IQ: Brain scans confirm what has long been known from twin studies

Intelligent people's brains are wired differently: Researchers say 'smart minds' are more likely to be happy, well educated and earn more

High achievers have brains that are wired differently from those with fewer intellectual or social abilities, researchers have claimed.

Scientists who analysed brain scan data on 461 volunteers found some had 'connectome' patterns linked to classically positive aspects of life, such as having a good memory and vocabulary, feeling satisfied, and being well educated.

People at the other end of the connectome scale were more likely to display negative traits including anger, rule-breaking, substance use and poor sleep quality.

The findings are among the first to emerge from the Human Connectome Project (HCP), a £20 million collaboration between Oxford University and Washington and Minnesota universities in the US.

As the study unfolds, data from functional magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) brain scans conducted on 1,200 healthy volunteers will be coupled with lifestyle and behaviour tests and questionnaires.

The Oxford team used 461 of the scans to create an averaged map of brain functioning across the participants.

Then, we looked at how much all of those regions communicated with each other, in every participant.'  The result was a 'connectome' for every individual - a detailed description of the extent to which the 200 separate brain regions communicate with each other.

Specific connectome variations were found to correlate with a range of behavioural and demographic measures.

A strong connectivity pattern that included symmetrical peaks on both sides of the brain in five particular regions was seen as 'positive'.

The correlation shows that those with a connectome at one end of scale score highly on measures typically deemed to be positive, such as vocabulary, memory, life satisfaction, income and years of education.

Meanwhile, those at the other end of the scale were found to exhibit high scores for traits typically considered negative, such as anger, rule-breaking, substance use and poor sleep quality.

The findings, published in the journal Nature Neuroscience, echo what psychologists refer to as the 'general intelligence g-factor', said the scientists.

First proposed in 1904, the 'g-factor' is supposed to summarise an individual's abilities in different cognitive tasks but has been criticised for failing to reflect the true complexity of what goes on in the brain.

Prof Smith said: 'It may be that with hundreds of different brain circuits, the tests that are used to measure cognitive ability actually make use of different sets of overlapping circuits.

'We hope that by looking at brain imaging data we'll be able to relate connections in the brain to the specific measures, and work out what these kinds of test actually require the brain to do.'

SOURCE

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Does This Explain TRUMP?

The new Bloomberg Politics poll conducted by Iowa-based Selzer & Company (9/18-21; 1,001 adults) at least partially explains Donald Trump’s apparent sudden appeal.  Asking pointed questions about how the respondents perceive various issues provides supporting data as to why Trump’s message is striking chords with many prospective voters.

In a previous Update, we discussed the Bloomberg/Selzer Democratic primary ballot test (375 likely Democratic primary voters – a sample too small to adequately draw national conclusions).  This new data reveals that a bare majority would now choose a Dem candidate other than former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.  Additionally, their underlying issue questions provide us a relatively sound base from which to analyze potential voting patterns.

The key questions surround America’s greatness, a subject that has become the theme of Trump’s national campaign.  From his slogan “let’s make America great again”, it becomes obvious that Mr. Trump no longer thinks the country is heading toward its apex.  According to the Bloomberg/Selzer data, the majority of respondents share that opinion.  Their question is reproduced below, with response percentages in adjoining parenthesis:

Do you think the United States today is:

Greater than it has ever been  (6%)
Equally great as it has been in the past  (20%)
Falling behind  (47%)
Failing  (25%)
Not sure  (2%)

Adding the categories, we see that almost three-quarters of the respondents, 72%, believe the country is either “falling behind” or “failing”.  This is the sentiment that Trump is channeling.

Their follow-up question provides even more interesting information (asked of those who responded negatively to the previous query):

What do you think are the ONE or TWO biggest threats to American greatness? (Multiple responses accepted, so total may exceed 100%.)

Moral decay   (32%)
Our own lagging work ethic  (27%)
The rise of ISIS, also known as the Islamic State  (26%)
The concentration of the nation’s wealth among very few individuals  (25%)
Competition from China and other countries  (21%)
People living in the country illegally  (12%)
Not sure  (5%)

These responses tell us why Trump is doing so well with the substantial number of people who feel America has declined.  Though their reasons are very evenly spread over a large and diverse issue field, the underlying feeling driving their response is captured in the sentiment that the country isn’t as good as our history dictates.  Trump, seizing upon this sentiment with his theme of “making America great again” harnesses a feeling that virtually all of the people who are negative about politics possess, regardless if their driving issue is moral decay, ISIS, China, wealth re-distribution, or immigration.

Another tenet of this campaign appears, particularly on the Republican side, as a desire to elect a person who has not previously held elective office.  The fact that Trump, Dr. Ben Carson, and businesswoman Carly Fiorina, together, consistently poll a sizable majority of Republican voters underscores this view.

The Bloomberg/Selzer survey provides us information to better gauge the electorate’s position, and the reasoning driving their decisions may be different than first surmised:

All other things being equal, which of the following is a more attractive candidate for president at this time:

A government outsider who has been a leader in the field, handling complex issues and managing teams to get things done  (37%)

A governor who has been a government executive, has worked with a legislature, and who is responsible for balancing a budget  (27%)

A U.S. senator who has involvement with national security and international relations and diplomatic issues   (27%)

Not sure  (9%)

Comparing the recent Republican polling results, one would have expected the outsider response to poll much stronger on the Bloomberg Politics survey.  Surprisingly, combining the Governor and Senator question actually gives the insiders a clear majority.  This tells us that the heavy pull against the particular candidates with elective experience may actually be directed against them individually as opposed to the political position(s) they hold or once held.

SOURCE

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Redistribution: The Unconquerable Delusion

“A pope that mentions Dorothy Day is a pope that rocks,” tweeted Neera Tanden of the left-leaning Center for American Progress. Tanden might have wished to reel back that praise if she had known that Day, though a prominent pacifist and socialist, was also a fervent opponent of abortion, birth control, Social Security and the sexual revolution.

It’s fitting that Pope Francis should have invoked Dorothy Day among his pantheon of great Americans — she’s a symbol of where leftists always go wrong. This pope is going wrong in the same way. The left’s delusions of “social justice” seem indomitable — impervious to evidence.

The pope lauded Day for “her social activism, her passion for justice and for the cause of the oppressed, (which) were inspired by the Gospel, her faith, and the example of the saints.”

Let’s assume that Day’s motives were as pure as Pope Francis described: Does having the right motives excuse everything?

Day’s interpretation of the Gospel led her to oppose the U.S. entry into World War II, which arguably would have led to a world dominated by Nazi Germany, fascist Italy and Imperial Japan. How would that have worked out for the poor and the oppressed?

Though her social views were heterodox for a leftist, Day was a supporter of Fidel Castro and found very kind things to say about North Vietnam’s Ho Chi Minh. She visited Leonid Brezhnev in the Kremlin and leant her moral support to other communist regimes despite their persecution of Catholics and others.

Of Castro, Day said, “I am most of all interested in the religious life of the people and so must not be on the side of a regime that favors the extirpation of religion. On the other hand, when that regime is bending all its efforts to make a good life for the people … one cannot help but be in favor of the measures taken.”

According to “The Black Book of Communism,” between 1959 and the late 1990s, more than 100,000 (out of about 10 million) Cubans spent time in the island’s gulag. Between 15,000 and 19,000 were shot. One of the first was a young boy in Che Guevara’s unit who had stolen a little food. As for quality of life, it has declined compared with its neighbors. In 1958, Cuba had one of the highest per capita incomes in the world. Today, as the liberal New Republic describes it:

“The buildings in Havana are literally crumbling, many of them held upright by two-by-fours. Even the cleanest bathrooms are fetid, as if the country’s infrastructural bowels might collectively evacuate at any minute.

"Poverty in Cuba is severe in terms of access to physical commodities, especially in rural areas. Farmers struggle, and many women depend on prostitution to make a living. Citizens have few material possessions and lead simpler lives with few luxuries and far more limited political freedom.”

This left-leaning pope (who failed to stand up for the Cuban dissidents who were arrested when attempting to attend a mass he was conducting) and our left-leaning president have attributed Cuba’s total failure to the U.S.

It’s critically important to care about the poor — but if those who claim to care for the poor and the oppressed stand with the oppressors, what are we to conclude?

Much is made of Pope Francis' Argentine origins — the fact that the only kind of capitalism he’s experienced is of the crony variety. Maybe. But Pope Francis is a man of the world, and the whole world still struggles to shake off a delusion — namely, that leftists who preach redistribution can help the poor.

Has this pope or Obama taken a moment to see what Hugo Chavez’s socialist/populist Venezuela has become? Chavez and his successor (like Castro, like Lenin, like Mao) promised huge redistribution from the rich to the poor. There have indeed been new programs for the poor, but the economy has been destroyed. The leader of the opposition was just thrown in jail. Meanwhile, the shops have run out of flour, oil, toilet paper and other basics.

If you want moral credit for caring about the poor, when, oh when, do you ever have to take responsibility for what happens to the poor when leftists take over?

