Why Won't the Media Cover Huma Abedin's Ties to Global Jihad Movement?

Nationalized health care was one of the first programs enacted by the Bolsheviks after they seized power in 1917. Nearly a century later, the U.S. enacted "Obamacare."

Who won the Cold War again? This is one of the questions I work over in my new book, "American Betrayal: The Secret Assault on Our Nation's Character" (St. Martin's Press). Can we realistically claim liberty and free markets triumphed over collectivism when today there is only a thin Senate line trying to fend off Obamacare's totalitarian intrusions into citizens' lives? We see perhaps a dozen or so patriots led by conservative ace Republican Sen. Mike Lee of Utah, gallantly mustering forces to defund further enforcement of this government behemoth aborning. (Call your senators and ask them to join - or tell you why they didn't at the next town hall.) How can we maintain that the republic endured when a centralized super-state has taken its place?

So, once more, who really won the Cold War? The question is better framed when we realize that the battleground where the Free World met Marx was also psychological. Consciously or not, we struggled against an insidious Marxist ideology that was always, at root, an assault on our nation's character.

The most recent manifestation of victory over the American character shows through the Anthony Weiner-Huma Abedin scandal. This scandal is a paradoxical double whammy of both exposure and cover-up.

Everyone knows (too much) about the exposure part: Anthony Weiner, candidate for mayor of New York City, turns out to be a recidivist pervert. The fatuous conversation that has followed this "news" has turned on the decision of Weiner's wife, Huma Abedin, to step forward to try to salvage her husband's bid for public office. The Wall Street Journal's response to Abedin's decision was typical: "Watching the elegant Huma Abedin stand next to her man Tuesday as he explained his latest sexually charged online exchanges was painful for a normal human being to watch."

The media want to know why the "elegant Huma" - Hillary Clinton's longtime aide and former deputy chief of staff - would do such an inelegant thing. Was this couple's therapy writ large? Was it for their child? Was it ... love?

True, the barbs of Huma's ambition - as naked as her husband's dirty pics - have broken through the gauzy chatter. But cut off from context, they, too, end up perpetuating what is, in fact, the great Huma Abedin cover-up.

It is not enough to analyze Huma Abedin as a "political wife." Abedin is also a veritable Muslim Brotherhood princess. As such, the ideological implications of her actions - plus her long and privileged access to U.S. policy-making through Hillary Clinton - must be considered, particularly in the context of national security.

But talk about paradoxes. In an era when the most minute and lurid descriptions of her husband's anatomical and sexual details are common talk, Huma Abedin's familial and professional connections to the world of jihad are unspeakable.

In a nutshell - quoting former federal prosecutor Andrew C. McCarthy writing at National Review this week - Huma Abedin "worked for many years at a journal that promotes Islamic supremacist ideology that was founded by a top al-Qaida financier, Abdullah Omar Naseef." That would be for at least seven years (1996-2003), by the way, during which Abedin also worked for Hillary Clinton.

Let this sink in for just a moment. The journal Huma worked for - which promotes Islamic supremacism and was founded by al-Qaida financer Naseef, who also headed the Muslim World League, a leading Muslim Brotherhood organization - is called the Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs. It was edited first by Huma's father, Syed Abedin, and now by her mother, Saleha Abedin. Saleha is a member of the Muslim Sisterhood. Mother Abedin also directs an organization (the International Islamic Committee for Woman and Child) that comes under the umbrella of the Union for Good, another U.S.-designated terrorist organization. As McCarthy reminds us, "the Union for Good is led by Sheikh Yusef al-Qaradawi, the notorious Muslim Brotherhood jurist who has issued fatwas calling for the killing of American military and support personnel in Iraq as well as suicide bombings in Israel."

Given these alarming professional and family associations, it is hard to imagine how Huma Abedin ever received the security clearance necessary to work closely with the secretary of state. But she did, and from her powerful post, she undoubtedly exerted influence over U.S. policy-making. (In his National Review piece, McCarthy lists specific actions that bespeak a shift in U.S. foreign policy to favor the Muslim Brotherhood.)

Isn't the Abedin-Clinton national security story at least as newsworthy as Weiner's private parts?

At this point, only McCarthy's National Review piece reprises these well-documented facts. In other words, it is not only CNN and the New York Times that draw blanks for their readers. Most "conservative" outlets, including Fox News, the New York Post, The Blaze, Breitbart.com and Rush Limbaugh, are ignoring this story, too.

If the Abedin-Muslim Brotherhood story rings any bells, it is probably because of Rep. Michele Bachmann, R-Minn. Last summer, Bachmann, along with four other House Republicans, raised the issue of Huma Abedin among other examples of possible Muslim Brotherhood penetration of the federal policy-making chain. They asked inspectors general at five departments, including the State Department, to investigate their concerns, but nothing happened - nothing, that is, except that Bachmann was crucified, by Democrats and Republicans alike for asking urgently important questions about national security.

This made the entire subject, already taboo, positively radioactive - with Huma Abedin becoming the poster victim of this supposed "McCarthyism" redux. End of story. Never mind facts. Never mind also that in his day, Sen. Joseph McCarthy was asking urgently important questions about national security, too.

But don't worry. We "won" the Cold War. Obamacare, here we come. At this rate, we'll declare "victory" in the so-called war on terror and, before you know it, become a leading outpost of the caliphate.

SOURCE

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Take your jobs plan and shove it, Mr. President: Your policies have harmed Chattanooga enough

I always thought that Chattanooga was mainly famous for its choo choo but it seems that they have an excellent newspaper editorialist too. On Tuesday, Obama pitched a new 'grand bargain' on jobs in Chattanooga

President Obama,

Welcome to Chattanooga, one of hundreds of cities throughout this great nation struggling to succeed in spite of your foolish policies that limit job creation, stifle economic growth and suffocate the entrepreneurial spirit.

Forgive us if you are not greeted with the same level of Southern hospitality that our area usually bestows on its distinguished guests. You see, we understand you are in town to share your umpteenth different job creation plan during your time in office. If it works as well as your other job creation programs, then thanks, but no thanks. We’d prefer you keep it to yourself.

That’s because your jobs creation plans so far have included a ridiculous government spending spree and punitive tax increase on job creators that were passed, as well as a minimum wage increase that, thankfully, was not. Economists — and regular folks with a basic understanding of math — understand that these are three of the most damaging policies imaginable when a country is mired in unemployment and starving for job growth.

Even though 64 percent of Chattanooga respondents said they would rather you hadn’t chosen to visit our fair city, according to a survey on the Times Free Press website, it’s probably good that you’re here. It will give you an opportunity to see the failure of your most comprehensive jobs plan to date, the disastrous stimulus scheme, up close and personal.

The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 helped fund the Gig to Nowhere project, a $552 million socialist-style experiment in government-owned Internet, cable and phone services orchestrated by EPB — Chattanooga’s government-owned electric monopoly.

• • •

The Gig to Nowhere is a Smart Grid, a high tech local electricity infrastructure intended to improve energy efficiency and reduce power outages. After lobbying for, and receiving, $111.6 million in stimulus money from your administration, EPB decided to build a souped-up version of the Smart Grid with fiber optics rather than more cost-effective wireless technology. This decision was supposed to allow EPB to provide the fastest Internet service in the Western Hemisphere, a gigabit-per-second Internet speed that would send tech companies and web entrepreneurs stampeding to Chattanooga in droves.

In reality, though, the gig, like most of the projects funded by your stimulus plan, has been an absolute bust.

While the Smart Grid will cost taxpayers and local electric customers well over a half-billion dollars when all is said and done, there has been little improvement in the quality of EPB’s electric service. Worse, despite being heavily subsidized, EPB’s government-owned Internet, cable and telephone outfit that competes head-to-head against private companies like AT&T and Comcast is barely staying afloat, often relying on loans from electric service reserve funds to afford its business expenses.

Further, there has been no credible evidence to suggest that EPB can even provide a gig of service consistently and reliably. Any companies hoping to utilize the Gig to Nowhere are quoted monthly billing costs that make the service unfeasible. As a result, Chattanooga has remained a relative ghost town for technological innovation. Almost no economic development whatsoever has resulted from the gig.

• • •

What the gig has brought, however, is that shocking price tag. Because of your unwillingness to balance the budget, Mr. President, the $111.6 million federal handout to subsidize the Gig to Nowhere will actually cost federal taxpayers $158.2 million, due to interest. Once EPB received the stimulus infusion to fund the pork project, the electric monopoly took out a $219.8 bond that will balloon to $391.3 million by the time Chattanoogans are done paying it off.

The bond’s first payment comes due this fall and there remain significant questions about how EPB can manage to pay the debt without hiking electric rates on EPB customers.

Building a Smart Grid to get into a telecom sector already well-served by private companies was a bad idea from the start. But getting government involved in places it doesn’t belong is a hallmark of your administration. As a result, you and your policymakers were happy to fund the Gig to Nowhere.

