broad consensus ever since that at least some government welfare measures are necessary.

So I am at a loss to know what Leftists have originated that could be described as "best".  Is their current promotion and valorization of homosexuality "best"?  It might gain them a few votes among homosexuals but alienates a lot of Christians. Don't they matter? The legalization of homosexuality was certainly an act of kindness but in the USA that has been primarily the work of the courts rather than of either political party.

And the 1964 Civil Rights Act aimed at benefiting blacks got more congressional support from Republicans than it did from Democrats.

So if someone can point me to beneficial Leftist destruction, I would be all ears.

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While other controversies rage, work on border wall moves forward

New revelations come almost by the minute in the Trump-Russia affair. The White House moves into full-defense mode. The Trump agenda stalls on Capitol Hill.

A reasonable observer might conclude that is all that is happening in the Trump administration. But even as those troubles fill news sites and cable TV, administration officials are quietly moving ahead on one of the president's top campaign promises: the construction of a wall on the U.S.-Mexico border. Although it hasn't received much attention relative to the president's many problems, extensive planning for the wall is under way, officials are evaluating specific proposals, sites are being studied, and yes, there is money available to get going.

The work is being done under President Trump's executive order of Jan. 25, which declared the administration's policy to "secure the southern border of the United States through the immediate construction of a physical wall …" The order went on to set a high standard of effectiveness: "the prevention of all unlawful entries into the United States" along the border. Finally, the order cited an existing law, the Secure Fence Act, which in 2006 called for the construction of "at least two layers of reinforced fencing" and "additional physical barriers" on up to 700 miles of the 1,954-mile border.

"The executive order calls on the authority in the Secure Fence Act for us to begin immediately," said a senior administration official who recently provided an extensive update on the state of the wall project. In March, U.S. Customs and Border Protection sent out a request for proposals for companies to bid on the construction of prototypes — not little models to sit on someone's desk, but full-scale sections of proposed wall designs that will be put in place on the border. So far, Border Protection has received more than 100 proposals.

"We are evaluating what started out as a solicitation to industry and request for proposals — 18 to 30 feet high, concrete, impenetrable, hard-to-scale, the correct aesthetics," the official said. "We've tried to capture the intent [of the executive order] in the requests for proposals, and those proposals are being evaluated now."

There are some important points to remember before going any further. First, there is no intention to build a wall to stretch the entire border, from San Diego, Calif., to Brownsville, Texas. In his campaign, the president made clear that the wall need not cover every mile of the border. Certainly, no expert who supports more barriers at the border believes it should, either.

And the wall does not always mean a wall. The Jan. 25 executive order defined "wall" as "a contiguous, physical wall or other similarly secure, contiguous and impassable physical barrier." Planners say that in practice, that will certainly mean extensive areas with an actual wall. But other areas might have the type of fencing outlined in the Secure Fence Act, or some other barrier yet to be designed.

And that leads to a third point: The border barrier will not look the same at all points along the border. The terrain of the border is different — some parts are so imposing they don't need a barrier at all — and officials plan to design walls and barriers that fit each area, rather than one long, unchanging structure.

Right now, officials are studying how many "buildable miles" will need a barrier. Whatever the precise number, it will be big. In 2015, the Department of Homeland Security told Congress that, of the 1,954 miles of border, 1,300 miles, or 66.5 percent, have no fencing or barriers at all; 299.8 miles, or 15.3 percent, have vehicle fence; and 316.6 miles, or 16.2 percent, have pedestrian fence. Only 36.3 miles, or 2 percent, have the kind of double-layer fencing required by the Secure Fence Act. (The law was passed by Congress and signed by President George W. Bush, but neither Bush nor Congress really wanted to build the fence. So they didn't.)

"We've asked the nine sectors on the Southwest border, if you have to meet the standards in the executive order and the Secure Fence Act, where is it that barriers are required to complete the task?" said the senior administration official. "We've then evaluated those areas where the traffic [of illegal border-crossers] is highest." Planners are considering those factors in light of the executive order's "prevent all entries" standard — administration officials are taking that edict very seriously — to come up with areas in which a wall would be the best solution, or where some other type of physical barrier would do the job better.

At the moment, planners believe that about 700 "buildable miles" of the border will require a wall or other barrier. That just happens to be about the same amount called for in the Secure Fence Act.

Does the government have that much land available? The answer is mostly yes. Remember, from the numbers cited above, that there are more than 650 miles along the border with something on them — vehicle fence, simple pedestrian fence, whatever. That means the government has already gone through the land acquisition and approval process required to erect a barrier. "It's federal property now because we've either condemned it or purchased it," said the official.

There's no doubt that hundreds of miles of truly impenetrable barriers would have a huge effect on illegal border crossings. Talk to some experts who favor tougher border enforcement, and they will say that even as few as 100 well-chosen miles of barrier would make a difference.

In any event, there is a significant amount of border land that is already in government hands. "West of El Paso, a lot of the land is public," the official noted, while "as you go further east from El Paso towards Brownsville, a lot of that land is private." Going through the process of condemning or buying land — with all the legal and financial issues involved — will depend "on how we choose the priorities."

Once planners decide where to build, there will then be the question of what to build. If the decision is to build a wall, then the question is: a wall of what? Planners have decided that concrete will definitely be involved, even though it hasn't played much of a role in earlier barriers. Why concrete? "It's an interpretation of the vision," the senior administration official explained. By "vision," he meant it is a way to make Trump's oft-repeated promise of a "big, beautiful wall" a reality. Trump didn't mean a fence.

On the other hand, using concrete presents one obvious problem. Whatever barrier is built, Border Protection agents on the U.S. side need to be able to see through it. That's always been a requirement with earlier barriers. So now, officials are looking for creative ideas for a wall that will still allow them full sight of the Mexican side.

That touches on the most important consideration for planners. A wall isn't just a wall. It is a system — a "smart wall," as they call it. It involves building a barrier with the monitoring technology to allow U.S. officials to be aware of people approaching; to be able to track them at all times; to have roads to move people around; the facilities to deal with the people who are apprehended; and more. "It's not just a barrier," noted the official. (Last year, with the Obama administration still in office, a number of Border Protection officials traveled to Israel to study that country's highly effective barriers; they came home big believers in a smart wall.)

At this point, it's impossible to say what building a smart wall will cost, because officials haven't yet decided on a plan. But how much money does the administration have to get started now? Begin with money that was already to available to the Department of Homeland Security.

"Congress gave us a re-programming for money we were planning to do other things with — mostly technology — to get us through this request for proposals and to get the prototypes underway immediately," the senior administration official said. "That has happened already. We found $20 million to get that effort underway."

"Then, the 2017 budget resolution gives us substantial money to continue doing real estate and environmental planning and design, and then replace some fencing," he continued. "That's in the neighborhood of $900 million."

"You won't get a lot of new fence for that," the official conceded. "You'll get some upgrades. But you'll get some behind-the-scenes work underway — engineering, design, real estate acquisition, title searches, the kinds of things that have to happen to make it work."

That is a start. Republicans on the Hill argue that they got as much money in the recent spending bill as they could for the project, given that they had to work with Democrats to avoid a government shutdown and fund the government through Sept. 30. "We weren't going to get anything passed that said, quote-unquote, 'wall,'" noted one GOP staffer.

The next funding hurdle will come when Congress considers spending for 2018. Most House and Senate Democrats appear determined to stop a border barrier. They say it will be expensive and ineffective, while some Republicans believe Democrats oppose the wall mainly because they fear it will work.

SOURCE

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Another disgusting Leftidst "comedian"

CONTROVERSIAL comedian Kathy Griffin has hastily apologised for a shocking photo shoot in which she was seen wielding President Donald Trump’s bloodied, decapitated head.

The veteran comic has long been an outspoken Trump critic, but it’s the gruesome nature of her latest anti-Trump display that shocked fellow celebs and even Hillary and Bill Clinton’s daughter, Chelsea.

The instant backlash to the shockingly realistic photos made Griffin pull all evidence of the bloody stunt from the internet, issuing a video apology in its place. “I sincerely apologise. I am just now seeing the reaction of these images. The image is too disturbing, I understand how it offends people. I’ve made a lot of mistakes in career. I will continue. Taking down the image, gonna ask the photographer to take down the image. I beg for your forgiveness. I went too far, I made a mistake and I was wrong,” she said.

