A MERRY CHRISTMAS AND A HEALTHY NEW YEAR TO ALL THOSE WHO COME BY HERE

Only old guys wish you a healthy new year!  I expect to be blogging more or less as usual over the Christmas period  -- though there may be a few gaps.  I have already had one big family celebration, which was very enjoyable.  I have family allies for my conservative views but there are some Leftish views too.  No hostility though.  We manage to have perfectly civil discussions.

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We Aren't Quite as Stupid as They Think

Most politicians and many in the media truly believe we are stupid. We are the masses. We are those meant to receive a pat on the head, an empty promise and a warm feeling --- that leaves us empty. Trust me, I was in this business, and while those in it now think I am not on to them, I am. I know when I get the run-around or that pat on the head. So let me just take some stories in the news as we end the year and apply this concept to them.

Let's start with the story of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's stomach virus that led to massive dehydration that led to a fall at home and a failure to go to the hospital with a serious concussion. Now I have made it clear in the past that I consider former President Clinton a roaring conservative as compared to President Obama, and I am not accusing Secretary Clinton of lying. But the fact that hearings were to be held on the entire Benghazi debacle, the State Department was already set to be given blame by a White house appointed panel, and suddenly Hillary Clinton simply could not testify -- give me a break. Do they think we are stupid? Yes, they do.

On the subject of tragic shooting at a Connecticut elementary school, I'm not a big on guns personally, and when I hear of these types of senseless murders, particularly of innocent young children, I am prone to ask questions about the sale of certain weapons and ammunition.

But as soon as I start seeing the Drudge Report carrying immediate talk of efforts toward gun control and later see a television news bulletin with President Obama naming Joe Biden to head up a special something or another to deal with gun control, then I realize that once again emotions of the moment are being manipulated by politicians. And whatever shift in my views over gun rights that might naturally have occurred end as I hear television news "reporters" arguing with those opposed to changes in the law or pontificating while "reporting" the news. Do they think we are stupid? Yes, they do.

And that, of course, leads us to the continuing "stalled" negotiations over the "fiscal cliff." My, my, it is almost Christmas, the Senate is going home, and the big bad speaker and President Obama are seemingly stalled in a lockdown over spending cuts and who qualifies to be a millionaire.

Hah, what a laugh. Make no mistake, a last-minute bill will be agreed to before the end of the year. Special treatment will be extended to the defense industry to avoid the dreadful cuts that would have occurred under the automatic sequestration that otherwise would have kicked in on Jan. 1. Unemployment benefits will be extended, and taxes for those earning over, say, $400,000 -- or perhaps a bit more or less -- will go up. Sounds OK, right? Again they think we are stupid.

In the process, the Republican's long-fought battle, which raised many a penny in campaign contributions to fight the so-called "death tax," will be thrown right out the window. In the end, whether by January or more likely next year, deductions and credits that have served to stimulate the economy will be curtailed or eliminated. Who will suffer in the long term? The answer is the integrity and word of the GOP, and conservatives and plenty who have fought for their cause only to see another last-minute deal that will never ever really reduce the deficit.

Oh, and by the way, the world was set to end on Dec. 21, as well. Oh, that got plenty of media attention. And you know why? That's right, they think we are stupid. And if I've written another version of this in years past, blame it on stupidity!

SOURCE

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The strange things that bother Europe

Still obsessed with the Jews  -- while real problems are ignored

More than 40,000 people have been slaughtered during the rebellion in Syria, and the death toll rises daily. The European Union does not appear to be particularly concerned. North Korea’s rulers have launched a three-stage rocket, moving closer to their goal of developing a nuclear-tipped ICBM, and they’re sharing nuclear-weapons technology with the world’s leading sponsors of terrorism in Iran. The EU does not seem to be worrying about that either. Israel is considering building homes on barren hills adjacent to Jerusalem. The EU’s 27 foreign ministers said they were “deeply dismayed” and warned Israel of unspecified consequences if the plan is carried out.

The European Union — recent winner, I should note, of the Nobel Peace Prize — has its priorities. So let’s talk about what the Israelis are doing to so distress them.

The area in which Israel may build covers 4.6 square miles. For the sake of comparison, Denver International Airport is 53 square miles. Known as E1, this area lies within a territory that has a much older name: the Judean Desert. Might Jews think they have a legitimate historical claim to the Judean Desert? This question is rarely asked.

For Israeli military planners, E1’s strategic value is more germane than its history. Developing it would help in the defense of Jerusalem, and would connect Jerusalem to Maaleh Adumim, an Israeli town with a population of 40,000. Media reports note that both Israelis and Palestinians claim Jerusalem as their capital. Media reports often fail to note that right now both Jews and Arabs live in Jerusalem — for the most part peacefully, with both populations growing — while Hamas vows to forcibly expel every Jew from Jerusalem. Such threats of ethnic cleansing also do not trouble the EU much.

It has been widely reported that if Israel should build in E1, the possibility of a two-state solution would be shattered. The New York Times was among those reporting this but, to the paper’s credit, it later published a correction, stating that building in E1 actually “would not divide the West Bank in two,” nor would it cut off the West Bank cities Ramallah and Bethlehem from Jerusalem. Anyone looking at a map would see that.

People forget, or perhaps choose not to remember, that Israelis always have been willing to give up land for peace, including land acquired in defensive wars. Historically, that has not been a common practice, for a very sound reason: Aggression can be deterred only if it carries substantial risk. Nevertheless, Israelis gave up Gaza and the Sinai, and have offered to give up more land — at least 97 percent of the West Bank, retaining only those areas absolutely necessary for national security.

Israelis do want something in exchange: an end to the long conflict they have been fighting against those who insist that the Jewish people, uniquely, has no right to self-determination, no right to independence, no right to self-rule within their ancient and ancestral homeland.

What Israelis have received instead: missile and terrorist attacks and, last week, Hamas leader Khaled Mashaal at a rally in Gaza proclaiming that “jihad,” armed struggle, will continue until Israel is defeated, conquered, and replaced — every square mile — by an Islamist theocracy.

“Since Palestine is ours, and it is the land of the Arabs and Islam,” he said, “it is unthinkable that we would recognize the legitimacy of the Israeli occupation of it. . . . Let me emphasize that we adhere to this fundamental principle: We do not recognize Israel . . . The Palestinian resistance will crush it and sweep it away, be it Allah’s will.” He added: “We will free Jerusalem inch by inch, stone by stone. Israel has no right to be in Jerusalem.”

Within the EU there was a debate about whether to comment on that. Eventually, pressure from Germany and the Czech Republic led the EU to issue a mild rebuke to Hamas — a single paragraph in a three-page statement focusing on Israel’s “dismaying” behavior.

Mahmoud Abbas, regarded as a moderate Palestinian leader, could not bring himself to call Mashaal’s latest threats wrong — or even unhelpful. Instead, Azzam Alahmed, a senior official in Abbas’s Fatah organization, described Mashaal’s speech as “very positive,” because it stressed the need for reconciliation between Hamas and Fatah. Such reconciliation would be achieved not by Hamas softening its positions, but by Fatah more explicitly agreeing that Israel’s extermination — rather than a two-state solution — remains the Palestinian goal, the final solution, if you will.

Just after the conclusion of the truce halting the most recent Hamas/Israel battle, Abbas went to the U.N. General Assembly to request that Palestine be recognized as a “non-member state.” The outcome was never in doubt — the UNGA, which cannot with a straight face be described as a deliberative body, has a reflexively anti-Israeli majority. Abbas’s action was a blatant violation of the Oslo Accords, under which any change in the Palestinians’ status is to come about only through negotiations with Israel.

New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman laments that “the Europeans in general, and the European left in particular, have so little influence” in Israel. He is puzzled as to why that is. He insists that “it’s incumbent on every Israeli leader to test, test and test again — using every ounce of Israeli creativity — to see if Israel can find a Palestinian partner for a secure peace.” Only by so doing, he adds, can Israel “have the moral high ground in a permanent struggle.”

If “creative” Israelis were to find such a partner, would Friedman be able to arrange a life-insurance policy for him? And between those threatening their neighbors with genocide — which is, indisputably, what Hamas is doing — and those offering to negotiate peace with their neighbors — which is what Israel is doing — can there really be ambiguity about who holds the moral high ground?

Evidently, there can — at least for Friedman and the EU and, I’m afraid, lots of other folks around the world. Israelis, and their few friends, may just have to learn to live with that as best they can.

SOURCE

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Liberal Obsession With Race is Growing Old

Anything that will feed their hate they love  -- even if it means they have to live in the past  -- JR

Jonah Goldberg

When will liberals stop living in the past? Specifically, when will they accept that they aren't all that stands between a wonderful, tolerant America and Jim Crow?

I was in the room when, during the Democratic convention, civil rights hero John Lewis suggested that Republicans wanted to "go back" to the days when black men like him could be beaten in the street by the enforcers of Jim Crow. I thought it an outrageous and disgusting bit of demagoguery. The audience of Democratic delegates cheered in a riot of self-congratulation.

It's bizarre. I spend most of my time talking or listening to fellow conservatives, and I never hear anybody talk about wanting anything of the sort. But to listen to liberals, that's all we care about.

Toward the end of the presidential campaign, various liberal pundits -- a great many of them born after the signing of the Civil Rights Act -- thought it a brilliant and damning indictment to note that Mitt Romney ran strong in states that once comprised the Confederacy. When Barack Obama won, Jon Stewart conceded that at least Romney won "most of the Confederacy."

These states committed the obvious sin of voting Republican while the president was black.

Just this week, in an essay for the New York Times, Adolph Reed attacked South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley -- the first female Indian American governor in America -- for appointing Rep. Tim Scott to retiring Sen. Jim DeMint's seat. Scott is a black man and a conservative Tea Party favorite.

