A Nation of Cowards?

I excerpt below an article from the NYT by a black writer in response to the much criticized speech by Attorney General Holder. The article is generally reasonable but I nonetheless add some comments at the foot of the excerpt

"Then came Attorney General Eric Holder's scathing comments about America being "a nation of cowards" because we don't have "frank" conversations about race. That got a lot of attention. I take exception to Holder's language, but not his line of reasoning. Calling people cowards is counterproductive. It turns the conversation into a confrontation - moving it beyond the breach of true dialogue and the pale of real understanding. That said, frank conversations are always welcomed. But, before we start, it might be helpful to have a better understanding of the breadth and nature of racial bias.

According to an ABC News/Washington Post poll released last month, twice as many blacks as whites thought racism was a big problem in this country, while twice as many whites as blacks thought that blacks had achieved racial equality...

What explains this wide discrepancy? One factor could be that most whites harbor a hidden racial bias that many are unaware of and don't consciously agree with. Project Implicit, a virtual laboratory maintained by Harvard, the University of Washington and the University of Virginia, has administered hundreds of thousands of online tests designed to detect hidden racial biases. In tests taken from 2000 to 2006, they found that three-quarters of whites have an implicit pro-white/anti-black bias. (Blacks showed racial biases, too, but unlike whites, they split about evenly between pro-black and pro-white. And, blacks were the most likely of all races to exhibit no bias at all.) In addition, a 2006 study by Harvard researchers published in the journal Psychological Science used these tests to show how this implicit bias is present in white children as young as 6 years old, and how it stays constant into adulthood.

So why do so many people have this anti-black bias? I called Brian Nosek, an associate professor in psychology at the University of Virginia and the director of Project Implicit, to find out. According to him, our brains automatically make associations based on our experiences and the information we receive, whether we consciously agree with those associations or not. He said that many egalitarian test-takers were shown to have an implicit anti-black bias, much to their chagrin. Professor Nosek took the test himself, and even he showed a pro-white/anti-black bias. Basically, our brains have a mind of their own.

Now that we know this, are we ready to talk? Maybe not yet. Talking frankly about race is still hard because it's confusing and uncomfortable. First, white people don't want to be labeled as prejudiced, so they work hard around blacks not to appear so. A study conducted by researchers at Tufts University and Harvard Business School and published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology found that many whites - including those as young as 10 years old - are so worried about appearing prejudiced that they act colorblind around blacks, avoiding "talking about race, or even acknowledging racial difference," even when race is germane. Interestingly, blacks thought that whites who did this were more prejudiced than those who didn't. Second, that work is exhausting. A 2007 study by researchers at Northwestern and Princeton that was published in the journal Current Directions in Psychological Science found that interracial interactions leave whites both "cognitively and emotionally" drained because they are trying not to be perceived as prejudiced.

More here

The major omission above is an assumption that perceived racism is due to actual racism. He omits to consider that blacks perceive prejudice against them because the Left, for their own political ends, are constantly TELLING blacks that whites are prejudiced against them and discriminate against them. Given the way whites work hard to avoid the appearance of racism, I would be inclined to say that the prejudice that blacks perceive is almost entirely a product, not of real experience but of believing what they are told.

Nonetheless the writer is certainly correct to say that negative thoughts and feelings about race ("hidden racial bias") do exist among both blacks and whites and he is also correct to say that such thoughts and feelings are the fruits of experience ("associations based on our experiences"). They are postjudice rather than prejudice. Even Jesse Jackson famously recognized that when he said: "There is nothing more painful to me at this stage in my life than to walk down the street and hear footsteps and start thinking about robbery -- then look around and see somebody white and feel relieved."

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ISRAEL

A poem by JEAN CARPENTER WILLIAMS

We're watching a very small nation
That's decided to take a stand
They're tired of their enemy's rockets
Daily blasting across their land
Though man are against them
God's the captain of their band.
And the truth is marching on.

The Jews don't realize why many hate them
Somehow their eyes are blind
But, they are the chosen nation
That brought a saviour to all mankind.
And though the world may turn against them
God in Heaven says "They're mine."
And the truth is marching on.

So pray for the peace of Jerusalem
God will bles s you when you do
For his eye is always on them
And his word is forever true.
He will never forsake his people
Remember, Jesus is a Jew
And the truth is marching on.

SOURCE

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ELSEWHERE

Collective rituals spur support for suicide attacks: researchers: "Religion plays a role in suicide bombings -- but it's collective worship, rather than level of devotion, that fosters support for such deeds, a new study concludes. The analysis found that among Muslims and Jews surveyed in the Middle East, how often people attended a house of worship better predicted their backing for suicide attacks than did prayer frequency. Suicide attacks -- today most often associated with acts against Americans or Israelis by Muslims -- seem to be one aspect of a wider phenomenon in which collective religious ritual fosters a mindset known as parochial altruism, according to psychologists. Parochial altruism is a combination of negative attitudes toward another social group and sacrifice for one's own. Suicide attacks would be an extreme form of parochial altruism, said the psychologists who conducted the study, from the New School for Social Research in New York and the University of British Columbia. And when forms of parochial altruism other than suicide attacks were considered, the researchers found many cultures and religions followed the pattern identified in the Middle East. The scientists proposed that collective religious rituals and services create a sense of community among participants and thus enhance admiration for parochially altruistic acts. But "only in particular geopolitical contexts" do suicide attacks arise from this, the scientists wrote in the study, which appears in the journal Psychological Science."

One Brit has the right idea: "Plans to axe new laws that would increase costs for businesses, including enhanced maternity leave and tougher equality legislation, are threatening to blow open a Cabinet rift over how Labour should respond to the economic downturn, The Times has learnt. The proposals, outlined in the Queen's Speech just two months ago, and championed by Harriet Harman, the deputy Labour leader, are at risk after Lord Mandelson, the Business Secretary, and the Chancellor called for a moratorium on any measures that would add to the current financial pressure on businesses. Right-to-roam legislation and powers to allow councils to ban alcohol promotions are also under threat as the Government prepares to gut its legislative programme in the face of the recession. Lord Mandelson's attempt to purge antibusiness measures comes after a meeting of the Economic Development ministerial committee last week. In a confidential memo ministers have been asked to "advise on a moratorium on legislation and legislative announcements made but not yet implemented that will entail additional costs for businesses".

Obama promises magic: "President Obama will this week make an enormously ambitious and high-risk promise to the American people that he can not only spend the US out of recession but also push ahead with expensive campaign promises while simultaneously slashing the budget deficit. In a key prime-time address to Congress tomorrow, followed by the outline of his first budget on Thursday, Mr Obama will lay out an agenda to cut the ballooning national deficit in half within four years, while pressing ahead with plans to tackle healthcare, education and climate change. The pledges come amid a financial crisis that one of Mr Obama's top advisers said could be even worse than the Great Depression, and after his Administration has already outlined plans to line up an extraordinary $3trillion to stabilise the stricken banking sector and revive the economy. About $2 trillion of that will come from borrowing."

Europe says all markets must be regulated: "Europe said on Sunday it was time to get tough with tax havens and strictly oversee all financial markets as part of sweeping reforms to avoid future meltdowns. European Union leaders met in Berlin to forge a common approach to the global economic downturn that they can take to a meeting in April of the G20, a group of rich and big emerging economies charged with reforming the rules of world finance."

Housing secretary defends Obama foreclosure plan: "The Obama administration's efforts to help struggling homeowners will aid `responsible' borrowers, not deadbeats or speculators, Housing Secretary Shaun Donovan said Sunday. President Barack Obama announced the plan Wednesday, saying it will help up to 9 million people keep their homes in a housing market ravaged by foreclosures. But critics, including several leading Republicans and some commentators, said the $75 billion proposal will unfairly help some people at the expense of others."

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, EYE ON BRITAIN and Paralipomena

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

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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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That dreaded IQ again

I am continually amazed at people's capacity to fool themselves. And the smarter you are, the better you are at fooling yourself, it seems. Perhaps the most persistent fallacious belief is that there is such a thing as "healthy" food. Many people, particularly well-educated people, desperately want to believe that they can extend their lifespan by controlling what goes into their mouths. And what is the usual definition of "healthy" food? Low-fat food. And you cannot pick up a newspaper or magazine without seeing some comment about healthy food. Yet there is, as far as I am aware, no such thing. As you can see in the sidebar of my FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC blog, the biggest, best and most conclusive research study of the subject found that a low-fat diet had no effect on your health whatever! But that finding was like water off a duck's back. Although the U.S. government spent $400 million on making the study the very best piece of research that could be conducted on the subject, I have yet to see a single mention of it in the popular press and middle-class people still fuss about their food as if it will do them some long-term good. It is a form of religion I guess. People just NEED to feel that they have some control over their fate.

