Evolutionary biology:  Three theories

Evolutionary biology is an inherently speculative field and new fossil finds seem regularly to upset such theories. So I am going to concentrate on theories for which we have some solid data -- in the form of IQ scores.  I am going to look at just 3 populations for which average IQ has now been fairly securely assessed: East Asians, Europeans and Australian Aborigines. Why do the scores decline so markedly across those three groups? I think the main key is warfare or the lack of it.

Europeans are an interesting example of balance.  They have had frequent and ferocious wars with one-another but have also had substantial periods of peace. And they seem to have benefited from both.  Wars are often won by guile rather than by numbers  but that is never easy and requires ever-changing tactics.  So a general problem solving ability was selected for.  Europeans developed their IQs to help them win their many wars. A smarter tribe tended to win and therefore prosper, with more children being born for that tribe.

But the periods of peace were long enough for the pursuits of peace to thrive from time to time also.  And one of the most interesting peaceful pursuit is enquiry, scholarship, finding things out.  And because of that scholarship tends to be highly regarded.  Even in ancient Sumeria there is a record of a father bringing a fleece to give to a teacher. Which is something of an advance on an apple but we can see the same motive and the same respect.

So scholarly people tended to be well supported and hence were an economically successful group.  Sadly, many of the European scholars were celibate monks so the effect was probably much less than it might have been. The monks did however help to make scholarship prestigious so that was a useful function.

An interesting special case is the Germans.  For most of history, there was no German nation.  Germany was a geographical concept only.  It was a place where many large and small independent nations lived who all spoke a form of German.  And, ever since the Roman republic and probably before, Germans have always been warlike. And they as often made war on one-another as they did on others.  So they were heavily selected for martial ability.  Only good warriors survived.  And that selectivity did result not only in a healthy IQ but also in other advantageous attributes.  Their average IQ did not become outstanding compared with their neighbors because it was supplemented by other advantages, one of which is extreme: innovativeness.

It was probably the desirability of military flexibility that made Germans into master innovators, something I have written at length about previously. Leftist psychologists go to great lengths to isolate important intellectual abilities that are not captured by IQ tests but their suggested alternatives mostly reduce to absurdity.  So it is amusing that one of the few genuine alternatives is innovativeness.  That Germans are the masters in that attribute must grind a few gears, however.

Hollywood war movies portray German troops as rigid and robotic bunglers so my characterization of them as flexible will no doubt be a surprise to non-historians.  In fact however, flexibility in tactics was preached in Vom Kriege,  that great Prussian bible of military doctrine by Clausewitz, written early in the 19th century.  The big bunglers of WWII were allied troops.

Particularly in the case of the Prussians (North-Eastern Germans), their martial tendencies were channeled in another direction as well:  into a military personality, with self-discipline being a major part of that. For instance, punctuality requires self discipline and Germans are famous for that.

Speaking more generally, it once used to be said that you just had to drop any German into a military uniform and he immediately became the perfect soldier.  And the exploits of the Wehrmacht in WWII were amazing.  Although heavily outnumbered they very nearly won, despite the large handicap of Corporal Hitler's overall inept leadership.

Just to give you the flavor of that, the British air ace with the highest number of enemy aircraft shot down was "Johnnie" Johnson, with 38 "kills". By comparison, Erich Hartmann of the Luftwaffe had 352 "kills". A similar ratio was not unknown in WWII tank battles.

But Germany did have periods of peace so the arts of peace thrived there as well.  It might be noted that the contributions to the arts made by Germans as a group were however very unevenly distributed, with Austria being by far the greatest contributor -- particularly in music -- and Prussia the least. To this day, about two thirds of the classical repertoire in music was composed in Austria (Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert etc.).

So what is distinctive about Austria?  It was a large empire that got big not by war but by intermarriage of its royal family with other royal families.  They did have wars -- particularly with invading Prussians -- but life in the empire was mostly peaceful.  So "useless" but beguiling things like music and literature could thrive.

And up to WWII, Vienna, the capital of Austria, was THE great city.  It was the intellectual capital of the world.  Most of the eminent philosophers (e.g. Schlick, Wittgenstein), psychologists (e.g. Freud, Jung), Economists (e.g. Boehm von Bawerk, Mises) and artists (e.g. Klimt, Klee) were there. And Vienna was also prominent in new music. It was the home of a great new musical artform, the operetta -- with operettas by composers such as Strauss and Kalman generating many perennially popular songs.  Dutch musical entrepreneur Andre Rieu is a great user of songs from operetta.

China

Compared with Europe, China had long periods of peace under the various dynasties.  So peaceful pursuits could flourish.  And one of those pursuits was scholarship, a much respected pursuit. So China developed its famous civil service examinations, which gave you access to the Chinese elite.  You reached the top in China not by the sword but by the ink brush. And that made scholarship universally respected and aspired to.

And a major factor in scholarly achievement is IQ. So it was the high IQ section of the Chinese population who got all the gravy. They flourished economically and thus tended to have more children.  So IQ was heavily selected for in China over many generations. And so we have the finding today that the Chinese are roughly half a standard deviation higher in average IQ than are Westerners.

And Chinese civilization was much admired in Korea and Japan.  Confucian thinking was adopted there. Chinese bureaucracy, culture, religion, and philosophy were closely studied.  Japan had a particular advantage there.  The Tokugawa shogunate gave Japan over 200 years of peace, an unprecedented achievement. So peaceful pursuits were of particular interest there as well. The Chinese model was largely adopted, with similar results.  So China, South Korea and Japan are closely similar in IQ.

Which leads to an interesting contrast:  Other East Asians, such as the Chinese and Vietnamese do quite poorly on average IQ.  How come?  They all look the same to us!  The Philippines is an easy answer. They are separated from China by rather a lot of ocean.  China did have some influence but the Filipinos mostly went on with their own ways.

And for Vietnam, the problem was the neighborhood bully:  China.  Vietnam was a minor issue in China but China was a big issue in Vietnam.  Little Vietnam kept being invaded from next-door China.  And because China could muster far more troops than Vietnam, Vietnamese had to develop as warriors if they wanted to keep China at bay. And they did.  Like Germans, the Vietnamese became a warrior race -- as both France and the USA found out in the 20th century.  So there was much less scope for peaceful pursuits in Vietnam. Keeping out foreigners became the Vietnamese specialty. And they are still good at that.

Aborigines

And so on to Australian Aborigines, who register one of the lowest average IQs that have been found.  And their unusual situation was very clear: isolation. They had virtually no contact with the outside world for as much as 60,000 years. So they developed with reference to the Australian environment only. And Australia as it was before white settlement tended to be an unforgiving place.  It was hard to make a living there.  For a primitive people the food supply was always precarious.  So the environment was the big challenge and the big shaping influence.  And shape them it did.

Aborigines are not inferior to others intellectually.  They have just deveoloped different intellectual skills.  The skills they have are a very poor at dealing with IQ tests or modern life generally but are superbly adapted to their lives before the white men came along.  Each tribe usually had a fairly wide geographic range that they wandered over.  They had to.  They were hunter/gatherers, not farmers.  So food was scarce everywhere, particularly in the large dry areas of Australia.  So detecting from afar and creeping up on juicy herbivores was the big requirement for life.

So Aborigines developed a quite eerie ability to "read" and remember the landscape. If a few leaves on the ground had moved in the last day or two, an Aborigine would notice that as a message that there was an animal nearby.  He could probably even say which sort of animal. You have to see it to believe it.  They just have enormous visual abilities and a vast visual memory.

That extraordinary skill was in fact very useful to the white man in earlier days. It was useful in tracking down fugitives and criminals.  So the phenomenon of the "black tracker" arose.  Aborigines were hired by police to find people who would otherwise be unfindable.  An evildoer might think that he had made good his escape and he would be right in thinking that -- UNTIL the police put a black tracker on his trail.  The black tracker would see a clear trail that was invisible to whites.  Just a slightly turned leaf would be enough. So crooks who thought they were safe were often surprised to find police knocking on their door.

I could go on.  The way the environment often underlies human differences is fascinating.  I will forbear from mentioning Africans however.

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Another set of findings showing that IQ scores are firmly grounded in DNA

Note that a particular DNA profile correlated .78 with educational attainment and .86 with IQ. That is about as high as you get in explaining human variation

A genome-wide association study for extremely high intelligence

D Zabaneh et al.

