"Diversity" is a snark

"Time" magazine has a long-winded article under the heading: Diversity has become a booming business. So where are the results?  It goes on to set out the great efforts and large sums that have been devoted to the cause.  One might summarize their message as: "Never in the field of human endeavor has so much been done by so many for so little".

And they are perfectly right.  Any psychometrician could explain it to you.  As the old proverb says: "You can't make a silk purse out of a sow's ear".  Blacks, Hispanics and whites all have their own characteristics and fields of expertise and you can't shoehorn the minority groups into white characteristics and fields of expertise.  Seldom the twain shall meet.

There is a dreaded two letter word I could mention here but I think it suffices that conservatives have for over a century opposed Leftist claims of human malleability by the counter-claim that much in human behavior is genetically determined -- and therefore immutable:  "Human nature". And the research in behavior genetics has resoundingly supported the conservative contention. It's truly amazing how much of our behavior is genetically inherited.

One simply has to apply that knowledge to the "diversity" efforts to understand what is going on. Diversity efforts are undoubtedly an attempt to impose some of the characteristic  behaviours of whites onto the minorities. It was bound to fail. To put it as succinctly as I can:  You will rarely make a white man out of a black.

And why should we make that racist attempt?  Members of all the groups have liberty to behave as they want so let them go on doing what they want to do and stop trying to shoehorn them into a mould that doesn't fit.  Try liberty instead of racism.

But the "Time" magazine solution to the problem that the Left have created is typical Leftist brainlessness: The failure of diversity efforts is due to evil men.  I quote: It is due to "a willful negation of our shared humanity". In other words, "We're all racists, you know".  A prime example of the pot calling the kettle black -- JR.

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Portugal’s socialist miracle? Pull the other one

The newly re-elected centre left has presided over austerity and privatisation.

Portuguese voters went to the polls on Sunday and returned the incumbent Socialist Party – and prime minister Antonio Costa – with an increased share of the vote, much as commentators expected.

In late 2015, the centre-left Socialist Party formed a minority government with the support of the Portuguese Communist Party and the Ecologist Party. Since then, sections of the international media have been singing the praises of Portugal’s government. The Financial Times, Der Spiegel, the Atlantic, the New Statesman and many others have hailed Europe’s supposedly ‘socialist success story’. Some left-wing Remainers see it as a model for the UK to emulate or see it as an antidote to right-wing populism. But is Portugal really a success story? And what exactly is socialist about it?

Portugal’s economic performance certainly looks good on paper. GDP, GDP per capita and GDP growth are all up. Inflation is also under control and unemployment and government debt are both down. However, while some media outlets credit the government’s ostensibly left-wing policies for these results, all of these figures (apart from government debt) actually started improving under the previous centre-right administration. (Portuguese voters duly rewarded the then-incumbent centre-right Social Democratic Party with the highest vote share in 2015, but it was unable to form a government, leading the Socialists to take the reins in a leftish alliance.)

So what are the Socialist Party’s achievements in government? It certainly has pursued some traditionally left-wing policies, including raising the minimum wage, pensions and some social benefits. But it has also embarked on or maintained a range of measures that are positively anti-socialist.

The government has committed itself to the EU’s tight rules on spending. Contrary to the international narrative that Portugal has ‘cast aside austerity’ – which is impossible as a Eurozone member – Portugal has actually embraced ‘austerity lite’. Rises in wages and benefits have come at the cost of public investment. According to an article in the Nation, Portugal had the lowest level of public investment in the Eurozone in 2018. As a result, its universities are almost bankrupt, the health system is understaffed and underfunded, and over half of its railways are in a bad or mediocre condition.

The government’s lack of investment in the fire and forest services has also been criticised by unions, particularly in the wake of the June 2017 wildfires, which killed 66 people and injured 204 – the deadliest fires in the country to date. Earlier this year, public funds were, however, found to bail out a private bank, Novo Banco, at a cost of €1.6 billion.

The Socialist Party has also opted to keep and extend a number of the previous centre-right government’s policies. Privatisation, rampant under the previous administration, has continued apace. The Socialists have sold a number of publicly owned companies and assets to foreign buyers from China and elsewhere. The current government has also refused to scrap the golden-visa programme. The programme, which allows wealthy foreigners essentially to jump the immigration queue, has failed to deliver the levels of job creation its advocates promised. Instead, it has helped to push up property prices.

In fact, property speculation has been a key driver of Portugal’s rising GDP. As a result, evictions have skyrocketed as landlords take advantage of soaring house prices. Between one and three families are reportedly being evicted every day. In ‘socialist’ Portugal, social housing accounts for just two per cent of the country’s housing stock, compared to 17 per cent in the UK.

