Tuesday, May 28, 2019
We’re Not the Same Under the Skin
Blood can be racially or ethnically specific, and it makes a difference
“We need black blood.” I didn’t know what to say to this, not least because it had been said by the head of donor services at England’s National Health Service Blood and Transplant. The interview was for a book I was writing on blood, and his statement shocked me. Surely we’re all the same under the skin?
I knew the history of race and blood was an ugly one. America’s earliest blood bank, founded in 1937 at Cook County Hospital in Chicago, noted race on donor forms and other blood banks followed suit. During World War II, African-American blood was labeled N for Negro (and some centers refused African-American donors outright) and given only to African-American soldiers. Writing to Eleanor Roosevelt, the chairman of the American Red Cross, Norman H. Davis, admitted that segregating blood was “a matter of tradition and sentiment rather than of science,” but didn’t stop doing it until 1950. Louisiana banned the segregation of blood only in 1972.
But the Red Cross was wrong: While no one is suggesting forced segregation of blood bags, it’s now scientifically established that blood can be racially or ethnically specific.
Most people know about the eight major blood groups: A, B, AB and O, each of which can be positive or negative (the Rh factor). These are determined by genes, and what group you are depends on what combination of proteins and sugars — antigens — are on the outside of your red blood cells. The International Society of Blood Transfusion lists 360 known antigens, but the combinations are infinitely more. Many have no bearing on routine blood transfusion, though all were discovered because they caused a problem with compatibility.
A successful blood transfusion relies on sameness. If incoming blood has an antigen that you lack, your body can react badly to it. In extremely rare cases, the reaction can be fatal; and even if not, it can tax the immune system in people who are already weakened by their condition. Also, you will make an antibody, a sort of immune storm trooper, to better recognize the same antigen next time. Patients who need regular blood transfusions — those who have sickle cell disease, thalassemia or leukemia, for example — may face an ever decreasing pool of suitable blood because they keep creating antibodies.
Wouldn’t it be easier if all our blood was the same? Blame bugs. Much of the variance “has been driven by evolutionary selection by bacteria, malaria and parasites,” says Connie Westhoff, executive scientific director at the National Center for Blood Group Genomics at the New York Blood Center. If malaria finds its way into the bloodstream via a particular antigen, that antigen may change to defend itself, leading to different blood types. Cholera thrives better on intestinal cells derived from O-type stem cells, but O is also more protective against malaria. For many complicated reasons, only 27 percent of Asians have type A, but 40 percent of Caucasians do. Type B is found more commonly in Asia than Europe.
This works not just with blood types. Sickle cell trait is now known to protect against malaria, which is why sickle cell, a painful and debilitating disease caused by malformed blood cells, is found frequently — but not only — in people with African heritage, because malaria thrives in Africa.
This past winter, the case of a little girl named Zainab Mughal in South Florida illustrated all this complexity perfectly. Zainab, who is now 3, has neuroblastoma, an aggressive cancer, and her treatment — chemotherapy and stem cell transplants — means she will need blood.
But she also has rare blood. She belongs to the fewer than 1 percent of the population missing an antigen that makes her blood some of the rarest in the world. She lacks both the antigens Indian B and Big E. Via appeals to the American Rare Donor Program, and then the International Rare Donor Panel in England, Zainab’s local blood banker, One Blood, found five donors with the same extremely rare type.
It was a tall order: The Indian B antigen is lacking in the blood of Iranians, Pakistanis and Indians, so donors had to have both parents from these populations. Two donors live in the United States, two in Britain and one in Australia.
Publicity about Zainab’s case, though it was extreme in its rarity, helped raise awareness.
Yet it is a difficult message: that our blood is different. When it comes to finding stem cells for bone marrow transplants, the search also has to be discriminatory. This time the issue is HLA, the human leukocyte antigens present in white blood cells.
“The reason why ethnicity comes into the picture,” says Dr. Abeer Madbouly, a senior scientist at Be the Match, a program run by the National Marrow Donor Program, the largest stem cell donor registry in the world, “is that HLA encodes the immune system, and the immune system goes through particular conditions based on where you are.” Depending on the threat, each population will develop particular sets of HLA types. In a diverse population like that of the United States, finding a matched donor becomes more challenging.
“Let’s say you have someone with African roots and someone from Asian descent coming together, and then they have an offspring of mixed ethnicities,” Dr. Madbouly says. “You have an African HLA and an HLA type common in Asian areas coming together to form a new type of HLA that is not common in either.” Though Be the Match added nearly two million donors to its registry last year, only 30 percent were what Dr. Madbouly calls “diverse.” That’s not enough.
Zainab’s situation is rare. What concerns blood bankers is a more common condition caused by uncommon blood. Sickle cell disease is predominantly found in African- Americans, and thalassemia among South Asians, and both conditions require precisely matched blood. But there is a shortfall between ethnic minority patients who need blood, and ethnic minority donors. In New York, Caucasians are 35 percent of the population but 58 percent of donors. Twenty-eight percent of New Yorkers are African-American but only 8 percent of donors, and that’s after five years of outreach by the New York Blood Center with its PreciseMatch campaign.
Even so, there was trouble when the Blood Center began in 2009 to offer the option to “self-declare” ethnicity on its donor forms. This was efficient: Without a budget to precisely screen every donation, they could home in on antigens known to be specific to certain populations. At first staff members were upset. “We didn’t educate the staff,” Dr. Westhoff says, “to know that we weren’t segregating the blood just to be segregating. We were doing it to send all the African-American units to the sickle program children because they were doing much better with blood that came from this same ethnic group.”
Disquiet was inevitable given sensitivity about whether race is skin-deep and whether differences should be highlighted. But the startling truth about blood is that acknowledging its differences can tip the balance between life and death for people who need it.
Blood bankers are reluctant to talk about why some communities are keener to donate than others, but read some of the “myths about blood donation” that they regularly publish and a picture emerges: Blood donation doesn’t make you put on weight. Nor does it affect your sex drive (though you shouldn’t do vigorous exercise within 24 hours). It is not against Islamic law or tradition. One of the most common reasons people who don’t donate give is that no one has asked them.
Cases like Zainab’s help reach these populations: Many of the 25,000 people who emailed in wanting to help were first-time donors. But as Susan Forbes of One Blood says, “The goal is for them to make it a habit and come back, and help boost the blood supply wherever they live.”
SOURCE
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Don't knock NATO
Jeff Jacoby
THIS SEASON marks the 20th anniversary of one of the greatest feats of statesmanship since the end of the Cold War: the opening of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization to Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. It was in the spring of 1999 that Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic became the first of the nations from behind the Iron Curtain to join the Atlantic alliance. Seven more nations joined in 2004, and another three since then.
NATO today comprises 29 countries in Europe and North America. Much has gone wrong in the world over the past two decades. The enlargement of NATO is one hugely important thing that went right.
That is not the received wisdom, however. Elite academics and pundits have been denouncing the expansion of NATO ever since the idea was first broached.
Enlarging the alliance would be "a dreadful, potentially catastrophic idea," the Cato Institute's Ted Galen Carpenter warned at the time, calling it a 1990s "equivalent of the Treaty of Versailles, which sowed the seeds of revenge and an enormously destructive war." The Federation of American Scientists decried NATO expansion as "a Pandora's box" that would needlessly provoke Russia. Foreign-affairs sage George Kennan condemned it as "a fateful error." Opposition to NATO's eastward growth has flourished on the isolationist right and the pro-Russia left. So-called "realist" scholars blame it for Vladimir Putin's aggression against Ukraine. New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman derides the expansion of NATO as "one of the dumbest things we've ever done."
But the naysayers are wrong.
NATO was founded 70 years ago in the turbulent aftermath of World War II. With the Soviet Union ruthlessly imposing totalitarian police states on half the European continent, the new allies were intent on keeping Europe's other half free and at peace. In the famous formulation of its first secretary general, NATO was created to "keep the Russians out, the Americans in, and the Germans down" — and it did. Under America's nuclear umbrella, Western Europe remained safe from Soviet violence throughout the Cold War. Just three years after its birth, NATO began to expand, admitting Greece and Turkey in 1952, West Germany in 1955, and Spain in 1982. With each new accession, the zone of European stability and democratic freedom widened, and Moscow's scope for aggressiveness was reduced.
The end of the Cold War consigned Soviet communism to the ash-heap of history, but it didn't render NATO obsolete — far from it. It was as necessary as ever to "keep the Russians out," and newly liberated Eastern European nations lobbied to join the alliance. Writing in the March issue of Foreign Affairs, historian M. E. Sarotte described how leaders of the fledgling democratic governments in Budapest, Warsaw, and Prague first began talking about NATO membership within months of the end of communist rule in 1989, and how they earnestly pressed the matter with Bill Clinton after he became president in 1993.
"In our values and spirit, we are part of Western Europe," the Czech president (and former political prisoner) Vaclav Havel told Clinton. Lech Walesa, Poland's democratic hero, put the stakes bluntly: "We are all afraid of Russia," he said. "If Russia again adopts an aggressive foreign policy, that aggression will be directed to Ukraine and Poland."
If that was true for former members of the Warsaw Pact, it was even truer for the Baltic countries. Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia had been forcibly annexed by the Soviet Union in 1940, and desperately feared what Russia might do in the future to reassert its hegemony. When they broke free at last from the Kremlin and knocked on NATO's door, should the allies have turned them away?
Critics routinely claim that Russia was bound to feel endangered by NATO's expansion, but that turns reality on its head. NATO never threatened Russia. It was the threat of Russia's aggression that led most of its former satrapies into the arms of the alliance. Moscow may bristle, but a bigger NATO has kept it at bay. Russia has not dared to attack or invade any NATO member. Contrast that with its violent assaults on Ukraine and Georgia, which are not NATO allies.
After winning the Cold War, America might have pulled out and gone home. But just as NATO expansion continued to "keep the Russians out," it continued to "keep the Americans in," deeply invested in maintaining European peace and stability. Under US leadership, NATO provided the space for a new, post-Soviet normalcy to take hold. Within NATO's borders, peace has reigned for 70 years. Germany, once such a hateful menace, abandoned its murderous, militaristic ways. Liberal democracy has not triumphed everywhere in Europe — Hungary under Viktor Orban and, especially, Turkey under Recep Tayyip Erdogan have grown alarmingly authoritarian. But the day is long past when half the continent could be terrorized, or plunged into war, by totalitarian superpowers.
That would never have happened had it not been for NATO. Seventy years after its creation, the Atlantic alliance remains one of the towering achievements of modern statecraft, with a membership that is bigger, and therefore better, than ever.
SOURCE
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Pence Tells West Point Grads To Expect To See Combat
Vice President Mike Pence told the most diverse graduating class in the history of the U.S. Military Academy on Saturday that the world is “a dangerous place” and they should expect to see combat. “Some of you will join the fight against radical Islamic terrorists in Afghanistan and Iraq,” he said.
Pence congratulated the West Point graduates on behalf of President Donald Trump, and told them, “As you accept the mantle of leadership I promise you, your commander in chief will always have your back. President Donald Trump is the best friend the men and women of our armed forces will ever have.”
More than 980 cadets became US. Army second lieutenants in the ceremony at West Point’s football stadium.
Pence noted that Trump has proposed a $750 billion defense budget for 2020 and said the United States “is once again embracing our role as the leader of the free world.”