Abstract

We used a case–control genome-wide association (GWA) design with cases consisting of 1238 individuals from the top 0.0003 (~170 mean IQ) of the population distribution of intelligence and 8172 unselected population-based controls. The single-nucleotide polymorphism heritability for the extreme IQ trait was 0.33 (0.02), which is the highest so far for a cognitive phenotype, and significant genome-wide genetic correlations of 0.78 were observed with educational attainment and 0.86 with population IQ. Three variants in locus ADAM12 achieved genome-wide significance, although they did not replicate with published GWA analyses of normal-range IQ or educational attainment. A genome-wide polygenic score constructed from the GWA results accounted for 1.6% of the variance of intelligence in the normal range in an unselected sample of 3414 individuals, which is comparable to the variance explained by GWA studies of intelligence with substantially larger sample sizes. The gene family plexins, members of which are mutated in several monogenic neurodevelopmental disorders, was significantly enriched for associations with high IQ. This study shows the utility of extreme trait selection for genetic study of intelligence and suggests that extremely high intelligence is continuous genetically with normal-range intelligence in the population.

Molecular Psychiatry advance online publication 4 July 2017; doi: 10.1038/mp.2017.121

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A real man holds his own umbrella


Donald Trump speaks with reporters on Friday



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

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

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Who is the Ruling Class? They Exposed Themselves Last Night

Let me start by saying that I have a deep reverence for John McCain as an American hero of the last century. In his currently stricken state, it might seem that he is a poor choice of starting point for this particular argument. I would argue that exactly the opposite is true. For more on the other side of Senator McCain, here is a good primer.

Last night he and two other Republicans drove a stake through the heart of the attempt to stop the nationalization of health care. He left the care of his own doctors and flew to Washington for that express purpose. This is the very pinnacle of ruling class hubris. Whilst engaged in a battle for his own life and taking advantage of a level health care that most Americans can only dream of, he flew across the continent to cast a vote against the tide of failed government interference in the market for medical care that has succeeded only in breaking the system to the point that we are on the brink of an irresistible movement to take freedom out of health care altogether and institute “single payer” government control.

Leaving aside the illogic of increasing the control of the government in order to “fix” what the government broke in the first place, I want to focus on the people whose ”leadership” keeps us digging while it becomes more and more improbable that we could ever climb out of this hole into which we have all, leaders and constituents, dug ourselves.

The most privileged people in our country are arrogant and self-important. But they are still dependent on the votes and confidence of the public. To convince the voting public, themselves and each other that they are magnanimous and trustworthy, they make public shows of “compassion”. They crusade to expand insurance coverage for “the uninsured”. They open our borders without discrimination both to those who will enrich our culture and those who will impoverish it. They grant subsidies for all manner of anti-social and counter-productive behavior: low interest financing and tax benefits for useless degrees at schools that offer not much more than “party campuses” and breeding grounds for political unrest, welfare benefits that encourage families without fathers and multi-generational dependance the list is endless. The bottom line is that The United States of America is turning into a modernized reproduction of the Ancient Regimes of pre World War I.

Instead of “The Church”, The Royal Families and the Landed Aristocrats, we now have Politicians, Academics, Journalists and Money Manipulators as our “betters” but the result is very similar. If I had the artistic talent, I would do an updated version of the Heinrich Kley drawing showing the new worthies loading up the backs of our working people and entrepreneurs with illegal immigrants, affirmative action, alternative energy, relaxed mortgage requirements for people designed to encourage minority home ownership, single payer health care and all the other vanity projects of our ruling class.

John McCain is sick and he is fighting, once again, for his life but let’s get this straight because it is life and death for the rest of us. He had the opportunity to get treatment and his operation at the VA. He is entitled and deserving of that for his service. As a grateful nation, we should ensure that the VA gives the best care possible to our veterans. He, however, chose not to get that treatment but to go to The Mayo Clinic. I cannot fault that decision personally but politically, it is very telling.

 More and more our “public servants” send their children to private schools, use government paid transportation, live behind security walls with armed guards, ignore laws and ethical practices the rest of us are held to, avoid taxes with impunity, amass private wealth at the public trough and, in general, live lives that are entirely unlike ours.

They keep pushing the idea that they are compassionate, not by living compassionate lives or even by helping the poor achieve better lives, but by posing as compassionate people. It is an illusion! The programs they create do nothing but continually decrease the difference between those who work and those who don’t work. They take our tax money and create federal fiefdoms (EPA, HUD, BLM, Education, etc…,) that create and exacerbate more problems than they solve.

Most corrosive of all, they tell the undocumented aliens and the entrenched poor they have taken into their plantation that they are their benefactors. then the go home, with a wink to their fellow elitists, to their gated communities. This is where we are headed as a nation unless we can get the right leadership in place. We now have a president who gets it but the McCain, Collins, Alexander, Moore-Capito, Heller, Murkowski, and Portman votes of last evening just added more burden for us all, This virtue posing and false compassion is killing us. We need it to stop.

SOURCE

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The Staircase to Government Corruptocracy

In Toronto, common sense is severely lacking. A resident spent a relatively paltry $550 — provided through the benevolence of him and his community — to erect a park staircase on a dangerous slope. Apparently, government officials were upset over the initiative shown by the resident, who had serious and legitimate qualms with the city’s project estimate of at least $65,000 (and possibly as high as $150,000). Under the guise of safety requirements, the city considered destroying the stairway to install what it deems is a regulatory-compliant structure. Fortunately, new indications are that demolition is probably off the table and refinements will be pursued.

Update: The city moved forward with destroying the structure and a new one will be assembled for roughly $10,000. Which begs the question: Where in the world did the original estimate come from?
According to Mayor John Tory, “We just can’t have people decide to go out to Home Depot and build a staircase in a park because that’s what they would like to have.” The question is: Why not? To be fair, the mayor did also call his government’s price tag “completely out of whack with reality.” But that’s not stopping him from venting frustration. We’re literally talking about eight steps. Park-goers were getting injured. And for $550 residents solved two issues: unnecessary government expenditure and a dangerous situation that wasn’t being sufficiently remediated. It may not be the most well-built structure, but it’s better than government either doing nothing or wasting tax dollars. It would be easy to mock Canada for this uncanny situation, but it’s hardly a Canadian specialty. Taxpayers here in the U.S. know just how pitiful the government is when it comes to frugality.

John Stossel chronicles a similarly obnoxious case of government waste in his most recent column. He writes, “Did you see the $2 million dollar bathroom? That’s what New York City government spent to build a ‘comfort station’ in a park. I went to look at it. There were no gold-plated fixtures. It’s just a little building with four toilets and four sinks.” He adds, “No park bathroom needs to cost $2 million. An entire six-bedroom house nearby was for sale for $539,000.” But no matter: “Everything costs more when government builds it.” For the record, another bathroom located at nearby Bryant Park was constructed for a far more reasonable $300,000 — because, Stossel says, it’s privately managed. He notes, “Since government spends other people’s money, they don’t care that much about cost and they certainly don’t care much about speed.”

The fact is, government is just about the worst money manager there is. Take Barack Obama’s “stimulus,” for example. According to The Washington Free Beacon, some of the waste that occurred from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act included funding for studies analyzing duck penises, erectile dysfunction and obesity, alcoholic effects on mice, as well as funding for puppet shows vilifying free enterprise and, least but not least, the infamous Solyndra debacle.

Even Obama conceded that “shovel-ready was not as shovel-ready as we expected.” And no wonder — a good deal of it was spent on frivolous and unnecessary things. This underscores too the importance of making frugal decisions when it comes to infrastructure repairs. As Tony Caporale and Marc Poitras write at Real Clear Policy, “Infrastructure Spending Must Justify Itself.” And the private sector has to play a critical role. Otherwise, you risk outlandish outcomes. Like $2 million bathrooms, multi-thousand-dollar staircases and even research on duck private parts.

SOURCE

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Leftists Suddenly Worry About Politicizing Boy Scouts

What could be less controversial than the president of the United States addressing the Boy Scouts of America jamboree in West Virginia? Of all the public addresses given by President Donald Trump in the first seven months of his presidency, surely this one would keep Democrats and their media attack dogs from going into hysterics.

Think again. Leftists managed to characterize the speech with their typical vitriol, exaggeration and animosity. Some even compared the event to a Hitler Youth rally. But it doesn't take long to figure out that much of the criticism has less to do with Trump talking politics at the jamboree than it does with Trump talking about the "wrong" politics.

