A Korean triumph for Trump

The media were hysterical at Trump's strong threat to North Korea.  But it worked.  Kim Jong Un backed down.  The media response?  Crickets.  Kim just ignored Obama but having a real man in the White House made a difference.  It pushed the world back from nuclear war.  See here

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Summary of recent events

Black people who were never slaves fighting white people who were never Nazis over a confederate statue erected by Dems. Media blames Trump!

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Virginia State Police Say They Didn't Find Caches of Weapons in Charlottesville

Another lying Democrat

Contradicting statements by Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe, the Virginia State Police say they did not find caches of weapons stashed around Charlottesville in advance of last Saturday's deadly white nationalist rally.

In an interview Monday on the Pod Save the People podcast, hosted by Black Lives Matter activist DeRay Mckesson, McAuliffe claimed the white nationalists who streamed into Charlottesville that weekend hid weapons throughout the town.

SOURCE

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Senator Tim Kaine‏ says:

Charlottesville violence was fueled by one side: white supremacists spreading racism, intolerance & intimidation. Those are the facts.

So what caused this violence?



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Trump's reward



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Progressives Use Violence to Whitewash History  

The awful violence this past weekend in Charlottesville is the inevitable culmination of the Left’s goal of achieving the complete eradication of opposing viewpoints. Whitewashing history (pardon the pun) and engaging in political violence are tools to that end.

As the Dallas Morning News observantly noted, “History is not easily compartmentalized. It isn’t simply right versus wrong, black versus white, or blue versus gray. But there’s an entire crowd of folks who want to do just that because they believe it is all those things, and most egregiously, they believe there is an individual right for all to go through life unoffended.”

Dr. Lee Cheek, senior fellow of the Alexander Hamilton Institute, concurred, noting, “The events in Charlottesville have no connection to understanding the political traditions of the American South, and everything to do with battles among professional ideologues without any attachment or knowledge of the historical situation.”

Millions of Southerners are proud of their heritage for reasons that have nothing to do with slavery. They revere Confederate General Robert E. Lee, who stated in 1856, five years before the commencement of the War Between the States, “Slavery as an institution is a moral and political evil in any country.” Lee is heralded as a brilliant military strategist who served America faithfully in the Mexican War and as Superintendent of West Point. However, when called upon by President Abraham Lincoln to lead Union forces against the seceding South, he declined, incapable of bearing arms against his family, friends and home state. He accepted the commission as commander of Confederate forces in order to defend his beloved state of Virginia. Following the war, Lee worked tirelessly to convince his fellow Southerners to seek peace and reconciliation.

None of this matters to the Left, though. There is no understanding of the complexities of history, no appreciation for context. Slavery has existed throughout human history, regardless of color or nationality. In fact, there are more people enslaved worldwide today than ever before, including slavery practiced by Muslims. Mohammad owned slaves. One wonders if American progressives will now call for banning all things Islamic.

Indeed, how far will this go? Historical monuments of the Confederacy are being removed in Memphis, Lexington, Baltimore, New Orleans and elsewhere to appease angry leftists. These fascists even desecrated an Atlanta monument dedicated to unity and reconciliation.

Violent leftists have rioted in recent years in Brooklyn, Baltimore, Chicago, Ferguson, Charlotte, Berkeley, DC, Oakland and other cities, destroying businesses, setting cars on fire, and dragging people from their cars and beating them, declaring their right to do so because of past and current “injustices” — such as hearing words they don’t like.

As detestable as the KKK and white supremacists are, they have a right to speak and to peaceably assemble. Our First Amendment was written specifically to protect unpopular speech, and we show our own intolerance by silencing those with whom we disagree. The violence in Charlottesville would not likely have occurred had not the leftist agitators shown up looking to pick a fight, though the murderous Nazi thug is obviously responsible for his own actions.

So again we ask, how far does this go?

Do we eliminate all monuments to Democrat/progressive hero Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who opposed anti-lynching legislation, turned a blind eye to the Nazi eradication of Jews, and imprisoned 100,000 Japanese-Americans? What about progressive icon and racist Woodrow Wilson, who re-segregated the federal workforce?

Progressives have already declared war on Thomas Jefferson, author of the Declaration of Independence, who owned slaves but sought to prohibit slavery in the newly formed nation. They now call for taking down the Jefferson Memorial.

Even Lincoln, author of the Emancipation Proclamation, is not immune to leftist hatred. The Lincoln Memorial was desecrated Tuesday. Is that because Lincoln, a staunch opponent of slavery, was willing to save it in order to preserve the Union, or because he also believed in the superiority of the white race?

If we truly want to rid our nation of its shameful history regarding racism, let’s start by abolishing the racist Democrat Party. After all, it was the Democrats who waged war to preserve slavery, founded the KKK, enacted Jim Crow laws, and fought against Republican efforts to pass the Civil Rights Act.

Democrat President Andrew Jackson owned slaves and signed the Indian Removal Act of 1830.

It was Harry Truman who wrote to his wife, “I think one man is just as good as another so long as he’s not a n—er or a Chinaman.”

It was the Democrat Party that praised Senator and former KKK Exalted Cyclops Robert Byrd until his death a few years ago, a man who filibustered the Civil Rights Act for 14 hours. It was Lyndon Johnson, a virulent racist but a political pragmatist, who told two Southern Democrat governors his signing of the Civil Rights Act would “have those n—ers voting Democrat for 200 years.” And it’s Johnson’s “Great Society” that has yielded today’s urban poverty plantations, where blacks slaughter other blacks without too much notice from the Leftmedia.

What about Bill Clinton, whining of the upstart Obama, “A few years ago, this guy would have been carrying our bags”? Or the absolute devotion of Democrats to Planned Parenthood, founded by eugenicist Margaret Sanger for the express purpose of exterminating blacks through abortion and sterilization? According to Tuskegee University, the KKK lynched 3,446 blacks in 86 years. Planned Parenthood is a white supremacist’s dream, killing more blacks in two weeks than the KKK killed in a century. And the Democrat Party fights to ensure that $500 million a year in taxpayer funds is funneled to Planned Parenthood to kill all of those black babies.

Surely we could at least agree to remove the Seattle monument to Vladimir Lenin? Anyone? Anyone?

How far do we go? Are we willing to engage in violence and oppression of opposing viewpoints? If so, then Charlottesville will only be the beginning.

SOURCE

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More Leftist violence.  Where is the media uproar about this?

Is it only Leftist lives that matter?

A West Goshen, Pennsylvania man shot his GOP neighbor twice in the head and killed him late Monday night. Clayton Carter, an unhinged anti-Trump fanatic, shot his neighbor twice in the head on his neighbor’s property.