“It is a virtual certainty that you will fight on a battlefield for America at some point in your life,” Pence said. “You will lead soldiers in combat. It will happen. Some of you may even be called upon to serve in this hemisphere.”
Pence spoke as the U.S. plans to send another 1,500 troops to the Middle East to counter what the Trump administration describes as threats from Iran; as the longest war in U.S. history churns on in Afghanistan; and as Washington considers its options amid political upheaval in Venezuela. The administration is also depending more heavily on the military to deter migrants from crossing the U.S.-Mexico border.
The class was the most diverse in West Point’s history, and Pence said he wanted to acknowledge “the historic milestones that we’re marking today.”
The 2019 cadets included 34 black women and 223 women, both all-time highs since the first female cadets graduated in 1980. The academy graduated its 5,000th woman Saturday.
The 110 African Americans who graduated were double the number from 2013.
Pence said the graduates also included the academy’s 1,000th Jewish cadet.
Pence did not serve in the military but noted that his late father served with the Army in the Korean War.
“And as I stand before you today here at West Point I can’t help but think that First Lt. Edward J. Pence, looking down from glory, is finally impressed with his third son,” Pence said. “So thank you for the honor.”
The ceremony was Pence’s second visit to West Point and his first as commencement speaker.
SOURCE
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Trump sees 'great progress' in trade negotiations with Japan
President Trump said on Sunday that "great progress" is being made in trade negotiations with Japan.
The president focused on agriculture and beef in a tweet sent during his trip to Japan, adding, however, that "much will wait until after" the nation’s elections in July.
"Numerous Japanese officials told me that the Democrats would rather see the United States fail than see me or the Republican Party succeed - Death Wish!" he added in another post.
Speaking to a reception of Japanese business leaders Saturday evening, Trump said the relationship between the U.S. and Japan "has never been stronger" and called it an "exciting time" for commerce between the two countries.
“You're doing fantastically well. I was looking very closely on the ride over at some of the numbers being produced in Japan, and you're doing great,” he said, according to a White House transcript of the president's remarks.
“I would say that Japan has had a substantial edge for many, many years, but that's OK. Maybe that's why you like us so much. But we'll get it a little bit more fair, I think. I think we'll do that,” he added, noting that Japan is ordering a “great deal” of U.S. military equipment. Trump also mentioned last week’s reopening of Japanese markets to U.S. beef exports.
“We welcome your support in these efforts, and we hope to have several further announcements soon and some very big ones over the next few months,” he said.
Trump's visit to Japan also included a number of ceremonial events, including a round of golf Sunday morning with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe.
Trump on Sunday also attended a sumo tournament, where he awarded a "United States President’s Cup" trophy to the champion.
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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Monday, May 27, 2019
Media Forced to Cover FBI Lovebirds Story
A message from Phelim McAleer
Well it has just been unbelievable - we have had a great launch with amazing media coverage of our FBI Lovebirds: UnderCovers project. We have supporters like you to thank for the current success of this project.
Politico has called the show, which stars Young Superman Dean Cain and Kristy Swanson, “Hamilton for the Make America Great Again crowd.” That isn’t such a bad analogy. Should we get T-shirts made with this inscription?
The Hollywood Reporter states that the play, which we are also filming, will put Trump's campaign and presidency under the spotlight. That’s what we are hoping will happen. When we release the film online, you won't believe what was going on behind the scenes, with law enforcement personnel boasting in texts to one another that they were subverting the democratic process.
USA Today also says that the focus of the play is on Trump. That is half right since the focus of the play is on revealing the truth about those who tried to end the Trump campaign and presidency.
This is only part of the coverage this story has received, but the great thing about these reports is that the mainstream media are forced to cover the story that they really, really want to ignore. FBI Lovebirds: UnderCovers is a verbatim play consisting entirely of the text messages between FBI agents Page and Strzok and their answers when questioned in private by a Congressional panel. We have the transcript of that grilling and the play has no added drama - it is just their own words verbatim.
As Dean Cain said: “I look forward to playing Peter Strzok as written by Peter Strzok.”
What is especially infuriating is that Deadline Hollywood saw us writing about the death threat to actors and their audience of this production, and the only thing they thought was noteworthy was that we were “fundraising” of it. This is crazy!
Someone has threatened to burn alive actors and their audience, and Deadline Hollywood thinks this is a non story and doesn't reach out to us or to industry people to get them to condemn it. Instead, they believe that the people who received the death threat are the ones who should be condemned.
This is why it so important that the FBI Lovebirds project goes ahead. The truth is that we are slightly behind where we would like to be at this stage in fundraising. We should be 35% funded and we have just hit 26%. We did get off to a good start but undoubtedly things will slow down over the Memorial Day weekend. We want to continue to expose the lies that are being told and continue to force the media to cover this story, even in their own twisted way. Without the proper funding, we won't be able to properly film and promote the project and release it to a wide audience.
So please, give what you can. If you have already donated, think about giving again. Would you also do us a favor? If you share this link - www.fbilovebirds.com - with just 5 others and they donate the same as you, this project could be funded within hours. This would be a phenomenon that the media could not stay quiet about.
Via email
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Nancy Pelosi, profile in courage? Hardly
by Jeff Jacoby
I WONDER SOMETIMES whether officials at the John F. Kennedy Library Foundation, which presents the annual Profile in Courage Award, have ever read Profiles in Courage. In his Pulitzer Prize-winning 1956 book, then-Senator John Kennedy described eight US senators who upheld an unpopular political position with fortitude, even though it meant defying their party or allies and jeopardizing their careers.
Recipients of the Profile in Courage Award are supposed to epitomize the kind of political fearlessness that JFK extolled. But while some have indeed been exemplars of conscience who put the public good ahead of their own political safety, others definitely have not. At times the award has served as a kind of consolation prize for haughty liberals whose disdainful manner alienated their constituents. At other times it has amounted to little more than a lifetime achievement prize for famous Democrats, such as Barack Obama and Ted Kennedy.
On Sunday, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi became the newest Profile in Courage honoree. She received the award, according to the JFK Library, for shepherding passage of the Affordable Care Act in 2010 and for "leading the [Democratic] effort to retake the majority" in the House of Representatives in 2018. Those accomplishments, impressive as they were, had nothing to do with political bravery. They attest to Pelosi's legislative and electoral acumen, not her moral grit. The Affordable Care Act was the top priority of a Democratic president and the Democrats who controlled Congress; it took no heroism to push it into law. As for quarterbacking her party's efforts to win more House seats — that's what party leaders are expected to do. No courage required.
Yet when Pelosi found herself in a situation where political courage was required, she showed none.
Just a few months ago, the House was roiled by the anti-Semitism of freshman Representative Ilhan Omar. In public comments, the Minnesota Democrat perpetuated the ugly stereotypes that Jewish money dominates American policymaking and that pro-Israel Jews in Congress are motivated by "allegiance to a foreign country." That outraged respected party veterans, who introduced a resolution condemning such anti-Jewish bigotry. But the measure triggered an uproar from far-left Democrats and the Congressional Black Caucus, who rallied around Omar and demanded that the resolution be watered down into a bland condemnation of all forms of hatred.
That was when the speaker of the House could have shown real mettle and insisted that Democrats repudiate the anti-Semitism in their ranks. Instead, she caved to the extremists. The strong resolution was spiked, and Pelosi lamely excused Omar on the grounds that she hadn't understood the "full weight" of her slurs.
But if Pelosi doesn't fit the description of a profile in courage, there are others who do.
When Senator Susan Collins of Maine decided last October to support Brett Kavanaugh's elevation to the Supreme Court, she knew well that "her vote will haunt her politically for the remainder of her career," as The New York Times put it. The pressure on Collins to oppose Kavanaugh was noisy, public, and abusive. A crowdfunding campaign raised millions of dollars for a future campaign to unseat Collins if she didn't vote no. Her office was inundated with profane and threatening messages.
The House speaker is a Democrat, a liberal, a safe incumbent, and a powerful politician. Those don't add up to a profile in courage.
Undeterred, Collins cast the crucial vote for Kavanaugh, carefully explaining her reasons in a speech on the Senate floor.
Now that's what JFK would have called a profile in courage.
SOURCE
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Profile of a Hater: Rep. Ilhan Omar
What should have been an inspiring story turned sour due to her own bitter hatred.
At one time, hers was an inspiring story: A young child is plucked from a Kenyan refugee camp four years after having escaped the strife in her home country of Somalia, and she and her family ultimately arrive in the U.S. before her 11th birthday. Instead, the feel-good tale of Congresswoman Ilhan Omar has been sullied by her oft-documented anti-Semitism and her seeming ungratefulness for such good fortune. In fact, only her family’s wealth, prominence, and privilege allowed her such an opportunity, all while she rails against the “privilege” of others.
Now 37 years old, Omar’s rapid political rise tells part of the story, while then-candidate Donald Trump told another part on a 2016 campaign visit to Minneapolis: “[We] have seen firsthand the problems with faulty refugee vetting,” he said, “with large numbers of Somali refugees coming into your state, without your knowledge, without your support or approval.” Among those refugees was Omar, who was just about to be formally elected to the Minnesota House of Representatives, having won the Democrat-Farmer-Labor (DFL) primary over a 44-year incumbent legislator who fell victim to the changing demographics in a district that includes a Minneapolis neighborhood known as “Little Mogadishu.”
The area Omar now represents in Congress was formerly the district of Muslim convert Rep. Keith Ellison, yet it also hosts about half of Minnesota’s modest Jewish population. Not surprisingly, then, Omar’s anti-Semitic statements, as well as those expressing support for the boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel were front and center during the campaign to succeed Ellison. While Omar denied backing BDS at a town hall event, Powerline blogger (and Minneapolis attorney) Scott Johnson put it succinctly: “Omar knows precisely what she is doing. She lies baldly and without conscience.” Ultimately, Omar got the DFL endorsement, which was tantamount to victory in her D+26 district.
To play devil’s advocate, perhaps there’s some truth to Omar’s claims that Republicans “spread misinformation about how refugee resettlement works.” She claims the current setup gives states “leverage” over knowing how many refugees they would get. That said, surely Omar doesn’t believe that “ignorance is really pervasive in many parts of this country,” does she? Or is she referring to the Left, which routinely traffics in half-truths and demagoguery?
Regardless, Omar lets the mask slip when, referring to recent pro-life legislation passed in Alabama and Georgia, she says, “If [the Religious Right] cared about or were concerned about children, they would be concerned about the children that are being detained and those that are dying in camps across our borders, or the children who are languishing in hunger and facing homelessness.” Setting aside the swipe at the pro-life movement, wouldn’t it be preferable if those children weren’t put in the position of being detained in the first place?
What Congress now has in Omar is an ardent leftist in a somewhat unique package: the first Somali-American elected to Congress and one of the first two Islamic women to serve. So that’s why, this week, she celebrated the “honor to preside over the House Floor” as speaker pro tempore. Far from any kind of real rebuke for her bile, she’s rewarded.
But her anti-American tendencies are evident when she talks to her political peers. Speaking to Benjamin Wallace-Wells of The New Yorker as part of a glowing article on Omar’s political rise, she told him, “We have values and ideals of prosperity and equality and protecting human dignity. All of these things are part of the American value system.”
So far, so good — until this: “But in actuality we have mass incarceration. We have people who literally are sleeping outside in sub-zero weather. We have all kinds of atrocities. We are caging children at our borders. We have police officers who are shooting unarmed black men. So we have practices that really do not live up to the values and the ideas that are very much part of our DNA.”