And people's understanding of IQ also seems to be needs-driven. Just about the worst thing you can be called in the USA today is a "racist", yet IQ tests clearly show that blacks are, on average, outstandingly dumb. And their high level of dysfunctional behaviour and low level of educational and economic success is exactly what you would expect of dumb people. It is clear that the tests do not lie. Prisons are full of dumb people and huge numbers of them are black.

But what I have just said is for most people very threatening. If they accept its obvious truth, they risk being seen both by themselves and others as "racist", and that will not do at all. So there are all sorts of mental wriggles that people use to avoid accepting what I have just said. And the truth of all those wriggles has of course been extensively tested and found to be lacking. But there are whole books written on that subject (start here if you want to look into it) so I will not go into details now about it.

What started me off on that little meditation was something very simple, the strapline (subheading) given for the article excerpted below. In answer to the question "Why men are more intelligent than women", the strapline gives an answer: "They aren't". Yet that strapline does not represent the findings reported in the article at all. The article is a generally accurate summary of our current knowledge about IQ and says that women DO on average have slightly lower IQs. It then makes a start on explaining why.

So why such an inaccurate strapline? Because the article was published in a semi-popular magazine and there would have been great cries of outrage from both feminists and real women otherwise. The fact that averages tell us nothing about any one individual within a given population would be no consolation. Many women would just not WANT to believe the conclusion so they had to be assuaged. So the conclusions were slanted to deflect attention from the actual averages to theoretical averages.

Why men are more intelligent than women

The answer is: They aren't.

By Satoshi Kanazawa

The orthodoxy in intelligence research for the second half of the 20th century had been that men and women had the same average intelligence, but men had greater variance in their distribution than women. Most geniuses were men, and most imbeciles were men, they said, while most women were in the normal range. This conclusion, however, was manufactured out of political expediency. Not wanting to discover, or a priori denying, any sex differences in intelligence, psychometricians simply deleted from the standardized IQ tests any item on which the performance of men and women differed.

More recently, however, especially since the turn of the millennium, there have been an increasing number of studies that cast doubt on this politically correct conclusion. Studies with large representative national samples from Spain, Denmark, and the United States, as well as meta-analyses of a large number of published studies throughout the world, all conclude that men on average are slightly but significantly more intelligent than women, by about 3-5 IQ points. So this has now become the new (albeit tentative) consensus in intelligence research.

However, these studies do not answer the ultimate evolutionary question of why men should be more intelligent than women. General intelligence likely evolved as a domain-specific psychological mechanism to deal with evolutionary novelty. However, unlike populations in different geographic parts of the world [translation: different races], men and women within a population have always faced the same level of evolutionary novelty throughout evolutionary history, because they have always migrated together. If general intelligence is a function of the evolutionary novelty of the environment, why then are men on average slightly more intelligent than women? My LSE colleague, Diane J. Reyniers, and I offer one possible explanation in our article, forthcoming in the American Journal of Psychology.

Psychometricians have known since the end of the 19th century that height is positively correlated with intelligence: Taller people on average are more intelligent than shorter people. And men in every human population are taller than women. So one possibility is that men are more intelligent than women, not because they are men, but because they are taller.....

More here

I am not sure why Kanazawa claims that items differentiating men and women have been excluded from IQ tests in the past. It is demonstrably and grossly untrue. He must have in mind some particular instance that is well outside normal practice. It is demonstrably untrue because many items in standard IQ tests DO discriminate men and women. For instance, women tend to do better on verbal puzzles and men do better on mathematical puzzles.

Normal psychometric practice is to select test items by the extent to which they hang together (correlate) with other items -- using such criteria as factor loadings or item-to-total correlations. Doing anything else would damage both the reliability and validity of the test.

It has been suggested -- correctly -- that one could construct an IQ test that did not discriminate men and women by adding in more verbal items and deleting some mathematical items but since the difference between men and women is small, it is hard to see what would be gained by that and, as mentioned, it would detract from at least the validity (construct validity, to be technical) of the test and probably the reliability also.

It would be nice to think that one could dictate the final composition of an IQ test or any other test by the initial item pool that one starts out with before test construction begins but that is not wholly true if one is really doing research rather than just making things up. I have found, for instance, that a subset of items that are not strongly represented in the initial item pool can be quite dominant in the test which emerges from the item analyses. See here for instance. So reality tends to defy intentions and expectations. In other words, there is every reason to believe that existing IQ tests give a correctly balanced picture of IQ. What is in them has emerged empirically.

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ELSEWHERE

The self-defeating stimulus: "[Nobel Prize-winning economist Edmund] Phelps is among the world's leading authorities on the way different economic systems enable or thwart the dynamic adjustment and entrepreneurial innovation that delivers long-run productivity and growth. By significantly increasing government involvement in so many sectors of the economy, Phelps worries the enacted stimulus plan could make the climate of investment more rather than less uncertain, and make growth-enhancing innovation less rather than more likely. Potential investors may become spooked by businesses increasingly dependent on government contracts, Phelps notes, since these firms may face additional regulations and bureaucratic requirements which may make them appear less able nimbly to adapt. Additionally, the anticipation of higher future taxes - the price of the current spending surge - could dampen consumer demand and `have a chilling effect upon the desire of entrepreneurs to innovate,' Phelps says."

Public "servants": "We are constantly urged to admire the 'sacrifice' of `public servants,' and to revile the `greed' and 'selfishness' of those who choose to make an honest living in the private sphere. Yet public 'service' is frequently a much more lucrative racket than honest private work. Witness the fact, reported in a Washington Post column by Chris Edwards in August 2006, that the average federal civilian employee is paid twice the amount that was earned by the average private sector worker - a little more than $106,000 per year, as compared to an annual salary of $56,000. Note as well that while real estate prices are plummeting throughout most of the country, the suburbs and exurbs of the Imperial Capital continue to boom, thanks in no small measure to the metastatic growth of government and the lucrative compensation enjoyed by the federal nomenklatura."

Yesterday's history is today's politics (Comment from Britain): "The Petrograd Strikes, which heralded the start of the 1917 Revolution in Russia commenced on 22 February; find a moment for reflection this Sunday. Even though the Soviet system of Communism lasted for 69 years, its ideology is evidently still very much alive and well: the British government now spends half the nation's income. Yesterday's history is today's politics, to adapt the adage. This Thursday our very own Nicholas II went to see the Pope. Perhaps he asked the Vicar of Christ to pray for a miracle - huge monetary expansion without hyperinflation - or perhaps he asked for the economy to receive the Last Rites. Ironically, one of the things the Prime Minister did discuss was freeing the world from poverty. He can contribute best to this desirable goal in Great Britain by the near abolishment of the State."

Taxpayers treated to an education recently : "Our education in government affairs, politicians and such continued over the past few weeks. We learned, for instance, that a fair number of politicians owe a fair amount of taxes that they hadn't given a thought to, until, of course, they were considered for a Cabinet post. But average taxpayers like you and I were expected to understand that these were busy people leading big, important lives, who had fingers in many pies, and that these were all `honest' and `unintentional' mistakes. We also learned that in a 300-million-plus country, there is sometimes just one person with the right knowledge, skills and experience for a particular job, and when such a person comes along, we were expected to cut him some slack and not fuss over things like his taxes. Several things have been bothering me lately. One of them is the arbitrariness of it all. . Just what are the rules, and who gets to make them?"

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

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, EYE ON BRITAIN and Paralipomena

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

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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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Less rather than more government intervention is needed to cure the recession

The story is told that Ludwig von Mises was once asked, "Do you mean to say that the government should have done nothing during the Great Depression?" Mises responded, "I mean to say it should have started doing nothing long before that."

I hope the story is not apocryphal, because it perfectly sums up the government's proper role in managing the economy: none. The misnamed stimulus law is now on the books. While nearly everyone believes the government has to do something to get the economy out of the recession, those who understand markets insist that we'd be better off if the government did nothing at all. Of course, politicians are incapable of doing nothing when there is harm to be done, but the "stimulus" critics intrepidly insist that anything the government does will be worse than doing nothing at all.