While unemployment is down in the official figures, a 2018 report from the University Institute of Lisbon suggests the real figure may be almost 10 percentage points higher. Furthermore, employment conditions have continued to worsen since the Euro crisis, with the proliferation of short-term, low-wage and insecure contracts.

It is no surprise, then, that in his bid for re-election, prime minister António Costa largely sold himself to the Portuguese public as a fiscal conservative rather than a socialist radical. While Costa’s party performed best in Sunday’s elections, it fell short of the majority it had worked for and turnout was the lowest in a General Election since the country’s return to democracy in 1974.

Costa has said he will once again seek the support of one or both parties involved in the previous confidence-and-supply pact. But he also said that he might also hold talks with the PAN (People-Animals-Nature) Party, a minor animal-rights party focused on animal-welfare issues. Such a pact would likely combine the Socialists’ own ‘austerity lite’ with eco-austerity and animal rights (an ideology traditionally treated with scepticism by socialists). All the while, any truly ‘socialist’ programme, should Costa even want to implement one, would be impossible under EU rules.

Whether Portugal’s past few years can be described as a success is up for debate. Portuguese voters have at least given it their lukewarm approval. But there is very little that is socialist in this centre-left, ‘austerity lite’ government.

SOURCE 

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McConnell Slams Dems Over Banana Republic-Style Impeachment Inquiry

Congressional Republican leaders laid into House Democrats over their illegitimate so-called impeachment inquiry that is designed to deprive President Trump of basic procedural fairness and boot him from office at bullet-train speed.

“Overturning the results of an American election requires the highest level of fairness and due process, as it strikes at the core of our democratic process,” Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) wrote on Twitter Oct. 8, as reported by The Hill.

“So far, the House has fallen far short by failing to follow the same basic procedures that it has followed for every other President in our history,” he added.

House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) also weighed in the same day on Twitter.

McCarthy wrote that the president “is right to call out this rushed process because Democrats refuse to protect the transparency and basic fairness that have been integral to previous impeachment proceedings.”

“House Democrats have wanted to undo the results of the 2016 election for three years, and now they’re rushing a sham impeachment process,” he added.

The statements from McConnell and McCarthy came as White House counsel Pat Cipollone sent a letter to Democrat leaders in the House accusing them of working to “overturn the results of the 2016 election” and violating the Constitution with “legally unsupported demands” for evidence from Trump administration officials.

“Given that your inquiry lacks any legitimate constitutional foundation, any pretense of fairness, or even the most elementary due process protections, the Executive Branch cannot be expected to participate in it,” Cipollone wrote.

“Because participating in this inquiry under the current unconstitutional posture would inflict lasting institutional harm on the Executive Branch and lasting damage to the separation of powers, you have left the President no choice,” he added.

Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) replied in histrionic fashion.

“For a while, the President has tried to normalize lawlessness. Now, he is trying to make lawlessness a virtue,” she said. “The White House letter is only the latest attempt to cover up his betrayal of our democracy, and to insist that the President is above the law.”

It was Sept. 24 that Pelosi purported to launch “an official impeachment inquiry” by the House as news spread that President Trump asked the president of Ukraine to assist in a probe into the leftist plot to remove him office, as well as to investigate former Vice President Joe Biden and his son’s shady dealings in that country.

This “official impeachment inquiry” is unprecedented in the annals of presidential impeachment sagas.

Pelosi was in such a frenzied rush to oust Trump she didn’t bother asking the House of Representatives, whose constitutionally-specified duty is to consider impeachment, to go on record on the matter. Even though the House had a recorded vote all three previous times it considered impeaching a U.S. president, Pelosi discarded 151 years of precedent.

Bill Clinton, who was impeached but not convicted in the Senate, went through it.

On Oct. 8, 1998, the House voted 258-176 to approve what is called a “simple resolution” (meaning it affects only one chamber of Congress) authorizing “the House Committee on the Judiciary, acting as a whole or by any subcommittee thereof appointed by the chairman for the purposes hereof and in accordance with the rules of the Committee, to investigate fully and completely whether sufficient grounds exist for the House to exercise its constitutional power to impeach President Clinton.”

Richard Nixon, who probably would have been impeached if he hadn’t resigned, also went through it.

On Feb. 6, 1974, the House voted 410-4 to approve a resolution authorizing “the House Committee on the Judiciary to investigate fully and completely whether sufficient grounds exist for the House of Representatives to impeach President Richard M. Nixon.”

