China, Taiwan and North Korea
China has repeatedly and belligerently advertised their “concern” about every plan the US has made to supply Taiwan with defensive weapons. To imagine Taiwan as the aggressor, as a risk to mainland China, is pure sophistry. The reverse however is everywhere evident. Yet General Liang of the People’s Liberation Army has often in the past emphatically denounced U.S. arms sales to Taiwan as seriously damaging China’s core interests.
Clearly China feels it’s their absolute right to liberate Taiwan from its successfully functioning democracy of 14 years (it originally obtained effective independence in 1945); and to do so by force. Otherwise why focus like a laser on primarily weapons deals?
The White House approach is now unlimited negotiating ladled with a liberal amount of pandering. China’s unambiguous snubs show how little this approach means to them. Yet we seem to repeat the same mistakes, again and again with Iran, Russia, China and others. They understand our weaknesses only too well and we seem to now effectively hide our strengths in order to gain international acceptance and favor.
A most simple resolution to the White House’s quandary is to call China’s bluff. Let’s drag North Korea into the discussion and link increased arms sales to Taiwan and South Korea to conducive Chinese leverage in denuclearizing North Korea – finally and transparently. Since North Korea is totally dependent on China for energy, raw materials and its economic “life blood”, China could turn off the tap and achieve critical North Korean accommodations instantaneously.
Yet it refuses. Why? Because China, not the U.S., makes demands, communicates threats and acts the Asian bully. If they refuse the U.S. demands then we still get to shore up militarily our good friends and allies Taiwan and South Korea and further help balance our budget with much needed exports. All to the good; and if they alternatively participate in pushing recalcitrant North Korea towards denuclearization – fantastic. There is no downside.
Why is the White House so oblivious to that simplicity?
SOURCE
*****************************
Loathing Conservative Christian Candidates
Time magazine didn't mind ruffling feathers in religious America with a cover this summer that asked "Is Hell Dead?" Never mind that America is overwhelmingly Christian. Then Time found only one letter worth plucking out to feature in large, bold type from a man in Dallas: "Hell is easy to define. It would be spending eternity with evangelicals."
That sums up the secular, liberal media attitude toward America's Christian majority, and it explains why they find Republicans so objectionable when they make their religious faith part of their campaign for the presidency. Matthew Philbin and Erin Brown of the Media Research Center's Culture and Media Institute have written a new report called "Baptism By Fire" that analyzes coverage of the presidential candidates and their religious faith. Does it surprise anyone that they found a huge difference in coverage of Republicans and Democrats?
In the first ten months of 2011, network morning and evening news stories mentioned the religious faith of GOP presidential challengers more than seven times as often (143 stories to 19 stories) than they had for Democratic challengers in the first ten months of 2007. They've been 13 times more likely to be critical of the Republicans' religious beliefs than they were of Democrats just four years ago.
Did I mention Rev. Jeremiah Wright? In the first ten months of 2007, there were just six instances where stories challenged or negatively highlighted the faith of liberal White House hopefuls. The networks almost entirely avoided questions about Barack Obama's upbringing in a Muslim country and his two decades of attendance of a radical Chicago church. Likewise, audiences were reassured that Hillary Clinton's faith was important -- but only as it saw her through her husband's reckless infidelities. Primary candidates Joe Biden and Chris Dodd were never asked about their fervent voting record in favor of abortion -- even partial-birth abortion -- in full opposition to their Catholic faith.
SOURCE
*****************************
Did FDR Provoke Pearl Harbor?
It's always been pretty obvious that the Democrat hero forced Japan into war with the USA by cutting off their oil but now we have extensive documentation of FDR's scheming -- JR
Pat Buchanan
On Dec. 8, 1941, Franklin Roosevelt took the rostrum before a joint session of Congress to ask for a declaration of war on Japan. A day earlier, at dawn, carrier-based Japanese aircraft had launched a sneak attack devastating the U.S. battle fleet at Pearl Harbor. Said ex-President Herbert Hoover, Republican statesman of the day, “We have only one job to do now, and that is to defeat Japan.”
But to friends, “the Chief” sent another message: “You and I know that this continuous putting pins in rattlesnakes finally got this country bit.”
Today, 70 years after Pearl Harbor, a remarkable secret history, written from 1943 to 1963, has come to light. It is Hoover’s explanation of what happened before, during and after the world war that may prove yet the death knell of the West.
Edited by historian George Nash, “Freedom Betrayed: Herbert Hoover’s History of the Second World War and Its Aftermath” is a searing indictment of FDR and the men around him as politicians who lied prodigiously about their desire to keep America out of war, even as they took one deliberate step after another to take us into war.
Yet the book is no polemic. The 50-page run-up to the war in the Pacific uses memoirs and documents from all sides to prove Hoover’s indictment. And perhaps the best way to show the power of this book is the way Hoover does it -- chronologically, painstakingly, week by week.
Consider Japan’s situation in the summer of 1941. Bogged down in a four year war in China she could neither win nor end, having moved into French Indochina, Japan saw herself as near the end of her tether.
Inside the government was a powerful faction led by Prime Minister Prince Fumimaro Konoye that desperately did not want a war with the United States.
The “pro-Anglo-Saxon” camp included the navy, whose officers had fought alongside the U.S. and Royal navies in World War I, while the war party was centered on the army, Gen. Hideki Tojo and Foreign Minister Yosuke Matsuoka, a bitter anti-American.
On July 18, 1941, Konoye ousted Matsuoka, replacing him with the “pro-Anglo-Saxon” Adm. Teijiro Toyoda.
The U.S. response: On July 25, we froze all Japanese assets in the United States, ending all exports and imports, and denying Japan the oil upon which the nation and empire depended.
Stunned, Konoye still pursued his peace policy by winning secret support from the navy and army to meet FDR on the U.S. side of the Pacific to hear and respond to U.S. demands.
U.S. Ambassador Joseph Grew implored Washington not to ignore Konoye’s offer, that the prince had convinced him an agreement could be reached on Japanese withdrawal from Indochina and South and Central China. Out of fear of Mao’s armies and Stalin’s Russia, Tokyo wanted to hold a buffer in North China.
On Aug. 28, Japan’s ambassador in Washington presented FDR a personal letter from Konoye imploring him to meet.
Tokyo begged us to keep Konoye’s offer secret, as the revelation of a Japanese prime minister’s offering to cross the Pacific to talk to an American president could imperil his government.
On Sept. 3, the Konoye letter was leaked to the Herald-Tribune.
On Sept. 6, Konoye met again at a three-hour dinner with Grew to tell him Japan now agreed with the four principles the Americans were demanding as the basis for peace. No response.
On Sept. 29, Grew sent what Hoover describes as a “prayer” to the president not to let this chance for peace pass by.
On Sept. 30, Grew wrote Washington, “Konoye’s warship is ready waiting to take him to Honolulu, Alaska or anyplace designated by the president.” No response. On Oct. 16, Konoye’s cabinet fell.
In November, the U.S. intercepted two new offers from Tokyo: a Plan A for an end to the China war and occupation of Indochina and, if that were rejected, a Plan B, a modus vivendi where neither side would make any new move. When presented, these, too, were rejected out of hand.
At a Nov. 25 meeting of FDR’s war council, Secretary of War Henry Stimson’s notes speak of the prevailing consensus: “The question was how we should maneuver them (the Japanese) into ... firing the first shot without allowing too much danger to ourselves.” “We can wipe the Japanese off the map in three months,” wrote Navy Secretary Frank Knox.
As Grew had predicted, Japan, a “hara-kiri nation,” proved more likely to fling herself into national suicide for honor than to allow herself to be humiliated.
Out of the war that arose from the refusal to meet Prince Konoye came scores of thousands of U.S. dead, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, the fall of China to Mao Zedong, U.S. wars in Korea and Vietnam, and the rise of a new arrogant China that shows little respect for the great superpower of yesterday. If you would know the history that made our world, spend a week with Mr. Hoover’s book.
SOURCE
*****************************
Where Have Our Cojones Gone?
Last week in Boston, a seven-year-old boy named Mark got into a fight with a bully. The bully put his hands around the boy's throat and began to squeeze. That's when Mark fought back; he kicked his aggressor right in the family jewels. In a normal society, we'd celebrate Mark. Throw him a ticker tape parade or something. Bullies need a sharp kick to the testicles. That's how you convince them that bullying is wrong.
But in Boston, Mark was charged with sexual assault.
Just to get this straight: Massachusetts Democrat Barney Frank's gay lover can run a homosexual prostitution ring from his apartment and Frank will not be prosecuted. But a boy kicks a bully in the berries and he faces expulsion from school.
It's not the bully who lost his chestnuts. It's our country.
At some point in the recent past, America moved from the Gilded Age to the Gelded Age. It's no longer considered polite to beat up bullies -- that's simply not "tolerant." All this chatter from the left about the problem of bullying -- Lady Gaga is visiting the White House this week to tell her subordinate, President Obama, what to do about it -- is so much nonsense. The left has no idea how to solve the bullying problem. They treat all violence as equal -- Mark and the bully are on the same moral plane -- and so they recommend counseling and training, as though a little classroom instruction can solve boys' basic biological urge toward aggression.
Have these people ever met little boys?
Apparently not. Lady Gaga has only met her "little monsters," androgynous pantywaists with no distinguishing sexual characteristics. She thinks that homosexual boys are "born this way," but bullies can be changed by a few sensitivity training sessions. The sad truth is that biology can only be overcome by real conditioning, not by nattering. And in the case of bullies, conditioning equals physical violence.
But in our country today, that solution is considered as bad as the problem. The left has instead come up with an alternative solution: eunichism. If male biology drives violence, we have to wash that man right out of the young boys' hair. We will train them not to use toy guns but to play with dolls. We will teach them that heterosexuality and homosexuality are equals, since all sexes are the same. We will teach them that fighting bullies is the same as being a bully. No wonder the left isn't all that upset about female genital mutilation in Muslim countries, they're busily removing the testes of our young boys right here at home.
There's only one problem with this beautiful new world of asexualism: It's idiotic. All we do is train good boys to be pansies; bullies, meanwhile, continue to be bullies. Jerry Sandusky wasn't going to stop raping little boys based on taking a few seminars -- but Mike McQueary was going to avoid reporting that rape to police if he was trained into spinelessness by the surrounding culture. The Muslim Brotherhood isn't going to stop its aggressive pursuit of worldwide Shariah if we offer its members free Lady Gaga tickets and a shopping spree at Sephora. But Western civilization will let them do it if we spend enough time decrying our own aggressive instinct.
The fact is that males' aggressive instinct is good for the world, if channeled properly. Without it, Hitler goes unpunished. Without it, millions continue to starve in the Soviet Union. The key to the aggressive instinct is training it to act along proper moral lines, not eradicating it.
The American people know that down deep. A few months back, a video went viral of a young Sydney boy, Casey Heynes, being bullied by a younger attacker, Richard. Richard punches the much larger Heynes in the face. Then he punches him again. Finally, Heynes can stand it no longer: He picks up Richard and body-slams him to the ground. Richard gets up and wobbles around, off camera. End video.
Elites of the world decried Heynes' behavior. "We don't believe that violence is ever the answer," said John Dalgleish, head of research at Kids Helpline and Boys Town. But tribute sites went up on the Internet to Heynes; videos celebrating his heroics became common fodder. As everyone who has ever faced down a bully knows, the only way to stop a bully is to show him that physical force won't get him anywhere. The only way to show him that is to beat the hell out of him.
We live in a world of bullies. So long as we continue to psychologically castrate our own boys, the bullies of the world will continue winning. We will continue asking why they hate us, and they will continue choking the life out of us. Only if we re-learn to kick them in the cojones rather than removing our own will we emerge victorious.
SOURCE
*************************
ELSEWHERE
Invisible Americans: Overlooked millions inside job numbers: "Some politicians are saying that the latest unemployment report is good news, but it's not. It shows us that this country is still in crisis. It shows us that the government needs to act quickly and aggressively to create jobs, and to restore the lost earning power of the average American who has a job. Most of all it shows us that millions of struggling people are still invisible in the Nation's Capitol."
What free market?: "If America is indeed a free-market fundamentalist nation, it sure has a funny way of showing it. Federal, state, and local governments combine to spend roughly 40 percent of GDP. Washington indirectly spends another 12 percent of GDP by forcing businesses and consumers to comply with $1.75 trillion worth of federal regulations."
The golden years really are golden: "Despite occasional lurid stories about a grandmother eating cat food shortly before being wheeled off a cliff, the wealth gap favors ... the old! And the gap is enormous. Census data reveal that households headed by someone 65 or older have an average net worth 47 times greater than that of households headed by someone under 35."
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)
****************************
Tuesday, December 06, 2011
My Fourth Statement
Bryan Caplan
When I was promoting Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids, one of the most common questions I heard was, "Are you going to have any more?" I always avoided a definite answer. But now I'm pleased to announce that my wife and I are expecting our fourth child, a baby girl, in April. She'll be named Valeria, middle name TBD (though I'm partial to Ayn and Fanya).
Back in the Baby Boom, having four kids was roughly average. But nowadays, it verges on counter-cultural. As Jonathan Last observes, "When you meet couples with more than three children today, chances are they're making a cultural and theological statement." I'm irreligious, but Last still has my number. I am indeed making a cultural statement. Having lots of kids is my way of saying all of the following:
1. People should feel grateful to be alive - and people who give the gift of life do a great thing.
2. People in the First World today should be incredibly grateful to be alive; they have a golden opportunity to build a joyful life free of mankind's historic troubles. (Corollary: People should take most of the energy they spend on complaining and reallocate it to self-improvement).
3. More people make the world a better place. Our culture greatly overblows the social costs of population - especially on the environment - and severely neglects the social benefits - especially on innovation and choice.
4. Parents' most meaningful effect is on their kids' appreciation - how their kids feel about and remember them. The key to being a great parent isn't sacrifice and suffering on your kids' behalf. It's treating them with kindness and respect, and having fun together.
5. Parental sacrifice and suffering are usually a waste of time in any case. At least in the modern First World, your kids' future depends primarily on their genes and their free will, not your "investment." (Corollary: Our four kids will be roughly as successful in school and work as they would have been if they were only children who enjoyed our undivided time and resources).
6. You can have the pride and joy of being a parent without losing the pride and joy of being an individual. While many parents would work themselves to death taking care of four kids, there's no reason to do so.
7. Kids are cute and fun. Especially my kids.
SOURCE (See the original for links)
*********************
Obamacare is already destroying jobs
In 1941, Carl Karcher was a 24-year-old truck driver for a bakery. Impressed by the large numbers of buns he was delivering, he scrounged up $326 to buy a hot dog cart across from a Goodyear plant. And the war came.
So did millions of defense industry workers and their cars. And, soon, Southern California’s contribution to American cuisine — fast food. Including, eventually, hundreds of Carl’s Jr. restaurants. Karcher died in 2008, but his legacy, CKE Restaurants, survives. It would thrive, says CEO Andy Puzder, but for government’s comprehensive campaign against job creation.
CKE, with more than 3,200 restaurants (Carl’s Jr. and Hardee’s), has created 70,000 jobs, 21,000 directly and 49,000 with franchisees. The growth of those numbers will be inhibited by — among many government measures — Obamacare.
When CKE’s health-care advisers, citing Obamacare’s complexities, opacities and uncertainties, said that it would add between $7.3 million and $35.1 million to the company’s $12 million health-care costs in 2010, Puzder said: I need a number I can plan with. They guessed $18 million — twice what CKE spent last year building new restaurants. Obamacare must mean fewer restaurants.
And therefore fewer jobs. Each restaurant creates, on average, 25 jobs — and as much as 3.5 times that number of jobs in the community. (CKE spends about $1 billion a year on food and paper products, $175 million on advertising, $33 million on maintenance, etc.)