We know what actually lifts people out of poverty: property rights, the rule of law, free markets. Not only do those things deliver the fundamentals that people need to keep body and soul together, but they accomplish this feat without a single arrest, persecution or show trial.

SOURCE

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Fast food doesn't make you fat

The CDC says so.  See the summary of their research report below.  The final sentence is the kicker

In 2011–2012, children and adolescents aged 2–19 consumed an average 12.4% of their daily calories from fast food. Adolescents aged 12–19 consumed twice the average daily percentage of calories from fast food than did younger children. The percentage of calories from fast food differed by age and race and Hispanic origin. Overall, non-Hispanic Asian children and adolescents consumed a lower percentage of calories from fast food compared with the other race and Hispanic groups. Previous studies have reported that acculturation to the U.S. lifestyle plays an important role in the adoption of unhealthy behaviors, such as fast food consumption, in Asian-American and other immigrant groups (4,5). In 2011–2012, a greater percentage of non-Hispanic Asian children and adolescents were foreign-born (27.4%), compared with Hispanic (19.7%), non-Hispanic white (2.5%), and non-Hispanic black (1.9%) children and adolescents (data not shown). This analysis found no significant differences in fast food consumption by poverty status or weight status among children and adolescents.

SOURCE

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

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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Why the West wants to lose (?)

Sociologist John Carroll writes below from Australia but his perspective is an international one.  He considers at the outset that the negativity he discusses is Leftist but dismisses that.  He argues that it is simply human.  He justifies that by saying that the Nazis were a bad lot and they were "Right-wing".  But they were not.  They were socialists and Carroll should know that.  And antisemitism is once again very Leftist, though usually under the shallow pretence of "anti-Zionism".  Even Karl Marx despised Jews so claiming that antisemitism is "Rightist" is a joke.

I think Carroll's claims are a crazy overgeneralization.  Conservatives are the people who are happily getting on with their lives and just want the government off their backs.  It is the Left who are congenital miseries, who hate just about everything about them.  So I read Carroll's interesting analysis below as an analysis of the Left.  They truly are a dismal bunch.  It is the Western Left who want their countries and societies to lose and lose big -- JR


George Orwell wrote in England in 1944, in an essay for Partisan ­Review, that he had come to judge the entire Left intelligentsia as hating their country, to the extreme of being dismayed whenever Britain won a victory in the war against Hitler.

Orwell still identified himself as a socialist when he wrote this. Orwell was, without doubt, exaggerating, in his blanket condemnation of the entire Left intelligentsia. And his observation needs the further qualification: he was writing at the close of a period in which the extreme Right in Europe, via messianic fascist nationalism, had been cataclysmically destructive.

I have been puzzled myself by the phenomenon Orwell observed, very common in humanities faculties at the universities at which I have worked. It might be termed cultural masochism, and has manifested in many forms. Whenever before in human history have significant groups within a nation — often privileged, elite groups — wanted their own to fail or to be defeated?

THE ORDEAL OF UNBELIEF

The broad cultural condition of unbelief established the preconditions. They arose in the wake of the death of God: the near total collapse of institutional religion, and, in generalised accompaniment, confident belief in a higher power that directs the human world. In relation to the possibility of a metaphysical beyond, most people today, at best, believe there is “something there”. That something is vague.

The prototype of the paralysing anxiety aroused in someone sensitive to the fact he believes in nothing was Dostoevsky’s character Stavrogin, from The Possessed (1872). Stavrogin is a handsome, brilliant and confident young aristocrat whom almost everyone of his generation — male and female — falls in love with. He has studied widely, travelled, visited the holy sites, fought duels and engaged in many love affairs. He fears no one. A few years earlier he was the charismatic teacher to a circle of young men, engaging them in questions of ultimate meaning. His name derives from the Greek word for cross; Dostoevsky is experimenting with him as the messiah for a secular age.

Stavrogin has taken on life and lived it to the full. If anyone has discovered the answer of how to live in a secular time, and make sense of one’s own life, it is he. When we meet him, however, he is listless and nihilistic, indifferent to the offer to lead a revolutionary group. Stavrogin’s passions are so flat the most he can manage is a few adolescent pranks. His face looks like a beautiful mask, a death mask. He admits to past times of wild debauchery — not for pleasure but to try to find a limit, something to believe in that would stop him. He finds no limits; for him, everything is permitted.

A feature of the cultural turbulence of the early 20th century was the number of commanding philosophical and literary figures who were driven by despair at cultural decadence. The conclusion they had reached — that my culture has no authority, and provides me with no convincing explanations to justify my existence — left them in an intolerable position. To choose two of the exemplars: Georg Lukacs and TS Eliot both took a deliberate leap of faith out of their respective wastelands. When Lukacs joined the Communist Party in 1918, arguably the most sophisticated and well-read intellectual of his generation had turned into an apologist for Stalin. From soon after Eliot became a “little England” Anglican Christian in 1927, the pungency of his earlier poetry evaporated into fey abstraction.

Today, the youth that takes with idealistic enthusiasm to the Green political movement may be located in this same mental domain, although without the self-consciousness or the intensity of anguish. The content seems almost arbitrary, with the attachment rather to the enthusiasm itself — Stavrogin was as desperate to find a passion in himself, irrespective of its end, as to find a limit. Naive Green idealism is possible only in an affluent world under no threat of war; and little threat of hardship, for the young Greens, by and large, live in the prosperous inner cities.

Freud’s pregnant concept of negation is useful. What appears in surface behaviour is the opposite of its unconscious motivation, the act deliberately inverting its true nature. In Freud’s own examples, negation is provoked by feelings of guilt — as with the forced smile in someone whose ideal of themselves is that they are a nice person, who smiles on the surface to cover up unconscious aggression, “to smile and smile and be a villain”.

More interestingly in the context of this essay, negation may also be triggered by a longing for authority. Marlow, the narrator in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, reaches the conclusion, at the end of his adventures, that humans need something outside themselves to bow down before. Otherwise they go mad.

In the narrow political sphere, power, if it is to gain legitimacy, needs the authority of an established order: say, the ensemble of a hereditary monarch, age-old institutions, a venerable legal tradition, and a people’s cherished customs. Every dynamic community — from the nuclear family, to the sporting club, school, trade union, or church — lives off a powerful collective conscience, giving it authority over the actions of its members. Today, nostalgia for cosy, close-knit community, which it is feared is disappearing, pervades television soap opera. It reflects a longing for one type of lost authority.

Failing belief may trigger hatred of the dying god. Lapsing ­Catholics turn against the Pope. The residue of some love or need generates the hatred. The longing for authority, in negation, leads to hostility to the weakness of existing authorities — for university students in the 1960s it was parents, political leaders, and university lecturers and vice-chancellors. This was understandable, and more than pure negation: the curiosity of a youth generation eager to take on the adult world seeks leadership, not an ineffectual older generation limp in its own lack of direction. Stavrogin was brought up by weak father figures and an hysterical mother.

More pathological in the 1960s was the lurch into idealising mega-powerful, brutal dictators like Mao Zedong. Here was a vivid symbol of the hurt felt by the loss of the old gods — the old authorities. More simple negation was exhibited when self-proclaimed peace-loving, flower-waving students demonstrated violently against the Vietnam war.

The ordeal of unbelief provides the modern context for the eruption of drives universal to the human condition, notably power envy and moral paranoia. They have provided the energy source for a new form of social pathology, one peculiar to the modern West — cultural masochism. The sado-masochistic pleasure gained by some individuals in suffering pain at the hands of another is projected outwards on to the person’s own culture and society. Damaging it, attacking it, seeing it suffer and being diminished, brings pleasure. This is extraordinary.

These same drives may be projected in any political direction, depending on the historical moment. In Germany in the 1930s, students were, in the main, inclined to the Nazi Right, and to a messianic nationalism with sadistic rather than masochistic tropes. Hitler cleverly exploited, in his writings and speeches, the need for something to believe in, which he offered to provide. Since the 1940s, it happens that political pathology in the West has been predominantly of the Left. This may, of course, change — for instance, xenophobic right-wing parties may rise again in Europe to be of more than marginal significance. And the emergence of Muslim youth in Western countries attracted by Islamic State fanaticism illustrates the broad effect of the ordeal of unbelief.

POWER PLAY

Three great psychologists have cast their powerful interpretative gaze across the modern world — Dostoevsky, Nietzsche and Freud. Of them, the master interpreter of culture and its contemporary travails was Nietzsche. Nietzsche argued that a will-to-power is at the core of human motivation. It leads inevitably to the weak envying the strong, and individual behaviour manifesting sublimations of this envy across all fronts. Nietzsche was following 17th-century French moralist the Duc de La Rochefoucauld, who identified self-esteem (and with it vanity and insecurity) as the key to all human motivation. Humans are insecure egotists, which explains the pride and the fear that governs almost all of what they do. Nietzsche extends the analysis to those discontented with their lives, ill at ease in themselves, which means, sick of themselves. Such individuals are inwardly driven to seek a cause for their suffering: someone or something must be to blame. The hurt becomes externalised.