This is certainly true. Unquestionably, doing nothing is better than borrowing nearly $800 billion from the credit markets (to be repaid through inflation and taxation) and spending it on pet political projects, from food stamps to bridge repairs to subsidies for favored energy forms. (Remember opportunity cost!) Doing nothing is indeed is an attractive option. For example, it would avoid re-stimulating parts of the economy shouldn't have been stimulated in the first place, such as housing and autos. As economist Mario Rizzo said recently, "Trying to prop up housing prices or injecting capital into areas of misallocation is a bad idea. It prevents the market's corrective mechanisms from working. Wealth should not continually be destroyed after the errors of the bubble have been revealed. This is the proverbial practice of throwing good money after bad." (Watch Rizzo's presentation here. The written remarks are downloadable here.)

But, frankly, doing nothing is only the second-best option. We can do better. We need the government to do less than nothing. It should undo many things.

Government-Inflated Bubble

Let's remember that government created the housing bubble through a constellation of policies that made borrowing for home mortgages - prime and subprime - artificially attractive. Because of the securitization of mortgages (in itself a good risk-spreading device), the consequences of government housing policies spread far beyond the housing and banking industries. When home prices seemed to be perpetually rising, people were encouraged to refinance their homes and withdraw equity so they could spend the money on cars, trips, and other big-ticket items. Government-stimulated demand touched everything. When the bubble popped - when interest rates rose and the housing glut became apparent - things turned around. People now had costly mortgages they couldn't refinance; homes bought on the expectation of early profitable resale were now money losers. The party was over.

It was a party that couldn't have been thrown without politicians eager to do things for us and, not coincidentally, to boost their reelection prospects as well. The upshot is that if the economy is to thrive again, the reigning philosophy of government as a social service center will have to change. Many things will have to be undone.

These things will strike most people as politically impossible, but if no one ever talks about them, that's what they will remain. We have to start somewhere. The first thing we need is a monetary system that is beyond the reach of manipulative politicians and political appointees. Whatever the Fed Reserve's role in the housing bubble - even if it was only the Alan Greenspan's promise to provide liquidity to overextended lenders - the central bank has again proven itself hazardous to our economic well-being. When will we cease to tolerate this continuing threat in our midst? When will we realize that the mortals who run it cannot know how much money the economy needs or what interest rates should be? Market-rooted money - most likely gold - and free banking are long overdue. How can we afford to wait any longer?

No More Housing Policy

Also on the list of things to go is every manifestation of housing policy. In a free society there would be no such thing. The alphabet soup of agencies - from HUD to FHA to FHLB, and the rest - should be abolished at once.

The same goes for those privileged cartoon characters Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, Ginnie Mae, and any I may have overlooked. They exist to circumvent the market in order to carry out the agendas of politicians, who must dispense goodies to favored constituencies in order to keep their hold on power. Because the agencies are backed by captive taxpayers, they are can do things no free-market institution can do, such as obtain special low-interest loans and guarantees. These bureaucracies have no place in a free market. If we haven't learned that by now, what will it take? (We haven't learned it. The Obama administration wants to give them more billions.)

While we're at it, let's get rid of the income tax if for no other reason than because it would end the mortgage deduction. We must stop thinking of home-ownership as something worthy of government privilege. There's nothing magic about housing. It's one more thing we need. Yet it gets special treatment in the law, and economy-watchers give it special attention. Why do news agencies report housing starts faithfully each month as though the fate of the planet hangs in the balance? They never tell us how many computers, Coca-Colas, or boxes of Cheerios were produced.

Other taxes should be cut or abolished too, including the payroll tax, which is a tax on hiring. But - this is often overlooked - tax cuts without spending cuts require more borrowing and more inflation. It's a bad bargain in the tradition of Keynes. We must cut government spending along with taxes.

If government really wants to make it easier for people to own homes, let it give up control of money and banking, divest itself of the land it holds off the market, and generally relieve society of its endless burdens. The biggest favor the state can do for us is to stop doing us favors!

Source

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ELSEWHERE

Keith Burgess Jackson has a new site for exposing the academic thuggishness of far-Left law professor Brian Leiter

I Finally Figured It Out...: "I admit it. I've had a hard time figuring out how zealously borrowing and spending and subsidizing the unsuccessful is supposed to get us out of an economic crisis caused in large part by overly zealous borrowing and spending and encouraging the unsuccessful to take on obligations they couldn't meet. But now I've figured it out. Obama and his party like poor people so much they're determined to make lots more of them".

Bill Clinton gets one thing right: "Bill Clinton called on President Obama yesterday to show more of what he promised America during his two years as a presidential candidate: hope. Mr Clinton reflected growing misgivings among some Democrats that the President's warnings about the economy are so dire that he risks smothering the confidence that will be needed to get America out of the crisis. He urged Mr Obama - who ran on a message of hope - to put on a more positive face when speaking to the country about the economy. "I just want the American people to know that he's confident that we are going to get out of this and that he feels good about the long run," the former President told the Good Morning America programme.

President Klaus compares EU to Soviet-era dictatorships: "The leader of the Czech Republic has long been one of the most strident critics of the European Union, missing no opportunity to let another withering attack fly. Now he has inherited the ideal pulpit to air his views: the EU presidency itself. In his latest diatribe, this time before the European Parliament on Thursday, President Klaus, whose country assumed the rotating EU helm in January from France, branded the organisation an undemocratic and elitist project comparable to Soviet-era dictatorships that forbade free thought. "Not so long ago," Mr Klaus thundered, "in our part of Europe we lived in a political system that permitted no alternatives and therefore also no parliamentary opposition. We learned the bitter lesson that with no opposition, there is no freedom." He may have felt gratified by the reaction: boos from many lawmakers and a walkout by the left-wing parties - but applause from a minority of nationalists and other anti-EU legislators. While deeply unpopular in EU circles, Mr Klaus strikes a deep chord in some member states where citizens fear European plans to share more powers come at the cost of national sovereignty. He has refused to fly the EU flag over his official seat in Prague during the Czech presidency, saying the country is not an EU province."

How to slim the bureaucracy, British style: "Ministers have blown almost 1billion pounds axing an army of bureaucrats - only to rehire the same huge number. Government departments have cut almost 15,000 civil servants in the last three years, according to figures released by Parliament. Because of the generous redundancy packages given to Whitehall officials, the average payout was 60,000 - a total cost to the public purse of 882million. But despite the cull of Government waste, it can be revealed that ministries are taking on almost as many staff as they have ditched. Figures from just five departments - including the Home Office and Department of Health - show that about 5,000 permanent, temporary and agency staff have been taken on. If this is extended across all Government departments, the number of new staff will be around 15,000. Hundreds of civil servants have walked away with pay-offs worth tens of thousands of pounds, with some taking 100,000. Most of those taking voluntary redundancy are high earners - sparking fears the most experienced staff are disappearing from Whitehall. Incredibly, top officials have failed to carry out studies to discover whether the policy would trim budgets."

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, EYE ON BRITAIN and Paralipomena

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

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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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Ever-present Leftist propaganda does make an impression -- and is weakening America

Comment received by email from Sam Wells of Toward the Laissez-Faire Republic [ewillers@laissez-fairerepublic.com]

Americans are flooded with propaganda, both subtle and not so subtle -- mostly from the Democrat, left-wing perspective, especially on TV. Because the propaganda is so ubiquitous few people even realize they are immersed in it. I believe that many libertarians and conservatives and definitely most populists have unwittingly bought into some aspects of the Left's disinformation efforts. I have heard "libertarians" admit to believing in some of the most absurd left-wing conspiracy theories -- usually about the Bush Administration -- from 9/11 attacks being an "inside job" to Bush weakened the levies in New Orleans so as to flood certain mostly black areas because he hates black folks so much. (I can just see Bush and Cheney in SCUBA gear swimming down to the base of the levies and cleverly planting all that C4 so the levy would break just in the right way to flood blacks and not white people. Right.)

Most of the anti-Bush hatred has been instilled by propaganda over the past eight years -- stored in peoples' minds through repeated barrages of propaganda messages. An election comes around and it is time to trigger that stored hate. Bush did not run for re-election (could not under the Constriction)? Not to worry; just associate whoever is running under the GOP banner with Bush and all that programmed hate has not gone to waste. A lot of us in the libertarian subculture have absorbed the hate-Bush stuff and some even buy into the DNC/Move On anti-Bush conspiracy tales. But not all those who oppose the war against jihadist terrorism are that naive, of course.

I consider myself to be a constitutionalist. I believe the constitutional approach to limiting the scope of government to its proper functions has been the most successful one so far, (given the Greco-Roman heritage underlying our Anglo-American traditions). But we must not lose sight that the Constitution is a means, not an end in itself and that the purpose of the Constitution is to protect liberty -- not to serve as an excuse not to defend our way of life.

