The pill and Massey Ferguson

The great moral questioning of the '60s is normally attributed to the contraceptive pill, which became generally available at that time. The pill did what conventional morality had long done: remove the risk of ex-nuptial births. So conventional morality lost its authority among the young. Whether any sexual restraint of any kind was warranted became questionable. So sexual promiscuity probably reached its peak at that time. I was there and was a cautious participant in the mood of the times.

And ALL morality, not only sexual morality, came into question at that time.  There was a collapse of values and standards across the board at that time.  If sexual restraint had become irrelevant, might not all forms of restraint be old-fashioned and irrelevant?  So practices that had evolved over millennia for the guidance of society lost their authority and there was nothing to replace them.  People were cast adrift from all guidance and had to figure out entirely from new how to live the good life.  Nobody knew any longer what was wise.

Fortunately, however, Christians in particular kept the old moral thinking alive and showed by results that it gave a better balanced life.  I was myself a fundamentalist Protestant throughout my teens (late '50's to early '60s) and that gave me a great set of rules to live by.  I did not have to invent my own rules. I had the wisdom of the ages on my side.

So I got though my teens with no trauma at all and much happiness.  I took no mind altering substances so was not damaged by them.  I did not drink alcohol so avoided all the risks associated with that.  I had friends who drank who died while drunk driving but I did not.  I was celibate so avoided some nasty diseases. I kept clear of crime.  So I arrived undamaged at adulthood and mental maturity.

And at around age 20 (1963) I became an atheist.  But my teen-aged experience of a very puritanical lifestyle gave me strong habits of restraint so I participated in the sexual revolution from that time on only as part of affectionate relationships. A lot of my old Christian values stay with me to this day and even in the '60s casual sex had no attractions for me.

So I saw it all in the '60s and was sober enough to remember what I saw.  Many of the people who glorify the life they had in the '60s can't actually remember much detail of what they did. They can't remember what they saw through a blur of drugs and alcohol.

So what I have given so far is a conventional explanation of the great break of the '60s.  But the pill is in fact only half the story.  It's not the whole explanation for that break.  The other half is the Massey Ferguson tractor!  How's that for a strange proposition?  To understand that proposition we have to go back to what was behind the conventional morality of the pre-1960 era.

Conventional morality was heavily influenced by a shortage of food.  In our present era of cheap and abundant food, we find it hard to comprehend that for most of human history, it was a struggle for most families to put enough bread on the table for their children.  Most people were poor and the money often did not stretch far enough to buy all the food that the family wanted.  They often had to make do with the cheapest possible food in order to eat at all.  Oaten porridge was a lifesaver.

So in those circumstances men wanted to be absolutely certain that the children they were feeding were their own. "Cuckoos" were regarded as robbing the man's natural children of what was rightfully theirs.  But the problem was how to tell who was the father of the various children.  Women mostly had a pretty good idea of it but the men did not.  And there is no doubt that both men and women sometimes "stray".  In a moment of passion a woman might easily sleep with someone other than her husband and produce a child from that union.

So there was only one way a man could ensure that his scarce resources were spent on his own children:  He had to convince his wife to sleep only with him.  And all the persuasive resources of society were brought to bear on that need.  Sexual restraint became the highest morality, with everything from ostracism to hellfire deployed to produce it.

And the pill did little to reduce that need.  Sex became less perilous but the man still needed to know which children were his.  So how come a highly functional morality broke down?  Why did not the pill simply drive promiscuity underground?

And that's where we come to Massey Ferguson.  The Massey Ferguson tractor was only one part of a broader phenonenon but it was a very visible one.  The Massey Ferguson was a small, cheap tractor  that was a remarkably tough machine.  I remember seeing lots of them in Australia and I gather that they were equally popular in Britain.  Massey Ferguson have made tractors of all shapes and sizes over the years but those small post-war models had a big impact.



With a Massey Ferguson farmers could pull bigger implements than a horse team could, could pull them for longer and could pull them more cheaply.  A horse team was not cheap to maintain.  You had farrier's bills, veterinary bills and feed bills.  And a  team of big working horses can go though a phenomenal amount of feed every day. For his Massey Ferguson the farmer just had to keep a drum of fuel handy.

So a farmer's productivity was at least doubled when he bought a Massey Ferguson. And what does a farmer's productivity add up to?  Food.  Along with other agricultural advances of the postwar era, the Massey Ferguson steadily drove down the price of food.  In the USA it was probably John Deere who provided most of the tractors but the result was the same.

So by the time the '60s hit, feeding your family was a difficulty only for the very unfortunate.  So it was no longer a tragedy if a man fed a child who was not his own.  His other children were not deprived thereby.  So the great need for the sexual control of women largely fell away.  Conventional morality had lost its main function.

So the Massey Ferguson is at least as important as the pill as an explanation of the '60s moral revolution -- JR

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

Who's the Treasonous Candidate?

Lie often and long enough and one will begin to believe one’s own lies to be reality. Evidently, Hillary Clinton has been living in the reality of her own lies for quite a while now. On Tuesday, Clinton claimed that Donald Trump’s rhetoric against Islamic terrorism “is giving aid and comfort to our adversaries.” That’s right, Hillary just accused Trump of treason — for calling Islamic terrorism … Islamic terrorism. It is this kind of backward and dishonest thinking which underhandedly vilifies those who speak the truth while at the same time justifying the motives of those who commit these heinous acts of terror. The truth is Trump is not the one who should be accused of treasonous actions.

Actually, the fault lies with Clinton and her former boss, Barack Obama, who did “create the Islamic State,” which emerged as the direct consequence of the politically motivated and premature withdrawal from Iraq. That, in turn, created the most catastrophic humanitarian crisis in the history of the region.

As an additional consequence of the failure of Obama and Clinton to contain Islamic terror, the frequency of attacks targeting Americans on our soil will increase. Don’t buy into the errant “lone wolf” rhetoric. All of these attackers are unified by Islamist doctrine. But according to Hillary, even the suggestion of an Islamic connection to the actions of these terrorists is tantamount to treason. Clinton’s deceit has blinded her from reality, and, sadly, too many Americans have bought into this lie as well.

SOURCE

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

Dozens Injured in 'Narrative Fight' With Islamic Terrorists

Everything is only a narrative to this administration

In Aeneid, the epic by the ancient Greek poet Virgil, the story is told of how the Greeks defeated the Trojans through the use of stratagem. As the story goes, the Greeks, after a decade-long siege of the city of Troy failed to secure a victory, deceived the Trojans by building a huge wooden horse, leaving it at the gates of the city as the Greek army sailed away. The Trojans, believing the Greeks had given up, brought the great horse within the city walls as a symbol of their victory. Unbeknownst to the Trojans, an elite force of Greek soldiers was hidden inside, which came out under cover of night, opened the gates for the Greek army (which had sailed back), and destroyed the city, ending the war decisively.

As the philosopher George Santayana noted, those who refuse to learn from history are doomed to repeat it. Barack Obama and his legions of progressive Democrats certainly seem determined to repeat history when it comes to allowing our enemies within our borders.

Following Islamist terror attacks this past weekend in New York, New Jersey and Minnesota, Obama once again buried his head in the proverbial sand, berating the media for reporting the incidents as acts of terrorism. He admonished the press to “try to refrain from getting out ahead of the investigation” because, he argued, “it does not help if false reports or incomplete information is out there.”

Except no one was getting out ahead of anything. The perpetrator was yet another radicalized Muslim — this one from Afghanistan who became a U.S. citizen. Ahmad Khan Rahami, suspected of the bombings that caused an explosion in New Jersey and another which injured 29 in New York, has traveled between the U.S., Afghanistan and Pakistan multiple times in the last five years, and he was interviewed each time upon return though never suspected of being radicalized.

In a separate incident, nine people were injured by a knife-wielding man at a mall in Minnesota who, as he slashed his victims, reportedly made references to Allah.

These are just the latest of dozens of terrorist attacks (or, as Obama calls them, incidents of “workplace violence”) that have occurred under Obama’s watch, and yet he and his would-be successor Hillary Clinton are both calling for an increase in the flow of “refugees” from countries infested with Islamic radicals.

This despite Obama’s own FBI director admitting there is no way to properly vet Syrian refugees to weed out potential terrorists. Yet Obama plans to increase the number of refugees next year from 85,000 to 110,000, and Clinton has announced she will raise that quota even higher. This becomes of even greater concern when considering a recent report out of the U.S. Southern Command warning that, in 2015, of the 331,000 illegal aliens known to have crossed the U.S. border with Mexico, a staggering 30,000 of those come from “countries of terrorist concern.” If only 1% of those turn out to be terrorists, that is still 300 terrorists that we have allowed to come into our borders.

This is on top of a report from Homeland Security revealing that the U.S. “mistakenly” granted citizenship to at least 858 immigrants (and perhaps more than 1,800) from “special interest countries” that are struggling to deal with Islamic terrorism.

Speaking in response to the revelations, Donald Trump stated that the attacks “should be a wake-up call for every American” regarding the need to get tougher on immigration and secure our borders. He continued, “We need to get smart and get tough fast so that this weekend’s attacks do not become the new normal here as it has in Europe and other parts of the world. … The safety and security of the homeland must be the overriding objective of our leaders when it comes to our immigration policy.”