You claimed that the Smart Grid would create jobs for Chattanooga. But in reality, all it did was push America deeper in debt and lure a local government agency into making a terrible financial decision that will weigh on Chattanoogans like a millstone for decades to come.

So excuse us, Mr. President, for our lack of enthusiasm for your new jobs program. Here in Chattanooga we’re still reeling from your old one.

SOURCE

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CT Newspaper Compares the KKK to Ted Nugent, Fox News and All Republicans

But the KKK were Democrats!

The New Haven Register’s recent editorial piece, ““The KKK, Ted Nugent, and ‘mainstream’ racism,” is a must-read.

No, not for the interesting facts or intellectual stimulation; you won’t find any of that. It is a very important read though, as it illustrates the new era of liberal media; a time when unfounded, libel accusations are made against conservatives, with little to no worry of the consequences.

On Monday, The Register’s editorial article accused The Republican Party, Fox News and individuals such as Ann Coulter of holding and promoting the same beliefs as the KKK.

Three weeks ago, members of an Alabama-based group, called the United Klans of America, distributed flyers throughout Milford Connecticut which read: “You can sleep well tonight knowing the UKA is awake!” The UKA claims to be a new version of the Ku Klux Klan and their stunt is being investigated by Connecticut police and may lead to criminal charges.

The actions of a few, ideologically deranged people were dealt with appropriately by the state’s officials, elected representatives, city police and Milford citizens. They saw the stunt as a travesty; the editors over at the New Haven Register; however, saw it as an opportunity.

Three weeks after the event took place, The Register used the stunt in Milford as a faulty spring board to directly compare individual conservative voices, Fox News, and the National Republican Party to the KKK.

“The same basic message that the KKK has promoted for 148 years is embraced by the likes of…Fox News, Ann Coulter, a burgeoning array of fringe “conservative” media and members of our own community commenting on stories on the New Haven Register’s website." ...

It’s not an anomaly when a member of the liberal media or press says something unkind about the conservative base. It is rare; however, when a reputable news source like the New Haven Register publishes blatant libelous accusations against individuals, fellow news corporations and national parties without any evidence to back them up.

To compare any person or any entity to an organization like the KKK, or the UKA, one should have hard facts connecting them racist rhetoric—spouting ideas that inherent differences between races make one race superior to another- or promoting/actively engaging in the sought-out violence against African Americans.

The Register’s article was clearly a cheap attempt to deflect the tough conversations the country is starting to have about race relations. If liberals acknowledged the high crime rates and low graduation rates that exist in minority communities, they would be forced to realize that most of their social programs and highly-funded public schools are failing the African American community. So, instead, they create a false narrative of ‘conservative racism,’ and put off finding real solutions for those who are struggling.

If the Register has any evidence of The National Republican party promoting or advocating racism, by all means, bring it to light and let there be justice. But accusations of racism for the sake of deflecting tough issues is libel, irresponsible, and nothing short of morally wrong.

SOURCE

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For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC,  AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated) and Coral reef compendium. (Updated as news items come in).  GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten.

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

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A failed Presidency already visible

Will history recall ANY positive accomplishments of the Obama regime?



Re-elected presidents always find it difficult to sustain first-term momentum for their agenda into a second four years. First terms are often capped by bruising re-election campaigns, making it tough to sustain political backing and public interest. Plus, significant turnover in the president's cabinet and among his senior advisors in the first year of a second term can create debilitating continuity of management challenges.

So the tendency is to stick with "what works," which is to say to keep talking about the same issues, programs and policies that prevailed in the first term. Put another way, presidents become prisoners of their own narratives. Thus, Obama's Galesburg address offered no genuinely new ideas, as indeed his advisers warned would be the case beforehand

One phrase captures the essence of Obama's second term domestic vision, "more of the same:" More stimulus spending, more green energy development boondoggles, more "investments" - i.e. federal spending and regulation - on student loans, mortgage refinance programs and Obamacare, and more tax "reforms" to make the top 1 percent of income earners pay "their fair share." Obama cannot deviate from this programmatic menu because doing so would be an admission of failure, one that is pointedly reflected in the declining number of Americans with jobs or still looking for jobs, the growing Food Stamp recipient rolls and a steady accumulation of evidence that the Obamacare train wreck is gathering speed.

Then there are the scandals. Obama suffered little damage in his first term when the headlines were about Solyndra, Fast and Furious and related matters. But it's different now because of Benghazi, NSA surveillance, and IRS harassment of the president's Tea Party critics. Virtually every president stumbles as a result of scandals, but they often become far more serious matters early in a second term (think Nixon's Watergate, Reagan's Iran-Contra and Clinton's Monica Lewinsky trials, all of which became major disruptions following their re-elections).

Second term scandals may intensify in part because presidents invariably dismiss them as unimportant, just as Obama yesterday referred to his troubles as "phony." But he likely won't be any more convincing with that line than Nixon was in calling Watergate "a second-rate burglary." Similarly, Obama's exasperated "I am here to say this needs to stop" recalled Clinton's finger-wagging order, "I want you to listen to me ... I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky ..."

But a presidential dalliance with an intern is a far cry from using the IRS to silence political opponents or covering up incompetence that killed four brave Americans in Libya, nor is there anything phony about the potential consequences for Obama.

SOURCE

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How U.S. Steel Helped Break Down Racism

My economic historian friend, Jeff Hummel, has recommended for years that I read David M. Kennedy's Freedom from Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929-1945. Kennedy is a first-rate historian at Stanford. I'm enjoying the book as I'm working my way slowly through it. Jeff warned me that Kennedy is not an economist, but he is so careful with his facts that an economist can read it and sometimes substitute his own judgment, based on economics, for Kennedy's. Here's the first place in the book where I noticed that possible absence of economic knowledge. Although possibly not; maybe it's a tone thing. Judge for yourself.

Kennedy writes:

"Fancying themselves as labor's aristocracy, craft unionists ignored the problems of their unskilled co-workers. Ethnic rivalries exacerbated the troubles in the house of labor. Skilled workers tended to be old-stock, native-born white Americans, while the unskilled were mostly recent urban immigrants from the hinterlands of Europe and rural America. The AFL [American Federation of Labor], in thus insulating itself from the men and women who were fast becoming the majority of industrial workers, handed management a potent antilabor weapon. Management knew how to use it. U.S. Steel cynically exploited the ethnic divisions that were the bane of American unionism when the AFL in 1919 hesitantly abandoned its traditionally elitist attitudes and led a strike to organize an industrial union in steel. The corporation sent agents into the steel districts around Chicago and Pittsburgh to spawn animosity between native and immigrant workers. They excited the strikers' darkest anxieties by recruiting some thirty thousand southern blacks, hungry to possess previously forbidden jobs, to cross the picket lines. On these rocks of racial and ethnic distrust, the great steel strike of 1919 foundered miserably."

From everything I know about that era, Kennedy gets it exactly right. U.S. unions were highly racist in those days, a fact that former President Jimmy Carter's Secretary of Labor, economist F. Ray Marshall, spent much of his academic career documenting. And certainly it would make sense for U.S. Steel to cynically exploit this racism by the white unions. Finally, it's true that those jobs were traditionally off-limits to black people, largely because of the white unions' actions, sometimes including murdering their black competitors. That's why two early 20th-century black leaders, Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. DuBois, although strongly at odds with each other about strategy, agreed that unions were anti-black. As DuBois put it, unions are "the greatest enemy of the black working man."

So why am I highlighting this?

Over the years, I've taught myself to have two personae when reading: that of an economist and that of a normal, non-economically-literate person. The second of my personae reacted highly negatively to U.S. Steel. After all, U.S. Steel acted "cynically" and "exploited" ethnic divisions. Also, U.S. Steel was "antilabor." That's pretty damning, especially to one who picks up on emotive words.

But the economist in me thinks much differently. I'm perfectly willing to believe that U.S. Steel acted cynically and exploited ethnic divisions. But that doesn't mean U.S. Steel was anti-labor. It means that U.S. Steel was anti-union. U.S. Steel was profoundly pro a particular group of laborers, namely 30,000 black laborers who were "hungry to possess previously forbidden jobs."

It's possible that Kennedy knows all this. It's possible that he doesn't. I simply want to point out the bottom line that David Kennedy has shown: U.S. Steel helped break down racism.

SOURCE

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Another lying Muslim

There is a bit of a hubbub in the interwebs about an interview conducted by Lauren Green, religion correspondent for Fox News Channel, with Reza Aslan, author of a new book on Jesus titled Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth. Our friend Joe Carter, over at GetReligion, has the basic story. Green launched the interview (available here in full) with a question about why a Muslim should want to write a book about Jesus. A reasonable question, and not a hostile one on its face–but by the end of the interview Green has returned to it in a somewhat more accusatory fashion. As Joe says, the interview is a mess. But as he also points out, Green’s critics are passing right by something far more interesting: that Aslan has misrepresented his scholarly credentials.