Clayton Carter has anti-Trump signs sprinkled on his lawn. He has a history of arguments with his neighbors.

The victim G. Brooks Jennings was murdered while his wife watched Clayton stand over her husband and shoot him in the head.
ABC6 reported:

A man is under arrest, accused of killing his next door neighbor in West Goshen, Chester County. Police have charged Clayton Carter, 51, in the shooting death of G. Brooks Jennings.

More HERE

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On the lighter side

Under the heading, "A Conservative manifesto from England", I have just put up in my sidebar a link to some quotations from Jacob Rees-Mogg, a very old-fashioned and very popular Conservative member of the House of Commons in London. He is noted for his humorous speeches. His comment on small businessmen cracked me up. See here

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

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

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Trump tells it like it is

Is he the only one who is immune to the tidal wave of media hysteria and lies? He is immensely valuable if he is.  Anyone who has seen the graphics coming out of Charlotteville must be aware of the violent attacks on the marchers by Antifa but that seems to be unmentionable to the Left.  Trump saw it and tells what he saw.  He will not let pass the claim that the Left were peaceful.  Ever since the French revolution, the Left have NEVER been peaceful unless they had to be. So it's a sad day when it needs the President to tell people what the media will not.  I am pleased to say that I have been saying much the same as Trump on my various blogs


Donald Trump launched an extraordinary and angry defense of his performance in the wake of the Charlottesville riots Tuesday in a free-wheeling, finger-pointing confrontation with the press at Trump Tower.

He lashed out at his critics following a botched response to the weekend's Charlottesville murder, insisting that a violent 'alt-left' mob came to protests ready for war but a dishonest news media is shielding them from blame.

The president even defended elements of the far-right protest, claiming some were 'fine people' protesting against the removal of Confederate symbols.

'You had some fine people. But you also had trouble makers,' he said during a Q&A session in the lobby of Trump Tower – an event that was supposed to be a press event about infrastructure projects.

'You see them come with the black outfits and with the helmets and the baseball bats,' he said, describing what he said had happened in the Virginia college town.

While the vehicular homicide of a liberal protester, allegedly by a neo-Nazi who is now charged with her murder, has grabbed the nation's attention, Trump insisted that 'you had a lot of bad people in the other group too.'

His aides had expected him to address infrastructure and the press conference began with praise for his new plan to make it simpler to build, but quickly veered off course.

He offered the comment as a defense of his Saturday statement in which he ad-libbed that there had been 'bigotry and violence on many sides.'

Those words prompted a second statement on Monday that more forcefully denounced white supremacists.

'What about the alt-left that came charging at the, as you say, the alt-right?' he asked reporters on Tuesday, answering questions with questions. 'Do they have any semblance of guilt?'

'Let me ask you this: What about the fact that they came charging with clubs in their hands, swinging clubs. Do they have any problem? I think they do.'

'And you had a group on one side that was bad and you had a group on the other side that was also very violent,' Trump said. 'And nobody wants to say that.' 'But I'll say it right now.'

'I think there's blame on both sides,' he added as he attacked the political press. 'And I have no doubt about it, and you don't have any doubt about it either.'

Trump's reference to the 'alt-left' is a nod to so-called 'Antifa' protesters, short for 'anti-fascist,' a movement that has seen its own violent protests aimed at conservatives.

But Ku Klux Klansmen and white nationalists in Nazi regalia stole the spotlight over the weekend. The protest was explicitly planned as 'Unite the Right' and sought permission under that name.

Behind the scenes, Trump aides reacted with a range of emotions that ranged from fist-pumping to head-shaking. 'That's our president,' one White House official aligned with the populist, nationalist wing of the Trump camp, told DailyMail.com. The aide was glad that Trump 'said the truth, no matter what the reporters think.'

Another, from a different wing, however, was shell-shocked. 'That wasn't in the plan. None of it was supposed to happen,' the aide said.

There was equal shock among some of the most senior Republicans.  Florida Senator Marco Rubio tweeted a lengthy statement about the danger of suggesting anyone other than neo-Nazis shares the blame for Saturday's violence

'The organizers of events which inspired & led to #charlottesvilleterroristattack are 100% to blame for a number of reasons,' he wrote in a series of tweets. 'They are adherents of an evil ideology which argues certain people are inferior because of race, ethnicity or nation of origin.'

'When entire movement built on anger & hatred towards people different than you, it justifies & ultimately leads to violence against them. These groups today use SAME symbols & same arguments of #Nazi & #KKK, groups responsible for some of worst crimes against humanity ever.

'Mr. President, you can't allow #WhiteSupremacists to share only part of blame. They support idea[s] which cost nation & world so much pain. The #WhiteSupremacy groups will see being assigned only 50% of blame as a win. We can not allow this old evil to be resurrected.'

House Speaker Paul Ryan didn't fault Trump directly, but made it clear that he agreed with Trump's statement on Monday condemning neo-Nazis. 'We must be clear. White supremacy is repulsive,' Ryan tweeted. 'This bigotry is counter to all this country stands for. There can be no moral ambiguity.'

Florida Republican Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen struck a more aggressive chord. 'Blaming "both sides" for #Charlottesville?! No,' she tweeted. 'Back to relativism when dealing with KKK, Nazi sympathizers, white supremacists? Just no.'

Trump's words were quickly denounced by Democrats as an attempt to draw moral equivalence between Nazis and liberal activists. 'As a Jew, as an American, as a human, words cannot express my disgust and disappointment. This is not my President,' tweeted Hawaii Democratic Sen. Brian Schatz. 'There has to be room for people of all political stripes among the coalition of the sane. We all need to take our country back together.'

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, a California Democrat, issued a scathing statement saying that Trump's 'continued talk of blame 'on many sides' ignores the abhorrent evil of white supremacism, and continues a disturbing pattern of complacency around acts of hate from this President, his Administration and his campaign for the presidency.'

'There is only one side to be on when a white supremacist mob brutalizes and murders in America. The American people deserve a president who understands that,' she said.

Conservative columnist Ann Coulter was quick to defend Trump, however, 'Nearly the entire quisling 'conservative' media immediately caved to the B.S. left-wing media narrative on Charlottesville. NOT TRUMP!' she tweeted.

Trump insisted Tuesday that many on the political right who gathered in Charlottesville were peaceful protesters themselves who aimed to save a statue of Confederate general Robert E. Lee from the scrap heap.

The city is removing it in line with many others across the old South, under pressure to renounce ties to slavery.

'Not all of those people were white supremacists by any stretch. Those people were also there because they wanted to protest the taking down of a statue,' he said.