Omar goes on to say that her first impressions of America were romanticized, but then reality hit her hard. Writes Wallace-Wells, “It explained the reaction she had when, four years later, her family was accepted into the United States. In the camp, they had been shown films of pristine, quiet American suburbs. Omar arrived in busy, dirty New York in 1992, and asked her father why there was so much trash everywhere and people sleeping outside. He said not to worry, that this was not the end of their trip. ‘I didn’t imagine this was also a land of homeless people,’ she said.”
Ilhan Omar is a very fortunate woman in two respects, even though she doesn’t seem thankful for the first and hasn’t yet realized the blessing of the second. First, as a “feminist with a hijab,” she’s been given opportunities that are denied to millions of women in Islam-dominated nations. But second, since fellow freshman congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is sucking up nearly all the oxygen in the room, Omar’s vile and outlandish statements aren’t part of the public conscience yet. And this is perhaps Omar’s biggest blessing to date.
SOURCE
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CBS News Encourages Physical Assaults Against Political Right
With its embrace of the left’s milkshake assaults on politicians, CBS News has joined CNN’s campaign to encourage violence against the political right.
Brexit Party leader Nigel Farage was just the latest right-leaning politician attacked with a milkshake over the weekend, and as my colleague James Delingpole points out, there is nothing funny or harmless about these assaults.
“Once you start suggesting that physical assaults of any kind are acceptable then you are legitimising violence. And violence has a nasty habit of escalating,” Delingpole writes, and that is exactly correct. The right to swing your fist ends at the tip of my nose, and hurling a milkshake at someone is a physical assault. Period.
Even if it does not escalate beyond the milkshake, you are still throwing a physical object at someone, which at worst could injure them and at best vandalizes their property in the form of their clothes.
Physical assault is an extremely easy and moral line to draw, and we all know the media would hit Defcon 1 if a Barack Obama or Elizabeth Warren was ever hit with a milkshake. Nevertheless…
Here is CBS News openly encouraging physical assaults against their political enemies on the right:
"Protesters in Britain have weaponized the milk shake. In the latest of a series of attacks on right-wing politicians, Brexit Party Leader Nigel Farage was doused with a milkshake yesterday. That was actually salted caramel if anyone is wondering.
[Laughter.] He was campaigning. These attacks have come to be known as milk shaking. Now, this follows egging. It follows pieing, punching. I don’t know. I’m sure it feels great. I’m sure people love the feeling. Pictures fly around the world. Put some of that energy into campaigning and maybe the people you don’t want to be in office won’t be in office."
That is not some talking head cracking wise, that is a so-called journalist, Tony Dokoupil, who co-hosts CBS This Morning.
This is yet another example of how the corrupt establishment media want to create an Animal Farm Affirmative Action world where the left enjoy more civil rights than the right.
When the right says something the media do not like, it is violence, racism, and dangerous. When the left does actually assaults someone, it is “great.”
The political elite, academia, the news media, Hollywood, and our tech lords are all abusing their power to grant the left the civil right to say and do whatever they like — including violence (see: Antifa).
Meanwhile, the right is silenced and slapped with scarlet letters over terms and traditional beliefs; for refusing to call a biological man a woman, for opposing abortion and gay marriage, for using the term “illegal alien” as opposed to the Orwellian mush that is “undocumented immigrant.”
We are censored, blacklisted, de-platformed, and disappeared over ideas and words, while the left engages in actual violence and is applauded for it.
And now you have CBS News joining CNN in legitimizing, condoning, and encouraging physical assaults, but only against one class of people, the unprotected class.
Now ask me again why the political elite, the news media, tech lords, academia, and Hollywood are so desperate to take away our Second Amendment civil right to own a firearm…
So far there have been more than 330 documented hate crimes against Trump supporters. CNN and CBS consider that only a good start.
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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A message from Phelim McAleer
Well it has just been unbelievable - we have had a great launch with amazing media coverage of our FBI Lovebirds: UnderCovers project. We have supporters like you to thank for the current success of this project.
Politico has called the show, which stars Young Superman Dean Cain and Kristy Swanson, “Hamilton for the Make America Great Again crowd.” That isn’t such a bad analogy. Should we get T-shirts made with this inscription?
The Hollywood Reporter states that the play, which we are also filming, will put Trump's campaign and presidency under the spotlight. That’s what we are hoping will happen. When we release the film online, you won't believe what was going on behind the scenes, with law enforcement personnel boasting in texts to one another that they were subverting the democratic process.
USA Today also says that the focus of the play is on Trump. That is half right since the focus of the play is on revealing the truth about those who tried to end the Trump campaign and presidency.
This is only part of the coverage this story has received, but the great thing about these reports is that the mainstream media are forced to cover the story that they really, really want to ignore. FBI Lovebirds: UnderCovers is a verbatim play consisting entirely of the text messages between FBI agents Page and Strzok and their answers when questioned in private by a Congressional panel. We have the transcript of that grilling and the play has no added drama - it is just their own words verbatim.
As Dean Cain said: “I look forward to playing Peter Strzok as written by Peter Strzok.”
What is especially infuriating is that Deadline Hollywood saw us writing about the death threat to actors and their audience of this production, and the only thing they thought was noteworthy was that we were “fundraising” of it. This is crazy!
Someone has threatened to burn alive actors and their audience, and Deadline Hollywood thinks this is a non story and doesn't reach out to us or to industry people to get them to condemn it. Instead, they believe that the people who received the death threat are the ones who should be condemned.
This is why it so important that the FBI Lovebirds project goes ahead. The truth is that we are slightly behind where we would like to be at this stage in fundraising. We should be 35% funded and we have just hit 26%. We did get off to a good start but undoubtedly things will slow down over the Memorial Day weekend. We want to continue to expose the lies that are being told and continue to force the media to cover this story, even in their own twisted way. Without the proper funding, we won't be able to properly film and promote the project and release it to a wide audience.
So please, give what you can. If you have already donated, think about giving again. Would you also do us a favor? If you share this link - www.fbilovebirds.com - with just 5 others and they donate the same as you, this project could be funded within hours. This would be a phenomenon that the media could not stay quiet about.
Via email
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Nancy Pelosi, profile in courage? Hardly
by Jeff Jacoby
I WONDER SOMETIMES whether officials at the John F. Kennedy Library Foundation, which presents the annual Profile in Courage Award, have ever read Profiles in Courage. In his Pulitzer Prize-winning 1956 book, then-Senator John Kennedy described eight US senators who upheld an unpopular political position with fortitude, even though it meant defying their party or allies and jeopardizing their careers.
Recipients of the Profile in Courage Award are supposed to epitomize the kind of political fearlessness that JFK extolled. But while some have indeed been exemplars of conscience who put the public good ahead of their own political safety, others definitely have not. At times the award has served as a kind of consolation prize for haughty liberals whose disdainful manner alienated their constituents. At other times it has amounted to little more than a lifetime achievement prize for famous Democrats, such as Barack Obama and Ted Kennedy.
On Sunday, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi became the newest Profile in Courage honoree. She received the award, according to the JFK Library, for shepherding passage of the Affordable Care Act in 2010 and for "leading the [Democratic] effort to retake the majority" in the House of Representatives in 2018. Those accomplishments, impressive as they were, had nothing to do with political bravery. They attest to Pelosi's legislative and electoral acumen, not her moral grit. The Affordable Care Act was the top priority of a Democratic president and the Democrats who controlled Congress; it took no heroism to push it into law. As for quarterbacking her party's efforts to win more House seats — that's what party leaders are expected to do. No courage required.
Yet when Pelosi found herself in a situation where political courage was required, she showed none.
Just a few months ago, the House was roiled by the anti-Semitism of freshman Representative Ilhan Omar. In public comments, the Minnesota Democrat perpetuated the ugly stereotypes that Jewish money dominates American policymaking and that pro-Israel Jews in Congress are motivated by "allegiance to a foreign country." That outraged respected party veterans, who introduced a resolution condemning such anti-Jewish bigotry. But the measure triggered an uproar from far-left Democrats and the Congressional Black Caucus, who rallied around Omar and demanded that the resolution be watered down into a bland condemnation of all forms of hatred.
That was when the speaker of the House could have shown real mettle and insisted that Democrats repudiate the anti-Semitism in their ranks. Instead, she caved to the extremists. The strong resolution was spiked, and Pelosi lamely excused Omar on the grounds that she hadn't understood the "full weight" of her slurs.
But if Pelosi doesn't fit the description of a profile in courage, there are others who do.
When Senator Susan Collins of Maine decided last October to support Brett Kavanaugh's elevation to the Supreme Court, she knew well that "her vote will haunt her politically for the remainder of her career," as The New York Times put it. The pressure on Collins to oppose Kavanaugh was noisy, public, and abusive. A crowdfunding campaign raised millions of dollars for a future campaign to unseat Collins if she didn't vote no. Her office was inundated with profane and threatening messages.
The House speaker is a Democrat, a liberal, a safe incumbent, and a powerful politician. Those don't add up to a profile in courage.
Undeterred, Collins cast the crucial vote for Kavanaugh, carefully explaining her reasons in a speech on the Senate floor.
Now that's what JFK would have called a profile in courage.
SOURCE
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Profile of a Hater: Rep. Ilhan Omar
What should have been an inspiring story turned sour due to her own bitter hatred.
At one time, hers was an inspiring story: A young child is plucked from a Kenyan refugee camp four years after having escaped the strife in her home country of Somalia, and she and her family ultimately arrive in the U.S. before her 11th birthday. Instead, the feel-good tale of Congresswoman Ilhan Omar has been sullied by her oft-documented anti-Semitism and her seeming ungratefulness for such good fortune. In fact, only her family’s wealth, prominence, and privilege allowed her such an opportunity, all while she rails against the “privilege” of others.
Now 37 years old, Omar’s rapid political rise tells part of the story, while then-candidate Donald Trump told another part on a 2016 campaign visit to Minneapolis: “[We] have seen firsthand the problems with faulty refugee vetting,” he said, “with large numbers of Somali refugees coming into your state, without your knowledge, without your support or approval.” Among those refugees was Omar, who was just about to be formally elected to the Minnesota House of Representatives, having won the Democrat-Farmer-Labor (DFL) primary over a 44-year incumbent legislator who fell victim to the changing demographics in a district that includes a Minneapolis neighborhood known as “Little Mogadishu.”
The area Omar now represents in Congress was formerly the district of Muslim convert Rep. Keith Ellison, yet it also hosts about half of Minnesota’s modest Jewish population. Not surprisingly, then, Omar’s anti-Semitic statements, as well as those expressing support for the boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel were front and center during the campaign to succeed Ellison. While Omar denied backing BDS at a town hall event, Powerline blogger (and Minneapolis attorney) Scott Johnson put it succinctly: “Omar knows precisely what she is doing. She lies baldly and without conscience.” Ultimately, Omar got the DFL endorsement, which was tantamount to victory in her D+26 district.
To play devil’s advocate, perhaps there’s some truth to Omar’s claims that Republicans “spread misinformation about how refugee resettlement works.” She claims the current setup gives states “leverage” over knowing how many refugees they would get. That said, surely Omar doesn’t believe that “ignorance is really pervasive in many parts of this country,” does she? Or is she referring to the Left, which routinely traffics in half-truths and demagoguery?
