Genius of Trump enrages liberal media

The media is replete with fools with an unwavering media orthodoxy: Trump must be impeached, he’s unhinged, his character is all wrong, he’s crude, he’s rude, he’s putting family in charge of the country, he’s alone on the world stage, he’s cutting off Europe, he’s out of his depth with North Korea and China, he’s clearly in cahoots with Russia and Vlad Putin, he’s a weird night-time tweeter who simply should not be president. Barack Obama never behaved this way. Hillary Clinton would never have behaved like this as madam president.

The media’s conventional wisdom misses one glaringly obvious point: Trump is a completely unconventional President, just as he was a very different candidate vying for the Republican nomination and just as he was a very different contender facing off against Hillary Clinton. Understand this elemental truth, then put it aside as less important than matters of substance. The constant blather about Trump’s style and character, whether it’s in the media or at dinner parties, is propelling too many people into intergalactic irrelevance. And in space no one can hear you scream.

The genius of Trump is how he manipulates fools in the media to his own ends. During last year’s presidential campaign, mainstream media’s “get Trump” cov­erage backfired badly. The more the media dumped on Trump, the more coverage it gave him and the more it helped Trump win the presidency — not just with free air­time, estimated to be worth $US2 billion, but by feeding Trump’s message of a biased media. It’s the same now. Trump goes after the “fake news” media because he can and because it works. Trump speaks directly to his 34 million Twitter followers without being filtered by the media. This drives the media nuts, as it can’t game the system the same way.

As The New York Post’s Michael Goodwin said during a speech a few months ago, while left-liberal politics were baked into the journalism cake decades ago during the social revolution of the 1960s and 70s, what happened last year was something altogether worse. “As with grief, there were several stages” in journalists’ coverage of Trump, he said. They started out treating him like a joke, then, when Trump won the GOP nomination, the media got angry, especially because his battle with the media aided and abetted his rise. Since he won the presidency, the media has tried to get even, calling for Trump’s impeachment absent hard evidence. Having helped create the celebrity who became a president, the media seems to imagine it can bring him down too.

Trump’s message resonates because the media’s anti-Trump bias is still evident. Just look at the feverish reporting of the latest ABC/Washington Post poll this week. Trump’s six-month approval rating is at an all-time low, sitting at just 36 per cent, the lowest of any president in 70 years. Our own excitable ABC journalists added that the poll had a fine history of accuracy; it was out by only 2 per cent at the November presidential poll. No biggie unless you remember that being out by 2 per cent meant the poll failed to predict the 45th American President.

When former FBI boss James Comey gave evidence before the US Senate last month, there was fanatical condemnation of Trump by the unholy trinity of The New York Times, The Washington Post and CNN. Cooler analysis might have noted that Comey refused to say Trump’s actions were an obstruction of justice. There’s no excited reporting of the poll that found 79 per cent of Republican voters backed Trump’s decision to sack Comey. Or of last week’s poll that found 60 per cent of Trump voters weren’t fussed by Donald Trump Jr meeting a Russian lawyer who promised dirt on Clinton during last year’s campaign.

Attacking the media works for Trump for another reason: the cycle suits him. He tweets about “Low IQ Crazy Mika” and “Psycho Joe” from MSNBC Morning Joe. He posts hashtags like #FraudNewsCNN and #FNN — fraud news network. He posts spoofs on Twitter of him in a WWE professional wrestling match with a candidate wearing a CNN logo. The media responds: he’s juvenile, he’s encouraging violence. He’s un-presidential, petty and devaluing his office. A comedian quips: “Imagine a kindergarten principal tweeting: ‘The little f..ker punched me first’.” Sweet old actress Mia Farrow demands that the President “stop this nonsense”. Author JK Rowling quotes George Washington about silence being the best answer to calumny.

Then Trump strikes back. The media responds with more attacks and unwittingly, the outraged media and countless celebrities become his useful idiots, their frenzied loathing helping him to feed the message about media bias and disconnected celebrities. Then, the media ratchets up its Trump loathing even further when it realises he’s playing it like a hillbilly fiddler.

Indeed, if this continues for 3½ more years, the US President will look more like a masterful conductor of Wagner’s epic Ring cycle.

Constant entreaties for the US President to act more presidential fail to understand him. Trump is unlike anything America, or the world, has seen before. He makes no apologies and he’s not interested in changing. He celebrates his difference, tweeting: “My use of social media is not Presidential — it’s MODERN DAY PRESIDENTIAL. Make America Great Again.” Normal programming cannot resume until the media starts reporting news and offering considered analysis rather than trying to get even with a modern-day President it helped create.

SOURCE

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"Secret" meeting with Putin was held in a roomfull of other people!

Donald Trump has lashed out at reports of his undisclosed encounter with Vladimir Putin at the G20 earlier this month, describing them as "sick".

The US and Russian leaders were in Germany for the summit, and came face-to-face for the first time at a two-hour meeting on July 7 – which was reported at the time.

It emerged on Tuesday that the pair had a second discussion, lasting about an hour, during a dinner for the Group of 20 heads of state and their spouses in Hamburg. The pair were joined only by Mr Putin's translator.

Mr Bremmer said the US president got up from his seat halfway through dinner and spent about an hour talking "privately and animatedly" with Mr Putin.

More HERE

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Left-Wing Extremism Killed JFK and His Party

Election Denial is the latest left-wing conspiracy theory.

The Democrat Party now stands for one thing: accusing President Trump of being a Russian agent.

This bold new agenda has proven so enormously popular that the Democrats have wasted $40 million to lose four special elections. The Democrats are leaderless. Their base has become a roving mob of angry embittered sloganeers showing up at town hall meetings and random political events to scream hate. They threaten to kill the wives, children and dogs of Republican members of Congress.

Some, like James Hodgkinson, the Bernie Sanders supporter who opened fire at a Republican charity baseball practice, do more than threaten. They actually unleash all that simmering anger.

The Democrats are going into the midterm elections on a conspiracy theory. The theory is backed by their fake news media outlets at the Washington Post, the New York Times and CNN. It just lacks any actual evidence beyond the sort of web of connections usually advanced by conspiracy theorists.

This is the second time that Democrats have embraced a conspiracy theory to escape reality. And behind that conspiracy theory lay the same unpleasant and inconvenient fact of left-wing extremism.

The Democrats couldn’t cope with the fact that a left-wing extremist murdered JFK. So they built a vast array of conspiracy theories that blamed the CIA, the Cubans and the “climate of right-wing hate” in Dallas. The Communist who killed JFK was just a “patsy” for one of those vast right-wing conspiracies.

But it was left-wing extremism that killed Camelot. It’s left-wing extremism that is killing the Democrats.

This time the assassin isn’t on the outside. The assassins of the Democrats are on the inside. They pushed the party so far to the left that its base now consists of the deranged left. It’s unviable outside its bicoastal and urban enclaves. So obviously the Democrats lost Wisconsin because of the Russians. Not because they had become entirely dependent for their political survival on the mass turnout of minority bloc voters who usually have low turnout rates. It was Podesta’s leaked emails that lost Pennsylvania.

But you can’t blame Barack Obama, Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren and Keith Ellison for turning the Democrats into the party of Portland, Austin and Berkeley… but not America. You certainly can’t admit that waging war on nuns, police officers and small businessmen might have alienated a few voters.

It’s easier to invent a conspiracy theory so that you never have to address the real problem. And the real problem is the inability of the Democrats to shake the left-wing monkey maliciously riding on their backs.

Left-wing extremism has consequences. Presidents are shot and presidential elections are lost.

The Soviet Union spent generations blaming its economic failures on everything except its left-wing ideology. It drowned its lands in blood, filled gulags with slave labor and killed its own faithful to evade the simple fact that its left-wing ideology was the problem. The Democrats are desperately scrambling to blame everyone and everything except their left-wing ideology for their political destruction.

Conspiracy theories are the first refuge of failed political movements. When a movement can’t deal with the rottenness in its own ranks, it invents conspiracy theories to explain the ideologically impossible.

If Communism worked, the Soviet Union should have prospered. If Socialism worked, the Obama years should have led to an economic golden age. If the left’s theory of a New Majority displacing old white voters worked, President Hillary Clinton should be on her thousandth executive order by next Tuesday.

The left responds to failure in two ways. Either it blames it on an insufficiently hardline approach. The USSR wasn’t Communist enough. Obama compromised too much. Bernie Sanders should have been the candidate. If Bernie had lost, then a more uncompromising candidate like Jill Stein or Lenin’s pickled carcass would have won. And then to avoid a purity spiral and circular firing squad, it blames some outside force. The Dems blamed Hillary and she blamed them. They both agreed to blame a conspiracy.