Trump's claim at the 15-minute question-and-answer in Trump Tower that leftists 'came charging with clubs in their hands, swinging clubs' has some basis in reports of what happened in Charlottseville.

The Washington Post on Monday described the situation in Charlottesville on Friday night, at the statue of Thomas Jefferson on the lawn of UVA as around 250 white far-right protesters met a group of 30 counter-protesters - and that both sides were armed in some form.

'Within moments, there was chaos. Shoves. Punches. Both groups sprayed chemical irritants,' the paper reported.

The next day, it said, armed anti-right wing protesters were present in Emancipation Park from around 8.30am.

'Members of anti-fascist groups yelled at the rallygoers. Many of them also carried sticks and shields,' the paper said.

 And the New York Times reported that not all the anti-far-right protesters were violent. It noted the presence of a group called Redneck Revolt, which had up to 20 people present carrying rifles and which describes itself as 'a pro-worker, anti-racist organization that focuses on working class liberation from the oppressive systems which dominate our lives' and claims to be inspired by John Brown, the anti-slavery rebel.

Trump challenged reporters to imagine the nation stripped of symbols of its slave-owning Founding Fathers, while conceding that local communities should ultimately decide the fate of statuary dedicated to Confederate war heroes.

'George Washington was a slave owner. Was George Washington a slave owner? So will George Washington now lose his status?' he asked.

'Are we going to take down statues to George Washington? How about Thomas Jefferson? What do you think Thomas Jefferson? You like him? Okay, good. Are we going to take down the statue? Because he was a major slave owner.'

'You're changing history, you're changing culture,' Trump carped, saying of the right's more thoughtful, permitted protesters that 'the press has treated them absolutely unfairly.'

'You had a lot of people in that group that were there to innocently protest and very legally protest.'            

Speaking of James Alex Fields Jr., the 20-year-old white nationalist accused of running down a woman with his car as fellow racists egged him on, Trump called him 'a disgrace to himself, his family and his country.'

He wouldn't say if the murder was an act of terrorism, calling the question a quibble over 'legal semantics.'  But 'the driver of the car is a murderer,' Trump said without naming him. 'And what he did is a terrible, horrible thing.'

He also defended his chief strategist Steve Bannon, whom Democrats and some news outlets regularly clobber as a racialist at the very least who guided the Breitbart News to prominence by kowtowing to alt-right bigots and at worst is a white supremacist.

'He's a good man. He's not a racist, I can tell you that,' the president said, while not offering the embattled Bannon his full-throated approval as he fights to keep his job. 'He's a good person, and I think frankly the press treats him very unfairly,' he said.

Trump said Tuesday that his widely panned insistence on Saturday that there had been bigotry and violence 'on many sides' – an ad-libbed line that prompted Monday's do-over – was a prudent step to make sure his statement didn't get ahead of the facts as investigators knew them.

'I'd do it the same way,' he declared. 'And you know why? Because I want to make sure when I make a statement that the statement is correct. And ... there was no way of making a correct statement that early.' 'I had to see the facts, unlike a lot of reporters.'

Trump claimed that on Saturday he was unaware that David Duke, the infamous former Klan leader, was present at the scene of the riot.

'I wanted to see the facts,' he said again. 'And the facts as they started coming out were very well-stated.'

'In fact, everybody said, "His statement was beautiful; if he would have made it sooner, that would have been good." I couldn't have made it sooner because I didn't know all of the facts. Frankly, people still don't know all of the facts.'

SOURCE

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What motivated the fatal car collision?

A reader writes:

I've seen the videos of the "car plowing into the crowd". Several things become evident to anyone watching the video. First the car was slowly following other cars down a street with protestors crowding both sides, at one point someone steps off behind his car and swings at it, despite the distance you can hear the impact.

That evidently startles the drivers who then plows into the demonstrators who had stepped between his car and the previous car. A number of other protestors mobbed the car at that point striking it and attempting to break out its windows. The driver quickly backed up striking those who had jumped behind his car which is where the majority of those who were struck got hurt.

By that time it was apparent that there was no way he would be safe in that violent crowd. Those are all points his lawyer is going to be raising when this goes to trial.

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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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Facing the reality of HiTech

Here is the reality:

"In 2014, tech companies Google, Yahoo!, Facebook, Apple, and others, released corporate transparency reports that offered detailed employee breakdowns. In May, Google said 17% of its tech employees worldwide were women, and, in the U.S., 1% of its tech workers were black and 2% were Hispanic. June 2014 brought reports from Yahoo! and Facebook. Yahoo! said that 15% of its tech jobs were held by women, 2% of its tech employees were black and 4% Hispanic. Facebook reported that 15% of its tech workforce was female, and 3% was Hispanic and 1% was black. In August, Apple reported that 80% of its global tech staff was male and that, in the U.S., 54% of its tech jobs were staffed by Caucasians and 23% by Asians. Soon after, USA Today published an article about Silicon Valley's lack of tech-industry diversity, pointing out that it is largely white or Asian, and male. "Blacks and Hispanics are largely absent," it reported, "and women are underrepresented in Silicon Valley — from giant companies to start-ups to venture capital firms".

It's an unbudgeable gap. The companies concerned are very politically correct and have made great efforts to alter the pattern of their employment -- but with negligible success.  The industry concerned runs on IQ and the level of IQ required is just not generally available outside white and Asian males.

The only way to get more women and minority employees in the sector would be to drop recruitment standards.  And doing that would rapidly hand the entire industry over to China.  China already has an IQ advantage over America so will probably take charge eventually anyway but the innovativeness of American firms is so far keeping America in the lead.  Doing anything to degrade the performance of the sector would be fatal.  My software developer son has been to China three times recently in order to teach computer people there some skills they did not currently have and he has only one word for the Chinese:  "Unbeatable".

What I think outsiders don't get is how complex computer programming is.  It requires the utmost attention to detail and constant creativity to find a way ahead through the task.  For some of us that comes easily but for most people it just cannot be done.  Many years ago, I tried to teach FORTRAN to sociology students at a major university but in the end none of them really "got" it. They were smart but not that smart. And the composition of silicon valley firms is a loud announcement of where the required level of talent is mostly to be found. The Leftist preoccupation with equality is just madness in that sphere.  It could very easily become destructive madness. Reality is unco-operative with Leftist dreams -- JR

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It is a caricature of what happened in Charlottesville to call Trump and his supporters racists

Since Trump’s ascendancy, there have been repeated outbreaks of violence, mostly perpetrated by Antifa against ordinary Republicans and other conservatives, either at pro-Trump rallies or on other public platforms. These people have been either stopped from speaking or physically attacked by Antifa and other left-wing demonstrators.