So obviously, this is a very clever ploy to restore Jim Crow.

"Just as white Southern Democrats once used cynical manipulations -- poll taxes, grandfather clauses, literacy tests -- to get around the 15th Amendment," Reed writes, "so modern-day Republicans have deployed blacks to undermine black interests."

That's it exactly. Indeed, that's what the Tea Party was always about: undermining black interests.

When Herman Cain -- another inconveniently black man -- was the overwhelming preference among Tea Party activists for the Republican presidential nomination, a historian writing in The New York Times suggested that Cain could be seen as proof the legacy of the Ku Klux Klan lives on.

You know you've been pounding a square peg into a round hole for too long when you find yourself insinuating that a black man from Georgia represents the KKK tradition in contemporary politics.

More recently, liberal writers apparently convinced themselves that Republican opposition to Susan Rice becoming the next secretary of state was payback for the Emancipation or something.

"Angry over the reelection of the nation's first black president," vented a writer for The American Prospect, "a handful of old white senators -- one of whom hails from the cradle of the Confederacy -- launch hysterical and dishonest attacks on ... a well-qualified African American woman."

The Washington Post editorial board connected the dots, too, finding it important to note that of the Republican legislators expressing their reservations about Rice, "nearly half are from states of the former Confederacy."

Of course, the same racist representatives of Dixie also thought it fine to confirm Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice for the same job.

It's like a metastasizing cancer of delusion. Jim Sleeper, a lecturer at Yale and once a relatively sober-minded liberal writer, insists that opposition to gun control has something to do with the segregationist mind-set. Or something.

To watch MSNBC is to think the hosts see themselves as the official newsletter of the Underground Railroad.

Sure, there are racists in the Republican Party. (There are some in the Democratic Party, too.) And if you define racism as disagreeing with the Congressional Black Caucus or Barack Obama, the GOP is racist to the bone.

But the inconvenient truth is that conservatives are not only not racist, they aren't a fraction as obsessed with race as liberals are.

Of course, that lack of obsession is no doubt itself proof of conservative racism. And why shouldn't it be? Everything else is.

SOURCE

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ELSEWHERE

Schools claim “major victory” after contraception mandate ruling:  "Two religious-affiliated colleges claimed a 'major victory' Tuesday after a federal appeals court ordered the Obama administration to verify that it is revising the so-called contraception mandate in ObamaCare. The decision out of the D.C. Court of Appeals effectively reinstated a challenge that had been dismissed by lower courts. Wheaton College and Belmont Abbey College were arguing against the federal healthcare overhaul rule that requires employers to provide access to contraceptive care. The Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, which has represented several plaintiffs challenging the rule, hailed the court decision."

SPLC attacks dangerous extremists:  "The Southern Poverty Law Center, the thought-control outfit by which millionaire Morris Dees terrifies old ladies into sending him their Social Security checks, is an important arm of the regime. Its targets often include quite despicable people, but just as often seem to include normal Americans whose views happen to fall outside the three-by-five card of acceptable opinion as defined by the New York Times. ... This time the target is anarcho-capitalists, who are evidently on the verge of taking over this here country, and who hold the dangerous view that no one should initiate violence against anyone else."

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For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC,  AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, EYE ON BRITAIN and Paralipomena .  GUN WATCH is now put together by Dean Weingarten.

List of backup or "mirror" sites here or  here -- for when blogspot is "down" or failing to  update.  Email me  here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or  here (Pictorial) or  here  (Personal)

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The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist.  It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day.  It was only to the Right of  Stalin's Communism.  The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist" (Nationalsozialist) and the full name of Hitler's political party (translated) was "The National Socialist German Workers' Party" (In German: Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei)

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Socialism:  Lubos Motl, a young Czech astrophysicist, nails it

Today, the Japanese voters ended a ludicrous 3-year-long experiment with the left-wing politicians at the top that began in 2009, after decades of right-wing governments that were able to rebuild Japan after the loss in the world war and bring its economy to the #2 spot.

Shinzo Abe of the LDP will return to the chair of the prime minister; the DPJ socialists have lost approximately 3/4 of their seats gained in 2009. The voters realized that the leftists emit lots of big words and promises but they're just dirty lies. Of course, the leftists faced some event they couldn't quite have influenced – e.g. the tsunami or the fact that China surpassed Japan as the world's #2 economy (probably a coincidence) but it's clear they were bringing nothing good to the country.

Meanwhile, France has a left-wing government that codified a breathtaking 75 percent tax rate for the rich that should come into force in 2 weeks. Now, would you be pleased to work hard and pay 75 percent of your income to a group of dirty gangsters who call themselves the government? If you would, you are a psychopath; it's a kind of a psychiatric disorder that many other people may support you in having – for various not too mysterious reasons – but that doesn't change anything about the fact that you're profoundly sick. ;-)

Needless to say, there are many mentally healthy people among the wealthy Frenchmen. And you have heard their names. Many famous people moved out of France. They include Asterix and Obelix. The first one, Gerard Depardieu, moved to a Belgian town right behind the borders where he pays no taxes designed for the rich. The latter, Christian Clavier, moved to London.

Karl Lagerfeld, the German creative director of French Chanel, has informed Mr Hollande that he (Hollande) was an idiot. It's clearly not a terribly original insight but it may still be important for Mr Hollande to memorize it at this stage. Alain Delon is leaving the country to become a resident elsewhere, too. The same is true about Johnny Hallyday, a singer. Well, that's quite a brain drain, or clown drain or whatever is the appropriate term. ;-)

All of us understand what's going on and we don't have to use too strong words. On the other hand, it's still interesting to ask whether these transfers are too different from what we have known as emigration in the socialist bloc. Hundreds of thousands of Czechoslovaks have escaped the communist country since the coup since 1948 – for reasons that were always a mixture of political ones and economic ones. Of course, their separation from the homeland was "more irreversible" – although it turned out to be reversible in many cases, after all – than it is in the case of the French actors who may still visit France.

However, the "motivation side" of their decision isn't too different. France is currently led by imbeciles representing jealous losers who either don't have a clue how wealth is produced or they have a clue but they dream about "maliciously screwing the rich", anyway. They either don't understand that the policies will chase a part of the elite out of country and reduce the investment and production in the country (including the birth of culture) in general; or they don't mind. I don't know which of those is more typical and which of them is more justifiable and I don't really care; it wouldn't change my verdict on these individuals (or, more precisely, mobs; I mean those that brought Hollande to the power) much.

The Depardieu case is the most interactive one. He has upped the ante in his battle when he threatened (or announced?) to return the French passport. This is really getting closer to the stories of the emigrants from the communist bloc. He has offered his explanation through the media. He says that he has worked hard as a printer before he became an actor. He always paid all his taxes, fulfilled all duties, loved the French nation, but now he's so insulted that there are no doubts about his next steps.

In 2012, he paid a 85% tax on his income. Whatever he exactly counts, it is just insane. In the last 45 years, he has paid 145 million in taxes. Wow. Now, he's going to be a true European, free cosmopolitan citizen.

The prime minister of France has called Depardieu "pathetic" and "unpatriotic" because, the prime minister believes, "to pay taxes is a patriotic act". Holy cow, please give me a break with these pathetic pomposities; paying taxes is always just a necessary, enforced evil, not a reason to celebrate; and a government forcing citizens to do obviously unpleasant things and hide their unhappiness at the same moment is intrinsically an authoritarian government. At Harvard, I was paying at most 25% which is much less than 75% but it did make me somewhat angry about the organized thieves at the IRS and Mass DOR, anyway (especially because of the combination with the insane bureaucracy and permanent retroactive harassment linked to previous returns).

Depardieu vows to remain polite but asks the prime minister: Who are you? I join Mr Depardieu. Who is the French prime minister? I have never written down his name (because I don't remember what it is, even though I could have been looking at it just 10 seconds ago) and I wouldn't recognize his face. I can recognize Mr Depardieu but not the current French prime minister.

Could the French prime minister please fully exploit the opportunity to shut his arrogant socialist mouth up (or down, whatever is more appropriate)? And to adjust his behavior according to his being the ultimate embarrassing socialist zero that the prime minister undoubtedly is? He hasn't contributed 1% of the things (or paid 1% of the taxes) to France or the world that Mr Depardieu has. Still, he seems to believe that he has not only the right to steal most of the income from Mr Depardieu but even to be unbelievably arrogant towards Mr Depardieu.

The prime minister's behavior is what many people have called the "arrogance of power". It may sound a bit intimidating when the prime minister of the country where you live calls you "pathetic" just because you don't want to do something that no sane person would want to do – to pay 75% taxes.

SOURCE

Lubos doesn't like global warming much, either

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Race politics fails ordinary blacks

By WALTER E. WILLIAMS

JoAnn Watson, Detroit city council member, said, "Our people in an overwhelming way supported the re-election of this president, and there ought to be a quid pro quo." In other words, President Obama should send the nearly bankrupted city of Detroit millions in taxpayer bailout money. But there's a painful lesson to be learned from decades of political hustling and counsel by intellectuals and urban experts.

In 1960, Detroit's population was 1.6 million. Blacks were 29 percent, and whites were 70 percent. Today, Detroit's population has fallen precipitously to 707,000, of which blacks are 84 percent and whites 8 percent. Much of the city's decline began with the election of Coleman Young, Detroit's first black mayor and mayor for five terms, who engaged in political favoritism to blacks and tax policies against higher income, mostly white people. Young's successors, Dennis Archer and Kwame Kilpatrick, followed his Third World tyrant policies, but neither had his verbal vulgarity. Kilpatrick (2002-2008) went to jail and is on trial today on charges of corruption. Mayor David Bing is making an effort to revive Detroit. His problem is that he's not God.