Regardless, Omar lets the mask slip when, referring to recent pro-life legislation passed in Alabama and Georgia, she says, “If [the Religious Right] cared about or were concerned about children, they would be concerned about the children that are being detained and those that are dying in camps across our borders, or the children who are languishing in hunger and facing homelessness.” Setting aside the swipe at the pro-life movement, wouldn’t it be preferable if those children weren’t put in the position of being detained in the first place?
What Congress now has in Omar is an ardent leftist in a somewhat unique package: the first Somali-American elected to Congress and one of the first two Islamic women to serve. So that’s why, this week, she celebrated the “honor to preside over the House Floor” as speaker pro tempore. Far from any kind of real rebuke for her bile, she’s rewarded.
But her anti-American tendencies are evident when she talks to her political peers. Speaking to Benjamin Wallace-Wells of The New Yorker as part of a glowing article on Omar’s political rise, she told him, “We have values and ideals of prosperity and equality and protecting human dignity. All of these things are part of the American value system.”
So far, so good — until this: “But in actuality we have mass incarceration. We have people who literally are sleeping outside in sub-zero weather. We have all kinds of atrocities. We are caging children at our borders. We have police officers who are shooting unarmed black men. So we have practices that really do not live up to the values and the ideas that are very much part of our DNA.”
Omar goes on to say that her first impressions of America were romanticized, but then reality hit her hard. Writes Wallace-Wells, “It explained the reaction she had when, four years later, her family was accepted into the United States. In the camp, they had been shown films of pristine, quiet American suburbs. Omar arrived in busy, dirty New York in 1992, and asked her father why there was so much trash everywhere and people sleeping outside. He said not to worry, that this was not the end of their trip. ‘I didn’t imagine this was also a land of homeless people,’ she said.”
Ilhan Omar is a very fortunate woman in two respects, even though she doesn’t seem thankful for the first and hasn’t yet realized the blessing of the second. First, as a “feminist with a hijab,” she’s been given opportunities that are denied to millions of women in Islam-dominated nations. But second, since fellow freshman congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is sucking up nearly all the oxygen in the room, Omar’s vile and outlandish statements aren’t part of the public conscience yet. And this is perhaps Omar’s biggest blessing to date.
SOURCE
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CBS News Encourages Physical Assaults Against Political Right
With its embrace of the left’s milkshake assaults on politicians, CBS News has joined CNN’s campaign to encourage violence against the political right.
Brexit Party leader Nigel Farage was just the latest right-leaning politician attacked with a milkshake over the weekend, and as my colleague James Delingpole points out, there is nothing funny or harmless about these assaults.
“Once you start suggesting that physical assaults of any kind are acceptable then you are legitimising violence. And violence has a nasty habit of escalating,” Delingpole writes, and that is exactly correct. The right to swing your fist ends at the tip of my nose, and hurling a milkshake at someone is a physical assault. Period.
Even if it does not escalate beyond the milkshake, you are still throwing a physical object at someone, which at worst could injure them and at best vandalizes their property in the form of their clothes.
Physical assault is an extremely easy and moral line to draw, and we all know the media would hit Defcon 1 if a Barack Obama or Elizabeth Warren was ever hit with a milkshake. Nevertheless…
Here is CBS News openly encouraging physical assaults against their political enemies on the right:
"Protesters in Britain have weaponized the milk shake. In the latest of a series of attacks on right-wing politicians, Brexit Party Leader Nigel Farage was doused with a milkshake yesterday. That was actually salted caramel if anyone is wondering.
[Laughter.] He was campaigning. These attacks have come to be known as milk shaking. Now, this follows egging. It follows pieing, punching. I don’t know. I’m sure it feels great. I’m sure people love the feeling. Pictures fly around the world. Put some of that energy into campaigning and maybe the people you don’t want to be in office won’t be in office."
That is not some talking head cracking wise, that is a so-called journalist, Tony Dokoupil, who co-hosts CBS This Morning.
This is yet another example of how the corrupt establishment media want to create an Animal Farm Affirmative Action world where the left enjoy more civil rights than the right.
When the right says something the media do not like, it is violence, racism, and dangerous. When the left does actually assaults someone, it is “great.”
The political elite, academia, the news media, Hollywood, and our tech lords are all abusing their power to grant the left the civil right to say and do whatever they like — including violence (see: Antifa).
Meanwhile, the right is silenced and slapped with scarlet letters over terms and traditional beliefs; for refusing to call a biological man a woman, for opposing abortion and gay marriage, for using the term “illegal alien” as opposed to the Orwellian mush that is “undocumented immigrant.”
We are censored, blacklisted, de-platformed, and disappeared over ideas and words, while the left engages in actual violence and is applauded for it.
And now you have CBS News joining CNN in legitimizing, condoning, and encouraging physical assaults, but only against one class of people, the unprotected class.
Now ask me again why the political elite, the news media, tech lords, academia, and Hollywood are so desperate to take away our Second Amendment civil right to own a firearm…
So far there have been more than 330 documented hate crimes against Trump supporters. CNN and CBS consider that only a good start.
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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Sunday, May 26, 2019
Lessons from history in support of Trump
Primarily Australian and German lessons
To this day it is widely accepted in Australia that R.G. (Bob) Menzies (later Sir Robert Menzies) was our greatest Prime Minister. He was the Prime Minister of Australia from 1939 to 1941 and again from 1949 to 1966. He is Australia's longest-serving prime minister, serving over 18 years in total. He ran Australia in the '50s and most of the '60s in what many now look back upon as a golden age. (I do. I was there). There was great embarrassment if unemployment exceeded 2% and life was generally tranquil, though Communist unions did their best to make trouble.
Doing nothing can be a good policy
But when people say what a great man Bob was, a common response was: "But what did he DO?" And that is a hard question to answer. Whenever people came to Bob and suggested something that the government should do, Bob would reply: "But if we do that, that will create another problem here". So Bob would send the suggestions away, saying that the best thing to do was nothing.
People are always calling on the politicians to do something so it takes great political talent to do nothing. And doing nothing means that the size of the government stays pretty small -- unlike what mostly happens today when the government never ceases to expand.
So Bob's talent was to let the people of the nation create any change they desired, with little or no government interference. If enough people backed the change it would happen. If it had little backing it would not happen. So prosperity and quality of life increased almost entirely through private initiatives.
So the torrent of legislation to which all governments subject us was a comparative trickle under Menzies. He generally resisted the urge to meddle. And under him Australia was peaceful, calm and secure -- with unemployment negligible and living standards steadily rising. Contracts were enforced, criminals were punished and taxation was a fraction of what it is now. There was welfare for those who really needed it
Bob was however of Scottish origins and he inherited the great Scottish reverence for education. So he saw it as a real problem that poor families could not send their children to university. So, for once, he DID something about that. He instituted a scheme where the Federal government would send to university all children from poor families who had scored in the top third of High School grades. The government not only paid the tuition fees but even gave the kid a living allowance. It was called the Commonwealth Scholarship Scheme and I was one of its beneficiaries.
So Australian conservatives today only have to remember the world of Menzies in the 1950s and 1960s to realize that their ideal of a much smaller and fairer government is far from an impossible dream.
"Honest" Frank Nicklin
But Bob was rare even among conservative politicians for his ability to do next to nothing.
So let me mention another such rarity: "Honest" Frank Nicklin. Would you believe a politician with the nickname "Honest"? In WWI he was a war hero and after the war he was a banana farmer. In 1957, he became the Premier of my home state of Queensland and ran Queensland for around 10 years in the 60s. Frank was by all accounts a very nice man: A pre-Reagan Reagan. He got on well with the bureaucracy and even the unions. So life in Queensland was very tranquil in his time.
How Frank did it can perhaps be gleaned from the words of a unionist who had just gone to see him with some request. He was asked afterwards what had happened with his request. He answered: "Mr. Nicklin can say No in the nicest possible way"!
But, like Bob Menzies Frank did do something: He spent a lot on upgrading the infrastructure -- roads and bridges etc.
Eisenhower
And then we come to an example that older Americans will know about: Ike.
Ike didn't like to rock boats and mainly just wanted to let people get on with their own lives. He kept the government low-key and tried to reduce government financial deficits. But he too did SOMETHING. Like Frank Nicklin, he spent a lot on building up infrastructure -- a big network of high quality interstate highways. That network is in rather bad repair these days but if all the money wasted on the global warming myth had been spent the way the three men above operated, there would be no such problem today.
But it is wrong to say that conservatives favour the status quo. Conservative-run legislatures legislate as energetically as any but mostly that is just to undo the damage caused by previous Leftist policies. It is Leftist changes that they oppose, not all change. But, as we see above, even the three champion conservative leaders did also make positive changes: carefully considered changes that generated broad consensus
Trump looks to be going down a similar road. He is mainly unwinding Obama-era initiatives rather than launch initiatives of his own. But he too has the one big thing he wants to accomplish: The Wall
East Germany and the virtue of stability
But the Communist State of East Germany (the DDR or Deutsche Demokratische Republik) also has something to tell us about change. The regime is now long gone but its demise is particularly instructive.
When the Gorbachev reforms in Russia allowed it, thousands of East Germans breached the Berlin wall, leading to the downfall of the East German regime and a peaceful takeover of the Eastern lands by the West Germans in 1990.
Easterners had not generally foreseen any negative consequences of reunion but some soon emerged. In particular, the businesses and industries of the East were not remotely competitive with their Western counterparts and rapidly went broke. This led to very high levels of unemployment and economic depression generally in the East and there very soon emerged among some people "Ostalgie" -- a longing for the old Communist regime, a longing that continues among some to this day
What Easterners miss from the old regime was stability, particularly stability of employment, but they also missed the orderly and predictable availability of goods and services as well. You didn't have to compete for anything. All was provided, albeit at a low level. So there was a brotherly feeling among Easterners and that is missed by some too.
So it is clear that some of the aspects of extreme socialism were and are appreciated by some people. The entire developed world does have a degree of socialism (welfare measures etc.) so there is clearly something basic in the appeal of socialism.
The great discovery of 18th and 19th century Britain, however, was that individualism was also beneficial -- particularly for generating wealth. Money talked and it talked loudly. Britain did have its socialist system (Workhouses, poorhouses, church schools etc) but they left plenty of room for individual enterprise. And the rest is history, as they say. In the developing, mostly European, world of the 19th century, Britain became the model and socialism took a back seat to individual enterprise because of its obvious advantages
So an obvious question is whether capitalism can deliver some of the things that socialists like. The extensive welfare provisions already in existence already go some way towards that but is there more that we can do without wrecking our successful economic model.
East Germany gives us the clue. The one thing that "Ossis" particularly liked was stability, the absence of change. In particular they liked economic stability -- confidence that you would have a job tomorrow and that the job is easy to do.
That is in fact a thoroughly conservative wish. Stability and an absence of change are good conservative values. So where have we gone wrong? Why did it take a Communist state to put conservative values into practice? The answer is that all of life is a tradeoff. Only feminists think you can have it all. And we have traded too much for economic liberty. East Germany was poorer but more secure and relaxed and that tradeoff suited many people.
Menzies and tariffs
And there is a robust Anglo-Saxon democracy with all the traditional liberties that did offer something like East German tradeoffs. Again we come to Australia in the 1950s under the long running Prime Ministership of the very conservative R.G. Menzies.
Australia was very autarkic at that time. It made its own cars and kitchen appliances plus much else. Some goods were imported, chiefly from Britain, but Australian manufacturers were encouraged and were readily given tariff protection. If you made toasters in Australia you did not have to worry about overseas competition. A nice little tariff would protect you.