In fact, it is Aslan who immediately turns the interview into a cage match by reacting very defensively to Green’s first question. And here is where the misrepresentations begin. For roughly the first half of the interview Aslan dominates the exchange with assertions about himself that seem intended to delay the substance of the discussion:

I am a scholar of religions with four degrees including one in the New Testament . . . I am an expert with a Ph.D. in the history of religions . . . I am a professor of religions, including the New Testament–that’s what I do for a living, actually . . . To be clear, I want to emphasize one more time, I am a historian, I am a Ph.D. in the history of religions.

Later he complains that they are “debating the right of the scholar to write” the book rather than discussing the book. But the conversation took that turn thanks to Aslan, not Green! By the final minute he is saying of himself (and who really talks this way!?) that “I’m actually quite a prominent Muslim thinker in the United States.”

Aslan does have four degrees, as Joe Carter has noted: a 1995 B.A. in religion from Santa Clara University, where he was Phi Beta Kappa and wrote his senior thesis on “The Messianic Secret in the Gospel of Mark”; a 1999 Master of Theological Studies from Harvard; a 2002 Master of Fine Arts in Fiction from the University of Iowa; and a 2009 Ph.D. in sociology from the University of California, Santa Barbara.

None of these degrees is in history, so Aslan’s repeated claims that he has “a Ph.D. in the history of religions” and that he is “a historian” are false.  Nor is “professor of religions” what he does “for a living.” He is an associate professor in the Creative Writing program at the University of California, Riverside, where his terminal MFA in fiction from Iowa is his relevant academic credential. It appears he has taught some courses on Islam in the past, and he may do so now, moonlighting from his creative writing duties at Riverside. Aslan has been a busy popular writer, and he is certainly a tireless self-promoter, but he is nowhere known in the academic world as a scholar of the history of religion. And a scholarly historian of early Christianity? Nope.

What about that Ph.D.? As already noted, it was in sociology. I have his dissertation in front of me. It is a 140-page work titled “Global Jihadism as a Transnational Social Movement: A Theoretical Framework.” If Aslan’s Ph.D. is the basis of a claim to scholarly credentials, he could plausibly claim to be an expert on social movements in twentieth-century Islam. He cannot plausibly claim, as he did to Lauren Green, that he is a “historian,” or is a “professor of religions” “for a living.”

It may be that Aslan sensed a tougher interview from Lauren Green than he is accustomed to. Hence he immediately went into high-dudgeon mode, and made the ten minutes all about her alleged disrespect of him and his alleged scholarly credentials. But in order to change the subject he told a string of gratuitous falsehoods about himself. Perhaps that master’s in fiction writing came in handy.

Is Aslan’s book worth reading? I have no idea. But he has earned enough distrust from me that I haven’t any interest in finding out.

SOURCE

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From ‘Anti-Communist’ to ‘Counterjihadist’

Remember when “anti-Communist” was a preferred leftist term of abuse? “Oh, you’re an anti-Communist” — translation: you’re not one of the trendy people and, moreover, you probably harbor “McCarthyite” tendencies and think Ronald Reagan (the American cowboy) is more of a hero than Mikhail Gorbachev, the glamorous prophet of perestroika.

Think back to the 1980s. Was there any cool person you knew who didn’t glamorize Gorbachev? Every academic (near enough) did, and of course the media slobbered all over the guy. Was he a Communist to the very end?  Yes, but for Dan-Diane Sawyer-Rather, for the battalions of scribes who scribbled about such things in the pages of the New York Times, the New Yorker, the Washington Post and other approved outlets, Gorbachev was the hero, Reagan the crazy, trigger-happy anti-Communist.

“Star Wars”: Oh, with what contempt they uttered that dismissive phrase. “Evil Empire,” forsooth. What a dangerous clown he was. Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative, his plan to deploy a missile defense system (which, incidentally, he offered to share with the Soviet Union): what a joke, what a stupidity! It was ruinously expensive and [deep breath] would never work and destabilizing and why-would-we-need-to-protect-ourselves-from-a-cuddly-sophisticate-like-Mikhail-Gorbachev-with-his-chic-wife?

Then, quite suddenly, the Soviet Union was no more. It just, you know, vanished. “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down that wall.” Reagan said that one day in Berlin and, presto-change-o, down came the wall. Star Wars, SDI, had helped expose the empty, burnt-out shell that was the fag-end of the lumbering, senile Communist redoubt. And then at last all the beautiful, right-thinking (i.e., left-leaning) folk who had ridiculed Reagan and Star Wars and his repulsive talk of the Soviet Union being an “Evil Empire” — suddenly, they woke up and realized what fools they had been and thanked Reagan and those who had supported him for helping to end one of the most monstrous tyrannies in history …

Except, of course, they did no such thing. Reagan was still, must always be to blame, though enough water has passed under the bridge by now that he is no longer scary because he has receded into the impotence of history.

No one talks about anti-Communists now because that threat — under that name, anyway — has more or less passed. Today’s anti-Communists are the Islamophobes, those folks (like me) who think that the Islamic effort to spread Sharia (i.e., Islamic law) is fundamentally incompatible with liberal democracy with its principles of free speech, freedom of religion, and political equality of men and women.

“Islamophobia”: what sort of beast is that? A phobia, as I have been at pains to point out in this space and elsewhere, is an irrational fear or hatred. Is it irrational to fear and hate an ideology that denies the equality of the sexes, murders apostates and homosexuals, wishes to subjugate the non-Islamic world, and has consigned Jews and Christians to the perilous second-class citizenship of dhimmitude? (“First the Saturday People,” runs an Islamic slogan, “then the Sunday People”: first we’ll deal with the Jews, then move on to the Christians.)

Who rules the language, rules the world. Orwell knew that. And so does the Left. “Islamophobia” is a mendacious neologism designed to obscure the reality of Islamic ideology. Major Nidal Hasan shouts “Allahu Akbar” and murders 13 people at Fort Hood. What do you call that?  I call it “Islamic terrorism.” The Obama administration insists it’s “workplace violence.” In 2007, some young Muslim packs a Jeep Cherokee full of propane canisters and detonates it at the Glasgow airport. What do you call that? I call it “Islamic terrorism.” Jacqui Smith, then the British home secretary, insists that we call it “anti-Islamic activity.” (How’s that for an example of the “no-true-Scotsman” fallacy?)

In a brilliant, no-to-be-missed column for Frontpage.com, the Scandinavian-based Bruce Bawer reports on the Left’s latest piece of linguistic mendacity: “counterjihad.” Yesterday it was the anti-Communists who were the bad guys. Today, it’s the counterjihadists:

"The “counterjihadists”  are the villains — the hysterics, the fools, who see a Muslim under every bed, with a bomb in his turban. Meanwhile the good guys are the counter-counterjihadists — the journalists, activists, and others who make a career of slamming Islam’s critics, whom they frequently represent (especially over here in Scandinavia) as “conspiracy theorists.” For just as the anti-Communists of yesteryear were viewed not as sober, well-informed students of life behind the Iron Curtain but as obsessive, ignorant haters, we counterjihadists are viewed not as people who’ve read the Koran and studied Islamic societies and subcultures but as semi-literate morons and bigots."

More HERE

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For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC,  AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated) and Coral reef compendium. (Updated as news items come in).  GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten.

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

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Leftism as a low information phenomenon

Exit interviews with voters leaving the ballot box have repeatedly shown huge ignorance and misunderstanding among Obama voters  -- so much so that ignorance must be held to be one of the major forces behind Leftism.  Hollywood actor Jon Voight has found that too:

Voight, previously a staunch left-winger and anti-war protester, has performed a spectacular U-turn. “I regret being caught up in the hysteria of the Sixties,” he says now, revealing a glimpse of the intensity I more readily associate with him. “The left have blood on their hands and I do too.”

He publicly backed Mitt Romney in the 2012 presidential election. “I think he would have made a wonderful president,” he sighs. “He is a man of great char­acter, but they demonised him, as they have done with other people before him.” He also spoke out against Barack Obama, in an open letter to The Washington Post in 2010, calling him a liar and accusing him of promoting anti-Semitism, leading many to denounce Voight as an inciter of hatred. Two years later he called the president a Marxist, compared him to Hugo Chavaz, and accused him of controlling the media.

Do his politics cause him any grief, in the left-leaning Hollywood community? "I have found that I have too much information for anyone to want to sit down and talk to me," he says. "They usually leave early. But it’s a family out here, we all respect each other. If people disagree with me, that’s no big deal to me, except that it is a very important disagreement.

"I will say: 'Would you like to talk about it?' And they say: 'Oh yeah, sure.' But then we get into it, and they will then say: 'Well, you know John, I don’t really know that much about it.' He smiles, benevolently. ‘And I understand that, because I was like that at the end of the Sixties. I thought these people were cool and I thought I knew a lot of things, and I knew nothing. So, I ask everybody to get educated. And as you get educated, you see things much more clearly.’