Policies that ran whites and other more affluent people out of Detroit might have been Young's and his successors' strategy. After all, why not get rid of people who aren't going to vote for you anyway? The problem is that getting rid of these people left Detroit with a lower tax base, fewer jobs and fewer consumers. Fewer whites might be good for the careers of black politicians, but it's not in the best interests of ordinary blacks. Blacks have political control of Detroit, but the relevant question is whether some control of something is better than 100 percent control of nothing. By most measures, Detroit is one of the nation's most tragic cities, and it's mostly self-imposed.

Detroit topped Forbes magazine's 2010 list of America's Most Dangerous Cities. That year there were 345 homicides, but that's going to be topped with this year's 365 homicides so far. Most homicide victims in Detroit and elsewhere are black, and 95 percent of the time their murderers are black. But far more important to black leaders and white liberals than blacks murdering blacks are charges of police misconduct and racial profiling.

Detroit's predominantly black public schools are close to being the worst in the nation, perhaps with the exception of those of Washington, D.C. Only 4 percent of Detroit's eighth-graders scored proficient or above on the most recent National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP) test, sometimes called "The Nation's Report Card." Thirty-six percent scored basic, and 57 percent below basic. "Below basic" is when a student is unable to demonstrate even partial mastery of knowledge and skills fundamental for proficient work at their grade level. "Basic" indicates only partial mastery.

Unbeknownst to most black parents is the fact that most black students who manage to graduate from high school cannot read and compute any better than whites four years younger and still in junior high school. Here's a question for you: If we put a group of 100 students of any race having an eighth-grade level of proficiency and another group of 100 students of any race with a 12th-grade level of proficiency in college, is it reasonable to expect the first group to perform as well as the second? On top of that, is it reasonable to expect a student of any race to be able to make up 12 years of fraudulent K-12 education in the space of four or five years of college?

Detroit's social pathology is seen in other cities with large black populations such as Philadelphia, Newark, Baltimore and Chicago.

These are cities where blacks have for years dominated the political machinery in the forms of mayors, police chiefs, superintendents of schools and city councilmen, plus they've been Democrats. It's safe to conclude that the focus on political power doesn't do much for ordinary blacks.

SOURCE

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Implement the Balcerowicz Plan

 From 1989 through 1992, I had the good fortune of visiting Poland to see firsthand the rapid economic transformation the country was going through in the post-Soviet era.

Just a few hundred yards away from the Parliament, near the corner of Wiejska and Boleslawa Prusa, one could observe free market forces asserting themselves over time. The first year, the economy had completely collapsed amid crushing inflation.

Nonetheless, on that street corner I found a prototypical Polish butcher with little more than a tree stump and a cleaver, cutting the meat and selling it from the back of a dirty truck, perhaps for the first time in his life. In the Soviet days, this man might have found himself being shipped to a gulag in Siberia, but now, he was a small businessman and free to engage in commerce without fear of penalty.

This was the beginning of free enterprise in Poland. The man was happy, of course, as human nature was once again reasserting itself — that innate desire to provide for oneself and one’s family without any need for direction from a central authority.

Within three years, the tree stump had been converted into a full-range butcher shop, funded by French investors, selling every type of meat imaginable. The speed of this transformation was astounding. Each subsequent year I visited, it was akin to observing a time series of photographs detailing the progress that was being made economically in the former Soviet bloc.

It has been about twenty years since I last visited Warsaw. I have no way of knowing if the butcher shop is still there today, but what I saw was just a microcosm of what was taking place nationally.

In fact, there was a very good reason for the rapid economic miracle that took place in Poland following the fall of the Soviet Union.

Leszek Balcerowicz was that reason.

Throughout his term as deputy prime minister and finance minister from 1989 to 1991, Balcerowicz rapidly administered a wide ranging economic reform package that transformed Poland almost overnight from a communist dystopia into a relatively free market economy.

In the years that followed, Poland economically outperformed other former Soviet satellites and even Russia with average 6.6 percent annual growth. Inflation was crushed.

Today, Poland has weathered the financial crisis and even the meltdown of the Eurozone without falling into recession.

Under his plan, Balcerowicz allowed the Polish zloty to float freely on currency markets. State-owned companies were dissolved — bringing an end to Soviet-style “too big to fail”. Price controls and subsidies were abolished. The Polish central bank was prohibited from monetizing government debt. State spending was cut substantially, and more than 1 million government workers were laid off. Arbitrary taxes were abolished in favor of more uniform laws.

In 1995, after his term was over, Poland expanded on the Balcerowicz reforms by reissuing the zloty via a 10,000 to 1 redenomination. This reduced the money supply drastically.

It is striking how these policies contrast so sharply with how the U.S. and other advanced economies have responded to the financial crisis in 2008. They are the exact opposite of what we have done here.

Today, spending increases every year, the debt increases more than 8 percent annually while the central bank prints money to finance it. Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and Sallie Mae — comprising the mortgage and higher education lending industries — have all been nationalized.

Too big to fail was institutionalized, first via 2008 and 2009’s ad-hoc bailouts from TARP and the Federal Reserve, and then through the Dodd-Frank legislation by creating permanent bailout authority for financial institutions.

The Fed under Ben Bernanke has drastically increased its balance sheet by $2 trillion since the crisis began in Aug. 2007, and now is promising an additional $1 trillion of quantitative easing every year perhaps for the rest of our lifetimes.

Why do two men, Bernanke and Balcerowicz look at a very similar problem — i.e. a national insolvency crisis — and come to such diametrically opposed conclusions about how to solve them?

I would contend that Balcerowicz is a patriot who was looking out for the Polish people foremost, putting the national interest first. Yes, the spending cuts and other reforms were painful at first, but they set a stable foundation and by 1992, robust economic growth had been restored.

In contrast, Bernanke has put the interests of financial institutions and their solvency first, ahead of the interests of the people, which are not always the same thing. This was the protection of the investor class, and banks, who were covered by government favors, meanwhile, nationwide more than 8 million people lost their jobs.

We can compare the results of both policies with hindsight. The fact is, even after a fantastic collapse of an entire society, a national bankruptcy where even the government had fallen, Poland recovered in V-shaped fashion. Former government workers eventually found jobs in the newly created private sector.

That is not something we can claim here, where the economy is only growing at about a 2 percent rate this year so far and 23 million people cannot find full-time work, with another 5 million having given up.

The bailouts are prolonging the process of deleveraging (i.e. debt repayment and default) by financial institutions. “The longer you practice these sorts of policies, the more difficult it is to exit it. Japan is trapped,” Balcerowicz observed in a recent interview with Matthew Kaminski in the Wall Street Journal, noting that they forestall necessary fiscal reforms and balance sheet repair in both the governmental and private sectors.

As a result, ever-greater “stimulus” from the Fed is a producing less and less economic growth, proving Balcerowicz’s approach to be the only rational course.

While the attention of our media and national politicians remains fixed on the small conversations between House Speaker John Boehner and the White House, perhaps our nation should be looking at the bigger approach that Poland took when faced with a far more serious fiscal cataclysm. Failure to do so now may make it impossible to achieve in the future, consigning our nation to the never-ending economic stall pattern that Japan finds itself in.

SOURCE

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For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC,  AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, EYE ON BRITAIN and Paralipomena .  GUN WATCH is now put together by Dean Weingarten.

List of backup or "mirror" sites here or  here -- for when blogspot is "down" or failing to  update.  Email me  here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or  here (Pictorial) or  here  (Personal)

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The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist.  It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day.  It was only to the Right of  Stalin's Communism.  The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist" (Nationalsozialist) and the full name of Hitler's political party (translated) was "The National Socialist German Workers' Party" (In German: Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei)

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IQ tests are 'meaningless and too simplistic' claim researchers

This appears to have been based on an internet survey and such surveys  are notorious for giving non-representative results.  A large sample size is no substitute for representativeness

The underlying controversy, however, is as old as the hills:  Should IQ be measured as a set of subscores or as one overall score?  Among psychometricians it is known as the Spearman/Thurstone controvery and dates back to the beginning of the last century.

The accepted answer is to present results both ways:  As one overall score plus a set of sub-scores.  Results can reasonably be represented both ways because the subscores are correlated.  Knowing a person's subscore on (say) verbal ability will give you a useful (but not of course perfect) prediction of his mathematical ability.  That has repeatedly been demonstrated.

The novelty in the report below is that the various sub-abilities were said to be NOT correlated  -- which runs contrary to 100 years of findings by others.  I note however that the authors are more cautious in the underlying journal article.  They say:  

Using simulations based on neuroimaging data, we show that the higher-order factor “g” is accounted for by cognitive tasks corecruiting multiple networks. Finally, we confirm the independence of these components of intelligence by dissociating them using questionnaire variables. We propose that intelligence is an emergent property of anatomically distinct cognitive systems, each of which has its own capacity.

That sounds to me as if they admit the existence of a general factor but find that the subfactors don't all use exactly  the same parts of the brain -- which should be no surprise to anyone.

There is also a question about how comprehensive were the test items used.  Without seeing all the questions, I get the impression  that a deliberate attempt was made to find questions that would not produce correlated results.  One can ask plenty of questions not conceptually related to intelligence and in that case intercorrelations are not be be expected.  In psychometrican's terms, the test would lack construct validity.

The journal article is "Fractionating Human Intelligence" by Hampshire et al.  I look forward to seeing a more detailed examination of the article by those who specialize in IQ studies

After conducting the largest ever study of intelligence, researchers have found that far from indicating how clever you are, IQ testing is actually rather ‘meaningless’.

In a bid to investigate the value of IQ, scientists asked more than 100,000 participants to complete 12 tests that required planning, reasoning, memory and attention.  They also filled in a survey on their background.

They discovered that far from being down to one single factor, what is commonly regarded as intelligence is influenced by three different elements - short-term memory, reasoning, and verbal ability.  But being good at one of these factors does not mean you are going to be equally gifted at the other two.

