More skepticism about the death of Hitler
You can read here an overview of another book that claims Hitler did not die in Berlin but escaped to Argentina. I said in my previous post on the subject that I have my own reasons -- founded on my own close study of Hitler's history and psychology -- for not believing that.
I am beginning to wonder however -- not because of the new book but because of the response to it. The critics of the book say that it is a "consensus" of the experts that Hitler died in Berlin and the publisher should be ashamed for publishing such a book. That is so close to what defenders of the global warming hoax say that my skeptical antennae begin to twitch.
Moreover they admit that the alleged fragment of Hitler's skull held by the Russians is not in fact Hitler's and that there was a great deal of confusion in Hitler's bunkler at the time of the Russian surge into Berlin.
The only "proof" they offer that Hitler died in his Berlin bunker is the testimony from one of Hitler's closest aides who says that he saw Hitler dead there. The possibility that one of Hitler's aides might have lied to protect his boss has apparently not occurred to them.
I think I will now have to say that I am agnostic on the matter.
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Occupy This!
Hey Wall Street “occupiers.” What do you suppose would happen to the United States if the rest of us – I’ll call us “the other 99.99%” – started behaving like you?
Will you allow this question to “occupy” your minds for a moment? Seriously, what would happen to our country if we all chose to do nothing but take up space on “public” property (or even on other people’s private property as some of you have done), consume resources at other people’s expense, and spend several days in a row not producing things? Have you even thought of what might happen, if the rest of us followed your “example?”
Participants in the nationwide “occupy” movement would probably be shocked to know this. But the fact is, their oh-so-important demonstrations are able to occur as they do because the majority of us in America do not think and act the way they do. In fact, to be even more precise, their choices are enabled in no small part by – gasp!- American-styled Capitalism! Yet just as those who burn the U.S. flag fail to understand that the object they desecrate is emblematic of the freedom they exercise, the occupiers fail to see that the “C-word” which they loathe is precisely what makes their occupying possible.
Consider the property on which the demonstrations are occurring. Most of them have happened on public property – city streets, public parks, and so forth – while some of the protestations have migrated on to privately-owned commercial and residential property. In either case, the demonstrations have occurred on property that belongs to somebody - property that has been purchased with money, and that is “owned” by some group or individual.
The occupiers seem to convey a vague belief that land just simply “exists,” and it rightly belongs to “everybody.” Yet if they were only interested in “land” on which to hang-out, then they could just as easily gather in the virgin forests of upstate New York or the un-refined terrain of the rural Nevada desert.
But that’s not what the occupiers are doing. Oh, no, they’re enjoying the modern comforts and conveniences of developed land – land entailing well-built and maintained streets and sidewalks, and nicely manicured lawns – all of which were created by somebody else’s labor and purchased with that dreaded thing called money.
And guess what, occupiers? The labor that built the streets and walkways, the education that prepared the laborers, and the capital that purchased the land and paid for the labor, were all brought about by capitalism and our free-market enterprise system. Even if you’re on “government property,” the government bought it with tax dollars that were generated in our free-market economic system.
Speaking of labor - how would you like it, occupiers, if both government and private-sector workers in and around your demonstrations chose to join you, rather than to continue working at their jobs and continue serving you? Imagine, for example, if the NYPD officers assigned to patrol Wall Street – no doubt dismissed as “oppressors” or “the man” by the occupiers but who nonetheless keep the demonstrators safe – were to stop working at their jobs, and chose instead to become occupiers themselves. Might you, occupiers, become a bit inconvenienced, or maybe even endangered?
And what if the workers and managers at the local Starbucks, McDonald’s, and other service businesses chose to protest with you, and allowed their stores to remain closed? Might that create a little problem, occupiers?
Or what if the owners and operators of these for-profit capitalistic enterprises actually became as greedy and evil as you characterize them to be, occupiers, and they started denying you entrance in to their facilities? What if you could no longer do your potty breaks and your after-the-overnighter-in-the-park wash ups in their restrooms that are paid-for with the wealth of the business owners?
The occupy movement appears as though it will be with us for the foreseeable future. And perhaps the only thing worse than the selfish, narcissistic, vacuous behavior and rhetoric of the occupiers is the fact that our President and members of his party in Congress have given their blessing to it all.
The good news is that a majority of us Americans do not speak and behave as the occupiers do. We choose to both consume, and to produce, and we choose to think as well as to feel. We understand the basic tenet of capitalism, that one earns a day’s pay by doing a day’s work.
We also realize that if too many people choose only to consume and live off the largesse of others, then our nation is doomed. And as the late, great “one percenter” Steve Jobs might say, a majority of us choose to “think different.”
SOURCE
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Tea Party Represents America, Not Occupy Wall Street
For years, I have been impressed with this young man I see working at Walmart retrieving shopping carts in the parking lot. He is challenged, I suspect from birth, with physical issues involving an arm and a leg. I saw him leaving work one evening in his car. While I do not know his living situation, I do know he has a job and drives what I assume is his own car.
Looking at this young man hobbling around doing his job, one could think, “Why isn't this poor soul home collecting disability?” He obviously prefers the dignity which accompanies earning his own money. Thus, the reason for my utmost respect for him.
Then, I look at the Occupy Wall Street despicable mobs; spoiled brat college students, America hating Marxists, paid professional protesters and plain old lazy bottom feeders, all demanding freebies while claiming ownership of the fruit of other folk's labor. And the left expects me to respect and sympathize with these parasites.
The liberal media, the left and the Obama administration are trying to convince us these ignorant arrogant Occupy Wall Street knuckleheads represent the thinking of most Americans. If their premise were true, we would be in deep, deep trouble as a nation. Fortunately, these mobs are NOT a majority.
Like parents who are in denial protecting a juvenile delinquent child, the left is doing everything in their power to portray these violent, destructive, anti-Semitic and ungodly Occupy Wall Street thugs in a positive light. Meanwhile, the left remains relentless in their quest to slander the tea party with false undocumented accusations of racism and violence.
The Tea Party movement which is driven by “We The People” is the polar opposite of the George Soros and far left organizations funded Occupy Wall Street assault on Capitalism and America. How dare they compare their low rent “trashy movement” to the dignified Tea Party.
As a Tea Party activist/performer who has traveled on five Tea Party Express national bus tours, I have attended over 300 tea parties. I can assure you the well-informed, hard working and decent people who attend tea parties represent the thinking of a majority of Americans, not the Occupy Wall Street mobs.
While Occupy Wall Street participants trash, vandalize and disrespect public parks and government buildings, we tea party patriots leave our rally sites the way we found them or cleaner. The Tea Party is inspired by love for America and a desire to follow our Constitution. It is also in rebellion of political correctness and about restoring values and principles which have made America great. Tea Party goals are far superior to Occupy Wall Street which proclaims, “You rich guys have too much and we're takin' it!”
Occupy Wall Street is nothing more than a vile orgy of class envy, covetousness and hatred of achievers. You Occupy losers need to get a clue, a life and a job!
SOURCE
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Hitler's predecessors were American do-gooders and "scientists"
Below is an editorial from the 1911 "Scientific American". It sounds very reasonable but that makes it an even better example of the deplorable "unintended consequences" of government interventionism
ADA JUKE is known to anthropologists as the "mother of criminals." From her there were directly descended one thousand two hundred persons. Of these, one thousand were criminals, paupers, inebriates, insane, or on the streets. That heritage of crime, disease, inefficiency and immorality cost the State of New York about a million and a quarter dollars for maintenance directly. What the indirect loss was in property stolen, in injury to life and limb, no one can estimate.
Suppose that Ada Juke or her immediate children had been prevented from perpetuating the Juke family. Not only would the State have been spared the necessity of supporting one thousand defective persons, morally and physically incapable of performing the functions of citizenship, but American manhood would have been considerably better off, and society would have been free from one taint at least.
Instances such as these are not isolated. Ever since the late Sir Francis Galton? gave us his science of Eugenics, which in its most literal sense means "good breeding," the scientific students of mankind, the directors of insane asylums and hospitals, criminologists the world over, have been compiling statistics to show not only the danger of permitting the marriage of criminals, lunatics, and the physically unfit, but the effect upon" mankind. Thus, Prof. Karl Pearson?, Galton's ablest disciple, has driven home the necessity of the scientific study of the human race in many a telling statistical comparison and monograph. He has shown that in Great Britain 25 per cent of the, population (and that the undesirable element in England) is producing 50 per cent of English children, and that if this goes on unchecked, national deterioration and degeneracy must inevitably result.
Galton originally worked only with statistics, and in his capable hands, they proved a powerful weapon. After he had enunciated the principles of Eugenics, Mendel's law of heredity was revived and applied to the problem. Imperfectly understood as that law may be as yet, nevertheless it enables us to prophesy with considerable accuracy what the offspring of animals, plants and human beings may be, not only in the next generation, but in generations to come. Mendelian principles have no doubt long been followed by professional animal breeders in an empirical way, but only within recent years have enough data been accumulated to show that they apply with equal force to human beings.
We know enough about the laws of heredity, we have enough statistics from insane asylums and prisons, we have enough genealogies, to show that, although we may not be able directly to improve the human race as we improve the breed of guinea pigs, rabbits or cows, because of the rebellious spirit of mankind, yet the time has come when the lawmaker should join hands with the scientist, and at least check the propagation of the unfit. Prizes have been offered to crack trotters for beating their own record, $10,000 for a fifth of a second, all for the purpose of evolving a precious two-minute horse. Yet we hear of no prizes which are offered for that much worthier object, the physically and intellectually perfect man.
Fortunately the need of intelligent legislation on the subject is being driven home by scientific men and Eugenic associations here and abroad. The Eugenics laboratory founded by Sir Francis Galton and the American Breeders' Association have done much to clear away the popular prejudices inevitably encountered in such educational work and to prepare the ground for legislative action. Some States have already passed laws that show an appreciation of the situation.
The proper attitude to be taken toward the perpetuation of poor types is that which has been attributed to Huxley. "We are sorry for you," he is reported to have said; "we will do our best for you (and in so doing we elevate ourselves, since mercy blesses him that gives and him that takes), but we deny you the right to parentage. You may live, but you must not propagate."
The absurdity of legislation to cure social evils without scientific facts to base that legislation upon, is no more apparent than in the disposal of the insane. In Wethams's "Family and the Nation," it is stated: "According to the mid-Victorian concept, a man was either sane or insane-quite mad or completely cured. How he became mad, how completely he was cured, were not taken into consideration." It is not enough to take care of an insane man. To discharge him after a period of a few months or a few years and brand him as cured, when his whole family history points to the fact. that he is a hereditary epileptic or lunatic, and to place no barriers in his path when he attempts to marry, is statesmanship of the poorest order.
If the Eugenist has his way, "well-born" will acquire a new meaning. It will not cease to mean descent from a proud and noble race that has accomplished great things in the past, but it will also mean that the stock descended from that race is composed of men and women who will live up to its traditions, who will have that perfect physique and stable mental organization which Maudsley, that most literary and philosophical of psychiatrists, calls "the highest sanity."
SOURCE
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Some "civilty" from an aging Leftist film-star
Susan Sarandon has been slammed for calling the Pope a Nazi. The 65-year-old American actress made the comment about Pope Benedict XVI over the weekend during an appearance at the Bay Street Theatre in New York while talking about her 1995 film Dead Man Walking. She said she had sent a copy of the book it was based on to the Pope, but then clarified which one she was talking about.
"The last one, not this Nazi one we have now," she told interviewer Bob Balaban. When he showed his disapproval of her comments Sarandon allegedly then repeated the comment drawing laughter from the crowd.
But Bill Donohue, President of the Catholic League told TMZ that the comments made by the Thelma & Louise star were "obscene". "Joseph Ratzinger (Pope Benedict XVI) was conscripted into the Nazi Youth the way every other 14-year-old German boy was at the time," Donohue explained. "Unlike most others, he not only refused to go to the compulsory meetings - he actually deserted the Hitler Youth. Which is precisely why Jews today regard him as a friend, not as an enemy. "In short, what Sarandon said is positively obscene."
SOURCE
My Twitter.com identity: jonjayray. I have deleted my Facebook page as I rarely access it. For more blog postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, 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 (Academic) or here (Pictorial) or here (Personal)
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The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist" (Nationalsozialist) and the full name of Hitler's political party (translated) was "The National Socialist German Workers' Party" (In German: Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei)
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Monday, October 17, 2011
More academic evidence of the importance of genes and the UNIMPORTANCE of your home environment
Aren't you glad that there's someone around to translate that academic Double-Dutch for you?
Note initially that after decades of research it is now generally accepted that both political and religious ideology is substantially determined by your genes. You didn't CHOOSE to be a Conservative or religious: You were BORN that way. That still grates on the teeth of most people but that is what the inheritance research has repeatedly shown. Exactly WHAT is inherited which makes you a Leftist is still not pinned down but my bet is that it is a tendency to be miserable. Happiness is definitely a stable trait and conservatives are certainly happier, which again shows up repeatedly in research.
But that is all prelude. The reseachers above werre looking for OTHER things that might be genetically inherited. They found that traits of Intellectualism, Harmony, Materialism, and Conservatism were all determined heavily by genetics but hardly at all by the environment. Religiosity, however, was to a degree influenced by your environment. Pretty simple, really -- even if runs against almost everybody's preconceptions.
You now see why elections are won or lost according to how well the candidate appeals to the voter in the middle. Most of us are born conservative (happy) or Leftist (miserable) and can't be changed from that. It's only the minority who are half way between happy and miserable who can be swung. Background on previous research in the area here
Clarifying note: It is your tendency to be religious in general that is inherited, not your particular religion.
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ObamaCare Starts to Unravel
The real story behind the Class program failure, and what to do now
Now that one of ObamaCare's major new benefit programs has been scrapped, liberals are trying to make stone soup by claiming that the Obama Administration merely committed an act of "good government." They claim that when this long-term care insurance program proved to be unworkable, the Administration conceded as much, and now it's gone. So let's review the evidence, not least because it so perfectly illustrates the recklessness that produced the Affordable Care Act.
When Democrats were pasting it together in 2009 and 2010, the immediate attraction of the program known by the acronym Class was that its finances could be gamed to create the illusion that a new entitlement would reduce the deficit. Ending the complicated Class budget gimmick erases the better part of ObamaCare's purported "savings," but it's also worth focusing on the program's long-run political goals.
For decades Democrats have been trying to put government on the hook for middle-class costs like home health services ($1,800 a month on average) and nursing homes ($70,000 to $80,000 per year). On paper, Class was supposed to be like normal insurance, funding benefits through premiums with no subsidy. But since the budget gimmick and the program's larger structure meant that premiums could never cover benefits, Democrats were trying to force a future Congress to prevent a Class bankruptcy using taxpayer dollars.
As the costs to the federal fisc continued to climb, the Democratic gambit was that Class would gradually morph into another part of Medicare. Insurance depends on younger, healthier people signing up to cross-subsidize the older and sicker, but under the Class program as written almost all of its enrollees would soon also be beneficiaries.
So to fix this "adverse selection," the plan was for Congress to eventually make participation mandatory, with the so-called premiums converted into another payroll tax and the benefits into another entitlement. Former White House budget director Peter Orszag has been writing that the long-term care insurance market can't function without a mandate, while HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius declined to rule one out at a Senate hearing in February. Now they tell us.
The only reason the Health and Human Services Department pre-emptively called off this scheme is that former New Hampshire Senator Judd Gregg succeeded in inserting a proviso that required the Class program's reality to match Democratic promises as a matter of law. If HHS couldn't provide "an actuarial analysis of the 75-year costs of the program that ensures solvency throughout such 75-year period," it couldn't be legally implemented.
In other words, HHS had to prove that the Class program wouldn't go broke the way it was designed to—and actuarial analysis is a matter of math, not politics. In a 48-page report that HHS submitted to Congress Friday, the department concedes that it is literally impossible to create any kind of long-term care program under the law's statutory text in which revenues match expenditures. Such a plan would cost as much as $3,000 per month, which no one would ever buy.
The HHS gnomes even considered "features deviating from or going beyond a plain reading of the statutory language" that its lawyers didn't think could pass legal muster, and they still couldn't avoid violating the known laws of mathematics despite 19 months of trying. HHS lawyers also said the government would have to warn enrollees that the promised benefits weren't contracts and could be abrogated to "dispel any claims that the Class program had misled the public or had encouraged reliance on its programs under false pretenses."
Those pretenses have been obvious all along, with outside analysts and internal Administration experts saying Class wasn't viable. President Obama was a mask of indifference with no response when Paul Ryan took Class apart at the 2010 White House health summit. Democrats included it anyway, but now that the Administration itself has vindicated its critics, Republicans have a new political opportunity to make real health-care legislative progress.
At a minimum the GOP could begin by repealing the Class program altogether, since its legal authority is still intact. "One should never leave a partly loaded gun on the table, even if most of the chambers are empty or just house blanks," writes the American Enterprise Institute's Tom Miller. He also suggests attaching a few of the more destructive provisions and forcing Democrats to defend them, such as Mr. Orszag's Independent Payment Advisory Board of 15 political appointees who have broad unaccountable powers to control health-care markets and health care.