Case in point: New York Magazine's headline reads, "The 14 Most Inappropriate Moments From Trump's Speech at the Boy Scout Jamboree." The headline suggests that Trump invited the Scouts to join him for beer and poker after the event. Yet many of the 14 points are based on Trump criticizing Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and the press. Trump's speech was indeed political, and we could have done without his reference to a party in New York, but it was hardly inappropriate.

Opining in The Washington Post, Stephen Stromberg took issue with the ideological content and erratic nature of Trump's address. He remarked, "Sure, scout membership skews right. But those of us who did not fit that stereotype know that the organization is and should be open to all. I spent middle and high school in a small troop that met in a Mormon church but contained Jews, agnostics, a Seventh-day Adventist and various others." But Trump didn't say anything about religion. Talk about erratic.

Scroll down a few paragraphs and the real reason for the outrage over Trump's remarks comes to the surface. Stromberg adds: "When one of our fellow scouts came out of the closet, he left the troop. But the BSA has since revised its membership policies to better reflect its mission of offering guidance to all young men."

There you go. Stromberg and other leftists aren't as upset over Trump's partisan remarks as they are about his failure to touch on the issues that Democrats want the boys to hear. We doubt Trump would have been criticized had he stated that the Scouts need to be more diverse and inclusive. Had he called for more transgender Scouts, Democrats would be lauding his remarks.

Some of the criticism of Trump's speech is understandable. He should have focused more on the Scouts' history and core principles, or on American patriotism and civics more generally. But the most critical remarks have come from Democrats and Republicans who already have issues with the president.

While the content of Trump's address has been the focus, far less reporting has been done on the fact that the Scouts cheered just about everything he had to say, despite the fact that the president of the Scouts discouraged them from showing partisan support for Trump. But they couldn't resist. Despite his flaws, the Scouts know that Trump will defend and fight for their values.

Apparently, however, the organization's leadership wasn't pleased. On Thursday, Chief Scout Executive Michael Surbaugh stated, "I want to extend my sincere apologies to those in our Scouting family who were offended by the political rhetoric that was inserted into the jamboree."

But Surbaugh didn't mind getting political when transgender Scouts were admitted earlier this year. At the time, Surbaugh exclaimed, "Communities and state laws are now interpreting gender identity differently than society did in the past. And these new laws vary widely from state to state." It was no different when they accepted homosexual Scouts four years ago and homosexual leaders two years ago. In other words, some in the BSA are perfectly willing to change according to the shifting political winds, as long as those winds are blowing in a certain direction.

Surbaugh's apology seems hypocritical and one-sided. After all, where were the apologies to the Scouts offended by the Left's political and cultural ideology over the past generation? And did anyone apologize when delegates to the 2000 Democrat National Convention actually booed Boy Scouts when they walked on the stage?

There were no apologies then, just political attacks against the Scouts. Philip Wegmann writes in the Washington Examiner, "The Boy Scouts have come under fire in the last two decades because of their membership standards concerning gay boys and leaders. They were regularly attacked as bigots in the editorial pages of the New York Times. They were mocked by the likes of Madonna (the elderly Queen of Pop creepily proclaimed she knew 'how to scout for boys.') And they were assaulted in the courts again and again and again."

As for the media, it's beyond hypocritical that they're suddenly worried about the Boy Scouts of America. The Left has successfully forced the BSA to change core principles and beliefs for many years, but suddenly media types are worried that Donald Trump criticizing Barack Obama is somehow going to tarnish a century's worth of Boy Scout values. All this damage had been done long before Trump took the stage at this year's jamboree.

The Rules and Regulations of the Boy Scouts of America state that the organization "must not, through its governing body or through any of its officers, chartered councils, Scouters, or members, involve Scouting in political matters." The handbook should have been revised years ago, because the BSA is very much a political organization these days. All President Trump did was provide a different political view. And that's the real reason why his speech has been condemned.

SOURCE

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

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

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Picture gallery

Every now and again I put up a retrospective of what I think are the "best" pictures from my various blogs.  I have just put up the selection for the second half of last year.  You can access it here or here

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Democrats' 'Better Deal' — Same as the Old New Deal

Rolling out 80-year-old socialist ideas isn't the way to chart a way forward for the party in the wilderness  

Donald Trump has been president for six months now and if you listen to Democrats and the Leftmedia, you might conclude that he and the Republican-controlled Congress are destroying America. But perhaps there is no better indicator of Trump’s performance thus far as president than to hear Democrats rail about how terrible a job he has done and how horrific his policies are.

Democrats remain dumbfounded at his election and they’re even more confused that the last four special elections ended with Republican victories. Their “progressive” proposals and the millions of dollars they’ve wasted on campaigns haven’t worked.

That said, at least Chuck Schumer has enough sense to tell Hillary Clinton to stop blaming everyone else. “When you lose to somebody who has 40% popularity, you don’t blame other things — Comey, Russia — you blame yourself,” Schumer said. “And the number one thing that we did wrong is … we didn’t tell people what we stood for.”

So, this week, Democrats introduced their “Better Deal” for America. But you’d be forgiven for thinking it sounds just like everything they’ve been saying for 80 years. As Jonah Goldberg quipped, “I mean, the word ‘Deal’ is hardly subtle.”

Their beloved highness Nancy Pelosi wrote an opinion piece in The Washington Post to lay out this supposedly better deal. Predictably, Pelosi starts by ripping Republicans for wanting to dismantle the (Un)Affordable Care Act, claiming that they’re “trying to raise Americans’ health costs to fund tax breaks for billionaires.” Naturally, she leaves out the details of the Democrats’ health care takeover. The mandate to buy health insurance policies that cover a long list of (often unwanted) required services caused premiums to skyrocket, squeezing the very voters she’s trying to reach with this noxious class warfare.

Trump wants ObamaCare gone, though Senate Republicans failed to accomplish any meaningful repeal and so, for now, we’re stuck with the Democrats’ terrible law.

Aside from this, Pelosi and her fellow Democrats are offering three empty slogans: better jobs, better wages and a better future. All of these sound like fantastic proposals for Americans, but the methods Democrats want to use to accomplish these goals are the same ideas that had the opposite effect and brought on the 2008 financial crisis.

On jobs, Pelosi writes, “Democrats are pledging ourselves to the goal of creating good-paying, full-time jobs for 10 million more Americans in the next five years.” When is the last time that a politician created a job? Government cannot create jobs without taking money from those who are already working in order to pay for it. Her proposal offers a new tax credit for companies that train and hire skilled workers and offer them a good wage (read: higher minimum wage). Aren’t successful companies already doing this and without a tax credit?

On better wages, beyond a higher, job-destroying $15/hour minimum wage, Pelosi wants government to crack down on large corporations and monopolies that she blames for Americans missing out on opportunities. Yet she calls for more of the same central planning that has never worked and never will work. In fact, to whip these large corporations into shape she wants tougher standards and even more regulations. Well, we just had eight years of excessive regulations and government standards, and such heavy-handed policy was the primary reason for the slowest decade of economic growth in our nation’s history.

On health care, Pelosi and her fellow Democrats want to take “unprecedented action to lower the costs of prescription drugs.” Prescription drugs are far more expensive than they should be, but the biggest reason is — you guessed it — government regulation. But, as usual, rather than rein in the overbearing regulatory commissars at the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), Pelosi proposes doubling down. “We will leverage the power of Medicare to negotiate lower drug prices,” she writes, “force drug manufacturers to open their books and justify cost increases, and create a strong, independent enforcement agency empowered to end outrageous and unjustified prescription drug price-gouging.”

Instead, the best way to reduce the cost of prescription drugs for consumers is to keep government out. Let the free market work the way it should and allow companies to compete for better prescription drugs and the costs will go down. Democrats won’t hear of such things.

Every proposal that Pelosi and the Democrat Party have is part of the same old socialist agenda that has already been tested and failed. They want more control over the economy, more regulations, more taxes to pay for their ideas and more power over Americans. That is the Democrats’ vision for a “better” future. Nowhere in Pelosi’s proposal are the ideas of less government, more freedom and more individual rights and responsibilities. Hers is the collectivist, statist vision that is the antithesis to what our Founders intended. And it is an agenda that will make America lose, not win.

