Leftist lies and egotism again

Book review of "HOTEL FLORIDA: TRUTH, LOVE AND DEATH IN THE SPANISH CIVIL WAR  --  BY AMANDA VAILL"

Review by John Preston

During the early months of 1937, a very strange collection of people descended on a rundown hotel in central Madrid.

On the face of it, they had come to report on the Spanish Civil War in which General Franco's fascists were trying to topple the democratically elected Republican government.

But reading Amanda Vaill's riveting and richly atmospheric account of their time in the Hotel Florida, it's hard to avoid the conclusion that they had also come to have the mother of all parties.

Among them was the writer Ernest Hemingway. For Hemingway, the war offered him a chance to revive his career as a novelist. His last few books had been flops and he was desperate to find a subject that would re-ignite his imagination.

Other guests included American journalist Martha Gellhorn. She, too, had come in search of inspiration, but she also wanted to envelop her idol, Hemingway, in an escape-proof bear hug.

Also there was a young Hungarian and his Polish girlfriend. The Hungarian had been born Endre Erno Friedmann, but in Spain he and his girlfriend hatched a brilliant plan.

They decided to re-invent themselves as 'Robert Capa', a rich, famous and entirely fictitious American photographer. Friedmann would take the photos while his girlfriend would sell them, asking for three times the going rate on the grounds that Capa was a reclusive genius.

Other unexpected characters wandering through the Florida's lobby included the spy Kim Philby, the Hollywood actor Errol Flynn and the British poet Stephen Spender. All claimed to have come to find the truth of what was happening in the civil war, but as Vaill reveals - with a lethally sharp scalpel - most of them were far more at home with falsehood than they were with truth.

Martha Gellhorn had plenty of form here. She had made her name as a journalist with a piece about a lynching she’d witnessed in Mississippi.  The piece was full of vivid little touches - the victim 'making a terrible sound like a dog whimpering' - and various magazines bid handsomely for the right to publish it.

The trouble was that Gellhorn had never been anywhere near a lynching - she had pinched a few details from here and there, and made the rest up.

Then disaster struck. Greatly moved by her account, the House of Representatives invited her to testify at a Senate committee.  Faced with the prospect of lying under oath, Gellhorn was forced to come clean.

Not that this dented her self-regard for long. Soon afterwards she ran Hemingway to earth in Florida, where she employed the classic vamp's trick of befriending his wife in order to get to him.

Amid great subterfuge, Hemingway and Gellhorn set off for Spain. Disturbed by reports of food shortages, Hemingway arrived laden with tinned ham, prawns and pate to ensure he didn’t go peckish.

Ensconced in the Hotel Florida, he began sending back reports of what he'd witnessed, or claimed to have witnessed - Hemingway was just as prone to embellishing stories as Gellhorn.

As for Robert Capa, he hadn't been there long when he took one of the most famous of all war photographs - of a Spanish soldier at the moment of death. Except that this, too, was a lie, or very close to one.

One morning, Capa asked a group of Republican soldiers if they would simulate being hit by gunfire. A man obligingly ran down a hillside with his rifle in his hand, then dropped to the ground as instructed.

But when Capa asked if he wouldn't mind having another go, the man stayed where he was. It turned out that he really was dead, shot by a sniper on the other side of the valley.

This, at least, was Capa's version of events. But 80 years on, there's still speculation that the soldier wasn't shot at all.   Instead, it's claimed, he simply stood up, dusted himself down and carried on his way. Whatever the truth, Capa was made.

While Hemingway was in Spain, he wrote the commentary for a documentary intended to alert the American people to the reality of what was happening there.

But even this was a con. The footage was cut together with no regard for accuracy, but simply to look as dramatic as possible.

Worried that the roar of real bombs didn't sound scary enough, the director used a recording of earthquake rumbles that he took from an old film called San Francisco and ran backwards.

Yet however ludicrous the experience may have been, for Hemingway at least it worked.

He returned to Spain in September 1937 - this time armed with tins of salmon and ham as well as a poulet roti en gelee - and began work on what many consider to be his masterpiece, For Whom The Bell Tolls.

'The best book he has written,' declared the New York Times when it was published. 'The fullest, the deepest, the truest.'

SOURCE

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How do we solve unemployment?

