Dissecting Leftism

Scientists predict reading ability from DNA alone

Reading ability is a major component of IQ so this is another step forward towards measuring IQ directly from brain features

Researchers from King's College London have used a genetic scoring technique to predict reading performance throughout school years from DNA alone.

The study, published today in Scientific Studies of Reading, shows that a genetic score comprising around 20,000 of DNA variants explains five per cent of the differences between children's reading performance. Students with the highest and lowest genetic scores differed by a whole two years in their reading performance.

These findings highlight the potential of using genetic scores to predict strengths and weaknesses in children's learning abilities. According to the study authors, these scores could one day be used to identify and tackle reading difficulties early, rather than waiting until children develop these problems at school.

The researchers calculated genetic scores (also called polygenic scores*) for educational achievement in 5,825 individuals from the Twins Early Development Study (TEDS) based on genetic variants identified to be important for educational attainment. They then mapped these scores against reading ability between the ages of seven and 14.

Genetic scores were found to explain up to five per cent of the differences between children in their reading ability. This association remained significant even after accounting for cognitive ability and family socio-economic status.

The study authors note that although five per cent may seem a relatively small amount, this is substantial compared to other results related to reading. For example, gender differences have been found to explain less than one per cent of the differences between children in reading ability.

Saskia Selzam, first author of the study from the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology & Neuroscience (IoPPN) at King's College London, said: 'The value of polygenic scores is that they make it possible to predict genetic risk and resilience at the level of the individual. This is different to twin studies, which tell us about the overall genetic influence within a large population of people.'

'We think this study provides an important starting point for exploring genetic differences in reading ability, using polygenic scoring. For instance, these scores could enable research on resilience to developing reading difficulties and how children respond individually to different interventions.'

Professor Robert Plomin, senior author from the IoPPN at King's College London, said: 'We hope these findings will contribute to better policy decisions that recognise and respect genetically driven differences between children in their reading ability.'

*Calculating an individual's polygenic score requires information from a genome-wide association study (GWAS) that finds specific genetic variants linked to particular traits, in this case educational attainment. Some of these genetic variants, known as single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs), are more strongly associated with the trait, and some are less strongly associated. In a polygenic score, the effects of these SNPs are weighed by the strength of association and then summed to a score, so that people with many SNPs related to academic achievement will have a higher polygenic score and higher academic achievement, whereas people with fewer associated SNPs will have a lower score and lower levels of academic achievement.

SOURCE

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Is Putin the 'Preeminent Statesman' of Our Times?

By Patrick J. Buchanan

"If we were to use traditional measures for understanding leaders, which involve the defense of borders and national flourishing, Putin would count as the preeminent statesman of our time.

"On the world stage, who could vie with him?"

So asks Chris Caldwell of the Weekly Standard in a remarkable essay in Hillsdale College's March issue of its magazine, Imprimis.

What elevates Putin above all other 21st-century leaders?

"When Putin took power in the winter of 1999-2000, his country was defenseless. It was bankrupt. It was being carved up by its new kleptocratic elites, in collusion with its old imperial rivals, the Americans. Putin changed that.

"In the first decade of this century, he did what Kemal Ataturk had done in Turkey in the 1920s. Out of a crumbling empire, he resurrected a national-state, and gave it coherence and purpose. He disciplined his country's plutocrats. He restored its military strength. And he refused, with ever blunter rhetoric, to accept for Russia a subservient role in an American-run world system drawn up by foreign politicians and business leaders. His voters credit him with having saved his country."

Putin's approval rating, after 17 years in power, exceeds that of any rival Western leader. But while his impressive strides toward making Russia great again explain why he is revered at home and in the Russian diaspora, what explains Putin's appeal in the West, despite a press that is every bit as savage as President Trump's?

Answer: Putin stands against the Western progressive vision of what mankind's future ought to be. Years ago, he aligned himself with traditionalists, nationalists and populists of the West, and against what they had come to despise in their own decadent civilization.

What they abhorred, Putin abhorred. He is a God-and-country Russian patriot. He rejects the New World Order established at the Cold War's end by the United States. Putin puts Russia first.

And in defying the Americans he speaks for those millions of Europeans who wish to restore their national identities and recapture their lost sovereignty from the supranational European Union. Putin also stands against the progressive moral relativism of a Western elite that has cut its Christian roots to embrace secularism and hedonism.

The U.S. establishment loathes Putin because, they say, he is an aggressor, a tyrant, a "killer." He invaded and occupies Ukraine. His old KGB comrades assassinate journalists, defectors and dissidents.

Yet while politics under both czars and commissars has often been a blood sport in Russia, what has Putin done to his domestic enemies to rival what our Arab ally Gen. Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi has done to the Muslim Brotherhood he overthrew in a military coup in Egypt?

What has Putin done to rival what our NATO ally President Erdogan has done in Turkey, jailing 40,000 people since last July's coup — or our Philippine ally Rodrigo Duterte, who has presided over the extrajudicial killing of thousands of drug dealers?

Does anyone think President Xi Jinping would have handled mass demonstrations against his regime in Tiananmen Square more gingerly than did President Putin this last week in Moscow?

Much of the hostility toward Putin stems from the fact that he not only defies the West, when standing up for Russia's interests, he often succeeds in his defiance and goes unpunished and unrepentant.

He not only remains popular in his own country, but has admirers in nations whose political establishments are implacably hostile to him.

In December, one poll found 37 percent of all Republicans had a favorable view of the Russian leader, but only 17 percent were positive on President Barack Obama.

There is another reason Putin is viewed favorably. Millions of ethnonationalists who wish to see their nations secede from the EU see him as an ally. While Putin has openly welcomed many of these movements, America's elite do not take even a neutral stance.

Putin has read the new century better than his rivals. While the 20th century saw the world divided between a Communist East and a free and democratic West, new and different struggles define the 21st.

The new dividing lines are between social conservatism and self-indulgent secularism, between tribalism and transnationalism, between the nation-state and the New World Order.

On the new dividing lines, Putin is on the side of the insurgents. Those who envision de Gaulle's Europe of Nations replacing the vision of One Europe, toward which the EU is heading, see Putin as an ally.

So the old question arises: Who owns the future?

In the new struggles of the new century, it is not impossible that Russia — as was America in the Cold War — may be on the winning side. Secessionist parties across Europe already look to Moscow rather than across the Atlantic.

"Putin has become a symbol of national sovereignty in its battle with globalism," writes Caldwell. "That turns out to be the big battle of our times. As our last election shows, that's true even here."

SOURCE

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Here’s What Happened to Workers After Philadelphia Passed a Soda Tax

Pepsi announced last week that it will lay off around 100 employees at distribution plants that supply the Philadelphia area. This is the latest blow for the city’s new beverage tax, which went into effect in January.

“Unfortunately, after careful consideration of the economic realities created by the recently enacted beverage tax, we have been forced to give notice that we intend to eliminate 80 to 100 positions, including frontline and supervisory roles,” Pepsi spokesman Dave DeCecco said, according to Philly.com.

However, the layoffs could be quickly reversed if the beverage tax is abandoned, according to DeCecco.

“If the tax is struck down or repealed, we plan to bring people back to work,” DeCecco said, according to Reuters. The tax is currently under appeal in the Commonwealth Court, with arguments anticipated to begin in early April.

Although it is commonly known as the “soda tax,” the law also includes all “non-100 percent-fruit drinks; sports drinks; sweetened water; energy drinks; pre-sweetened coffee or tea; and nonalcoholic beverages intended to be mixed into an alcoholic drink,” according to the city of Philadelphia’s website.

The tax, passed in June 2016 by the Philadelphia City Council, adds 1.5 cents to every ounce of liquid, which amounts to an 18-cent tax for a 12-ounce can of soda and a $2.16 tax for a 12-pack of soda.

The tax was implemented to finance pre-kindergarten programs, increase funding to public parks and facilities, and improve the health of Philadelphians, according to a statement published online by Mayor James Kenney’s office.

Since the law was enacted, some local consumers and businesses say they have suffered.

Bloomberg reported:

Canada Dry Delaware Valley—a local distributor of Canada Dry Ginger Ale, Sunkist, A&W Root Beer, Arizona Iced Tea and Vita Coco—said business fell 45 percent in Philadelphia in the first five weeks of 2017, compared with the same period last year. Total revenue at Brown’s Super Stores, which operates 12 ShopRite and Fresh Grocer supermarkets, fell 15 percent at its six retailers in the city.

According to Bloomberg, the CEO of Brown’s Super Stores, Jeff Brown, said, “In 30 years of business, there’s never been a circumstance in which we’ve ever had a sales decline of any significant amount, I would describe the impact as nothing less than devastating.”

Daren Bakst, a research fellow in agricultural policy at The Heritage Foundation, said:

“The Philadelphia City Council decided it knew what its city residents should eat and drink. Freedom was apparently not important to them,” Bakst told The Daily Signal in an email. “They didn’t care that it would undermine freedom. They didn’t care that it would hurt small businesses in their city. Nor did they care that a tax like this is regressive, hurting the poor the most because a greater share of the poor’s income goes to food purchases.

“The Philadelphia City Council deserves all the blame that is coming their way. For those unfortunate individuals who are losing their jobs, they can thank this to the arrogance of people who think they should socially engineer diets,” Bakst said.

SOURCE

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

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

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A revolt against deference

Frank Furedi

People aren’t rejecting truth – they’re rejecting the values of the elites

When political commentators talk of the emergence of a post-truth world, they are really lamenting the end of an era when the truths promoted by the institutions of the state and media were rarely challenged. It’s a lament that’s been coming for a few years now. Each revolt of sections of the public against the values of the elites has been met with the riposte that people are no longer interested in the truth. What the elites really mean is that people don’t care about their version of the truth. So when the French celebrity philosopher Bernard-Henri Levy asserted that people have ‘lost interest in whether politicians tell the truth’, he was venting his frustration at an electorate that no longer shares his values.

Today’s elite angst about so-called post-fact or post-truth public discourse is but the latest version of an historical struggle – a struggle over the question of who possesses moral and intellectual authority. Indeed, the rejection of the values and outlook of the holders of cultural power in many Western societies has long been portrayed as a rejection of truth itself. The reason elite values have been enshrined as ‘the truth’, right from the Ancient Greeks onwards, is because the rulers of society need to secure the deference of the masses. The masses are being encouraged to defer not to the power of the elites, but to the truth of elite values.

That this is not widely understood is due to contemporary society’s reluctance to acknowledge that cultural and political life still relies on the deference of the public – passive or active – to the values and moral authority of the elites. The term ‘deference’ – ‘submission to the acknowledged superior claims, skill, judgement or other qualities of another’, as the OED defines it – suggests a non-coercive act of obedience to authority. Hence it was frequently coupled with terms such as instinct, custom and habit (1). In the 19th century, it was frequently used to imply people’s willingness to accept and bow down before the elites on the basis of their superior wisdom. Deference presumed the intellectual and moral hegemony of the educated middle class, or cultural elite, over the wider public.

In recent decades it has been suggested that the era of deference is over. We are told that people are far too critical to defer to the superior wisdom of others. In this context, the idea of deference has acquired negative connotations, and is often identified with uncritical thinking. However, in practice, deference is still demanded by elites. But it is demanded in the form of calls to respect the authority of the expert, because he speaks the truth. So, in almost every domain of human experience, the expert is presented as the producer not just of facts, but also of the truth. Those who fail to defer to experts risk being denounced as irrational, superstitious or just plain stupid. Hence, in 2001, the consummate cynic, Michael Moore, could ask his educated American readers: ‘Do you feel like you live in a nation of idiots?’ Moore knew that his readers would share his contempt for their moral inferiors (2). Today, many sections of the commentariat share Moore’s disdain, and portray people’s rejection of their values, and with it their cultural authority, as something other than it is – that is, as a rejection of facts and truth.

Historically, concern about what is now called fake news and post-truth politics was bound up with a worry about the capacity of ordinary people to discriminate between what the cultural elites interpreted as the truth and other versions of reality. It was Plato, writing through the figure of Socrates, who first raised the alarm about the threat to truth, as he saw it, posed by the invention of reading and writing. Socrates feared that written ideas, unlike verbal communication, could acquire a life of their own, and ‘roam about everywhere’. Writing does not discern between readers who can understand and benefit from a communication and those who will become misled and confused by it. He warned that writing reaches those with ‘understanding’ no less than ‘those who have no business with it’ (3). In line with the paternalistic worldview of his era, Socrates assumed that in the wrong hands, a little knowledge was a threat to the social order.

Socrates’ disapproval of the written text was based, in part, on a conviction that the pursuit of the truth was so demanding that only a few Athenian citizens could be trusted with its undertaking. He insisted that knowledge ‘is not something that can be put into words like other sciences’; it is only ‘after long-continued intercourse between teacher and pupil, in joint pursuit of the subject’ that true knowledge finds its way to the soul (4). Plato’s main concern appears to have been not so much the written text, but its circulation among a mass audience.

In today’s self-consciously inclusive democratic public culture, Socrates’ inclination to restrict people’s freedom to read material of their own choosing and in circumstances of their own making would be seen as anathema. Yet even in the 21st century, the public is often represented as a mass of powerless victims of media manipulation. They have been led astray by tabloid journalism or by the subliminal techniques of advertisers, we are told. Such concerns have become amplified in the age of the internet. And now, after the apparent rejection of the cultural values of the political establishment by populist movements, concern with the supposedly fragile status of the truth often assumes the form of a moral panic.

Socrates’ critique of the capacity of the people to distinguish between truth and falsehood led him to invest his faith in the authority of the would-be experts of the day – or, as he imagined them, ‘philosopher guardians’. He derided the authority of the Athenian demos, and argued that the people lacked the intellectual resources required to grasp the truth. In some of the comments attributed to him in the Apology, what he seeks is not opinion but ‘opinions that are better informed and more completely thought through’ (5). Consequently, Socrates offered an unambiguous argument for deference to expertise.

As he put it, if society is ready to defer to the views of experts and ignore the opinion of ordinary folk on technical matters such as shipbuilding and architecture, why is it not prepared to defer to experts on political matters? In his dialogue with Protagoras, Socrates states that ‘when it is something to do with the government of the country that is to be debated, the man who gets up to advise [people] may be a builder or equally well a blacksmith or a shoemaker, a merchant or ship owner, rich or poor, of good family or none’ (6). Socrates took the view that the people could not be trusted to find their way to the truth. As far as he is concerned, what most people think on political matters is far less important than the views of the one man who really understands the issues at stake – the expert (7).

Socrates believed that in the domain of politics, there was a need for men who possessed the wisdom to grasp what is true. Although he looked to the authority of the moral expert to guide people towards the truth, he was at a loss to explain where such special individuals could be found. It is only in modern times, when the focus shifted from the moral expertise of the philosopher to the factual expertise of the scientist, that the quest for a political expert has been resolved.

Deference to the expert

Public life in Western societies is underpinned by the assumption that people will defer to the opinion of an expert. Politicians frequently remind us that their policies are ‘evidence-based’, which usually means informed by expert advice. Experts have the last word on topics of public interest and increasingly on matters to do with people’s private affairs. The exhortation to defer to experts is underpinned by the premise that their specialist knowledge entitles them to a higher moral status than the rest of us.

In the 19th century there was an ascendancy of the expert as the producer of truth. This was the outcome of the project to construct a form of deference appropriate to the age of mass politics. Strikingly, it was during the 19th century that the question of deference emerged as a major issue in British public life. British elite opinion recognised that ‘natural deference’ to authority would have to be replaced by a new form of deference to the superior sections of society. It was identified by the 19th-century journalist and essayist, Walter Bagehot, as ‘intellectual deference’ (8).

The debate over deference in 19th-century Britain represented an important change in the way that the elites have sought to validate their authority. The most interesting contribution to this shift was made by liberal and utilitarian thinkers who sought to reconstitute deference on a new rational foundation. In his 1820 essay Government, James Mill outlined a theory of political deference that had as its premise the capacity of the new middle class to exercise moral authority over the lower orders (9). Mill wrote:

‘The opinions of that class of the people, who are below the middle rank, are formed, and their minds directed by that intelligent and virtuous rank, who come most immediately in contact with them, to whom they fly for advice and assistance in all their numerous difficulties, upon whom they feel an immediate and daily dependence, in health and in sickness, in infancy, and in old age: to whom their children look up as models for their imitation, whose opinion they hear daily repeated, and account it their honour to adopt.’ (10)

James Mill’s optimism about middle-class hegemony was based on his belief in that class’s superior public virtues. He praised this class for giving ‘to science, to art and to legislation itself, their most distinguished ornaments, the chief source of all that has exalted and refined human nature’. And he sought to reassure those who doubted the capacity of middle-class opinion to influence the behaviour of urban workers and the poor: ‘Of the people beneath them, a vast majority would be sure to be guided by [the middle class’s] advice and example.’ (11)

James Mill’s son, the philosopher John Stuart Mill, believed that the power of persuasion was the most effective way of avoiding instability and conflict. He wrote that the ‘only hope from class legislation in its narrowest, and political ignorance in its most dangerous form, would lie in such disposition as the uneducated might have to choose educated representatives and defer to their opinion’ (12). Mill’s argument for deference was founded on a belief in the authority of the knowledge of the expert. Although he was inclined to be more democratic than most of his liberal contemporaries, he allocated a central role for elected expert representatives in the drafting of legislation (13), insisting that it was ‘so important that the electors should choose as their representatives wiser men than themselves, and should consent to be governed according to that superior wisdom’ (14).

The elevation of the status of the expert along with the professionalisation of expertise’s authority has profound implications for the meaning of truth. As the historian Thomas Haskell pointed out in The Emergence of Professional Social Science (2000), the professionalisation of expertise during the 19th century led to ‘changes in the very notion of truth itself’. Truth was now perceived as the outcome of expert reasoning, and it was assumed that citizens would readily defer to it.

Experts versus the people: an unresolved tension

Most experts are responsible and well-meaning individuals who have an important contribution to make to the welfare of society. However, given the authority enjoyed by expertise, it is not surprising that it has become the target of political manipulation. The consolidation of the political role of experts, and the reliance of politicians on expert advice rather than on their own analysis, has encouraged the development of a form of authority that violates the fundamental norms of democratic accountability. Politicians now find it all too easy to retreat behind the experts. And they are happy for issues to be complicated, rather than simplified, explained and resolved.

The problem is not expertise in itself. Society needs expert authority on technical and scientific matters. But it does not need expert authority for political decision-making; in that sphere, rather, it needs people to exercise their own political judgement.

The flipside of the apotheosis of expertise is the idea of an incompetent public. This is why, historically, the ambiguous relationship between democracy and a reliance on expertise has led many commentators to draw pessimistic conclusions about the capacity of the public to play the role of a responsible citizenry. The public are seen as irrational, governed by emotion rather than reason. As a result, the public’s refusal to defer to the experts is perceived as a threat to the political order – because it promises the rule of unreason and emotion. The political elites do not see a decline in deference to their opinions for what it is – a rejection of their values; rather, they experience it as a rejection of the facts and even of truth itself!

Plato’s disdain for the demos and his advocacy of the authority of the expert have reappeared today in the form of the anti-populist script. It was not surprising that during the EU referendum campaign, anti-populist commentators were outraged and horrified when then Conservative minister Michael Gove said: ‘I think the people of this country have had enough of experts.’ From the media and political establishment’s standpoint, all that stands between civilisation and barbarism is the authority of the expert.

It’s worth thinking about why Socrates was unable to explain where political or moral expertise could be found and how it could be institutionalised. He failed because politics and morality are not appropriate subjects for the pronouncements of experts. Science can certainly provide facts, but not truths. It is only through the public interpretation of facts that people arrive at truths.

Truths are simply not reducible to scientific reasoning. When Thomas Jefferson, one of the Founding Fathers, stated that ‘we hold these truths to be self-evident’, he was giving voice to something that was not simply a product of reasoning. As the political philosopher Hannah Arendt explained, ‘by virtue of being self-evident, these truths are pre-rational – they inform reason but are not its product – and since their self-evidence puts them beyond disclosure and argument, they are in a sense no less compelling than “despotic power” and no less absolute than the revealed truths of religion or the axiomatic verities of mathematics’ (15). In the current climate, different attitudes towards the truth will not be decided by the ‘facts’, but by the contestation of cultural authority.

In recent years the decline of deference towards the Western establishment’s truths has prompted it to wage a crusade against populism. This has led to a new stage in the decades-long Culture War. What stands in the way of the elite crusade to regain deference is the wisdom of the people.

SOURCE

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Which Commandments?

There are three different versions of the Ten Commandments (seen as the Ten Suggestions by liberal churches) in the Torah. Which is most authoritative? I have an article up on my Scripture Blog which looks at that.

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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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Don’t ask cronies to reform crony capitalism

MARTIN HUTCHINSON

Paul Ryan’s health care “reform” bill was defeated last week without even receiving a vote in the House of Representatives, in spite of the care he had taken to get input from the health insurance industry. That was the problem. In a crony capitalist system, where bad lobbyist-pushed laws and regulations have poured illicit profits into the pockets of oligopolists, the oligopolists are the last people to consult on how to reform those laws. The same dynamic is visible in monetary policy, in bank regulation and in corporate and individual tax. We are a long way from true free-market capitalism, and we won’t get there by consulting the current crony “capitalists.”

Healthcare is a classic example. U.S. healthcare costs 18% of GDP, compared to 12% in the next-highest cost countries, France, Sweden and Switzerland, 11% in Germany and Canada, 10% in Japan and 9% in Britain and Australia. Effectively, the U.S. government pays as much for healthcare as Britain’s state-run system, then private American citizens pay the same amount all over again. The U.S. gets nothing extra in terms of outcomes for all this expenditure; indeed U.S. indicators of healthcare results, such as life expectancy, are distinctly mediocre by rich-world standards.

Whatever your political view on who should pay for what, getting the United States’ appallingly high healthcare costs down to those of its competitors should surely be the top priority, indeed more or less the only priority, in any healthcare system reform.

Paul Ryan’s American Health Care Act achieved essentially nothing in the way of cost control. It claimed to do so, replacing Medicaid by a system of “block grants” to the states, but that change does not actually reduce the cost of healthcare at all, it merely shifts it from the Federal government to the states and, inevitably, to America’s less wealthy citizens who depend on Medicaid.

The legislation did nothing about the trial lawyer blight, it kept all Obamacare’s cost-increasing regulations in place, it did not provide for insurers bidding across state lines and it did not remove the egregious 1986 emergency room mandate, by which hospital emergency rooms must treat indigent patients without limit and without receiving any kind of compensation from the state that mandates this nonsense. Without proper cost-reducing measures, the legislation was essentially useless; its 17% approval in the polls was probably higher than would have been achieved once the public discovered what a colossal waste of Congressional time it had been.

