Give Max the boot?

Max Boot has some record as a conservative but his writing below shows him as a typical Leftist.  As a NY Jew that is no surprise.  American Jews voted overwhelmingly for Obama. Again as a Leftist, he has no respect for the truth at all. He does the typical Leftist trick of misrepresentation by omission.  It would be tedious to fisk his whole outpouring but let me mention a few of his misrepresentations.

He mentions that he received some antisemitic abuse recently and probably hopes to persuade us that antisemitism is now common in America and that it comes from conservatives.  He offers no proof of either of those things.  It is true that in the last decade or two there has been a gradual upwelling of antisemitism in America -- from the Left.  Many Leftists joyously particpate in the BDS movement, for instance, which aims at eradicating the State of Israel.  No matter what spin they put on it, it's essentially modern-day Nazism.  Max mentions none of that.

He says:  "Trump came to office vilifying Mexicans and Muslims".  He did no such thing.  He advocated more control of illegal immigration and immigration from terrorist infested nations.  Most Muslim nations were NOT subject to his restrictions.  Max is quite simply lying -- deliberately ascribing motivations to certain actions without any evidence that such motivations were in play.

Max says that Trump praised the Charlottesville protesters.  He did not.  He said of both the marchers and their attackers that they included good people on both sides.  He gave no blankret approval to anyone.

Max criticizes the pardoning of Sheriff Joe, without mentioning that Sheriff Joe was simply doing his job despite obstacles to immigration control created by Obama.  Obama was by far the real lawless actor in the matter.

But what seems to have set Max off is the withdrawal by Trump of the DACA regulations promulgated by Obama with no legislative authority. That Trump is simply reasserting the rule of law that Obama undermined he does not mention.

Max could well mislead less informed people by his lies so we conservatives do need to combat them but it is a weary task. Lies just seem to flow of of every pore of Leftists. Lies are essentially all they've got.


I am white. I am Jewish. I am an immigrant. I am a Russian American. But until recently I haven’t focused so much on those parts of my identity. I’ve always thought of myself simply as a normal, unhyphenated American.

Ever since I arrived here, along with my mother and grandmother, from Russia in 1976 at age 7, I have been eager to assimilate. And I’ve done a pretty good job of it.

Last year I experienced the first sustained anti-Semitism I have ever encountered in the United States. Like many other anti-Trump commentators, I was deluged with neo-Nazi propaganda on social media, including a picture of me in a gas chamber, with Herr Trump in a Nazi uniform pulling the lever to kill me. This was accompanied by predictable demands that I leave this country to “real” Americans and go back to where I came from — or, alternatively, to Israel.

At one time it was easy to dismiss such sentiments as the ravings of a handful of marginal losers. That’s harder to do now that the president of the United States has embraced the far-right agenda. Trump came to office vilifying Mexicans and Muslims. As president, he has praised the protesters who marched with neo-Nazis in Charlottesville as “very fine people” and come out against taking down Confederate monuments, symbols of white supremacy. He has pardoned former sheriff Joe Arpaio, who became a symbol of racism and lawlessness for locking up Latinos, in defiance of a court order, simply on the suspicion that they might be undocumented immigrants. And now Trump has set in motion the end of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, which prevents 800,000 law-abiding people from being deported because their parents brought them to the United States illegally.

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How bureaucracy destroys research in U.S. hospitals

There is a long article here which gives a blow by blow account of a doctor trying to get permission to do a research study -- a study that seemed to need doing.  He spent years dealing with the bureaucracy only to be defeated by all the nitpicking in the end.  He was not able to do a perfectly reasonable study.

The article had a particular resonance to me because what he wanted to do -- a questionnaire survey -- was something I did many, many times in my research career.  And I never asked ANYBODY for permission.  I just did it.  So how come the difference?  Several possible reasons:

I did my research in the '70s and '80s.  Things may have tightened up more by now.

I also did my work mostly in Australia, a much less uptight country than the USA.  Many of my fellow academics, including the head of school, would have had a pretty good idea of what I was doing but trying to rein me in would have needed effort and they just could not be bothered with that

But perhaps the key factor was that I did not ask.  I did not set the bureaucratic machinery in motion. The bureaucracy just did not know of me. I was below their horizon.  I had not foolishly set their rumbling machinery into motion.  "Just do it" was an old piece of Hippie advice from the '60s and I was there in the '60s.

So with my experience I read with great horror what this guy experienced.  But he makes the correct point that bureaucracy does that.  The job of the bureaucracy is to say "No" to anything that might conceivably be dangerous in some conceivable world and it takes a lot to get around that.  And sometimes you can't.

And the end result?  I had 200+ academic journal articles published whereas this guy had none.  What a waste!