Shockingly, as if we are engaged in a mere policy debate with radical Islam rather than a shooting war where thousands of innocents are beheaded, burned, shot, stoned, raped and tortured, White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest said, in response to the attacks, “When it comes to ISIL, we are in a fight — a narrative fight with them. A narrative battle.”

Everything is only a narrative to this administration.

That is weapons-grade stupidity that will get more Americans killed. Hillary Clinton must be getting the message though, because after insisting we import hundreds of thousands of unvetted “refugees” from radicalized Muslim countries, she has changed her tune, suddenly talking tough on vetting immigrants. It will be remembered, however, that in her four years as secretary of state, she showed no such interest in stronger vetting of potentially dangerous refugees.

America simply cannot survive this suicidal self-loathing in which we paint ourselves as a racist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic (one might say, “deplorable”) nation, and refuse to defend our borders, our citizens, our values, and our way of life. We cannot ignore the existential danger of the progressive, globalist agenda which seeks to undermine U.S. sovereignty and security while importing millions of immigrants, legal and illegal, who have no desire to become adopted members of their new home country, who have no desire to assimilate, and who in many cases openly seek to destroy the very things that made us the greatest engine of freedom and prosperity in the history of the world.

Of course, when it comes to America-hating, maybe they are just following Obama’s example. He never misses an opportunity to denigrate and browbeat the country he supposedly leads, as he just did on Tuesday in his final speech to the UN.

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 A WESTERN HEART.

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

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

Racism and freedom of thought

I am a racist -- as the Left define that term.  I think that there are different races and that some (not all) of the differences between those races matter.  Aside from the fanatic Left, most people would concede that there are differences between people and that some of those differences can matter so why deny that groups of people can be different too?  I suppose an answer to that is possible but I have yet to hear one.

The reason the Left get such a charge out of the "racist" accusation is that it puts people in mind of the deeds of the unforgotten Uncle Adolf.  Adolf was for a time seen as a kindly uncle by most Germans.  So Leftists exploit that memory to imply that anybody who mentions race at all must be only a hairsbreadth away from being a genocidal maniac.  I suppose most people can see that such an inference is too sweeping but I want to show that it is very sweeping indeed.

And I intend to use myself to show how incorrect that inference is.  Although I am a racist, one of the people I most admire is David P.  To my mind he is worth more to humanity than a whole skyscraper full of bureaucrats.  David runs a small cafe where I often have brunch.  He takes orders, he makes coffees, he delivers orders to the tables, he clears away dirty dishes and wipes down tables.  And he has got a ready smile for everyone all the time.

And all those things are needed. They are things that people voluntarily seek out and pay money for.  And the benefit of them is totally clear and uncontrovertible -- unlike the dubious "services" provided by bureaucrats in skyscrapers.  I certainly enjoy my excellent brunches from David but when has any bureaucrat given me pleasure?  If a skyscraper full of bureaucrats vanished overnight, few people would notice.  But if David did not come in one morning, there would be a lot of people milling around and feeling very deprived.

David is Vietnamese.  He grew up in Australia but his parents  were "boat people": People who fled Communism in small boats to get to a safer place.  So what sort of racist am I when I admire immensely a brownish man of unambiguously Asian appearance?  I will tell you what sort I am.  I think the Vietnamese are a fine race who pull their weight more than most.  I am racially pro-Vietnamese.  Not all of them are as good as David but Vietnamese have been in Australia for a long time now and I have been observing them for a long time.  And a lot of them are as good as David P.

I could go on with other examples of people I admire.  I could mention Pavan, who is Indian and also the most good humoured man I know.  I could mention Les, who is one of the manliest men I know but who, like a lot of Kiwis, has both English and Maori ancestors.  And so on.  And more broadly, I could mention how much I admire the Japanese and Chinese for their unusual intelligence.  I am in fact a Sinophile of sorts.  I admire the Han.

So, you see, it is possible to be a racist without thinking ill of people, let alone wishing to harm them.

But I don't think highly of all people I meet and I don't think highly of all human groups that I encounter.  It could hardly be clearer that people of Sub-Saharan African ancestry are in general dangerous people to have around and I understand well the "white flight" to the suburbs whereby mainstream Americans seek to avoid them.  Their problem is not their skin color but their aggressive behavior.

And it is that aggressive behaviour that should in my view be focused on, not their racial origin.  As I have long argued, I think it is crazy to catch malefactors and then let them go.  Once someone has been found guilty of some foul deed, it seems crazy to let them go so that they can re-offend.  So how to improve that situation?  We once did deal with it well. Up until the early 19th century, murderers and other grave offenders in England were hanged at Tyburn and similar places.  There was a zero rate of re-offending for them.

There are so many people who commit crimes these days that we can hardly hang them all.  Even in the early 19th century, the British didn't hang everybody.  Petty criminals were, for instance, banished to Australia.  I am descended from two such petty criminals.

It seems to me, however, that recidivists (repeat offenders) are a special case.  It is often said that anybody can make a mistake and that people should be given an opportunity to learn from their mistakes. So a first-offender should be punished but after that let go in the hope that he will not re-offend.  But what if he does reoffend?  I think that shows him as a seriously deficient person who is unlikely to change in response to mercy and forgiveness.

That doesn't mean that we have to hang him but it does mean that he has to be kept permanently out of circulation in the law-abiding community.  Low-cost permanent detention would be one possibility.  Only about 2% of the population commit crimes and only about half of them re-offend so the numbers to be accommodated might not be impossibly costly -- particularly if bare-bones accommodation only were provided.

And a traditional method could be used too:  Exile. Exile goes back to ancient Greek and Roman times and probably earlier.  As a descendant of exiled people, I think it could almost be called humane.  There is no doubt that some poor countries could be paid a small sum to take in exiled Western criminals.  Africa might be particularly receptive.  Afro-Americans would not seem too different from the local population and criminals of Caucasian origin would usually seem positively law-abiding compared to the African locals.

And then there are the Jihadis.  There is no doubt that they are a problem group at the moment. To deal with them I think we have to deny Muslims not only freedom of speech but even freedom of thought.  That is an extraordinary thing to propose but the only other way I can see of protecting ourselves from the insane minority of Muslims is to repatriate all Muslims to their ancestral lands.

So what do I mean by freedom of thought?  I mean that any evidence of Jihadi sympathies among Muslims has to be made illegal so that the person concerned can be caught before he carries out Jihadi deeds. He is then exiled to his ancestral country.

The cooperation of the Muslim population at large would be needed for that to be done effectively but if it is put strongly to them that their permission to stay in Western countries is at stake, I have no doubt that co-operation would be forthcoming.  Very quietly, a lot of co-operation at preventing terrorist acts is already given. There have even been instances of Muslim parents incriminating their radicalized children.

But what about the First Amendment, Americans will say?  I hate to state the obvious here but the First Amendment protects speech only, not thought!  I think a court could find the two to be separable.

So I don't want to harm anyone on the basis of their race but I do believe that we need to use firmer measures to protect ourselves from crime.  And noting the differences between different groups of people can aid that.  The characteristic crimes of each group may benefit from solutions "tailor-made" for that group:  Jihadis need thought monitoring, Africans need Africa.

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

More corroboration of what a nasty piece of work Hillary is in private



Note that Facebook Suspended the Military K9 Handler’s  Account After He Wrote the above

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

Cruz Endorses Trump for President

Sen. Ted Cruz has endorsed Republican nominee Donald Trump for President four months after dropping out of the race for president, returning to his work in the U.S. Senate, and beginning to campaign for re-election in 2018. A statement from Cruz read:


"This election is unlike any other in our nation’s history. Like many other voters, I have struggled to determine the right course of action in this general election.

In Cleveland, I urged voters, “please, don’t stay home in November. Stand, and speak, and vote your conscience, vote for candidates up and down the ticket whom you trust to defend our freedom and to be faithful to the Constitution.”

After many months of careful consideration, of prayer and searching my own conscience, I have decided that on Election Day, I will vote for the Republican nominee, Donald Trump.

I’ve made this decision for two reasons. First, last year, I promised to support the Republican nominee. And I intend to keep my word.

Second, even though I have had areas of significant disagreement with our nominee, by any measure Hillary Clinton is wholly unacceptable — that’s why I have always been #NeverHillary.

Six key policy differences inform my decision. First, and most important, the Supreme Court. For anyone concerned about the Bill of Rights — free speech, religious liberty, the Second Amendment — the Court hangs in the balance. I have spent my professional career fighting before the Court to defend the Constitution. We are only one justice away from losing our most basic rights, and the next president will appoint as many as four new justices. We know, without a doubt, that every Clinton appointee would be a left-wing ideologue. Trump, in contrast, has promised to appoint justices “in the mold of Scalia.”

For some time, I have been seeking greater specificity on this issue, and today the Trump campaign provided that, releasing a very strong list of potential Supreme Court nominees — including Sen. Mike Lee, who would make an extraordinary justice — and making an explicit commitment to nominate only from that list. This commitment matters, and it provides a serious reason for voters to choose to support Trump.

Second, Obamacare. The failed healthcare law is hurting millions of Americans. If Republicans hold Congress, leadership has committed to passing legislation repealing Obamacare. Clinton, we know beyond a shadow of doubt, would veto that legislation. Trump has said he would sign it.

Third, energy. Clinton would continue the Obama administration’s war on coal and relentless efforts to crush the oil and gas industry. Trump has said he will reduce regulations and allow the blossoming American energy renaissance to create millions of new high-paying jobs.