Written by Tim Worstall

It appears that the correct method to reduce unemployment is to reduce unemployment benefits, increase in work benefits, abolish the minimum wage and insist that those unemployed take a job, any job, at any price.

After all, that's what Germany has done and the German unemployment rate fell dramatically as a result of doing just that. Scott Sumner has the detail:

"So what's the real explanation for the German success? That's pretty obvious; the Hartz reforms of 2003 sharply reduced the incentive to not work, and sharply increased the incentive to take low wage jobs. As a result, today Germany has lots of very low wage jobs of the type that would be illegal in France or California. ....So the one major success story among developed countries has achieved its success by doing essentially the exact opposite of what progressives want. Germany has no minimum wage, reduced its incentives to live off welfare, and has a level of wage inequality that is increasing even faster than in the US. It's no wonder that progressives prefer to focus on things like "vocational training programs," which were just as common during the 30-year period of steadily rising German unemployment."

That's a fairly forthright explanation of what has been going on. And the real annoyance of that Progressive stand (what we over here might call Guardianista), that we must raise the wages of the lowly paid, not reduce them, that no one should be forced to work to gain benefits, is that you can derive the Hartz reforms from the work of Richard Layard. Indeed, even the timid attempts we do have to get people to work, any job at all at any price, even if the pay must be topped up with benefits, can be derived from Layard's work. For what he's actually saying is that long term unemployment puts people on the scrap heap. Thus there have to be sticks and carrots to drag them, screaming wildly if need be, back into the labour force.

Sumner is depressed at the way that the American left insists on counterproductive policies on unemployment. And we are here about the British left. If the market for low skill labour isn't clearing then that must mean that the price of low skilled labour is too high for the market to clear. If you're really worried about getting people into jobs you've therefore got to accept that wages will fall. If you then want to top them up with in work benefits then that's intellectually at least, just fine. But wibbling on about how the minimum wage must rise because inequality is just condemning ever more people to lives wasted on the dole.

SOURCE

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Inspector General Shock:  Homeland Security Watchdog delayed and deleted info embarrassing to Obama Administration

Under Obama the watchdog has become a watchpuppy

The integrity of the government watchdog system has been called into question by the revelation that the Acting Inspector General of the Department of Homeland Security bowed to political pressure within the Obama Administration by delaying and withholding information on three separate reports.

The Office of the Inspector General is an independent watchdog within each Department and Agency charged with the responsibility to investigate allegations of malfeasance and corruption.  Recently, the Inspector General of the IRS uncovered and reported the finding that IRS employees had been illegally targeting tax exempt applications from conservative groups.  That allegation led to congressional investigations and the resignation of Lois Lerner, the IRS’ head of exempt organizations.

Americans for Limited Government’s Nathan Mehrens warned back in July, 2011 about the danger of not having fully confirmed Inspectors General in place in every Agency and Department, and unfortunately the DHS revelations proved him to be prescient.

In a statement released in reaction to a Washington Post report on the DHS scandal, Mehrens reiterated the need for appointed and confirmed Inspectors General throughout the government,

“Today’s revelation in the Washington Post that the acting Inspector General at the Department of Homeland Security delayed and withheld information that was damaging to the Obama administration confirms our worst fears that the President’s failure to fill IG positions damages the integrity of this important public watchdog function.  The Inspector General of a Department is charged with protecting the public from government corruption, misspending and malfeasance independently of the political appointees who run the Department or Agency that they oversee.

“The fact that Obama Administration officials even dared to try to pressure an acting IG to skew his report shows a contempt for the watchdog process that is unparalleled.  Congress needs to immediately eliminate the salary and pension for the acting IG who violated his public trust, and learn who in the Administration pressured this supposedly independent corruption investigator to violate his public trust.  Whoever is involved in this manipulation of three separate IG reports should be immediately called to testify to learn if they were directed to do so by other political appointees.