He was a great admirer of the late Baroness Thatcher, calling her "a great woman, the most influential since Catherine the Great". I wonder if he might ever consider following in the footsteps of Ronald Reagan and Schwarzenegger by taking up political office? “Oh, I think I am better as a fella on the sidelines,” he shrugs. “I think there are others much better equipped for office.”

SOURCE

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The Royal Baby Is a Rejection of the Family Chaos Liberalism Feeds Upon

The birth of Prince George creates a problem for liberals. They love the idea of royalty because it validates their vision of an anointed elite with a divine right to the obedience of their subjects. However, this wonderful couple has created a traditional nuclear family that provides a powerful counterpoint to the kind of freak show dysfunction that liberalism requires to survive.

If families actually stayed together and raised their children, well, who would need the liberal elite?

Sure, the royal couple gets paid out of the British treasury, but it isn’t as if Prince William sits around being fanned and fed grapes. Besides cutting ribbons and promoting charities, he is a warrior who has proved his courage by seeking service on battlefields he could have easily avoided. Royalty is a bizarre concept, but he does work for a living.

By contributing to society, Prince William repudiates the basic premise of liberalism. If you vote for liberals they will redistribute free stuff to you from the people who contribute to society. This will allow you to wallow in the cesspit of social pathologies that led you to expect handouts in the first place, and thereby guarantee another generation of liberal constituents.

Liberalism depends on people continuing to do the things that ensure they will be poor. The most obvious among these bad decisions is to have kids out of wedlock. Yeah, we all know the single mom who is prospering or the gay couple with a great kid. That’s awesome, but it’s an anecdotal irrelevancy. The simple, unarguable fact is that the epidemic of broken families means a broken society, and liberalism feeds off the wreckage.

Society should stop being coy, and it needs to stop worrying that people will be offended. It should say, loudly and unequivocally, that you shouldn’t have kids if you aren’t married to a guy who’s not going to disappear when things get real.

A recent Huffington Post article buried the lede when it talked to a woman named Irene Salyers, who is currently living off of government disability checks while working at a fruit stand with her current boyfriend. Leaving aside that this makes her not disabled at all, Ms. Salyers was married and divorced three times. Her jobless, single-mom daughter, is living off her boyfriend’s disability checks and hoping “that employers will look past her conviction a few years ago for distributing prescription painkillers, so she can get a job.”

I’m guessing they all vote Democrat.

Liberalism, of course, must be in denial about the true causes of the poverty it exploits. “Marriage rates are in decline across all races,” the article notes. But in the very next paragraph it quotes some Harvard professor who “specializes in race and poverty” who says, “It's time that America comes to understand that many of the nation's biggest disparities, from education and life expectancy to poverty, are increasingly due to economic class position.”

Hmmmm. Maybe their “economic class position” comes from having multiple illegitimate kids and dealing Oxy, Professor Einstein. But identifying and addressing that problem would result in academics who specialize “in race and poverty” having to get real jobs.

Instead of validating this kind of lifestyle chaos with “understanding” and “help,” we ought to apply that ancient, time-honored means of enforcing positive social values: Shame. You should be ashamed if you are a jobless felon shacked up with some deadbeat sperm donor who is milking Uncle Sucker while your kids wonder what it’s like to have a real father.

You’re not a victim. You’re a loser.

Concurrently, we need to model good behavior. Prince William and Kate Middleton should use their position and their visibility to hammer home the truth that solid families are the model to be emulated instead of merely one option in a smorgasbord of equally valid familial arrangements.

Let me be clear: Having some random dude move into your Section 8 flat so you can get a cut of the SSI check he gets because of his bogus anger management disorder is not a valid familial arrangement. It’s a petri dish for growing future inmates and welfare cheats.

President Obama should step up, but he won’t. The only thing conservatives appreciate about this neo-socialist disaster of a president is his obviously close-knit and lovely family. He occasionally pays lip service to the importance of intact families, but the fact is that his party supports the status quo.

As Dr. Helen Smith observes in her terrific new book Men on Strike: Why Men Are Boycotting Marriage, Fatherhood, and the American Dream - and Why It Matters, government policy, the legal system and society have conspired to undercut marriage by making it unattractive to men. On the policy side, the welfare system has utterly cut men out of the picture by making their income unnecessary. Fathers are superfluous; for millions of Americans, government is their baby daddy.

Family courts are so tilted against men that when I was taking the Bar Exam, the joke about how to pass the family law question without studying was, “Give the kids to the mother.” Which I did, and I passed the first time.

Socially, radical feminist influence has led to men being viewed as incompetent buffoons when they aren’t violent exploiters. All men are either Homer Simpson or Ted Bundy. The only approved males are liberal icons, and they get a pass for over-enthusiastic hugging, genital sexting, Oval Office intern tapping and leaving women to drown in icy water.

No wonder, as Dr. Smith observes, men are simply opting out of the whole family thing. After all, what’s in it for them? Instead of changing the incentives that lead to this sorry result, Obama’s course of action is to chastise men even more. Apparently the floggings will continue until morale improves.

This is a huge opportunity for the GOP. It could fix the tax code so that getting married doesn’t cost people a fortune. If my wife started working, for example, her income on top of mine would be hit with a 50%+ marginal rate. Maybe in GOP states they could fix family law so that the man doesn’t lose before he walks into court. Maybe it could work to reduce welfare benefits so that having a man around actually means there is more money rather than less. But this is the GOP, so it will undoubtedly blow it by focusing on something else, like importing zillions of Democrat voters against the wishes of its base.

We need to make it so that the novelty of the birth of someone like Prince George is that he is part of a royal family, rather than that he is part of any family at all.

SOURCE

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Liberalism Makes It Easier to be Bad

There are many liberals who lead thoroughly decent lives. And there are conservatives who do not.  But that is not the whole issue.

There is something about liberalism that is not nearly as true about conservatism. The further left one goes, the more one finds that the ideology provides moral cover for a life that is not moral. While many people left of center lead fine personal lives, many do not. And left-wing ideals enable a person to do that much more than conservative ideals do.

There is an easy way to demonstrate this.  If a married -- or even unmarried -- conservative congressman had texted sexual images of himself to young women he did not even know, he would have been called something Anthony Wiener has not been called -- a hypocrite.

Why? Because conservatives -- secular conservatives, not only religious conservatives -- are identified with moral values in the personal sphere, and liberals are not. Liberals rarely called Bill Clinton a hypocrite for his extramarital affair while president. George W. Bush would have been pilloried as such.

Simply put, we do not generally judge personal conduct the same when it comes to liberals and conservatives.

Both liberals and conservatives know this. As a result, as noted, liberal social positions can provide moral cover for immoral behavior in a way that conservative positions cannot.

Though there are many sincere liberals, it is likely that this ability to provide moral cover for a less than moral life is one source of liberalism's appeal.

I first thought about this when I saw how the left-wing students at my graduate school, Columbia University, behaved. Aside from their closing down classes, taking over office buildings, and ransacking professors' offices, I saw the way in which many of them conducted themselves in their personal lives. Most of them had little sense of personal decency, and lived lives of narcissistic hedonism. Women who were involved with leftist groups have told of how poorly they were treated. And one suspects that they would have been treated far better by conservative, let alone religious, men on campus.

My sense was that the radicals' commitment to "humanity," to "peace," and to "love" gave them license to feel good about themselves without having to lead a good life. Their vocal opposition to war and to racism provided them with all the moral self-esteem they wanted.

Consider the example of the late Sen. Edward M. Kennedy. He had been expelled from college for paying someone to take his exams. His role in the death of a woman with whom he spent an evening would have sent almost anyone without his family name to prison -- or would have at least resulted in prosecution for negligent homicide. And he spent decades using so many women in so public a way that stories about his sex life were routinely told in Washington. Read the 9,000-word 1990 article in GQ by Michael Kelly, who a few years later became the editor of the New Republic.

When this unimpressive man started espousing liberal positions, speaking passionately about the downtrodden in society, it recalled the unimpressive students who marched on behalf of civil rights, peace and love.

It is quite likely that Ted Kennedy came to believe in the positions that he took. But I also suspect that he found espousing those positions invaluable to his self-image and to his public image: "Look at what a moral man I am after all." And liberal positions were all that mattered to the left and to the liberal media that largely ignored such lecherous behavior as the "waitress sandwich" he made in a Washington, D.C. restaurant with another prominent liberal, former Senator Chris Dodd.

In addition to knowing that liberal positions provide moral cover for immoral personal behavior, liberals know that their immoral behavior will be given more of pass than exactly the same behavior would if done by a conservative.

Women's groups provided Bill Clinton with enormous moral capital because he supported their feminist agenda. One leading feminist famously said she would be happy to get on her knees and pleasure Clinton thanks to his pro-choice position on abortion.

Conservative politicians have the same sex drive as liberal politicians, the same marital problems and the same ubiquitous temptations and opportunities. And some will therefore engage in extramarital sex. But every conservative politician knows that should he be caught, his positions on issues not only do not provide moral cover for his conduct, those very positions condemn it. There is no benefit to the conservative sinner in being a conservative. There is great benefit to the liberal sinner in being a liberal.