Griffin had earlier posted behind the scenes footage from the shoot with photographer Tyler Shields on her Twitter account, writing: “I caption this ‘there was blood coming out of his eyes, blood coming out of his ... wherever.”

The caption is a reference to comments Trump made about journalist Megyn Kelly in 2015 after a fiery debate exchange.
The video was met with an instant backlash from both sides of the political divide.

SOURCE

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

Email me  here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or  here (Pictorial) or  here (Personal)

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Master innovators again

A few days ago, I pointed out that I am so far from being a white supremacist that I am in fact a N.E. Asian supremacist. The Left will still call me a racist for that but they called a sentimental Christian gentleman named George Bush II a Nazi so I think we can see that they have no truth in them (John 8:44).

The main point of my previous post was however to point out how people descended from German tribes living on the Southern shore of the Baltic 1500 years ago had a remarkable record of innovation -- so much so that they can be seen as having created the modern world. Documentation of that remarkable record can be seen here.

The leading tribe concerned we know as the Saxons but North Germans generally were not too different, as was shown by the rapid Northern adoption of that great Saxon innovation:  Protestantism. Saxon culture rapidly became the culture of all the Northern German lands. The South, of course, remained Catholic.

I now want to make a small update to that. I want to show that innovativeness among the descendants of the old Saxons continues to this day. It is not a mere historical curiosity. Modern day descendants of the old Saxon people in both Britain and Germany are great innovators to this day.  That we have invented unusually desirable societies in which to live is of course very vividly shown by the way most of the rest of the world wants to come and live among us.

But I want to highlight here something less obvious but which is only half-known these days:  The German innovations of WWII.  I imagine that most people know that Nazi Germany was the first nation to deploy both cruise missiles and ballistic missiles (V1 and V2) but that is merely the headline of WWII German innovation. Germany also deployed in WWII the first jet fighter aircraft (the ME 262), the first military radar, the first assault rifle (the Sturmgewehr), the first smart bomb and the first military helicopter.  Germany deployed a range of new technologies that were not fully adopted by the USA until the Iraq war. Germany re-invented modern warfare.

At the outset of the war, German ships had radar while British ships did not.  The British however improved their radars much more rapidly so they gained most from that technology.  It is usually pointed out that both radar and the jet engine were British inventions but the British of course are also descendants of those South Baltic tribes so my generalization about the great innovators is in fact reinforced by that.

I am not going to say anything about the Sturmgewehr as I know that many of my readers will be gun enthusiasts who know far more than I do about the subject.  When it was issued to German troops, however, they were ecstatic.

I must make a note about the Focke helicopters.  They used a twin rotor configuration quite different to what we mostly see today but that configuration puts all its power into lift -- so that is why the heavy-lift Chinook helicopters also  use a version of that configuration.  The Focke helicopters have only one modern-day descendant but it is a distinguished one. The Chinook is a real military workhorse

And then there were the various German smart bombs -- precision guided munitions to be technical.  Germans tried several versions of them and some were very effective -- and effective relatively early on in the war.  The sinking of the allied troopship "Rohna" in 1943 with great loss of life (1,100) was seen as so frightening that the allied powers hushed it up completely.  It has become known only in recent times.  To my knowledge it wasn't until Iraq that the USA used smart bombs in combat.

And Germany did all that despite losing so many top flight physicists and other scientists to Hitler's madness about the Jews.  It was a solely German effort.  Germany also went close to deploying an atom bomb but air raids on the facilities being used for that derailed the effort.

So the ball that Luther set rolling in 1517 in Saxony is still rolling.  New ideas are still proliferating among those of Saxon ethnic or cultural descent right into the modern era. I think most people reading here will know about Alan Turing and the origins of computers and even the internet was a British/American invention.

China will one day swamp us economically but I think that the descendants of those South Baltic tribes of 1500 years ago will remain the great innovators. I am pleased that I speak a version of that South Baltic language: English --JR.

FOOTNOTE:

It's not very relevant but it amuses me to note that the British royal family is a Saxon dynasty.  If they had not changed their surname to "Windsor" in WWI, their family name would be "Sachsen-Coburg und Gotha".  "Sachsen" is the German spelling of "Saxony".

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Trump’s Tweet That Made The Media Lose Its Mind

From long experience at fixing my own typos I am prety sure he meant to write "coverage"

President Donald Trump’s tweet Tuesday night had people on Twitter asking, “What is ‘covfefe’?”

The president hit send on an unfinished message with a head-scratching misspelling at the end of it. “Despite the constant negative press covfefe,” Trump wrote.

What Trump was attempting to say was unclear, but the tweet left Twitter users speculating what “covfefe” could mean.

By Wednesday morning, the tweet had been deleted, and Trump himself had made a joke about it.

SOURCE

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Time for a Food Stamp Diet

Trump's budget has Democrats screaming about the end of the safety net, but true compassion requires reform.

President Donald Trump’s 2018 budget suggests some serious changes to welfare in America. Let’s start with the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), a.k.a. food stamps. His proposal to trim the number of people on food stamps includes requiring able-bodied adults to work or train for work in exchange for benefits. He also wants the states to start taking a larger fiscal role in welfare. Those are common sense suggestions, which naturally have Democrats in an uproar.

The president’s budget proposals have been labeled a “horror” that will gut America’s safety net. That’s not what’s going to happen, but statists reflexively oppose any program that makes people more self-reliant. After all, how can the government control the masses without them being dependent on it for their every need?

Take the first part of Trump’s plan: worker activation. This means that people who apply for food stamps will have to work a regular job, prove they are physically incapable of work, or take part in community service or job training.

This is not an unreasonable stipulation. When Congress enacted welfare reform back in 1996, establishing a work requirement was one of the single biggest reasons the welfare rolls were dramatically reduced. It wasn’t until Barack Obama and the Democrat-controlled Congress loosened restrictions for applying for food stamps that welfare numbers started to rise again.

In 2013 and 2014, Kansas and Maine were able to reduce the number of able-bodied adults on food stamps with basic work requirements. In 2016, Georgia did likewise.

Trump’s call for getting the states more involved should also be a no-brainer. The federal government accounts for 75% of the $1.1 trillion in spending on means-tested aid. Almost all the money that the states chip in goes to Medicaid.

Trump’s budget proposal stipulates that the states start picking up 25% of the tab for food stamps as well. Democrats deceitfully claim that this accounts for a 25% cut in food stamps. That’s not the case. All that is taking place here is making sure states have “skin in the game,” as the saying goes.

The states will take whatever money the federal government gives them. In fact, they have a vested interest in having more people on food stamps because that means they get more money from the government.

In some twisted way, many state officials believe more money for food stamps actually helps the economy. Well, there are more people on food stamps than ever before in the history of the program. Is the American economy better for it?

The goal should be to reduce the number of people on food stamps. Obama, by loosening restrictions and making it seem patriotic to be on the government dole, drove the numbers above 46 million people. That’s nearly one in every six Americans on food stamps. That travesty is what he had the audacity to call Hope ‘n’ Change™.

It’s important to have a safety net for people who are not as fortunate. When the food stamp program was first introduced in 1964, it was believed that it and other welfare programs could provide temporary assistance. But Lyndon Johnson’s so-called War on Poverty and Obama’s actions during his presidency ensured not a safety net, but a spider web people could not escape. Ever since the “Great Society,” Democrats have offered a never-ending handout in exchange for votes. So far, their 50-year-old plan has worked perfectly.

Unfortunately for statists, to paraphrase the late Margaret Thatcher, they’ll eventually run out of other people’s money. The end is already near. The disability insurance fund, for which claims have risen three-fold since requirements were relaxed in the 1980s, would have gone dry last year had Congress not raided another fund to keep it solvent. This is but one pot that is nearly empty. If governments at the federal and state level don’t tighten restrictions for receiving food stamps and other aid, then the day will soon come when there won’t be any help for anybody.