“This report goes to the heart of the public’s right to have an independent watchdog protecting them from abuse, and is why Americans for Limited Government has repeatedly called for the appointment of permanent IGs across the Administration.  Currently, there are eight Inspectors General’s offices that are being led by acting officials who, as was the case in the Department of Homeland Security, are subject to the additional pressure of seeking to please those they are overseeing as they seek appointment to the permanent position.  Here is the list:  http://www.ignet.gov/igs/homepage1.html ”

The incredible aspect of the scandal at the Department of Homeland Security is that the former Acting head of the Inspectors General office was transferred from that post to another high paying career civil service job within the Department just days prior to his being scheduled to testify before a Senate Committee on the allegations of malfeasance.  Upon the transfer, the Democratic Party controlled Senate Committee cancelled the scheduled hearing.

There is no excuse for political pressure to ever be applied to those who are charged with exposing waste, fraud and abuse in our federal government.  While the former Acting IG should be held accountable for his failing to uphold the public trust, it is even more important to learn who within the Obama Administration directed the politically motivated delays and cover up.

Those involved in applying this political pressure are the ones who need to be forced to testify before Congress to determine if there is any White House involvement in this cover up scheme, or if it was the work of rogue political appointees.

Failure for Congress to step up and hold those responsible for impugning the integrity of the Office of Inspector General would create a permanent stain on the supposed impartiality of the Office’s future findings.  And that would be bad for both those accused, but also those exonerated of future public corruption charges.

SOURCE

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Jodi Arias vs. Kermit Gosnell: You’ve Probably Heard of One, Why Not the Other?

Jodi Arias became a household name during her trial for the murder of boyfriend Travis Alexander. His death and her conviction turned into a media circus, even prompting a daily show on HLN.

Filmmaker Phelim McAleer took note of the media coverage and interviewed people on the streets of Hollywood to find out just how much they knew about Arias.

In the subsequent video McAleer released, participants were shown a photo of Arias, and then a photo of another convicted murderer. Everyone recognized Arias. One of the participants said, “It felt like you didn’t really have to deliberately look her up to find something about her.”

No one had heard about Kermit Gonsell, however. Even when McAleer prompted participants with Gosnell’s name, they “never heard it.”

Arias was convicted of first-degree murder on May 8, 2013. Gosnell, a Philadelphia abortion doctor, was convicted on three counts of first-degree murder and one count of involuntary manslaughter on May 13, 2013, just five days after Arias. He’s suspected of killing thousands of babies over his 40 years in the abortion business.

Why had so many of McAleer’s interview subjects heard of Arias but not Gosnell, whom he calls “the most prolific serial killer in American history”?

It’s the reason why McAleer and co-producers Ann McElhinney and Magdalena Segieda decided to make a movie. The film, titled “Gosnell,” has raised more than $1.3 million on Indiegogo. That’s 65 percent of the $2.1 million goal it must reach by May 12.

At the end of his man-on-the-street video, McAleer informs a person about Gosnell’s crimes. Her response, “That goes to show you that the media focuses on the trials they want us to be concerned about.”

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, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated) and Coral reef compendium. (Updated as news items come in).  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 Exodus and Akhnaten

On several occasions I have suggested that the Israelites who fled Egypt might have been expelled or escaping devotees of Egypt's  monotheistic Akhnaten religion.  There is much that fits but the problem is that the Exodus story is quite unlike anything we know from Egyptian history.  Below is an account that shows the connection is possible  -- JR

The whole subject of the Exodus is embarrassing to archaeologists. The Exodus is so fundamental to us and our Jewish sources that it is embarrassing that there is no evidence outside of the Bible to support it. So we prefer not to talk about it, and hate to be asked about it.

However, there is another way of looking at it, another way of seeking support for this fundamental experience of our peoplehood.

We do not look for evidence from the biblical text, but we can look to it for the general context of a sojourn in, and an exodus from, Egypt, and there are three major elements.

The first is that the Israelites were slave workers in mudbrick. They had to manufacture the material and they were semi-skilled workers in laying the bricks. As there were thousands of Israelites, what projects were they working on? The pyramids and the temples were in stone, the mudbrick houses of the peasants were built by themselves, so what project needed hundreds of workers in mudbrick? Secondly, when the Israelites escaped, it was during a period of turmoil brought on by the magical plagues, a period when the Egyptians were off their guard and keen to see the slaves go as they wished into the desert.