Scientists from Canada’s Western University in Ontario, also scanned some of the participants’ brains while they undertook the tests.

They found that different parts of the brain were activated when they were tested on each of the three factors.

Traditional IQ tests are ‘too simplistic’, according to the research, which found that what makes someone intelligent is too complex to boil down to a single exam.

IQ, which stands for Intelligence Quotient, is an attempt to measure how smart an individual is.  The average IQ is 100. Mensa, the high IQ society, only accepts individuals who score more than 148, putting them in the top two per cent of the population.

The new study, published in the journal Neuron, suggests that intelligence is too complex to be represented by a single number.

Study leader Dr Adrian Owen, a British neuroscientists based at Western University in Canada, said an ‘astonishing’ number of people had contributed to the research.

‘We expected a few hundred responses, but thousands and thousands of people took part, including people of all ages, cultures and creeds and from every corner of the world,’ he said.

‘When you take 100,000 people and tested their brain function, we couldn’t find any evidence for a single uniform concept of intelligence.

‘The best we could manage is get it down to three elements that contribute to intelligence. But they are completely different factors, unrelated to one another, and you could be brilliant at one and awful at another.  For example, the absent-minded professor.

‘IQ tests are pretty meaningless - if you are not good at them, all it proves is that you are not good at IQ tests.

'It does not say anything about your general intelligence.’ The majority of IQ tests were developed in the 50s and 60s when the way we thought and interacted with the world was different, said Dr Owen.

SOURCE

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Gun Owners are racists -- of course

When Leftist hate takes the place of thought we get the sort of intellectual garbage below ...

Jim Sleeper, a “lecturer in political science” at Yale, wrote the following in today’s Huffington Post:

    The astonishing “new normal” of heavy gunfire that took hold in Newtown long before last week’s massacre only reinforces the parallel I drew here last week between today’s gun enthusiasts and yesterday’s racial segregationists.....

    To understand what we’re up against here, understand that many other gun enthusiasts think of themselves this way, too — and that they see their critics as moralists addled by silly delusions about human nature. They alone uphold honor against depravity: Southern segregationists thought their way of life necessary to channel the violence at the bottom of all society toward a safer, more stable order, refined by codes of honor and masterful stewardship of Negroes wise enough to accept their place in it.

    Many white Americans outside the South accepted this reasoning’s death-grip on the Congress, where long-serving Southern senators chaired many committees. They dismissed as regrettable but necessary, and, someday perhaps surmountable, the ranters and ravers at the fringes of White Citizens Councils and among unruly poor whites at the fringes of town or in the hollows beyond, and among egregious and sometimes-embarrassing Klansmen at night and sheriffs at noon.

    The apologists considered themselves as innocent of all this hatred as today’s gun enthusiasts think themselves innocent of the gun lobby’s death-grip on the Congress and innocent of the depredations and confusions of Jared Loughner, George Zimmerman, Adam Lanza and the rest, not to mention of militias camping out in the hills.

This is what passes for thought among Yale lecturers today, is it? At least Sleeper’s disregard for constitutional originalism is comprehensive:

As we try to free the Second Amendment of interpretations and statutory encrustations as destructive as the Dred Scott and Plessy v. Ferguson decisions, we’ll also have to free First Amendment of jurisprudence that equates the speech of citizens with disembodied corporate marketing’s algorithmically driven desperation to glue our kids’ eyeballs and rewire their guts as it inundates them not with artists’ art, political actors’ appeals, or real reporters’ findings but with endless, empty titillation and intimidation for profit.

It’s something of a tactical mistake for Sleeper to include these Supreme Court cases in his article, because anybody who bothers to look up 1857′s Dred Scott v. Sandford decision will notice right away the court’s awful observation that if slaves were permitted to enjoy full citizenship rights, then they would — shock horror! — enjoy the right “to keep and carry arms wherever they went.” This, the court thought, would be disastrous.

The fear of blacks with guns is not, of course, new. The very first gun-control measures in American history were designed to keep arms out of the hands of blacks and Indians: The Massachusetts and Plymouth colonies both prohibited the sale of guns to Indians in the early seventeenth century, and the “Black Codes” of the mid-eighteenth century required French colonists in Louisiana to disarm and beat “any black carrying any potential weapon.” Many pre-Civil War state constitutions went further, reserving the right to bear arms — which was not, as Sleeper claims, understood as anything other than an individual right — to “freemen,” which, naturally, meant whites. After their damnable cause was lost, the KKK picked up and ran with disarmament as a way of keeping blacks down. As Adam Winkler hasobserved, “gun control” was “at the very top of its agenda.” The Democratic party’s “Black Codes,” which barred former slaves from owning guns in the (segregated) post-bellum South, were passed for the same purpose.

It is no accident that the first draft of the 1871 Anti-Klan Act contained a provision that made it a federal crime to “deprive any citizen of the United States of any arms or weapons he may have in his house or possession for the defense of his person, family, or property,” for that was exactly what segregationists set out to do. Robert Franklin Williams’s classic work, Negroes with Guns, tells a tale of the KKK’s systematic attempt to disarm black Americans — and of the National Rifle Association’s work in forming a counter-group called the “Black Armed Guard” — as late as the as the 1950s. As Williams points out, it was guns in the hands of his family that saved their lives and allowed them — literally — to fight the KKK and their allies.

Sleeper’s thinking is arse over elbow. It is gun controllers who have historically been analogous to segregationists, and gun owners and defenders of the Second Amendment that have been the enemy of institutionalized racism and segregation — not the other way about. The very purpose of slaveowners and segregationists was to deprive a whole class of people of their unalienable liberties; the very purpose of the NRA is to ensure that all maintain their access to them. Even as recently as 1968, as the anti-gun Robert Sherrill admitted in his book, The Saturday Night Special, gun control measures were a thinly veiled attempt to disarm black people: “The Gun Control Act of 1968 was passed not to control guns to but control blacks, and inasmuch as a majority of Congress did not want to do the former but were ashamed to show that their goal was the latter, the result was that they did neither. Indeed, this law, the first gun-control law passed by Congress in thirty years, was one of the grand jokes of our time.” Jim Sleeper’s profoundly illiterate essay shares the same honor.

SOURCE

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Good laws will never abolish all evil

by Jeff Jacoby

IT IS REMARKABLE how confident so many people are that they know what causes – and just how to prevent – horrific massacres like Friday's bloodbath at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut.

In a TV interview over the weekend, one observer insisted that the mass-murder in Newtown was all too predictable, given America's failure to implement an obvious and desperately overdue reform. "Should we be so surprised that schools would become a place of carnage?" this individual demanded, showing no hint of uncertainty about exactly what needs to be fixed.

Who was that?

Was it Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel, amplifying his call for Congress to take a "vote of conscience" and enact a nationwide assault-weapons ban? Or the Washington Post's Eugene Robinson, who excoriates "the National Rifle Association and other apologists for murder" for resisting more aggressive gun control?

Was it Connecticut's departing senator, Joe Lieberman, resurrecting his longtime warning that the brutality that pervades American entertainment "does cause vulnerable young men to be more violent"? Or presidential adviser David Axelrod, enlarging on a plea he posted on Twitter: "All for curbing weapons of war. But shouldn't we also quit marketing murder as a game?"

Was it Liza Long, whose blog post about her son's psychiatric problems -- "I Am Adam Lanza's Mother" -- went viral, leading to an appearance on NBC in which she argued that the way to deal with mass shootings is to deal with madness of potential perpetrators: "It's easy to talk about guns but it's time to talk about mental illness."

Was it former Education Secretary Bill Bennett, who contended on Sunday that the most effective means to prevent Newtown-style bloodbaths might be to ensure that school employees are armed? Was it Larry Pratt, head of the 300,000-member Gun Owners of America, decrying gun-free zones as a "lethal insanity" that gives homicidal gunmen an unconscionable advantage over their victims?

In reality, it was former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee, who asserted within hours of the atrocity in Newtown that 26 innocent souls perished because "we've systematically removed God from our schools." If only Americans would let God in "on the front end," said Huckabee, schools ravaged by murder wouldn't need Him so often "on the back end."

It was a graceless thing to say, and Huckabee was rightly criticized for rushing to exploit a ghastly horror in order to promote his particular agenda. But Huckabee was far from the only offender. In the wake of Newtown there was no end of sanctimony from politicians and pundits who declared not just that America must do something to avert such terrible killings, but that they know precisely what that something is: More gun control. Less gun control. Better screening for mental illness. Restoration of school prayer. No media publicity for mass killers. A crackdown on hyperviolent video games. Armed guards at schools.

How can such terrible evil be thwarted? The desperate need for answers – better yet, for an answer – is always palpable after a Newtown, an Aurora, a Columbine. That urge to turn back cruelty, to find effective responses to anguish and pain, is so intensely human. The yearning for an end to suffering runs deep in our species, and at its best has been a powerful force for justice and progress. "We can't tolerate this anymore," President Obama said in Connecticut on Sunday. "These tragedies must end." At the level of heart and gut, who doesn't share that feeling?

But tragedy will always be part of the human condition. Some evils we can never hope to eliminate – not even with the best will in the world. No regulation or reform can undo all homicidal insanity. Still less can legislation guarantee universal integrity and decent character. It will always take more than law and politics to make men and women kind, honest, and moral.

None of the nostrums prescribed after this year's shooting rampages in Connecticut and Colorado would guarantee that nothing like them will ever recur. Stringent gun laws haven't prevented frightful massacres of students in Norway, Germany, and the United Kingdom. There were mass killings in America long before there were video games – and long before the Supreme Court ruled prayer in public school unconstitutional.

Nightmares like the one in Newtown are rare. Yet a free society cannot make them absolutely impossible and still remain free. Good laws can do a lot, but they will never abolish all human evil.

