The double standards never stop<



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Gravy!

It has been federal for three years. It has brought chaos to the labor markets. It has cost people their livelihoods and it is more unpopular than ever.

So why does “Obamacare” (officially known as the “Affordable Care Act”) remain so irresistible for so many of our fellow Americans? Because at its core Obamacare is not about health care, so much as it is about the redistribution of wealth, and for those who are on the receiving end of the redistribution the agenda is completely irresistible.

When the federal government doles-out cash, it’s difficult to say “no.” That’s why many of our nation’s top business consulting firms are cashing-in, as state government officials hire the consulting firms to figure out how to set up the new federal health care bureaucracies, complete with their own state-specific websites and call centers.

How difficult and costly could it be, do you suppose, to set up a website and a call center for the residents of one individual state? In the world of private enterprise, most small to midsize companies doing business within a specific region of the U.S. would be foolish to spend much more than a hundred thousand dollars for their customer service website and the infrastructure for a call center, and in many cases the project could be completed for much less.

But with Obamacare, the “customer service” element has become more of a “corporate welfare” element. Companies, careers, and personal fortunes are being made by people who are the states, as firms bill the individual states millions of taxpayer dollars for the website and call center set-ups (and the Obama administration frequently offers to reimburse the states for the set-up costs).

Take for example a company called Leavitt Partners, LLC. Founded by the former Republican Governor of Utah (and former U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services) Michael Leavitt, the company describes itself as a “healthcare intelligence business,” and is focused solely on state-by-state Obamacare compliance (they have already completed Utah’s insurance exchange start-up).

We’re talking here about Michael Leavitt, the former Utah Governor who last year endorsed and campaigned on behalf of Mitt Romney, the presidential candidate who pledged to “end” Obamacare. Yes, that Michael Leavitt is making millions advising the states on how to comply with the monstrosity that his pal Mitt wanted to eliminate.

How much money is in play for these companies? Consider that last fall representatives from Leavitt’s company traveled north and proposed to build an exchange for their tiny nieghboring state of Idaho, a state with a population of less than 1.7 million people. Once the Leavitt representatives unveiled their proposed price tag to build an exchange - $70 million-an incredulous member of Idaho’s state insurance task force asked “does Governor Leavitt really believe that this is a good idea?”

Company associate Brett Graham replied with the nuanced explanation that “Governor Leavitt doesn’t like the feds dictating to the states,” however, the Governor also believes that the states should “stand inside the circle with the feds rather than stand outside of it”- which was an artful way of saying “yes, Governor Leavitt likes this and wants to get paid to show you how to do it.”

Leavitt’s proposal was not the most expensive that the sparsely populated Idaho received. The global accounting and consulting firm KPMG weighed-in with a price tag of $77 million, and when a state official asked what the residents of Idaho would get in return for such a large expenditure, KPMG representative Andrew Gottschalk was vague: “It’s hard to explain exactly what you get…It’s hardware, it’s software, there’s infrastructure, there’s people and staffing” he stated. “There would likely be a call center. It’s all kinds of things… there’s a lot of stuff….but it’s hard to be specific.”

States spending millions of taxpayer dollars, and receiving “all kinds of things” and “a lot of stuff” in return. That’s our present-day reality with Obamacare. Along with Leavitt Partners and KPMG, global consulting firms Maximus and Mercer are also cashing-in. These firms employ well educated, highly skilled professionals with JD’s, MBA’s, and advanced degrees in information systems and healthcare management, most of whom would undoubtedly reject the idea that they are welfare recipients. As the Maximus corporate website states, “we leverage our extensive experience and strong commitment to ethics to provide high quality services and solutions.”

This is the reality of Obamacare. It’s wildly unpopular for the masses, but irresistible for those on the receiving end of the money grab.

SOURCE

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Self-Wrecking Pols Take 'Public' Out of 'Republican'

 Paul Jacob

Since the dawning of Obama Nation in 2008, Republicans have made significant gains at the state level — historic victories in 2010, and even small gains made last year, which at the federal level was a debacle for the GOP. Republicans now control both chambers of the state legislature and the governor’s mansion in 25 states; Democrats have such universal control in only 13 states.

“This is significant. While we may expect more of the gridlock in Washington that we have seen over the past two years,” wrote Grover Norquist and Patrick Gleason in Politico, “. . . the states, over three-quarters of which are completely controlled by Republicans or Democrats, are unobstructed from moving in whichever direction the party in power chooses.

Republicans, therefore, have many opportunities to connect with the voters, to show voters their best side.

Or, infuriate.

Right now, in a number of state capitols, Republican legislators are at risk of giving up the game by using their legislative power to enact new laws to frustrate and undermine citizen-initiated ballot measures.

To be blunt, neither Republican nor Democrat career politicians much like the idea of citizens having any involvement in politics — save voting for them or mailing them a big, fat check. And the thought of voters making real decisions by proposing and imposing reforms through the citizen initiative or challenging legislative enactments by forcing a voter referendum is absolutely anathema.

But voters very much like making decisions; they know that even their own favored parties and politicians need the discipline of a independent, democratic check. Without initiative and referendum, the citizenry loses all manner of control over runaway spending and taxes, crony corporate welfare schemes, excessive nannyism and government corruption.

No wonder voters don’t like it when politicians try to silence their voice.

But that is precisely what is happening in several Republican-controlled states — none more critical for congressional and also presidential success than Ohio.

Last week, Senate Bill 47 passed the House of Representatives with every Republican member voting yes and every Democrat voting no. Two weeks ago, the bill had passed the state Senate with one Republican (bless him) joining every Democrat in voting no, with every other elephant approving the legislation.

SB 47 would reduce the amount of time initiatives or referendums have to gather signatures from voters, which makes it tougher for voters to get to decide issues.

And it throws a few other rods into the engine of petitioning, as well. For example, it would re-impose an unconstitutional residency requirement already once struck down by a court and previously deemed unenforceable by state officials.

Why would Republican legislators want to do such a thing? Unions have beaten them at the ballot box on a referendum and some initiatives.

Meanwhile, grassroots conservatives and Republicans and libertarians join liberals, Democrats and independents in opposing this anti-initiative legislation. Not a single person or group, except for the bill’s Republican sponsor, testified in favor of SB 47.

If Kasich signs this bill, will these supporters of basic citizen democracy vote for him for governor in 2014 anyway? And if they don’t, will they be more or less willing to vote Democrat or Libertarian or Constitution Party for president in 2016?

In Idaho, Republican legislators got whupped by the powerful state teachers union on three citizen referendums on last November’s ballot. Voters sided with the teachers. I would have sided with legislators, but in a democratic republic, these are issues the people of Idaho decide.

When we lose a vote, the answer isn’t to end the practice of voting.

Nonetheless, Idaho legislators were busy, last week, passing Senate Bill 1108. Though only three of the 26 states with statewide initiative and/or referendum have a more difficult petition signature threshold than Idaho, SB 1108 would raise it higher yet. In addition to satisfying the current statewide signature requirement, SB 1108 would add a requirement to run 18 additional petition drives to qualify in 18 legislative districts.

Not a single Democrat voted for the bill. Anti-tax and property rights conservatives weren’t with the state teachers union or Democrats on the referendums, but they have been making common cause with them in opposing this assault on a constitutional citizen check on big government.

Maybe it doesn’t matter in a state as red as Idaho. But dissing citizens doesn’t seem helpful to the GOP brand. Or to maintaining a grassroots base of energy for actually mobilizing neighbors and friends for winning elections.

I grew up in Arkansas, which just last November voted Republicans into majorities in both houses of the legislature for the first time since Reconstruction (the century before last). There have been some good bills passed, I trust, but Monday the full state senate will vote on an awful one: Senate Bill 821.

The legislation is designed to attack fraud in petitions, and it appears from reports that there were indeed forged signatures on petitions turned in for a couple of 2012 ballot initiatives. The problem is that no one has been charged with a crime. Instead, legislators are slapping a cumbersome and expensive new state registration and training program on future initiative and referendum petitions.

The frightening result of any transgression of the new Labyrinth of rules and regs embedded in SB 821 is that the perfectly valid petition signatures of registered Arkansas voters would be thrown out and discounted, right along with the bad. A simple technical mistake made by someone working for the campaign — petition circulator, manager, clerk, notary public — can deny voters a signature and, thus, a vote.

Will Arkansas Republicans throw this monkey wrench into Arkansas’s long, proud tradition of initiative and referendum? Will they allow this law to pass on their very first watch?

Republicans have the opportunity to prove to voters close to home that they are different — indeed, better — than Democrats, who haven’t always been very nice to small-d democracy, either. But in Ohio, Idaho and Arkansas (and elsewhere) Republican politicians seem bent on taking whacks at democracy . . . and, in the process, losing future elections.

Politics is a struggle over hearts and minds. The Republican Party now points its weaponry at the hearts and minds of its own supporters.

SOURCE

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Targeting Multinationals, the OECD Launches New Scheme to Boost the Tax Burden on Business

 Daniel J. Mitchell

I’ve been very critical of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. Most recently, I criticized the Paris-based bureaucracy for making the rather remarkable assertion that a value-added tax would boost growth and employment.

But that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

The OECD has allied itself with the nutjobs from the so-called Occupy movement to push for bigger government and higher taxes.

The OECD, in an effort to promote redistributionism, has concocted absurdly misleading statistics claiming that there is more poverty in the US than in Greece, Hungary, Portugal, or Turkey.

The OECD is pushing a “Multilateral Convention” that is designed to become something akin to a World Tax Organization, with the power to persecute nations with free-market tax policy.

The OECD supports Obama’s class-warfare agenda, publishing documents endorsing “higher marginal tax rates” so that the so-called rich “contribute their fair share.”