Such attacks on mainstream conservatives have been ignored, downplayed or even endorsed by Democrats and their media acolytes.

In June the House Republican whip, Steve Scalise, was shot and almost killed by a Bernie Sanders-supporting Democrat who opened fire on a group of Republicans at a baseball practice. A New Jersey Democratic party activist, James Devine, posted on his Facebook page that he had “little sympathy” for Scalise because he opposed gun restriction policies. Another Democratic party official in Nebraska was fired after saying he was “glad” that Scalise had been shot.

The real target is mainstream American values and culture
The Democratic establishment dismisses such people as mavericks with no significance for the left-wing causes they support. Yet a double standard operates against President Trump, who is held to be personally defined by the unacceptable nature of a tiny minority of his supporters.

The fact that the former Ku Klux Klan “grand wizard” David Duke, who was at Charlottesville, claims to support Trump’s agenda (that is, when he’s not in the next breath condemning him) is being used to smear Trump himself as a white supremacist.

It is grotesque to equate Trump’s pledge to “make America great again”, which was endorsed by the 63 million Americans who voted for him, with the bigotry of white supremacism. The former is driven by people wanting to uphold core American values they deeply cherish and share with each other. The latter is driven by loathing of racial and ethnic groups deemed to be inferior.

In last year’s presidential campaign Hillary Clinton was endorsed by Will Quigg, “grand dragon” of the Ku Klux Klan’s California chapter. He claimed she had a “hidden agenda” and that if elected she would come out for gun ownership and sealing America’s borders. Quigg’s support of Clinton was rightly dismissed as either mischief-making or barking mad. Yet when such people support Trump, this is held to define him.

The left’s real target is not the far right but mainstream conservatives who want to uphold American values and culture: the people who brought Trump to power. Defending national identity, however, is denounced by western progressives as white racism.

The result is an unholy alliance between the left and the far right. A white supremacist called Richard Spencer invented the blanket term “alt-right” to associate his ilk with conservatives seeking merely to defend American identity and core values. Through this tactic, Spencer intended to boost the far right and simultaneously smear and thus destroy regular conservatives.

The left has seized upon this smear with unbridled joy, routinely using the “alt-right” term to try to destroy the national identity agenda by bracketing it with white supremacism. The result is a powerful boost for the far right. From deserved obscurity, they suddenly find the left are transmitting their every utterance to the world. The phrase “useful idiots” comes inescapably to mind.

Charlottesville was but the latest front in what has become America’s cultural civil war. It won’t, alas, be the last.

SOURCE

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ObamaCare Is Dumping Millions of Middle Class to Insure More Poor

While Democrats and Republicans fret over millions "losing" coverage to reform, the actual law is taking its toll.

Barack Obama and the Democrats’ “Affordable” Care Act was never really about making the cost of health care more affordable. It was never about giving Americans greater access to health care. ObamaCare was always a scheme designed to give the government greater power to control and redistribute Americans’ wealth, essentially taking from the middle class to give it the poor — and to insurance companies.

While Democrats like to point to the increasing numbers of individuals receiving ObamaCare’s subsidized insurance coverage, they are ignoring a dirty little secret. The number of Americans with unsubsidized individual coverage has decreased precipitously. From March 2016 to March 2017, some 2.6 million fewer people had unsubsidized policies, an overall decrease of 15% in one year alone.

But the unsubsidized coverage bleed is not limited to the individual market. Since 2013, the year before ObamaCare began subsidizing plans, the number of individuals with employment-based coverage has decreased by almost three million.

Doug Badger of National Review describes the issue:

The narrative nevertheless endures. Believing it requires indifference to millions of people who can no longer afford individual policies and to millions more who may forfeit their policies with the next round of rate hikes. For many of them, Obamacare has been a serial nightmare, producing policy cancellations, skyrocketing premiums and deductibles, and a narrowing choice of doctors before finally leaving them uninsured.

Obamacare is insuring more poor people and uninsuring millions of middle-income people. That suits the Democratic party and many congressional Republicans just fine. They measure social progress in the number of people receiving government assistance. Those struggling to pay their own way evoke little sympathy. Lawmakers of both parties, whose consciences were lacerated by CBO’s theory that millions would “lose” coverage under the GOP’s “repeal and replace” legislation (most of those “losses” the result of people voluntarily dropping insurance once the individual mandate was repealed) are unmoved that millions actually have lost coverage under the law they fought to preserve.

Obama was a leftist who was bound and determined to foist his socialism onto the American people. Health care was his means to that end, and so far too many Americans and their representatives in Congress are content to sell their freedom for the mirage of greater security and health.

SOURCE

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Problems with AG Jeff Sessions

The two big issues I have with Sessions are his intention to escalate the so-called war on drugs, and his support for civil asset forfeiture.

The war on drugs is misnamed. It is not a war on inanimate objects, it is a war on American citizens who make choices some people in government don’t like. As for civil asset forfeiture–government’s ability to take people’s property without even accusing them of a crime–I honestly don’t see any defense for it that is compatible with basic principles of due process and liberty.

Sessions seems to have gained a bit of support from Trump for his attack on sanctuary cities, I’m sorry to see. My sorrow here has nothing to do with sanctuary cities and everything to do with the war on drugs and civil asset forfeiture. I don’t feel I’m being extreme in expressing dissatisfaction with an attorney general who has so little respect for individual rights.

SOURCE

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CA: More Costs Flowing from Dam Negligence

National Water Quality Month is turning out rather dry in California, but trouble will soon be washing up in court. Farmers and business owners have filed more than 90 claims against the state government for causing a total of $1.7 billion in losses from the spillway failure at Oroville Dam back in February. Might they have a case?

As we noted, the failure of the spillway prompted the evacuation of 200,000 people, hardly a frivolous move, because if the spillway collapsed it could have caused complete failure of the dam, built in 1968.

As it turned out, government engineers knew for decades that the dirt spillway was unreliable but failed to reinforce it with concrete. As Representative John Garamendi (D–Walnut Grove) famously put it, the dirt spillway “worked fine until it had to be used, in which case it didn’t work so well.” State water bosses also failed to add gates above the spillway, which would have allowed the reservoir to rise another ten feet. Governor Jerry Brown claimed to be unaware of these problems and proclaimed, “stuff happens and we respond.”

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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Should Trump have condemned the "white supremacists" at the Charlottesville fracas?

He probably should have -- if there were any there.  The only evidence that I have seen put forward so far is that there was a peaceful torchlit procession at another time in another place. I guess we have to call that media logic. No court would convict anybody of anything on such flimsy "evidence".  And can the marchers be collectively condemned for the deeds of one man in a car? I think the difficulties in so doing are obvious.