Even a widely disliked post-Civil War president went through the process. In the end he was impeached but his enemies fell one vote short of convicting him in the Senate.

Abraham Lincoln’s successor, President Andrew Johnson, was afforded due process by the House which voted to initiate the impeachment process. “The Joint Committee on Reconstruction rapidly drafted a resolution of impeachment, which passed the House on February 24, 1868, by a vote of 126 to 47,” according to the U.S. Senate’s history pages. “Immediately, the House proceeded to establish an impeachment committee, appoint managers, and draft articles of impeachment.”

Moving measures through the House at breakneck speed, Americans learned during the Obamacare legislative saga, is a Pelosi specialty. She infamously said during that process that reading the massive bill wasn’t realistic. “We have to pass the bill so you can find out what’s in it,” she said.

As this writer argued previously, the only reason not to go through a formal vote on opening an impeachment inquiry is to railroad the president and eliminate the possibility of lawmakers being held accountable by Americans. All Americans, no matter their views on our president, deserve to know where their representatives stand on this all-important issue.

But Democrats don’t care about fairness, or democracy, for that matter.

They are creating “a Star Chamber ‘impeachment’ process fueled by anonymous whistleblowers and selective leaks that is not so much designed to remove the president, though they would if they could, but to manipulate the 2020 election,” William A. Jacobson writes at Legal Insurrection.

Since even before Donald Trump was elected president the Left has been trying to make the normal presidential job-related things he has been doing look abnormal. There were anti-Trump protesters outside the Trump International Hotel in the nation’s capital in the dark wee hours of Nov. 9, 2016, not long after the media called the race for Trump. The manufactured, media-driven mass hysteria directed against Trump has grown exponentially over time.

All the tricks the Democrat-media complex have attempted to force Trump from the White House have failed.

We now know that the plot to use fake intelligence from Russia from a dossier compiled by a Trump-hating British spy to surveil Trump’s campaign and transition team was ordered by then-President Barack Hussein Obama. That phony dossier paid for by Hillary Clinton and the Democratic National Committee was used to fraudulently obtain surveillance warrants from the secret U.S. Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.

On Oct. 2 former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper admitted to CNN’s Anderson Cooper that Obama directed the intelligence community to spy on Trump, a move that “set off a whole sequence of events” that led to semi-senile former Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s anticlimactic report on the Left’s beloved Russian electoral collusion conspiracy theory, the Washington Sentinel reports.

“One point I’d like to make, Anderson, that I don’t think has come up very much before, and I’m alluding now to the president’s criticism of President Obama for all that he did or didn’t do before he left office with respect to the Russian meddling. If it weren’t for President Obama, we might not have done the intelligence community assessment that we did that set off a whole sequence of events which are still unfolding today, notably, Special Counsel Mueller’s investigation.”

The rest of the media ignored this damning admission from Clapper so they could continue bashing Trump.

And the phony impeachment process continues.

SOURCE 

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IN BRIEF

LEGAL TEAM: The Washington Times reports, "Former Republican Rep. Trey Gowdy has been tapped to serve as outside counsel to President Donald Trump as the House impeachment inquiry expands."

PROFILES OF THE AMERICAN SPIRIT: Trump awards Presidential Medal of Freedom to former Attorney General Edwin Meese (CNSNews.com)

TERRORISM REAWAKENED: After a lull, Islamist terrorism in Europe returns with a vengeance (The Daily Signal)

DISTRICT OF CONFORMITY: "Is this the last time we can celebrate Columbus Day? A wave of cities have decided to remove the holiday from the calendar and replace it with 'Indigenous Peoples' Day," reports The Daily Signal's Jarrett Stepman. That now includes Washington, DC, which was named after ... Christopher Columbus.

JUST TAKE MY WORD FOR IT: "Lawyers for the CIA officer whose whistleblower complaint helped ignite an impeachment inquiry into President Trump have asked Congress whether their client could submit testimony in writing instead of appearing in person." (The Wall Street Journal)

FELON VOTES: The Hill reports that 22,000 felony convicts have had their voting rights restored by Gov. Ralph Northam, which Democrats hope will turn the state supremely blue.

MORE PLANNED PARENTHOOD DECEPTION: "An arson attack on a Planned Parenthood facility that was reported as a hate crime inspired by undercover videos was actually an incident of domestic violence, a senior executive of the organization has been forced to admit in a San Francisco court room." (The Daily Wire)

PRIORITIES: California Gov. Gavin Newsom signs ban on small plastic bottles in hotels — as blackouts batter that state's economy (National Review)

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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.

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