SOURCE

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For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC,  AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated) and Coral reef compendium. (Updated as news items come in).  GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten.

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

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Uncle Sam's latest attack on Americans abroad is faltering

It's a long established principle that when you move from one country to another, you pay tax in your new country, not in your old country.  Americans are not so lucky.  Uncle Sam still wants your money wherever you are  -- as long as you remain a U.S. citizen.  And they make it hard to renounce your citizenship too.  The latest bit of enforcement is a law -- FATCA --that lays extensive reporting requirements on foreign banks -- although the U.S. has in fact no jurisdiction over what happens in other countries.  Many foreign banks are however so leery of legal harassment by Uncle Sam that they are refusing to open accounts for Americans abroad.  Other  problems with this arrogant bit of legislation are also beginning to show -- JR

Since its passage in 2010, the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act has been delayed multiple times. Most recently the Treasury Department has pushed back 6 months the beginning of FATCA’s withholding penalty for noncompliant institutions, from January 1, 2014 to July 1, 2014. This newest delay is further proof that FATCA is poorly conceived and unworkable, and should be repealed.

Bad Design

Under the guise of catching tax evaders, a dubious claim given that the law lacks any targeting of people or places prone to evasion, FATCA treats anyone who invests overseas as a criminal. Without need for a warrant, the government demands that foreign institutions spy on their US clients, while expecting individuals to report their entire holdings to the government. In light of the ongoing backlash over multiple instances of government invading the privacy rights of citizen, the complete erosion of financial privacy rights of anyone working or investing overseas should be cause for similar uproar.

Fighting the FATCA Menace

FATCA’s requirements that foreign financial institutions act as deputy tax collectors for the US government were flawed from the start. The US government lacks the moral and legal authority to justify the legislation, much less the resources to enforce the law as written, relying instead on its dominant position and a might-makes-right mentality to strong arm foreign governments into enforcing the law on their own institutions. Specifically, they’ve sought to sign “intergovernmental agreements” to outsource the invasion of privacy of US citizens to foreign governments, through whom the Treasury Department seeks to launder the sensitive information of Americans.

IGA’s Falter

Scrambling to get FATCA implemented before Congress realizes the extent of its error and reverses course, Treasury officials have done their best to con foreign governments into relinquishing their sovereign authority. They’ve relied heavily on disinformation to give the effort an air of inevitability, and feed international media dubious claims such as that there are 50 IGA’s just around the corner. But the truth is far different. As James Jatras of RepealFATCA.com recently noted, Treasury “expected to sign 17 IGAs by the end of 2012. Instead, they had four. Here we are more than halfway through 2013, and they only have nine – barely half of their 2012 year-end target.”

Opposition Gaining Ground

The latest delays provide yet more time for opposition to FATCA to solidify. As awareness of the law grows, we hope thanks in part to CF&P’s education efforts on and off Capitol Hill, so too does the backlash against the government’s radical overreach. In the last few months alone, CF&P spearheaded a coalition of 22 free market, taxpayer protection and grassroots organization that endorsed legislation introduced by Rand Paul to repeal FATCA. Congressman Posey, a member of the House Financial Services Committee, sent a letter to Treasury Secretary Lew questioning the legitimacy of the IGA process and calling on a moratorium on FATCA enforcement. And last week, a former Deputy Assistant Secretary of State blasted FATCA in a Wall Street Journal op-ed.

Tax collectors at the Treasury Department will never openly admit that the unprecedented power and authority granted by FATCA was ill-advised, but their repeated delaying of the law speaks louder than words. FATCA is a mess, and Congress needs to step in and spare the world from its disastrous consequences.

SOURCE

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There oughta be a law? Don't be so sure

by Jeff Jacoby

AMONG THE chattering classes these days, it is a popular lament that the 112th Congress has passed fewer bills than any in the last 60 years. But not everyone is joining in the breast-beating. When CBS newsman Bob Schieffer asked House Speaker John Boehner last week how he feels about presiding "over what is perhaps the least productive and certainly one of the least popular congresses in history," Boehner rejected the planted axiom that making laws makes lawmakers productive.

"We should not be judged on how many new laws we create," he said. "We ought to be judged on how many laws that we repeal."

To those of us who regard "Don't just do something, stand there!" as an excellent rule of thumb, above all for politicians, Boehner's response was refreshing. Complaints about "gridlock" and "dysfunction" are neverending, but getting things done in Washington was never supposed to be easy. Nor is it what voters want: That's why they returned a Republican majority to the House of Representatives last November, while keeping the Senate and the White House in Democratic hands.

"We've got more laws than the administration could ever enforce," Boehner said on CBS. "We deal with what the American people want us to deal with. Unpopular? Yes. Why? We're in a divided government. We're fighting for what we believe in."

Needless to say, the notion that Congress ought to be doing less — and undoing more — immediately drew flak.

"Did Speaker Boehner really say that the Congress should be judged on the number of laws they repeal not the number they pass?" tweeted White House aide Dan Pfeiffer. The speaker's remarks were "just embarrassing," the pro-Obama activist group Organizing for Action said scornfully; members of Congress weren't elected "to sit there and wind back the clock." The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee quickly moved to exploit Boehner's comments in online ads aimed at 19 Republican incumbents Democrats hope to unseat.

Joe Gandelman, editor of The Moderate Voice, a political website, could barely contain his contempt: "Welcome to the new age of spin where you take a rotted, fetid, smelly, almost poisonous lemon and try to sell it not just as lemonade, but the best lemonade ever made."

Actually, Congress gets even lower marks when judged by Boehner's preferred metric. So far this year Congress has passed 15 laws; it hasn't actually repealed any. While the House has voted more than 30 times to repeal all or part of the Affordable Care Act, there is no chance that the Senate will go along. "Stop taking meaningless repeal votes," President Obama needled Republicans in a speech on Wednesday. "Repealing ObamaCare and cutting spending is not an economic plan."

ObamaCare remains highly unpopular, more Americans than ever want it repealed, and only 13 percent think the law will personally help them, while three times as many expect it to hurt them. A key Senate Democrat warned months ago that the law's rollout would cause "a huge train wreck," and the White House this month put off for another year the enforcement of a key ObamaCare provision. As you contemplate this legislative dog's dinner, is it really so absurd to suggest that repealing laws may be a better test of congressional effectiveness than passing them in the first place?

"There oughta be a law!" is more likely to be an emotional reaction than a considered judgment, but we live in an age that has turned worship of government into an unofficial state religion, so resisting demands for more laws is treated as heresy. The belief that whenever there is a problem more government must be the cure flies in the face of experience – especially the experience of all the problems governmental cures made worse. It was "There oughta be a law!" that gave us the Fugitive Slave Law and Prohibition, uncommonly silly bans on contraception and out-of-control drug laws, tuition subsidies that make tuition more expensive and immigration "reforms" that caused an illegal immigration crisis.

On becoming president of the Massachusetts Senate in 1914, Calvin Coolidge offered his colleagues some timeless advice: "Don't hurry to legislate. Give administration a chance to catch up with legislation." Making laws, Coolidge knew, is no proof that lawmakers are productive. As he wrote to his father, a Vermont legislator: "It is much more important to kill bad bills than to pass good ones."

He was right. And so, on this score, is Boehner. Action isn't the same as accomplishment — least of all in Congress, which often does its best work when it does nothing at all.

SOURCE

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Middle class has been left behind by Obamanomics

"Even though our businesses are creating new jobs and have broken record profits," President Obama said in his economics address last week, "nearly all the income gains of the past 10 years have continued to flow to the top 1 percent."

It's odd that Obama touts these facts, because the facts indict his policies. This is even stranger: Many Republicans want to downplay these facts, even though they provide the GOP with an opening.

Obama's first term, with all its tax hikes, regulations, mandates, subsidies and bailouts, saw stock markets rise, corporate earnings break records and the rich get richer, while median income stagnated and unemployment remained stubbornly high.

Obama rightly calls the last few years "a winner-take-all economy where a few are doing better and better and better, while everybody else just treads water."

Median household income has fallen by 5 percent since 2009 — when the recession ended and Obama came into office — as the Wall Street Journal pointed out after Obama's speech. But corporate profits and the stock market keep hitting record highs.

How does Obama think these are points in his favor?

If he's using this data to prove he's no Marxist, fine. Point granted. But Obama seems to think that middle-class and working-class stagnation under Obamanomics somehow calls for more Obamanomics.

The unstated premise is this: More government means more equality, while the free market favors the rich and tramples on the rest.

Liberals and mainstream journalists believe this, but so do some Republicans. When Mitt Romney dismisses the lower 47 percent of earners as hopelessly liberal, he's buying the notion that free enterprise is a system for the wealthy.

But Obama's own facts help undermine that: Government grows, the wealthy, the big, and the well-connected pull away, and the rest of us struggle.