Now the bureaucrats have concocted another scheme to increase the size and scope of government. The OECD just published a study on “Addressing Base Erosion and Profit Shifting” that seemingly is designed to lay the groundwork for a radical rewrite of business taxation.

In a new Tax & Budget Bulletin for Cato, I outline some of my concerns with this new “BEPS” initiative.

"…the BEPS report…calls for dramatic changes in corporate tax policy based on the presumption that governments are not seizing enough revenue from multinational companies. The OECD essentially argues that it is illegitimate for businesses to shift economic activity to jurisdictions that have more favorable tax laws. …The core accusation in the OECD report is that firms systematically—but legally—reduce their tax burdens by taking advantage of differences in national tax policies."

To elaborate, the BEPS scheme should be considered Part II of the OECD’s anti-tax competition project. Part I was the attack on so-called tax havens, which began back in the mid- to late-1990s.

The OECD justified that campaign by asserting there was a need to fight illegal tax evasion (conveniently overlooking, of course, the fact that nations should not have the right to impose their laws on what happens in other countries).

The BEPS initiative is remarkable because it is going after legal tax avoidance. Even though governments already have carte blanche to change business tax policy.

So what does the OECD want?

"…the OECD hints at its intended outcome when it says that the effort “will require some ‘out of the box’ thinking” and that business activity could be “identified through elements such as sales, workforce, payroll, and fixed assets.” That language suggests that the OECD intends to push global formula apportionment, which means that governments would have the power to reallocate corporate income regardless of where it is actually earned."

And what does this mean? Nothing good, unless you think governments should have more money and investment should be further penalized.

Formula apportionment is attractive to governments that have punitive tax regimes, and it would be a blow to nations with more sensible low-tax systems. …business income currently earned in tax-friendly countries, such as Ireland and the Netherlands, would be reclassified as French-source income or German-source income based on arbitrary calculations of company sales and other factors. …nations with high tax rates would likely gain revenue, while jurisdictions with pro-growth systems would be losers, including Ireland, Hong Kong, Switzerland, Estonia, Luxembourg, Singapore, and the Netherlands.

Since the United States is a high-tax nation for corporations, why should Americans care?

For several reasons, including the fact that it wouldn’t be a good idea to give politicians more revenue that will be used to increase the burden of government spending.

But most important, tax policy will get worse everywhere if tax competition is undermined.

More HERE

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

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

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

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Violence of the Left

The article below is from a couple of years back but still makes some good points -- JR

Most violence and violent rhetoric is leftist in origin. As the left has a firm grip on the reins of mainstream media, it should come as no surprise that the right is the scapegoat for the sins of the left. The irony is that the left is guilty of what its favorite leftist psychologist, Sigmund Freud, coined “projection.” The left denies its own violent actions and rhetoric and instead ascribes it to its chief political opposition—the right.

The left projects its own violent tendencies upon the right through extensive use of media propaganda. “Right-wingers” are immediately blamed for any outburst of random violence perpetrated by isolated and disturbed individuals, yet the entire history of leftist aggression, angry rhetoric, and physical violence is swept into the dustbin of history. Leftist riots, leftist terrorists, leftist serial bombers, leftist calls for genocide—all of these sink down the memory hole, purposefully eclipsed by a barrage of stories about right-wing violence. Reality is quite different.

Worldwide, the left-wing forces of communism are responsible for more than 100 million civilian deaths in the Twentieth Century. Russia, Romania, Yugoslavia, China, Cambodia, Vietnam, and other communist-controlled nations became killing fields in the name of social progress—a favorite term of the left. America mistakenly believes that Marxism and leftism largely died with the fall of the Soviet Union, but the parasite merely changed hosts.

As far as violent and hateful language and calls for White genocide, there is a long list of belligerent quotations by leftists in the media, politics, and academia. The following is a small sample.

Jewish intellectual and leftist activist Susan Sontag snarled, “The White race is the cancer of history.”

Leonard Jeffries, chairman of African-American studies at the City College of New York, said he wanted to leave his children in a “world in which there aren’t any White people.”

Jewish Harvard professor and editor of “Race Traitor” magazine Noel Ignatiev trumpeted, “The goal of abolishing the White race is on its face so desirable that some may find it hard to believe that it could incur any opposition other than from committed White supremacists… Keep bashing the dead White males, and the live ones, and the females, too, until the social construct known as the White race is destroyed. Not deconstructed, but destroyed.”

Mario Obledo, founder of the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund (MALDEF), remarked on radio station KIEV, “California is going to be a Hispanic state and anyone who doesn’t like it should leave. If they don’t like Mexicans, they ought to go back to Europe.”

Miles Davis, famous Black jazz man, quipped in a Jet magazine feature: “If somebody told me I had only one hour to live, I’d spend it choking a White man. I’d do it nice and slow.”

Professor Jose Gutierrez of the University of Texas gleefully boasted, “We have an aging White America. They are dying. They are [expletive] in their pants with fear! I love it!”

Malcolm X described a plane crash in 1962 as follows: “The death of over 120 White people is a very beautiful thing.”

Eldridge Cleaver, former Black Panther leader, explained why he raped White women: “Rape was an insurrectionary act. It delighted me that I was defying and trampling upon the White man’s law, upon his system of values, and that I was defiling his women.”

Even President Barack Obama is not above the use of violent language: “If they bring a knife to the fight, we bring a gun…Folks in Philly like a good brawl.”

Leftists have conducted an incessant and strident media, political, and educational campaign to spread the lie that White Americans are irredeemably racist. This slander and libel has motivated many Blacks to murder, rape, rob, and assault Whites, or at the very least has lessened apprehensions toward doing so. The amount of Black-on-White violent crime overshadows White-on-Black violent crime by such an egregious magnitude that it should enrage any reasonable person. Black men rape White women approximately twenty to thirty thousand times every single year in America. The annual count of White men raping Black women rarely breaks into the double digits.

Instead of pointing out the horrendous amount of Black-on-White violent crime, the left purposefully covers it up by not reporting it in the mainstream media. The silence is deafening, especially for victims and their families. Even worse, the left plays up any examples of White-on-Black violence to warp the public’s perception of reality. Instead of taking steps to reduce or call attention to Black-on-White rape, robbery, assault, and murder, the left clamors for “Hate Crime” laws which only apply to White perpetrators.

Former head of the US Commission on Civil Rights, Mary Frances Berry, explained that “Civil rights laws were not passed to protect the rights of White men and do not apply to them.” When Whites are beaten, raped, or killed in a racially-motivated fashion, the motive is always swept under the rug and described as a “random act of violence.” When Whites speak out against the disproportionate amount of non-White crime in America, leftists cry “racism!” and push for “Hate Speech” laws to silence dissent and sidestep the First Amendment by legislative means. Leftists have encouraged, incited, sanctioned, obfuscated, and defended unspeakably vicious acts of violent crime in America, and will continue to do so in the future—unless the perpetrator is White or conservative. In that case, the incident will become front-page news and transform into an endlessly-repeated “talking point.”

The mainstream right in America stands for traditional moral values, property rights, freedom of association, freedom of speech, and individual liberty—all non-violent ideals. Conversely, the left in America stands for coercive redistribution, forced integration, silence of political opposition, and laws restricting individual liberty—all of which require violence and the threat thereof to enforce. The lion’s share of political violence towards the citizenry emanates from leftist political ideals. The rolling avalanche of violent crime in America resonates from leftist propaganda, leftist social policy, and leftist agitation. The left has the blood of millions on its hands yet dares to point a red-stained finger at others.

SOURCE

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Obama Retreats After High Water Mark

Call it over-reach, hubris, arrogance; call it what you will, but for all practical purposes Obama’s presidency and experimentation in transformative politics is over.

Oh sure; we’ll have four more years of strident rhetoric, of evasions, of ruses and stratagems.

Obama’s nothing if not persistent.  He wants to be the guy who transformed America -in fact, moved it on the path toward the socialist, state-sponsored model of Europe.  He might even be the guy who recognizes that only under a “dictatorship of the proletariat” or some modern version of it, will African-Americans enjoy anything like real power as a minority group that represents only about 13 percent of the population.

But his re-election didn’t change the fact that his power to change things is still limited right now.

Much of his presidency has been the story of Obama not being able to come to grips with that very fact. So instead of using the legitimate mechanisms granted a president to get things done, Obama pushes and bullies from above to try to accomplish what he can’t under the law.    

No nation can undergo a permanent revolution from above. Especially a nation that essentially remains one of the most free, just and tolerant societies ever created. Eventually the 99 percent who aren’t bused-in, paid-to-protest, or paid to act as a political commissariat disguised as government employees, asks to be let alone.

At least that’s the way it works in America.

The United States of America today is not the turn-of-the-Century Russia of 1917.  It’s not even Victorian England.  It’s not even the United States of America of the 1950’s.

While racial and gender equality is not perfect in the US, nobody can argue with a straight face that, in the main, everyone doesn’t have a shot at the American Dream.  Not an equal shot to be sure, but even Franklin Roosevelt understood that government couldn’t or shouldn’t protect everyone from all the circumstances that life brings.

Obama’s problem, then, essentially, is one that he readily recognizes: “This is something I’ve struggled with throughout my presidency,” said Obama in a moment that could have been sponsored by the Contemporary Freudian Society. “The problem is that I’m the president of the United States. I’m not the emperor of the United States.”

Yes, that is his problem, but it’s our problem too.

As Democrats busy themselves with disarming the population, state by state, to distract from the poor economic record amassed by Obama and his liberal friends, “Americans are still worried about government being a threat to freedom,” reported Gallup. “The 64% of Americans who say big government will be the biggest threat to the country is just one percentage point shy of the record high.”

And this was before Obama’s latest, greatest Big Government push.