Our suggestion is for a Gregg-like amendment that applies to the entire health law and not simply Class. If reality can't match the rhetoric that accompanied the bill—about fiscal responsibility, bending the cost curve, keeping your health care if you like your health care and all the other false promises—then, legally, it should be repealed like Class. Call it a truth-in-advertising clause. ObamaCare would collapse in a heartbeat.
SOURCE
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Change at the Top Creates Jobs at the Bottom
“When paperwork gets in the way of benefits, that’s a problem.”
So said John Bemis, Secretary-designate of New Mexico’s Energy, Minerals and Natural Resources Department, appointed by Governor Susana Martinez. What is significant about Bemis’ comment, made during a presentation in front of the New Mexico Oil and Gas Association’s Annual meeting on October 3, is that it represents a total change in attitude from the previous administration and is indicative of the difference one person—at the top—can make.
The change in attitude in NM presents a case study from which the rest of the US would be wise to learn.
Governor Richardson’s approach was very much like President Obama’s. He added regulations and appointed people to positions of leadership who made doing business in the state difficult—especially in regard to natural resource management. As a result, businesses moved to other states and revenues suffered.
While some people think one person can't make that much of a difference, NM is proving that couldn't be farther from the truth. A culture of growth and prosperity starts with attitudes at the top.
Governor Martinez was elected in 2010. She appointed her people to head up the various agencies—including John Bemis at the Energy, Minerals and Natural Resources Department. The rules didn’t change; instead the new leadership reevaluated their application. Rather than dictating just because she can, Governor Martinez has chosen to focus where she can get the most bang for the buck. For example, the limited resources of the Oil Conservation Division can now be directed toward actual environmental issues, rather than enforcing paperwork.
As a result of the change in attitude at the top, industry is more enthusiastic about doing business in the state. As I usually do during August, September and October, I participated in three state-wide events; the annual meetings of the Independent Petroleum Association of New Mexico, New Mexico Mining Association, and New Mexico Oil and Gas Association. The contrast from previous years in the outlook of the participants was startling. They are excited about the possibilities! Instead of the regulations being used like a hammer to beat down all development, departments are now looking to help folks work within the regulations. If the regulations are excessively punitive or inappropriate, industry is encouraged to submit proposed changes—which they’ve done and which are being considered. Things are picking up in New Mexico.
Across the US, we have much the same problem as New Mexico did. We have excessive regulations, businesses are leaving, and revenues are suffering. The leadership has the power to reverse the trend. We’ve seen it in New Mexico. We saw it in August when President Obama instructed the EPA to delay the ozone regulations—which would have been one of the costliest in the history of the US as hundreds of counties would be instantly out of compliance for things as simple as fireworks displays.
The EPA has more tricks up its sleeve, and President Obama’s pick to head up the EPA, Lisa Jackson, has no intention of slowing down.
On October 10, an unprecedented group of Attorney Generals from 25 different states, joined together to ask Secretary Jackson to postpone implementation of the Utility MACT rule because it threatens to endanger electric reliability, eliminate jobs, and saddle consumers with significantly higher costs. The next day, the EPA issued a statement declaring that the rule would be implemented as planned on November 16. The MACT (Maximum Achievable Control Technology) rule condenses potential future coal-fueled power plant improvements and upgrades into an unachievable timeline. As a result of the Utility MACT rule, electricity providers already have outlined which coal-fueled power plants will be shut down. The remaining plants will have to spend billions for the required overhauls for marginal or questionable benefits to public health.
As he did in early September with the ozone regulations, President Obama has the power to tell Secretary Jackson to slow down, delay, or stop altogether. However, without intense public pressure, he is unlikely to do anything. The Utility MACT rule is just one of the expensive rules flowing down from the EPA that will cause America to lose important and cost-effective energy that is essential to economic growth. The higher costs will be passed on to the already struggling businesses and households.
It is actions like the EPA’s complete disregard for the public’s outcry, as expressed by the 25 attorney generals, that has pushed Congress to attempt to limit these excessive regulations through the EPA Regulatory Relief Act of 2011 (HR 2250) passed by the House on October 13—which President Obama says he’ll veto should it make it through the Senate.
The one person at the top makes the difference.
Another example is the Wilderness and Roadless Area Relief Act (HR 1581), which aims to legislatively push what the one person at the top won’t do.
There are 43 million acres of federal lands that for decades have been managed as “wilderness”—meaning that potential grazing and resource development is limited, firefighting efforts are thwarted, and recreation and tourism are restricted—despite the fact that these areas have already been studied and determined to be unsuitable for wilderness. The BLM and the Forest Service has recommended that the restrictive management practices be lifted. Instead of encouraging Congress to do so, President Obama’s Interior Secretary Ken Salazar issued an order to lock up more lands with a new label: “Wild Lands”—conflicting with the Wilderness Act which states that only Congress has the right to designate wilderness areas.
The Wilderness and Roadless Area Relief Act will remove these lands from limbo and opens them up for multiple uses, while giving local communities a voice in how the lands are managed. Unfortunately, based on their record, the people at the top are unlikely to support the recommendations of the BLM and Forest Service. They will probably choose to keep these lands locked up, blocking economic development and job creation.
However, remember, President Obama did order Secretary Jackson to delay implementation of the ozone rules. We can be confident that he didn’t do this because he one day had an epiphany and realized that the regulations were too harsh. He backed down because public pressure was so intense that it became clear his support of the expensive rule threatened his re-election.
Ideally, the public pressure changes the behavior of people at the top—absent that, like we did in New Mexico—we change the people at the top.
Because, one person can make a difference.
SOURCE
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ELSEWHERE
NASA buys flights on Virgin Galactic’s private spaceship: "The space tourism company Virgin Galactic has struck a deal with NASA worth up to $4.5 million for research flights on the company's new private spaceliner SpaceShipTwo, Virgin Galactic officials announced Oct. 13. Under the deal, NASA will charter up to three flights on Virgin Galactic's SpaceShipTwo, an air-launched spacecraft designed to carry eight people on trips to suborbital space."
How to lie with statistics: Tax rates: "A good deal of the recent rhetoric in support of Democratic proposals for raising taxes is designed to make it sound as though rich people pay federal taxes at a lower rate than everyone else. That, as one can easily check by looking at the published figures from the Congressional Budget Office, is not only false but wildly false."
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. I have deleted my Facebook page as I rarely access it. For more blog postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, 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 (Academic) or here (Pictorial) or here (Personal)
****************************
The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist" (Nationalsozialist) and the full name of Hitler's political party (translated) was "The National Socialist German Workers' Party" (In German: Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei)
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"Human values: Genetic and environmental effects on five lexically derived domains and their facets"
By Walter Renner et al.
Abstract
Whereas a substantial genetic component of Conservatism and Religiosity is well documented, there is little evidence with respect to the behavior genetics of other aspects of human values. A sample of 157 monozygotic and 74 dizygotic twins reared together received the Austrian Value Questionnaire (AVQ), which measures a broad variety of value domains and their facets, found by the lexical approach in the German language. Family resemblance of Intellectualism, Harmony, Materialism, and Conservatism was best explained by additive or dominance genetic and non-shared environmental effects, whereas the influence of the environment shared by twins was negligible. In contrast, Religiosity was transmitted by additive genetic, shared and non-shared environmental influences. At the level of facets, the Intellectualism and Harmony showed a homogenous etiology while Religiosity, Materialism, and Conservatism were etiologically heterogeneous.
Personality and Individual Differences. In Press, Corrected Proof - doi:10.1016/j.paid.2011.09.003
Aren't you glad that there's someone around to translate that academic Double-Dutch for you?
Note initially that after decades of research it is now generally accepted that both political and religious ideology is substantially determined by your genes. You didn't CHOOSE to be a Conservative or religious: You were BORN that way. That still grates on the teeth of most people but that is what the inheritance research has repeatedly shown. Exactly WHAT is inherited which makes you a Leftist is still not pinned down but my bet is that it is a tendency to be miserable. Happiness is definitely a stable trait and conservatives are certainly happier, which again shows up repeatedly in research.
But that is all prelude. The reseachers above werre looking for OTHER things that might be genetically inherited. They found that traits of Intellectualism, Harmony, Materialism, and Conservatism were all determined heavily by genetics but hardly at all by the environment. Religiosity, however, was to a degree influenced by your environment. Pretty simple, really -- even if runs against almost everybody's preconceptions.
You now see why elections are won or lost according to how well the candidate appeals to the voter in the middle. Most of us are born conservative (happy) or Leftist (miserable) and can't be changed from that. It's only the minority who are half way between happy and miserable who can be swung. Background on previous research in the area here
Clarifying note: It is your tendency to be religious in general that is inherited, not your particular religion.
**************************
ObamaCare Starts to Unravel
The real story behind the Class program failure, and what to do now
Now that one of ObamaCare's major new benefit programs has been scrapped, liberals are trying to make stone soup by claiming that the Obama Administration merely committed an act of "good government." They claim that when this long-term care insurance program proved to be unworkable, the Administration conceded as much, and now it's gone. So let's review the evidence, not least because it so perfectly illustrates the recklessness that produced the Affordable Care Act.
When Democrats were pasting it together in 2009 and 2010, the immediate attraction of the program known by the acronym Class was that its finances could be gamed to create the illusion that a new entitlement would reduce the deficit. Ending the complicated Class budget gimmick erases the better part of ObamaCare's purported "savings," but it's also worth focusing on the program's long-run political goals.
For decades Democrats have been trying to put government on the hook for middle-class costs like home health services ($1,800 a month on average) and nursing homes ($70,000 to $80,000 per year). On paper, Class was supposed to be like normal insurance, funding benefits through premiums with no subsidy. But since the budget gimmick and the program's larger structure meant that premiums could never cover benefits, Democrats were trying to force a future Congress to prevent a Class bankruptcy using taxpayer dollars.
As the costs to the federal fisc continued to climb, the Democratic gambit was that Class would gradually morph into another part of Medicare. Insurance depends on younger, healthier people signing up to cross-subsidize the older and sicker, but under the Class program as written almost all of its enrollees would soon also be beneficiaries.
So to fix this "adverse selection," the plan was for Congress to eventually make participation mandatory, with the so-called premiums converted into another payroll tax and the benefits into another entitlement. Former White House budget director Peter Orszag has been writing that the long-term care insurance market can't function without a mandate, while HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius declined to rule one out at a Senate hearing in February. Now they tell us.
The only reason the Health and Human Services Department pre-emptively called off this scheme is that former New Hampshire Senator Judd Gregg succeeded in inserting a proviso that required the Class program's reality to match Democratic promises as a matter of law. If HHS couldn't provide "an actuarial analysis of the 75-year costs of the program that ensures solvency throughout such 75-year period," it couldn't be legally implemented.
In other words, HHS had to prove that the Class program wouldn't go broke the way it was designed to—and actuarial analysis is a matter of math, not politics. In a 48-page report that HHS submitted to Congress Friday, the department concedes that it is literally impossible to create any kind of long-term care program under the law's statutory text in which revenues match expenditures. Such a plan would cost as much as $3,000 per month, which no one would ever buy.
The HHS gnomes even considered "features deviating from or going beyond a plain reading of the statutory language" that its lawyers didn't think could pass legal muster, and they still couldn't avoid violating the known laws of mathematics despite 19 months of trying. HHS lawyers also said the government would have to warn enrollees that the promised benefits weren't contracts and could be abrogated to "dispel any claims that the Class program had misled the public or had encouraged reliance on its programs under false pretenses."
Those pretenses have been obvious all along, with outside analysts and internal Administration experts saying Class wasn't viable. President Obama was a mask of indifference with no response when Paul Ryan took Class apart at the 2010 White House health summit. Democrats included it anyway, but now that the Administration itself has vindicated its critics, Republicans have a new political opportunity to make real health-care legislative progress.
At a minimum the GOP could begin by repealing the Class program altogether, since its legal authority is still intact. "One should never leave a partly loaded gun on the table, even if most of the chambers are empty or just house blanks," writes the American Enterprise Institute's Tom Miller. He also suggests attaching a few of the more destructive provisions and forcing Democrats to defend them, such as Mr. Orszag's Independent Payment Advisory Board of 15 political appointees who have broad unaccountable powers to control health-care markets and health care.
Our suggestion is for a Gregg-like amendment that applies to the entire health law and not simply Class. If reality can't match the rhetoric that accompanied the bill—about fiscal responsibility, bending the cost curve, keeping your health care if you like your health care and all the other false promises—then, legally, it should be repealed like Class. Call it a truth-in-advertising clause. ObamaCare would collapse in a heartbeat.
SOURCE
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Change at the Top Creates Jobs at the Bottom
“When paperwork gets in the way of benefits, that’s a problem.”
So said John Bemis, Secretary-designate of New Mexico’s Energy, Minerals and Natural Resources Department, appointed by Governor Susana Martinez. What is significant about Bemis’ comment, made during a presentation in front of the New Mexico Oil and Gas Association’s Annual meeting on October 3, is that it represents a total change in attitude from the previous administration and is indicative of the difference one person—at the top—can make.
The change in attitude in NM presents a case study from which the rest of the US would be wise to learn.
Governor Richardson’s approach was very much like President Obama’s. He added regulations and appointed people to positions of leadership who made doing business in the state difficult—especially in regard to natural resource management. As a result, businesses moved to other states and revenues suffered.
While some people think one person can't make that much of a difference, NM is proving that couldn't be farther from the truth. A culture of growth and prosperity starts with attitudes at the top.
Governor Martinez was elected in 2010. She appointed her people to head up the various agencies—including John Bemis at the Energy, Minerals and Natural Resources Department. The rules didn’t change; instead the new leadership reevaluated their application. Rather than dictating just because she can, Governor Martinez has chosen to focus where she can get the most bang for the buck. For example, the limited resources of the Oil Conservation Division can now be directed toward actual environmental issues, rather than enforcing paperwork.
As a result of the change in attitude at the top, industry is more enthusiastic about doing business in the state. As I usually do during August, September and October, I participated in three state-wide events; the annual meetings of the Independent Petroleum Association of New Mexico, New Mexico Mining Association, and New Mexico Oil and Gas Association. The contrast from previous years in the outlook of the participants was startling. They are excited about the possibilities! Instead of the regulations being used like a hammer to beat down all development, departments are now looking to help folks work within the regulations. If the regulations are excessively punitive or inappropriate, industry is encouraged to submit proposed changes—which they’ve done and which are being considered. Things are picking up in New Mexico.
Across the US, we have much the same problem as New Mexico did. We have excessive regulations, businesses are leaving, and revenues are suffering. The leadership has the power to reverse the trend. We’ve seen it in New Mexico. We saw it in August when President Obama instructed the EPA to delay the ozone regulations—which would have been one of the costliest in the history of the US as hundreds of counties would be instantly out of compliance for things as simple as fireworks displays.
The EPA has more tricks up its sleeve, and President Obama’s pick to head up the EPA, Lisa Jackson, has no intention of slowing down.
On October 10, an unprecedented group of Attorney Generals from 25 different states, joined together to ask Secretary Jackson to postpone implementation of the Utility MACT rule because it threatens to endanger electric reliability, eliminate jobs, and saddle consumers with significantly higher costs. The next day, the EPA issued a statement declaring that the rule would be implemented as planned on November 16. The MACT (Maximum Achievable Control Technology) rule condenses potential future coal-fueled power plant improvements and upgrades into an unachievable timeline. As a result of the Utility MACT rule, electricity providers already have outlined which coal-fueled power plants will be shut down. The remaining plants will have to spend billions for the required overhauls for marginal or questionable benefits to public health.
As he did in early September with the ozone regulations, President Obama has the power to tell Secretary Jackson to slow down, delay, or stop altogether. However, without intense public pressure, he is unlikely to do anything. The Utility MACT rule is just one of the expensive rules flowing down from the EPA that will cause America to lose important and cost-effective energy that is essential to economic growth. The higher costs will be passed on to the already struggling businesses and households.
It is actions like the EPA’s complete disregard for the public’s outcry, as expressed by the 25 attorney generals, that has pushed Congress to attempt to limit these excessive regulations through the EPA Regulatory Relief Act of 2011 (HR 2250) passed by the House on October 13—which President Obama says he’ll veto should it make it through the Senate.
The one person at the top makes the difference.
Another example is the Wilderness and Roadless Area Relief Act (HR 1581), which aims to legislatively push what the one person at the top won’t do.
There are 43 million acres of federal lands that for decades have been managed as “wilderness”—meaning that potential grazing and resource development is limited, firefighting efforts are thwarted, and recreation and tourism are restricted—despite the fact that these areas have already been studied and determined to be unsuitable for wilderness. The BLM and the Forest Service has recommended that the restrictive management practices be lifted. Instead of encouraging Congress to do so, President Obama’s Interior Secretary Ken Salazar issued an order to lock up more lands with a new label: “Wild Lands”—conflicting with the Wilderness Act which states that only Congress has the right to designate wilderness areas.
