A few observations about immigration and intelligence
In my comments on IQ, yesterday, I asked why the descendants of African slaves who have in recent decades come to the USA from the Caribbean tend to outperform in various ways the descendants of African slaves whose ancestors were transported directly to what is now the USA. Afro-Americans themselves are well aware of the difference and refer to Afro-Caribbeans as "coconuts" (brown on the outside, white on the inside).
I attributed the difference between the two groups to an immigration effect: "People who have somehow got themselves out of a Caribbean hellhole such as Jamaica or Haiti and re-established themselves in America are obviously smarter than those who stay behind in their scenic but poor, corrupt and crime-ridden homelands. So they do better in America because they are smarter to start with. They are an environmentally-selected superior subset of their parent population. Most of their success follows from that. The first generation too tend to have better motivation, having grown up in a society lacking welfare payments. It's basically work or starve where they come from. And they do of course tend to pass work-oriented values onto their kids."
A question that flows from that, however, starts from the fact that Americans generally are of immigrant origin. So why is not the average white American IQ higher than the average IQ of (say) Britain? The easy answer, of course is that Americans today originate from all corners of the globe. They are not solely of British descent and some of the incoming groups may originally have come from backward populations and thus have dragged the average down.
But let me look in a bit more detail at that: Unlike the "coconuts", the earliest white settlers in North America were NOT fleeing from backward hellholes. They were in fact fleeing from the most advanced civilizations of the day, predominantly Britain and Germany. They were fleeing mainly for religious reasons rather than economic ones and whether that indicates greater intelligence or not is I think at least not obvious. Later waves of immigration, however, clearly DID come to America for economic reasons: poor people from Ireland, Poland, Germany, Russia and Southern Italy, principally. And as Herrnstein & Murray showed long ago, there is a social class effect on IQ: Poor people tend to be dumber. So the fact that the descendants of that later wave suffer no present-day IQ disadvantage illustrates that the immigration effect DID work for them too: The immigrant poor were smarter than the poor populations that they left behind. So, just looking at the major population groups that today constitute white America, there is no reason to expect in them higher average IQs than the average IQs in (say) Britain or Germany. And the reality corresponds to that expectation.
A small coda to that which I mention with some hesitation concerns Ireland -- seeing that I myself have substantial Irish ancestry. The various 20th century studies of Irish IQ have produced some rather low averages, with a 7-point disadvantage often quoted. There are various possible reasons for that but we may be seeing there the other end of the immigration effect: For various reasons, but particularly the potato blight, the emigration from Ireland was particularly heavy and the smartest people left Ireland long ago for parts of the world with greater opportunities: principally Britain, North America and the Antipodes. I am rather glad that some of them came to the Antipodes because I would not exist otherwise. And I can assure you that I am perfectly delighted by my Irish ancestry.
And that somehow brings me to the Chinese. No-one in his right mind can deny the outstanding academic success and success generally of the Chinese in America. So is that an immigrant effect too? Are they smart solely because they are immigrants who had to overcome large difficulties in order to come to America? I think that there is some truth in that, but it is far from the whole story. The studies of IQ in China itself unfailingly show an above-average result, usually considerably above average. On the other hand, as far as I am aware, none of the studies of IQ in China come from completely representative national population samples and it may be that there are among the poor populations of the more remote regions of China some quite low averages to be found, which could well drag the national average down to something like the Western average if taken into account. But that is speculation. Clearly, the parts of China from which Chinese Americans come show above average IQs so Chinese Americans are a select subset of an already talented population. No wonder they do so well.
*******************************
Know thy enemy: This is not your mother's Democratic Party
By Andrew Breitbart
The Democratic Party's attitude to elections is admirable: Win. And recent history has shown it will do anything to do so. When, if not now, will Republicans develop such a fighting spirit? Democrats invest - with taxpayer money, mind you - in groups like ACORN that, among other sordid tactics, seek out Skid Row bodies and wheel them to polling places. All the Democratic National Committee needs are vans and smelling salts. Pop culture and the "education system" have done the rest, making "D" the default choice on Election Day.
Democrats brazenly take policy positions - think government services and even amnesty for illegal immigrants - not because they are the right thing to do, but because they are time-tested demographic bribes. Forget cigarettes and beer, Democrats would distribute needles, methadone, medical marijuana and biscotti in voter goodie bags if they could get away with it.
Democrats long ago jettisoned America's melting-pot ideal - E Pluribus Unum ("Out of Many, One") - because it imperils their campaign for permanent rule. Splitting the country into separate identity groups and playing them against each other works a lot better. And anyone who disagrees is a racist.
One of the first things President Obama attempted to do after taking office was to take control of the Census Bureau, an act that could redraw congressional districts and ensure Democratic majorities for years to come. The new president also etched out an enemies list, focusing on conservative talk-radio hosts, including Rush Limbaugh. He also appears to have singled out Fox News. Comedians and mainstream journalists who are usually contemptuous of government bullying and First Amendment threats also continue to do the president's bidding.
These overt political gestures were done amid economic chaos and mainstream media delirium to ensure permanent victory for a newly radicalized Democratic Party. Moveon.org, George Soros and the ghost of Saul Alinsky are in charge now. It's not just "tea party" protesters who think we've tilted far left. Self-avowed anarchists and open socialists proudly brandished Obama placards at well-attended May Day parades.
When elected, the Democrats dole out billion-dollar bonuses to their core supporters at taxpayers' expense. Witness the $787 billion stimulus package, an orgy of special-interest payback for labor unions, liberal activist groups and multinational corporations. One would be hard pressed to name a Democratic policy that is motivated more by principle than by winning.
Where is the media to expose this blatant corruption when the media are in the middle of the pile? NBC News, whose parent company General Electric is getting billions in stimulus cash to perpetuate Democrat-friendly "green" technologies and health care information systems, is at the forefront of a bizarre campaign to act as a check on the party that is out of power, not the party in power. NBC anchor Brian Williams bowed to the new president; MSNBC is a Fellini-esque exercise in liberal triumphalism.
With Democrats holding comfortable majorities in the House and Senate, as well as controlling the executive branch, it's only logical that the mainstream media to focus their scrutiny on Mr. Limbaugh, ex-Rep. Tom DeLay, former President George W. Bush and Sarah Palin, the governor of one of the least populous states. Right?
NBC News and MSNBC are certainly not along among the government watchdogs that have been tamed. The New York Times expends its considerable yet waning clout to ensure that our future is in a one-party state. Vocal, liberal Hollywood celebrities - on the same page as the Huffington Post and Keith Olbermann - spread the venom by making membership in the Grand Old Party seem like an anti-social act for young voters.
Such brazenly reprehensible Democratic lawmakers as Nancy Pelosi, John P. Murtha, Barney Frank, Harry Reid and Christopher J. Dodd are not trotted before the media because of their telegenic appeal and oratorical skills, but to act as symbols of what politicians can get away with it. It's a big-league taunt - like gang members in prison sporting "tear" tattoos under their eyes to brag about their kill count. Yeah ... What are you going to do about it, Mr. Boehner and Mr. McConnell?
Yet Democrats at least wield a logical and workable strategy to defeat their enemy. And "enemy" is precisely how they view the Republican Party.
Republicans, on the other hand, act like a snobby condo board and appear to seek out potential voters for their savoriness. The party expects pre-existing respectable organizations, Protestant churches in particular, to do the heavy lifting. In this day of dwindling Republican appeal, the party's ace in the hole is heard at the end of the polling day: "Have they counted the overseas military vote yet?" It's amazing Republicans ever win.
Most disturbing, Republicans seem to think Democrats can be their friends. Not only does the Republican Party not have a Ronald Reagan, the Democratic Party has no Tip O'Neill. Washington doesn't have end-of-the-day, cross-party social sessions over single-malt scotches. There is no bipartisanship that doesn't end in Republicans acquiescing in defeat of their core principles. A coordinated Democratic campaign against mainstream middle-of-the-road Republicanism is here to stay. And our strategy, as best as I can decipher it, is to be more liked than the last go around.
In the next election cycle, things need to be drastically different. Democracy is not Augusta National Golf Club. It's a messy free-for-all, and in a two-party system, the GOP will not survive if it doesn't accept the fact that the Democrats are its enemy and that it must begin to play for keeps. That means finding another Lee Atwater - only meaner - and not apologizing when we get him.
SOURCE
**************************
The awareness-challenged Obama
Barack Obama, through his spokesman, claimed that he was unaware of the Tax Day Tea parties. Granted, the Mainstream Media has done a good job in suppressing any sort of coverage ahead of time (and the little coverage they did provide was derisive at best) but how out of touch is the Community Organizer in Chief, really?
He was unaware that he was attending a church (for 20 years) with a visceral racist pastor who hates America.
He was unaware that he was family friends with, and started his political career in the living room of, a domestic terrorist, William Ayers.
He was unaware that he had invested in two speculative companies (AVI, Skyterra) backed by some of his top donors right after taking office in 2005.
He was unaware that his own aunt was living in the US illegally.
He was unaware that his own step brother lives on pennies a day in a hut in Kenya.
He was unaware of the AIG bonuses that he and his administration approved of and signed into a bill.
He was unaware that the man he nominated to be his Secretary of Commerce was under investigation in a bribery scandal.
He was unaware that the man he nominated to be his Secretary of Health and Human Services was a tax cheat.
He was unaware that the man he nominated to be his Secretary of the Treasury was a tax cheat.
He was unaware that the man he nominated to be the U.S. Trade Representative was a tax cheat.
He was unaware that the woman he nominated to be his Chief Performance Officer was a tax cheat.
He was unaware that the man he nominated to be #2 at the Environmental Protection Agency was under investigation for mismanaging $25 million in EPA grants.
There are people in comas that are more aware of world affairs than this guy.
SOURCE (See the original for links)
**********************
ELSEWHERE
Pakistan: Angry villagers fight, surround Taliban: “Pakistani villagers enraged with the Taliban after the bombing of a mosque battled the militants on Monday, underscoring a shift in public opinion away from the hardline Islamists. … Outraged by the attack, villagers formed a militia, known as a lashkar, of about 500 men and began fighting the militants on Saturday in an bid to force them out of their area. A top government official in Upper Dir, Atif-ur-Rehman, said the militia fighters had pushed the Taliban out of three villages and surrounded them in another two.”
Crazy: “High levels” of bacteria in some hand sanitizers: “The Food and Drug Administration warned consumers Monday not to use skin products made by Clarcon because of high levels of disease-causing bacteria found during a recent inspection. Clarcon Biological Chemistry Laboratory Inc. of Roy, Utah, issued a voluntary recall of some skin sanitizers and skin protectants marketed under several different brand names, the FDA said in a statement. Consumers should not use any Clarcon products and should throw them away, the FDA said. … Examples of products that should be discarded include Citrushield Lotion, Dermasentials DermaBarrier, Dermassentials by Clarcon, Antimicrobial Hand Sanitizer, Iron Fist Barrier Hand Treatment, Skin Shield Restaurant, Skin Shield Industrial, Skin Shield Beauty Salon Lotion, Total Skin Care Beauty and Total Skin Care Work.”
Afghan surge: Marines expand base in Taliban stronghold: “Teams of builders worked through dust storms Monday to expand a base for a brigade of U.S. Marines now fanning out across southern Afghanistan to change the course of a war claiming American lives faster than ever before. Some 10,000 Marines have poured into Afghanistan in the last six weeks, the military said Monday, transforming this once small base in the heart of the country’s most violent province, Helmand, into a desert fortress.”
Government Motors is no substitute for General Motors : “Many believe that GM is an example of the state abandoning its hands-off approach to the market and stepping in to control the unbridled market and rescue the company. But that’s a misconception: the idea of a neo-liberal, free-market US economy is a myth. The US government has been intertwined with the nation’s economy for many years (including during the Reagan era); it’s not just jumping in now. The auto industry is a case in point. American politicians have protected the Detroit carmarkers in various ways for decades, most notably by restricting imports. And in setting its fuel economy rules, the government set a lower bar for pickups and light trucks, thus supporting Detroit’s decision to focus on those vehicles. There has not been a bright line separating the market and state in the US. The GM case is a change in degree, not in kind. What’s new about GM is that government intervention is taking the form of direct ownership, which means a qualitative increase in control.”
Michelle O channeling Jackie O? : “Is anyone else getting wrist-slashing bored over the unmitigated giddy slobbering the mainstream media amasses on Michelle Obama? The creepy media mutts and fashion photogs pant after the First Lady like she’s the Second Coming of Jackie Onassis. She’s Movie Idol, Superstar, European Royalty, Cultural Diva and Holy Madonna all rolled into one mega-merchandising mind-manipulating media package. She’s the Imperial Majesty so many Americans lust after but can’t have because that silly old Constitution proscribes crowned craniums in America.”
My Twitter.com identity: jonjayray. For more blog 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)
****************************
Wednesday, June 10, 2009
The NYT and IQ again
Ya gotta laugh! Below are the first three paragraphs from an article by Kristoff. He is making his second obeisance before the badly-flawed work of Richard Nisbett on IQ:
Equating "coconuts", as American blacks often call them, with Jews and Asians is one extravagant comparison. It's true that they outperform American-born blacks but that does not say much. They are nowhere up to the Jewish/Chinese/Japanese standard.
Kristoff's basic but ludicrous point is that IQ and achievement generally are all due to working hard at your education and that all three groups he mentions do so. I will leave the Jewish/Asian aspect of that aside for the moment and just concentrate on the "coconuts". Their success is largely a reflection of a strong immigration effect. People who have somehow got themselves out of a Caribbean hellhole such as Jamaica or Haiti and re-established themselves in America are obviously smarter than those who stay behind in their scenic but poor, corrupt and crime-ridden homelands. So they do better in America because they are smarter to start with. They are an environmentally-selected superior subset of their parent population. Most of their success follows from that. The first generation too tend to have better motivation, having grown up in a society lacking welfare payments. It's basically work or starve where they come from. And they do of course tend to pass work-oriented values onto their kids. So attitudes do play SOME part in their success. But there is no sign that they are about to rival Jews in Nobel-prize-quality work!
The rest of Kristoff's article is, as far as I can see, just a rehash of points that I have rebutted already in my previous commentaries on Nisbett. See here, here, here and here
One point I have not seen mentioned before, however, is this doozy:
So Chinese pre-schoolers did not speak English well but rapidly caught up and surged ahead once they went to a real school. It has apparently not occurred to Kristoff that the Chinese littlies might have not been good at English or understood their classes at all because they mostly heard Chinese at home!
***********************
Now that he's been elected, Obama is a Muslim again
One year ago in June 2008, Floyd produced a television ad which asked the simple question, “Was Barack Obama ever a Muslim?” The Obama campaign came unglued. It earned Floyd prominent placement on a special Obama Web site called “Fight the Smears.” The news media jumped on the bandwagon. Newsweek reported: “Barack Obama has never been Muslim and never practiced Islam. But rumors about his religion intended to frighten some voters persist, and they mostly return to one point of fact: his name.” The Boston Globe wrote: “Obama is a member of the United Church of Christ. His Kenyan paternal grandfather and Indonesian stepfather were Muslim, but he attended secular and Catholic schools and was never a practicing Muslim.” ...
Now all has changed with Barack Obama’s coming out to the Muslim world. Jake Tapper of ABC News reports, “The other day we heard a comment from a White House aide that never would have been uttered during the primaries or general election campaign. During a conference call in preparation for President Obama’s trip to Cairo, Egypt, where he will address the Muslim world, deputy National Security Adviser for Strategic Communications Denis McDonough said ‘the President himself experienced Islam on three continents before he was able to -- or before he’s been able to visit, really, the heart of the Islamic world -- you know, growing up in Indonesia, having a Muslim father -- obviously Muslim Americans (are) a key part of Illinois and Chicago.’”
Tapper also reported, “In his April 6 address to the Turkish Parliament, President Obama referenced how many ‘Americans have Muslims in their families or have lived in a Muslim majority country. I know, because I am one of them.’”
More HERE
**************************
The Media Fall for Phony 'Jobs' Claims: The Obama Numbers Are Pure Fiction
Mr. Fratto was a colleague of mine in the Bush administration, and as a senior member of the White House communications shop, he knows just how difficult it can be to deal with a press corps skeptical about presidential economic claims. It now appears, however, that Mr. Fratto's problem was that he simply lacked the magic words -- jobs "saved or created."
"Saved or created" has become the signature phrase for Barack Obama as he describes what his stimulus is doing for American jobs. His latest invocation came yesterday, when the president declared that the stimulus had already saved or created at least 150,000 American jobs -- and announced he was ramping up some of the stimulus spending so he could "save or create" an additional 600,000 jobs this summer. These numbers come in the context of an earlier Obama promise that his recovery plan will "save or create three to four million jobs over the next two years."