Puzder laughs about the liberal theory that businesses are not investing because they want to “punish Obama.” Rising health-care costs are, he says, just one uncertainty inhibiting expansion. Others are government policies raising fuel costs, which infect everything from air conditioning to the cost (including deliveries) of supplies, and the threat that the National Labor Relations Board will use regulations to impose something like “card check” in place of secret-ballot unionization elections.
CKE has about 720 California restaurants, in which 84 percent of the managers are minorities and 67 percent are women. CKE has, however, all but stopped building restaurants in this state because approvals and permits for establishing them can take up to two years, compared to as little as six weeks in Texas, and the cost to build one is $100,000 more than in Texas, where CKE is planning to open 300 new restaurants this decade.
CKE restaurants have 95 percent employee turnover in a year — not bad in this industry — and the health-care benefits under CKE’s current “mini-med” plans are capped in a way that makes them illegal under Obamacare. So CKE will have to convert many full-time employees to part-timers to limit the growth of its burdens under Obamacare.
In an economic climate of increasing uncertainties, Puzder says, one certainty is that many businesses now marginally profitable will disappear when Obamacare causes that margin to disappear. A second certainty is that “employers everywhere will be looking to reduce labor content in their business models as Obamacare makes employees unambiguously more expensive.”
According to the U.S. Small Business Administration, by 2008 the cost of federal regulations had reached $1.75 trillion. That was 14 percent of national income unavailable for job-creating investments. And that was more than 11,000 regulations ago.
Seventy years ago, the local health department complained that Karcher’s hot dog cart had no restroom facilities. He got help from a nearby gas station. A state agency made him pay $15 for workers’ compensation insurance. Another agency said that he owed more than the $326 cost of the cart in back sales taxes. For $100, a lawyer successfully argued that Karcher did not because his customers ate their hot dogs off the premises.
Time was, American businesses could surmount such regulatory officiousness. But government’s metabolic urge to boss people around has grown exponentially and today CKE’s California restaurants are governed by 57 categories of regulations. One compels employees and even managers to take breaks during the busiest hours, lest one of California’s 200,000 lawyers comes trolling for business at the expense of business.
Barack Obama has written that during his very brief sojourn in the private sector he felt like “a spy behind enemy lines.” Puzder knows what it feels like when gargantuan government is composed of multitudes of regulators who regard business as the enemy. And 22.9 million Americans who are unemployed, underemployed or too discouraged to look for employment know what it feels like to be collateral damage in the regulatory state’s war on business.
SOURCE
****************************
That good ol' double standard again: What Did The Corzine Democrats Say About Abramoff?
Jon Corzine, former CEO of collapsed brokerage MF Global, has become a major embarrassment to his friends on Capitol Hill.
The former senator and governor of New Jersey has not only donated money recently to the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee Democratic National Committee, he has also contributed to the following U.S. representatives, the Hill notes: New Jersey’s Rush Holt, Donald Payne Frank Pallone, and Steve Rothman; California’s George Miller; New York’s Kathy Hochul, Nita Lowey, Jerrold Nadler and Charlie Rangel and Massachusetts’ Ed Markey.
Republicans are calling on Democrats to return the money. Top blogger Instapundit suggested that someone should look up what these lawmakers said in the wake of the Jack Abramoff scandal, where considerable pressure was brought to bear on the GOP to return contributions from Abramoff and those affiliated with him.
So, Capitol Hill did some searching, dug into the archives, and came up with some rather choice morsels. Here’s Rep. Holt, on Jan 18, 2006:
Where has Holt been during the Solyndra mess?
On April 6, 2006, Rep. Nadler said the following at a Judiciary subcommittee hearing on lobbying reform:
Any reporter out there who could ask Nadler how he feels about Corzine?
Oh, and this part of his statement wasn’t related to Corzine, but was ironic in view of what happened in subsequent years:
Do you recall Nadler protesting during the stimulus debate or during ObamaCare? Me neither.
Rep. Miller said the following after the Senate Indian Affairs Committee released its report on Abramoff on June 22, 2006:
Let’s hope Miller will be calling for a thorough investigation into Corzine’s activities. Hope, but don’t hold your breath.
More HERE
**************************
Obama Administration Denies Federal Drug Price Controls are Killing Americans
While Americans are dying because of a drug shortage problem serious enough to call a national emergency, the Obama Administration is denying that Medicare price controls are the cause.
Two hearings now have been held on the government induced prescription drug shortage in the House and another has been requested by ranking members of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform. The Senate will hold a hearing of its own on Wednesday.
In a nation as prosperous as our own — how can we have such drug shortages? That was the question the minds of congressmen in a hearing on Nov. 30, 2011 before the House Oversight and Government Reform’s Subcommittee on Health.
Four out of the five expert witnesses before the Subcommittee agreed that a Medicare price control policy has disincentivized the production of certain drugs and is at least part of the reason we now have the drug shortages that are killing Americans.
The Medicare Modernization Act of 2003 introduced the “average sales price” repayment method for certain drugs. Instead of paying drug manufacturers based on the “wholesale acquisition cost,” Medicare pays based on the average price of the medication six months ago plus six percent. So, if the costs of producing the medicines increases more than 6 percent in six months, the manufacturer will have to take a loss.
The fifth expert agreed that Medicare’s price controls might be a factor, but refused to say so without further evidence.
However, the Obama Administration denies that Medicare pricing policies are a major problem. Dr. Howard K. Koh, Assistant Secretary for Health at the Department of Health and Human Services , said as much in Congressional testimony House Energy & Commerce Committee’s Subcommittee on Health on September 23, 2011.
Congressman Brett Guthrie (R-KY) asked Dr. Koh the following question: "I had a group of oncologists in the other day … and they say they literally have to make choices about who they take care of because they don’t have the drugs available. So I asked kind of the question, “I can’t believe a company won’t make them if you have the demand for them.” And they told me that this particular type of drug–a generic—[is] priced differently in the federal government. So Medicare actually prices these drugs different than other drugs. Is what they were saying true?"
Dr. Koh’s response: "We have a role of Medicare here that reimburses according to what’s called the average sales price. So that is one factor here but we don’t view that as a significant issue in driving the shortages we’re seeing here."
Unfortunately, we have bureaucrats in the Obama Administration that believe the solution is more government control and not removing government restraints on the marketplace. Here’s a dialog between Rep. John Shimkus (R-IL) and Dr. Koh from the same hearing:
Shimkus: "Why doesn’t the shortage of a product in this sector then send an increased price signal to manufacturers for them to then produce the good?"
Koh: "Well, we have come to learn that the standard economic principles of supply and demand…"
Shimkus: "And the question is why is that distorted? That . . . I think that is the basic fundamental question of this problem. What has distorted the fundamental principles of supply and demand? . . . but I think that is the heart of this issue." ...
Koh: "First of all, these agreements are made often through these long term contracts, and so also this whole process involves multiple stakeholders–especially and including the pharmacy benefit managers and the group purchasing organizations. So it complicates this environment and sort of does not make relevant the sort of standard supply and demand economic principles that we would see in other businesses."
So the economic principles of supply and demand are not relevant? ....
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)
****************************
Bryan Caplan
When I was promoting Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids, one of the most common questions I heard was, "Are you going to have any more?" I always avoided a definite answer. But now I'm pleased to announce that my wife and I are expecting our fourth child, a baby girl, in April. She'll be named Valeria, middle name TBD (though I'm partial to Ayn and Fanya).
Back in the Baby Boom, having four kids was roughly average. But nowadays, it verges on counter-cultural. As Jonathan Last observes, "When you meet couples with more than three children today, chances are they're making a cultural and theological statement." I'm irreligious, but Last still has my number. I am indeed making a cultural statement. Having lots of kids is my way of saying all of the following:
1. People should feel grateful to be alive - and people who give the gift of life do a great thing.
2. People in the First World today should be incredibly grateful to be alive; they have a golden opportunity to build a joyful life free of mankind's historic troubles. (Corollary: People should take most of the energy they spend on complaining and reallocate it to self-improvement).
3. More people make the world a better place. Our culture greatly overblows the social costs of population - especially on the environment - and severely neglects the social benefits - especially on innovation and choice.
4. Parents' most meaningful effect is on their kids' appreciation - how their kids feel about and remember them. The key to being a great parent isn't sacrifice and suffering on your kids' behalf. It's treating them with kindness and respect, and having fun together.
5. Parental sacrifice and suffering are usually a waste of time in any case. At least in the modern First World, your kids' future depends primarily on their genes and their free will, not your "investment." (Corollary: Our four kids will be roughly as successful in school and work as they would have been if they were only children who enjoyed our undivided time and resources).
6. You can have the pride and joy of being a parent without losing the pride and joy of being an individual. While many parents would work themselves to death taking care of four kids, there's no reason to do so.
7. Kids are cute and fun. Especially my kids.
SOURCE (See the original for links)
*********************
Obamacare is already destroying jobs
In 1941, Carl Karcher was a 24-year-old truck driver for a bakery. Impressed by the large numbers of buns he was delivering, he scrounged up $326 to buy a hot dog cart across from a Goodyear plant. And the war came.
So did millions of defense industry workers and their cars. And, soon, Southern California’s contribution to American cuisine — fast food. Including, eventually, hundreds of Carl’s Jr. restaurants. Karcher died in 2008, but his legacy, CKE Restaurants, survives. It would thrive, says CEO Andy Puzder, but for government’s comprehensive campaign against job creation.
CKE, with more than 3,200 restaurants (Carl’s Jr. and Hardee’s), has created 70,000 jobs, 21,000 directly and 49,000 with franchisees. The growth of those numbers will be inhibited by — among many government measures — Obamacare.
When CKE’s health-care advisers, citing Obamacare’s complexities, opacities and uncertainties, said that it would add between $7.3 million and $35.1 million to the company’s $12 million health-care costs in 2010, Puzder said: I need a number I can plan with. They guessed $18 million — twice what CKE spent last year building new restaurants. Obamacare must mean fewer restaurants.
And therefore fewer jobs. Each restaurant creates, on average, 25 jobs — and as much as 3.5 times that number of jobs in the community. (CKE spends about $1 billion a year on food and paper products, $175 million on advertising, $33 million on maintenance, etc.)
Puzder laughs about the liberal theory that businesses are not investing because they want to “punish Obama.” Rising health-care costs are, he says, just one uncertainty inhibiting expansion. Others are government policies raising fuel costs, which infect everything from air conditioning to the cost (including deliveries) of supplies, and the threat that the National Labor Relations Board will use regulations to impose something like “card check” in place of secret-ballot unionization elections.
CKE has about 720 California restaurants, in which 84 percent of the managers are minorities and 67 percent are women. CKE has, however, all but stopped building restaurants in this state because approvals and permits for establishing them can take up to two years, compared to as little as six weeks in Texas, and the cost to build one is $100,000 more than in Texas, where CKE is planning to open 300 new restaurants this decade.
CKE restaurants have 95 percent employee turnover in a year — not bad in this industry — and the health-care benefits under CKE’s current “mini-med” plans are capped in a way that makes them illegal under Obamacare. So CKE will have to convert many full-time employees to part-timers to limit the growth of its burdens under Obamacare.
In an economic climate of increasing uncertainties, Puzder says, one certainty is that many businesses now marginally profitable will disappear when Obamacare causes that margin to disappear. A second certainty is that “employers everywhere will be looking to reduce labor content in their business models as Obamacare makes employees unambiguously more expensive.”
According to the U.S. Small Business Administration, by 2008 the cost of federal regulations had reached $1.75 trillion. That was 14 percent of national income unavailable for job-creating investments. And that was more than 11,000 regulations ago.
Seventy years ago, the local health department complained that Karcher’s hot dog cart had no restroom facilities. He got help from a nearby gas station. A state agency made him pay $15 for workers’ compensation insurance. Another agency said that he owed more than the $326 cost of the cart in back sales taxes. For $100, a lawyer successfully argued that Karcher did not because his customers ate their hot dogs off the premises.
Time was, American businesses could surmount such regulatory officiousness. But government’s metabolic urge to boss people around has grown exponentially and today CKE’s California restaurants are governed by 57 categories of regulations. One compels employees and even managers to take breaks during the busiest hours, lest one of California’s 200,000 lawyers comes trolling for business at the expense of business.
Barack Obama has written that during his very brief sojourn in the private sector he felt like “a spy behind enemy lines.” Puzder knows what it feels like when gargantuan government is composed of multitudes of regulators who regard business as the enemy. And 22.9 million Americans who are unemployed, underemployed or too discouraged to look for employment know what it feels like to be collateral damage in the regulatory state’s war on business.
SOURCE
****************************
That good ol' double standard again: What Did The Corzine Democrats Say About Abramoff?
Jon Corzine, former CEO of collapsed brokerage MF Global, has become a major embarrassment to his friends on Capitol Hill.
The former senator and governor of New Jersey has not only donated money recently to the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee Democratic National Committee, he has also contributed to the following U.S. representatives, the Hill notes: New Jersey’s Rush Holt, Donald Payne Frank Pallone, and Steve Rothman; California’s George Miller; New York’s Kathy Hochul, Nita Lowey, Jerrold Nadler and Charlie Rangel and Massachusetts’ Ed Markey.
Republicans are calling on Democrats to return the money. Top blogger Instapundit suggested that someone should look up what these lawmakers said in the wake of the Jack Abramoff scandal, where considerable pressure was brought to bear on the GOP to return contributions from Abramoff and those affiliated with him.
So, Capitol Hill did some searching, dug into the archives, and came up with some rather choice morsels. Here’s Rep. Holt, on Jan 18, 2006:
Rep. Rush Holt returned to Washington today to join House and Senate Democrats in unveiling their “Honest Leadership, Open Government” Act, an aggressive reform package to reverse Republican excesses and protect the public trust.
“The Abramoff debacle has joined Teapot Dome and the Keating Five in the lexicon of Congressional corruption scandals,” said Rep. Holt. “As long as Congressional rules allow this kind of corruption to go on unabated, public cynicism about government will only grow. Our action today is designed to deal with this problem head on.”
(The Legislation) will fix the gift and travel rules that allowed the Jack Abramoffs of the world to buy Republican influence in Congress, ensuring that legislation will never again be written in back rooms by industry lobbyists.
Where has Holt been during the Solyndra mess?
On April 6, 2006, Rep. Nadler said the following at a Judiciary subcommittee hearing on lobbying reform:
The recent indictments, convictions and resignations of leading members of Congress and their staff, up to and including the former majority leader, Mr. DeLay, have cast a pall over this institution and over every one of us, whether we like it or not, whether any of us has done anything improper or not.
Unless this Congress acts and acts effectively and with credibility, the public will rightly judge this institution and its members harshly. The public will become only more cynical.
I do not believe that members are corrupted by a $50 or $75 dinner. They are corrupted by the necessity to raise large sums of campaign finance from private sources.
Any reporter out there who could ask Nadler how he feels about Corzine?
Oh, and this part of his statement wasn’t related to Corzine, but was ironic in view of what happened in subsequent years:
Bills hundreds of pages long, written in the dead of night, and brought to a vote with little or no examination by the members will always be an invitation to disaster and to corruption, because they are an invitation to payoffs for campaign contributions when no one is looking.
There was a time when legislation was actually the result of a deliberative and bipartisan process. That is, regrettably, becoming the exception, rather than the rule in this Congress. It creates bad policy and innumerable opportunities for mischief.
Do you recall Nadler protesting during the stimulus debate or during ObamaCare? Me neither.