So businesses and their employees could relax. Their factory would just keep running year after year. The workers could plan their savings and their holidays with no fear that their job would suddenly vanish due to a new competitor entering the market and selling the product at a cheaper price.
And under that system there was very little unemployment. Anyone who wanted one could get a job. Unemployment was always under 2%. It was a crisis if it seemed likely to rise to 2%. There is nowhere like that in the world today.
So Australia at that time was a capitalistic economy with East German characteristics. Despite its tariffs, Australia was in the '50s one of the most prosperous places in the world.
Australia is a major primary producer so there was often steak on the dinner table, most houses had a substantial backyard where you could grow most of your fruit and vegetables if you were so inclined, you could get on a steam train and go interstate to visit family and friends at vacation time, there was always the family car for local trips, the newspapers had lots of interesting news, particularly from overseas, you could hear all the latest songs on the radio, the ladies had pretty dresses and even in small towns there were several bars where one could drink cold beer after a hard day's work. What else is there?
But that is lost today. Australia is now a normal nation with few tariffs and unemployment around 5%. And you can buy things for pocket change that once would have been a serious hit on the budget.
Trump's tariffs
But there is hope. Trump too looks like going down something like the Menzies road. American unemployment has sunk to levels way below anything expected. So Trump has got an amazingly successful recipe for American prosperity. Whatever he has been doing must be given great credit for creating a multitude of new jobs
Yet what Trump has been doing runs completely against conventional economic wisdom. Economists preach free trade as the highroad to prosperity -- but Trump has been a champion of tariffs and import restrictions. Yet Trump has recently said that he learned the free trade story while he was at Wharton and still regards it as the ideal.
So it is clear that free trade alone is not enough for prosperity in the real world we have at the present. You actually have to sponsor jobs -- by protections if necessary -- in order to get good job growth. There was striking evidence of that in the 19th century -- when American industry prospered mightily behind high tariff walls.
So how do economists explain the 19th century boom? It is to them a classic case of the "infant industry" exception. American technology and industry were still very new and well behind the mature industries of the old world. So it had to be given time to catch up. And that does seem to be what happened. So the 19th century experience is not necessarily a guide to the 21st century. It gives us no assurance that Trump's policies will continue to succeed. As initial optimism wears off and the costs become evident, one could argue that America will rebound to the old 5% level of "frictional" employment. You cannot square the circle for long.
Logical that may be but the Menzies precedent offers hope that Trump's success with jobs will NOT be ephemeral
Robert Menzies was a very conservative man. So what were his economic policies? They were very protectionist and focused on creating and preserving Australian jobs. And Menzies stuck to his high tariff policies for the whole of his long Prime Ministership. So that sounds a lot like Trump's policies, does it not? So what was unemployment like in the Menzies era? It was almost always UNDER 2%. It was regarded as a political crisis if it looked like it would go over 2%. Frictional unemployment barely existed.
So the lesson is clear: Maximum jobs requires some protection of industry. Both Trump and Menzies have demonstrated that. It could be called the "Trump/Menzies Rule": That there is a trade-off between tariffs and unemployment such that as tariffs go up unemployment goes down. And the Australian precedent says that we can even hope for 2% under Trump. How good is that?
So WHY is an actively protectionist administration needed for businessmen to be maximally enterprising? It's dead simple. It gives businessmen throughout the country the feeling that government has got their back. It gives them the feeling that government will at least be on their side if there is a push for change of any sort. Democrat administrations are, by contrast, enemies of business -- and blind Frederick can see that. Hence up to 9.6% unemployment under Obama compared with 3.8% under Trump. Businessmen are people too. They respond to incentives and recoil from attack. So that is the theory: Tariffs stimulate business confidence and confident businessmen go on a hiring spree in their keenness to make money
Trump has an economics degree from the Wharton school so he knows the downside of tariffs. He knows that his tariffs are impoverishing to a degree but he also knows that stability is a neglected but important value. Money is not everything. It is unlikely that America will ever come near to East Germany in an offering of stability but Mr Trump is rebalancing American priorities in that direction, which should make America a better place overall.
Trump, Barr fight back against judicial tyranny of nationwide injunctions
This is a "Harry Reid" issue, where Democrats fail to think ahead. If this egregious practice is not stopped now, it will be open for Trump judges to block all the actions of a future Democrat administration. That could be good
We are facing a constitutional crisis. Through the use of nationwide injunctions, a group of liberal federal district judges are fighting to maintain Obama era policies until President Donald Trump leaves office.
And now, President Donald Trump is fighting back as his administration seeks a case to be brought in federal court against the practice.
These judges’ actions are an attack on our system of government undermining the value of voting and the public’s trust in the impartiality of the judicial branch. These injunctions must be halted, either by the Supreme Court or by legislation.
Nationwide injunctions, which are also called universal or national injunctions, are issued by federal district judges and prohibit the federal government from enforcing laws or policies against anyone, not just the plaintiffs in the case.
There have now been 37 nationwide injunctions issued against the Trump Administration, which is significantly more than were issued in the entire 20th century. In contrast, there were only two nationwide injunctions during the first two years of the Obama Administration; and there were no nationwide injunctions issued during the first 175 years of our Republic.
Recently, U.S. Attorney General Bill Barr gave a speech attacking nationwide injunctions, saying that the bar for getting one from a district judge is too low: “When Congress passes a statute or the President implements a policy that is challenged in multiple courts, the Government has to run the table — we must win every case. The challengers, however, must find only one district judge — out of an available 600 — willing to enter a nationwide injunction. One judge can, in effect, cancel the policy with the stroke of the pen.”
And this is bad for democracy, Barr said, “Nationwide injunctions undermine the democratic process, depart from history and tradition, violate constitutional principles, and impede sound judicial administration, all at the cost of public confidence in our institutions and particularly in our courts as apolitical decision-makers dispassionately applying objective law.”
Barr is not the first prominent conservative to take aim at these injunctions. Barr’s predecessor, former U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions, has also denounced the injunctions. Sessions stated, “Increasingly, we are seeing individual federal district judges go beyond the parties before the court to give injunctions or orders that block the entire federal government from enforcing a law or policy throughout the country…. This trend must stop. We have a government to run. The Constitution does not grant to a single district judge the power to veto executive branch actions with respect to parties not before the court. Nor does it provide the judiciary with authority to conduct oversight of or review policy of the executive branch. These abuses of judicial power are contrary to law…”
Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas has indicated his skepticism of the legitimacy of the injunctions. Thomas wrote, “These [universal] injunctions are beginning to take a toll on the federal court system—preventing legal questions from percolating through the federal courts, encouraging forum shopping, and making every case a national emergency for the courts and for the Executive Branch. I am skeptical that district courts have the authority to enter universal injunctions… They appear to be inconsistent with longstanding limits on … the power of Article III courts.”
Elections must have consequences. Members of Congress and Presidents are elected to set and implement federal laws and policies; and unelected, unaccountable lower court judges must not be allowed to obstruct the policies of the elected branches of the government indefinitely. The Supreme Court will soon weigh in on nationwide injunctions and make it clear to district court judges that they have no authority to issue these injunctions.
If the Court fails to do so, then it will fall to Congress to enact legislation to end these acts of judicial tyranny once and for all.
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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Friday, May 24, 2019
Trump's patience finally runs out
I doubt that any national leader ever has endured such a torrent of abuse and accusations as Trump has. So it is no surprise that he has eventually become fed up with it. He has so far been a miracle of patience but everything has its limits.
The Democrats have only one serious policy: Get Trump. It suits their hate filled minds. Rage and hate are what moves them. So their attacks on Trump come naturally to them. They could -- and probably will -- keep it up for the next five years of Trump's presidency. They are in their element. If they weren't attacking Trump, they would be attacking someone else or something else
US President Donald Trump has angrily lashed out at Democratic leaders' claims he is engaged in a "cover-up".
"I don't do cover-ups," the Republican president said in an unscheduled briefing from the White House.
His remarks came after House Speaker Nancy Pelosi met fellow Democrats to discuss impeaching the president.
Mr Trump is fighting congressional inquiries by ignoring subpoenas, withholding documents and blocking testimony by current and ex-advisers.
What did President Trump say?
The president spoke minutes after cutting short a planned meeting with the two top Democratic leaders on Capitol Hill.
The trio were due to discuss spending on ageing US roads and bridges, a rare possible area of agreement between the White House and its political antagonists.
But Mr Trump abruptly left the discussion with House of Representatives leader Mrs Pelosi and her Senate counterpart Chuck Schumer after barely five minutes.
The president then appeared in the Rose Garden to make a surprise statement, condemning "phoney investigations" by Democrats.
Mr Trump also charged his political opponents with "abuse" and railed against their invoking of "the big i word" - impeachment.
According to CBS News, Mr Trump walked into the meeting with Mrs Pelosi and Mr Schumer and did not shake either's hand or sit down.
An unnamed source familiar with the encounter said Mr Trump upbraided the House speaker for her "terrible" allegation earlier in the day about a cover-up.
The president demanded Democrats end their investigations against him, or he would not discuss anything else, then abruptly left the room.
SOURCE
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The coverup accusations that finally riled Trump:
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) emerged from a meeting with her fellow Democrats Wednesday morning, telling reporters "we were exchanging information and points of view" on the various investigations focusing on all things Trump.
"Would you believe that it's important to follow the facts?" Pelosi said on her way to a meeting with President Trump.
"We believe that no one is above the law, including the president of the United States. And we believe the president of the United States is engaged in a cover-up -- in a cover-up. And that was the nature of the meeting."
At that closed-door meeting, no fewer than five Democrat committee chairs -- Elijah Cummings (Oversight and Reform), Maxine Waters (House Financial Services), Adam Schiff (Intelligence), Richard Neal (Ways and Means) and Jerry Nadler (Judiciary) gave presentations, which Pelosi called "impressive."
Pelosi has tried to quell growing calls from Democrats to start impeachment proceedings, but it's not clear that she's succeeding.
Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) told Fox News Wednesday morning he thinks Democrats have already started those impeachment proceedings: "They just won't formally declare it," he said.
There are secret memorandums of understanding, secret MOUs, between the various chairmen on how they will coordinate their attack on the president. I mean, they're basically contracts --you're going to do this, we're do this. We're going to share certain information. A coordinated effort to take down the president.
So I think they've already started. They won't formally declare it. I think at some point they will probably do it. The American people know it's not justified, the American people know it's not going to succeed. But I don't think the Democrats can help themselves.
Remember, after all in the very first day of congress they introduced articles of impeachment, Congressman Blumenaur did. So they've been determined to get here -- I think they've already started; they just haven't formally stated that that's what they're up to.
Jordan said there's nothing Republicans can do to appease the "ridiculous" Democrat requests for the president's tax returns, bank records, White House documents and witnesses appearances before the committees:
"So this is the Democrats -- so much focus on taking down the president and not any type of focus on doing what's best for the country. I think this is where they're going to go. So I don't know what we can do to satisfy that. They're bound and determined to do things we've never seen before."
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Spendthrift policies encourage socialism
Socialism is the subject of much talk in the United States, fueled by would-be Democratic presidential candidates who lean toward some version of that socioeconomic model—and polls in which many voters sympathize with that view.
As someone who has witnessed varieties of socialism in Latin America and Europe, I think the real danger in the United States is not the ideological radicalization of the Democratic Party, the political conversion of millions of Americans, or the emergence of a viable socialist party on a national scale. Rather, the real danger is the impact that the country’s intractable structural problems could have on people’s idea of how capitalism works.