One reason: Obamanomics leans heavily on trickle-down economics. How does Obama promise to create jobs? With more loan guarantees to sell jumbo jets and more subsidies to make solar panels — taxpayer transfers to the big companies with the best lobbyists, with some crumbs hopefully falling to the working class.

Also, Obama's regulations crush small businesses, protecting the big guys from competition. This hurts Mom & Pop and would-be entrepreneurs, but it also hurts the working class. New businesses are the engine of job growth, but new business formation has accelerated its decline in the last few years, hitting record lows.

This gives Republicans an opening to explain that they can deliver on Obama's promises of helping the middle class and the working class, but they can do it by reversing Obamanomics — cutting everyone's taxes, undoing the most onerous regulations, ending trickle-down corporate welfare and so on.

Call it free-market populism, or libertarian populism.

Trig's Supermarkets, in Wisconsin, is an emblematic victim of Obamanomics. Trig's employs about 1,100 people, with about two-thirds working part-time, according to local TV station WJFW. Under Obamacare, anyone who works more than 30 hours per week is considered full time, though, and Trig's will be forced to provide health-care coverage for them.

The company crunched the numbers and decided this would spell bankruptcy. So, they told their workers their hours would be cut to below 30 per week. Nobody is happy with this, but the alternative was laying off all 1,100.

In a couple of ways, this story shows how Obamanomics undermines its stated goals and creates an opening for free-market populism.

Big-government regulations are supposed to hold big business accountable. But Trig's story shows how they often do the opposite. Recall Walmart loudly supported Obamacare's employer mandate, and Costco's founder — who also spent at least $180,000 trying to elect Obama — publicly lobbied for Obamacare.

Walmart and Costco can afford the costs of government — and Costco even got a shout-out from Obama in his economics speech. Smaller employers aren't so lucky.

Government tends to benefit the big and well-connected, and that's not Mom & Pop. Every small-business owner is a potential Republican if the GOP becomes the party of free-market populism.

More important, though — and more numerous — are the hundreds of Trig's employees seeing a reduction in hours. Obamacare was supposed to help them. Obama, on his economic-policy tour, suggests more government intervention will help them. But Obamacare is hurting them. Why should more of the same help?

Obama is right about the middle class being left behind. The working class is faring even worse. This doesn't call for more Obamanomics. It calls for unrigging the game that Washington has rigged.

SOURCE

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

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For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC,  AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated) and Coral reef compendium. (Updated as news items come in).  GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten.

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

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China not squeamish about IQ

After being identified early as a science prodigy, Zhao raced through China’s special programs for gifted students and won a spot in Renmin, one of the country’s most elite high schools. Then, to the shock of his friends and family, he decided to drop out when he was 17. Now, at 21, he oversees his own research project at BGI Shenzhen—the country’s top biotech institute and home to the world’s most powerful cluster of DNA-sequencing machines—where he commands a multimillion-dollar research budget.

Zhao’s goal is to use those machines to examine the genetic underpinnings of genius like his own. He wants nothing less than to crack the code for intelligence by studying the genomes of thousands of prodigies, not just from China but around the world. He and his collaborators, a transnational group of intelligence researchers, fully expect they will succeed in identifying a genetic basis for IQ. They also expect that within a decade their research will be used to screen embryos during in vitro fertilization, boosting the IQ of unborn children by up to 20 points. In theory, that’s the difference between a kid who struggles through high school and one who sails into college.

Some people are smarter than others. It seems like a straightforward truth, and one that should lend itself to scientific investigation. But those who try to study intelligence, at least in the West, find themselves lost in a political minefield. To be sure, not all intelligence research is controversial: If you study cognitive development in toddlers, or the mental decline associated with Alzheimer’s disease, “that’s treated as just normal science,” says Douglas Detterman, founding editor of Intelligence, a leading journal in the field. The trouble starts whenever the heritability of intelligence is discussed, or when intelligence is compared between genders, socioeconomic classes, or—most explosively—racial groupings.

Since the 1990s, when a book called The Bell Curve (coauthored by a psychologist and a political scientist) waded into this last morass, attempts to quantify or even study intelligence have become deeply unfashionable. Dozens of popular books by nonexperts have filled the void, many claiming that IQ—which after more than a century remains the dominant metric for intelligence—predicts nothing important or that intelligence is simply too complex and subtle to be measured.

For the most part, an IQ test—the most common of which today is called the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale—is a series of brainteasers. You fit abstract shapes together, translate codes using a key, sort numbers or letters into ascending order in your mind. It’s a weirdly playful exercise, the sort of test you would expect to have no bearing on anything else. But studies make it clear that IQ is strongly correlated with the ability to solve all sorts of abstract problems, whether they involve language, math, or visual patterns. The frightening upshot is that IQ remains by far the most powerful predictor of the life outcomes that people care most about in the modern world. Tell me your IQ and I can make a decently accurate prediction of your occupational attainment, how many kids you’ll have, your chances of being arrested for a crime, even how long you’ll live.

Critics claim that these correlations are misleading, that those life outcomes have more to do with culture and environmental circumstances than with innate intellectual ability. And even IQ researchers are far from in agreement about whether scores can be validly compared between groups of people—men and women, blacks and whites—who experience very different environments even within the same country. Variations within groups are often greater than the variations between them, making it impossible to draw conclusions about someone based on their group.

But on an individual level, the evidence points toward a strong genetic component in IQ. Based on studies of twins, siblings, and adoption, contemporary estimates put the heritability of IQ at 50 to 80 percent, and recent studies that measure the genetic similarity of unrelated people seem to have pushed the estimate to the high end of that range.

This is an idea that makes us incredibly uncomfortable. “People don’t like to talk about IQ, because it undermines their notion of equality,” Detterman says. “We think every person is equal to every other, and we like to take credit for our own accomplishments. You are where you are because you worked hard.” The very idea of the American dream is undermined by the notion that some people might be born more likely to succeed. Even if we accept that intelligence is heritable, any effort to improve or even understand the inheritance process strikes us as distasteful, even ghoulish, suggesting the rise of designer superbabies. And given the fallout that sometimes results when academics talk about intelligence as a quantifiable concept—such as the case of Harvard president Lawrence Summers, who in 2006 resigned after suggesting that science is male-dominated due not to discrimination but to a shortage of high-IQ women—it’s no surprise that IQ research is not a popular subject these days at Western universities.

But in his lab at BGI, 21-year-old Zhao has no such squeamishness. He waves it away as “irrational,” making a comparison with height: “Some people are tall and some are short,” he says. Three years into the project, a team of four geneticists is crunching an initial batch of 2,000 DNA samples from high-IQ subjects, searching for where their genomes differ from the norm. Soon Zhao plans to get thousands more through Renmin—his former high school—as well as from other sources around the world. He believes that intelligence has a genetic recipe and that given enough samples—and enough time—his team will find it.

Ask Zhao what draws him to IQ as a research subject and invariably he talks about the mysteries of the brain. He’s driven by a fascination with kids who are born smart; he wants to know what makes them—and by extension, himself—the way they are. But there’s also a basic pragmatism at work. By way of explanation, he points to the International Mathematical Olympiad, a tough competition that has helped define China’s approach to math. Two-thirds of students train for it, he says, and its judgment of the talent is so respected that for years high scorers were allowed to skip gaokao, the traditional college entrance exam. But only a tiny fraction of people have the mathematical gifts to be competitive, Zhao says, and this basically comes down to IQ. “You cannot ask a kid with low IQ to just work hard and then become a really talented mathematician,” he says. “It’s impossible.” And yet, Zhao says, that’s what is currently expected in China. He wants to stop the vast majority of Chinese students from wasting their time.

Three years after arriving at BGI, Zhao’s messy mop of hair is gone, replaced by a dark shadow across his shaved scalp. His project, meanwhile, has grown up along with him. Just a week before my visit, thousands of DNA samples arrived at the institute, each containing the genome of a person with extraordinarily high IQ. They were collected from volunteers around the world by Robert Plomin, a behavioral geneticist at King’s College London who is now one of the project’s main collaborators. Once these samples are processed, BGI’s battery of DNA sequencers will decode them.

SOURCE

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Corruption:  Costco backs Obama, Obama touts Costco

If you’re a millionaire corporate bigwig using your wealth to influence elections, and using your company’s clout to influence legislation, President Obama might give you a tongue-lashing.

Unless you’re a fundraiser and donor for the Obama Victory Fund, and your company’s lobbying agenda coincides with the White House’s — then Obama will give you a shout-out in a major economic address.

In his nationally televised speech Wednesday, Obama sang the praises of retail giant Costco, whose founder Jim Sinegal gave Obama the maximum contribution in two elections and hosted fundraisers for his reelection. Costco has also lobbied for many of Obama’s legislative priorities, including higher minimum wage, Obamacare, and price controls on financial processing fees.

Given the company’s politics and tendency to seek profit through big government, Costco stands out as a model of Obamanomics. The money trail and the free advertising also give off a whiff of cronyism.