The enemies of freedom are past masters at manipulating the virtues of good, well-intentioned folks in the service of their ultrastatist agendas. There are those who sincerely question Congress's war powers declaration as being strong enough to fulfill the Constitution's requirement for lawfully going to war in Iraq and Afghanistan. But those who genuinely believe they are "constitutionalists" by opposing wars on such arguably technical grounds should search their consciences and ask themselves if they are just being led by the nose and used by the Left's "anti-war" front offensive for political partisan ends. Does their nitpicking constitute genuine constitutionalism or is it just an excuse to look the other way and pretend not to see what is really happening? I cannot say what is in their hearts. But leftists often pretend to be supporters of the Constitution when they think they can distort its meaning and purpose so as to serve their ultimate goal of imposing more taxes, more regulations, bigger government, and more socialism on us all.

The 21st century Lord Haw-Haws and wishful-thinking Neville Chamberlains who refuse to recognize that the reactionary jihadists are a real threat to America and the world are aiding America's enemies and supporting the ostrich-like position of the surrendercrats. That pacifist approach does not really lead to peace but only postpones the conflict temporarily until a much more devastating war is unavoidable. Would they wait until the enemy has nuclear weapons and biotoxins to throw against us? Prudence dictates getting a conflict over as soon as possible, if it be inevitable, before the enemies are more powerful and can kill far more innocent people.

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Upside Down Economics

by Thomas Sowell

From television specials to newspaper editorials, the media are pushing the idea that current economic problems were caused by the market and that only the government can rescue us. What was lacking in the housing market, they say, was government regulation of the market's "greed." That makes great moral melodrama, but it turns the facts upside down. It was precisely government intervention which turned a thriving industry into a basket case.

An economist specializing in financial markets gave a glimpse of the history of housing markets when he said: "Lending money to American homebuyers had been one of the least risky and most profitable businesses a bank could engage in for nearly a century." That was what the market was like before the government intervened. Like many government interventions, it began small and later grew.

The Community Reinvestment Act of 1977 directed federal regulatory agencies to "encourage" banks and other lending institutions "to help meet the credit needs of the local communities in which they are chartered consistent with the safe and sound operation of such institutions." That sounds pretty innocent and, in fact, it had little effect for more than a decade. However, its premise was that bureaucrats and politicians know where loans should go, better than people who are in the business of making loans. The real potential of that premise became apparent in the 1990s, when the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) imposed a requirement that mortgage lenders demonstrate with hard data that they were meeting their responsibilities under the Community Reinvestment Act.

What HUD wanted were numbers showing that mortgage loans were being made to low-income and moderate-income people on a scale that HUD expected, even if this required "innovative or flexible" mortgage eligibility standards. In other words, quotas were imposed-- and if some people didn't meet the standards, then the standards need to be changed. Both HUD and the Department of Justice began bringing lawsuits against mortgage bakers when a higher percentage of minority applicants than white applicants were turned down for mortgage loans. A substantial majority of both black and white mortgage loan applicants had their loans approved but a statistical difference was enough to get a bank sued.

It should also be noted that the same statistical sources from which data on blacks and whites were obtained usually contained data on Asian Americans as well. But those data on Asian Americans were almost never mentioned. Whites were turned down for mortgage loans more often than Asian Americans. But saying that would undermine the reasoning on which the whole moral melodrama and political crusades were based.

Lawsuits were only part of the pressures put on lenders by government officials. Banks and other lenders are overseen by regulatory agencies and must go to those agencies for approval of many business decisions that other businesses make without needing anyone else's approval. Government regulators refused to approve such decisions when a lender was under investigation for not producing satisfactory statistics on loans to low-income people or minorities. Under growing pressures from both the Clinton administration and later the George W. Bush administration, banks began to lower their lending standards.

Mortgage loans with no down payment, no income verification and other "creative" financial arrangements abounded. Although this was done under pressures begun in the name of the poor and minorities, people who were neither could also get these mortgage loans. With mortgage loans widely available to people with questionable prospects of being able to keep up the payments, it was an open invitation to financial disaster. Those who warned of the dangers had their warnings dismissed. Now, apparently, we need more politicians intervening in more industries, if you believe the politicians and the media.

SOURCE

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Toothless Blue Dogs Roll Over on Stimulus Bill

The House's Blue Dog Democrats like to pretend they are the deficit tigers of Congress, determined to stop runaway spending and stamp out waste, fraud and abuse. But when push came to shove, as it did in the pork-crammed $800 billion economic-stimulus bill, most of these tigers mewed like pussycats, voting in lock step with Nancy Pelosi and Barney Frank for a bill they had not read. One by one, they inserted their voting cards into the slot in front of their seats and charged the stimulus money to the taxpayers. The first payment will be due April 15. Brace your wallets.

"Toothless tigers is one way to describe them. They are more gums than teeth when it comes to putting a bite on deficits," said Pete Sepp, spokesman for the National Taxpayers Union. NTU's "bill tally" monitoring showed that Blue Dogs propose three-quarters less spending increases than the Democrats as a whole, but the majority of Blue Dogs still vote for most of the spending bills their party brings to the floor.

"The Blue Dogs can't say with a straight face that they have a moderate or conservative bone in their body. They're exposed as pawns of the most left-wing Democratic leadership in American history," says tax-cut crusader Grover Norquist.

There are about four-dozen Blue Dog Democrats who took their name about a dozen years ago from their Southern ancestry and who showed their party loyalty by saying they would vote for an old yellow dog before voting Republican. At the start of the new Congress, they vowed that a "top priority will be to refocus Congress on truly balancing the budget and ridding taxpayers of the burden the national debt places on them." In a Feb. 4 letter to Speaker Pelosi, Indiana Rep. Baron Hill and seven other Blue Dog leaders said they had "serious reservations" about the big stimulus bill then working its way through Congress.

But on final passage, only a half-dozen brave Blue Dogs voted against the bill that will, with interest, add $1 trillion-plus to the federal debt.

More here

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ELSEWHERE

Through his bias and bigotry, "Pinch" Sulzberger has done a great job of destroying his family inheritance: "New York Times Stock Now Costs Less Than Sunday Paper. Shares of NYT dropped 29 cents today to close at $3.77. The Sunday paper goes for $4 at the newsstand. Maybe they could save costs by printing the paper on their stock certificates". By coincidence, in Australia some time ago, another Jewish-born boy, Warwick Fairfax Jr. also destroyed a great family media inheritance, though his main problem was that he had a Harvard MBA and therefore thought he knew something (See today's EDUCATION WATCH for a comment on Harvard MBAs). I wonder how that all plays out with the conspiracy theorists who see Jews as controlling everything? Maybe Jews are NOT all-powerful and all-knowing, after all? Belief in Jewish control of the media must be rather hard to sustain in the face of the fact that the world's most powerful and successful media owner is of Presbyterian background. Perhaps they assume his real name must be Murdochstein.

Just In Case It Wasn't Obvious . . .: "Does anyone else grasp the irony of AG Holder's characterization of Americans as a "nation of cowards" for their reluctance to discuss race -- just as the story about the NY Post chimp cartoon is part of every blog and newscast? I guess the coverage of the cartoon controversy is just another sign of America's endemic reluctance to talk about race, right?"

This Should Scare You: "Carter voices confidence in Obama stimulus plan" That would be the Carter who left us with interest rates of 21%, inflation at 13.5% and unemployment at 7%. When he's got "confidence" in Obamanomics, be afraid. Be very afraid."

Was Ted Stevens railroaded?: "The headlines are gone, and MSNBC no longer cares. But that's all the more reason to take note of the strange and disturbing turn in the Ted Stevens legal saga. Prosecutors claimed this senior Senatorial scalp last year, winning an ethics conviction a fortnight before the octogenarian Republican narrowly lost his bid for a seventh term from Alaska. Though media interest stopped there, the story has since become one of ambitious prosecutors who at the very least botched the job and may have miscarried justice."