Let me switch back to the contemporary world. Patriotism feeds off, and generates, an undercurrent of confidence, wanting the nation to be successful, which means powerful. It is the same with football fans supporting their team. Where the identification fails, or the authority of the parent society is too weak, resentment may surface in that hatred of nation Orwell found abhorrent. In Western countries, power envy is often expressed in reflex anti-Americanism, the target chosen simply because it is the leading power in the West — the leader on our side, so to speak. The morning after the destruction of the twin towers in New York in 2001, Mon­ash University students were celebrating in public.

David Hicks became a hero for a broad section of those who are left-oriented, on the surface grounds that he might have been tortured by the Americans while he was imprisoned at Guantanamo Bay. The subtext was that he had trained with al-Qa’ida in Afghanistan before and after September 11, 2001, including direct contact with Osama bin Laden; and he had fought against Coalition forces that included the Australian Army. The actions of this “hero” bordered on treason. The Hicks example suggests the subject was not chosen simply as a device for thinking evil of America — although that was the case. Negation was at work, the candidate chosen because he had been actively engaged, siding with the enemy.

The ideological Left has generally had an irrationally wrought hostility to strong and intelligent leaders on the Right, such as Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, Malcolm Fraser (while prime minister), Jeff Kennett and John Howard. Some were mocked as boof-headed (Kennett) or senile (Reagan). Strong leaders of the Left — for example, Franklin Roosevelt and Bob Hawke — have not attracted similar ­antipathy.

Nietzsche argued that the clerisy — which includes the clergy and the intelligentsia — is of its nature impotent, compared with people who live active lives, who direct and make things, who are decisive, and who enjoy themselves. The clerisy, in its tortured inwardness, becomes rancorous — and above all moralistic. Out of disgust at itself, and irritation with its life, it launches into bad-tempered projections. While Nietzsche oversimplified — given that we humans are often composed of diverse personae blended into one complex form — strains of his central theme may be noted today. The clergy in mainstream churches hardly ever talk of faith, redemption or God. They seem embarrassed by their core mission, which is to provide convincing answers to the big-meaning questions of why we are here and what happens when we die. They rather don the ethical robes of empathy for the disadvantaged and rail against government callousness, appearing more like politicised social workers than apostles of the faith. Religion and politics do not belong together — as Jesus himself taught.

Much of the intelligentsia has turned against the long Western high-cultural tradition that since Homer and Plato has sought the true, the beautiful, and the good. It has rather set to criticising its society: customs, traditions and institutions. The current lead manifestation is refugee studies, whereby a dozen areas in the humanities have taken up the politically fashionable “oppressed” of the moment, victims of a cruel, hard-hearted Australian government — there must be hundreds of PhD theses being written around the country on this blight on the national character. Now I don’t question that the practical politics of how to deal with a flow of people voyaging on barely seaworthy boats to try to land in Australia raises difficult human challenges with no morally clear-cut solutions. What I do question is the exploitation of the issue to attack the civic order.

MORAL PARANOIA

The paranoid disposition splits the world into good and evil (no grey). It does so in just the same way that fundamentalist religions do. Indeed, all fundamentalism exhibits the same psycho-pathology.

Paranoid extremism is manifest in grandiose delusions of self-importance, or in delusions of persecution. The cosmos is riven by the warring forces of good and evil. Evil is satanic, and therefore potent enough to spread superhuman contagion. Modern secular crusades are driven by ideological fundamentalism, imputing quasi-religious metaphysical forces that justify the venom against what is hated. These crusades have been predominantly but not exclusively of the Left — on the Right, the free-market camp has included some zealotry.

Let two examples suffice. In the 1970s, Australian and American soldiers returning from fighting for their country in Vietnam were confronted by screaming contempt by tens of thousands of their fellow citizens. It was as if they had been fighting for the devil. Second, the nation and its people are spat on today as racist, with particular examples (which can be found in any country) blown up and generalised. This is singularly unconvincing in the case of Australia, which has successfully welcomed and settled millions of immigrants.

Moral paranoia may be a sub-category of power envy. The powerful, or the imagined powerful (Jewish bankers or more recently Israel, capitalists, the CIA, right-wing media moguls), are inflated to embody monolithic evil. Examples from the Right include Pauline Hanson’s fears that Asians were taking over Australia. Rupert Murdoch has made the perfect bogeyman with his global media empire, given that the rampaging paranoid imagination is inclined to see the invisible tentacles of media influence reaching into every home and controlling the minds of the simple souls who live there. These contemporary Big Brothers flood the world in a fog of pollution — with the very use of contamination imagery illustrating the high moralist cast of mind, and the quasi-religious associations with sin and damnation.

Free-floating resentment may be projected on to the political stage without any personal repercussions, or face-to-face confrontations, where irresponsible opinions do not need to be defended or tested.

CONCLUSION

The ultimate challenge of Nietzsche is to prove that he is exaggerating. If we humans are no more than monomaniacal egotists, simply motivated by power, and the anxieties that flow from fear of powerlessness, this reality is a more severe blow to our self-­esteem than Darwin’s linking our parentage to the monkey.

What is the evidence in support of Nietzsche? Who has any friends whom they don’t suspect will gain some pleasure if they come to harm? Gore Vidal quipped that whenever one of his friends had a success, a part of him died. Strip away the civilised veneer and raw competitiveness rules. Children are unabashedly transparent in their me-me-me self-promotions. Are they not simply more open and honest than adults?

Competitiveness rules as much in the defences against fear of failure as in open battles for power and influence. The compulsion to do better than others, have more influence, and more power to attract may be direct, as in elaborate female rituals of make-up and dressing. It may be indirect, as in sublimated identification with a celebrity or a football team. Fear of failure generates a plethora of rationalisations, from the openly hypocritical “I am a caring person”, and “competition is selfish”; to the self-deception of “I am a better person for the experience”; and to the more subtle putdowns of “he is too good to be true” and “she is just a pretty bird-brain”.

On the other side of the ledger, contra Nietzsche, there is some genuine compassion, a spontaneous and sympathetic warmth to another’s suffering. Nietzsche was right to judge pity as a mask for superiority, usually — its condescension an aspect of the will-to-power. But it is not always so. Orwell was an example.

Summing up, the obvious conclusion to draw is that the psychological reality of the human condition is mainly dispiriting. Writ large is Macbeth’s “poor player who struts and frets his hour upon the stage”. Which takes us back to the threat of unbelief in a secular age. With the axis of ­belief/unbelief tipping towards the latter, it becomes more difficult to find metaphysical inspiration. In other words, when unbelief doesn’t slide into cultural pathology it may be interpreted as a rational and honest response to a disenchanted reality. But that is Stavrogin.

Nietzsche’s will-to-power is the theory for a disenchanted age. When the world is disenchanted, power stands alone and rules. It is in service of the last limit, the No of No’s: death. Stavrogin is cursed by his failure to find anything with the authority to check him, to shame him, and any passion strong enough to engage him, so the one thing left to stop him is death, which he chooses. Australian politics today is jammed with wretched illustration, in the phalanxes of diminutives who choose to enter its halls without the slightest commitment to any cause except their own ­careers.

But no era is disenchanted in any absolute sense. That is not the nature of the human condition. Today, as always, the sense of a transcendent is what lifts the individual above the rapaciously selfish psychological plane. Those who find deep fulfilment in their work are likely to give it selfless devotion, and with it whomever they serve. Many find in family life a rich fulfilment that is inextricably tied to them giving themselves to something bigger than their individual selves. The sportsman or woman who finds scintillating form may be humbled by the experience. Then there is the awesome power of nature. And genuine compassion depends on some kind of faith in the human essence, which is another vein of the transcendent.

Here are intimations of “something there”, ones to which Stavrogin remained deaf.

SOURCE

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

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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Obama as Nero



The burdens Obama has placed on America are great so the question is how lasting they are.  After Obama is gone, will America's freedom and prosperity continue to deteriorate or will they bounce back?  Much will depend on the resolve of the president who replaces Obama.  A timid Republican would not attempt to wind back the clock and even the banishment of crybaby Boehner has not banished Republican timidity. Leftist expectations still rule America in many ways.

Only Trump would appear to have the independence and resolve needed to put the destructive policies into reverse.  Otherwise the great weight of regulations (from the EPA and elsewhere) that now exist will continue to exercise their destructive force and will slowly smother America.  But Trump so far has only an outside chance so what if Hillary or some milksop Republican is elected next year?  Will that be the final nail in the coffin?

Perhaps not.  For a long time, many people, including America's revolutionaries, looked to ancient Rome for lessons.  Many of the ancient empires of the Far-East were big, powerful and long-lasting but only Rome seemed to be "like us".  So does Rome have lessons that could encourage us today?  I believe it does.

When Caesar's conquests expanded the Roman republic into the Roman empire, he inherited a great legacy of balanced and substantially democratic government from his predecessors.  The Senate was democratically elected by the upper class and there was also a "tribunis plebis" to represent the ordinary people of Rome.  And government functions were split up so that much power could not be concentrated in one man's hands.  By disobeying the Senate and crossing the Rubicon river with his army, Caesar offended against that division of power.  So they killed him.