SOURCE

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Evidence Proves DNC Fabricated Russian Conspiracy
 
Just some introductory paragraphs below from a complicated bit of document sleuthing.  I am reminded of the downfall of Dan Rather after he was taken in by faked documents about GWB


New evidence proves beyond a reasonable doubt that the Democrats manufactured the Russian interference story as a disinformation campaign as far back as June 2016.

Information gathered by internet sleuths proves that the DNC, Clinton campaign and Obama administration conspired to concoct the Russia-Trump story, and provides a brand new motive for why Seth Rich was murdered.

Reddit.com reports: Understanding the order in which the events happened will be important to understand why it was the DNC and only the DNC could have manufactured the Russian campaign.

DNC announces they’ve been hacked.

The day after, a hacker calling himself Guccifer 2.0 claims to have taken credit for the hack and announces he will be giving his documents to Wikileaks. Guccifer 2.0 vehemently denies being Russian, a façade he keeps up throughout his activity.

Bolstered by Crowdstrike’s report and the metadata in Guccifer 2.0’s documents, media outlets immediately start screaming that Guccifer 2.0 must be Russian agents.

What did Guccifer 2.0 do?

Guccifer 2.0 hosted a WordPress site where the DNC documents could be publicly downloaded. June 15th was the date of the first Guccifer 2.0 leak; further leaks would continue thereafter. I focus only on the first leak, as they contain the metadata which are essential to proving it was a DNC operation.

Guccifer 2.0 leaked a total of 10 Office documents from the DNC in the first batch (many more would come, but none contain the same “mistakes” as the ones I shall detail).

All Microsoft Office documents have metadata entries which contain attributes about the document itself such as the user that created them, the user that modified them, and so on. This metadata is usually invisible to viewers but can be viewed with a raw text editor like Notepad, or on Mac OS, vim.

It would be unusual for a leaker to modify the metadata, but Guccifer 2.0 did, claiming that it was his “watermark.”

In Office, the metadata includes the owner of the Office application who created the file and the owner of the Office application who modified the file.

More HERE

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

Email me  here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or  here (Pictorial) or  here (Personal)

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Is President Trump our Messiah?

That heading will no doubt get a few laughs.  It may even attract some Leftist derision.  With his short temper and impatience with detail he is a most unlikely Messiah -- but the Pharisees thought that about the carpenter from Galilee too. I don't really believe in Messiahs but I am beginning to think that he is as near to our Messiah as we are likely to get.  His repudiation of the Paris climate accord is a YUGE break with the status quo.  Warmism will be on death watch from now on.  The greatest craze of the postwar era will have run its course. Someone of influence has finally declared that the emperor has no clothes.

And he brings us salvation from oppression of many other sorts too:  Tax reform, healthcare reform, immigration reform and much more is on his agenda.  None of those things are new ideas but it took Trump to get them rolling.  Jesus too based his teaching on what was already there in the Old Testament: "I came not to abolish ..." (Matthew 5:17).  The breadth of Trump's breaks with the past is truly astonishing.  He slays the sacred cows of convention daily.

And the sacred cows he slays are mostly Leftist.  He even shows how Leftist thinking has seeped into conservative thought.  I myself plead guilty to having accepted the conventional doctrine that unalloyed free trade is an ultimate goal.  There is no doubt that unalloyed free trade delivers all goods and services at lowest cost but is that the only desideratum?  Do we care whether our Chinese electric kettle costs us $7 or $9? Are there goals more important than that? Trump has made clear that there are.  Stability of employment matters too; social stability matters too.  Preserving jobs may be well worth it if the price is  to accept a $9 kettle instead of a $7 kettle.

My brother is so far Right he is almost out of sight and he has always said you have to look after your own people as first priority.  Thanks to Prez. Trump we now agree on that.

And when my son got home from work after the climate announcement we toasted Mr. Trump in good Australian "Champagne"

So Trump has even educated conservatives on what is important.  He is a great educator and conservatives not on his wavelength should accept what they can learn from him rather than digging their heels in like the Pharisees

covfefe! -- JR

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What Kathy Griffin Means for Us

The most heinous aspect of the Kathy Griffin faked beheading of Donald Trump is that it shows us exactly how degraded the sensibilities of the liberal establishment have become- and how subverted they are by the Islamic Jihad.

I do not remember, prior to Daniel Pearl’s cold-blooded murder in 2002, even being aware of beheading in the modern world. I think that, to my mind it was, back then, as distant and ancient as impaling and crucifixion. After February 1, 2002 cutting the head off of a living human being with a knife became a particular and real horror. In an attempt to understand what happened to him, I found the video on line.The utter barbarity, the bloody reality, the ghastly psychopathic cruelty of the act was overpowering. This rough disconnection of the head from the body, accompanied by the flood of life’s blood is at once a terrifying, spectacular mutilation and a desecration of the most elemental spiritual wholeness of humanity. The mouth is open, the eyes go dull and if we fail to be horrified, we die inside ourselves.

I recognized it right away as a close cousin of the gas chambers, firing squads, death trucks and starvation of the holocaust. What sane American in the early twentieth century could have seen those coming? The numbers of victims were not the same but they were both cases of how the human mind can calculate its way- rage and reason its way- to doing deeds of previously unthinkable evil. Anyway, didn’t Stalin say that “the death of one person is a tragedy, the death of millions is a statistic”?

Now, more than 15 years later, beheadings are common, almost daily occurrences. The brutal savages post videos and pictures of them on the internet as terror tactics. How many people in the west have watched one of them- or even made themselves look at one of the pictures?  I wonder if Kathy Griffin ever watched one of those videos. They are real and they are happening all the time.

As unthinkable and despicable as joking about “Lynching president Obama” was for the past eight years, there had been no epidemic of racial lynchings for many decades to give them a similar dimension of possibility. Even the catcalls against Jews who support Israel that “the gas chambers are waiting” and “kill the Jews” taunts that are heard in anti-Israel demonstrations around the world are not as immediate and visceral as beheading is today. Only to people who are not paying attention to the wholesale murder of innocent Christians and Jews in the Islamic Jihad is a beheading anodyne enough to be a subject of a humorous satire. This is the worst horror of Kathy Griffin and her failed jape, It is yet another how so many of us are unwilling to look squarely at the most immediate threat to all of us.

She doesn’t get it. Nor do the rest of the clucking liberal press who are all in some degree sympathetic in their condemnations. They think it was “inappropriate”. Beheading is not funny,  it is not merely inappropriate, it is emblematic of how the barbaric Jihad is beginning to incrementally succeed in separating our minds from our hearts and our souls.

SOURCE

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Booming US jobs market lifts equities

American employers created more than a quarter of a million jobs last month in a “rip-roaring” labour market as manufacturing conditions improved for the sixth month running, according to reports yesterday which sent stock markets to new highs.

Private employers hired significantly more workers in May than economists expected, a closely watched forecast suggested, raising hopes of a strong showing in today’s official jobs report. A separate reading of manufacturing conditions showed that new orders, exports and backlogs built up rapidly.

The three main US share indices closed at record highs. The Dow Jones rose 135.53 points to 21,144.18 while the broader S&P 500 was 0.6 per cent up at 2,430.06. The tech-heavy Nasdaq finished 0.7 per cent higher.

SOURCE

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Loony Liberal Insults General Mattis With This Idiotic Statement




Prof. Juan Cole goofs again below. The Leftist "expert" on the Middle East (a  professor of Modern Middle East and South Asian History in the History Department at the University of Michigan), Juan Cole, gets shown up for the know-nothing he is here. And there is another scathing takedown of him here.  For more on that see Mark Kleiman.  We also read  here that Cole thinks  Iraq is on the Mediterranean!  And if  you read here you will see that the wacky Prof. Cole does not even know that a large part of what is the USA today was taken from Mexico!

At least one national media contributor thinks professional singer Ariana Grande, not Secretary of Defense (DOD) Jim Mattis, is the leader America needs to win the war on terror.

The Nation contributor and University of Michigan history professor Juan Cole published an article Wednesday centered on Grande and how the Department of Defense could learn a thing or two from the 23-year-old Nickelodeon alum.

The headline reads: “Arianna Grande Understands Counterterrorism Better Than Jim Mattis.”

Even for skeptics of the Trump administration, this assertion is a bit of a stretch. Cole accuses Mattis of underestimating our enemy and feels it is pointless to wipe out terrorists because it would only turn their families against the U.S.