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, EYE ON BRITAIN and Paralipomena

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

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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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Obama the magician

In case you have not seen it yet: A Japanese sendup of Obama:



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BrookesNews Update

Monetary policy - not Obama's stimulus - is what needs watching : On the one hand the US faces a massive boondoggle that has greatly disturbed the markets and threatens to destabilise the economy. On the other hand the threat of inflation is looming up as the money supply expands. This is a truly terrible witches' brew and like it or not Obama and his crew of economic vandals need to be held accountable for it
Prime Minister Rudd's misbegotten assault on the market goes unchallenged : Rudd's essay is an opening salvo against free market thinking and deserves to be taken seriously. Ideas have consequences, particularly bad ideas. If these ideas are not thoroughly refuted in the public arena they are likely to take root in the public mind. The consequences for the economy could be disastrous. This article is an attempt to expose the shoddy thinking, economic illiteracy and the ignorance of economic history and the history of economic thought that underpin Rudd's essay
Rudd's "growth gap" myth : Politicians are talking about rising unemployment, falling production and output gaps. Being politicians their first response is more spending in order to raise aggregate demand. They are too ignorant to realise that what they propose is dose of the same fallacious economic medicine that caused the crisis in the first place
Mr. Obama, the barn is also "shovel ready" and is as useful to the economy as the stimulus bill :Obama's brilliant tax plant amounts to workers getting an additional $13 a week in their pay checks (at least those still with jobs) beginning in June 2009 and then $8 a week in 2010. Does anyone but the most ardent Obama acolyte really think these tax cuts will spur on the economy? With the increasing price of gasoline the 'Obama tax cuts' are not even likely to fill the gas tank of your car. The rest of his phony stimulus plan is just as shoddy
Honoring Cuba's Heroes:You'll often find people with red-rimmed eyes ambling amidst the long rows of white crosses at Miami's Tamiami Park. It's the Cuban Memorial and it stands in honor of the tens of thousands of murder victims of Fidel Castro and Che Guevara. It is a tribute, too, to those who fell while trying to free Cuba from the barbarism that the two imposed with their Soviet overlords while America's 'best and brightest' dithered, bumbled and finally betrayed the Cuban people
The impact of Obama's pending program on the US economy : All real economic growth comes from an increase in the accumulation of capital per worker. There is no other source, Keynesianism notwithstanding. Capital is generic unconsumed wealth saved up and available for investment in productive enterprises. Obama's economic package will not create wealth. It will only create more economic problems
Murphy's Law, the Peter Principle and Barack Obama:In only three weeks Obama has signaled to every terrorist on the planet that we are a sorry, groveling, ashamed Nation ready to come to the diplomatic confessional. He is closing Gitmo within one year, has suspended trials there, and dismissed the charges against the U.S.S. Cole plotter. The perfect collision of Murphy's Law with the Peter Principle has arrived to explode in our faces
Will Obama start a trade war? :Access to the $996 billion global infrastructure market will disappear in a trade war, all in exchange for access to $43 billion in federal stimulus spending on infrastructure - not a good swap. Obama's 'Buy American' may turn into 'Bye, American'

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ELSEWHERE

Obama's "openness" in action: "In his first weeks in office, President Barack Obama shut down his predecessor's system for reviewing regulations, realigned and expanded two key White House policymaking bodies and extended economic sanctions against parties to the conflict in the African nation of Cote D'Ivoire. Despite the intense scrutiny a president gets just after the inauguration, Obama managed to take all these actions with nary a mention from the White House press corps. The moves escaped notice because they were never announced by the White House Press Office and were never placed on the White House web site."



Another Obama corruptocrat: "News broke last week that Rahm Emanuel, now White House chief of staff, lived rent- free for years in the home of Rep. Rosa De Lauro (D-Conn.) - and failed to disclose the gift, as congressional ethics rules mandate. But this is only the tip of Emanuel's previously undislosed ethics problems. One issue is the work Emanuel tossed the way of De Lauro's husband. But the bigger one goes back to Emanuel's days on the board of now-bankrupt mortgage giant Freddie Mac. Emanuel is a multimillionaire, but lived for the last five years for free in the tony Capitol Hill townhouse owned by De Lauro and her husband, Democratic pollster Stan Greenberg. During that time, he also served as chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee - which gave Greenberg huge polling contracts... Emanuel never declared the substantial gift of free rent on any of his financial-disclosure forms. He and De Lauro claim that it was just allowable "hospitality" between colleagues. Hospitality - for five years? Some experts suggest that it was also taxable income: Over five years, the free rent could easily add up to more than $100,000. "


Under fire, Burris refuses to resign Senate seat: "Despite calls for his resignation, Sen. Roland W. Burris (D-Ill.) made clear Wednesday that he intends to fight. Burris, appointed to fill President Obama's Senate seat, is under investigation for repeatedly changing his story about contacts with associates of then-Gov. Rod Blagojevich (D). But he insisted that his hands are clean. . Burris has offered five varying explanations - three of them under oath - of his contacts with associates of Blagojevich, who was charged Dec. 9 with taking part in a bribery conspiracy that included trying to sell Obama's former seat."

Homeless families face strict new rules -- in Massachusetts!: "Less than two years after vowing to end homelessness in Massachusetts, the Patrick administration has proposed new regulations that it acknowledges could force hundreds of homeless families back on the street. The regulations, scheduled to take effect April 1, would deny shelter to families who in the last three years had been evicted from or had abandoned public or subsidized housing without good cause, and to those who fail to meet a new 30-hour per week work requirement and save 30 percent of their income."

"Truth to power" gap: "`Speak truth to power,' a phrase of Quaker origins adopted by campus radicals, Hollywood gadflies, and establishment journalists, has become shorthand for bravely criticizing government, big corporations, and other stereotypical villains. But where's the bravery? I don't know many journalists who are afraid of the government, and most make their living from big corporations. Sure, liberals - which most journalists are - are afraid of what conservatives will do in power and vice-versa. But they aren't very afraid of what government will do to them, specifically. In fact, being singled out for criticism by the president of the United States is nothing short of a gift."

Why gay rights activists need to straighten up: "My darling daughter. You want to disestablish marriage as a legally regulated institution entirely? As a libertarian, I'm with you. You want to amend the California constitution so that any two or more adults who want to get married - including groups of men and women in any number and mixture - may legally do so . I'll cross the border from my home state of Nevada to help you campaign for it. But don't tell me that `gays' have a greater right to marriage than Mormon-offshoot polygamists. That sort of special pleading that ignores the historical discrimination against others just revolts me."

In defense of the "filibuster" : "So Ezra Klein wonders whether it's better that a minority can block good policy or a majority can enact bad policy? Given the 'stickiness' of bad policy (Ezra, in another post, suggests that corn and beef subsidies aren't so wonderful but that there are structural incentives to retain them) one would think that inhibiting bad policy would be a good goal for either side of the aisle. So let's stipulate a few general principles: 1. Government, by definition, is coercive. 2. Most government `programs' (here defined as positive government acts rather than simple regulatory prohibitions or laws) expand the state and curtail personal liberty - at least to the extent that they must be paid for by non-voluntary means. 3. Therefore, government action is more likely to reduce individual liberty than increase it. 4. Finally, to a libertarian (one whose first principles are towards individual liberty), it is best to inhibit government action."

Who Gives, and Why It Matters: "Arthur Brooks, professor of public administration at Syracuse University, is a rare scholar. In "Who Really Cares," he surveys the data on American charitable giving, and he has much to report - much, he admits, that surprised him, going against his own cultural prejudices. The facts show that all the common myths about giving are exactly opposite to reality. Take the perception that Americans are generally indifferent to other people's suffering, a view that St. Jimmy Carter once trumpeted. The reality is that around 75% of American families give to charity annually, to the tune of an average of 3.5% of their household income. Only a third of this largess goes to churches; the rest goes to secular charities. Brooks urges that far and away the biggest predictors of charitableness are religious belief, skepticism about powerful government, strength of family, and personal entrepreneurism. Brooks' first chapter debunks the common myth that people who are politically "progressive" are more charitable than others, a myth endlessly promoted by the Left. The data show that at every income level, self-identified conservatives donate more than self-identified liberals, despite the fact that liberals average 6% more income. Next, Brooks considers differences in charitableness as it relates to ideology. Specifically, he raises the question of whether people who favor the forced redistribution of income by government ("redistributionists," estimated by one large 1996 survey at 33%) give more to charity than people who oppose government redistribution ("nonredistributionists," about 43% in the same survey). The answer is - drum roll, please! - Hell, no! Nonredistributionists give four times more money to charity than redistributionists.

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, EYE ON BRITAIN and Paralipomena

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

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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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Should scientists study race and IQ?

The usual Leftist strategy when faced with truths that contradict their simplistic theories: Shut down debate. Everything bad is due to "poverty", don't you know? Everything they do seems to lead to impoverishment so I guess there is some sort of weird consistency there. Report below from one of the "Science blogs"

Just in case anyone has missed it, the pair of duelling essays in the latest issue of Nature is well worth a read. The topic is whether there is any justification for scientific exploration of associations between gender or race and intelligence; Stephen Ceci and Wendy M. Williams from Cornell argue the affirmative, while Steven Rose takes up the opposing case.