The Wilderness and Roadless Area Relief Act will remove these lands from limbo and opens them up for multiple uses, while giving local communities a voice in how the lands are managed. Unfortunately, based on their record, the people at the top are unlikely to support the recommendations of the BLM and Forest Service. They will probably choose to keep these lands locked up, blocking economic development and job creation.
However, remember, President Obama did order Secretary Jackson to delay implementation of the ozone rules. We can be confident that he didn’t do this because he one day had an epiphany and realized that the regulations were too harsh. He backed down because public pressure was so intense that it became clear his support of the expensive rule threatened his re-election.
Ideally, the public pressure changes the behavior of people at the top—absent that, like we did in New Mexico—we change the people at the top.
Because, one person can make a difference.
SOURCE
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ELSEWHERE
NASA buys flights on Virgin Galactic’s private spaceship: "The space tourism company Virgin Galactic has struck a deal with NASA worth up to $4.5 million for research flights on the company's new private spaceliner SpaceShipTwo, Virgin Galactic officials announced Oct. 13. Under the deal, NASA will charter up to three flights on Virgin Galactic's SpaceShipTwo, an air-launched spacecraft designed to carry eight people on trips to suborbital space."
How to lie with statistics: Tax rates: "A good deal of the recent rhetoric in support of Democratic proposals for raising taxes is designed to make it sound as though rich people pay federal taxes at a lower rate than everyone else. That, as one can easily check by looking at the published figures from the Congressional Budget Office, is not only false but wildly false."
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. I have deleted my Facebook page as I rarely access it. For more blog postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, 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 (Academic) or here (Pictorial) or here (Personal)
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The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist" (Nationalsozialist) and the full name of Hitler's political party (translated) was "The National Socialist German Workers' Party" (In German: Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei)
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Sunday, October 16, 2011
Democrats, the Media and the Heart of the "Occupy" Movement
The OWS movement seems to have at its heart old-fashioned Leftist ideas of class war and anti-capitalism -- indicating the intellectual poverty of the protesters. They did have a perfectly reasonable starting point for their anger -- the huge sums that have been taken home by bankers and Wall St operators even while America as a whole was falling into an economic pit. The protesters seemed to see that as a failure of capitalism.
It is the opposite. The cause is a refusal of government to let capitalism do its work. Most of Wall st would be bankrupt and unable to pay millions to anyone if George Bush and particularly Obama had simply sat on their hands and let the whole gang of crooks go broke. Instead they provided gargantuan handouts to rescue these failed capitalists. It is at the White House that the protesters should be congregating. Sadly, a movement that at first seems to have had an element of sponaneity is now firmly in the grip of the far-Left so there is little hope of that
"What do they want?" is a common refrain in the media these days. Left-wing talking heads and progressive TV hosts are still scrambling to figure out exactly what the "Occupy Wall Street" crowd is up to. But this lack of knowledge hasn't stopped nearly every person on the Left of the political spectrum from offering full-throated support for the unwashed, unruly rabble. But who, or what, are they supporting?
It's been a month since the first group of professional protesting leftists squatted on a patch of private property in lower Manhattan, pitched a tent and started their drum circle. What we knew about them then is about what we know about them now - they're angry.
There has been no mainstream media investigation of who these people are, how this came about or what they want beyond the superficial "They're young, disaffected and worried about the future." That's all well and good, but it's not even in the same ZIP code as reality.
Normally, politicians would have to vet a potential endorsee before they'd ever consider offering anything beyond tepid support. Such is not the case here. In a press conference, President Obama sympathized with the protestors and said he understood their frustration. Exactly what frustration remains encased in a thicker fog than the cloud of body odor hovering over Zuccotti Park.
Former Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi understands them too. She took her support a step further by offering a "God bless them" when asked what she thought. But what was she blessing?
Any look at this mob from anything lower than a helicopter flyover reveals a dark, dangerous, radical and anti-Semitic side. Meet "occupier" Patricia McAllister. Patricia works for the Los Angeles Unified School District. She also hates Jews. She told Reason.tv, "I think that the Zionist Jews who are running these big banks and our Federal Reserve, which is not run by the federal government, they need to be run out of this country."
Even more disturbing than what Patricia said was the calm demeanor in which she said it. Anti-Semitic hatred flows casually, openly and freely at these events. She seemed somewhat concerned she might be overheard by someone who would take offense, that the person interviewing her might have a problem with it. But she had no worry whatsoever what she was saying might be anything other than fact. This woman is involved in some way with educating children.
Former Obama administration "Green Jobs" czar Van Jones, who resigned after his 9/11 truther and communist sympathies came to light, called for the American people to "stand in solidarity with Occupy Wall Street." Would you stand with Patricia McAllister? Apparently Mr. Jones would.
But Jones and McAllister won't be alone. There are plenty of radicals and racists willing to stand up and be counted because they're safe in the knowledge the hatred they exhale will not be covered by their fellow travelers in the media. Did you hear about Democrat Congresswoman Jan Schakowsky marching with communists? The pamphlets being passed out with calls to destroy Israel? The speaker decrying calls for non-violence, calling for French Revolution-type actions to cheers?
No? Weird. How about Lisa Fithian, the professional radical anarchist who is helping run these events? No? Seriously?
That's because, aside from a few brave souls like my friend Andrew Breitbart and his "Big" websites, no one is covering these people the way they did the Tea Party. Reporters were dispersed into the massive crowds to find the most absurdly dressed people carrying fringe signs, then presented them as the norm. In any large group you're going to find some kooks-that's just the law of averages. But the media willingly portrayed them as representative of the whole.
Remember the Obama-with-Hilter mustache pictures from the Tea Party events? It was clear they belong to left-wing fringe perpetual candidate Lyndon LaRouche's supporters, yet they were portrayed as Tea Party members. Even LaRouche supporters admit they found that odd.
Or the bogus charge that the N-word was hurled at black Members of Congress as they walked through a crowd on their way to cast their ObamaCare vote? That's still accepted as gospel to the Left despite the fact that a $100k reward for proof it happened remains unclaimed.
Instead of the truth, instead of questions, we get cheerleading and cherry-picked camera angles showing perfectly lit, perfectly well behaved, smiling people. You'll never see the fringe, the loons and the unstable on CNN or MSNBC, aside from the hosts. They're too busy demanding conservatives admit these protests are "resonating" with people (in the newsroom at least) or saying they need another "Kent State moment," only this time without the deaths. These are paid professionals.
The Media Research Center did a study of the "Big Three" networks and found that in its short life, not only did the "Occupy" crowd get more coverage over a two-week period than the Tea Party did over a nine-month period, but that coverage was significantly more positive.
Not being content with owning the spin machines, they've even cooked up flawed polling to bolster their case. Shocking, I know.
The best thing about the Internet is that we are no longer dependent upon these corrupt information brokers to be informed. Not to sound all X-Files-y on you, but the truth is out there...you just have to find it. Unfortunately, far too many of our fellow citizens still receive their "news" through the filter of this corrupt machine. But that number is shrinking every day. If this "occupation" has any redeeming quality, perhaps it will be to force even more people who seem willing to take the "Red Pill" to, instead, see the world for what it really is.
SOURCE
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Damn Those Stubborn American Consumers!
SOURCE
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Perry still in there fighting
MANCHESTER, NH - Rick Perry's Granite State headquarters has the feel of a typical campaign office: Red, white, and blue "Perry - President" placards line the walls, young staffers tap away incessantly on keyboards and Blackberries, and dry erase boards are crowded with maps of the state, important dates, and key endorsements. The Texas Governor may have just sustained a series of extraordinary blows in national polling, but you wouldn't know it from the demeanor of his staffers. The fight goes on, even in rival Mitt Romney's regional backyard.
Unsurprisingly, several staffers I spoke with are upbeat about Perry's latest debate performance at Dartmouth College. The word "solid" comes up more than once. "It's what we needed," one aide says, expressing relief that Perry "wasn't a pinanta this time," unlike in previous debates. They're also quick to point out that debates are only one small element of a candidate's overall appeal. Their man, they say, is much more dynamic in person and on the stump, which is why the campaign plans to get Perry in front of as many voters as possible before the first votes are cast in Iowa and New Hampshire. "We've adopted a marathon strategy," one staffer explains. They certainly have the resources to take the long view; Perry raked in over $17 million in under 50 days last quarter.
Paul Young, the former New Hampshire GOP chair who now works for Perry's campaign, says his team is fighting to overcome some distinct advantages enjoyed by former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney -- who leads comfortably in most statewide polls. "[Mitt] has been here campaigning for years, really. Compared to him, everyone else is getting in late. Especially us." Young echoes the sentiment that debates are not the end-all-be-all of a candidate's ability or electability. "Rick clearly connects in person. In that sense, he's Clintonesque or Reaganesque in his ability to work a room and make real, personal connections with people. We want to play to that strength," Young says, adding that Perry is "getting better" at debating.
Aside from an emphasis on retail politics, Team Perry continues to tout the Governor's record in Texas as a major selling point. "Every time [Gov. Perry] comes to New Hampshire and talks about what he's accomplished in Texas, we sign up literally hundreds of people to be part of this campaign," another aide explains. Asked if Perry's thoroughly Texan flair might limit his appeal with infamously reserved New Englanders, Perry aides insist they aren't concerned. The real "uphill battle," they say, involves the calendar and basic logistical blocking and tackling. Revisiting a recurring theme, they outline the challenge of competing with Romney's campaign infrastructure that has been operating in one way or another for at least four years.
"It's August 13th 2011 (Perry's launch date) vs. 2007," Young says. Indeed. Every day counts, which helps explain why the Perry camp seems aggrieved by rumors that New Hampshire's first-in-the-nation primary could vault ahead to as early as December 6th. "That wouldn't be ideal," Young deadpans, in a piece of classic New England understatement.
Nevertheless, Perry's campaign professes optimism in the face of multiple state polls showing Romney holding dominant leads. Staffers direct me to a recent WMUR poll, which put Romney ahead of his closest rival (Herman Cain) by 25 points. "The numbers look great for Mitt, but if you look a little closer, you'll notice that 89 percent of respondents say they're not `dead set' on their pick," an aide notes. "[Romney] has been here for five years. Why is his support so soft?"
Prior to the Dartmouth debate, the Romney campaign got a boost by unveiling a marquee endorsement from New Jersey Governor Chris Christie. Perry's New Hampshire team seems neither surprised, nor impressed, by the alliance. "Endorsements only go so far," Young says. "Policy positions and results matter more." Another staffer shrugs, "Romney and Christie are both Northeastern moderates. Christie could end up being a liability [for Romney], actually. He's soft on guns, soft on life.the only thing he's strong on is his own voice."
Perry aides say they're not interested in sweating day-to-day horserace developments, and vow not to fall victim to media pressure. Some pundits wondered if Perry would reveal his own big-name endorsement to counter Romney's Christie nod. Others have asked why Perry hasn't released a specific jobs plan yet. "We're rolling out the features of our campaign on our own terms," I'm told. "We don't need the media telling us how to run our campaign - no offense to your profession." In other words, more endorsements are in the pipeline, and the jobs plan will be introduced on the campaign's preferred timetable. "We're going to have our economic plan out faster than it took Romney or Cain from the time they announced," Young confirms. He says phase one of Perry's jobs plan will be released next week, and the full package will be made public by the end of the year.
SOURCE
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Obama's Pennsylvania Problem
Obama has a Pennsylvania problem, particularly with working-class Democrats and women who supported Hillary Clinton in 2008’s primary. He eventually won them over (along with young people and blacks), beating Republican John McCain by nearly 10 points.
Today, not so much – and much of that is based on trust. Candidates know they can evoke strong negative feelings and still win back voters. But lose the voters’ trust, and that is nearly impossible to recover.
“A lot of working-class and middle-class Democrats in Pennsylvania see candidates through the prism of their values,” said one party strategist who is working to win back distrustful voters for Obama. This time, he admits, the task “is more of a challenge.”
Actually, Obama has trouble all around, according to Mark Rozell, public policy professor at George Mason University: “The liberal core is unhappy with his policies and won't turn out for him as solidly as in 2008, and … independents and so-called Reagan Democrats are abandoning him in large numbers.” Signs of discontent are seen even among African-Americans.
More HERE
My Twitter.com identity: jonjayray. I have deleted my Facebook page as I rarely access it. For more blog postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, 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 (Academic) or here (Pictorial) or here (Personal)
****************************
The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist" (Nationalsozialist) and the full name of Hitler's political party (translated) was "The National Socialist German Workers' Party" (In German: Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei)
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The OWS movement seems to have at its heart old-fashioned Leftist ideas of class war and anti-capitalism -- indicating the intellectual poverty of the protesters. They did have a perfectly reasonable starting point for their anger -- the huge sums that have been taken home by bankers and Wall St operators even while America as a whole was falling into an economic pit. The protesters seemed to see that as a failure of capitalism.
It is the opposite. The cause is a refusal of government to let capitalism do its work. Most of Wall st would be bankrupt and unable to pay millions to anyone if George Bush and particularly Obama had simply sat on their hands and let the whole gang of crooks go broke. Instead they provided gargantuan handouts to rescue these failed capitalists. It is at the White House that the protesters should be congregating. Sadly, a movement that at first seems to have had an element of sponaneity is now firmly in the grip of the far-Left so there is little hope of that
"What do they want?" is a common refrain in the media these days. Left-wing talking heads and progressive TV hosts are still scrambling to figure out exactly what the "Occupy Wall Street" crowd is up to. But this lack of knowledge hasn't stopped nearly every person on the Left of the political spectrum from offering full-throated support for the unwashed, unruly rabble. But who, or what, are they supporting?
It's been a month since the first group of professional protesting leftists squatted on a patch of private property in lower Manhattan, pitched a tent and started their drum circle. What we knew about them then is about what we know about them now - they're angry.
There has been no mainstream media investigation of who these people are, how this came about or what they want beyond the superficial "They're young, disaffected and worried about the future." That's all well and good, but it's not even in the same ZIP code as reality.
Normally, politicians would have to vet a potential endorsee before they'd ever consider offering anything beyond tepid support. Such is not the case here. In a press conference, President Obama sympathized with the protestors and said he understood their frustration. Exactly what frustration remains encased in a thicker fog than the cloud of body odor hovering over Zuccotti Park.
Former Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi understands them too. She took her support a step further by offering a "God bless them" when asked what she thought. But what was she blessing?
Any look at this mob from anything lower than a helicopter flyover reveals a dark, dangerous, radical and anti-Semitic side. Meet "occupier" Patricia McAllister. Patricia works for the Los Angeles Unified School District. She also hates Jews. She told Reason.tv, "I think that the Zionist Jews who are running these big banks and our Federal Reserve, which is not run by the federal government, they need to be run out of this country."
Even more disturbing than what Patricia said was the calm demeanor in which she said it. Anti-Semitic hatred flows casually, openly and freely at these events. She seemed somewhat concerned she might be overheard by someone who would take offense, that the person interviewing her might have a problem with it. But she had no worry whatsoever what she was saying might be anything other than fact. This woman is involved in some way with educating children.
Former Obama administration "Green Jobs" czar Van Jones, who resigned after his 9/11 truther and communist sympathies came to light, called for the American people to "stand in solidarity with Occupy Wall Street." Would you stand with Patricia McAllister? Apparently Mr. Jones would.
But Jones and McAllister won't be alone. There are plenty of radicals and racists willing to stand up and be counted because they're safe in the knowledge the hatred they exhale will not be covered by their fellow travelers in the media. Did you hear about Democrat Congresswoman Jan Schakowsky marching with communists? The pamphlets being passed out with calls to destroy Israel? The speaker decrying calls for non-violence, calling for French Revolution-type actions to cheers?
No? Weird. How about Lisa Fithian, the professional radical anarchist who is helping run these events? No? Seriously?
That's because, aside from a few brave souls like my friend Andrew Breitbart and his "Big" websites, no one is covering these people the way they did the Tea Party. Reporters were dispersed into the massive crowds to find the most absurdly dressed people carrying fringe signs, then presented them as the norm. In any large group you're going to find some kooks-that's just the law of averages. But the media willingly portrayed them as representative of the whole.
Remember the Obama-with-Hilter mustache pictures from the Tea Party events? It was clear they belong to left-wing fringe perpetual candidate Lyndon LaRouche's supporters, yet they were portrayed as Tea Party members. Even LaRouche supporters admit they found that odd.
Or the bogus charge that the N-word was hurled at black Members of Congress as they walked through a crowd on their way to cast their ObamaCare vote? That's still accepted as gospel to the Left despite the fact that a $100k reward for proof it happened remains unclaimed.
Instead of the truth, instead of questions, we get cheerleading and cherry-picked camera angles showing perfectly lit, perfectly well behaved, smiling people. You'll never see the fringe, the loons and the unstable on CNN or MSNBC, aside from the hosts. They're too busy demanding conservatives admit these protests are "resonating" with people (in the newsroom at least) or saying they need another "Kent State moment," only this time without the deaths. These are paid professionals.
The Media Research Center did a study of the "Big Three" networks and found that in its short life, not only did the "Occupy" crowd get more coverage over a two-week period than the Tea Party did over a nine-month period, but that coverage was significantly more positive.