SOURCE

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Astounding Number of States Support Trump Against Illegal Immigration

Two thirds of the nation’s states have taken action to join in President Trump’s bid to crackdown on illegal immigration and “sanctuary cities,” a sweeping national move that would bolster the administration’s effort even if it loses in the Supreme Court.

The Migration Policy Institute reports that 33 states have moved to choke off illegal immigration, led by Texas which OK’d a law to block cities from giving “sanctuary” to illegals.

“While Texas was the first state to pass a sweeping law focused on illegal immigration since the presidential election, at least 32 other states have introduced immigration enforcement bills,” said the Institute.

SOURCE

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Local government abuse of poor families

A column in the Washington Post reveals that local governments try to make families pay if their kids wind up in the legal system, even if they’re ultimately declared not guilty of any offense.

In dozens of one-on-one meetings every week, a lawyer retained by the city of Philadelphia summons parents whose children have just been jailed, pulls out his calculator and hands them more bad news: a bill for their kids’ incarceration. Even if a child is later proved innocent, the parents still must pay a nightly rate for the detention. Bills run up to $1,000 a month… The lawyer, Steven Kaplan…is paid up to $316,000 a year in salary and bonuses, more than any city employee, including the mayor.
I haven’t given any thought to whether families should cough up money if kids are found guilty and then incarcerated.

But I find it to be outrageous that bills are sent to families when the kids are found to be not guilty.

And let’s be honest. Such a policy is not about criminal justice. It’s about figuring out new ways of pillaging people to finance bureaucracy.

To add insult to injury, most of the families are poor, so it’s very difficult to collect revenue. Indeed, very little money is collected after paying the lawyer.

Because these parents are so often from poor communities, even the most aggressive efforts to bill them seldom bring in meaningful revenue. Philadelphia netted $551,261 from parents of delinquent children in fiscal 2016.
And when you look at the consequences for poor families, it’s hard to think this is a good policy. Especially if the kid isn’t convicted of any crime!

When parents fail to pay on time, the state can send collection agencies after them, tack on interest, garnish 50 percent of their wages, seize their bank accounts, intercept their tax refunds, suspend their driver’s licenses or charge them with contempt of court.
Here’s an example from the west coast.

When Mariana Cuevas’s son was released from a California jail, after being locked up in a juvenile hall for more than 300 days for a homicide he did not commit, the boy’s public defender, Jeffrey Landau, thought his work was done. The case had been dismissed; his client was free. But at a celebratory dinner afterward, Cuevas, a Bay Area home cleaner, pulled out a plastic bag full of bills and showed Landau that the state had tried to collect nearly $10,000 for her child’s imprisonment. …In fiscal 2014-2015, Alameda County, which contains Oakland, spent $250,938 collecting $419,830 from parents. An internal county report called that “little financial gain.”
This is astounding. Trying to pillage a poor family for $10,000 when the kid didn’t commit the crime. If you care about decency and justice, this may even be worse than civil asset forfeiture.

SOURCE

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

Email me  here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or  here (Pictorial) or  here (Personal)

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Five Reasons Why America Is About To Become A Very Conservative Country

For generations, we’ve seen the political landscape in this country teeter back and forth between the Left and the Right. Usually about every 8 years or so, whichever political party is dominating Congress, the Executive Branch, and the state legislatures, is kicked out by voters and replaced with the other political party.

However, there’s something very different going on this time around. Donald Trump’s ascent to the oval office represents a major shift in our society and culture, and I’m not talking about the intermittent shuffle of politicians that we see every few years. Instead, the pendulum is about to swing very hard to the right.

I think that the political landscape in America is going to be drifting towards conservatism for the next 20-40 years. Though it may not be identical to what we view as conservative today, and it certainly won’t be the phony neoconservatism that dominated the past, it will be right-wing nonetheless. Here’s why:

1. The Supreme Court Is About To Change

President Trump has already chosen one Supreme Court justice, and there’s a good chance that he’s going to wind up choosing several more (much to the dismay of the Left). Because of their advanced age, we may see three more Supreme Court justices retire or die over the next four to eight years, two of whom lean to the left.

If Trump lasts two terms, we’re definitely going to see a Supreme Court that is dominated by conservatives for the next 20-30 years. So even when liberals take back Congress and the presidency on occasion, many of their most radical ideas won’t be able to take hold for many years.

2. Immigration Is Going To Decline

The percentage of the population that is foreign born hasn’t been this high since the early 1900’s, and most of those immigrants are liberal. That’s why our loose borders, combined with The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, have probably done more to bolster the ranks of the Left than any other law.

But just as our nation’s political landscape tends to swing back and forth between the Left and the Right, so to does number of immigrants in America. In the short term, we can expect people like Trump to restrict the border and maybe pass laws that will decrease immigration to some degree.

But there’s a long term trend to consider as well, because the election of Trump likely represents a turning point for our society. Considering how crucial his immigration stance was to his victory, it’s clear that a growing number of Americans want the border tightened up, and the number of immigrants moving here to decrease. And rest assured that in the near future, there will be more conservatives voting for politicians who will try to lower immigration rates, because…

3. The Next Generation Is Incredibly Conservative

Over the years we’ve seen each generation of Americans become a little more liberal than the last, but that’s about to change. According to a study from last year, Generation Z, which represents kids born after the year 2000, is the most conservative generation since World War Two. To give you an idea of just how right-wing the next generation is, when asked if they are “quite conservative,” 14% of teenagers say they are, compared to just 2% of Millennials. That’s a mind boggling shift, from one generation to the next.

4. Liberal Birth Rates Are Declining

The Left is about to pay a huge price for denigrating the family and traditional gender roles for so many years. Because liberal women tend to be more career minded and wait longer to have children, they often have fewer kids over the course of their lives. That’s why liberal states always have lower birth rates than conservative states.

All of the states with a birth rate of of 60 or less per 1000 people are liberal, and all of the states with a birth rate of 70 or more per 1000 people are conservative. That may not sound drastic, but consider that these states still have a sizeable mix of conservatives and liberals. Even the most liberal states have millions of conservative residents and vice versa, which offsets the results. If ideology is really driving birth rates, then liberals are probably having very very few children. They’re probably not reaching the minimum replacement rate of 2.1 children per mother.

When you consider how many values kids learn from their parents and carry into adulthood, it’s obvious that the Left has a serious demographic problem. The only way they’ve been able to create more liberals, is through immigration and through indoctrination in the school system. Unfortunately for the Left, they’re not going to have a stranglehold on our schools for much longer either.

5. Leftist Academia Is In Serious Trouble

From Kindergarten to college, our schools are breeding grounds for liberal ideas. That’s become abundantly clear in recent years, as we’ve seen the horrifying rise of political correctness and social justice beliefs on college campuses. These institutions are little more than indoctrination centers for the Left.

But this isn’t going to go on for much longer. We have a whole generation of kids who were buried in over a trillion dollars worth of debt, just so they could get worthless liberal arts degrees that won’t ever help them get a job. They paid tens of thousands of dollars to be indoctrinated by liberal professors, before going back home to live with their parents.

That’s why student loans constitute a bubble in our economy, and once it pops, colleges are going to have to cut back on many classes that don’t actually increase the earning power of students. Coincidentally, the fields of study that harbor the most liberal professors, are the ones that don’t help most students get jobs, like the arts, humanities, liberal arts, gender studies, etc. Someday soon, colleges are going to be forced to trim the fat, and many of these Marxist professors and diversity administrators are going to get the axe. Their positions are incredibly superfluous.

As for the leftists public schools, let’s not forget that the number of kids being homeschooled is growing rapidly, and most of their parents are conservatives. They’re raising a new generation that isn’t going to be brainwashed by government run schools.

And let’s not forget that the mainstream media, which has been largely wed to the left, is dying. So basically, every institution that the Left uses to teach its ideas, from the media to academia, is slowly crumbling away.

In summation, everything liberals have relied on to bolster their ranks, propagate their ideas, and pass their laws, are failing. So there shouldn’t be any doubt. Over the next few decades, America is going to become a very conservative place.