The debate continues as a lively discussion on Nature Network, which contains many thoughtful comments from both sides.

I find it pretty hard to stomach the notion that any field of scientific enquiry should be completely off the table, even an area as contentious and politically charged as this one - in fact especially in such an area, since nowhere are solid facts needed as desperately as in a debate driven largely by ideals and emotions. Thus while Rose makes some fair points about the difficulties of defining both race and intelligence, I find his overall argument less than compelling.

In fact this sentence from Rose's final paragraph is downright worrying: "In a society in which racism and sexism were absent, the questions of whether whites or men are more or less intelligent than blacks or women would not merely be meaningless -- they would not even be asked."

This borders on defining anyone who even thinks about group differences in cognition as a bigot. Poisoning the well in this fashion is a highly effective strategy for shutting down debate on a particular topic - but this is a terrible strategy for a scientist to adopt.

Source

I should perhaps mention that the first comment on the blog post reproduced above is a tease. Razib is a geneticist of Bangladeshi origin who is in fact confident that the specific genes for IQ will eventually be identified

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Some marvellous news from Italy

Another defeat for media-enabled Leftist lies. Report below by Fiamma Nirenstein, a journalist and some-time resident of Jerusalem. She is a new Member of the Italian Parliament. I like her first name. It is Italian for "flame". I have long had great affection for Italians and the report below certainly reinforces that



We didn't expect what you see in this picture. This is the square of the Italian Parliament in Rome, Piazza Montecitorio: You can see the Palace on top of the square, and in front a lot of Israeli flags. That was last night from 6:30 to 9:30 pm. What you cannot see here, is the extraordinary number of members of Parliament, about 100 from all political sides, that took the stage during this time: for about three hours we were speaking about the role of Israel, its right to self defense, its moral height, its fight on behalf of us all, of our civilization and values, against the wild hate of the Islamic jihad represented by Hamas.

It seems to me that for the first time in the too long history of the Arab/Israeli conflict, apart from a minority of crazy leftists and fascists that took the street with anti-Semitic slogans, we have achieved a huge consensus on one critical point: this is not a local conflict, there is nothing in it that reminds us of a peace theme that has characterized the Palestinian issue. This is an attack against the western world, and Iran is behind it.

What happens today, at least in Italy, is the defeat and fall of the leftist ideologies: ideology that has allowed justification of all the most violent crimes and most disgusting verbal attacks. If Arafat launched the terrorist Intifada, if he promoted the martyrdom of children in public speeches, the ideologists were ready to justify him with the issues of occupation, the Palestinian misery and loss of any hope. Not so with Hamas.

History, in Italy, has brought to a profound crisis the ideology of revolution and the justification of any cruel attack against a so-called unjust imperialist order. That time is over, nobody will see Hamas as the resolution of the problem and not even as the problem itself. I think that the word "peace" has lost that healing meaning that it once had. The new non-ideological point of view sees that there is no peace when one of the contenders doesn't want it, and that even if the world in the short run asks for a truce, in the long run it hopes for the defeat of Hamas.

Last night, many people, Ministers and Members of Parliament, composed a very new, interesting mix of opinions. I think that when you are not overwhelmed by exotic thirdworldism, the images of children educated as hate machines, the speeches of jihad leaders, from Ahmadinejad to Nasrallah, to Haniyeh, that deny the holocaust and promise death to Jewish and Christians alike, you are left only with disgust. Westerners, thank God, can still be disgusted by uncivilized levels of political speech.

But most of all, in the Parliament square, many of the Parliament Members said: "I love Israel". You can't imagine how many.

Source

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The Decline of California

They still think they can tax their way out of this one.

If you thought Washington's stimulus debate was depressing, take a look at the long-running budget spectacle in California. The Golden State's deficit has reached $42 billion, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger is threatening to furlough 20,000 state workers (go ahead, make our day), and as we went to press yesterday Democrats who control the legislature had blocked lawmakers from leaving until they finally get a deal.

It's sad to watch. The Golden State -- which a decade ago was the booming technology capital of the world -- has been done in by two decades of chronic overspending, overregulating and a hyperprogressive tax code that exaggerates the impact on state revenues of economic boom and bust. Total state expenditures have grown to $145 billion in 2008 from $104 billion in 2003 and California now has the worst credit rating in the nation -- worse even than Louisiana's. It also has the nation's fourth highest unemployment rate of 9.3% (after Michigan, Rhode Island and South Carolina) and the second highest home foreclosure rate (after Nevada).

Roughly 1.4 million more nonimmigrant Americans have left California than entered over the last decade, according to the American Legislative Exchange Council. California is suffering more than most states from the housing bust, but its politicians also showed less spending restraint during the boom.

To close the current deficit, the pols in Sacramento are nearing a deal that cuts spending by $15 billion and raises $14.2 billion in higher taxes on income, sales, gasoline and cars. Six years ago Mr. Schwarzenegger helped depose Governor Gray Davis by calling him "Car-taxula." Now he's agreed to double the same tax.

Mr. Schwarzenegger has won at least some concessions from Democrats, who run the most liberal legislature this side of Trenton. The budget deal contains a handful of useful tax breaks for job creation and the first public union workplace reforms in a decade; it also creates a new rainy day fund. These taxpayer victories wouldn't have been possible if Republicans in the legislature hadn't held out for them. But the plan is still far short of the radical tax and spending surgery the state needs. It's loaded with short-term gimmicks -- such as $5 billion of borrowing from future lottery receipts and nearly $10 billion in one-time federal stimulus cash. Even proponents concede the plan doesn't balance spending and revenues 18 months from now.

The tax increases will continue to chase even more productive people out of the state. For at least two years, the sales tax would rise by one percentage point to 8.25% and the income tax by 0.3% to a top marginal rate of 10.56%. These will both be the highest statewide rates in the nation (see chart).

Do these taxes hurt business? Ask Hollywood. Film makers are threatening to flee to avoid the state's high costs, so to keep them in Southern California the deal offers $500 million in tax breaks for producers. Rich liberals like Rob Reiner, who love higher taxes on other people, get a sweetheart tax break and everyone else pays more.

Mr. Schwarzenegger is finally getting a constitutional state spending cap that will be on the ballot in the next election, but even that is flawed. This cap would limit spending hikes in any year to a rolling average of the percentage increase of the past 10 years. Nice idea, except that if Californians vote yes, the higher income and sales taxes automatically kick in for three more years. So to get a modicum of spending restraint, the voters have to agree to tax themselves by $25 billion more for three additional years. Californians can be forgiven if they say "no deal."

The tragedy of this gamesmanship is that the political class still won't address the root cause of its financial problems, which is that the state is becoming less economically competitive. California businesses and high-income families already pay a surtax for locating inside the state. The new budget deal raises that tax toll higher still.

It's no surprise that most CEOs we talk to, many of whom live in California, say they'd be foolish to build another plant in the state. California's budget crisis is the inevitable result of runaway liberal governance, and the state's voters will keep paying for it until they reduce their tax burden and adopt more radical spending controls.

Source

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ELSEWHERE

Britain: Race of attackers mentioned for once. I wonder why? "An Australian woman has been subjected to a horrific seven-hour rape ordeal after being snatched from the streets of Edinburgh in broad daylight. Two men grabbed the 24-year old woman and sprayed her in the face with a "noxious substance'' before dragging her into nearby bushes, police say. The woman had been walking through an underpass near the city centre at 3pm on Monday. She was not released until 10pm, after a prolonged assault that has shocked local officers. A police spokeswoman said: "This young woman has been subjected to a terrifying ordeal at the hands of these two men - the trauma she has experienced cannot be underestimated. Police were last night unable to provide further details about the woman, such as which state she was from or whether she was a tourist or resident. The suspects are described as being white, Eastern European, and in their 20s."

What's America's backup plan? : "Barney Frank needs to go back to running a whore house and Chris Dodd needs an economic ejumacation to name a few. Nancy Peeelosi needs a math lesson at the very least with her oft repeated 500,000,000 job loss per month (it's on tape more than once). Hey, Nanc, the population of the entire US is only 300,000,000. Or were you using Democratic voter math? Ok, my bad. Oh, and get back on your meds. The whole bunch has a bad case of hubris and at that can't seem to find a direction or logical path. Oops I forgot, they are emotion based decision makers. The stock market is still waiting on what the government will do, not because they think it will help, but so that they know where to invest with the least likelihood of getting burnt. On the bright side, at least the House Republicans showed a little spine in voting against the Porkulus Bill."