Not being content with owning the spin machines, they've even cooked up flawed polling to bolster their case. Shocking, I know.
The best thing about the Internet is that we are no longer dependent upon these corrupt information brokers to be informed. Not to sound all X-Files-y on you, but the truth is out there...you just have to find it. Unfortunately, far too many of our fellow citizens still receive their "news" through the filter of this corrupt machine. But that number is shrinking every day. If this "occupation" has any redeeming quality, perhaps it will be to force even more people who seem willing to take the "Red Pill" to, instead, see the world for what it really is.
SOURCE
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Damn Those Stubborn American Consumers!
Here I shamelessly, again, steal a brilliant tactic from Carpe Diem‘s Mark Perry: I edit what is roughly the first half of a news report in ways that do not alter its factual accuracy but, hopefully, that reveal the dangers lurking in familiar yet flawed modes of thinking. This report is on Americans’ trade with the Chinese:
The Obama administration, under fire for not taking a harder line
on China over its currencyon American consumers who stubbornly take advantage of good deals offered by Chinese sellers and, allegedly, made even more attractive by Beijing’s monetary policy appears set to move againstthe Asia export powerhouse on other frontsthese politically unorganized Americans as next year’s U.S. elections approach.The United States is likely to launch fresh challenges against
ChinaAmerican consumers at the World Trade Organization, probably stoking tensions between the world’s two biggest economies.“I expect the United States will be bringing more cases against China in the coming year,” said James Bacchus, who as a former WTO appellate judge used to sit in judgment of international trade disputes.
Already firmly in campaign mode, President Barack Obama recently boasted of taking a tougher line on
tradeeconomic change, including consumers’ decisions to change how they spend their own money than his predecessors. In particular, American consumers’ voluntary choices to buy more goods and services from China, its currency and other trade issues have already become a big issue in the election campaigning.Republican presidential hopeful Mitt Romney has ratcheted up his criticism of
ChinaAmerican consumers’ choices despite his party’s traditionally pro-free trade stance.“If you are not willing to stand up to China, you will get run over by China, and that’s what’s happened for 20 years,” the former Massachusetts governor said on Tuesday – apparently suffering the bizarre delusion that lower-priced inputs and consumer goods and services harm the U.S. economy.
He was speaking shortly after the U.S. Senate passed legislation to crack down on
Chinese currencyAmerican-consumers’ practices that U.S.lawmakerslegislation-makers blame for millions of lost jobs.Sensitive to how the criticism of China plays with U.S. voters, Obama has not yet explicitly said he would veto the bill. In any case, the legislation is unlikely to pass the House of Representatives where Republican leaders have voiced concern that it might breach WTO rules and could spark a trade war which would damage U.S. corporations. Even non-Romneyite GOP politicians remain oblivious to the fact that trade is ultimately to be judged by how well it promotes consumption opportunities and not by how well it does, or does not, enhance the bottom line of corporations.
But Obama is likely to want to show voters his mettle on
trade issuesconsumer sovereignty and trade experts say he has plenty of options to pursue which, unlike the Senate currency bill, are likely to conform with WTO rules.New government data on Thursday that showed the U.S.
trade deficitcapital-account surplus with China hit a record $29 billion in August and is also likely to set a record for the year could add to the pressure on Obama to act to stop the Chinese and other foreigners from investing so much in America.Last week, U.S. trade officials notified the WTO of some 200 Chinese government subsidy programs and scolded Beijing for not halting its self-destructive actions of taxing its own people to make non-Chinese people, including Americans, richer.
taking the action itself as required under WTO rules.U.S. officials at the WTO’s headquarters in Geneva also recently took China to task over agricultural policies much like the policies that Uncle Sam himself has hypocritically and harmfully employed for decades that they said unfairly discriminated against foreign suppliers.
SOURCE
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Perry still in there fighting
MANCHESTER, NH - Rick Perry's Granite State headquarters has the feel of a typical campaign office: Red, white, and blue "Perry - President" placards line the walls, young staffers tap away incessantly on keyboards and Blackberries, and dry erase boards are crowded with maps of the state, important dates, and key endorsements. The Texas Governor may have just sustained a series of extraordinary blows in national polling, but you wouldn't know it from the demeanor of his staffers. The fight goes on, even in rival Mitt Romney's regional backyard.
Unsurprisingly, several staffers I spoke with are upbeat about Perry's latest debate performance at Dartmouth College. The word "solid" comes up more than once. "It's what we needed," one aide says, expressing relief that Perry "wasn't a pinanta this time," unlike in previous debates. They're also quick to point out that debates are only one small element of a candidate's overall appeal. Their man, they say, is much more dynamic in person and on the stump, which is why the campaign plans to get Perry in front of as many voters as possible before the first votes are cast in Iowa and New Hampshire. "We've adopted a marathon strategy," one staffer explains. They certainly have the resources to take the long view; Perry raked in over $17 million in under 50 days last quarter.
Paul Young, the former New Hampshire GOP chair who now works for Perry's campaign, says his team is fighting to overcome some distinct advantages enjoyed by former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney -- who leads comfortably in most statewide polls. "[Mitt] has been here campaigning for years, really. Compared to him, everyone else is getting in late. Especially us." Young echoes the sentiment that debates are not the end-all-be-all of a candidate's ability or electability. "Rick clearly connects in person. In that sense, he's Clintonesque or Reaganesque in his ability to work a room and make real, personal connections with people. We want to play to that strength," Young says, adding that Perry is "getting better" at debating.
Aside from an emphasis on retail politics, Team Perry continues to tout the Governor's record in Texas as a major selling point. "Every time [Gov. Perry] comes to New Hampshire and talks about what he's accomplished in Texas, we sign up literally hundreds of people to be part of this campaign," another aide explains. Asked if Perry's thoroughly Texan flair might limit his appeal with infamously reserved New Englanders, Perry aides insist they aren't concerned. The real "uphill battle," they say, involves the calendar and basic logistical blocking and tackling. Revisiting a recurring theme, they outline the challenge of competing with Romney's campaign infrastructure that has been operating in one way or another for at least four years.
"It's August 13th 2011 (Perry's launch date) vs. 2007," Young says. Indeed. Every day counts, which helps explain why the Perry camp seems aggrieved by rumors that New Hampshire's first-in-the-nation primary could vault ahead to as early as December 6th. "That wouldn't be ideal," Young deadpans, in a piece of classic New England understatement.
Nevertheless, Perry's campaign professes optimism in the face of multiple state polls showing Romney holding dominant leads. Staffers direct me to a recent WMUR poll, which put Romney ahead of his closest rival (Herman Cain) by 25 points. "The numbers look great for Mitt, but if you look a little closer, you'll notice that 89 percent of respondents say they're not `dead set' on their pick," an aide notes. "[Romney] has been here for five years. Why is his support so soft?"
Prior to the Dartmouth debate, the Romney campaign got a boost by unveiling a marquee endorsement from New Jersey Governor Chris Christie. Perry's New Hampshire team seems neither surprised, nor impressed, by the alliance. "Endorsements only go so far," Young says. "Policy positions and results matter more." Another staffer shrugs, "Romney and Christie are both Northeastern moderates. Christie could end up being a liability [for Romney], actually. He's soft on guns, soft on life.the only thing he's strong on is his own voice."
Perry aides say they're not interested in sweating day-to-day horserace developments, and vow not to fall victim to media pressure. Some pundits wondered if Perry would reveal his own big-name endorsement to counter Romney's Christie nod. Others have asked why Perry hasn't released a specific jobs plan yet. "We're rolling out the features of our campaign on our own terms," I'm told. "We don't need the media telling us how to run our campaign - no offense to your profession." In other words, more endorsements are in the pipeline, and the jobs plan will be introduced on the campaign's preferred timetable. "We're going to have our economic plan out faster than it took Romney or Cain from the time they announced," Young confirms. He says phase one of Perry's jobs plan will be released next week, and the full package will be made public by the end of the year.
SOURCE
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Obama's Pennsylvania Problem
Obama has a Pennsylvania problem, particularly with working-class Democrats and women who supported Hillary Clinton in 2008’s primary. He eventually won them over (along with young people and blacks), beating Republican John McCain by nearly 10 points.
Today, not so much – and much of that is based on trust. Candidates know they can evoke strong negative feelings and still win back voters. But lose the voters’ trust, and that is nearly impossible to recover.
“A lot of working-class and middle-class Democrats in Pennsylvania see candidates through the prism of their values,” said one party strategist who is working to win back distrustful voters for Obama. This time, he admits, the task “is more of a challenge.”
Actually, Obama has trouble all around, according to Mark Rozell, public policy professor at George Mason University: “The liberal core is unhappy with his policies and won't turn out for him as solidly as in 2008, and … independents and so-called Reagan Democrats are abandoning him in large numbers.” Signs of discontent are seen even among African-Americans.
More HERE
My Twitter.com identity: jonjayray. I have deleted my Facebook page as I rarely access it. For more blog postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, 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 (Academic) or here (Pictorial) or here (Personal)
****************************
The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist" (Nationalsozialist) and the full name of Hitler's political party (translated) was "The National Socialist German Workers' Party" (In German: Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei)
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The Jobs/Apple religion
It had a lot in common with Leftism and Environmentalism: It allowed undistinguished people to feel superior. But it was much preferable to Leftism and Environmentalism. I much prefer Steve Jobs to Al Gore or Barack Obama. Jobs DID create things while Gore is just a fat parasite and Obama is just a numbskull with a nice voice and a dark skin -- JR
By Wesley Pruden
Steve Jobs was a genius. No one could doubt that. His genius lay not in technology, as most of the obituaries and eulogies reckoned, but as master of hype, hope and marketing.
He was the secular prophet for the secular age, preaching the gospel of the technology that offers salvation, but only a salvation of better and more beautiful machines. The only higher power he believed in lies hidden somewhere in the power of more RAM, more powerful chips and in the perfectibility of an earthly operating system.
Atheist he may have been (though no one knows what he thought in the moments just before he slipped quietly into the awful and infinite mystery of death), but the mystique of Apple, which he never quit trying to perfect and extend, had all the trappings of religious faith for a secular age.
He thought about faith a lot. Shortly after he was diagnosed with a rare form of pancreatic cancer in 2003, he was invited to give the commencement address at Stanford. Mortality was much on his mind, as such thoughts naturally are for an ailing serious man. "No one wants to die," he told the students assembled on the lawn at Palo Alto. "Even people who want to go to heaven don't want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because death is very likely the single best invention of life. It's life's change agent, it clears out the old to make way for the new."
This was not new stuff, not even from the oracle of the iPod, the iPhone and the iPad. Socrates and Buddha said it better. But when he died at 56, the full force and appeal of an organized religion spread across the land. Thousands of iPod and iPad owners descended on Apple stores to turn them into sidewalk shrines and temples. Many dropped to their knees, some folding their hands in the universal pose of supplication to the heavens, to offer prayers to . . . well, it wasn't quite clear to whom. Perhaps to an unseen motherboard.
Wondrous as Mr. Jobs' machines are, there's an arrogance about Apple that turns infidels -- the unfortunate skeptics armed only with a PC from Dell or Sony -- into puzzled seekers, like curious Christians trying to plumb the violent contradictions of the Koran.
A customer puts down his $500 for an iPad and the only instructions he gets is the assurance that "it's intuitive, you'll understand how to use it." Nobody gets an owner's manual, and unless the customer has been using one of the wondrous machines that preceded his iPad -- someone who already knows the rituals of the tribe, the secret handshakes, the words to the strange hymns, the baptismal rites -- he'll want to throw his new toy into the street to be punished under the wheels of traffic. Only slowly, like a Mason suffering through 33 degrees, does Mr. Jobs' wondrous machine reveal its riches.
Nevertheless, it's difficult to argue with success, and Steve Jobs won his success the hard way, by giving his vision its working clothes and protecting it from the hewers of wood and chippers of stone who couldn't understand what Mr. Jobs was talking about when he described the destination of his machines as "the place where technology meets art."
He recognized the Internet for what it is, an "amazingly efficient distribution system for stolen property," and figured out how to exploit it all with the personal computer and the machines that flowed afterward from his amazing imagination.
He was the ultimate capitalist, driven to get all the profits that his imagination, vision and business smarts entitled him to, but his legacy to the corporate world is limited. Without the vision, the value even of hard work is limited. He was contemptuous of the toys of the mind so precious to the graduate of the business school.
He regarded consultants and focus groups as well-meaning wastes of time and money. Or worse. "We figure out what we want," he told Rolling Stone in 2003. "And I think we're pretty good at having the right discipline to think through whether a lot of other people are going to want it, too. That's what we get paid to do. So you can't go out and ask people what's the next big thing."
He was fond of recalling Henry Ford's story of inventing the automobile: "If I'd have asked my customers what they wanted, they would have told me 'a faster horse.'" He understood, and exploited, the moral of the story.
SOURCE
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A Leftist Creation Myth
Governments are worse than no good at “creating jobs.”
A week before President Barack Obama was scheduled to deliver yet another big-think proposal to Get America Working Again, reality intervened with a well-timed smack upside the head: Solyndra, a California solar panel company, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy.
Back in May 2010, as part of the run-up to what the administration was then touting as “Recovery Summer,” Obama used Solyndra as a poster child for both the 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act and his long-stated promise to create millions of “green jobs.” During a visit to the company’s factory in Fremont, he declared: “We invested…in clean energy because not only would this spur hiring by businesses but it creates jobs in sectors with incredible potential to propel our economy for years, for decades to come. And we can see the positive impacts right here at Solyndra. Less than a year ago, we were standing on what was an empty lot, but through the Recovery Act, this company received a loan to expand its operations. This new factory is the result of those loans. Since ground was broken last fall, more than 3,000 construction workers have been employed building this plant.…When it’s completed in a few months, Solyndra expects to hire 1,000 workers to manufacture solar panels and sell them across the country and around the world. And this in turn will generate business for companies around our country who will create jobs supplying this factory with parts and materials.”
Or not. Solyndra’s $535 million failure was not an unlucky one-off. According to Environmental Protection Agency numbers cited by Investor’s Business Daily in August, the Recovery Act’s $7.2 billion in “clean tech” money had “created or retained” a pathetic 7,140 jobs, at a cost of about $1 million each. According to the Department of Energy’s inspector general, one reason for this paltry payoff is the wage and regulatory provisions of the Davis-Bacon Act, the National Environmental Policy Act, and the Buy American Act.
In sum: The government scooped up hundreds of billions from taxpayers, redistributed it in the name of creating jobs, then attached a series of requirements that made job creation much more expensive and therefore unlikely. The predictably miserable results (go to reason.com and conduct searches on “green jobs” and “multiplier” to see just how predictable they were) should have, but did not, shame a broad swath of the political class into a long-overdue facing of facts: Governments the world over are worse than no good at “creating jobs.”
That much is clear when we compare the job creationists’ rhetoric to their results. Every day on the campaign trail, then-candidate Obama promised to create 5 million “green jobs” during the next 10 years. In January 2009, the White House predicted that the stimulus it was finalizing would create up to 4.1 million jobs. (In a depressing bit of symmetry, the economy ended up losing 4.7 million nonfarm payroll jobs in 2009, according the Bureau of Labor Statistics, representing the greatest rate of decline since 1945.)
In February 2010, then–House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) vowed that the soon-to-pass Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act would “create 4 million jobs, 400,000 jobs almost immediately.” The last time Washington, D.C., was in a frenzy to “create jobs,” while passing an already-forgotten jobs bill in the summer of 2010, Pelosi promised this latest dollop of $26 billion would create or save 300,000 more.
And these are just the job-focused bills. The general idea of using government spending to stimulate aggregate demand, particularly during economic down times, ruled official Washington for a solid decade, starting with George W. Bush’s inauguration and ending last summer with the Tea Party–influenced debt ceiling deal, which marked the first time in recent memory elected officials stood athwart spending and yelled “stop!” The results of this Keynesian stimulus (and anti-Keynesian profligate spending during good times) should speak for themselves: Fewer able-bodied Americans are employed as a percentage of the potential work force than at any time since 1983.
Such persistence in the face of repeated failure suggests that some powerful myths continue to hold sway among politicians and many of the people they represent. Among the most stubborn of these is the notion that passing a bill to fix a problem is the same as actually fixing the problem. This assumption—which reaches its illogical conclusion during times of national panic, when do-something busybodies like Michael Bloomberg will say that it doesn’t matter what Washington does, it just needs to do something—is oblivious to the law of unintended consequences, to the reality of corporatist lobbying, and to the limitations of government power.
The 2010 Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, passed in the name of ending “too big to fail,” actually paved the way for the next round of financial bailouts. Obama-Care, supposedly rammed down the throats of health care “special interests,” was actually rammed down the throats of Americans at the behest of those special interests. The Troubled Assets Relief Program, sold by then-President George W. Bush as a way to prevent bank failures, stock market losses, housing devaluations, home foreclosures, credit tightness, business failure, job losses, and recession, failed utterly at preventing anything on that list.