In the meantime, something that really makes a difference in all of our lives- gas prices- are again hitting seasonal highs, just prior to driving season ramping up. So expect higher prices still

The result will almost certainly be higher unemployment, as we have correctly demonstrated again, and again.  Add in runaway healthcare costs, which Obamcare - now three years old- was supposed to fix, higher taxes on everyone, and more taxes to come and you get the idea why the job "emperor" seems so much more appealing to Obama, than being a weak, ineffective president.

His tax increase was the high water mark.

Because re-election returns aside, Obama is still much more mouth than magic. Nothing he’s done has actually worked.  And we know from history that it won’t work.

You could give Obama a trillion dollars and he still couldn’t create a credible recovery.

Yes, that’s right we tried that already.  And that’s why it will never happen again.

So, all Obama has left is his desire to be a Napoleon, while trapped in an intellect 5’2’’ tall, a permanent bully from above that truly is beneath us.

SOURCE

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Sorry, GOP, but You Will Never Out-Care the Democrats

Republicans now have a comprehensive "autopsy" report detailing some of the perceived and some of the real shortcomings of the 2012 presidential election. And the rather optimistically named Growth and Opportunity Project's report is jampacked with so many painfully obvious observations that one wonders why it had to be written in the first place.

You may not be surprised to learn, for instance, that a bunch of people find the Republican Party "scary," "narrow minded," "out of touch" and a party of "stuffy old men." Alas, the "perception that the GOP does not care about people is doing great harm to the Party and its candidates," states the report. This theme was in full display at the recent Conservative Political Action Conference, as well. The GOP has to care more, a lot more.

As practical politics go (not to mention personal morality), compassion is never a bad idea. But rest assured, politically speaking, the GOP will never out-"care" the Democratic Party. It will never out-empathize it. Or out-diversify it. Or be able to promise that government can do more. And it shouldn't want to.

For starters, there's no reason to accept the liberal definition of caring -- at all. Conservatives can be as compassionate as anyone else; just look at polls that gauge who gives to charities. It just so happens that conservatives don't like to do their caring with other people's money. If Republicans start holding up government as the principal source of empathy, hope and charity, America can expect an even bigger arms race in spending and dependency -- the kind that, in the end, burdens the young and poor and everyone else.

It's one thing to be more diverse and open-minded, to engage all sorts of people, even to shift your opinions when generational forces or facts demand it. It's quite another to, as Newt Gingrich explained at CPAC, become a "party focused on the right to life and the right to a good life." To begin with, politicians are in no position to offer you a good life -- or a right to it. Secondly, it's a myth that a good life isn't available to anyone who is genuinely seeking it. In any event, liberal populism already has a monopoly on victimhood, so there's scarce room for Republicans in that space.

In many tactical areas, the Growth and Opportunity Project seems to make sense. Modernization and more effective outreach are great ideas. The problem is that too often, the RNC allows Democrats to define the parameters of debate. There's way too much worrying about acceptance and far too little about persuasion.

As a practical matter, let's concede for a moment that conceding issues such as immigration, gay marriage and abortion makes sense -- and that's the implicit message of the project's report. I'm sympathetic on a number of points, but what's the cost-benefit analysis? Folks in Washington are obsessed with winning, and winning is nice. But politics is their livelihood. Average Americans don't participate in the political process to join a team; they knock on doors because -- as surprising as this may be to some -- they believe in something.

And even though social conservatives feel as if they're being swept aside by Republican Beltway types, fiscal conservatism will fare no better under this thinking. The idea of free markets is a moral one -- an American idea -- and a sellable one. Yes, polls show that young Americans are more pro-government than ever. So it'd be nice if there were a plan to convince them of how wrong they are -- as opposed to trying to sound more like the people they already agree with.

SOURCE

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Obama Delivers Recipe For Disaster in Israel

The president’s wish is for Israelis to lose their resolve against Palestinian terrorism, to shrug and just let a Palestinian state sprout in their midst.

For the record, there are plenty of Israelis willing to do just that, which has confounded me for years.

How is it that I, an American Christian, am more vigilant about the security of Israel than some Israeli jews?

Polls show that many young Israelis are more skeptical of the “two-state solution” than their parents. I hope so, but I wonder if Israel has the time for these youngsters to grow up, achieve power, and spread the kind of clarity currently offered by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Meanwhile, I hope Netanyahu is eating right and hitting the treadmill often. At 63, he needs to be around a very long time to awaken some of his own people and educate current and perhaps future American presidents.

To be bipartisan about this, the Bush administration bought into this two-state nonsense, willingly marching Israel toward shared space with a freshly-created country that would surely be peppered with leadership flavored by Hezbollah and Hamas.

This is, as they say in international affairs, crazy.

I know it is hard to tell long-suffering Palestinians that their propensity to elevate leaders of a terrorist bent is a deal-breaker for any group looking for its own country.

It is even harder to deliver the ultimate clarity-- that there is in fact no basis in logic or history for a new nation called Palestine, carved from the soil of Israel.

There is already a Palestinian state in the region. It’s called Jordan. If geography is a sticking point, any Palestinian seeking to remain on Israeli soil can be assured of a life far more promising under Israeli governance than the violent third-world lives they lead in the West Bank and Gaza, lands handed over to them in the most recent phony offer of land for peace.

It’s never enough. if Israel, a tiny slice of land surrounded by millions of square miles of people longing for its extinction, will just give up a little more territory, then, finally, there will supposedly be peace.

So goes the scam. How many times will people fall for this? How many times will Israelis listen to leaders, from America and among their own ranks, who recommend such a suicidal march?

More HERE

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

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

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Fiction that will unfortunately be remembered as fact

Thirteen minutes into the Oscar-winning movie "Argo," CIA agent Tony Mendez asks supervisor Jack O'Donnell what happened to a group of Americans when the U.S. Embassy was stormed in Tehran.

"The six of them went out a back exit," O'Donnell tells Mendez, played by Ben Affleck. "Brits turned them away. Kiwis turned them away. Canadians took them in."

That passing reference to New Zealand is rankling Kiwis five months after "Argo" was released in the South Pacific nation. Even Parliament has expressed its dismay, passing a motion stating that Affleck, who also directed the film, "saw fit to mislead the world about what actually happened."

New Zealand joins other countries, including Iran and Canada, that have felt offended by the fictionalized account of how the six Americans were sheltered and secreted out of Iran during the 1979 Islamic Revolution.

Some in New Zealand have taken those words — "Kiwis turned them away" — as implying the country did nothing to help.

In fact, a U.S. State Department document dated Feb. 6, 1980, says "four Embassies — Canadians, British, Swedish and New Zealand — were involved in their protection and escape." The document was posted online last fall by the Jimmy Carter Library and Museum.

And published interviews indicate diplomats from Britain and New Zealand did help by briefly sheltering the Americans, visiting them and bringing them food, even driving them to the airport when they left.

Yet those interviews also indicate that both countries considered it too risky to shelter the Americans for long. That left the Canadians shouldering the biggest risk by taking them in.

Lawmaker Winston Peters, who brought last week's uncontested motion before Parliament, said New Zealanders are unfairly portrayed as "a bunch of cowards," an impression that would be given to millions who watch the movie.

"It's a diabolical misrepresentation of the acts of courage and bravery, done at significant risk to themselves, by New Zealand diplomats," he said.

Affleck could not be reached for comment this week.

During Oscar media interviews last month, Affleck told reporters: "Let me just start by saying I love New Zealand, and I love New Zealanders." He added that "I think that it's tricky. You walk a fine line. You are doing a historical movie and naturally you have to make some creative choices about how you are going to condense this into a three-act structure."

But Affleck and his screenwriter, Chris Terrio, who won the adapted screenplay Oscar, did catch some flak from critics for taking major liberties, especially a heart-stopping — but fictional — airport finale that had gun-wielding Iranian Revolutionary Guards chasing the Swissair plane down the tarmac, with the plane lifting off just in the nick of time. (In reality, the airport exit went smoothly.)

And after the film was made, Affleck took the step of changing the film's postscript, the Toronto Star reported, to more generously credit Canada and its ambassador at the time, Ken Taylor, who protected the Americans at huge personal risk and was uncomfortable with some details in the film.

SOURCE

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A big story about racial conflict that gets ignored by the media

Unless you read the Los Angeles Times, you probably have not heard much about the Latino-on-black violence that has been plaguing southern California on and off for many years. Most recently, four Latino gang members jumped a black stranger in Compton and beat him with pipes. The man was visiting a black family that had just moved into the neighborhood; the men who beat him called him n*gger, informing him that blacks were no longer welcome in that neighborhood.

For several days after the beating, crowds gathered on the family’s lawn, shouting racial epithets and throwing beer bottles at the house. They disbanded each time the police arrived but returned as soon as they left. They achieved their goal; the mother sent her children to live with relatives and is packing up to move. According to federal authorities, this is not an isolated incident; Latino gangs have been forcing blacks out of particular neighborhoods all over southern California.

Unfortunately, this is nothing new. Last year I wrote of the 2008 slaying of high school football player Jamiel Shaw by gang member (and illegal immigrant) Pedro Espinoza. The court concluded that Shaw, a standout football player recruited by colleges like Stanford and Rutgers, was targeted because he was black. And I can’t help but wonder: if Espinoza had been white, would more of us know Jamiel Shaw’s name?

Few have heard of this Latino-on-black crime wave because it doesn’t fit the narrative that many in the media perpetuate. Media elitists would have us to believe that aristocratic whites are relentlessly oppressing all racial minorities and causing all of their woes. (Except Asians, whose high levels of education and economic success they find difficult to explain.) Hence blacks and Latinos are supposedly in the same boat: recipients of the short end of the stick in a white man’s world.