Fourth, immigration. Clinton would continue and even expand President Obama’s lawless executive amnesty. Trump has promised that he would revoke those illegal executive orders.

Fifth, national security. Clinton would continue the Obama administration’s willful blindness to radical Islamic terrorism. She would continue importing Middle Eastern refugees whom the FBI cannot vet to make sure they are not terrorists. Trump has promised to stop the deluge of unvetted refugees.

Sixth, Internet freedom. Clinton supports Obama’s plan to hand over control of the Internet to an international community of stakeholders, including Russia, China, and Iran. Just this week, Trump came out strongly against that plan, and in support of free speech online.

These are six vital issues where the candidates’ positions present a clear choice for the American people.

If Clinton wins, we know — with 100% certainty — that she would deliver on her left-wing promises, with devastating results for our country.

My conscience tells me I must do whatever I can to stop that.

We also have seen, over the past few weeks and months, a Trump campaign focusing more and more on freedom — including emphasizing school choice and the power of economic growth to lift African-Americans and Hispanics to prosperity.

Finally, after eight years of a lawless Obama administration, targeting and persecuting those disfavored by the administration, fidelity to the rule of law has never been more important.

The Supreme Court will be critical in preserving the rule of law. And, if the next administration fails to honor the Constitution and Bill of Rights, then I hope that Republicans and Democrats will stand united in protecting our fundamental liberties.

Our country is in crisis. Hillary Clinton is manifestly unfit to be president, and her policies would harm millions of Americans. And Donald Trump is the only thing standing in her way.

A year ago, I pledged to endorse the Republican nominee, and I am honoring that commitment. And if you don’t want to see a Hillary Clinton presidency, I encourage you to vote for him"


During the first Republican presidential primary debate, all the candidates on the stage were asked if they would support whichever candidate won the Republican nomination. Only Trump expressed at the time that he could not yet make that commitment. Cruz was on that stage. Eventually, each candidate present at the first debate made the pledge to back the Republican nominee. Cruz re-affirmed that pledge in March as the race tightened.

Trump invited Cruz to speak at the Republican National Convention in July, where Trump was officially named and accepted the Republican nomination for president of the United States. Rumors flew around the convention speculating on whether Cruz would seize the public opportunity to endorse Trump. But while Cruz congratulated Trump on winning the nomination and made several indictments of Democratic nominee-to-be Hillary Clinton and President Barack Obama, he stopped short of endorsing Trump, instructing those listening rather to “vote your conscience.”

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 A WESTERN HEART.

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

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

Trump is Hitler? Why HILLARY is More Like The Führer...



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

The Experiment:  Capitalism versus Socialism

What if we could have an experiment to compare the two systems? Wait – we already did

David R. Legates

Experimentation is a major tool in the scientist’s arsenal. We can put the same strain of bacteria into two Petri dishes, for example, and compare the relative effects of two different antibiotics.

What if we could do the same with economic systems? We could take a country and destroy its political and economic fabric through, say, a natural disaster or widespread pestilence – or a war. War is the ultimate political and economic cleansing agent. Its full devastation can send a country back almost to the beginning of civilization.

We could then take this war-torn country and divide it into two parts. It would have similar people, similar climate, similar potential trading partners, similar geography – but one part is rebuilt using capitalism as its base, while the other rebuilds using socialism and its principles. We’d let the virtues of each system play out and see where these two new countries would be after, say, fifty years.

Don’t you wonder what the outcome might be? Well, as it turns out, we have already performed The Experiment. It’s post-war Germany.                                                                                                                                                          

Following the devastation of World War II, Germany was split into two parts. The German Federal Republic, or West Germany, was rebuilt in the image of the western allies and a capitalist legal-political-economic system.  By contrast, the German Democratic Republic, or East Germany, was reconstructed using the socialist/communist principles championed by the Soviet Union. The Experiment pitted the market economy of the West against the command economy of the East.

On the western side, considering what’s being taught in our schools, one might expect that “greedy capitalism” would create a state where a few people became the rich elite, while the vast majority were left as deprived masses. Socialism, by contrast, promised East Germany the best that life had to offer, through rights guaranteed by the state, including “human rights” to employment and living wages, time for rest and leisure, health care and elder care, and guaranteed housing, education and cultural programs.

So the Petri dishes were set, and The Experiment began. In 1990, after just 45 years, The Experiment abruptly and surprisingly ended – with reunification back into a single country. How did it work out?

In West Germany, capitalism rebuilt the devastated country into a political and economic power in Europe, rivaled only by its former enemy, Great Britain. Instead of creating a rich 1% and a poor 99%, West Germans thrived: average West Germans were considerably wealthier than their Eastern counterparts. The country developed economically, and its people enjoyed lives with all the pleasures that wealth, modern technologies and quality free time could provide.

By contrast, East Germany’s socialist policies created a state that fell woefully behind. Its people were much poorer; property ownership was virtually non-existent amid a collectivist regime; food and material goods were scarce and expensive, available mostly to Communist Party elites; spies were everywhere, and people were summarily arrested and jailed; the state pretended to pay its workers, and they pretended to work. A wall of concrete, barbed wire and guard towers was built to separate the two halves of Berlin – and keep disgruntled Eastern citizens from defecting to the West. Many who tried to leave were shot.

By the time of reunification, productivity in East Germany was barely 70% of that in West Germany. The West boasted large, vibrant industries and other highly productive sectors, while dirty antiquated factories and outmoded farming methods dominated the East. Even staples like butter, eggs and chicken – abundant and affordable in West Germany – were twice as expensive in the eastern “workers’ paradise.”

Coffee was seven times more expensive, while gasoline and laundry detergent were more than 2½ times more expensive. Luxury items, like automobiles and men’s suits were twice as expensive, color televisions five times more costly. About the only staple that was cheaper in East Germany were potatoes, which could be distilled into vodka, so that lower caste East Germans could commiserate better with their abundant Russian comrades.

Moreover, state-guaranteed health care in the East did not translate into a healthier society. In 1990, life expectancy in the West was about 3½ years longer than in the East for men, and more than 2½ years longer for women. Studies found that unfavorable working conditions, psychological reactions to political suppression, differences in cardiovascular risk factors and lifestyles, and lower standards of medical technology in East Germany were largely responsible for their lower health standards.

The socialist mentality of full employment for everyone led to more women working in the East than in the West. This pressure resulted in better childcare facilities in East Germany, as mothers there returned to work sooner after giving birth and were more inclined to work full-time – or more compelled to work, to put food on the table, which meant they had to work full-time and run the household. This also meant East German children had far less contact with their parents and families, even as West Germans became convinced that children fared better under their mothers’ loving care than growing up in nurseries.

As the education system in East Germany was deeply rooted in socialism, the state ran an extensive network of schools that indoctrinated children into the socialist system from just after their birth to the university level. While it’s true that today East Germans perform better at STEM (science, technology, engineering, math) studies than their Western counterparts, that may be explained in part by the influx of numerous poorly educated immigrants to former West German areas, and the extensive money invested in the eastern region since reunification.

However, schools of the East were not intended to establish creative thinking, which results in creativity and innovation. Rather, they were authoritarian and rigid, encouraging collective group-think and consensus ideas, rather than fostering outside-the-box thinking, novel philosophies and enhanced productivity. Thus, East German technology was slow to develop and students were often overqualified for available jobs.

Did the East gain any advantage? Nudism was more prevalent in the East, if that was your thing.  Personal interaction was higher too, because telephones and other technologies were lacking. But even though East Germany was much better off than other Soviet satellite countries (a tribute to innate German resourcefulness), East German socialism offered few advantages over its capitalist western counterpart.  In fact, in the years since reunification, homogenization of Germany has been slow, due largely to the legacy of years lived under socialist domination, where any work ethic was unrewarded, even repressed.

Freedom was the single most important ingredient that caused West Germany to succeed. Freedom is the elixir that fuels innovation, supports a diversity of thought, and allows people to become who they want to be, not what the state demands they must be. When the government guarantees equality of outcomes, it also stifles the creativity, diversity, ingenuity and reward systems that allow people and countries to grow, develop and prosper. The Experiment has proven this.

These days in the United States, however, forgetful, unobservant and ideological politicians are again touting the supposed benefits of socialism. Government-provided health and elder care, free tuition, paid day care and pre-school education, guaranteed jobs and wages are all peddled by candidates who feel government can and should care for us from cradle to grave. They apparently think East German socialism is preferable to West German capitalism. Have they learned nothing from The Experiment?

A friend of mine believes capitalism is greedy and evil – and socialism, if “properly implemented,” will take us forward to realizing a better future. I counter that The Experiment proves society is doomed to mediocrity at best under autocratic socialism. Indeed, those who turn toward the Siren call of socialism always crash upon its rocks. But my friend assures me: “Trust me, this time it will be different.”

That’s what they always say. Perhaps Venezuela and Cuba are finally making socialism work?

Via email

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

A Battle of Narratives?

On Sunday, while the search for bombing suspect Ahmad Khan Rahami was unfolding, CNN had Barack Obama spokesman Josh Earnest in the studio for an interview. Earnest made a point to stress that the U.S. battle against Islamic terror was a “battle of narratives.” He said, “What I am telling you is that we are, when it comes to ISIL, we are in a fight — a narrative fight with them, a narrative battle, and what ISIL wants to do is they want to project that they are an organization that is representing Islam in a fight and a war against the West and a war against the United States.”