We have already seen how the financial crisis of 2008, the government’s ensuing rescue of major corporations, the prolonged recession, and the temporary dislocations brought about by globalization have fueled illiberal populism, right and left, in recent years. Many people blame market capitalism for the failure, a decade ago, of a system in which government intervention—specifically, a politically engineered credit boom—played a much bigger role than free enterprise. Given that the last 10 years have seen a major boost to financial assets and corporations (again, through monetary easing and other interventionism) while part of the middle class was painfully reducing its debts, it is likely that the next crisis and recession will reinforce the notion that what is failing is the free market.
We have learned that the U.S. budget deficit grew 15 percent in the first half of fiscal 2019: between October and March, expenses exceeded revenue by almost $700 billion. Contrary to widespread perceptions, the reason had little to do with tax cuts and revenue—which actually grew 1 percent while spending grew 5 percent.
The Treasury has released its 2018 financial report, and it isn’t pretty. Although in recent years the government’s primary deficit (not counting the servicing of the debt) has tended to go down and growing interest payments seemed to be the main problem, projections indicate that both are now headed in the wrong direction. The crux of the matter is the unsustainable commitments the U.S. government has made and refuses to pare down. We tend to talk of the U.S. debt as equivalent to 100 percent of GDP, but that proportion will be dwarfed in the not-too-distant future if nothing changes soon. The debt will double in less than three decades if we leave out government-sponsored entities—such as Freddie Mac; if we include them (which, of course, we should), the doubling will occur much sooner.
The Treasury has also calculated the net present value of future liabilities (essentially Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid) to more realistically estimate the debt. If we take that into account, we are talking about five times GDP.
Various studies have projected expenditures to exceed revenues in one of the Social Security trust funds as soon as 2022, and one of the Medicare trust funds has been running a deficit for several years; it will likely be depleted by 2029.
By way of consolation, the United States is not alone. The net present value of pension liabilities amounts to several times GDP in many European countries (more than three times in Germany, France, the United Kingdom, and Italy). None of this has anything to do with the free-enterprise capitalist system—quite the opposite. But the populist and, dare I say, socialist zeitgeist in which this crisis of government is taking place will push millions of people to lose faith in markets as the prime drivers of prosperity and social mobility when these imbalances come to a head and produce the inevitable financial and economic disruptions; that is, unless a consensus develops among decisionmakers about the urgent need to attack the statist root of the problem.
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The Insanity of the Push for Rent Control
One popular definition of insanity is: doing the same thing again and again while expecting a different result. Decades of evidence show that rent controls are a bad idea, yet several Californian cities maintain their rent-control ordinances. A new proposal working its way through the legislature would double down on this insanity by implementing it statewide.
Assemblyman David Chiu, D-San Francisco, introduced AB1482 to limit annual rent increases to 5 percentage points above the rate of change in the consumer price index or a maximum of 10 percent, whichever is lower. Gov. Gavin Newsom signaled his support for the bill after it cleared the legislature’s Housing and Community Development Committee by stating “The California Dream is in peril if our state doesn’t act to address the housing affordability crisis” and thanking the committee for passing the “renter protection” bill.
If this bill becomes law, California will be the second state, following Oregon, to implement statewide rent control. Oregon recently approved an ordinance to limit rent increases to 7 percentage points above the rate of inflation.
Despite high housing costs on the west coast, the renewed political support for rent control is surprising. After reaching peak popularity in the 1970s, the number of rent-control ordinances has declined nationally ever since. The most common statewide laws regarding rents prohibit local jurisdictions from controlling rents. Thirty-five states have such preemptions.
Even California policymakers, in a rare bout of sanity, weakened local rent controls with the Costa-Hawkins Act in 1995. The act allows landlords in cities with rent controls to return rents to market rates after a tenant voluntarily vacates or is legally evicted, and eliminates rent controls for single-family homes and units built after 1995.
The nationwide retreat of rent control was consistent with the thrust of decades of economic research, and the new controls fly in the face of that research. Economists have compiled a long list of theoretical arguments and empirical evidence showing the destructive consequences of rent control.
As Matthew Brown summarized in my book Housing America, these destructive effects include “shortages of apartments for rent, decreases in quality and lack of maintenance, decreased construction of new apartments, long waiting times and high search costs [to find apartments], discrimination, homelessness, abandoned buildings, and labor market inefficiencies.”
A 2009 article surveying the vast theoretical and empirical scholarly literature agreed with an 1985 assessment that “the economics profession has reached a rare consensus: Rent control creates many more problems than it solves.” When polled, more than 92% of economists agreed with the statement “A ceiling on rents reduces the quantity and quality of housing available.”
Rent control is an issue on which the econ-101 textbooks, the opinions of the vast majority of economists, and the current scholarly research all point in the same direction. In 1982 economist Thomas Hazlett observed that “economists have been notoriously thorough in convincing themselves of the destructive effects of rent control and notoriously inept at convincing anyone else.” For a while the economists had apparently convinced the vast majority of policymakers nationwide. Unfortunately, insane politicians in California and Oregon seem to have forgotten what everyone else has learned.
Rent control will only make California’s housing problems worse. If politicians really wanted to promote affordability, they would remove urban-growth boundaries and other restrictions that limit the housing supply. That would do more to promote affordability than passing destructive rent-control laws.
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Averting a War With Iran: Despite Leftmedia hyperventilating, the Trump administration is making some good moves
With the exception of Russia and China, Iran is arguably the biggest threat faced by the United States. In some ways, Iran is an even bigger threat — and that’s despite the fact that both Russia and China have substantial strategic nuclear arsenals. That makes resolving the latest tension points with Iran a good thing.
It all started with warnings from the intelligence community about a possible Iranian threat. Contingency plans were drawn up, but signs that a major war was the plan were absent. What is more likely is that the United States was trying to deter Iran from doing something stupid — simply by reminding the mullahs that we have them badly outgunned.
Prior to this past December, we didn’t really need to rattle sabers much, mostly because the presence of then-Secretary of Defense James Mattis alone sufficed as deterrent. The prospect of his wrath was far scarier than that of a Khaleesi gone mad with a dragon. Without Mattis as a behavioral motivator, it means we have to be a little more, shall we say, blunt.
Iran is a country that may need more blunt behavioral motivation than most potentially hostile entities. This regime has routinely voiced its intention to wipe Israel off the map, an action and endeavor that necessarily would entail a new Holocaust — albeit one to which Israel would not meekly submit. Iran has a long track record of supporting terrorists, including those responsible for the devastating attack on the Marine barracks in Beirut in 1983.
Contrary to the rantings of those like Bernie Sanders, America is not provoking Iran; Iran’s been carrying out hostile actions against us — especially via proxies. Iran’s assistance has been directly tied to the deaths of American troops during Operation Iraqi Freedom. Their Houthi stooges fired missiles at the Arleigh Burke-class guided-missile destroyer USS Mason (DDG 87) on multiple occasions.
We at The Patriot Post have noted this track record before, particularly in defending President Donald Trump’s veto of a congressional effort to force the United States to stop backing the Saudis. The need to stick by the Saudis cannot be understated, given the track record of Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Thankfully, Trump has been willing to put America’s interest first, including denying the F-35 to the Erdogan regime.
Re-directing Turkey’s F-35s to Israel would be a nice way to help address the Iranian threat. So is continuing to support the Saudis. While Mohammed bin Sultan allegedly ordered the brutal murder of Jamal Khashoggi, he’s also openly recognized that Israel has a right to exist and is making some steps toward respecting women’s rights as well — in other words, changes in the right direction.
Nobody wants what would be a costly war with Iran. Thankfully, that seems to have been averted. And Trump’s warning will hopefully be heeded, although the irrational and genocidal theocrats of Tehran will probably be back to their antics when they think they can get away with it.
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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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Thursday, May 23, 2019
Trump: 'You Do Have a Military-Industrial Complex. They Do Like War.'
The threat of an official end to Iran sounds to me like a threat to use nukes
President Trump, speaking about hostile foreign powers, Iran especially, told Fox News that if he can solve tensions economically, he prefers that to a military solution.
But he said he's up against a military-industrial complex in Washington that wants to keep the wars going:
Well, I'm the one that talks about these wars that are 19 years (long), and people are just there. And don't kid yourself, you do have a military industrial complex. They do like war.
You know, In Syria with the caliphate, so I wipe out 100% of the caliphate that doesn't mean you're not going to have these crazy people going around, blowing up stores and blowing up things, these are seriously ill people...But I wiped out 100 percent of the caliphate.
I said, I want to bring our troops back home -- the place went crazy. They want to keep-- you have people here in Washington, they never want to leave. I said, you know what I'll do, I'll leave a couple hundred soldiers behind, but if it was up to them they'd bring thousands of soldiers in.
Someday people will explain it, but you do have a group, and they call it the military-industrial complex.
They never want to leave, they always want to fight. No. I don't want to fight, but you do have situations like Iran. You can't let them have nuclear weapons. You just can't let that happen.
President Trump made the remarks last week in an interview with Fox News's Steve Hilton. The interview aired on Sunday night.
On Sunday evening, following reports that an Iranian-backed militia may have fired the rocket that landed near the U.S. Embassy in Iraq, Trump tweeted: "If Iran wants to fight, that will be the official end of Iran. Never threaten the United States again!"
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CheOC, Omar and Tlaib, Oh My!
It is almost as if the Democrats want to lose the 2020 presidential election.
Most of their front-runners and all who currently serve as federal election officials eagerly signed onto Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’ — hereafter “CheOC” — Green New Deal legislation and embraced her warning that the world only has twelve years left before the ravages of global warming become unstoppable.
Now, the thoughtful and serious CheOC tweeted on Mother’s Day, “This is a technique of the GOP, to take dry humor + sarcasm literally and ‘fact check’ it. Like the ‘world ending in 12 years’ thing, you’d have to have the social intelligence of a sea sponge to think it’s literal. But the GOP is basically Dwight from The Office so who knows.”
To be fair, nobody thought she meant the world would vanish after 12 years but her hard deadline, again, was to act before climate change became irreversible. That was the impetus for the radical change contained in the Green New Deal and embraced by its supporters.
Of course, the radical solutions proposed in her released and rapidly pulled back fact sheet around her proposal which included murdering all the cows in America and ending domestic airline travel along with the internal combustion engine were justified by the short time frame for action. The Ocasio-Cortez recanting of the hard deadline effectively saws the limb off on those eager to embrace the hot new thing in D.C. and actually gives aid and comfort to former Vice President Joe Biden who favors the slower approach that CheOC still eschews.
And in case you missed it, the duo of Representatives Ilyan Omar and Rashida Tlaib seem to thrive on rolling rhetorical hand grenades under the DNC building.
Rep. Omar, who has come under constant scrutiny for her outrageous comments about Israel, compounded her verbal dismantling of Democrat legitimacy when an October 2017 tweet of hers was uncovered where she tweeted, “In his selective memory, he forgets to also mention the thousands of Somalis killed by the American forces that day! #NotTodaySatan.
The revelation of the tweet by then Minnesota state Representative Omar, a Somali refugee who fled with her family from the very warlords and violence that the U.S. troops were seeking to overcome as they tried to deliver food supplies to a starving population, was stunning as it brought into stark reality that those very refugees who Americans generously welcomed to our country, actually are being taught to hate us within their ethnic enclaves.