Mr. Fratto sees a double standard at play. "We would never have used a formula like 'save or create,'" he tells me. "To begin with, the number is pure fiction -- the administration has no way to measure how many jobs are actually being 'saved.' And if we had tried to use something this flimsy, the press would never have let us get away with it."
Of course, the inability to measure Mr. Obama's jobs formula is part of its attraction. Never mind that no one -- not the Labor Department, not the Treasury, not the Bureau of Labor Statistics -- actually measures "jobs saved." As the New York Times delicately reports, Mr. Obama's jobs claims are "based on macroeconomic estimates, not an actual counting of jobs." Nice work if you can get away with it.
More HERE
************************
ELSEWHERE
Obama can walk on water: ""I would love nothing more than to have a leisurely week in Paris, stroll down the Seine, take my wife out to a nice meal, have a picnic in Luxembourg gardens. Those days are over for the moment," he added." [The Seine is a river]
China to spur global recovery: "China's stellar growth could help pull the world out of its current economic slump, the head of the World Bank says. With Chinese growth in the first quarter of 2009 exceeding most expectations, World Bank president Robert Zoellick said overnight that China could act as a catalyst for a global economic resurgence. "Any forecast in this environment is hazardous, but I think China is likely to surprise on the upside," the former US trade envoy said, speaking at a conference in Canada. "By and large (China's growth) has not only been a stabilising force, but a force that will pull the system (out of the downturn)." China's meteoric rise as a global economic player has boosted world trade in manufactured goods and provided western companies with an enormous new market for their products and services."
I think Obama just lost the homosexual vote: “The Supreme Court on Monday agreed with the Obama administration and refused to review Pentagon policy barring gays and lesbians from serving openly in the military. The court said it will not hear an appeal from former Army Capt. James Pietrangelo II, who was dismissed under the ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ policy. … During last year’s campaign, President Barack Obama indicated he supported the eventual repeal of the policy, but he has made no specific move to do so since taking office in January. Meanwhile, the White House has said it won’t stop gays and lesbians from being dismissed from the military.”
Ginsburg delays Chrysler sale : “Chrysler LLC’s planned asset sale to a group led by Italy’s Fiat SpA was delayed by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg while the U.S. Supreme Court considers a request for a longer postponement that might scuttle the deal. … A federal appeals court in New York last week allowed the sale, while putting its decision on hold until 4 p.m. today to let opponents including Indiana pension funds seek Supreme Court intervention. Ginsburg’s one-sentence order today said the bankruptcy court orders allowing the sale ‘are stayed pending further order’ of the Supreme Court.”
Democrats declare war on the poor: “Given the abject failure of the War on Poverty — as Ronald Reagan said, ‘Poverty won’ — now Democrats apparently have decided to go right for the heart of the problem, by making war on the poor. That’s the only plausible explanation for S.500, the ‘Protecting Consumers from Unreasonable Credit Rates Act of 2009,’ introduced earlier this year by Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Illinois). The bill would limit interest rates in such a way that pawn shop owners say it would drive them out of business. Currently under consideration by the Senate Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs committee, this legislation could only make sense to someone who (a) knows nothing about pawn shops, and (b) knows nothing about economics.”
SCOTUS moves to curb “perception of bias” in judicial ranks: “The US Supreme Court has established a broad, new constitutional standard requiring judges to step aside in cases involving a perceived probability of judicial bias. The 5-to-4 decision was announced on Monday in a case involving a justice on the West Virginia Supreme Court. Justice Brent Benjamin had refused to step aside in a case involving a company that spent $3 million to help defeat an incumbent justice, whose seat was filled by Justice Benjamin. The Supreme Court ruled that Benjamin violated the due process rights of the litigants before the West Virginia high court when he declined to recuse himself in that case. The majority justices on the US high court viewed the company’s independent campaign expenditure as a significant factor in Benjamin’s electoral success. They concluded the effort created a perception of a ‘probability of actual bias’ when the company later appeared before Benjamin and the other justices.”
NY Senate goes Republican, aided by two renegade Dems: “Republicans who claimed control of the New York state Senate with help from two Democrats cast their action as a rebellion against a $131.8 billion budget negotiated in secret with coerced support. Democrats immediately challenged the claim and described the action as illegal. Governor David Paterson called it ‘despicable.’ The maneuver, just two weeks before the Legislature’s scheduled June 22 adjournment, leaves in doubt the outcome of bills to allow gay marriage, create a new money-saving pension category for future state and city workers and approve taxes to balance New York City’s budget.”
GM, Amtrak and an increasingly fascist America : “Last week, General Motors finally declared bankruptcy. Many in government thought $20 billion in taxpayer dollars would save the company, but as predicted, it only postponed the inevitable. The government will dump another $30 billion into GM and take a 60 percent controlling interest for it. Public officials are now involving themselves in tactical business decisions such as where GM’s headquarters should move and what kind of cars it will build. The promise that this is temporary and will eventually be profitable is supposed to ease the American people into accepting this arrangement, but it is of little comfort to those who remember similar promises when the American taxpayers bought Amtrak. After three years, government was supposed to be out of the passenger rail business. 40 years and billions of dollars later, the government is still operating Amtrak at a loss, despite the fact that they have created a monopoly by making it illegal to compete with Amtrak. Imagine what they can now do to what is left of the great American auto industry!”
“Are you proud to be white?” Uh, no: “I despise the obsession with race that is forced upon us by the nanny state. I’m always having to fill out these forms that ask my race. Liberals are so fixated on race that they would make a Nazi Gauleiter proud. Nowadays, when I get the chance and I come across some official piece of paper that demands ‘race,’ I put an asterisk in the box and at the bottom or along the margin I write this: ‘No, not so much anymore. I’m too old, fat and out-of-shape to win.’ … The reason this came up is that a fellow just sent me an email asking the question: ‘Are you proud to be white?’ My answer went something like this: ‘No, not particularly. I am proud to be an American. My race is incidental. To think otherwise is to buy into racial collectivism, which I refuse to do.’”
There is a new lot of postings by Chris Brand just up -- this time mainly looking at the implications of the recent voting in Britain.
My Twitter.com identity: jonjayray. For more blog 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)
****************************
Ya gotta laugh! Below are the first three paragraphs from an article by Kristoff. He is making his second obeisance before the badly-flawed work of Richard Nisbett on IQ:
In the mosaic of America, three groups that have been unusually successful are Asian-Americans, Jews and West Indian blacks — and in that there may be some lessons for the rest of us.
Asian-Americans are renowned — or notorious — for ruining grade curves in schools across the land, and as a result they constitute about 20 percent of students at Harvard College.
As for Jews, they have received about one-third of all Nobel Prizes in science received by Americans. One survey found that a quarter of Jewish adults in the United States have earned a graduate degree, compared with 6 percent of the population as a whole.
West Indian blacks, those like Colin Powell whose roots are in the Caribbean, are one-third more likely to graduate from college than African-Americans as a whole, and their median household income is almost one-third higher.
Equating "coconuts", as American blacks often call them, with Jews and Asians is one extravagant comparison. It's true that they outperform American-born blacks but that does not say much. They are nowhere up to the Jewish/Chinese/Japanese standard.
Kristoff's basic but ludicrous point is that IQ and achievement generally are all due to working hard at your education and that all three groups he mentions do so. I will leave the Jewish/Asian aspect of that aside for the moment and just concentrate on the "coconuts". Their success is largely a reflection of a strong immigration effect. People who have somehow got themselves out of a Caribbean hellhole such as Jamaica or Haiti and re-established themselves in America are obviously smarter than those who stay behind in their scenic but poor, corrupt and crime-ridden homelands. So they do better in America because they are smarter to start with. They are an environmentally-selected superior subset of their parent population. Most of their success follows from that. The first generation too tend to have better motivation, having grown up in a society lacking welfare payments. It's basically work or starve where they come from. And they do of course tend to pass work-oriented values onto their kids. So attitudes do play SOME part in their success. But there is no sign that they are about to rival Jews in Nobel-prize-quality work!
The rest of Kristoff's article is, as far as I can see, just a rehash of points that I have rebutted already in my previous commentaries on Nisbett. See here, here, here and here
One point I have not seen mentioned before, however, is this doozy:
One large study followed a group of Chinese-Americans who initially did slightly worse on the verbal portion of I.Q. tests than other Americans and the same on math portions. But beginning in grade school, the Chinese outperformed their peers, apparently because they worked harder.
So Chinese pre-schoolers did not speak English well but rapidly caught up and surged ahead once they went to a real school. It has apparently not occurred to Kristoff that the Chinese littlies might have not been good at English or understood their classes at all because they mostly heard Chinese at home!
***********************
Now that he's been elected, Obama is a Muslim again
One year ago in June 2008, Floyd produced a television ad which asked the simple question, “Was Barack Obama ever a Muslim?” The Obama campaign came unglued. It earned Floyd prominent placement on a special Obama Web site called “Fight the Smears.” The news media jumped on the bandwagon. Newsweek reported: “Barack Obama has never been Muslim and never practiced Islam. But rumors about his religion intended to frighten some voters persist, and they mostly return to one point of fact: his name.” The Boston Globe wrote: “Obama is a member of the United Church of Christ. His Kenyan paternal grandfather and Indonesian stepfather were Muslim, but he attended secular and Catholic schools and was never a practicing Muslim.” ...
Now all has changed with Barack Obama’s coming out to the Muslim world. Jake Tapper of ABC News reports, “The other day we heard a comment from a White House aide that never would have been uttered during the primaries or general election campaign. During a conference call in preparation for President Obama’s trip to Cairo, Egypt, where he will address the Muslim world, deputy National Security Adviser for Strategic Communications Denis McDonough said ‘the President himself experienced Islam on three continents before he was able to -- or before he’s been able to visit, really, the heart of the Islamic world -- you know, growing up in Indonesia, having a Muslim father -- obviously Muslim Americans (are) a key part of Illinois and Chicago.’”
Tapper also reported, “In his April 6 address to the Turkish Parliament, President Obama referenced how many ‘Americans have Muslims in their families or have lived in a Muslim majority country. I know, because I am one of them.’”
More HERE
**************************
The Media Fall for Phony 'Jobs' Claims: The Obama Numbers Are Pure Fiction
Mr. Fratto was a colleague of mine in the Bush administration, and as a senior member of the White House communications shop, he knows just how difficult it can be to deal with a press corps skeptical about presidential economic claims. It now appears, however, that Mr. Fratto's problem was that he simply lacked the magic words -- jobs "saved or created."
"Saved or created" has become the signature phrase for Barack Obama as he describes what his stimulus is doing for American jobs. His latest invocation came yesterday, when the president declared that the stimulus had already saved or created at least 150,000 American jobs -- and announced he was ramping up some of the stimulus spending so he could "save or create" an additional 600,000 jobs this summer. These numbers come in the context of an earlier Obama promise that his recovery plan will "save or create three to four million jobs over the next two years."
Mr. Fratto sees a double standard at play. "We would never have used a formula like 'save or create,'" he tells me. "To begin with, the number is pure fiction -- the administration has no way to measure how many jobs are actually being 'saved.' And if we had tried to use something this flimsy, the press would never have let us get away with it."
Of course, the inability to measure Mr. Obama's jobs formula is part of its attraction. Never mind that no one -- not the Labor Department, not the Treasury, not the Bureau of Labor Statistics -- actually measures "jobs saved." As the New York Times delicately reports, Mr. Obama's jobs claims are "based on macroeconomic estimates, not an actual counting of jobs." Nice work if you can get away with it.
More HERE
************************
ELSEWHERE
Obama can walk on water: ""I would love nothing more than to have a leisurely week in Paris, stroll down the Seine, take my wife out to a nice meal, have a picnic in Luxembourg gardens. Those days are over for the moment," he added." [The Seine is a river]
China to spur global recovery: "China's stellar growth could help pull the world out of its current economic slump, the head of the World Bank says. With Chinese growth in the first quarter of 2009 exceeding most expectations, World Bank president Robert Zoellick said overnight that China could act as a catalyst for a global economic resurgence. "Any forecast in this environment is hazardous, but I think China is likely to surprise on the upside," the former US trade envoy said, speaking at a conference in Canada. "By and large (China's growth) has not only been a stabilising force, but a force that will pull the system (out of the downturn)." China's meteoric rise as a global economic player has boosted world trade in manufactured goods and provided western companies with an enormous new market for their products and services."
I think Obama just lost the homosexual vote: “The Supreme Court on Monday agreed with the Obama administration and refused to review Pentagon policy barring gays and lesbians from serving openly in the military. The court said it will not hear an appeal from former Army Capt. James Pietrangelo II, who was dismissed under the ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ policy. … During last year’s campaign, President Barack Obama indicated he supported the eventual repeal of the policy, but he has made no specific move to do so since taking office in January. Meanwhile, the White House has said it won’t stop gays and lesbians from being dismissed from the military.”
Ginsburg delays Chrysler sale : “Chrysler LLC’s planned asset sale to a group led by Italy’s Fiat SpA was delayed by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg while the U.S. Supreme Court considers a request for a longer postponement that might scuttle the deal. … A federal appeals court in New York last week allowed the sale, while putting its decision on hold until 4 p.m. today to let opponents including Indiana pension funds seek Supreme Court intervention. Ginsburg’s one-sentence order today said the bankruptcy court orders allowing the sale ‘are stayed pending further order’ of the Supreme Court.”
Democrats declare war on the poor: “Given the abject failure of the War on Poverty — as Ronald Reagan said, ‘Poverty won’ — now Democrats apparently have decided to go right for the heart of the problem, by making war on the poor. That’s the only plausible explanation for S.500, the ‘Protecting Consumers from Unreasonable Credit Rates Act of 2009,’ introduced earlier this year by Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Illinois). The bill would limit interest rates in such a way that pawn shop owners say it would drive them out of business. Currently under consideration by the Senate Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs committee, this legislation could only make sense to someone who (a) knows nothing about pawn shops, and (b) knows nothing about economics.”
SCOTUS moves to curb “perception of bias” in judicial ranks: “The US Supreme Court has established a broad, new constitutional standard requiring judges to step aside in cases involving a perceived probability of judicial bias. The 5-to-4 decision was announced on Monday in a case involving a justice on the West Virginia Supreme Court. Justice Brent Benjamin had refused to step aside in a case involving a company that spent $3 million to help defeat an incumbent justice, whose seat was filled by Justice Benjamin. The Supreme Court ruled that Benjamin violated the due process rights of the litigants before the West Virginia high court when he declined to recuse himself in that case. The majority justices on the US high court viewed the company’s independent campaign expenditure as a significant factor in Benjamin’s electoral success. They concluded the effort created a perception of a ‘probability of actual bias’ when the company later appeared before Benjamin and the other justices.”
NY Senate goes Republican, aided by two renegade Dems: “Republicans who claimed control of the New York state Senate with help from two Democrats cast their action as a rebellion against a $131.8 billion budget negotiated in secret with coerced support. Democrats immediately challenged the claim and described the action as illegal. Governor David Paterson called it ‘despicable.’ The maneuver, just two weeks before the Legislature’s scheduled June 22 adjournment, leaves in doubt the outcome of bills to allow gay marriage, create a new money-saving pension category for future state and city workers and approve taxes to balance New York City’s budget.”
GM, Amtrak and an increasingly fascist America : “Last week, General Motors finally declared bankruptcy. Many in government thought $20 billion in taxpayer dollars would save the company, but as predicted, it only postponed the inevitable. The government will dump another $30 billion into GM and take a 60 percent controlling interest for it. Public officials are now involving themselves in tactical business decisions such as where GM’s headquarters should move and what kind of cars it will build. The promise that this is temporary and will eventually be profitable is supposed to ease the American people into accepting this arrangement, but it is of little comfort to those who remember similar promises when the American taxpayers bought Amtrak. After three years, government was supposed to be out of the passenger rail business. 40 years and billions of dollars later, the government is still operating Amtrak at a loss, despite the fact that they have created a monopoly by making it illegal to compete with Amtrak. Imagine what they can now do to what is left of the great American auto industry!”
“Are you proud to be white?” Uh, no: “I despise the obsession with race that is forced upon us by the nanny state. I’m always having to fill out these forms that ask my race. Liberals are so fixated on race that they would make a Nazi Gauleiter proud. Nowadays, when I get the chance and I come across some official piece of paper that demands ‘race,’ I put an asterisk in the box and at the bottom or along the margin I write this: ‘No, not so much anymore. I’m too old, fat and out-of-shape to win.’ … The reason this came up is that a fellow just sent me an email asking the question: ‘Are you proud to be white?’ My answer went something like this: ‘No, not particularly. I am proud to be an American. My race is incidental. To think otherwise is to buy into racial collectivism, which I refuse to do.’”
There is a new lot of postings by Chris Brand just up -- this time mainly looking at the implications of the recent voting in Britain.