However, it appears that the real battle over narratives is not primarily between the U.S. and ISIL but between leftists and conservatives. Consider how CNN reported on Donald Trump’s remarks after the bombings. A CNN headline read: “Trump Says ‘Racial Profiling’ Will Stop Terror.” The problem is that Trump never said “racial” in his comments on the need for better vetting of immigrants. CNN simply injected the word into its coverage. Clearly, CNN wants to promote a false image of Trump being a racist.

Then there was MSNBC’s Chris Hayes. He tweeted: “We’re also very very lucky that the attackers tried to use explosives rather than guns.” Hayes, seeking to make some anti-gun point, comes across as completely out of touch with regards to the actual issue at hand. This kind of unabashed exploitation of a horrific event in order to further some unconnected social agenda has become increasingly common for the Leftmedia. On a side note, to counter Hayes' foolish comment, it was a citizen armed with a handgun who stopped the knife-wielding attacker in Minnesota.

Back to Earnest’s comments on a “battle of narratives,” the Democrat leadership and specifically Hillary Clinton, who was the secretary of state at the time of ISIL’s rise, and current Secretary of State John Kerry are responsible for framing this as a battle of narratives rather than what it truly is — a war against American values. To deny the radical Islamic ideological motivation for these terrorist attacks and boil them down to merely a “battle of narratives” is to deny reality.

SOURCE

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

No Thank You, Obama

Last week, while touting the new Census report on income and poverty in America, Barack Obama took credit for $2 a gallon gasoline, and immodestly shouted to his crowd of supporters: “Thank you, Obama.”

I don’t want to sound ungrateful, but given that for eight years your administration has done everything to decapitate the oil and gas industry that gave us low gas prices, sorry: No thanks are in order, Mr. President.

Even more amazing was Obama’s victory lap on the income numbers. Yes, incomes for middle-class families rose by an impressive 5 percent in 2015. And poverty fell. Thank goodness. It’s about time.

But the Census report was anything but cause for celebration. It is a stinging indictment of the policy results of both the George W. Bush and the Obama legacies. They both miserably failed and are equally culpable for the sad state of the American family’s finances today.

Census found that American incomes are lower today (adjusted for inflation) than they were in 2007. What kind of recovery is this, when we still haven’t made up the lost ground from a recession that happened seven years ago? Thank you, Obama.

Even more worrisome is the Census revelation that Americans are poorer today than they were in 2000. In other words, for 15 years, average families have made no progress at all in terms of their personal financial situations. That’s a decade and a half of no growth. That’s sad. The Bush administration has to be held accountable for this malaise, since most of it happened on Bush’s watch. This is a good point to make to the pro-Bush “never-Trumpers,” who keep sanctimoniously denouncing Trump’s policies as reckless. They should look in the mirror.

Other decade-long trends brought to light by the Census report were equally gloomy. We still have more than 43 million Americans in poverty today. About 1 in 7 of our citizens is poor. The absolute number of poor people is so large it is now the equivalent of every resident of California being in poverty. Obama’s record on fighting poverty has been a complete failure. The number of families that are poor grew by 3.2 million since the self-proclaimed savior entered office. Thank you, Obama.

If the poverty rate stood today where it was 15 years ago, we would have 7 million fewer Americans under the poverty threshold.

Why is poverty higher? Two reasons. One is that economic growth has been abysmally low over the last decade. And second: a smaller share of adults are actually working. Getting a job and a paycheck is usually a good way to move out of poverty, but we now have a near-record number of adults who are unemployed. Thank you, Obama.

These numbers are not just worrisome; they are scandalous. They point to a decade of failed policies enacted by our clueless political leaders. As the great Reagan economist Arthur Laffer has put it so aptly, we keep punishing success through taxes and rewarding failure through welfare, and then we wonder why we are getting nothing but failure.

One other depressing statistic is the lack of economic progress for black Americans under Obama. You won’t likely hear this from Black Lives Matter or the NAACP, but blacks have lost ground economically since Obama entered office. Their incomes have fallen by 2 percent. That’s especially disappointing because blacks already have much lower incomes than whites and Asians, so they are falling further behind relatively. Thank you, Obama.

The left’s flimsy explanation for all this slow growth is that this is the best America can do in the 21st century. But Donald Trump put it very well in his economic speech last Thursday at the New York Economic Club when he admonished the liberal policies that have put us in this current state. “This isn’t the best America can do; this is the best they can do,” he explained.

He’s right. Tax cuts, regulatory relief, energy production, school choice and repealing Obamacare will fix these problems and create, as John F. Kennedy put it half a century ago, a rising tide that lifts all boats.

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 A WESTERN HEART.

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

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

Fascism in the open



The stranglehold that the Left have on American education strives to ensure that no part of history that might embarrass the Left becomes generally known.  The slogan in the graphic above would never have been used except that a knowledge of Benito Mussolini has been thoroughly anaesthetized.  Mussolini invented the word Fascism to convey exactly what Mrs Clinton is conveying.  He was a scholarly man who knew his history and he knew that the symbol of authority in ancient Rome was a bundle of rods called a Fasces borne by the lictors.  The image was that the bundle was much stronger than any single rod it contains. In historical terms, then, Mrs Clinton is quite explicitly a Fascist. She has chosen as her theme the central message of Italian Fascism.

And in their intolerance of dissent, the Left are getting close to another great Fascist slogan:  Mussolini ha sempre ragione (Mussolini is always right).

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

It doesn’t matter what names the mainstream media call Trump – he says exactly what most Americans think, especially when it comes to Islamic terror

By Piers Morgan, who knows Trump well

 Donald Trump’s a monster. A vile, hideous, bigoted, nasty, ignorant, deluded, psychotic, ruthless, preposterous, demented buffoon on a collision course to steal the White House and destroy the planet.

Oh, and he’s a sexist, racist, homophobic, misogynist pig too, and every other word ending in ‘–ist’ you can think of for that matter.

Actually he’s even worse than that; in fact, Trump’s the new Hitler – a man who, you may recall, ordered the slaughter of six million Jews.

I know all this because I’ve been reading those exact descriptions about Trump for weeks in the US media, from a whole phalanx of intelligent, experienced journalists, broadcasters, politicians and pundits.

All of them sounding increasingly like Dr Frankenstein in their desperation to try to put this ‘disgusting’ political creature they helped create, nurture and flourish firmly back in his reality TV box.

Yet despite this unprecedented bombardment of mainstream abuse, Trump’s poll numbers keep rising and his chances of becoming President keep increasing.

The reason, to me, is obvious: tens of millions of Americans just don’t agree with that withering verdict.

They think Trump’s a fiery, flamboyant, super-rich, shoot-from-the-hip buccaneer on a mission to make America great again.

They agree with him about illegal immigration, about big Government corruption, about Wall Street greed, about ‘crooked’ Hillary Clinton and most pertinently, about the threat of Islamic terrorism.

They see Trump as standing up for them, the little guys, especially the working class little guys, against the Establishment that’s conspiring to ruin their lives.

To them, he’s a towering, unbelievably self-confident fusion of Robin Hood and Friar Tuck who has decided ‘enough is enough’ and wants to reclaim the American dream from those who’ve abused it and take it back to the way it was, to what it was meant to be.

They like the way he talks, struts and fights. So the more the media whack him, the more they root for their guy. Especially when he whacks the media back with even greater ferocity.

All this came to a head over the past week with the two terrorist attacks by radicalised Muslims in Minnesota and New York. This was a perfect storm for both Trump-haters and Trump-lovers.

The former knew he would benefit politically from the incidents, because they were of the exact type he has been vociferously warning about for the past year.

The latter shared his outrage at the indiscriminate attacks on fellow Americans and the apparent impotence of President Obama in doing anything to stop them.

Hillary Clinton, as she normally does, tried to be all calm and collected.  This is not a war against Islam, she insisted. We can’t blame all Muslims for what’s happened, she declared.

She’s right, it’s not and we can’t. But what neither she nor Obama offers the American people is any kind of plan to combat such attacks.  They talk of how awful it all is, but studiously avoid advocating any real action for fear of upsetting or offending people.

The President doesn’t even like using the phrase ‘Islamic terrorism’, which is utterly absurd given that’s plainly what it is.

In the face of such apparently weak, insipid, mealy-mouthed and frankly meaningless rhetoric, it’s hardly surprising that Trump emerges as a non-PC, no-nonsense voice of reason to many Americans.

His anger is THEIR anger.  It’s real.

I’ve been down to places like Florida and Texas recently and heard with my own ears many people ranting about the abject failure of their government to tackle ISIS.

In Trump, they see someone at least prepared to say the unsayable, even if it ruffles a few feathers.

Ahmad Khan Rahami, the New Jersey and New York pipe and pressure cooker bomber, is the perfect illustration of what Trump has been talking about. His family came to the US as asylum seekers in the 1990s, when he was seven years old.  In recent years, Rahami made ‘multiple’ visits to Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Authorities told CNN that he spent a whole year, between 2013 and 2014, in the Pakistan city of Quetta, a hotbed of Islamic extremism. A friend revealed the shocking change in him after these trips.

‘He left to go to Afghanistan,’ said Flee Jones, ‘and two years ago he came back, popped up again and was real religious. It was shocking. I’m trying to understand what made him like this.’

It’s not hard to work out the likely answer: Rahami was radicalised by jihadis.  He then brought his new radicalised views back to America where they festered inside his rage-filled mind until he finally erupted in an orgy of violence.