And Representative Tlaib of Michigan refusing to be outdone, spoke of the German Nazi Holocaust that murdered six million Jewish people,
“There’s always kind of a calming feeling, I tell folks, when I think of the Holocaust, and the tragedy of the Holocaust, and the fact that it was my ancestors — Palestinians — who lost their land and some lost their lives, their livelihood, their human dignity, their existence in many ways, have been wiped out, and some people’s passports.”
Tlaib continued, “And, just all of it was in the name of trying to create a safe haven for Jews, post-the Holocaust, post-the tragedy and the horrific persecution of Jews across the world at that time. And, I love the fact that it was my ancestors that provided that, right, in many ways, but they did it in a way that took their human dignity away and it was forced on them.”
So in a period of two weeks, CheOC (besides discovering what a garbage disposal is in a shock video) walked away from the 12 year timeline of doom that is the predicate for her legislative prescription that would destroy the U.S. economic system, Rep. Omar is discovered to have dismissed the sacrifices of American fighting men immortalized in the movie Blackhawk Down, and Rep. Tlaib revealed that thinking of the Holocaust calms her.
It is no wonder that their fellow freshmen Democrats who represent districts that have historically leaned Republican or which President Trump won in 2016 have begun to scramble to distinguish themselves from the terrible trio.
And the fact that House Democrats have failed to rein in CheOC, Omar and Tlaib serves as proof to swing voters in America of the party’s far leftward lurch.
A white flag decision which makes one wonder whether Democrats are conceding a second term for Donald Trump, and an inevitable GOP House takeover in 2021.
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No, AOC is not the new normal and young people are not socialists
The Atlantic article last week on young voters painted a gloomy picture for conservatives, claiming that a majority of Generation Z — young people born after the mid-nineties — hold far-left views in alignment with those of democratic socialist Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. The authors rely on the 2019 Harvard Youth Poll to make the claim that Generation Z surpasses the Millennial generation in their appetite for socialism, and that young people are driving the American policy agenda to the left.
The data, which the Institute of Politics at Harvard generously provided to the public, blatantly contradicts these claims. Instead, the data shows an increasing share of young Americans identify as moderates, liberal identity has been declining steadily for over ten years, and young people largely reject Ocasio-Cortez’s key proposals, including her ‘Green New Deal’ and 70 percent income tax plan. In reality, a majority of Generation Zers are political moderates who support America First policies on issues like illegal immigration and foreign wars, and are critical of big-government policies that they fear could negatively impact economic growth. What’s more, the share of young people today who identify as liberals has declined by a staggering 41 percent since 2008, while the share of young moderates has more than doubled over the past 11 years, according to publicly available Harvard IOP polls.
Let’s start with the one of the far-left’s most prized proposals: radically overhauling transportation systems and buildings to address climate change. This is a no-brainer, given everything we’ve seen in the media lately, we all know young people are the champions of combating climate change through draconian government intervention without a second thought, right? Wrong. Despite the pollsters going so far as to label the proposals plucked directly from Ocasio-Cortez’s Green New Deal as ‘the bold action we need’, less than a third of young people agreed with them (31 percent). A full 33 percent said the ideas might be good but were worried about the economic impact, 21 percent didn’t know, and 12 percent stated the ideas were too radical to even consider. A combined 66 percent of young people either didn’t support the proposals, had reservations, or weren’t sure how they felt about them, as shown below. That’s a pretty resounding rejection of the Green New Deal from a constituency that the mainstream media would have us believe is enthusiastically driving the agenda.
What about income inequality, another policy area where socialist champions like Ocasio-Cortez allegedly lead the nation’s youth in demanding wealth redistribution and government intervention? Surely, young people can at least embrace the socialist ideal of levying a 70 percent income tax on the highest earners, and enacting a $15 minimum wage. Not by a long shot. The Harvard poll gave young people every opportunity to enthusiastically embrace these proposals, once again labeling them as ‘bold action’, but less than a quarter of young people agreed. Just 24 percent embraced the proposals, while 31 percent expressed concerns about, shocker, the economic impact. Meanwhile 21 percent outright rejected a 70 percent income tax and $15 minimum wage, and an equal share admitted they weren’t sure what to think. A net 73 percent of young people either had reservations, outright rejected, or weren’t sure about these two core elements of leftist economic solutions.
All rright, so maybe Ocasio-Cortez’s “bold” proposals are a little ahead of her time even for the vast majority of 18 to 29-year-old Americans, but can we at least admit that over time, young voters are shifting to left? Again, no. While Millennials — those born between 1981 and 1996 — were arguably the most progressive generation, these voters are now in their mid-twenties to mid-thirties. As the Millennial population has aged, their views have remained relatively liberal compared to older generations, but the views of Generation Z are stalling, if not outright reversing, the liberal youth cycle.
Look no further than the Harvard Youth Poll from 2008 which showed a full 46 percent of young people considered themselves liberal or liberal-leaning, while 19 percent considered themselves moderate, and 35 percent considered themselves conservative or conservative-leaning. Keep in mind a majority of those respondents are now in their thirties, and compare those numbers to the latest Harvard Youth Poll.
Just 27 percent of 18 to 29-year-olds now consider themselves liberal — a 41 percent decline in liberal affiliation since 2008. Meanwhile, the share of young people who now consider themselves moderate has more than doubled, from 19 percent in 2008 to 45 percent in 2019. That is an increase of 58 percent. Read that again: the share of young people who say they are moderate has more than doubled since 2008, and the share of young people who say they are liberal has declined by well over a third over the same time period. The share of young people who say they are conservative has declined modestly, from 35 percent in 2008 to 26 percent in 2019.
Conclusion? No, Generation Zers are not more liberal than Millennials were. In fact, today’s 18 to 29-year-olds are significantly more likely to identify as moderates than in the past, and Ocasio-Cortez’s most radical proposals on income inequality and the Green New Deal earn abysmal support from young Americans. The overwhelming majority of Generation Zers reject radicalism, and express economic concerns when presented with socialist policies, despite pollsters using terms like “bold” to goad them into agreement.
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The Labor Department’s Harwood Grant Program Should Be Eliminated
Every year, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) at the U.S. Department of Labor awards grants to unions and union-affiliated organizations through the Susan Harwood Training Grant Program. Although the Harwood grant program is supposed to train and educate “workers and employers on workplace safety and health hazards, responsibilities and rights,” it is little more than a union giveaway program. Due to the chronically low number of trainees, the dubious training quality, the unwillingness of wealthy grantees to assist with funding their own training programs, the ample availability of safety training, and amount of federal resources needed to manage the program, Congress should honor the Trump Administration’s request and eliminate the Harwood grant program.
In spite of all of the advantages that many Harwood grantees have, including years of experience dealing with safety hazards, training, and government grants, they regularly fail to meet their own goals. Some grantees boast in their applications about the number of union members they have, the number of employees at friendly companies or institutions who “need” training, or the extent of their shop steward network; yet, time after time, they request a contract extension to allow more time to meet their goals. What makes this situation even more perplexing is that trainees are sometimes even paid by their employers to attend training and that goals are often modest, such as training a few hundred people over the course of a year.
Training provided by the Harwood grant program seems unremarkable. Many of the training sessions are short, lasting just 30 to 60 minutes, and much of the training is also provided by trainees who may only have a small amount of formal training on a topic. Additionally, the information taught at these training sessions is largely from the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH), OSHA, or other OSHA grantees; sometimes grantees even apply for another grant to train on a topic they have previously covered.
Harwood grants are often awarded to connected, multi-million dollar organizations, yet these grantees typically contribute little or no money to fund their own training programs. Furthermore, there does not appear to be any effort to seek funding from state or local governments or charitable foundations to help cover the cost of these training programs. Nonetheless, grantees tend to receive grant, after grant, after grant. While grantees contribute little or nothing to funding these training programs, grantees or affiliated organizations often spend large sums of money on political expenditures and lobbying.
Instead of committing to help fund their own training programs, grantees routinely request funding for employees’ health insurance and pensions; some even seek money for rent and utilities. In addition, as the grant applications show, some grantees are requesting taxpayer funds to subsidize the six-figure salaries and benefits of their executives.
Safety training is, and should be, easily accessible. There are many sources of training, such as colleges, trade associations, state governments, and the U.S. Department of Labor. A large amount of safety training programs are available online. Furthermore, businesses should take responsibility for training their own employees. With recent tax and regulatory cuts, businesses should be better able to afford to pay for training that meets the exact needs of their employees. Additionally, unions should be knowledgeable about the safety hazards facing their industries or professions and should gladly offer safety training to their members or to potential members.
Managing the Harwood grant program requires a lot of government resources. For example, OSHA holds orientation meetings for grantees, conducts on-site financial reviews, and conducts field observation of training classes. In one case, an OSHA employee, who had scheduled a training observation meeting, emailed the grantee to ask, “Are you sure about the two hour Susan Harwood Grant Training on Machinery and Machine Guarding for workers at Eii Inc?” [1] The OSHA employee also included text from the Eii Inc. website which stated that the company had received the OSHA Star Voluntary Protection Programs Award, which recognizes “excellence in occupational safety and health protection.”
For all these reasons, Congress should eliminate the Harwood grant program. Failing that, Congress should further restrict the grants, including requiring matching non-federal investment in these training programs. If the training these grantees provide is truly needed, then they should either be able to provide significant funding themselves or find a foundation or a wealthy donor willing to contribute.
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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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Wednesday, May 22, 2019
Absurdity of Candidates Promising ‘Free’ Goodies, and Modern Monetary Theory
Below is an orthodox analysis of government spending but Obama's big spending without inflation has thrown that into doubt. Trump is just following the Obama precedent to see where it leads. Modern monetary theory claims to account for the new reality but it is not much of a theory. Prudence as advocated below would be wise but we are basically in uncharted waters now
As the campaign in the 2020 presidential race heats up, so do the promises, with each new candidate vying for who can offer voters the most goodies.
But goodies don’t come cheap. Many of the promises being thrown around could prove quite expensive to implement. The implications for the economy should be obvious.
Experts in fiscal policy can’t help pondering some important questions:
Should the federal government create additional fiat currency to directly finance government spending and then issue government bonds or raise taxes if this newly created currency begins to stoke inflation?
Should Congress enable the Treasury to unilaterally change tax policy to prevent inflation stemming from this spending largesse and to manage the business cycle?
Can politicians actually be entrusted to allow the unpopular decisions (spending reductions or tax increases) required to prevent potentially disastrous inflationary consequences of fiat currency expansion?
Should the trillions of dollars of government debt be viewed as public asset—as something we as the public merely owe ourselves?
For proponents of modern monetary theory, the answer to all of the above is “yes.” This defiance of economic and political reality rivals the absurdity of the Flat Earth Society’s rejection of geographic reality.
The fact is, fiat currency represents value; it doesn’t create value. An increase in the supply of fiat currency without a corresponding decrease in the scarcity of resources leads to the price of those resources increasing—i.e., inflation.
The Federal Reserve printing presses cannot magically transform digital bytes into sparkling treasure. Alchemy makes for great fiction, but dismal public policy.
The absolute value of every existing unit of currency declines, harming consumers and investors. Such government-induced inflation also siphons wealth from the holdings of savers to the federal government as the real worth of accumulated savings declines.