The Trump-Russia conspiracy theory diverts attention from what really went wrong. It saves the Democrats from having to admit that they have a problem. And that problem is the left.

The Kennedy killing should have been a warning about the threat of the left. Instead the Democrats drifted further from JFK’s anti-Communist positions until they came full circle and blamed the anti-Communists for the murder of an anti-Communist by a Communist.

The 2016 election should have been a warning to the Democrats about the dangers of extremism. Their embrace of radical politics had marginalized them politically. But instead they found refuge in conspiracy theories. But the Trump-Russia conspiracy fails to answer why the Democrats have been losing election after election around the country, in state races and national ones, long before Trump.

Obama’s reelection was that rare triumph for the Dems in a string of national political disasters. These disasters had nothing to do with Trump or the Russians. The Democrats had become a radical party that was no longer capable of relating to the concerns and values of most of the communities of this country.

The premise that Hillary Clinton, a candidate whom most Americans rated as untrustworthy, could not have lost the election except through a conspiracy is a belief so delusional that it beggars belief. But it’s either that or admit that her embrace of every crazy left-wing idea that had become trendy in the party had killed any hope of a platform that would appeal outside Berkeley leaving her with nothing to run on except her charm and charisma. And that charm and charisma can’t be found with an electron microscope.

Now the Democrats are repeating the same disaster all over again. Instead of connecting with the voters on economic issues, they are pandering to their left-wing base with a Trump-Russia conspiracy theory. Most Americans won’t be voting based on conspiracy theories. And those who will are already a solid left-wing base. But the Dems would rather lose by going to the left than win by moving to the center.

The best evidence of the radicalization of the Dems is that they would rather protect their ideology from accountability than resurrect their political fortunes. Conspiracy theories are how radical movements find a way to have their ideological cake and eat it too. And that’s what the Dems are doing.

JFK conspiracy theories were born out of a refusal to come to terms with the threat of Communism, not just in Europe or Asia, but right here at home. 9/11 denial was born out of the same response to Islam. The conspiracy that ate the left’s brain now is election denial. The moon landing was faked. Bush did 9/11. And Trump didn’t really win the election.

Election denial is what happens when you not only deny that you lost the election, but why you lost. And as Gorbachev would be happy to explain to Tom Perez, that’s the surest way to lose for good.

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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"Daddy's girl" in the era of Trump

Those who have been involved in it know it well enough but there is very little said either in the popular press or in the academic journals about the "Daddy's girl" phenomenon.  So I think I need to give a brief outline of it.

What happens is that an unknown but probably substantial proportion of fathers absolutely adore their little daughters.  And they express that in every way, including spoiling the little girl rotten.  And the little girl laps it up of course.  The two become bound in a bond of mutual love.  It is in my mind the most beautiful human relationship there is.

So to take an example:  The father comes home from work and as soon as he steps in the door the little girl runs to him with open arms.  He snatches her up, gives her a close cuddle and then carries her further into the house where a mother sees two faces with big smiles on them.  Since she loves those two persons she too smiles with pleassure.  It is a happy homecoming.

I am sure that Leftists will deplore that example as "heteronormative", or whatever their latest neologistic jargon is, but they are the losers if they have never been part of that. It happens.

I also see fathers and little daughters coming into my favorite coffee shop.  The daughter will cling to the father as both of them order and will then wind herself around the proud and happy dad when they sit down.  You have to see it.

Having been part of such a relationship gives the girl confidence in her desirability and that is usually a long-term effect. It permanently gives the girl self-confidence and repose for all the rest of her life. And even after she has married and herself become a mother, she will at some times of stress go home to see "Dad".  And when she sees his eyes light up as she enters the room, calm and reassurance will come over her.  It may not solve her problems but gives her strength to bear them.

I was once talking to a mother who said that when her daughter's father came home, there was no-one else in the room for the girl but her father.  She just ran to him on sight.  I was concerned that the mother might be a bit put out by that so I said to her that the girl was lucky as that "Daddy's girl" relationship would give her strength and confidence for the rest of her life.  The mother replied serenely:  "Yes. I know.  I was one too".

To my regret, I never had a daughter but I was very close to a beautiful step-daughter so I have some personal feeling for what that is all about.

Where does the mother fit in?  Some may ask.  I am afraid that it does make the mother the usual disciplinarian but the father can be a backup.  If he told his little daughter that something "would make Daddy sad", that would be powerful.

So that brings us to the Trumps.  To anyone aware of the phenomenon, Donald and Ivanka have an outstandingly strong "Daddy's girl" relationship.  They dote on one another and wherever Donald is, Ivanka is usually no more than yards away, if that.  They are as close to inseparable as they can reasonably be.



For me the picture below encapsulates best the relationship between the two. They were (of course) together at the big G20 meeting but the personal was not for a moment forgotten.  A comforting hand is on Ivanka's shoulder saying "I am here".  And she looks on with a relaxed smile at what is before her. (And what WAS the Japanese Prime Minister thinking?)



I think that loving relationship is thoroughly admirable And tells you much about Donald Trump.  Had Obama had such a relationship, he would have been praised to the high heavens for it.  But with Donald Trump it is totally ignored.  I hope I am not the last to congratulate Donald on his outstandingly loving relationship with his daughter.

There has of course been much foul speculation about Ivanka and Donald as seen in the picture below when she was 15 years old.  But it is just the girl being loving towards her Dad.  Close physical contact is normal in that context.



There were events in my relationship with my stepdaughter that would have looked most alarming to an outsider looking in but everything was in fact completely innocent and known to be such by all the family.

The happy, poised and self-confident lady we see in Ivanka today is clearly NOT the victim of sexual abuse.



And I think the picture below shows how good they are for one-another.  She is happy and he is relaxed as they walk along.  It's a beautiful relationship.



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Bitcoins as a defense against socialism

When I first looked at Bitcoin, I thought it was a badly constructed Millennial scam. Its vaunted “blockchain” had clear design problems, as Kevin Dowd and I pointed out in a Cato Institute paper. I now realize that this was a failure of imagination. I should have seen Bitcoin for what it was: the first flawed attempt to regain our freedom, as governments worldwide use software and thuggery to eliminate cash and Swiss bank accounts. The global government Godzilla will not stop its predations; we are so interconnected that votes for Brexit or Donald Trump merely slow it somewhat. But a crypto-currency with true anonymity – that at last will liberate us from its clutches.

Thirty years ago, we had several means of making transactions anonymously, without governments knowing about therm. For small sums, cash was almost completely anonymous, although numbered bills always gave police departments the chance to trace transactions in large criminal cases. For larger amounts, there were a wide range of banking jurisdictions offering anonymity and complete respectability to those seeking a safe bolt-hole for their cash. In the 1980s, I worked for an Austrian bank whose proud boast was that they would verify only your nationality, not your name, so that if you registered yourself as Mickey Mouse, they would greet you each time you came into the branch with elegant Austrian formality: Grüss Gott, Dr. Maus!

This was no doubt convenient for Third World dictators, terrorists and the international Mafia, but it is also essential for ordinary citizens, for one very good reason: governments cannot be trusted. They always seek to expand their control and income, and they will generally give way to temptation if it is presented to them, even fleetingly. The extreme example, of course, is that of the Jewish inhabitants of inter-war Germany who had the foresight to hold a Swiss bank account; if they were able to escape when the Nazis came to power, as many were, their Swiss bank accounts were essential to being able to re-start their lives in a safe country.

Yes, those unfortunates who did not manage to escape and did not tell their non-German families about the Swiss bank account provided an unexpected bonus for the Swiss banks, but contrary to public hysteria when this was revealed; this did not make the Swiss banks collaborators with the Nazis. It made them diligent service providers whose diligence could not solve all their clients’ problems, just the financial ones. But against governments less insane than the Third Reich, financial defenses are often the ones you need most.

To those who expostulate that we should surely trust democratic governments not to behave like Nazi Germany, I would agree wholeheartedly in terms of pogroms, Kristallnachts and the like, but not on financial matters. I give you the example of Britain, an admirably democratic country that twice, in 1815 and 1945, found itself financially exhausted at the end of major wars with government debt around 250% of GDP. The first time, the government cut spending by 69% and returned within six years to the Gold Standard, with government bonds through a quirk in their design providing savers with a massive capital gains bonanza – the result being a century of peace and prosperity.

The second time, the British government controlled interest rates, set the top rate of tax above 90%, and inflated the currency until it was worth a tenth of its pre-war value – the result being relative impoverishment all round and absolute impoverishment for those savers foolish enough to pay their taxes and attempt to live on the returns from their savings. Only those with secret Swiss bank accounts, and money kept in international equities, gold and Swiss Franc deposits, were exempt from the British government’s depredations in 1945-79.