Nonetheless the media and some RINOs are criticizing Trump's statesmanlike response of condemning all violence from all sides.

But the fact that there was a peaceful torchlit procession through the University of Virginia the night before the fracas proves only one thing and even for that we have to make an unproven assumption.  If the marchers on the two occasions were the same (an assumption), it shows that the marchers were peaceful until attacked by Antifa goons.  Antifa protesters came equipped with bats, sticks, and flame throwers. The marchers were entitled to hit back at the Antifa goons and they did.  It was not they who turned up with violent intent.

And a parade of torches proves nothing. I have some of those torches myself, which I use to light up backyard feasts at night. In a parade, they are just an attention-getting device and have been used by many groups in many places in a perfectly peaceful and non-ideological manner.  Google "torchlit procession" if you doubt it.

And the march was organised to protest the removal of a statue of Confederate General Robert E. Lee. So was probably comprised overwhelmingly of Southern patriots honoring their forefathers  rather than any "racist" cause.

History is written by the victors so most people still believe the propaganda that the North/South war was fought to free the slaves.  Yet, in his famous letter to Horace Greeley, Lincoln himself said that slavery was not the issue.  "The union" was the basic cause.  600,000 young Americans had to die to preserve Yankee dominance over the South.  So Southerners have cause to remember and honor their forebears.

In my view it is the Leftist thugs of Antifa whom Trump should have particularly condemned.  They turned a peaceful march into a violent occasion.

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How the Liberal Media Created Charlottesville

John Hawkins

I wish I could say that it’s a shock that someone died in Charlottesville, but I’ve been predicting just this sort of thing in radio appearances for months. The liberal media is dying to blame it all on Donald Trump, but it should look in the mirror.

To begin with, the liberal media is almost entirely responsible for growing the Alt-Right merger of hate groups and internet trolls. Most people are well aware of the stifling political correctness that reached an apex under Barack Obama. People are sick and tired of being attacked and scolded by the humorless left-wing thought police every time they stray from the latest liberal doctrine. That created a large group of people who enjoyed tweaking social justice warriors and some of them realized the easiest way to do that was with racial slurs.

Every time some doofus leaves a noose on a college campus or says the N-word, it’s treated like a national crisis. If you’re an anonymous troll who enjoys getting people to react to everything you say, that’s a FEATURE, not a bug. All you have to do is say something racially offensive and all these people who studiously try to ignore you will go out of their minds.

That racial element gave the Nazis, white supremacists and KKK mouth-breathers a way to connect with the more socially adept trolls making the Pepe the Frog memes. Of course, the media liberals fueled them as well with their hypocrisy. They painted EVERY white supporter of Donald Trump or the Republican Party as a racist even as they ignored and defended the vicious anti-white rhetoric that has become commonplace on the Left.

Just to give you a quick example of that, there was a hashtag that trended on Twitter after the attack called #ThisIsNotUS. It started out as a way for white liberals to virtue signal, but it quickly turned into an all too typical attack on white people, America and Trump voters. Here are some of the most popular comments from the hashtag…

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#ThisIsNotUs Then who is it? 63% of white men & 53% of white women voted for KKK-endorsed Trump. The majority of EVERY OTHER ETHNICITY didn’t

If you are white and you are trying to say #ThisIsNotUs you are part of the problem.

If you're earnestly tweeting #ThisIsNotUS, know that the you might as well have been one of the white supremacists walking w/ tiki torches.

Every white person that tweets #ThisIsNotUs is being complicit in not addressing the rampant racism and bigotry that in their community

#ThisIsNotUS? Easy to say so. Unfortunately you can't have the Black, Brown, Asian, Jewish, Muslim or LGTBQ "experience" to know #THISISYOU

Gaga, prime example of a white woman using tag #ThisIsNotUs like this country wasn’t built on slavery & racism. THIS HAS ALWAYS BEEN AmeriKa

#ThisIsNotUs is how white people try to absolve themselves from their complicity in white supremacy; it v much is you, your inaction fuels it

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The biggest talking point white supremacists have are comments like these. Would that be true if the mainstream media actually treated these comments with the same sort of contempt it has for the Alt-Right?

Nope.

Yet these sort of comments are MAINSTREAM on the Left. Let me repeat that. They are MAINSTREAM on the Left.

On the other hand, white supremacists are nothing on the Right. David Duke is a joke. Richard Spencer? Let me tell you a little story about Richard Spencer. I was walking around CPAC and noticed an enormous gaggle of media surrounding someone I didn’t recognize, who didn’t seem to be drawing a crowd of regular attendees. As it turns out, the massive group of media people weren’t following a big name. They were following Richard Spencer, who was later kicked out of the conference, presumably because the organizers never wanted him there in the first place.

Yet Richard Spencer, like David Duke before him, is treated like some kind of rock star by the media liberals even though he’s a nobody in the conservative movement. Why? Because they don’t care about conservative opinion. They don’t care about conservative views. They care about creating propaganda that paints the Right as a bunch of hood-wearing, Nazi-saluting scumbags. So, they treat Richard Spencer like a rock star.

This creates a sort of Kim Kardashian effect. Ninety five percent of any influence Spencer has comes from the fact that anything he does is a big deal to the media. Why were Spencer and Duke able to gather even 500 Tiki torch-waving idiots in Charlottesville? Because the media would cover everything they did with bated breath. It gave them a chance to feel important, to feel like they were making an impact. In fact, white supremacists have started to believe its own BS because they keep hearing it from the media.

The hardcore racists out there are pariahs everywhere except in the mainstream media, where they’re treated as incredibly important.

On the other hand, the same mainstream media that has elevated the Alt-Right has been silent as violence has increasingly become a mainstay at liberal protests, including the counter-protest of this event. A few shops getting looted or people getting hurt doesn’t stop the media from describing a liberal event as a peaceful protest. Even the counter-protests in Charlottesville were widely described as “peaceful.” Yet, protesters chanted “From the Midwest to the South, punch a Nazi in the mouth,” a female reporter was punched by one of those counter-protesters, the organizer of the rally was hit, and other people were attacked. That’s not peaceful. That’s something LIBERAL POLITICIANS should be asked to condemn.

In other words, Nazi and KKK members are HORRIBLE. The violent liberal counter-protesters are ALSO horrible. James Alex Fields, Jr? Who appears to have marched at the rally before plowing into a crowd? I condemn what he did. I also condemn the Bernie supporter who shot up a congressional Republican softball game.

Additionally, I will condemn the next person on the Left or the Right who kills someone over politics, which seems inevitable when you have opposing sides carrying shields and weapons to political rallies. Those condemnations don’t make a damn bit of difference as long as the liberal media keeps elevating white supremacists and excusing the violence of the Alt-Left. I’m genuinely sorry people are dying at political rallies, but it would be surprising if the death at Charlottesville were the last one. Their blood will be on the hands of the liberal media.