But Humpty Dumpty could not be put back together again. Armies had become too powerful. Caesar had replaced democratic government with military rule and military rule would continue.  At that juncture, however, Rome was extraordinarily fortunate.  The victor in the military struggles to replace Caesar was the man we now  call Augustus.  That August in our calendar follows July celebrates the memory that Augustus followed Julius Caesar in ruling Rome.

And Augustus was wise enough to draw from the Roman past many lessons about government.  Although the Senators had murdered Caesar, Augustus did not abolish the Senate but converted it into a sounding board for his policies.  They had no power during his reign but still had influence.

He expanded the borders of the empire but through strong and wise rule gave the core of the empire a long period of peace and prosperity.  He adapted the wisdom of old, Republican Rome to form a strong new system of governance for the Roman empire.  And he ruled Rome for 45 years until his death at age 75 in the year 14 AD.

And that long rule set the precedent for how Rome was to be governed thenceforth.  Rome was again ruled not only by men but also by a system of government, a system that had deep roots in the Republic but had been successfully and convincingly made the new normal by Augustus.

Romans now expected their governments to be of a certain type  -- an Augustan type. The reign of Augustus was immensely influential in the minds of Romans -- and later emperors were judged by that criterion.  Rulers who did not provide government along roughly Augustan lines did not last.  A powerful SYSTEM now ruled Rome and Rome prospered greatly under it, even undergoing further expansion of the empire.  So even rather bad emperors such as Nero still kept the system going to some extent and Rome survived him well.  The empire kept expanding and reached its greatest extent under emperor Trajan some decades later.

So I think we can now see the parallels.  Like Nero, Obama has been destructive but American political forms and expectations have been preserved.  The system that is America still exists much as it always has done.  There is a strength in America in the form of the customary systems of law and government that continue to exist. And those systems rest on nothing so fragile as laws.  They exists in the expectations that Americans hold about how things should be done.  Those expectations have given prosperity and substantial freedom to Americans in the past and will continue to do so.  America can withstand its traitor president -- JR.

Note:  I refer to Nero above only because he is well known -- but there were of course other bad emperors

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Another recovering Leftist from Britain

As Labour elects Jeremy Corbyn, the most left wing leader in the party's recent history, Tony Parsons writes on the rise of the reluctant Conservatives

Like millions of others, I joined the ranks of reluctant Conservatives at the last election. To the haters on the left, I have sold my soul and turned to the dark side. And I'll do it again, because the left has nothing to offer. Here comes the abuse...

I first realised that I was Tory scum on the weekend after the general election. The losing side was throwing a terrible tantrum. "F*** TORY SCUM", they sprayed on a Whitehall memorial dedicated to the women who fought in the Second World War. Well, that's me, I thought. They are definitely talking about me. Because whatever these people believe, I know that I will always be on the other side.

Like 11 million of my countrymen, I had voted Conservative because the alternative felt indistinguishable from national suicide.

This is what the pollsters got so terribly wrong - the general election was decided not by shy Tories but by us reluctant Conservatives. The millions like me who saw nothing but catastrophe in Labour's addiction to high taxes and big spending, their loathing of success, the way they could use a word like "mansion" with a straight face and, above all, that endless pious prattle about the NHS - as though the British have no other identity but as a sickly, enfeebled, diseased people in need of having our bottoms wiped by the state from dawn till dusk.

Red Ed, Fat Ed and all their unreconstructed comrades appalled me. But it was only when I saw that ugly graffiti sprayed on a memorial to women who gave their life for our freedom that I knew I would vote Conservative for the rest of my life. I looked at that graffiti - those three hateful little words - and felt an implacable opposition that will remain with me to my grave, something very like what they must have felt in Paris after mass murder had come to the offices of Charlie Hebdo. I knew, as the old Bowie song has it, that the shame was on the other side. And I thought, "Je suis Tory scum."

I like Ed Miliband. Whenever I have met him, I have found him to be an engaging and intelligent man. I don't think he's stupid. I don't think he's weird. I believe Miliband to be a well-intentioned man of principle who would have done to the British economy exactly what his socialist hero François Hollande has done to France.

Wreck it for a generation.

But none of that makes Ed a bad person. None of that makes him scum. So why are those of us who believe in a different economic model - one where aspiration is encouraged, where the state gets out of your way and doesn't spend money it doesn't have - morally reprehensible? Exactly why are we scum? History suggests that, when presented with the chance to vote for socialism the British people always run as fast as we can in the opposite direction. It doesn't make us bad people. But the left have lost the argument and are reduced to shrieking abuse.

Twitter - the frat house of left-wing piety - was incandescent in the aftermath of the general election. One popular image, widely shared, was of a deliveryman waiting outside 11 Downing Street with a trolley loaded with champagne. Oh, those wicked Tories! Swilling champagne while Martin Freeman rummages through a food bank! Tory scum! But the image was misleading because it dated from 9 September 2004, when Labour were in power and Gordon Brown, chancellor of the exchequer, had his big fat backside firmly planted in 11 Downing Street. "If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it," proclaimed Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels. And the big lie of our time is that the liberal left is morally pure and the Tories are filth.

But I will vote Tory for the rest of my life because there will be nobody else to vote for. I grew up in a working-class Labour household, had the traditional loud left leanings in my young manhood, but that Labour party is receding into the mists of history, as relevant to our own time as the Whigs or the Monster Raving Loony Party. There is no Old Labour or New Labour any more; there is only Dead Labour - a 20th-century party who find themselves as pertinent as banana rationing.

For Labour, this was the Red Wedding of general elections. Labour were obliterated by the SNP north of the border, run ragged by Ukip in the north of England and washed away by the Tories in the south. Labour will never come back from this defeat. I would bet my last euro that Labour will become little more than a debating society, endlessly preaching their pious certainties to each other. It will suit them. They will be much happier. They will keep their virtue intact and never have to make hard decisions in the real world.

Who cares who leads the Labour party next? Who cares what sound bites some mealy-mouthed "moderniser" is coached to make about "aspiration"? They will never again reach out to anyone but their dwindling core support. Dead Labour will get a warm glow when they remind each other how righteous they are, how morally superior to the wicked Tories. But the sanctimonious "progressives" who hate the Tories the most are always the party's greatest recruiting agents. Their shrill pieties make a much better case for Conservative government than [Conservative PM] David Cameron ever did.

Although the SNP may have annihilated Labour in Scotland, they drove England - where we have a sentimental attachment to democracy - into the arms of the Tory scum for generations. Every time the SNP's Nicola Sturgeon vowed, "We will lock David Cameron out of Number 10," she showed him where the key to the door was hidden.

It wasn't just the pollsters who got it wrong. It was the celebrity circus of ageing love gods and socially concerned luvvies who told us the Tories were Satan's spawn. Billy Bragg. Bilbo Baggins. All the shrill keyboard comrades on Twitter. It was the Guardian, sagely supporting Labour. And it was the BBC where, shortly before the general election, Andrew Marr wrongly accused David Cameron of "loving" fox hunting - TORY SCUM! - and later made a grovelling apology. "It turns out he never said it," choked Marr. The BBC today is about as representative of the British people as the men's toilets at the Guardian. Fifteen million people voted for the Tories or Ukip - but how many of them work in Broadcasting House? My guess would be: none. But none of it mattered.

The heartland of our country turns out to be staunchly conservative with a very small "c", and more than ten million of us remained remarkably unmoved by a political party broadcast by Bilbo Baggins and earnest leaders in the Guardian. We didn't care what they thought. Eddie Izzard stood by Ed Miliband's side in Scotland and we did not care. In fact, they made Tory scum of us all.

How certain they were that Labour would get to play the SNP's bitch. How little they know of the people of this country. More than ten million of us elected an Old Etonian prime minister and a Conservative government because there truly seemed to be no viable alternative.

We are often judged to be beyond the age of great political loyalties, when voters supported one party for a lifetime, as though it was a football team. And perhaps it is true. For among the nearly 11 million who voted Conservative were millions of Tories who came in from the cold - those of us who voted for Ukip at the European elections, but backed the Tories on 7 May. This was hard on Ukip - who got twice as many votes as the SNP, but returned only one MP - but so much was at stake that nobody had the luxury of a protest vote. We became Tory scum for the sake of the nation.

Because if you wanted economic stability, if you desired the freedom to discuss immigration without being thought of as racist, xenophobic and not very nice, then there was no alternative. If you want dignity for your parents, a better life for your children and a country that is not cowed by the politics of spite and envy, then there was no other way. If the Jurassic socialism of the Eds sickened you, all that palpable loathing of success dressed up as moral superiority, then there was only one place to go.

And it is no bad thing to vote for a party without any great expectations that they will lead you to some bright, shining new dawn. Because they never do. That is why politicians who are swept to power on a wave of wild hope - from Tony Blair to Nick Clegg - always end up as despised figures who disappoint those who loved them the most. Clegg will never be forgiven by all the dippy Lib Dems for the betrayal on tuition fees. And Blair - easily the most successful Labour Party leader in history - will always be loathed for his dirty little war in Iraq. Cameron will not break our hearts, because the millions who voted for him do not expect him to change our world. We just want him to do no harm. We see our country slowly emerging from the worst recession of our lifetimes and we don't want anyone to cock it up.