Rep. Miller said the following after the Senate Indian Affairs Committee released its report on Abramoff on June 22, 2006:
Today, the Senate Indian Affairs Committee released a report on some of Jack Abramoff’s many contributions to the Republican culture of corruption. The report is an important contribution to our understanding of Abramoff’s illicit activities, but it is not complete. Congress must get more answers about Abramoff’s influence over its legislative affairs — in particular with regard to sweatshops in the Northern Mariana Islands.”
Let’s hope Miller will be calling for a thorough investigation into Corzine’s activities. Hope, but don’t hold your breath.
More HERE
**************************
Obama Administration Denies Federal Drug Price Controls are Killing Americans
While Americans are dying because of a drug shortage problem serious enough to call a national emergency, the Obama Administration is denying that Medicare price controls are the cause.
Two hearings now have been held on the government induced prescription drug shortage in the House and another has been requested by ranking members of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform. The Senate will hold a hearing of its own on Wednesday.
In a nation as prosperous as our own — how can we have such drug shortages? That was the question the minds of congressmen in a hearing on Nov. 30, 2011 before the House Oversight and Government Reform’s Subcommittee on Health.
Four out of the five expert witnesses before the Subcommittee agreed that a Medicare price control policy has disincentivized the production of certain drugs and is at least part of the reason we now have the drug shortages that are killing Americans.
The Medicare Modernization Act of 2003 introduced the “average sales price” repayment method for certain drugs. Instead of paying drug manufacturers based on the “wholesale acquisition cost,” Medicare pays based on the average price of the medication six months ago plus six percent. So, if the costs of producing the medicines increases more than 6 percent in six months, the manufacturer will have to take a loss.
The fifth expert agreed that Medicare’s price controls might be a factor, but refused to say so without further evidence.
However, the Obama Administration denies that Medicare pricing policies are a major problem. Dr. Howard K. Koh, Assistant Secretary for Health at the Department of Health and Human Services , said as much in Congressional testimony House Energy & Commerce Committee’s Subcommittee on Health on September 23, 2011.
Congressman Brett Guthrie (R-KY) asked Dr. Koh the following question: "I had a group of oncologists in the other day … and they say they literally have to make choices about who they take care of because they don’t have the drugs available. So I asked kind of the question, “I can’t believe a company won’t make them if you have the demand for them.” And they told me that this particular type of drug–a generic—[is] priced differently in the federal government. So Medicare actually prices these drugs different than other drugs. Is what they were saying true?"
Dr. Koh’s response: "We have a role of Medicare here that reimburses according to what’s called the average sales price. So that is one factor here but we don’t view that as a significant issue in driving the shortages we’re seeing here."
Unfortunately, we have bureaucrats in the Obama Administration that believe the solution is more government control and not removing government restraints on the marketplace. Here’s a dialog between Rep. John Shimkus (R-IL) and Dr. Koh from the same hearing:
Shimkus: "Why doesn’t the shortage of a product in this sector then send an increased price signal to manufacturers for them to then produce the good?"
Koh: "Well, we have come to learn that the standard economic principles of supply and demand…"
Shimkus: "And the question is why is that distorted? That . . . I think that is the basic fundamental question of this problem. What has distorted the fundamental principles of supply and demand? . . . but I think that is the heart of this issue." ...
Koh: "First of all, these agreements are made often through these long term contracts, and so also this whole process involves multiple stakeholders–especially and including the pharmacy benefit managers and the group purchasing organizations. So it complicates this environment and sort of does not make relevant the sort of standard supply and demand economic principles that we would see in other businesses."
So the economic principles of supply and demand are not relevant? ....
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)
****************************
Monday, December 05, 2011
Civil Society or Dictatorship?
Put aside all other issues for a moment, and ignore the trivialities that dominate the airwaves and what passes for national debate in this country. The Senate this week ratified a defense authorization bill containing an amendment cosponsored by Democratic Sen. Carl Levin and Republican Sen. John McCain that would empower the military to detain American citizens captured on U.S. soil indefinitely without civil process, in addition to expanding the post-9/11 Authorization to Use Military Force and making it harder to transfer detainees out of Guantánamo.
Ten years of the war on terror, decades of the war on drugs, and a century of growing government power in general, particularly in the presidency and various police authorities, have perhaps desensitized Americans to what is at stake here. As the proverbial frogs in the pot of water, we are accustomed to rising temperatures and so do not notice when our flesh begins to boil. Yet when the Senate overwhelmingly accepts the principle that the military should displace civilian courts even for citizens captured on American soil, it has adopted a standard of justice remarkably tyrannical even compared to America’s very rocky history.
In the Civil War, the Lincoln administration detained American citizens without trial. Parts of the country constituting the United States were actually battlegrounds, littered by many thousands of bodies. Congress formally suspended habeas corpus. This was a dramatic move that has been criticized to this day. Yet the Supreme Court ruled in Ex parte Milligan (1866) that even the suspension of habeas corpus did not preclude the federal court system from intervening in the military trial of U.S. citizens, and that such military commissions of U.S. citizens on U.S. soil were unconstitutional so long as the civil courts were operating. Neither Congress nor the president could overturn this constitutional protection, the Court found.
Ah, but those were quaint times. Defenders of the kind of despotic military law being proposed today often say that even citizens do not deserve due process if they are at war with their own country. This is 100% false, at least as far as the Constitution is concerned. Indeed, the founding document of this government requires additional due process to try someone for treason:
But this kind of talk seems awfully soft on terrorists, doesn’t it? It is not as though the framers of the Constitution had ever confronted a formidable foreign enemy. It’s only been ten years since 9/11. Of course, by the time the Constitution was ratified, the American Revolution had been over just six years, and in that war about one percent of the American population perished—the proportional equivalent of three million Americans today, or one thousand 9/11s.
Still, this is a new kind of war, as the majority of Senators clearly believe, including almost everyone from the supposed opposition party. An amendment to remove the Levin/McCain language was rejected 61 to 37. Only two Republicans—two!—Rand Paul and Mark Kirk—voted against this blatantly unconstitutional measure for military dictatorship. If anything demonstrates that the leaders of this party claiming to stand for liberty and the rule of law are in fact almost unanimously and adamantly opposed to these principles in the most important imaginable areas, this demonstrates it beyond a reasonable doubt. Indeed, the fact that John McCain, characterized in the 2008 presidential election as a “moderate” among Republicans on questions like torture, backed this bill, should reveal beyond question that had things gone differently in that election, we would not have likely gotten any sort of reprieve from the steady descent toward total tyranny that has characterized the Obama years.
And indeed Obama, for his part, offers no true alternative to the McCain-Republican line of the war on terror. The substance of this bill is essentially in line with everything Obama has done, and, for that matter, what Bush did for eight years, although without formal Congressional codification. Glenn Greenwald notes that the horrifying reality portended in this legislation “more or less describes the status quo. Military custody for accused Terrorists is already a staple of the Obama administration.” Greenwald also helpfully explains that the media’s coverage of the Obama White House’s indications that it might veto this legislation has tended to mischaracterize the situation:
The United States is not a free country, not even close. There are plenty of worse places in the world, for sure, but a key characteristic of something resembling a free society that adheres to something resembling a rule of law is that the executive branch cannot use the military to indefinitely detain people, regardless of citizenship or location, indefinitely without ever explaining itself to a court or affording the detainee some process to challenge his detention.
Even with such protections, a free country requires more—a functioning legal system that respects property rights and free exchange; civil liberties including free speech and freedom from lawless search and seizure; the freedom of people to control their own bodies, homes, and businesses; protections against involuntary servitude; and a general respect for freedom of association. In all of these areas, America has lost some of its liberties, and they all must be restored if the country is ever going to deserve the label of a “free country.”
Yet one freedom without which the whole concept of liberty is a total mirage, befitting of a black comedy and best affirmed only in Orwellian doublespeak, is the freedom from unjust, lawless, indefinite imprisonment. Since 9/11, the United States has abandoned this principle in many respects. Predictably, it was war—threat of a foreign enemy—that allowed this fundamental freedom to be destroyed, initially in large part for foreigners whose rights and dignity were never even given a significant consideration as thousands were rounded up, many tortured, many killed, many detained to this day for no crime at all but being in the wrong place at the wrong time, whether seized by Pakistani war lords in exchange for American dollars or declared terrorists by a presidential military legal system several of whose own military prosecutors have resigned in disgust with the blatant injustice of the whole enterprise.
American citizenship doesn’t guarantee due process either, of course—it did not for Jose Padilla for almost four years of detention, nor for the citizens currently targeted for assassination by the Nobel Prize-winning Constitutional law professor sitting in the Oval Office. Today we are on the verge of seeing the last bits of this retreat from civilized standards of justice codified into law. Our political culture has degenerated so much that should the courts strike down these developments, I would not be surprised to see the court decisions ignored altogether or, alternatively, a successful effort to amend the Constitution and finally give the president and his military full dictatorial power over the United States.
And for what, may I ask, did Americans finally relinquish this last claim to living under a qualitatively different kind of government from the absolutist monarchies or third-rate communist despotisms that now dot our history books as artifacts of political failure and vast human misery? Oh, that’s right. Because the terrorists hate us for our freedom.
SOURCE
************************
Secretary of Defense Panetta Shows How the Obama Administration Is Selling Out Israel… and US Interests
In a major address on U.S. Middle East policy to the Brookings Institution U.S. Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta gave us a clear picture of the Obama administration’s view of the region. When taken along with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s recent speech on the same subject, we now know the following regarding Obama’s policy:
It is dangerously and absurdly wrong. This administration totally and completely, dangerously and disastrously for U.S. interests misunderstands the Middle East. They are 180 degrees off course, that is heading in the opposite direction of safety.
Despite the satisfactory state of relations on a purely military level, the Obama administration is not a friend of Israel, even to the extent that it was arguably so in the first two years of this presidency.
It is now an enemy; it is on the other side. Again, the issue is not mainly bilateral relations but the administration’s help and encouragement to those forces that are Israel’s biggest enemies, that want to rekindle war, and that are 100 percent against a two-state solution. And I don’t mean the Palestinian Authority, I mean the Islamists.
And the Obama administration is also a strategic enemy of Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Oman, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates, Algeria, Morocco, and Jordan. It is also a strategic enemy to the democratic opposition forces in Iran, Syria, Turkey, Tunisia, and Egypt.
Having analyzed and studied the Middle East for almost four decades I say none of this lightly. And these conclusions arise simply from watching what the administration says and does.
In his speech, Panetta has bashed Israel based on a ridiculously false premise. Here it is:
“I understand the view that this is not the time to pursue peace, and that the Arab awakening further imperils the dream of a safe and secure, Jewish and democratic Israel. But I disagree with that view.” Nevertheless, Israel needs to take risks and particularly, “The problem right now is we can’t get them to the damn table, to at least sit down and begin to discuss their differences.”
First, there is a peculiar phrase that I have not seen used even once to describe the Middle East events of 2011, “Arab awakening” instead of “Arab Spring.” This apparently comes from the title of a new book about these events.
But what is the origin of this phrase? The Arab Awakening was the famous book written by George Antonius (subsidized by a U.S foundation to do so, by the way) advocating Arab nationalism and opposition to Zionism in 1938. The Arab Awakening began a half-century pan-Arab struggle against Israel’s creation or existence. Might this not give us a hint of what the new “Arab Awakening” is going to do? Oh, and 1938 marks the year when Great Britain desperately tried to sell out the Jews in order to gain Arab support (for the coming war with Germany and Italy). Within two years of Antonius’s book the form the Arab Awakening took was an alliance with Nazi Germany. One of the main allies of Berlin was the Muslim Brotherhood, now coming into power in Tunisia and Egypt.
Interesting parallels. But there are three other major questions raised in Panetta’s statement.
First, does the current “Arab Awakening” imperil Israel? Yes, of course it does. By changing a reasonably friendly Egyptian government into a totally hostile Muslim Brotherhood and Salafi dominated political system closely allied with Hamas, the Gaza Strip’s ruler, and by helping establish Islamist regimes in Tunisia and Libya allied with this Muslim Brotherhood International; the changes create a four-member alliance intent on wiping Israel off the map.
Add to that Islamist domination of Lebanon by Hizballah, an Islamist regime in Turkey, and the continuing threat from Iran and you’ve got quite a regional situation.
Second, and more interestingly, why is the above true? The answer is as follows:
Democracy in theory is admirable but when you have masses imbued with very radical views, strong Islamist movements, and weak moderate ones, the election winners will be extremely radical Islamists. By winning massive victories, facing a weak (even sympathetic) United States, and seeing even more extreme forces becoming so popular (the Salafists in Egypt), the Islamists are emboldened to be even more radical in their behavior. Who’s going to stop them?
We are thus not facing a springtime of democracy but a springtime of extremism. The Islamists don’t want peace with Israel on any terms. They want its destruction.
More HERE
*************************
Dear Left: Corporatism Is Your Fault
Dear members of the moderate left,
America is suffering from rampant, run-away corporatism and crony capitalism. We are increasingly a plutocracy in which government serves the interests of elite financiers and CEOs at the expense of everyone else.
You know this and you complain loudly about it. But the problem is your fault. You caused this state of affairs. Stop it.
Unlike we libertarianish people, you people actually hold and have been holding significant political power in the US over the past 50 years. What have you done with this power? You’ve greased the corporatist machine every chance you’ve gotten. You’ve made things worse, not better. Our current problems are your fault. You need to stop.
We told you this would happen, but you wouldn’t listen. You complain, rightly, that regulatory agencies are controlled by the very corporations they are supposed to constrain. Well, yeah, we told you that would happen. When you create power—and you people love to create power—the unscrupulous seek to capture that power for their personal benefit. Time and time again, they succeed. We told you that would happen, and we gave you an accurate account of how it would happen.
You complain, perhaps rightly, that corporations are just too big. Well, yeah, we told you that would happen. When you create complicated tax codes, complicated regulatory regimes, and complicated licensing rules, these regulations naturally select for larger and larger corporations. We told you that would happen. Of course, these increasingly large corporations then capture these rules, codes, and regulations to disadvantage their competitors and exploit the rest of us. We told you that would happen.
It’s not rocket science. It’s public choice economics. You recognized, rightly, that public choice economics was a threat to your ideology. So, you didn’t listen, because you didn’t want to be wrong. Public choice predicted that the government programs you created with the goal of fixing problems would often instead exacerbate those problems. Well, the evidence is in. You were wrong and public choice theory was right. If you have any decency, it is time to admit you were wrong and change. Stop making things worse.
You spent the past fifty years empowering corporations and the most unscrupulous of the rich. You created rampant moral hazard in the financial sector. You created the system that socializes risks but privatizes profit. You created the system that creates a revolving door between Obama’s staff and Goldman Sachs. There’s a reason why Wall Street throws money at Obama. It’s because you, the moderate left, are Wall Street’s biggest supporters. Oh, I know you complain about Wall Street. But your actions speak louder than your words.
SOURCE
**********************
ELSEWHERE
Depression-era labor laws harmful in modern global economy: "Chalk up another 'victory' for unions as American Airlines filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection Tuesday. The reason? High labor costs compared to its competitors. It seems the unions were demanding things such as a 10 percent signing bonus followed by 7 percent raises in each of the next three years for pilots"
The regulatory thicket: "In the seemingly endless debate about how to put Americans back to work, one solution dare not speak its name: deregulation. Yet if implemented correctly, it would provide an almost cost-free stimulus of a trillion dollars or more. According to the Small Business Administration (SBA), the regulatory burden on our economy is a staggering $1.75 trillion annually. The Obama administration is apparently in denial over that figure."
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)
****************************
Put aside all other issues for a moment, and ignore the trivialities that dominate the airwaves and what passes for national debate in this country. The Senate this week ratified a defense authorization bill containing an amendment cosponsored by Democratic Sen. Carl Levin and Republican Sen. John McCain that would empower the military to detain American citizens captured on U.S. soil indefinitely without civil process, in addition to expanding the post-9/11 Authorization to Use Military Force and making it harder to transfer detainees out of Guantánamo.