There are several dangerous consequences to this cookie cutter approach to race relations. First of all, the disparity of media coverage for certain crimes implies that justice for the black victim of a Latino (or black) killer is a less pressing concern. The murder of fifteen-year-old Hadiya Pendleton in Chicago by Michael Ward and Kenneth Williams (also black) briefly made national news because Pendleton had sung at President Obama’s inauguration. But how many more Hadiya Pendletons are there whose stories will never be told? Deaths of teens like Pendleton and Shaw speak to a much larger, more complicated problem: lawlessness in many urban areas would never be tolerated in a white, middle class suburb.

The one dimensional understanding of race relations also leads to perilous media inaccuracies. Any event that doesn’t fit the narrative of “white oppressor, black/brown victim” must either be forced into that mold or ignored altogether. This is why, when the Latino George Zimmerman (who grew up in a multi-racial family and modest neighborhood) shot black teenager Trayvon Martin, we were told Zimmerman was a “white Hispanic.” This was only the sixth time in its 160-year history the New York Times had used such a term; would they have used it if Zimmerman had been shot by a white man?

Perhaps the most harmful aspect of an overly simplistic approach to race relations is that it presumes that the power to improve the prospects of blacks and Latinos lies solely with powerful whites. If the plight of suffering blacks and Latinos is due entirely to the racist attitudes of whites, then it follows that only a change in those attitudes will improve their standard of living. This attitude trivializes both the power and importance of the families, churches and community organizations that have been so pivotal in lifting successful blacks and Latinos out of poverty.

It is also easier for a journalist to lament the existence of racism than to report on interventions in areas like education and community development that actually work. The politically incorrect truth is that popular government sponsored programs, such as Head Start, have very little impact on outcomes for lower income black and Latino children. Despite receiving over $150 billion in funding, a 2010 study of Head Start by the Department of Health and Human Services concluded that “the benefits of access to Head Start at age four are largely absent by first grade for the program population as a whole.”

What does have a positive effect on at risk youth? Multiple studies, from institutions including Harvard University, have concluded that regular church attendance, even when controlled for income and parental marital status, has a dramatically positive effect on an at risk child’s likelihood to graduate from high school, avoid crime and become gainfully employed. But don’t expect to read that in the newspaper anytime soon.

SOURCE

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The Obamacare Revolt: Physicians Fight Back Against the Bureaucratization of Health Care

Dr. Ryan Neuhofel, 31, offers a rare glimpse at what it would be like to go to the doctor without massive government interference in health care. Dr. Neuhofel, based in the college town of Lawrence, Kansas, charges for his services according to an online price list that's as straightforward as a restaurant menu. A drained abscess runs $30, a pap smear, $40, a 30-minute house call, $100. Strep cultures, glucose tolerance tests, and pregnancy tests are on the house. Neuhofel doesn't accept insurance. He even barters on occasion with cash-strapped locals. One patient pays with fresh eggs and another with homemade cheese and goat's milk.

"Direct primary care," which is the industry term for Neuhofel's business model, does away with the bureaucratic hassle of insurance, which translates into much lower prices. "What people don't realize is that most doctors employ an army of people for coding, billing, and gathering payment," says Neuhofel. "That means you have to charge $200 to remove an ingrown toenail." Neuhofel charges $50.

He consults with his patients over email and Skype in exchange for a monthly membership fee of $20-30. "I realized people would come in for visits with the simplest questions and I'd wonder, why can't they just email me?" says Neuhofel. Traditional doctors have no way to get paid when they consult with patients over the phone or by email because insurance companies only pay for office visits.

Why did he choose this course? Neuhofel’s answer: “I didn’t want to waste my career being frustrated.”

This model is growing in popularity. Leading practitioners of direct primary care include Seattle, Washington-based Qliance, which has raised venture capital funding from Jeff Bezos, Michael Dell, and comedian (and Reason Foundation Trustee) Drew Carey; MedLion, which is about to expand its business to five states; and AMG Medical Group, which operates several offices in New York City. Popular health care blogger Dr. Rob Lamberts has written at length about his decision to dump his traditional practice in favor of this model.

"Since I started my practice, I seem to hear about another doctor or clinic doing direct primary care every other week." says Neuhofel.

Direct primary care is part of a larger trend of physician-entrepreneurs all across the country fighting to bring transparent prices and market forces back to health care. This is happening just as the federal government is poised to interfere with the health care market in many new and profoundly destructive ways.

Obamacare, which takes full effect in 2014, will drive up costs and erode quality—and Americans will increasingly seek out alternatives. That could bring hordes of new business to practitioners like Neuhofel, potentially offering a countervailing force to Obamacare. (One example, the Surgery Center of Oklahoma's Dr. Keith Smith, profiled for Reason TV in September, is doing big business offering cash pricing for outpatient surgery at prices about 80 percent less than at traditional hospitals.)

Health "insurance" is more than just insurance; it's also "a payment plan for routine expenses," as University of Chicago business school economist John Cochrane puts it in a superb recent paper. The late free-market economist Milton Friedman pointed out that we insure our houses against fire and our cars against major damage, but we don't also insure ourselves against cutting the lawn and buying gas. That's the main reason innovation almost never makes health care cheaper. Most patients never see the bill for an ingrown toenail removal or a glucose tolerance test, so doctors have little incentive to seek ways to offer their services for less. For simple consultations, why bother with Skype when insurance will pay full price for an office visit.

Insurance plans that cover everything, a situation that came about largely because of a quirk in our tax code, have also led to the "bureaucratization of medical care," Friedman wrote in a 2001 essay, in which "the caregiver has become, in effect, an employee of the insurance company or...the government."

Dr. Lisa Davidson had 8 years of frustration while running a successful traditional practice in Denver, Colorado. She had 6,000 patients when she decided to stop taking insurance and adopt the same business model as Neuhofel. Her patient list has dropped to about 2,000. She used to spend about 15 minutes with each patient and now it's more like 45 minutes. "We're on track to make more money and take better care of our patients," says Davidson. "It's a win-win all around."Dr. Lisa Davidson (pictured to the far right) and her staff

Before adopting direct primary care, Davidson was unhappy working at the practice she had built because the insurance system imposed a way of doing business that resembled an assembly line. "It's true that in 2014, many more people will have insurance, so there will be a profound need for primary care doctors," says Davidson. "You might say I've done a disservice by dramatically cutting the size of my practice. However, if we make it desirable again to be a primary care physician more people will want to do it."

Under Obamacare, more and more doctors are becoming employees of large hospitals, where there will be more control over how they practice medicine. Hoover Institution Senior Fellow Dr. Scott Atlas fears this will cause a brain drain in medicine. "Really smart people want autonomy, and when you take that away it's naive to think you're going to get really bright people becoming doctors," says Atlas. "The best doctors could excel at any profession, so why go into medicine if they won't have the opportunity to be their best?"

When she was operating a traditional practice, Davidson witnessed firsthand how our "payment plans for routine expenses" drive up prices and block innovation. She recalls that one insurance company paid $118 for a routine PSA test. Now that her patients pay the bill directly the cost is $18. Insurance used to pay $128 for a bag of IV fluid. Now Davidson doesn't bother passing on the cost of IV bags because they run $1.50 each.

Dr. Eric Bricker is the medical director at Compass, a Dallas-based company that helps individuals with high-deductible insurance plans. In a previous job, Bricker was a finance consultant for hospitals, giving him firsthand knowledge of how health insurance drives up prices. "When insurance companies and hospitals negotiate," says Bricker, "it's an exercise in horse trading." For example, an insurance company might let a hospital get away with charging $2,000 for an MRI, says Bricker. In exchange, the hospital agrees to charge the bargain price of $2,000 to deliver a baby. "You do that mixing and matching," says Bricker, "and at the end of the day it works out about even."

According to Bricker, this horse-trading method provides an opportunity for hospitals to earn windfall profits: If the hospital gets $2,000 for MRIs, it will start encouraging patients to get more MRIs.

Given how prices are set, it's no mystery why in health care high costs often correlate with low quality. Bricker cites one facility in Dallas, where a 3-tesla MRI (the more teslas, the higher the resolution) can be had for $860, while a nearby facility offers a 1.5-tesla MRI for $2,500. The latter facility stays in business only because many of its customers don't know the difference. They pay the same $20 co-pay wherever they go for an MRI.

So Bricker co-founded Compass, which works with about 1,200 firms to guide their employees to those doctors and testing facilities that offer both high quality and low prices. These employees have an incentive to seek out value because they're responsible for paying a large portion of their own routine medical costs before their insurance coverage kicks in.

High-threshold plans are exploding in popularity, which is a promising trend. According to a 2012 report by the Kaiser Family Foundation, about 31 percent of firms now offer health plans in which patients pay most routine costs out of pocket, like a Health Savings Account (HSA) or Health Reimbursement Arrangement (HRA), and 19 percent of covered workers have one of these plans. High-deductible plans go a long way towards unbundling our "payment plans for routine expenses" from the catastrophic coverage that should be the sole function of health insurance.

SOURCE

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

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

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The "diminishing" man

President Barack Obama distorted Palestinian Authority terror at a joint press conference with Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu Wednesday night and asserted that 2012 was a good year in Judea and Samaria because no one died from terrorist attacks.

He also implicitly stated Israel could settle for less than total security so long as the possibility of rocket attacks from Judea and Samaria were “diminished.”

President Obama tried to minimize his comments on the “peace process” during the “Barack and Bibi” show, which showed that they are the best of chums who never disagree.

The president called Netanyahu “Bibi” several times, and both of them poured lavish praise on each other while being remarkably honest on Iran. Prime Minister Netanyahu admitted for the first time that President Obama is correct in saying that Iran is at least a year from manufacturing a nuclear weapon. He differentiated between Iran’s ability to make a weapon and its capability to produce enough enriched uranium for one.