SOURCE

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Allah's war on us continues

Police believe three male suspects were involved in Saturday's London Bridge attacks, but say more work needs to be done to establish if they were alone. All three men were shot and killed by armed police at nearby Borough Market.

A white B&Q van being driven at speeds of up to 50 miles per hour mounted the pavement at London Bridge and ploughed into pedestrians.

Three men wielding knives 10 inches long then began attacking passersby, even entering at least one restaurant to attack Saturday night diners.

Police say the attack lasted around eight minutes before armed officers attended the scene and took down the assailants.

One eyewitness spoke of the men shouting “this is for Allah” as they stabbed indiscriminately.

"We saw people running away and then I saw a man in red with a large blade, at a guess 10 inches long, stabbing a man, about three times," one witness said.

"It looked like the man had been trying to intervene, but there wasn't much he could do. He was being stabbed quite coldly and he slumped to the ground."

SOURCE

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Written Out of History: The Forgotten Founders Who Fought Big Government

Some of America’s most important founders have been erased from our history books. In the fight to restore the true meaning of the Constitution, their stories must be told.
   
In the earliest days of our nation, a handful of unsung heroes—including women, slaves, and an Iroquois chief—made crucial contributions to our republic. They pioneered the ideas that led to the Bill of Rights, the separation of powers, and the abolition of slavery. Yet, their faces haven’t been printed on our currency or carved into any cliffs. Instead, they were marginalized, silenced, or forgotten—sometimes by an accident of history, sometimes by design.
   
In the thick of the debates over the Constitution, some founders warned about the dangers of giving too much power to the central government. Though they did not win every battle, these anti-Federalists and their allies managed to insert a system of checks and balances to protect the people from an intrusive federal government. Other forgotten figures were not politicians themselves, but by their thoughts and actions influenced America’s story. Yet successive generations have forgotten their message, leading to the creation of a vast federal bureaucracy that our founders would not recognize and did not want.

For example:

 *  Aaron Burr who is depicted in the popular musical Hamilton and in history books as a villain, but in reality was a far more complicated figure who fought the abuse of executive power.

 *  Mercy Otis Warren, one of the most prominent female writers in the Revolution and a protégé of John Adams, who engaged in vigorous debates against the encroachment of federal power and ultimately broke with Adams over her fears of the Constitution.

 *  Canasatego, an Iroquois chief whose words taught Benjamin Franklin the basic principles behind the separation of powers.

If we knew of the heroic fights of these lost founders, we’d never have ended up with a government too big, too powerful, and too unresponsive to its citizens. The good news is that it’s not too late to rememberand to return to our first principles. Restoring the memory of these lost individuals will strike a crippling blow against big government.

More HERE

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Tucker Carlson: 'Humor Is Dead; Politics Killed It'

“Humor is dead; politics killed it,” Tucker Carlson declared after comedian Kathy Griffin held up, ISIS-style, a fake, bloodied severed head of President Donald Trump.

On his Thursday television program, Carlson bemoaned that so-called comedians like Kathy Griffin and Samantha Bee have stopped even trying to be funny.

Instead, they’re just appealing to the malicious attitudes of people who agree with their politics:

“People clap for her, not because they’re amused, but because they agree with her politics. That’s not art. It’s affirmation.

“An awful lot of comedy is like that all of a sudden. Ever watch Samantha Bee? If you like preachy self-righteousness in massive doses, that’s the show for you.

“Or try John Oliver – you get the same thing there - or Bill Maher or Trevor Noah, or Stephen Colbert. Some of these guys used to be funny, a long time ago – but, not Samantha Bee, she was never funny.”

And, because it’s working, all entertainers have been forced to abandon humor in order to preach liberal political propaganda:

“Now, they are playing to the biases and vanities of their audiences and it's working, unfortunately, which means they are all the exactly the same, prisoners of conformity, which is always the sworn enemy of art. Step out of line, and you pay the price.”

SOURCE

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

Email me  here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or  here (Pictorial) or  here (Personal)

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Trump’s Food Stamp Reform Would Close the Trap of Dependency

President Donald Trump’s newly released budget contains a proposed food stamp reform, which the left has denounced as a “horror” that arbitrarily cuts food stamp benefits by 25 percent.

These claims are misleading. In reality, the president’s proposed policy is based on two principles: requiring able-bodied adult recipients to work or prepare for work in exchange for benefits, and restoring minimal fiscal responsibility to state governments for the welfare programs they operate.

The president’s budget reasserts the basic concept that welfare should not be a one-way handout. Welfare should, instead, be based on reciprocal obligations between recipients and taxpayers.

Government should definitely support those who need assistance, but should expect recipients to engage in constructive activity in exchange for that assistance.

Work Requirements

Under the Trump reform, recipients who cannot immediately find a job would be expected to engage in “work activation,” including supervised job searching, training, and community service.

This idea of a quid pro quo between welfare recipients and society has nearly universal support among the public.

Nearly 90 percent of the public agree that “able-bodied adults that receive cash, food, housing, and medical assistance should be required to work or prepare for work as a condition of receiving those government benefits.”

The outcomes were nearly identical across party lines, with 87 percent of Democrats and 94 percent of Republicans agreeing with this statement.

Establishing work requirements in welfare was the core principle of the welfare reform law enacted in the mid-1990s. That reform led to record drops in welfare dependence and child poverty. Employment among single mothers surged.

Despite the harsh impact of the Great Recession, much of the poverty reduction generated by welfare reform remains in effect to this day.

Unfortunately, though, welfare reform altered only one of more than 80 federal means-tested welfare programs. The other programs were left largely untouched. Trump’s plan is to extend the successful principle of work requirements to other programs.

Restoring State-Level Accountability

The second element of Trump’s plan is to restore a minimal share of fiscal responsibility for welfare to state governments.

As noted, the federal government operates over 80 means-tested welfare programs providing cash, food, housing, medical care, training, and targeted social services to poor and low-income persons. In addition, state governments run a handful of small separate programs.

Last year, total federal and state spending on means-tested aid was over $1.1 trillion. (This sum does not include Social Security or Medicare.)

Some 75 percent of the $1.1 trillion in spending comes from the federal government. Moreover, nearly all state spending was focused in a single program: Medicaid.

Excluding Medicaid, the federal government picks up the tab for nearly 90 percent of all means-tested welfare spending in the U.S.

The United States has a federal system of government with three separate levels of independent elected government: federal, state, and local. Under this three-tier system, the federal government already bears full fiscal responsibility for national defense, foreign affairs, Social Security, and Medicare.

It makes no sense for the federal government to also bear 90 percent of the cost of cash, food, and housing programs for low-income persons.

But for decades, state governments have increasingly shifted fiscal responsibility for anti-poverty programs to the federal level. As a result, the federal government picks up nearly all the tab for welfare programs operated by the states.

This is a recipe for inefficiency and nonaccountability.

One of the key lessons from welfare reform—now 20 years ago—is that both blue and red state governments spend their own revenues far more prudently than they spend “free money” from Washington.

Efficiency in welfare requires state governments to have some fiscal responsibility for the welfare programs they operate.

The food stamp program is 92 percent funded by Washington. Washington sends blank checks to state capitals—the more people a state enrolls in food stamps, the more money Washington hands out.

A dirty secret in American politics is that many governors, both Republican and Democrat, regard this type of “free money” poured from Washington as a benign Keynesian stimulus to their local economies. The more spending, the better.

The Trump budget recognizes that the food stamp program will become more efficient if the state governments that operate the program have “skin in the game.” Therefore, it raises the required state contribution to food stamps incrementally from 8 percent to 25 percent.

By 2027, this would cost state governments an extra $14 billion per year. Half of the so-called “cuts” in food stamp spending in the Trump budget simply represent this modest shift from federal to state funding.

The remaining savings in food stamps in the Trump budget come from assumed reduction in welfare caseloads due to the proposed work requirement.

A Proven Policy

Today, there are some 4.2 million nonelderly able-bodied adults without dependent children currently receiving food stamp benefits. Few are employed. The cost of benefits to this group is around $8.5 billion per year.

In December 2014, Maine imposed a work requirement on this category of recipients. Under the policy, no recipient had his benefits simply cut. Instead, recipients were required to undertake state-provided training or to work in community service six hours per week.