Ten years of the war on terror, decades of the war on drugs, and a century of growing government power in general, particularly in the presidency and various police authorities, have perhaps desensitized Americans to what is at stake here. As the proverbial frogs in the pot of water, we are accustomed to rising temperatures and so do not notice when our flesh begins to boil. Yet when the Senate overwhelmingly accepts the principle that the military should displace civilian courts even for citizens captured on American soil, it has adopted a standard of justice remarkably tyrannical even compared to America’s very rocky history.
In the Civil War, the Lincoln administration detained American citizens without trial. Parts of the country constituting the United States were actually battlegrounds, littered by many thousands of bodies. Congress formally suspended habeas corpus. This was a dramatic move that has been criticized to this day. Yet the Supreme Court ruled in Ex parte Milligan (1866) that even the suspension of habeas corpus did not preclude the federal court system from intervening in the military trial of U.S. citizens, and that such military commissions of U.S. citizens on U.S. soil were unconstitutional so long as the civil courts were operating. Neither Congress nor the president could overturn this constitutional protection, the Court found.
Ah, but those were quaint times. Defenders of the kind of despotic military law being proposed today often say that even citizens do not deserve due process if they are at war with their own country. This is 100% false, at least as far as the Constitution is concerned. Indeed, the founding document of this government requires additional due process to try someone for treason:
Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort. No Person shall be convicted of Treason unless on the Testimony of two Witnesses to the same overt Act, or on Confession in open Court
But this kind of talk seems awfully soft on terrorists, doesn’t it? It is not as though the framers of the Constitution had ever confronted a formidable foreign enemy. It’s only been ten years since 9/11. Of course, by the time the Constitution was ratified, the American Revolution had been over just six years, and in that war about one percent of the American population perished—the proportional equivalent of three million Americans today, or one thousand 9/11s.
Still, this is a new kind of war, as the majority of Senators clearly believe, including almost everyone from the supposed opposition party. An amendment to remove the Levin/McCain language was rejected 61 to 37. Only two Republicans—two!—Rand Paul and Mark Kirk—voted against this blatantly unconstitutional measure for military dictatorship. If anything demonstrates that the leaders of this party claiming to stand for liberty and the rule of law are in fact almost unanimously and adamantly opposed to these principles in the most important imaginable areas, this demonstrates it beyond a reasonable doubt. Indeed, the fact that John McCain, characterized in the 2008 presidential election as a “moderate” among Republicans on questions like torture, backed this bill, should reveal beyond question that had things gone differently in that election, we would not have likely gotten any sort of reprieve from the steady descent toward total tyranny that has characterized the Obama years.
And indeed Obama, for his part, offers no true alternative to the McCain-Republican line of the war on terror. The substance of this bill is essentially in line with everything Obama has done, and, for that matter, what Bush did for eight years, although without formal Congressional codification. Glenn Greenwald notes that the horrifying reality portended in this legislation “more or less describes the status quo. Military custody for accused Terrorists is already a staple of the Obama administration.” Greenwald also helpfully explains that the media’s coverage of the Obama White House’s indications that it might veto this legislation has tended to mischaracterize the situation:
[W]ith a few exceptions, the objections raised by the White House are not grounded in substantive problems with these powers, but rather in the argument that such matters are for the Executive Branch, not the Congress, to decide. In other words, the White House’s objections are grounded in broad theories of Executive Power. They are not arguing: it is wrong to deny accused Terrorists a trial. Instead they insist: whether an accused Terrorist is put in military detention rather than civilian custody is for the President alone to decide.
The United States is not a free country, not even close. There are plenty of worse places in the world, for sure, but a key characteristic of something resembling a free society that adheres to something resembling a rule of law is that the executive branch cannot use the military to indefinitely detain people, regardless of citizenship or location, indefinitely without ever explaining itself to a court or affording the detainee some process to challenge his detention.
Even with such protections, a free country requires more—a functioning legal system that respects property rights and free exchange; civil liberties including free speech and freedom from lawless search and seizure; the freedom of people to control their own bodies, homes, and businesses; protections against involuntary servitude; and a general respect for freedom of association. In all of these areas, America has lost some of its liberties, and they all must be restored if the country is ever going to deserve the label of a “free country.”
Yet one freedom without which the whole concept of liberty is a total mirage, befitting of a black comedy and best affirmed only in Orwellian doublespeak, is the freedom from unjust, lawless, indefinite imprisonment. Since 9/11, the United States has abandoned this principle in many respects. Predictably, it was war—threat of a foreign enemy—that allowed this fundamental freedom to be destroyed, initially in large part for foreigners whose rights and dignity were never even given a significant consideration as thousands were rounded up, many tortured, many killed, many detained to this day for no crime at all but being in the wrong place at the wrong time, whether seized by Pakistani war lords in exchange for American dollars or declared terrorists by a presidential military legal system several of whose own military prosecutors have resigned in disgust with the blatant injustice of the whole enterprise.
American citizenship doesn’t guarantee due process either, of course—it did not for Jose Padilla for almost four years of detention, nor for the citizens currently targeted for assassination by the Nobel Prize-winning Constitutional law professor sitting in the Oval Office. Today we are on the verge of seeing the last bits of this retreat from civilized standards of justice codified into law. Our political culture has degenerated so much that should the courts strike down these developments, I would not be surprised to see the court decisions ignored altogether or, alternatively, a successful effort to amend the Constitution and finally give the president and his military full dictatorial power over the United States.
And for what, may I ask, did Americans finally relinquish this last claim to living under a qualitatively different kind of government from the absolutist monarchies or third-rate communist despotisms that now dot our history books as artifacts of political failure and vast human misery? Oh, that’s right. Because the terrorists hate us for our freedom.
SOURCE
************************
Secretary of Defense Panetta Shows How the Obama Administration Is Selling Out Israel… and US Interests
In a major address on U.S. Middle East policy to the Brookings Institution U.S. Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta gave us a clear picture of the Obama administration’s view of the region. When taken along with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s recent speech on the same subject, we now know the following regarding Obama’s policy:
It is dangerously and absurdly wrong. This administration totally and completely, dangerously and disastrously for U.S. interests misunderstands the Middle East. They are 180 degrees off course, that is heading in the opposite direction of safety.
Despite the satisfactory state of relations on a purely military level, the Obama administration is not a friend of Israel, even to the extent that it was arguably so in the first two years of this presidency.
It is now an enemy; it is on the other side. Again, the issue is not mainly bilateral relations but the administration’s help and encouragement to those forces that are Israel’s biggest enemies, that want to rekindle war, and that are 100 percent against a two-state solution. And I don’t mean the Palestinian Authority, I mean the Islamists.
And the Obama administration is also a strategic enemy of Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Oman, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates, Algeria, Morocco, and Jordan. It is also a strategic enemy to the democratic opposition forces in Iran, Syria, Turkey, Tunisia, and Egypt.
Having analyzed and studied the Middle East for almost four decades I say none of this lightly. And these conclusions arise simply from watching what the administration says and does.
In his speech, Panetta has bashed Israel based on a ridiculously false premise. Here it is:
“I understand the view that this is not the time to pursue peace, and that the Arab awakening further imperils the dream of a safe and secure, Jewish and democratic Israel. But I disagree with that view.” Nevertheless, Israel needs to take risks and particularly, “The problem right now is we can’t get them to the damn table, to at least sit down and begin to discuss their differences.”
First, there is a peculiar phrase that I have not seen used even once to describe the Middle East events of 2011, “Arab awakening” instead of “Arab Spring.” This apparently comes from the title of a new book about these events.
But what is the origin of this phrase? The Arab Awakening was the famous book written by George Antonius (subsidized by a U.S foundation to do so, by the way) advocating Arab nationalism and opposition to Zionism in 1938. The Arab Awakening began a half-century pan-Arab struggle against Israel’s creation or existence. Might this not give us a hint of what the new “Arab Awakening” is going to do? Oh, and 1938 marks the year when Great Britain desperately tried to sell out the Jews in order to gain Arab support (for the coming war with Germany and Italy). Within two years of Antonius’s book the form the Arab Awakening took was an alliance with Nazi Germany. One of the main allies of Berlin was the Muslim Brotherhood, now coming into power in Tunisia and Egypt.
Interesting parallels. But there are three other major questions raised in Panetta’s statement.
First, does the current “Arab Awakening” imperil Israel? Yes, of course it does. By changing a reasonably friendly Egyptian government into a totally hostile Muslim Brotherhood and Salafi dominated political system closely allied with Hamas, the Gaza Strip’s ruler, and by helping establish Islamist regimes in Tunisia and Libya allied with this Muslim Brotherhood International; the changes create a four-member alliance intent on wiping Israel off the map.
Add to that Islamist domination of Lebanon by Hizballah, an Islamist regime in Turkey, and the continuing threat from Iran and you’ve got quite a regional situation.
Second, and more interestingly, why is the above true? The answer is as follows:
Democracy in theory is admirable but when you have masses imbued with very radical views, strong Islamist movements, and weak moderate ones, the election winners will be extremely radical Islamists. By winning massive victories, facing a weak (even sympathetic) United States, and seeing even more extreme forces becoming so popular (the Salafists in Egypt), the Islamists are emboldened to be even more radical in their behavior. Who’s going to stop them?
We are thus not facing a springtime of democracy but a springtime of extremism. The Islamists don’t want peace with Israel on any terms. They want its destruction.
More HERE
*************************
Dear Left: Corporatism Is Your Fault
Dear members of the moderate left,
America is suffering from rampant, run-away corporatism and crony capitalism. We are increasingly a plutocracy in which government serves the interests of elite financiers and CEOs at the expense of everyone else.
You know this and you complain loudly about it. But the problem is your fault. You caused this state of affairs. Stop it.
Unlike we libertarianish people, you people actually hold and have been holding significant political power in the US over the past 50 years. What have you done with this power? You’ve greased the corporatist machine every chance you’ve gotten. You’ve made things worse, not better. Our current problems are your fault. You need to stop.
We told you this would happen, but you wouldn’t listen. You complain, rightly, that regulatory agencies are controlled by the very corporations they are supposed to constrain. Well, yeah, we told you that would happen. When you create power—and you people love to create power—the unscrupulous seek to capture that power for their personal benefit. Time and time again, they succeed. We told you that would happen, and we gave you an accurate account of how it would happen.
You complain, perhaps rightly, that corporations are just too big. Well, yeah, we told you that would happen. When you create complicated tax codes, complicated regulatory regimes, and complicated licensing rules, these regulations naturally select for larger and larger corporations. We told you that would happen. Of course, these increasingly large corporations then capture these rules, codes, and regulations to disadvantage their competitors and exploit the rest of us. We told you that would happen.
It’s not rocket science. It’s public choice economics. You recognized, rightly, that public choice economics was a threat to your ideology. So, you didn’t listen, because you didn’t want to be wrong. Public choice predicted that the government programs you created with the goal of fixing problems would often instead exacerbate those problems. Well, the evidence is in. You were wrong and public choice theory was right. If you have any decency, it is time to admit you were wrong and change. Stop making things worse.
You spent the past fifty years empowering corporations and the most unscrupulous of the rich. You created rampant moral hazard in the financial sector. You created the system that socializes risks but privatizes profit. You created the system that creates a revolving door between Obama’s staff and Goldman Sachs. There’s a reason why Wall Street throws money at Obama. It’s because you, the moderate left, are Wall Street’s biggest supporters. Oh, I know you complain about Wall Street. But your actions speak louder than your words.
SOURCE
**********************
ELSEWHERE
Depression-era labor laws harmful in modern global economy: "Chalk up another 'victory' for unions as American Airlines filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection Tuesday. The reason? High labor costs compared to its competitors. It seems the unions were demanding things such as a 10 percent signing bonus followed by 7 percent raises in each of the next three years for pilots"
The regulatory thicket: "In the seemingly endless debate about how to put Americans back to work, one solution dare not speak its name: deregulation. Yet if implemented correctly, it would provide an almost cost-free stimulus of a trillion dollars or more. According to the Small Business Administration (SBA), the regulatory burden on our economy is a staggering $1.75 trillion annually. The Obama administration is apparently in denial over that figure."
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)
****************************
The Fallacy of Liberal Intelligence
The claim that the Tories are "The stupid party" was political propaganda in 19th century Britain. Liberals think that anyone who disagrees with their utopian schemes to change the world and humanity with it must be stupid. That caution might be smart and lack of it stupid they cannot entertain.
The column below offers some good rejoinders but the best rejoinder to my mind is the fact that about 50% of those in the population with college degrees voted for that "idiot moron numbskull chimpanzee" George Bush Jr. in 2004. Yet people who have college degrees have gone right through the Left-run educational system and been certified by the Leftist professoriat themselves as intellectually accomplished! People whom Leftists themselves certify as the brightest are just as likely to vote Republican as Democrat! So it is demonstrably NOT intellectual accomplishment that differentiates the parties -- JR
By David Bozeman
One of the most annoying axioms in politics is that of the smart liberal/dumb conservative. Look for the media to ramp it up in the coming months, though the notion is so absurd it would be laughable were it not for the fact that so many people buy it. Basically, liberals are not smarter, they just (to borrow an old adage) know more that isn’t true.
Roger Simon recently penned a column on the perceived intellectual shortcomings of the Republican field, quoting Chicago mayor and former Obama advisor Rahm Emanuel (and I’m paraphrasing) that Sarah Palin seems a deep thinker by contrast. Columnist Kathleen Parker, who inexplicably passes for conservative in many papers, recently weighed in on the theme. While she doesn’t buy Paul Begala’s assessment of the GOP as the “stupid party” (and she opines that Begala doesn’t either), she writes that “scientific skepticism, the engine that propels intellectual inquiry, has morphed into the skepticism of science fueled by religious certitude.”
Jon Huntsman, she continues, committed blasphemy by stating that he trusts scientists on global warming. “It takes courage to swim against the tide of know-nothingness that has become de rigueur among the anti-elite, anti-intellectual base. Call it the Palin-ization of the GOP.” Ah, a Palin reference. How original. And by the way, Huntsman may be courageous, that doesn’t make him right.
In a nutshell, the supposed anti-intellectualism of modern conservatives is merely a rebuke of liberal dogma. The left has audaciously declared global warming, to name one issue, a closed subject, despite questionable data and ongoing doubt. Risk being compared to a Holocaust denier — now that’s courageous. British writer and journalist James Delingpole recently described the latest episode of the 2009 Climategate scandal as Climategate II, which he writes “shows the scientists at the heart of the Man-Made Global Warming industry in a most unflattering light.” He notes that the global warming scare is not about science but about political activism. Certainly, whether or not man-made global warming proves to be true, the case is far from closed.
So, could it be that the left does not embrace science so much as junk science? The Paul Begalas of the world hide their statist dreams behind the window-dressing of intellectual pedigree.
How would one of these hardcore advocates of the scientific method react if scientists discovered massive oil reserves off the coasts of Malibu or Martha’s Vineyard? Would they be considered anti-science for barring progress at the expense of their exclusive beachfront getaways?
Could one not make the case that opposing nuclear power is anti-progress and anti-science? Why are liberals, particularly feminists, so quick to shun science when differences in male and female brain structures and aptitudes are merely alluded to? In 2005, Harvard President Larry Summers suggested that males may possess an advantage in mastering science and engineering (while it is widely regarded that females enjoy a similar advantage in verbal and communication skills). After a chorus of outrage and censure by the Faculty of Arts & Sciences, the man lost his job. Now who’s the one committing blasphemy?
Intellectual bravado provides wide latitude for social and economic experimentation and daft verbal cover when things don’t go as planned. Conservatives may appear less intelligent because, in an increasingly complex world, we still defer to common sense, which is rooted in an understanding of human nature.