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Rainbow Mafia: Dubious Economics to Further Agenda

Socially conservative laws are labeled as dangerous for business, while leftist prerogatives are an economic boon.

The Texas Association of Business has been a vocal critic of a proposed transgender bathroom bill — one that would restrict the use of public bathrooms to an individual’s biological sex rather than one’s self-declared gender identity. It’s similar to the law that was passed last year in North Carolina. So why would a business advocacy group oppose a common-sense law that protects the vast majority of the population? Because it fears an economic backlash to the tune of an estimated $8.5 billion in lost business should the bill become law.

In Florida, a small-business advocacy group called Florida Competes has been actively and aggressively pushing for the state to make sexual orientation and gender identity a protected class under the Florida Civil Rights Act. The advocacy group maintains that this change would boost Florida’s economy by some $5 billion and add at least 36,000 jobs over the next decade.

What’s driving this connection between business revenue and leftist “social justice”? Call it the Rainbow Mafia’s economic carrot-and-stick approach. Across the country, these single-minded pressure groups have been promoting their agenda by pouring money into a “network of small-business coalitions that routinely make doom-and-gloom economic prognostications about socially conservative legislation.” To put it simply, they find “experts” to study the issue and then declare that any legislation which impedes their agenda is backward, bad for business and harmful for economic growth.

But even lefty PolitiFact rated the Texas Association of Business prognostication as “mostly false.” Politicians seem to be especially susceptible to these dubious doom-and-gloom “studies” because they’re terrified of being blamed for any ill economic effects. Their constituents, however, would be far better served by an adherence to principled and untainted sources of information.

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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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Leftist hate never stops


Whom would you pick?

Liberals always complain that Conservatives try to dictate the way women dress. However, ‘feminist’ Joan Walsh did just that. While Ivanka Trump is fighting for women, Walsh is demanding that Ivanka change her clothes because she looks too ‘girly’.

“I mean, I don’t mean to sound sexist — it can be dangerous to comment on what women wear — but the fact that she sat in for her father in a dress that was so incredibly ornamental was such a contradiction in terms. And I think that what we see is that in patriarchal, authoritarian societies, daughters have great value — they are property,” said Walsh.

“And the message that she is sending about her own value, about her place in the White House, and about the place of women in this administration, I think, are really pretty frightening,” said Walsh.

“So you can’t be a feminist and be girlie at the same time?” asked Thomas Roberts. “You can be a feminist and be girlie. We all have our girlie days, but I think showing up, taking your father’s seat in a pink dress with big bows on the sleeves is really an interesting message,” said Walsh.

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Candidate Set To Be First Female Navy SEAL Quits After A Week Of Training

Reality sets in

A woman who enlisted to become the first ever female Navy SEAL quit after one week of training, reports Task and Purpose.

"The unidentified female candidate dropped out in early August during a three-week course in San Diego that began July 24. It was the first assessment of potential SEAL officers before they can be sent on to more grueling courses, according to the website, which cited 'multiple Naval Special Warfare Command sources,'" reports The Washington Examiner.

Before former President Barack Obama's rule change, which took effect in January of 2016, women were not allowed in United States Military combat roles. "​But there were no female applicants in the 18 months since that historic change until now," reported CNN at the end of July, referring to the enlistment of the unidentified candidate.

There is still one remaining female candidate attempting to join the Navy's special operations teams; this unidentified woman is training for the Special Warfare Combatant-Craft Crewman (SWCC) program.

As previously reported by The Daily Wire, women, generally speaking, are unqualified for combat. Moreover, sex-integrated units have been found to be far less effective and more injury-prone than all-male units.

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THE GOOGLE GULAG

The internet cannot remain in the hands of a corporation that hates free speech.

Let me Google that for you.

James Damore is an FIDE chess master who studied at Princeton, MIT and Harvard. He had been working as a software engineer at Google for four years.

Danielle Brown is the new Vice President of Diversity at Google. She has an MBA from the University of Michigan and campaigned for Hillary.

She had been working at Google for a few weeks.

James Damore wrote a memo suggesting that Google should pursue ideological diversity, end discriminatory efforts to achieve identity politics diversity and be honest about gender differences. Danielle responded by denouncing his paper. “It’s not a viewpoint that I or this company endorses, promotes or encourages.”

Brown and Google CEO Sundar Pichai made some vague noises about free speech. And fired him.

“This has been a very difficult time.” That’s how Pichai began his letter to Google employees. Some might have thought that he was about to discuss a massive data breach, not an employee writing something that he disagreed with.

It was a difficult time because leftists at Google had to confront the horror of an original thinker in their ranks. Some were so traumatized by his intrusion into their safe space that they threatened to quit.

And so Damore was fired for “advancing harmful gender stereotypes”.  What were these stereotypes?

That the gender gap in coding could be explained because women are more interested in people and men are more interested in things. Women were more cooperative and he suggested and that the gender gap could be reduced by making “software engineering more people-oriented with pair programming.”

Google could have disagreed with him. And left it at that. Instead it was, “Off with his head.”

Pichai claimed that some Google employees were “hurting”. Social media accounts were full of bizarre claims that leftist employees were “afraid” to come to work. But the only actual casualty was Damore.

It’s never the oppressed leftists crying to friendly media outlets who suffer. Only their targets.

James Damore is what most people think of when they imagine a Google employee. A brilliant original thinker with interests spread across the scientific and technological spectrum. But Danielle Brown is what Google actually is: a Hillary Clinton supporter who handled diversity at Intel and Google.

Google is a search engine monopoly that makes its money from search ads. It began with a revolutionary idea from young engineers much like Damore. Then the engineers became billionaires. And the company that began in a garage hired a Vice President of Diversity to get rid of the brilliant young engineers.

The idea that made Google some twenty years ago was PageRank. It was ahead of its time in utilizing social technology to rate the relevance of a page. The idea has since been cannibalized as Google’s search algorithm favors its own products. And increasingly it also favors its own political views.

As the company swings left, it isn’t interested in the “wisdom of crowds”, only in its own agenda.

Google has embedded partisan attacks on conservatives into its search and news territories under the guise of “fact checks”. It has fundamentally shifted results for terms such as “Jihad” to reflect Islamist propaganda rather than the work of counterterrorism researchers such as Robert Spencer. And it wasn’t the first time. Google had been previously accused of manipulating search results during Brexit.

Censorship has long been a problem on YouTube. And it will now officially be caging “controversial” videos using a method developed by Jigsaw. Formerly Google Ideas, Jigsaw is Google’s left-wing incubator developing social justice tech.