His story, and his method of attack, bear a striking resemblance to the Russian-born Tsarnaev brothers who terrorised the Boston marathon.

The case of the Minnesota terrorist, Dahir Ahmed Adan, is less clear.  We know he was a 22-year-old student who randomly stabbed ten people in a shopping mall, making ‘some reference to Allah’ and asking at least one victim whether they were Muslim before knifing them.

ISIS gleefully claimed responsibility, as they will for any attack of this nature where there’s even a suggestion of allegiance to or inspiration from their barbarous group.

Who knows what his exact connection might have been? But the FBI seem pretty firmly of the belief Adan was radicalised too.

How many more of these potential killers are out there, ready to strike in the name of their warped view of Islam? We don’t know, nobody does.

That’s the problem. And that’s why Donald Trump is damn right to keep shouting about it, even if some of his comments are unpalatable.  At least he seems to understand the gravity of the situation and is coming up with plans to try to deal with it.

This week, it emerged the Obama administration wrongly granted citizenship to over 800 immigrants awaiting deportation from ‘countries of concern’ because the Department of Homeland Security didn’t have their fingerprints on file.

The Washington and media elite seems more intent on mocking, belittling and abusing Trump himself than on such staggering and dangerous incompetence.

They need to realise he’s not the real enemy here, and that when it comes to Islamic terror, Trump’s been proven absolutely, horribly right.

SOURCE

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

Clinton blames Trump for N.Y., N.J. and Minn. terror attacks

“I don’t want to speculate, but here’s what we know, and I think it’s important for voters to hear this and weigh it in making their choice in November. We know that a lot of the rhetoric we’ve heard from Donald Trump has been seized on by terrorists, in particular ISIS…”

That was Hillary Clinton’s response to an outlandish question on Sept. 19 by Bloomberg Politics reporter Jennifer Epstein on if Islamic State or Islamic State-inspired terrorists in New York, New Jersey and Minnesota were a part of a foreign plot to influence the presidential election. Epstein even added for good measure, “or really any other group, maybe it’s Russian.”

As if after decades of terrorist attacks aimed at Americans, Islamist terrorists really needed any more excuses to attack the U.S.

In any event, Clinton didn’t want to speculate, but she proceeded to do so anyway. In her view, the terrorists want Trump to win the presidential elections to boost recruitment in response to his calls for a halt to immigration from nations with a history of terrorism. Following her logic, a vote for Trump is a vote for terrorism.

I don’t know, maybe the terrorists just hate us, Secretary Clinton?

Then Clinton accused Trump of treason, attributing her thoughts to the former head of our Counterterrorism Center, Matt Olsen, adding, “[T]he kinds of language and rhetoric Trump has used is giving aid and comfort to our adversaries.”

Ludicrous. As if taking stances against Islamist terrorism by focusing on border security and immigration from countries where terrorists tend to come from — a proposal of the Trump campaign — are somehow the reason for terrorist attacks.

In the meantime, real terrorist attacks have actually been enabled by U.S. immigration policy. For example, the 9/11 hijackers, who killed more than 3,000 Americans, were in the U.S. legally on student visas. If they hadn’t been issued visas, they probably would not have been able to complete the attacks. Pointing that fact out doesn’t cause terrorist attacks.

The suspect in the most recent New York pressure cooker bombing attack, Ahmad Khan Rahami, was an Afghan-born immigrant who became a naturalized citizen. If he hadn’t been issued his visa, he probably couldn’t have completed his attack either. Pointing this fact out doesn’t cause any more terrorist attacks.

You know what causes terrorist attacks? Terrorists.

And it is undeniable that many of the major attacks on U.S. soil in recent history have been religiously motivated by Islam.

The 1993 World Trade Center bombing was completed by terrorists who were or whose families were originally from Pakistan, Egypt, Iraq, and the West Bank.

The aforementioned 9/11 hijackers were on student visas from Saudi Arabia, Lebanon, United Arab Emirates and Egypt.

The Boston Marathon bombing was completed by the Tsarnaev brothers, who were here on refugee status from Chechnya.

The San Bernardino attacks were by U.S. citizen of Pakastani origin and his wife on a fiancé visa from Saudi Arabia.

The Orlando gay night club attack was by a U.S. citizen of Afghan origin.

The New York bomber was from Afghanistan, and the Minnesota stabber, who was shot and killed by a former police chief, was a refugee from Somalia.

Yes, that is not every Islamist terrorist attack. There have been others. And there have also been many other non-Islamist terrorist attacks, including Timothy McVeigh and Oklahoma City, the Unabomber and others.

One can disagree with Trump’s proposed policy that would restrict immigration from areas of the world with a clear history of terrorism, where the vast majority of residents are Muslims. Or argue that it would not stop every attack, which is most certainly true. Those are reasonable objections to be raised.

But to suggest Trump’s proposal — or even noting the Islamic origins of the attackers — is somehow the cause of Islamic-inspired terrorist attacks which go back decades ignores who the real enemy is. And that’s Islamic State and other terrorist organizations.

These were not Trump protestors. Or Russian agents. Or really trying to influence the elections. They were ruthless Islamist killers. They want us dead. Isn’t that enough? This time, it’s a miracle nobody was killed. Here, Clinton politicized the attacks and immediately blamed her opponent for what just as likely could have been a national day of mourning. There’s something sick and twisted about that.

Trump for his part responded to Clinton’s remarks in kind, being far more explicit, “Today, Hillary Clinton showed again that she will say anything — and blame anyone — to shift attention away from the weakness she showed as Secretary of State. The Obama-Clinton doctrine of not taking ISIS seriously enough has emboldened terrorists all over the world. They are hoping and praying that Hillary Clinton becomes President so that they can continue their savagery and murder.”

Which, is about the response you’d expect from Trump. What’s good for the goose, as the saying goes. If Clinton wants to blame her opponent for terrorist attacks, that’s fine. For what it’s worth, weakness is provocative. And it is perfectly legitimate to note the Obama administration’s failure to put a stop to Islamic State in Iraq long before the war got to this point as a potential cause for the group’s continued success. That certainly makes more sense than blaming Trump, who as a businessman and politician, has wielded no power to affect policy the past many years.

Here it is Clinton who is missing the mark, and now is sounding rather outlandish in her assessment of the threats facing the country. To hear her tell it, it is not Islamic extremist terrorists who pose a danger, but those who want to keep them out of the country. Nonsense.

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 A WESTERN HEART.

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

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

Famous last words

DeBlasio would seem to have egg on his face now that Ahmad Khan Rahami has been arrested in connection with the Chelsea bombing.  But Leftists have hides like Rhinoceroses so he is probably untroubled

New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio, evidently fearing negative optics regarding the latest terror bombing, said, "We ... want to be upfront saying that there is no evidence at this point of a terror connection to this incident. This is preliminary information. It's something we will be investigating very carefully, but there is no evidence at this point of a terror connection." While de Blasio did acknowledge that it was "an intentional act," his claiming there is no "terror connection" is simply asinine. As the investigation unfolds, Americans will learn who is responsible for these acts of terror — jihadis. But Democrats like Obama and de Blasio seem more concerned about Americans' perception of terrorists than actual Islamists and their hateful violence.

SOURCE

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

Leftmedia's Racial Bias

According to the Leftmedia, Donald Trump is the modern example of a bigoted racist. Story upon story go after Trump for such things as David Duke’s endorsement, which Trump rejected, or Trump’s call to limit immigration from Islamic countries or his plan to build a wall on the U.S. southern border. But which side is most responsible for injecting racism into the campaign?

On Saturday Barack Obama told the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation, “There’s no such thing as a vote that doesn’t matter. It all matters, and after we have achieved historic turnout in 2008 and 2012, especially in the African-American community, I will consider it a personal insult, an insult to my legacy, if this community lets down its guard and fails to activate itself in this election. You want to give me a good sendoff? Go vote!” In other words, if you’re black and you don’t vote for Hillary Clinton because Obama supports her, then you are insulting him. This statement is blatantly racist, yet there are no accusations from the media of Obama being a racist.

The New York Times on Monday ran a story with the following headline: “White Voters Keep Trump’s Hopes Alive in Must-Win Florida.” Once again, the media is fixated on maintaining a carefully crafted image that implies racism because a majority of Trump’s supporters are white.

As Dallas police sergeant Demetrick Pennie has recognized with his lawsuit against Black Lives Matter and other prominent liberal black leaders including Barack Obama for inciting violence against law enforcement, it is not Donald Trump who is responsible for inciting racial polarization but liberals with their obsession on viewing all political perspectives through the lens of race.

SOURCE

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

Banks and Banksters: Too Big to Fail or Jail?

There's one set of laws for the ruling class elitists and another set for us "deplorables."

In 2008, when a combination of government mandates severely compounded by Wall Street greed nearly blew up the world’s financial system, Congress and the Bush administration conjured up the $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) to save institutions deemed “too big to fail.” Ever since, too big to fail has rendered large financial institutions, and the executives that run them, virtually immune from criminal prosecution. And nothing speaks more forcefully to this reality than the latest scandal perpetrated by Wells Fargo.

Two weeks ago, federal regulators revealed the country’s third-largest bank spent the last five years opening 1.5 million bank accounts and 565,000 credit card accounts without customer permission. A staggering 5,300 employees were involved in the scam that included using a customer’s personal information from a legitimate account to open a bogus one and moving money from one to the other. Workers even created fake email addresses and PIN numbers to facilitate the corruption.