The central flaw in democracy is that there is very little to stop 51% of the population oppressing the other 49%, and when it comes to finance and taxation, the poor will almost always be tempted from time to time to oppress not just the rich but the middle class. Britain elected Clement Attlee and Harold Wilson after World War II, both admirable men, but the result was middle class impoverishment and the loss of the Empire, thrown away to fund the National Health Service. Today, Britain is more than capable of electing Jeremy Corbyn.

The United States elected Barack Obama, who no doubt is even now skulking in his magnificent Georgetown house growling “Next time, no more Mr. Nice Guy” – and could easily elect the likes of Bernie Sanders or worse. Indeed, even in the 1950s, with the universally admired Dwight Eisenhower as President, the top rate of U.S. income tax remained at 91% throughout the decade, albeit only on extremely high incomes. The John Birch Society, madmen though they were, had a point when they accused Ike of being a Communist agent; in terms of tax policy, he effectively was.

There are two reasons for an ordinary middle-class person to need both cash and the opportunity to open a Swiss bank account. First, governments can always turn nasty, either generally or against you personally, for example through the disgraceful U.S. Civil Asset Forfeiture process. Second, the existence of cash and Swiss Bank accounts is a useful albeit not completely effective deterrent against governments getting too ambitious in their “tax and tax, spend and spend, elect and elect” mania. Conversely, the lack of such mechanisms puts temptation in government’s way, just begging it to impose tyranny.

By a series of international treaties, the U.S. and EU governments have now effectively eliminated the usefulness of Swiss banks and their Austrian cousins. With the tax authorities being given details of their citizens’ Swiss bank accounts, those accounts are no longer a reliable defense against government extortion. For the Russian Mafia, there are still some numbered bank account havens available, but they are much less reliable than Switzerland, so you may need your trusty henchman Igor to blow up the bank’s head office if they try any funny business. For the rest of us, sadly lacking an Igor, the avenue has been closed.

As for cash, the authorities are now trying to abolish that, ostensibly to facilitate their crazed negative-interest-rate policies. Andy Haldane, of the Bank of England, first proposed this monstrous idea, which has now been supported by the apparently sensible Kenneth Rogoff, whose “The curse of cash” sent frissons of pleasure down the spines of Keynesian central bankers worldwide. In India, which experimented with removing cash from the system last autumn, the use of Bitcoin has skyrocketed. (Although the Bitcoin blockchain is not completely secure, presumably its Indian users think cracking it for the gigantic Indian population of Bitcoin users is at least beyond the capabilities of the permit raj.)

Bitcoin is imperfect, just as the 1885 Benz, with its top speed of 3 miles per hour, was not the perfected automobile. But improvements are coming all the time, and with massive customer usage, the need for further improvements is all the time becoming more apparent – just as the manufacturers of the 1910 Gräf und Stift learned from the assassination of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand that they needed to improve their reverse gear mechanism. Soon we will have a crypto-currency that is completely impervious to the efforts of the NSA. GCHQ, the IRS and all the other government agencies who wish to view our financial transactions.

The ideal crypto-currency would combine complete anonymity with a gold link, like the late lamented E-gold, disgracefully shut down by the U.S. government. Just as anonymity enables ordinary people to escape the fiscal follies of evil and incompetent governments, so gold, which unlike crypto-currencies provides a secure non-fiat store of value, enables ordinary people to escape governments’ monetary follies, so overwhelming in recent years. A crypto-currency that combined complete anonymity with a firm and unbreakable link to gold would provide the ultimate solution to those wishing to live in financial freedom.

A fully anonymous and secure crypto-currency will be some help to terrorists, but only to the extent they have billionaires wishing to finance them. It will be only a modest help to Russian and other mafias, who have other means of keeping their financial transactions a secret from the world’s authorities. However, it will be a massive protection for the world’s ordinary citizens, even those who are of only modest means, as they will be able to store and transfer wealth in a form that is undetectable by the world’s authorities.

Poor people living under oppressive dictatorships, such as in Venezuela, will be able to provide themselves with food and maybe a bolt-hole outside their oppressive country, just as did the luckier German Jews in the 1930s. Rich people whose wealth is attacked by Socialist governments will be able to spirit it away where it cannot be found. But above all, ordinary middle-class people of moderate means will sleep in their beds, knowing that taxes on them will not be arbitrarily increased, nor property arbitrarily seized, nor wealth eroded by inflation and government overspending, because if any such thing threatens, they have a crypto-currency bolt-hole available, even if in normal times they never bother to use it.

For the world’s governments and central bankers, mass usage of crypto-currencies would be an existential threat. The withdrawal of wealth into crypto-currencies from other stores of value, such as stocks, bonds and real estate, would cause a massive market crash (such a crash may be inevitable, given the last decade’s foolishness, but this would very much worsen it.) For the world’s central bankers, there would only be one solution: forswear, now and forever, their evil attempts to abolish cash and, to make that foreswearing credible, push interest rates far above zero, to a rate well above the rate of inflation, and pledge to keep them there.

That would enable the economy to function normally again. It would cause a mass liquidation of all the foolish investments made in the last decade, but, combined with de-regulation, it would allow productivity growth to return to its historic robust levels, and thereby begin the blessed process of making us all richer again, as we had become used to since the Industrial Revolution.

Most important, if the world invests in untraceable crypto-currencies, even a global government that attempted to seize the resources of its citizens would find itself unable to do so. And that, above all, would become our principal guarantee against an impoverished and servile future.

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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18 July, 2017

Levin on Gov’t-Run Health Care: If Gov’t Ran Food Production, ‘We’d All Starve to Death’

On his nationally syndicated radio talk show Monday, host Mark Levin compared government-run health care with government-run food production, saying that if the government controlled food production, “we’d all starve to death.”

“Trust me, if the government controlled food production in this country, we’d all starve to death,” said Mark Levin. “If the Department of Housing and Urban Development was truly in charge of housing in your neighborhood and construction costs and everything else, we’d all be homeless. We’d all be homeless. Why would we take one of the most complex areas of life, and that is health care, which is really and truly a personal decision, and surrender it to the federal government?”

Below is a transcript of Levin’s comments from his show on Monday, July 10:

“Trust me, if the government controlled food production in this country, we’d all starve to death. If the Department of Housing and Urban Development was truly in charge of housing in your neighborhood and construction costs and everything else, we’d all be homeless. We’d all be homeless.

“Why would we take one of the most complex areas of life, and that is health care, which is really and truly a personal decision, and surrender it to the federal government or have it seized from us, and then make all these excuses: why it’s great, and people with pre-existing conditions?

“Ladies and gentlemen, if the only issue was people with pre-existing conditions and poor people, why do we have to destroy the rest of the health care market? They use these as excuses, as lies -- that people can’t get health care with pre-existing conditions.

“Number one: If you’re healthy and you don’t have insurance, what the hell is wrong with you? Then if you get sick, everybody else has to pay for it? Well, that’s why they have group insurance. We cannot set up a rational system aimed at the lowest common denominator. We just can’t. It won’t work.

“So, what’s necessary? Competition, choice, freedom, individual responsibility, individual decisions: that’s the only way we’re going to get the cost down. That’s the only way you’ll be able to buy a policy that you want. It’s the only way you’re going to see the doctors you want to see. There’s no other way. And why we resist it, I don’t know.

“Was the Industrial Revolution really so horrible? That we have clean water? That you can flick a switch and get electricity? That you can drive an automobile? Was it really that horrible that we can’t apply it to health care? These aren’t theoretical matters. This is reality. There’s a system that works and a system that doesn’t.

“And it seems to me that the progressives have won the battle of the minds. It just -- They just have. Just incredible.”

SOURCE

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After minimum wage hikes and ammunition taxes, the lesson is don’t be like Seattle

On June 2, 2014 Seattle’s city council approved a raise in the minimum wage to a highest in the nation $15 an hour. Not one member of the council voted against it. Like most liberal progressives, the Seattle city council believed they could regulate prosperity. The law did not have the intended consequences.

The National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), a private, non-profit, non-partisan organization conducting economic research, published a paper, on June 26, about the impact of the increase in the minimum wage on Seattle. The working paper is called “Minimum Wage Increases, Wages, and Low-Wage Employment: Evidence from Seattle.”, and was put together by a team from the Daniel J. Evans School of Public Policy and Governance of the University of Washington.

The report analyzes of data from the second quarter of 2014, right before the law was passed, and the second quarter of 2016. The data shows a reduction of 39 percent in jobs that pay less than $13, as to be expected. However, the data also showed a decline in jobs, 4,528, that pay under $19. This is where the jobs were the loss in jobs under $13 was supposed to go.