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, EYE ON BRITAIN and Paralipomena

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

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

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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France guilty of deporting Jews in WWII

France has had something of an undeserved reputation for tolerance since the butchers of the French revolution were the first to declare the emancipation of the Jews. That declaration did not affect basic French attitudes, however -- as the Dreyfus case of the 1890s showed. And we see below some final acceptance of the fact that the French of WWII fully "understood" the Nazi antipathy to Jews. And guess what? French Jews are being forced out of France right now -- with many going to Israel -- because of the failure of the French State to defend them from Muslim attacks. It seems that the French of today "understand" Muslim attitudes too

France's top administrative court ruled today that the state was responsible for the deportation of French Jews during World War Two, but appeared to close the door on major new compensation for victims' families. Some 76,000 Jews were arrested in France between 1942 and 1944 and transported in appalling conditions to Nazi concentration camps such as Auschwitz. Only 3000 returned.

Today's landmark ruling by the Conseil d'Etat court establishes a legal recognition of France's role in the deportations and was welcomed by Jewish organisations. "The Conseil d'Etat recognises the error and responsibility of the state," the court said. "This persecution, in a total break with the values and principles ... enshrined in the declaration of human rights and the traditions of the Republic, inflicted exceptional damage of extreme gravity," it said.

Former President Jacques Chirac was the first French leader to acknowledge state complicity in the deportations in an historic speech in 1995, breaking with past efforts to dissociate France from the collaborationist Vichy regime. His recognition of French involvement opened the way for victims' families to seek compensation and the authorities have since given hundreds of millions of euros to plaintiffs.

The Conseil d'Etat issued its ruling after a minor court sought guidance over the liability of the state in the case brought by daughter of a deportee. The top administrative court said the junior courts could decide on compensation, but added that the state had already met its obligations and respected European norms. "Taken together, these various measures ... have compensated as much as is possible ... the losses suffered as a result of the actions of the state, which collaborated with the deportation," the ruling said.

Serge Klarsfeld, a famous French Nazi hunter whose own father was deported from France, welcomed the ruling. "This ruling is satisfying," he was quoted as saying by Le Figaro newspaper website. "France is now showing itself to be a leader amongst countries facing up to their past." He added that reparations was no longer a major issue. "Those who are currently seeking more compensation have often already received something."

Source

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Some more interesting onomastics (Onomastics = the study of names)

The journal abstract is here. Interesting that the finding applied to whites as well as blacks

The authors of Freakonomics, Steven Levitt, an economist at the University of Chicago, and Stephen Dubner, a New York Times journalist, noted that data shows African Americans are far more likely than other racial groups to give their children uncommon names. White people tend to favour more familiar names that formerly were popular with other, more affluent white people (hence the journey of Madison from relative obscurity in 1988, when it was ranked 300th on the Social Security Administration's name database, to its high of No. 2 in 2001 and 2002).

New research out of Shippensburg University in Pennsylvania also looks at what names signify. However, unlike Freakonomics - which maintained that although a name might tell you something about a person's background, it wouldn't predict the outcome of that person's life - the new study purports to show a link between name and outcome: The more unpopular your name, the more likely you are to land in the juvenile justice system.

The Shippensburg researchers first assigned a popularity score to boys' names, based on how often they showed up in birth records in an undisclosed state from 1987 to 1991. Michael, the No. 1 name, had a popular name index score of 100; names such as Malcolm and Preston had index scores of 1. The researchers then assessed names of young men born during that time who landed in the juvenile justice system. They found that only half had a rating higher than 11. By comparison, in the general population, half of the names scored higher than 20. The take-away? "A 10 per cent increase in the popularity of a name is associated with a 3.7 per cent decrease in the number of juvenile delinquents who have that name," they say in the study, to be published in Social Sciences Quarterly.

For the most part, this isn't new territory. That's because we know that boys with uncommon names are more likely to come from a socio-economically deprived background, which means they also are more likely to get involved with crime. The Shippensburg researchers readily admit that it's not a name alone that affects a child's outcome, but rather the circumstance underlying the name.

A lot of baby names in Hollywood these days would have to rate badly. I'm not just talking about marginally weird names given to Gwyneth Paltrow's daughter - Apple - or Sylvester Stallone's son - Sage Moonblood. I'm talking names like Pilot Inspektor (actor Jason Lee's son), Hud and Speck Wildhorse (singer John Mellencamp's sons), and Tu (actor Rob Morrow's daughter; get it? Tu Morrow?). Insofar as such names are often a symptom of a larger problem - parental narcissism and immaturity, anyone? - you can see why some people might want to get the US Congress involved.

And they illuminate the degree to which some parents view kids as accessories. Sure, some odd names may have family significance, but they mostly seem like ads for parents' cleverness and self-congratulatory "individualism". It's not fair saddling a kid with an ad for his folks rather than giving him a name of his own.

Source

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The New Patriotism

"It is worth considering the meaning of patriotism because the question of who is - or is not - a patriot all too often poisons our political debates, in ways that divide us rather than bring us together." -Barack Obama, June 30, 2008

Throughout the Bush years, particularly in the wake of Iraq's liberation, liberals from coast to coast grew increasingly paranoid about patriotism. Virtually anything conservatives said about anything could be twisted and perceived as a dig-subtle or overt-at any given liberal's love of country. Here are some illustrative examples of this phenomenon, circa 2004:

Conservative A: "I support the troops."

Liberal A: "Dissent is patriotic, chicken hawk."

Conservative B: "God Bless America."

Liberal B: "How dare you suggest that I don't want God to bless America! For your information, I hope that he or she blesses America, and every other country for that matter."

Conservative C: "I'm flying American Airlines today."

Liberal C: "Stop questioning my patriotism!"

Suffice it to say, they seemed a tad insecure about the whole thing. Left-leaning pundits and talking heads continually insisted that Republicans, particularly those within the administration, reflexively tarred anyone who dared to deviate from the party line as a traitor. In most cases, these accusations were figments of the Left's collective imagination. Still, to liberals, it was very real and totally outrageous, so America was introduced to a new Golden Rule of politics: Questioning someone else's patriotism is strictly verboten in all circumstances.

A Congressman from Pennsylvania maliciously slanders US Marines by falsely accusing them of murder? Don't bring up the P-word. A former haughty-looking presidential candidate encourages young people to educate themselves, lest they get "stuck" in the military? He won three purple hearts. Bite your tongue. A certain Democratic leader in the Senate prematurely declares an active US military mission "lost" for partisan gain? He loves the troops! He has many friends who are troops!

The lesson, time and again, was that ascribing patriotism (or the lack thereof) based on someone's statements, positions, or actions was out of bounds. To use patriotism as a political badge of honor was an unforgivable-even un-American!-tactic of the warmongering, bloodthirsty Bush/Cheney death machine. In fact, perhaps the purest form of true patriotism, we were told, was the act if dissenting from the creeping fascism promulgated by the neo-con cabal at the helm of Amerikkka's government.

To the astonishment of no one, these once-sacred rules are suddenly vanishing now that the Left has taken power. In fact, three of the most powerful Democrats in America have already gone to the patriotism well to help reinforce support for specific policy preferences.

While still a candidate, Vice President Joe Biden faced questions from an ABC News about his ticket's plan to hike taxes for "the rich." The term "rich," incidentally, was defined at the time as households making $250,000 or more-though that figure crept steadily downward as the campaign wore on. These rich Americans, Biden explained, could afford to fork over more of their earnings to Uncle Sam. In fact they should be proud to do so: "It's time to be patriotic," he explained, flashing his patented painted-on grin. (No movement from his forehead, of course). Got that, "rich" folks? You will surrender more of the money you work hard for, and you will do so merrily. Out of patriotism. Why, to even complain would be unacceptable-don't you love your country? Considering this new standard he constructed, one wonders what the Vice President thinks of, say, his administration's current Treasury Secretary. Never mind. One ought not get bogged down with such distractions.

This past week, the President of the United States abandoned his June 2008 position by eagerly expanding the politicization of patriotism. In his efforts to woo public support for his entirely pork-free, catastrophe-preventing, crucially-crucial stimulus package, Obama hoped to enlist some Republicans patsies to help create the mirage of bipartisanship. He succeeded, winning over three whole Republicans out of the 219 in Congress. For those keeping score at home, that's a .014 batting average for the post-partisan healer. According to the New York Times, after the northeastern trio knuckled under, the president called each of them to "applaud them for their patriotism." What a thrill it must have been. After all, it's not every day that one gets the opportunity to condemn future generations to mind-bending piles of debt, all in the name of promoting a non-stimulatory "stimulus" plan that rewards Lefty interest groups and furthers the sweeping policy goals of the party that-technically-represents your opposition.