Nearly all affected recipients chose to leave the program rather than participate in training or community service. As a result, the Maine caseload of able-bodied adults without dependent children dropped 80 percent in just a few months.

A similar work requirement for able-bodied adults without dependents, imposed nationwide, would save the taxpayer $80 billion over the next decade.

Even this would be a pittance compared to the $3.6 trillion the federal government will spend on cash, food, and housing benefits over that period.

The Trump policy is the exact opposite of so-called “block grants” in welfare.

In a welfare block grant, the federal government collects tax revenue and dumps money on state governments to spend as they will.

Welfare block grants have always been failures. In fact, the Trump budget would eliminate two failed block grant programs—the Community Development Block Grant and the Community Services Block Grant.

Instead of block grants, Trump is seeking to reanimate the principles of welfare reform from the 1990s that emphasized work requirements and renewed fiscal responsibility from state governments.

Deeply Needed Reforms

Of course, the left adamantly opposed welfare reform in the 1990s. In their view, welfare should be unconditional. Recipients should be entitled to cash, free food, free housing, and medical care without any behavioral conditions.

No wonder they have proclaimed Trump’s proposal to be “devastating” and a “horror.”

Contrary to protestations from the left, the U.S. welfare state is very large and expensive. For example, federal spending on cash, food, and housing benefits for families with children is nearly three times the amount needed to raise all families above the poverty level.

But the current welfare state is very inefficient. Trump seeks to reform that system.

In Trump’s unfolding design, welfare should be synergistic. Aid should complement and reinforce self-support through work and marriage rather than penalizing and displacing those efforts.

A welfare state founded on this synergistic principle would be more efficient than the current system. It would reduce both dependence and poverty.

More importantly, it would improve the well-being of the poor who have benefited little from the fractured families, nonemployment, dependence, and social marginalization fostered by the current welfare state.

SOURCE

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The myth of ‘caring liberals’

Progressive politics is now about feeling good, not doing good. Comment from Britain:

It’s long been a common assumption that liberal, left-wing people are more caring than those on the right, that they are more compassionate people than conservatives. Right-wing people, by contrast, are generally assumed to be selfish, greedy and generally horrible. This consensus explains why now, if you live in a British city or large town, you will be surrounded by a multitude of signs outside houses exhorting you to vote Labour, Liberal Democrat or Green, and why you will scarcely see any ‘Vote Conservative’ signs. Everyone wants to be seen as a caring lefty, and no one wants to parade their right-wing opinions.

I have never fallen for this myth myself, that left-wing people are better or morally superior people. If anything, and if we are going to judge a person’s character by their politics, I’ve always been more inclined to believe the opposite – that people who loudly espouse caring politics tend to be more egotistical and selfish. This is because the main things that ostentatious liberals care about are themselves, their public image and their reputation as really nice people.

The ‘caring liberals’ myth was exposed once again in the aftermath of the Manchester bombing. The bien pensants were on hand to issue clamorous declarations of peace, love, hashtags and sympathy, but few from the liberal media or in the Labour Party dared to speak out unequivocally against the obvious evil afoot: Islamism, an extreme variant of a creed that now deliberately kills children.

The thing that metropolitan liberals fear most is to be accused of racism and being ‘right-wing’. They are utterly terrified of losing face this way. Hence in times of terror, they stick to pacifist platitudes and evasive, deceitful words. Far better, and far safer, to direct their anger instead against people like Katie Hopkins and other non-U vulgarians. For the liberal left, the abiding concern is always: how do I make myself look good out of this situation?

This reluctance to speak the truth after Manchester is indeed despicable, but none of us is surprised. The tactic by the liberal left has always been to change the subject of a conversation about Islamist terrorism, and to instead invoke the mythical spectre of ‘Islamophobia’. Or ‘foreign policy’. Or ‘root causes’. This egotism is all the more outrageous in that it masquerades itself as altruism and outward-looking compassion.

This behaviour is not new. It’s part of our Christian heritage, which long ago instilled in our collective mindset the notion that self-abasement and self-hatred are virtues. George Orwell wrote copiously about the liberal left’s infantile, attention-seeking self-hatred. And I remember my dad telling me about a letter he read in the Guardian in the 1960s, from a reader who would bump into West Indians and Pakistanis on purpose on the buses, just so he could say sorry to them. ‘We are all guilty’ remains the mantra of simpering, self-flagellating pietists.

‘Progressive’ politics today is about feeling good first, making yourself look good second, and doing good third. Ostensible and ostentatious liberal politics is now less about changing the world and more about you. Nietzsche’s warning about conspicuously caring types remains pertinent: ‘Where in the world have there been greater follies than with the compassionate? And what in the world has caused more suffering than the follies of the compassionate?’

SOURCE

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

Email me  here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or  here (Pictorial) or  here (Personal)

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Seeds of fascism sprout anew in Trump’s America (?)

H.D.S. Greenway below focuses mainly on style and it is true that Trump has a forceful style. But style is not substance and what Greenway omits is that Mussolini was a Marxist and Trump is a capitalist.  Those are REAL differences and they matter.  And the ideology matters too.  Mussolini was a centralizer intent on expanding government control whereas Trump has scrapped regulations by the bagful.   The unending shrieks from the Left should tell you about  that. So the idea that Musso is a forerunner for Trump is a strange comparison indeed.  H.D.S. Greenway should look to policies, not appearances

It is however true that the seeds of Fascism are to be found in the USA.  The constant expansion of government regulation and control under Obama was very Fascist.  It was Fascism with a courteous face but Fascism nonetheless.  Even Hillary's election slogan "better together" was what the Fasces of ancient Rome symbolized and it was that Roman example which Musso adopted as the symbol and name of his party.  Fascism is indeed not far away in the USA. Trump is doing his best to roll it back

Leftists make many attempts to redefine what Italian Fascism was -- some examples below -- so let us look at Mussolini's own summary of the Fascist philosophy: "Tutto nello Stato, niente al di fuori dello Stato, nulla contro lo Stato" (Everything in the State, nothing outside the State, nothing against the State).  Clear enough? How does that compare with "Drain the swamp"?

WATCHING DONALD TRUMP on TV whipping up his base of supporters at a rally in Harrisburg, Pa., I had a sudden feeling I had seen this all before. I remembered a speech I had seen on YouTube. It was a speech Mussolini had given in Milan in 1932. I watched it again, and it was all there. The chin thrust, the pouts, the hand gestures, the adoring base cheering every word. He spoke of the might of his army “second to none,” the “injustices committed against us,” and how he had “stormed the old political class.” There was even a complaint about the press that had drawn “arbitrary conclusions” to what he was saying. Mussolini’s Blackshirts, his squads of roughnecks, were used to assaulting reporters they didn’t like.

Today the Italians are an easygoing and generous people. But when Fascism took hold in the early 1920s, Italy became belligerent and bullying. Its concentration camps for the native population in Libya and its use of poison gas became genocidal. And it was quick to join the Nazis in dreams of conquest. Mussolini was telling Italians they had to begin winning again.

In his 2004 book, “The Anatomy of Fascism,” Robert O. Paxton wrote that fascism did not die with the end of World War II, that its seeds were planted “within all democratic countries, not excluding the United States.” According to Paxton, fascism was a “form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation, or victimhood. . . . “Fascism was an affair of the gut more than of the brain.”

Or as R.J.B. Bosworth wrote in his 2005 book “Mussolini’s Italy,” “Border fascism,” an obsession with borders and keeping the population pure, was always a “key strain in the fascist melody,” as was “allowing the nation to stand tall again.” All you needed was a charismatic leader, Mussolini, whom Paxton compared to the modern “media-era celebrity.”

Thirteen years ago Paxton wrote that all that is required for a rebirth of fascism is “polarization, deadlock, mass mobilization against internal and external enemies, and complicity by existing elites. . . . It is of course conceivable that a fascist party could be elected to power in free, competitive elections.”

SOURCE

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Governor Gasbag Abuses Taxpayers

California governor Jerry Brown has signed off on a $5.2 billion deal that will raise the tax on gasoline, raise the tax on diesel and raise user fees on motorists. Before the Memorial Day weekend, Brown ranted that those who complain about this tax hike are “freeloaders.” This doesn’t deserve a response, but taxpayers may find one helpful.