A curious flip side to the myth of government omnipotence is near-complete incuriosity about government side effects. That is, people remain convinced that the state can and should look a problem squarely in the eye and fix it, but they are rarely moved by daily examples of the harm caused by earlier fixes.
Just before Solyndra announced its bankruptcy, armed federal agents stormed three factories and the corporate headquarters of the Gibson Guitar Corporation, seizing guitars and raw materials, forcing employees out into the street, and shutting down production for a day. Why? Because of a century-old law called the Lacey Act, which prohibits the import of wildlife and plant products that were obtained illegally overseas. India, where some of Gibson’s raw materials originate, bans the export of unfinished wood.
Overzealous enforcement of job-killing laws is the rule, not the exception, under Obama. His Department of Justice has shown much more enthusiasm than his predecessor’s in conducting workplace raids to enforce immigration, drug, and even milk pasteurization laws. Politicians and the public support such relentless meddling without pausing much to consider the deleterious effects on employment. As I write, the California Senate is on the verge of passing a Domestic Workers Bill of Rights that would, among many other onerous things, require parents to provide nannies with breaks every two hours and fill out ridiculously complicated time cards for the government to peruse.
In a sense, every bill is a jobs bill, except for the ones labeled as such. Every business regulation, every intrusion between employer and employee, dampens the incentives to create more jobs. Sucking up tax money and spitting it out at politically chosen recipients is another net drag on the economy.
‘Jobs’ are deals between workers and employers, and so ‘creating’ them out of unwilling parties is impossible. The state, though, can outlaw deals, and has.”
Until that insight sinks in, it will be a long time before America gets back to work.
SOURCE
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Obama’s Solyndra Talking Cure Fails
The scandal over Solyndra, a Fremont, California-based maker of tube-shaped solar panels, has only gotten worse since President Barack Obama tried to defend his command-economy principles to a polite press corps last week. Shortly after Obama's lackluster press conference on Thursday, Jonathan Silver, administrator of the Department of Energy’s loan guarantee program, announced he was leaving his powerful and prestigious federal government job for the opportunity to become a “distinguished visiting fellow” at the Third Way think tank.
Human sacrifice is the food of politics, so career crashes like these are to be expected. Note that Silver has now been sacrificed twice—first in having to testify over a loan that was made two months before he took office, and now as the preliminary to Chu’s highly probable departure.
But Solyndra has been remarkably lethal for a hubbub that only surfaced because House Republicans made an issue of it. Whether you believe Americans are not interested in Solyndra, have not heard enough about it from the establishment media, or are too smart to be fooled by a “faux scandal,” one thing stands out: Like the originally marginal Occupy Wall Street movement, Solyndra keeps getting bigger the more it is belittled.
It also continues to generate side troubles. Human Events' Neil W. McCabe reported Wednesday on another green energy company with close ties to Golden State Democrats that has lately come into a big federal loan. You may not share McCabe's judgment that San Jose-based SunPower will be "twice as bad" as Solyndra or his confidence that the company is doomed. But the drumbeat of publicly funded green-job disappointments is turning what had been the president's signature industrial policy into a grinding, extended walk of shame.
As the bad news continues to pile up, Obama is consistent in his notion that it's possible to make the problem go away with sugary words. At his press conference last week, the president gave his most complete response on Solyndra to date, but the responses were nothing new
Obama’s speech misfired in other ways. His jingoistic jabs at Rep. Cliff Stearns (R-Florida), who heads up oversight for the Energy Committee, set Stearns up for an obvious rejoinder.
“If President Obama believes that we should borrow billions of dollars from China to subsidize American businesses trying to compete with China then he doesn’t understand this country’s economic system,” Stearns said in a statement. “We should not be picking winners and losers, which is a fundamental flaw in his stimulus scheme.”
Obama also tried to create distance between himself and the company by saying the loan guarantee program “predates” him. This is unlikely to stick given Obama’s famous photo opp at Solyndra’s swanky headquarters and the Bush Administration’s decision to pass on the company’s loan application.
This was the special weakness of Obama’s explanation. In nearly 1,300 words [pdf] he barely went beyond the widely ridiculed couple of sentences he muttered in an earlier Good Morning America appearance. The content merely reiterated a month’s worth of unsuccessful efforts to blame Bush, China, and capitalism. If he thinks creatively enough, Obama might find some new targets: The recent revelation of how much money California green energy companies have managed to grab from the loan program at least holds out the possibility of claiming it was all Prop 13’s fault. But the stubborn fact remains that the Nobel-winning president’s Nobel-winning energy secretary chose to throw $528 million at a company closely tied to one of his billionaire campaign donors.
If that were the sum of the troubles—or if Obama had launched this charm offensive a month ago—the cloud might have passed with only a loss of a few kW in output. But the president has been relentlessly evasive. He has deployed his police in a manner that obstructs the Congress in its own investigation. He ignored his own staffers who doubted both the viability of the company and the public relations “optics” of an abundantly photographed presidential visit to Solyndra last year. Prior to the company’s implosion, the president’s Energy Department was on track to lend it another $469 million, and his minions showed an outrageously cavalier attitude toward the stewardship of your tax money.
In a perverse way, Obama might be better off if the second loan of $469 million had gone through. At a billion dollars the Solyndra loss might have become just another unfathomable statistic to a nation already dazed by the many trillions that have been wasted in the past few years. But when it’s half a billion, you can almost get your mind around it. Solyndra continues to grow as a scandal not because the stakes are high but because they are revealing. It will also continue to radiate political obstructions to whatever Obama's agenda is these days.
More HERE
My Twitter.com identity: jonjayray. I have deleted my Facebook page as I rarely access it. For more blog postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, 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 (Academic) or here (Pictorial) or here (Personal)
****************************
The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist" (Nationalsozialist) and the full name of Hitler's political party (translated) was "The National Socialist German Workers' Party" (In German: Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei)
****************************
It had a lot in common with Leftism and Environmentalism: It allowed undistinguished people to feel superior. But it was much preferable to Leftism and Environmentalism. I much prefer Steve Jobs to Al Gore or Barack Obama. Jobs DID create things while Gore is just a fat parasite and Obama is just a numbskull with a nice voice and a dark skin -- JR
By Wesley Pruden
Steve Jobs was a genius. No one could doubt that. His genius lay not in technology, as most of the obituaries and eulogies reckoned, but as master of hype, hope and marketing.
He was the secular prophet for the secular age, preaching the gospel of the technology that offers salvation, but only a salvation of better and more beautiful machines. The only higher power he believed in lies hidden somewhere in the power of more RAM, more powerful chips and in the perfectibility of an earthly operating system.
Atheist he may have been (though no one knows what he thought in the moments just before he slipped quietly into the awful and infinite mystery of death), but the mystique of Apple, which he never quit trying to perfect and extend, had all the trappings of religious faith for a secular age.
He thought about faith a lot. Shortly after he was diagnosed with a rare form of pancreatic cancer in 2003, he was invited to give the commencement address at Stanford. Mortality was much on his mind, as such thoughts naturally are for an ailing serious man. "No one wants to die," he told the students assembled on the lawn at Palo Alto. "Even people who want to go to heaven don't want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because death is very likely the single best invention of life. It's life's change agent, it clears out the old to make way for the new."
This was not new stuff, not even from the oracle of the iPod, the iPhone and the iPad. Socrates and Buddha said it better. But when he died at 56, the full force and appeal of an organized religion spread across the land. Thousands of iPod and iPad owners descended on Apple stores to turn them into sidewalk shrines and temples. Many dropped to their knees, some folding their hands in the universal pose of supplication to the heavens, to offer prayers to . . . well, it wasn't quite clear to whom. Perhaps to an unseen motherboard.
Wondrous as Mr. Jobs' machines are, there's an arrogance about Apple that turns infidels -- the unfortunate skeptics armed only with a PC from Dell or Sony -- into puzzled seekers, like curious Christians trying to plumb the violent contradictions of the Koran.
A customer puts down his $500 for an iPad and the only instructions he gets is the assurance that "it's intuitive, you'll understand how to use it." Nobody gets an owner's manual, and unless the customer has been using one of the wondrous machines that preceded his iPad -- someone who already knows the rituals of the tribe, the secret handshakes, the words to the strange hymns, the baptismal rites -- he'll want to throw his new toy into the street to be punished under the wheels of traffic. Only slowly, like a Mason suffering through 33 degrees, does Mr. Jobs' wondrous machine reveal its riches.
Nevertheless, it's difficult to argue with success, and Steve Jobs won his success the hard way, by giving his vision its working clothes and protecting it from the hewers of wood and chippers of stone who couldn't understand what Mr. Jobs was talking about when he described the destination of his machines as "the place where technology meets art."
He recognized the Internet for what it is, an "amazingly efficient distribution system for stolen property," and figured out how to exploit it all with the personal computer and the machines that flowed afterward from his amazing imagination.
He was the ultimate capitalist, driven to get all the profits that his imagination, vision and business smarts entitled him to, but his legacy to the corporate world is limited. Without the vision, the value even of hard work is limited. He was contemptuous of the toys of the mind so precious to the graduate of the business school.
He regarded consultants and focus groups as well-meaning wastes of time and money. Or worse. "We figure out what we want," he told Rolling Stone in 2003. "And I think we're pretty good at having the right discipline to think through whether a lot of other people are going to want it, too. That's what we get paid to do. So you can't go out and ask people what's the next big thing."
He was fond of recalling Henry Ford's story of inventing the automobile: "If I'd have asked my customers what they wanted, they would have told me 'a faster horse.'" He understood, and exploited, the moral of the story.
SOURCE
****************************
A Leftist Creation Myth
Governments are worse than no good at “creating jobs.”
A week before President Barack Obama was scheduled to deliver yet another big-think proposal to Get America Working Again, reality intervened with a well-timed smack upside the head: Solyndra, a California solar panel company, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy.
Back in May 2010, as part of the run-up to what the administration was then touting as “Recovery Summer,” Obama used Solyndra as a poster child for both the 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act and his long-stated promise to create millions of “green jobs.” During a visit to the company’s factory in Fremont, he declared: “We invested…in clean energy because not only would this spur hiring by businesses but it creates jobs in sectors with incredible potential to propel our economy for years, for decades to come. And we can see the positive impacts right here at Solyndra. Less than a year ago, we were standing on what was an empty lot, but through the Recovery Act, this company received a loan to expand its operations. This new factory is the result of those loans. Since ground was broken last fall, more than 3,000 construction workers have been employed building this plant.…When it’s completed in a few months, Solyndra expects to hire 1,000 workers to manufacture solar panels and sell them across the country and around the world. And this in turn will generate business for companies around our country who will create jobs supplying this factory with parts and materials.”
Or not. Solyndra’s $535 million failure was not an unlucky one-off. According to Environmental Protection Agency numbers cited by Investor’s Business Daily in August, the Recovery Act’s $7.2 billion in “clean tech” money had “created or retained” a pathetic 7,140 jobs, at a cost of about $1 million each. According to the Department of Energy’s inspector general, one reason for this paltry payoff is the wage and regulatory provisions of the Davis-Bacon Act, the National Environmental Policy Act, and the Buy American Act.
In sum: The government scooped up hundreds of billions from taxpayers, redistributed it in the name of creating jobs, then attached a series of requirements that made job creation much more expensive and therefore unlikely. The predictably miserable results (go to reason.com and conduct searches on “green jobs” and “multiplier” to see just how predictable they were) should have, but did not, shame a broad swath of the political class into a long-overdue facing of facts: Governments the world over are worse than no good at “creating jobs.”
That much is clear when we compare the job creationists’ rhetoric to their results. Every day on the campaign trail, then-candidate Obama promised to create 5 million “green jobs” during the next 10 years. In January 2009, the White House predicted that the stimulus it was finalizing would create up to 4.1 million jobs. (In a depressing bit of symmetry, the economy ended up losing 4.7 million nonfarm payroll jobs in 2009, according the Bureau of Labor Statistics, representing the greatest rate of decline since 1945.)
In February 2010, then–House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) vowed that the soon-to-pass Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act would “create 4 million jobs, 400,000 jobs almost immediately.” The last time Washington, D.C., was in a frenzy to “create jobs,” while passing an already-forgotten jobs bill in the summer of 2010, Pelosi promised this latest dollop of $26 billion would create or save 300,000 more.
And these are just the job-focused bills. The general idea of using government spending to stimulate aggregate demand, particularly during economic down times, ruled official Washington for a solid decade, starting with George W. Bush’s inauguration and ending last summer with the Tea Party–influenced debt ceiling deal, which marked the first time in recent memory elected officials stood athwart spending and yelled “stop!” The results of this Keynesian stimulus (and anti-Keynesian profligate spending during good times) should speak for themselves: Fewer able-bodied Americans are employed as a percentage of the potential work force than at any time since 1983.
Such persistence in the face of repeated failure suggests that some powerful myths continue to hold sway among politicians and many of the people they represent. Among the most stubborn of these is the notion that passing a bill to fix a problem is the same as actually fixing the problem. This assumption—which reaches its illogical conclusion during times of national panic, when do-something busybodies like Michael Bloomberg will say that it doesn’t matter what Washington does, it just needs to do something—is oblivious to the law of unintended consequences, to the reality of corporatist lobbying, and to the limitations of government power.
The 2010 Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, passed in the name of ending “too big to fail,” actually paved the way for the next round of financial bailouts. Obama-Care, supposedly rammed down the throats of health care “special interests,” was actually rammed down the throats of Americans at the behest of those special interests. The Troubled Assets Relief Program, sold by then-President George W. Bush as a way to prevent bank failures, stock market losses, housing devaluations, home foreclosures, credit tightness, business failure, job losses, and recession, failed utterly at preventing anything on that list.
A curious flip side to the myth of government omnipotence is near-complete incuriosity about government side effects. That is, people remain convinced that the state can and should look a problem squarely in the eye and fix it, but they are rarely moved by daily examples of the harm caused by earlier fixes.
Just before Solyndra announced its bankruptcy, armed federal agents stormed three factories and the corporate headquarters of the Gibson Guitar Corporation, seizing guitars and raw materials, forcing employees out into the street, and shutting down production for a day. Why? Because of a century-old law called the Lacey Act, which prohibits the import of wildlife and plant products that were obtained illegally overseas. India, where some of Gibson’s raw materials originate, bans the export of unfinished wood.
Overzealous enforcement of job-killing laws is the rule, not the exception, under Obama. His Department of Justice has shown much more enthusiasm than his predecessor’s in conducting workplace raids to enforce immigration, drug, and even milk pasteurization laws. Politicians and the public support such relentless meddling without pausing much to consider the deleterious effects on employment. As I write, the California Senate is on the verge of passing a Domestic Workers Bill of Rights that would, among many other onerous things, require parents to provide nannies with breaks every two hours and fill out ridiculously complicated time cards for the government to peruse.
In a sense, every bill is a jobs bill, except for the ones labeled as such. Every business regulation, every intrusion between employer and employee, dampens the incentives to create more jobs. Sucking up tax money and spitting it out at politically chosen recipients is another net drag on the economy.
‘Jobs’ are deals between workers and employers, and so ‘creating’ them out of unwilling parties is impossible. The state, though, can outlaw deals, and has.”
Until that insight sinks in, it will be a long time before America gets back to work.
SOURCE
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Obama’s Solyndra Talking Cure Fails
The scandal over Solyndra, a Fremont, California-based maker of tube-shaped solar panels, has only gotten worse since President Barack Obama tried to defend his command-economy principles to a polite press corps last week. Shortly after Obama's lackluster press conference on Thursday, Jonathan Silver, administrator of the Department of Energy’s loan guarantee program, announced he was leaving his powerful and prestigious federal government job for the opportunity to become a “distinguished visiting fellow” at the Third Way think tank.
Human sacrifice is the food of politics, so career crashes like these are to be expected. Note that Silver has now been sacrificed twice—first in having to testify over a loan that was made two months before he took office, and now as the preliminary to Chu’s highly probable departure.
But Solyndra has been remarkably lethal for a hubbub that only surfaced because House Republicans made an issue of it. Whether you believe Americans are not interested in Solyndra, have not heard enough about it from the establishment media, or are too smart to be fooled by a “faux scandal,” one thing stands out: Like the originally marginal Occupy Wall Street movement, Solyndra keeps getting bigger the more it is belittled.
It also continues to generate side troubles. Human Events' Neil W. McCabe reported Wednesday on another green energy company with close ties to Golden State Democrats that has lately come into a big federal loan. You may not share McCabe's judgment that San Jose-based SunPower will be "twice as bad" as Solyndra or his confidence that the company is doomed. But the drumbeat of publicly funded green-job disappointments is turning what had been the president's signature industrial policy into a grinding, extended walk of shame.
As the bad news continues to pile up, Obama is consistent in his notion that it's possible to make the problem go away with sugary words. At his press conference last week, the president gave his most complete response on Solyndra to date, but the responses were nothing new
Obama’s speech misfired in other ways. His jingoistic jabs at Rep. Cliff Stearns (R-Florida), who heads up oversight for the Energy Committee, set Stearns up for an obvious rejoinder.