When the final deal was struck a few days later, Harry Reid echoed the president's kudos, albeit with his renowned cloying charmlessness: "I'm really at a lack of words how to express my admiration and respect for the love of our country, the patriotism, and the courage of three brave senators," Reid said, "Specter from Pennsylvania, Snowe and Collins from Maine. I don't think I need to say more than that." No, he needn't. There's a new patriotism in town. This time around, 98 percent of Congressional Republicans failed to reach the patriotic plateau. Not to worry, though. They'll have three years and 42 more weeks, at least, to redeem themselves and display their genuine love for America by supporting the president and whatever emergency/apocalypse-averting policies he may have in store. God Bless Omerica.

Source

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, EYE ON BRITAIN and Paralipomena

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

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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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Typical socialist lies

The self-described socialist senator from Vermont, Bernard Sanders, is prematurely declaring the teachings of Milton Friedman dead in the fringe publication, In These Times. Many dim bulbs on Capitol Hill think the same way as Sanders does, so if only for that reason it's worthwhile to see what he's thinking.

The senator's beliefs are not merely misguided but evil and profoundly un-American. He and his fellow travellers on the Hill and in the media routinely lie and distort the history and function of markets in this country. Never does it occur to them that government, because it set the rules of the road and provided incentives for perverse behavior, is a primary cause of the current temporary economic downturn. Instead they are adherents of an imported ideology that tolerates no dissent and crushes all freedom. Take this Sanders statement:

My colleagues in the Senate and I are now picking up the pieces of a banking system brought to the edge of collapse by this theory of deregulation and by the insatiable greed of a small number of wealthy financiers playing in the market and engaging in incredibly risky-if not illegal-behavior.

Which deregulation would he, as Congress enslaves future generations by running up debts in the trillions of dollars, be referring to? Sarbanes-Oxley? The Community Reinvestment Act? Ask these people for specifics and you consistently get stammering evasions. Sanders and those like him are just trotting out the same lies that one of America's worst presidents ever, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, used in the 1930s to vilify the market after government intervention helped to push it over the edge.

Source

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The Truth about taxes

Stimulus: President Obama, a smart man, says that tax cuts for the wealthy are the main reason we're now in such economic trouble. Someone needs to tell him how utterly - and dangerously - wrong that is.

"We have tried that strategy time and time again," the president said Monday of "tax cuts for the wealthiest few Americans," and "it's only helped lead us to the crisis we face right now."

Well, he's half-right: We have tried it again and again. But rather than create crises, economic growth has been restored. The evidence is pretty much beyond dispute. Since World War I - the start of the modern financial era - we've suffered four major downturns. In three of them, the government cut tax rates. And each time an economic boom ensued. In only one did the government respond by raising taxes, erecting trade barriers and enacting massive new spending programs to get out of the slump. Today, we call that time the Great Depression.

As noted in a recent study by UCLA economists Harold Cole and Lee Ohanian, President Roosevelt's efforts at government direction of the economy likely extended the Depression by seven years. As history shows, lower taxes, not more government, work best:

The 1920s: When the income tax was established in 1913, the rate was 7%. But it quickly soared, especially for the rich, and by 1918 the top rate was 77%. Unfortunately, coming out of the war the economy was a mess, with prices falling, unemployment soaring and nominal GDP dropping by more than 15% in just one year. From 1921 to 1925, under Presidents Harding and Coolidge, tax rates were slashed to 25%, and GDP rose at an annual rate of 3.4% in the four years after the tax cuts vs. 2% before. All told, GDP swelled more than 50% during the 1920s.

All this was undone, however, on a bipartisan basis - first by President Hoover, a Republican, then by the Democrat FDR. Hoover boosted the top income tax rate to 63%. Then, FDR took it to 79%, while also doubling the corporate tax to 24%, imposing a Social Security tax of 2% and raising taxes on stocks and dividends, estates, and "excess" profits. Is it any wonder the economy went nowhere in the 1930s?

The 1960s: President Kennedy, a Democrat, believed strongly that lower taxes meant higher growth, and he was soon proven right. Before he was assassinated, JFK proposed cutting top tax rates from a punitive 91% to 70%. In 1965, his cuts were enacted under President Johnson by a Democratic Congress. Once again, growth took off, along with private investment. Real GNP, which averaged just 2.4% from 1952 to 1960, expanded at 4.5% during the '60s. The expansion that began in 1961 and ended in 1970 was, at the time, the longest ever.

The 1980s: President Reagan took over an economy with a 21% prime interest rate, double-digit unemployment and inflation, slowing productivity and flagging economic growth. But he too was a big tax cutter. His 25% across-the-board rate cuts snapped the economy out of its funk, creating the longest peacetime expansion ever at the time. During Reagan's two terms real GDP growth averaged 3.2% compared with 2.8% in the preceding eight years. After stagnating through most of the 1970s, real median family income grew $4,000 under Reagan. Investment boomed, as did the stock market, business creation and innovation. Some 20 million new jobs were created, due to the increased incentives to work, save and invest resulting from lower tax rates.

We all want our new president to succeed. But to do so, he needs to drop the class-warfare rhetoric on taxes and cut them instead. Like Coolidge. Like Kennedy. Like Reagan.

Source

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ELSEWHERE

The Mysterious Disappearing Tax Cuts in Stimulus Bill : "We have all heard about the debate regarding the percentage of the Obama Stimulus Bill that is tax cuts as opposed to expenditures. Originally, there was discussion that it should be up to 40% of the total of the bill. There were arguments because it had slipped to 33%. In the final package, I don't see much at all in the way of real cuts -- certainly not tax cuts that will stimulate the economy in the near future... For individuals, a large portion of the tax savings is a one-year correction to the tax code to limit tax hitting about 70 million Americans with the Alternative Minimum Tax (AMT). Allowing for the fact that only one person in a back office on the fifth floor of a very large building in Washington actually understands the AMT, how are these 70 million Americans going to know that they saved taxes from a tax they never knew existed? How are they going to quantify how much they are saving? Even if they could figure out what they are saving are they now going to go out and spend this mystery savings? Even if they knew about these savings, they would not happen until March or April 2010. So much for this "tax cut" being a stimulus.

The Left as a Mafia: "Members of the Mafia have to take a vow of silence, and if they break it, they face the very real possibility of winding up dead. Liberals have their own version of the vow. However, instead of having to keep quiet about murder, drug deals and extortion, they must promise not to ridicule their own kind. The price of breaking the code isn't death, it's something far more serious; namely, exile from their social circle. Dare to make fun of Joe Biden's statement that in 1929, President Roosevelt went on TV to reassure his fellow Americans about the Depression, and don't expect to be invited to write for the Huffington Post. Dare to laugh at Nancy Pelosi's contention that 500 million Americans are losing their jobs every month, and you can forget about being invited to brunch at Streisand's or to pitch a movie idea to Tom Hanks or Steven Spielberg. Believe me, for some people, that's a far worse fate than swimming with the fishes. When you remember what a big deal the press and the late night jokesters made out of Dan Quayle's merely misspelling "potato," you get some idea of what partisan hypocrites these people are."

Helping people to see Muslims in a better light: "Orchard Park police are investigating a particularly gruesome killing, the beheading of a woman, after her husband - an influential member of the local Muslim community - reported her death to police Thursday. Police identified the victim as Aasiya Z. Hassan, 37. Detectives have charged her husband, Muzzammil Hassan, 44, with second-degree murder. "He came to the police station at 6:20 p.m. [Thursday] and told us that she was dead," Orchard Park Police Chief Andrew Benz said late this morning. Muzzammil Hassan told police that his wife was at his business, Bridges TV, on Thorn Avenue in the village. Officers went to that location and discovered her body. Muzzammil Hassan is the founder and chief executive officer of Bridges TV, which he launched in 2004, amid hopes that it would help portray Muslims in a more positive light.

Israel: No truce unless soldier freed : "Israel said yesterday that it would not agree to a long-term truce with the Hamas rulers of the Gaza Strip unless an Israeli soldier held by the Islamists was freed. Full opening of the Gaza border crossings has been a Hamas condition for a truce. Israel linked that demand with the release of Gilad Shalit, held captive in Gaza since 2006, when he was kidnapped in a cross-border raid. `The prime minister's position is that Israel will not reach understandings on a truce before the release of Gilad Shalit,' Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's office said in a statement. Palestinian officials had reported significant headway in the indirect talks mediated by Egypt."

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, EYE ON BRITAIN and Paralipomena

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

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

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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