The tax hike is intended to fix California’s disastrous roads, but maintenance of roads is already part of California’s budget. Trouble is, as we noted, the California Department of Transportation developed a model for the allocation of maintenance funds but abandoned it because it would have reduced more than 100 Caltrans staff positions. Caltrans distributes funding based the previous spending patterns of the region in question, whatever the road conditions. Taxpayers might also recall that for years the state has diverted $1.5 billion in transportation infrastructure taxes to subsidize California’s General Fund bond payments.

Anybody who drives already pays substantial gas taxes every time they fill up, so in no sense are working motorists “freeloaders.” California workers already pay the highest income and sales taxes in the nation, and they are weary of government shaking them down for more. Taxpayers might note that Brown and the legislature made zero cuts to the state’s bloated bureaucracy and failed to trim wasteful spending. Brown and the legislature could have scrapped the $70 billion “bullet train” boondoggle, and $15 billion to dig tunnels under the San Joaquin-Sacramento River Delta. Fixing the roads and building new ones would be a better application for those funds.

As is happens, Caltrans employs more than 3,000 engineers who basically do nothing but Brown is okay with that sort of parasite, common in state government. The first recourse of California’s hereditary, recurring governor, is to punish the workers with higher taxes and fees then abuse them as “freeloaders.” As working taxpayers may recall, this is the same governor who responded “I mean, look, shit happens,” to safety lapses on the new span of the Bay Bridge, a project that came in 10 years late and $5 billion over budget.

SOURCE

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Leftist mob Cheers As Speaker Criticizes U.S. Bombing of ISIS

Hundreds of anti-Trump protesters gathered at the Washington Monument on Saturday in what was billed as a “March for Truth.”

According to the group’s Twitter page, the rally in Washington and other U.S. cities was a call for “urgency and transparency” on the Trump-Russia probe.

At the event, protesters carried signs accusing President Trump of colluding with the Russian government. Signs read “Investigate Trump,” “Liar, liar, Pence on fire,” and “Follow the money.”

The headline speaker at the event was Linda Sarsour, who describes herself as a Palestinian-American-Muslim, civil rights activist, and national co-chair of the Women’s March. Sarsour blamed “right-wing Zionists” for victimizing her, and she also criticized President Trump’s decision to bomb ISIS fighters in Afghanistan.

After her speech, CNSNews.com asked Sarsour why she opposed the April 13 airstrike that killed 94 ISIS fighters in Afghanistan, but no civilians. Sarsour responded that “civilians were being directly affected.”

“I’m anti-war, and I also didn’t get any confirmation about that, like, did you see a list of these ISIS fighters? I didn’t.”

Both Afghan and U.S. officials confirmed that no civilians died in the airstrike.

Asked if she was okay with the fact that the bomb killed ISIS members, Sarsour replied: “If we are actually not killing civilians, and we’re directly targeting terrorists.”

Sarsour has come under fire for some of her controversial connections and statements. In March, she was arrested for disorderly conduct at the “Day Without A Woman” protest in New York City near Trump Tower.

Sarsour also has called shari’a Law “reasonable” and “misunderstood,” tweeting what she sees as the benefits of shari’a

SOURCE

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Whom are you calling crazy?

By Alex Beam, writing in the Boston Globe

IT IS AN article of faith in polite society, where I live in a kind of internal exile, that President Trump is clinically insane.

Here are some headlines from the august New York Times: “Mental Health Professionals Warn About Trump,” “Is It Time to Call Trump Mentally Ill?,” and so on. Before those two articles appeared in February, Sharon Begley of STAT wrote a more convincing and measured overview of head-shrinkers’ thoughts about Trump, cannily titled, “Crazy Like a Fox.”

Trump’s mental state definitely interests me. He seems deeply wounded, frantically impulsive, and obviously capable of endangering the nation and the world. But medicalizing heinous behavior — a favorite pastime of the chattering classes — is counterproductive. Not everyone who is sad is depressed. Not everyone who is excited is manic. Not every miscreant is nuts.

It’s a good idea to leave diagnoses to the diagnosticians, and we don’t have access to any of Trump’s psychiatric records, if such even exist. It should not go unnoticed that the man who literally wrote the book on the “narcissistic personality disorder” so commonly ascribed to Trump, opined, “He may be a world-class narcissist, but this doesn’t make him mentally ill.”

Dr. Allen Frances, the chairman of the committee that created psychiatry’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Volume 4, continued: “It is a stigmatizing insult to the mentally ill (who are mostly well behaved and well meaning) to be lumped with Mr. Trump (who is neither).”

Mental health professionals should be familiar with the “Goldwater Rule,” which strongly cautions psychiatrists against commenting on the mental state of people they have not examined. The rule harks back to 1964, when several psychiatrists dilated on the mental fitness of the Republican presidential candidate, Senator Barry Goldwater.

Goldwater sued the publication that quoted them, and, in an unusual legal victory for a public figure, won. Savor the irony: Goldwater, a five-term US senator, was about 20 times more qualified to be president than Trump. Talk about defining deviancy down.

There have been other comical attempts at psychoanalyzing presidents. In 1931, the prominent Freudian A.A. Brill published a paper diagnosing Abraham Lincoln as a “manic schizoid personality.” He observed that Lincoln’s famous stories and jokes “are of an aggressive and [sexually masochistic] nature, treating of pain, suffering and death, and that a great many of them were so frankly sexual as to be classed as obscene.”

Simultaneously rebutting and demeaning Freud’s American disciple, analyst Jacob L. Moreno noted that the barely five-foot tall Brill sported a beard and was also named “Abe.” “Brill had waited patiently for a chance to measure up to that other Abe,” Moreno wrote.

In 1967, the retired diplomat William Bullitt published a “psychological study” of Woodrow Wilson purportedly coauthored by Freud, who had been dead for 28 years. The “authors” refered to Wilson as “Tommy” throughout, and attributed his reformist urges in part to an “under-vitalized” mother and “the ego of a boy who has no sister.”

“What a can of worms,” the New York Sun editorialized. “The tome was so weird that it horrified even Harvard’s Erik Erikson,” who called it “a disastrously bad book on Wilson.”

If and when Trump is forced to answer for his many depradations, let’s not rationalize his behavior with a bogus insanity defense.

SOURCE

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

Email me  here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or  here (Pictorial) or  here (Personal)

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"Trumpileaks" and Leftist flexibility

Leftists have no principles, ethics or morals.  How do I know that?  They tell us.  Whenever they are cornered in an argument, they will say, with a great air of superiority, "But there's no such thing as right and wrong".  And they do mean that.  We should take them at their word.  They do have aims -- destroying anything they can -- but that is all, no ethics or principles.  You can see it for yourself any time.  When they say something is wrong -- like anything that Trump does -- just reply: "But  there's no such thing as right and wrong".  It really stumps them.  Years ago I did some research into their insincere use of "right" and "wrong" which showed their inconsistency.

And there is no limit to what Leftists will appeal to. When George Bush's intervention in Iraq was being mooted -- Bush made sure to get Congressional approval for it first -- John Kerry and others even made an appeal to preserve the status quo -- the one thing Leftists most consistently oppose.  They even stressed the importance of the Peace of Westphalia -- a set of documents created in the year 1648.  You couldn't make it up! Leftists will appeal to anything that they think will be persuasive to others, regardless of what they themselves think.

And that brings us to Michael Moore and his establishment of a gossip site called "Trumpileaks".  Moore gives a classic exhibition of Leftist "flexibility".  He claims that Trump has done all sorts of illegal things but can't actually name one.  He mistakes Leftist howls for evidence of illegality.

He makes up for his lack of substance, however, by appealing to all sorts of authorities that Leftists normally abhor. He speaks warmly of the founding fathers and even quotes Mike Pence approvingly. The whole thing is too silly to reproduce but a reader has done an extensive fisking of it so I will forward the fisked version to anyone who asks for it.