But hey, at least Pelosi didn’t blame Vladimir Putin or James Comey.

SOURCE

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Is this anti-Soros European leader Trump's greatest ally?

Hungary's foreign minister came to Washington last week seeking something from the Trump administration that his government is being denied by the European Union (EU)-sympathy for its sovereign right to make its own internal decisions and laws.

He deserves a hearing.

Such a return to basic relations among nation-states-let alone treaty allies and friends-is also a radical departure from the previous administration. Foreign Minister P‚ter Szijj rt¢ said the Obama administration had failed to respect Budapest's right to self-determination.

At a speech at The Heritage Foundation last week, Szijj rt¢ shared an anecdote of a meeting he had in 2014 with Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland. The two were meeting because then-Secretary of State John Kerry refused to meet Szijj rt¢.

In the meeting, Nuland "threw" a piece of paper at Szijj rt¢ with a list of requirements that Hungary would have to meet before the administration would formally meet with the Hungarian Government.

"And do you know what was written on the paper?" Szijj rt¢ asked. "How to change the constitution, how to change the media laws, how to change the electoral laws, how to change regulation of churches, how to change regulation of constitutional courts."

These efforts to interfere in Hungary's domestic politics only served to alienate the Hungarian government, as is the case now with the EU.

What has Hungary done to deserve all this?

Its democratically elected prime minister, Viktor Orban, has fought for Hungary's right to self-govern. He has emphatically opposed the EU's overly permissive migrant policy, calling it "self-destructive and na‹ve."

More importantly, Orban has led the fight against the influence that left-wing billionaire George Soros wields in Hungarian domestic affairs. He's done that in several ways, but mainly by requiring the Central European University in Budapest, a university set up by Soros, to comply with current Hungarian law.

For daring to do all that, Orban has been vilified in the mainstream media and formally rebuked by the EU.

Most recently, the European Commission declared that the law passed by Hungary's parliament that is being used against the university is incompatible with "the right of academic freedom, the right to education, and the freedom to conduct a business."

Brussels declared that if Hungary did not respond to this declaration within one month, Hungary would face sanctions and could even lose its voting rights.

Despite Brussels's ham-handedness, Szijj rt¢ said Hungary will continue to press for deep reform in the EU.

"There is one consensus that is shared by everyone-that we want a strong European Union," he said. "The major debate is about how to get there."

Szijj rt¢'s five goals for the EU going forward are noteworthy in that they represent an attempt to turn the institution into less of a hidebound, anti-growth body:

    Continued enlargement of the EU

    Greater autonomy to member states to keep them strong and competitive

    Faster action on free trade agreements

    Stronger homeland security and immigration regulation; and

    A Brexit deal that imposes the least possible barriers to trade between the U.K. and the EU

As Szijj rt¢ describes it-and as is increasingly apparent to those studying the issue-EU nations are split on the question of sovereignty.

Some member states advocate for increased centralization of power at the EU headquarters in Brussels as the best path to European prosperity. Others, like Hungary, argue that Europe as a whole will be strongest with strong, sovereign member states.

Brexit is illustrative of this centralization vs. sovereignty debate. The U.K. proved unwilling to continue ceding its rights as a sovereign nation to centralized bureaucrats in Brussels.

Though some in Europe blame Brexit for the EU's current political uncertainty, Szijj rt¢ argues that these people have it backwards:

    We reject the position which says that Brexit is the reason for the serious challenges in the European Union. We say that Brexit is the outcome, is the consequence of the postponed and missed reforms.

There are good arguments behind Hungary's pro-sovereignty, anti-centralization stance. Americans can approve of it, as it both aligns with American principles and protects American interests. Stronger European countries mean stronger allies for the U.S.

It would also advance the idea that pursuing one's national interest is morally legitimate-a view that has all too often been derided.

Szijj rt¢ said that Trump's "America First" foreign policy "is much, much more important than people think."

Before President Trump used it, "if you thought or said that your country is the first for you, the interests of your nation is first for you, you had to feel ashamed, and you were considered as a dictator, as a nationalist, as in retrograde, as not modern enough and not internationalist enough, not globalist enough."

Now, according to Szijj rt¢, this has changed:

    Now we are happy to be free to say that for us Hungary is first. We always acknowledge the rights of nations to put themselves in the first place when it comes to interests, and now we are very happy that the leader of the number one superpower in the world said the same.

Szijj rt¢ sees in Trump's pro-sovereignty attitude a level of respect that was lacking in the Obama administration. According to Szijj rt¢: "Mutual respect was something that was really emphasized in the speech of your president in Warsaw, and I think that's a game changer."

SOURCE

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

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

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Maternal deaths and the elephant in the room

Below is a judicious article from a medical journal that addresses a problem that should not be happening.  Why is giving birth in the USA so often fatal?  The article runs through the range of possible causes and notes that it is mainly a black problem, but not entirely so. And the various potential causes do make sense.  So, as with many social phenomena, it is reasonable to conclude that a range of factors contribute to the final outcome.  There are many things you can die from.

But there is an elephant in the room that is only obliquely mentioned.  One that could very well contribute to the deaths:  Obamacare.  Many people cannot afford the much higher premiums now demanded and there are even more people who are only nominally insured.  They have insurance but their deductibles can easily reach $10,000 or more -- which in effect means that they are not insured at all.  A lot of routine medical costs are way below $10,000 so no help with such costs is available.  And even costs below $10,000 can be hard to meet for a big family or for people with many calls on their funds -- such as working single mothers who have to pay for childcare. And some people are just  not good at saving so the effective absence of insurance to help with medical costs simply means that medical care is simply not sought by them on many occasions.

So there can be little doubt that many precautionary visits to the doctor are not made and many possibly revealing scans are not carried out. So problems are missed until it is too late.  Early diagnosis is universally advantageous but is not practically available.  So Obamacare should be called DeniedCare.  Someone should tell the "rebel" GOP senators who are blocking reform that they are killing mothers


In 2005, 23 US mothers per 100 000 live births died from complications related to pregnancy or childbirth. In 2015, that number rose to 25. In the United Kingdom, the number was less than 9. In Canada, it was less than 7.

Very few wealthy countries saw increases over those years. Many poorer countries, including Iran and Romania, saw declines. But here in the United States, things got worse.

These numbers have been confirmed by independent research. Last year, a study published in Obstetrics and Gynecology found that the maternal mortality rate in the United States had increased by more than 25% from 2000 to 2014. This trend differed by state, however. Although California had shown some declines, Texas had seen significant increases.

Texas in particular has been the focus of much of the news on maternal mortality in the last few years. From 2011 to 2014, the rate doubled. Although we lack good data to tell us why, many have postulated that changes to family planning in the state coincided with this increase. In 2013, for example about half of the state’s clinics that provided abortion in addition to other reproductive health services were closed because of regulations passed against them. In 2011, the family-planning budget was slashed in an attempt to defund Planned Parenthood. Many clinics closed and more were forced to reduce their services.

Family planning matters. About 50% of pregnancies in the United States are unplanned and might lack preventive care that properly planned-for pregnancies might.

There’s more to this story than changes in regulations and family planning. Some of the increase is likely due to the growing prevalence of other chronic conditions. Obesity, diabetes, and heart disease likely contribute to maternal mortality, and trends for many conditions have been increasing over the last decade. Women are having children later in life than they used to, and some have more complex conditions. More women have caesarian deliveries, which can lead to complications. The opioid epidemic may contribute to maternal mortality, as well.

Disparities exist in maternal mortality as they do in other areas of health care. The increases we’ve seen are most noticeable in non-Hispanic black women. The number of deaths per 100 000 live births among black women is more than 3 times that among white women. In fact, for any state, the higher the percentage of black women in the delivery population, the higher its rates of maternal mortality. But racial disparities can only account for so much of the problem. Even if you look only at white women in the United States, the rates of mothers who die is greater than those in other developed countries.

The fragmented nature of the US health care system doesn’t help either. Too many people in the United States go without necessary care, because they lack access to care or avoid it because of cost. This is just as true of pregnant women as it is of everyone else. As many politicians argue that maternity care shouldn’t be considered essential benefits, some worry that coverage might get worse with reform.

It is possible that some of the increase in maternal mortality is due to better record keeping. States have been working to improve how they keep track of maternal deaths, as well as other causes of death, and better reporting would be reflected as increases in prevalence. It’s hard to imagine, however, that this increase in better records has been solely in the United States, and could account for all of the increases. There’s no reason to believe that all other countries would be keeping themselves in the dark. Moreover, the more universal and socialized health systems are less likely to have women, and their deaths, fall through the cracks and be missed.