The reason for the Ryan bill’s poor quality is that it was designed after extensive discussions with the insurance industry and other beneficiaries of the current system. Ryan is a champion fund-raiser and much admired as a “policy wonk”, largely because of the care he takes to consult the special interests before proposing new policies. Thus, the provisions that might make a serious dent in insurance company incomes were missing from Ryan’s bill, as were provisions that would collapse the cost of medical care overall, reducing the economic rents that health insurers, hospital chains, trial lawyers and others could extract.

This is not a problem limited to healthcare. We are likely to get another almost perfect example of it when Ryan unveils his corporate tax reform plan. While it may include some form of “border adjustment tax”, favored by President Trump, which redistributes income from retailers to manufacturers, it’s likely that the main feature of it will be the abandonment of worldwide taxation and a movement to “territoriality” in corporate tax, by which corporations will pay U.S. corporate income tax only on U.S. income.

This is a move in precisely the wrong direction. The economically neutral and efficient means of taxing multinationals would tax all worldwide income, without any deferral of income earned overseas, but with a full tax credit for taxes paid overseas. The United States has never had this system; corporations’ overseas income is deferred from tax until it is remitted to the United States, under “Subpart F” legislation introduced in 1962.

Thus, we have a system in which U.S. corporations have stashed over $2 trillion overseas to avoid taxes, and companies such as Apple are borrowing domestically to pay dividends and engage in economically damaging repurchases of stock, while keeping ziggurats of cash offshore.

The current system makes no sense at all. It encourages companies to invest overseas, by giving them the potential to avoid tax on the investment, thus discriminating against domestic investment, precisely the problem against which Trump rightly rails. It is also grossly unfair to U.S. individual taxpayers, who have only a very limited ability to use this loophole. U.S. taxpayers who earn income overseas, as I did for some years, must pay full U.S. tax (and in some cases, state tax) on that income, with a modest $75,000 foreign earned income exemption. What’s more if they attempt to keep their own money overseas tax free, in a tax haven bank account, the U.S Treasury goes after the foreign banks, with a spurious excuse of finding terrorist funding, and subjects the taxpayers to threats of imprisonment.

The corporate tax bill Ryan is likely to propose, as favored by corporatist lobbyists from the Wall Street Journal down, would make this economic insanity worse, by allowing all foreign income to be fully exempt from U.S. corporate tax. Of course, the first effect of this would be a “giant sucking sound” of money rushing out of the U.S. into tax havens for spurious foreign investment, doubtless leveraged to the eyeballs by Fed-induced cheap money.

There are other examples of this. President Trump’s economic crew, made up largely of alumni of Goldman Sachs, are unlikely to reform the disgraceful Fed funny-money policies that have distorted resource allocation and destroyed productivity growth for the last decade. They are also likely to gut banking regulations that restrict the insane amount of leverage in the system, while retaining those that add cost and bureaucracy, which provide useful barriers to entry against new and smaller competitors.

We are also likely to see this problem in the Trump administration’s “reform” of individual taxes. It may well be inspired by President Reagan’s 1986 tax law, which reduced rates of tax by eliminating deductions. It may well eliminate the deductions relied upon by the upper middle class, for home mortgage interest and state and local taxes. But you can be absolutely sure that, guided as they will be by the billionaires in the political donor class, the tax law’s drafters will not reform the true source of inequality and scams: the charitable tax deduction. This serves the combined purpose of funding a myriad of sleazy left wing agitators and allowing the ultra-rich to finance their lifestyles tax-free through foundations such as the Clintons’ while the merely mega-rich on the two coasts tax-deduct their repulsive social climbing and networking through charity dinners.

There is an overall principle here, and it should be pretty obvious. Once an economic system has moved away from a free market, usually through legislation drafted by panicky and economically illiterate leftists given license by a war or an economic crisis, it creates crony capitalists. These benefit from the new restrictions and build businesses optimized for the restrictions that the laws and regulations have introduced. Very often, as in the case of medical care and modern financial services, the new system absorbs a far larger share of GDP than would the equivalent activity in a free market, with the result that new avenues are opened up for crony capitalists to generate extraordinary levels of profits, while the old free-market businesses are squeezed out of existence.

This happened most visibly in Britain after the 1986 Financial Services Act, when the merchant banks, which had provided sophisticated financial services worldwide, some of them for as long as 200 years at modest economic cost, were within a decade squeezed out by foreign behemoths. The behemoths were much larger (and so less efficient) because of the compliance costs they were forced to absorb, which increased the economic share absorbed by the financial services businesses and their practitioners, while destroying the quality of service that the merchant banks had provided.

Similarly in U.S. healthcare, a business with which I am less familiar, the addition of regulations after 1960 took away the family doctors and small hospitals that had provided good cost-effective services, and pushed the business towards large bureaucratic hospital chains, with teams of lawyers attached to resist shyster lawsuits, plus an entirely new and unnecessary layer of health insurance companies that exist purely to shuffle paper and intermediate between patients and health services providers. As in finance, these new “crony capitalists” have no interest whatever in dismantling the system under which they have grown rich.

Every now and then a government is elected that wants to return, at least partially, to a free market system. To do so, that government must dismantle a host of regulations which in many sectors have destroyed the free market and replaced it with a crony capitalist rent-seeking cabal. The free-market-seeking government will face huge opposition from the crony capitalists, as well as from the myriad of citizens who benefit from heavy regulation, high taxes and government control, or are ideologically in favor of them.

To win through, a free-market government will need to draft the new laws itself, and not rely on crony capitalist help, however generous the crony capitalists may be as political donors. If Paul Ryan is a major political fund-raiser, he should not be allowed near the drafting of free-market legislation.

SOURCE

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Meals on Wheels Outrage is Based on a Lie

It made for great copy—irresistibly clickable and compulsively shareable. “Trump’s Budget Would Kill a Program That Feeds 2.4 Million Senior Citizens,” blared Time’s headline. “Trump Proposed Budget Eliminates Funds for Meals on Wheels,” claimed The Hill, in a piece that got 26,000 shares.

But it was false. And it wouldn’t have taken long for reporters to find and provide some needed context to the relationship between federal block grant programs, specifically Community Development Block Grants (CDBG), and the popular Meals on Wheels program.

Funding Has Not Been Cut

From Thursday’s conversation in the press, it was easy to assume that block grant programs—CDBG and similar block grants for community services and social services—are the main source of federal funding for Meals on Wheels. Not so.

Instead, as the national Meals on Wheels site explains, the major source of federal funding for the programs, accounting for 35 percent of overall local budgets, comes through the Sixties-era Older Americans Act. (Local programs also obtain support from state and county governments, private donors, and so on.)

According to the website, cuts have not been announced in Older Americans Act funding, although the group fears that they may lie ahead.

So where do the federal block grant programs come in? Well, they give states and localities a lot of discretion on where to allocate the money, one option is to add money to supplement Meals on Wheels funding. Some do use it for that purpose.

But as Scott Shackford makes clear in his new piece for Reason, that isn’t what CDBG is mostly about. CDBG funds regularly go into pork-barrel and business-subsidy schemes with a cronyish flavor. That’s why the program has been a prime target for budget-cutters for decades, in administration after administration.

It’s important to the CDBG program’s political durability that its grantees wind up sprinkling a bit of extra money on popular programs mostly funded by other means. That way, defenders can argue that the block grants “fund programs like Meals on Wheels.”

That’s what happened in the press this week.

Outrage Over Nothing

The New York Times got things rolling by reporting that the new budget proposes “the complete elimination of the $3 billion Community Development Block Grant program, which funds popular programs like Meals on Wheels, housing assistance and other community assistance efforts.”

CNN’s Jake Tapper then boiled it down to a tweet: “On chopping block: $3 billion Community Development Block Grant program, which funds programs like Meals on Wheels.”

Meals on Wheels’s own national website, meanwhile, quotes its CEO and president Ellie Hollander being appropriately cautious and conditional: “We don’t know the exact impact yet,” she said. Big cuts “would be a devastating blow.” According to the website, “Details on our network’s primary source of funding, the Older Americans Act, which has supported senior nutrition programs for 45 years, have not yet been released.”

Most of the major press coverage Thursday had nothing at all to say about the OAA, which would only have complicated the shock headlines. And social media burned all day with indignant posts that seemed unaware that no cuts had been announced as of yet in the main program that funds Meals on Wheels.

One reason was the press conference at which budget director Mick Mulvaney faced a host of questions about the new budget release, with Peter Alexander of NBC News pressing him especially hard on the aren’t-you-trying-to-cut-things-like-Meals-on-Wheels angle.

Mulvaney repeatedly tried to switch the conversation over to the shortcomings of the wider CDBG program, and did not bring up the point about OAA funding at all. Amid further awkward exchanges, Mulvaney spoke about how social programs had often not been shown to have benefits.

A charitable reading of his intended point was that activities funded by block grants in general often lack any proof of positive effect; a less charitable reading was that he was trying to single out Meals on Wheels in particular as an endeavor of no proven use to anyone. (A middle ground, I suppose, would have been to call his office for a clarification.) No prizes for guessing which direction the press, from MSNBC to New York magazine, chose to take for its headlines.

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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‘Shameful’ Media Defense of Susan Rice in Unmasking Scandal

Liberals in the media are scrambling to cover for the revelation that Barack Obama’s former National Security Adviser, Susan Rice, unmasked Donald Trump associates in classified intelligence. Media Research Center President Brent Bozell issued the following statement:

“The liberal media’s ‘nothing to see here’ approach to Susan Rice’s politically-motivated unmasking of Trump associates in sensitive intelligence material is shameful. You’d think someone who lied to the press and the American people about her role in the unmasking just two weeks ago would invite more scrutiny. We have a smoking gun that points to criminal activity by President Obama’s national security advisor and the media have shown an utter lack of interest in pursuing the story. If this story is not a top priority for every news outlet, they are aiding and abetting a cover-up. President Trump has every right to be furious with the press and the American people have every reason to be disgusted."

SOURCE

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Limited Government is Important -- and Trump is actually limiting it

Fewer than 70 days into the new administration and some in the media are already writing and talking about the "do-nothing" Congress and presidential administration, which critics allege have yet to accomplish anything significant.

Regardless of what you might hear from their critics, you shouldn't believe these baseless accusations. In less than three months, President Trump and Congress have done a lot. Most of their early actions are getting relatively no attention, however, which is occurring for a number of reasons, including the fact most members of the mainstream media are big-government liberals who dislike Mr. Trump and Congress for what they've achieved.

The laws passed and executive orders issued by Mr. Trump and congressional Republicans are substantially different than those actions taken by most previous administrations. Rather than expand the size and scope of the federal government, Mr. Trump and the GOP have worked to reduce government's influence on society - in large part by reversing or blocking "midnight" regulations enacted by Obama administration officials before they finally made their way out the door at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue in January.

Republicans have long-claimed their party is the champion of limited government, but since Ronald Reagan was president in 1980s, they have done relatively little to back up the claim. Instead, Republican presidents have often pushed their own brand of activism that grew government, including No Child Left Behind, the creation of the Transportation Security Administration, the expansion of prescription drug coverage, a ban on imported semi-automatic rifles, and the creation of the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change.

When Republican presidents weren't busy doing their best impression of big-government Democrats, Republican-controlled Congresses repeatedly failed to block regulations they said are illegal and passed budgets that increased government's power and control.

Thus far, this trend seems to have halted with the Trump administration. Mr. Trump issued an executive order that ultimately ensured the completion of the Dakota Access Pipeline, a project President Barack Obama blocked in the waning days of his administration to appease his radical environmental allies.

Mr. Trump also issued an executive order to force reconsideration of the Environmental Protection Agency's (EPA) Waters of the United States (WOTUS) rule, which would have greatly expanded the federal government's control over private property across the United States. Federal courts had previously stayed WOTUS, out of the suspicion it unconstitutionally ignored previous Supreme Court wetlands decisions. Now, Trump ordered EPA to reconsider the rule and has decided not to defend it in court.

Arguably the most far-reaching executive order Mr. Trump has issued is his directive for all administrative agencies to remove two regulations for each new regulation they issue.

On the budget front, Mr. Trump has proposed cutting the budgets of the vast majority of the existing regulatory agencies. For instance, he proposed cutting EPA's budget by more than 25 percent and reducing the agency's staff by 20 percent. In the process, Trump would end all of EPA's climate programs.

Other agencies and cabinet offices would also see significant cuts, including a nearly 29 percent cut to the State Department's budget and an approximately 12 percent cut to the Department of the Interior.

Mr. Trump seems intent to do what he has promised - which greatly conflicts with what other so-called conservatives before him have done - forcing government to focus on its core functions. No more funding for the arts, public television, green-energy boondoggles, or international climate programs on Mr. Trump's watch.

Congress has had the power to review and block major regulations since it passed the Congressional Review Act (CRA) in 1996, but it has rarely used it. CRA allows the House and the Senate to pass resolutions of disapproval to block major regulations issued by federal agencies. Despite tens of thousands of regulations being enacted in the 20 years since CRA passed, Congress has used it only three times to block new rules, and only once has a president signed the resolution. (Mr. Obama vetoed the two disapproval resolutions passed during his presidency.)

Mr. Trump's ascendance seems to finally have stiffened Congress' backbone, because the House and Senate are now using the CRA with a vengeance. Congress has sent more than a half-dozen CRA resolutions disapproving late-term Obama administration regulations to Trump for his signature, and, incredibly, he's actually signing them.

Using the CRA, Congress blocked a regulation forcing local school districts to adopt specific federal teacher-preparation programs and directions for how states and school districts must evaluate and report school performance. Congress also prevented regulations that would have taken away senior citizens' Second Amendment rights if they need help managing their finances.

In its first use of the CRA under Mr. Trump, Congress halted a rule imposed by Mr. Obama that would have unnecessarily threatened over one-third of the nation's coal-mining jobs. Despite the Interior Department's own reports showing virtually all coal mines have no off-site impacts and lands are being restored successfully under existing federal and state regulations, Mr. Obama tried to institute a so-called "stream protection rule," which would have forced the revision of more than 400 regulations.

Contrary to what is being reported, Mr. Trump and Congress are quickly working to achieve one of their most important goals: limiting the size and power of the federal government over people's lives. And in doing so, they are keeping the commitment they made when they took the oath of office, which requires they uphold and defend the Constitution of the United States.

Let's hope the progress continues.

SOURCE

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What Congress Can Learn From the Rhode Island Miracle

You’d be hard-pressed to find a more poorly designed program in the federal budget than Medicaid, the health insurance program for low-income Americans. The costs are shared between the states and the feds, which means that the more money a state wastes under Medicaid, the bigger the check Washington writes to the state. No wonder the program costs keep spiraling out of control.

Obamacare added nearly 20 million people to the Medicaid rolls, and the Left considers that a policy victory. Federal and state budgets are swelling.

Oh, to return to the days when taking people off of welfare — not putting them on the dole — was the goal.

Conservatives have argued that Medicaid’s management should be turned over to the states through a block-grant allotment of funds. When Republicans proposed this in their Obamacare replacement bill, liberals blew a gasket. They hate the notion of allowing governors to run the program in their states as the governors see fit, free of the thicket of cumbersome federal rules. The Left portrays the idea as heartless and a scheme to rip a hole in the safety net.

In reality, block granting Medicaid to the states would likely add a new incentive structure to control costs while holding state lawmakers accountable for delivering quality care. Medicaid doesn’t do that right now. It delivers subpar care, with many top hospitals and treatment centers refusing to take Medicaid patients.

We already have a wonderful case study of a state running its own Medicaid program, and Congress and the White House should aim to duplicate this success story.

I am referring to the under-publicized Rhode Island experiment of a few years ago. In 2009, Rhode Island received a waiver from federal Medicaid rules in exchange for a cap on federal costs.

It worked like a charm. A 2013 analysis by Gary Alexander, the former secretary of Rhode Island’s Health and Human Services, found that in the first four years the state’s annual cost increases dropped to less than half of the national pace.

When Rhode Island received its Medicaid waiver, 1 of every 5 residents was enrolled, and costs were growing by 7.5 percent annually. Under the waiver, the state’s official Medicaid documents show, costs rose an average of only 1.3 percent a year from 2009 to 2012 — far below the 4.6 percent rate in the other 49 states.

Rhode Island saved money by reducing the amount of emergency-room visits by Medicaid recipients for routine medical needs. The state saved even more by shifting the elderly out of expensive nursing homes, offering home-care subsidies and promoting assisted-living arrangements. Seniors often would rather avoid institutionalization, making this a win-win.

An independent assessment by the economic consulting firm Lewin Group concluded that reforms allowed under the waiver were “highly effective in controlling Medicaid costs.” The program was found to have “improved access to more appropriate services.”

Alexander has become the Pied Piper for Medicaid waivers. “This is such a terrific solution because in Rhode Island we reduced costs and provided better care. When the state had an incentive to save money rather than spend it, this changed everything.” He added, “State waivers are the way out of the Medicaid crisis.”

But the Left and the Washington bureaucrats don’t want to surrender control of the program. They want a universal, one-size-fits-all solution. We know from welfare reform in the mid-1990s (with work requirements, time limits and training programs) that turning control over to the states will lead to innovative solutions that improve people’s lives — and save money. Why can’t that success happen with health care?

Republicans should continue to insist on solutions to Medicaid that provide some federal funding but allow states maximum flexibility. The GOP block grant makes financial sense and will help ensure that Medicaid doesn’t bankrupt Washington and the 50 states.

The Trump administration doesn’t need to wait. It can start this program tomorrow, simply by putting out word that it will issue Rhode Island-style Medicaid waivers to states that apply. The White House has full authority to do this, and many states will line up for the offer.

One big advocate for this is Vice President Mike Pence. Back when Pence was governor of Indiana, he told me: “If Washington would give me 80 percent of the Medicaid money they now send Indiana but got rid of the red tape and regulations, I would take that deal in a minute.” Donald Trump should listen to his vice president and let the Rhode Island miracle take hold in every state in the nation.

SOURCE

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Liberal logic yet again

Hatred of the rest of us is all they know

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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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Politics and IQ

Are smart people Left-leaning? There is some recent evidence to say so, though the correlation is weak. A paper by Michael Woodley is therefore of interest ("Problematic constructs and cultural-mediation: A comment on Heaven, Ciarrochi and Leeson (2011)").

He surveys the literature and shows that the findings go both ways. On some occasions Leftists score highest while on others conservatives do.

He resolves that the way I do -- by saying that high IQ people are quicker to figure out what is currently socially acceptable and say that. At the moment being conservative is likely to bring a ton of abuse ("racist") down on your head so it is no wonder that smart people claim to be Leftist

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US healthcare: most people don't know what they're talking about

The article below is good at debunking some myths about U.S. healthcare. It points out factors that distort the national averages. It skips over the big one, however. National averages are a poor guide to the health of most Americans. America has two big minorities that tend to have poor health and which therefore drag down the national averages. If the statistics for whites only are extracted, they show average health levels that are among the world's best

US healthcare is famous for three things: it's expensive, it's not universal, and it has poor outcomes. The US spends around $7,000 per person on healthcare every year, or roughly 18% of GDP; the next highest spender is Switzerland, which spends about $4,500. Before Obamacare, approx 15% of the US population were persistently uninsured (8.6% still are). And as this chart neatly shows, their overall outcome on the most important variable—overall life expectancy—is fairly poor.

But some of this criticism is wrongheaded and simplistic: when you slice the data up more reasonably, US outcomes look impressive, but being the world's outrider is much more expensive than following behind. What's more, most of the solutions people offer just don't get to the heart of the issue: if you give people freedom they'll spend a lot on healthcare.

The US undoubtedly spends a huge amount on healthcare. One popular narrative is that because of market failures and/or extreme overregulation in healthcare, prices are excessively high. So Americans with insurance (or covered by Medicare, the universal system for the elderly, or Medicaid, the government system for the poor) get the same as other developed world citizens, but those without get very poor care and die younger. A system like the NHS solves the problem, according to this view, with bulk buying of land, labour, and inputs, better incentives, and universal coverage.

But there are some serious flaws in this theory. Firstly, extending insurance to the previously-uninsured doesn't, in America, seem to have large benefits. For example, a recent NBER paper found no overall health gains from the massive insurance expansion under Obamacare.* A famous RAND study found minuscule benefits over decades from giving out free insurance to previously uninsured in the 1970s. In fact, over and above the basics, insuring those who choose not to get insurance doesn't ever seem to have large gains. Indeed, there is wide geographic variation in the life expectancy among the low income in the US, but this doesn't even correlate with access to medical care! This makes it unlikely that the gap between the US and the rest is explained by universality.

To find the answer, consider the main two ingredients that go into health outcomes. One is health, and the other is treatment. If latent health is the same across the Western world, we can presume that any differences come from differences in treatment. But this is simply not the case. Obesity is far higher in the USA than in any other major developed country. Obviously it is a public health problem, but it's unrealistic to blame it on the US system of paying for doctors, administrators, hospitals, equipment and drugs.

In fact in the US case it's not even obesity, or indeed their greater pre-existing disease burden, that is doing most of the work in dragging their life expectancy down; it's accidental and violent deaths. It is tragic that the US is so dangerous, but it's not the fault of the healthcare system; indeed, it's an extra burden that US healthcare spending must bear. Just simply normalising for violent and accidental death puts the USA right to the top of the life expectancy rankings.

This is what we'd expect if we approached the topic more honestly, and dug into the detail of healthcare stats. You might think—you might think!—that this is what international healthcare rankings like those from the WHO or the Commonwealth Fund do. Not so. The WHO just looks at a corrected life expectancy measure, but not one corrected for any of the factors which attempt to isolate the impact of healthcare. The Commonwealth Fund's is a mix of high level aggregate measures like physicians per capita and a survey asking people around the world questions like whether "Doctor or other clinical staff talked with patient about a healthy diet and healthy eating". Neither are useless, but they are not the real deal.

Academic papers that drill down into the detail find that the US does well in cancer survival, heart attack and stroke survival, and successfully medicating those with long-term conditions such as diabetes. In fact, when the Commonwealth Fund did this sort of analysis themselves decades ago, the US ranked among the best of countries. This is partly because the US has much more advanced equipment, partly because it funds more costly treatments in general, and partly because it funds the newest treatments, when their marginal costs are often stratospheric. This may subsidise medical research for everyone else.

Now this is not to say the US system works well. The fact that the US spends vastly more than everyone else, and only does a bit better, if that, makes the system pretty unimpressive. But it's important to understand why. The UK really does have "death panels" that refuse treatments because they're extremely costly relative to their tiny impact. The USA has a system where most people can buy—are even subsidised through the tax system to buy—insurance that is as extensive as they like, paying for ever more expensive and marginally beneficial therapies. Eventually you're spending a fifth of your GDP on it.

Maybe if the US government straightened things out—scrapped the incentives that push people to get too much healthcare and deregulated the system to increase competition and push down costs the US would spend a more rational share of its income on health. I think this is pretty likely. But I bet the gap wouldn't go away fully. Americans just have a lot of cash, and want to spend an increasing share of it on their wellbeing as they get even richer. As long as the system is mostly open, I'd expect that to continue.