Sinegal contributed the maximum $35,800 to the Obama Victory Fund last year and also held a $35,800-a-plate fundraiser for Obama. In the 2008 election, Sinegal gave $43,500 to the DNC (here and here), which is, in effect, a contribution to Obama. On top of that, the Costco founder gave the maximum $2,300 to Obama’s campaign. So that’s more than $80,000 personally to Obama. Add in $100,000 to Obama’s SuperPAC, Priorities USA, plus the $2 million the July 2012 fundraiser reportedly brought Obama, and you’ve got a healthy amount of support.

Obama’s gotten even more, though, from Sinegal and his company.

Sinegal lobbied for Obamacare in 2009. His company has supported a higher minimum wage. Both of these regulations impose proportionally greater costs on the company’s smaller competitors — and almost every competitor is smaller, because Costco is the nation’s No. 2 retailer behind only Wal-Mart. Sinegal also spoke in Obama’s favor at the 2012 convention.

Costco’s founder did all these favors for Obama over five years, and on Wednesday, Obama returned the favor:

"We’ll need our businesses, the best in the world, to pressure Congress to invest in our future, and set an example by providing decent wages and salaries to their own employees.  And I’ll highlight the ones that do just that – companies like Costco, which pays good wages and offers good benefits; or the Container Store, which prides itself on training its workers and on employee satisfaction – because these companies prove that this isn’t just good for their business, it’s good for America."

To recap: Raise $2 million for him, give his campaigns $180,000, lobby for his legislation, and the President will advertise for your store.

SOURCE

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Zimmerman Backlash Continues Thanks to Media Misinformation

More than a week after George Zimmerman’s acquittal in the fatal shooting of black teenager Trayvon Martin, the backlash against the verdict continues. President Obama spoke some undeniable truths when he noted that the African-American community’s intense reaction to the case must be seen in the context of a long, terrible history of racism. But there is another context too: that of an ideology-based, media-driven false narrative that has distorted a tragedy into a racist outrage.

This narrative has transformed Zimmerman, a man of racially mixed heritage that included white, Hispanic and black roots (a grandmother who helped raise him had an Afro-Peruvian father), into an honorary white male steeped in white privilege. It has cast him as a virulent racist even though he once had a black business partner, mentored African-American kids, lived in a neighborhood about 20 percent black, and participated in complaints about a white police lieutenant’s son getting away with beating a homeless black man.

This narrative has perpetuated the lie that Zimmerman’s history of calls to the police indicates obsessive racial paranoia. Thus, discussing the verdict on the PBS NewsHour, University of Connecticut professor and New Yorker contributor Jelani Cobb asserted that “Zimmerman had called the police 46 times in previous six years, only for African-Americans, only for African-American men.” Actually, prior to the call about Martin, only four of Zimmerman’s calls had to do with African-American men or teenage boys (and two of them were about individuals who Zimmerman thought matched the specific description of burglary suspects). Five involved complaints about whites, and one about two Hispanics and a white male; others were about such issues as a fire alarm going off, a reckless driver of unknown race, or an aggressive dog.

In this narrative, even Zimmerman’s concern for a black child—a 2011 call to report a young African-American boy walking unsupervised on a busy street, on which the police record notes, “compl[ainant] concerned for well-being”—has been twisted into crazed racism. Writing on the website of The New Republic, Stanford University law professor Richard Thompson Ford describes Zimmerman as “an edgy basket case” who called 911 about “the suspicious activities of a seven year old black boy.” This slander turns up in other left-of-center sources, such as ThinkProgress.org.

Accounts of the incident itself have also been wrapped in false narrative—including such egregious distortions as NBC’s edited audio of Zimmerman’s 911 call which made him appear to say that Martin was “up to no good” because “he looks black.” (In fact, Zimmerman explained that Martin was “walking around and looking about” in the rain, and mentioned his race—of which he initially seemed unsure—only in response to the dispatcher’s question.)

While this falsehood was retracted and cost several NBC employees their jobs, other fake facts still circulate unchecked: most notably, that Zimmerman disobeyed police orders not to follow Martin (or even, as Cobb and another guest asserted on the NewsHour, not to get out of his car). In fact, there was no such order. The dispatcher asked if Zimmerman was following the teenager; Zimmerman said yes, the dispatcher said, “We don’t need you to do that,” and Zimmerman replied, “Okay.” (Just before this, the dispatcher had made comments that could be construed as asking him to watch Martin, such as, “Just let us know if he does anything else.”)

No one except Zimmerman knows whether he continued to track Martin—or, as he claims, headed back to his truck only to have Martin confront him. No one but Zimmerman knows who initiated physical violence. Both eyewitness testimony and forensic evidence, including injuries to Zimmerman’s face and the back of his head, supported his claim that he was being battered when he fired the gun. It was certainly enough to create reasonable doubt. Yet accounts that deplore the verdict often completely fail to mention Zimmerman’s injuries. Thus, Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson says only that an unarmed “skinny boy” could not have been a serious threat to “a healthy adult man who outweighs him by 50 pounds”—nearly doubling the actual 27-pound difference between Martin and Zimmerman and omitting the fact that Martin was four inches taller.

The false narrative also makes it axiomatic that a black man in Zimmerman’s shoes wouldn’t stand a chance—especially if he had shot someone white. Never mind examples to the contrary, such as a 2009 case in Rochester, New York in which a black man, Roderick Scott, shot and killed an unarmed white teenager and was acquitted. Scott, who had caught 17-year-old Christopher Cervini and two other boys breaking into a car, said that the boy charged him and he feared for his life. (While the analogy has been decried as false in a number of Internet discussions because Scott actually saw Cervini doing something illegal, this is irrelevant to the self-defense claim: stealing from a car does not call for execution.)

What about general patterns? In the New Republic article, Ford cites a report in the Tampa Bay Times showing that “stand your ground” self-defense claims in Florida are more successful for defendants who kill a black person (73 percent face no penalty, compared to 59 percent of those who kill a white person). But he leaves out a salient detail: since most homicides involve people of the same race, this also means more black defendants go free. Nor does he mention that another article based on the same study of “stand your ground” cases from 2005 to 2010 noted “no obvious bias” in the treatment of black defendants—or mixed-race homicides: “Four of the five blacks who killed a white went free; five of the six whites who killed a black went free.”

One Florida case has been widely cited as a contrast to the Zimmerman verdict and a shocking injustice: the case of Marissa Alexander, a black woman said to be serving twenty years in prison for a warning shot to scare off her violent estranged husband. But that’s not quite what happened. Alexander’s “stand your ground” claim was rejected because, after the altercation with ex-husband Rico Gray, she went to the garage, returned with a gun and fired a shot that Gray said narrowly missed his head (a claim backed by forensics). There is plenty of evidence that Gray was abusive, but Alexander was not the complete innocent her champions make her out to be: she also assaulted Gray, giving him a black eye, while out on bail for the shooting and under court orders to stay away from him. Her twenty-year sentence, required by a mandatory minimum for firearm offenses, was a travesty; her conviction was not.

Liberals and disenchanted conservatives who decry fact-free ideological narratives, true-believer hysteria and willful reality-denial on the right should take a good look at the left’s Zimmerman Derangement Syndrome.

SOURCE

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For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC,  AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated) and Coral reef compendium. (Updated as news items come in).  GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten.

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

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Cause for REAL outrage

This story has circulated widely on conservative blogs, mostly prior to the exoneration of George Zimmerman.  It seemed worthwhile to look at the story again in the light of that exoneration.



        You won't recognize me. My name was Antonio West and I was the 13-month old child who was shot in the face at point blank range by two Black teens who were attempting to rob my mommy -- who was also shot. She didn't have any money, so they shot us both.

        Too bad I was given a death sentence -- shot right in my face  because my white mommy didn't have any money with her.

        My family made the mistake of being white in a 73% non-white neighborhood, but my murder was not ruled a Hate Crime. Nor did President Obama take so much as a single moment to acknowledge my murder.

        I am one of the youngest murder victims in our great Nation's history, but the media doesn't care to cover the story.  President Obama has no children who could possibly look like me -- so he doesn't care.  And CNN & NBC don't care because my story is not interesting enough to bring them ratings.  Neither Al Sharpton nor Jesse Jackson visited my family or promised to get justice for me.  I don't understand why.  Maybe if I had been allowed to grow older, I might have understood some day.

        There is not a white equivalent of Al Sharpton because if there was he would be declared racist, so there is no one rushing to Brunswick GA to demand justice for me. There is no White Panther party to put a bounty on the lives of those who murdered me. I have no voice, I have no representation, and unlike those who shot me in the face while I sat innocently in my stroller - I no longer have my life.

        So while you are seeking justice for Treyvon, please remember to seek justice for me too. Tell your friends about me, tell you families, get tee shirts with my face on them and make the world pay attention, just like you did for Treyvon.
       
Excerpt from Jon Jay, who offers a comprehensive coverage of the issues this raises, including the various Leftist attempts to wriggle out of the implications.