Pregnancy and childbirth are risky. We don’t like to talk about it, but maternal mortality is the sixth most common cause of death among US women age 25 years to 34 years old. Proper maternal care helps to prevent morbidity and mortality, but that care is difficult when clinics close and insurance lapses. Medicaid can help to close the gap and often does with pregnant women, but even then, both physician services and mother’s finances are strained.

As with many things in health care, a rising tide would lift all boats. Efforts to improve the health of women in general would improve our rates of maternal mortality. Reducing levels of obesity, diabetes, and heart disease would achieve results. So would getting a handle on the opioid epidemic. But we’ve spent the last few years—if not more—focused on efforts to reduce infant mortality. Mothers may need a similar commitment.

SOURCE

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The Truth About Capitalism

One of the chief objectives of globalism is to transfer wealth from rich nations to poor nations. To the equality-of-results crowd it sounds great, because they don’t understand that spreading the wealth actually makes everyone poorer.

The main reason I’m against giving handouts to countries who destroy themselves through their socialist policies is that it sends the wrong message. We should not lie to such countries about the morality and merits of capitalism. The greatest gift we can offer is to help them understand that freedom is not about security or equality; it’s about insecurity and inequality.

We should teach them that the price of freedom is self-responsibility, and self-responsibility means that no one has a right to a house, a car, a job — no, not even healthcare. What everyone does have a right to is exactly what others are willing to pay him, free of government interference.

Those who think otherwise are responsible for our $20 trillion national debt and a federal budget deficit that is projected to be in the area of $500 billion and rising. Economic security is not a right, but it sure is a formula for disaster.

If we continue to subsidize bankrupt nations around the globe, we will be encouraging them to believe that capitalism is about security and equality. That, in turn, will cause them to be disillusioned when they find out the hard way that it is not. If instead we focus our efforts on educating them to understand that capitalism is about freedom of choice, self-responsibility, and risk, we will be doing them a great favor.

Unfortunately, progressives (as well as many phony conservatives) do not seem to understand this, especially wealthy faux liberals who are immune to the effects of socialist policies in Washington. I was reminded of this a couple weeks ago when a casual acquaintance of mine invited me to a social gathering at his home. In a moment of temporary insanity, and after being assured that no members of Black Lives Matter, the American Civil Liberties Union, or the Communist Party USA would be in attendance, I agreed to drop by.

I tend to be a target at limousine-liberal gatherings, and, sure enough, a middle-aged gentleman of means came up to me and, from out of the blue, sneered, “Capitalism is the most evil system ever invented.” He obviously was trying to get my goat.

Displaying my finest George Will deadpan expression, I asked how an intelligent, successful gentleman like him had managed to arrive at such a fascinating conclusion. To which he groused, “Under capitalism, the poor are exploited by the rich.” Yikes — it was the ghost of Vladimir Lenin!

Masochist that I am, I asked him to define the terms rich and poor for me, but he simply waived aside my question as though it were frivolous. My acquaintance’s wife then intervened and admonished us that political discussions were forbidden in her house, thus preventing a Sunday afternoon homicide.

Darn. I didn’t even get a chance to see the expression on his face had I been able to lay this one on him: The gap between the rich and the poor is supposed to increase under capitalism! That’s right, folks. Like it or not, it’s built into the system.

But hold on: Also built into the system is the fact that almost everyone is better off under capitalism. Why? Because trickle-down economics really does work! Try finding a Republican politician who will admit to that.

The U.S. government’s own Census Bureau’s statistics confirm this truth. Average-income figures clearly show that during the Reagan years, almost everyone’s income rose significantly, while during the Carter years, most people got poorer. Does anyone seriously believe that voters kicked Carter out of office and gave Reagan two landslide victories because they were better off under Carter and worse off under Reagan?

What was in play during the Reagan years was the so-called invisible hand of the marketplace. When people realize they can reap financial rewards by providing better goods and services to others, they work harder and longer hours to do so. As a result, the economy prospers and everyone is better off.

On the other hand, the more government interferes with this natural process, the worse off everyone is. How far mankind has advanced is not a reflection of his true potential; it is his true potential minus government interference. Those who believe that a strong central government is needed to manage a nation’s economy simply do not understand the awesome power of the invisible hand of the marketplace.

Which takes me back to the growing disparity between the rich and the poor (setting aside, for now, the important question of who has the omniscience and moral authority to decide who should be slotted into these two categories in the first place). In a mythical, totally free society, if everyone were to start with nothing, some people would become “rich” while others would become “poor.”

Now, stop and think about that for a moment. Wouldn’t natural forces assure that the most successful people would become even more successful over time and thus increase the gap between themselves and those who have not been as successful? After all, they would be using the same talents, efforts, and self-discipline that made them better off in the first place.

I’d love to see the Trump administration set aside childish notions and tell the truth about this “income inequality” garbage. Of course the gap between the rich and the poor increases under capitalism. But that, of and by itself, does not harm anyone. (Remember, the pie is not fixed.) The only problem is the one caused by venomous progressive thinkers who have unilaterally decided that such a gap is not “fair.” Which, of course, is merely their subjective opinion.

Personally, I don’t think of the increasing gap between the rich and the poor as fair or unfair. It’s simply reality. However, I do believe the fact that successful people tend to become even more successful is fair, provided they achieve their success on a non-coercive basis. Why shouldn’t a person be allowed to become as successful as his talents and hard work will take him?

That said, I believe the first step toward regaining our lost freedoms is to totally defeat progressive subjectivism. Go-along-to-get-along conservatives need to come to grips with the reality that compromise does not work, because it encourages a lie, and lies simply do not work.

Of course, the progressive is free to think whatever makes him feel good at any given moment. However, he should not be allowed to force others to give up their freedom to accommodate his arrogant notion of one of the most abstract ideas known to man: fairness. Fairness is a subjective word, right up there with “social justice.”

To paraphrase the great Milton Friedman, the only social justice that makes any sense is for everyone to keep what he earns in a totally free market.

SOURCE

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

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

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Border Patrol: Trump performs ‘miracle’ on immigration

A spokesman for the nation’s Border Patrol agents is telling the mainstream media what they don’t want to hear. The truth.

In an interview with C-SPAN, National Border Patrol Council President Brandon Judd spoke about the 53 percent decrease in the number of arrests for illegal crossings, hailing it as a “miracle” performed by Trump.

“As far as the Trump administration’s efforts on immigration, this is something they campaigned heavily on,” he said. “At six months, where we are on meeting those promises, we are seeing nothing short of miraculous. If you look at the rhetoric that President Trump has given, it has caused a number of illegal border crossings to go down. We have never seen such a drop that we currently have,” said Judd.

Much of the drop is attributable to Trump himself.  Under Obama, illegal crossings surged as women and children swarmed the US border to enter illegally, believing they would likely be given amnesty.  Border Patrol agents, used to illegals seeking to elude officers, found themselves overwhelmed by thousands of illegals who would sneak over the border, then walk to the nearest Patrol station to turn themselves in, believing they would be given amnesty.

That stopped once Trump won.

“(S)ince the fiscal year began in October, arrests are down two-thirds, from 66,712, a six-year record high, to 21,659 a six-year record low,” The Washington Examiner’s Paul Bedard reported July 7.

SOURCE

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"Lost" health insurance

A few weeks ago, MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow was going on and on about a “single insurance provider” that pays for 49 percent of all births, as well as full health care costs of almost 40 percent of all children in the United States. This single “insurer,” Maddow said, was the biggest “health insurance provider in the country by a mile.”

Maddow was talking about Medicaid, which, of course, is not “insurance” but “welfare.”

When we’re allowed to call things whatever we want in order to win an argument, there is a total breakdown in democratic politics, fair commerce and social interaction.

Thus, for example, until we get our terms straight, Americans will be forced to keep paying through the nose whenever they try to buy actual health insurance — because they aren’t buying health insurance; they’re paying for other people’s welfare. Washington will never be able to make it legal to sell real health insurance — because, if they try, the welfare recipients will mob congressional offices claiming that Republicans are murdering them.