We are all far from perfect, thus we rely on the time-tested (but less academic) institutions of faith, family, community, limited government and the free market to keep human nature in check.
SOURCE
************************
Despite What You've Heard, Unemployment Rate Rising not Falling
In "Unemployment Rate Dips to 8.6% as 487,000 Drop Out of Labor Force" I presented some quick facts on the drop in the unemployment rate.
In the last year, the civilian population rose by 1,726,000. Yet the labor force fell by 67,000. Those not in the labor force rose by 1,793,000.
In November, those "Not in Labor Force" rose by a whopping 487,000. If you are not in the labor force, you are not counted as unemployed. Were it not for people dropping out of the labor force, the unemployment rate would be well over 11%.
More HERE
*****************************
Obama Abandons the Working Class
An opening for Romney, if he's smart enough
There's a message here for Republicans for 2012. Ironically, it may have been outlined best by two Democratic strategists in a publication for the left-leaning Center for American Progress. In "The Path to 270: Demographics versus Economics in the 2012 Presidential Election," Ruy Teixeira and John Halpin made headlines for making official what everyone has known unofficially for some time: The Democratic Party is abandoning the white working class.
The authors therefore suggest that Mr. Obama's best demographic bet for 2012 lies in holding white college graduates. They are also up front about the vulnerability. Mostly they phrase it politely—"the perceived inability of the Obama administration's policies to spark real recovery"; "serious doubts about Democratic stewardship of the economy"; or "disenchantment on the economy."
That shouldn't be a hard sell in places like Scranton, where the 9.7% unemployment rate is the worst in the state. When the Obama stimulus came, Lackawanna County spent nearly half of the $39 million it received on education, which means teachers. The city has been deemed "financially distressed" for two decades, and just this month the mayor released a new budget that includes a 29% hike in property taxes.
If these citizens weren't bitter before, they sure have reason to be now. For the white working class, the private sector was what gave them jobs and propelled them into the middle class. Yet whether it's drilling for oil or putting up a shopping mall, today's Democratic Party seems opposed to most of the private-sector jobs that deliver opportunity to those without a college degree.
That's an opportunity for Mitt Romney. In these hard economic times, the former Massachusetts governor could be the first Republican in history to benefit from the prejudice that Republicans are the party of business.
Put it this way. If you are a Democrat or independent who has lost confidence in Mr. Obama, what might you like about Mr. Romney? You might like that he's proved himself successful in business. You might find that especially attractive if you are someone who has lost your job or worry that you might lose your job.
Alas for Mr. Romney, the winning message here will not come by accepting Mr. Obama's class approach to tax relief. The way to win is by drawing distinctions—between states that welcome investment and states that drive it away; between states burdened by a politicized and overcompensated public sector and states that are not; between an approach that divides people by race and class and one that emphasizes upward mobility for all.
Above all, the way to win is by asking Americans whether they want a future for their children that looks like Texas and Indiana—or like Michigan and Illinois?
People in places like Scranton are hungry for more than a 59-point business plan. They need an economic vision rooted in an expanding private sector. Mr. Romney appreciates that his success next November would depend in good part on his ability to attract disaffected Democrats and independents. What he may not know is that this will in turn depend on whether he comes across as a successful businessman, or merely a rich one.
SOURCE
***************************
Obama the unready
He wasn’t ready to be a US Senator and he wasn’t ready to be president either. And because some Americans put White Guilt above common sense and thereby elected the most unready of candidates to the office of President of the United States, our economy is at a standstill.
But even more importantly, the country has, under Obama, once again lost a sense of its place and is questioning its historical mission of being the City on a Hill for the rest of the world.
Only 18 percent of Americans now believe that the country is on the right track, according to Rasmussen. The number has never been above 47 percent since Obama took office. The country reached it’s feel good moment at the six-month mark of the Democrat takeover of Congress, and it’s been downhill for Obama ever since. He now faces an 18 precent gap between those who strongly approve of his performance versus those who strongly disapprove according to Rasmussen.
The last time the world was this demoralized, was the last time a Democrat president let things drift because he had no idea how to be president of the United States.
Obama has been lately reprising that president’s “malaise” speech, calling Americans “lazy” and generally bemoaning the country’s lack of direction.
The guy who couldn’t find his way to Congress even if a cruise missile was strapped to his backside recently sympathized with the one-tenth percent of Americans whom Occupy Wall Street think they represent, saying, according to ABCNews: “A lot of the folks who’ve been down in New York and all across the country in the Occupy movement,” says Obama, “there is a profound sense of frustration, a profound sense of frustration about the fact that the essence of the American Dream… feels like it’s slipping away.”
Bravo, Mr. Obama. Terrific job acting like Occupy Wall Street has anything to do with the American Dream. Terrific job pretending like you even understand what the American Dream is about. Spoken like a true, leftist community organizer.
If the American Dream is slipping away, though, the only replacement Obama has offered the country is the lush verbiage from the book Dreams from My Father, a mish-mash of circular logic, an American Oblomov, superfluous, inert and self-absorbed- the inverse actually of the American Dream.
“Congress needs to pass the rest of my American Jobs Act,” said Obama, after Dems and the GOP passed modest legislation aimed at making it easier to hire veterans, “so that we can create jobs and put money in the pockets of the middle class.”
But Obama’s words belie the real trouble with him: He doesn’t really have a Jobs Act. He doesn’t have a budget, a foreign policy, an energy policy, an immigration policy. Instead he only acts like he has some of these.
He’s the incomplete genesis of a community organizer.
But reading words on cue cards prepared by others isn’t a substitute for having a policy; it isn’t the same thing as being president of the United States.
Complicating things for Obama is the dilemma that is that he has never really decided in life who he really is.
“Thomas Aquinas once raised the issue of choosing between a proud man and a pusillanimous one,” writes William Manchester in Goodbye Darkness. “Take the proud one every time, he advised, because you will be sure that he will at least do something.”
Perhaps it’s time for someone to ask the relevant question: Does the life of a community organizer, which is necessarily a parochial endeavor, adequately prepare someone for the job of leading the nation?
At least in the case of Obama, one would have to say no; not because of policy, not because of ideology, not because of point of view, but rather on account of inadequate preparation. When the history of the Obama administration is written, I predict, Americans will be appalled by the pusillanimity of the man once anointed the One.
But that’s not all. Because, he not only lacks the skills, but he also lacks the conviction to be president of the United States.
A man with conviction would be either for or against Occupy Wall Street- or banks or illegal immigrants, etc- not both for and against them at the same time.
That’s what happens when a community organizer wars with the president of the United States, wholly in the person of himself.
It makes for great drama, great acting. But it makes for the poorest possible history.
SOURCE
****************************
Federal Housing Authority May Have 13 Billion More In Losses
The Federal Housing Administration recently gave even odds that it would need a taxpayer bailout within the next year. But the reality is a lot worse, according to one housing expert. "The FHA is effectively insolvent," said Edward Pinto, resident fellow at the conservative American Enterprise Institute. The FHA denies this, calling AEI's claims "irresponsible."
The agency, which insures mortgages, has come under increased scrutiny in the last month after its recent actuarial report suggested there was a 50% chance it would need a bailout sometime next year.
The report also noted that the FHA has a $27 billion negative cash flow in its single-family program, but has $28 billion in total capital resources to offset that.
But Pinto claims that more rigorous accounting paints a bleaker picture. He points out that any private mortgage insurance company would assume that about 55% of the loans delinquent at least 60 days or in foreclosure would go to claim. As of October, FHA had 836,789 loans in that category, totaling $117 billion. Expected claims on that would be about $64.4 billion.
The FHA's most recent loss ratio, how much it pays on claims, was about 63%. That would mean the FHA would need $41 billion to pay claims, $13 billion more than its current assets.
FHA has increased its loan exposure from about $300 billion in late 2007 to more than $1 trillion now in response to private mortgage companies exiting the market in the wake of the housing bust. FHA guaranteed 24% of new mortgages in fiscal 2011 ended Sept. 30. It was 30% in 2010.
FHA's seriously delinquent rate — those loans at least 90 days late or in foreclosure — has grown since FHA has expanded into the mortgage market, from 5.5% at the end of fiscal 2007 to more than 9% in October 2011.
Pinto also notes that 17% of FHA-insured loans are at least 30 days delinquent, up from 16.8% in September. The delinquency rate for all home loans is 12.4%, according to the latest figures from the Mortgage Bankers Association.
FHA capital reserves were only about 0.24% of loan amounts as of September vs. about 0.5% a year earlier. Congress mandates a modest 2%. HUD Secretary Shaun Donovan told lawmakers Thursday that FHA may need to raise insurance premiums for the fourth time since 2010.
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)
****************************
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)
****************************
The claim that the Tories are "The stupid party" was political propaganda in 19th century Britain. Liberals think that anyone who disagrees with their utopian schemes to change the world and humanity with it must be stupid. That caution might be smart and lack of it stupid they cannot entertain.
The column below offers some good rejoinders but the best rejoinder to my mind is the fact that about 50% of those in the population with college degrees voted for that "idiot moron numbskull chimpanzee" George Bush Jr. in 2004. Yet people who have college degrees have gone right through the Left-run educational system and been certified by the Leftist professoriat themselves as intellectually accomplished! People whom Leftists themselves certify as the brightest are just as likely to vote Republican as Democrat! So it is demonstrably NOT intellectual accomplishment that differentiates the parties -- JR
By David Bozeman
One of the most annoying axioms in politics is that of the smart liberal/dumb conservative. Look for the media to ramp it up in the coming months, though the notion is so absurd it would be laughable were it not for the fact that so many people buy it. Basically, liberals are not smarter, they just (to borrow an old adage) know more that isn’t true.
Roger Simon recently penned a column on the perceived intellectual shortcomings of the Republican field, quoting Chicago mayor and former Obama advisor Rahm Emanuel (and I’m paraphrasing) that Sarah Palin seems a deep thinker by contrast. Columnist Kathleen Parker, who inexplicably passes for conservative in many papers, recently weighed in on the theme. While she doesn’t buy Paul Begala’s assessment of the GOP as the “stupid party” (and she opines that Begala doesn’t either), she writes that “scientific skepticism, the engine that propels intellectual inquiry, has morphed into the skepticism of science fueled by religious certitude.”
Jon Huntsman, she continues, committed blasphemy by stating that he trusts scientists on global warming. “It takes courage to swim against the tide of know-nothingness that has become de rigueur among the anti-elite, anti-intellectual base. Call it the Palin-ization of the GOP.” Ah, a Palin reference. How original. And by the way, Huntsman may be courageous, that doesn’t make him right.
In a nutshell, the supposed anti-intellectualism of modern conservatives is merely a rebuke of liberal dogma. The left has audaciously declared global warming, to name one issue, a closed subject, despite questionable data and ongoing doubt. Risk being compared to a Holocaust denier — now that’s courageous. British writer and journalist James Delingpole recently described the latest episode of the 2009 Climategate scandal as Climategate II, which he writes “shows the scientists at the heart of the Man-Made Global Warming industry in a most unflattering light.” He notes that the global warming scare is not about science but about political activism. Certainly, whether or not man-made global warming proves to be true, the case is far from closed.
So, could it be that the left does not embrace science so much as junk science? The Paul Begalas of the world hide their statist dreams behind the window-dressing of intellectual pedigree.
How would one of these hardcore advocates of the scientific method react if scientists discovered massive oil reserves off the coasts of Malibu or Martha’s Vineyard? Would they be considered anti-science for barring progress at the expense of their exclusive beachfront getaways?
Could one not make the case that opposing nuclear power is anti-progress and anti-science? Why are liberals, particularly feminists, so quick to shun science when differences in male and female brain structures and aptitudes are merely alluded to? In 2005, Harvard President Larry Summers suggested that males may possess an advantage in mastering science and engineering (while it is widely regarded that females enjoy a similar advantage in verbal and communication skills). After a chorus of outrage and censure by the Faculty of Arts & Sciences, the man lost his job. Now who’s the one committing blasphemy?
Intellectual bravado provides wide latitude for social and economic experimentation and daft verbal cover when things don’t go as planned. Conservatives may appear less intelligent because, in an increasingly complex world, we still defer to common sense, which is rooted in an understanding of human nature.
We are all far from perfect, thus we rely on the time-tested (but less academic) institutions of faith, family, community, limited government and the free market to keep human nature in check.
SOURCE
************************
Despite What You've Heard, Unemployment Rate Rising not Falling
In "Unemployment Rate Dips to 8.6% as 487,000 Drop Out of Labor Force" I presented some quick facts on the drop in the unemployment rate.
In the last year, the civilian population rose by 1,726,000. Yet the labor force fell by 67,000. Those not in the labor force rose by 1,793,000.
In November, those "Not in Labor Force" rose by a whopping 487,000. If you are not in the labor force, you are not counted as unemployed. Were it not for people dropping out of the labor force, the unemployment rate would be well over 11%.
More HERE
*****************************
Obama Abandons the Working Class
An opening for Romney, if he's smart enough
There's a message here for Republicans for 2012. Ironically, it may have been outlined best by two Democratic strategists in a publication for the left-leaning Center for American Progress. In "The Path to 270: Demographics versus Economics in the 2012 Presidential Election," Ruy Teixeira and John Halpin made headlines for making official what everyone has known unofficially for some time: The Democratic Party is abandoning the white working class.
The authors therefore suggest that Mr. Obama's best demographic bet for 2012 lies in holding white college graduates. They are also up front about the vulnerability. Mostly they phrase it politely—"the perceived inability of the Obama administration's policies to spark real recovery"; "serious doubts about Democratic stewardship of the economy"; or "disenchantment on the economy."
That shouldn't be a hard sell in places like Scranton, where the 9.7% unemployment rate is the worst in the state. When the Obama stimulus came, Lackawanna County spent nearly half of the $39 million it received on education, which means teachers. The city has been deemed "financially distressed" for two decades, and just this month the mayor released a new budget that includes a 29% hike in property taxes.
If these citizens weren't bitter before, they sure have reason to be now. For the white working class, the private sector was what gave them jobs and propelled them into the middle class. Yet whether it's drilling for oil or putting up a shopping mall, today's Democratic Party seems opposed to most of the private-sector jobs that deliver opportunity to those without a college degree.
That's an opportunity for Mitt Romney. In these hard economic times, the former Massachusetts governor could be the first Republican in history to benefit from the prejudice that Republicans are the party of business.
Put it this way. If you are a Democrat or independent who has lost confidence in Mr. Obama, what might you like about Mr. Romney? You might like that he's proved himself successful in business. You might find that especially attractive if you are someone who has lost your job or worry that you might lose your job.
Alas for Mr. Romney, the winning message here will not come by accepting Mr. Obama's class approach to tax relief. The way to win is by drawing distinctions—between states that welcome investment and states that drive it away; between states burdened by a politicized and overcompensated public sector and states that are not; between an approach that divides people by race and class and one that emphasizes upward mobility for all.
Above all, the way to win is by asking Americans whether they want a future for their children that looks like Texas and Indiana—or like Michigan and Illinois?
People in places like Scranton are hungry for more than a 59-point business plan. They need an economic vision rooted in an expanding private sector. Mr. Romney appreciates that his success next November would depend in good part on his ability to attract disaffected Democrats and independents. What he may not know is that this will in turn depend on whether he comes across as a successful businessman, or merely a rich one.
SOURCE
***************************
Obama the unready
He wasn’t ready to be a US Senator and he wasn’t ready to be president either. And because some Americans put White Guilt above common sense and thereby elected the most unready of candidates to the office of President of the United States, our economy is at a standstill.
But even more importantly, the country has, under Obama, once again lost a sense of its place and is questioning its historical mission of being the City on a Hill for the rest of the world.