SOURCE

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Your Cellphone Is Spying on You

How the surveillance state co-opted personal technology

Big Brother has been outsourced. The police can find out where you are, where you’ve been, even where you’re going. All thanks to that handy little human tracking device in your pocket: your cellphone.

There are 331 million cellphone subscriptions—about 20 million more than there are residents—in the United States. Nearly 90 percent of adult Americans carry at least one phone. The phones communicate via a nationwide network of nearly 300,000 cell towers and 600,000 micro sites, which perform the same function as towers. When they are turned on, they ping these nodes once every seven seconds or so, registering their locations, usually within a radius of 150 feet. By 2018 new Federal Communications Commission regulations will require that cellphone location information be even more precise: within 50 feet. Newer cellphones also are equipped with GPS technology, which uses satellites to locate the user more precisely than tower signals can. Cellphone companies retain location data for at least a year. AT&T has information going all the way back to 2008.

Police have not been shy about taking advantage of these data. According to the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), U.S. law enforcement agencies made 1.5 million requests for user data from cellphone companies in 2011. And under current interpretations of the law, you will never find out if they were targeting you.

In fact, police no longer even have to go to the trouble of seeking information from your cell carrier. Law enforcement is more and more deploying International Mobile Subscriber Identity locators that masquerade as cell towers and enable government agents to suck down data from thousands of subscribers as they hunt for an individual’s cell signal. This “Stingray” technology can detect and precisely triangulate cellphone signals with an accuracy of up to 6 feet—even inside your house or office where warrants have been traditionally required for a legal police search.

Law enforcement agencies prefer not to talk about cellphone tracking. “Never disclose to the media these techniques—especially cell tower tracking,” advises a guide for the Irvine, California, police department unearthed by the ACLU in 2012.

More HERE

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For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC,  AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, EYE ON BRITAIN and Paralipomena .  GUN WATCH is now put together by Dean Weingarten.

List of backup or "mirror" sites here or  here -- for when blogspot is "down" or failing to  update.  Email me  here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or  here (Pictorial) or  here  (Personal)

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The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist.  It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day.  It was only to the Right of  Stalin's Communism.  The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist" (Nationalsozialist) and the full name of Hitler's political party (translated) was "The National Socialist German Workers' Party" (In German: Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei)

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Black Nazis go too far this time

Redskins quarterback Robert Griffin III (RGIII, as he is known) has a problem. It turns out that some black commentators, and probably some black elites, don’t think he is black enough — because he dared to publicly state that he didn’t want to be judged solely by his skin color as an NFL quarterback.

Last Thursday morning on First Take, ESPN’s Rob Parker uttered a comment for which he was later fired, although he probably only said what some African Americans think but don’t publicly express: “My question is, and it’s just a straight, honest question: Is he a brother, or is he a cornball brother?”

I’d never heard the term before, so I did a quick search and landed at UrbanDictionary.com. Here is the definition I found there:  "Cornball brother: An African-American man who chooses not to follow the stereotype . . . life choices include marrying white women, being a Republican, and not being ‘down with the cause.’"

UrbanDictionary also lists “corn dog brother” as a related term and gives this example in its definition:  "Leroy is a Republican who listens to country music, enjoys golfing on weekends, and drives [an] eco-friendly car. He is a corn dog brother."

I love it when I get an example with my definitions!

Little did Parker know, he was performing a public service by reminding the country of the interesting concept of the not-black-enough brother.  And you wonder why there are not more black Republicans?

Things got more interesting as Parker continued his riff.

“He’s black, he does his thing, but he’s not really down with the cause,” Parker continued. “He’s not one of us. He’s kind of black, but he’s not really like the kind of guy you really want to hang out with.” Parker admitted that he needed to learn more about Griffin’s personal life before he could accept him as authentically black. “I just want to find out about him,” he said.

It could be a comedy routine on Saturday Night Live — the notion of a black man standing before some kind of Blackness Panel to determine if he’s black enough. What would be the qualifications? Who would the questioners be, and what would they ask? How would the scoring work, and would there be a talent requirement? Singing and dancing, possibly? And an oath of black allegiance at the end?

A comedy routine is exactly what this should be. But it is a reality that black people face, although I hope it affects only a thin minority of African-American commentators and elites.

But there are those words on UrbanDictionary.com, those made-up, ugly words.

 “I don’t know because I keep hearing these things,” Parker explained. “We all know he has a white fiancée.”

There you have it! Exhibit A for expulsion from the Blackness Club. What kind of authentic black man falls in love with a white woman?

“Then there was all this talk about he’s a Republican,” Parker continued. “There’s no information at all [about that].”

He is marrying a white woman, and he might be a Republican? That’s automatic disbarment from the Blackness Club. And a lifetime pass to the Cornball Brother Hall of Fame.

Parker finished his rant with this observation about another not-so-black black man: “Because we did find out with Tiger Woods, Tiger Woods was like, ‘I’ve got black skin, but don’t call me black.’ So people got to wondering about Tiger Woods.”

Didn’t white people used to get in big trouble for this kind of backwards, exclusionary thinking?
It isn’t just athletes who face this scrutiny. And it’s not just from black sportscasters. President Obama faced it, too.

In a column called “Colorblind,” in September of 2007, Debra Dickerson, the popular African-American columnist for Salon, explained to her large following why she had waited so long to write about then-candidate Obama. At the time, if you remember, the battle was between two firsts: the first major-party female presidential nominee and the first African-American presidential nominee.

“Which brings me to the main reason I delayed writing about Obama,” Dickerson wrote. “For me, it was a trick question in a game I refused to play. Since the issue was always framed as a battle between gender and race, I didn’t have the heart (or the stomach) to point out the obvious: Obama isn’t black.”

There goes that historic win for racial equality in 2008! Dickerson thinks there should be an asterisk in the record books next to Obama’s title as the first black president — because he has white blood.

Wasn’t it white racists — along with eugenicists — who deployed the “single drop” rule to perpetuate their worldview?

Colin Powell, too, came under fire for being inauthentically black. Powell had the temerity to accept a position working for President George W. Bush as America’s first African-American secretary of state. Harry Belafonte lead the charge against Powell on Ted Leitner’s popular San Diego talk show, in 2002:

There is an old saying, in the days of slavery. There were those slaves who lived on the plantation, and there were those slaves who lived in the house. You got the privilege of living in the house if you served the master, do exactly the way the master intended to have you serve him. That gave you privilege. Colin Powell is committed to come into the house of the master, as long as he would serve the master, according to the master’s purpose.

And you thought the Taliban was tough? These race brownshirts show little tolerance for people who don’t meet their code of blackness, and even less for intellectual disobedience. Their law is simple: Kiss the ring, and behave and believe as we tell you, or face excommunication from the race.

Belafonte had similar unkind words for Condoleezza Rice, who responded with a simple and strong statement: “I don’t need Harry Belafonte to tell me what it means to be black.”

Poor Condi. She was thrown out of the brotherhood and sisterhood for the role she played in a Republican administration.

And then there was Bill Cosby.

It was the NAACP’s 50th-anniversary celebration of Brown v. Board of Education, in 2004, and Cosby had the audacity to talk about some of the serious challenges facing African Americans, particularly in America’s inner cities.

“Brown versus the Board of Education is no longer the white person’s problem,” he said. “We’ve got to take the neighborhood back. We’ve got to go in there. Just forget telling your child to go to the Peace Corps. It’s right around the corner.”

Not exactly fighting words, you’d think. Cosby then addressed the problems confronting black Americans: senseless black-on-black crime in America, failing public schools that so poorly serve young black men, and a dysfunctional welfare state.

“There’s no English being spoken, and they’re walking and they’re angry,” he said. “Oh, God, they’re angry and they have pistols and they shoot and they do stupid things. And after they kill somebody, they don’t have a plan. Just murder somebody. Boom. Over what? A pizza?”

He went on to talk about the problem of illegitimacy as it affects black America:

Five or six different children, same woman, eight, ten different husbands or whatever, pretty soon you’re going to have to have DNA cards so you can tell who you’re making love to. You don’t know who this is. It might be your grandmother. I’m telling you, they’re young enough. Hey, you have a baby when you’re twelve. Your baby turns 13 and has a baby, how old are you? Huh? Grandmother.

He closed out the speech with some words about the legacy of all of those who fought the civil-rights battles of the 1960s: “I just want to get you as angry as you ought to be. When you walk around the neighborhood and you see this stuff, that stuff’s not funny. These people are not funny anymore. And that’s not [my] brother. And that’s not my sister.”

You would have thought Cosby would be celebrated for the speech, and for the courage it took to make it on such a big night.
But no. Out came the Blackness Panel’s chief enforcement agent. In a New York minute — or a Philadelphia nanosecond — University of Pennsylvania professor Michael Eric Dyson challenged not only Bill Cosby’s comments, but Bill Cosby’s black bona fides.

“All who have made it need not have ‘Afroamnesia,’” Dyson told a University of Michigan audience, referring to successful blacks such as Cosby who forget where they come from. Dyson described the subsequent speeches Cosby made in defense of his original speech as Cosby’s “Blame-the-Poor Tour.”

Dyson even managed to mock Cosby’s successful TV series for not being black enough. It pandered to whites, he said, because the show was about an intact black family — father and mother together — living a traditional, upper-middle-class life.

How utterly unblack!

Dyson wrote the book Is Bill Cosby Right? to offer a counterpoint to Cosby’s speech. In it, he attacked Cosby’s character — and his heart.

“No matter how you judge Cosby’s comments, you can’t help but believe that a great deal of his consternation with the poor stems from his desire to remove the shame he feels in their presence and about their activity in the world,” he wrote. “There’s nothing like a formerly poor black multimillionaire bashing poor blacks to lend credence to the ancient assaults they’ve endured from the dominant culture.”