SOURCE

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Levin: Progressivism, Statism 'Is a Poison for Power'

Talking about the judicial branch of government on his nationally syndicated radio talk show program, host Mark Levin suggested that the leftists would use the court to gain power, saying that progressivism, statism “is a poison for power.”

“[P]rogressivism, or as I call it, statism, but either way, is a poison,” stated Mark Levin. “It is a poison, and it is a poison for power.”

Levin’s comments come as Judge Neil Gorsuch awaits confirmation this week in Washington DC. Below is a transcript of Mark Levin’s comments from his show:

“You need to know, and I know you do, that progressivism, or as I call it, statism, but either way, is a poison. It is a poison, and it is a poison for power.

“And you’ll learn all about it and a heck of a lot more in “Rediscovering Americanism,” but I want to stay on this.

“The leftists decided, the statists decided more than 100 years ago that the key institution that would be used to alter the American landscape, the constitutional landscape, the American culture with rugged individualism, the American psychology of freedom would be the courts.

“First, you needed an all-powerful president, and then you need an all-powerful president who would change the judiciary. And that’s exactly what happened – in big chunks, starting in the 1900s, the early 1900s, and then a massive leap with Franklin Roosevelt. “And it’s never stopped.”

SOURCE

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Benign neglect: How Hong Kong prospered

The power of do-nothing government

Hong Kong could easily be described as the most neoliberal country in the world — a paragon of neoliberal success.

The story of Hong Kong’s growth is both long and fascinating, and could not be done justice in a mere blogpost. But there is one man who is worth mentioning, who has much responsibility for making Hong Kong into what it is today, and yet is all too often forgotten.

John J. Cowperthwaite is not likely a name that you will remember from your history lessons. In fact, it is not likely a name that you will remember at all. He is arguably one of history’s most unsung heroes, and that is a great shame, for he was absolutely instrumental in not only taking Hong Kong’s economy from strength to strength after the Second World War, but also in showing the world that laissez faire economics is workable and brings results.

Milton Friedman said “it would be hard to overestimate the debt that Hong Kong owes to Cowperthwaite”. But he was by no means a self-important man. He had a reputation for being shy, and as an appointed civil servant, he owed no favours to anyone. He arrived in Hong Kong in 1946 as the Assistant financial secretary, with instructions to “come up with a plan for economic growth”. But he came up with no plan, and yet the economy grew. It grew astoundingly. In the decade that he was financial secretary, wages rose by 50% and the percentage of those living in poverty in Hong Kong plummeted from 50 to 15%.

What did this son of a Scottish tax collector do to propel so many into prosperity? The answer is that he didn’t do anything. When a British executive approached Cowperthwaite to ask him to develop the merchant banking industry, Cowperthwaite politely palmed him off and told him that he had better find a merchant banker. Similarly, when a legislator suggested to Cowperthwaite that the government should prioritise the development of promising industries, Cowperthwaite refused and asked how the government could possibly know which businesses had potential and which did not.

Cowperthwaite flat out refused to collect most economic statistics, from fear that doing so would give bureaucrats and legislators an excuse to meddle in the economy. Of course, this caused upset in Whitehall, and when they commanded a group of civil servants to go over and see just what the hell was going on, Cowperthwaite sent them home as soon as they arrived. Yet still from 1945 to 1997 Hong Kong ran a surplus every financial year – surprising all involved because the surpluses were not planned. Rather, they arose as a result of the market being left free.

It was slightly unfair of me to state that John Cowperthwaite “didn’t do anything”. For though his success was largely down to his non-interventionism, ensuring that there was no intervention was backbreaking work. People were always trying to tinker with the economy. But Cowperthwaite maintained: “in the long run, the aggregate of the decisions of individual businessmen, exercising individual judgment in a free economy, even if often mistaken, is likely to do less harm than the centralized decisions of a Government; and certainly the harm is likely to be counteracted faster.”

Today Hong Kong has a GDP per capita at 264% of the world's average, which has doubled in the last 15 years. The World Bank now rates the “ease of doing business” in Hong Kong as the best in the world. It has no taxes on capital gains, interest income or earnings from abroad. Its overall tax burden is just half of that of the United States. Its people are rich and its government small, and for this reason, it makes a fitting cover for our latest paper, but for this reason also, we should be thankful to John J Cowperthwaite.

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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An important victory

The media hopes it goes away unnoticed .... Another win for Trump, another loss for Chuck Schumer, the Libtards, and the media that said Trump couldn't get Gorsuch through the Senate. But, he did, didn't he?

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Russia! Russia! Russia! from the Left -- A frantic attempt to cover up for the real crooks -- in the Obama administration.

And judging by his increased military preparations, the fact-free hysteria has caused concern to Vladimir Vladimirovich. That most of the loud voices in America seem to be both insane and hostile must bother him. He must wonder whether Trump can override it

BY: ANN COULTER

The Susan Rice bombshell at least explains why the Democrats won’t stop babbling about Russia. They need a false flag to justify using national intelligence agencies to snoop on the Trump team.

Every serious person who has tried to locate any evidence that Russia attempted to influence the 2016 election — even Trump-haters at the New York Review of Books and Rolling Stone magazine — has come away empty-handed and angry. We keep getting bald assertions, unadorned with anything resembling a fact.

But for now, let’s just consider the raw plausibility of the story.

The fact-less claim is that (1) the Russians wanted Donald Trump to win; and (2) They thought they could help him win by releasing purloined emails from the Democratic National Committee showing that the Democrats were conspiring against Hillary Clinton’s primary opponent, Bernie Sanders.

First, why on earth would Russia prefer a loose cannon, untested president like Trump to an utterly corrupt politician, who’d already shown she could be bought? The more corrupt you think Russia is, the more Putin ought to love Hillary as president.

The Russians knew Hillary was a joke from her ridiculous “reset” button as secretary of state. They proceeded to acquire 20 percent of America’s uranium production, under Hillary’s careful management — in exchange for a half-million-dollar speaking engagement for her husband and millions of dollars in donations to the Clinton Foundation.

More HERE

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Russia! Russia! Russia! no more?

Strike on Syria is Trump's most popular move yet -- Approval from around the world

One president blinked, the other didn’t. When Bashar al-Assad crossed Barack Obama’s famous red line by using chemical weapons against his own people, nothing happened to him. When he did it on Donald Trump’s watch, he got hit with 59 Tomahawk missiles.

The Syrians are outraged at Trump’s actions; so are the Iranians; so are the Russians.

All of this might be good for Trump politically and in defining the character of his still inchoate presidency.

This US missile strike will have real effects — it destroyed a Syrian air force base — but it is unlikely to change the underlying strategic dynamics in Syria.

Trump and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson have been at pains to say this does not represent a basic change of Syria policy from the US. The missile strike was a one-off — as Malcolm Turnbull puts it, a calibrated and proportionate response to a war crime.

It has three narrow purposes: to punish the Assad regime for using chemical weapons; to show Assad that such actions will have costs; and to deter him from doing such things in the future. The missile strike has a very good chance of achieving all three of those aims.

It also has wider strategic consequences. It shows bad actors everywhere that for all his domestic troubles, Trump remains a dangerous President to cross.

Trump has appointed three generals to his cabinet. He loves the US military and plans to strengthen it considerably.

He is not indifferent to risk; certainly the generals around him will have all the characteristic military caution about unnecessary military action, but nor is he scared to exercise the military option.

The political success of this operation lies in its limited, proportionate nature.

Trump is not committing the US to any follow-up action, still less to large numbers of US boots on the ground and a central role in shaping Syria politically. He has switched from a few weeks ago believing that the identity of the Syrian leader was a matter of indifference to the US to saying now that Assad should go.

This is a real setback for the Syrian dictator who, despite the savagery of his behaviour throughout the civil war, had won a kind of grudging acceptance from realists in governments around the world.

Increasingly they had come to recognise that Assad could not be ousted while he had Russian and Iranian support. More than that, they were terrified of what might come after Assad.

The biggest risk in the missile strike was that it might unintentionally kill Russians and provoke some kind of hot conflict between Russian and American forces in Syria.

This was the greatest danger of escalation. The Americans have avoided that. They told the Russian forces on the ground what they were doing in advance and the strike was precisely targeted.

The Russians nonetheless don’t like it, but it is not in Moscow’s interests to escalate against Washington.

And it will be impossible for Trump’s opponents to argue any longer that he is secretly acting in Russia’s interests. That may be a liberation for Trump.

For all that, the Syrian tragedy will continue.

SOURCE

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Trump's statement about the strike:

My fellow Americans: On Tuesday, Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad launched a horrible chemical weapons attack on innocent civilians. Using a deadly nerve agent, Assad choked out the lives of helpless men, women, and children. It was a slow and brutal death for so many. Even beautiful babies were cruelly murdered in this very barbaric attack. No child of God should ever suffer such horror.

Tonight, I ordered a targeted military strike on the airfield in Syria from where the chemical attack was launched. It is in this vital national security interest of the United States to prevent and deter the spread and use of deadly chemical weapons. There can be no dispute that Syria used banned chemical weapons, violated its obligations under the Chemical Weapons Convention, and ignored the urging of the U.N. Security Council.

Years of previous attempts at changing Assad’s behavior have all failed, and failed very dramatically. As a result, the refugee crisis continues to deepen and the region continues to destabilize, threatening the United States and its allies.

Tonight, I call on all civilized nations to join us in seeking to end the slaughter and bloodshed in Syria, and also to end terrorism of all kinds and all types. We ask for God’s wisdom as we face the challenge of our very troubled world. We pray for the lives of the wounded and for the souls of those who have passed. And we hope that as long as America stands for justice, then peace and harmony will, in the end, prevail.

SOURCE

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12,392,000: U.S. Manufacturing Jobs Reach Highest Level in 8 Years

The United States added 11,000 jobs in manufacturing in March reaching a total of 12,392,000 people employed in the manufacturing sector, according to data released today by the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

That is the greatest number of people employed in manufacturing in the United States since January 2009—the month that President Barack Obama was inaugurated—when there were 12,561,000 people employed in manufacturing.

In February 2009, manufacturing employment dropped to 12,380,000—a number it did not exceed until February of this year, when it reached 12,381,000.

At the same time, according to BLS, the number of people employed in government increased by 9,000 in March, climbing from 22,309,000 in February to 22,318,000.

Since December 2016, the U.S. has gained 49,000 manufacturing jobs and 19,000 government jobs.

Government jobs in the United States in March still outnumbered manufacturing jobs by 9,926,000.

The number of manufacturing jobs in the United States peaked in June 1979 at 19,553,000. Since then, it has declined by 7,161,000 to the 12,392,000 reported for this March, according to the BLS numbers.

During the same time frame—from June 1979 to February 2017—the number of government jobs grew from 16,045,000 to the current 22,318,000, an increase of 6,273,000.

SOURCE

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Swedes not laughing now

Was Donald Trump right all along about Sweden's crime and immigration problems?

Just over six weeks after Donald Trump was mocked across the world for suggesting that Sweden was the victim of a terror attack, at least three people have been left dead when a hijacked truck ploughed into pedestrians.

The American president's proclaimed attack - which turned out to be fictitious - was linked to high levels of immigration and rising levels of crime in the country he said, later clarifying that he had based his comments on a Fox News report.

He was immediately ridiculed, with Carl Bildt, the former Swedish Prime Minister asking "what has he been smoking?" and the country's US embassy appeared to mock him on Twitter.

But yesterday the Swedish capital was hit by its own terrorist attack, with echoes of those in London, Berlin and Nice.

Integration has remained a problem in the country where the relatively high numbers of immigrants compared to a population of just under 10 million means it has one of the highest rates of immigration per capita in northern Europe.

The numbers have been rising steadily since the 1990s, and in 2015 Sweden accepted a record number of more than 160,000 refugees.

Meanwhile, in a report published in February last year the police "identified 53 residential areas around the country that have become increasingly marred by crime, social unrest and insecurity".

While the Government denies that these are "no-go zones", it admitted in a rebuttal to the claims of Mr Trump that police "have experienced difficulties fulfilling their duties".

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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Hate-filled DNC Chairman Perez Doesn't Share American Values

"Republicans don't give a s**t" about you" - DNC Chairman Tom Perez, addressing attendees at a rally

Is this what public discourse has come to? The head of one of the two major parties uses potty mouthed language in public...and then goes on to say he doesn't care what people think about what he said. Charming, isn't he...

Of course, we shouldn't be surprised...Perez was Obama's labor secretary. Anyone who worked for someone as virulently opposed to all of America's founding ideals and way of life as Barack Obama is bound to be infected with the same Alinksy inspired communist drivel.

Perez seems to be lacking when it comes to facts in general. In addition to his other "colorful" remarks, the DNC head claimed that "Donald Trump, you don't stand for our values."

Whose values? Those of Perez and the left wing loons that form the largest part of the Democrat party? Those values?

People may question how sincere President Trump is regarding his campaign platform, but the policies he ran on are America's values.

America First means having fair trade that helps keep and expand American jobs for American workers. Does Mr. Perez disagree with helping to expand job opportunities for American citizens?

America First means keeping out people who don't belong here, thereby preserving jobs for Americans. It also means to stop picking the pockets of American taxpayers who have been forced to support the cost of keeping up those who are here illegally. Mr. Perez apparently finds that not to be a value he shares with the majority of Americans, who do support Trump's policies.

America First also means keeping our people safe from those who mean us harm. Perez doesn't share that value either, as he apparently thinks the more potential jihadists flooding into the country, the better.

Actually Mr. Perez, it's a lot more than just "Republicans" or "Trump" who don't "share your values".

Donald Trump won the votes of millions of people who aren't "Republicans". They were independents, moderates, working class and yes, a lot of disaffected Democrats who like Reagan, said many years ago, "I didn't leave the Democrat Party, they left me".

While your party has sold out to a myriad of special interests and engaged in identity politics for the sake of getting votes, you left the middle class behind.

Because of that, those middle class "deplorables" find the current Democrat Party deplorable...That's why your party lost all of those rust belt states that you took for granted of all these years.

Now you have the nerve to open up that potty mouth of yours and insult the people who said enough of class warfare and the divisive Democrat Party.

You're right, we don't share "your values", because your values are rooted in a very deep anti-American hatred. Your values represent destroying jobs for Americans. Your values represent destroying the rights of Christians to worship and exercise their faith freely as outlined in the first amendment of that document that you so despise.

Your values mean a never ending cycle of poverty for the inner cities with continued high unemployment and crime in black communities, because you'd rather buy their votes with welfare schemes than empowering small businesses.

Your values mean attacking law enforcement and making those communities even less safe as a result.

I could go on, but the fact is you're right about one thing - we don't share your "values". What you call values are not values at all...they are nothing more than a not so subtle attempt to take down this country.

No Mr. Perez, we don't share your "values", and we never will.

SOURCE

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Another poisonous bureaucracy

What happens when a reckless, unaccountable arm of the administrative state collides head-on with a Congressional committee demanding answers for constituents who have been harassed, extorted, or ignored for more than five years?

In the case of yesterday’s appearance by Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) Director Richard Cordray before the House Financial Services Committee, that would be a call for his dismissal. Surrounded by a cadre of green t-shirt wearing “consumer advocates,” Cordray was greeted by Chairman Jeb Hensarling (R-Texas) with this statement:

“Under Dodd-Frank, you can be removed for cause. Either way, I believe the President is clearly justified in dismissing you and I call upon the President — yet again — to do just that, and to do it immediately.”

Harsh? Maybe. Undeserved? Consider Chairman Hensarling’s succinctly stated case against the CFPB:

“[U]nder Mr. Cordray’s leadership, the CFPB has shown an utter disregard for protecting markets and has made credit more expensive and less available in many instances; this is particularly true for low and moderate income Americans. What is also clear is that under Mr. Cordray’s leadership, the CFPB has acted unlawfully, routinely denied market participants due process and abused its powers.”

If the charges against the CFPB had ended there, Chairman Hensarling would have had enough reason for calling the agency and Cordray out on the carpet. But the CFPB has been tagged with a laundry list of other shady practices, including race and sex discrimination, political favoritism, the targeting of individuals, and extravagant advertising.

Of even greater concern is the CFPB’s total lack of accountability. Created by the Dodd-Frank Act, the CFPB’s only oversight requirement is to appear and report twice annually before the House Financial Services and Senate Banking committees. Its funding comes from the Federal Reserve System, not Congress; therefore, it is considered “off-budget” and not constrained by the Congressional appropriations process. The CFPB is run by a single director, who does not report to the President and can only be removed for “good cause.” Recently, a federal appeals panel found this structure to be unconstitutional, calling the unelected CFPB director “the single most powerful official in Washington,” aside from the duly elected President.

This absence of agency accountability, combined with the CFPB’s unprecedented thumbing of its nose to oversight inquiries, reinforced an adversarial environment for the hearing. Knowing that their opportunities to question Mr. Cordray were few and far between, committee members gave the CFPB director their best shots. Sadly, committee members had more questions than Cordray had answers. Here are a few highlights.

Prepaid Cards

In October 2016, the CFPB issued a 1,689-page rule, regulating the issuance of prepaid cards, which have garnered popularity due to rising checking account fees and minimum balance requirements. Opponents of the rule say it endangers providers of these cards and the nearly 68 million Americans who use these products. Congressional threats pressured the CFPB to delay implementation of the rule. At the hearing, Rep. Roger Williams (R-FL) stated his intention to pursue legislation introduced by him and Senator David Perdue (R-GA) to use the Congressional Review Act to rescind the rule.

Small Dollar Lending

Last summer, the CFPB proposed a far-reaching rule regulating small dollar, or “payday” lending practices. Under questioning from Rep. Blaine Luetkemeyer (R-MO), Cordray mentioned that the CFPB had received more than a million public comments to the rule. But he passed on answering Luetkemeyer’s questions about alternatives for small-dollar loan users if the regulations effectively ban the product. Nor did Cordray respond to questions about when to expect a final rule, despite the public comment period ending six months ago.

International Remittances

Under questioning from Rep. Andy Barr (R-Ky.), Cordray stated that the CFPB could not exempt credit unions from its regulations, in spite of the fact that CFPB’s burdensome rulemaking has forced credit unions on military bases to stop offering remittance products to American military personnel. Cordray made his assertion, despite the disagreement of Barr and other committee members, including Democrats.The CFPB continues to review this regulation.

Questions were also directed at Cordray regarding potential law breaking by the CFPB during the issuance of indirect auto lending regulations and rules adversely affecting the manufactured housing industry. Throughout the hearing, Cordray hemmed, hawed, and otherwise neglected to give answers.

Congress is unlikely to put up much longer with the dilatory tactics of the CFPB to explain its heavy-handed and abusive “consumer protection” tactics. Last year, Chairman Hensarling offered “The Financial CHOICE Act,” which would overhaul the Dodd-Frank Act, severely rein in the CFPB, and build in greater accountability safeguards for the agency and its director. With Hensarling preparingto introduce a 2.0 version of the Financial CHOICE Act this year and the possibility that President Trump could remove Cordray from his perch of power, the director may have to come up with some answers — while he still can.

SOURCE

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She Never Joined a Union. But Union Fees Got Deducted From Her Paycheck

ST. PAUL, Minn.—Patricia Johansen has worked as a home caregiver for her two special-needs grandchildren for about 10 years.

Since she never agreed to join the union that represents such Medicaid-eligible caregivers in Minnesota, Johansen was surprised to discover that union dues had been deducted from her benefit check for about four months.

In an affidavit, the Fergus Falls resident says she is convinced the union, SEIU Healthcare Minnesota, forged her signature so it could start deducting the dues.

Johansen’s story is one reason a state lawmaker is scheduling a hearing where she expects the head of the state’s labor relations agency, a political appointee of Gov. Mark Dayton, to explain how SEIU Healthcare Minnesota won a unionization election—and why it should continue to represent the home caregivers.

State Rep. Marion O’Neill, chairman of the Subcommittee on Employee Relations, told The Daily Signal that she wants the Dayton appointee to appear before the joint panel of the Minnesota House and Senate to address evidence of “fraudulent signatures, nonexistent voters, and ballot tampering” in a 2014 unionization election.

Johansen’s experience is one such discrepancy.

“We are going to have a full, robust hearing on how this process happened and have the personal care assistants come forward to talk about their experiences, and to talk about how it came to be that union dues were taken out of their paycheck without their knowledge or permission,” O’Neill, a Republican from Buffalo, said in an interview with The Daily Signal.

The SEIU affiliate collects $4 million to $5 million in annual dues from the Medicaid benefits paid to what Minnesota calls personal care assistants, a lawyer representing them estimates.

The state government considers residents who care for chronically ill or disabled relatives at home to be personal care assistants who are able to receive Medicaid benefits for providing that care.

As The Daily Signal previously reported, a relatively small number of Minnesota’s 27,000 eligible personal care assistants voted in favor of an affiliate of Service Employees International Union, or SEIU, becoming their representative in collective bargaining.

Now personal care assistants such as Johansen have banded together in an effort to set a new election to decertify SEIU Healthcare Minnesota, in part because of what their lawyers describe as questionable tactics and the evidence of fraud.

The Minnesota Bureau of Mediation Services, a state agency that describes itself as promoting “stable and constructive labor-management relations,” has denied the caregivers’ petition for a new election.

O’Neill wants Commissioner Josh Tilsen, appointed in 2011 by Dayton, a Democrat, to lead the bureau, to explain its pro-SEIU actions so far.

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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COMPASSION AND POLITICS

Nathan J. Robinson, a leftist writer with an apparently substantial educational background (He quotes Schopenhauer) has a recent article under the heading above. I offer below some excerpts from it. He comes across as someone who is genuinely concerned about the poor. He also writes that many prominent Democrats don't give a fig for the poor and in fact look down on the poor. And he is right to say that this is the opposite of the historic Leftist claim.

It is a article worth reading in full but, like most Leftist writing, leaves out half the story. So maybe I should briefly allude to some of that other half.

He appears to think that Leftist elitism is a new thing. He seems to see it as something that came into the light only with the advent of Trump. That is hilariously wrong. Leftism has always been elitist. Karl Marx, for instance, was born into a middle class German Jewish family and was homeschooled by his father, the gentlemanly and rather admirable Heinrich Marx. He later studied at the universities of Bonn, Berlin, and Jena. He was fascinated by the ponderous writings of the near-incomprehensible German philosopher G.W.F. Hegel, regarded by many as the founder of modern Leftism. Marx was also a parasite, living off the generosity of his rich businessman admirer, Friedrich Engels. So Marx was not a man of the people in any sense.

The Bolsheviks too were overwhelmingly middle class. And the prominent Leftists in prewar Britain were almost entirely prominent literary and intellectual figures, such as the Bloomsberries, the Webbs, J.M. Keynes, H.G. Wells, G.B. Shaw, Bertrand Russell etc. They were also -- most amusingly but also most revealingly -- great believers in eugenics. And that's as elitist as you can get: Wipe out the dummies!