When could that have been? And thirdly, the Israelites escaped into the desert and there built a most luxurious portable shrine to their God, to accompany them through their long desert trek and to house the Deity that would lead them and protect them on the way. It was to be made of fabulous materials, in hardwood and colored cloth with gold and copper trimmings, as described in detail in 16 chapters of the Torah.

How could all that have been manufactured and assembled in the arid Sinai wilderness? We should then ask, is there any period in Egyptian history when the conditions for these three elements could have come together and thus formed a basis for the context and account of the Exodus? And the answer here is “yes” – there was one such period.

It was around the death of the heretic Pharaoh Akhenaten, the one who decreed that all worship should be directed to the single god Aten, the disc of the sun, and all other gods should be downgraded to secondary rank. To impose his new religious order, Akhenaten closed the old cultic centers of Saqqara and Luxor, closed the temples there, disowned their priests and founded a new city, Akhetaten, called the Horizon of the Aten, on a prime site well away from the old centers.

TO IMPOSE the new rule, the city had to be built quickly, and it went up in the incredibly short time of two years, being built throughout in mudbrick, except for the temple and palace, which were in traditional stone.

How could it have been built so quickly? It was said to have employed thousands of slaves working under military taskmasters. It was the largest mudbrick project in Egyptian history and it required thousands of bricklayers and millions of bricks. It employed the army to supervise the slave workers and force them to work as fast as the Pharaoh demanded.

The new city was at El Amarna, on the east bank of the Nile, where there was plenty of soft mud for the bricks but little straw.

Thanks to slave labor, Akhenaten’s model city was built in record time, but it did not last long. After only 16 years, Akhenaten died, his reforms had been deeply unpopular and when he died, his new religion was abandoned, and so was his city. Akhenaten and his beautiful wife Nefertiti had had no son, only six daughters, and so it was one of the sons-inlaw who succeeded him: Tutankhamun, the famous boy king Tut.

He had the onerous task of restoring the old order, the old religion, the old gods and their priests, and he was under threat if he did not do so. The restitution stele says that the old gods would punish him if they were not given back their old rights and positions.

Hapi, the androgynous god of the Nile, would make its waters undrinkable; Kermit, the goddess of fertility, would release her frogspawn to swarm over the land; Osiris, the god of corn, would not prevent the locusts from consuming his cereals, and Ra, the sun god, would refuse to shine. Sound familiar? The laws of succession had already been altered, there was no firstborn son to succeed Akhenaten, only a daughter and son-in-law.

As the new city was abandoned, there was breakdown in law and order and the Israelite slaves saw their chance to escape. Like the other departing inhabitants they took with them any treasure they could lay their hands on. They “despoiled the Egyptians” (Exodus 12:36) and marched off with precious materials and above all the battle shrine of Tutankhamun.

Every Pharaoh had a portable battle shrine, to go with him into war, so he could consult the deity and look to it for guidance on the field. Tutankhamun did not go to war, as far as we know, but he had to be ready and he had a war chariot, as one was figured on his furniture, so he would have had a battle shrine as well, but none was found among the luxurious treasures of his tomb when it was uncovered by Howard Carter in 1922.

Where then was his battle shrine ? It had been taken away by the Israelites.

And what was its form? We can assume that it was similar to that of Ramesses the Great, whose battle shrine is depicted on the walls of his temple at Abu Simbel. It was a two-chamber movable building set in a large courtyard; the inner chamber was square and contained the ark of a deity protected by two winged birds, and the outer room was twice as large, for the worshipping priests.

That of Tutankhamun was taken by the fleeing Israelites and converted by artisans Bezalel and Oholiab, as instructed by Moses, to become the portable Mishkan or Tabernacle, that accompanied them through the wilderness and landed up at Shiloh, in Canaan. Thus it was made of the finest material, as was everything else that Tutankhamun left behind, including furniture with carrying poles and a golden chest surrounded by cherubim. Sound familiar?

THUS, AT the death of Akhenaten we have a situation in Egypt where the three major conditions of the Israelite account of the Exodus came together; the building of a vast mudbrick project; a period of unrest and turmoil when slaves could escape; and the foundation of the Mishkan in the shape of a luxury battle shrine. The date of the death of Akhenaten is placed at about 1330 BCE, and Tutankhamun came to the throne the same year.