Only 18 percent of Americans now believe that the country is on the right track, according to Rasmussen. The number has never been above 47 percent since Obama took office. The country reached it’s feel good moment at the six-month mark of the Democrat takeover of Congress, and it’s been downhill for Obama ever since. He now faces an 18 precent gap between those who strongly approve of his performance versus those who strongly disapprove according to Rasmussen.
The last time the world was this demoralized, was the last time a Democrat president let things drift because he had no idea how to be president of the United States.
Obama has been lately reprising that president’s “malaise” speech, calling Americans “lazy” and generally bemoaning the country’s lack of direction.
The guy who couldn’t find his way to Congress even if a cruise missile was strapped to his backside recently sympathized with the one-tenth percent of Americans whom Occupy Wall Street think they represent, saying, according to ABCNews: “A lot of the folks who’ve been down in New York and all across the country in the Occupy movement,” says Obama, “there is a profound sense of frustration, a profound sense of frustration about the fact that the essence of the American Dream… feels like it’s slipping away.”
Bravo, Mr. Obama. Terrific job acting like Occupy Wall Street has anything to do with the American Dream. Terrific job pretending like you even understand what the American Dream is about. Spoken like a true, leftist community organizer.
If the American Dream is slipping away, though, the only replacement Obama has offered the country is the lush verbiage from the book Dreams from My Father, a mish-mash of circular logic, an American Oblomov, superfluous, inert and self-absorbed- the inverse actually of the American Dream.
“Congress needs to pass the rest of my American Jobs Act,” said Obama, after Dems and the GOP passed modest legislation aimed at making it easier to hire veterans, “so that we can create jobs and put money in the pockets of the middle class.”
But Obama’s words belie the real trouble with him: He doesn’t really have a Jobs Act. He doesn’t have a budget, a foreign policy, an energy policy, an immigration policy. Instead he only acts like he has some of these.
He’s the incomplete genesis of a community organizer.
But reading words on cue cards prepared by others isn’t a substitute for having a policy; it isn’t the same thing as being president of the United States.
Complicating things for Obama is the dilemma that is that he has never really decided in life who he really is.
“Thomas Aquinas once raised the issue of choosing between a proud man and a pusillanimous one,” writes William Manchester in Goodbye Darkness. “Take the proud one every time, he advised, because you will be sure that he will at least do something.”
Perhaps it’s time for someone to ask the relevant question: Does the life of a community organizer, which is necessarily a parochial endeavor, adequately prepare someone for the job of leading the nation?
At least in the case of Obama, one would have to say no; not because of policy, not because of ideology, not because of point of view, but rather on account of inadequate preparation. When the history of the Obama administration is written, I predict, Americans will be appalled by the pusillanimity of the man once anointed the One.
But that’s not all. Because, he not only lacks the skills, but he also lacks the conviction to be president of the United States.
A man with conviction would be either for or against Occupy Wall Street- or banks or illegal immigrants, etc- not both for and against them at the same time.
That’s what happens when a community organizer wars with the president of the United States, wholly in the person of himself.
It makes for great drama, great acting. But it makes for the poorest possible history.
SOURCE
****************************
Federal Housing Authority May Have 13 Billion More In Losses
The Federal Housing Administration recently gave even odds that it would need a taxpayer bailout within the next year. But the reality is a lot worse, according to one housing expert. "The FHA is effectively insolvent," said Edward Pinto, resident fellow at the conservative American Enterprise Institute. The FHA denies this, calling AEI's claims "irresponsible."
The agency, which insures mortgages, has come under increased scrutiny in the last month after its recent actuarial report suggested there was a 50% chance it would need a bailout sometime next year.
The report also noted that the FHA has a $27 billion negative cash flow in its single-family program, but has $28 billion in total capital resources to offset that.
But Pinto claims that more rigorous accounting paints a bleaker picture. He points out that any private mortgage insurance company would assume that about 55% of the loans delinquent at least 60 days or in foreclosure would go to claim. As of October, FHA had 836,789 loans in that category, totaling $117 billion. Expected claims on that would be about $64.4 billion.
The FHA's most recent loss ratio, how much it pays on claims, was about 63%. That would mean the FHA would need $41 billion to pay claims, $13 billion more than its current assets.
FHA has increased its loan exposure from about $300 billion in late 2007 to more than $1 trillion now in response to private mortgage companies exiting the market in the wake of the housing bust. FHA guaranteed 24% of new mortgages in fiscal 2011 ended Sept. 30. It was 30% in 2010.
FHA's seriously delinquent rate — those loans at least 90 days late or in foreclosure — has grown since FHA has expanded into the mortgage market, from 5.5% at the end of fiscal 2007 to more than 9% in October 2011.
Pinto also notes that 17% of FHA-insured loans are at least 30 days delinquent, up from 16.8% in September. The delinquency rate for all home loans is 12.4%, according to the latest figures from the Mortgage Bankers Association.
FHA capital reserves were only about 0.24% of loan amounts as of September vs. about 0.5% a year earlier. Congress mandates a modest 2%. HUD Secretary Shaun Donovan told lawmakers Thursday that FHA may need to raise insurance premiums for the fourth time since 2010.
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)
****************************
The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist" (Nationalsozialist) and the full name of Hitler's political party (translated) was "The National Socialist German Workers' Party" (In German: Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei)
****************************
Saturday, December 03, 2011
Left-sympathizing big businessmen trying to pass the buck
They blame capitalism for the extraordinarily high incomes received by many big-business chiefs and say it will provoke unrest. But many of the high incomes originate in firms that were bailed out by the government or have a cosy relationship with government.
So the high incomes concerned are not the fault of capitalism but the fault of corporatism -- the intimate connection between government and big business that Mussolini rightly envisaged as dominating the 20th century and beyond. To put it bluntly, it is our present neo-Fascist system that is creating dangerous strains, not capitalism.
If none of the big banks and other financial institutions had been bailed out and gone broke instead, most of those big incomes would have vanished too. Capitalism was not allowed to do its work of creative destruction. It is a turning back to real capitalism that is needed -- JR
A review of Capitalism at Risk: Rethinking the Role of Business
Three professors from the world's pre-eminent business school have co-written a study that at first blush seems to fall more in the genre of horror tale than business text.
Professor Bower and his colleagues note in their study the broad concerns of the 46 business thinkers that they brought together in forums on three continents, but by far the most widely held was "the tendency of capitalism, as it currently functions, to produce extreme disparities of income and wealth".
It took little to conclude that the vast accumulation of wealth by individuals compared with the stagnating fortunes of low- and middle-income workers is fuelling the backlash worldwide.
"Some leaders pointed to what they regard as excessive compensation earned by CEOs [that] strike many people as intrinsically unjustified," the authors write. The reality of growing disparities - one that is the crux of political debate within Western democracies - poses questions about capitalism's very raison d'etre.
One unidentified Asian business leader told the authors: "Herein lies a major challenge, because the world has become very much more prosperous as a result of market capitalism.
"The rich have become richer. The poor in most cases have become richer. But the gap between the rich and the poor has also grown wider … There is the growing sense of being left out, even as people are getting better off."
A European executive said: "What was the good of capitalism? Was it the fact that we were building a very large, very well-off … middle class? We are not doing this any more."
And in the US, a chief executive told the authors: "It's undeniable that in a country like ours, unfettered capitalist impulse on a global basis does seem to exacerbate the problem."
Joining the discussions were executives such as Jeffrey Immelt of General Electric, John Elkann of Fiat and Bertrand Collomb of the French group Lafarge. They included bankers and financiers, as well as the heads of conglomerates and the former US labour secretary, Elaine Chao.
That capitalism has delivered for billions is not at issue: in the last decades of the 20th century, 97per cent of countries enjoyed increased wealth, according to the World Bank. More than 450 million people were lifted out of extreme poverty.
But the executives also cited as potential threats the powerful forces within financial markets, environmental degradation, political populism, terrorism and war, fundamentalism, mass migration and pandemics.
They are quoted anonymously throughout the work.
"History tells us that when an awful lot of people are disenfranchised, they have no incentive to play by the rules, and given today's communications availability, weaponry … that's an issue we have to really think about, probably over a very long period of time," one executive said.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, given that many were the beneficiaries of fabulous remuneration, the business leaders do not appear to offer easy solutions to bridging inequalities. But they back business, not government, largely to ameliorate strains on the system.
More HERE
**************************
Ron Paul, the prophet not honoured in his own country
Internet conspiracy theorist? No, Ron Paul, candidate for Republican presidential nomination. Those words were from a speech to Congress in 2008 urging a "no" vote on TARP, the Mother of All Bailouts.
Three years later, with the crisis switching up a gear from banks to sovereigns and Europe teetering, Paul predicted "they will probably bail out Europe next".
That they did. This week, the Fed led a coterie of central banks in a dramatic market intervention which cut the cost of US dollar funding to European banks in half. Drunk on this latest round of credit shots, world stockmarkets popped up 5 per cent, as they do every time the Fed cranks up the presses.
Ron Paul was predictably unimpressed: "Bankers should take their dreaded haircut rather than making innocent people pay for their mistakes. The losses should be limited and liquidated, rather than perpetuated and rewarded. This is the only way we can recover."
Time wins more converts than reason. Despite being ignored by the mainstream media for years, Paul is now running between second and fifth in the polls for the Republican presidential nomination.
After a recent TV debate, host network CNBC took down an internet poll which had Ron Paul thrashing his rivals. His supporters were "gaming" the poll, said the network. There was no evidence.
A civil libertarian and stickler for the constitution, Ron Paul voted against Dubya's invasion of Iraq, the Patriot Act and the TARP bailout. He wants Fort Knox and the Federal Reserve audited, and the gold standard returned.
Needless to say both Wall Street and the military industrial complex - and Republicans and Democrats - are equally leery.
Fox News, which is pushing Newt Gingrich, gave Paul a spot of airtime the other day. A Barbie-blonde presenter attempted to fit him up with a sex scandal of the confected "do you deny…?" genre. It backfired.
The presenter simply couldn't nail him as Paul a) doesn't have that "girls in the hot-tub" look about him, b) has a penchant for telling the truth, and c) displays the uncommon trait of common sense.
They haven't been able to snare or discredit him yet, so they ignore him so assiduously that people are beginning to suspect he must be onto something.
He is fond of pointing to paradox, for instance the Fed lending to the banks at close to zero and then the banks lending it back to the government at 3 per cent - by buying Treasury bonds - after the government has given it to the Fed in the first place for free (by expanding the Fed's balance sheet).
If Ron Paul looked prescient for his call on Europe this week there was sure-fire vindication after the Bloomberg news agency won its freedom of information lawsuit against the Fed and revealed the central bank had funnelled $US13 billion in funds to US banks without disclosing it to Congress.
Bear in mind the Fed, unlike other reserve banks, is owned by private banks. Wall Street if you like. The Fed and the big banks fought for more than two years to keep details of the largest bailout in US history a secret. Now the rest of the world can see what it was missing.
The Fed didn't tell anyone which banks were in trouble so deep they required a combined $US1.2 trillion on December 5, 2008, their single neediest day.
The abuses are legion, well worth a read. Morgan Stanley, for instance, took $US107 billion in Fed loans in September 2008, "enough to pay off one-tenth of the country's delinquent mortgages" while it was telling everybody it was healthy. That was before TARP.
The rub with hiding things, with lax accountability, is that confidence in public institutions suffers. Indeed the capitalist system is based on trust, trust that a counterparty will pay, that an institution won't run off with your money, that you are being told the truth.
SOURCE
************************
More doubts about the Breivik diagnosis
In Norway, an insanity defense requires a defendant be psychotic - so out of touch he cannot control his own actions - while committing a crime. Somehow this week, two forensic psychiatrists determined that Anders Behring Breivik, 32, was insane when he methodically killed 77 people on July 22.
Breivik has admitted that he set off a car bomb in Oslo, killing eight, then gunned down 69 people, mostly teenagers, on an island summer camp. But he has refused to plead guilty on the grounds that his actions were "atrocious but necessary" in service to his crusade to "save" Europe from Marxism and a "Muslim invasion."
The maximum criminal sentence in Norway is 21 years - although authorities can extend prison time for those deemed to be a danger to society. Thus Breivik had reason to believe that, disguised as a police officer, he could shoot up a camp full of teenagers, lay down his weapons and surrender - and he still might go free in his 50s.
If the forensics board backs up the insanity finding, a court could commit Breivik to three years of psychiatric care. It's unlikely, but he could be out in his 30s.
In an e-mail, University of Oslo psychology Professor Svenn Torgersen explained, "At least every three years, he can be assessed. If he is non-psychotic, and in addition considered no threat to other people, he will be free, and no new court case. Yes, many psychiatrists and psychologists are surprised."
Prosecutor Svein Holden supported the "delusional" finding as he told reporters that Breivik's "thoughts and acts are governed by this universe." And: "He sees himself as chosen to decide who shall live and who shall die, and that he is chosen to save what he calls his people."
Swedish forensic psychiatrist Anders Forsman, however, told the Associated Press, "It is difficult to see this as criminal insanity. He seems to have carried out the killings in a rational way. He is an efficient killing machine."
Consider these words from Breivik's terrorist manifesto: "Once you decide to strike, it is better to kill too many than not enough, or you risk reducing the desired ideological impact of the strike." For a man not in control of his thoughts or actions, he sure did what he wanted to do.
News accounts indicate that Norwegians could accept an insanity finding as long as Breivik spends the rest of his life in government custody. But Oslo deliberately prohibits life sentences, even for the most heinous crimes. Politicians boast about the nation's humane criminal justice system with its commitment to redemption.
SOURCE
***************************
Israel hobbling Iranian nuke threat
AN IRANIAN nuclear facility has been hit by a huge explosion, the second such blast in a month, prompting speculation that Tehran's military and atomic sites are under attack.
Satellite imagery seen by The Times confirmed that a blast that rocked the city of Isfahan on Monday struck the uranium enrichment facility there, despite denials by Tehran.
The images clearly showed billowing smoke and destruction, negating Iranian claims yesterday that no such explosion had taken place. Israeli intelligence officials told The Times that there was "no doubt" that the blast struck the nuclear facilities at Isfahan and that it was "no accident".
The explosion at Iran's third-largest city came as satellite images emerged of the damage caused by one at a military base outside Tehran two weeks ago that killed about 30 members of the Revolutionary Guard, including General Hassan Moghaddam, the head of the Iranian missile defence program.
Iran claimed that the Tehran explosion occurred during testing on a new weapons system designed to strike at Israel. But several Israeli officials have confirmed that the blast was intentional and part of an effort to target Iran's nuclear weapons program.
A former Israeli intelligence official cited at least two other explosions that have "successfully neutralised" Iranian bases associated with the Shahab-3, the medium-range missile that could be adapted to carry a nuclear warhead. "This is something everyone in the West wanted to see happen," he added.
More HERE
***************************
Republicans aim to quash new union rules
Republicans are maneuvering to short-circuit an effort by Democrats on the National Labor Relations Board to approve rules that would quicken the pace of union elections.
The GOP member of the labor board is threatening to resign his post, which would deny the board a quorum and quash the entire process. At the same time, the House is poised Wednesday to approve a GOP bill aimed at short-circuiting moves they consider anti-business. That measure is unlikely to go anywhere in the Senate.
The developments are the latest sign of how intensely business groups are opposing any moves that could help organized labor make new inroads at companies that have long opposed unions.
At the labor board, the Democratic majority was set to take up a proposal Wednesday that would simplify procedures and shorten deadlines for holding union elections after employees at a work site gather enough signatures.