The Southern Poverty Law Center guided Google’s censorship of Islamic search results. But there’s no reason to think that it will stop there until Google has completely cannibalized PageRank and replaced it with ProgRank in which search results will be dominated by left-wing sites in one category after another. First Autocomplete results and then actual search results will be censored and suppressed.

Google’s treatment of conservative users mirrors its internal treatment of conservative employees.

Internally, Google is a toxic environment where conservatives are threatened, blacklisted and even physically assaulted. Damore’s case went public. Countless other conservatives were forced out of Google and blacklisted by left-wing activists without their cases ever receiving public attention.

Once upon a time, James Damore would have represented what was best about Google. But Google doesn’t need brilliant minds. It needs to find more ways to squeeze ad dollars out of its monopoly. The pretense that it’s a hub of innovation is the meaningless default brand for a Bay Area tech company.

Damore was working on Google’s search infrastructure. And there’s little doubt that he was wasted there. Google’s search has grown more useless even as the company’s search revenues have grown. Google’s goal is to streamline and shape search results for a mobile environment by giving users what it thinks they want rather than what they are actually searching for. Google isn’t just politically left-wing, its product mindset has become all about forcing users to do what it thinks they should be doing.

Google’s efforts to get a foothold in social media have repeatedly failed because of this mindset.

Damore, like so many of us, wasn’t thinking the way that Google thought he should be thinking. And so it dealt with the problem by getting rid of him. When users search for results that Google doesn’t like, it guides them to what it thinks they should be looking for. If they persist, then the results vanish. If they upload videos it doesn’t like, they get censored. That’s the totalitarian left-wing Google model in action.

Google is approaching the ecological dead end of its technological niche. There’s not much else to do except make fringe investments that are little more than disguised advertising and build more free apps to feed into its own ad business while driving traffic to them through its search and Android leverage.

If the business model ever fails or the government takes a closer look at its abuses, then it’s all over.

Meanwhile its Google.org philanthropy can fund pro-crime and anti-police causes. Google Ideas, now known as Jigsaw, can try to get involved in the Syrian Civil War. And the herd of leftists it hired can police internal messaging by spamming angry social justice memes and waiting for an actual engineer to contradict them. That’s what happened to James Damore. It’s happened to plenty of others before him.

When Google fired Damore, it sent a very clear message. The message wasn’t tolerance, but intolerance.

It said that its Vice President of Diversity knows more about biology than a researcher who received his biology degree in the top 3% of his class. It announced that there is no room for original thinking, heterodoxy or genius at Google. And it went even without saying, no room for anyone to the right.

When asked at a shareholder meeting whether conservatives would feel welcome at Google, Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt replied, “The company was founded under the principles of freedom of expression, diversity, inclusiveness.” But freedom of expression no longer comes before diversity. It’s breathing in the toxic fumes of fake inclusiveness and watching diversity vanish down the highway.

“Viewpoint diversity is arguably the most important type of diversity,” James Damore had argued.

But that’s not what the left means by diversity. At Google and everywhere else it means a plurality of people from different backgrounds, races, genders and sexual identities who agree with us.

It’s an artificial consensus that displaces the old democratic values of individualism and freedom. Instead it imposes a system of safe spaces that treat any dissent as an act of violence against the oppressed.

The gates of the internet cannot remain in the hands of a corporation intolerant of free speech. Google’s monopoly doesn’t only threaten the free market. It threatens freedom of expression on the internet.

It’s not just about James Damore. It’s about all of us.

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Jobs

For anybody who has not got it already, Trump's personal Facebook page is here.  The latest announcement is that there have been over 1 million new jobs created since Trump took office. See the video of Aug. 9th..  While the media are  obsessing about Russia, Trump is delivering the miracle he promised.  So who's dumb now?  He knows the important stuff.  The Left don't.  Trump encourages and supports the people who make America tick.  Obama despised them as "bitter clingers". Trump is a great blessing to America.

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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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Google Manifesto: Does Biology Explain Gender Disparities in Tech?

An article under the above heading appeared in Live Science, in reply to the claims of James Damore of Google fame.  As one would expect from Left-dominated mainstream academe the answer given is broadly "No".

What they trot out is all old chestnut stuff that basically aims at a straw man.  What psychometricians assert is only a TENDENCY.  There is no claim that men generally are good at tech and women not.  The research finding is that there is a big overlap in male and female abilities. Abilities differ only at the margins. So the various arguments put forward about exceptional female abilities are pointless. In various times and places you can find women who do math and tech well.  And the "No" article is mainly just a trotting out of such examples.

What is of interest is the GENERAL TENDENCY in mental abilities, not a parade of anecdotes about tribes in India etc. And the way to measure a general tendency is to apply a valid and reliable test of problem-solving ability to a representative population sample. And the finding from such studies is that at the top of the IQ range in Western populations, there are always many more men than women. And if we look at mathematical ability only, the gap is even larger. You can theorize yourself blue in the face about why that is so -- "patriarchy" and all the rest -- but there remains there a clear and firm difference in ability that you have to deal with.

It is perfectly reasonable that some populations somewhere have undergone selective pressures which make females better at the top of the range but that does not alter the reality in Western society.

So on the basis of measured facts rather than a lot of speculation, Damore was perfectly right.  You will always get a substantial number of women who are good at tech and mathemstics but they will be greatly outnumbered by men.

In the circumstances, it matters little if the differences are inborn nor not but the way such differences have consistently shown up for around a  hundred years certainly suggest something inborn -- or at least something very resistant to change.   And the various genetic studies -- now including DNA findings -- do show that most of IQ and its component abilities is genetically determined.

So Google's frenetic efforts to introduce "equality" into its workforce were pushing uphill from the beginning. Such efforts were doomed to failure.  Damore's greatest offence may have been to point that failure out.

That despite great efforts Google could not equalize the number of its employees in stat/math applications would seem good confirmation of what the tests show.  Despite its great efforts to  swing the results in the way it wanted, Google ended up finding exactly what the IQ and other tests predicted.  A psychometrician would call Google's experiment good validation of the tests.  Google showed that the tests were right.

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Trump Attacked for N. Korea Remarks, But Liberals, Media Okay With Similar Words by Truman, Clinton

Although Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), Democrat lawmakers, and many members of the media were quick to criticize President Donald Trump’s “fire and fury” remarks towards North Korea, they were wrong to suggest that no other U.S. president had used such tough rhetoric about another country.

For instance, comments made by Democratic President Harry Truman, after the first atomic bomb was dropped on Japan, were arguably much harsher than what Trump said.