SOURCE

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Bundy Ranch Repeat Brewing On The Red River

The Texas – Oklahoma border on the Red River is the latest flashpoint in the growing property rights war between overreaching federal bureaucrats and private citizen landowners.

Breitbart’s Bob Price reports that the Bureau of Land Management (the rogue federal agency that precipitated the Bundy Ranch standoff in Nevada) is considering seizing 90,000 acres of private land along the Red River that forms part of the border between Texas and Oklahoma.

The BLM is now contemplating the same strategy it used some 30 years ago to deprive Texas rancher Tommy Henderson of 140 acres of his property without paying him one cent to gain control of more land in the Red River area.

According to Representative Mac Thornberry’s staff, the issue of the ownership of this land dates back to the Louisiana Purchase of 1803. When the BLM made the claim on Henderson’s land, their position was that Texas never had the authority to deed the land to private parties and therefore it would fall under federal control.

According to Breitbart’s Price, the U.S. Supreme Court attempted to settle the boundary dispute in Oklahoma v. Texas and declared the boundary to be defined by wooden stakes set on the river bank. But as Price observed, that boundary apparently lasted no longer than anyone could expect wooden stakes to last in the shifting sands of a meandering river. In 2000, Texas and Oklahoma’s legislatures agreed to a “Red River Boundary Compact” which defined the border between the states as the southern vegetation line.

In 2000, Texas and Oklahoma’s legislatures agreed to a “Red River Boundary Compact” which defined the border between the states as the southern vegetation line. According to the Constitution, Congress must ratify agreements of this kind between the states (Article 1, Section 10, Clause 3) which was done when Congressman Thornberry introduced House Joint Resolution 72 during the 106th Congress which was passed and signed by the President to become Public Law No: 106-288.

Ostensibly the issue that has once again brought the BLM into the picture is a state dispute between Texas and Oklahoma, and federal rights accrued through the 212 year-old Louisiana Purchase, but the real issue is not whether the land in question is rightly or wrongly in private hands; it is who controls the public lands in Texas.

Texas is the only western state with no significant federal landholdings outside of parks and military installations because when the Republic of Texas came into the Union it claimed title to all the lands not then in private hands within the state borders.

The Republic of Texas had a policy of attracting settlers and encouraging them to build wealth through the protection of private property rights and eventually those Texas lands were deeded to private parties.

In many cases the lands currently eyed by the federal government have been in Texas families for generations, but were the BLM to pursue its claim to the Red River lands vast areas of Texas could be open to a similar challenge and eventual federal control.

The great Texas oil boom of the 20th century, and the vast expansion and wealth of Texas cities, such as Dallas, Ft. Worth and Houston that accompanied it, all took place on private property without much federal interference. Likewise the newer shale plays, such as the Cline shale are outside of federal control.

The Red River lies between the Barnett shale in Texas and the Woodford in Oklahoma and some observers are beginning to wonder if controlling the water and energy potential of the region isn’t behind the sudden federal interest in the Red River private property.

Citizen outrage continues to rise and were federal bureaucrats attempt another land grab using the Henderson case as precedent the situation along the Red River could become another Bundy Ranch-style confrontation between citizens protecting their private property and overreaching federal bureaucrats.

Organizers with the Oklahoma Militia, that claims nearly 50,000 volunteers, say they currently have members in Nevada helping to defend Cliven Bundy’s ranch.

Members say they are taking Bundy’s side and fear the BLM's practices there could spread to the Sooner State.

Scott Shaw told Oklahoma City’s News Channel 4, “Evidently in America we don’t actually own the property anymore if you ever did.”

Shaw says Oklahoma Militia members are ready to take up arms against the federal government if needed.

He said, “It’s up to the feds. The ball’s in their court! You can do this legally or if you want to try to do a land grab violently, you can do that. We’re going to resist you!”

Shaw says the militia has not had to defend Oklahoma from the government yet but members are becoming concerned.

Shaw said, “Just look around the country, they are doing it everywhere. If they can do it in Nevada, they can do it in Colorado, Texas. I mean, what’s to stop them from coming to Oklahoma? The only thing to stop them is ‘We the People’.”