The bad news didn’t stop there. Over the same two-year period, the data showed a significant reduction in the amount of hours worked. People making under $13 showed a decline of 5.8 million hours in reduction, while people making under $19 lost 1.7 million hours of work. Once again, there was supposed to be a decrease in hours of people making less than $13 with an increase in people making less than $19. Just as the number of jobs decreased, the hours worked by those that held onto their jobs decreased.

Overall, this was a disaster for the working class in Seattle. Yes, people got raises, but thousands lost their jobs, and those that could keep their jobs, saw their hours decreased. For someone working for an hourly wage, it’s simple math, work more hours, make more money. It is estimated the race to make $15 the minimum wage in Seattle cost low-wage earners an average of $1,500 per year. The increase in pay, did not make up for the reduction in hours. I don’t remember “work less, get paid less” being a slogan of the $15 movement.

The federal government should use the Seattle model as a warning. According to the U.S. Census data there are approximately 84 million jobs that make under $40,000. If Seattle’s experience is any indicator of how a national minimum wage hike up to $13 an hour would work out, the cost could be a loss of 1.2 million jobs making less than $40,000 a year, without being moved to a higher wage.

In another winner from the Seattle City Council, a “violence” tax went into effect on January 1, 2016. The measure placed a $25 tax on firearms sold in the city, and up to 5 cents per round. The city tried to hide the attempted denial of Second Amendment rights, by saying the tax would be a revenue raiser with the proceeds going towards violence research. It was expected to raise between $300,000 and $500,000 per year. Let’s just say, it didn’t quite work out the way they planned.

The measure failed spectacularly in two ways. First the measure failed to raise the expected funds. Seattle has yet to release how much was raised last year, probably because it is ashamed to mention the number. What we do know, is that it is less than $200,000. That is at least 33 percent less than the minimum expected revenue. And what revenue has been collected, has not been spent on the promised research. There is a lawsuit challenging the tax, and the city will not spend the money until the suit is resolved. The city went forward with the research spending and spent $275,000 on the research. So, the “violence tax” has so far cost taxpayer over a quarter of a million dollars, and if the lawsuit goes against the city, they will never see the money.

What about the violence the tax was supposed to mitigate? Once again, Seattle failed miserably. Comparing the first five months before the tax was initiated with the first five months of this year, you get startling statistics. Rapes have gone up by 56 percent. Aggravated assault has gone up by 18 percent. Homicide and robbery have stayed the same. The Seattle violence tax did nothing to discourage violence. Will they ever learn?

Two laws passed had the exact opposite affect the laws intended. When it comes to the progressive left, no matter how much evidence presented of a failed policy, nothing changes.

Seattle now stands as a message to other cities across the U.S. The city enacted laws that tax citizens who want to defend themselves, or ended up getting them fired all together. Don’t be like Seattle.

SOURCE

********************************

The Level of Evil That Existed at Auschwitz Under Hitler Exists Today

By Charlie Daniels, country music star

Congressman Clay Higgins at Auschwitz. (YouTube Screenshot)
Recently Congressman Clay Higgins visited Auschwitz, the Nazi death camp where untold thousands of Jews were gassed to death, their bodies burned in furnaces and their ashes disposed of like garbage.

Congressman Higgins has come under heavy fire for videoing and narrating his visit, and in graphic language explaining the horrific process, step by step, location by location as the Jews were first herded into the mass execution chambers and moved to the furnaces where their bodies were disposed of.

I remember, in the waning days of the Second World War as the Allied Forces liberated the concentration camps and the newsreels and magazine articles exposed the gas chambers and furnaces and captured film of bulldozers pushing the skeletal bodies of Jews who had been starved and worked to death into mass graves.

This happened. It is undeniably documented, and every man, woman, and child in the free world should know that it happened. They must understand just how far prejudice and rabid hatred can push evil men and the lengths they are willing to go to achieve their dark ambitions.

They need to realize that, given the chance, ISIS, al-Qaeda, Boko Haram and any number of

radical Islamic groups or governments would gladly repeat the same or worse.

Hitler is not an anomaly or a prototype. He is just one of the monsters who visited demonic evil on mankind, along with Joseph Stalin, Pol Pot and now the demented Islamists who take great joy in hacking off the heads of infidels, throwing gays off the rooftops of tall buildings, burning and drowning helpless people in steel cages, and crucifying their enemies on crosses.

Is this any less evil than what the Nazis did?

Should the world not be aware that this level of evil exists, past and present? Should not the ovens and gas chambers where six million Jews were mercilessly murdered be exposed to the light of day?

Should not the atrocities of Hitler, Stalin, ISIS and all the rest of the monsters responsible for the murder of millions of human beings and the methods they used to accomplish it be made public knowledge, to be reviled and abhorred and prevented from ever happening again.

I have visited Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Museum in Israel, and it was a heartbreaking experience.

As you walk through the exhibits, see the actual box cars where Jews were herded like cattle and transported to their final destination, the graphic photographs, the Children’s Memorial and Hall of Remembrance where the pictures of beautiful Jewish children who died at the hands of the Nazis, their names read aloud one after the other, you can’t help but wonder, “Why didn’t somebody stop this?”

So, Congressman Clay Higgins, I care not what criticism others level at you, those who say you defiled a hallowed place by injecting reality and reminding the world that such evil existed and making us face the fact that it still exists today.

As one who remembers those days and observed them from afar, my hat is off to you, sir. I only wish that some of our other “public servants” would do something as realistic and useful.

As a Christian, I join hands with my Jewish brothers and sisters to reinforce the Israeli national motto, “NEVER AGAIN!”

What do you think?

Pray our troops, our police and the peace of Jerusalem. God Bless America

SOURCE

*********************************

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)

***************************

Levin on Gov’t-Run Health Care: If Gov’t Ran Food Production, ‘We’d All Starve to Death’

On his nationally syndicated radio talk show Monday, host Mark Levin compared government-run health care with government-run food production, saying that if the government controlled food production, “we’d all starve to death.”

“Trust me, if the government controlled food production in this country, we’d all starve to death,” said Mark Levin. “If the Department of Housing and Urban Development was truly in charge of housing in your neighborhood and construction costs and everything else, we’d all be homeless. We’d all be homeless. Why would we take one of the most complex areas of life, and that is health care, which is really and truly a personal decision, and surrender it to the federal government?”

Below is a transcript of Levin’s comments from his show on Monday, July 10:

“Trust me, if the government controlled food production in this country, we’d all starve to death. If the Department of Housing and Urban Development was truly in charge of housing in your neighborhood and construction costs and everything else, we’d all be homeless. We’d all be homeless.

“Why would we take one of the most complex areas of life, and that is health care, which is really and truly a personal decision, and surrender it to the federal government or have it seized from us, and then make all these excuses: why it’s great, and people with pre-existing conditions?

“Ladies and gentlemen, if the only issue was people with pre-existing conditions and poor people, why do we have to destroy the rest of the health care market? They use these as excuses, as lies -- that people can’t get health care with pre-existing conditions.

“Number one: If you’re healthy and you don’t have insurance, what the hell is wrong with you? Then if you get sick, everybody else has to pay for it? Well, that’s why they have group insurance. We cannot set up a rational system aimed at the lowest common denominator. We just can’t. It won’t work.

“So, what’s necessary? Competition, choice, freedom, individual responsibility, individual decisions: that’s the only way we’re going to get the cost down. That’s the only way you’ll be able to buy a policy that you want. It’s the only way you’re going to see the doctors you want to see. There’s no other way. And why we resist it, I don’t know.

“Was the Industrial Revolution really so horrible? That we have clean water? That you can flick a switch and get electricity? That you can drive an automobile? Was it really that horrible that we can’t apply it to health care? These aren’t theoretical matters. This is reality. There’s a system that works and a system that doesn’t.

“And it seems to me that the progressives have won the battle of the minds. It just -- They just have. Just incredible.”

SOURCE

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After minimum wage hikes and ammunition taxes, the lesson is don’t be like Seattle

On June 2, 2014 Seattle’s city council approved a raise in the minimum wage to a highest in the nation $15 an hour. Not one member of the council voted against it. Like most liberal progressives, the Seattle city council believed they could regulate prosperity. The law did not have the intended consequences.

The National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), a private, non-profit, non-partisan organization conducting economic research, published a paper, on June 26, about the impact of the increase in the minimum wage on Seattle. The working paper is called “Minimum Wage Increases, Wages, and Low-Wage Employment: Evidence from Seattle.”, and was put together by a team from the Daniel J. Evans School of Public Policy and Governance of the University of Washington.

The report analyzes of data from the second quarter of 2014, right before the law was passed, and the second quarter of 2016. The data shows a reduction of 39 percent in jobs that pay less than $13, as to be expected. However, the data also showed a decline in jobs, 4,528, that pay under $19. This is where the jobs were the loss in jobs under $13 was supposed to go.