In his resignation speech, Ed Miliband declared that Labour may have lost the election but they "did not lose the argument". But of course Labour lost the argument - emphatically, comprehensively, totally. Presented with Miliband's vision of a socialist paradise, the British people reacted in exactly the same way they did when it was offered to them by Neil Kinnock and Michael Foot. They rejected it against all predictions. The left lost the argument and now they howl in the wilderness.

"You rarely hear people saying they 'hate' the Labour party," wrote Dominic Sandbrook in the Daily Mail. "You certainly hear it about the Conservatives - or, as left-wing activists like to call them, 'Tory scum'."

Who are these people screaming "Tory scum"? Most seem to hail from academia or the creative arts and have a column or blog in the Guardian. They are certainly not the working class. Rod Liddle wrote in the Spectator, "According to the pollster Peter Kellner, Ukip's support base is 61 per cent working class - way more than Labour, the party set up to represent the working class... Labour will be left as a party of the affluent, secular, achingly liberal London middle classes - plus all those minorities who have not yet decided to vote Green."

A total of 11,334,576 people voted Conservative not because the Tories are cruel, stupid or evil. Those softly spoken millions were not brainwashed by the right-wing press. They know what they want and it is certainly not Fat Ed talking about "mansions". Get beyond the watering holes of the metropolitan elite and the heartland's deeply held values - my family, my work, my country - are the new mainstream.

The loud left are as pertinent to modern Britain as blacksmiths. No wonder their protests are increasingly ugly. They react with furious disbelief at the result of a democratic election. They rave about balancing the nation's books as if it was like drowning kittens in a sack. They scream in our faces about their own compassion while bandying around epithets like "scum" and "filth" with the vicious abandon of Nazis talking about Jews.

So how are the Tories morally inferior to this shower? ["shower" is a polite but derogatory British expression.  The original form of the expression was "A shower of sh*t"]

The Conservatives now look like the natural party of government because only they seem to understand what our people believe. Hard work, a quiet patriotism, an instinctive self-reliance. And a future aspiring to more than having your bedpan changed by some saintly NHS nurse.

And every time I see another anti-austerity placard, or a Labour-loving hobbit, or defaced war memorial, I find myself warming to the pejorative the mob love to chuck around. I feel like wearing it as a badge of honour.

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, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated) and Coral reef compendium. (Updated as news items come in).  GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten. I also put up occasional updates on my Personal blog and each day I gather together my most substantial current writings on A WESTERN HEART.

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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Trump the Presbyterian

Donald Trump has undoubtedly been a sinner in his life but forgiveness of sin is central to Christianity so I cannot see any true Christian shunning him for that.  What his heart holds is what matters. John 3:16

I make no judgment on what doctrines he believes but even if he is basically an atheist, which seems possible, he is still very  clearly a cultural Christian -- as I am. I value the lessons of my Christian youth and still believe that the Bible is the best guide to a good life and is the bedrock of Western civilization.  Although I have been an atheist for all of my adult life,  I regularly defend Christianity -- and Trump does too.

In a Left-dominated age, Christians need all the friends they can get and, whatever he believes, it is clear that Trump would be a powerful and unabashed supporter of Christians. Trump for President! -- JR


Donald Trump recently showed up at a gathering of Iowa conservative Christian voters with a copy of the Bible in hand.

As the Republican presidential front-runner and billionaire businessman tries to maintain his lead in early polls with rivals quickly gaining ground, Trump is increasingly courting a wing of the Republican Party that might seem antithetical to his brand: evangelical Christians.

“I love them. They love me,” Trump, a Presbyterian, said of evangelicals last month in Greenville, South Carolina. “I love the Evangelicals, and it’s really shown in the polls.”

After initially declining the invitation, Trump will be speaking Friday in front of an expected 2,000 social conservative leaders at the Family Research Council’s Values Voter Summit in Washington. He joins a speaking program that includes Republican rivals with long records of dedication to religious causes — among them, former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, a Baptist pastor, and Texas Sen. Ted Cruz.

In many ways, Trump’s brand as the bombastic, thrice-married billionaire showman would seem an ill-fit among religious conservatives. He once held a reputation as a womanizing playboy, previously supported abortion rights, and appears to spend more time calling into Sunday morning talk shows than attending church.

Russell Moore, the president of the Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention, said Trump’s candidacy is fundamentally opposed to Christian values.

“When one looks at the very serious moral character questions, from Trump’s involvement in the casino gambling industry all the way through to his attitude toward women, Donald Trump is the embodiment of everything that evangelical Christians have been standing against in American culture,” he said.

Social conservatives are eager to have “a conversation” with Trump about his previous support for abortion rights, among other positions most conservatives strongly oppose, said Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council, which is hosting the Value Voters Summit.

On Monday he’s set to host a group of evangelical pastors and bishops from across the country for a private meeting and prayer session at Trump Tower in New York.

Several attendees, including Pastor Lionel Traylor of Jackson, Mississippi, said evangelical voters are particularly drawn to Trump’s direct style and his strong defense of Christians at a time “when Christianity is under attack.” Trump has frequently made reference to attacks on Christians abroad and said that he will be a champion for religious liberty, including defending Christmas.

Trump’s relationship with evangelical leaders goes back far longer than he’s been running for president.

According to previously reported tax documents, the Donald J. Trump Foundation has given to numerous Christian causes in recent years, including $100,000 to the Billy Graham Evangelist Association in 2012, as well as ministries as far away as Debra George Ministries in Texas and the Ramp Church in Lynchburg, Virginia.

Monday’s gathering is expected to open with a prayer service and include discussion of issues affecting the preachers’ communities, said Trump Organization attorney Michael Cohen, who struck up a friendship with Scott.

SOURCE

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Liberal Reasoning: Idiotic or Dishonest?

By Walter E. Williams

Many people argue that liberals, socialists and progressives do not understand basic economics. I am not totally convinced about that.

Take the law of demand, for example, one of the fundamental principles of economics. It holds that the lower the cost of something the more people will take or do of it. Conversely, the higher the cost the less people will take or do something. By their actions, liberals fully understand the law of demand. Let’s look at some proof.

The Seattle City Council voted unanimously to establish a tax on gun and ammunition sales. Hillary Clinton has called for a 25 percent tax on gun sales. In Chicago, Cook County Board President Toni Preckwinkle proposed “violence taxes” on bullets to discourage criminals from buying guns. Let’s ignore the merit of these measures. They do show that gun grabbers acknowledge the law of demand. They want fewer gun sales and thus propose raising the cost of guns.

NBCBLK contributor Danielle Moodie-Mills said, “We need to stop misgendering people in the media, and there needs to be some type of fine that’s put into place for … media outlets … that decide that they’re just not going to call people by their name.” What Moodie-Mills wants is for us to be obliged, if a man says he’s a woman, to address him as her and, if a woman says she’s a man, to address her as him. The basic point here is that Moodie-Mills acknowledges the fundamental law of demand when she calls for FCC fines for media people who “misgender” folks. By the way, if I claimed to be the king of Siam, I wonder whether she would support my demand that I be addressed as “your majesty.”

In the Ohio Legislature, Rep. Bill Patmon, a Democrat from Cleveland, introduced a bill to make it illegal to manufacture, sell or display toy guns. The ban would apply to any toy gun that a “reasonable person” could confuse with a real one. A $1,000 fine and up to 180 days in jail would be imposed for failure to obey the law. That’s more evidence that liberals understand the law of demand. You want less of something? Just raise its cost.

Even San Francisco liberals and environmentalists understand the law of demand. They’ve proposed a ban that over the next four years would phase out the sale of plastic water bottles that hold 21 ounces or less in public places. Violators could face fines of up to $1,000.

Former U.S. Secretary of Energy Steven Chu once said, “We have to figure out how to boost the price of gasoline to the levels in Europe” in order to make Americans give up their “love affair with the automobile.” If gas prices rise high enough, Chu knows that Americans will drive less.

There you have it — abundant evidence that liberals, socialists and progressives understand the law of demand. But wait a minute. What about raising the cost of hiring workers through increases in the minimum wage?

Aaron Pacitti, Siena College professor of economics, wrote that raising the minimum wage “would reduce income inequality and poverty while boosting growth, without increasing unemployment.” The leftist Center for Economic and Policy Research has written a paper whose title tells it all: “Why Does the Minimum Wage Have No Discernible Effect on Employment?” The U.S. Department of Labor has a page on its website titled “Minimum Wage Mythbusters,” which relays a message from liberal economists: “Increases in the minimum wage have had little or no negative effect on the employment of minimum-wage workers.”

What the liberals believe — and want us to believe — is that though an increase in the cost of anything will cause people to use less of it, labor is exempt from the law of demand. That’s like accepting the idea that the law of gravity influences the falling behavior of everything except nice people. One would have to be a lunatic to believe either proposition.