“If President Obama believes that we should borrow billions of dollars from China to subsidize American businesses trying to compete with China then he doesn’t understand this country’s economic system,” Stearns said in a statement. “We should not be picking winners and losers, which is a fundamental flaw in his stimulus scheme.”
Obama also tried to create distance between himself and the company by saying the loan guarantee program “predates” him. This is unlikely to stick given Obama’s famous photo opp at Solyndra’s swanky headquarters and the Bush Administration’s decision to pass on the company’s loan application.
This was the special weakness of Obama’s explanation. In nearly 1,300 words [pdf] he barely went beyond the widely ridiculed couple of sentences he muttered in an earlier Good Morning America appearance. The content merely reiterated a month’s worth of unsuccessful efforts to blame Bush, China, and capitalism. If he thinks creatively enough, Obama might find some new targets: The recent revelation of how much money California green energy companies have managed to grab from the loan program at least holds out the possibility of claiming it was all Prop 13’s fault. But the stubborn fact remains that the Nobel-winning president’s Nobel-winning energy secretary chose to throw $528 million at a company closely tied to one of his billionaire campaign donors.
If that were the sum of the troubles—or if Obama had launched this charm offensive a month ago—the cloud might have passed with only a loss of a few kW in output. But the president has been relentlessly evasive. He has deployed his police in a manner that obstructs the Congress in its own investigation. He ignored his own staffers who doubted both the viability of the company and the public relations “optics” of an abundantly photographed presidential visit to Solyndra last year. Prior to the company’s implosion, the president’s Energy Department was on track to lend it another $469 million, and his minions showed an outrageously cavalier attitude toward the stewardship of your tax money.
In a perverse way, Obama might be better off if the second loan of $469 million had gone through. At a billion dollars the Solyndra loss might have become just another unfathomable statistic to a nation already dazed by the many trillions that have been wasted in the past few years. But when it’s half a billion, you can almost get your mind around it. Solyndra continues to grow as a scandal not because the stakes are high but because they are revealing. It will also continue to radiate political obstructions to whatever Obama's agenda is these days.
More HERE
My Twitter.com identity: jonjayray. I have deleted my Facebook page as I rarely access it. For more blog postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, 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 (Academic) or here (Pictorial) or here (Personal)
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The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist" (Nationalsozialist) and the full name of Hitler's political party (translated) was "The National Socialist German Workers' Party" (In German: Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei)
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Friday, October 14, 2011
The strange mind of a veteran British socialist politician
She even defends Britain's deplorable National Health Service (socialized medicine)
What a stroke of bad luck for Shirley Williams. At the very moment when the Lib Dems’ ‘Shirl the Pearl’ was on her feet in the Lords this week, mounting her dewy-eyed defence of the ‘altruistic’ NHS against the Government’s planned ‘money-based’ reforms, the Care Quality Commission was publishing the truth about what all this altruism actually means for patients.
The document makes horrifying reading. As this paper reported yesterday, in one in five of the hospitals they visited unannounced, the Commission’s inspectors found neglect of the elderly so serious that it breaks the law, while in nearly half of them staff were not doing enough to ensure patients didn’t go hungry or thirsty.
On some wards, they saw frail patients rattling their bedrails or banging on water jugs to try to attract the attention of staff. On many others, elderly invalids were forced to undergo the indignity of using commodes next to their beds, because staff were too busy to take them to the lavatory.
At Alexandra Hospital in Worcester, meanwhile, they found that some dehydrated patients hadn’t been given anything to drink for more than ten hours. Imagine that, Shirl the Pearl — and then tell us about the altruism that underpins the good old NHS.
In the words of the CQC’s chairman, Dame Jo Williams (no relation, as far as I’m aware): ‘Time and again, we found cases where patients were treated by staff in a way that stripped them of their dignity and respect.
People were spoken over, and not spoken to; people were left without call bells, ignored for hours on end, or not given assistance to do the basics of life — to eat, drink or go to the toilet.’
Meanwhile, over in the Lords, Dame Jo’s namesake, the bluestocking baroness, was burbling on in that deep, bossy voice of hers about the sacred founding principles of the NHS and this wicked Government’s attempts to dismantle what she described last month as ‘one of the most efficient public services of any in Europe’.
Before I explode with rage, I must acknowledge that, of course, there are thousands upon thousands of hugely dedicated doctors and nurses in the NHS, who are as angry as any of us about the unnecessary suffering they so often see around them, and who do what they can to relieve it.
Indeed, if there were an index of the milk of human kindness, graded from one to ten, I would guess the medical profession would top most, if not all, other occupations, with an average score of perhaps seven. I must also make it clear that I am not saying Lady Williams is a cruel woman. On the contrary, she has always struck me as very well-meaning. Give her a six-and-a-half on the scale....
For what has always struck me about Shirley Williams, and never more so than this week, is that like so many intellectuals, she is profoundly silly.
And although she is neither cruel nor ruthless herself, she has clung doggedly throughout her life to a Socialist belief system that taints everything it touches with cruelty and ruthlessness, causing misery to the very people she most wants to help.
The most maddening thing is that even when the evidence of Socialism’s failure is all around her — whether in the poverty of Soviet Russia in her youth or the black and white print of this week’s CQC report on the state of the NHS — she refuses to see it. In her eyes, it’s never the theory itself that’s wrong, it’s just the way that people have put it into practice.
So what if the health service, as it is presently constituted, cannot manage on £2billion a week of taxpayers’ money without subjecting old ladies to torture?
The answer’s simple, say the Williamses of this world. Just give it £4billion a week. Or if that doesn’t work, try £8billion. But don’t, whatever you do, whisper the blasphemies ‘private enterprise’ or ‘market economics’, or else the poor baroness will fall into a swoon.
Witness her horror over the Health Secretary’s plan to allow ‘any willing provider’ to supply services to the NHS. This is ‘stealth privatisation’, she says, as if no worse crime could be imaginable. ‘The NHS was always seen as the preferred provider. That is swept away.’ Can’t she see that those cruelly-abused patients, parched with thirst and rattling their bedrails to try to attract attention, would count it the greatest blessing on Earth if only a willing provider would hand them a glass of water?
Or take that entirely false contrast she seeks to draw between an ‘altruistic’ and a ‘money-based’ NHS. Doesn’t she remember what happened when the last government gave GPs hugely generous new contracts, with the option of skipping work in the evenings and at weekends? In their droves, they headed for the golf-course, abandoning their patients to strangers —some of whom couldn’t even speak English. Where’s the altruism in that?
And where’s the sense in Lady Williams’s ideological horror of a money-based health service? Leave aside that under the health reforms, care would remain free at the point of delivery. Forget, too, that much of the NHS has been money-based since its foundation, with drug companies and equipment suppliers selling their wares for hard cash.
Imagine that our bread was funded by general taxation and supplied to us on prescription, under the altruistic health service model. Does Lady Williams honestly believe, in her heart of hearts, that it would be cheaper, fresher, better than the bread we buy now, under the wicked money-based system operated by the supermarkets? Come off it! There would be queues round the block for a week-old, £10 bread roll.
But it’s not for her failed attempt to sabotage the NHS reforms that this well-meaning old biddy deserves a special place in the hottest circle of Hell. In my book, her greatest crime was to press ahead with the destruction of grammar [selective] schools in her days as Education Secretary (and yes, I know, though it grieves me to say it, her successor Margaret Thatcher was also guilty there).
The difference is that Lady Williams was driven by a blind ideological faith in the new comprehensive school system (though it was not so blind as to prevent her from sending her own daughter to a fearsomely selective London state school. Comprehensives may have been good enough for other people’s children, but not for hers).
So it is that she bears a large part of the blame for depriving bright working-class children of their surest chance of a leg-up in life, while condemning the not-so bright to empty lives in a new, unemployable underclass.
But of course she wouldn’t see it that way. Never mind the evidence of all our eyes. As far as she’s concerned, Socialist theory is never wrong. It’s just the facts that tend to be a bit awkward.
More HERE
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Two similar capitalists get very different treatment
Both provided popular products but one provided an ego boost and one did not. I am pleased to say that I have never owned an Apple product, never regretted it and never lacked any phone or computer capability I wanted -- JR
The passing of Steve Jobs saw a remarkable outpouring of appreciation for the man and the company he founded, and its many innovative products. The quality and user-friendliness of the products, combined with outstanding brand management and marketing, explain Apple’s loyal, even sectarian, following.
It is unusual for an entrepreneur to be appreciated this way. The obvious comparison is with Bill Gates. Gates and the company he founded have also had a profound impact on our everyday lives. Yet if Gates were to die tomorrow, it is hard to imagine people lighting candles outside computer stores. Gates is still seen as the grasping robber-baron of computing, even though his business strategies have been no more anti-competitive than Apple’s iTunes store. Gates’ success earned him prosecution by the US Justice Department and EU competition authorities for supposedly harming consumers.
Microsoft has bestowed benefits on the world rivalling those of Apple, but to the extent that Gates earns plaudits, it is mainly for his philanthropic efforts. Gates’ philanthropy is likely motivated, at least in part, by the desire to win the respect and appreciation he never found as an entrepreneur. Gates is a member of a group of billionaires who have signed up to the notion that they must give away the majority of their wealth. In Australia, Dick Smith threatens to ‘out’ the wealthy who fail to give, treading a fine line between moral suasion and public intimidation. Yet Gates has done more for humanity as an entrepreneur than he is ever likely to achieve as a philanthropist. It is only the entrepreneurship that made the philanthropy possible.
This is something Jobs understood very well. He showed little interest in philanthropy, not because he was uncharitable but because he recognised that it was not his comparative advantage. Jobs was consequently ‘named and shamed’ by the US philanthropic sector. This did not dent his reputation, perhaps because the public also recognised they were better served by his relentless focus on Apple’s product.
Adam Smith famously observed that ‘it is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we can expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest.’ In 1985, Jobs told Playboy magazine ‘we think the Mac will sell zillions, but we didn’t build the Mac for anybody else. We built it for ourselves.’ Like Gates, Jobs was a self-interested and self-serving businessman and yet we are all much richer for their efforts.
SOURCE
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Occupy Wall Street’s ACORN-related Rent-A-Mobs
by Matthew Vadum
Evidence suggests that ACORN, the Left’s premiere astro-turfing organization, has been paying people to participate in the Occupy Wall Street protests.
Astro-turfing campaigns can generate big money, and ACORN’s lucrative protest-for-profit program is nothing new. As I note in my book, Subversion Inc.: How Obama’s ACORN Red Shirts are Still Terrorizing and Ripping Off American Taxpayers, ACORN has acquired great expertise in manufacturing so-called grassroots protests.
Left-wing loan sharks Herb and Marion Sandler, the founders of World Savings Bank, gave ACORN affiliates close to $11 million to manufacture mobs to protest their competition in subprime mortgage lending. The United Federation of Teachers paid ACORN $500,000 to create a spontaneous uprising against charter schools in Manhattan.
The sleazy, SEIU-funded Working Families Party, a front group for ACORN, placed a want ad on the Craig’s List website dated Sept. 26. The ad indicates that WFP was recruiting activists to carry out “direct action,” leftist argot for a variety of activities aimed at forcing sociopolitical change. The line between direct action and violent terrorism can become blurry. Extreme forms of direct action can lead to bodily injury and sometimes death. The labor movement is no stranger to assault and killings. Left-wing activists David Gilbert and Kathy Boudin participated in an attack on an armored car that left two police officers and a security guard dead. Two anarchists tried to disrupt the 2008 GOP convention with Molotov cocktails. The eco-terrorist Sea Shepherd Conservation Society admits both to attacking whaling ships with acid and sinking them.
WFP’s ad is titled, “FIGHT TO HOLD WALLSTREET ACCOUNTABLE NOW! MAKE A DIFFERENCE GET PAID!” It states:
As previously reported, WFP has been involved in organizing the Occupy Wall Street protests since the beginning.
As radical journalist Laura Flanders reported, WFP organizer Nelini Stamp has “been here since day one and she is part of the organizing team and the outreach team that has managed to bridge the distance between that first day and this day and between the grassroots folks here and the labor movement.” Stamp said the protests are aimed at “trying to change the capitalist system” and bringing “revolutionary changes to the states.”
WFP organizer Matthew Cain also acknowledged the party’s involvement Oct. 5 and helpfully provided a photograph of party staffers bearing a blue and white WFP banner during a march in lower Manhattan. Across from Foley Square,
Of course WFP executive director Dan Cantor, a longtime ACORN operative, is pleased with Occupy Wall Street so far. Cantor told supporters in an email that “the spirit of Wisconsin and Tahrir Square is alive and well in New York City.”
More HERE
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ELSEWHERE
US Congress passes three trade agreements: "Congress approved free trade agreements Wednesday with South Korea, Colombia and Panama, ending a four-year drought in the forming of new trade partnerships and giving the White House and Capitol Hill the opportunity to show they can work together to stimulate the economy and put people back to work. In rapid succession, the House and Senate voted on the three trade pacts, which the administration says could boost exports by $13 billion and support tens of thousands of American jobs."
Free vs. stealing: Do students know the difference?: "'Free,' as a grossly distorted concept, is not indigenous to the US but crosses international borders like any other disease. Exhibit A is a Yuma Sun article with a lead paragraph that begins, 'Chilean police used water cannons and tear gas to break up a student march for free public education ...'"
TN: TSA molestation victim’s mom’s case goes to Nashville grand jury: "A Nashville judge decided today that a grand jury should hear the case of a Clarksville mother who was arrested for disorderly conduct in July after a confrontation with security officers at Nashville International Airport. Senior Judge John P. Brown made his decision after a fiery preliminary hearing in Davidson County General Sessions Court to determine if there was probable cause for the charges. Officers said Andrea Abbott, 41, yelled and swore at Transportation Security Administration officers and airport police after her 14-year-old daughter was selected for a full-body scan."
My Twitter.com identity: jonjayray. I have deleted my Facebook page as I rarely access it. For more blog postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, 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 (Academic) or here (Pictorial) or here (Personal)
****************************
The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist" (Nationalsozialist) and the full name of Hitler's political party (translated) was "The National Socialist German Workers' Party" (In German: Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei)
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She even defends Britain's deplorable National Health Service (socialized medicine)
What a stroke of bad luck for Shirley Williams. At the very moment when the Lib Dems’ ‘Shirl the Pearl’ was on her feet in the Lords this week, mounting her dewy-eyed defence of the ‘altruistic’ NHS against the Government’s planned ‘money-based’ reforms, the Care Quality Commission was publishing the truth about what all this altruism actually means for patients.
The document makes horrifying reading. As this paper reported yesterday, in one in five of the hospitals they visited unannounced, the Commission’s inspectors found neglect of the elderly so serious that it breaks the law, while in nearly half of them staff were not doing enough to ensure patients didn’t go hungry or thirsty.
On some wards, they saw frail patients rattling their bedrails or banging on water jugs to try to attract the attention of staff. On many others, elderly invalids were forced to undergo the indignity of using commodes next to their beds, because staff were too busy to take them to the lavatory.
At Alexandra Hospital in Worcester, meanwhile, they found that some dehydrated patients hadn’t been given anything to drink for more than ten hours. Imagine that, Shirl the Pearl — and then tell us about the altruism that underpins the good old NHS.
In the words of the CQC’s chairman, Dame Jo Williams (no relation, as far as I’m aware): ‘Time and again, we found cases where patients were treated by staff in a way that stripped them of their dignity and respect.
People were spoken over, and not spoken to; people were left without call bells, ignored for hours on end, or not given assistance to do the basics of life — to eat, drink or go to the toilet.’
Meanwhile, over in the Lords, Dame Jo’s namesake, the bluestocking baroness, was burbling on in that deep, bossy voice of hers about the sacred founding principles of the NHS and this wicked Government’s attempts to dismantle what she described last month as ‘one of the most efficient public services of any in Europe’.
Before I explode with rage, I must acknowledge that, of course, there are thousands upon thousands of hugely dedicated doctors and nurses in the NHS, who are as angry as any of us about the unnecessary suffering they so often see around them, and who do what they can to relieve it.
Indeed, if there were an index of the milk of human kindness, graded from one to ten, I would guess the medical profession would top most, if not all, other occupations, with an average score of perhaps seven. I must also make it clear that I am not saying Lady Williams is a cruel woman. On the contrary, she has always struck me as very well-meaning. Give her a six-and-a-half on the scale....
For what has always struck me about Shirley Williams, and never more so than this week, is that like so many intellectuals, she is profoundly silly.
And although she is neither cruel nor ruthless herself, she has clung doggedly throughout her life to a Socialist belief system that taints everything it touches with cruelty and ruthlessness, causing misery to the very people she most wants to help.
The most maddening thing is that even when the evidence of Socialism’s failure is all around her — whether in the poverty of Soviet Russia in her youth or the black and white print of this week’s CQC report on the state of the NHS — she refuses to see it. In her eyes, it’s never the theory itself that’s wrong, it’s just the way that people have put it into practice.
So what if the health service, as it is presently constituted, cannot manage on £2billion a week of taxpayers’ money without subjecting old ladies to torture?