The bad news didn’t stop there. Over the same two-year period, the data showed a significant reduction in the amount of hours worked. People making under $13 showed a decline of 5.8 million hours in reduction, while people making under $19 lost 1.7 million hours of work. Once again, there was supposed to be a decrease in hours of people making less than $13 with an increase in people making less than $19. Just as the number of jobs decreased, the hours worked by those that held onto their jobs decreased.

Overall, this was a disaster for the working class in Seattle. Yes, people got raises, but thousands lost their jobs, and those that could keep their jobs, saw their hours decreased. For someone working for an hourly wage, it’s simple math, work more hours, make more money. It is estimated the race to make $15 the minimum wage in Seattle cost low-wage earners an average of $1,500 per year. The increase in pay, did not make up for the reduction in hours. I don’t remember “work less, get paid less” being a slogan of the $15 movement.

The federal government should use the Seattle model as a warning. According to the U.S. Census data there are approximately 84 million jobs that make under $40,000. If Seattle’s experience is any indicator of how a national minimum wage hike up to $13 an hour would work out, the cost could be a loss of 1.2 million jobs making less than $40,000 a year, without being moved to a higher wage.

In another winner from the Seattle City Council, a “violence” tax went into effect on January 1, 2016. The measure placed a $25 tax on firearms sold in the city, and up to 5 cents per round. The city tried to hide the attempted denial of Second Amendment rights, by saying the tax would be a revenue raiser with the proceeds going towards violence research. It was expected to raise between $300,000 and $500,000 per year. Let’s just say, it didn’t quite work out the way they planned.

The measure failed spectacularly in two ways. First the measure failed to raise the expected funds. Seattle has yet to release how much was raised last year, probably because it is ashamed to mention the number. What we do know, is that it is less than $200,000. That is at least 33 percent less than the minimum expected revenue. And what revenue has been collected, has not been spent on the promised research. There is a lawsuit challenging the tax, and the city will not spend the money until the suit is resolved. The city went forward with the research spending and spent $275,000 on the research. So, the “violence tax” has so far cost taxpayer over a quarter of a million dollars, and if the lawsuit goes against the city, they will never see the money.

What about the violence the tax was supposed to mitigate? Once again, Seattle failed miserably. Comparing the first five months before the tax was initiated with the first five months of this year, you get startling statistics. Rapes have gone up by 56 percent. Aggravated assault has gone up by 18 percent. Homicide and robbery have stayed the same. The Seattle violence tax did nothing to discourage violence. Will they ever learn?

Two laws passed had the exact opposite affect the laws intended. When it comes to the progressive left, no matter how much evidence presented of a failed policy, nothing changes.

Seattle now stands as a message to other cities across the U.S. The city enacted laws that tax citizens who want to defend themselves, or ended up getting them fired all together. Don’t be like Seattle.

SOURCE

********************************

The Level of Evil That Existed at Auschwitz Under Hitler Exists Today

By Charlie Daniels, country music star

Congressman Clay Higgins at Auschwitz. (YouTube Screenshot)
Recently Congressman Clay Higgins visited Auschwitz, the Nazi death camp where untold thousands of Jews were gassed to death, their bodies burned in furnaces and their ashes disposed of like garbage.

Congressman Higgins has come under heavy fire for videoing and narrating his visit, and in graphic language explaining the horrific process, step by step, location by location as the Jews were first herded into the mass execution chambers and moved to the furnaces where their bodies were disposed of.

I remember, in the waning days of the Second World War as the Allied Forces liberated the concentration camps and the newsreels and magazine articles exposed the gas chambers and furnaces and captured film of bulldozers pushing the skeletal bodies of Jews who had been starved and worked to death into mass graves.

This happened. It is undeniably documented, and every man, woman, and child in the free world should know that it happened. They must understand just how far prejudice and rabid hatred can push evil men and the lengths they are willing to go to achieve their dark ambitions.

They need to realize that, given the chance, ISIS, al-Qaeda, Boko Haram and any number of

radical Islamic groups or governments would gladly repeat the same or worse.

Hitler is not an anomaly or a prototype. He is just one of the monsters who visited demonic evil on mankind, along with Joseph Stalin, Pol Pot and now the demented Islamists who take great joy in hacking off the heads of infidels, throwing gays off the rooftops of tall buildings, burning and drowning helpless people in steel cages, and crucifying their enemies on crosses.

Is this any less evil than what the Nazis did?

Should the world not be aware that this level of evil exists, past and present? Should not the ovens and gas chambers where six million Jews were mercilessly murdered be exposed to the light of day?

Should not the atrocities of Hitler, Stalin, ISIS and all the rest of the monsters responsible for the murder of millions of human beings and the methods they used to accomplish it be made public knowledge, to be reviled and abhorred and prevented from ever happening again.

I have visited Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Museum in Israel, and it was a heartbreaking experience.

As you walk through the exhibits, see the actual box cars where Jews were herded like cattle and transported to their final destination, the graphic photographs, the Children’s Memorial and Hall of Remembrance where the pictures of beautiful Jewish children who died at the hands of the Nazis, their names read aloud one after the other, you can’t help but wonder, “Why didn’t somebody stop this?”

So, Congressman Clay Higgins, I care not what criticism others level at you, those who say you defiled a hallowed place by injecting reality and reminding the world that such evil existed and making us face the fact that it still exists today.

As one who remembers those days and observed them from afar, my hat is off to you, sir. I only wish that some of our other “public servants” would do something as realistic and useful.

As a Christian, I join hands with my Jewish brothers and sisters to reinforce the Israeli national motto, “NEVER AGAIN!”

What do you think?

Pray our troops, our police and the peace of Jerusalem. God Bless America

SOURCE

*********************************

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)

***************************

Arabian gold

Did you know that they mine gold in Saudi Arabia?  I didn't but I should have.  There are over 400 mentions of gold in the Bible so it had to come from somewhere. And Arabia is right next door. But as far as I can find the only mention of gold's origin is in Genesis 2:

"And a river went out of Eden to water the garden; and from thence it was parted, and became into four heads. The name of the first is Pison: that is it which compaseth the whole land of Havilah, where there is gold".

Archaeologists have recently identified where the ancient river Pishon flowed.  And it is roughly in the middle of Arabia.



A few excerpts about modern gold mining in Saudi Arabia:


State-controlled mining firm Saudi Ma'aden plans to develop the Mansourah, Massarah gold mine, industry sources told Reuters.

Ma'aden operates six gold mines in the Central Arabian Gold Region, western Saudi Arabia which contains much of the Kingdom's gold rich ore deposits. It has recently started operating the Ad Duwayhi gold mine.

Saudi Arabia's efforts to build an economy that does not rely on oil and state subsidies involves a shift towards mining vast untapped reserves of bauxite, the main source of aluminium, as well as phosphate, gold, copper and uranium.

SOURCE

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Anglospheric solidarity again

It is amazing how the major Anglospheric nations tend to shadow one another in all sorts of ways.  Under conservative governments both the USA and the UK have just had big drops in unemployment and are approaching historic lows.  The recently announced US rate is 4.4%.  Compare that with the current UK rate below

Unemployment in Britain has fallen once again as the labour market shows resilience to a slowdown in the wider economy.

The Office for National Statistics said on Wednesday the country's unemployment rate between March and May fell to 4.5 per cent in the three months to May, down 0.2 percentage point from the previous three-month period.

The rate is now at its lowest level since 1975.

Overall, the agency said, the number of people out of work declined by 64,000 during the quarter.

The employment rate, the proportion of people aged from 16 to 64 who were in work, was 74.9 per cent, the highest since comparable records began in 1971.

SOURCE

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Some States Have No Interest in Fighting Voter Fraud

It was a simple request—hardly one to stir up controversy.

Kris Kobach, Kansas secretary of state and vice chair of the Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity, recently sent letters to his fellow secretaries of state requesting “publicly-available voter roll data” and soliciting feedback on ways to secure America’s electoral system against fraud.

Yet the response has been as swift as it is absurd. Liberal activist groups, many media outlets, and politicians—predominantly left-leaning ones—assailed the commission for somehow invading the privacy of American voters.

Some went even further. Maryland Attorney General Brian Frosh tweeted that the request was “repugnant.” Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe labeled the commission a “tool to commit large-scale voter suppression.” California Secretary of State Alex Padilla called it a “waste of taxpayer money.”

All three indicated their states will provide no information to the commission. They apparently believe that their voter registration rolls are 100 percent accurate.

They must agree with New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, who publicly proclaimed voter fraud to be just a “myth”—so why bother investigating it?