My Twitter.com identity: jonjayray. For more blog 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)
****************************
Tuesday, June 09, 2009
Leftist emotional insensitivity
During my career as an academic researcher in psychology and sociology, my main interest was in ideological attitudes but I also made forays into personality research at times. One such foray was into the study of psychopathy, using the most widely accepted measure of it: The MMPI PD scale. One of the two articles I wrote on that subject received a very minor but perhaps significant mark of distinction: It was to a small degree quoted by later authors on the subject. One sometimes gets the impression that most academic journal articles are read by only two people: The author and his mother -- though, if you are lucky, the article might also have been read right through by the editor and referees of the journal in which it was published. I think that most authors of academic articles will assure you with some passion that referees have clearly NOT read with any care the articles they comment on.
My article which received some attention was on sub-clinical psychopathy. You can read it here. So I probably am on firmer ground than most in commenting on that subject. The hallmarks of psychopathy are a lack of normal emotional feelings, an absence of any morality or ethics and a well-disguised contempt for everybody else. In extreme cases this can lead to singularly brutal crimes. Like most personality dispositions, however, there are degrees of psychopathy. In milder cases it can have some advantages and it is those cases that I call sub-clinical: i.e. cases where the psychopath manages to keep himself out of trouble with either the law or the mental health system. And it is often asserted that a degree of psychopathy is helpful in business success.
As it was not my main focus of study, however, I never got around to examining the role of psychopathy in politics. Though I did find in my original research that psychopathy was associated with permissiveness and rejection of punitiveness, attitudes which are common on the Left. And these days I would not attempt research that looked directly at the correlation between Leftism and psychopathy because the conclusion I came to at the end of my research career was that most Leftists are incapable or unwilling to describe their real attitudes. For instance: They will almost all, if asked, claim to be ardent supporters of free speech. Yet, as almost daily posts on my TONGUE-TIED blog reveal, they are in fact relentless enemies of it.
So it seems to me that it is real-life behaviour alone that we must look at in assessing Leftists and I have already used that approach to look at some length at the relationship between Leftism and psychopathy here. As you might have inferred from my original description of psychopathy above, there is much about characteristic Leftist behaviour that a psychiatrist would recognize as psychopathic.
A recent article has emerged, however, that reinforces that conclusion. I reprint the central part of it below. It tends to show that, relative to conservatives, Leftists have a deficit in emotional sensitivity to unpleasant things -- something that is very characteristic of the psychopath. That is of course not at all a new conclusion. We know, for instance, the unfailing brutality of Communist regimes. Not the slightest human sensitivity there. And Stalin's mass murders never bothered American "liberals" during the Soviet era, though the brutality sure bothered conservatives. Nonetheless it is interesting (and a little surprising) to see from attitude research a confirmation of something we know to be true from real life. Given the relentless Leftism of academic psychology and sociology, the authors of article do of course try to "spin" their conclusions as in some way detrimental to conservatives but I think the research results speak for themselves.
One point I should make here, however, is that I AGREE with the authors below in seeing a strong relationship between emotional responses and morality. I have previously argued at some length that seeing morality as having an instinctive emotional basis is a strong position from a philosophical viewpoint and the work of Pinker and Haidt and others has also found some empirical association between morality and emotions of disgust etc.
I should perhaps stress strongly at this point, however, that neither psychopaths nor Leftists are DEVOID of emotion. The one emotion which they do have and which they do share is contempt or hate towards other people about them, contempt for the "status quo" in the Leftist case. And that can be a very strong emotion indeed: A dominant emotion, even. I say more about that here. So on to the recent article:
And below we have another case in point, where an apparently very Leftist female was not even disgusted by being gang raped:
***********************
CHINA BLOCKING
China is once again blocking access to a lot of sites. Even my mirror sites are now inaccessible at times. I have therefore put up a second lot of mirrors as under that ARE so far still accessible:
Mirror site for "Tongue Tied" here
Mirror site for "Dissecting Leftism" here
Mirror site for "Political Correctness Watch" or here
Mirror site for "Greenie Watch" here
Mirror site for "Education Watch International" here
Mirror site for "Gun Watch" here
Mirror site for "Socialized Medicine here
Mirror site for "Australian Politics" here
Mirror site for "Food & Health Skeptic" here
Mirror site for "Immigration Watch International" here
**********************
Elections to the European parliament
Conservatives racing ahead in EU parliament voting: "Conservatives raced toward victory in some of Europe's largest economies on Sunday as initial results and exit polls showed voters punishing left-leaning parties in European parliament elections in France, Germany and elsewhere. Some right-leaning parties said the results vindicated their reluctance to spend more on company bailouts and fiscal stimulus amid the global economic crisis. First projections by the European Union showed centre-right parties would have the most seats - between 263 and 273 - in the 736-member parliament. Centre-left parties were expected to get between 155 to 165 seats. Right-leaning governments were ahead of the opposition in Germany, France, Italy and Belgium, while conservative opposition parties were leading in Britain and Spain. Greece was a notable exception, where the governing conservatives were headed for defeat in the wake of corruption scandals and economic woes. Germany's Social Democrats headed to their worst showing in a nationwide election since World War II. Four months before Germany holds its own national election, the outcome boosted conservative Chancellor Angela Merkel's hopes of ending the tense left-right "grand coalition" that has led the European Union's most populous nation since 2005. "We are the force that is acting level-headedly and correctly in this financial and economic crisis," said Volker Kauder, the leader of Merkel's party in the German parliament. France's Interior Ministry said partial results showed the governing conservatives in the lead, with the Socialists in a distant second and the Europe Ecologie environmentalist party a close third.
Anti-EU party wins big in EU elections!: "UKIP early this morning appeared to be the main beneficiary of another set of disastrous results for Labour in the European elections. A big protest vote against all the main political parties because of the MPs’ expenses row led to increases in the votes of all smaller parties, with UKIP making a breakthrough in several regions. The anti-EU party got its first seat in Wales, retained its seats in the Eastern region, the South East and Yorkshire and the Humber and increased its share of the vote. The party looked set to overtake Labour and come second behind the Tories, with the Lib Dems coming fourth. Initial predictions of the share of the vote across Britain suggested that the Tories would poll 27 per cent, roughly the same as in 2004, UKIP would come second with 17 per cent, one percentage point up from last time, with Labour a dismal third on 16 per cent, down 7 percentage points, its worst ever result. The Lib Dems were expected to get about 15 per cent of the vote, with the Greens and BNP getting 7 to 8 per cent each."
Bad news for the Warriors of Destiny: "Fianna Fáil, the most successful political party in Western Europe, was facing up to its worst electoral performance in its history last night with the likelihood that it would lose a European Parliament seat in Dublin. The party’s woes were compounded by disastrous results in local council elections and two Dublin by-elections. Another loser last night appeared to be Declan Ganley, founder and leader of Libertas, which brought the Lisbon Treaty ratification process to a standstill when it spearheaded the No vote in last year’s Irish referendum. Mr Ganley polled better than predicted, but his 16 per cent share in the Ireland North West constituency was not likely, after the first round of counting, to secure him its third seat. [Yes. Fianna Fáil really does mean "Warriors of Destiny". Irish political loyalties owe as much to history as anything else but in non-Irish terms they are a centrist party]
British anti-immigration party wins EP seats: "Nick Griffin, leader of the far-right British National Party, has won a seat in the European Parliament. Mr Griffin, standing in the Northwest of England region, was the second candidate of the anti-immigration party to be elected. Hours earlier, Andrew Brons won the party's first European seat in the nearby Yorkshire and the Humber region. Both seats were at the expense of Prime Minister Gordon Brown's Labour Party, which suffered a devastating result across the country. Mr Griffin had earlier hailed Mr Brons' win - with almost 10 per cent of the vote - as "a huge breakthrough'' for his party, and used the victory to reiterate his party's anti-immigration and anti-Islam stance. He denied his party was racist, but said: "We do say this country is full up. The key thing is to shut the door.'' Mr Griffin told Sky News television: "This is a Christian country and Islam is not welcome, because Islam and Christianity, Islam and democracy, Islam and women's rights do not mix. "That's a simple fact that the elites of Europe are going to have to get their heads round and deal with over the next few years.''
*********************
ELSEWHERE
Palin defeats all ethics charges: "The accusations made news, but with another dismissal of an ethics charge last week against Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, the former Republican vice-presidential nominee has quietly been cleared of every ethics complaint filed since the torrent of allegations began in 2008. Mrs. Palin, who became a target of such complaints after being named Sen. John McCain's running mate, is 14-for-14 in fighting off the complaints. She's been cleared of 13 charges by the independent State Personnel Board and of another complaint by the Federal Election Commission (FEC). After the latest complaint in Alaska was dismissed last week, Mrs. Palin's team said that having to fend off the pile of accusations was wasting state money. "This complaint cost the governor personally, and the state of Alaska, thousands of dollars to address," said Thomas Van Flein, the governor's attorney. "It is regrettable that the ethics process has been diverted for partisan purposes by some, but it is also commendable that the board remains focused on the law."
Righteous Gentile: "Nicholas Winton is a name that ought to be better known. He has been called the British Schindler. As the Nazis were dismembering Czechoslovakia and preparing for mass persecutions, he went to Prague and set up an office there. At the time, he was 29 and a stockbroker’s clerk, nobody special. It was a feat to organize eight trains that brought Jewish children to London — they all needed sponsors, complex paperwork, and funding. In all, Winton saved 667 children, though sometimes the figure is given as 669. The ninth train was due to leave on September 3, 1939, the day war was declared, so it was canceled. The 250 children who would have been on that train were soon murdered. There’s been some recognition. Books have been written about him, and films made. The Queen knighted him and the Czechs proposed him for the Nobel Peace Prize. Winton makes no claims for himself, merely saying, “I just saw what was going on and did what I could to help.” This admirable and modest man has just celebrated his 100th birthday.
Funds ask SCOTUS to block Chrysler sale: “Opponents of Chrysler’s sale to Fiat are asking the Supreme Court to block the deal. Three Indiana state pension and construction funds filed emergency papers at the high court early Sunday to put the sale on hold so they can pursue an appeal. The federal appeals court in New York approved the sale Friday, but gave objectors until Monday afternoon to try to get the Supreme Court to intervene. Chrysler wants to sell the bulk of its assets to a group led by Italy’s Fiat as part of its plan to emerge from bankruptcy protection.”
Israel: Netanyahu to give major speech in response to Obama: “Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will discuss the future of settlement construction and the establishment of a Palestinian state during a major policy address at Bar-Ilan University on Sunday. In the speech, Netanyahu will lay out his plans for Israel’s relations with the Palestinian Authority and Arab countries, a source close to the premier said yesterday. It remains unclear whether Netanyahu will recognize the principle of two states for two peoples in the speech, which is meant as a response to U.S. President Barack Obama’s address in Cairo last week. Obama stressed the two-state solution, saying it is good for both Israel and the Palestinians”
CA: Politicians contemplate rewrite of “social contract”: “With empty pockets and maxed-out credit, California is debating whether it can continue honoring all parts of its social contract [sic] with the state’s most vulnerable residents. The state faces an unprecedented drop in tax revenue and a widening budget deficit amid the deepest recession in decades, prompting Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger to propose cost-cutting steps that once seemed unthinkable.”
North Korea’s defiance puts Obama in a corner: “North Korea’s defiant nuclear test May 25 presents President Obama with a challenging new set of problems on the international scene. The test is a setback for the Obama concept of engagement with rogue nations. It vastly complicates his attempts to defuse Iran’s nuclear program. Iran’s leaders may reasonably conclude: If North Korea can get away with building a nuclear arsenal largely unscathed, why not us? Indeed, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was quick to rule out nuclear negotiations with other nations, declaring: ‘Iran’s nuclear issue is over, in our opinion.’ This, in turn, injects some tension into Mr. Obama’s relationship with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.”
There is a new lot of postings by Chris Brand just up -- on his usual vastly "incorrect" themes of race, genes, IQ etc.
My Twitter.com identity: jonjayray. For more blog 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)
****************************
During my career as an academic researcher in psychology and sociology, my main interest was in ideological attitudes but I also made forays into personality research at times. One such foray was into the study of psychopathy, using the most widely accepted measure of it: The MMPI PD scale. One of the two articles I wrote on that subject received a very minor but perhaps significant mark of distinction: It was to a small degree quoted by later authors on the subject. One sometimes gets the impression that most academic journal articles are read by only two people: The author and his mother -- though, if you are lucky, the article might also have been read right through by the editor and referees of the journal in which it was published. I think that most authors of academic articles will assure you with some passion that referees have clearly NOT read with any care the articles they comment on.
My article which received some attention was on sub-clinical psychopathy. You can read it here. So I probably am on firmer ground than most in commenting on that subject. The hallmarks of psychopathy are a lack of normal emotional feelings, an absence of any morality or ethics and a well-disguised contempt for everybody else. In extreme cases this can lead to singularly brutal crimes. Like most personality dispositions, however, there are degrees of psychopathy. In milder cases it can have some advantages and it is those cases that I call sub-clinical: i.e. cases where the psychopath manages to keep himself out of trouble with either the law or the mental health system. And it is often asserted that a degree of psychopathy is helpful in business success.
As it was not my main focus of study, however, I never got around to examining the role of psychopathy in politics. Though I did find in my original research that psychopathy was associated with permissiveness and rejection of punitiveness, attitudes which are common on the Left. And these days I would not attempt research that looked directly at the correlation between Leftism and psychopathy because the conclusion I came to at the end of my research career was that most Leftists are incapable or unwilling to describe their real attitudes. For instance: They will almost all, if asked, claim to be ardent supporters of free speech. Yet, as almost daily posts on my TONGUE-TIED blog reveal, they are in fact relentless enemies of it.
So it seems to me that it is real-life behaviour alone that we must look at in assessing Leftists and I have already used that approach to look at some length at the relationship between Leftism and psychopathy here. As you might have inferred from my original description of psychopathy above, there is much about characteristic Leftist behaviour that a psychiatrist would recognize as psychopathic.
A recent article has emerged, however, that reinforces that conclusion. I reprint the central part of it below. It tends to show that, relative to conservatives, Leftists have a deficit in emotional sensitivity to unpleasant things -- something that is very characteristic of the psychopath. That is of course not at all a new conclusion. We know, for instance, the unfailing brutality of Communist regimes. Not the slightest human sensitivity there. And Stalin's mass murders never bothered American "liberals" during the Soviet era, though the brutality sure bothered conservatives. Nonetheless it is interesting (and a little surprising) to see from attitude research a confirmation of something we know to be true from real life. Given the relentless Leftism of academic psychology and sociology, the authors of article do of course try to "spin" their conclusions as in some way detrimental to conservatives but I think the research results speak for themselves.
One point I should make here, however, is that I AGREE with the authors below in seeing a strong relationship between emotional responses and morality. I have previously argued at some length that seeing morality as having an instinctive emotional basis is a strong position from a philosophical viewpoint and the work of Pinker and Haidt and others has also found some empirical association between morality and emotions of disgust etc.
I should perhaps stress strongly at this point, however, that neither psychopaths nor Leftists are DEVOID of emotion. The one emotion which they do have and which they do share is contempt or hate towards other people about them, contempt for the "status quo" in the Leftist case. And that can be a very strong emotion indeed: A dominant emotion, even. I say more about that here. So on to the recent article:
Liberals and conservatives are often disgusted with one another. No surprise there. But conservatives are literally the more easily disgusted of the two when it comes to such squeamish things as maggots, questionable toilet seats and the prospect of eating monkey meat. Such sensitivity, it seems, plays a role in their ideology and moral values.
Two joint studies released Friday from psychologists at Cornell, Harvard and Yale universities determined that conservatives are more fastidious about the creepier, smellier side of life reflective of a hard-wired instinct for safety and self-preservation. It raises questions about the role of disgust an emotion that likely evolved in humans to keep them safe from potentially hazardous or disease-carrying environments in contemporary judgments of morality and purity, said study leader David Pizarro, an assistant professor of psychology at Cornell who led the study.
People have pointed out for a long time that a lot of our moral values seem driven by emotion, and, in particular, disgust appears to be one of those emotions that seems to be recruited for moral judgments....
The researchers surveyed 181 adults from politically mixed swing states, offering them the Disgust Sensitivity Scale, a personality ratings system initially developed by behavioral psychologists at the University of Virginia. It poses all sorts of uncomfortable possibilities to participants gauging their reactions on a scale of 1-5 to vomit, graveyards, preserved body parts, squashed earthworms and monkey meat.
The researchers surveyed the degree of ideological beliefs of the same test group, to reveal a correlation between being more easily disgusted and political conservatism, the study said.
Disgust really is about protecting yourself from disease; it didn't really evolve for the purpose of human morality, Mr. Pizarro said. It clearly has become central to morality, but because of its origins in contamination and avoidance, we should be wary about its influences.
In another study, the researchers offered the disgust scale to 91 Cornell undergraduates, also asking them where they stood on gay marriage, abortion, gun control, labor unions, tax cuts and affirmative action.