SOURCE

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British government medicine

Dr. Max Pemberton, an NHS doctor, gives us a vision of where Obamacare is likely to lead

Until recently, Addenbrooke’s Hospital in Cambridge was considered one of the best in the country and, indeed, one of the best centres in the world for cancer treatment and organ transplants. It was a jewel in the NHS crown.

All that changed this week when it was branded ‘inadequate’ by the Care Quality Commission (CQC), the hospital inspectors, and taken over by an ‘improvement director’.

For a hospital to be branded inadequate, you’d expect some seriously dreadful stories to have been uncovered: abuse, neglect, deaths.

But, in fact, the rating came down to staffing levels and failures in paperwork. Not enough staff isn’t an issue unique to Addenbrooke’s, of course, as NHS budgets are increasingly cut and frontline staff culled to make ends meet.

So how is an ‘improvement director’ going to solve this problem in a hospital that already has to overspend by £1.2 million a week just to keep going? This is the problem with the CQC — what they test for is utterly meaningless to anyone who actually uses the NHS.

To give you an idea of what an inspection is like — and how warped and unhelpful the criteria used — my hospital is currently in the throes of preparing for one.

My hospital is by no means perfect, but the staff work incredibly hard and everyone really cares about trying to get the best for their patients.

Yet rather than using actual real-life clinical encounters to assess the care, the inspectors use ‘proxies’ — substitute tests that can be easily measured. So they will ask me questions such as: Do I know the physical location of the infection control policy on my ward?

Regardless of the fact that I know what the infection control policy is — and, indeed, have been on training for this — I need to know where the folder with the actual piece of paper is. If I don’t, that’s a black mark.

At a meeting last week, someone realised the carpet between two rooms that are occasionally used is the wrong type. Apparently, it needs to be a special variety that doesn’t attract dust.

The current one is regularly vacuumed by the cleaners, but it seems that doesn’t matter. So now we’re running around frantically changing carpets so that we don’t get marked down. Do the people behind these inspections live in the real world?

If you’re having a heart attack in A&E, I don’t believe there’s a soul on this planet who’d care if the nurse providing pain relief could locate the staff uniform policy. It’s so ridiculous you could laugh. Almost.

Clearly, the people who have come up with these sorts of criteria have absolutely no awareness of what’s important to patients.

If they did, they’d go round seeing whether nurses brought you water when you were thirsty or held your hand when you were scared, or if a doctor stayed late to explain something to your daughter because she was worried — or any other of the million things that actually affect people’s experiences of the NHS.

Instead, the inspectors are going to quiz me on whether I’ve been on diversity training.

SOURCE

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Pope's encounter with daughter of illegal immigrants, 5, was a stunt

Sophie Cruz's brief encounter with Pope Francis during his parade in Washington this week appeared to be the kind of spontaneous moment that is so endearing about this pope: an initially hesitant young child wrapping an arm around his neck as he offers a kiss and a blessing.

But for 5-year-old Sophie, the moment unfolded as perfectly as it was scripted by members of a coalition of Los Angeles-based immigration rights groups. They had been preparing for nearly a year for the young girl from suburban Los Angeles to make a dash for the pope-mobile to deliver a message about the plight of immigrant parents living in the country illegally.

They had even pulled off a similar public-relations coup a year ago in Rome using a 10-year-old girl with the pope.

'We planned to do this from the moment we learned he was coming to the States,' Juan Jose Gutierrez of the Full Rights for Immigrants Coalition.

'We have been working for a while now trying to sensitize the American public that dealing with immigration is not just dealing with the people who came in without proper documents but that we also have ... countless children whose parents are undocumented.'

Gutierrez said the group decided to use the children of immigrants to represent their push for immigration reforms to the pope, a staunch supporter of immigrants.

Gutierrez said Sophie's success came from a 'combination of factors, one being in the right spot at the right time.' He added that he thinks Francis may also have remembered Jersey.

'When he saw this little girl,' Gutierrez said, 'he had to have known in his heart that this was another important message in the form of a little girl.'

SOURCE

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

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

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The chimpanzee effect confirmed

For some years now, I have been talking about a chimpanzee effect.  The idea is that at 6 months of age a chimpanzee baby is much more able in all ways than is a 6 month old human baby. But a human baby grows to be a much smarter adult that does a chimp.  So in assessing IQ, early measurements can be misleading.  So we find that the IQ gap between blacks and whites tends to become greater as time goes by.  In their brain-dead way Leftists tend to interpret the widening gap in various adverse ways.  They say that blacks start out smart but "whites" somehow oppress them.  They fail to take note that chimps develop earlier too.  And chimp IQ certainly does not plateau early because of "racism" or "oppression".

At no point, of course have I compared blacks to chimps.  I am just using the term "chimpanzee effect" as a vivid term for the general rule that final IQ will be reached more slowly the higher is the final level.

So I am rather pleased that the recent journal article below finds that effect in a solely human population. In the study below, lower socio-economic status children fill the role of chimps in my thesis.  But note again that I am not comparing ANY humans to chimps.  I am just pointing out what an initial high or low IQ finally leads to.  It may be worth noting that the final age in the study below was 16.  That age is usually found to be the point beyond which IQ does not develop further.

Socioeconomic status and the growth of intelligence from infancy through adolescence

by Von Stumm, Sophie and Plomin, Robert.

Abstract

Low socioeconomic status (SES) children perform on average worse on intelligence tests than children from higher SES backgrounds, but the developmental relationship between intelligence and SES has not been adequately investigated. Here, we use latent growth curve (LGC) models to assess associations between SES and individual differences in the intelligence starting point (intercept) and in the rate and direction of change in scores (slope and quadratic term) from infancy through adolescence in 14,853 children from the Twins Early Development Study (TEDS), assessed 9 times on IQ between the ages of 2 and 16 years. SES was significantly associated with intelligence growth factors: higher SES was related both to a higher starting point in infancy and to greater gains in intelligence over time. Specifically, children from low SES families scored on average 6 IQ points lower at age 2 than children from high SES backgrounds; by age 16, this difference had almost tripled. Although these key results did not vary across girls and boys, we observed gender differences in the development of intelligence in early childhood. Overall, SES was shown to be associated with individual differences in intercepts as well as slopes of intelligence. However, this finding does not warrant causal interpretations of the relationship between SES and the development of intelligence.

SOURCE

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Why I’ve finally given up on the left

Former moderate British Leftist, Nick Cohen, says below that Left-wing thought has shifted towards movements it would once have denounced as racist, imperialist and fascistic.  The rise to leadership of the British Labour party by neo-Marxist Jeremy Corbyn has made that very clear

‘Tory, Tory, Tory. You’re a Tory.’ The level of hatred directed by the Corbyn left at Labour people who have fought Tories all their lives is as menacing as it is ridiculous. If you are a woman, you face misogyny. Kate Godfrey, the centrist Labour candidate in Stafford, told the Times she had received death threats and pornographic hate mail after challenging her local left. If you are a man, you are condemned in language not heard since the fall of Marxist Leninism. ‘This pathetic small-minded jealousy of the anti-democratic bourgeois shows them up for the reactionary neocons they really are,’ a Guardian commenter told its columnist Rafael Behr after he had criticised Corbyn.

Not that they are careful about anything, or that they will take advice from me, but the left should be careful of what it wishes for. Its accusations won’t seem ridiculous soon. The one prophesy I can make with certainty amid today’s chaos is that many on the left will head for the right. When they arrive, they will be greeted with bogus explanations for their ‘betrayal’.

Conservatives will talk as if there is a right-wing gene which, like male-pattern baldness, manifests itself with age. The US leftist-turned-neocon Irving Kristol set the pattern for the pattern-baldness theory of politics when he opined that a conservative is a liberal who has been ‘mugged by reality’. He did not understand that the effects of reality’s many muggings are never predictable, or that facts of life are not always, as Margaret Thatcher claimed, conservative. If they were, we would still have feudalism.

The standard explanation from left-wingers is equally self-serving. Turncoats are like prostitutes, they say, who sell their virtue for money. They are pure; those who disagree with them are corrupt; and that is all there is to it.

Owen Jones, who seems to have abandoned journalism to become Jeremy Corbyn’s PR man, offers an equally thoughtless argument. ‘Swimming against a strong tide is exhausting,’ he sighed recently. Leftists who stray from virtue are defeated dissidents, who bend under the pressure to conform.

It won’t wash, particularly as Jones cannot break with the pressures that enforce conformity in his left-wing world and accept the real reason why many leave the left. It ought to be obvious. The left is why they leave the left. Never more so than today.

In the past, people would head to the exits saying, ‘Better the centre right than the far left.’ Now they can say ‘better the centre right than the far right’. The shift of left-wing thought towards movements it would once have denounced as racist, imperialist and fascistic has been building for years. I come from a left-wing family, marched against Margaret Thatcher and was one of the first journalists to denounce New Labour’s embrace of corporate capitalism — and I don’t regret any of it. But slowly, too slowly I am ashamed to say, I began to notice that left-wing politics had turned rancid.