Like Cosby, Tiger, Barack, Condi, and Colin, RGIII will hear more challenges to his blackness in years to come. Luckily, he has his priorities lined up. When recently asked by a sports reporter what his biggest fear was about coming to Washington, D.C., to be an NFL quarterback, RGIII had a simple answer: “You try not to fear too many things. I fear God.”

After receiving an outpouring of support from African Americans all over the country, and white Americans as well, RGIII had this to say to his fans on Twitter about the whole ESPN incident: “I’m thankful for a lot of things in life, and one of those things is your support. Thank You.”

Pure class. He never bothered to dignify the claims of his critic, whose shrill commentary is a reflection not of Griffin’s blackness, but of Parker’s refusal to respect the rich diversity of his own people and the choices they make.

Blackness enforcers such as Parker are the ones fixated on race as America lurches forward to a truly post-racial society, one in which black people fall in love with white people and get married and few people care.

Just the racists — white and black alike.

SOURCE

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When "Forwards" is backwards

Thomas Sowell knows his history.  He could also have mentioned that "Vorwärts" (Forwards) was the song of the Hitler Youth.  See and hear the whole terrible deception below



The political slogan “Forward” served Barack Obama well during this year’s election campaign. It said that he was for going forward, while Republicans were for “going back to the failed policies that got us into this mess in the first place.”

It was great political rhetoric and great political theater. Moreover, the Republicans did virtually nothing to challenge its shaky assumptions, though a few hard facts could have made those assumptions collapse like a house of cards.

More is involved than this year’s political battles. The word “forward” has been a political battle cry on the left for more than a century. It has been almost as widely used as the Left’s other favorite word, “equality,” which goes back more than two centuries.

The seductive notion of economic equality has appealed to many people. The pilgrims started out with the idea of equal sharing. The colony of Georgia began with very similar ideas. In the Midwest, Britain’s Robert Owen — who coined the term “socialism” — set up colonies based on communal living and economic equality.

What these idealistic experiments all had in common was that they failed.

They learned the hard way that people would not do as much for the common good as they would do for their own good. The Pilgrims nearly starved learning that lesson. But they learned it. Land that had been common property was turned into private property, which produced a lot more food.

Similar experiments were tried on a larger scale in other countries around the world. In the biggest of these experiments — the Soviet Union under Stalin and Communist China under Mao — people literally starved to death by the millions.

In the Soviet Union, at least six million people starved to death in the 1930s, in a country with some of the most fertile land on the continent of Europe, a country that had once been a major exporter of food. In China, tens of millions of people starved to death under Mao.

Despite what the Left seems to believe, private-property rights do not exist simply for the sake of people who own property. Americans who do not own a single acre of land have abundant food available because land is still private property in the United States, even though the Left is doing its best to restrict property rights in both the countryside and in the cities.

The other big feature of the egalitarian Left is promotion of a huge inequality of power, while deploring economic inequality.

It is no coincidence that those who are going ballistic over the economic inequality between the top 1 or 2 percent and the rest of us are promoting a far more dangerous concentration of political power in Washington — where far less than 1 percent of the population increasingly tells 300 million Americans what they can and cannot do, on everything from their light bulbs and toilets to their medical care.

This movement in the direction of central planning, under the name of “forward,” is in fact going back to a system that has failed in countries around the world — under both democratic and dictatorial governments and among peoples of virtually every race, color, creed, and nationality.

It is one thing when conservative leaders like Ronald Reagan in America and Margaret Thatcher in Britain declared central planning a failure. But what really puts the nails in the coffin is that, before the end of the 20th century, both socialist and communist governments around the world began abandoning central planning.

India and China are the biggest examples. In both countries, cutbacks on government control of the economy were followed by dramatically increased economic-growth rates, lifting millions of people out of poverty in both countries.

The ultimate irony is that the most recent international survey of free markets found the world’s freest market to be in Hong Kong — in a country still ruled by Communists! But the Chinese Communists have at least learned, the hard way, a lesson that Barack Obama seems oblivious to.

We are going “forward” to a repeatedly failed past following a charismatic leader, after a 20th century in which charismatic leaders led countries into unprecedented catastrophes.

SOURCE

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For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC,  AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, EYE ON BRITAIN and Paralipomena .  GUN WATCH is now put together by Dean Weingarten.

List of backup or "mirror" sites here or  here -- for when blogspot is "down" or failing to  update.  Email me  here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or  here (Pictorial) or  here  (Personal)

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

The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist.  It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day.  It was only to the Right of  Stalin's Communism.  The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist" (Nationalsozialist) and the full name of Hitler's political party (translated) was "The National Socialist German Workers' Party" (In German: Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei)

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Invincible Ignorance

Thomas Sowell

Must every tragic mass shooting bring out the shrill ignorance of "gun control" advocates?

The key fallacy of so-called gun control laws is that such laws do not in fact control guns. They simply disarm law-abiding citizens, while people bent on violence find firearms readily available.

If gun control zealots had any respect for facts, they would have discovered this long ago, because there have been too many factual studies over the years to leave any serious doubt about gun control laws being not merely futile but counterproductive.

Places and times with the strongest gun control laws have often been places and times with high murder rates. Washington, D.C., is a classic example, but just one among many.

When it comes to the rate of gun ownership, that is higher in rural areas than in urban areas, but the murder rate is higher in urban areas. The rate of gun ownership is higher among whites than among blacks, but the murder rate is higher among blacks. For the country as a whole, hand gun ownership doubled in the late 20th century, while the murder rate went down.

The few counter-examples offered by gun control zealots do not stand up under scrutiny. Perhaps their strongest talking point is that Britain has stronger gun control laws than the United States and lower murder rates.

But, if you look back through history, you will find that Britain has had a lower murder rate than the United States for more than two centuries-- and, for most of that time, the British had no more stringent gun control laws than the United States. Indeed, neither country had stringent gun control for most of that time.

In the middle of the 20th century, you could buy a shotgun in London with no questions asked. New York, which at that time had had the stringent Sullivan Law restricting gun ownership since 1911, still had several times the gun murder rate of London, as well as several times the London murder rate with other weapons.

Neither guns nor gun control was not the reason for the difference in murder rates. People were the difference.

Yet many of the most zealous advocates of gun control laws, on both sides of the Atlantic, have also been advocates of leniency toward criminals.

In Britain, such people have been so successful that legal gun ownership has been reduced almost to the vanishing point, while even most convicted felons in Britain are not put behind bars. The crime rate, including the rate of crimes committed with guns, is far higher in Britain now than it was back in the days when there were few restrictions on Britons buying firearms.

In 1954, there were only a dozen armed robberies in London but, by the 1990s-- after decades of ever tightening gun ownership restrictions-- there were more than a hundred times as many armed robberies.

Gun control zealots' choice of Britain for comparison with the United States has been wholly tendentious, not only because it ignored the history of the two countries, but also because it ignored other countries with stronger gun control laws than the United States, such as Russia, Brazil and Mexico. All of these countries have higher murder rates than the United States.

You could compare other sets of countries and get similar results. Gun ownership has been three times as high in Switzerland as in Germany, but the Swiss have had lower murder rates. Other countries with high rates of gun ownership and low murder rates include Israel, New Zealand, and Finland.

Guns are not the problem. People are the problem-- including people who are determined to push gun control laws, either in ignorance of the facts or in defiance of the facts.

There is innocent ignorance and there is invincible, dogmatic and self-righteous ignorance. Every tragic mass shooting seems to bring out examples of both among gun control advocates.

Some years back, there was a professor whose advocacy of gun control led him to produce a "study" that became so discredited that he resigned from his university. This column predicted at the time that this discredited study would continue to be cited by gun control advocates. But I had no idea that this would happen the very next week in the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals.

SOURCE

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Bloomberg admits he doesn't know what guns do

New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who politicized the Sandy Hook tragedy within hours last Friday, just wrapped up a press conference announcing new plans to fight gun violence and to counter the National Rifle Association with his own Super PAC. Bloomberg was asked by a reporter to respond to Rep. Louie Gohmert's comments over the weekend that he wished the principal of the school, who died trying to take down shooter Adam Lanza, had a gun. Bloomberg responded by saying, "There are dumb statements and then there are stupid statements.....I don't know what the gun would have done."

With this logic, I'm sure Bloomberg feels the same way about his armed body guards; that the guns they carry to protect him "do nothing." If sane and trained people with guns are capable of "doing nothing," then why do police and security guards carry them? Why do thousands of people a year save their own lives or the lives of others protecting themselves with guns?

SOURCE

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Why Capitalism?

Allan Meltzer is an eminent professor of economics at Carnegie-Mellon University. He is a world-renowned U.S. Federal Reserve scholar, a 1973 founder and chairman of the Shadow Open Market Committee, and an American Economic Association Distinguished Fellow. What else could he possibly add to those laurels?

Meltzer has written Why Capitalism?

Meltzer answers that question with personal and scholarly reflections on capitalism—the one economic system that achieves both prosperity and individual freedom. While Meltzer celebrates such bounty, anyone expecting a polemic will surely be disappointed.

Meltzer gives himself a wide enough berth to assess capitalism across many cultures, countries, and mixed economies. To satisfy his definition, functioning capitalism more or less requires individual ownership of the means of production, property rights protection, and the rule of law. As Meltzer sees it, these basic features can be found in economies with both large and small public sectors, in countries with massive amounts of regulation, and in places where the necessary institutional building blocks are just beginning to form. In no way does he expect his definition to be satisfied perfectly in practice.

Of the many stars in the constellation of capitalist thinkers, Meltzer mentions Friedman and Hayek. Otherwise, his central foundational figure is Immanuel Kant. The book begins with Kant’s fundamental assertion about human nature: “Out of timber as crooked as that from which man is made, nothing entirely straight can be carved.” And Meltzer echoes this truth throughout Why Capitalism?