It was the “peace process” that prompted comments from the president that were enough to show that his advisers still think terrorist attacks, at least in Israel, are only dangerous when people are killed. That was the same kind of thinking that kept Israel from striking at Hamas terrorists in Gaza so long as rockets landed in “open areas” and wounded “only” a few farmers and foreign workers. After missiles started wounding and murdering civilians closer to Tel Aviv last November, Israel finally “had a right to defend itself.”

President Obama made two statements that ignore reality and which will give him the excuse to lecture Israelis at his speech at the Jerusalem Conference Center Thursday night that Israel faces disaster if it does not admit that the country cannot exist so long as Jewish communities in Judea and Samaria remain an “obstacle” to a Palestinian Authority state.

First of all, the president said that there was not a single death in Judea and Samaria in 2012 due to Palestinian terror.

Secondly, he stated that a peace agreement with the Palestinian Authority cannot be concluded until Israelis feel that the possibility of rocket attacks has “diminished.” He did not say that there should be “no chance” of missile attacks but only that the “possibility of rockets has diminished.”

A “diminishing” possibility is what the United States and well-meaning starry-eyed Israeli dreamers, like President Shimon Peres, supposedly created in 2005 with the expulsion of Jews and the withdrawal of all Israeli soldiers from Gaza.

Knesset Members scoffed at right-warnings that rockets would land on Ashkelon, let alone Tel Aviv. President Peres found himself stating later that he simply cannot understand why Hamas would attack Israel with rockets after the withdrawal from Gaza.

Obama’s mention that no one died in attacks from Judea and Samaria last year is even more off the mark.

First of all, there were many serious injuries.

Secondly, an infant’s life is hanging in the air at this very moment after last week’s savage rock-throwing terrorist attack on a central Samaria highway. The rock-throwers achieved their aim of causing a crash, similar to the fatal accident in Kiryat Arba in September 2011 that killed Asher Palmer and is two-year-old son. But that happened less than four months before 2012, so Obama could forget about it in his wrap-up for the year. And last week’s attack is in 2013, so that also does not count.

Thirdly, the reason there were no deaths is not because Palestinian Authority terrorists did not try but because the IDF has been able to deploy from within Judea and Samaria to prevent them, an impossibility if Mahmoud Abbas takes full control of Judea and Samaria and excludes the IDF.

SOURCE

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Fusion Power on the Right

By Jonah Goldberg.  Jonah might have quoted the Gipper: "If you analyze it I believe the very heart and soul of conservatism is libertarianism..... The basis of conservatism is a desire for less government interference or less centralized authority or more individual freedom"

"At CPAC, the Future Looks Libertarian," read a dispatch on Time magazine's website. "CPAC: Rand Paul's Big Moment," proclaimed The Week magazine. Meanwhile, the New York Times headlined its story about the annual conservative political action conference "GOP divisions fester at conservative retreat."

George Will, a man who actually knows a thing or two about conservatism, responded to the NYT's use of the word "fester" on ABC News' "This Week." "Festering: an infected wound, it's awful. I guarantee you, if there were a liberal conclave comparable to this, and there were vigorous debates going on there, the New York Times' headline would be 'Healthy diversity flourishes at the liberal conclave.'"

Will went on to note that social conservatives and libertarian free-market conservatives in the GOP have been arguing "since the 1950s, when the National Review was founded on the idea of the fusion of the two. It has worked before with Ronald Reagan. It can work again."

Will was right as far as he went, but I would go further. Fusionism was an idea hatched by Frank Meyer, a brilliant intellectual and editor at National Review. An ex-communist Christian libertarian, Meyer argued that freedom was a prerequisite for virtue and therefore a virtuous society must be a free society. (If I force you to do the right thing against your will, you cannot claim to have acted virtuously.)

Philosophically, the idea took fire from all sides. But as a uniting principle, fusionism worked well. It provided a rationale for most libertarians and most social conservatives to fight side by side against communism abroad and big government at home.

What often gets left out in discussions of the American right is that fusionism isn't merely an alliance, it is an alloy. Fusionism runs through the conservative heart. William F. Buckley, the founder of the conservative movement, often called himself a "libertarian journalist." Asked about that in a 1993 interview, he told CSPAN's Brian Lamb that the question "Does this augment or diminish human liberty?" informed most of what he wrote.

Most pure libertarians and the tiny number of truly statist social conservatives live along the outer edge of the Venn diagram that is the American right. Most self-identified conservatives reside in the vast overlapping terrain between the two sides.

Just look at where libertarianism has had its greatest impact: economics. There simply isn't a conservative economics that is distinct from a libertarian one. Adam Smith, Friedrich Hayek, Milton Friedman, Henry Hazlitt, Ludwig von Mises, James M. Buchanan & Co. are gods of the libertarian and conservative pantheons alike. When Pat Buchanan wanted to move America towards protectionism and statism, he had to leave the party to do it.

Libertarian and conservative critiques of Obamacare, the stimulus and other Democratic policies are indistinguishable from one another. On trade, taxes, property rights, energy, the environment, intellectual property and other issues, I'd be hard-pressed to tell you the difference, if any, between the conservative and libertarian positions.

On the Constitution, there are some interesting debates, but both factions are united in rejecting a "living Constitution." The debate on the right is over what the Constitution says, not what liberals think it should say.

When Jim DeMint resigned from the Senate, the pro-life libertarian journalist Timothy Carney wrote for the Washington Examiner, "For libertarians, Christian conservative pro-lifer Jim DeMint was the best thing to come through the Senate in decades." DeMint had a 93 percent rating from the National Taxpayers Union and a perfect 100 percent from the libertarian Club for Growth.

Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), according to most media accounts, represents a new, younger, more libertarian approach. But at CPAC, Paul also announced that he would be introducing the "Life at Conception Act." On gay marriage, Paul's position is that it should be left to the states. And on immigration, Paul's newfound support for a path to citizenship has more in common with George W. Bush's compassionate conservatism than it does with doctrinaire libertarianism.

Libertarianism has a better brand name than conservatism these days, particularly among young people. Conservatives shouldn't be freaking out about this any more than libertarians should start a victory dance. The agreements between the two sides remain far greater than the differences.

SOURCE

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U.S. National Security Document Will Omit References to Islamic Extremism and Jihad

In what appears to be another victory for the US Muslim Brotherhood, Associated Press is reporting that "religious terms" such as Islamic extremism and Jihad will be removed from the document known as the National Security Strategy. According to the AP report:

"President Barack Obama's advisers will remove religious terms such as "Islamic extremism" from the central document outlining the U.S. national security strategy and will use the rewritten document to emphasize that the United States does not view Muslim nations through the lens of terror, counterterrorism officials said. The change is a significant shift in the National Security Strategy, a document that previously outlined the Bush Doctrine of preventative war and currently states: "The struggle against militant Islamic radicalism is the great ideological conflict of the early years of the 21st century."

The officials described the changes on condition of anonymity because the document still was being written, and the White House would not discuss it. But rewriting the strategy document will be the latest example of Obama putting his stamp on U.S. foreign policy, like his promises to dismantle nuclear weapons and limit the situations in which they can be used. The revisions are part of a larger effort about which the White House talks openly, one that seeks to change not just how the United States talks to Muslim nations, but also what it talks to them about, from health care and science to business startups and education.

That shift away from terrorism has been building for a year, since Obama went to Cairo, Egypt, and promised a "new beginning" in the relationship between the United States and the Muslim world. The White House believes the previous administration based that relationship entirely on fighting terror and winning the war of ideas.

The AP report also identifies a little known White House office that appears to have played a major role in the language change:
"You take a country where the overwhelming majority are not going to become terrorists, and you go in and say, ‘We're building you a hospital so you don't become terrorists.' That doesn't make much sense," said National Security Council staffer Pradeep Ramamurthy. Ramamurthy runs the administration's Global Engagement Directorate, a four-person National Security Council team that Obama launched last May with little fanfare and a vague mission to use diplomacy and outreach "in pursuit of a host of national security objectives."

Since then, the division has not only helped change the vocabulary of fighting terror but also has shaped the way the country invests in Muslim businesses, studies global warming, supports scientific research and combats polio.

Before diplomats go abroad, they hear from the Ramamurthy or his deputy, Jenny Urizar. When officials from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration returned from Indonesia, the NSC got a rundown about research opportunities on global warming. Ramamurthy maintains a database of interviews conducted by 50 U.S. embassies worldwide. And business leaders from more than 40 countries head to Washington this month for an "entrepreneurship summit" for Muslim businesses.

A post from 2008 discussed a Department of Homeland Security memo urging employees not to use terms including ‘jihad,' ‘jihadist' or ‘Islamic terrorist' in describing Islamic terrorism. As that post noted, the efforts of the US Brotherhood to change US counterterrorism language dates back to the 1988  bombings of U.S. embassies in Africa:

"Prior to the activities of Al Qaeda, MPAC and CAIR focused their efforts on defending the activities of Palestinian terror groups such as Hamas, arguing as noted above that they were motivated by suffering and oppression. Following the 1998 bombings of U.S. embassies in Africa, the Brotherhood groups were faced with a new issue- organized Islamic terrorists attacking the United States and killing civilians who were not party to any conflict involving Muslims.

After initial denials that Muslims were involved in the attacks, the U.S Brotherhood groups began arguing that although the grievances were "legitimate", the action were "un-Islamic." In total, the U.S. Brotherhood effort is in accord with the larger Muslim Brotherhood notion of "defensive Jihad" which holds that Jihad is justified where Muslims or "Muslim honor" is under attack. Therefore, under this definition, Hamas/Hezbollah violence is not terrorism because it is justified and Al Qaeda violence is not "Islamic" because it is not justified.