The perpetrator


17 year old De’Marquis Elkins  who shot and killed Antonio West the 13 month old baby who was sitting his  stroller

Elkins shot the infant in the face after the mother refused to give him money. He also shot the mother in the leg and the neck.

He did not use an assault rifle. He did not get his stolen pistol from a gun show.  He was never instructed in gun safety from his father, grandfather, the NRA or anyone with any sense of responsibility

His favorite music is rap, He did not attend Christian school, nor was he home schooled. He did attend multicultural public education

His Momma was on welfare, got food stamps, and lived in public housing. His daddy was not around, and his two brothers have a different daddy.

He already has a record for violent crimes. He is gang member.

His mom, grandma, and Aunty all voted for Obama.

His public education and family taught him that the white man owes him something.

He went to collect it.

He has no plans on getting married, but does have a Baby Momma, and no, he is not supporting her baby.

He smokes dope. He does respect Kayne West.

While he has no job, nor is looking for one, he is well fed. He has no skills outside of crime. He speaks Ebonics, and is not capable of doing a professional interview, even though he spent 11 years in our public education system.

He is one of millions.

SOURCE

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More evidence that there is a vacuum between the ears of most Hollywood celebrities

According to a tweet sent Wednesday by singer Bette Midler, Republicans did everything they could to ensure the Allies lost to Adolf Hitler in World War Two, Twitchy reported.

"@GOP treats Mr. Obama the way they treated FDR in WWII. They did everything they could to ensure an Allied loss," she tweeted to her more than 449,000 followers.

A post at Twitchy called her tweet "ridiculous" and reminded readers that a very prominent Republican by the name of Dwight David Eisenhower not only led the Allied effort to defeat Hitler, he went on to become president.

History shows that the first woman elected to the U.S. Congress, Republican Jeannette Rankin of Montana, voted against declaring war in 1941, but she was the only member of Congress to do so. It was not the first time she opposed U.S. military action, having voted to keep American troops out of World War One.

Twitchy said Midler simply used the argument adopted by liberals that anyone who opposes Obama on anything is guilty of treason against the United States.

"Midler doesn’t seem to apply that same 'logic' when a Republican is president, however," Twitchy said.

Twitter users took Midler to task for her tweet.

"You should explain that to all the dead Republicans buried at Arlington National Cemetery," one person tweeted.

"Lets be real here," another person tweeted, "Midler knows as much about history as she knows about meteorology, not much, nothing."

SOURCE

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Obamacaare Fee: $3; Cost of Paying: $100

Like a lot of conservatives, I have plenty of doubts about the president’s massive health care overhaul that’s going to change the way Americans get health coverage come Jan. 1, 2014. I think the plan is too big, too expensive, too cumbersome, too reliant on subsidies and imposes too may regulations. Although I support some of its goals, I would have surely voted against it were I a member of Congress.

Many on the political left — including a lot of thoughtful people whose opinions I respect — like the plan a lot more than I do. But I’ve just discovered a feature I think even they would agree is utterly futile.

Among the provisions that thousands (perhaps tens of thousands) of small businesses are soon going to have to comply with is one that requires filling out a hugely complex form and paying an accountant to review and file it. In the case of the R Street Institute, we will be paying our accountant $53 to file this form. That may not sound like much but, aye, here’s the rub:

Our fee came to just $3.

You read that right. We will be spending, when you figure in staff time, at least $100 to comply with a bureaucratic mandate, just so the government can collect a $3 fee. Even our accountant was dumbstruck; you can read his take here.

This so-called “Patient-Centered Outcomes Trust Fund Fee” is imposed on health insurance plans and employer-funded Health Reimbursement Arrangements. R Street offers HRA as an employee benefit, which allows us to reduce our base health insurance premium by opting for a higher deductible plan without disadvantaging employees with higher health care costs. As an employer, we cover the entire premium, and fund the full $1,000 in HRA benefits ourselves.

If the Patient-Centered Outcomes Trust Fund is to exist at all, taxes on health insurers and big health plans might well be a good way to fund it. But a form that costs $100 to fill out so that the government can collect $3 in revenue is simply pointless by any standard. Furthermore, since few people seem to know about the rule (final guidance just came out) one imagines a great many small businesses are probably going to be in breach come July 31st.

There’s both a Regulatory Flexibility Act and a Small Business Administration Office of Advocacyspecifically intended to prevent the government from imposing requirements this stupid. Right now, they seem to be asleep at the switch.

This has got to change.

SOURCE

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More Anti-Capitalist Hypocrisy from the Left

Liberals want to force Goldman Sachs out of warehouse business

A Democratic Senator from Ohio, Sherrod Brown, plans a hearing Tuesday and wants the Federal Reserve to get banks out of the warehouse business. The New York Times previewed the hearing with a 3,600-word article that ran at the top of its Sunday front page and that blamed Goldman for costing American consumers more than $5 billion over three years in higher costs for canned soda, beer, and other products.

The Times followed up with a series of staff Twitter posts telling readers what to think about the news: “Don’t miss: damning story on how Goldman Sachs manipulates aluminum market….This story will fuel notion that Goldman is a ‘giant vampire squid.’”

There you have left-wing hypocrisy in a nutshell. When a government official like New York mayor Michael Bloomberg tries to reduce the public consumption of sugary beverages with a tax that makes the drinks more expensive, he’s a public health hero. But when it’s a profit-generating company that stands accused of increasing beverage costs, it’s a greedy manipulative Wall Street blood-sucker.

In Goldman’s case, it’s not even clear that the firm has increased the price of beverages or of other aluminum products. In February 2010, when Goldman announced it was buying the metal warehouse Metro International Trade Services, a metric ton of aluminum cost about $2,053. Last month, it cost about $1,815.

And if Goldman were increasing the cost of aluminum cans, it’s not clear that the practices are in any way related to its status as a bank. Some non-bank firm could also buy an aluminum warehouse and try to jack up rent to customers.

The best way to deal with the problem of aluminum can prices — if that is a problem at all — is not for the government to decide who can or can’t buy an aluminum warehouse. It’s allowing the market to address the issue, either through new entrants — competition — or vertical integration.

Slate’s Matthew Yglesias noted the Times article failed to explain why someone else doesn’t just open up an aluminum warehouse that moves faster than the one Goldman runs, or charges lower rent. It’s not like the warehouse business has such high barriers to entry or is so capital intensive that no one else can compete.

Another possibility is that the aluminum end-users, such as the beverage or aluminum foil companies or Boeing, can own and operate their own warehouses. If they think they can do it cheaper or better than Goldman, nothing is stopping them from trying.

For the Federal Reserve, or Congress, to tell banks they can’t be in the warehouse business, though, is a risky proposition. The flip side of it is the regulators telling the bankers that they can only invest in certain government-approved things, such as bonds that are AAA rated by a nationally recognized rating agency, or mortgage debt backed by Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac. And we all know how that ended up.

Sure, if bank deposits are going to be backed by Federal Deposit Insurance or the institutions themselves are going to be subsidized or backstopped by the taxpayers, then there needs to be some oversight of how the banks invest capital. But there what regulators need to be watchful for is bank investments that lose too much money, not investments that make too much money, as the Goldman aluminum warehouse is accused of doing.

The best public policy outcome would be to take a hard look at the subsidies and the taxpayer backstops, so that a bank owning an aluminum warehouse wouldn’t be any different from any other company owning one.

SOURCE

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Chicago’s Struggles Reflected In Big Moody’s Credit Downgrade

First the Motor City, then the Windy City.

In the same week the City of Detroit made national headlines by filing the largest municipal bankruptcy in national history, the City of Chicago made smaller headlines when Moody’s Investors Service announced it had hit the city with a nearly unprecedented triple-downgrade of its credit rating on general obligation bonds.

Chicago now has a credit rating four notches below New York and Los Angeles and below other large cities in the Midwest, including Milwaukee and Cleveland.

In a statement, Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel said, “This confirms what I have been saying for more than a year. Without comprehensive pension relief from Springfield, municipalities such as Chicago will continue to receive negative reviews from rating agencies.” Emanuel became mayor in 2011, following the 22-year reign of Richard M. Daley.

Higher Debt Service Costs

The three-notch downgrade – with a negative outlook – does not bode well for Chicago’s bond investors, residents, or taxpayers. The city’s debt is estimated at $8.2 billion, and the big drop in its credit rating means its costs of repaying the debt and issuing debt in the future are sure to go up.

“The downgrade of the [general obligation bond] rating reflects Chicago's very large and growing pension liabilities and accelerating budget pressures associated with those liabilities,” Moody’s wrote in announcing the downgrade. “The city's budgetary flexibility is already burdened by high fixed costs, including unrelenting public safety demands and significant debt service payments. “

Those fixed costs could soon eat up half of Chicago’s operating budget, according to Moody’s, forcing the city to reduce services or raise taxes to maintain current service levels.

More HERE

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For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC,  AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated) and Coral reef compendium. (Updated as news items come in).  GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten.

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

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