I think his final comments are worth reproducing:


"I sometimes worry that people misunderstand the case against bureaucracy. People imagine it’s Big Business complaining about the regulations preventing them from steamrolling over everyone else. That hasn’t been my experience. Big Business – heck, Big Anything – loves bureaucracy. They can hire a team of clerks and secretaries and middle managers to fill out all the necessary forms, and the rest of the company can be on their merry way. It’s everyone else who suffers. The amateurs, the entrepreneurs, the hobbyists, the people doing something as a labor of love. Wal-Mart is going to keep selling groceries no matter how much paperwork and inspections it takes; the poor immigrant family with the backyard vegetable garden might not.

Bureaucracy in science does the same thing: limit the field to big institutional actors with vested interests. No amount of hassle is going to prevent the Pfizer-Merck-Novartis Corporation from doing whatever study will raise their bottom line. But enough hassle will prevent a random psychiatrist at a small community hospital from pursuing his pet theory about bipolar diagnosis. The more hurdles we put up, the more the scientific conversation skews in favor of Pfizer-Merck-Novartis. And the less likely we are to hear little stuff, dissenting voices, and things that don’t make anybody any money.

There are so many privacy and confidentiality restrictions around the most harmless of datasets that research teams won’t share data with one another (let alone with unaffiliated citizen scientists) lest they break some arcane regulation or other. Closed access journals require people to pay thousands of dollars in subscription fees before they’re allowed to read the scientific literature; open-access journals just shift the burden by requiring scientists to pay thousands of dollars to publish their research. Big research institutions have whole departments to deal with these kinds of problems; unaffiliated people who just want to look into things on their own are out of luck.

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Obama Rages Against the Constitutional Machine

President Donald Trump acted Tuesday to rescind Barack Obama's controversial and unconstitutional 2012 executive order known as Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA). Trump emphasized, "I am not going to just cut DACA off, but rather provide a window of opportunity for Congress to finally act. We will resolve the DACA issue with heart and compassion — but through the lawful democratic process — while at the same time ensuring that any immigration reform we adopt provides enduring benefits for the American citizens we were elected to serve."

Unlike former presidents who have had enough personal humility and respect for this nation, its history and the office to refrain from directly criticizing their successors, Obama sees himself as being above such decorum. Following Trump's DACA announcement, Obama took to Facebook, raging that Trump's decision is "cruel" and a violation of "basic decency." Worse, he scolded the president with his favorite moralizing cudgel, "It's about who we are as a people." Which prompts the question: Is Obama's view of America one of a nation where law and order are merely subjective suggestions that lack any real meaning or limiting power? A country without laws is no country at all.

Obama also explained his own decision, saying, "I asked Congress to send me such a bill. The bill never came. And ... my administration acted." That's not how our constitutional system works. You'd think a "constitutional law professor" would know better. He did once upon a time, and then political gain came knocking.

In 2013, he taunted, "You don't like a particular policy or a particular president? Then argue for your position. Go out there and win an election."

Well, Trump did.

No, Mr. Obama, it is not Trump who lacks "basic decency" on this issue, it is you. It is you who lack a basic respect for the Rule of Law and the borders that define this great nation, which were designed to protect American citizens first and foremost. It was you, Obama, who thumbed your nose at American citizens and our laws in order to promote your own globalist social agenda. And now you're upset that Trump wants to restore constitutional order to how laws are made. How pathetically cynical.

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Majority of Minorities Suffer No Discrimination

A recent study finds that only 25% of Americans say they have ever experienced discrimination. The study, conducted by Brian Boutwell, a criminology professor from Saint Louis University, surveyed 14,000 Americans across all racial backgrounds. He found that 27% of Hispanics, 31% of blacks, 23% of whites and 18% of Asians surveyed claimed to have experienced discrimination "sometimes" or "often." The findings suggest that discrimination is less prevalent than is often assumed, especially in light of today's polarized political climate and raging debate over DACA in particular.

Boutwell cautioned, "People have rightly pointed out that 25 percent of the population is a lot of people. That's still millions of people. That's far higher than what we'd like to see." Most people surveyed believed that "race" was the largest motivating factor behind unfair treatment. Boutwell noted that another potentially growing factor may be political beliefs. He states, "If anyone feels that their political alignment creates blowback for them in daily life, that's one possibility ... a reasonable one, given the data on political polarization."

Certainly Dennis Prager thinks this is true, writing, "Millions of Americans who hold conservative and/or pro-Trump views rationally fear ostracism by their peers, public humiliation, ruined reputations, broken families, job loss and the inability to work in their field. Under these circumstances, they have decided that coming out as conservative or pro-Trump is not worth the persecution they would endure."

It's also worth noting that surveys like this rely on data that is obtained via the subjective perception of individuals' experiences. What someone perceives may not accurately reflect the reality of what they have experienced. However, contrary to what is preached by race hustlers and social justice warriors, America is a broadly accepting and Liberty-loving nation. Americans' recent response to the devastation caused by Hurricane Harvey typifies this spirit more than fascist malcontents rioting in the streets.

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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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