Participants who rated higher in disgust sensitivity were more likely to oppose gay marriage and abortion, issues that are related to notions of morality or purity, the study found. Squeamish people were also more likely to disapprove of gays and lesbians in general.
The findings revealed complex emotions, indeed. Conservatives have argued that there is inherent wisdom in repugnance; that feeling disgusted about something gay sex between consenting adults, for example is cause enough to judge it wrong or immoral, even lacking a concrete reason, Mr. Pizarro said. Liberals tend to disagree, and are more likely to base judgments on whether an action or a thing causes actual harm.
He speculated that the link between disgust and moral judgment could help explain stark differences in values among Americans and be of interest to canny political strategists. He added that the findings could offer strategies for persuading some to change their views. The research was published in Cognition and Emotion and Emotion, two academic journals, and funded solely by Cornell University....
SOURCE
And below we have another case in point, where an apparently very Leftist female was not even disgusted by being gang raped:
Well, yes, the Taliban raped me, but they also respected me — they are not monsters
From the Brussels Journal comes the mind-blowing story of a left-wing Dutch journalist, Joanie de Rijke, who went to Afghanistan to conduct a sympathetic interview with Taliban jihadists who had just killed 10 French troops. Naturally, she was abducted and serially raped for six days. And now she is angry ... not at the chief Taliban thug — who showed her "respect," though, regrettably, "he could not control his testosterone" — but at the Dutch and Belgian governments who refused to pay the $2 million ransom the jihadists demanded.
SOURCE
***********************
CHINA BLOCKING
China is once again blocking access to a lot of sites. Even my mirror sites are now inaccessible at times. I have therefore put up a second lot of mirrors as under that ARE so far still accessible:
Mirror site for "Tongue Tied" here
Mirror site for "Dissecting Leftism" here
Mirror site for "Political Correctness Watch" or here
Mirror site for "Greenie Watch" here
Mirror site for "Education Watch International" here
Mirror site for "Gun Watch" here
Mirror site for "Socialized Medicine here
Mirror site for "Australian Politics" here
Mirror site for "Food & Health Skeptic" here
Mirror site for "Immigration Watch International" here
**********************
Elections to the European parliament
Conservatives racing ahead in EU parliament voting: "Conservatives raced toward victory in some of Europe's largest economies on Sunday as initial results and exit polls showed voters punishing left-leaning parties in European parliament elections in France, Germany and elsewhere. Some right-leaning parties said the results vindicated their reluctance to spend more on company bailouts and fiscal stimulus amid the global economic crisis. First projections by the European Union showed centre-right parties would have the most seats - between 263 and 273 - in the 736-member parliament. Centre-left parties were expected to get between 155 to 165 seats. Right-leaning governments were ahead of the opposition in Germany, France, Italy and Belgium, while conservative opposition parties were leading in Britain and Spain. Greece was a notable exception, where the governing conservatives were headed for defeat in the wake of corruption scandals and economic woes. Germany's Social Democrats headed to their worst showing in a nationwide election since World War II. Four months before Germany holds its own national election, the outcome boosted conservative Chancellor Angela Merkel's hopes of ending the tense left-right "grand coalition" that has led the European Union's most populous nation since 2005. "We are the force that is acting level-headedly and correctly in this financial and economic crisis," said Volker Kauder, the leader of Merkel's party in the German parliament. France's Interior Ministry said partial results showed the governing conservatives in the lead, with the Socialists in a distant second and the Europe Ecologie environmentalist party a close third.
Anti-EU party wins big in EU elections!: "UKIP early this morning appeared to be the main beneficiary of another set of disastrous results for Labour in the European elections. A big protest vote against all the main political parties because of the MPs’ expenses row led to increases in the votes of all smaller parties, with UKIP making a breakthrough in several regions. The anti-EU party got its first seat in Wales, retained its seats in the Eastern region, the South East and Yorkshire and the Humber and increased its share of the vote. The party looked set to overtake Labour and come second behind the Tories, with the Lib Dems coming fourth. Initial predictions of the share of the vote across Britain suggested that the Tories would poll 27 per cent, roughly the same as in 2004, UKIP would come second with 17 per cent, one percentage point up from last time, with Labour a dismal third on 16 per cent, down 7 percentage points, its worst ever result. The Lib Dems were expected to get about 15 per cent of the vote, with the Greens and BNP getting 7 to 8 per cent each."
Bad news for the Warriors of Destiny: "Fianna Fáil, the most successful political party in Western Europe, was facing up to its worst electoral performance in its history last night with the likelihood that it would lose a European Parliament seat in Dublin. The party’s woes were compounded by disastrous results in local council elections and two Dublin by-elections. Another loser last night appeared to be Declan Ganley, founder and leader of Libertas, which brought the Lisbon Treaty ratification process to a standstill when it spearheaded the No vote in last year’s Irish referendum. Mr Ganley polled better than predicted, but his 16 per cent share in the Ireland North West constituency was not likely, after the first round of counting, to secure him its third seat. [Yes. Fianna Fáil really does mean "Warriors of Destiny". Irish political loyalties owe as much to history as anything else but in non-Irish terms they are a centrist party]
British anti-immigration party wins EP seats: "Nick Griffin, leader of the far-right British National Party, has won a seat in the European Parliament. Mr Griffin, standing in the Northwest of England region, was the second candidate of the anti-immigration party to be elected. Hours earlier, Andrew Brons won the party's first European seat in the nearby Yorkshire and the Humber region. Both seats were at the expense of Prime Minister Gordon Brown's Labour Party, which suffered a devastating result across the country. Mr Griffin had earlier hailed Mr Brons' win - with almost 10 per cent of the vote - as "a huge breakthrough'' for his party, and used the victory to reiterate his party's anti-immigration and anti-Islam stance. He denied his party was racist, but said: "We do say this country is full up. The key thing is to shut the door.'' Mr Griffin told Sky News television: "This is a Christian country and Islam is not welcome, because Islam and Christianity, Islam and democracy, Islam and women's rights do not mix. "That's a simple fact that the elites of Europe are going to have to get their heads round and deal with over the next few years.''
*********************
ELSEWHERE
Palin defeats all ethics charges: "The accusations made news, but with another dismissal of an ethics charge last week against Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, the former Republican vice-presidential nominee has quietly been cleared of every ethics complaint filed since the torrent of allegations began in 2008. Mrs. Palin, who became a target of such complaints after being named Sen. John McCain's running mate, is 14-for-14 in fighting off the complaints. She's been cleared of 13 charges by the independent State Personnel Board and of another complaint by the Federal Election Commission (FEC). After the latest complaint in Alaska was dismissed last week, Mrs. Palin's team said that having to fend off the pile of accusations was wasting state money. "This complaint cost the governor personally, and the state of Alaska, thousands of dollars to address," said Thomas Van Flein, the governor's attorney. "It is regrettable that the ethics process has been diverted for partisan purposes by some, but it is also commendable that the board remains focused on the law."
Righteous Gentile: "Nicholas Winton is a name that ought to be better known. He has been called the British Schindler. As the Nazis were dismembering Czechoslovakia and preparing for mass persecutions, he went to Prague and set up an office there. At the time, he was 29 and a stockbroker’s clerk, nobody special. It was a feat to organize eight trains that brought Jewish children to London — they all needed sponsors, complex paperwork, and funding. In all, Winton saved 667 children, though sometimes the figure is given as 669. The ninth train was due to leave on September 3, 1939, the day war was declared, so it was canceled. The 250 children who would have been on that train were soon murdered. There’s been some recognition. Books have been written about him, and films made. The Queen knighted him and the Czechs proposed him for the Nobel Peace Prize. Winton makes no claims for himself, merely saying, “I just saw what was going on and did what I could to help.” This admirable and modest man has just celebrated his 100th birthday.
Funds ask SCOTUS to block Chrysler sale: “Opponents of Chrysler’s sale to Fiat are asking the Supreme Court to block the deal. Three Indiana state pension and construction funds filed emergency papers at the high court early Sunday to put the sale on hold so they can pursue an appeal. The federal appeals court in New York approved the sale Friday, but gave objectors until Monday afternoon to try to get the Supreme Court to intervene. Chrysler wants to sell the bulk of its assets to a group led by Italy’s Fiat as part of its plan to emerge from bankruptcy protection.”
Israel: Netanyahu to give major speech in response to Obama: “Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will discuss the future of settlement construction and the establishment of a Palestinian state during a major policy address at Bar-Ilan University on Sunday. In the speech, Netanyahu will lay out his plans for Israel’s relations with the Palestinian Authority and Arab countries, a source close to the premier said yesterday. It remains unclear whether Netanyahu will recognize the principle of two states for two peoples in the speech, which is meant as a response to U.S. President Barack Obama’s address in Cairo last week. Obama stressed the two-state solution, saying it is good for both Israel and the Palestinians”
CA: Politicians contemplate rewrite of “social contract”: “With empty pockets and maxed-out credit, California is debating whether it can continue honoring all parts of its social contract [sic] with the state’s most vulnerable residents. The state faces an unprecedented drop in tax revenue and a widening budget deficit amid the deepest recession in decades, prompting Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger to propose cost-cutting steps that once seemed unthinkable.”
North Korea’s defiance puts Obama in a corner: “North Korea’s defiant nuclear test May 25 presents President Obama with a challenging new set of problems on the international scene. The test is a setback for the Obama concept of engagement with rogue nations. It vastly complicates his attempts to defuse Iran’s nuclear program. Iran’s leaders may reasonably conclude: If North Korea can get away with building a nuclear arsenal largely unscathed, why not us? Indeed, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was quick to rule out nuclear negotiations with other nations, declaring: ‘Iran’s nuclear issue is over, in our opinion.’ This, in turn, injects some tension into Mr. Obama’s relationship with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.”
There is a new lot of postings by Chris Brand just up -- on his usual vastly "incorrect" themes of race, genes, IQ etc.
My Twitter.com identity: jonjayray. For more blog 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)
****************************
Monday, June 08, 2009
Now Obama is driving Microsoft overseas
It takes an incredibly powerful company to threaten the U.S. government in hopes of impacting a significant decision, but that’s precisely what Microsoft is doing. Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer made headlines when he publicly attacked President Barack Obama’s plan to cut tax breaks on U.S. companies’ foreign profits, a plan which is currently awaiting Congressional approval. Mr. Ballmer suggests that if the tax succeeds, Microsoft may begin a significant move out of the U.S., taking with it tax revenue and jobs. He states, “It makes U.S. jobs more expensive. We’re better off taking lots of people and moving them out of the U.S. as opposed to keeping them inside the U.S.”
The plan, proposed by President Obama on May 4, seeks to help raise tax revenue and balance the budget by rolling back $190B USD in tax breaks for offshore companies over the next decade. Microsoft is not the first to oppose the measure — the National Foreign Trade Council, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the Business Roundtable are among the numerous others to voice their disapproval.
Previously, companies could defer paying corporate rates as high as 35 percent on most types of foreign profits, contingent that the company invests the money overseas. The idea was that foreign profits are not the domain of the U.S. President Obama disagrees, arguing that U.S. corporations’ profits are U.S. earnings. He believes that by taxing foreign profits, companies will be more likely to invest in the U.S., rather than shelter their money overseas.
Thanks to the current provision Microsoft enjoyed a very low tax rate of only 26 percent in 2008 on its profits. A company report describes, “Our effective tax rates are less than the statutory tax rate due to foreign earnings taxed at lower rates.”
Some, like Barry Bosworth, an economist in Washington at the Brookings Institution research center, accuse Microsoft and others of wrongdoing. He says the company has exploited the system, an expensive abuse that has cost our nation tax revenue and domestic investment. Indeed, Microsoft’s shell game is a bit strange — it typically develops products like Windows and then transfers the licenses for free to an Ireland subsidiary. This subsidiary then proceeds to sell them, free of U.S. taxes. Mr. Bosworth states, “What Microsoft wants to do is deduct the cost at a high tax rate and report the profits at a low tax rate. Relative to where they are now, the administration’s proposals are less favorable, so there will be some rebalancing on their part.”
Symantec Corp. and some smaller companies such as privately held Bentley Systems, an Exton, Pennsylvania-based maker of engineering software, carry out similar practices and are similarly opposed to the measure. Symantec says it’s frustrated with being called a tax cheat. Symantec Chairman John Thompson adds, “It is a little bit ironic that most of our most significant trading partners and partners globally have taken the tack that they’ll reduce corporate tax rates to stimulate economic growth and not raise corporate tax rates.”
Mr. Ballmer, perhaps the most outspoken critic, did acknowledge that the Obama proposal preserved research and experimentation cost tax breaks. He warned, though, that the cuts to foreign exemptions would raise the cost of Microsoft’s 56,552 U.S. employees. He says this could necessitate moving them overseas. Microsoft was previously embroiled in a controversy over whether it should lay off foreign workers before U.S. ones.
SOURCE
**************************
THE PERIL OF FEEDING FANATICS
NO matter how gently you pet a snake, it's not going to love you back. And faith-fueled fanatics always show their fangs in the end.
Nobody seems to learn. Again and again, states imagine that they can use and control Islamist extremists. Then the terrorists turn against their "masters." That's what happened Monday in Pakistan, when Muslim militants brazenly struck a police academy near the Indian border -- far from the lawless tribal regions. The terrorists killed seven cops and two civilians. Nearly a hundred officers suffered wounds during the siege. The terrorists blew themselves up, rather than be captured. They knew Allah would welcome them. The one captured fanatic meant to die.
Pakistan's homegrown jihadis began with local takeovers in the back country. In response, the government -- which had backed the Taliban in the hope of controlling Afghanistan -- tried to cut deals. But the deals only helped the extremists, ceding them territory. Their attacks spread to major cities, such as Peshawar and Quetta. Then terror crossed the Indus River into the heartland. Benazir Bhutto was assassinated. Islamabad's Marriott Hotel suffered a catastrophic bombing. Even Sri Lanka's visiting cricket team was marked for death.
Now the terrorists have reached right across Pakistan to mount a frontal assault on a police academy. Give 'em credit -- that took guts. And fervor. Fired by visions of serving an angry god, the terrorists are sure that they're bound to win, that all those of weaker belief will fall before them. Nothing short of death will make them quit.
The story isn't new. The US supported Muslim fanatics against the Soviets in Afghanistan. At the time, it seemed awfully clever. After all, the mujahedin were the baddest hombres in the Hindu Kush, willing to fight on after others quit. Of course, we didn't take faith's power seriously. We still don't. Washington continues, frantically, to deny that belief has anything to do with religious terrorism.
Inevitably, the serpents bit those who imagined they were pets. We're still getting fanged. The Saudis, who funded al Qaeda enthusiastically, learned to their horror that even their own abusive Wahhabism wasn't cruel enough for Allah's avengers.
Not so long ago, some Israelis hoped that the newborn Hamas would be a useful tool to weaken the PLO's grip on the Palestinians. The bad news is they were right.
The phenomenon shows up in secular history, as well. During the Weimar Republic, German conservatives were confident that they could exploit that down-market ex-corporal and his Brownshirts, then brush them aside. (Slow learners, the same Germans had viewed Lenin and his Bolsheviks as useful mischief-makers.)
Never underestimate a fanatic's fanaticism. Dealing with religious extremists is the toughest challenge of all. They have one great advantage over the rest of us: True believers submerge their lives in their cause. Our own leaders -- or Pakistanis or Saudis -- may act in the national interest, but they're always aware of their personal interests, as well. Faith-inspired terrorists are not only willing but often impatient to die for their cause. That trumps working overtime in Washington.
When dealing with those who believe they're on a mission from their god, our cult of negotiations plays into their hands. They'll break any agreement, when the time is right. A deal isn't a deal. Unbelievers have no standing.
Nor is this only a problem for the Muslim world. Indian politicians have unleashed Hindu extremists and may find their rage uncontainable one day. Any politician, anywhere, who thinks he can exploit religious fanatics with impunity is dancing with cobras.
Pakistan can no longer get the serpents it nurtured back into the basket. Even Iran may find that the Shia terrorists it encourages may fail to be charmed by Tehran's magic flute when a crisis comes. When governments seek to manipulate religion to their own ends, they're not just playing with fire. They're playing with hellfire.
SOURCE
**********************************
OBAMA AND PLANTATION POLITICS
Obama To Poor Blacks – Stay Poor
While professing to care about the plight of the poor, Obama continues to take actions that keep blacks impoverished, so he can use black grievances for partisan political gain. In his book “Dreams From My Father”, Obama wrote disdainfully about blacks who complain about being poor, yet continue to vote for Democrats — like Obama — who keep them poor. On page 147 of his book, Obama described what he and his fellow Democrats do to poor blacks as “plantation politics” when he wrote: “A plantation. Black people in the worst jobs. The worst housing. Police brutality rampant. But when the so-called black committeemen came around election time, we’d all line up and vote the straight Democratic ticket. Sell our soul for a Christmas turkey.”