The reason? They were trying to meet sales quotas, even though this practice, known as “sandbagging,” resulted in $50 fines for the customer.

Wells Fargo’s punishment? The 5,300 employees were terminated, and the bank paid a $185 million fine levied by officials at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), which boasted that “Wells Fargo is paying the largest penalty the CFPB has ever imposed” since its creation following the financial meltdown.

Yet those officials didn’t mention a despicable reality revealed by The New York Times, which explained the deal “was classic Wall Street.” In short, no matter how egregious the activity, many cases are settled “without a bank having to admit doing anything wrong.”

Enter Wells Fargo Chief Executive John Stumpf, who offered the standard faux-mea culpa. “Our goal is to get it right with every customer 100% of the time,” he stated. “When we fall short of that goal, I feel accountable and our leadership team feels accountable — and we want all our stakeholders to know that.”

Feeling accountable? Stumpf and his senior management team have suffered no consequences whatsoever for the bank’s malfeasance. And adding insult to injury, Carrie Tolstedt, the Wells Fargo executive who ran the phony accounts unit she resigned from the firm in July, received a $124.6 million golden parachute. At the time, Stumpf referred to Tolstedt as “a standard-bearer of our culture” and “a champion for our customers.”

Champion sandbagger is more like it.

Moreover, those boastful CFPB officials apparently looked the other way. “Regulators never determined the extent of Tolstedt’s knowledge about the abuse, and she was never named directly in the lawsuits brought over it,” reports the New York Daily News. “But she took over the division in 2008, meaning she oversaw it for the entirety of the racket.”

Even worse, this racket was exposed three years ago by Los Angeles Times reporter E. Scott Reckard, who chronicled the frenzied level of company-pressured “cross-selling” and the concomitant threats of termination that battered employee morale to the point where it led to ethical breaches. “To meet quotas, employees have opened unneeded accounts for customers, ordered credit cards without customers' permission and forged client signatures on paperwork,” he revealed.

Three years later, Americans are supposed to believe this scam was the sole handiwork of middle management and staffers, “some of whom were being paid as little as $10 an hour,” as the Chicago Sun Times put it.

Hopefully it won’t fly. Tomorrow, Stumpf is scheduled to appear at a Senate Banking Committee hearing that will focus on Wells Fargo’s sales practices. While he’s there, maybe he’ll be asked to explain how his insistence there was no incentive to perpetrate this fraud squares with a series of videos — many of which were posted in 2011 — blasting those sales incentives.

Even more important — maybe — the Department of Justice has issued subpoenas to Wells Fargo. Maybe because the DOJ has yet to characterize its involvement as a criminal investigation, without which any subsequent penalties will amount to the aforementioned “classic Wall Street” outcome. And maybe because the DOJ’s track record is utterly dismal in that regard. As Fortune revealed in 2013, despite a total of $62.2 billion in fines paid by the nation’s six largest banks over three years, and another $24.7 billion needed to settle pending lawsuits, not a single bank has had to admit any wrongdoing, and not one dollar of these billions in fines has been paid by any bank executive.

It was shareholders who took all the hits.

Why? The title of a report prepared by the Republican staff of the House Financial Services Committee and issued on July 11 says it all. “Too Big to Jail” reveals the depredation of British banking giant HSBC, which laundered nearly $900 million for drug traffickers and processed transactions for Cuba, Iran, Libya, Sudan and Myanmar/Burma, despite them being subject to U.S. sanctions. HSBC paid a $2 billion fine — and the DOJ granted the bank a “deferred prosecution” arrangement that amounts to a delay, or no prosecution whatsoever, because it promised to change its behavior.

That would be the same HSBC whose clients donated $81 million to the Clinton Foundation. The same HSBC that in 2013 appointed as a Director of HSBC Holdings … current FBI Director James Comey.

“Back in 2008, the smart people said we had to bail out the banks — because if we didn’t, we’d get an economic catastrophe,” writes New York Post columnist Nicole Gelinas. “Maybe. We know what we did get: generations of voters, liberal and conservative, who are disillusioned with capitalism. They can see that the chief of Wells Fargo gets $19.3 million annually to preside over systemic fraud, while they get blots on their credit reports.”

We also know what we didn’t get: Not a single resignation required in exchange for the $700 billion taxpayer-funded TARP bailout. Thus, it’s not just the banks the ruling class considers too big to fail. The bankers themselves who ran the system into the ground also remain conspicuously immune from anything resembling genuine accountability.

In an appearance on CNBC’s “Mad Money,” Stumpf resisted the suggestion he should resign, telling host Jim Cramer the best thing he could do now is provide leadership for his company.

Really? Stumpf became chairman of Wells Fargo in 2010. Under his “leadership” between then and now, the bank has paid out billions of dollars in fines and lawsuit settlements related to a host of infractions that include fraud, reckless underwriting, improper certification of home loans, and illegal student loan servicing practices.

This nation remains divided over a host of issues. But one suspects an overwhelming majority of Americans on both sides of the political divide are thoroughly disgusted with the reality that there appears to be one set of laws for the ruling class elitists and another set for the rest of us “deplorables.” Few things would restore a sense of justice more effectively than tossing the odious concepts of too big to fail and too big to jail on the ash heap of history.

The alternative? Abiding criminal activity mitigated solely by fines. Fines large financial institutions see as little more than the cost of doing business.

SOURCE

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

Sanctuary cities kill

Kate Steinle, a 32-year-old San Franciscan women, was murdered by an undocumented immigrant living in the city illegally in July of 2015. Now her family blames more than just her murderer Juan Francisco Lopez-Sanchez, Kate’s family has decided to sue the city for being an “sanctuary city”.

The lawsuit writes that “Kate’s death was both foreseeable and preventable had the law enforcement agencies, officials and/or officers involved simply followed the laws, regulations and/or procedures which they swore to uphold.”

By definition, these sanctuary cities are known to defy the law in order to provide a safe haven for illegal immigrants living in the United States. However, this also provides no protection in situations like Kate’s, where Juan had been a repeat felony offender and deported 5 times after illegal activity aside from his residence.

These safety cities for illegal immigrants have now taken center stage on the immigration debate. The issue was brought to the Senate floor by Pennsylvania Republican Pat Toomey in July to strip funding from sanctuary cities, however; Democrats united to protect the cities claiming the legislation does not provide a “real solution to our broken immigration system.”

Later, Donald Trump made it one of the pillars of his immigration agenda on the campaign trail. At a Phoenix, Arizona rally on August 31, 2016, Trump discussed the importance of working with Congress to prevent taxpayer money from funding institutions which are not following through on their simple promises to citizens-to enforce the law.

Trump noted “Cities that refuse to cooperate with federal authorities will not receive taxpayer dollars, and we will work with Congress to pass legislation to protect those jurisdictions that do assist federal authorities… Block funding for sanctuary cities… We will end the sanctuary cities that have resulted in so many needless deaths.”

Sanctuary cities are committing far more than an act against federal law. According to the Washington Post of July 2016, from 2004 to 2012 sanctuary cities generated agreements between local and federal law enforcement to keep illegal immigrants in U.S. prisons after completing time served for crimes in order to provide shelter and resources to stall deportation and provide an opportunity to fight immigration court. Often passing the “prisoners” from prison to prison without providing family notice or legal counsel, only to eventually release the illegal immigrant back into society.

However, this plan has been criticized as an obvious violation of international human rights accords and simply a method to keep and rerelease illegal immigrants. Without consequence for a lack of adherence to federal law, cities were able to commit any number of legal violations they desired.

Federal immigration law becomes absolutely purposeless without state and local adherence to the policies. Even in situations where cities tried to imprison illegal immigrants without warrant to protect against deportation, human rights violations ran rampant. Sanctuary cities must be discovered and punished for their lack of accountability, if they are not any possibility of immigration reform will be a lost cause.

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 A WESTERN HEART.

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

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

Children born with big heads have higher IQs and thus a better chance of a successful future

The connection between larger head size and higher IQ is well-known but is usually given as a correlation around .3.  But in this very careful research it came out at .5, which is a major effect.  Interestingly, autistic people tend to have big heads too, and they often have quite extraordinary abilities in some field.  The study mentioned below was not confined to head size.  It looked at many physical attributes -- and many were intertwined with IQ and achievement.  IQ is a physical reality and an important one.  All men are not equal

Babies with big heads are more likely to be clever and have successful futures, a study has shown. Research carried out by UK Biobank has strongly linked higher intelligence with large head circumferences and brain volume.

Half a million Brits are being monitored by the charity to discover the connection between their genes, their physical and mental health and their path through life.

The latest evidence is the first finding to emerge from the study that aims to break down the relationship between brain function and DNA.

Researchers in a paper published by the Molecular Psychiatry journal said: 'Highly significant associations were observed between the cognitive test scores in the UK Biobank sample and many polygenic profile scores, including . . . intracranial volume, infant head circumference and childhood cognitive ability.'

Professor Ian Deary, of Edinburgh University, who is leading the research, said gene variants were also strongly associated with intelligence, according to The Times.

The new evidence is so accurate that experts claim it could even predict how likely it was that a baby would go to university based on their DNA.

SOURCE

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

House conservatives are winning

If one listens to the narrative advanced by rent-seeking, parasitic Washington political establishment, conservatives were “trounced,” as one publication put it, in Republican congressional primaries this cycle. This narrative could not be further from the truth.