There is no truth in any discussion of Obamacare. Currently, the most persistent lie is the claim that — according to scoring by the CBO! — 22 million Americans would “lose” their health insurance under the Senate health care bill. Turn on the TV right now and you’ll hear someone saying this.

“A new (CBO) budget score said 22 million more Americans would lose health coverage under this plan …”

— Poppy Harlow, CNN, June 27, 2017

“A score from the Congressional Budget Office … said the Republican bill to kill Obamacare would kick 22 million Americans off their health insurance.”

— Rachel Maddow, June 27, 2017

“The clock is ticking on the Senate health care bill as the CBO estimates 22 million people will lose their insurance.”

— Chris Hayes, June 26, 2017

HELLO? REPUBLICANS? ANY OF YOU GUYS WANT TO REBUT THAT? IT’S PRETTY EASY TO DO!

The actual CBO report says nothing of the sort. People citing the “22 million” figure didn’t read past the CBO’s headline-grabbing paragraph at the top of the “Summary” page.

In fact, the CBO merely estimates that — in the year 2026 — 22 million Americans who otherwise would have been forced by the Obamacare penalty to buy health insurance will choose not to buy insurance once the penalty is gone. By “people thrown off their health insurance,” liberals mean: “people who voluntarily decide not to have health insurance.” (More accurately, “people who choose not to prove to the government that they have health insurance.”)

To use the word “lose” here is absurd. It would be like saying that Nixon ending the draft meant that 50,000 American men would “lose” their military service. The poor lads would be forced to volunteer.

Last year, I chose to end my New York Times subscription. I wasn’t “thrown off” the Times’ subscriber list. In full possession of the facts, I made an informed decision that I no longer wanted to receive the Times — just as 22 million Americans (the CBO guesses) will make an informed decision in the year 2026 not to have health insurance, if given that option.

Redefining words like “insurance” and “lose” to mean whatever the speaker wants them to mean makes human conversation impossible. We can still grunt, howl and shiver when it’s cold, but we will no longer have the ability to communicate slightly more complex thoughts to one another.

The only solution is for the rest of us to impose a broken windows policy on the truth, demanding it in every walk of life. If liars continually get away with it, their lies will only become more preposterous and more enraging.

Illegal aliens are not “undocumented immigrants.” They’re not “immigrants” at all. Immigrants wait in line and jump through hoops to be here. They are invited, by us, to come. Illegals cut to the head of the line whenever the mood strikes them, without waiting for an invitation.

SOURCE

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The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau:  A bureaucratic monster that shafts the consumer

Imagine you have a dispute with your credit card company. Currently, you can go to an arbitration body, where the card company will almost certainly pay all your expenses, and you may get compensated in full, usually promptly. Now, thanks to a new rule, courtesy of the inaptly named Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), the regulatory agency unleashed by the Dodd-Frank Act of 2010, that won’t happen.

Instead, you’ll have to wait for trial lawyers to form a “class” that includes you, wait years while the lawyers do whatever it is they do, probably never see court, and then rejoice in a small refund, while the lawyers pocket millions. It’s what passes for “consumer protection” these days.

That’s the upshot of the CFPB’s new Arbitration Rule, which bans providers of unsecured personal credit from including mandatory arbitration clauses in their contracts. Bureau Director Richard Cordray portrays the rule as a consumer protection measure, but the only beneficiaries will be his wealthy trial lawyer friends.

If consumers need protection, it’s from the CFPB. Thankfully, the Senate can provide consumers — as well as investors and entrepreneurs — needed regulatory relief by passing the Financial CHOICE Act (FCA). Among its many good features, it would repeal the CFPB’s authority to prohibit arbitration.

Such a move would be welcome. Mandatory arbitration cuts costs for everyone. According to the CFPB’s own study, it produces better results for consumers than class action lawsuits. For class action attorneys, however, those consumer savings mean less in fees. Trial lawyers, the same CFPB study found, benefit to the tune of over $1 million in a typical class action, while the average class member receives only $32.

Naturally, lawyers have bridled at mandatory arbitration, which functions as a private, contractual form of dispute resolution, and have lobbied for it to be banned. With the Arbitration Rule, Cordray is poised to grant them their wish. The rule will transfer wealth transfer from low-income consumers to rich lawyers, delay the settlement of grievances, and reduce payouts. So much for consumer protection.

This CFPB move underscores the urgent need to curtail the agency and other abuses wrought by Dodd-Frank. For starters, Congress should repeal the rule by using a resolution of disapproval under the Congressional Review Act, which requires simple majorities in both chambers. The House and Senate have 60 days to vote down the CFPB arbitration rule, so they need to move fast.

Congress made a big mistake when it gave the CFPB so much power under Dodd-Frank — power enhanced by its unusual — and unconstitutional — structure. There are few checks on its power. It is not accountable to Congress’ “power of the purse,” because it gets its funding from the Federal Reserve. Nor is the Bureau subject to any meaningful oversight from the president as head of the Executive Branch. This led a federal Appeals Court last year to rule that the CFPB’s structure is unconstitutional (the ruling was set aside and the case is currently being reheard.

If that sounds like the Bureau can act as it wants, it does — as it did when it finalized its Arbitration Rule. We can expect CFPB regulators to promulgate more arbitrary rules in the future.

Fortunately, the Senate need not wait for the courts to rein in the unaccountable CFPB. It can build on disapproval of the rule by passing the Financial CHOICE Act. The FCA would restructure the Bureau by making its director subject to presidential oversight and its financing dependent on Congress.

The FCA would also address other problems foisted on the American economy by the Dodd-Frank Act. For example, it would provide a better solution to the “Too Big to Fail” problem, which Dodd-Frank has made worse. By designating them as “systemically significant financial institutions,” Dodd-Frank has made big banks more entrenched. It also has subjected non-bank financial institutions to inappropriate regulation that has raised the price of insurance.

The crushing burden of rules from the CFPB and other financial regulators has been a huge drag on the American economy since the financial crisis, contributed to the slow recovery, and hit Main Street banks hard. The rate of closure among small and community banks has doubled since the passage of Dodd-Frank. Around 1 million Americans have been forced out of the banking system by higher fees as banks have struggled to pay the costs of compliance.

Yes, the Senate has a lot on its plate right now, but this is an issue that’s fundamental to American prosperity. A freely functioning financial system is essential to faster economic growth — and the creation of more jobs and economic opportunity. Congress can start by disapproving the CFPB’s new rule, and the Senate can go further by passing the Financial CHOICE Act.

SOURCE

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

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

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Trump and civil rights

A prominent family member of the late Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. is defending President Donald Trump from attacks by Congressman John Lewis (D-GA.)



“We have come a distance. We made progress. But there are forces in America trying to slow us down or take us back,” Lewis said Friday on low-rated CNN. “I think the person we have in Washington today is uncaring,” Lewis said, adding that he believes Trump “knows very, very little about the history and the struggle of the Civil Rights Movement.”

That drew a sharp response from Dr. Alveda King, pro-life civil activist and niece of Martin Luther King.

King says Trump is “leading the charge for civil rights today for the little unborn persons in the womb who have a right to live.”

“He has surrounded himself with African-American leaders,” King said. “At the African-American museum, for example, he was knowledgeable of much of the history of African-Americans.”

Lewis also believes the 2016 election was rigged with secret computers, and that Trump is not really the President.

“I truly believe to this day that this election was rigged in his favor,” Lewis told low-rated CNN.

SOURCE

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Disgraceful V.A. hospital in Manchester, N.H.

The Trump team has made a start on sorting out the V.A. but they have decades of rot to correct

This is what the US Department of Veterans Affairs says a four-star hospital looks like:

One operating room has been abandoned since last October because exterminators couldn’t get rid of the flies. Doctors had to cancel surgeries in another OR last month after they discovered what appeared to be rust or blood on two sets of surgical instruments that were supposedly sterile.

Thousands of patients, including some with life-threatening conditions, struggle to get any care at all because the program for setting up appointments with outside specialists has broken down. One man still hadn’t gotten an appointment to see an oncologist this spring, more than four weeks after a diagnosis of lung cancer, according to a hospital document obtained by the Globe.

And when patients from the Manchester Veterans Affairs Medical Center are referred to outside specialists, those physicians are sometimes dismayed by their condition and medical history. A Boston neurosurgeon lamented that several Manchester patients sent to him had suffered needless spinal damage, including paralysis, because the hospital had not provided proper care for a treatable spine condition called cervical myelopathy.