And elitism on the American Left is not new to the era of Trump. Expressions of disdain for the masses were equally prominent at the onset of the G.W. Bush presidency in 2004. I in fact set up a blog to preserve such expressions for posterity. Google has however taken most of that blog down for reasons unknown to me. Never fear, however! I have kept exact copies of all the posts Google has censored and have now uploaded them to a new site here. So the whole gruesome episode is once again online for all to see.

Something else that comrade Robinson fails to remember is that G.W. Bush ran on a platform of "compassionate conservatism". It may have been no more sincere than similar protestations from Leftists but it is the platform he ran on and which got him elected. And if it is deeds not words that count, who was it who sent in the troops to break the racial segregation maintained by the Southern Democrats? It was Ike, a Republican President. And who was it that enlisted Chappaquiddick Ted to help set up the "No child left behind" attempt to improve black educational outcomes? It was G.W. Bush. The Republican record on helping the underdog is at least as good as the Democrat record. I won't mention Woodrow Wilson's segregationist policies or FDR's antisemitism.

So comrade Robinson is pissing into the wind if he thinks it is possible for the Left to become genuinely egalitarian and compassionate. Elitism is an integral part of what they are. See here for more details of that. Leftists are as compassionate as their most famous exponents: Robespierre, Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot

Instead of heeding suggestions that greater amounts of empathy for working-class Trump constituencies might make Democrats less likely to lose these people’s votes, lately some liberals have doubled down. As Clio Chang pointed out recently in Jacobin, figures including Paul Krugman (“I try to be charitable, but when you read about Trump voters now worried about losing Obamacare it’s kind of hard”) and Markos Moulitsas (“Be happy for coal miners losing their health insurance; they’re getting exactly what they voted for”) have reacted to stories about hardships and deprivation in Trump-leaning communities with unqualified disdain. Ex-New York Times theater critic Frank Rich recently declared he had “no sympathy for the hillbilly,” and suggested that:

“Liberals looking for a way to empathize with conservatives should endorse the core conservative belief in the importance of personal responsibility. Let Trump’s white working-class base take responsibility for its own votes — or in some cases failure to vote — and live with the election’s consequences… Let them reap the consequences for voting against their own interests.”

This kind of thinking isn’t limited to media commentators. It seems to be a strand in liberal thinking more broadly. Matthew Stoller collected a series of Huffington Post comments on an article about poor whites dying from ill-health and opiate addiction:

“Sorry, not sorry. These people are not worthy of any sympathy. They have run around for decades bitching about poor minorities not “working hard enough,” or that their situation is “their own fault.” Well guess what? It’s not so great when it’s you now, is it? Bunch of deplorables, and if they die quicker than the rest of us that just means the country will be better off in the long run.”

“Karma is a bitch and if these people choose to continue to vote Republican and try to deny other [sic] from attaining the American dream, they deserve no better than what they are getting!”

“I for one have little sympathy for these despairing whites. If they can’t compete against people of color when everything has been rigged in their favor, then there’s really no help for them. Trump and his G(r)OPers will do little to elevate their lot. If anything, these poor whites will be hired to dig grave pits and assemble their own coffins.”

SOURCE

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Today’s populist movements are not the first to challenge parasitic oligarchies

Their grip needs to be broken in order for their country to flourish, says The Rt. Hon, the Viscount Ridley

I am writing this from the Netherlands, where one of the most gruesome paintings in the Rijksmuseum, by Jan de Baen, depicts the eviscerated bodies of the de Witt brothers, hanging upside down after the mob had killed them and then roasted and eaten their livers in 1672. It is an episode mentioned in a new book published this week by Douglas Carswell, a British MP, called Rebel, in which he wrestles with an eternal dilemma: why populist revolutions sometimes bring tyranny.

The republics of Rome, Venice and the Netherlands all experienced the same thing: an inept populist revolt against the growing power of an oligarchy — by Tiberius Gracchus, Bajamonte Tiepolo and Johan de Witt respectively — followed by a counter-revolution that resulted in an even worse oligarchy that throttled prosperity, in the form of Sulla, the Council of Ten and William of Orange respectively. The coups that killed the French and Russian revolutions were similar, but more about new forms of tyranny than returns to old ones.

Carswell sees parallels in today’s populism. Despite a hundred commentators saying so, Donald Trump is not like Nero or Hitler, but he may be like Gracchus (“a cross between Jeremy Corbyn and Donald Trump”): an anti-oligarch insurgent who soon makes oligarchy look preferable. After Trump, Americans may fall back in love with the bicoastal elite. Faced with Le Pen, many French will feel that énarques are not so bad after all. Prime Minister Farage would have made us appreciate PPE graduates again.

It is the Dutch parallel that is perhaps most instructive. Mr Trump has seen off a Bush and a Clinton, just as Johan de Witt tried to prevent the stadtholder of the Netherlands becoming a hereditary position, owned by the House of Orange. The similarities perhaps end there. De Witt was a cultured doctor of law with a fascination for Roman history who believed in free trade, free speech and republicanism. Yet in the end he ushered in monarchy, bankruptcy and decline.

That decline was not, Carswell says, because the Dutch lost their entrepreneurial spirit, as historians sometimes lazily assert, but because the Orangist elite became closed and parasitical, living off the spoils of conquest and investing their regressively raised taxes in bonds issued by overborrowed government, rather than in ships and shops. By 1713, 70 per cent of tax revenue went on servicing debt. “A free-wheeling republic had become a restrictionist, rentier state,” as Carswell puts it.

There is a lesson here. Europe as a whole is heading down the same path: slow growth and far too many people living off redistribution rather than enterprise — in private, public and voluntary sectors. The goose that always lays the golden eggs of prosperity is the habit of exchange and specialisation: people doing what they are good at, and getting better at it with innovation, while swapping the results freely with others through commerce. (Disclosure: here Carswell draws on my own recent books to buttress his case, and he showed me the text before publication.)

Carswell reminds us that “every society that ever managed to sustain intensive economic growth did so by staying close to the free-exchange end of the spectrum”. Like a rainforest ecosystem, commerce is a self-organising system that results in spontaneous order and complexity. For instance, nobody has planned or is in charge of the job of feeding ten million people for lunch in London today, but this incredibly complex task will be achieved smoothly.

Yet history shows that free exchange is constantly at risk of being infected and captured by parasites and predators who live off productive people through taxes, tithes, rents, slavery, subsidy, war and theft. This is what killed the goose in ancient Greece and Rome, in Renaissance Italy and Holland’s golden age. From time to time anti-oligarch insurgents are needed to purge the parasites, expel the predators and free the economy from their burden.

Now, says Carswell, is such a time. Forget the Ukip debacle: he is as genuine a rebel as parliament contains, who wants to “rein back the emerging oligarchy”. One of the problems with most of the new radicals, whether a Trump, a Farage, a Wilders or a Le Pen, is that they seem to be in thrall to the myth of the big (wo)man, who will lead the people to the promised land. Carswell wants to challenge the myth of the Big Man who knows everything. Instead he would allow the organisation of society along bottom-up lines.

He would end the power of central bank bureaucrats, allowing customers to decide banks’ reserve ratios by choosing among different options with different risks and rewards.

In place of debased fiat currencies, he would have self-regulating currencies controlled by competition, not by officials, along the lines of Bitcoin. He would have corporations regulated by those who own them and those who buy from them, rather than by easily lobbied crony regulators and subsidy providers. He would have public services controlled by members of the public.

All easier said than done, of course. And in politics he would undermine the power and privilege of the cartel of the main political parties with their public subsidies, access to patronage and ability to gerrymander constituencies to preserve safe seats: “In Clacton, I have twice taken on and defeated the established parties by doing for myself, often on a laptop, what political parties spend millions failing to do well.” It is now possible to do politics without party. Trump, Bernie Sanders and Emmanuel Macron all ran almost independently of their parties.

Carswell is right that the left does not get this. He cheered when Corbyn was elected, but says that radicals on the left do not understand how free exchange has elevated the human condition or the way that redistribution ultimately sustains oligarchy. We end up with the spectacle of left-wing activists such as Owen Jones and Paul Mason campaigning alongside Goldman Sachs and Christine Lagarde on behalf of the oligarchs of Brussels.

You might ask what a low-grade oligarch like me is doing endorsing this insurgent philosophy against my interests. The truth is I spend most of my time exchanging prose for profit, or speaking up in parliament for innovation and free exchange, and against cronyism and subsidy, usually ineffectively.

So when the revolution comes, metaphorically at least, I will join Douglas at the barricades.

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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What's Become of the American Dream?

Part of the problem is definitional. It isn’t just about houses, cars and material prosperity

Peggy Noonan

I want to think aloud about the American dream. People have been saying for a while that it’s dead. It’s not, but it needs strengthening. We should start by saying what it means, which is something we’ve gotten mixed up about. I know its definition because I grew up in the heart of it and remember how people had long understood it. The American dream is the belief, held by generation after generation since our beginning and reanimated over the decades by waves of immigrants, that here you can start from anywhere and become anything. In America you can rise to the heights no matter where and in what circumstances you began. You can go from the bottom to the top.

Behind the dream was another belief: America was uniquely free, egalitarian and arranged so as to welcome talent. Lincoln was elected president in part because his supporters brought lengths of crude split-rails to the Republican National Convention in Chicago in 1860. They held the rails high and paraded them in a floor demonstration to tell everyone: This guy was nothing but a frontier rail splitter, a laborer, a backwoods nobody. Now he will be president. What a country. What a dream.

This distinguished America from old Europe, from which it had kicked away. There titles, families and inherited wealth dictated standing: If you had them, you’d always be at the top. If you didn’t, you’d always be at the bottom. That static system bred resentment. We would have a dynamic one that bred hope.

You can give a dozen examples, and perhaps you are one, of Americans who turned a brilliant system into a lived-out triumph. Thomas Edison, the seventh child of modest folk in Michigan and half-deaf to boot, filled the greatest cities in the world with electric light. Barbara Stanwyck was from working-class Brooklyn. Her mother died, her father skipped town, and she was raised by relatives and foster parents. She went on to a half-century career as a magnetic actress of stage and screen; in 1944 she was the highest-paid woman in America. Jonas Salk was a hero of my childhood. His parents were Jewish immigrants from Poland who settled in East Harlem — again, working-class nobodies. Naturally young Jonas, an American, scoped out the true facts of his time and place and thought: I’ll be a great lawyer. His mother is reported to have said no, a doctor. He went on to cure polio. We used to talk about him at the public school when we waited in line for the vaccine.

In America so many paths were offered! But then a big nation that is a great one literally has a lot of paths.

The American dream was about aspiration and the possibility that, with dedication and focus, it could be fulfilled. But the American dream was not about material things — houses, cars, a guarantee of future increase. That’s the construction we put on it now. It’s wrong. A big house could be the product of the dream, if that’s what you wanted, but the house itself was not the dream. You could, acting on your vision of the dream, read, learn, hold a modest job and rent a home, but at town council meetings you could stand, lead with wisdom and knowledge, and become a figure of local respect. Maybe the respect was your dream.

Stanwyck became rich, Salk revered. Both realized the dream.

How did we get the definition mixed up?

I think part of the answer is: Grandpa. He’d sit on the front stoop in Levittown in the 1950s. A sunny day, the kids are tripping by, there’s a tree in the yard and bikes on the street and a car in the front. He was born in Sicily or Donegal or Dubrovnik, he came here with one change of clothes tied in a cloth and slung on his back, he didn’t even speak English, and now look — his grandkids with the bikes. “This is the American dream,” he says. And the kids, listening, looked around, saw the houses and the car, and thought: He means the American dream is things. By inference, the healthier and more enduring the dream, the bigger the houses get, the more expensive the cars. (They went on to become sociologists and journalists.)

But that of course is not what Grandpa meant. He meant: I started with nothing and this place let me and mine rise. The American dream was not only about materialism, but material things could be, and often were, its fruits.

The American dream was never fully realized, not by a long shot, and we all know this. The original sin of America, slavery, meant some of the oldest Americans were brutally excluded from it. The dream is best understood as a continuing project requiring constant repair and expansion, with an eye to removing barriers and roadblocks for all.

Many reasons are put forward in the argument over whether the American Dream is over (no) or ailing (yes) or was always divisive (no — dreams keep nations together). We see income inequality, as the wealthy prosper while the middle class grinds away and the working class slips away. There is a widening distance, literally, between the rich and the poor. Once the richest man in town lived nearby, on the nicest street on the right side of the tracks. Now he’s decamped to a loft in SoHo. “The big sort” has become sociocultural apartheid. It’s globalization, it’s the decline in the power of private-sector unions and the brakes they applied.

What ails the dream is a worthy debate. I’d include this: The dream requires adults who can launch kids sturdily into Dream-land.

When kids have one or two parents who are functioning, reliable, affectionate — who will stand in line for the charter-school lottery, who will fill out the forms, who will see that the football uniform gets washed and is folded on the stairs in the morning — there’s a good chance they’ll be OK. If you come from that now, it’s like being born on third base and being able to hit a triple. You’ll be able to pursue the dream.

But I see kids who don’t have that person, who are from families or arrangements that didn’t cohere, who have no one to stand in line for them or get them up in the morning. What I see more and more in America is damaged or absent parents. We all know what’s said in this part — drugs, family breakup. Poor parenting is not a new story in human history, and has never been new in America. But insufficient parents used to be able to tell their kids to go out, go play in America, go play in its culture. And the old aspirational culture, the one of the American dream, could counter a lot. Now we have stressed kids operating within a nihilistic popular culture that can harm them. So these kids have nothing — not the example of a functioning family and not the comfort of a culture into which they can safely escape.

This is not a failure of policy but a failure of love. And it’s hard to change national policy on a problem like that.

SOURCE

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Why Justice Gorsuch Will Have an Immediate (and Big) Impact on the Supreme Court

Relentless, harsh and wholly unmerited — such were the attacks against Judge Neil Gorsuch. Yet Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) held firm to his promise to hold a full-Senate vote on the judge’s nomination and today we have, once again, a full complement of justices on the U.S. Supreme Court.

Hopefully, Gorsuch’s confirmation means that the Court once again has the crucial fifth vote needed to sustain the Constitution as written and to protect fundamental rights like religious freedom, free speech, and the right to bear arms.

Once he is sworn in, Justice Gorsuch will arrive at the Court just in time to hear the April 19 oral arguments in Trinity Lutheran Church v. Pauley. It is a case of stark, blatant religious discrimination by the government.

The state of Missouri provides grants to help nonprofit organizations resurface their playgrounds with rubber from recycled tires. The goal is to provide safer play areas for kids. But Missouri denied a grant to the licensed preschool and daycare center at Trinity Lutheran solely because it is a church. Missouri said the grant would violate separation of church and state. In reality, it violated prior Supreme Court precedent.

Given the hostility to religious freedom expressed in prior decisions like Burwell v. Hobby Lobby (2014) (the contraceptive mandate case) and Town of Greece v. Galloway (2014) (the town council opening prayer case) by the four liberal justices on the Court, Gorsuch is needed in the Trinity Lutheran case to prevent an injustice from occurring. Excluding churches from an otherwise neutral and secular government aid program clearly violates the First Amendment.

Gorsuch may also make a difference in the Court’s decisions about which of the pending petitions it will accept for appeal. Each term, the Court accepts only a little over 70 of the roughly 7,000 petitions it receives. It will be helpful, therefore, to have another justice who understands the importance of constitutional issues and will vote to accept the most important cases for review.

Among the petitions currently pending is Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission, an important case about an individual’s right to not be forced by the government to act in violation of his or her religious beliefs.

Another petition is Husted v. A. Philip Randolph Institute. In this case, the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals issued an erroneous decision, misinterpreting federal law to prevent the state of Ohio from cleaning up its voter registration list. This is an especially important case for improving election integrity — and one which Justice Gorsuch may be inclined to take up.

Another petition that could help assure election integrity is North Carolina v. North Carolina NAACP. Here, a three-judge panel of the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals erroneously threw out North Carolina’s voter ID law as well as numerous other election reforms.

Justice Gorsuch may also make a difference on petitions to come — such as the emergency appeals of the numerous injunctions issued against President Donald Trump’s executive order temporarily suspending travel from terrorist safe-havens.

As five dissenting judges from the Ninth Circuit pointed out, those decisions confound Supreme Court precedent and the constitutional and federal statutory provisions that authorize the president’s actions.

Neil Gorsuch should be the fifth vote needed to quash this judicial activism that interferes with the president’s authority as commander-in-chief to protect the nation.

SOURCE

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New Jewish conspiracy theory

From the Left of course. It's the new "Protocols"

Chabad of Port Washington, a Jewish community center on Long Island’s Manhasset Bay, sits in a squat brick edifice across from a Shell gas station and a strip mall. The center is an unexceptional building on an unexceptional street, save for one thing: Some of the shortest routes between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin run straight through it.

Two decades ago, as the Russian president set about consolidating power on one side of the world, he embarked on a project to supplant his country’s existing Jewish civil society and replace it with a parallel structure loyal to him. On the other side of the world, the brash Manhattan developer was working to get a piece of the massive flows of capital that were fleeing the former Soviet Union in search of stable assets in the West, especially real estate, and seeking partners in New York with ties to the region.

Their respective ambitions led the two men—along with Trump’s future son-in-law, Jared Kushner—to build a set of close, overlapping relationships in a small world that intersects on Chabad, an international Hasidic movement most people have never heard of.

Starting in 1999, Putin enlisted two of his closest confidants, the oligarchs Lev Leviev and Roman Abramovich, who would go on to become Chabad’s biggest patrons worldwide, to create the Federation of Jewish Communities of Russia under the leadership of Chabad rabbi Berel Lazar, who would come to be known as “Putin’s rabbi.”

A few years later, Trump would seek out Russian projects and capital by joining forces with a partnership called Bayrock-Sapir, led by Soviet emigres Tevfik Arif, Felix Sater and Tamir Sapir—who maintain close ties to Chabad. The company’s ventures would lead to multiple lawsuits alleging fraud and a criminal investigation of a condo project in Manhattan.

Meanwhile, the links between Trump and Chabad kept piling up. In 2007, Trump hosted the wedding of Sapir’s daughter and Leviev’s right-hand man at Mar-a-Lago, his Palm Beach resort. A few months after the ceremony, Leviev met Trump to discuss potential deals in Moscow and then hosted a bris for the new couple’s first son at the holiest site in Chabad Judaism. Trump attended the bris along with Kushner, who would go on to buy a $300 million building from Leviev and marry Ivanka Trump, who would form a close relationship with Abramovich’s wife, Dasha Zhukova. Zhukova would host the power couple in Russia in 2014 and reportedly attend Trump’s inauguration as their guest.

With the help of this trans-Atlantic diaspora and some globetrotting real estate moguls, Trump Tower and Moscow’s Red Square can feel at times like part of the same tight-knit neighborhood. Now, with Trump in the Oval Office having proclaimed his desire to reorient the global order around improved U.S. relations with Putin’s government—and as the FBI probes the possibility of improper coordination between Trump associates and the Kremlin—that small world has suddenly taken on outsize importance.

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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Will N.E. Asia eclipse Caucasians by the end of this century?

It seems obvious that they will. Japan and S. Korea are already rich and influential countries and China is just getting into its stride -- while economic growth rates in Europe and America are very sluggish.

And something I notice because I read a lot of academic journal articles across several disciplines is that there always seems to be an East Asian among the list of authors. There are very few single-author papers these days. So East Asians are already there at the heart of Western science. How soon will it be before the corresponding (main) author usually has an Asian name?

Prophecy is a mug's game unless it is based on clear extrapolations from the past and present and even then "Black Swan" events can upset the applecart. But we are all interested in the future so at least we can attempt informed opinions. My opinion is that China will once again be the centre of the world by the end of this century. So I want to look at why I might be wrong. No Leftist ever seems to do that but it is certainly in line with conservative caution.

An obvious factor is the law of diminishing returns and the ogive curve that seems to describe most variations in biological phenomena. Apologies for that bit of academic-speak but it will become VERY clear if we look at Japan. For about 4 decades after WWII, Japan astonished the world by it huge economic growth rates. It leapt to some sort of parity with European countries very rapidly and European countries were growing richer at that time too.

But it did not continue. It just about hit a brick wall. Japan has had negligible growth for around a couple of decades now. A statistician might say that Japanese economic growth has approached an asymptote. And lots of things do approach an asymptote. It is normal for natural processes to have limits on how far they can change. So Japan will almost certainly never again see high rates of econnomic growth. It will probably stay on some sort of parity with Western countries but may never get further than that. Could that happen to China too? It is clearly possible.

It is also possible that the USA could get steam up again. Under Obama, huge numbers of Americans left the workforce, middle incomes stagnated and business was ever more tightly strangled by regulations. But that already seems to be going into reverse under Trump. And it's early days yet. The more Uncle Sam gets his fingers out of business, the more the economy is likely to grow. And in my reading we are in fact due for a boom under Trump.

It would be too much of a diversion to tackle the arguments of economists against Trumpenomics but let me just note that Trump does have an economics degree and America thrived mightily behind high tariff walls in the 19th century.

So if America booms again, it might be very difficult for N.E. Asia to keep up, let alone excel.

A standard criticism of E. Asians is that they are not creative. They just use well what others have invented. That might seem like stupid old racism but some recent work in genetics gives it some substance. And it is in part the work of that intrepid outspeaker, Edward Dutton -- a Briton who has been "exiled" to Northern Finland. Maybe he just likes cold climates. His latest paper that I know of (2015) is below:

Why do Northeast Asians win so few Nobel Prizes?

Kenya Kura, Jan te Nijenhuis & Edward Dutton

Abstract

Most scientific discoveries have originated from Europe, and Europeans have won 20 times more Nobel Prizes than have Northeast Asians. We argue that this is explained not by IQ, but by interracial personality differences, underpinned by differences in gene distribution. In particular, the variance in scientific achievement is explained by differences in inquisitiveness (DRD4 7-repeat), psychological stability (5HTTLPR long form), and individualism (mu-opioid receptor gene; OPRM1 G allele ). Northeast Asians tend to be lower in these psychological traits, which we argue are necessary for exceptional scientific accomplishments. Since these traits comprise a positive matrix, we constructed a q index (measuring curiosity) from these gene frequencies among world populations. It is found that both IQ scores and q index contribute significantly to the number of per capita Nobel Prizes.

SOURCE

Linking Nobel prizes to genetics is undoubtedly clever and impressive so my objections to their conclusions are rather weak. My objections may however be right. The key statistic in their results is the variance explained by their q factor and IQ combined. It is only 19%. Many other factors could be at work.

And an obvious factor is history. Nobel prizes are normally awarded late in the Nobelist's life. And for something like 98% of the time over which Nobels have been awarded, China had not even got its boots on academically. Among those Asian co-authors of academic papers today may be a majority of the Nobelists of tomorrow. In other words, the criterion for achievement -- a Nobel -- may be too narrow. I believe it is.