While in the Illinois Senate, Obama helped keep blacks corralled on the Democratic Party’s economic plantation when he provided funding for slum projects in Chicago, as was exposed in the Boston Globe article that can be found on the Internet here
That Boston Globe article shows how Obama provided millions of tax dollars to his slum lord buddies, including now convicted felon Tony Rezko who contributed hundred of thousands of dollars to Obama’s political campaign and helped Obama buy a million-dollar house in a shady real estate deal.
As president, Obama put a poison pill in the Stimulus Bill that kills welfare reform, so that tax dollars can no longer be used to help the poor become self-sufficient through job training and child care assistance. Instead welfare will, once again, become a government handout that keeps poor blacks mired in generational poverty. Welfare has destroyed the black family, and Uncle Sam has replaced the father in black urban homes.
After Obama worked to end the school choice opportunity scholarship program in the District of Columbia that helps poor blacks get a better education, he produced a budget that, astonishingly, eliminates the $85 million designated for the HBCU’s (Historically Black Colleges and Universities). In typical hypocritical liberal fashion, Obama is sending his own two children to a private school, while kicking poor blacks out of that same private school and effectively sending the poor blacks back to the failing DC public school system.
Waking up to the danger Obama poses to the poor and our economy, the National Black Chamber of Commerce (NBCC) issued an alarming report showing that Obama’s “cap-and-trade” mandates – designed by radical environmentalists – would make American consumers poorer and the products they buy more expensive.
The NBCC study found specifically that the cap-and-trade law, known as the Waxman-Markey legislation, will cost 2.5 million U.S. jobs by the year 2030 and reduce GDP by $350 billion. Further, it will reduce earnings for the average U.S. worker by $390 per year and reduce the average household’s annual purchasing power by $830 per year. That report can be found on the Internet here
Another study reported by the Heritage foundation demonstrates that Obama’s cap-and-trade, or “cap-and tax”, law could be an even bigger economic disaster, raising electricity rates by 90 percent and the price of gasoline by 74 percent. Only a hard-core liberal would be so wedded to his liberal agenda that he would deliberately put that agenda above the well-being of the people in this country. That report may be found here
Just as some black Republicans, including the NBRA, are fighting to help save black communities from continued destruction by the Democratic Party‘s socialist policies, average Americans are in a battle to save our country from being turned into a failed socialist nation by Obama and his Democrat minions. With the liberal media refusing to hold Obama accountable and Democrats in control of Congress, there is no check on Obama’s power, except we, the people. Our only real weapon is our vote.
Three cheers to the sensible people in California who, by an incredible 65-35 margin, said “no” to five initiatives for higher taxes for irresponsible spending on “feel good” social programs that are wrecking California’s economy. “Tighten your belt”, Californians shouted at their government, each citizen wielding just one vote, but, oh, the impact of that vote. Remember also that no Republican in the House of Representatives voted for that economy-wrecking Stimulus Bill.
SOURCE
*************************
The auto industry takeover has all happened before on a planet faraway
Here’s some history. In 1952, the merger of several British auto companies resulted in the British Motor Corporation. It was the largest of its day with 39% of British output. Despite established dealerships for the various models, a series of poor management decisions resulted in the loss of market share.
By 1968, British Leyland was formed out of British Motor Corporation and became British Leyland Motor Corporation Ltd. In 1975, it was partially nationalized and the government became a holding company. UK market share barely changed and despite brands such as Jaguar, Rover and Land Rover, the government motor company continued its decline. By 2005, the MG Rover Group went bankrupt, bringing to an end the production by British owned companies. The MG became part of Chinese Nanjing Automobile.
The 1970s were difficult economic times for the United Kingdom and its Labor government (1974-1979), as noted above, created a holding company with the government as the major shareholder. At that point British Leyland employed 159,000 people in its many divisions that included a bus and truck operation.
In 1984, Jaguar Cars became independent once more through a public sale of its shares, but the Leyland truck and bus operation was sold to Volvo in 1988. The Rover Group was sold by the government to British Aerospace that in turn sold it to BMW. Suffice it to say, the British auto industry is now largely owned by companies in other nations or operating as a mere shadow of its former self.
Anyone who thinks that General Motors will revive is wrong. As Larry Kudlow, the radio-TV business maven, recently wrote, “Taxpayers won’t get their money back” and that figure now stands at $50 billion.
Both GM and Chrysler should have been allowed to choose bankruptcy months ago, but the U.S. government in its infinite wisdom has thrown our money down a rat hole created by bad management and excessive labor union demands over the past four decades. Meanwhile, as was the case in the UK, Chrysler is now owned by an Italian auto manufacturer.
The U.S. government now owns GM, AIG an insurance company, and billions in housing mortgages through the government entities of Freddie Mac and Fanny Mae. Kudlow said, “We’re talking about hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars that will never be repaid.”
That news is bad enough, but consider now that the U.S. government has just increased the standards of how much mileage must be achieved from a gallon of gasoline at the very same time it demands that more of that gasoline be mixed with ethanol. Ethanol reduces mileage. President Obama has already made clear that he wants GM to manufacture “green” automobiles. No one will buy them.
The Telegraph, a British newspaper, recently did the math on the price of “green” cars, noting that the present UK models cost the equivalent of more than about $5,000 extra. “To benefit from the difference in fuel efficiency, you would have to drive 198,000 miles, the equivalent of driving around the world eight times.” The same will apply to comparable American-made “green” cars.
Here in America, the biofuels industry receives a 45 cent tax credit for every gallon of ethanol or biodiesel it produces or about $3 billion a year. The US government requires that 10% of all gasoline be blended with these biofuels whether consumers want it or not. This mandate is scheduled to double by 2015. Not only will the automobiles cost more and get less mileage per gallon, but the Congressional Budget Office last month reported that “the increased use of ethanol accounted for about 10% to 15% of the rise in food prices.” That’s because the main ingredient of ethanol is corn. That is insane.
.jpg)
At the same time, the government refuses to permit exploration and extraction of known oil reserves in the nation’s interior and off its continental coastal shelf despite estimates of literally billions of barrels of untapped oil. In the Bakken Formation under North Dakota and Montana, there are an estimated 3.0 to 4.3 billion barrels of undiscovered, technically recoverable oil. And we’re not even talking about the billions of barrels off the coast of California, Florida and other coastal states. The U.S. by some estimates has eight times as much oil as Saudi Arabia, eighteen times as much as Iraq and twenty-two times as much oil as Iran.
There is one, single reason why we can’t get at those oil and natural gas reserves, as well as being denied access to the massive amounts of U.S. coal reserves. It is the environmental organizations that maintain a campaign against energy use in the nation. The government is to blame, of course, but you can thank Greenpeace USA, Friends of the Earth, the Sierra Club, the Environmental Defense Fund, and the United Nations Environmental Program, among countless others that have fought against any and all development, any and all economic expansion and growth.
Government control of the auto industry is now merely a prelude to its eventual end. Jobs will disappear forever. “Green jobs” are a myth. The economy will suffer a grievous loss. And, if you draw the lessons from the British experiment, you can accurately predict the future of our auto industry.
More HERE
My Twitter.com identity: jonjayray. For more blog 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)
****************************
It takes an incredibly powerful company to threaten the U.S. government in hopes of impacting a significant decision, but that’s precisely what Microsoft is doing. Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer made headlines when he publicly attacked President Barack Obama’s plan to cut tax breaks on U.S. companies’ foreign profits, a plan which is currently awaiting Congressional approval. Mr. Ballmer suggests that if the tax succeeds, Microsoft may begin a significant move out of the U.S., taking with it tax revenue and jobs. He states, “It makes U.S. jobs more expensive. We’re better off taking lots of people and moving them out of the U.S. as opposed to keeping them inside the U.S.”
The plan, proposed by President Obama on May 4, seeks to help raise tax revenue and balance the budget by rolling back $190B USD in tax breaks for offshore companies over the next decade. Microsoft is not the first to oppose the measure — the National Foreign Trade Council, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the Business Roundtable are among the numerous others to voice their disapproval.
Previously, companies could defer paying corporate rates as high as 35 percent on most types of foreign profits, contingent that the company invests the money overseas. The idea was that foreign profits are not the domain of the U.S. President Obama disagrees, arguing that U.S. corporations’ profits are U.S. earnings. He believes that by taxing foreign profits, companies will be more likely to invest in the U.S., rather than shelter their money overseas.
Thanks to the current provision Microsoft enjoyed a very low tax rate of only 26 percent in 2008 on its profits. A company report describes, “Our effective tax rates are less than the statutory tax rate due to foreign earnings taxed at lower rates.”
Some, like Barry Bosworth, an economist in Washington at the Brookings Institution research center, accuse Microsoft and others of wrongdoing. He says the company has exploited the system, an expensive abuse that has cost our nation tax revenue and domestic investment. Indeed, Microsoft’s shell game is a bit strange — it typically develops products like Windows and then transfers the licenses for free to an Ireland subsidiary. This subsidiary then proceeds to sell them, free of U.S. taxes. Mr. Bosworth states, “What Microsoft wants to do is deduct the cost at a high tax rate and report the profits at a low tax rate. Relative to where they are now, the administration’s proposals are less favorable, so there will be some rebalancing on their part.”
Symantec Corp. and some smaller companies such as privately held Bentley Systems, an Exton, Pennsylvania-based maker of engineering software, carry out similar practices and are similarly opposed to the measure. Symantec says it’s frustrated with being called a tax cheat. Symantec Chairman John Thompson adds, “It is a little bit ironic that most of our most significant trading partners and partners globally have taken the tack that they’ll reduce corporate tax rates to stimulate economic growth and not raise corporate tax rates.”
Mr. Ballmer, perhaps the most outspoken critic, did acknowledge that the Obama proposal preserved research and experimentation cost tax breaks. He warned, though, that the cuts to foreign exemptions would raise the cost of Microsoft’s 56,552 U.S. employees. He says this could necessitate moving them overseas. Microsoft was previously embroiled in a controversy over whether it should lay off foreign workers before U.S. ones.
SOURCE
**************************
THE PERIL OF FEEDING FANATICS
NO matter how gently you pet a snake, it's not going to love you back. And faith-fueled fanatics always show their fangs in the end.
Nobody seems to learn. Again and again, states imagine that they can use and control Islamist extremists. Then the terrorists turn against their "masters." That's what happened Monday in Pakistan, when Muslim militants brazenly struck a police academy near the Indian border -- far from the lawless tribal regions. The terrorists killed seven cops and two civilians. Nearly a hundred officers suffered wounds during the siege. The terrorists blew themselves up, rather than be captured. They knew Allah would welcome them. The one captured fanatic meant to die.
Pakistan's homegrown jihadis began with local takeovers in the back country. In response, the government -- which had backed the Taliban in the hope of controlling Afghanistan -- tried to cut deals. But the deals only helped the extremists, ceding them territory. Their attacks spread to major cities, such as Peshawar and Quetta. Then terror crossed the Indus River into the heartland. Benazir Bhutto was assassinated. Islamabad's Marriott Hotel suffered a catastrophic bombing. Even Sri Lanka's visiting cricket team was marked for death.
Now the terrorists have reached right across Pakistan to mount a frontal assault on a police academy. Give 'em credit -- that took guts. And fervor. Fired by visions of serving an angry god, the terrorists are sure that they're bound to win, that all those of weaker belief will fall before them. Nothing short of death will make them quit.
The story isn't new. The US supported Muslim fanatics against the Soviets in Afghanistan. At the time, it seemed awfully clever. After all, the mujahedin were the baddest hombres in the Hindu Kush, willing to fight on after others quit. Of course, we didn't take faith's power seriously. We still don't. Washington continues, frantically, to deny that belief has anything to do with religious terrorism.
Inevitably, the serpents bit those who imagined they were pets. We're still getting fanged. The Saudis, who funded al Qaeda enthusiastically, learned to their horror that even their own abusive Wahhabism wasn't cruel enough for Allah's avengers.
Not so long ago, some Israelis hoped that the newborn Hamas would be a useful tool to weaken the PLO's grip on the Palestinians. The bad news is they were right.
The phenomenon shows up in secular history, as well. During the Weimar Republic, German conservatives were confident that they could exploit that down-market ex-corporal and his Brownshirts, then brush them aside. (Slow learners, the same Germans had viewed Lenin and his Bolsheviks as useful mischief-makers.)
Never underestimate a fanatic's fanaticism. Dealing with religious extremists is the toughest challenge of all. They have one great advantage over the rest of us: True believers submerge their lives in their cause. Our own leaders -- or Pakistanis or Saudis -- may act in the national interest, but they're always aware of their personal interests, as well. Faith-inspired terrorists are not only willing but often impatient to die for their cause. That trumps working overtime in Washington.
When dealing with those who believe they're on a mission from their god, our cult of negotiations plays into their hands. They'll break any agreement, when the time is right. A deal isn't a deal. Unbelievers have no standing.
Nor is this only a problem for the Muslim world. Indian politicians have unleashed Hindu extremists and may find their rage uncontainable one day. Any politician, anywhere, who thinks he can exploit religious fanatics with impunity is dancing with cobras.
Pakistan can no longer get the serpents it nurtured back into the basket. Even Iran may find that the Shia terrorists it encourages may fail to be charmed by Tehran's magic flute when a crisis comes. When governments seek to manipulate religion to their own ends, they're not just playing with fire. They're playing with hellfire.
SOURCE
**********************************
OBAMA AND PLANTATION POLITICS
Obama To Poor Blacks – Stay Poor
While professing to care about the plight of the poor, Obama continues to take actions that keep blacks impoverished, so he can use black grievances for partisan political gain. In his book “Dreams From My Father”, Obama wrote disdainfully about blacks who complain about being poor, yet continue to vote for Democrats — like Obama — who keep them poor. On page 147 of his book, Obama described what he and his fellow Democrats do to poor blacks as “plantation politics” when he wrote: “A plantation. Black people in the worst jobs. The worst housing. Police brutality rampant. But when the so-called black committeemen came around election time, we’d all line up and vote the straight Democratic ticket. Sell our soul for a Christmas turkey.”
While in the Illinois Senate, Obama helped keep blacks corralled on the Democratic Party’s economic plantation when he provided funding for slum projects in Chicago, as was exposed in the Boston Globe article that can be found on the Internet here
That Boston Globe article shows how Obama provided millions of tax dollars to his slum lord buddies, including now convicted felon Tony Rezko who contributed hundred of thousands of dollars to Obama’s political campaign and helped Obama buy a million-dollar house in a shady real estate deal.
As president, Obama put a poison pill in the Stimulus Bill that kills welfare reform, so that tax dollars can no longer be used to help the poor become self-sufficient through job training and child care assistance. Instead welfare will, once again, become a government handout that keeps poor blacks mired in generational poverty. Welfare has destroyed the black family, and Uncle Sam has replaced the father in black urban homes.
After Obama worked to end the school choice opportunity scholarship program in the District of Columbia that helps poor blacks get a better education, he produced a budget that, astonishingly, eliminates the $85 million designated for the HBCU’s (Historically Black Colleges and Universities). In typical hypocritical liberal fashion, Obama is sending his own two children to a private school, while kicking poor blacks out of that same private school and effectively sending the poor blacks back to the failing DC public school system.
Waking up to the danger Obama poses to the poor and our economy, the National Black Chamber of Commerce (NBCC) issued an alarming report showing that Obama’s “cap-and-trade” mandates – designed by radical environmentalists – would make American consumers poorer and the products they buy more expensive.
The NBCC study found specifically that the cap-and-trade law, known as the Waxman-Markey legislation, will cost 2.5 million U.S. jobs by the year 2030 and reduce GDP by $350 billion. Further, it will reduce earnings for the average U.S. worker by $390 per year and reduce the average household’s annual purchasing power by $830 per year. That report can be found on the Internet here
Another study reported by the Heritage foundation demonstrates that Obama’s cap-and-trade, or “cap-and tax”, law could be an even bigger economic disaster, raising electricity rates by 90 percent and the price of gasoline by 74 percent. Only a hard-core liberal would be so wedded to his liberal agenda that he would deliberately put that agenda above the well-being of the people in this country. That report may be found here
Just as some black Republicans, including the NBRA, are fighting to help save black communities from continued destruction by the Democratic Party‘s socialist policies, average Americans are in a battle to save our country from being turned into a failed socialist nation by Obama and his Democrat minions. With the liberal media refusing to hold Obama accountable and Democrats in control of Congress, there is no check on Obama’s power, except we, the people. Our only real weapon is our vote.
Three cheers to the sensible people in California who, by an incredible 65-35 margin, said “no” to five initiatives for higher taxes for irresponsible spending on “feel good” social programs that are wrecking California’s economy. “Tighten your belt”, Californians shouted at their government, each citizen wielding just one vote, but, oh, the impact of that vote. Remember also that no Republican in the House of Representatives voted for that economy-wrecking Stimulus Bill.