In 2007 I tried to make amends, and published What’s Left. If they were true to their professed principles, my book argued, modern leftists would search out secular forces in the Muslim world — Iranian and Arab feminists, say, Kurdish socialists or Muslim liberals struggling against reactionary clerics here in Britain — and embrace them as comrades. Instead, they preferred to excuse half the anti-western theocrats and dictators on the planet. As, in their quiet way, did many in the liberal mainstream. Throughout that period, I never heard the BBC demanding of ‘progressives’ how they could call themselves left-wing when they had not a word of comfort for the Iraqi and Afghan liberals al-Qaeda was slaughtering.

The triumph of Jeremy Corbyn has led to "What’s Left" sales picking up, and readers acclaiming my alleged prescience. Grateful though I am, I cannot accept the compliment. I never imagined that left-wing politics would get as bad as they have become. I assumed that when the criminally irresponsible Blair flew off in his Learjet, the better angels of the left’s nature would re-assert themselves.

What a fool I was.

Jeremy Corbyn did not become Labour leader because his friends in the Socialist Workers party organised a Leninist coup. Nor did the £3 click-activist day-trippers hand him victory. He won with the hearty and freely given support of ‘decent’ Labour members.

And yes, thank you, I know all about the feebleness of Corbyn’s opponents. But the fact remains that the Labour party has just endorsed an apologist for Putin’s imperial aggression; a man who did not just appear on the propaganda channel of Russia, which invades its neighbours and persecutes gays, but also of Iran, whose hangmen actually execute gays. Labour’s new leader sees a moral equivalence between 9/11 and the assassination of bin Laden, and associates with every variety of women-hating, queer-bashing, Jew-baiting jihadi, holocaust denier and 9/11 truther. His supporters know it, but they don’t care.

They don’t put it like that, naturally. Their first response is to cry ‘smear’. When I show that it is nothing of the sort, they say that he was ‘engaging in dialogue’, even though Corbyn only ever has a ‘dialogue’ with one side and his ‘engagement’ never involves anything so principled as robust criticism.

A few on the British left are beginning to realise what they have done. Feminists were the first to stir from their slumber. They were outraged this week when Corbyn gave all his top jobs to men. I have every sympathy. But really, what did they expect from a man who never challenged the oppression of women in Iran when he was a guest on the state propaganda channel? You cannot promote equality at home while defending subjugation abroad and it was naive to imagine that Corbyn would try.

The women’s issue nicely illustrates the damage he can do, even if he never becomes prime minister. When Labour shows by its actions that it doesn’t believe in women’s equality, the pressure on other institutions diminishes. Secularists and liberal Muslims will feel a different kind of prejudice. They will no longer get a hearing for their campaigns against forced marriage and sharia law from a Labour party that counts the Muslim Brotherhood among his allies.

The position of the Jews is grimmer still. To be blunt, the new leader of the opposition is ‘friends’ with men who want them dead. One Jewish Labour supporter told me, ‘I feel like a gay man in the Tory party just after they’ve passed Section 28.’ Another described his position as ‘incredibly exposed’. He had ‘come to understand in the last few weeks, quite how shallow the attachment of the left is to principles which I thought defined it.’

And yes, thank you again, I know at this point I am meant to say that Corbyn isn’t an anti-Semite. Maybe he isn’t, but some of his best friends are, and the record shows that out of cynicism or conviction he will engage in the left’s version of ‘dog-whistle’ race politics.

I am middle-class and won’t suffer under the coming decade of majority Tory rule. Millions need a centre-left alternative, but I cannot see them being attracted by the revival of lumpen leftism either. Unlike their Scottish and French counterparts, the English intelligentsia has always had a problem with patriotism. Whenever this trend has manifested itself, voters have turned away, reasoning that politicians who appear to hate England are likely to have little time for the English.

By electing Corbyn, Labour has chosen a man who fits every cliché the right has used to mobilise working-class conservatism. In the 1790s, George Canning described the typical English supporter of the French Revolution ‘as a friend of every country but his own’. Today’s Tories can, with justice, say the same about Corbyn. George Orwell wrote of the ‘English intellectual [who] would feel more ashamed of standing to attention during “God Save the King” than of stealing from a poor box’. That came to mind on Tuesday when Corbyn declined to sing ‘God Save the Queen’ at the Battle of Britain remembrance service.

I opened What’s Left with a quote by Norman Cohn, from Warrant for Genocide, his history of how the conspiracy theories that ended in fascism began in the dark, neglected corners of 19th-century Europe:

It is a great mistake to suppose that the only writers who matter are those whom the educated in their saner moments can take seriously. There exists a subterranean world where pathological fantasies disguised as ideas are churned out by crooks and half-educated fanatics for the benefit of the ignorant and superstitious. There are times when this underworld emerges from the depths and suddenly fascinates, captures and dominates multitudes of usually sane and responsible people.

In the years since What’s Left was published, I have argued that the likes of Corbyn do not represent the true left; that there are other worthier traditions opposed to oppression whether the oppressors are pro-western or anti-western. I can’t be bothered any more. Cries of ‘I’m the real left!’, ‘No I’m the real left!’ are always silly. And in any case, there is no doubt which ‘real left’ has won.

The half-educated fanatics are in control now. I do not see how in conscience I can stay with their movement or vote for their party. I am not going to pretend the next time I meet Owen Jones or those Labour politicians who serve in Corbyn’s shadow cabinet that we are still members of the same happy family. There are differences that cannot and should not be smoothed over.

I realise now what I should have known years ago. The causes I most care about — secularism, freedom of speech, universal human rights — are not their causes. Whatever they pretend, when the crunch comes, they will always put sectarian unity first, and find reasons to be elsewhere.

So, for what it is worth, this is my resignation letter from the left. I have no idea who I should send it to or if there are forms to fill in. But I do know this: like so many before me, I can claim constructive dismissal.

SOURCE

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Huckabee says Obama 'pretends to be' a Christian after papal guest list includes pro-abortion nun, gay marriage bishop, transgender woman and Catholic school teacher sacked for marrying her girlfriend

Mike Huckabee said Tuesday that Barack Obama 'pretends to be a Christian,' after the president's guest list for Pope Francis' White House welcome ceremony included a short list of Catholics and other Christians who haev visibly parted with Church doctrine.

Huckabee told Newsmax TV that he is 'concerned about a guy that believes he's a Christian, and pretends to be and then says he is, but does things that makes it very difficult for people to practice their Christian faith.'

'I’m disappointed if a person says, "I’m a Christian," but you invite the Pope into your home and then you invite a whole bunch of people who are at odds with the Catholic Church policy. I think there’s something very unseemly about that.'

Huckabee lashed out at Obama on Tuesday in an essay published by The Daily Caller, saying he 'shows total disrespect to millions of Americans by transforming Pope Francis’ White House visit into a politicized cattle call for gay and pro-abortion activists.'

The former Arkansas governor, also a Baptist minister, is making his second run at the White House and aims to capture the enthusiasm of evangelicals.

Huckabee wrote Tuesday in his op-ed that before he was the Roman pontiff, 'when the issue emerged in his native Argentina, Pope Francis blasted same-sex marriage as a "destructive pretension against the plan of God".'

'Why then does the Obama White House invite crude critics of the Catholic Church and its teachings to welcome the Pope to America for the first time?' he asked.

SOURCE

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

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

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The New Left: Envy, Resentment and Hate

John C. Goodman

Bernie Sanders is angry. Who is he angry at? Rich people. Why rich people? That’s not clear.

At Liberty University, Sanders complained about a small number of people who have “huge yachts, and jet planes and tens of billions” while others “are struggling to feed their families.” In Madison Wisconsin, Sanders called for a “political revolution against greed.”

So what’s the connection between people who have “tens of billions” and people who are “struggling to feed their families”? For the most part it’s a positive one. In a capitalist system, people get rich by meeting other people’s needs. Because some people are rich, other people find it easier to feed their families.

Take the world’s richest man, Bill Gates. When I was a student at Columbia in the 1970s, I remember a friend showing me a fantastic hand held device. It could add, subtract, divide and multiply. And it only cost $400. Today, I can sit in bed with my lap top, which in 1970 dollars cost less than $400. I can buy and sell goods on eBay, conduct personal banking, purchase airline tickets, book hotel rooms and even work the New York Times crossword puzzle – in large part because of Bill Gates.

Take the world’s richest woman, JK Rowling. When she wrote the last Harry Potter book or helped on the last Harry Potter movie was she making anyone worse off? Was she taking food out of the mouths of babes? Or was she bringing entertainment and pleasure to millions of people?

Is Bill Gates greedy? There’s no evidence of that. He is giving all his money away in ways that are curing diseases that kill children all over the world. More generally, I have never met a truly creative person who was motivated by greed. But even if greed were the motivation, we need more of it – as long as it’s meeting our needs.

So what’s Sander’s complaint? Here are his own words:  "99 percent of all new income today (is) going to the top 1 percent.”

In 2007, "the top 1 percent of all income earners in the United States made 23.5 percent of all income," which is "more than the entire bottom 50 percent."

"Today the Walton family of Walmart own more wealth than the bottom 40 percent of America."