If voter fraud were as rare as the left contends, and if adequate procedures are in place to prevent it from occurring, you would think those who make this argument would be anxious to provide the data that would serve to verify their assertions.

Could it be that they fear the data would refute their claims?

Indeed, the evidence points to a different conclusion: Voter fraud is not only real, it is a serious and ongoing threat to the integrity of the electoral process.

Voter registration rolls in some states are in sad shape. They are filled with large numbers of individuals who are ineligible to vote because they are dead, have moved away and registered in a different state, or are not U.S. citizens.

Such inaccuracies can be exploited by fraudsters who would rather cheat to achieve their political objectives, knowing that many states have lax procedures that make it extremely likely that they can commit voter fraud and get away with it.

This is not just a crime against our electoral system, but against American citizens. Every fraudulent ballot that is cast negates the vote of a legitimate voter, effectively disenfranchising that voter.

The U.S. Supreme Court has cited “flagrant examples” of voter fraud in American history to justify its conclusion that “the risk of voter fraud [is] real [and] that it could affect the outcome of a close election.”

The Heritage Foundation’s Voter Fraud Database has thus far tallied 848 documented criminal convictions in voter fraud cases spanning 47 states, with new cases being uncovered every week.

In May, the Public Interest Legal Foundation published a startling report on widespread noncitizen voting in Virginia.

The report not only revealed that thousands of ineligible aliens registered and voted in the state’s elections, it also detailed the considerable efforts that state officials undertook to try to block the Public Interest Legal Foundation from obtaining the publicly available voter records the organization needed to complete its investigation.

Once more, Virginia appears to be stonewalling by refusing to comply with the presidential commission’s request, and other states appear to be following suit (although early reports of the precise number of noncomplying states appear to have been exaggerated).

This is disappointing and somewhat surprising, given that federal law requires states to maintain, and make available to the public, the very voter records the commission seeks.

According to a provision in Section 20507 of Title 52, part of the National Voter Registration Act (52 U.S.C. § 20507(i)):

Each state shall maintain for at least two years and shall make available for public inspection and, where available, photocopying at a reasonable cost, all records concerning the implementation of programs and activities conducted for the purpose of ensuring the accuracy and currency of official lists of eligible voters …

Federal law (52 U.S.C. §§ 20701 & 20703) also mandates that election officers must “retain and preserve, for a period of 22 months from the date of any general, special, or primary election” for a federal office all records pertaining to “any application” or “registration” to vote.

The law requires that these records be made available “upon demand in writing by the attorney general … for inspection, reproduction, and copying.”

Many state laws also make this very same voter information available to the public.

California is a perfect example of this. Even though California is refusing to provide the requested information, its state election code makes voter registration records, including “home address, telephone number, email Address, [and] precinct number” available to “any voter … to any candidate for federal, state, or local office, to any committee for or against any initiative or referendum … and to any person for election, scholarly, journalistic, or political purposes, or for governmental purposes … ”

For those concerned that the commission is seeking voter information states would not otherwise make available, the commission’s letter makes it explicitly clear that it is seeking only information that is “publicly available under the laws of your state,” and nothing more.

In addition to the fact that the commission has only requested publicly available information, those states that are citing the need to protect the privacy of voters as the reason for their noncompliance are being somewhat disingenuous.

After all, voter registration information is routinely purchased and used by political parties and candidates for public office, as well as private companies who use such data for commercial purposes.

Many of the politicians who are expressing outrage at the commission’s request obviously did not have any qualms about obtaining and using such data themselves to further their own political ambitions.

The commission’s request for public voter records is designed to serve one purpose: to allow the comparison of voter records across the states, and with federal databases, such as Social Security Administration’s death records and the Department of Homeland Security’s noncitizen records.

This will help to determine whether state voter rolls are accurate and reliable—an extremely important undertaking given the significant evidence that has emerged suggesting that voter registration records are riddled with errors and duplicate entries.

In 2012, for example, a Pew study concluded that roughly “24 million—one of every eight—voter registrations in the United States are no longer valid or are significantly inaccurate.”

The study estimated that 2.75 million people are registered in multiple states, and 1.8 million deceased voters remain on voter rolls.

Five years later, there is little reason to believe that the problem has corrected itself.

The commission now has an opportunity to update the Pew findings and, if the problem remains, to develop policies and recommendations to facilitate state and federal action to clean up the voter rolls and help secure the integrity of American elections.

Some liberal activists are attacking the commission’s credibility before it even gets started, claiming its purpose is to engage in “voter suppression” and “discrimination.”

Perhaps they can explain how determining the accuracy of voter registration rolls, investigating the numbers of individuals who are illegally voting in multiple states, and identifying noncitizens and others who are ineligible to vote but nonetheless registered constitutes acts of “vote suppression.”

In that regard, it is worth noting that the letter from the commission also requests any information that states have on intimidation of voters or other efforts to prevent eligible Americans from voting.

Rather than helping to investigate and remedy the problems we have in our systems, opponents would rather stick their heads in the sand and pretend there are no problems.

They would also like to tarnish the commission’s reputation with the public in hopes that it will be easier to dismiss its findings later on.

That tells us all we need to know about their motivations. Politics before integrity.

Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis once stated that sunlight is the “best of disinfectants.” When it comes to America’s electoral system, truer words have never been said.

SOURCE

*********************************

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)

***************************

The Russia connection



*******************************

The American Left's Downward Spiral

R. Emmett Tyrrell
   
I have returned! From Europe, that is, and I hope I met with no Russian agents while there. The soi-disant liberals are in a snit about the Russians. Apparently, Donald Trump Jr. and the mysterious senior White House adviser Jared Kushner met with an agent of the Kremlin in June of last year, and they did not report their meeting to The Powers That Be. Who are The Powers That Be? Actually, I have no idea, but Trump and Kushner should have reported their exchange, which had something to do with adoption or adaption or, possibly, Hillary Clinton’s unwashed socks. You figure it out.

The stalwarts of the American Left (we no longer call them liberals — it is inappropriate) are in another of their tense moments with the Trumps, and, of course, it has something to do with the Trumps and the Russians. The Left has developed an irrational fear of the Russians, and it is positively obsessed with them. I am not sure why this is. Perhaps it is because the Russians today are no longer communists and the erstwhile liberals had long admired certain aspects of the communist system. As I recall, they admired the Marxist-Leninist tax code and its attendant slow-growth economy. Remember their great economists, such as John Kenneth Galbraith and Lester Thurow, oohing and aahing over how prosperous Russia was in the 1980s, just before the crash of communism?

How did that crash come about, comrades? Was it caused by something then-President Ronald Reagan did? Reagan was the Donald Trump of his era. Are our friends to the left still perplexed as to how a B-list movie actor contributed to the fall of communism? Now what can they be expecting from a billionaire businessman?

The morbid preoccupations of the American Left continue apace. Of course, there is its aforementioned paranoia over post-communist Russia. And there is the environment that is increasingly sickening the Left; and the civil rights of public toilet users in certain red states; and civil rights in general. The Ku Klux Klan is making a comeback, and it is aided and abetted by the increasingly popular “alt-Right” movement and the Sons and Daughters of the Confederacy, who object the expurgation of five years of American history back in the 19th century. Then there is the resistance movement that has been a theme with the American Left ever since Hillary Clinton had her meltdown on election night.

As David Gelernter pointed out last week in The Wall Street Journal, the American Left has adopted “resistance” in response to the free and democratic election of President Trump. As Gelernter wrote, “Democrats, in their role as opponents of President Trump, have taken to calling themselves ‘the resistance.’” They are co-opting the term “resistance” from the free French who, in World War II, opposed the Nazis in occupied France. In their delusions, the members of the American Left are modern-day freedom fighters, and the Trumps are Nazis. Continuing the Left’s fantasy, the American army and its allies will eventually be called in to liberate “the resistance.” And who will march down our Champs-Elysees? Hillary?

I saw my first member of the resistance at the airport in Brussels. The hero was wearing a black T-shirt with “Resistance” boldly emblazoned across his chest. He was asleep. I did not want to wake him with troubling news. His fly was halfway down. Since then, I have seen black T-shirts everywhere in Washington, DC, bearing variations on the Resistance theme: “The Resistance”; or, simply, “Resist”; or, harkening back to Hillary, “She Persists, You Resist.” Nowhere is it reported that Trump has taken any notice, to say nothing of ordering out his brown shirts.

Is it possible that we shall endure such childishness into 2018? I believe it is. Comparing oneself to freedom fighters who faced torture and death while one lounges in the Brussels airport may seem to normal Americans like a leap into fantasy, but it is nothing to the American Left. It has been inhabiting a fantasy world since the first Clinton administration. Those were the years in which it beheld then-President Bill Clinton as the Virgin President and Monica Lewinsky as The Stalker. Ever since then, the Left’s condition has worsened.