SOURCE
*************************
The auto industry takeover has all happened before on a planet faraway
Here’s some history. In 1952, the merger of several British auto companies resulted in the British Motor Corporation. It was the largest of its day with 39% of British output. Despite established dealerships for the various models, a series of poor management decisions resulted in the loss of market share.
By 1968, British Leyland was formed out of British Motor Corporation and became British Leyland Motor Corporation Ltd. In 1975, it was partially nationalized and the government became a holding company. UK market share barely changed and despite brands such as Jaguar, Rover and Land Rover, the government motor company continued its decline. By 2005, the MG Rover Group went bankrupt, bringing to an end the production by British owned companies. The MG became part of Chinese Nanjing Automobile.
The 1970s were difficult economic times for the United Kingdom and its Labor government (1974-1979), as noted above, created a holding company with the government as the major shareholder. At that point British Leyland employed 159,000 people in its many divisions that included a bus and truck operation.
In 1984, Jaguar Cars became independent once more through a public sale of its shares, but the Leyland truck and bus operation was sold to Volvo in 1988. The Rover Group was sold by the government to British Aerospace that in turn sold it to BMW. Suffice it to say, the British auto industry is now largely owned by companies in other nations or operating as a mere shadow of its former self.
Anyone who thinks that General Motors will revive is wrong. As Larry Kudlow, the radio-TV business maven, recently wrote, “Taxpayers won’t get their money back” and that figure now stands at $50 billion.
Both GM and Chrysler should have been allowed to choose bankruptcy months ago, but the U.S. government in its infinite wisdom has thrown our money down a rat hole created by bad management and excessive labor union demands over the past four decades. Meanwhile, as was the case in the UK, Chrysler is now owned by an Italian auto manufacturer.
The U.S. government now owns GM, AIG an insurance company, and billions in housing mortgages through the government entities of Freddie Mac and Fanny Mae. Kudlow said, “We’re talking about hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars that will never be repaid.”
That news is bad enough, but consider now that the U.S. government has just increased the standards of how much mileage must be achieved from a gallon of gasoline at the very same time it demands that more of that gasoline be mixed with ethanol. Ethanol reduces mileage. President Obama has already made clear that he wants GM to manufacture “green” automobiles. No one will buy them.
The Telegraph, a British newspaper, recently did the math on the price of “green” cars, noting that the present UK models cost the equivalent of more than about $5,000 extra. “To benefit from the difference in fuel efficiency, you would have to drive 198,000 miles, the equivalent of driving around the world eight times.” The same will apply to comparable American-made “green” cars.
Here in America, the biofuels industry receives a 45 cent tax credit for every gallon of ethanol or biodiesel it produces or about $3 billion a year. The US government requires that 10% of all gasoline be blended with these biofuels whether consumers want it or not. This mandate is scheduled to double by 2015. Not only will the automobiles cost more and get less mileage per gallon, but the Congressional Budget Office last month reported that “the increased use of ethanol accounted for about 10% to 15% of the rise in food prices.” That’s because the main ingredient of ethanol is corn. That is insane.
At the same time, the government refuses to permit exploration and extraction of known oil reserves in the nation’s interior and off its continental coastal shelf despite estimates of literally billions of barrels of untapped oil. In the Bakken Formation under North Dakota and Montana, there are an estimated 3.0 to 4.3 billion barrels of undiscovered, technically recoverable oil. And we’re not even talking about the billions of barrels off the coast of California, Florida and other coastal states. The U.S. by some estimates has eight times as much oil as Saudi Arabia, eighteen times as much as Iraq and twenty-two times as much oil as Iran.
There is one, single reason why we can’t get at those oil and natural gas reserves, as well as being denied access to the massive amounts of U.S. coal reserves. It is the environmental organizations that maintain a campaign against energy use in the nation. The government is to blame, of course, but you can thank Greenpeace USA, Friends of the Earth, the Sierra Club, the Environmental Defense Fund, and the United Nations Environmental Program, among countless others that have fought against any and all development, any and all economic expansion and growth.
Government control of the auto industry is now merely a prelude to its eventual end. Jobs will disappear forever. “Green jobs” are a myth. The economy will suffer a grievous loss. And, if you draw the lessons from the British experiment, you can accurately predict the future of our auto industry.
More HERE
My Twitter.com identity: jonjayray. For more blog 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)
****************************
Sunday, June 07, 2009
Our First Female President?
In the same sense that Toni Morrison claimed Bill Clinton was our first black president, Barack Obama could be thought of as another groundbreaker: our first female president. He displays every trope of femininity more than any female "who could ever be elected in our children's lifetime" (to borrow Morrison's phrase about Clinton).
Obama is filled with sensitivity (one might even say, empathy), he would rather talk than fight, is highly (yet selectively) compassionate and to top it all off, he has a finely tuned sense of fashion. B.O. attempts to collaborate with Europeans, South Americans, Muslims and nearly everyone except the citizens of red state America. Oh, and his position on abortion and women's rights is nearly identical to that of the Choicers at NARAL and NOW. Ms. Magazine felt so simpatico with B.O. that he was featured on their special Inaugural issue cover, ripping open his shirt to expose his "This is What a Feminist Looks Like" T-shirt. While the cover was somewhat controversial for the magazine, the editor pointed out that (Obama) purportedly told them: "I am a feminist." According to Ms., Obama "ran on the strongest platform for women's rights of any major party in American history."
In addition, Obama has surrounded himself with women in most important security and foreign policy positions in his administration. While some might choose to describe BO as our first metrosexual President, the clincher is that, consistent with all outward appearances, the Obama administration fights like a girl.
The Axis of Evil has certainly picked up on this. Not a week goes by without Kim Jong-Il or Iran's Ahmadinejad or some other pipsqueak tin-pot wannabe figuratively bitch-slapping the POTUS. Every week another news story features another fascist thug playing the role of Moe from the Three Stooges to Obama's Shemp .
Last week Little Kim East and the Mighty Mahmoud were like tag-team midget wrestlers ganging up on the sputtering Obie One. First Korea's Crackpot in Chief set off a nuclear fireworks display smack dab in the middle of our Memorial Day Weekend. Meanwhile, Ahmadinejad continued demanding apologies from Obama for imagined American offenses against the Iranians while announcing that the Persian nuclear program is a fait accompli. Yesterday in Cairo, Obama compliantly apologized to Iran for the ovcerthrow of Mossadegh. Then the 12th-Imam-stepper challenged Obama to a debate at the U.N. Inquiring minds want to know: would a teleprompter be allowed at the debate?
Down South, Raul and Fidel Castro played their own brand of good cop/bad cop on our Dear Sensitive Leader, while their fellow Latin-American banana-republicans took turns exhorting President BO to join the Great Marxist Books Club and channeling Dennis Miller's rants of yore with mucho hammering of America.
Obama's response to all the extra-curricular Axis of Evil activity and Gringo-Go-Homerism? "Just words". With the arsenal of the world's sole remaining superpower available to him, Obama sounds more like the U.N. Secretary General scrambling for the best euphemism to downplay each situation than a serious statesman with the greatest military and economic might on the planet to back him up. No matter what other qualities our belligerent enemies might have, they are definitely men of action. And regardless of our neophyte President's desire to chat and make friends, the leaders of North Korea, Syria, Iran and Cuba remain our enemies. No matter how many "stern warnings" and U.N. resolutions you can cook up with the gals down at the U.N. coffee klatch, these busy thugs will keep upping the ante precisely until action is taken against them.
Unfortunately, any meaningful action by this administration is highly unlikely, as Obama understands that many Democratic and independent voters, especially women, were eager to move from hard-power locker-room tactics to a soft-power sewing circle approach. Less towel-snapping and more towel color coordinating, less steroids and more sensitivity.
I'm just grateful that Obama had the good sense to bow to the Saudi King at the G20 summit in London. At least he didn't curtsey.
More HERE
***********************
The first test of Obama's "outreach" is upon us
A real test of the success of the Cairo speech will come quickly on June 7 and June 12, the dates of the Lebanese and Iranian elections.
In Lebanon, if Hezbollah and its partners (Michael Aoun, etc.) have a significant victory on June 7, they will continue to build pressure on Israel, regardless of Israel’s policies on the West Bank and Gaza. Hamas will be further emboldened and tensions will rise and the chance for “peace” will be further diminished.
Israel cannot negotiate with a Tehran that has taken over a neighboring country on its northern flank and a Hamastan on its south and publicly is dedicated to the destruction of Israel.
If Ahmadinejad wins a significant victory in Iran, reinforced with the Hezbollah victory, the mullahs will be more inclined to take Obama’s statement on their right to civilian nuclear power as a green light to continue developing nuclear weapons and delivery systems. If there is no realistic opposition from the U.S. and the EU, nothing will stop the current corrupt and incompetent religious fanatics from moving as quickly as possible toward the weapons which would give them a dominant role in the Gulf and in world oil. There is virtually no real debate or differences among the mullahs on that strategy.
Although Iran is facing increasingly difficult economic problems, an Ahmadinjad victory will sustain its current course of ignoring economic carrots or sticks from the E.U. The E.U., more concerned with domestic fiscal and monetary issues, probably take the Obama speech as a green light to continue to trade and haphazard strengthening of Iran. Election of one of the other candidates, similarly, would not change Iranian policy, but it might lead to more “dialogue” with the aging and calculating Supreme Leader Ali Khameini. There is little real chance that Obama’s speech will turn the elections.
If and when they do not, “facts on the ground” will far outweigh his rhetoric. The speech did not slow the doomsday clock of the Iranian nuclear program and the growing strength of Hezbollah and Hamas.
Unfortunately Obama may quickly need a new strategy and policies to deal directly with a growing “correlation of forces,” as the Soviets used to say. His speech contained no hint of where he would take the Western alliance in the face of that more likely outcome, and he may well have only created more confusion among enemies and allies on The Road to Hell.
More HERE
******************
US push to shore up ties with Israel
WASHINGTON is trying to lower tensions with Jerusalem after US President Barack Obama's landmark address to the Muslim world in Cairo, with White House officials reportedly insisting: "There is no crisis in our relationship with Israel."
After several weeks of rising tensions over Israel's refusal to halt the building of Jewish settlements in the West Bank, US and Israeli officials are attempting to reduce perceptions of a public disagreement to ensure the previously solid relationship does not deteriorate. Reports yesterday said senior White House officials had declared there was no crisis in the US relationship with Israel and said: "We will succeed in reaching understandings on the matter of settlements."
The newspaper Haaretz reported that while Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had publicly praised Mr Obama's speech in Cairo, he privately expressed disappointment at what he saw as a soft stance on Iran's nuclear ambitions.
After the speech, Mr Netanyahu met key cabinet colleagues to decide Israel's response. The Prime Minister's office released a statement that said: "The Government of Israel expresses its hope that this important speech in Cairo will indeed lead to a new period of reconciliation between the Arab and Muslim world and Israel. "We share President Obama's hope that the American effort heralds the beginning of a new era that will bring about an end to the conflict and lead to Arab recognition of Israel as the homeland of the Jewish people, living in peace and security in the Middle East. "Israel is committed to peace and will make every effort to expand the circle of peace while protecting its interests, especially its national security."
More HERE
*********************
The forgotten recession of the early 1920s
When real laissez faire was practiced
Although the Keynesians tell us that budget deficits are the price that we have to pay for full employment, that equation did not seem to pan out when followers of Lord Keynes held full sway in the 1930s. As self-proclaimed intellectuals get embarassingly excited over the prospect of a new, New Deal, the rest of us would do well to take every opportunity to examine how the first one turned out. For one thing, it didn't start under Roosevelt.
In The Politically Incorrect Guide To The Great Depression And The New Deal, economist Robert P. Murphy, Ph. D., gives us a very useful comparison of what happened in another recession that occurred in the 1920s when so-called laissez-faire economics was practiced and the more famous economic collapse when it wasn't.
"The annual unemployment rate peaked at 11.7 percent in 1921, but it had fallen to 6.7 percent by the following year, and was down to an incredible 2.4 percent by 1923," Murphy writes. "That is how a market with flexible wages and prices quickly corrects itself after a Fed-induced inflationary boom."
"But because the 'compassionate' Hoover forbade businesses from cutting wages after the 1929 crash, unemployment went up and up and up, hitting the unimaginable peak of 28.33 percent in March 1933." "Compassionate conservatism," then, is not a terribly new deal either.
More HERE
***********************
ELSEWHERE
A good patriotic slideshow here. It was originally a Tea Party commercial put together by an Alabama teenager, Justin Holcomb.
California arsonist sentenced to death: "A 38-YEAR-OLD arsonist has been sentenced to death for starting a blaze in the Los Angeles area in 2006 that killed five firefighters. A judge in Riverside, California, close to the city of Los Angeles, followed a jury's recommendation to impose the death penalty on Raymond Lee Oyler, a prosecution spokesman said. The jury had earlier unanimously recommended Oyler receive the death sentence after finding him guilty of first degree murder and arson. He was suspected of lighting at least 26 fires in the Los Angeles region in 2006 before a blaze took the lives of five firefighters on October 26 that year. The fire also destroyed 34 homes and 20 other buildings, consuming more than 16,000 hectares of land. According to the prosecution Oyler had wanted to hit out at the emergency services after they seized and destroyed his dog, a pitbull. His car was spotted by security cameras shortly after leaving the scene of the fire. Matches discovered at the scene were the same as those found at his workplace".
Soto not bipartisan: "Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor said in a 1998 speech that she owed her first federal judicial nomination almost entirely to New York Democratic Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, undercutting the spirit of President Obama's claim that it was Republican President George H.W. Bush who was responsible for her first appointment to the federal bench. Mr. Obama and fellow Democrats have repeatedly pointed to her initial nomination to a federal district court by Mr. Bush in 1991, and her later elevation to an appeals court by President Clinton seven years later, as evidence she is a nonpartisan jurist."
My Twitter.com identity: jonjayray. For more blog 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)
****************************
In the same sense that Toni Morrison claimed Bill Clinton was our first black president, Barack Obama could be thought of as another groundbreaker: our first female president. He displays every trope of femininity more than any female "who could ever be elected in our children's lifetime" (to borrow Morrison's phrase about Clinton).
Obama is filled with sensitivity (one might even say, empathy), he would rather talk than fight, is highly (yet selectively) compassionate and to top it all off, he has a finely tuned sense of fashion. B.O. attempts to collaborate with Europeans, South Americans, Muslims and nearly everyone except the citizens of red state America. Oh, and his position on abortion and women's rights is nearly identical to that of the Choicers at NARAL and NOW. Ms. Magazine felt so simpatico with B.O. that he was featured on their special Inaugural issue cover, ripping open his shirt to expose his "This is What a Feminist Looks Like" T-shirt. While the cover was somewhat controversial for the magazine, the editor pointed out that (Obama) purportedly told them: "I am a feminist." According to Ms., Obama "ran on the strongest platform for women's rights of any major party in American history."
In addition, Obama has surrounded himself with women in most important security and foreign policy positions in his administration. While some might choose to describe BO as our first metrosexual President, the clincher is that, consistent with all outward appearances, the Obama administration fights like a girl.
The Axis of Evil has certainly picked up on this. Not a week goes by without Kim Jong-Il or Iran's Ahmadinejad or some other pipsqueak tin-pot wannabe figuratively bitch-slapping the POTUS. Every week another news story features another fascist thug playing the role of Moe from the Three Stooges to Obama's Shemp .
Last week Little Kim East and the Mighty Mahmoud were like tag-team midget wrestlers ganging up on the sputtering Obie One. First Korea's Crackpot in Chief set off a nuclear fireworks display smack dab in the middle of our Memorial Day Weekend. Meanwhile, Ahmadinejad continued demanding apologies from Obama for imagined American offenses against the Iranians while announcing that the Persian nuclear program is a fait accompli. Yesterday in Cairo, Obama compliantly apologized to Iran for the ovcerthrow of Mossadegh. Then the 12th-Imam-stepper challenged Obama to a debate at the U.N. Inquiring minds want to know: would a teleprompter be allowed at the debate?
Down South, Raul and Fidel Castro played their own brand of good cop/bad cop on our Dear Sensitive Leader, while their fellow Latin-American banana-republicans took turns exhorting President BO to join the Great Marxist Books Club and channeling Dennis Miller's rants of yore with mucho hammering of America.
Obama's response to all the extra-curricular Axis of Evil activity and Gringo-Go-Homerism? "Just words". With the arsenal of the world's sole remaining superpower available to him, Obama sounds more like the U.N. Secretary General scrambling for the best euphemism to downplay each situation than a serious statesman with the greatest military and economic might on the planet to back him up. No matter what other qualities our belligerent enemies might have, they are definitely men of action. And regardless of our neophyte President's desire to chat and make friends, the leaders of North Korea, Syria, Iran and Cuba remain our enemies. No matter how many "stern warnings" and U.N. resolutions you can cook up with the gals down at the U.N. coffee klatch, these busy thugs will keep upping the ante precisely until action is taken against them.