SOURCE

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ELSEWHERE

The Plan: Dump Those Plans:  "Another ObamaCare insurance policy casualty may be what's known as fixed benefit or indemnity insurance. People who hold these policies receive a fixed sum of money when they use health care services, and because they're not tied to a network, these policyholders can visit any doctor they like. And they're less expensive than the typical insurance policy. Yet new regulations sprouting from ObamaCare would make these plans illegal because they don't offer the required benefits of the law. That means -- you guessed it -- another wave of cancellations of plans that people like. There are hundreds of thousands of people on these policies, and enrollment in them has increased thanks to ObamaCare's spiking premium costs. The poor will be hardest hit.

How Many Uninsured?:  "Ostensibly, the purpose of ObamaCare was to insure the uninsured. At least that's what Barack Obama and his leftist cadres repeatedly told us. Well, so much for that. The CBO estimates that at the end of this year, 42 million Americans will still lack insurance. A decade from now, the number will be 31 million. And the CBO's estimate is likely too good because it's based on their calculation that of the supposed eight million enrollees in ObamaCare, six million were previously uninsured. Other estimates put that number as low as two or three million. But it gets worse, Fox News reports: “Not only that, but starting in 2018, the CBO report projected the total getting coverage from the exchange will hit 25 million, although at the same time 12 million will lose coverage.” If you like your… oh, never mind.

IRS Awards Its Tax Evaders Bonuses:  "As if you needed yet another reason to despise the IRS, the Associated Press reports on an inspector general investigation revealing that between October 2012 and December 2012, tax evaders within the agency were awarded $1 million in bonuses and $2.8 million overall was given “to employees with recent disciplinary problems.” The AP notes, “[The] report said the bonus program doesn't violate federal regulations, but it's inconsistent with the IRS mission to enforce tax laws.” Those would be the very tax laws that land ordinary citizens in deep trouble for evading. But laws are for the little people; breaking the law in the public sector earns you a reward. The report adds that these bonuses “create a conflict with the IRS's charge of ensuring the integrity of the system of tax administration.” Did the agency ever have any integrity? The targeting of conservative groups should put any such assertion to rest.

Obama's war on women:  "As of 2012, the most recent year for Census Bureau income data, the median income of American women was $21,520 in constant 2012 dollars. That was down $914 dollars—or about 4.1 percent—from 2009.  The median income of American women has not recovered in the current recovery. It has continued to decline from its pre-recession high.  The measure of “income,” according to the Census Bureau, does not include “noncash benefits, such as food stamps, health benefits, rent-free housing, and goods produced and consumed on the farm.” But it does include money a person takes in from such sources as unemployment compensation, Social Security payments, Supplemental Security Income, public assistance, disability benefits, and other cash payments such as rents, royalties, dividends, and interest."

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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, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated) and Coral reef compendium. (Updated as news items come in).  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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Cliven Bundy has a good legal case



The BLM has assumed complete control of a swath of land out West, forbidding any and all from stepping foot on it without BLM permission. It sent troops to enforce a court order to Bundy to pay what the BLM claimed he owed, and also to collect what one can only guess it treated as collateral, Bundy's cattle. The BLM, along with the Park Service and the Environmental Protection Agency, had banded together to put 52 other ranches out of business in that area. Bundy is the "last man standing."

Laron Fred Woods, a resident of Utah, supplied this brief history of the land under dispute:

    "When Nevada became a state in 1864, the state had control of its land because of its sovereignty. The federal government started taking control back in the 1930's. Until then, the General Land Office managed public lands. Even though the GLO was a national agency, it was administered locally. After the Taylor Grazing act of 1934, passed under Franklin D. Roosevelt, a "U.S. Grazing Service" office was created. The "U.S. Grazing Service" office was merged with the General Land Office in 1946 (under Harry S. Truman) and the BLM (Bureau Of Land Management) was created. They then assumed control of all "public" lands and took over management from the state. Cliven Bundy's Grandfather purchased grazing rights from the General Land Office in the 1880's. Note: He PURCHASED those rights. Not the land, just the grazing rights.

    After the BLM took over management, they [the BLM] no longer recognized as legitimate those actions of purchasing grazing rights. Right or wrong, they still refuse to recognize the purchased grazing rights from the Bundy's."

Two BLM sites carry the same official history.