The answer’s simple, say the Williamses of this world. Just give it £4billion a week. Or if that doesn’t work, try £8billion. But don’t, whatever you do, whisper the blasphemies ‘private enterprise’ or ‘market economics’, or else the poor baroness will fall into a swoon.
Witness her horror over the Health Secretary’s plan to allow ‘any willing provider’ to supply services to the NHS. This is ‘stealth privatisation’, she says, as if no worse crime could be imaginable. ‘The NHS was always seen as the preferred provider. That is swept away.’ Can’t she see that those cruelly-abused patients, parched with thirst and rattling their bedrails to try to attract attention, would count it the greatest blessing on Earth if only a willing provider would hand them a glass of water?
Or take that entirely false contrast she seeks to draw between an ‘altruistic’ and a ‘money-based’ NHS. Doesn’t she remember what happened when the last government gave GPs hugely generous new contracts, with the option of skipping work in the evenings and at weekends? In their droves, they headed for the golf-course, abandoning their patients to strangers —some of whom couldn’t even speak English. Where’s the altruism in that?
And where’s the sense in Lady Williams’s ideological horror of a money-based health service? Leave aside that under the health reforms, care would remain free at the point of delivery. Forget, too, that much of the NHS has been money-based since its foundation, with drug companies and equipment suppliers selling their wares for hard cash.
Imagine that our bread was funded by general taxation and supplied to us on prescription, under the altruistic health service model. Does Lady Williams honestly believe, in her heart of hearts, that it would be cheaper, fresher, better than the bread we buy now, under the wicked money-based system operated by the supermarkets? Come off it! There would be queues round the block for a week-old, £10 bread roll.
But it’s not for her failed attempt to sabotage the NHS reforms that this well-meaning old biddy deserves a special place in the hottest circle of Hell. In my book, her greatest crime was to press ahead with the destruction of grammar [selective] schools in her days as Education Secretary (and yes, I know, though it grieves me to say it, her successor Margaret Thatcher was also guilty there).
The difference is that Lady Williams was driven by a blind ideological faith in the new comprehensive school system (though it was not so blind as to prevent her from sending her own daughter to a fearsomely selective London state school. Comprehensives may have been good enough for other people’s children, but not for hers).
So it is that she bears a large part of the blame for depriving bright working-class children of their surest chance of a leg-up in life, while condemning the not-so bright to empty lives in a new, unemployable underclass.
But of course she wouldn’t see it that way. Never mind the evidence of all our eyes. As far as she’s concerned, Socialist theory is never wrong. It’s just the facts that tend to be a bit awkward.
More HERE
***********************
Two similar capitalists get very different treatment
Both provided popular products but one provided an ego boost and one did not. I am pleased to say that I have never owned an Apple product, never regretted it and never lacked any phone or computer capability I wanted -- JR
The passing of Steve Jobs saw a remarkable outpouring of appreciation for the man and the company he founded, and its many innovative products. The quality and user-friendliness of the products, combined with outstanding brand management and marketing, explain Apple’s loyal, even sectarian, following.
It is unusual for an entrepreneur to be appreciated this way. The obvious comparison is with Bill Gates. Gates and the company he founded have also had a profound impact on our everyday lives. Yet if Gates were to die tomorrow, it is hard to imagine people lighting candles outside computer stores. Gates is still seen as the grasping robber-baron of computing, even though his business strategies have been no more anti-competitive than Apple’s iTunes store. Gates’ success earned him prosecution by the US Justice Department and EU competition authorities for supposedly harming consumers.
Microsoft has bestowed benefits on the world rivalling those of Apple, but to the extent that Gates earns plaudits, it is mainly for his philanthropic efforts. Gates’ philanthropy is likely motivated, at least in part, by the desire to win the respect and appreciation he never found as an entrepreneur. Gates is a member of a group of billionaires who have signed up to the notion that they must give away the majority of their wealth. In Australia, Dick Smith threatens to ‘out’ the wealthy who fail to give, treading a fine line between moral suasion and public intimidation. Yet Gates has done more for humanity as an entrepreneur than he is ever likely to achieve as a philanthropist. It is only the entrepreneurship that made the philanthropy possible.
This is something Jobs understood very well. He showed little interest in philanthropy, not because he was uncharitable but because he recognised that it was not his comparative advantage. Jobs was consequently ‘named and shamed’ by the US philanthropic sector. This did not dent his reputation, perhaps because the public also recognised they were better served by his relentless focus on Apple’s product.
Adam Smith famously observed that ‘it is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we can expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest.’ In 1985, Jobs told Playboy magazine ‘we think the Mac will sell zillions, but we didn’t build the Mac for anybody else. We built it for ourselves.’ Like Gates, Jobs was a self-interested and self-serving businessman and yet we are all much richer for their efforts.
SOURCE
******************************
Occupy Wall Street’s ACORN-related Rent-A-Mobs
by Matthew Vadum
Evidence suggests that ACORN, the Left’s premiere astro-turfing organization, has been paying people to participate in the Occupy Wall Street protests.
Astro-turfing campaigns can generate big money, and ACORN’s lucrative protest-for-profit program is nothing new. As I note in my book, Subversion Inc.: How Obama’s ACORN Red Shirts are Still Terrorizing and Ripping Off American Taxpayers, ACORN has acquired great expertise in manufacturing so-called grassroots protests.
Left-wing loan sharks Herb and Marion Sandler, the founders of World Savings Bank, gave ACORN affiliates close to $11 million to manufacture mobs to protest their competition in subprime mortgage lending. The United Federation of Teachers paid ACORN $500,000 to create a spontaneous uprising against charter schools in Manhattan.
The sleazy, SEIU-funded Working Families Party, a front group for ACORN, placed a want ad on the Craig’s List website dated Sept. 26. The ad indicates that WFP was recruiting activists to carry out “direct action,” leftist argot for a variety of activities aimed at forcing sociopolitical change. The line between direct action and violent terrorism can become blurry. Extreme forms of direct action can lead to bodily injury and sometimes death. The labor movement is no stranger to assault and killings. Left-wing activists David Gilbert and Kathy Boudin participated in an attack on an armored car that left two police officers and a security guard dead. Two anarchists tried to disrupt the 2008 GOP convention with Molotov cocktails. The eco-terrorist Sea Shepherd Conservation Society admits both to attacking whaling ships with acid and sinking them.
WFP’s ad is titled, “FIGHT TO HOLD WALLSTREET ACCOUNTABLE NOW! MAKE A DIFFERENCE GET PAID!” It states:
The WFP is seeking immediate hires.
You must be an energetic communicator, with a passion for social and economic justice.
Only outgoing, articulate dedicated, determined candidates will be considered for the positions.
For those candidates that qualify WFP offers substantial paid-training provided by senior leadership, on varied issues such as: advocacy, public speaking, mobilizing, fundraising, networking and organizing. We invest in passionate people with excellent communication skills and a full benefits package is offered to those candidates that qualify. In addition, there is opportunity for advancement and travel to our satellite chapters and out of state affiliates.
This is not a policy job! Through direct action you will be shaping NY state politics for the next 20 years.”
As previously reported, WFP has been involved in organizing the Occupy Wall Street protests since the beginning.
As radical journalist Laura Flanders reported, WFP organizer Nelini Stamp has “been here since day one and she is part of the organizing team and the outreach team that has managed to bridge the distance between that first day and this day and between the grassroots folks here and the labor movement.” Stamp said the protests are aimed at “trying to change the capitalist system” and bringing “revolutionary changes to the states.”
WFP organizer Matthew Cain also acknowledged the party’s involvement Oct. 5 and helpfully provided a photograph of party staffers bearing a blue and white WFP banner during a march in lower Manhattan. Across from Foley Square,
several WFP field staff were standing on the steps. For some of the staffers, it was their first time at the square, but for many others they had already spent nights sleeping in the park. Even those who have been there for two weeks or more have not seen their spirits diminished – they’re every bit as committed as they were when they first showed up.
Of course WFP executive director Dan Cantor, a longtime ACORN operative, is pleased with Occupy Wall Street so far. Cantor told supporters in an email that “the spirit of Wisconsin and Tahrir Square is alive and well in New York City.”
More HERE
**************************
ELSEWHERE
US Congress passes three trade agreements: "Congress approved free trade agreements Wednesday with South Korea, Colombia and Panama, ending a four-year drought in the forming of new trade partnerships and giving the White House and Capitol Hill the opportunity to show they can work together to stimulate the economy and put people back to work. In rapid succession, the House and Senate voted on the three trade pacts, which the administration says could boost exports by $13 billion and support tens of thousands of American jobs."
Free vs. stealing: Do students know the difference?: "'Free,' as a grossly distorted concept, is not indigenous to the US but crosses international borders like any other disease. Exhibit A is a Yuma Sun article with a lead paragraph that begins, 'Chilean police used water cannons and tear gas to break up a student march for free public education ...'"
TN: TSA molestation victim’s mom’s case goes to Nashville grand jury: "A Nashville judge decided today that a grand jury should hear the case of a Clarksville mother who was arrested for disorderly conduct in July after a confrontation with security officers at Nashville International Airport. Senior Judge John P. Brown made his decision after a fiery preliminary hearing in Davidson County General Sessions Court to determine if there was probable cause for the charges. Officers said Andrea Abbott, 41, yelled and swore at Transportation Security Administration officers and airport police after her 14-year-old daughter was selected for a full-body scan."
My Twitter.com identity: jonjayray. I have deleted my Facebook page as I rarely access it. For more blog postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, 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 (Academic) or here (Pictorial) or here (Personal)
****************************
The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist" (Nationalsozialist) and the full name of Hitler's political party (translated) was "The National Socialist German Workers' Party" (In German: Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei)
****************************
Spot the difference
***********************
2012: Time for a common sense election
Want to annoy a liberal? Tell one that America needs a business-person as president to put our economic house in order. Most libs will, however subtly, react defensively, given that their experiment in “transforming” America has turned out — how to put it mildly? — disastrous, with even Democratic campaign officials using Titanic metaphors.
The standard reply (and we’re hearing it more and more) is that running the country and running a business are two different things. The responsibilities and consequences of leading a nation can be, and usually are, far graver than those of, say, running a fast-food empire.
There is some truth to that. As we are reminded, the president doesn’t enjoy the luxury of firing members of the opposing party. But the significant advantage of electing a business leader — or, at the very least, one who appreciates the dynamics of a free economy — is having someone who has been held accountable. Accountability, providing goods and services that people want, satisfying stockholders are the defining traits of a free economy. It isn’t complicated nor is it just one of many competing economic theories out there. It’s common sense.
That, in part, explains the appeal of Herman Cain. And the GOP’s flirtation with Donald Trump a few months back. And why Mitt Romney, a mere one-term governor, remains a front-runner. It’s his life-long devotion to business where common sense can mean the difference between solvency and shutting the doors for good.
Contrast Cain, Trump and Romney to Barack Obama in 2008. Our 44th president sailed into office on charisma, platitudes, an activist media, a GOP in ruins and a wafer-thin resume. Soon, he and his cabinet were lauded for their intellectual heft.
Today, by contrast, the American electorate expects reason over rhetoric and solutions over academic pedigree. One of our great common-sense presidents, Calvin Coolidge, said of experts that, “Whoever deals with current public questions is compelled to rely greatly upon the information and judgments of experts and specialists. Unfortunately, not all experts are to be trusted as entirely disinterested.”
Indeed, common sense forged this nation from the beginning. In his aptly titled essay Common Sense, Thomas Paine wrote that the crises of his day served some good, in that “the mind grows through them and acquires a firmer habit than before.” Also, they “bring things and men to light which might otherwise have lain forever undiscovered. . . they sift out the hidden thoughts of man and hold them up in public to the world.”
Our founders knew that great leaders derive their power and inspiration from the common sense and goodwill of everyday Americans. They knew that it takes all of us to make this country work: labor and management, urban and rural, all races, creeds and colors. We now know that economic class is not set for life, with workers rising above their lowly circumstances even in the toughest of times.
A majority of Americans can easily discern the current Occupy Wall Street protests for the turgid, disjointed people’s-movement-wannabe that it is. Common sense values can easily contrast the rank class envy masquerading as discourse, and the moral (and physical) sloth disguising itself as a helpless victim of economic injustice.
2012 is all but crying out for an antidote to fear, pessimism and resentment — and to the politicians stoking the flames to fuel their own ambitions. Calm, cool reason, along with a passionate love for America’s founding ideals can rule the day, and common sense voters can well define 2012 the way values voters and soccer moms seemed to capture more recent elections.
The raucous leftists always fashion themselves the starry-eyed idealists, but we can’t even give them that one, for Calvin Coolidge also remarked that “economy is idealism in its most practical form.”
SOURCE
************************
Notes on Sweden's welfare state
Most people are familiar with what I call the Swedish Fallacy – the reliance on Sweden by people on all sides of the spectrum to back up whatever policy proposal they're making, as if Sweden is a paradise on earth that everybody can emulate by adopting the same policies. It's especially common on the left: they have high taxes and a dynamic economy, so higher taxes must not be a bad thing! A new report from the Libera Foundation, a Finnish think tank, throws a spanner into those works:
This is a point that Tim Worstall has made in the past as well. The report also discusses the cultural factors that make such high taxes tolerable. Yes, Sweden is a high tax, high welfare country, but it's also remarkably free market by most other measures. Indeed, it might be that the only way they're able to pay for so much welfare is because in many other respects they take a more laissez-faire approach to their economy than we do.
That should be food for thought for socialists who want to take from the rich to give to the poor – if a free market maximises the money they have to redistribute in the medium-term, the most sincere socialist position might be to favour fairly high taxes and low regulation. It's not something I'd support – high taxes are still bad news for lots of reasons – but I'd prefer it to the primitive central planning that many on the left still favour. I don't think Sweden's a paradise, but it might still be able to teach the left a thing or two about how to pay for the welfare state they want.
SOURCE
**************************
SunPower: Twice As Bad As Solyndra, Twice As Bad For Obama
Congressman's son lobbied for failing solar panel company
How did a failing California solar company, buffeted by short sellers and shareholder lawsuits, receive a $1.2 billion federal loan guarantee for a photovoltaic electricity ranch project—three weeks after it announced it was building new manufacturing plant in Mexicali, Mexico, to build the panels for the project.
The company, SunPower (SPWR-NASDAQ), now carries $820 million in debt, an amount $20 million greater than its market capitalization. If SunPower was a bank, the feds would shut it down. Instead, it received a lifeline twice the size of the money sent down the Solyndra drain.
Two men with insight into the process are SunPower rooter Rep. George R. Miller III, (D.-Calif.), the senior Democrat on the House Education and Workforce Committee and the co-chairman of the Democratic Steering and Policy Committee, and his SunPower lobbyist son, George Miller IV.
Miller the Elder is a strong advocate for SunPower, which converted an old Richmond, Calif., Ford plant in his district to a panel-manufacturing facility.
The congressman hosted an Oct. 14, 2010, tour of the plant with company CEO Thomas H. Werner and Interior Secretary Kenneth L. Salazar to promote the company’s fortunes.
“The path to a clean energy economy starts here, in places like SunPower’s research and development facility,” said Salazar during the tour. “The work that comes from these facilities transforms renewable energy ideas into a reality. When renewable energy companies continue to invest in places like California, the realization of a new energy future is within our reach,” he said.
Miller the Elder said he was grateful for Salazar's interest. “We’ve worked hard to make renewable energy a priority because it represents America’s future economic growth. Today, businesses like SunPower are moving forward, hiring 200 people for good clean energy jobs in the East Bay,” he said.
“By fostering a business climate that encourages companies like SunPower, even more good jobs will be created locally, we’ll reduce demand for dirty energy sources, and we’ll cut customers’ utility bills. That’s the right direction,” he said.
SunPower’s political action committee (PAC) was not shy about participating in the political process either.
According to the SunPower PAC filings for its activities in the 2010 midterm election campaign cycle, it donated more than $36,000. Of the $15,650 donated to House and Senate candidates, $14,650 went to Democrats, with these top recipients: $4,000 to Sen. Harry Reid (D.-Nev.), $3,000 to Rep. Gabrielle Gifford (D.-Ariz.) and $2,900 Sen. Barbara Boxer (D.-Calif.).
The congressman was not forgotten either. The SunPower PAC remembered him with $500 for his 2010 campaign. While SunPower was a financial partner in the congressman’s reelection campaign, it straight-out hired his son.
Miller the Younger is not registered to lobby in Washington, but he is a member of its bar. He is not a member of the California bar, home of his lobbying firm, Lang, Hansen, O'Malley and Miller (LHOM), of which he is a founding partner.
According the firm's website LHOM specializes in providing advice to clients on larger macro political issues trends. “Utilizing our broad experience in California and Washington, D.C., we can furnish 'big picture' analysis of developing political and policy trends which may affect client interests and goals.”
What does Miller the Younger bring? Read here: “George Miller brings a lifetime of friendships, relationships, and contacts together with over 15 years of front-line advocacy experience. He’s an attorney with expertise that ranges from insurance and banking to transportation, taxation and gaming law,” according to the website. “Unlike most advocates, George is at ease working both the corridors of Sacramento power or the halls of Congress.”