Unfortunately, any meaningful action by this administration is highly unlikely, as Obama understands that many Democratic and independent voters, especially women, were eager to move from hard-power locker-room tactics to a soft-power sewing circle approach. Less towel-snapping and more towel color coordinating, less steroids and more sensitivity.
I'm just grateful that Obama had the good sense to bow to the Saudi King at the G20 summit in London. At least he didn't curtsey.
More HERE
***********************
The first test of Obama's "outreach" is upon us
A real test of the success of the Cairo speech will come quickly on June 7 and June 12, the dates of the Lebanese and Iranian elections.
In Lebanon, if Hezbollah and its partners (Michael Aoun, etc.) have a significant victory on June 7, they will continue to build pressure on Israel, regardless of Israel’s policies on the West Bank and Gaza. Hamas will be further emboldened and tensions will rise and the chance for “peace” will be further diminished.
Israel cannot negotiate with a Tehran that has taken over a neighboring country on its northern flank and a Hamastan on its south and publicly is dedicated to the destruction of Israel.
If Ahmadinejad wins a significant victory in Iran, reinforced with the Hezbollah victory, the mullahs will be more inclined to take Obama’s statement on their right to civilian nuclear power as a green light to continue developing nuclear weapons and delivery systems. If there is no realistic opposition from the U.S. and the EU, nothing will stop the current corrupt and incompetent religious fanatics from moving as quickly as possible toward the weapons which would give them a dominant role in the Gulf and in world oil. There is virtually no real debate or differences among the mullahs on that strategy.
Although Iran is facing increasingly difficult economic problems, an Ahmadinjad victory will sustain its current course of ignoring economic carrots or sticks from the E.U. The E.U., more concerned with domestic fiscal and monetary issues, probably take the Obama speech as a green light to continue to trade and haphazard strengthening of Iran. Election of one of the other candidates, similarly, would not change Iranian policy, but it might lead to more “dialogue” with the aging and calculating Supreme Leader Ali Khameini. There is little real chance that Obama’s speech will turn the elections.
If and when they do not, “facts on the ground” will far outweigh his rhetoric. The speech did not slow the doomsday clock of the Iranian nuclear program and the growing strength of Hezbollah and Hamas.
Unfortunately Obama may quickly need a new strategy and policies to deal directly with a growing “correlation of forces,” as the Soviets used to say. His speech contained no hint of where he would take the Western alliance in the face of that more likely outcome, and he may well have only created more confusion among enemies and allies on The Road to Hell.
More HERE
******************
US push to shore up ties with Israel
WASHINGTON is trying to lower tensions with Jerusalem after US President Barack Obama's landmark address to the Muslim world in Cairo, with White House officials reportedly insisting: "There is no crisis in our relationship with Israel."
After several weeks of rising tensions over Israel's refusal to halt the building of Jewish settlements in the West Bank, US and Israeli officials are attempting to reduce perceptions of a public disagreement to ensure the previously solid relationship does not deteriorate. Reports yesterday said senior White House officials had declared there was no crisis in the US relationship with Israel and said: "We will succeed in reaching understandings on the matter of settlements."
The newspaper Haaretz reported that while Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had publicly praised Mr Obama's speech in Cairo, he privately expressed disappointment at what he saw as a soft stance on Iran's nuclear ambitions.
After the speech, Mr Netanyahu met key cabinet colleagues to decide Israel's response. The Prime Minister's office released a statement that said: "The Government of Israel expresses its hope that this important speech in Cairo will indeed lead to a new period of reconciliation between the Arab and Muslim world and Israel. "We share President Obama's hope that the American effort heralds the beginning of a new era that will bring about an end to the conflict and lead to Arab recognition of Israel as the homeland of the Jewish people, living in peace and security in the Middle East. "Israel is committed to peace and will make every effort to expand the circle of peace while protecting its interests, especially its national security."
More HERE
*********************
The forgotten recession of the early 1920s
When real laissez faire was practiced
Although the Keynesians tell us that budget deficits are the price that we have to pay for full employment, that equation did not seem to pan out when followers of Lord Keynes held full sway in the 1930s. As self-proclaimed intellectuals get embarassingly excited over the prospect of a new, New Deal, the rest of us would do well to take every opportunity to examine how the first one turned out. For one thing, it didn't start under Roosevelt.
In The Politically Incorrect Guide To The Great Depression And The New Deal, economist Robert P. Murphy, Ph. D., gives us a very useful comparison of what happened in another recession that occurred in the 1920s when so-called laissez-faire economics was practiced and the more famous economic collapse when it wasn't.
"The annual unemployment rate peaked at 11.7 percent in 1921, but it had fallen to 6.7 percent by the following year, and was down to an incredible 2.4 percent by 1923," Murphy writes. "That is how a market with flexible wages and prices quickly corrects itself after a Fed-induced inflationary boom."
"But because the 'compassionate' Hoover forbade businesses from cutting wages after the 1929 crash, unemployment went up and up and up, hitting the unimaginable peak of 28.33 percent in March 1933." "Compassionate conservatism," then, is not a terribly new deal either.
More HERE
***********************
ELSEWHERE
A good patriotic slideshow here. It was originally a Tea Party commercial put together by an Alabama teenager, Justin Holcomb.
California arsonist sentenced to death: "A 38-YEAR-OLD arsonist has been sentenced to death for starting a blaze in the Los Angeles area in 2006 that killed five firefighters. A judge in Riverside, California, close to the city of Los Angeles, followed a jury's recommendation to impose the death penalty on Raymond Lee Oyler, a prosecution spokesman said. The jury had earlier unanimously recommended Oyler receive the death sentence after finding him guilty of first degree murder and arson. He was suspected of lighting at least 26 fires in the Los Angeles region in 2006 before a blaze took the lives of five firefighters on October 26 that year. The fire also destroyed 34 homes and 20 other buildings, consuming more than 16,000 hectares of land. According to the prosecution Oyler had wanted to hit out at the emergency services after they seized and destroyed his dog, a pitbull. His car was spotted by security cameras shortly after leaving the scene of the fire. Matches discovered at the scene were the same as those found at his workplace".
Soto not bipartisan: "Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor said in a 1998 speech that she owed her first federal judicial nomination almost entirely to New York Democratic Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, undercutting the spirit of President Obama's claim that it was Republican President George H.W. Bush who was responsible for her first appointment to the federal bench. Mr. Obama and fellow Democrats have repeatedly pointed to her initial nomination to a federal district court by Mr. Bush in 1991, and her later elevation to an appeals court by President Clinton seven years later, as evidence she is a nonpartisan jurist."
My Twitter.com identity: jonjayray. For more blog 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)
****************************
Saturday, June 06, 2009
Obama's Cairo speech from an Israeli perspective
By Barry Rubin
Barack Obama’s speech in Cairo is one of the most bizarre orations ever made by a U.S. president, not a foreign policy statement but rather something invented by Obama, an international campaign speech, as if his main goal was to obtain votes in the next Egyptian primary. That approach defined Obama’s basic themes: Islam’s great. America is good. We’re sorry. Be moderate (not that you haven’t always been that way). Let’s be friends.
Here, Obama followed the idea that if you want someone to like you agree with almost everything he says. Obama also gave, albeit with some minor variations, the speech that the leader of a Third World Muslim country might give, justifying it in advance by claiming America is a big Muslim country, after all.
Of course, the speech had tremendous—though temporary—appeal combined with its counterproductive strategic impact. It will make him more popular. It may well make America somewhat less unpopular. But its effect on Middle East issues and U.S. interests is another matter entirely.
The first problem is that Obama said many things factually quite untrue, some ridiculously so. Pages would be required to list all these inaccuracies. The interesting question is whether Obama consciously lied or really believes it. I’d prefer him to be lying, because if he’s that ignorant then America and the world is in very deep trouble. If he really believes Islam’s social role is so perfect, radical Islamists are a tiny minority, Palestinians have suffered hugely through no fault of their own, and so on, then he’s living in a fantasy world. Unfortunately, we are not. The collision between reality and dream is going to be a terrible one.
The second problem is the speech’s unnecessarily extreme one-sidedness. Obama portrays the West as the guilty party. Despite a reference to September 11—even that presented as an American misdeed, unfair dislike of Islam resulting— he gave not a single example of Islamist or Muslim responsibility for anything wrong in the world.
Obama could easily have made the same points in a balanced way: you’ve made mistakes; we’ve made mistakes. You’ve done things to us; we’ve done things to you. And having established that I respect you, let me tell you how Americans feel and what’s needed. But that’s not how he chose to do it. So afraid was Obama of giving offense—and thus not maximizing his popularity-at-all–costs mission—he did the political equivalent of scoring an own-goal. President Bill Clinton said, “I feel your pain.” In effect, Obama declared, “We’re your pain.”
So if Muslims are always the innocent victims, isn't Usama bin Ladin and others correct in saying that all the violence and terrorism to date has been just a "defensive Jihad" against external aggression and thus justifiable? Why should anything change simply because Obama has "admitted" this and asked to start over again? When he cited examples of oppression, Obama listed only Bosnia (where he didn’t even mention the U.S. role in helping Muslims), along with Israel, and also the Muslim-on-Muslim violence in Darfur. He didn’t mention terrorist violence and mistreatement of non-Muslims by Muslims in Indonesia, Thailand, the Philippines, Pakistan, India, Iraq, Sudan, the Gaza Strip, against Israel, Europe or even Egypt itself.
This is a hallmark of the kind of thinking dominating much contemporary Western thought extending something that works in their own societies-- where self-criticism, apology, and unilateral concessions really can lead to the other side forgiving and compromising--to places where it doesn't work. In the Middle East if you say you’re to blame, that communicates to the other side that their cause is right and they're entitled to everything it wants. If you apologize, you’re weak. Sure, some relatively Westernized urban liberals will take what Obama said that way, I doubt whether radical states and political forces, as well as the masses, will do so.
The main ingredient in the Obama speech was flattery. There is a bumper sticker that says: Don’t apologize. Your friends don’t need to hear it and your enemies don’t care. Obama’s situation might be described as: Don’t grovel. It scares the hell out of your friends and convinces your enemies you owe them big time. As a result, the mainstream in the region will say, “We were right all the time. Obama admitted it!” While more extreme radicals say, “We’ve won and America’s surrendering.” But if Obama, as it appears, is running to be the region’s favorite politician, he’ll find he—not to mention America’s allies--has to give up many more things to win that dubious honor.
Third, Obama undermined the existing states. True, to Obama's credit, he did talk about reform, democracy, and equal rights for women. Yet the speech suggests to listeners is: democracy plus Islam equals solution. If Islam is so perfect and has such a great record—except for a tiny minority of extremists—why shouldn’t it rule? And since the extremists are presumably al-Qaida, Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood parliamentarians in the audience must have found a lot to applaud. How will this go over with the rulers Obama wants as allies?
Finally, Obama played into the stereotype that Israel is the central political issue in the region. Others, of course, are happy to find the usual scapegoat. An Associated Press headline reads, “Obama’s Islam Success Depends on Israel.” Is the entire “Muslim World” just waiting for Israel to stop building a few thousand apartment units a year before deciding that America is great, reform is needed, and moderation wise.
Obama’s phrases were carefully crafted. He called on Palestinians to stop violence, show their competence in administration, and accept a two-state solution, living in peace alongside Israel. Hamas was commanded to be moderate. Yet he in no way seemed to condition Palestinians getting a state on their record. His administration may think this way but he didn’t make that clear.
Middle Eastern ears won’t hear this aspect--which is part of the reason they may cheer the speech—in the way Washington policymakers intend. Inasmuch as the United States now has more credibility for them it’s because they hope it will just force Israel to give without them having to do much. When this doesn’t happen, anger will set in, intensified by the fact that the president “said” the Palestinians are in the right and should have a state right away.
Everything specific concerning Israel’s needs and demands--an end to incitement, security for Israel, end of terrorism, resettlement of refugees in Palestine—weren’t there. While Israel was specifically said to violate previous agreements on the construction within settlements issue—an assertion that’s flat-out wrong—there was no hint that the Palestinians had done so.
I can’t shake the image of Obama as the new kid in school, just moved into the neighborhood, fearful of bullies, who says anything to ingratiate himself and is ready to turn over his lunch money. There’s a famous line in “Citizen Kane” where one characters says that it’s very easy to make a lot of money….If all you want to do is make a lot of money. It’s also easy to make a lot of popularity, if that’s all one wants to do. An American president has to do more, a lot more.
SOURCE
************************
Obama's Cairo speech from an American perspective
A WSJ editorial
One benefit of the Obama Presidency is that it is validating much of George W. Bush's security agenda and foreign policy merely by dint of autobiographical rebranding. That was clear enough yesterday in Cairo, where President Obama advertised "a new beginning between the United States and Muslims around the world." But what he mostly offered were artfully repackaged versions of themes President Bush sounded with his freedom agenda. We mean that as a compliment, albeit with a couple of large caveats.
So there was Mr. Obama, noting that rights such as "freedom to live as you choose" and "the ability to speak your mind and have a say in how you are governed" were "not just American ideas, they are human rights." There he was insisting that "freedom of religion is central to the ability of peoples to live together," and citing Malaysia and Dubai as economic models for other Muslim countries while promising to host a summit on entrepreneurship.
There he was too, in Laura Bush-mode, talking about the need to expand opportunities for Muslim women, particularly in education. "I respect those women who choose to live their lives in traditional roles," he said. "But it should be their choice."
Mr. Obama also offered a robust defense of the war in Afghanistan, calling it "a war of necessity" and promising that "America's commitment will not weaken." That's an important note to sound when Mr. Obama's left flank and some Congressional Democrats are urging an exit strategy from that supposed quagmire. On Iraq, he acknowledged that "the Iraqi people are ultimately better off without the tyranny of Saddam Hussein" and pledged the U.S. to the "dual responsibility" of leaving Iraq while helping the country "forge a better future." The timeline he reiterated for U.S. withdrawal is the one Mr. Bush negotiated last year.
The President even went one better than his predecessor, with a series of implicit rebukes to much of the Muslim world. There would have been no need for him to specify that six million Jews were murdered by the Nazis if Holocaust denial weren't rampant in the Middle East, including Egypt, just as there would have been no need to name al Qaeda as the perpetrator of 9/11 if that fact were not also commonly denied throughout the Muslim world. There also would have been no need to insist that "the Arab-Israeli conflict should no longer be used to distract the people of Arab nations from other problems," if that were not the modus operandi of most Arab governments.
Mr. Obama also noted that "among some Muslims, there is a disturbing tendency to measure one's own faith by the rejection of another's," a recognition of the supremacist strain in Islamist thinking. He also included a pointed defense of democracy, including "the ability to speak your mind and have a say in how you are governed" and "confidence in the rule of law." We doubt the point was lost on Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, now in his 29th year in office. All of this will do some good if it leads to broader acceptance among Muslims of the principles of Mr. Bush's freedom agenda without the taint of its author's name.
As for the caveats, Mr. Obama missed a chance to remind his audience that no country has done more than the U.S. to liberate Muslims from oppression -- in Kuwait, Bosnia, Kosovo and above all in Afghanistan and Iraq, where more than 50 million people were freed by American arms from two of the most extreme tyrannies in modern history. His insistence on calling Iraq a "war of choice" is a needless insult to Mr. Bush that diminishes the cause for which more than 4,000 Americans have died.
He also couldn't resist his by now familiar moral self-indulgence by asserting that he has "unequivocally prohibited the use of torture" and ordered Guantanamo closed. Aside from the fact that the U.S. wasn't torturing anyone before Mr. Obama came into office, his Arab hosts can see through his claims. They know the Obama Administration is "rendering" al Qaeda detainees to other countries, some of them Arab, where their rights and well-being are far less secure than at Gitmo.
The President also stooped to easy, but false, moral equivalence, most egregiously in comparing the U.S. role in an Iranian coup during the Cold War with revolutionary Iran's 30-year hostility toward the U.S. He also compared Israel's right to exist with Palestinian statehood. But while denouncing Israeli settlements was an easy applause line, removal of those settlements will do nothing to ease Israeli-Palestinian tensions if the result is similar to what happened when Israel withdrew its settlements from Gaza. We too favor a two-state solution -- as did President Bush -- but that solution depends on Palestinians showing the capacity to build domestic institutions that reject and punish terror against other Palestinians and their neighbors.
Hanging over all of this is the question of Iran. In his formal remarks, Mr. Obama promised only diplomacy without preconditions and warned about a nuclear arms race in the Middle East. Yet surely Iran was at the top of his agenda in private with Mr. Mubarak and Saudi Arabia's King Abdullah, both of whom would quietly exult if the U.S. removed that regional threat. They were no doubt trying to assess if Mr. Obama is serious about stopping Tehran, or if he is the second coming of Jimmy Carter.