“Only in 3rd World countries is it common to see patients end up as disabled from myelopathy as the ones who have been showing up after referral from you,” wrote Dr. Chima Ohaegbulam , of New England Baptist Hospital, to a doctor at the Manchester VA in 2014.

But this hospital, the only one for military veterans in New Hampshire, is just 50 miles from Boston. And it’s supposedly one of the better VA hospitals in the country. Late last year, in fact, the veterans affairs department raised Manchester’s quality rating from three stars to four, putting it in the top third of the entire VA system.

Ratings can deceive. Inside the unassuming red-brick walls of the Manchester medical center is ground zero for an extraordinary rebellion led by doctors who say they have almost no say in how the hospital is run, lack tools to do their jobs, and witness chronic shortcomings in patient care. They say the four top administrators, only one of them a doctor, seem more concerned with performance ratings than in properly treating the roughly 25,000 veterans who go to Manchester for outpatient care and day surgery each year.

So far, 11 physicians and medical employees — including the hospital’s retiring chief of medicine, former chief of surgery, and former chief of radiology — have contacted a federal whistle-blower agency and the Globe Spotlight Team to say the Manchester VA is endangering patients. The US Office of the Special Counsel, the whistle-blower agency, has already found a “substantial likelihood” of legal violations, gross mismanagement, abuse of authority, and a danger to public health, according to a January letter to one of the doctors who alleged wrongdoing.

“I have never seen a hospital run this poorly — every day it gets worse and worse,” said Dr. Stewart Levenson, chief of medicine, an 18-year veteran of the hospital who is among the whistle-blowers. “I never thought I would be exposing the system like this. But I went through the system and got nowhere.”

On Thursday night, a spokesman for Veterans Affairs Secretary David J. Shulkin expressed concerns about the problems relayed by the Spotlight Team.

“These are serious allegations, and while we cannot comment on the specifics due to patient privacy issues, rest assured that we will look into them right away,” said the VA press secretary in Washington, D.C., Curt Cashour.

Remarkably, leaders of the Manchester VA have confirmed many of the problems, from the fly-infested operating room — “an episodic issue,” said one administrator — to thousands of patients waiting indefinitely for specialist care, which the leaders blamed on the private company hired by the federal government to set up veterans’ appointments outside the hospital.

In a recent hourlong interview with the Globe, hospital director Danielle Ocker and her chief of staff, Dr. James Schlosser, also acknowledged significant cuts in services, such as the elimination of cataract surgery, as well as administrative glitches that further limited care.

For example: The hospital ordered a $1 million nuclear medicine camera in 2015 to replace a balky one, but never installed it because it was too big for the examination room. Without a reliable camera, the hospital in February stopped offering nuclear stress tests for heart disease risk, and bone scans that can detect tumors. The building is expected to be remodeled for a new camera in 2018.

But Ocker and Schlosser expressed surprise that so many members of the medical staff have reported the hospital’s problems to federal investigators. They said the hospital is addressing shortcomings and that patient safety has not been compromised. Ocker, a nurse, contended that Manchester boasts “a zero infection rate” in the operating rooms — a hospital spokeswoman said the unblemished record dates back to 2011 — and shared a veteran’s recent letter praising Manchester VA care.

Ocker also said she wanted medical staff to know that she and other leaders take their concerns seriously.

“My feeling is that if there are issues that we need to address, or if there are concerns, that we need to hear about them,” she said.

In many ways, the Manchester VA is under investigation because doctors became convinced that Ocker and other leaders were not listening. A number of problems date back years before Ocker arrived in 2015, and often reflected lapses in care that occurred when Manchester referred veterans to other VA hospitals or when multiple hospitals failed to coordinate follow-up treatment. But they are coming to the forefront now, in large measure, because one outspoken doctor went public about many patients that he believed had gotten subpar care. Patients like Robert McWhinnie.

McWhinnie, a Korean War veteran who lives in the small New Hampshire town of Gilmanton, relied mainly on a wheelchair to get around when he first visited Dr. William “Ed” Kois, head of Manchester VA’s spinal cord clinic, in July 2016. McWhinnie, who was 84 at the time, had long been a vigorous man who built much of the furniture in his house from maple trees on his land. But then his legs and arms grew weak, he had difficulty talking, and he became incontinent.

Kois immediately got alarmed when reading McWhinnie’s medical records.

They showed that the retired telephone cable splicer had undergone two surgeries at the VA hospital in Jamaica Plain to remove a tumor from his spine in 1995 but that the surgeon could not remove all of it, according to a copy of the records that his family shared with the Globe.

Over the next 21 years, McWhinnie went to the Manchester VA dozens of times for treatment of a variety of ailments. But no one had done imaging to find out if the tumor was growing again, even though regular monitoring was the standard of care after surgery on this type of tumor, according to his lawyer, Mark Abramson.

At least as far back as 2007, McWhinnie was gradually losing the ability to walk, the records indicate, something that could have been caused by a tumor pressing on his spine.

Kois “took one look at Bob, and he said, ‘Oh, my God, this is a disgrace. This man should have been taken care of,’ ” recalled McWhinnie’s wife of 63 years, Janice McWhinnie.

So Kois ordered an MRI and an X-ray and, sure enough, the tumor was choking McWhinnie’s upper, or cervical, spine. It had also grown too big to remove.

“They ignored him basically for 20 years and allowed this thing to grow and grow and grow,” said Abramson, who recently wrote the VA in Manchester and in Boston that his client intends to sue for negligence.

Hospital officials declined to comment, citing potential litigation.

For Kois, McWhinnie’s condition was sickeningly familiar. In his five years at the VA, Kois has compiled a list of at least 80 Manchester patients who were suffering from advanced and potentially crippling nerve compression in the neck, or myelopathy. Some, like McWhinnie, had undergone surgery at other VA hospitals and then relied on Manchester for subsequent care.

Kois said he complained about the situation to administrators and other doctors. He even organized a September 2015 conference at Manchester, where he told a roomful of doctors and other VA staff that patients were getting substandard spinal care.

Ocker herself gave introductory remarks at the conference. Yet, in the interview with the Globe, she said she only became aware of Kois’s concerns more than a year later when she heard that they were part of the federal investigation. She said she left Kois’s conference after welcoming guests and was never briefed on the content of his presentation.

“I did not hear that,” she said of Kois’s allegations.

Kois found a far more receptive audience the following year at the federal Office of the Special Counsel, which made his contentions about poor care a central part of its inquiry. After finding a “substantial likelihood” of wrongdoing, the office recommended a full-fledged investigation by the Veterans Affairs Office of Medical Inspector, which began in January.

The VA medical care system, which is used by about 6 million military veterans each year, has been stumbling since 2014. News stories reported that the Phoenix VA Health Care System had engaged in an elaborate scheme to hide the fact that sick veterans were waiting months to see a doctor, and that some had died before they could be seen.

As similar allegations surfaced at other VA hospitals and tens of thousands of veterans around the country were found to be waiting months for care, Veterans Affairs Secretary Eric K. Shinseki resigned.

“I can’t explain the lack of integrity among some of the leaders of our health care facilities,” he said, shortly before stepping down.

But Shinseki’s departure did not stop the drumbeat of scandal. Last year, nearly three dozen whistle-blowers charged that the VA hospital in Cincinnati had made budget cuts that forced out experienced surgeons, reduced access to care, and endangered patients’ safety. The head of the VA’s Ohio-based regional network then retired, and the Cincinnati hospital’s chief of staff was suspended and later indicted on criminal charges.

Now President Trump’s appointee as VA secretary, Shulkin, is vowing to stabilize the health care system. “We are still in critical condition and require intensive care,” Shulkin said at a May press briefing. Last month, Trump signed a bill into law to make it easier for whistle-blowers to come forward and for employees to be fired for misconduct.

SOURCE

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

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

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Yale historian warns Trump’s rise perfectly mirrors frightening ascent of Fascism and Nazis in the 1930s

Typical Leftist cherry picking below.  He quotes a few bits he likes and leaves out the rest. He can't find much that Trump has said so he quotes Steve Bannon -- quite ignoring that Bannon is now out of influence with Trump.