On Tuesday, in response to Communist North Korea threatening to bomb the island of Guam where U.S. troops are stationed, President Trump said, “North Korea best not make anymore threats to the United States, they will be met with fire and fury, like the world has never seen.”

“He [Kim Jong-un] has been very threatening, beyond a normal statement,” said Trump.  “And as I said, they will be met with fire, fury, and frankly power - the likes of which the world has never seen before.”

CNN anchor Jake Tapper criticized the president’s statement, saying “this is a time when words should be chosen and measured carefully. The White House sources tell us that the president spoke extemporaneously when he made that statement about ‘fire and fury.’ Perhaps now might not be the best time to improvise.”

Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) also disapproved of Trump’s remarks during an interview on KTAR radio: "I take exception to the president's comments because you gotta’ be able to do what you say you're going to do…. In other words, the old walk softly but carry a big stick, Teddy Roosevelt's saying, which I think is something that should've applied because all it's going to do is bring us closer to a serious confrontation,” said McCain, who is a strong opponent of President Trump.

“I think this is very, very, very serious,” he said. “The great leaders I've seen don't threaten unless they're ready to act and I'm not sure President Trump is ready to act…. It's the classic Trump in that he overstates things.”

In addition, many Democrats attacked the president’s comments. Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) said that, "President Trump is not helping the situation with his bombastic comments,” and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) called Trump’s “fire and fury” quote “reckless rhetoric.”

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) concurred with her Democrat colleagues, going as far as to say that the president’s remarks “demonstrates weakness” and are “recklessly belligerent.”

However, former Democratic Presidents Harry Truman and Bill Clinton have made similar and even stronger comments during times when the security of the United States was being threatened.

In 1993, The New York Times reported: “On his weekend visit to South Korea, President Clinton warned that if North Korea developed and used an atomic weapon, ‘we would quickly and overwhelmingly retaliate.’ ‘It would mean the end of their country as they know it,’” he said.

Democratic President Truman also used harsh language in 1945 when facing the ongoing threat posed by Japan. “It is an atomic bomb. It is a harnessing of the basic power of the universe. The force from which the sun draws its power has been loosed against those who brought war to the Far East,” said Truman in a statement on August 6, 1945, after the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima.  (The second bomb was dropped on Aug. 9, 1945.)

“We are now prepared to obliterate more rapidly and completely every productive enterprise the Japanese have above ground in any city,” said Truman, the only U.S. president to order a nuclear strike on largely civilian targets. “We shall destroy their docks, their factories, and their communications. Let there be no mistake; we shall completely destroy Japan’s power to make war.”

“If they do not accept our terms they may expect a rain of ruin from the air the like of which has never been seen on this earth,” said Truman.  “Behind this air attack will follow sea and land forces in such number and power as they have not yet seen and with the fighting skill of which they are already well aware.”

Neither McCain, Feinstein, Pelosi, Tapper, or other members of the liberal media have said the comments by Clinton and Truman were too harsh or dangerous.

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Union Foolishly Persists, Wasting Time and Resources

In 2011, the United Food and Commercial Workers International Union (UFCW) and its co-conspirators started invading Maryland Walmart stores and harassing customers and staff. Perhaps the UFCW thought it could get away with its outrageous behavior in a union-friendly state or that the federal courts would weigh in on its behalf. But, either way, it was in for a series of surprises.

The UFCW claims that it launched this campaign of harassment to improve working conditions for Walmart employees and that it does not wish to represent Walmart workers itself. Of course, since the UFCW is at least as honest as any unscrupulous used car salesman, its claims may or may not be accurate.

During this campaign, which went on for several years, the UFCW would assemble “flash mobs” to block traffic, block check-out lanes, sing, dance, scream, use bullhorns indoors, litter, confront managers, force their way into management meetings, etc. UFCW protesters would then refuse to leave as they were instructed to do by Walmart managers. The police would be called, and they would order the protesters to leave.

In response to this harassment, Walmart lawyers repeatedly sent cease and desist letters to the UFCW; and the union stubbornly refused to honor them. So, in March of 2013, Walmart filed an unfair labor practice complaint with the National Labor Relations Board accusing the union of coercing Walmart employees to join the union.

In September of 2013, Walmart filed a lawsuit against the UFCW for trespassing and nuisance in Maryland’s Anne Arundel County. The UFCW filed a motion to dismiss the case, which was denied. Walmart requested a preliminary injunction preventing the union from trespassing on company property; the UFCW argued that the state’s trespassing law was preempted by federal labor law. Rejecting the union’s argument, the court issued a preliminary injunction just before Black Friday in 2013 and a permanent injunction in early 2015.

The permanent injunction prohibited UFCW from entering Walmart property in Maryland for the purpose of “picketing, patrolling, parading, demonstrations, chanting, ‘flash mobs,’ handbilling, solicitation, customer disruptions, manager delegations or confrontations, or associate engagement for a non-shopping purpose.” The injunction also prohibited

“Interfering with, obstructing or blocking Walmart’s and its customers’ access to, and use of, easements and/or right-of-ways granted by  Walmart across or upon apron sidewalks and parking lots adjacent to stores for which Walmart has a “building only” lease; and engaging in any nuisance conduct off Walmart’s private property which disrupts and/or interferes with Walmart customers’ or associates’ access to, or ability to move around or exit, Walmart private property…”

Hoping for a more favorable ruling, the UFCW appealed the circuit court’s decision to the Maryland Court of Special Appeals. That court unanimously affirmed the lower court’s ruling.

Still not able to accept that it was wrong, the UFCW appealed to the highest court in the state, the Court of Appeals. Late last month, the court handed down its decision. Once again, the UFCW’s arguments were found to be without merit, and the Court of Appeals unanimously affirmed the ruling of the Court of Special Appeals. In other words, the UFCW’s lawyers could not persuade even one of the seven judges on the Court of Appeals – whether appointed by a Republican or a Democrat – to side with the union.

For over three years, the UFCW spent its members’ money paying lawyers to fight a losing battle with Walmart in Maryland courts, and the union has absolutely nothing to show for it. Of course, the union tried its shenanigans at Walmart stores in a number of other states. And judges from California to Ohio to Florida also told the UFCW to stop trespassing on Walmart property.

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Hopes rise for diabetes patients as trial jab brings the disease to a halt

A twice-monthly injection can stop type 1 diabetes in its tracks, according to an early-stage study that raises hopes of a vaccine for the disease.

Scientists have found the first strong evidence that the previously untreatable disorder can be halted by reining in attacks from the immune system.

Combined with advanced blood tests that spot the disease before symptoms appear, the approach has the potential to prevent most of the 16,000 new cases diagnosed in Britain each year.

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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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