The "roundup" of Bundy's cattle by the feds, given the context in which Bundy is acting, is simply a naked seizure of his property, under the guise of protecting the habitat of the desert tortoise. But even that pretext was exploded when it was learned that the BLM was actually euthanizing these tortoises.

Of course, if the government needn't recognize the right to property secured over a century ago, never mind property secured within the last half century, the last decade, the last year. Private property rights of any kind, whether prescriptive or outright or common law, have been drowned in an avalanche of fiat law and legalized theft under the rubric of the "public" or "common good" or the "public interest."

Freedom Outpost's Ben Swann reveals the cluelessness of the BLM in his April 16th article, "BLM: We Were Worried Cliven Bundy Might Have Prescriptive Rights and He Might Use that Defense in Court." He asks:

    "Why this year, spend nearly $1,000,000 of taxpayer money to round up 400 cattle that ultimately have to be returned? Why didn't the BLM just place a lien on the cattle rather than attempting to take them by force and then auction them off? The Bureau of Land Management has suffered a huge black eye this week because of their response to the Bundy situation. Perhaps though, there is a reason the BLM chose force over the courts."

Swann contacted Montana cattleman Todd Devlin, who is also County Commissioner in Prairie County, Montana. Devlin made his own enquiries about the BLM's ham-fisted, Gestapo-like behavior towards Bundy.

    "Among the questions Devlin asked of the BLM, "Is it possible that this guy (Cliven Bundy) has prescriptive rights?" The response from top officials at the BLM, "We are worried that he might, and he might use that defense."

    So what exactly are prescriptive rights? Prescriptive right to property is an easement that gives some one the right to use land owned by someone else for a particular purpose. An example is using a path through Party A's land to get to your land; a prescriptive easement is allowed which gives the user the right to get to his land through A's property."

Swann explained that if no one, even a government agency, challenges a prescriptive right in five years, then the right is secured and trespass cannot be legally claimed.

Swann concludes his article:

    "Finally, Devlin says instead of allowing the situation with Bundy's cattle to grow completely out of control, the BLM could have simply placed a lien on the cattle in the first place. Of course, that lien might have been rejected in court if Bundy were able to demonstrate those prescriptive rights. Then again, the courts so far have sided with the government; therefore, it is even more baffling why the lien wasn't placed on the livestock.

    Days after the BLM has claimed they will stand down, they are now reportedly considering a lien on the cattle, "I asked why you didn't put a lien against the cattle?" Devlin asked the BLM. "They hadn't thought about that, but they are considering it now."

DUH!!!! But then, those with a congenital, larcenous state of mind and method of doing things, don't usually, as a matter of habit, think ahead, do they? Their first impulse is to initiate force.

The New Energy News site, which is pro-"renewable," features a map of where the BLM and the federal government plan to implement solar, wind, and geothermal power projects. It also has a link to a map of the all the states with the percentage of federally-owned land in each state, published by the General Services Administration under the title, "Who Owns the West?" About 86% of Nevada is federal land.

The Las Vegas Review-Journal article featured an excerpt of the Nevada Constitution, only partly quoting from it, allowing Harry Reid to slip a mickey into his two-faced taqiyya.

    "Nevada's 1864 Constitution, however, cedes rights to the vast stretches of public land to the federal government.

    "The people inhabiting said territory do agree and declare, that they forever disclaim all right and title to the unappropriated public lands lying within said territory, and that the same shall be and remain at the sole and entire disposition of the United States," the state Constitution says in the ordinance section. Reid noted many of the protesters care deeply about the Constitution, both state and federal.

    "Nevada's Constitution sets out very clearly the situation," Reid said.

One reader of that article, named Hilda, went to the trouble in her comments to educate the writer and Nevadans by citing that part of the Nevada Constitution:

    "Reid says, "Nevada's 1864 Constitution, however, cedes rights to the vast stretches of public land to the federal government." Reid fails to mention that despite that, the Supreme Court has upheld the right of all western states to have all the land returned to them under the "equal footing" doctrine. Also, the US Constitution allows for the federal government to own property only for "Forts, Magazines, Arsenals, dock-Yards, and other needful Buildings." No other ownership of land is permitted by the government for a reason. The Founding Fathers wanted to ensure limits on the federal government precisely to prevent the abuse of federal power we are witnessing now."