SOURCE

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GOP Rallies Behind Idiotic Bill

BY: ANN COULTER

Republicans are about to do something very stupid. Using bribery, threats and cajolery, they intend to pass a catastrophically unpopular bill on a party-line vote.

GOP: Obamacare is unpopular, so let’s pass a new health care bill that’s even MORE unpopular.

Normal Person: Why would you do that?

GOP: No, you don’t understand. Obamacare is totally imploding, so if we pass this bill now, all its problems will be blamed on us!

Republicans would be better off doing nothing. They can survive the ridicule for running against Obamacare through four election cycles and then not repealing it. They cannot survive a bill that does nothing to fix the actual problems with Obamacare.

The only explanation for the GOP doing something so stupid and unpopular is that it’s all about tax cuts.

Why can’t we get it through their heads that we didn’t elect Trump to cut taxes? Forty-five percent of people don’t pay any federal income tax — and they voted for Trump! Taxes on high earners (or “Hillary voters”) are at a historic low.

Here’s a somewhat more important issue I’d like to submit for Republicans’ consideration: PEOPLE CAN’T BUY HEALTH INSURANCE THEY WANT, CAN’T SEE THE DOCTORS THEY WANT AND CAN’T AFFORD THEIR PREMIUMS AND DEDUCTIBLES.

How about allowing people the option of buying insurance that doesn’t cover sex change operations, gambling addictions, psychotherapy, liver transplants for illegal aliens and so on?

Instead of squandering this moment, Trump the businessman should seize it to trumpet the free market. This is a golden opportunity to give a speech explaining why, contrary to everything your professors told you, communism doesn’t work. To paraphrase Talleyrand, what Republicans are doing with Obamacare is worse than a crime; it’s a mistake.

Liberals always promise us wondrous cost-saving government programs, and then, it turns out, none of the laws of physics support their exciting plans. Obamacare is crashing and burning — and Trump hasn’t done a thing to anyone’s health care. He can say, perfectly accurately, he was just standing there when the plane hit the ground.

What sets us apart from the rest of the world is freedom — free people, free markets, free minds. That is how America became the most prosperous nation in the world. There’s no genius that can compete with the genius of the free market.

Sentient adults are perfectly capable of making their own choices about what health insurance to buy, the same way they make choices about what food to buy. The whole key to fixing Obamacare is not to repeal it, but to allow the rest of us to buy insurance on the free market.

Right now, it’s illegal to sell an insurance plan that most people would like to buy. Instead, you have to buy plans that cover millions of things you don’t want and nothing that you do want — all in order to pay for other people’s health care.

It would be as if grocery stores were required to charge you $60 for a head of lettuce in order to fund the federal school lunch program.

It is a blood libel to say we don’t care about the old, sick and dispossessed. Everyone has plenty of food in America, even without $60 heads of lettuce. That’s the free market! As Trump said, we will care for them better than they’ve ever been cared for before. But, first, the welfare cases have to be separated from the free market.

Proposed law: “Notwithstanding any other provision of federal or state law, it shall be lawful to purchase or sell any health insurance product in the United States of America.”

Skip the repeal — so there’s nothing for leftist ruffians to protest — and just give the rest of us the option of escaping Obamacare to buy health insurance the same way we buy everything else. Only a free market can guarantee good products at good prices.

Trump used to understand this! In the very first GOP debate, he said, “What I’d like to see is a private system without the artificial lines around every state. … Get rid of the artificial lines and you will have yourself great plans. And then we have to take care of the people that can’t take care of themselves. And I will do that through a different system.”

The “lines around the states” were the 50 state insurance commissions determining which health plans could legally be sold in each state — mandating, for example, that every plan include coverage for acupuncturists, chiropractors, fertility treatments, speech pathologists and so on.

Instead of throwing off the shackles of these commissions and giving us a nationwide free market in health insurance, Obamacare imposed one enormous federal shackle.

As a result, “health insurance” under Obamacare isn’t insurance at all — it’s the government forcing us to pay for other people’s health care through ghastly insurance premiums, deductibles and co-pays in exchange for highly limited health insurance for ourselves.

Trump ought to be using the flaming wreckage of Obamacare to illustrate what’s wrong with all Soviet five-year plans. It could be as iconic as Reagan’s Berlin Wall speech. Teenagers would vote Republican for the next 70 years — 80 or 90 years, if they could finally buy decent health insurance.

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Congress is letting Trump and his voters down

Most Americans are dissatisfied – rightly and wrongly — with this Congress, but the frustration of many might have been placated had Congress actually accomplished something in its first 84 legislative days. Having already completed 57% of its schedule this year, the top accomplishment of the 115th Congress is the Senate confirmation of Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch – no small victory. Congress also passed about 15 resolutions under the Congressional Review Act rescinding various regulations issued in the waning days of the Obama Administration.

Otherwise, the trophy mantle is pretty much empty and rapidly gathering dust.  The House passed its version of Obamacare overhaul, but the Senate left town without taking a single vote.  The same goes for defanging the job-killing Dodd-Frank Act and the Frankenstein monster it created, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.  The budget is in shambles with liberal Republicans refusing to pass needed spending reductions for sacred cow entitlement programs, like Medicaid and food stamps.  Neither tax reform nor infrastructure is even on the launching pad.

And the much-promised wall between the U.S.-Mexican border the most tangible, symbolic reminder of the 2016 campaign?  Silence.

What Congress did pass in May was a $1.1 trillion spending bill to keep the government open till September 30th.  The bill maintained so many liberal priorities that the Washington Post declared it a “win” for Democrats, enough to give the resistance  confidence they can block the Trump agenda.

So, if Republican voters are frustrated and wondering why they voted and are stuck paying for a Congress that hasn’t delivered, they’ve got plenty of evidence to back them up.  And with only 63 legislative days scheduled for the rest of the year, a budget left to pass, the debt ceiling set to expire in September, and distractions like North Korea emerging, the prospects aren’t promising.  If only Congress could buy some more time.

They can – but it’s going to cost them their cherished August recess.

In June, the House Freedom Caucus called on Speaker Paul Ryan to cancel the August recess “to accomplish the priorities of the American people.”   As it became increasingly clear that the Senate would not vote on its health care bill before the July recess, ten senators signed a letter calling for the August recess to be shortened or canceled.  Organizations like Americans for Limited Government have pushed lawmakers to cancel their summer break so Congress can “get to work.”

Congressional leaders would be wise to heed these suggestions. Voters entrusted them with power in November to pass an agenda for making America great again; in its first 84 official days, Congress has come up woefully short.

Our elected officials behave much like schoolchildren.  Historically, the prospect of losing out on recess time has been the only consistent way to goad them into action.  With the clock working against them, lawmakers’ only option for delivering on even part of what they promised may be declaring that this time, school’s not out for summer.

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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The compassion paradox in the UK

‘Kinder, gentler’ political activism is so often the opposite

It is somewhat ironic that ever since Jeremy Corbyn promised a new dawn of ‘kinder, gentler politics’, one of the great paradoxes of modern politics has become ever more glaring. This is the compassion paradox, the phenomenon by which the more caring and sympathetic people profess to be in their outlook, the nastier they are likely to be in person.

This paradox is not new, of course. Animal-rights fanatics are legendary for their misanthropy and acts of terrorism. ‘Tory Scum’ has long been the charming phrase used by those who complain, without any self-awareness, that the Tories are ‘nasty’.

Belligerent sanctimony is an age-old character trait of anti-Tories who love nothing more than rancorous, vindictive rhetoric. As one placard at the anti-austerity march at the weekend opined of Theresa May: ‘I’m sorry. I just really fucking dislike you. You piece of shit.’ Another, held aloft by a man in a black-and-red striped jumper, simply said: ‘Oh just fuck off!’

This compassion paradox has become more evident recently. Last week, Conservative MP Sheryll Murray talked of her experiences during the General Election, in which she read posts on social media urging people to ‘burn the witch’ and ‘stab the cunt’. Murray’s election posters were defiled with swastikas and a protester urinated in the doorway of her office, before shouting: ‘Fuck you, Sheryll Murray, you’re a fucking prick.’

Elsewhere, Sarah Wollaston, Conservative MP for Totnes, had the walls of her constituency office defaced with anti-Tory messages by masked men. A bridge leading into Totnes was also graffitied with the obligatory ‘Tory scum’. In east London, the Conservative MP for Romford, Andrew Rosindell, had the windows of his car smashed by a man on a moped. He, too, was followed everywhere with taunts of ‘Tory scum’.