More HERE
******************************
ELSEWHERE
Leaping toward the Keynesian Dream: "The Fed’s latest inflationary scheme sounds like a technocratic innovation. It lowered the costs of currency swaps between central banks of the world, with the idea that the Fed would do for the globe what Europe, England and China are too shy to do, which is run the printing presses 24/7 to bail out failing institutions and economies. In effect, the Fed has promised to be the lender of last resort for the entire global economy."
Plundering wealth vs producing wealth: "In recent decades, the rich have gathered an increasing share of the total wealth in the United States. As this wealth disparity grows and especially as large numbers of the formerly middle class fall into poverty and even into homelessness, this flow of wealth from main street (from anyone not seriously wealthy) to those who already have extreme wealth, becomes more obvious -- and more suspect."
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)
****************************
They blame capitalism for the extraordinarily high incomes received by many big-business chiefs and say it will provoke unrest. But many of the high incomes originate in firms that were bailed out by the government or have a cosy relationship with government.
So the high incomes concerned are not the fault of capitalism but the fault of corporatism -- the intimate connection between government and big business that Mussolini rightly envisaged as dominating the 20th century and beyond. To put it bluntly, it is our present neo-Fascist system that is creating dangerous strains, not capitalism.
If none of the big banks and other financial institutions had been bailed out and gone broke instead, most of those big incomes would have vanished too. Capitalism was not allowed to do its work of creative destruction. It is a turning back to real capitalism that is needed -- JR
A review of Capitalism at Risk: Rethinking the Role of Business
Three professors from the world's pre-eminent business school have co-written a study that at first blush seems to fall more in the genre of horror tale than business text.
Professor Bower and his colleagues note in their study the broad concerns of the 46 business thinkers that they brought together in forums on three continents, but by far the most widely held was "the tendency of capitalism, as it currently functions, to produce extreme disparities of income and wealth".
It took little to conclude that the vast accumulation of wealth by individuals compared with the stagnating fortunes of low- and middle-income workers is fuelling the backlash worldwide.
"Some leaders pointed to what they regard as excessive compensation earned by CEOs [that] strike many people as intrinsically unjustified," the authors write. The reality of growing disparities - one that is the crux of political debate within Western democracies - poses questions about capitalism's very raison d'etre.
One unidentified Asian business leader told the authors: "Herein lies a major challenge, because the world has become very much more prosperous as a result of market capitalism.
"The rich have become richer. The poor in most cases have become richer. But the gap between the rich and the poor has also grown wider … There is the growing sense of being left out, even as people are getting better off."
A European executive said: "What was the good of capitalism? Was it the fact that we were building a very large, very well-off … middle class? We are not doing this any more."
And in the US, a chief executive told the authors: "It's undeniable that in a country like ours, unfettered capitalist impulse on a global basis does seem to exacerbate the problem."
Joining the discussions were executives such as Jeffrey Immelt of General Electric, John Elkann of Fiat and Bertrand Collomb of the French group Lafarge. They included bankers and financiers, as well as the heads of conglomerates and the former US labour secretary, Elaine Chao.
That capitalism has delivered for billions is not at issue: in the last decades of the 20th century, 97per cent of countries enjoyed increased wealth, according to the World Bank. More than 450 million people were lifted out of extreme poverty.
But the executives also cited as potential threats the powerful forces within financial markets, environmental degradation, political populism, terrorism and war, fundamentalism, mass migration and pandemics.
They are quoted anonymously throughout the work.
"History tells us that when an awful lot of people are disenfranchised, they have no incentive to play by the rules, and given today's communications availability, weaponry … that's an issue we have to really think about, probably over a very long period of time," one executive said.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, given that many were the beneficiaries of fabulous remuneration, the business leaders do not appear to offer easy solutions to bridging inequalities. But they back business, not government, largely to ameliorate strains on the system.
More HERE
**************************
Ron Paul, the prophet not honoured in his own country
"The problem came about because we spent too much, we borrowed too much, we printed too much money, we inflated too much and we over-regulated. We are looking at the collapsing of a market which is unstable. It is unstable because of the way it came about. It came about because of the monopoly control of money and credit by the Federal Reserve system and that is a natural consequence of what happens when the Federal Reserve system creates too much credit."
Internet conspiracy theorist? No, Ron Paul, candidate for Republican presidential nomination. Those words were from a speech to Congress in 2008 urging a "no" vote on TARP, the Mother of All Bailouts.
Three years later, with the crisis switching up a gear from banks to sovereigns and Europe teetering, Paul predicted "they will probably bail out Europe next".
That they did. This week, the Fed led a coterie of central banks in a dramatic market intervention which cut the cost of US dollar funding to European banks in half. Drunk on this latest round of credit shots, world stockmarkets popped up 5 per cent, as they do every time the Fed cranks up the presses.
Ron Paul was predictably unimpressed: "Bankers should take their dreaded haircut rather than making innocent people pay for their mistakes. The losses should be limited and liquidated, rather than perpetuated and rewarded. This is the only way we can recover."
Time wins more converts than reason. Despite being ignored by the mainstream media for years, Paul is now running between second and fifth in the polls for the Republican presidential nomination.
After a recent TV debate, host network CNBC took down an internet poll which had Ron Paul thrashing his rivals. His supporters were "gaming" the poll, said the network. There was no evidence.
A civil libertarian and stickler for the constitution, Ron Paul voted against Dubya's invasion of Iraq, the Patriot Act and the TARP bailout. He wants Fort Knox and the Federal Reserve audited, and the gold standard returned.
Needless to say both Wall Street and the military industrial complex - and Republicans and Democrats - are equally leery.
Fox News, which is pushing Newt Gingrich, gave Paul a spot of airtime the other day. A Barbie-blonde presenter attempted to fit him up with a sex scandal of the confected "do you deny…?" genre. It backfired.
The presenter simply couldn't nail him as Paul a) doesn't have that "girls in the hot-tub" look about him, b) has a penchant for telling the truth, and c) displays the uncommon trait of common sense.
They haven't been able to snare or discredit him yet, so they ignore him so assiduously that people are beginning to suspect he must be onto something.
He is fond of pointing to paradox, for instance the Fed lending to the banks at close to zero and then the banks lending it back to the government at 3 per cent - by buying Treasury bonds - after the government has given it to the Fed in the first place for free (by expanding the Fed's balance sheet).
If Ron Paul looked prescient for his call on Europe this week there was sure-fire vindication after the Bloomberg news agency won its freedom of information lawsuit against the Fed and revealed the central bank had funnelled $US13 billion in funds to US banks without disclosing it to Congress.
Bear in mind the Fed, unlike other reserve banks, is owned by private banks. Wall Street if you like. The Fed and the big banks fought for more than two years to keep details of the largest bailout in US history a secret. Now the rest of the world can see what it was missing.
The Fed didn't tell anyone which banks were in trouble so deep they required a combined $US1.2 trillion on December 5, 2008, their single neediest day.
The abuses are legion, well worth a read. Morgan Stanley, for instance, took $US107 billion in Fed loans in September 2008, "enough to pay off one-tenth of the country's delinquent mortgages" while it was telling everybody it was healthy. That was before TARP.
The rub with hiding things, with lax accountability, is that confidence in public institutions suffers. Indeed the capitalist system is based on trust, trust that a counterparty will pay, that an institution won't run off with your money, that you are being told the truth.
SOURCE
************************
More doubts about the Breivik diagnosis
In Norway, an insanity defense requires a defendant be psychotic - so out of touch he cannot control his own actions - while committing a crime. Somehow this week, two forensic psychiatrists determined that Anders Behring Breivik, 32, was insane when he methodically killed 77 people on July 22.
Breivik has admitted that he set off a car bomb in Oslo, killing eight, then gunned down 69 people, mostly teenagers, on an island summer camp. But he has refused to plead guilty on the grounds that his actions were "atrocious but necessary" in service to his crusade to "save" Europe from Marxism and a "Muslim invasion."
The maximum criminal sentence in Norway is 21 years - although authorities can extend prison time for those deemed to be a danger to society. Thus Breivik had reason to believe that, disguised as a police officer, he could shoot up a camp full of teenagers, lay down his weapons and surrender - and he still might go free in his 50s.
If the forensics board backs up the insanity finding, a court could commit Breivik to three years of psychiatric care. It's unlikely, but he could be out in his 30s.
In an e-mail, University of Oslo psychology Professor Svenn Torgersen explained, "At least every three years, he can be assessed. If he is non-psychotic, and in addition considered no threat to other people, he will be free, and no new court case. Yes, many psychiatrists and psychologists are surprised."
Prosecutor Svein Holden supported the "delusional" finding as he told reporters that Breivik's "thoughts and acts are governed by this universe." And: "He sees himself as chosen to decide who shall live and who shall die, and that he is chosen to save what he calls his people."
Swedish forensic psychiatrist Anders Forsman, however, told the Associated Press, "It is difficult to see this as criminal insanity. He seems to have carried out the killings in a rational way. He is an efficient killing machine."
Consider these words from Breivik's terrorist manifesto: "Once you decide to strike, it is better to kill too many than not enough, or you risk reducing the desired ideological impact of the strike." For a man not in control of his thoughts or actions, he sure did what he wanted to do.
News accounts indicate that Norwegians could accept an insanity finding as long as Breivik spends the rest of his life in government custody. But Oslo deliberately prohibits life sentences, even for the most heinous crimes. Politicians boast about the nation's humane criminal justice system with its commitment to redemption.
SOURCE
***************************
Israel hobbling Iranian nuke threat
AN IRANIAN nuclear facility has been hit by a huge explosion, the second such blast in a month, prompting speculation that Tehran's military and atomic sites are under attack.
Satellite imagery seen by The Times confirmed that a blast that rocked the city of Isfahan on Monday struck the uranium enrichment facility there, despite denials by Tehran.
The images clearly showed billowing smoke and destruction, negating Iranian claims yesterday that no such explosion had taken place. Israeli intelligence officials told The Times that there was "no doubt" that the blast struck the nuclear facilities at Isfahan and that it was "no accident".
The explosion at Iran's third-largest city came as satellite images emerged of the damage caused by one at a military base outside Tehran two weeks ago that killed about 30 members of the Revolutionary Guard, including General Hassan Moghaddam, the head of the Iranian missile defence program.
Iran claimed that the Tehran explosion occurred during testing on a new weapons system designed to strike at Israel. But several Israeli officials have confirmed that the blast was intentional and part of an effort to target Iran's nuclear weapons program.
A former Israeli intelligence official cited at least two other explosions that have "successfully neutralised" Iranian bases associated with the Shahab-3, the medium-range missile that could be adapted to carry a nuclear warhead. "This is something everyone in the West wanted to see happen," he added.
More HERE
***************************
Republicans aim to quash new union rules
Republicans are maneuvering to short-circuit an effort by Democrats on the National Labor Relations Board to approve rules that would quicken the pace of union elections.
The GOP member of the labor board is threatening to resign his post, which would deny the board a quorum and quash the entire process. At the same time, the House is poised Wednesday to approve a GOP bill aimed at short-circuiting moves they consider anti-business. That measure is unlikely to go anywhere in the Senate.
The developments are the latest sign of how intensely business groups are opposing any moves that could help organized labor make new inroads at companies that have long opposed unions.
At the labor board, the Democratic majority was set to take up a proposal Wednesday that would simplify procedures and shorten deadlines for holding union elections after employees at a work site gather enough signatures.
More HERE
******************************
ELSEWHERE
Leaping toward the Keynesian Dream: "The Fed’s latest inflationary scheme sounds like a technocratic innovation. It lowered the costs of currency swaps between central banks of the world, with the idea that the Fed would do for the globe what Europe, England and China are too shy to do, which is run the printing presses 24/7 to bail out failing institutions and economies. In effect, the Fed has promised to be the lender of last resort for the entire global economy."
Plundering wealth vs producing wealth: "In recent decades, the rich have gathered an increasing share of the total wealth in the United States. As this wealth disparity grows and especially as large numbers of the formerly middle class fall into poverty and even into homelessness, this flow of wealth from main street (from anyone not seriously wealthy) to those who already have extreme wealth, becomes more obvious -- and more suspect."
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)
****************************
Friday, December 02, 2011
The computerization scam
Governments seem to be suckers for computer salesmen who tell them that computerizing their operations will save them money and allow them to operate more efficiently.
It doesn’t happen. The one certainty is that the process will cost way more than budgeted and the big uncertainty is whether it will work at all. I could give innumerable examples but the one that stands out is Britain’s experience of linking all their government hospitals into one network with all the records of all the patients in the country on it. The Brits spent over 12 BILLION pounds over a period of about a decade on it. It never worked and has just recently been scrapped
Unbelievably in the circumstances, computerization is one of the far-fetched dreams of Obamacare. You would think the British experience would have engendered caution but it has not.
One of my readers is an anesthesiologist who is a computer enthusiast and an instructor for Electronic Hospital Records. He reports below one of the more successful uses of computerization in hospitals.
Its limited degree of success stems largely from the fact that a “tried and true” system was bought “off the shelf”. It is when governments order an entirely new system for themselves that the woes often become insurmountable:
****************************
More on Breivik's "symptoms"
It is a symptom of madness if one takes a close interest in politics and history? Oh boy! I am stark raving at that rate! And if wearing a face-mask to avoid germs is mad, there sure are a lot of crazy Japanese. See the picture of Japanese students in a lecture hall above
The Norwegian mass murderer Anders Behring Breivik showed signs of paranoid delusions as early as 2006, his mother has admitted in a tearful interview with forensic psychiatrists.
"He must have been insane, he became so different," Wenche Behring was quoted as saying in the psychiatric evaluation report submitted to the Oslo court. "It is hard to believe that these things happened. It's still hard to believe."
According to the report, leaked to Norway's Verdens Gang newspaper, Mrs Behring said that soon after the 32-year-old moved back in with her five years ago, he began to behave in an erratic way.
In interviews, Mrs Behring described to two psychiatrists how her son became obsessed with politics and history. "He was totally beyond reason and believed all the nonsense he said," she said.
In July, Mr Breivik killed 77 people in shootings on the island of Utoya and a bomb attack in Oslo.
By April, when he was planning the attacks, Mr Breivik had taken to wearing a face mask inside the house, fearing his mother would infect him. He often refused her cooking.
Mr Breivik was brought up by his mother, who had divorced her diplomat husband when her son was one.
More here
******************************
New Gun Company Advertisement Compares Obama to Hitler, Stalin
I am sure that the Left would like to shriek about this but after all the Bush=Hitler placards they would have a cheek to do so. I think the alarm below is overblown. Obama obviously has contempt for "bitter, clinging" gun owners but he would have to do an end-run around Congress to introduce new restrictions: Not impossible but unlikely
A gun company advertisement that warns of impending gun control compares President Obama to Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin.
The USAAmmo ad shows side-by-side pictures of Obama with Hitler, Stalin and other dictators who committed atrocities across the world. The ad, which is also accompanied by a video, warns that gun control is imminent and foreshadows that the U.S. could face millions in casualties if they are not allowed to defend themselves.
USAAmmo states that “tyranny is knocking down the doors of American cities daily” and that Obama, Attorney General Eric Holder and other gun control advocates “are secretly conspiring American Citizens of the right to bear arms.”
Trace Williams, director of operations for USAAmmo, defended the ad that was emailed Monday. He told CBS Washington that “Obama and his various czars are infringing on the rights of Americans to own guns.”
“He’s anti-gun and he’s obviously a socialist cramming health care down American’s throats,” Williams said. “That is exactly how those people in that ad rose to power.”
Williams told CBS Washington that he doesn’t regret comparing Obama to those dictators and that his company has received “unbelievable support” since the ad was put out.
“Just look at history. Obama’s socialist agenda is geared toward depriving American citizens of their God-given rights.” He also added that sales have gone “through the roof.”
Obama promised stricter gun control laws following the January Tucson shooting where Rep. Gabby Giffords was seriously injured and six others were killed.