So where does that leave us? All things considered, I suppose the future will be a lot like the present, with the new ideas coming mainly from people of N.W. European ancestry (including Russians, Britons and Americans) and Asia implementing those ideas even more effectively than we do.

I am still vastly impressed by China, however. My only visit to China was many years ago but my son has been to China a couple of times on problem-solving missions and I have Sinophilic friends. All tell me that China already dazzles in many ways. My son is a software engineer and his verdict from contact with them is that the Chinese are unbeatable. I am inclined to agree. I am inclined to think that China will eventually pull ahead of the USA in most ways. But I am also of the view that the USA will remain an indispensable second place-getter in many ways.

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United Airlines Flunks Economics 101

Supply and Demand: After forcing a paying customer off a flight to make room for an employee, United Airlines is catching hell, and rightly so. But what's really disturbing is that no one at United understood the most basic principle of free market economics.

The story goes like this. United overbooked a flight from Chicago to Louisville, Ky., on Sunday night. That's hardly unusual. But in this case, United wanted to make room for four employees who needed to be in Louisville the next day, and the next flight to Louisville wasn't until Monday afternoon.

According to news accounts, United offered passengers at the gate $400 and a hotel to give up their seats. But nobody took them up on it. After everyone had boarded the plane, United upped the offer to $800 for anyone willing to get off. Again, it got no takers.

So, the airline decided to do the "fair" thing and have a computer randomly pick four passengers, who were then told to get off the plane. When one refused, United called in cops. Another passenger recorded that man being yanked from his seat and dragged off the plane.

A high school student just learning about economics could explain what United did wrong. Namely, it tried to ignore the supply and demand curve and the market clearing price.

Clearly, the combination of an overnight stay and the reason for being bumped (to accommodate United workers) pushed the market price for giving up a seat above $800.

United spokesman Charlie Hobart said the airline tries to come up with a reasonable compensation offer, but "there comes a point where you're not going to get volunteers."

That's simply not true. Yes, United's contract of carriage gives them the ability to bump passengers. But United could have — and given the circumstances should have — continued to increase its offer price until it got enough volunteers. At some point, there would have been a rush to give up seats.

The result: Everyone would have gone away happy. The passengers who agreed to get off the flight would have received something they valued more than arriving on time, and United would have been able to get its own employees where they needed to be without raising a fuss.

Instead, United tried to impose its own form of price controls and then have the police enforce its nonmarket decision.

Does that sound familiar to anyone? It should, because this is precisely what happens when government interferes in any market, either by forcing prices higher or lower, or mandating businesses offer this or that, to accommodate some other alleged social goal — and then forcing everyone to abide by these rules. The result is economic inefficiency, rising animosity and a growing police state.

Price controls are why there were gasoline shortages in the 1970s and doctor shortages in Medicaid today. They explain why the individual insurance markets are failing under ObamaCare, and why Venezuelan grocery store shelves are empty.

Such economic illiteracy might be excusable among government regulators and bureaucrats who make their living telling other people what to do. But the fact that a private company — in an industry that is constantly changing ticket prices to meet even slight changes in demand — didn't understand this basic economic principle is really troubling.

Then again, it was the airlines themselves that fought to keep the government in charge of setting their routes and fares when Congress decided to deregulate the industry in the 1970s.

SOURCE

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Trump wins trade concessions from China in first meeting: Report

President Trump's first meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping reportedly made progress on trade issues with the world's largest country.

The Financial Times reported China offered to drop the ban on American beef, in place since 2003, and offered to allow foreigners to have majority stakes in Chinese investment and securities companies.

The former concession from the Chinese would allow American cattle producers to have access to a massive new market, while the Financial Times reported the latter is something that was discussed under former President Barack Obama but was received positively by Trump last week.

Trump and Xi met for two days of talks at Mar-a-Lago in Florida last week. Trump tweeted that he and Xi made progress on a personal relationship level but only time would tell about how the country's trade relationship would go.

SOURCE

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Democrat Russia narrative implodes

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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 on politics and IQ

Further to my recent comments on IQ, someone has drawn my attention to a 2014 article by Noah Carl. Carl recently came to attention for his articles on Leftism among academics. I had some comments on that on March 5 and on March 17. Carl is clearly something of a bad boy from a Leftist perspective. The 2014 journal article is as follows:

Cognitive ability and party identity in the United States (2014)

Noah Carl

Abstract

Carl (2014) analysed data from the U.S. General Social Survey (GSS), and found that individuals who identify as Republican have slightly higher verbal intelligence than those who identify as Democrat. An important qualification was that the measure of verbal intelligence used was relatively crude, namely a 10-word vocabulary test. This study examines three other measures of cognitive ability from the GSS: a test of probability knowledge, a test of verbal reasoning, and an assessment by the interviewer of how well the respondent understood the survey questions. In all three cases, individuals who identify as Republican score slightly higher than those who identify as Democrat; the unadjusted differences are 1-3 IQ points, 2-4 IQ points and 2-3 IQ points, respectively. Path analyses indicate that the associations between cognitive ability and party identity are largely but not totally accounted for by socio-economic position: individuals with higher cognitive ability tend to have better socio-economic positions, and individuals with better socio-economic positions are more likely to identify as Republican. These results are consistent with Carl's (2014) hypothesis that higher intelligence among classically liberal Republicans compensates for lower intelligence among socially conservative Republicans.

SOURCE

So what are we to make of it? Let us first compare it with two papers by the indefatigable Ian Deary. Deary has access to some very well sampled British databases so is in a position to report highly generalizable results:

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

Childhood intelligence predicts voter turnout, voting preferences, and political involvement in adulthood: The 1970 British Cohort Study (2008)

Ian J. Deary

Abstract

Little is known about the association between measured intelligence and how people participate in democratic processes. In the 1970 British Cohort Study, we examined the association between childhood intelligence and, at age 34: whether and how people voted in the 2001 UK general election; how they intended to vote; and whether they had taken part in other political activities. People with higher childhood intelligence were more likely to vote in the 2001 election (38% increased prevalence per SD increase in intelligence), and were more likely to vote for the Green Party and the Liberal Democrats (49% and 47% increased prevalence per SD increase in intelligence, respectively). The intelligence-Green party voting association was largely accounted for by occupational social class, the intelligence-Liberal Democrat voting association was not. Similar associations between intelligence and preference for the Green Party or Liberal Democrats were found as regards voting intentions, but neither of these associations was accounted for by occupational social class. People with higher childhood intelligence were more likely to take part in rallies and demonstrations, and to sign petitions, and expressed a greater interest in politics (40%, 65%, 33%, and 58% increased prevalence per SD increase in intelligence, respectively).

SOURCE

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

Bright Children Become Enlightened Adults (2008)

Ian J. Deary

Abstract

We examined the prospective association between general intelligence (g) at age 10 and liberal and antitraditional social attitudes at age 30 in a large (N = 7,070), representative sample of the British population born in 1970. Statistical analyses identified a general latent trait underlying attitudes that are antiracist, proworking women, socially liberal, and trusting in the democratic political system. There was a strong association between higher g at age 10 and more liberal and antitraditional attitudes at age 30; this association was mediated partly via educational qualifications, but not at all via occupational social class. Very similar results were obtained for men and women. People in less professional occupations-and whose parents had been in less professional occupations-were less trusting of the democratic political system. This study confirms social attitudes as a major, novel field of adult human activity that is related to childhood intelligence differences.

SOURCE

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

So in the first Deary study above we find that high IQ British voters did lean Left but they leant towards minority Leftist parties, not the major Leftist party, the Labour party. The Labour party has some repellent union associations so may have been seen as unattractive for that reason. The two minor parties, however, come across as high-minded.

The second study looked at the correlates of attitudes rather than vote. And ever since LaPiere in the 1930s we have known that attitudes are at best only weakly related to behaviour. Deary found greater social liberalism among high IQ people.

And so we come to Carl's 2014 American study. GOP identifiers were found to be slightly brighter on average than Democrat identifiers.

It is of course perfectly possible and reasonable that trends in Britain might not be reflected in the USA -- and vice versa. That would seem to be the case here. But note that in no case is the major Leftist party favoured. But the association between vote and IQ was in any case weak so IQ is clearly a very minor factor in determining vote. As I have often argued, it is a miserable personality that makes you Leftist. See, for instance, here

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Jeff Sessions Delivers Sweeping Reforms to Protect the Border and US Citizens

Attorney General Jeff Sessions paid a visit to the U.S.-Mexico border today during a trip to Nogales, Arizona, where he spoke to a group of Customs and Border Protection agents and prosecutors.

He referred to the southwest border as “ground zero” in the fight against “transnational gangs like MS-13 and international cartels [that] flood our country with drugs and leave death and violence in their wake.” He added that “it is here that criminal aliens and the coyotes and the document-forgers seek to overthrow our system of lawful immigration.”

Sessions pledged to ratchet up the fight against “criminal organizations that turn cities and suburbs into warzones, that rape and kill innocent citizens, and who profit by smuggling poison and other human beings across our borders” using “[d]epravity and violence a[s] their calling cards, including brutal machete attacks and beheadings.”

Sessions declared: “For those that continue to seek improper and illegal entry into this country, be forewarned: This is a new era. This is the Trump era. The lawlessness, the abdication of the duty to enforce our immigration laws, and the catch and release practices of old are over.”

Sessions backed up this statement by unveiling a series of new policies. First, he announced that each of the 94 U.S. attorney’s offices must now designate one of their prosecutors as a border security coordinator. Additionally, he announced that every federal prosecutor should consider prosecuting anybody accused of committing immigration-related offenses using the following guidelines:

Prosecute anyone suspected of transporting or harboring an illegal alien;

Charging those who unlawfully enter or attempt to enter the country with a felony offense if they have two or more prior misdemeanor convictions for improper entry, or one prior misdemeanor conviction for improper entry when accompanied by other aggravating circumstances;

Charging anyone who re-enters the country after a prior removal with a felony, if the person has a criminal record indicating that he or she poses a danger to public safety or is affiliated with a gang;

Charging those who engage in identity theft or immigration-related document fraud with felonies, including mandatory minimum offenses; and
Charging anyone accused of assaulting, resisting, or impeding a federal law enforcement officer.

Sessions also announced that he would take measures to accelerate some initiatives that had previously been announced. He stated that the administration would appoint 50 more immigration judges this year and 75 more next year.

This is welcome news indeed, since there are over 540,000 cases pending before 301 immigration judges, which works out to about 1,800 cases per judge.

Sessions also announced that the Justice Department had “already surged 25 immigration judges to detention centers along the border.”

This was part of the previously announced effort to reassign immigration judges to 12 cities (New York; Los Angeles; Miami; New Orleans; San Francisco; Baltimore, Bloomington, Minnesota; El Paso, Texas; Harlingen, Texas; Imperial, California; Omaha, Nebraska; and Phoenix, Arizona) that have the highest number of illegal immigrants with criminal charges.

In addition to proceeding with building a wall along the Mexican border, the Trump administration has called for the hiring of 5,000 more Border Patrol agents and 10,000 more Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents over the next couple of years.

The White House has also sought to reinvigorate cooperation agreements (which became dormant during the Obama administration) with state and local officials who seek to perform the functions of, and otherwise assist, immigration officers in relation to the investigation, apprehension, and detention of illegal immigrants.

These efforts have already started to bear fruit. Sessions noted that from January to February of this year—at a time when illegal immigration usually rises by 10 to 20 percent—illegal crossings dropped by 40 percent.

According to Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly, fewer than 12,500 people were stopped at the border in March, the lowest monthly figure in at least 17 years. Sessions also stated that illegal crossings have dropped a whopping 72 percent since Trump was inaugurated.

Not everyone is supporting the administration’s efforts, though. Several cities, including New York, Seattle, Baltimore, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Washington, D.C., have declared themselves to be sanctuary cities and are resisting the administration’s efforts to combat illegal immigration, thereby putting their residents in jeopardy.

Perhaps this is what Sessions had in mind when he poignantly added toward the end of his remarks:

Why are we doing this? Because it is what the duly enacted laws of the United States require. I took an oath to protect this country from all enemies, foreign and domestic. How else can we look the parents and loved ones of Kate Steinle, Grant Ronnebeck, and so many others in [the] eye and say we are doing everything possible to prevent such tragedies from ever occurring again?

When it comes to enforcing our nation’s immigration laws, clearly there is a new sheriff in town. His name is Jeff Sessions, and illegal immigrants had better beware.

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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Donald Trump and the Nature of Victory

Sean Gabb is an English libertarian/conservative but there are notoriously as many versions of libertarianism as there are libertarians. So I do not wholly agree with his points below. But the strength of Libertarianism is its ability to generate fresh pespectives -- and Gabb certainly provides that below. He thinks that Trump may go off the rails in some ways but his rise to power shows the way for future liberty-oriented politicians. Pure libertarianism will not do. You need to combine libertarianism with an appeal to national pride, national self-interest and anti-elitism. I think he is right

Since I am pushing myself into a debate between foreigners, I must begin by explaining myself. I am not an American, and do not wish to be one. I do not live in America, and do not wish to live there. The only country I love and know well is England. This being said, I have an obvious right of audience in the debate on Donald Trump. England and America share a language. Any impartial observer looking at the two countries will see two ruling classes, almost joined at the hip, facing two subject peoples whose assumptions about the good life and how it may be promoted largely overlap. If the relationship is unbalanced by an inequality of size and wealth, what happens in either country has an inescapable effect on what happens in the other. Rules of politeness that hold me from commenting on affairs in France or Germany do not apply to America. Here, then, are my thoughts on what has happened in America during the past week.

I am disturbed my Mr Trump’s apparent breaking of his election promises. He promised no more interventions in the Middle East. He has attacked Government forces in Syria, and on grounds that seem dubious in themselves. He promised better relations with Russia. These relations now seem lower than they were when Mr Obama was the American President. He denounced NATO as “obsolete.” He is now happy with NATO. American healthcare is not my proper concern. But it is worth observing, in the light of his foreign policy, that he seemed to promise his working class supporters a system less dominated by entrenched special interests. It is a mercy, I am told by friends whose judgement I trust, that his only attempt at reform was frustrated.

It may be that he has no intention of keeping his promises. Perhaps he never had any intention of keeping them. Perhaps he has seen the scale of resistance to what he promised, and has given up. Or it may be that he is playing some clever game, and will, once more, come out unexpectedly triumphant. I think it will take a year to know the truth beyond reasonable doubt. For the moment, however, I will assume the former possibility. I first voted in a general election in 1979, and paid close attention, over the next decade, to a woman [Margaret Thatcher] who, in breach of every actual or implied promise, made my country more regulated, more heavily taxed, more diverse, more subservient to foreign interests, and generally more enslaved than she found it. Ronald Reagan followed roughly the same course. It strikes me as more likely than not that Mr Trump is now doing the same.

If so, this would be a disappointment. But it is no cause for despair. 2017 is not the early 1980s. The differences go far beyond changes of fashion and an updating of lies. They are roughly as follows:

First, Mrs Thatcher and Mr Reagan took up the rhetoric of market liberalism. Many of us looked at the chapter headings, and assumed the promise was of radical deregulation and a general penumbra of changes that seemed to follow from this. We ignored the main text, or the alternative meanings that could be placed on words. I realised what was happening earlier than most. Even I took till after the 1983 general election to understand that the real agenda was one of corporatism and the beginnings of a police state. It took me longer still to see that this would be a politically correct police state.

The rhetoric that Donald Trump took up in his campaign was of populism – and a populism that took account of all that had been done to his country since about 1980 or before. There is no unread text in the promises he made. His words have no alternative meanings. He promised an end to foreign intervention, and an end to political correctness, and an end to domination by special interests. After a very short time – and, I grant again, that this short time may not yet be over – broken promises stand out as plainly as a wrong in arithmetic.

Second, in the 1980s, we faced a narrative constructed and maintained from the centre. There was a centralised media that allowed only certain issues to be discussed, and that ensured they were discussed only in certain ways. This is not to say that control of the media was monolithic. Debates were lively, and even acrimonious. But important facts were often withheld, and the public was encouraged to look at those facts that were published through various kinds of partisan lens that kept the truth from being perceived. Of equal and associated importance, the media in those days were organised to broadcast from the centre to the periphery. They did little to enable a conversation between the centre and the periphery, and conversations within the periphery were localised and compartmentalised. What has happened since then is too obvious to need describing. When Mr Trump ordered those missiles to be launched, Facebook and Twitter and the blogs began an unmanaged and unmanageable debate in which ordinary people could discuss in public whether and to what extent they had been lied to.

Third, and following from the above, Mr Trump’s supporters have the advantage of hindsight. I will boast again that I rumbled Mrs Thatcher earlier than most. Even so, it took years for it to dawn on me fully that she was fronting an elaborate fraud – or, at least, a mistake. Here, I speak from English experience, though I believe it was much the same in America. The Enemy she and her friends pointed us toward was a coalition of pro-Soviet union leaders and alleged degenerates. The remedy involved vast military spending, and an attack on the working class, and things like the prepublication censorship of video recordings. The actual enemy was a coalition of university graduates who wore suits, had at best a lingering taste for Marxism-Leninism, were not hostile to certain kinds of corporate enterprise, were out of love with the social liberalism of the 1960s, and whose own agenda can be summarised as political correctness plus the constable. Whether or not they noticed these people until it was too late, the Thatcherites did nothing to stop them, and tended to promote them. The rest of us were encouraged to laugh now and again at their linguistic tricks – and then go back to fretting over Arthur Scargill’s plan to make England into a copy of East Germany.

Nowadays, we know exactly who the Enemy is. These people run education and the media, and criminal justice and the administration, and most of big business. If they are not perfectly united, they stand together in a project to make the rest of us into denatured tax serf-consumers. Just because some of them work in the formally private sector does not make them into friends of private enterprise. Just because some of them want to make pornography illegal does not make them into social conservatives.

Fourth, and again following from the above, the Enemy is getting old. When I was a student, these people were in their thirties or my own age. They had a messianic belief in their own self-righteousness, and considerable networking abilities. Most of us, on the other hand, were old farts, pining for the 1950s, or semi-autistic libertarians, prepared to shun each other for taking a wrong view of the non-aggression principle. Those who were neither were chancers or shills. Hardly surprising if we were shoved aside or simply ignored.

The Enemy is now old and discredited. The successor generation is stuffed with mediocrities. The new generation of dissidents is young and not particularly bound by considerations of ideological purity. Open borders? Shut them! Socialised healthcare? If our own working classes want it, let it be! Trade policy? Whatever is politically useful! The managerial state? Shut down what we cannot take over; what we can take over use before we shut it down! Though I wrote one of its early texts, I am not sure if I qualify for membership of the Alternative Right. But I recognise quality when I see it. None of my old friends ever made the Enemy hysterical with fright. None of us ever reduced the Enemy to a laughing stock. I doubt if we ever did much, beyond voting for them, to help our clay-footed idols get elected.

The two big events of 2016 were the British Referendum and the election of Donald Trump. For a moment, it looked as if with a bound, we were free. We are now finding that not all may be as it then seemed. At the same time, those elections were won. They were won explicitly as rejections of the present order of things. Unlike in the 1980s, the correlation of forces is on our side. If Donald Trump sells out, that is unfortunate. But there will be other chances.

SOURCE

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Donald Trump is deliberately keeping the world guessing

Call it the mother of all backflips.Donald Trump won office on a promise to make America less the world’s policeman and more that weird hermit guy who lives up the street.

Yet as he approaches the three-month probation mark in the new job, President Trump is suddenly working all the levers on the foreign affairs front: Hosting China’s Xi Jinping at his Mar-a-Lago “winter White House”. Giving Bashar Assad a whack with the metaphorical rolled up newspaper for a sarin gas attack. Steaming the Carl Vinson carrier group towards the Korean peninsula.

And, now, dropping the so-called “Mother of All Bombs” on a network of ISIS-controlled caves and tunnels in Afghanistan.

For close Trump watchers, at first this new muscularism looked very Helen Lovejoy. His justification for his cruise missile strike on Syria, particularly his having been moved by images of the child victims of Assad’s chemical weapons, had no small hint of the reverend’s wife on The Simpson’s regular imprecation, “won’t somebody think of the children?” about it.

But the events of the past week suggest there’s also something of the Henry Kissinger going on here, too.

Kissinger, recall, was the legendary and often controversial US secretary of state and national security adviser under Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford who opened American relations with communist China and ran the negotiations to end the Vietnam War.

A great proponent of “realpolitik” — an unsentimental, self-interested rationalism in policy making — he also prized the virtue of unpredictability. Which is something Trump has in spades.

While pledging to end Obama’s wars and saying that going anywhere near Syria would be a disaster (“we should stay the hell out of Syria”, he tweeted in June, 2013), during his campaign Trump also talked about the need for America to stop telegraphing its moves to the enemy.

Obama’s hard and fast announcement in 2011 that he would pull all American troops out of Iraq not only gave what would become ISIS a vacuum to fill, it gave them a timetable as well.

Trump would later tell the New York Times, “That’s the problem with our country. A politician would say, ‘Oh I would never go to war,’ or they’d say, ‘Oh I would go to war.’ I don’t want to say what I’d do because, again, we need unpredictability.”

Having punished Assad for violating a “red line” Obama drew but never enforced around chemical weapons and seeming to form at least a temporary alliance of convenience with China over North Korea (which has been allowed to fester for far too long by both Washington and Beijing) the previously isolationist Trump is proving both a quick study and adept at keeping the world guessing.

And although the political Left — which after eight years suddenly remembered that it’s not cool to bomb foreigners — is howling, Trump’s approval rating in the Rasmussen daily tracking poll has been ticking northward again, up to 48 per cent.

Perhaps it was not Nobel Peace Prize-winning Barack Obama’s endless interventionism the American people were tired of — it was his fecklessness.

SOURCE

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Trump's border wall will get its start in San Diego County

Up to 400 companies are expected to submit proposals Tuesday to build President Donald Trump’s proposed border wall.
Phillip Molnar and Lyndsay WinkleyContact Reporters
President Trump’s proposed wall with Mexico will kick off in the San Diego border community of Otay Mesa, U.S. Customs and Border Protection confirmed Monday.

The community is home to one of two border crossings in San Diego and will be the site where 20 chosen bidders will erect prototypes of the envisioned wall. Winners will be selected around June 1, the agency said.

While funding for the massive infrastructure project is still not set, up to 450 companies submitted designs last week. The agency’s bid said roughly 20 companies will be selected to build the prototypes — 30 feet long and up to 30 feet high.

The models will be built on a roughly quarter-mile strip of federal land within 120 feet of the border, said a U.S. official with knowledge of the plans quoted by the Associated Press.

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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Liberalism and Low Self Esteem

The article below from late last year by Sean Last makes points that I have been making for many years -- though I allow that he expresses it better than I have. I think it was first in 2002 that I pointed out that Leftism is clearly motivated by ego needs. Leftism makes Leftists feel good -- as being wise and caring, whether or not they actually are, and mostly they are not. And Leftists are shallow enough to NEED that boost -- which is why they run away from any information that might undermine their half-baked policy preferences of the day.