Another earlier post discussed the Leadership Group of the U.S.-Muslim Engagement Project, an organization whose report expressed support for changing the language used to describe terrorism. Members of the Leadership Group include well-known past and present political figures including former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, US Muslim Brotherhood leaders such as Islamic Society of North America (ISNA) President Ingrid Mattson, and Obama Muslim "Faith Advisor Dalia Mogahed.

The US Brotherhood effort to remove terms such as "Islamic extremism", in turn, is part of a larger rhetorical strategy which appears designed to obscure the true goals of the organization.

It should be noted that the change in the tone of US counterterrorism language was presaged in President Obama's counterterrorism adviser John Brennan's February speech at NYU at which Ingrid Mattson was present.

SOURCE

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The Unmourned

By Mark Steyn

In 2011, I wrote about mass murder at Kermit Gosnell’s abortion “clinic”:  "From the Office of the District Attorney in Philadelphia:   Viable babies were born. Gosnell killed them by plunging scissors into their spinal cords. He taught his staff to do the same."

    This is a remarkable moment in American life: A man is killing actual living, gurgling, bouncing babies on an industrial scale – and it barely makes the papers. Had he plunged his scissors into the spinal cord of a Democrat politician in Arizona, then The New York Times, ABC, CBS, NBC and everyone else would be linking it to Sarah Palin’s uncivil call for dramatic cuts in government spending. But “Doctor” Kermit Gosnell’s mound of corpses is apparently entirely unconnected to the broader culture.

And so it goes two years on, at “Doctor” Gosnell’s trial:

"Medical assistant Adrienne Moton admitted Tuesday that she had cut the necks of at least 10 babies after they were delivered, as Gosnell had instructed her. Gosnell and another employee regularly “snipped” the spines “to ensure fetal demise,” she said.   Moton sobbed as she recalled taking a cellphone photograph of one baby because he was bigger than any she had seen aborted before. She measured the fetus at nearly 30 weeks, and thought he could have survived, given his size and pinkish color. Gosnell later joked that the baby was so big he could have walked to the bus stop, she said."

Funny!

Notwithstanding Dr. Gosnell’s jest, and the fact that newborns delivered alive are generally regarded as “babies,” the New York Times’ only story on the case is punctilious enough to refer to Gosnell’s victims as “viable fetuses,” and its early paragraphs emphasize the defense’s wearily predictable line that this is a “racist prosecution.”

Instead of my Arizona comparison, what about Sandy Hook? One solitary act of mass infanticide by a mentally-ill loner calls into question the constitutional right to guns, but a sustained conveyor belt of infanticide by an entire cadre of cold-blooded killers apparently has no implications for the constitutional right to abortion. As one commentator wondered two years ago:

    "Does 30 years of calling babies “blobs of tissue” have no effect on the culture?"

For the answer, consider the testimony of “Nurse” Moton — and the clarification by AP writer Maryclaire Dale:

    "She once had to kill a baby delivered in a toilet, cutting its neck with scissors, she said. Asked if she knew that was wrong, she said, “At first I didn’t.”  Abortions are typically performed in utero."

“Typically.” So, finding oneself called on to “abort” a “viable fetus” in a toilet with a pair of scissors, who wouldn’t be confused as to whether it’s “wrong” or merely marginally atypical?

Gosnell’s murderous regime in Philadelphia reflects on him. The case’s all but total absence from the public discourse reflects on America:

    It’s time for the lukewarm to get over whatever prejudices are keeping them from getting on the right side of this issue, for the good of the victims of this ghastly culture, and for their own good as well.

SOURCE

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

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

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Some interesting experiments on "racism"

In the 1950's and 60s there was a concerted Marxist-led effort by psychologists to prove that people with "racist" attitudes were psychologically maladjusted. The fact that the whole world had been racist up until the war didn't seem to hold them up any.

Reality triumphed eventually however and psychology textbooks these days routinely concede that some form of "in group favoritism" is normal, natural and essentially universal. We all tend to like best people similar to ourselves. In Freudian terms it is an extension of self-love.

It seems, however, that economists have been reinventing the wheel by demonstrating in-group favoritism yet again. There is a description below. The authors found that bus drivers were less likely to give a free ride to dark-skinned people.

As with all such experiments, however, the problem of generalizability arises. What generalizations, if any, can we extract from the findings? The authors of the study offer a fairly expansive interpretation of their findings but a simpler explanation might be that dark skin is in all the English-speaking countries associated with a high crime rate, so the drivers may have been more likely to suspect dark-skinned requests for a free ride of being dishonest. The principle of parsimony would favour that explanation.

But in reality it is all speculative. NOTHING firm can be concluded from the data. And the authors themselves show how weak generalizations in that field are. They show that what the drivers said they would do and what they actually did were roughly opposite. As LaPiere showed in the 1930s, you cannot infer behaviour from expressed behavioural intention. But if you cannot predict behaviour even from behavioural intention, what can you predict? Again the answer is nothing.

So these little experiments are fun but are no cause for any heartburn. We are all "racists" to a degree but what implications that has for behaviour will vary with both the individual and the situation. Only a Leftist could deny that.

Of course, part of the problem is how racism is defined. To the hysterical Left any mention of race is racism and any mention of racial differences is doubly so. Such reactions are irrational however so the most expansive definition I would support is "preference for one group over another". And that is the sense in which I have used it above.

Even that usage, however tends to associate too much with racism. It associates probably harmless attitudes with some of the great evils of history. A more historically-grounded definition would be: "Advocating or practicing harm or disadvantage to other people solely on account of their race". Racism of that sort is exceedingly rare today outside Muslim countries. -- JR

Two economists from the University of Queensland, Redzo Mujcic and Professor Paul Frijters, will publish the results of a natural field experiment on Thursday in which trained "testers" of different ethnic appearance got on buses in Brisbane, discovered their travel card wouldn't work, but then asked the driver to let them to make the trip anyway.

Various testers did this more than 1500 times. Overall, the driver agreed in almost two-thirds of cases.

But whereas the success rate for testers of white appearance was 72 per cent, for testers of black appearance it was just 36 per cent.

Testers of Indian appearance were let on 51 per cent of the time, whereas those of Chinese, Japanese or Malaysian appearance were allowed to travel about as much as Caucasians were.

On average, bus drivers were 6 percentage points more likely to favour someone of the same race. Black drivers tended to be the most generous, accepting in 72 per cent of cases, compared with 54 per cent by Indian drivers and 64 per cent by Asian and white bus drivers.

If you think that's interesting, try this: to test the importance of how people were clothed, the testers were then dressed in business suits with briefcases. The success rate of whites rose by 21 percentage points and the combined rate for blacks and Indians rose to 75 per cent.

Next, the testers were dressed in military clothes. The success rate of whites rose by 25 percentage points while the combined rate for blacks and Indians rose to 85 per cent.

As a follow-up, the researchers then conducted a random survey of bus drivers at selected resting stations in Brisbane, presenting them with pictures of the same test subjects and asking the bus drivers whether they would let them on or not with an empty travel card.

Some 80 per cent of the bus drivers at resting stations indicated they would give free rides to Indian and black test subjects, even though in reality less than 50 per cent were let on.

Indeed, bus drivers said they would let on white subjects 5 percentage points less often than black subjects, whilst in reality white test subjects were favoured at least 40 percentage points more than black testers.

The main reason given for not letting someone on was it was against the rules, while the main reason to let someone on was it was no burden to do so.

It's all a bit disturbing - if not so surprising - but how do we make sense of it? And what's it got to do with economics?

Frijters, perhaps Australia's leading exponent of "behavioural" economics, is developing an economic theory of groups: the different types of groups and how and why they form. All of us feel an affinity with a range of groups. Businesses and government agencies are groups, but there can be groups within those groups; working teams as well as sporting teams. Mixed in with all this are in-groups and out-groups - people we want to associate with and people we don't.

Often we form groups so as to co-operate in achieving some goal. And groups often involve reciprocation - I do you a favour in the expectation that, when my need arises, you'll do me one.

So Frijters explains the results of his experiment in terms of group behaviour. "People with Indian or black complexions are more likely to be treated as an out-group and less worthy of help compared to Caucasians and Asians," he says.

"The reason bus drivers were more reluctant to give black and Indian help-seekers a free ride was that they did not personally relate to them."

When testers were sent to bus stops in military clothes this made them appear to be patriots, defending the same community as the bus driver. So the drivers' original out-group reaction could be overcome by in-group clothing.

The more favourable treatment of testers in business dress suggests the "aspirational groups" of the bus drivers include people richer than themselves, people with more desirable visual characteristics. That is, people the drivers regard as part of their in-group.

If all this sounds more sociological or to do with social psychology than with economics, it is. But that's the point of behavioural economics: to incorporate insights from other social sciences into economics.

And what have groups got to do with economics? That's simple: the objective of many groups is to give their members greater control over economic resources.

Frijter's new book, An Economic Theory of Greed, Love, Groups and Networks, written with Gigi Foster, will be published this month.

SOURCE

Footnote:

The research described above is still unpublished in its original form so I am not entirely sure what is in it but the authors would appear to be reinventing the work of Hechter as in:

Hechter, M. (1986) Rational choice theory and the study of race and ethnic relations. Ch. 12 in J. Rex & D. Mason (Eds.) "Theories of race and ethnic relations", Cambridge: U.P.

Hechter, M. (1987) Nationalism as group solidarity. "Ethnic & Racial Studies" 10, 415-426.

Hechter, M., Friedman, D. & Appelbaum, M. (1982) A theory of ethnic collective action. "International Migration Review" 16, 412-434.