In ages past, kings and emperors required commercial transactions be conducted using coinage from the sovereign mint. In order to enrich the Crown without resorting to outright taxation, the mint would debase coinage by diluting gold and silver with cheaper metals, such as bronze and copper. Economic and political mayhem often followed.
Churning out paper and digital fiat currency is far easier than the metal debasement of yesteryear. The results become disastrous even more quickly.
Look at Venezuela’s current 80,000% annual inflation, the destruction of the German mark in World War II, Zimbabwe’s 1,730% annual inflation in 2007, or Argentina’s 1,100% annual inflation in the 1980s. In fact, from 1980-2005, two dozen nations experienced bouts of hyperinflation of at least 1,000% over a one-year period.
Rudyard Kipling’s warning of false economics prophets stated it well: “[W]e were promised abundance for all, by robbing selected Peter to pay for collective Paul; but, though we had plenty of money, there was nothing our money could buy.”
As economist Henry Hazlitt explained, “[Inflation] unbalances, reduces, and misdirects production. It leads to unemployment and to malemployment.”
Regardless of the demonstrable harm, governments struggle to deny themselves the attainment of temporary political gain through manipulation of the money supply.
Here in the United States, our own central bank has pursued a nearly constant—albeit less grossly negligent— inflationary course over the past century. The most recent episodes of distortionary activity include multitrillion-dollar purchases of government debt and mortgage securities.
To prevent this newly created money from flooding the economy—and stoking inflation—the Federal Reserve began paying banks to hold excess reserves in the Fed’s digital vault. Banks obliged.
Although this prevented massive inflation, the monetary experimentation resulted in relatively less funds available to other sectors, likely contributing to the historically slow recovery following the Great Recession.
To their credit, modern monetary theorists acknowledge the inflation risk of newly created fiat currency funding government spending. But even if their proposals to issue government debt and hike taxes successfully staved off inflation, the bottom line remains: As government gobbles up more of the economy, less wealth is left in the hands of the populace.
There is no free lunch. We will pay either through the visible burden of direct taxation, the hidden tax of inflation, or higher borrowing costs (as the government competes with businesses for available capital).
Such realities might not make for a great stump speech, but facing them squarely now can save us a lot of headaches down the road.
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A nihilist-Driven Birth Dearth: Four straight years of a declining birth rate reflects the Left's effects on Americans
According to provisional data provided by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), America’s birth rates hit a 32-year low in 2018. The data on more than 99% of America’s birth records indicates there were 3.788 million children born last year, marking the lowest total since 1986.
The CDC also noted that this is the fourth straight year of declines. That’s because slight gains made by women in their late 30s and early 40s, were more than offset by record-low birth rates for women in their teens and 20s. More ominously, the total fertility rate also hit a record low of 1.728 births per woman — meaning there aren’t enough babies being born to maintain current population levels.
Why does this matter? “A country’s birthrate is among the most important measures of demographic health,” columnist Ariana Eunjung Cha explains. “The number needs to be within a certain range, called the ‘replacement level,’ to keep a population stable so that it neither grows nor shrinks. If too low, there’s a danger that we wouldn’t be able to replace the aging workforce and have enough tax revenue to keep the economy stable.”
Those who responded to the report cited obstacles to child-bearing that included a lack of child care and parental leave, high insurance costs and job instability, as well as a lack of other policies to help younger adults cope with student-loan debt and housing costs.
University of Southern California demographer Dowell Myers believes those obstacles reflect an overall feeling of hopelessness. “The birthrate is a barometer of despair,” Myers asserts, explaining that people don’t have children unless they’re optimistic about the future.
No doubt, but quite likely something more insidious is in play here. Previous generations of Americans have coped with similarly pressing problems, yet continued to have children and raise families.
So what’s changed? While the opposite of optimism is pessimism, the bet here is young Americans have heartily embraced nihilism: Traditional values and beliefs are unfounded, and existence itself is both senseless and useless.
That’s not hard to understand, since they’ve been fed a steady diet of nihilism beginning as early as kindergarten. That’s where they begin learning that America is an inherently flawed, hopelessly bigoted nation in need of “fundamental transformation.” Transformation that wholly embraces the nihilistic dogma that men are “toxic,” whites are “privileged,” minorities and women are “victims,” gender is “fluid,” Christians are “bitter clingers,” the rich are “greedy and selfish,” certain speech is “hateful,” and social justice must transcend the Rule of Law.
More telling, as one moves up the educational ladder, the level of infantilism increases, as students become coddled by “trigger warnings,” attuned to “micro aggressions” and comfortable with safe spaces — replete with Play-Doh, therapy dogs, and coloring books.
Unfortunately for many young Americans, it’s a seamless transition from their “helicopter parents,” who are firmly convinced that even the slightest dent in their child’s self-esteem has the makings of life-long catastrophe — especially in a world where everyone gets a trophy just for showing up. This one-two punch has produced a generation of Millennials that considers itself the most stressed generation in history.
Thus, growing up — as in the primary prerequisite for responsible child-bearing — is to be feared.
Yet the most nihilist agenda force-fed to America’s youth is global warming. “It is not an easy time for people to feel hopeful, with the effects of global warming no longer theoretical, projections becoming more dire and governmental action lagging,” The New York Times reports. “And while few, if any, studies have examined how large a role climate change plays in people’s childbearing decisions, it loomed large in interviews with more than a dozen people ages 18 to 43.”
Those interviewees felt “saddled with painful ethical questions that previous generations did not have to confront,” the Times adds.
Really? Wholly inaccurate doom-and-gloom predictions have been an integral part of the leftist agenda for decades. In 1970, Nobel laureate and Harvard biology professor George Wald insisted the world “will end within 15 or 30 years unless immediate action is taken against problems facing mankind.” The same year Population Bomb author Paul Erlich declared that the “death rate will increase until at least 100-200 million people per year will be starving to death during the next 10 years.” Erlich further insisted “all important animal life in the sea will be extinct.”
In 1975, British science writer Nigel Calder warned that the world will endure a new ice age, a threat that “must now stand alongside nuclear war as a likely source of wholesale death and misery for mankind.”
And who can possibly forget the pronouncements of Al Gore and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who predicted the end of polar ice caps by 2014, and the end of the civilized world itself in 12 years, respectively?
Independent Women’s Forum senior policy analyst Patrice Onwuka views such rhetoric as counterproductive. “I would love to see a national campaign that says, ‘If you want to have kids, you should,’” she stated. “What we should not be hearing particularly from the far left is, ‘No, don’t have children right now because they are going to die in 12 years.’ And unfortunately, that’s what is picking up steam.”
What else is counterproductive? The Left’s ongoing love affair with abortion on demand right up to — and on occasion, beyond — the moment of birth. Since the Roe v. Wade Supreme Court ruling in 1973, this nation has endured 60 million abortions.
Coupled with declining birth rates, that genocidal level of carnage ought to elicit a slew of proposals regarding ways to incentivize child-rearing and the moral responsibility necessary to undertake it properly. Instead, exactly like the EU, America’s Ruling Class has a “better” idea: incentivize a wholesale invasion of the nation by illegal aliens, coupled with it unsupportable levels of legal immigration — and tell Americans it’s all for their own “demographic good.”
What are they really saying? Americans must sell out their culture, customs, language, and borders to maintain the solvency of Social Security and Medicare.
Does it get more cynical? The Trump administration has announced a comprehensive plan to deal with illegals, but every sentient American knows it’s a non-starter, because every sentient American knows that when each party had two years of unassailable control of Congress and the White House, the border remained wide open, and visas continued being overstayed with impunity. Moreover, the cap on H-1B visas for legal immigrants has already been filled — for the year 2020.
“Getting married, raising families, staying in one place, still working with our hands, and postponing gratification may be seen as boring and out of date,” writes Victor Davis Hanson. “But nearly 2,000 years later, all of that is what still keeps civilization alive.”
Not without hope. And for an American Left that embraces the institutionalization of victimhood and the grievance culture that sustains it, the choice between keeping civilization alive and “saving the planet” is becoming irreconcilable.
That’s the essence of nihilism. And unless Americans become willing to reject the intellectual and moral bankruptcy that sustains it, expect the “birth dearth” to continue.
SOURCE
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Anti-Semitism Must Be Defeated at Home and Abroad
Israel is under attack—both in its own homeland and in ours.
One week, The New York Times runs an anti-Semitic cartoon. The next week, Hamas launches 600 rocket attacks against Israel.
These are merely some of the more recent occurrences in an ongoing effort by the global anti-Israel community—which now includes members of our own Congress—to delegitimize and destroy one of our most reliable allies and to bolster a terrorist regime that harms Israelis and Palestinians alike.
Israel’s opponents employ a host of double standards. Hamas attempts to kill as many Israeli civilians as possible through indiscriminate rocket attacks, yet international outrage is directed at Israel’s precision strikes—in self-defense—against military targets that seek to minimize civilian casualties.
But just imagine if the situation were reversed, if Israel’s enemies were the ones who held a decisive military advantage. Hamas would without a doubt destroy Israel if only they had the capability, but Israel time and again has shown exceptional restraint in seeking peace.
When President Donald Trump rightly followed through on our longstanding commitment to move the U.S Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, the anti-Israel community insisted that Israel be the only nation on earth denied the right to determine its own capital.
The United Nations falsely accuses Israel of human rights violations while ignoring actual human rights violations committed by nations like Cuba, Pakistan, and Saudi Arabia, all of which sit on the U.N. Human Rights Council.
Here in the United States, anti-Semitic attacks, including at Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life synagogue and last month at the Chabad of Poway synagogue in California, have led to a growing unease among Jewish communities.
Even in Congress, anti-Semitic statements have become a regular occurrence, with members such as Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., characterizing Jews in Israel as using money and hypnotism to control world leaders—slurs that have centuries-old anti-Semitic roots.
House leadership recently had the opportunity to pass a resolution condemning anti-Semitism, yet lacked the courage to stand up to these vocal anti-Semitic members, opting instead to pass a vaguely worded resolution against “hatred” in general.
Just this week, in an attempt to smear Israel, Rep. Rashida Tlaib, D-Mich., made the wildly inaccurate claim that Palestinians provided “safe haven” to Jewish refugees, when in fact Palestinian leaders (including the grand mufti of Jerusalem, Amin al-Husseini) allied themselves with Hitler and attempted to bar entry to those fleeing persecution.
Ever since, terrorist groups like Hamas have waged violence against Israel, with the recent rocket attacks being only the latest instance. And to do this day, the Palestinian Authority compensates many who are imprisoned for acts of terrorism against Israeli citizens, along with many families of terrorists who died committing such acts.
But what the blame-Israel-first crowd refuses to acknowledge is that Hamas is responsible not just for violence against Israel, but for victimizing Palestinians themselves. The terrorist organization has not allowed legitimate elections to take place since it took over Gaza in 2007. And the Palestinian people have paid dearly—both materially and with their lives—for multiple wars started by Hamas against Israel.
In fact, hundreds of fed-up Gaza residents recently protested their government’s actions, and were fired on by Hamas forces.
Hamas also consistently misuses funds that could be used to benefit the Palestinian people, instead choosing to fund terrorism. Hamas spent $90 million to build tunnels for use in terrorist attacks—money that could have funded thousands of homes or hundreds of medical clinics.
And if that weren’t enough to demonstrate Hamas’ true priorities, consider that they routinely use Palestinian residents as human shields, firing rockets at Israel from schools, mosques, and hospitals in order to maximize their own civilian casualties and win international sympathy when Israel responds in self-defense.
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.
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