It is in those conversations, and in the hard calls the President will soon have to make, that his Middle East policy will stand or fall.
SOURCE
I think that the WSJ is right as far as it goes but overlooks what Rubin stresses: The Middle East is a different culture that will hear things very differently from the way Americans do. And it is how people in the Arab world hear it that matters. Obama is a novice; Prof. Rubin speaks from vast close-up experience
**************************
ELSEWHERE
Stimulate economy through deregulation: "The economy is contracting at a rate of more than 6 percent this year to date. This is hurting the country and especially Michigan, whose 12.9 percent unemployment rate is the nation’s highest. America’s troubled economy needs a boost, but politicians are taking the wrong approach. The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act works — or rather, doesn’t work — by taking money out of the economy, wasting some of it on bureaucracy and then putting it back in. The $787 billion in new debt it is creating will have to be paid back with higher future taxes, which will hurt growth down the road.”
Yet more government regulation coming: "The Internal Revenue Service is considering for the first time requiring income tax preparers to be licensed by the federal government as a way to root out fraud and raise compliance with increasingly complex tax law. IRS Commissioner Douglas Shulman revealed the seismic shift in congressional testimony Thursday. He said erroneous tax returns were such a large problem that the United States could shrink the so-called tax gap - the difference between what the government receives and what it should collect - by making sure the nation's tax preparers do their job correctly.
Ex-Countrywide CEO Mozilo charged with fraud: “The Securities & Exchange Commission announced today it will charge former Countrywide CEO Angelo Mozilo and two others with civil fraud and insider trading, making Mozilo the most high-profile individual to face federal charges in the wake of the financial crisis. Countrywide, once the nation’s largest home mortgage lender, was blamed by many for its role in the subprime mortgage meltdown that kicked off the ongoing financial crisis. The company collapsed last year and was acquired by Bank of America.”
Sotomayor: No friend of the little guy: "“Those who are of the badge worshipping and law enforcement bootlicking persuasion might assume that Judge Sonia Sotomayor may not have much to offer them as a Supreme Court Justice until they take a look at her record on the 2nd Circuit. As it turns out, Sotomayor has quite an authoritarian streak. It seems that when the powers that be are challenged by an ordinary individual, Sotomayor’s empathy seems to be with those who are employed by the government (and the facts of the circumstance be damned!).”
The Puritan legacy: “Concerns over binge drinking — the habit of drinking large quantities of alcohol with the intention of getting drunk, usually in company but without the benefit of conversation of any kind — have brought into focus the great difference that exists between virtuous and vicious drinking. Our puritan legacy, which sees pleasure as the doorway to vice, makes it difficult for many people to understand this difference. If alcohol causes drunkenness, they think, then the sole moral question concerns whether you should drink it at all, and if so how much. The idea that the moral question concerns how you drink it, in what company and in what state of mind, is one that is entirely foreign to their way of understanding the human condition.”
Energy freedom isn’t blowing in the wind or basking in the sun — It’s drilling now: “Miguel Cervantes created one of the most memorable characters of literature with Don Quixote, a delusional old man who jousted with windmills he thought were giants. Now the Obama Administration and Congress are quixotically raising their lances against another hypothetical menace: fossil fuels. In this instance, it’s not a just an elderly Spaniard who’ll be tossed to the ground, but an already staggering U.S. economy.”
My Twitter.com identity: jonjayray. For more blog 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)
****************************
By Barry Rubin
Barack Obama’s speech in Cairo is one of the most bizarre orations ever made by a U.S. president, not a foreign policy statement but rather something invented by Obama, an international campaign speech, as if his main goal was to obtain votes in the next Egyptian primary. That approach defined Obama’s basic themes: Islam’s great. America is good. We’re sorry. Be moderate (not that you haven’t always been that way). Let’s be friends.
Here, Obama followed the idea that if you want someone to like you agree with almost everything he says. Obama also gave, albeit with some minor variations, the speech that the leader of a Third World Muslim country might give, justifying it in advance by claiming America is a big Muslim country, after all.
Of course, the speech had tremendous—though temporary—appeal combined with its counterproductive strategic impact. It will make him more popular. It may well make America somewhat less unpopular. But its effect on Middle East issues and U.S. interests is another matter entirely.
The first problem is that Obama said many things factually quite untrue, some ridiculously so. Pages would be required to list all these inaccuracies. The interesting question is whether Obama consciously lied or really believes it. I’d prefer him to be lying, because if he’s that ignorant then America and the world is in very deep trouble. If he really believes Islam’s social role is so perfect, radical Islamists are a tiny minority, Palestinians have suffered hugely through no fault of their own, and so on, then he’s living in a fantasy world. Unfortunately, we are not. The collision between reality and dream is going to be a terrible one.
The second problem is the speech’s unnecessarily extreme one-sidedness. Obama portrays the West as the guilty party. Despite a reference to September 11—even that presented as an American misdeed, unfair dislike of Islam resulting— he gave not a single example of Islamist or Muslim responsibility for anything wrong in the world.
Obama could easily have made the same points in a balanced way: you’ve made mistakes; we’ve made mistakes. You’ve done things to us; we’ve done things to you. And having established that I respect you, let me tell you how Americans feel and what’s needed. But that’s not how he chose to do it. So afraid was Obama of giving offense—and thus not maximizing his popularity-at-all–costs mission—he did the political equivalent of scoring an own-goal. President Bill Clinton said, “I feel your pain.” In effect, Obama declared, “We’re your pain.”
So if Muslims are always the innocent victims, isn't Usama bin Ladin and others correct in saying that all the violence and terrorism to date has been just a "defensive Jihad" against external aggression and thus justifiable? Why should anything change simply because Obama has "admitted" this and asked to start over again? When he cited examples of oppression, Obama listed only Bosnia (where he didn’t even mention the U.S. role in helping Muslims), along with Israel, and also the Muslim-on-Muslim violence in Darfur. He didn’t mention terrorist violence and mistreatement of non-Muslims by Muslims in Indonesia, Thailand, the Philippines, Pakistan, India, Iraq, Sudan, the Gaza Strip, against Israel, Europe or even Egypt itself.
This is a hallmark of the kind of thinking dominating much contemporary Western thought extending something that works in their own societies-- where self-criticism, apology, and unilateral concessions really can lead to the other side forgiving and compromising--to places where it doesn't work. In the Middle East if you say you’re to blame, that communicates to the other side that their cause is right and they're entitled to everything it wants. If you apologize, you’re weak. Sure, some relatively Westernized urban liberals will take what Obama said that way, I doubt whether radical states and political forces, as well as the masses, will do so.
The main ingredient in the Obama speech was flattery. There is a bumper sticker that says: Don’t apologize. Your friends don’t need to hear it and your enemies don’t care. Obama’s situation might be described as: Don’t grovel. It scares the hell out of your friends and convinces your enemies you owe them big time. As a result, the mainstream in the region will say, “We were right all the time. Obama admitted it!” While more extreme radicals say, “We’ve won and America’s surrendering.” But if Obama, as it appears, is running to be the region’s favorite politician, he’ll find he—not to mention America’s allies--has to give up many more things to win that dubious honor.
Third, Obama undermined the existing states. True, to Obama's credit, he did talk about reform, democracy, and equal rights for women. Yet the speech suggests to listeners is: democracy plus Islam equals solution. If Islam is so perfect and has such a great record—except for a tiny minority of extremists—why shouldn’t it rule? And since the extremists are presumably al-Qaida, Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood parliamentarians in the audience must have found a lot to applaud. How will this go over with the rulers Obama wants as allies?
Finally, Obama played into the stereotype that Israel is the central political issue in the region. Others, of course, are happy to find the usual scapegoat. An Associated Press headline reads, “Obama’s Islam Success Depends on Israel.” Is the entire “Muslim World” just waiting for Israel to stop building a few thousand apartment units a year before deciding that America is great, reform is needed, and moderation wise.
Obama’s phrases were carefully crafted. He called on Palestinians to stop violence, show their competence in administration, and accept a two-state solution, living in peace alongside Israel. Hamas was commanded to be moderate. Yet he in no way seemed to condition Palestinians getting a state on their record. His administration may think this way but he didn’t make that clear.
Middle Eastern ears won’t hear this aspect--which is part of the reason they may cheer the speech—in the way Washington policymakers intend. Inasmuch as the United States now has more credibility for them it’s because they hope it will just force Israel to give without them having to do much. When this doesn’t happen, anger will set in, intensified by the fact that the president “said” the Palestinians are in the right and should have a state right away.
Everything specific concerning Israel’s needs and demands--an end to incitement, security for Israel, end of terrorism, resettlement of refugees in Palestine—weren’t there. While Israel was specifically said to violate previous agreements on the construction within settlements issue—an assertion that’s flat-out wrong—there was no hint that the Palestinians had done so.
I can’t shake the image of Obama as the new kid in school, just moved into the neighborhood, fearful of bullies, who says anything to ingratiate himself and is ready to turn over his lunch money. There’s a famous line in “Citizen Kane” where one characters says that it’s very easy to make a lot of money….If all you want to do is make a lot of money. It’s also easy to make a lot of popularity, if that’s all one wants to do. An American president has to do more, a lot more.
SOURCE
************************
Obama's Cairo speech from an American perspective
A WSJ editorial
One benefit of the Obama Presidency is that it is validating much of George W. Bush's security agenda and foreign policy merely by dint of autobiographical rebranding. That was clear enough yesterday in Cairo, where President Obama advertised "a new beginning between the United States and Muslims around the world." But what he mostly offered were artfully repackaged versions of themes President Bush sounded with his freedom agenda. We mean that as a compliment, albeit with a couple of large caveats.
So there was Mr. Obama, noting that rights such as "freedom to live as you choose" and "the ability to speak your mind and have a say in how you are governed" were "not just American ideas, they are human rights." There he was insisting that "freedom of religion is central to the ability of peoples to live together," and citing Malaysia and Dubai as economic models for other Muslim countries while promising to host a summit on entrepreneurship.
There he was too, in Laura Bush-mode, talking about the need to expand opportunities for Muslim women, particularly in education. "I respect those women who choose to live their lives in traditional roles," he said. "But it should be their choice."
Mr. Obama also offered a robust defense of the war in Afghanistan, calling it "a war of necessity" and promising that "America's commitment will not weaken." That's an important note to sound when Mr. Obama's left flank and some Congressional Democrats are urging an exit strategy from that supposed quagmire. On Iraq, he acknowledged that "the Iraqi people are ultimately better off without the tyranny of Saddam Hussein" and pledged the U.S. to the "dual responsibility" of leaving Iraq while helping the country "forge a better future." The timeline he reiterated for U.S. withdrawal is the one Mr. Bush negotiated last year.
The President even went one better than his predecessor, with a series of implicit rebukes to much of the Muslim world. There would have been no need for him to specify that six million Jews were murdered by the Nazis if Holocaust denial weren't rampant in the Middle East, including Egypt, just as there would have been no need to name al Qaeda as the perpetrator of 9/11 if that fact were not also commonly denied throughout the Muslim world. There also would have been no need to insist that "the Arab-Israeli conflict should no longer be used to distract the people of Arab nations from other problems," if that were not the modus operandi of most Arab governments.
Mr. Obama also noted that "among some Muslims, there is a disturbing tendency to measure one's own faith by the rejection of another's," a recognition of the supremacist strain in Islamist thinking. He also included a pointed defense of democracy, including "the ability to speak your mind and have a say in how you are governed" and "confidence in the rule of law." We doubt the point was lost on Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, now in his 29th year in office. All of this will do some good if it leads to broader acceptance among Muslims of the principles of Mr. Bush's freedom agenda without the taint of its author's name.
As for the caveats, Mr. Obama missed a chance to remind his audience that no country has done more than the U.S. to liberate Muslims from oppression -- in Kuwait, Bosnia, Kosovo and above all in Afghanistan and Iraq, where more than 50 million people were freed by American arms from two of the most extreme tyrannies in modern history. His insistence on calling Iraq a "war of choice" is a needless insult to Mr. Bush that diminishes the cause for which more than 4,000 Americans have died.
He also couldn't resist his by now familiar moral self-indulgence by asserting that he has "unequivocally prohibited the use of torture" and ordered Guantanamo closed. Aside from the fact that the U.S. wasn't torturing anyone before Mr. Obama came into office, his Arab hosts can see through his claims. They know the Obama Administration is "rendering" al Qaeda detainees to other countries, some of them Arab, where their rights and well-being are far less secure than at Gitmo.
The President also stooped to easy, but false, moral equivalence, most egregiously in comparing the U.S. role in an Iranian coup during the Cold War with revolutionary Iran's 30-year hostility toward the U.S. He also compared Israel's right to exist with Palestinian statehood. But while denouncing Israeli settlements was an easy applause line, removal of those settlements will do nothing to ease Israeli-Palestinian tensions if the result is similar to what happened when Israel withdrew its settlements from Gaza. We too favor a two-state solution -- as did President Bush -- but that solution depends on Palestinians showing the capacity to build domestic institutions that reject and punish terror against other Palestinians and their neighbors.
Hanging over all of this is the question of Iran. In his formal remarks, Mr. Obama promised only diplomacy without preconditions and warned about a nuclear arms race in the Middle East. Yet surely Iran was at the top of his agenda in private with Mr. Mubarak and Saudi Arabia's King Abdullah, both of whom would quietly exult if the U.S. removed that regional threat. They were no doubt trying to assess if Mr. Obama is serious about stopping Tehran, or if he is the second coming of Jimmy Carter.
It is in those conversations, and in the hard calls the President will soon have to make, that his Middle East policy will stand or fall.
SOURCE
I think that the WSJ is right as far as it goes but overlooks what Rubin stresses: The Middle East is a different culture that will hear things very differently from the way Americans do. And it is how people in the Arab world hear it that matters. Obama is a novice; Prof. Rubin speaks from vast close-up experience
**************************
ELSEWHERE
Stimulate economy through deregulation: "The economy is contracting at a rate of more than 6 percent this year to date. This is hurting the country and especially Michigan, whose 12.9 percent unemployment rate is the nation’s highest. America’s troubled economy needs a boost, but politicians are taking the wrong approach. The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act works — or rather, doesn’t work — by taking money out of the economy, wasting some of it on bureaucracy and then putting it back in. The $787 billion in new debt it is creating will have to be paid back with higher future taxes, which will hurt growth down the road.”
Yet more government regulation coming: "The Internal Revenue Service is considering for the first time requiring income tax preparers to be licensed by the federal government as a way to root out fraud and raise compliance with increasingly complex tax law. IRS Commissioner Douglas Shulman revealed the seismic shift in congressional testimony Thursday. He said erroneous tax returns were such a large problem that the United States could shrink the so-called tax gap - the difference between what the government receives and what it should collect - by making sure the nation's tax preparers do their job correctly.
Ex-Countrywide CEO Mozilo charged with fraud: “The Securities & Exchange Commission announced today it will charge former Countrywide CEO Angelo Mozilo and two others with civil fraud and insider trading, making Mozilo the most high-profile individual to face federal charges in the wake of the financial crisis. Countrywide, once the nation’s largest home mortgage lender, was blamed by many for its role in the subprime mortgage meltdown that kicked off the ongoing financial crisis. The company collapsed last year and was acquired by Bank of America.”
Sotomayor: No friend of the little guy: "“Those who are of the badge worshipping and law enforcement bootlicking persuasion might assume that Judge Sonia Sotomayor may not have much to offer them as a Supreme Court Justice until they take a look at her record on the 2nd Circuit. As it turns out, Sotomayor has quite an authoritarian streak. It seems that when the powers that be are challenged by an ordinary individual, Sotomayor’s empathy seems to be with those who are employed by the government (and the facts of the circumstance be damned!).”
The Puritan legacy: “Concerns over binge drinking — the habit of drinking large quantities of alcohol with the intention of getting drunk, usually in company but without the benefit of conversation of any kind — have brought into focus the great difference that exists between virtuous and vicious drinking. Our puritan legacy, which sees pleasure as the doorway to vice, makes it difficult for many people to understand this difference. If alcohol causes drunkenness, they think, then the sole moral question concerns whether you should drink it at all, and if so how much. The idea that the moral question concerns how you drink it, in what company and in what state of mind, is one that is entirely foreign to their way of understanding the human condition.”
Energy freedom isn’t blowing in the wind or basking in the sun — It’s drilling now: “Miguel Cervantes created one of the most memorable characters of literature with Don Quixote, a delusional old man who jousted with windmills he thought were giants. Now the Obama Administration and Congress are quixotically raising their lances against another hypothetical menace: fossil fuels. In this instance, it’s not a just an elderly Spaniard who’ll be tossed to the ground, but an already staggering U.S. economy.”
My Twitter.com identity: jonjayray. For more blog 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)
****************************
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