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Behind the Cyprus turmoil

An attempt to rein in Greek and Russian collaboration in crookedness

The European Union's $13 billion bailout plan for Cyprus has nothing to do with socialism but rather with much greater stakes. This is the EU attempting to outmaneuver an uncharacteristically flat-footed Vladimir Putin and Russia in a key battleground, over long-festering issues: transparency, corruption, and support of Syria and Iran. This is also a case of the EU calling out a Trojan-horse country embedded inside the Eurozone.

In exchange for the $13 billion from the EU, Cyprus would have to impose a one-time tax on bank deposits, increase corporate taxes from 10 percent to 12.5 percent, and submit to greater financial transparency. It's about time. But what a potential nightmare of transparency for Russia.

Cyprus accepted a 2.5 billion euro loan from Russia in 2011, with Russia denying a more recent loan request for 5 billion euros. Now, Russia is saying that it will be so generous as to, at the very least, ease conditions on the initial loan if Cyprus provides the Russian government with the identities of Russians sheltering money in Cyprus banks. And Russia isn't forking over any more cash because it isn't convinced that it has to (yet) in order to maintain Cyprus as an ally. The two nations are as thick as thieves, and both have been playing the EU for utter morons.

Foreigners hold an estimated 40 percent of the cash in Cyprus banks, most of it belonging to Russians. It's not hard to imagine why, when a 10 percent corporate tax rate is available to anyone willing to spend 300,000 euros on a Cyprus residence. As an added bonus, after five years you get Cypriot citizenship, an EU passport and zero taxation on your global income. Russia has also been trying to get Cyprus to lobby the EU to lift Russian visa requirements.

The World Bank lists the gross domestic product of Cyprus at $24.7 billion, yet Russians (including 80 oligarchs) hold an estimated $25.6 billion in Cyprus banks, according to German intelligence.

What's the nature of this cash, exactly? Seedy-to-filthy at best. In February, the EU's Financial Intelligence Unit launched an investigation into whether Russian mafia cash had been laundered through EU banks. And late last year, according to Russia's own RIA Novosti state media, Cyprus opened an investigation into whether $31 million in Russian tax-fraud cash uncovered by anti-corruption lawyer Sergei Magnitsky, who died while awaiting trial in a Russian jail after accusing Russian officials of $230 million worth of tax fraud, had been moved to five Cyprus banks.

Cypriot and Russian authorities have been playing the EU and the rest of the world for fools since the collapse of the Soviet Union. Both say they want to fight corruption, though they never seem to get around to actually doing anything about it. When American intelligence busted a Russian spy ring in 2010 -- which most famously included redheaded Anna Chapman -- the alleged money-man and SVR (Russian foreign intelligence) point man, Pavel Kapustin (alias: Christopher Metsos), was nabbed on an Interpol warrant in Cyprus and successfully fled because he was conveniently bailed by Cypriot authorities. Nice crime-fighting.

In early 2012, the Guardian reported that a Russian transport ship carrying 60 tons of ammunition purchased by the Syrian government from state-controlled Russian munitions exporter Rosoboronexport pulled into the Cypriot port in a storm and, despite being in clear violation of sanctions, was sent back on its way by Cyprus authorities.

Similarly, key Russian trade partner Iran has long circumvented sanctions through Cypriot front companies. Intelligence Online reported last year: "According to our sources, one of the traders supplying Syria is the small Cypriot company Q-One Energy Ltd, headquartered at Soboh House, Limassol, in the same building as fellow trader Soboh Pentroleum, headed by Aiman Soboh and which works closely with Russian traders. Q-One delivered two shipments of 30,000 tonnes of petrol to Syria on board the Breeze A on March 11 and the Voyager A on March 22."

Sounds cozy.

There are 19 Iranian front companies circumventing U.S. sanctions via Cyprus, according to the U.S. Office of Foreign Assets Control -- and those are just the ones identified so far.

If Russia does offer Cyprus another bailout, it will be because Russia fears the revelations and strategic losses that would result from the tiny nation moving squarely into the Western sphere of influence. No doubt Putin has been hoping to get the EU to pay the bill for propping up Russian business accounts, backed by Russian banks, in Cyprus. Any cash Russia offers will come under the guise of "fighting corruption," of course. "Don't worry, we'll take care of this cleanup. Nothing to see here, so please don't look."

Sure. Russia has done such a crack job with that so far. The EU is finally trying to do right.

SOURCE

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To Save Traditional Marriage, End State Involvement in Marriage

Within the next few months, Justice Anthony Kennedy will likely rule that same-sex marriage is mandated by the Constitution of the United States. The ruling will offend both common sense and Constitutional law. But it will nonetheless become the law of the land. With it, states will be forced to recognize same-sex marriages; same-sex marriage will enter the public school lexicon; religious institutions will be forced to recognize same-sex marriages or lose their tax-exempt status. Religious Americans will be forced into violating their beliefs or facing legal consequences by the government. The First Amendment's guarantee of religious liberty will largely become obsolete.

There is only one way to stop this development: Get the government out of the business of marriage. Right now.

States and localities originally gave tax benefits and crafted specific legal systems in order to incentivize Americans to get married and have children within the context of marriage. But those legal institutions have been undermined over the past several decades by a culture that degrades marriage and child rearing. Incentive structures that used to provide the cherry on top of good moral decision-making no longer matter enough to drive such decision-making.

That gap between culture and the legal system has led to a cycle of defining deviancy down, with government taking the lead. The view of the value of marriage in American life changed in the 1950's and 1960's; the left used that cultural shift in order to legitimize no-fault divorce laws, legal custody and child support arrangements that incentivized divorce and social welfare systems that incentivized unwed motherhood.

The last bastion of the old value system was the state's approval of traditional marriage. But thanks to a decades-long cultural shift away from marriage, the left is now in position to use the levers of government to redefine the institution once and for all -- and in the process, destroy the American religious culture that under-girds American freedom.

Unlike the movement to retract laws restricting sexual behavior, the same-sex marriage movement has never been about freedom in any real sense. The push for same-sex marriage is not about wanting freedom to copulate; same-sex copulation has been effectively legal in this country for decades, and formally legal since Lawrence v. Texas (2003). The push for same-sex marriage is not about wanting legal benefits available to heterosexual couples; same-sex couples are largely able to make contractual arrangements to achieve those benefits, and in many states, civil unions equate legally with marriage.

The push for same-sex marriage is about placing the power of government in direct opposition to traditional religious viewpoints.

And conservatives cannot stop that push unless they are willing to restrict government power. Conservatism has always been about preventing the power of government from invading the lives of citizens. Leftism has always been about using the power of government to restrict the behavior of others. It is time for conservatives to recognize the reality of their situation, realize the dangers inherent in their insistence on government interventionism and act quickly.

Getting the government out of marriage would mean voluntary lifestyle arrangements governed by contract -- a practice that has roots stretching back millennia. Religious people would not be forced by the state to approve behavior they find morally problematic. They would not have to worry about their children being taught about such behavior. Conservatives would be forced to rebuild a culture of marriage rather than focusing on a crumbling legal bulwark.

Conservatives lost the culture. Then they lost the law. They can only regain traditional values by removing legal coercion and incentivization from the table -- the left will never hesitate to use those means -- and focusing once again on the raising and production of children within a culture of traditional morality.

SOURCE

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

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

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Anti-Semitism is a light sleeper. Look at Agatha Christie

I agree that antisemitism is a light sleeper.  It suffuses the British Left to this day. See  here (scroll down) and here and here and here and here and here.  But I don't think there is anything significant in the antisemitism of Agatha Christie.  She was simply a person of her time.  And the whole world (more or less) was antisemitic before WWII.  Do I have to refer to FDR sending Jewish refugees from Hitler back to Germany?  Christie didn't know any better.  The modern-day Left should

It should also be remarked that not all antisemitism is the same.  At the height of the British Empire there were laws in Britain restricting what Jews could do.  And Britons generally at that time thought that the British were clearly a superior race.  Yet the British Conservative party elected as their leader a man most unapologetic about his "Hebrew" origins -- Disraeli.  And Disraeli had a most distinguished subsequent career as British Prime Minister.  As Bismarck said:  "Der alte Jude.  Das ist der Mann". ("The old Jew.  That's the man").

So compare antisemitism among conservatives with the antisemitism of the socialist Hitler. Anybody who can't see a huge difference isn't thinking.  It's the hate that makes the difference and hate is what makes you a Leftist -- JR

In reflections on Perspectives: The Mystery of Agatha Christie – in which David Suchet, the most popular of all Hercule Poirots, looked at her famous disappearance in 1926 – Matthew Sweet wonders why Christie’s work is so unexamined.  She was always pretty political in her way. As a child I was perplexed by the intrusion into her later books of her burning resentment of high taxes.  And because my parents deplored anti-Semitism, I noticed jarring anti-Jewish references in some of those she published pre-war.

Christie’s anti-Semitism was not eradicated by the horrors of the Holocaust, though it no longer disfigured her books. Sweet recalls Christopher Hitchens describing dinner chez Christie in the 1960s, when "the anti-Jewish flavour of the talk was not to be ignored or overlooked, or put down to heavy humour or generational prejudice. It was vividly unpleasant."

She was, of course, by no means alone.  I’ve been reading the canon of that fine crime-writer, Cyril Hare, a judge whose Tragedy at Law is both a superb puzzle and a marvellous guide to the almost unbelievable pomposity of an untrammelled bench. It’s the casual anti-Semitism in dialogue that gets one, eg, the throw-away description of someone as a "sub-Aryan". Yet Christie and Hare were decent, civilised, well-read people who abhorred cruelty.