But there is more than one source for Leftism and I have outlined many here. I actually think that the needy egos have hopped onto a train that had already been got rolling by others: The haters. As the huge demonstrations against Trump show, Leftists are huge haters. And their hate is primarily directed at the society in which they live. They want to destroy it, in the delusion that they can create a better society. So anybody who wants to make America great is anathema to them.

A better society can indeed be created. From the industrial revolution on, society has become richer and kinder and more capable of improving human lives. But none of that was done by Leftist policies of expropriation and destruction. It was done by the steady accumulation of human wisdom and ingenuity that a capitalist society enabled and produced. Other societies did well only insofar as they copied capitalist societies.

So the hatred that Leftists have for the society in which they live is at best impatient and at worst blind. There is much to criticize about modern society but Leftists want to throw the baby out with the bathwater. They fail to see that a better society is steadily evolving out of our existing society and that attacks on existing society are therefore attacks on the only hope for the future.

When Leftists do get the opportunity to mould a whole society into what they think is desirable, all we get are ghastly tyrannies like the Soviets, Mao's China, Pol Pot in Cambodia and the dead hand of Castro's Cuba.

But the hate thrives nonetheless. Why? It can have many causes. It can be a traditional hate for "the bosses" that we see in places like Scotland, it could come from some personal deprivation, like being born into a very poor family, or it could be the expression of a pathological personality. Karl Marx hated just about everyone and that is said to be because for most of his life he had painful boils on his butt.

But by far the most obvious source for a personality that is full of hate from birth onwards is psychopathy. I have in fact had academic journal articles published which report research into psychopathy so I have enough knowledge of psychopathy to see how startling are the parallels between psychopathy and Leftism. I go into details here

To summarize briefly, Psychopaths love only themselves and hate anyone who does not take them at their own high valuation of themselves and have no real morality or ethics whatsoever. They are masters of "faking good" -- of saying things that they think will make them look and sound good regardless of any truth in it. They lie at the drop of a hat. So they are very shallow thinkers. Only the here and now exists to them. I think that is a pretty good description of most prominent Leftists. Getting principles or even consistency out of a Leftist is a mug's game. They will say one thing one day and something else the next day. He/she will say anything that makes him/her look good on the given occasion. Obama's 180 degree turn on homosexual marriage is a good example of that. Or Bill Clinton's claim that Hillary was named after Sir Edmund, the Everest hero.

So that is where the needful ego guy comes in. He is not necessarily fully psychopathic but he shares the psychopath's need for praise and ego boosting. He jumps onto the psychopathic train being run by prominent Leftists. I set out here the reasons why the Clintons, Barack Obama and John Kerry are clear cases of psychopathy -- JR

In this post I am going to argue that one important reason why many people adopt a liberal political ideology is that it boosts their self esteem by allowing liberals to view themselves as noble warriors in a great battle against evil. There is a good deal of empirical data which is consistent with this theory. But I will also be making use of some evidence which is purely anecdotal. I fully recognize the limitations of such data. But I am still going to talk about it because it adds something meaningful to this theory.

The first question that needs answering is why liberals would need to increase their self-esteem in a way that conservatives do not. The answer is simple: liberals have less self esteem than conservatives to begin with. This is the conclusion of a 2012 paper published in the Journal of Research on Personality. The paper included two studies that found that liberals had lower self esteem than conservatives. The first study’s sample was moderate in size and consisted of college students. The second study made use of decades of data from the General Social Survey. The GSS is a large and highly representative survey that has been administered in the United States for over 40 years. Another paper published in 2014 replicated this finding in two more samples. Thus, the finding that liberals have low self esteem has been replicated several times, including one replication with an extremely high quality sample.

There is also experimental evidence showing that self esteem has a causal relation to liberalism. Researchers from Stanford have shown that causing people to feel especially good, or bad, about their looks influences their political beliefs and behavior. The researchers manipulated how people felt about themselves by asking them to recall incidents in which they felt either very attractive or very unattractive. When participants were made to feel good about themselves they became more likely to believe that social inequality was caused by individual differences in talent rather than by systemic forces outside of the individuals control. That is, they became more likely to endorse the conservative view on inequality. They also became less likely to donate to organizations aimed at lessening social inequality. When participants were made to feel poorly about themselves the opposite happened: they adopted a more liberal worldview and were more likely to donate to liberal groups.

So far we know that liberals have low self esteem and that having low self esteem causes people to be more liberal. There are at least two ways of looking at this. One way is to say that having low self esteem causes someone to be liberal because it makes it rational for them to favor equality. Equality helps everyone on the bottom half and that’s probably where you think you are if you have low self esteem. There’s clearly some truth to this narrative. But I believe that people with low self esteem will also be attracted to liberalism because being a liberal helps your self esteem a little bit. In particular, being a liberal lets you view yourself as a kind of moral hero waging a battle against dark and evil forces. Who doesn’t feel good about themselves while playing super hero?

The thing that initially caused me to think that liberalism boosts self esteem is the fact that liberals seem to be very proud of their political ideology. They want everyone to know about it. You can tell someone is liberal by the car they drive, the clothes they wear, and the food they eat. Non-liberals aren’t normally like this. I can’t look at someone and know whether they are a moderate, a conservative, a libertarian, etc. It’s only liberals that I can reliably spot on sight.

It also seems clear to me that morality is involved. Liberals are always crusading against something immoral. It’s never a simple factual disagreement. Conservatives are sexist, racist, homophobic, etc. And they hate the poor. Of course, many of these charges are ridiculous. For example, conservatives advocate the economic policies they do because they think that everyone will benefit from them. It has nothing to do with hating the poor. Notice that conservatives don’t respond in kind: conservatives don’t normally argue that liberals hate the poor, women, straight people or minorities, even though they think that liberal policies will negatively effect these groups.

Research by the moral psychologist Jonathan Haidt lends support to this theory. Haidt has developed surveys that ask people about their moral values. Early in his research Haidt found that liberals and conservatives tended to fill out these surveys differently. After replicating this finding several times Haidt did something pretty cool: he had liberals fill out the surveys as they imagined conservatives would and vice versa. Haidt found that conservatives were fairly accurate in their depictions of the moral values of liberals. But liberals were widely inaccurate in their view of conservative morality: they drastically underestimated how much conservatives cared about moral values like fairness and kindness. Haidt also had liberals fill out the surveys as if they were the average liberal and conservatives fill out the surveys as if they were the average conservative. Once again, conservatives were far more accurate than liberals. Liberals consistently over-estimated how much the average liberal cared about various moral values. And thus, Haidt showed that liberals irrationally view conservatives as immoral and view themselves as far more righteous than they actually are.

The behavior of liberals is also consistent with viewing them as moral crusaders. Pew polling shows that liberals are far more likely than conservatives to end a friendship with someone due to a political dispute. This is what we would expect from people who view the opposition as evil. Who wants to be friends with evil people?

I think this explains why liberals care so much about things that are offensive and don’t matter. If you want to feel morally superior to everyone around you, you can’t agree with them. And so you have to find things wrong with society which society won’t admit to. And so as time has gone on, liberals have had to invent increasingly ridiculous complaints about society. Consider transsexuals and people with autism. By even the most liberal estimates of transsexual prevalence, autism is about five times as common as trannies are. And no one could argue with the fact that autistic people have hard lives. But the left doesn’t generally care about people with autism because supporting autistic people isn’t offensive to most people. If the left launched a campaign to help autistic people most people would probably feel sorry for the mentally ill and agree with them. And then there would be no bogey men to wage war with. So the left concentrates on trannies instead. There are basically no trannies. And most of the few that do exist are clearly insane. So they are the perfect group for the left to champion. A lesser but similar case can be made about gay marriage. Being gay is rare, and almost no gays actually want to marry. But gay marriage is offensive to many people. So it is a great issue for the left. It creates lots of bogeymen.

I’ve found that this theory helps to explain a lot about how liberals debate. In my experience, liberals are more concerned with proving that I am evil than proving that I am wrong. (“The races differ in mean IQ scores.” … “You’re racist!”) I now think that this is because they can only grandstand by showing that I am evil. Showing that I am wrong won’t boost their self esteem the way that showing to the world that they are battling evil does.

In summary, studies show that liberals have low self esteem and that causing low self esteem causes people to be more liberal. Research also shows that liberals have unrealistically negative views of the morals of conservatives and unrealistically positive views of the morals of liberals. And polling shows that liberals are far more likely to break social ties with people over politics. They are moral crusaders. The fact that liberals want everyone to know that they are liberal, that they seem to purposefully pick offensive views, their debate style, and the fact that being morally superior normally feels pretty good, suggests to me that the moral crusading and the low self esteem are connected. Liberals are liberal so that they can say that society sucks, so that they can say that they are better than everyone else, so that they can feel a little less shitty about themselves.

SOURCE

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The Strategic Calculations Behind Trump's Flip-Flops

Headlines splashed across much of the mainstream media on Thursday morning stated that essentially Donald Trump had flipped his position on several campaign issues. Two of Trump’s policy changes were highlighted by the following headlines: Bloomberg’s headline, “Trump’s Reversal on China Currency His Latest Abandoned Promise” and the other in the Washington Post’s headline, “Trump on NATO: ‘I said it was obsolete. It’s no longer obsolete.’”

Given Trump’s typical off-the-cuff manner, it’s tempting to assume that he’s sliding into the realm of all flip-flopping politicians, but the truth — at least in these two cases — is more nuanced. In the case of China, Trump can’t think of its currency in a vacuum, but as part of his effort to contain North Korea. The U.S. and China will have to cooperate to some extent, meaning labeling China a currency manipulator is off the table for now. And as for NATO, a huge part of Trump’s strategy in Syria is to put pressure on Vladimir Putin. NATO is key in that calculation, thus it’s “no longer obsolete” — just as we argued from the beginning.

As with every campaign, the rhetoric of the politician is often overly simplistic, designed to present big picture issues in the most appealing way, while avoiding getting bogged down in the minutia of truly complex issues. Trump, like Barack Obama before him, proved to be skillful at connecting with Americans in getting his base message out clearly — “Make America Great Again.”

But unlike Obama, Trump truly was a non-establishment Washington outsider. Like anyone coming into a new job, there are things learned once on the job that can prove to change one’s perspective. To some degree, Trump is learning on the job, as have all presidents before him, but it would be naïve to suggest that Trump’s apparent flip-flop in policy position is due entirely to his newfound experience of being in office. Trump is a business man who is more of a pragmatist than an ideologue. He understands negotiating tactics — knowing when to “hold and when to fold.” And unlike Obama, Trump appears to truly listen to and trust the expertise of his cabinet and advisers.

On a final note, Trump’s shifting rhetoric on both China and NATO are encouraging and wise moves, but neither necessarily indicates that he has actually changed his policy position. This type of talking tough and then moving to the middle ground may have been his intention from the beginning.

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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Trumping healthcare’s bad hand

Some history lessons and suggestions to improve US healthcare without breaking the bank

By Scot Faulkner (Scot Faulkner was Chief Administrative Officer for the U.S. House of Representatives)

As the White House and Republican leaders continue debates and negotiations on a new bill, the blamestorming continues over the failure to repeal and replace Obamacare. Congressional Republicans have only themselves to blame. Since returning to majority in the House in January 2011, Republicans have formally voted 54 times to address all or part of Obamacare. Six were votes on full appeal.

In 2015, H.R. 132 is typical of these efforts. It simply stated: “such Act is repealed, and the provisions of law amended or repealed by such Act are restored or revived as if such Act had not been enacted.” Why didn’t Republicans vote on this a few weeks ago?

Republicans did not vote on simply going back in time, because they thought government should play a significant role in healthcare. It should not. Crippling regulations need to be changed and the private sector needs to be encouraged. Last month’s legislation did not clear the way for these solutions.

The Republicans’ problem is squandering six years with legislation designed more for fundraising and campaigning than governing. Instead, they could have viewed their repeal and replace efforts as prototyping or beta-testing a new product or APP. They could have tested ideas and built Republican consensus. Not doing this led to disaster. What to do next?

In 2013, I outlined a patient-centric versus politician-centric approach. Maybe now it will be followed. Those wanting an expanded governmental role in healthcare and those opposing it are fighting the wrong battle in the wrong way.

The debate over national healthcare policy has lasted over a century – intensifying during the Clinton Administration and since Obamacare. It has always been about coverage, liability, and finance, never about care protocols and patients. If making health affordable is everyone’s stated goal, then why not focus on the actual care, health, and wellness of Americans?

America remains the best place on Earth to have an acute illness or shock-trauma injury. Our nation’s emergency rooms and first responder protocols are unequaled. Princess Diana may have lived had her car accident happened in New York City instead of Paris. America’s diagnostic methods and equipment are unequaled. That’s why patients from all over the globe seek answers to complex symptoms by visiting the Mayo Clinic, Cleveland Clinic, Johns Hopkins, Sloan Kettering and countless other world class facilities.

The other side of American healthcare is its failings in chronic care, expense, and a system that is controlled by the medical profession, pharmaceutical companies and insurance industry. This triad of entrenched interests has prevented the widespread use of substances and therapies deemed effective in most of the world.

Thankfully, an increasing number of healthcare professionals are embracing global best practices, virtual technology, and patient-centric methods. Some are even exploring homeopathic and nutritional treatments that are common place around the globe, but viewed as “nontraditional” in America. These innovations are improving the health of patients while driving down costs. This is the arena where policy-makers should check their partisanship at the door. Seeking ways to improve healthcare, not health financing, will ultimately make health affordable to us all.

I have personal experience with the convergence of these worlds. Since 2007, I have been the primary caregiver to several family members with serious chronic conditions. These conditions have been punctuated by emergency care and major surgeries. Making decisions and managing treatment across this spectrum has been a real education that has helped me identify four major areas of opportunity for health and healthcare improvement, while addressing the affordability of private and public health services.

First, not all ailments require doctors and prescription medications. Government and industry policies drive people away from cheaper and more effective natural remedies. Herbal remedies have been successfully used since the first humans. For example, apple cider vinegar has completely solved acid reflex. Cayenne pepper has improved heart function.

However, natural substances are not covered as a medical expense either by insurance or tax deductions. Instead, acid reflex sufferers must pay for over-the-counter treatments (which are also not covered by insurance or tax deductions), or must obtain expensive prescriptions after paying to see a doctor or specialist. Being a natural treatment, the vinegar regime also avoids side effects and drug interactions. Why not go “back to the future” and find ways to support these more affordable and effective treatments?

Second, nurse practitioners form one of the new front lines of care. The overwhelming majority of my family’s office visits are with a nurse practitioner interacting with the patient and lab technicians. Occasionally, a doctor will review the information and discuss treatment options with the patient. Supporting the evolution to nurse practitioners through education, professional certification, protocol modifications and pricing would reduce costs and expand health options for professionals and patients.

Third, community caregiving is another new frontline of achieving and sustaining wellness. In 2009-2011, I was part of the planning team for developing a community-based care system for the Atlanta area. We found a disturbing pattern – patients, especially Medicare/Medicaid patients, arrive in hospital emergency rooms when their chronic conditions (diabetes, congestive heart failure or chronic obstructive pulmonary disease or COPD, eg) become acute. These patients are treated at the most expensive point of care: emergency room. Once they are released, many do not have the support (family, friends, neighbors) or the capacity (some form of dementia) to follow a treatment regime that would prevent the next emergency room visit. These revolving door patients drive-up costs and end-up in a cycle of deterioration.

Our solution was to develop a community-based healthcare network. Such networks are known as “Accountable Care Organizations” (ACOs). They break-out of traditional hospital and doctor office environments to forge partnerships with the community – churches, social workers, local government, neighbor associations, and nonprofits. A needy patient with chronic conditions is assessed holistically.

This includes risk factors (i.e. smoking, alcoholism, drugs) and environmental factors (family & home environment). A care plan is developed and assigned to a multi-faceted care team (comprising community resources) and a care manager. Doctors and nurses are part of the team. The majority of health actions take place among family and community – driven by electronic medical records, aided by remote sensors and virtual care, and guided by the managed care team.

The result of this holistic approach is improved care, sustainable health and reduced costs. It is the one way Medicare and Medicaid costs can be substantially reduced while enhancing quality of life. There are initiatives to promote this methodology within the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), but it is occurring too slowly and is too isolated. ACOs are making a difference, but no major politician has embraced the concept and neither party has promoted them as a way to reduce Entitlement costs.

Fourth, families have always been a pivotal component in healthcare. Whether it is a parent staying home to care for sick children, or adult children caring for ailing parents, family caregiving is vital; but it is also emotionally and financially draining.

Having been the care manager, medical power of attorney, and patient advocate for both my parents and my wife, I know how much time is spent with ailing family members. Current IRS regulations provide for listing parents as dependents based only upon financial support.

However, there are no tax credits or deductions for those who have the medical power of attorney and devote countless hours to direct care or acting as the patient’s advocate for managing their care. Politicians at both the state and federal levels should provide relief for this indispensable and growing volunteer service sector. Supporting Family-based assistance will save billions in public assistance.

According to the National Alliance of Caregiving, 70 million Americans provide unpaid assistance and support to older people and adults with disabilities. Forty percent of these caregivers provide care for 2-5 years, while approximately 29% provide care for 5-10 years. Unpaid caregiving by family and friends has an estimated national economic value (in 2004) of $306 billion annually – exceeding combined costs for nursing home care ($103.2 billion) and home health care ($36.1 billion). This value is increasing as the population ages.

These four areas of opportunity will not address every health issue or entirely diffuse the fiscal bombs strapped to medical entitlements, but they are a good nonpartisan start. It is time for politicians to focus on the wellbeing of patients, not themselves.

Via email

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Conservatives Must Hate the Poor – Because They Want Less Gov’t

When you’re a conservative, you have to develop a thick skin. You get used to hearing how heartless you are. How devoid of compassion.

And why? Because you don’t automatically support every government program that purports to help poor people. Why, you conservatives must hate poor people!

For our liberal friends, life is simple. “Hey, here’s a social problem,” they’ll say, in essence. “Let’s throw some money at it. That will solve it.” If we disagree, they take it as proof we care more about money than about people.

There’s a certain irony at work here. Sure, money is a concern. After all, scarce resources are being taken, either from the taxpayers or borrowed from future generations. But it isn’t just – or even primarily – the money that bothers us. It's all the regulations, all the big government, that goes along with it.

Because when actual flesh-and-blood people are being considered, when we consider how big government affects human beings, we find many victims of its policies not among the rich, but among the poor.

The problem of big government crops up in many different ways. The rules, the regulations, the fine print – they all affect what you can buy, or how much it costs, or what you can do. They dictate whether you can run a lemonade stand, or sell roses on a street corner, or even just drive a car without having to go through some overly complicated governmental process.

A new Heritage Foundation report, “Big Government Policies that Hurt the Poor and How to Address Them,” outlines the phenomenon in detail. One of the charts shows exactly why big government amounts to misplaced compassion – the one that shows household spending as a percent of after-tax income.

It’s broken down by income quintiles, and guess what? Government data show incontrovertibly that it is the poor who pay the biggest percentage of their income for things such as housing, food, clothing, electricity and gasoline. So when regulations and other government policies jack up the cost of these items, the poor are the ones hit the hardest. Not those of us who are fortunate enough to have done better and moved up the income ladder.

When we’re dealing with big, intrusive government, we need to forget about good intentions. Instead, let’s focus on how it adversely impacts people at the lower end of the income spectrum.

We don’t need another program. What we need is for government to get out of the way. Stop intervening. Stop requiring people to do certain things, whether it is to attend cosmetology school to become hair-braiders, or to stop them in other ways from making their own economic decisions – which they, obviously, are in the best position to make.

It may seem hard for big-government advocates to realize, but I know how to spend my own money better than some faceless bureaucrat does. I believe that frustration on this point has done much to create the new economic era and the new political era in which we find ourselves today.

This isn’t a new concept. The welfare studies we were doing 20 years ago addressed the same kind of question. We wanted to know how to rethink the dozens of means-tested welfare programs that are out there in a way that encouraged economic opportunity for all Americans, no matter what their income.

We succeeded, and the great welfare reform of 1996 led to some real and significant changes. I hope that this latest study will bring some significant changes as well.

“Government is not the solution to our problem,” Ronald Reagan said. “Government is the problem.” The sooner we realize this, the sooner we can help all Americans – especially the poor.

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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Leftists attack pro-Trump rally

They are violent people driven by hate

A melee erupted on Saturday in a Berkeley, California park where supporters and opponents of President Donald Trump were holding competing rallies, resulting in at least 20 arrests as police struggled to keep the two camps apart.

As fist fights broke out between the two sides and people threw bottles and cans over a barricade separating them, police resorted to using to an explosive device at one point in a bid to restore order.

Several people were observed by a Reuters reporter with bloodied faces and minor injuries, but there was no official word on casualties from authorities. Media, citing police, reported that at least 11 people were injured.

Police said more arrests could follow after video shot during the melee was reviewed.

The trouble unfolded when hundreds of Trump opponents staged a counter-rally alongside an event billed as a “Patriots Day” free-speech rally and picnic, organized by mostly Trump supporters.

Between 500 and 1,000 people were in the park as the rallies peaked, according to an estimate by a Reuters reporter.

Among the Trump opponents were some counter-protesters dressed in black and wearing masks. The other side included self-described “patriots” and “nationalists”, Trump supporters, free speech advocates, and other groups.

Daryl Tempesta, 52, who said he served in the U.S. Air Force near the end of the Cold War, went to the rally to show his support for Trump.

“As a veteran, I like the track America is on, and that Trump is willing to stand and say we are still America and we are not going to be globalist, we’re not going to be a communist country,” Tempesta said. “That’s a message I can get behind.”

SOURCE

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Donald Trump’s first 100 days better than you would think

AS the end of Donald Trump’s first 100 days in office approaches, now’s a good a time to cut through the fog of misinformation, disinformation, media propaganda, ideological bias and outright hostility that has greeted his arrival in Washington and take a clear-eyed look at how he’s really doing.

Answer: much better than you think.

Let’s take the area that was supposed to be his Achilles’ heel, foreign policy. After flirting publicly with the likes of John Bolton, Rudy Giuliani and David Petraeus, Mr Trump settled on dark horse Rex Tillerson, the former chief of ExxonMobil, to be his secretary of state. Like his boss, Mr Tillerson had no prior experience in government — which has turned out so far to be an excellent thing.

Unencumbered by the can’t-do conventional wisdom of the Foggy Bottom establishment and its parrots in the Washington press corps, Mr Tillerson has played the carrot to Mr Trump’s stick, soothing Chinese feathers ruffled during the campaign with a March visit to Beijing and setting up the successful meeting earlier this month between The Donald and the Chinese president at Mar-a-Largo that coincided with the cruise-missile salvo fired at Syria’s Bashar al-Assad.