What is the stated purpose of the SunPower’s DOE 1705 program loan guarantee?
SunPower has different lines of business. In addition to manufacturing solar panel and roof tiles, it builds solar panel ranches, which it then sells off, but retains the services contract.
The loan guarantee is earmarked for the job numbers for the California Valley Solar Ranch (CVSR) in San Luis Obispo County, which it has already sold to NRG Solar, but will continue to maintain.
According to the Department of Energy (DOE) website, the CVSR project will create 350 construction jobs during the two-year build and 15 permanent jobs—presumably those are the squeegee men for keeping the panels clean.
Capitol Hill powerbroker Rep. George Miller (D.-Calif.), center, hosted Interior Sec. Kenneth L. Salazar, left, on an Oct. 14, 2010 tour of SunPower's Richmond, Calif., plant. During the tour, Salazar said plants like SunPower's transform renewable energy ideas into reality. One month later, the company announced it had restated its 2008 and 2009 financial filings to correct for unsubstantiated accounting entries.
If $80 million per permanent job seems a little high, even for the current Obama administration, you are correct. In addition to the 350 construction jobs and the 15 squeegee men, there will an as-yet-undetermined number of jobs created building the panels for the CVSR—in Mexicali, Mexico.
The company is looking for a facility of up to 320,000 square feet, where it will build three different solar panel models and its solar roof tiles, according the company’s Aug. 5 statement.
Marty T. Neese, the company's chief operating officer, said, “Establishing our own manufacturing facility in Mexicali means we will be positioned to quickly deliver our high-efficiency, high-reliability solar products to a growing North American solar market.”
Mexicali Mayor Francisco Perez Tejada Padilla said he was thrilled. “Mexicali is rapidly becoming an industrial hub for high-tech companies, offering an educated workforce and a growing manufacturing area,” he said. “We welcome SunPower to our city and are pleased that they have chosen Mexicali to establish its solar panel manufacturing facility.”
The good news for Mexican jobs seekers did not affect the DOE's loan guarantee to SunPower. Hours before the DOE 1705 loan program expired at the end of Fiscal Year 2011 on Sept. 30, the $1.2 billion in loan guarantees was approved for the company.
More HERE
**************************
Panderer in Chief: What would a Mitt Romney presidency look like?
Romney brazenly proclaimed, "One reason to elect me is that I know what I stand for, I've written it down. Words have meaning."
"I've written it down"—I love that. I'm put in mind of the great New Yorker cartoon, featuring a Washington bigwig behind an enormous desk, the Capitol looming through his office window. "I keep my core beliefs written on the palm of my hand for easy reference," he tells his visitor.
With New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie out and Perry floundering, it's looking ever more likely that the alternative to President Obama will be a candidate who needs a cheat sheet to remember his core beliefs.
Taking to heart the Stoic principle that we shouldn't lament what we can't control, I'm going to try to convince you—and myself—that things could be worse.
In their 2007 editorial endorsing Romney, National Review argued—hilariously—that the former Massachusetts governor was a "full-spectrum conservative."
But if there's any case to be made for Romney, it's that he's a full-spectrum panderer. Paradoxically, Romney's faults—his incessant flip-flopping and desperate quest for approval—might make him a less-dangerous-than-average president.
On the campaign trail, Romney has savaged Obama's proposed Medicare cuts—the sign "keep your hands off our Medicare" is "absolutely right," he insists—and he has attacked Perry for questioning the constitutionality of Social Security.
The good news, I suppose, is that there is no better reason to take Romney at his word here than there is anywhere else.
Romney's strategically timed ideological conversions are well-known. On the road to the presidency, he's had convenient epiphanies about stem-cells, gay rights, and immigration, and gone from being a staunch gun-controller to, in 2007, buying a lifetime NRA membership and awkwardly bragging about blasting rabbits with a single-shot .22 rifle (do those come with laser sights?).
But, having suffered through two ideologically charged presidencies in a row, to many Americans the poll-tested pandering of the Clinton era doesn't look so bad by comparison.
Our 42nd president wanted national health care, but the country wanted welfare reform and prosperous normalcy—and the country got what it wanted.
More HERE
My Twitter.com identity: jonjayray. I have deleted my Facebook page as I rarely access it. For more blog postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, 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 (Academic) or here (Pictorial) or here (Personal)
****************************
The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist" (Nationalsozialist) and the full name of Hitler's political party (translated) was "The National Socialist German Workers' Party" (In German: Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei)
****************************
***********************
2012: Time for a common sense election
Want to annoy a liberal? Tell one that America needs a business-person as president to put our economic house in order. Most libs will, however subtly, react defensively, given that their experiment in “transforming” America has turned out — how to put it mildly? — disastrous, with even Democratic campaign officials using Titanic metaphors.
The standard reply (and we’re hearing it more and more) is that running the country and running a business are two different things. The responsibilities and consequences of leading a nation can be, and usually are, far graver than those of, say, running a fast-food empire.
There is some truth to that. As we are reminded, the president doesn’t enjoy the luxury of firing members of the opposing party. But the significant advantage of electing a business leader — or, at the very least, one who appreciates the dynamics of a free economy — is having someone who has been held accountable. Accountability, providing goods and services that people want, satisfying stockholders are the defining traits of a free economy. It isn’t complicated nor is it just one of many competing economic theories out there. It’s common sense.
That, in part, explains the appeal of Herman Cain. And the GOP’s flirtation with Donald Trump a few months back. And why Mitt Romney, a mere one-term governor, remains a front-runner. It’s his life-long devotion to business where common sense can mean the difference between solvency and shutting the doors for good.
Contrast Cain, Trump and Romney to Barack Obama in 2008. Our 44th president sailed into office on charisma, platitudes, an activist media, a GOP in ruins and a wafer-thin resume. Soon, he and his cabinet were lauded for their intellectual heft.
Today, by contrast, the American electorate expects reason over rhetoric and solutions over academic pedigree. One of our great common-sense presidents, Calvin Coolidge, said of experts that, “Whoever deals with current public questions is compelled to rely greatly upon the information and judgments of experts and specialists. Unfortunately, not all experts are to be trusted as entirely disinterested.”
Indeed, common sense forged this nation from the beginning. In his aptly titled essay Common Sense, Thomas Paine wrote that the crises of his day served some good, in that “the mind grows through them and acquires a firmer habit than before.” Also, they “bring things and men to light which might otherwise have lain forever undiscovered. . . they sift out the hidden thoughts of man and hold them up in public to the world.”
Our founders knew that great leaders derive their power and inspiration from the common sense and goodwill of everyday Americans. They knew that it takes all of us to make this country work: labor and management, urban and rural, all races, creeds and colors. We now know that economic class is not set for life, with workers rising above their lowly circumstances even in the toughest of times.
A majority of Americans can easily discern the current Occupy Wall Street protests for the turgid, disjointed people’s-movement-wannabe that it is. Common sense values can easily contrast the rank class envy masquerading as discourse, and the moral (and physical) sloth disguising itself as a helpless victim of economic injustice.
2012 is all but crying out for an antidote to fear, pessimism and resentment — and to the politicians stoking the flames to fuel their own ambitions. Calm, cool reason, along with a passionate love for America’s founding ideals can rule the day, and common sense voters can well define 2012 the way values voters and soccer moms seemed to capture more recent elections.
The raucous leftists always fashion themselves the starry-eyed idealists, but we can’t even give them that one, for Calvin Coolidge also remarked that “economy is idealism in its most practical form.”
SOURCE
************************
Notes on Sweden's welfare state
Most people are familiar with what I call the Swedish Fallacy – the reliance on Sweden by people on all sides of the spectrum to back up whatever policy proposal they're making, as if Sweden is a paradise on earth that everybody can emulate by adopting the same policies. It's especially common on the left: they have high taxes and a dynamic economy, so higher taxes must not be a bad thing! A new report from the Libera Foundation, a Finnish think tank, throws a spanner into those works:
One should remember that the golden age of Swedish entrepreneurship, where one successful firm after another was founded in the small country and gained international renown, occurred during a time where taxes and the scope of government were quite limited. Sweden shifted to radicalized social democratic policies in the 1960s, 1970s, and the 1980s. . . .
It is, however, important to remember that Sweden, like other Nordic nations, has compensated for these policies by improving economic liberty in other fields. Some reforms, such as the partial privatization of the mandatory pensions system and voucher systems in schools and health care surpass what has been possible to implement in most developed nations.
Swedish society is not necessarily moving away from the idea of a welfare state, but continuous reforms are implemented towards economic liberty within the scope of welfare. The rise of government has been stopped and even reversed in recent years. The nation is again returning to the free market policies which served it so well in the past.
This is a point that Tim Worstall has made in the past as well. The report also discusses the cultural factors that make such high taxes tolerable. Yes, Sweden is a high tax, high welfare country, but it's also remarkably free market by most other measures. Indeed, it might be that the only way they're able to pay for so much welfare is because in many other respects they take a more laissez-faire approach to their economy than we do.
That should be food for thought for socialists who want to take from the rich to give to the poor – if a free market maximises the money they have to redistribute in the medium-term, the most sincere socialist position might be to favour fairly high taxes and low regulation. It's not something I'd support – high taxes are still bad news for lots of reasons – but I'd prefer it to the primitive central planning that many on the left still favour. I don't think Sweden's a paradise, but it might still be able to teach the left a thing or two about how to pay for the welfare state they want.
SOURCE
**************************
SunPower: Twice As Bad As Solyndra, Twice As Bad For Obama
Congressman's son lobbied for failing solar panel company
How did a failing California solar company, buffeted by short sellers and shareholder lawsuits, receive a $1.2 billion federal loan guarantee for a photovoltaic electricity ranch project—three weeks after it announced it was building new manufacturing plant in Mexicali, Mexico, to build the panels for the project.
The company, SunPower (SPWR-NASDAQ), now carries $820 million in debt, an amount $20 million greater than its market capitalization. If SunPower was a bank, the feds would shut it down. Instead, it received a lifeline twice the size of the money sent down the Solyndra drain.
Two men with insight into the process are SunPower rooter Rep. George R. Miller III, (D.-Calif.), the senior Democrat on the House Education and Workforce Committee and the co-chairman of the Democratic Steering and Policy Committee, and his SunPower lobbyist son, George Miller IV.
Miller the Elder is a strong advocate for SunPower, which converted an old Richmond, Calif., Ford plant in his district to a panel-manufacturing facility.
The congressman hosted an Oct. 14, 2010, tour of the plant with company CEO Thomas H. Werner and Interior Secretary Kenneth L. Salazar to promote the company’s fortunes.
“The path to a clean energy economy starts here, in places like SunPower’s research and development facility,” said Salazar during the tour. “The work that comes from these facilities transforms renewable energy ideas into a reality. When renewable energy companies continue to invest in places like California, the realization of a new energy future is within our reach,” he said.
Miller the Elder said he was grateful for Salazar's interest. “We’ve worked hard to make renewable energy a priority because it represents America’s future economic growth. Today, businesses like SunPower are moving forward, hiring 200 people for good clean energy jobs in the East Bay,” he said.
“By fostering a business climate that encourages companies like SunPower, even more good jobs will be created locally, we’ll reduce demand for dirty energy sources, and we’ll cut customers’ utility bills. That’s the right direction,” he said.
SunPower’s political action committee (PAC) was not shy about participating in the political process either.
According to the SunPower PAC filings for its activities in the 2010 midterm election campaign cycle, it donated more than $36,000. Of the $15,650 donated to House and Senate candidates, $14,650 went to Democrats, with these top recipients: $4,000 to Sen. Harry Reid (D.-Nev.), $3,000 to Rep. Gabrielle Gifford (D.-Ariz.) and $2,900 Sen. Barbara Boxer (D.-Calif.).
The congressman was not forgotten either. The SunPower PAC remembered him with $500 for his 2010 campaign. While SunPower was a financial partner in the congressman’s reelection campaign, it straight-out hired his son.
Miller the Younger is not registered to lobby in Washington, but he is a member of its bar. He is not a member of the California bar, home of his lobbying firm, Lang, Hansen, O'Malley and Miller (LHOM), of which he is a founding partner.
According the firm's website LHOM specializes in providing advice to clients on larger macro political issues trends. “Utilizing our broad experience in California and Washington, D.C., we can furnish 'big picture' analysis of developing political and policy trends which may affect client interests and goals.”
What does Miller the Younger bring? Read here: “George Miller brings a lifetime of friendships, relationships, and contacts together with over 15 years of front-line advocacy experience. He’s an attorney with expertise that ranges from insurance and banking to transportation, taxation and gaming law,” according to the website. “Unlike most advocates, George is at ease working both the corridors of Sacramento power or the halls of Congress.”
What is the stated purpose of the SunPower’s DOE 1705 program loan guarantee?
SunPower has different lines of business. In addition to manufacturing solar panel and roof tiles, it builds solar panel ranches, which it then sells off, but retains the services contract.
The loan guarantee is earmarked for the job numbers for the California Valley Solar Ranch (CVSR) in San Luis Obispo County, which it has already sold to NRG Solar, but will continue to maintain.
According to the Department of Energy (DOE) website, the CVSR project will create 350 construction jobs during the two-year build and 15 permanent jobs—presumably those are the squeegee men for keeping the panels clean.
Capitol Hill powerbroker Rep. George Miller (D.-Calif.), center, hosted Interior Sec. Kenneth L. Salazar, left, on an Oct. 14, 2010 tour of SunPower's Richmond, Calif., plant. During the tour, Salazar said plants like SunPower's transform renewable energy ideas into reality. One month later, the company announced it had restated its 2008 and 2009 financial filings to correct for unsubstantiated accounting entries.
If $80 million per permanent job seems a little high, even for the current Obama administration, you are correct. In addition to the 350 construction jobs and the 15 squeegee men, there will an as-yet-undetermined number of jobs created building the panels for the CVSR—in Mexicali, Mexico.
The company is looking for a facility of up to 320,000 square feet, where it will build three different solar panel models and its solar roof tiles, according the company’s Aug. 5 statement.
Marty T. Neese, the company's chief operating officer, said, “Establishing our own manufacturing facility in Mexicali means we will be positioned to quickly deliver our high-efficiency, high-reliability solar products to a growing North American solar market.”
Mexicali Mayor Francisco Perez Tejada Padilla said he was thrilled. “Mexicali is rapidly becoming an industrial hub for high-tech companies, offering an educated workforce and a growing manufacturing area,” he said. “We welcome SunPower to our city and are pleased that they have chosen Mexicali to establish its solar panel manufacturing facility.”
The good news for Mexican jobs seekers did not affect the DOE's loan guarantee to SunPower. Hours before the DOE 1705 loan program expired at the end of Fiscal Year 2011 on Sept. 30, the $1.2 billion in loan guarantees was approved for the company.
More HERE
**************************
Panderer in Chief: What would a Mitt Romney presidency look like?
Romney brazenly proclaimed, "One reason to elect me is that I know what I stand for, I've written it down. Words have meaning."
"I've written it down"—I love that. I'm put in mind of the great New Yorker cartoon, featuring a Washington bigwig behind an enormous desk, the Capitol looming through his office window. "I keep my core beliefs written on the palm of my hand for easy reference," he tells his visitor.
With New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie out and Perry floundering, it's looking ever more likely that the alternative to President Obama will be a candidate who needs a cheat sheet to remember his core beliefs.
Taking to heart the Stoic principle that we shouldn't lament what we can't control, I'm going to try to convince you—and myself—that things could be worse.
In their 2007 editorial endorsing Romney, National Review argued—hilariously—that the former Massachusetts governor was a "full-spectrum conservative."
But if there's any case to be made for Romney, it's that he's a full-spectrum panderer. Paradoxically, Romney's faults—his incessant flip-flopping and desperate quest for approval—might make him a less-dangerous-than-average president.
On the campaign trail, Romney has savaged Obama's proposed Medicare cuts—the sign "keep your hands off our Medicare" is "absolutely right," he insists—and he has attacked Perry for questioning the constitutionality of Social Security.
The good news, I suppose, is that there is no better reason to take Romney at his word here than there is anywhere else.
Romney's strategically timed ideological conversions are well-known. On the road to the presidency, he's had convenient epiphanies about stem-cells, gay rights, and immigration, and gone from being a staunch gun-controller to, in 2007, buying a lifetime NRA membership and awkwardly bragging about blasting rabbits with a single-shot .22 rifle (do those come with laser sights?).
But, having suffered through two ideologically charged presidencies in a row, to many Americans the poll-tested pandering of the Clinton era doesn't look so bad by comparison.
Our 42nd president wanted national health care, but the country wanted welfare reform and prosperous normalcy—and the country got what it wanted.
More HERE
My Twitter.com identity: jonjayray. I have deleted my Facebook page as I rarely access it. For more blog postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, 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 (Academic) or here (Pictorial) or here (Personal)
****************************
The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist" (Nationalsozialist) and the full name of Hitler's political party (translated) was "The National Socialist German Workers' Party" (In German: Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei)
****************************
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