I’ve three thoughts on this. Firstly, looking at the anti-Semitism that so often  lurks under the guise of anti-Zionism, we should remember Conor Cruise-O’Brien’s description of anti-Semitism as “a light sleeper”.  The language may have changed, but the instincts remain.

Secondly, is it because of the contempt of the intelligentsia for crime writers that so little attention has been paid to the politics of so important and influential a writer as Christie?
And, thirdly, the call for retrospective censorship is always stupid: there’s no better way to understand the fears and prejudices of any period than by reading its unexpurgated fiction.

SOURCE

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Obama falsely claims credit for America's energy boom

Stealing conservative talking points is what Obama does.  He got the idea from Tony Blair. He is all talk, however.  He does nothing to implement conservative policies

During the Friday event at which President Obama announced $2 billion in new green energy subsidies, he erroneously credited his administration's "all of the above" energy policy for the nation's increased oil and gas production. "We produce more oil than we have in 15 years," he said. "We import less oil than we have in 20 years. We're producing more natural gas than we ever have before -- with hundreds of thousands of good jobs to show for it."

The numbers and facts that Obama cited were all correct. But his claim is still false, unless he can somehow claim credit (and we wouldn't necessarily put it past him) for placing massive shale deposits below ground stretching from Texas to North Dakota and from the mountain West to western Maryland.

Obama's energy policy has done nothing positive for the current boom in the "unconventional" (shale and tar sands) oil and gas extraction industry -- a boom that has providentially boosted employment, improved the nation's balance of trade, and probably saved the incumbent president from defeat last November. Further, Obama's policy has actually reduced oil and gas production on federal lands, where it genuinely falls under Obama's power. A recent study by the Congressional Research Service found that all of the increased production from fiscal years 2007 to 2012 took place on nonfederal lands.

Between fiscal 2010 and 2012, total U.S. oil production rose by about 1.1 million barrels per day. U.S. production will likely eclipse that of Saudi Arabia by the end of the decade. Natural gas production is an even bigger story. It rose by 20 percent during the same period, driving down prices and revolutionizing the way Americans generate their electricity. This all comes thanks to advances in technology and hydraulic fracturing techniques.

During the same period, oil and gas production on federal lands fell sharply, both in absolute terms and as a percentage of production. Federal lands accounted for more than a quarter of U.S. gas production as recently as 2009, but in 2012 made up only 15 percent. Federal offshore gas production in 2012 was less than half what it was in 2007.

Obama has made no secret of his goal of getting America off oil completely. His latest plan to subsidize green energy is funded by $2 billion in fees on oil and gas companies. He announced in his Saturday radio address that his goal is to "shift our cars and trucks off of oil for good."

How much more important will American oil production have to become to the health of the economy before Obama gives up on his ideologically charged defiance of economics and embraces oil and gas as the fuels of America's next century?

SOURCE

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What DOES lead to black success

 Thomas Sowell

A remarkable book titled Gifted Hands tells the personal story of Benjamin Carson, a black kid from the Detroit ghetto who went on to become a renowned neurosurgeon.

At one time young Ben Carson had the lowest grades in his middle school class, and was the butt of teasing by his white classmates. Worse yet, he himself believed that he was just not smart enough to do the work.

Fortunately for him, his mother, whose own education went no further than the third grade, insisted that he was smart. She cut off the television set and made him and his brother hit the books--books that she herself could scarcely read.

As young Ben's school work began to catch up with that of his classmates, and then began to surpass that of his classmates, his whole view of himself and of the wider world around him began to change. He began to think that he wanted to become a doctor.

There were a lot of obstacles to overcome along the way, including the fact that his mother had to be away from time to time for psychiatric treatment, as she tried to cope with the heavy pressures of trying to raise two boys whose father had deserted the family that she now had to support on a maid's wages.

In many ways the obstacles facing young Ben Carson were like those faced by so many other youngsters in the ghetto. What was different was that he overcame those obstacles with the help of a truly heroic mother and the values she instilled in him.

It is an inspiring personal story, told plainly and unpretentiously, including the continuing challenges he faced later as a neurosurgeon operating on the brains of people with life-threatening medical problems, often with the odds against them.

To me it was a personal story in another sense, that some of his experiences as a youngster brought back experiences that I went through growing up in Harlem many years earlier.

I could understand all too well what it was like to be the lowest performing child in a class. That was my situation in the fourth grade, after my family had moved up from the South, where I had been one of the best students in the third grade -- but in a grossly inferior school system.

Now I sometimes found myself in tears because it was so hard to try to get through my homework.

But in one sense I was much more fortunate than Ben Carson and other black youngsters today. The shock of being in a school, whose standards were higher than I was able to meet at first, took place in an all-black school in Harlem, so that there was none of the additional complications that such an experience can have for a black youngster in a predominantly white school.

By the time I first entered a predominantly white school; I had already caught up, and had no trouble with the school work. Decades later, in the course of running a research project, I learned that the Harlem school, where I had so much trouble catching up, had an average IQ of 84 back when I was there.

In the predominantly white school to which I later went, I was put in a class for children with IQs of 120 and up, and had no trouble competing with them. But I would have been totally wiped out if I had gone there two years earlier -- and who knows what racial hang-ups that might have led to?

Chance plays a large part in everyone's life. The home in which you are raised is often a big part of luck being on your side or against you. But you don't need parents with Ph.D.’s to make sure that you make the most of your education.

The kinds of things that statisticians can measure, such as family income or parents' education, are not the crucial things. The family's attitude toward education and toward life can make all the difference.

Virtually everything was against young Ben Carson, except for his mother's attitudes and values. But, armed with her outlook, he was able to fight his way through many battles, including battles to control his own temper, as well as external obstacles.

Today, Dr. Benjamin Carson is a renowned neurosurgeon at a renowned institution, Johns Hopkins University. But what got him there was wholly different from what is being offered to many ghetto youths today, much of which is not merely futile but counterproductive.

SOURCE

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The Cyprus Cash Grab - Coming to America?

 Neal Boortz remembers

You were shocked - SHOCKED, you say - at the very idea that the government of Cyprus would order banks to seize 10% of every bank account and hand the money over the government? Well … excuse me for being rude, but maybe if you had been spending a better part of the last 20 years paying attention to the atrocities that happen with nauseating regularity in Washington, instead of going into an annual swoon over March Madness and/or the Oscars, or blindly tuning in to Entertainment Tonight every evening rather than an actual newscast, you might have seen this money grab coming. I’m no rocket surgeon, and I saw it coming (in America, not Cyprus) and I been warning the listeners to my talk show from 1993 right up until my retirement two months ago.
It’s simple. Taxing your income is simply not enough. The left is coming after your wealth. They’ll be satisfied with some of your retirement funds … for now.

If you haven’t been paying attention to the Cyprus story, here’s your short version: Cyprus is in financial trouble. The Cypriot government is led by communists. Trade unions are fighting austerity programs needed to erase huge deficits. Sound familiar? That is similar to the situation in the United States in more ways that you might imagine. So Cyprus did what every other troubled Eurozone country is doing: went to the Eurozone finance commissioners for a bailout. The commissioners said fine, but as a condition of the bailout Cyprus must levy a 10% tax against the outstanding balance in all depository accounts in Cyprus banks. Call it a tax. Or call it stealing. Either way, every Cypriot depositor loses 10% of their account. The government screws up, the people pay. Again, it sounds so very familiar.

Oddly enough, the people of Cyprus weren’t particularly elated over this move, nor were investors and citizens throughout the Eurozone. Imagine that! Cypriots immediately grabbed their ATM cards and started to withdraw as much money as they could from their accounts. Cash in their hands wouldn’t be hit for 10%. It was clear there would be a run on the banks as soon as they reopened. Now the plan to simply seize individual wealth is being delayed, though not abandoned.

Could it happen here? Well certainly it could. Congress could pass and the President could sign legislation calling for the seizure of 10% of every checking and savings account in every bank in America. This might finally be enough to cause a resurrection, but they could do it. So in America the wealth seizure has to be just a bit more selective and subtle. And that brings us to the warning I’ve been voicing for 20 years.

Go back to 1993. Bill Clinton has just been sworn in. The Democrats are running the show. They’ve passed a nice little tax increase – retroactive, mind you – and they feel encouraged. Along comes a lady by the name of Alicia Munnell. She’s been appointed by Clinton to be an Assistant Treasury Secretary for Economic Development. Munnell proposes a plan to come up with some cash to shore up Social Security. Not everyone, it seems, is “fortunate” enough to have a nice little IRA or 401k retirement account. Why this just isn’t fair! Everyone should have a comfortable retirement, not just the people who actually planned and worked for one! So Munnell proposed to Clinton an idea! Let’s just go out there and seize 15% of the outstanding balance of every IRA and 401k. Seize that money and pump it into the Social Security system. As it turns out, Munnell and Clinton never really had the chance to put their plan into action since the very next year the Republicans took control of the House and the Senate in the voter revolution of 1994. Munnell hasn’t gone away though. She now hatches her wealth seizure and redistribution schemes as the Director of the Center for Retirement Research at Boston College.

Never fear .. the idea is alive. House and Senate Democrats are even now toying with various plots to seize retirement and pension plans and pour them into some grand new government operated and controlled pension system .. a system that would be “fair” to everyone. This is just a perfect scenario for Obamian class warfare. “Those rich people are enjoying their fat-cat retirements with the money that should have been used to pay workers a living wage. They steal a comfortable retirement from the middle class and laugh at them from their yachts and private jets.” Yeah … that works. And as you should know, the government would certainly do a better job providing for American’s retirements than could free people interacting in a system of economic liberty.

Cyprus? I hope you enjoy that spectacle as it unfolds. Shake your heads and tsk tsk all you like. Just remember … the Democrat party is watching this episode and celebrating. You’re next.

SOURCE

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

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

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