SOURCE
*****************************
Incentives are life and death
By economist Dr Oliver Marc Hartwich
If there was one word to sum up the whole body of economic theory, it would have to be ‘incentives.’ People act on incentives. As William Stanley Jevons (1835–82), one of the founding fathers of neoclassical economics, put it, the whole economy is ‘a calculus of pleasure and pain.’ Greece is playing out a most macabre application of incentives.
Greece may be the madhouse of the world economy, but there is method in its madness. According to a report in The Lancet, the number of HIV infections in Greece has skyrocketed. The increase was partly due to the termination of drug rehabilitation and street-work programs as a result of government austerity measures. But there was a more chilling explanation.
Drug addicts – acting on incentives – are injecting themselves with the deadly virus to qualify for ‘benefits of €700 per month and faster admission onto drug substitution programmes.’ The incentive to get higher welfare benefits plus access to medical treatment obviously is a strong one – particularly for people who have little left to lose.
It is not the first time economic research has revealed the strange consequences of people acting on incentives. One of the classic economic papers, ‘Dying to save taxes,’ was about how some people in the United States were successfully prolonging their lives by a few days to reduce the estate-tax liability of their heirs.
Australian economists Joshua Gans and Andrew Leigh came to a similar conclusion after studying the effects of the abolition of federal inheritance taxes in 1979: ‘in the very short run the death rate is highly elastic with respect to the inheritance tax rate.’ In other words, people managed to live a bit longer to beat the tax office.
Tax incentives certainly are a matter of life and death, as was confirmed by Germany’s introduction of parental benefits from 1 January 2007. Research by the University of Bolzano showed how German mothers delayed giving birth by a few days to qualify for the benefits.
Incentives matter. If policymakers kept this basic insight in mind, they would design better policies. It might also save the Greek government money it would otherwise spend on AIDS treatment.
SOURCE
****************************
The "Spring" that wasn't
At first glance, the Arab uprisings of this year looked to be advances for people often trapped by clerics and tyrants who have used Islam to enslave, torture and kill their people so that they can live in opulent grandeur among some of the planet's poorest populations.
Iran might appear to be the odd man out. For a start its people prefer to fashion themselves as Persians, but it has a significant Arab core. Its supreme leader seems to shun the indulgences that define the lifestyles of his neighbouring leaders, but he and his president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, are still the two of the most dangerous men on earth. Ahmadinejad is mad. Barking. And soon to be nuclear armed.
This year saw movements for freedom in Egypt, Tunisia, Yemen, Bahrain, Morocco, Iran, Syria, Jordan and even Saudi Arabia.
The tyrannical states that enjoy Western support - Bahrain and Saudi Arabia - have largely survived, although Egypt fell quickly. Those who alienated the West, or threatened it, or attacked it, are gone. By the hand of their own people.
A Libyan shot dead Colonel Gaddafi, even if his convoy was trapped in Sirte by NATO airstrikes.
But the next chapter in the lives of these states is unlikely to include anything like democracy.
A greater danger is that the threatening Muslim Brotherhood will overtly or otherwise control their destinies.
A year ago I wrote that we'd do well to remember the name Sayyid Qutb, and suggested that despite being dead for almost 50 years he could yet be the most influential man of this century, in the manner that Karl Marx was the most influential man of the last century while not living to see it. The Koran-quoting assassins of the Muslim Brotherhood work to Qutb's manifesto In The Shade of The Koran.
They are bad news for honest, secular Arabs who made such sacrifices this year in the hopes of liberalism and progress that might change their destiny.
The Brotherhood plans changes, too. First they'd turn the clock back to the sixth century, and introduce sharia law; Muslim women and girls could forget about equality. Next they'd start planning for the destruction of the state of Israel.
They are well organised for today's election in Egypt and the military's bloody crackdown on protesters last week plays directly in to their hands. The poll results will give us an indication of the Brotherhood's real strength there. It can hardly be a coincidence that Cairo will also be the venue for a meeting on December 22 between the Palestinian Fatah and Hamas movements as they strike a unity deal after recent talks on "the question of a truce ... with Israel and the question of popular resistance".
They can't have been long talks: Hamas demands the destruction of Israel.
If the Palestinians put down their weapons, there'd be peace. If the Israelis put down their weapons, there'd be genocide.
Meanwhile, in Yemen, the vacuum left by departing President Saleh also doesn't mean freedom for his people. Jockeying for power there are his son and some tribal chiefs, with various factions of the military.
In Moroccan elections at the weekend so-called "moderate" Islamists appear to have taken the lead, as they did in Tunisia a few weeks back, but secularists failed.
And then there's Libya. Run by a murderous lunatic and his sons - one of them the captured Saif, best mate of Prince Andrew, whose mum is Australia's head of state - after 40 years the people revolted and the era of fear, torture and murder was ended.
Already the new regime is talking of sharia law. Welcome the new barbarians.
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)
****************************
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)
****************************
Governments seem to be suckers for computer salesmen who tell them that computerizing their operations will save them money and allow them to operate more efficiently.
It doesn’t happen. The one certainty is that the process will cost way more than budgeted and the big uncertainty is whether it will work at all. I could give innumerable examples but the one that stands out is Britain’s experience of linking all their government hospitals into one network with all the records of all the patients in the country on it. The Brits spent over 12 BILLION pounds over a period of about a decade on it. It never worked and has just recently been scrapped
Unbelievably in the circumstances, computerization is one of the far-fetched dreams of Obamacare. You would think the British experience would have engendered caution but it has not.
One of my readers is an anesthesiologist who is a computer enthusiast and an instructor for Electronic Hospital Records. He reports below one of the more successful uses of computerization in hospitals.
Its limited degree of success stems largely from the fact that a “tried and true” system was bought “off the shelf”. It is when governments order an entirely new system for themselves that the woes often become insurmountable:
We just installed Electronic Hospital Records here Nov 6. Amusing how the State Government can’t seem to do anything right – any claim that Government can do medicine “more efficiently” is laughable.
Gettling into the game late is an advantage – the EPIC system has been used successfully in U T hospitals in Texas and many other places – successfully.
So using a product that has been made better by several generations should be an advantage – but think again when State Government interferes.
Problem # 1
HER was funded by Medicare Stimulus, with a deadline; much was done in haste to meet mandated deadline, Nov 6.
Problem #2
Instead of using a product “as is”, each of multiple State Hospitals just “had to have” “custom features” that simply were not on the original system.
As I know (wife was a programmer for many years) people just can’t wish for “custom programming” and get what they want in a reasonable period of time. Multiple delays.
Problem # 3
Anesthesia machine and monitor vendors were NOT informed that EHR was planned until several months ago. Modules for the machine and monitor to “talk” to computers was ordered late; this kind of hardware must be custom ordered; it isn't sold in Radio Shack or Best Buy. When we went “live”, many modules were not yet available, so data had to be entered manually.
Problem # 4
By the “grapevine”, our system was a “low budget” version, with low level support; when a problem occurs (like computer won’t boot etc..), it may be hours before a support person shows up in the operating room; and often, personnel don’t know what’s happening because the system is so specialized. Likely support package was low budget as well.
Problem # 5.
No surprises here since, in the past, institutions have lost tons of money when new computer systems fail at billing:
ALL my records from the last 3 weeks are listed as “not closed” (records are “closed” when all signatures are checked by myself, and listed as “complete”).
Although records are listed as “closed” in my workspace, on the central system they are listed as “open”; billing cannot occur electronically with open records.
So now entire anesthetic records are printed, and searched by hand for completeness before paper records are submitted for billing; rumor has it that this system will not work properly until local software is upgraded.
EHR is better medicine – looking up patient records online is fast, no paper must be searched for and manually delivered; and paper records are often “lost” because multiple people are using them, often without the record people knowing who has the record at the moment; worst time is days post op, when records are being used by business managers for billing; to dictate reports etc. With HER, we simply search patient’s name or numbers.
But PLEASE – anyone saying EHR saves money is a fool; besides hardware, a system of IT support is needed; on top of this, the system charges a fee.
****************************
More on Breivik's "symptoms"
It is a symptom of madness if one takes a close interest in politics and history? Oh boy! I am stark raving at that rate! And if wearing a face-mask to avoid germs is mad, there sure are a lot of crazy Japanese. See the picture of Japanese students in a lecture hall above
The Norwegian mass murderer Anders Behring Breivik showed signs of paranoid delusions as early as 2006, his mother has admitted in a tearful interview with forensic psychiatrists.
"He must have been insane, he became so different," Wenche Behring was quoted as saying in the psychiatric evaluation report submitted to the Oslo court. "It is hard to believe that these things happened. It's still hard to believe."
According to the report, leaked to Norway's Verdens Gang newspaper, Mrs Behring said that soon after the 32-year-old moved back in with her five years ago, he began to behave in an erratic way.
In interviews, Mrs Behring described to two psychiatrists how her son became obsessed with politics and history. "He was totally beyond reason and believed all the nonsense he said," she said.
In July, Mr Breivik killed 77 people in shootings on the island of Utoya and a bomb attack in Oslo.
By April, when he was planning the attacks, Mr Breivik had taken to wearing a face mask inside the house, fearing his mother would infect him. He often refused her cooking.
Mr Breivik was brought up by his mother, who had divorced her diplomat husband when her son was one.
More here
******************************
New Gun Company Advertisement Compares Obama to Hitler, Stalin
I am sure that the Left would like to shriek about this but after all the Bush=Hitler placards they would have a cheek to do so. I think the alarm below is overblown. Obama obviously has contempt for "bitter, clinging" gun owners but he would have to do an end-run around Congress to introduce new restrictions: Not impossible but unlikely
A gun company advertisement that warns of impending gun control compares President Obama to Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin.
The USAAmmo ad shows side-by-side pictures of Obama with Hitler, Stalin and other dictators who committed atrocities across the world. The ad, which is also accompanied by a video, warns that gun control is imminent and foreshadows that the U.S. could face millions in casualties if they are not allowed to defend themselves.
USAAmmo states that “tyranny is knocking down the doors of American cities daily” and that Obama, Attorney General Eric Holder and other gun control advocates “are secretly conspiring American Citizens of the right to bear arms.”
Trace Williams, director of operations for USAAmmo, defended the ad that was emailed Monday. He told CBS Washington that “Obama and his various czars are infringing on the rights of Americans to own guns.”
“He’s anti-gun and he’s obviously a socialist cramming health care down American’s throats,” Williams said. “That is exactly how those people in that ad rose to power.”
Williams told CBS Washington that he doesn’t regret comparing Obama to those dictators and that his company has received “unbelievable support” since the ad was put out.
“Just look at history. Obama’s socialist agenda is geared toward depriving American citizens of their God-given rights.” He also added that sales have gone “through the roof.”
Obama promised stricter gun control laws following the January Tucson shooting where Rep. Gabby Giffords was seriously injured and six others were killed.
SOURCE
*****************************
Incentives are life and death
By economist Dr Oliver Marc Hartwich
If there was one word to sum up the whole body of economic theory, it would have to be ‘incentives.’ People act on incentives. As William Stanley Jevons (1835–82), one of the founding fathers of neoclassical economics, put it, the whole economy is ‘a calculus of pleasure and pain.’ Greece is playing out a most macabre application of incentives.
Greece may be the madhouse of the world economy, but there is method in its madness. According to a report in The Lancet, the number of HIV infections in Greece has skyrocketed. The increase was partly due to the termination of drug rehabilitation and street-work programs as a result of government austerity measures. But there was a more chilling explanation.
Drug addicts – acting on incentives – are injecting themselves with the deadly virus to qualify for ‘benefits of €700 per month and faster admission onto drug substitution programmes.’ The incentive to get higher welfare benefits plus access to medical treatment obviously is a strong one – particularly for people who have little left to lose.
It is not the first time economic research has revealed the strange consequences of people acting on incentives. One of the classic economic papers, ‘Dying to save taxes,’ was about how some people in the United States were successfully prolonging their lives by a few days to reduce the estate-tax liability of their heirs.
Australian economists Joshua Gans and Andrew Leigh came to a similar conclusion after studying the effects of the abolition of federal inheritance taxes in 1979: ‘in the very short run the death rate is highly elastic with respect to the inheritance tax rate.’ In other words, people managed to live a bit longer to beat the tax office.
Tax incentives certainly are a matter of life and death, as was confirmed by Germany’s introduction of parental benefits from 1 January 2007. Research by the University of Bolzano showed how German mothers delayed giving birth by a few days to qualify for the benefits.
Incentives matter. If policymakers kept this basic insight in mind, they would design better policies. It might also save the Greek government money it would otherwise spend on AIDS treatment.
SOURCE
****************************
The "Spring" that wasn't
At first glance, the Arab uprisings of this year looked to be advances for people often trapped by clerics and tyrants who have used Islam to enslave, torture and kill their people so that they can live in opulent grandeur among some of the planet's poorest populations.
Iran might appear to be the odd man out. For a start its people prefer to fashion themselves as Persians, but it has a significant Arab core. Its supreme leader seems to shun the indulgences that define the lifestyles of his neighbouring leaders, but he and his president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, are still the two of the most dangerous men on earth. Ahmadinejad is mad. Barking. And soon to be nuclear armed.
This year saw movements for freedom in Egypt, Tunisia, Yemen, Bahrain, Morocco, Iran, Syria, Jordan and even Saudi Arabia.
The tyrannical states that enjoy Western support - Bahrain and Saudi Arabia - have largely survived, although Egypt fell quickly. Those who alienated the West, or threatened it, or attacked it, are gone. By the hand of their own people.
A Libyan shot dead Colonel Gaddafi, even if his convoy was trapped in Sirte by NATO airstrikes.
But the next chapter in the lives of these states is unlikely to include anything like democracy.
A greater danger is that the threatening Muslim Brotherhood will overtly or otherwise control their destinies.
A year ago I wrote that we'd do well to remember the name Sayyid Qutb, and suggested that despite being dead for almost 50 years he could yet be the most influential man of this century, in the manner that Karl Marx was the most influential man of the last century while not living to see it. The Koran-quoting assassins of the Muslim Brotherhood work to Qutb's manifesto In The Shade of The Koran.
They are bad news for honest, secular Arabs who made such sacrifices this year in the hopes of liberalism and progress that might change their destiny.
The Brotherhood plans changes, too. First they'd turn the clock back to the sixth century, and introduce sharia law; Muslim women and girls could forget about equality. Next they'd start planning for the destruction of the state of Israel.
They are well organised for today's election in Egypt and the military's bloody crackdown on protesters last week plays directly in to their hands. The poll results will give us an indication of the Brotherhood's real strength there. It can hardly be a coincidence that Cairo will also be the venue for a meeting on December 22 between the Palestinian Fatah and Hamas movements as they strike a unity deal after recent talks on "the question of a truce ... with Israel and the question of popular resistance".
They can't have been long talks: Hamas demands the destruction of Israel.
If the Palestinians put down their weapons, there'd be peace. If the Israelis put down their weapons, there'd be genocide.
Meanwhile, in Yemen, the vacuum left by departing President Saleh also doesn't mean freedom for his people. Jockeying for power there are his son and some tribal chiefs, with various factions of the military.
In Moroccan elections at the weekend so-called "moderate" Islamists appear to have taken the lead, as they did in Tunisia a few weeks back, but secularists failed.
And then there's Libya. Run by a murderous lunatic and his sons - one of them the captured Saif, best mate of Prince Andrew, whose mum is Australia's head of state - after 40 years the people revolted and the era of fear, torture and murder was ended.
Already the new regime is talking of sharia law. Welcome the new barbarians.
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)
****************************
The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist" (Nationalsozialist) and the full name of Hitler's political party (translated) was "The National Socialist German Workers' Party" (In German: Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei)
****************************
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