Certainly, there were some disappointments in this election cycle. The loss of Rep. Tim Huelskamp (R-Kan.), one of the most principled conservative members of the House, was a huge blow. Of course, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and other crony special interests spent heavily to boost his moderate Republican primary opponent.

Former Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio), who, rather than be spurned by the conservative members of his conference and lose his the speakership, resigned his House seat. He may have toasted a glass of red wine when Rep. Huelskamp lost, but this old House seat is now in the hands of a member of the House Freedom Caucus, Rep. Warren Davidson (R-Ohio).

The House Freedom Caucus’ win in Boehner’s backyard was not the only victory for conservatives in 2016. Principled conservatives like Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) and Reps. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.), Mark Meadows (R-N.C.), and Dave Brat (R-Va.) avoided primary challenges by sticking to their limited government, constitutionalist principles.

Rep. Paul Gosar (R-Ariz.) won more than 71 percent of the vote against his establishment-backed primary challenger, despite more than $500,000 in outside spending against him, proving that the model that may have worked in one race may not work in another. In Arizona’s 5th District, Andy Biggs won the Republican primary over a challenger favored by the D.C. political elite.

Conservatives are playing the long game, not that the House Republican leadership and the self-important pundit class have noticed. The fact of the matter is, we are winning. Although success may not always be defined by year-by-year primary election results, conservatives are advancing the ball down the field, a few yards at a time.

In the 1990s, there were only a handful of House conservatives -- including Reps. John Shadegg (R-Ariz.), Ron Paul (R-Texas), and Steve Largent (R-Okla.) -- who stuck to their principles when under pressure from Republican leadership. Today, we can count on the nearly 40-member House Freedom Caucus, as well as several other conservatives who aren’t members of the group, who consistently stay true to the limited government values.

The influence and importance of conservatives in the House Republican Conference is increasing, and, as the United States’ fiscal challenges continue to grow and the expansive federal bureaucracy strangles entrepreneurs with red tape, the power they wield to move the GOP in a pro-economic growth direction is happening at the right time.

Another definition of success is a shift in the voting habits of Republican incumbents. The very same publication which declared that conservatives were “trounced” during this election cycle noted that conservative challengers are “making [Republican incumbents] think harder about their primaries, and making them work harder to keep their base happy than in the recent past.” Although this particular point was made in reference to current members of the Senate Republican Conference, the same is true of House Republican incumbents.

Evolution is not an overnight process. It takes time. What the evolution of congressional Republicans has showed is that conservatives have more influence than ever before. That doesn’t mean that challenges, both electoral and legislative, won’t arise. And, of course, evolution is a slow process. With every passing moment, the national debt continues to rise, the regulatory state continues to grow, and rent-seeking, parasitic special interests are concocting the next scheme in their playbook to try to defeat principled conservatives in Congress.

In order to preserve the Republic, we absolutely must work to defend and strengthen conservatism on Capitol Hill and speed up the evolutionary process.

SOURCE

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

Meet the Alt-Left

Alt-right is becoming a term of soft bigotry whereas “alt-left” accurately describes the political ideology of today’s Democratic Party.

A strong offense is the best defense when fighting bullies. Today, our offense is to turn Hillary’s words against her. She and her ilk are the alternative-left. They have fallen away from the pragmatic Democratic ideals of John F. Kennedy and embraced a radical “power at any cost” fringe philosophy of Saul Alinsky and Bill Ayers.

Alt-Left Extremist Behavior:

Here are a few examples of the radical measures that today’s Democratic Party supports that indicate they have morphed into a fringe group:


1.) Ignoring Science: “Science-denier” is the modern Democrat’s middle name. Hillary Clinton opposed the construction of the Keystone Pipeline even though her own State Department thrice declared it to be environmentally safe.

2.) Pretending States Don’t Exist: Obama’s administration sued Arizona forexercising its own immigration laws; North Carolina over its bathroom laws. Obama’s administration also used aggressive and excessive measures to challenge California’s state authority on medical marijuana.

3.) Coddling Thugs, Killing Free Speech: Syed Rizwan Farook and Tashfeen Malik stormed a gun free zone in San Bernardino, CA last December—fatally shooting 14 individuals and injuring 24.  U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch threatened to prosecute anyone who dared say anything that could be in any way construed as anti-Muslim—despite Farook and Malik being radicalized jihadist Muslims.

4.) Crushing Bakeries and Pizzerias: Obama doesn’t think you can build a layered wedding cake “on your own” let alone open your own bakery. So, it’s not entirely surprising that his administration wouldn’t intervene when alt-left protesters put a bakery out of business when the owner practiced her 1st Amendment right to free speech.

5.) No ID to Vote: You must show an ID to withdraw cash from a bank; buy cigarettes; purchase alcohol; patronize a bar or dance club; buy ammo; or use your credit card at the U.S. Post Office—but the government doesn’t want to know who is voting. Could politicians want to hide their attempts to buy votes from illegal immigrants?

6.) Double Standards: If a Marine had access to classified material, he or she would be Court-Martialed for failing to follow basic security procedures with that material. If that Marine deleted tens of thousands of potentially jeopardized emails before turning over her emails to the FBI, she would likely spend a decade in jail. Not Hillary Clinton! She’s the Queen of the Alt-Left, which means she’s above the law.

7.) Normalizing Child Abuse: “As president, I will always have your back,” Hillary recently told Planned Parenthood. Democrats support using taxpayer dollars to fund the murder of a baby during the final months of pregnancy (partial-birth abortion) despite the baby showing signs of life and viability. In this objectively cruel procedure, the baby’s scull is punctured with a sharp surgical tool and its brain is suctioned, inducing the collapse of the baby’s scull and ultimately the child’s death.

8.) Security Blankets for College Students: Democrats want taxpayers to subsidize “safe spaces” so that students do not encounter intellectual diversity. The alt-left wants us to bankroll silly laws (think California Gov. Jerry Brown’s “Just Say No” law designed to stop rape on college campuses) that prevent students from exercising their 2nd Amendment right to carry concealed. Result: college students cry and stamp their feet when a professor corrects their grammar errors. Yes, this happened at the University of California at Los Angeles.

SOURCE

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

12 Hours of Terror: Just Another Weekend in Leftist-run America

We live in a country run by people who tell us that if a man puts on a dress and says he’s a woman we are supposed to take him at his word. But, if a man goes on a murderous rampage in the name of Allah, and ISIS claims responsibility, we shouldn’t draw conclusions.

The weak and ridiculous position in which we find ourselves did not happen on its own. Americans selected this band of leftist fools who have zero aptitude for dealing with terrorism. A quote from King Solomon, the wisest earthly leader to ever grace the planet comes to mind:

 “As dead flies give perfume to a bad smell, so a little folly outweighs wisdom and honor. The heart of the wise inclines to the right, but the heart of the fool to the left. Even as fools walk along the road, they lack sense and show everyone how stupid they are.” (Ecclesiastes 10:1-3)

Thanks to those whose hearts incline “to the left,” the terrorism which was once a rarity in America can happen anytime and anywhere.

And does. In a 12-hour span over the weekend, we saw that it is not safe to shop in a mall in Minnesota, or run a 5k in New Jersey or walk in New York City without risk of terrorism.

“Rest assured,” they tell us, “justice will be served.” Of course, they are always quick to remind us to not make assumptions. Heaven forbid we offend someone’s sensibilities.

Fox News reports ISIS claimed responsibility for the shopping mall stabbing spree saying the attacker “asked at least one victim whether they were Muslim and referenced Allah.” The group posted this public statement on AMAQ, a news agency known for speaking for ISIS: “The executor of the stabbing attacks in Minnesota yesterday was a soldier of the Islamic State and carried out the operation in response to calls to target the citizens of countries belonging to the crusader coalition.”

Apparently, this information wasn’t enough for the FBI to draw conclusions about the motive of the stabber which the Somali-American community in St. Cloud quickly identified as Dahir Adan.

According to the  St. Cloud Times: “Like the police, Minnesota FBI spokesman Kyle Loven declined to say Sunday if investigators believe the attack was a terrorist act.” Nor was it enough for Police Chief William Blair Anderson who  “pointedly declined to call the attacks an act of terrorism, saying the motive isn’t yet known,” reports a local paper.

Meanwhile, in New Jersey, a pipe bomb-like explosive device detonated along the route of a 5k charity race to help Marines and sailors, and in New York City, 29 people were injured when an improvised explosive device went off in a Manhattan neighborhood.  Business Insider reports that after the explosion, officials later found a “pressure cooker with an apparent mobile phone attached to it and wires protruding.”

And the mayor overly obsessed with controlling what New Yorkers eat immediately called the bombing “a very serious incident.”

Later at a press conference a reporter grilled  Mayor Bill de Blasio asking, “How can you say there is no link to terrorism when the Inspire magazine published instructions on how to build one of these pressure-cooker bombs, like the one used in the Boston Marathon bombing?” De Blasio dug in his heels, saying it was “a very serious incident,” and reiterating “we have a lot more work to do to be able to say what kind of motivation was behind this…”

Apparently, the mayor couldn’t get his sodium-free tongue to utter the word “terror,” proving to us just how true the Bible verse is: “Even as fools walk along the road, they lack sense and show everyone how stupid they are.”