Since then, the Chinese have openly cautioned the troublesome regime of Kim Jong-un in North Korea not to antagonise the US with further nuclear sabre-rattling in the region; “Trump is a man who honours his promises,” warned the People’s Daily, the ruling party’s official newspaper. Among those promises: a better trade deal for China and an ominous presidential tweet to the North Koreans that they’re “looking for trouble,” and signed “USA.” Even now, US warships are steaming Kim’s way.

Regarding Russia, Mr Tillerson rocked the former Soviets with a “frank discussion” in Moscow on Wednesday — diplo-speak for “contentious.” Meanwhile, at the UN, ambassador Nikki Haley has already proven her mettle, taking a hard line toward the Russians for their tactical alliance with Assad while making clear the US commitment to Israel.

Domestically, a first attempt at repealing and replacing ObamaCare flopped when Speaker Paul Ryan’s needlessly complex “better way” couldn’t muster enough GOP votes to make it to the House floor. But the fault was the ambitious Ryan’s. Now the way’s clear for a cleaner repeal. And, yes, tax reform’s on its way, too.

True, the president’s two executive orders regarding visitors from several Muslim countries have been stayed by federal judges refusing to acknowledge the plain letter of both the Constitution and the US Code 1182, which give the president plenary power regarding immigration. But the recent confirmation of Neil Gorsuch as an associate justice will quickly clear up that misunderstanding when the cases land in the Supreme Court.

Further, the Republicans’ use of the “nuclear option” to eliminate the filibuster for high court nominees means Mr Trump’s next pick is guaranteed a speedy confirmation.

Over at the National Security Council, H.R. McMaster has brought order out of the chaos that followed the abortive tenure of Mike Flynn, shuffling some staffers but retaining the services of crucial personnel. And at the Pentagon and Homeland Security, former Marine generals James Mattis and John Kelly can be counted on to faithfully execute presidential policy. Worries that they’re too soft on radical Islam are unfounded.

Less remarked but equally important has been the administration’s speedy action on downsizing the federal government, proposing real spending cuts and reorganising the bloated bureaucracy, which has drawn bleats of protest from the DC swamp creatures watching their sinecures circling the drain. Mr Trump’s also lifted the hiring freeze, in order to flesh out a still-undermanned executive staff and replace Obama holdovers.

Despite these clear successes, the media continues to depict the White House as a floundering, latter-day court of the Borgias, a backstabber behind every arras. But that’s to be expected of a novice administration in its infancy. When the smoke clears, look for an uneasy balance of power between chief counsellor Steve Bannon and Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner. Mr Trump can ill-afford to lose Mr Bannon and his diehard conservative base.

And the sooner the floundering White House press operation is rebooted, the better; the administration has played defence against a hostile, sneering media long enough.

No new president will ever match the whirlwind of new programs introduced by FDR when he took office during the Depression — the gold standard cited by Democrats who equate activity with action. But Mr Trump got elected for precisely the opposite reason: Less government is more freedom.

As long as he keeps that in mind, he — and we — will do just fine.

SOURCE

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Trump Removes the Handcuffs

As the number of Islamic State militants killed by the Massive Ordnance Air Blast or MOAB nears 100, the U.S. as well as the rest of the world is assessing the larger and continued impact of the bomb. The strategic rationale for the using our biggest non-nuclear bomb was sound, as the Nangarhar province of Afghanistan near the border of Pakistan has become a recent hot zone for the U.S. military’s engagement with an off-shoot of Islamic State militants. In this instance, the MOAB eviscerated an elaborate network of jihadi tunnels. Gen. John W. Nicholson stated that MOAB “is the right munition to reduce these obstacles and maintain the momentum of our offensive against ISIS.”

In the larger context, MOAB signals a significant change from the last eight years. Barack Obama was no fan of the U.S. military, and while he begrudgingly understood its necessity he did much to limit its ability to engage in effective warfare. Donald Trump’s attitude is markedly different, demonstrated both by his campaign rhetoric in calling for the defeat of America’s enemies and his willingness to back-up his rhetoric by giving military commanders the green light to use necessary force. Significantly, when Trump was asked whether he authorized the bomb itself, the president answered, “What I do is I authorize the military. We have the greatest military in the world, and they’ve done a [good] job as usual. So, we have given them total authorization.”

A few of observations can be noted here. First, Trump has taken the handcuffs off U.S. military leadership, trusting in their expertise to wage effective warfare. Second, Trump believes in winning wars. Wars are won when one side defeats the other, and too often politicians prove to get in the way and end up prolonging war, leading ultimately to more suffering and lost lives. As David French of National Review states, “Excessive American caution has cost American lives and American limbs.” Third, this bomb, coupled with the U.S. bombing of the Syrian air base responsible for launching the chemical attack, sends a clear message to both North Korea and Iran that Trump will use any means necessary, including force, to counter their aggression.

SOURCE

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Immigration Hawks Ascend to Senior DHS Positions

Two leading advocates for reforming illegal and legal immigration enforcement were appointed by President Donald Trump to serve as senior advisors for the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).

Jon Feere, the former legal analyst for the Center for Immigration Studies, and Julie Kirchner, the previous executive director for the Federation of American Immigration Reform (FAIR), have both been appointed to senior positions.

Feere, who work with the Trump campaign and transition team on immigration policy, will serve as the senior adviser to the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency Director Thomas Homan.

Kirchner, a campaign alum as well, will serve as the senior adviser to Customs and Border Protection (CBP) Commissioner Kevin McAleenan.

Center for Immigration Studies Executive Director Mark Krikorian told Breitbart Texas that the Trump Administration appointed a person who “knows the ins and outs” of immigration when they chose Feere to serve. “ICE needs somebody like Jon because he’s worked on immigration policy for many years,” Krikorian said. “After eight years of Obama, there were civil servants and people at ICE who weren’t as quite up to date on immigration enforcement.”

FAIR spokesperson Ira Mehlman told Breitbart Texas that Kirchner’s appointment is welcome news. “They’re both people with long experience and deep knowledge and they’re highly qualified for their positions,” Mehlman said.

Both the Center for Immigration Studies and FAIR have long been advocates for increased border security, a wall, reforming foreign guest worker visas and lower levels of legal immigration to help American wages to rise.

The appointments have come with the usual media backlash that the Trump Administration has grown accustomed to. CNN, for instance, has written that Feere and Kirchner’s appointments have “alarmed” the open borders lobby. The network propped up opposition to the appointments through the left-wing Southern Poverty Law Center, with Director Heidi Beirich claiming that that the Center for Immigration Studies and FAIR publish “racist” and “xenophobic” reports.

Krikorian, though, said the open borders lobby is only outraged because they know how effective both nominees could be. “This isn’t a complaint about qualification,” Krikorian told Breitbart Texas. “Jon and these others know what they’re doing and that’s what the anti-borders groups are afraid of.

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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Scientific proof that Trump voters are racist?

Excerpt below from Thomas Wood, an assistant professor of political science at Ohio State University. Tom may know a lot about political science but he knows nothing about psychometrics. Both his measure of authoritarianism and his measure of racism have no known validity at predicting actual behaviour in the general population.

Rather hilariously, The Stenner scale of "authoritarianism" is embarassingly INVALID. That may be because it is in a "forced-choice" format that makes it difficult for many people to report their views accurately. It has been PROCLAIMED as a measure of authoritarianism but there is no proof that it is. More on that here

And the Symbolic Racism scale is problematic in what it defines as racism. Its items could in fact be seen as simply true or false hypotheses. Take, for instance the item:

"Generations of slavery and discrimination have created conditions that make it difficult for blacks to work their way out of the lower class".

That is a Leftist credo but where is the evidence for it? That it is a false statement could reasonably be concluded from the fact that many other initially disadvantaged minorities have in fact worked their way up to prosperity.

So is it racist to acknowledge reality? Leftists seem to think it is but everything they disagree with is racist to them so that tells us nothing. The scale results could in fact tell us that Trump voters are more open to reality.

One also wonders why results from only 4 out of the 8 items of the Symbolic Racism scale were presented. Were results from the other four less congenial to the beliefs of the writer?

But in any case the scale is known only to predict other attitudes, not any aspect of actual behaviour. The results below therefore tell us nothing firm

During the 2016 presidential campaign, many observers wondered exactly what motivated voters most: Was it income? Authoritarianism? Racial attitudes?

Let the analyses begin. Last week, the widely respected 2016 American National Election Study was released, sending political scientists into a flurry of data modeling and chart making.

The ANES has been conducted since 1948, at first through in-person surveys, and now also online, with about 1,200 nationally representative respondents answering some questions for about 80 minutes. This incredibly rich, publicly funded data source allows us to put elections into historical perspective, examining how much each factor affected the vote in 2016 compared with other recent elections.

Below, I’ll examine three narratives that became widely accepted about the 2016 election and see how they stack up against the ANES data.

The rich, the poor, and the in-between

The first narrative was about how income affected vote choice. Trump was said to be unusually appealing to low-income voters, especially in the Midwest, compared with recent Republican presidential nominees. True or false?

The ANES provides us data on income and presidential vote choice going back to 1948. To remove the effects of inflation and rising prosperity, I plot the percentage voting for the Republican presidential candidate relative to the overall sample, by where they rank in U.S. income, from the top to the bottom fifth. To most directly test the Donald Trump income hypothesis, I’ve restricted this analysis to white voters.

2016 was plainly an anomaly. While the wealthy are usually most likely to vote for the Republican, they didn’t this time; and while the poor are usually less likely to vote for the Republican, they were unusually supportive of Trump. And the degree to which the wealthy disdained the 2016 Republican candidate was without recent historical precedent.

Authoritarians or not?

Many commentators and social scientists wrote about how much about authoritarianism influenced voters. Authoritarianism, as used by political scientists, isn’t the same as fascism; it’s a psychological disposition in which voters have an aversion to social change and threats to social order. Since respondents might not want to say they fear chaos or are drawn to strong leadership, this disposition is measured by asking voters about the right way to rear children.

The next chart shows how white GOP presidential voters have answered these questions since 2000. As we can see, Trump’s voters appear a little less authoritarian than recent white Republican voters.

Did racism affect the voting?

Many observers debated how important Trump’s racial appeals were to his voters. During the campaign, Trump made overt racial comments, with seemingly little electoral penalty. Could the unusual 2016 race have further affected Americans’ racial attitudes?

To test this, I use what is called the “symbolic racism scale” to compare whites who voted for the Democratic presidential candidate with those who voted for the Republican. This scale measures racial attitudes among respondents who know that it’s socially unacceptable to say things perceived as racially prejudiced. Rather than asking overtly prejudiced questions — “do you believe blacks are lazy” — we ask whether racial inequalities today are a result of social bias or personal lack of effort and irresponsibility.....

Finally, the statistical tool of regression can tease apart which had more influence on the 2016 vote: authoritarianism or symbolic racism, after controlling for education, race, ideology, and age. Moving from the 50th to the 75th percentile in the authoritarian scale made someone about 3 percent more likely to vote for Trump. The same jump on the SRS scale made someone 20 percent more likely to vote for Trump.

Racial attitudes made a bigger difference in electing Trump than authoritarianism.

More HERE

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The Willful Subversion of Critical Institutions Threatens America

Certain of our institutions play a critical role in sustaining the republic and promoting and protecting the unique character of the United States of America, and they therefore have a tremendous obligation to operate ethically and honorably. To the extent that they abandon their obligation, the country’s fundamental character is threatened.

Those institutions are the justice system, the education system, and the information media.

Imagine you have a business renting apartments. One of your tenants, who has rented a place for $1,500 a month for three years sends you a check for only $900 for the current month.

You contact the tenant and are told that he views the lease that both you and he signed as a “living document,” the meaning of which may be altered as circumstances change. Having lost the job that paid $73,000 a year, his new job pays only $45,000, and he says he can now only afford $900 rent a month.

That is precisely the rationale that activist judges apply when they abandon the clear language of the U.S. Constitution and the laws of the land to make rulings they say are in line with current circumstances and the “mood” of the country, and because the Founders and those who enacted older laws were unable at that time to imagine current circumstances, that old stuff must be modernized.

However, the laws or constitutional principles that activist judges disagree with must be amended or repealed through existing formal processes, not ignored or altered because they are viewed as inconvenient. If momentary interpretations are all that matter, and the Constitution is merely a “living document,” we don’t have a Constitution and we are not a nation of laws.

A nation needs its history and culture — all of it: the good, the bad, and the ugly — to be passed down from generation to generation so that its people will know who they are and where they came from, and can properly determine where they want to go and why.

While families should pass much of this along to children, we largely entrust this duty to formal education. To guide the learning process and assist students in learning an array of important and useful subjects and life lessons, we employ teachers, professors, instructors and such, who coach and assist students.

Most of us had at least some teachers, professors and coaches who inspired us and helped us learn difficult subject matter, develop our skills, and learn how to think critically and logically. Hopefully, we did not have any that strayed from their professional duties and tried to tell us what to think about things, rather than developing the ability to think for ourselves.

Today, among the great number of effective educators there are too many who stray from the straight and narrow, especially in colleges and universities, where education too often takes a back seat to political and ideological indoctrination and politically correct policies. Imposing beliefs on students is worse than merely disrespecting the student; it is an outright abandonment of integrity and principle.

Along with an accurate base of knowledge about the country’s founding and history presented to them in schools, the people need to be well informed about current events. Information journalism contains two parts, and they must be kept separate. One is news about events, which must be accurate, honest and objective. The other is opinion, and must be clearly defined and omitted from straight news.

But far too often, opinion and political considerations sneak into news reporting, and also into the selection of what news gets reported and how it is reported, as well as what news does not get coverage. This is like playing golf blindfolded. You might find your driver, your ball and a tee, and you might tee up and actually hit the ball, but after that, you are literally in the dark, depending on the honesty of those around you to accurately describe the situation for you.

The American Left has a vision of America that is in many ways sharply at odds with the founding principles. Both beneficial and harmful ideas that the Left pursues are at odds with the ideal of limited government, because using government to force things on the people is the Left’s tool of choice.

Fortunately, there are obstacles to using government to “fundamentally transform the United States of America,” as a former leftist president pledged. These obstacles are difficult to remove, as they should be. So the Left resorts not infrequently to re-interpreting the Constitution and the laws; managing and manipulating the information coming through much of the mass media; and sometimes indoctrinating children.

We all need to remember that worthy and broadly beneficial ideas will sell themselves; they don’t need people to take short cuts or cheat to get them accepted.

SOURCE

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On the lighter side

Just about everyone likes the Music of Strauss the younger but we often hear the music only, without realizing that there are words to go with it. An example is "Frühlingsstimmen" (Spring voices). Below is a charming performance of the song by a young Slovak soprano Patricia Janečková. She was only 18 at the time. I liked one of the comments on the performance: "I was captivated for 7 1/2 minutes - she is just great. Then I watched it again - this time, with the speakers on: and she was even better"

I give a translation of the first verse below so you know what it is all about:

The lark rises into the blue,
the mellow wind mildly blowing;
his lovely mild breath revives
and kisses the field, the meadow.
Spring in all its splendour rises,
ah all hardship is over,
sorrow becomes milder,
good expectations,
the belief in happiness returns;
sunshine, you warm us,
ah, all is laughing, oh,oh awakes!

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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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Leftists Detest Patriotism

An NBC sports writer complains that flags and the national anthem are injecting politics into the game.

NBC Sports writer Craig Calcaterra stirred a hornet’s nest this past weekend when he took to Twitter to complain about the injection of politics in sports. “Will you keep politics out of sports, please. We like sports to be politics-free.” By which he meant the American flag and national anthem, because he tweeted it with a picture of the Atlanta Braves' new stadium during the national anthem.

Calcaterra followed up his tweet with an essay on the NBC Sports website in which he claimed that the presence of American flags and patriotic imagery in sports is part of a post-9/11 “conspicuous patriotism” meant to evoke specific feelings in sports fans.

Maybe Calcaterra would like to file his complaint with the Marine who carried a flag all the way through the Boston Marathon — on a prosthetic leg.

Of course, American Patriots realize that it’s Calcaterra who’s guilty of mixing politics and sports. The display at the Braves game, and many like it at ballparks across the country, are patriotic displays meant to show support for our country and our military. This sort of thing has been going on at sporting events for generations. Despite what Calcaterra thinks, there is no Orwellian propaganda machine at work.

Sports fans are generally a patriotic lot. Calcaterra discovered this in the responses his tweet generated in the hours and days after he posted it. Many challenged his thinking, wondering what was so political about displaying the American flag and being patriotic. One of Calcaterra’s snarky replies was that “People often wrap themselves in the flag in order to achieve political ends.”

People often burn the flag for the same reason, but when flags are displayed in sports, there is no political end to achieve. America-hating leftists can’t seem to grasp that. For them, everything is political. And their inherently thin skin leads them to believe that there is some hidden agenda behind anything they can’t understand. No wonder they’re so bitter.

Take a look at the farce that was Colin Kaepernick’s protest last football season. Kaepernick claimed that he refused to stand during the playing of the National Anthem to show his solidarity for the mistreatment of black people by police. One could argue that Kaepernick’s sentiment to protest such abuse was well-intentioned, but he showed extremely poor judgment by directing his anger at America as a whole and not simply at those responsible for real abuse.

Kaepernick’s error quickly and roundly drew the ire of football fans, and he now sits jobless on the sidelines waiting to see if he will even be picked up by a team for next season. Rumor has it that no NFL team will touch him after the whole debacle.

Leftists are finding themselves increasingly marginalized in America either because they cannot grasp the true meaning of patriotism or because they are terrible at hiding their outright loathing for America. Perhaps it’s a combination of the two. Either way, they seem to want the flexibility to embrace patriotism and the American ideal when it suits them, mainly so they have something to hide behind when they show their contempt for this country and many of its time-honored institutions.

The difference between what is patriotic and what is anti-American should be easy to see, so it’s puzzling that there is such a vigorous debate over the issue. But leftists will keep that argument going because it’s in their nature.

It would just be nice if they can keep that debate out of sports. We Americans like baseball, football, basketball, and all the other contests because we admire physical skill and athletic prowess. We’re not looking for more social justice warriors. Hollywood, Washington and the mass media have given us more than enough of them to go around. Sports is one of the few things in American life that is inherently politics-free. That’s why we like sports. Let’s keep it that way.

SOURCE

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Big Labor Robs Members to Support Democrats

If you’re wondering why millions of workers are abandoning the idea of unionization, this statistic provides a clear answer: At least $1.7 billion — three-quarters of which came straight out of workers' pockets — was used to promote 2016 political campaigns, according to the National Institute for Labor Relations Research.

Two things stick out in the report. 1): “labor unions, which have the ability to tax employees via forced-dues, [are] the only 501(c)5 entities capable of sustaining this kind political expenditure for the past decade”; and 2): “Union officials spent $1.3 billion directly from union treasuries (filled with forced dues and fees) to spend it on politics, dwarfing George Soros' and the Koch Brothers' reported combined political spending during the same period.”

Democrats talk a lot talk about voters “making their voices heard” by “getting out the vote,” but most of this money is being siphoned from workers who don’t have a voice in how political contributions are allocated. And, needless to say, Democrats are the biggest beneficiaries. The most recent data reveals that just 14.6 million Americans (or 10.7% of the workforce) were unionized last year. This is a 9.4% reduction from 1983, when membership was 17.7 million (a participation rate of 20.1%). This might explain why, according to The Washington Free Beacon, there is a disparity between Big Labor’s political activism and the votes cast by subordinates: “Trump received votes from 43 percent of union households, while garnering two endorsements from unions representing Border Patrol agents and police officers.”

As National Right to Work Foundation’s Mark Mix put it, “This election was a case study in the disconnect between union bosses and their members, and the chasm is growing.” If unions truly believed in the idea of democracy, they’d quit forcing members to fund partisan politics.

SOURCE

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Net Neutrality Noise and Its Ultimate Goal: Total Government Control

For over a decade, professional liberal organizers and agitators – backed by a tidal wave of big liberal foundations and Silicon Valley corporate money – have told a bizarre scare story that without heavy-handed government regulation, Internet service providers (ISPs) will start blocking what websites you can go to and impeding free speech on the Internet. No such thing happened in the approximately two decades that ISPs were unregulated “information services” under the 1996 Telecom Act. Indeed, the opposite occurred as robust competition between phone and cable companies – and later wireless companies – drove speeds dramatically higher and consumers benefited from an Internet that innovated beyond our wildest dreams.

Nonetheless, in 2015, ultraliberal advocacy groups (fueled by $196 million from the Soros and Ford Foundations) and Silicon Valley giants like Google (which cycled a shocking 250 personnel through the Obama administration and saw regulating ISPs as a way to guarantee themselves access to below-market rate downstream bandwidth for their YouTube unit) succeeded in getting the FCC to reclassify ISPs as regulated public utilities. This was done under a Depression-era law designed for the old Ma Bell telephone monopoly. Thousands of complaints to potentially micromanage every aspect of the Internet piled up at the FCC Enforcement Bureau and the commission was set to adopt a sweeping new broadband tax to replace the private investment it scared off – with strings attached of course – during a Hillary Clinton administration.

The liberal organizers of the phony net neutrality scare campaign had even bigger plans; Robert McChesney, the founder of Free Press – the group that was cited 46 times in the Obama net neutrality order – openly bragged: “At the moment, the battle over network neutrality is not to completely eliminate the telephone and cable companies. We are not at that point yet. But the ultimate goal is to get rid of the media capitalists in the phone and cable companies and to divest them from control.”

If that’s too subtle for you, McChesney also said: “In the end, there is no real answer but to remove brick by brick the capitalist system itself, rebuilding the entire society on socialist principles.”

The American people elected Donald Trump, and President Trump elevated free-market champion Ajit Pai to be FCC chairman and undo the mischief the Obama FCC had done before it could reach its ultimate goals.

Chairman Pai is soon expected to unveil his plan to undo the Obama order and replace it with a light-touch approach that centers on competition and consumer protection and allows government intervention only when there is actual consumer harm – not just scare stories. And in a refreshing break from the usual pattern of regulators accruing to themselves as much power as possible, the Pai plan will probably relinquish authority from his own agency to the Federal Trade Commission, which has far better expertise in consumer protection and competition issues.

To the well-funded groups on the left that created the phony net neutrality issue as a pretext for a government takeover of the Internet, any step back will be unacceptable and the apocalyptic rhetoric will flow like water. They will again have hundreds of millions of dollars and massive platforms from the Silicon Valley giants like Google that supported the Obama regulations. And the liberal media will happily jump on board every vicious smear and lie to tarnish Chairman Pai and President Trump and try to spook Congress into reversing course. Some conservatives may be tempted to simply ride the tide of fake outrage. But that can only lead to McChesney’s ultimate goal of total government control. On this issue, conservatives in Washington D.C. must do what they were elected to do: stand and fight. And win.

SOURCE

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The Ugly Face of Sharia Law in America

Two recent reports underscore the danger of being ambivalent toward Western values.