This has generally been the direction of ‘caring’ politics lately: a radical posture combined with a lust for violence and bullying. Momentum’s reputation for threatening critics is infamous, while in the US this secular jihadism has manifested itself in the rise of antifa.

This behaviour is entirely consistent with the law of the compassion paradox: the kinder and gentler are your politics, the more violent are your words and actions. And the more you believe you are on the side of righteousness, of the poor against the rich, of Good against Evil, the more your mindset comes to resemble that of a religious fanatic. For those possessed with supreme righteousness, anything is permitted. The holy warrior can legitimise to himself or herself any manner of ferocity.

Intoxicated by a heady cocktail of malignant vindictiveness, grievance, moral indignation and unshakeable certitudes, the ostentatiously compassionate are on the march. They are whipping themselves into a frenzy over Grenfell Tower in particular. So watch out for greater tension on the streets. Behold when these kind, gentle zealots exact vengeance upon society.

SOURCE

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Most Europeans actually agree with the 'wicked' Donald Trump

Take his notorious decision to ban immigration from various Muslim countries. Even to raise such a proposal would shock most of those at the G20, and it's generally taken to be a policy that proves the blackness of Mr Trump's heart.

But if European voters disagree with him, it's more likely to be because they don't think he goes far enough. A survey by Chatham House this year showed that a majority in Austria, France, Germany, Greece and Italy would support a blanket ban on all immigration from Muslim countries. In Poland, which Mr Trump visited first, almost three quarters of the public would back a ban.

This does filter through into politics. A few weeks ago, Slovakia's prime minister declared that Islam has "no place" in his country. The Czech Republic has told the EU it will not take any Muslim asylum seekers.

Mark Rutte only won re-election in the Netherlands after telling immigrants to "behave normally or go away". They might not say this on Twitter, but the language is as shocking as anything coming out of the White House.

When it comes to building walls against neighbours, Mr Trump should spend his time in Europe today looking for tips. Macedonia built a wall with Greece last year, Lithuania is fencing off Russia's Kaliningrad exclave, and Norway is building a wall to keep out those making the rather heroic journey over its Arctic border with Russia.

Brazil, also a G20 member, has gone for a "virtual" wall, monitored by drones and satellites, around its 16,000-kilometre border. So you can disagree with Mr Trump's plan to build a wall, but it's hard to dismiss the idea as crazy.

Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, some 40 countries have built fences against 60 neighbours. The nation state is back in demand, as are walls: both are seen as useful tools to help manage a new era of mass immigration. The EU's idea of borderless travel was invented when net migration was at a fraction of today's levels. Now, we see chaos. For some Europeans, even a wall is not enough: Austria has been talking about deploying soldiers and armoured vehicles against migrants who might come over from Italy. Enough to shock even Mr Trump.

On trade, it's unclear what Mrs Merkel – or any EU leader – has to teach. Trump's "America first" trade policy simply mimics the Europe-first protectionism that has defined the EU since its inception. Trump has at least decided to keep NAFTA, the free trade deal with Canada and Mexico. The EU struggles to agree deals with any of its major trading partners; this week's much-feted agreement with Japan is only an "outline". And the US has been quicker than the EU to start free trade negotiations with Britain; talks start this month.

The difference is, mainly, one of language. The EU talks about being globally minded, while practising shameless protectionism. Trump boasts about his protectionism, while not (so far) managing to do very much of it.

Even on climate change, Mr Trump is not the villain that he pretends to be. He walked out of the Paris Agreement, but America's record is – and continues to be – strikingly impressive. Thanks to the fracking energy revolution, and ever-more efficient cars and machinery, the per capita carbon emissions in the US are now at levels not seen since the 1960s. The work might have been done by basic consumer demand rather than government diktats, but the US is doing rather well with marrying economic growth and decarbonisation. On the environment, the US should be judged by its achievements, not its promises.

And if Mr Trump is saying he's not too worried about global warming, he's also speaking for a lot of Europeans. A Pew survey shows just two in five say that they are very concerned about climate change, perhaps because environmental progress is doing rather well under its own steam. So, again, it comes down to language.

Mr Trump was elected president, in part because he has a genius for provoking his enemies into a deranged frenzy. But there's not much point in the EU, or any country, succumbing to the same temptation: this is how populists win. He might be jaw-droppingly undiplomatic, pointlessly argumentative and routinely offensive – characteristics that needlessly harm America's reputation. But he won because a great many of his supposedly fringe views are popular and, ergo, mainstream. Hard as it may be for his European counterparts to admit, this is true on both sides of the Atlantic.

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North Korea

China wants to maintain North Korea as a buffer state and will do nothing that could topple the Kim dynasty and give South Korea the chance to unite the peninsula. Beijing supports Pyongyang's view that nuclear arms will further protect the regime from externally induced regime change. Furthermore, Beijing believes that the propaganda spread in the Western media that even before Kim Jong-un has a weapon of mass destruction that can hit America, he has "escalation dominance" because of his massed artillery within range of Seoul. This is supposed to deter any military action to take out North Korea's research centers.

However, neither North Korea nor China has escalation dominance and the Trump administration must make it clear to both regimes why the balance of power still rests with the U.S. and its allies. Any attempt by North Korea to attack any of its neighbors in the wake of a limited strike against its nuclear and missile programs would mean the end of the Kim regime. Allied retaliation would be massive with the core objective of decapitating the government and military. If fighting persisted, the North would be decisively defeated and China's worst fears would be realized.

Kim must be told in no uncertain terms that he must disarm or face death. Menacing his neighbors is what will imperil his rule. If done quietly, we can count on him being too much of a spoiled brat to embrace martyrdom; problem solved.

Beijing must be given only two options; control and perhaps even remove Kim or risk being pulled into a wider war where its years of economic development would be demolished. For President Xi to take actions he does not want to take against Pyongyang, he must be presented with outcomes he finds even more unpalatable. As Carl von Clausewitz famously put it, the purpose of war is to "compel the enemy to do our will." That end can also be accomplished by diplomacy at a much lower cost; but only if the enemy believes war (and defeat) will be the consequence of diplomatic failure.

China knows the risks. The day after the Xi-Trump G20 meeting, Global Times ran a story on a joint U.S.-South Korean exercise, "Saturday's drill, designed to 'sternly respond' to potential missile launches by North Korea, saw two US bombers destroy 'enemy' missile batteries and South Korean jets mount precision strikes against underground command posts." The article concluded with the claim that "China has repeatedly expressed opposition to North Korea's missile launch against UN Security Council resolutions, as well as unilateral sanctions bypassing the UN Security Council, calling relevant parties to avoid escalating the tension and come back to the right track of peaceful negotiations." Beijing believes from experience with past American Presidents, that if America is talking, it is not acting---- and it is only acting that Beijing worries about. Talking gives North Korea more times to find a way to perfect long range weapons and nuclear warheads to put on them. Strategic patience is the route to Pyongyang becoming a global nuclear power          

China retreats from a superior United States, but reverts to form when the threats subside. After the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, Beijing organized the Six Power Talks to negotiate the "denuclearization" of the Korean peninsula so as to head off a feared attack on North Korea which had been lumped with Iraq and Iran into what President George W. Bush called an "axis of evil." The diplomatic efforts collapsed when it became apparent that the U.S. was not going to expand its military campaign against nuclear proliferators. No threat, no need to make concessions.        

In 2010, after North Korea sank a South Korean warship, tensions flared and military exercises were held by China, Russia, Japan and the U.S. all around the peninsula. Beijing's rhetoric hit new highs for militancy, but it backed away from any direct confrontations as a USN carrier group sailed into the East China Sea. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton worked to forge a strong coalition all along the Pacific Rim, including overtures to Vietnam. President Barack Obama, however, undercut Clinton. At a summit with President Xi, he called on business leaders from both countries to work together to promote peace. This sign of weakness assured China that it need not make any concessions on either North Korea bellicosity or its own mercantilist trade policies; both of which are dangerous to American security. The Chinese had taken stock of Obama and were not afraid.          

President Trump got Beijing's attention at Mar-a-lago by sending a barrage of missiles into a Syrian airfield in retaliation for the use of chemical weapons. But there has been no follow up in Asia. Washington has reinforced its naval and air strength in the region, but Beijing does not think anything more will happen than in 2010. Global Times even proclaimed, "The Trump administration has not been as tough on China as expected....Trump is returning to Washington's previous China policy." This so-called "engagement" policy of past years has worked in Beijing's favor, supporting both its own rise and that of North Korea. Trump must prove the Chinese wrong.  Only if there is a credible threat to Beijing's core interests will the Chinese work to resolve the crisis before the costs of resistance becomes too high to bear. The threat will not become credible until the costs actually start to be felt as America takes action. As the old and tested saying goes, "actions speak louder than words."

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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