The point is simple and powerful: Imperfect human beings build institutions that undergird economic systems. Capitalism will include flaws, imperfections, corrupt practices, and wasted resources. And so will any other economic system. Capitalism’s saving grace, however, is found in decentralization of decision-making, in competition for resources, and in dynamic markets. Markets are filled with customers who create competitive forces that reduce the cost of error and the scope of corruption. The power of capitalism lies in the system’s unique ability to punish resource owners who make bad decisions, to reward those who create value, and to adapt to rapidly changing conditions. Capitalism disperses power while other systems concentrate power.

Because of these inherent traits, Meltzer views capitalism as the best of the imperfect systems fashioned from crooked timber. Unlike other systems, capitalist systems are adjusted and reformed by success and failure. Along these lines, we find Meltzer’s own famous quip: “Capitalism without failure is like religion without sin: It doesn’t work.”

Meltzer offers a good treatment of the empirical work relating to economic growth across countries as it relates to variations in economic freedom. He also pays a lot of attention to regulation and the unfortunate incentives that accompany collective efforts to steer markets or to correct perceived excesses. In this he offers his first and second laws of regulation: First, lawyers and bureaucrats regulate. Markets circumvent regulation. Second, regulations are static. Markets are dynamic. (There is plenty here to contemplate.)

One finds a number of remarkable sections in Meltzer’s little book. Two of these gems are his summary history of the U.S. monetary history—which draws, of course, on his own two-volume history—as well as his criticism of the newly-formed institutions that arose in the wake of the Great Recession. Meltzer tears into the notion that the Fed is independent of government by citing instances where presidents pressured and got their desired response from Fed officials. He tells fascinating stories of how, with the exception of the Volcker years, the flawed logic of the Phillips Curve has strongly influenced Fed behavior.

Meltzer also looks critically at the perverse incentives found in Dodd-Frank, “too big to fail,” and the new and strangely unaccountable Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. In doing all this, Meltzer demonstrates his masterful ability to perform institutional analysis while focusing on the future health of American capitalism. Along the way, Meltzer offers some well-reasoned policy recommendations that could improve the nation’s long-run prospects for wealth creation.

Why Capitalism? is an ideal selection for small-book discussion groups, students, scholars, business people, and all who have an interest in capitalism’s ability to adapt and survive as ideologues attempt in vain to fashion more perfect systems from crooked timber.

SOURCE

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Unions Chant "Pork, Pork, Pork!"

 John Ransom

Unions suck.  Really they do. I have said this before, as an objective fact:  “They suck the money out of our wallets,” I wrote in July, “they suck productivity out of workers; and suck up all the leavings from the public trough. Increasingly, the public has had it with the private country clubs known as ‘public’ unions.”

The trouble with education, much public policy, government spending and the every-twenty-five-year bailout of auto companies in this country starts and ends with unions. I continued:

"They are out-of- touch museum relics, fitting for a day that used rotary presses to distribute the news, but wildly inappropriate for an age that‘s both wired and wireless. Unions have prevented, and continue to prevent, much-needed reforms in education, public finance and government. They cultivate a sense of entitlement wholly out of order for the times, which call for more self-reliance and entrepreneurship."

Union advocates like to reply to this thesis- with good reason- by sticking fingers in their ears, jumping up and down in place, saying “pork, pork, pork,” while vaguely threatening the voting public with vengeance if unions don’t get more “pork.”

The good reason they chose this line of attack is that they have no logical argument to make.  They are like the man told to us by Patrick Henry.

"Amid the general joy and shouts of triumph by the freezing, threadbare American army that accepted the surrender of the British army under Cornwallis at Yorktown, Henry tells us, was one John Hook, who could only think of the beef he lost, confiscated to provide food for the starving, yet victorious army.

“But hark!” says Henry. “What notes of discord are these that disturb the general joy and silence the acclimations of victory? They are the notes of John Hook, hoarsely bawling through the American camp ‘Beef! Beef! Beef !’” in protest of his loss."

So it goes with unions.  Cities may go bankrupt, police may be laid off, public safety endangered and public finance corrupted but the unions get paid first, no matter what.

As real-life mobster and union delegate Henry Hill explained it in the movie Goodfellas: “Business bad? F-- you, pay me. Oh, you had a fire? F-- you, pay me. Place got hit by lightning huh? F-- you, pay me."

That’s why it shouldn’t surprise us that while most of America hails Michigan for victory in passing a right-to-work law in the union-controlled state that borders Canada, the unions are complaining about their beef- and their benefits. They did much the same in Madison in 2011 as Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker forced unions to compete in an open way for benefit contracts. And despite union grousing, the world did not come to an end in Wisconsin. In fact, quite the opposite is true.

Magically, school districts on the verge of financial ruin suddenly were able to find millions of dollars in new money. How did that magic act happen?

“When the Appleton School District put its health-insurance contract up for bid for instance,” writes the City-Journal, “WEA Trust [the benefit provider run by the union] suddenly lowered its rates and promised to match any competitor’s price. Appleton will save $3 million during the current school year.” That open bidding process outside of the union monopoly was a result of Walker’s reforms.  And it reduced costs without degrading benefits.

So now, $3 million will go directly into the classroom, which is what teachers tell us they really care about. So now, $3 million will allow the district to retain employees, which what the union ought to care most about.

And that’s also what’s at stake in Michigan.  Right-to-work means an end to the union monopoly on employment. It means that more people can have jobs. It means that unions have to provide a competitive environment or their customers will leave.

But in the up-is-down, black-is-white and right-is-wrong world of unions, progressives and mental patients, a competitive environment must be avoided at all costs. That's way too much pressure.

“Exclusivity for a union with majority support is not a monopoly, it is democracy,” said Brenda Smith, local head of the AFL-CIO affiliated American Federation of Teachers and apparently an Orwell fan. “It is order rather than chaos. It allows employees to select their representative freely, without coercion from the employer. It allows them to amplify their voice through collective action under our constitutionally protected right to freedom of association.” And for unions freedom of association means workers are given only one representative, one association, one, non-dissenting voice carefully following the party line

Spoken like a true Menshevik.    Freedom of association, in a free society, also includes the right to NOT associate, especially with known associates, like union thugs.  And the right not to associate is what’s at issue in Michigan.

SOURCE

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For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC,  AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, EYE ON BRITAIN and Paralipomena .  GUN WATCH is now put together by Dean Weingarten.

List of backup or "mirror" sites here or  here -- for when blogspot is "down" or failing to  update.  Email me  here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or  here (Pictorial) or  here  (Personal)

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The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist.  It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day.  It was only to the Right of  Stalin's Communism.  The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist" (Nationalsozialist) and the full name of Hitler's political party (translated) was "The National Socialist German Workers' Party" (In German: Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei)

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All over America ....



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The baby bust generation

Jeff Jacoby points out some rather disturbing facts below but a note of caution is in order.  Birth rates vary considerably from year to year so to take the present rate as a prediction for the future would be foolish.  It is quite possible that what is happening is a filtering out of non-maternal women from the population and once that is done the birthrate among the remaining women may be quite high

FERTILITY IN AMERICA has been declining for years. According to the Pew Research Center, the nation's birth rate hit an all-time low in 2011 – just 63 births per 1,000 women of childbearing age. It was almost twice as high – 123 births per 1,000 women – at the peak of the Baby Boom in 1957.

As babies and children disappear from a society, what takes their place? One answer, as journalist Jonathan V. Last observes in a forthcoming book, "What to Expect When No One's Expecting," is pets.

In surveys taken from the 1940s to the 1980s, fewer than half of Americans said they owned a pet. Today America's 300 million humans own 360 million pets. Last puts that in perspective: "American pets now outnumber American children by more than four to one." Often those pets are pampered to a degree that quite recently would have been thought eccentric. The average dog-owning household's spending on pet grooming aids, for example, more than doubled between 1998 and 2006. Last notes that when a kids' clothing store in the suburban Washington neighborhood where he used to live went out of business, it was replaced by a doggie spa – leaving the neighborhood "with six luxury pet stores and only two shops dedicated to clothing children."

A mania for pets isn't all that materializes when the birth rate sinks. So do economic stagnation, dwindling innovation, a declining lifestyle, the exploding health and pension costs of an aging population, and the ever-heavier taxes needed to maintain the government safety net when there are fewer workers and entrepreneurs. Optimism, booming markets, and technological dynamism recede, supplanted by intergenerational conflict and loneliness.

Many people, it's true, are still in the grip of the Malthusian fallacy. The superstition that that the Earth is already too full, and that more human beings will mean more hunger, misery, and environmental despoliation, is a popular one. But serious demographers, economists, and others have been warning for years that declining populations lead to shortages, misery, and upheaval.

"If you think that population decline is going to be a net boon to society," Megan McArdle writes in the Daily Beast, "take a long hard look at Greece. That's what a country looks like when it becomes inevitable that the future will be poorer than the past: social breakdown, political breakdown, economic catastrophe."

If so, Greece will have plenty of company. Fertility rates are falling everywhere. The median age in many countries is already over 40, well above the prime childbearing years. In some places, plummeting fertility can be attributed to dictatorial coercion: To enforce its "One-Child" policy, China has employed methods ranging from steep fines and loss of employment to compulsory sterilization and abortions. The results have been brutal: Hundreds of millions of births have been prevented, China's median age is at 36 and rising, and the Chinese fertility rate is now 1.54 – well below the rate of 2.1 needed to maintain a steady population.

But as Last points out, the fertility rate for white, college-educated American women – a proxy for the US middle class – is 1.6. "In other words, America has created its very own 'One-Child' policy. It's soft and unintentional, the result of accidents of history and thousands of little choices. But it has been just as effective."