He says that Trump’s showman style of populism is heavily influenced by Bannon. But Trump has been a showman for decades, long before Bannon was heard of.  You would have to go back a long way before you found a time when Trump was not in the news. Here's an example of Trump as a young man:



It is true that Trump's rise to power was rapid and Snyder  implies that Fascists rose to power overnight too.  But they didn't.  Hitler fought many elections before he was able to cobble together a minority administration in the "Reichstag". There is no comparison to Trump's sweep.

He does quote Trump as liking the prewar "America First" movement and implies that it was Nazi.  It was in fact the exact opposite. It was the chief anti-immigration and anti-intervention movement in 1930s America.  They were isolationists. The last thing they wanted was to march on any other county.

Snyder in fact just disproves his own argument.  He admits that America First was isolationist but then says that the 1930s Fascists were internationalists.  Che?  But they certainly WERE internationalists. Hitler tried to take over Russia.  Trump gets condemned for being too friendly towards Russia!

It is true that German conservatives gave Hitler some support but that was only because they saw him as a lesser evil than the KPD: the powerful German Communist party.  There was no such threat in America.  The Democrats trust in bureaucracy, not class war. It is in fact the Democrats who are the true modern Fascists.  Right into the war years, Hitler trusted in bureaucracy too.

And the guy below is a historian!  More accurately a fraud

Note that there have been many equally shallow attempts to brand Trump and his followers as being Nazi/ Fascist/ racist/ authoritarian.  As authoritarianism is my main area of academic expertise I have debunked all of them that I know of.  See here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here and  here.


Writing for The Guardian, Timothy Snyder warns that conservatives seem to be unaware that Trump is taking their governing philosophy into darker — and more violent — territory.

According to Snyder, Trump’s showman style of populism is heavily influenced by White House Chief Strategist Steve Bannon.

“Stephen Bannon, who promises us new policies ‘as exciting as the 1930s,’ seems to want to return to that decade in order to undo those legacies,” Snyder writes. “He seems to have in mind a kleptocratic authoritarianism (hastened by deregulation and the dismantlement of the welfare state) that generates inequality, which can be channeled into a culture war (prepared for by Muslim bans and immigrant denunciation hotlines).”

“Like fascists, Bannon imagines that history is a cycle in which national virtue must be defended from permanent enemies. He refers to fascist authors in defense of this understanding of the past.”

Noting that President Trump is not an “articulate theorist,” Snyder points out that the president gives Bannon’s dark vision a populist veneer that has historical parallels.

“During the 2016 campaign, Trump spoke of ‘America first,’ which he knew was the name of political movement in the United States that opposed American participation in the second world war,” Snyder explains. “Among its leaders were nativists and Nazi apologists such as Charles Lindbergh. When Trump promised in his inaugural address that ‘from now on, it’s going to be America first’ he was answering a call across the decades from Lindbergh, who complained that ‘we lack leadership that places America first.’ American foreign and energy policies have been branded ‘America first.'”

“Conservatives always began from intuitive understanding of one’s own country and an instinctive defense of sovereignty. The far right of the 1930s was internationalist, in the sense that fascists learned one from the other and admired one another, as Hitler admired Mussolini,” Snyder continued.

“One of the reasons why the radical right was able to overcome conservatives back in the 1930s was that the conservatives did not understand the threat. Nazis in Germany, like fascists in Italy and Romania, did have popular support, but they would not have been able to change regimes without the connivance or the passivity of conservatives.”

“If Republicans do not wish to be remembered (and forgotten) like the German conservatives of the 1930s, they had better find their courage – and their conservatism – fast,” the historian concludes.

SOURCE

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As a Teen Cashier Seeing Food Stamp Use, I Changed My Mind About the Democrat Party

Mamaw encouraged me to get a job—she told me that it would be good for me and that I needed to learn the value of a dollar. When her encouragement fell on deaf ears, she then demanded that I get a job, and so I did, as a cashier at Dillman’s, a local grocery store.

Working as a cashier turned me into an amateur sociologist. A frenetic stress animated so many of our customers. One of our neighbors would walk in and yell at me for the smallest of transgressions—not smiling at her, or bagging the groceries too heavy one day or too light the next. Some came into the store in a hurry, pacing between aisles, looking frantically for a particular item. But others waded through the aisles deliberately, carefully marking each item off of their list.

Some folks purchased a lot of canned and frozen food, while others consistently arrived at the checkout counter with carts piled high with fresh produce.

The more harried a customer, the more they purchased precooked or frozen food, the more likely they were to be poor. And I knew they were poor because of the clothes they wore or because they purchased their food with food stamps. After a few months, I came home and asked Mamaw why only poor people bought baby formula. “Don’t rich people have babies, too?” Mamaw had no answers, and it would be many years before I learned that rich folks are considerably more likely to breast-feed their children.

As my job taught me a little more about America’s class divide, it also imbued me with a bit of resentment, directed toward both the wealthy and my own kind.

The owners of Dillman’s were old-fashioned, so they allowed people with good credit to run grocery tabs, some of which surpassed a thousand dollars. I knew that if any of my relatives walked in and ran up a bill of over a thousand dollars, they’d be asked to pay immediately. I hated the feeling that my boss counted my people as less trustworthy than those who took their groceries home in a Cadillac. But I got over it: One day, I told myself, I’ll have my own d–ned tab.

I also learned how people gamed the welfare system. They’d buy two dozen packs of soda with food stamps and then sell them at a discount for cash. They’d ring up their orders separately, buying food with food stamps, and beer, wine, and cigarettes with cash. They’d regularly go through the checkout line speaking on their cell phones. I could never understand why our lives felt like a struggle while those living off of government largesse enjoyed trinkets that I only dreamed about.

Mamaw listened intently to my experiences at Dillman’s. We began to view much of our fellow working class with mistrust. Most of us were struggling to get by, but we made do, worked hard, and hoped for a better life. But a large minority was content to live off the dole.

Every two weeks, I’d get a small paycheck and notice the line where federal and state income taxes were deducted from my wages. At least as often, our drug-addict neighbor would buy T-bone steaks, which I was too poor to buy for myself but was forced by Uncle Sam to buy for someone else. This was my mindset when I was seventeen, and though I’m far less angry today than I was then, it was my first indication that the policies of Mamaw’s “party of the working man”—the Democrats—weren’t all they were cracked up to be.

Political scientists have spent millions of words trying to explain how Appalachia and the South went from staunchly Democratic to staunchly Republican in less than a generation.

Some blame race relations and the Democratic Party’s embrace of the civil rights movement. Others cite religious faith and the hold that social conservatism has on evangelicals in that region.

A big part of the explanation lies in the fact that many in the white working class saw precisely what I did, working at Dillman’s. As far back as the 1970s, the white working class began to turn to Richard Nixon because of a perception that, as one man put it, government was “payin’ people who are on welfare today doin’ nothin’! They’re laughin’ at our society! And we’re all hardworkin’ people and we’re gettin’ laughed at for workin’ every day!”

SOURCE

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NYT won't publish defense of Trump's Russian contacts

Harvard law professor emeritus and prominent liberal author Alan Dershowitz said The New York Times won’t publish him because he’s offering an “alternative point of view” on the Trump-Russia collusion allegations.

Mr. Dershowitz told the Washington Examiner in an interview Monday that he’s tried to get in touch with the The New York Times’ editors, to no avail. He said he wanted to publish an op-ed last month arguing that President Trump likely didn’t attempt to obstruct justice when he fired former FBI Director James Comey.

“I said that I thought the readers of the New York Times were entitled to hear or read the other side of the issue whether there were crimes committed,” he said. “And I really do think The New York Times does not want its readers to hear an alternative point of view on the issue of whether or not Trump administration is committing crimes.”

A Times spokesperson declined to comment, telling the Examiner that the paper does not discuss the editorial process for op-ed submissions.

Mr. Dershowitz has made headlines recently for arguing that there was likely no crime committed by Donald Trump Jr. in June 2016 when he met with Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya in order to get potentially damaging information on Hillary Clinton. Mr. Dershowitz has stuck by his claim that the younger Mr. Trump’s conduct was likely protected by the First Amendment.

Mr. Dershowitz‘s comments have been most popular among conservative news outlets, but his goal is to “get out in the liberal media,” he told the Examiner.

Unfortunately, his view is “not the narrative they’re pushing,” Mr. Dershowitz said. “It’s not that I’m not credentialed,” he added. “It’s that I don’t have the right point of view.”

SOURCE

Dershowitz's essay eventually appeared in the Boston Globe and was reproduced here yesterday

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

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

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