According to The Detroit News, a middle-aged doctor by the name of Jumana Nagarwala has been arrested for illegally conducting female genital mutilation on two minors. Additionally, the Detroit Free Press reports that “an attorney for [Nagarwala] admitted that her client performed a procedure on the juveniles' private parts, but maintained that it wasn’t cutting. Instead, the lawyer said Dr. Jumana Nagarwala, 44, of Northville, removed the membrane from the girls' genitals as part of a religious practice that is tied to an international Indian-Muslim group that the doctor belongs to.” This spin doesn’t make the incidents any less horrendous. In fact, the minors were instructed not to divulge anything about the ordeal. And without the FBI’s involvement, the malefactors might have gotten away with it.

Meanwhile, in Minnesota, Abdullah Rashid is “trying to impose what he calls ‘the civil part of the sharia law’ in the Cedar-Riverside neighborhood of Minneapolis,” according to the StarTribune. His enforcement measures include ordering people to avoid alcohol and drugs, soliciting “indecent” females to wear Muslim garb, and encouraging folks not to socialize with the opposite sex. If there’s any good news it’s that the Tribune says “local Muslim leaders are sounding the alarm. They are working to stop Rashid’s group, General Presidency of the Religious Affairs and Welfare of the Ummah, and have notified Minneapolis police, who say he’s being banned from a Cedar-Riverside property.” But these Islam-inspired shenanigans aren’t new, particularly in Minneapolis. The problem is only getting worse.

We don’t know if Nagarwala is an immigrant (though presumably she is), and reports indicate Rashid is a Georgia native. But in both cases, they are being influenced by an ideology that’s prevalent in Islamic nations. The immigration debate — an issue in which both the Democrat and Republican Parties once found common ground — has turned into one of the most politically divisive topics. The Left arduously advocates open borders, which it says is about compassion and inclusivility. But that view is either misguided or politically calculated or both. What leftists completely disregard is the idea of assimilation. And without assimilation, the stories above with continue to metastasize.

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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Donald Trump has 'dangerous mental illness', say psychiatry experts

Psychiatrists will usually not hazard a diagnosis of someone they have not personally interviewed -- but for Trump that basic precaution flies out the window. And their "diagnosis" is very loose. He is a narcissist, a paranoid, and prone to grandiose thinking. It's a catalog of abuse rather than any serious attempt at a diagnosis.

There is no doubt that Trump is a most unusual man in all sorts of ways. That makes any attempt at diagnosis difficult and unlikely to fit. You can show that certain unusual behaviors fit one category but where does that leave you with all the other unusual behaviors? Diagnosis is extraordinarily risky in such cases and most unlikely to be accurate.

Nonetheless, I think Trump's pattern can be reduced to a single obvious syndrome -- one that the psychologists below clearly avoid. But I am not going to offer my thoughts on that in case they are twisted by the totally unscrupulous Left. It's Trump's policies that matter, not his personal idiosyncrasies

Donald Trump has a “dangerous mental illness” and is not fit to lead the US, a group of psychiatrists have warned during a conference at Yale University.

Mental health experts claimed the President was “paranoid and delusional”, and said it was their “ethical responsibility” to warn the American public about the “dangers” Mr Trump’s psychological state poses to the country.

Speaking at the conference at Yale’s School of Medicine on Thursday, one of the mental health professionals, Dr John Gartner, a practising psychotherapist who advised psychiatric residents at Johns Hopkins University Medical School, said: “We have an ethical responsibility to warn the public about Donald Trump's dangerous mental illness.”

Dr Gartner, who is also a founding member of Duty to Warn, an organisation of several dozen mental health professionals who think Mr Trump is mentally unfit to be president, said the President's statement about having the largest crowd at an inauguration was just one of many that served as warnings of a larger problem.

“Worse than just being a liar or a narcissist, in addition he is paranoid, delusional and grandiose thinking and he proved that to the country the first day he was President. If Donald Trump really believes he had the largest crowd size in history, that’s delusional,” he added.

Chairing the event, Dr Bandy Lee, assistant clinical professor in the Yale Department of Psychiatry, said: “As some prominent psychiatrists have noted, [Trump’s mental health] is the elephant in the room. I think the public is really starting to catch on and widely talk about this now.”

James Gilligan, a psychiatrist and professor at New York University, told the conference he had worked some of the “most dangerous people in society”, including murderers and rapists — but that he was convinced by the “dangerousness” of Mr Trump.

“I’ve worked with some of the most dangerous people our society produces, directing mental health programmes in prisons,” he said.

“I’ve worked with murderers and rapists. I can recognise dangerousness from a mile away. You don’t have to be an expert on dangerousness or spend fifty years studying it like I have in order to know how dangerous this man is.”

Dr Gartner started an online petition earlier this year on calling for Mr Trump to be removed from office, which claims that he is “psychologically incapable of competently discharging the duties of President”. The petition has so far garnered more than 41,000 signatures.

It states: “We, the undersigned mental health professionals (please state your degree), believe in our professional judgment that Donald Trump manifests a serious mental illness that renders him psychologically incapable of competently discharging the duties of President of the United States.

“And we respectfully request he be removed from office, according to article 4 of the 25th amendment to the Constitution, which states that the president will be replaced if he is 'unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office'."

The claims made in the conference have drawn criticism from some in the psychiatric establishment, who say they violate the American Psychiatric Association’s “Goldwater rule,” which states psychiatrists are not to give professional opinions on people they have not personally examined.

They have also been condemned by Republicans, including Connecticut Republican Party Chairman JR Romano, who accused the group of “throwing ethical standards out the window because they cannot accept the election results.”

Responding to the criticism, Dr Gartner said: “This notion that you need to personally interview someone to form a diagnosis actually doesn’t make a whole lotta sense. For one thing, research shows that the psychiatric interview is the least statistical reliable way to make a diagnosis.”

The doctors have said that even if it is in breach of tradition ethical standards of psychiatry, it was necessary to break their silence on the matter because they feared “too much is at stake”.

It is not the first time Mr Trump's mental health has been called into question. In February, Duty to Warn, which consists of psychiatrists, psychologists and social workers, signed an open letter warning that his mental state “makes him incapable of serving safely as president”.

The letter warned that the President’s tendency to “distort reality” to fit his “personal myth of greatness” and attack those who challenge him with facts was likely to increase in a position of power.

SOURCE

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The real Left

Foiled at the ballot box, the Left turns to its tried and true method of political discourse: bricks and baseball bats.

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DIAMOND AND SILK LAY THE SMACKDOWN ON MAXINE WATERS

Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.) is the latest liberal lawmaker to refuse to work with President Donald Trump, calling him “dangerous.”

Well, Diamond and Silk have a few words for Waters. “When you come for Donald J. Trump, we are going to come for you boo.” Watch below.

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How socialism works

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Apocalyptic Progressivism

Victor Davis Hanson

Shortly after the 2008 election, President Obama’s soon-to-be chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, infamously declared, “You never let a serious crisis go to waste.”

He elaborated: “What I mean by that [is] it’s an opportunity to do things you think you could not do before.”

Disasters, such as the September 2008 financial crisis, were thus seen as opportunities. Out of the chaos, a shell-shocked public might at last be ready to accept more state regulation of the economy and far greater deficit spending. Indeed, the national debt doubled in the eight years following the 2008 crisis.

During the 2008 campaign, gas prices at one point averaged over $4 a gallon. Then-candidate Obama reacted by pushing a green agenda — as if the cash-strapped but skeptical public could be pushed into alternative energy agendas.

Obama mocked then-Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin’s prescient advice to “drill, baby, drill” — as if Palin’s endorsement of new technologies such as fracking and horizontal drilling could never ensure consumers plentiful fuel.

Instead, in September 2008, Steven Chu, who would go on to become Obama’s secretary of energy, told The Wall Street Journal, “Somehow we have to figure out how to boost the price of gasoline to the levels in Europe.”

In other words, if gas prices were to reach $9 or $10 a gallon, angry Americans would at last be forced to seek alternatives to their gas-powered cars, such as taking the bus or using even higher-priced alternative fuels.

When up for re-election in 2012, President Obama doubled down on his belief that gas was destined to get costlier: “And you know we can’t just drill our way to lower gas prices.”

Yet even as Obama spoke, U.S. frackers were upping the supply and reducing the cost of gas — despite efforts by the Obama administration to deny new oil drilling permits on federal lands.

U.S oil production roughly doubled from 2008 to 2015. And by 2017, the old bogeyman of “peak oil” production had been put to rest, as the U.S. became nearly self-sufficient in fossil fuel production.

Viewing the world in apocalyptic terms was also useful during the California drought.

In March 2016, even as the four-year drought was over and California precipitation had returned to normal, Gov. Jerry Brown was still harping on the connection between “climate change” and near-permanent drought.

“We are running out of time because it’s not raining,” Brown melodramatically warned. “This is a serious matter we’re experiencing in California, as kind of a foretaste.”

Foretaste to what, exactly?

In 2017, it rained and snowed even more than it had during a normal year of precipitation in 2016.

Currently, a drenched California’s challenge is not theoretical global warming, but the more mundane issue of long-neglected dam maintenance that threatens to undermine overfull reservoirs.

Brown had seen the drought as a means of achieving the aim of regimenting Californians to readjust their lifestyles in ways deemed environmentally correct. The state refused to begin work on new reservoirs, aqueducts and canals to be ready for the inevitable end of the drought, even though in its some 120 years of accurate record keeping California had likely never experienced more than a four-year continuous drought.

And it did not this time around either.

Instead, state officials saw the drought as useful to implement permanent water rationing, to idle farm acreage, and to divert irrigation water to environmental agendas.

Well before this year’s full spring snowmelt, over 50 million acre-feet of water has already cascaded out to sea (“liberated,” in green terms). The lost freshwater was greater than the capacity of all existing (and now nearly full) man-made reservoirs in the state, and its loss will make it harder to deal with the next inevitable drought

No matter: Progressive narratives insisted that man-caused carbon releases prompted not only record heat and drought but within a few subsequent months also record coolness and precipitation.

And in Alice in Wonderland fashion, just as drilling was supposedly no cure for oil shortages, building reservoirs was no remedy for water scarcity.

In the same manner, neglecting the maintenance and building of roads in California created a transportation crisis. Until recently, the preferred solution to the state’s road mayhem and gridlock wasn’t more freeway construction but instead high-speed rail — as if substandard streets and highways would force millions of frustrated drivers to use expensive state-owned mass transit.

These days, shortages of credit, water, oil or adequate roads are no longer seen as age-old challenges to a tragic human existence. Instead of overcoming them with courage, ingenuity, technology and scientific breakthroughs, they are seen as existential “teachable moments.”

In other words, crises are not all bad — if they lead the public to more progressive government.

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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This is appalling. You don't hit a mother carrying babies. The thug must be locked up

An American Airlines flight attendant has been filmed challenging a passenger to a fight in heated scenes after the staffer allegedly whacked a mum with a stroller and kicked her off the plane.

The woman had just boarded a flight yesterday afternoon from San Francisco to Dallas when the shocking incident occurred.

Passengers allege the attendant "violently" took a stroller from a lady with twins - hitting her and just missing one of the babies.

The incident comes amid the debate over airline boarding treatment after the United Airlines furore involving a man being dragged off a flight in Chicago.

In the American Airlines incident yesterday, a video posted to Facebook by Surain Adyanthaya caught the tumultuous aftermath.

“OMG! AA Flight attendant violently took a stroller from a lady with her baby on my flight, hitting her and just missing the baby,” Adyanthaya captioned the video.

The passenger later added another photo: "They just in-voluntarily escorted the mother and her kids off the flight and let the flight attendant back on, who tried to fight other passengers.

"The mom asked for an apology and the AA official declined.

"I have videos of this too but we are taking off."

The footage doesn’t catch the moment when the flight attendant allegedly struck the woman.

But the atmosphere in the cabin turns turbulent as a man steps in to defend her.

“Hey bud, you do that to me and I’ll knock you flat,” the man says to the attendant as the distraught woman can be seen to the side clutching her baby, tears streaming down her face.

The attendant fires back: “You stay out of this.”

The man then takes a step forward and the attendant immediately turns confrontational. “Hit me, c’mon, bring it on!” the attendant shouts. “C’mon, you don’t know what the story is.”

The passenger responds: “I don’t care what the story is, you don’t hurt a baby.”

The woman is eventually escorted off the flight, but the quarrelsome attendant is allowed back on, the New York Daily News reports.

The Facebook video quickly spread across social media, and had been shared more than 3,500 times as of early Saturday.

American Airlines condemned the flight attendant’s behaviour and said it had launched an investigation into the incident.

“What we see on this video does not reflect our values or how we care for our customers,” the airline said in a statement.

“We are deeply sorry for the pain we have caused this passenger and her family and to any other customers affected by the incident.”

American said the woman and her baby have since boarded another flight bound for an international destination.

The attendant has been removed from duty pending an investigation. “We are disappointed by these actions,” American said.

SOURCE

Leftists never learn

I reproduce below an article by some VERY uncritical thinkers. What they write reveals their thinking to be just about the same as the thinking of Adorno et al. in 1950. The great mass of criticism and refutation thrown at the Adorno work (See for instance the first half of Altemeyer's first book) has had no impact on them at all.

But there is a reason for that. In the minds of most psychologists, the Adorno work is impervious to criticism. No matter how aware they are of the criticisms and refutations of it: Its conclusions are just too delicious to let it go. In the best projective style, it accuses conservatives of all the faults that liberals themselves have, such as authoritarianism. Its conclusions are emotionally irresistible. So the authors below are not alone in continuing to produce "research" that repeats the old catnip. They quote many others who have not learned from the criticisms either. Their article is in fact mainstream among Leftist psychologists.

But it takes only a moment of inspection to show that the latest study, like most before it, is entirely reliant on value judgments. What seem like sober empirical findings are in fact all "spin". As is so common among psychologists, they take some highly detailed laboratory task and draw huge conclusions about all humanity from it. They do not rest at saying that liberals and conservatives respond differently to a particular experimental task but rather claim with great expansiveness that this shows how conservatives think generally.

And they do it all on the basis of responses from an available group of university students -- and students have often been shown as responding very differently from the population at large. The authors conclude that "liberals" behave in a certain way rather than "A non-random selection of 44 students from Northwestern university" behaved in a certain way. In the absence of representative sampling the latter is the only conclusion they are entitled to draw from their data but they are far more expansive than that.

But two can play at their silly game. Where they conclude that:

"Liberals solved significantly more problems via insight instead of in a step-by-step analytic fashion"

I would conclude from the same set of results that liberals leap to conclusions whereas conservatives are more careful. Broadly, "conservatism=caution" so that is hardly a startling conclusion.

An amusing feature of the article is that they accept that liberals have a need for novelty. They are sensation seekers. I reported the same many years ago -- and my sample was a random one. I interpreted the finding as showing that liberals are impulsive airheads but the authors below seem to see it as a good thing. "De gustibus non disputandum est", I guess.

REFERENCES

Adorno,T.W., Frenkel-Brunswik, E., Levinson, D.J. & Sanford, R.N. (1950) The authoritarian personality. New York: Harper.

Altemeyer, R. (1981). Right-wing authoritarianism. Winnipeg: University Manitoba Press.

The politics of insight

Carola Salvi et al.

Abstract

Previous studies showed that liberals and conservatives differ in cognitive style. Liberals are more flexible, and tolerant of complexity and novelty, whereas conservatives are more rigid, are more resistant to change, and prefer clear answers. We administered a set of compound remote associate problems, a task extensively used to differentiate problem-solving styles (via insight or analysis). Using this task, several researches have proven that self-reports, which differentiate between insight and analytic problem-solving, are reliable and are associated with two different neural circuits. In our research we found that participants self-identifying with distinct political orientations demonstrated differences in problem-solving strategy. Liberals solved significantly more problems via insight instead of in a step-by-step analytic fashion. Our findings extend previous observations that self-identified political orientations reflect differences in cognitive styles. More specifically, we show that type of political orientation is associated with problem-solving strategy. The data converge with previous neurobehavioural and cognitive studies indicating a link between cognitive style and the psychological mechanisms that mediate political beliefs.

Q J Exp Psychol (Hove). 2016 Jun; 69(6): 1064–1072. doi: 10.1080/17470218.2015.1136338

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The Greatest Threat to America Isn’t Islam – It’s the Left

These days, many people are anxious about the threat that Islam poses to the West. The fear is understandable but misplaced. And there are a host of reasons why this proves to be true.

Islam is a religion stuck in pre-medieval times and has rarely produced any civilizational, scientific or technological advancements. Around 40 percent of Muslims worldwide are illiterate. Muslim nations are unable to manufacture even the most elementary of things without the aid of Western engineering, knowledge, and technology. To a great and powerful civilization, Islam can never pose a threat.

The only reason Islam was ever able to conquer two-thirds of the Christian territories after the death of Muhammed was because the Roman and Persian empires had weakened themselves and each other through centuries of warfare. Also, plague and famine had decimated the population in the Mediterranean region, leaving them vulnerable to attack.

The problems we are now facing with Islam are only symptoms of the left’s success in paralyzing the West and preventing it from asserting itself. Islam was never strong. The West has become weak. That is why fear of Islam is misplaced. The real enemy of the West is the ideological left, an adversary from within which slowly but surely destroys western civilization by debilitating its cultural and political immune system. In many ways, the left is like HIV, and Islam is like a cold. A cold is annoying but hardly life-threatening to someone with a healthy immune system. To someone ravaged by the HIV, however, even a common cold can be lethal.

For more than a century, the left has waged a relentless jihad on the West. In the 19th century, Karl Marx saw Christianity as the cultural carrier and defender of capitalism and launched an intentional attack on religion in general, and Christianity in particular. He believed that, if Christian values could be undermined, it would be much easier to replace capitalism with utopian socialism. As an articulate intellectual, Karl Marx attracted many academics to his cause, and gradually left-wing radicals took over western universities. From this position of intellectual power, they were slowly able to poison the minds of most young people by feeding them lies that effectually turned them into enemies of their own civilization.

The left has been insidious in accomplishing this feat by subtly rewriting academic history textbooks. Today, most positive elements of Western civilization have been erased from academia. Modern students do not learn that capitalism raised billions of people out of poverty and that every single day hundreds of thousands enter the middle class around the globe, thanks to free market economics.

At the same time, negative occurrences about other cultures have been carefully removed. Ask an average student in university, and he will know nothing about the one hundred million people who were effectively murdered under communist totalitarianism. He has not been made aware that almost all places that suffer from poverty in the world are governed by left-wing, anti-capitalistic regimes.

Instead, leftist professors teach only about the vices and atrocities that have occurred in our own history. As a student, you will learn that the West became rich due to slavery and imperialism, but they will never teach that slavery was endemic to all cultures across the world, and that it was Western Christian nations which ultimately abolished slavery.

University professors proclaim all the wealth of the West was stolen from innocent, peaceful cultures around the world. Students are taught that whites are fundamentally racist, but it will go unsaid that all these cultures from which we allegedly stole our wealth had been dirt poor for thousands of years and any racism that existed in the West pales in comparison to that of other cultures.

The professors may not use words like “evil,” but it isn’t necessary. Students infer this conclusion on their own based on the deceptions they are fed. They deduce that the West in general, and specifically the United States, must be destroyed so that all the other respectable and decent cultures of the world can blossom again to create the nirvana that existed before our ruthless impoverishment and exploitation.

The worst part is that decent conservatives and libertarians across the world have allowed this to happen practically without moral resistance. Why? The left has found the great weakness of conservatives: their conscience and decency. When someone accuses them of being racist or some other form of evil, their reflex is to apologize and appease. The more conservatives placate and soothe, the louder the left screams racism – because it works.

The cultural decay of our civilization will continue until conservatives choose to stand up and say “enough.” And the first step in what will certainly be a long process of restoring respect for American culture and values is to quit apologizing and cease pacifying the left.

SOURCE

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No, Trump Is Not a Neocon

BY: RICH LOWRY

With U.S. missiles flying in Syria, the “mother of all bombs” exploding in Afghanistan, and an aircraft-carrier strike group heading toward North Korea, has there been a revolution in President Trump’s foreign policy?

His most fervent supporters shouldn’t get overly exercised and his interventionist critics shouldn’t get too excited. What has been on offer so far is broadly consistent with the Jacksonian worldview that is the core of Trump’s posture toward the world.

Trump’s views are obviously inchoate. He has an attitude rather than a doctrine, and upon leaving office, he surely won’t, like Richard Nixon, write a series of books on international affairs.

What we have learned since he took office is that Trump is not an isolationist. At times, he’s sounded like one. His America First slogan (inadvertently) harkened back to the movement to keep us out of World War II. His outlandish questioning of the NATO alliance, an anchor of the West, created the sense that he might be willing to overturn the foundations of the post–World War II order.

This hasn’t come to pass. It’s not possible to be a truly isolationist president of the United States in the 21st century unless you want to spend all your time unspooling U.S. commitments and managing the resulting disruption and crises. And such an approach would undercut the most consistent element of Trump’s approach — namely strength.

His set-piece foreign-policy speeches during the campaign were clear on this. “The world is most peaceful and most prosperous when America is strongest,” he said last April at the Center for the National Interest. “America will continue and continue forever to play the role of peacemaker. We will always help save lives and indeed humanity itself, but to play the role, we must make America strong again.”

In direct contradiction to isolationism, he said repeatedly on the campaign trail that he would take the war to ISIS and build up our defenses. He even called himself — in a malapropism — “the most militaristic person you will ever meet.”

Now, there is no doubt that the Syrian strike is a notable departure for Trump, and he defended it in unapologetically humanitarian terms. But it’s entirely possible that the strike will only have the narrow purpose of reestablishing a red line against the use of chemical weapons in Syria and reasserting American credibility.

That is particularly important in the context of the brewing showdown with North Korea, which he roughly forecast in his speech last April. “President Obama watches helplessly as North Korea increases its aggression and expands further and further with its nuclear reach,” Trump said, advocating using economic pressure on China to “get them to do what they have to do with North Korea, which is totally out of control.”

The Tomahawks in Syria and saber-rattling at North Korea have Trump’s critics on the right and left claiming he’s becoming a neoconservative — a term of abuse that is most poorly understood by the people most inclined to use it. All neocons may be hawks, but not all hawks are neocons, who are distinctive in their idealism and robust interventionism.

We haven’t heard paeans to democracy from Trump, or clarion calls for human rights. He hasn’t seriously embraced regime change anywhere (even if his foreign-policy officials say Assad has to go). He shows no sign of a willingness to make a major commitment of U.S. ground troops abroad.

Trump is a particular kind of hawk. The Jacksonian school is inclined toward realism and reluctant to use force, except when a national interest is clearly at stake. As historian Walter Russell Mead writes, “Jacksonians believe that international life is and will remain both violent and anarchic. The United States must be vigilant, strongly armed. Our diplomacy must be cunning, forceful, and no more scrupulous than any other country’s.”

This tradition isn’t isolationist or neoconservative, and neither is Trump.

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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