SOURCE

Note

A bearded person known as Ahmad Khan Rahami, is being sought in connection with the Chelsea bombing.  That sounds like an Irish name to me.  What do you think?

There is a  new  lot of postings by Chris Brand just up -- about Muslims, free speech and IQ

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

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 A WESTERN HEART.

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

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

"Ethical Socialism"

I owe the excerpt from Oswald Spengler below to statistician Briggs.  It is indeed interesting.  Spengler was a popular German thinker of the early 20th century.  He thought that European civilization had just about reached its limit and was bound to fall while some other civilization arose.  The gutless reaction to Islamic hostility in the Western world today certainly does bring Spengler to mind.

And it is notable that Spengler identifies socialism as the power-hungry but ultimately nihilistic force that is destroying the countries it dominates.  His diagnosis of socialism as inherently totalitarian has certainly been borne out by subsequent events in Russia and Germany.

But in an indirect way, Spengler was responsible for the rise of Nazism.  He never was a Nazi and rejected its antisemitism but his diagnosis of his own society  as dying from its own weakness and lack of self-confidence did plant in people's minds  the hope that a strong leader would emerge who would restore the national will and self-confidence  -- make it great again --  and thus rescue European civilization from its decline.  And we all know who came along in Germany to offer just that.

Hitler was of course an idol who had feet of clay but it is not unreasonable to hope that a new leader with fewer flaws could arise.  And that seems to be where we are now.  No matter how often Muslim terrorists murder us, our Left-dominated leaders refuse to do anything about it.  And the rise of Trump has exposed the great discontent among the people about the lack of reaction to Islamic supremacism.

Trump is also far from a perfect saviour but he seems to be the only saviour we've got.  A successful American businessman and an undistinguished Austrian artist are very different people so very different things are to be expected from them.  What we get may not be ideal but it may include what we need.

But the rescue we need is NOT from Islam.  As Spengler foresaw, it is from the ever more powerful Left.  There is no lack of  patriotic pride and civilizational confidence among ordinary Americans.  It is the Left who are keeping a lid on it rather than proclaiming and defending it.  There is nothing wrong with America and Americans.  It is only the Leftist and Left-dominated parasites riding on its back that are the problem.  Reagan neutered them for a while but they have regrouped.  Trump is our best hope of purging their influence and hitting back at Islam


In spite of its foreground appearances, ethical Socialism is not a system of compassion, humanity, peace and kindly care, but one of will-to-power. Any other reading of it is illusory. The Stoic takes the world as he finds it, but the Socialist wants to organize and recast it in form and substance, to fill it with his own spirit. The Stoic adapts himself, the Socialist commands. He would have the whole would take the shape he desires, thus transferring the idea of the Critique of Pure Reason into the ethical field.

This is the ultimate meaning of the Categorical Imperative, which he brings to bear in political, social and economic matters alike—act as thought the maxims that you practise were to become by your will the law for all. And this tyrannical tendency is not absent from even the shallowest phenomena of the time. It is not attitude and mien, but activity that is to be given form. As in China and Egypt, life only counts insofar as it is deed. And it is mechanicalizing of the organic concept of Deed that leads to the concept of work as commonly understood, the civilized form of Faustian effecting.

Apollian man looked back to a Golden Age; this relieved him of the trouble of thinking upon what was still to come. The Socialist feels the Future as his task and aim, and accounts the happiness of the moment as worthless in comparison. The Classical spirit, with its oracles and its omens, wants only to know the future, but the Westerner would shape it. The Third Kingdom is the Germanic ideal. From Joachim of Floris to Nietzsche and Ibsen—arrows of yearning to the other bank, as the Zarathustra says—every great man has linked his life to an eternal morning.

And here Socialism becomes tragic. It is of the deepest significance that Nietzsche, so completely clear and sure in dealing with what should be destroyed, what transvalued, loses himself in nebulous generalities as soon as he comes to discuss the Whither, the Aim. His criticism of decadence is unanswerable, but his theory of the Superman is a castle in the air.

And therein lies a deep necessity; for, from Rousseau onwards, Faustian man has nothing more to hope for in anything pertaining to the grand style of Life. Something has come to an end. The Northern soul has exhausted its inner possibilities, and of the dynamic force and insistence that had exposed itself in world-historical visions of the future—visions of a millennial scope—nothing remains but the mere pressure, the passionate desire to create, the form without the content.

The soul was Will and nothing but Will. It needed an aim for its Columbus-longing; it had to give its inherent activity at least the illusion of a meaning and an object. And so the keener critic will find a trace of Hjalmar Ekdal in all modernity, even its highest phenomena. Ibsen called it the lie of life.

For deep down beneath it all is the gloomy feeling, not to be repressed, that all this hectic zeal is the despairing self-deception of a soul that may not and cannot rest. This is the tragic situation—the inversion of the Hamlet motive—and a thread of it runs through the entire fabric of Socialism, political, economic and ethical, which forces itself to ignore the annihilating seriousness of its own final implications, so as to keep alive the illusion of the historical necessity of its own existence.

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

IQ rediscovered yet again.  You can't suppress reality for long

They account for around one per cent of the population and much of their success has been put down to dedication and perseverance.

But new studies are now challenging the notion that extremely intelligent children earn their achievements through hard work.

Instead, they suggest that they may have a genetic advantage from birth, and that success is built on this early head-start.

Two clusters of genes have been found that are directly linked to human intelligence.

Called M1 and M3, these 'gene networks' appear to determine how smart a person is by controlling their memory, attention, processing speed and reasoning.

Crucially, scientists have also discovered that these two networks - which each contain hundreds of genes - are likely to be under the control of master regulator switches.

Researchers from Imperial College London are now keen to identify these switches and explore whether it might be feasible to manipulate them.

The research is at a very early stage, but the scientists would ultimately like to investigate whether it is possible to use this knowledge of gene networks to boost cognitive function.

The investigators analysed thousands of genes expressed in the human brain, and then combined these results with genetic information from healthy people who had undergone IQ tests.

Remarkably, they found that some of the same genes that influence human intelligence in healthy people were also the same genes that cause impaired cognitive ability and epilepsy when mutated.

In the US, there are several universities that look out for early talent and have been tracking where high-achieving children end up.  Their results show that those who succeed have an early cognitive advantage.

Johns Hopkins University in Maryland runs a talent programme which is open to adolescents who scored in the top one per cent in maths and English.  Notable alumni include Mark Zuckerburg, founder of Facebook, and Lady Gaga.

While many of the children on this programme have gone on to achieve great things, Jonathan Wai, a psychologist in the Talent Identification Programme at Duke University in North Carolina, wanted to test whether childhood aptitude was a guide to success in general.

He looked at five subsets of the US elite – federal judges, billionaires, Fortune 500 chief executives and members of the Senate and House of Representatives. He found that in each subset, those in the top one per cent of ability were over-represented.

While these people could have pushy parents, or have attended top schools, Mr Wai argues that environment factors alone cannot account for success.....

While these studies do suggest that intelligence has a high genetic basis, education and opportunity could still lead to success for those without a strong genetic basis.

SOURCE

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

Did the bank bailouts really save the free market system?

Eight years ago, on September 15, Lehman Brothers failed, starting a rapid series of events that resulted in the bank bailouts and the country has not been the same in so many ways.

While President George W. Bush famously said that he, “abandoned free market principles to save the free market system” explaining his decision to bail out Wall Street, General Motors and other failing entities. But did he save it, and if so, for who?

General Motors for its part, emboldened by its debt-free balance sheet invested in new factories in China and is now importing a mid-sized crossover SUV known as the Envision. Meanwhile Flint, Michigan, which used to be known as Buick City, finds itself struggling as a city left behind, more known as a place which messed up its drinking water treatment than for its auto legacy.

The banks have largely pulled out of the tailspin, but after bailing them out, the Obama Justice Department has been busily suing the survivors and winning massive awards with the big winners being local advocacy groups who have been cut into a big piece of the pie, even though they were not harmed in any way. Investor’s Business Daily reports, “Radical Democrat activist groups stand to collect millions from Attorney General Eric Holder’s record $17 billion deal to settle alleged mortgage abuse charges against Bank of America. Buried in the fine print of the deal, which includes $7 billion in soft-dollar consumer relief, are a raft of political payoffs to Obama constituency groups. In effect, the government has ordered the nation’s largest bank to create a massive slush fund for Democrat special interests.”

This creation of a well-funded new network of housing advocacy groups, exactly like the discredited ACORN which served as the community organizers who encouraged people with next to no ability to take out loans to buy first or sometimes even bigger homes.

Since the 2008 bailout, the labor participation of workers between the ages of 16-64 has continued to drop and millions more workers have increasingly been shifted to the service economy, or what’s left of it. Those who can’t make it wash out of the economy altogether.

But perhaps most significantly, the banking collapse and subsequent bailout led to eight years of President Obama’s constantly pulling at the threads of America finding the frayed edges and sowing discontent wherever possible.

America today is less confident and surefooted about the future economically and abroad, and while it can’t all be attributed to the bank crisis, it was this seminal event that threw us collectively off balance.  Our economic lives tossed about due to events that were not only out of our control, but were not understandable.

Eight years ago today, Lehman Brothers fell, starting a domino effect which continues to this day with persistent minimal economic growth numbers and unemployment numbers dependent upon people dropping out of the economy to be maintained.

Oh what an eight years it has been.

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 A WESTERN HEART.

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

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