When Sam Walton was alive, he was one of the world’s richest men. Yet he wore blue jeans and drove a pickup truck. No one in Bentonville, Arkansas even knew he was rich until they read about it in Forbes. Is Walmart making it harder or easier for people to feed their families? You be the judge.

Behind the rhetoric on the left, there is one persistent theme, always implicit, never explicit. Leftist rhetoric is designed to encourage people to believe that the reason they are poor is  because other people are rich.

And this kind of rhetoric is not confined to politicians who know nothing of basic economics. Paul Krugman, Joe Stiglitz, Jeffrey Sachs and other well-known economists are just as guilty. They invariably imply that “all property is theft,” a staple of barn yard Marxism. Yet, on rigorous examination, this idea is silly. Most of the people on the Forbes 400 list are self-made or next generation of self-made billionaires.

Writing in the Dallas Morning News, Cullen Godfrey asks: why do we demonize billionaires?

"They didn’t steal our money. They earned our money by providing us with the things that we want and that make our lives better. The Forbes 400 list includes names such as Oprah Winfrey, filmmakers Steven Spielberg and George Lucas, Jeff Bezos (Amazon), Phil Knight (Nike), Elon Musk (Tesla), Charles Schwab, Ralph Lauren and Michael Ilitch (Domino’s Pizza). Of course, there are those with inherited wealth, but the vast majority on the list are first-generation, self-made billionaires, and those with inherited wealth have, as a rule, been excellent stewards of their good fortune."

Like Jeremy Corbyn, the new Labour Party leader in Britain, Bernie Sanders is appealing to our worst instincts. His is not the message of compassion and love. His is the message of resentment, jealousy and hate.

What would he do? Tax capital. He hasn’t given us a figure, but if he goes along with the 90 percent income tax rate favored by Paul Krugman or the 80 percent rate proposed by Thomas Piketty, Bill Gates may never have been able to start Microsoft. Sam Walton may never have given us Sam’s Club.

As I wrote at Forbes earlier this week, the left is intellectually bankrupt. While appealing to our basest emotions, they have no real solutions to any real problems. In fact, their “solutions” would almost certainly make the poor more poor.

There is, however, a proposal from the right of the political spectrum: tax consumption rather than saving, investment and capital accumulation. As I wrote previously:

"[W]hen Warren Buffett is consuming, he’s benefiting himself. When he’s saving and investing, he’s benefiting you and me. Every time Buffett forgoes personal consumption (a pricey dinner, a larger house, a huge yacht) and puts his money in the capital market instead, he’s doing an enormous favor for everyone else. A larger capital stock means higher productivity and that means everyone can have more income for the same amount of work. So it’s in our self-interest to have very low taxes on Buffett’s capital. In fact, capital taxes should be zero. That means no capital gains tax, no tax on dividends and profits — so long as the income is recycled back into the capital market.

We should instead tax Buffett’s consumption. Tax him on what he takes out of the system, not what he puts into it. Tax him when he is benefiting himself, not when he is benefiting you and me."

SOURCE

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British National Health Service Stops Paying for Lifesaving Drugs

Britain’s government-monopoly (single-payer) health plan, the National Health Service (NHS), has announced plans to stop paying for the most innovative, lifesaving drugs:

    "More than 5,000 cancer patients will be denied life-extending drugs under plans which charities say are a “dreadful” step backwards for the NHS.

    Health officials have just announced sweeping restrictions on treatment, which will mean patients with breast, bowel, skin and pancreatic cancer will no longer be able to receive drugs funded by the NHS.

    In total, 17 cancer drugs for 25 different indications will no longer be paid for in future.

    Charities said the direction the health service was heading in could set progress back by centuries.

    The Cancer Drugs Fund was launched in 2011, following a manifesto pledge by David Cameron, who said patients should no longer be denied drugs on cost grounds.

    Drugs which will no longer be funded include Kadcyla for advanced breast cancer, Avastin for many bowel and breast cancer patients, Revlimid and Imnovid for multiple myeloma, and Abraxane, the first treatment for pancreatic cancer in 17 years."

This is the second round of cuts this year. All in all, reimbursement for 25 drugs used by about 8,000 patients has been cut off.

Unfortunately, this is not surprising. In a functioning health insurance market, these drugs would be reimbursed because they are very expensive and are used by a very small proportion of patients suffering from cancers with few other treatments. In other words, exactly the situation that calls for insurance.

In a system run by politicians, the incentives are upside down and unfair:

    The financial ability to pay is determined not by premiums paid, but by the government’s overall budget.

    The number of patients does not comprise a large enough interest group to cause politicians to prioritize their interests.

    There is no way to legally enforce the so-called “social contract” (as opposed to an actual insurance contract, which courts would enforce) that the politicians and bureaucrats promote to convince us to trust them.

Note, also, that Britain is home to leading pharmaceutical companies, including GlaxoSmithKine and AstraZeneca, and world-class academic pharmaceutical research. They should be able to make strong arguments for their contribution to good-paying jobs and economic growth. Unfortunately, the perverse incentives in a government-monopoly, single-payer health system are too strong to be overcome by even the best arguments.

SOURCE

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Trump, Carson and the Islamic Controversy

Over the last several days, the Leftmedia have worked themselves into a tizzy over two particular presidential candidates, Donald Trump and Ben Carson, following comments that were made — and not made — about Muslims. It’s one of those “gotcha” moments when a candidate must choose between speaking what he believes, dodging the question or simply not saying anything. Regardless of how the candidate answers, they will catch heat for it, primarily because they are Republicans.

During a town hall meeting in New Hampshire, a questioner accused Barack Obama of being a Muslim, of not being American and stated, “We have [Muslim] training camps growing where they want to kill us, that’s my question. When can we get rid of them?”

Trump didn’t respond the way many in the Leftmedia thought that he should have. He didn’t rebut the questioner’s accusations about Obama’s religion or citizenship. (After all, Trump himself once questioned Obama’s citizenship.) Instead, Trump answered the question vaguely, stating, “We’re going to be looking at a lot of different things, and a lot of people are saying that and saying that bad things are happening out there. We’re going to be looking at that and plenty of other things.”

To be sure, Trump could have answered the question better, and he could have taken the bait to address the man’s accusations. But he didn’t — or rather, deliberately chose to ignore the accusations from the man because he foresaw the media onslaught that would surely follow. In his own words, Trump told ABC News, “If I would have challenged the man … to put it mildly the media would have accused me of interfering with that man’s right of free speech. … A no win situation, do we agree?”

Perhaps Trump could have responded to the man’s accusation by recalling Hillary Clinton’s own veiled Obama-is-a-Muslim claim in 2008, or reminding voters of Obama’s interview with ABC’s George Stephanopoulos in which Obama mentions “my Muslim faith.” But Trump didn’t address it, and the media are having a field day.

None of this is to say that Obama is a Muslim. But his claim that he is a Christian is just as far fetched. Obama spent 20 years attending the “church” of the Marxist black liberation theology-spouting Jeremiah Wright. It’s far more likely, based on his actions, rhetoric and narcissism, that he worships himself, and will say or do whatever is politically expedient.

As columnist David Limbaugh writes, “It’s true we can’t know for sure what’s in a person’s heart, but we can observe his statements and behavior. … This is not a man with a track record of authenticity.”

“You will recognize them by their fruits,” Jesus said.

Meanwhile, Dr. Ben Carson stirred up controversy following an interview because of what he did say.

Keeping this question in context with Trump not correcting a questioner, when asked if a president’s faith should matter, Carson responded, “It depends on what that faith is. If it’s inconsistent with the values and principles of America, then of course it should matter.” He added that he “would not advocate that we put a Muslim in charge of this nation.”

He answered the question, but it clearly wasn’t what “tolerant” leftists wanted to hear. The Leftmedia have tried for more than a decade to convince Americans that Islam is the Religion of Peace™, so how could Carson say such a thing? Is he an Islamophobe? No, he just happens to understand that Sharia law, which is part of Islam, is inconsistent with the values and principles enshrined in the Constitution.

National Review’s Andrew McCarthy offers an outstanding explanation:

“Islam’s sharia is a code premised on the principles that Allah has prescribed the ideal way for human life to be lived; that people are required to submit to that prescription; and that Islamic governments exist to enforce that requirement. Our Constitution, to the contrary, is premised on the principles that we are free to choose how we will live; the laws we make are not required to comply with the principles of any religion; and that government is our servant, not our master.”

McCarthy further notes that Islam should be understood by public figures as both a religion and an all-encompassing political-social ideology. And that’s the very reason why Carson answered the question the way he did. Sharia law is the antithesis of the Constitution. It’s also why when Carson was asked if he would consider voting for a Muslim for Congress he replied that it would “depend on who that Muslim is and what their policies are.”

For Carson, if a practicing Muslim’s political ideology reflects that of the Constitution, rather than Sharia law, then that person is eligible for office. If not, then there is no place in American politics for them.

Of course, there is no Muslim running for president. But Americans should welcome this debate as we consider what it takes to sit in the executive seat of constitutional government. Remember what that is?

SOURCE

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

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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