It is hard to overstate the demographic and social transformation this represents. It wasn't that long ago that getting married and having children were life goals shared by nearly every American. For most of the 20th century, well over 90 percent of US adults married at some point in their lives – at one point the percentage went as high as 98.3 percent. Now, according to Pew, barely half of all adults in the United States – a record low – are married. And nearly 4 in 10 Americans say marriage is becoming obsolete.

And as more people choose not to marry, more of them retreat from childrearing. For decades Gallup has asked Americans what they consider the "ideal family size." From the 1940s to the 1960s, roughly 70 percent said that three or more children would be best. But beginning in the late 1960s, the American "ideal" fell sharply. Today only 33 percent of Americans regard three or more kids as desirable. And in practice, one in five American women now have no children at all.

What happens to a society that increasingly turns its back on marriage and babies? In which singlehood becomes standard, and pets outnumber kids by four to one? Ready or not, America is going to find out.

SOURCE

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Donations Pour in to Help Black Hot Dog Vendor After Union Goons  Destroyed His Supplies

Clint Tarver’s hot dog stand was destroyed during protests over the passage of Right to Work legislation at Michigan’s state capitol building last week. As Kate reported, Tarver was not involved in the protests but was hired by Americans for Prosperity to cater their tent as they counter-protested. As union thugs tore down AFP’s tent, they also destroyed Tarver’s equipment and called him an “Uncle Tom” among other racial slurs.

 “The Hot Dog Guy’s” luck has turned around, however. A staff member for a local lawmaker set up an online fundraiser for Tarver and as of Friday, more than $33,000 has been donated.

    “I’m overwhelmed,” Tarver said Friday. “The public has shown such love to me. You never know your true friends until you get down and I’ve had people I thought were pretty close to me and they’ve given me one call. You learn from your endeavors.”

    Lorilea Zabadal, a staff member for Republican state Rep. Al Pscholka, established the fundraiser  after learning of Tarver’s plight.

    “Everyone who has passed the hot dog cart knows what a kind and caring individual Clint is,” Zabadal wrote. “He never fails to bestow a smile or friendly greeting. In no way [did] he provoke this attack, nor any of the behavior displayed toward him. Regardless of your position on current legislation, rebuilding Clint's Hot Dogs is something we can all support. Please give what you can to get this deserving businessman back out there!”

So what will he do with the money?

    “First of all, I’m going to get a brand new cart,” he said. “And I have sick sister, so I’m going to help her out and I’m going to help my church too.”

    Tarver said Zabadal is a Facebook friend of his wife, Linda. He’s blown away by her unexpected concern, he said.

    “Well, she’s a vegetarian and it’s really odd that she started this website for me,” he said. “So there’s going to be a Lorilea hot dog. And it’ll be vegetarian.”

    Tarver’s cart will have other new offerings come next spring, although nothing has been finalized as of yet, he said.

    “Right now, I’m just thanking everyone for the gifts and love they’ve shown me,” he said. “I’ve forgiven the people who broke all of my stuff. I’ve prayed for them and that’s where I’m at now.”

SOURCE

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They Never Say "Tax the Successful"

Comedian Adam Carolla has never been one to censor what comes out of his mouth. The gift of gab took him from humble beginnings in economically destitute North Hollywood to dizzying heights inthe entertainment industry, where he could afford to move a few miles away.

It's a story of hard work and success that comes through in his recent book Not Taco Bell Material, a chaotic tour that takes readers from Carolla's early years to how he finally found his calling - and his success.

Carolla's disdain for the politically-correct culture of sensitivity has made him an unlikely but powerful critic of the progressive watering-down of American culture. His first book, In Fifty Years We'll All Be Chicks, was an ode to an era of manliness lost to decades of gender-neutral education. And in recent years, he's lamented the loss of a society that takes responsibility for its actions.

"I made my own luck," Carolla tells Townhall. "I'm the guy who was rejected from Taco Bell," he says, referring his failed application to the fast-food restaurant in his youth that inspired the book's title. "Would you think that guy was born with a four-leaf clover or a rabbit's foot up his butt?"

Thematically, Not Taco Bell Material could be summed up in four words: hard work pays off. It's a mantra espoused by Carolla, from his well-publicized criticisms of the Occupy Wall Street movement to recent comments about the deplorable class warfare deployed by Democrats. "They always say tax 'the rich.'" Carolla says. "Who's 'the rich'? I'm not rich. I'm successful. They never say 'tax the hard-working' or 'tax the successful.' They say 'the rich' because it's easier to deal with their inability to be successful by attributing others' success to luck."

Despite his criticism of the mentality of big-government progressives, Carolla insists his fellow entertainment-industry workers mean well. "Others in Hollywood are very humble. And they say, you know 'I'm very lucky and there are a lot of good actors out of work.' They all know, however, that they worked their tail off to get where they are."

Disdain for the entitlement society has become one of Carolla's distinctions after a rant about Occupy Wall Street went viral last year. "Self-entitled monsters," he called some of the protesters, who "think the world owes them a living."

"It's this envy and shame, and there's gonna be a lot more of it," he said. "Everybody's a winner, there are no losers."

Carolla's own humility comes from his connection with his roots. His retelling of the life story - crazy stories and all - is aided by the fact that he's constantly reminded of it.

"I never left Los Angeles... I probably live three miles from where all those antics took place. I drive past them on an almost-daily basis, which is sort of weird." And despite the adolescent ballbusting and trouble he and his friends got up to, he's stayed true. "I'm happy to say that most all those guys I'm still on great terms with."

SOURCE

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Wishing You Capitalism on Earth

Katie Kieffer

We wish each other "peace on earth." Wishing is not enough. We must act on this wish by promoting capitalism on earth.

Too many people (including some religious leaders) are promoting the idea that re-distribution of wealth or “social justice” is the best way to foster peace. But Christians and Jews need only read the Old Testament to see that God condemns stealing and envy so much that he gave Moses commandments like: “You shall not steal,” “You shall not covet your neighbor’s wife, and “You shall not covet your neighbor’s goods.”

And in the New Testament, Christ promoted capitalistic ideas. Christ’s allegories conveyed the basic principles of capitalism: freedom, ownership, profit, private property rights, honesty and justice.

How capitalism promotes peace

Men who are trading partners do not typically fight each other. For, they have an economic interest in maintaining friendly relations. And men who are free to pursue vocations that utilize their unique talents will be happier than those who are assigned to work in a specific industry by the state.

In Ayn Rand’s novel, Atlas Shrugged, the federal government takes over all private industry. Dagny Taggart is the heroine whose private railroad company becomes bound and regulated by the federal government. Taggart realizes that socialist public policy has caused her once cheerful employees to loathe her and each other.

Taggart observes: “… she was both a slave and a driver of slaves, and so was every human being in the country, and hatred was the only thing that men could now feel for one another.”

Capitalism thrives on peace; ownership and prosperity encourage individual morality. But socialism thrives on chaos, riots and animosity. Dictators can control people who are poor, hopeless and weak easier than they can control people who are wealthy, confident and powerful. Rand observes in the June 1966 edition of The Objectivist newsletter: “Statism needs war; a free country does not. Statism survives by looting; a free country survives by production.”

Specific action steps

Let me recommend specific action steps we can take to cultivate capitalism on earth:

1.) Trade freely with other countries. For example, I think Iran would deal more openly with our allies like Israel if it had an economic interest in maintaining friendly relations with America. Our current “tactics” of covertly launching cyber attacks (think Stuxnet and Flame) on Iran’s nuclear infrastructure, enforcing extreme economic sanctions and using drones that breach Iran’s national sovereignty are inciting blowback while rendering diplomatic relations unfeasible.

2.) Reduce taxes and regulations. Our high taxes and regulations are encouraging American entrepreneurs to leave this country. (Think billionaire co-founder of Facebook Inc., Eduardo Saverin who renounced his U.S. citizenship in May to become a resident of Singapore.) TIME reports that a record number of American citizens (1,788 in 2011) are relinquishing their U.S. citizenship.

And jobs are leaving too. The world’s most valuable company, Apple, once made its computers in California but now must produce its technology in China in order to turn a profit.

As wealth and jobs flow away from America, it will be difficult for us to remain a peaceful country because we will be susceptible to both civil unrest and outside attacks.

3.) Eliminate the Federal Reserve. This unconstitutional agency is destroying the value of our currency and yoking the markets. And politicians can clandestinely spend money on futile wars because most people will not recognize inflation as a tax until it is too late.

“Ideologically, the principle of individual rights does not permit a man to seek his own livelihood at the point of a gun, inside or outside his country. Economically, wars cost money; in a free economy, where wealth is privately owned, the costs of war come out of the income of private citizens—there is no overblown public treasury to hide that fact—and a citizen cannot hope to recoup his own financial losses (such as taxes or business dislocations or property destruction) by winning the war. Thus his own economic interests are on the side of peace,” writes Ayn Rand in a treatise called “The Roots of War” in The Objectivist.

In other words, capitalism allows men to see the true cost of war because there is no central bank and the federal government does not manipulate the currency and the markets. In this way, capitalism naturally encourages men to avoid war.

Capitalism is the political system that promotes peace because capitalists know that war is inherently opposed to their financial interest and livelihood. During this holy season, let us each think about ways that we can act on our wish for “peace on earth” and promote capitalism in our daily lives.

SOURCE

There is a  new  lot of postings by Chris Brand just up -- on his usual vastly "incorrect" themes of race, genes, IQ etc.

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For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC,  AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, EYE ON BRITAIN and Paralipomena .  GUN WATCH is now put together by Dean Weingarten.

List of backup or "mirror" sites here or  here -- for when blogspot is "down" or failing to  update.  Email me  here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or  here (Pictorial) or  here  (Personal)

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The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist.  It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day.  It was only to the Right of  Stalin's Communism.  The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist" (Nationalsozialist) and the full name of Hitler's political party (translated) was "The National Socialist German Workers' Party" (In German: Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei)

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