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The Church of Globalism Wants Your Blood (and Money)

I am still concerned with what I have been writing about as “human sacrifice” (here and here)  but in the aftermath of the London Bridge Attack it has become apparent that there are deeper concerns and the death of innocent people is a symptom of an even graver danger.

it is, surely, “The Jihad” and the renaissance of fundamentalist Sharia law that are the proximate causes of the slaughter but it is a mistake to focus solely on the Muslim side of the equation.  It is not so much the Islamists that we should be afraid of, it is the Globalist movement in the west that has allowed, and even fostered, those squalid barbarians to grow so dangerous and impudent.

The limp, mealy-mouthed responses of Kahn and May to President Trumps tweets after London have gotten me thinking. The majority of our elected officials, and their bureaucratic minions along with our leading academics and the majority of our artists and entertainers have conspired to lull us into suppressing our spiritual, intellectual and cultural defenses and open our borders to the unfettered immigration and the terror, disease, rape and murder it brings. But the terror is just the most noticeable manifestation. There is a whole complex Globalist movement that has pervaded and polluted our body politic.

I am not one of those who believe in an organized Globalization Conspiracy. I know there are conspiracy theories out there but they seem a bit overwrought and impossibly arcane. I think, though, that once you understand Globalism and its underpinnings you will see that its worse and more pervasive than any centralized conspiracy could be.

Globalism is actually a pseudo-religion, it is the Sharia Law analog of the West. It is an extreme belief in the infallibility and inevitability of Globalization. It and all of its doctrines are unassailable and anyone who questions them are disqualified from legitimacy. There are a number of dogmas connected with Globalism Chief among them is what is now commonly called Climate Change. Other dogmas include:

    The Right to Migrate (for western countries this means unfettered immigration- legal and otherwise)

    Multiculturalism (which is more accurately described as Cultural Relativism)

    Disdain for Nationalism and Populism

    Condemnation of Income Inequality (although, ironically most of those who trumpet this the loudest are pulling down vast incomes for doing so- see Bernie Sanders, Al Gore, Hillary Clinton, Barak Obama, et al)

But you don’t need to take my word for it. An excellent, if unintentional, indictment of Globalization may be found on the Barclay Bank website. The research paper abstracted on this page is a perfect case study in the arrogant cluelessness of what might be called the Globalist Elite. The title “The Politics of Rage” sets the tone. It is cold research seen through a pro-globalist lens. It presents a chilling picture of what Globalism aims to do. Here is the list of of factors necessary to globalization that are identified as causing the rage against globalization among the middle classes:

    Sovereignty (as in the loss of national sovereignty through Trade Pacts and the EU - See Brexit)

    Representative Reform (related to Sovereignty- the loss of local representation through mandates from national governments and their commitments to supra-national bodies)

    Immigration (unfettered migration of the un-assimilate-able, terrorists, carriers of diseases and non-productive third world populations into western countries)

    Trade (free trade that costs jobs and economic dislocation in developed countries)

    Redistribution of Income (related to Trade- loss of employment and depression of wages costs the lower and middle income people in developed countries  and creates more profit for the wealthy and corporations)

    Anti-Corporatism (see Redistribution)

I finally have a complete understanding of what Barak Obama meant when he vowed to “fundamentaly transform the United States of America.”  The picture that emerges is that the middle and lower middle class in the developed countries of the world are being sacrificed, in every way possible. Their jobs and wealth are being diluted and lost to the tidal wave of “migration”. They lose their very lives to the terrorists who wash ashore with that same wave.

All the while, the corporations, government apparatchiks, media pundits, academic theorists and financial manipulators, those that I call the Global Elite, get ever fatter and more insolent. They are not the ones being run over, slashed to death and shot in the streets. They live in enclaves with high walls. They are not losing their financial security, their interests are doing very well thank you. It is no transformation. It is a betrayal.

And to what effect is all this havoc being visited on the workers, earners and entrepreneurs who make it all possible? There is no proof that refugees from failed states can adapt well enough and in large enough numbers to modern western economies to do anything more than increase the burden of entitlements in those countries. There is no proof either that there is any chance that the other “benefits” predicted for globalization will ever materialize.

The Barclay researcher blandly asserts that it would lead to faster development in undeveloped countries. Even allowing for the scabrous old allegation that the abuses of the colonial era are responsible for the economic devastation in those countries, colonialism has been over for a century and the third world is still poor.

Culture is the most important determinant of development. Israel, for example, is a country founded in a place bereft of natural resources on land that had been poverty stricken for two millennia. In sixty years, under constant hostility and attack from neighbors with overwhelming numerical advantage, it is one of the strongest economies in the world. Globalists hate Israel for the very example that she is!

No! The only benefit that is real in the globalization scenario is that which accrues to the Globalist Elite who are trying to squelch the natural resistance to it by calling our distress “rage”. They call us “bitter clingers” (Obama), “deplorables” (Clinton), “uneducated” (Mainstream Press), deniers and they belittle our very sacrifice with statistical cruelties like “London is still one of the safest cities” or “undocumented immigrants commit crimes at a lower rate than the general population”.

These are untrue in any sense but they are most sinister in the way they negate real suffering. It is heartless to tell the families of the little girls killed in Manchester, or of the nine year old boy killed in Boston or of Kate Steinle that they should be comforted by those cold statistics when their loved ones would be alive today if immigration were under sufficient control. This is not inchoate “rage” as Barclay and the progressives try to invalidate it. It is not we who are “the deniers”.

SOURCE

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Enforced Equality: Fair or Foul?

Economic inequality has generated much discussion in recent years—in academia, on the campaign trail, and even on the international bestsellers list. Some might say that one of the dialogue’s core ideological drivers—egalitarianism—has claimed more than its fair share of public attention. The editors of The Independent Review, however, see the trend as a welcome opportunity to improve the quality of debate about economic progress and opportunity, the rule of law, intellectual history, public opinion, and ethics. The result is the Summer 2017 issue’s fascinating, in-depth Symposium on Egalitarianism—perhaps the most important forum in the journal’s twenty-two-year history.

“Love it or loathe it, egalitarian sentiments and concerns about inequality are clearly on the rise in both politics and the academy,” writes the journal’s co-editor Robert M. Whaples in his introduction to the symposium. The fact of inequality, he counsels, requires thoughtful consideration. “Will our response to it be ugly, say by envying or injuring those who have ended up with more than we have or by belittling and mistreating those who have less? Or will we see the dignity in all people—great and small—and treat others with respect, cooperating with them to fulfill that promise by achieving the virtue, prosperity, and peace that we all desire?”

Incidentally, of the symposium’s many outstanding essays, The Independent Review’s editors singled out one as standing above the rest—“The New Egalitarianism,” by Adam Martin. In it, the Texas Tech University assistant professor shows why today’s leading theoreticians of egalitarianism “are not your father’s collectivists.” Along with their obscurantist analysis of the ways that existing practices and norms may benefit the powerful at the expense of the disadvantaged, the New Egalitarians are distinguished by their decidedly anti-egalitarian solution to the world’s social ills: to appoint themselves as society’s adjudicators and enforcers of right and wrong.

More than merely of academic interest, the New Egalitarianism is a threat to be taken seriously. For his deep erudition, penetrating insights, and stylistic accessibility, Martin will be awarded the symposium prize of $10,000. Quick—someone call the equity police!

SOURCE

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Funeral of Chris Brand

I have received the following email from Dr. Shiou-Yun Fang

The date for Chris' funeral and memorial and thanksgiving service has just been set. They will take place on the 26th of June (Monday). The funeral will start at 2:30pm, for family and friends. Then is the memorial and thanksgiving service for the public which is going to be held in St Peter's Church, Lutton Place, Edinburgh at 3:30pm. This is the church Chris and I went every Christmas Eve. It has warmly-decorated interiors and the two vicars there are well known to us. After the service, there will be a reception in the sitting room of our Brand's mansion. I started joining his life in 2000. From close friends, I have heard lots of amusing stories about many parties that he had thrown there before. I believe that Chris will like the reception being held here.

I have received the photo below from Shiou: happy times for her and Chris at a Boxing Day party. You can see how well Chris did to get a lady who was beautiful and accomplished.  In a comment on the happy photo, Shiou said poignantly: "My happiness has been changed to much pain and grief".  I feel her grief.  A quality lady -- JR



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

Email me  here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or  here (Pictorial) or  here (Personal)

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