Federally-owned land was never intended to be space for the government to experiment with its preferred "energy" projects, with the hands of corrupt politicians and companies doing the experimenting

SOURCE

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Republicans say U.S. headed toward ‘armed revolution'

A survey of Republicans found nearly half agreed that “an armed revolution in order to protect liberties might be necessary in the next few years.”

The poll, from Farleigh Dickinson University’s Public Mind, surveyed a random sampling of 863 registered voters and had a margin of error of plus-minus 3.4 percentage points.

It found 44 percent of registered Republicans believed an armed rebellion could come in the next few years. But only 18 percent of Democrats and 27 percent of independents agreed.

Moreover, only 24 percent of Republicans believed new gun laws were necessary — compared to 73 percent of Democrats. Bipartisan legislation on gun control is not likely in the coming days, one political science professor at Farleigh Dickinson said, in a press release on the poll.

“If there was a bipartisan moment after Sandy Hook to pass gun control legislation, it’s past,” Dan Cassino said. “Partisan views have strongly reasserted themselves, and there’s no sign that they’ll get any weaker.”

The difference in views is due to partisan differences in beliefs about what guns are for, Mr. Cassino said.

“If you truly believe an armed revolution is possible in the near future, you need weapons, and you’re going to be wary about government efforts to take them away,” Mr. Cassino said.

SOURCE

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Charles Murray on allegations of racism

Since the flap about Paul Ryan’s remarks last week, elements of the blogosphere, and now Paul Krugman in The New York Times, have stated that I tried to prove the genetic inferiority of blacks in The Bell Curve.

The position that Richard Herrnstein and I took about the role of race, IQ and genes in The Bell Curve is contained in a single paragraph in an 800-page book. It is found on page 311, and consists in its entirety of the following text:

If the reader is now convinced that either the genetic or environmental explanation has won out to the exclusion of the other, we have not done a sufficiently good job of presenting one side or the other. It seems highly likely to us that both genes and the environment have something to do with racial differences. What might the mix be? We are resolutely agnostic on that issue; as far as we can determine, the evidence does not justify an estimate.

That’s it. The four pages following that quote argue that the hysteria about race and genes is misplaced. I think our concluding paragraph (page 315) is important enough to repeat here:

In sum: If tomorrow you knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that all the cognitive differences between races were 100 percent genetic in origin, nothing of any significance should change. The knowledge would give you no reason to treat individuals differently than if ethnic differences were 100 percent environmental. By the same token, knowing that the differences are 100 percent environmental in origin would not suggest a single program or policy that is not already being tried. It would justify no optimism about the time it will take to narrow the existing gaps. It would not even justify confidence that genetically based differences will not be upon us within a few generations. The impulse to think that environmental sources of differences are less threatening than genetic ones is natural but illusory.

Our sin was to openly discuss the issue, not to advocate a position. But for the last 40 years, that’s been sin enough.

I’ll be happy to respond at more length to allegations of racism made by anyone who can buttress them with a direct quote from anything I’ve written. I’ll leave you with this thought: in all the critiques of The Bell Curve in particular and my work more generally, no one ever accompanies their charges with direct quotes of what I’ve actually said. There’s a reason for that.

SOURCE

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Over 40,000 People Are Registered to Vote in Both Virginia and Maryland

As midterm elections quickly approach, many are starting to think about voting and potential fraud at the polls. And once again, we find that there is cause to be worried about voter fraud here in the U.S. It appears in a new report that 44,000 people are registered to vote in both Virginia and Maryland.

A vote-integrity group crosschecked the voter rolls in the two states and found far too many people registered in both states. The group, known as The Virginia Voters Alliance, is going to expand their research into surrounding states like Pennsylvania, the District of Columbia, New York, New Jersey, Delaware, North Carolina, Tennessee, West Virginia and Georgia.

The group found that the number of voters who actually cast ballots in both states was only 164 in 2012, but that is still far too many. And the problem of potentially having thousands of people casting multiple ballots is the real issue.

The Virginia Voters Alliance also worked with the Privileges and Elections committees of the state House and Senate. They found 31,000 dead voters through the Social Security Administration’s Death Master File. The president of the organization said that dead voter registration is a prime target for voter fraud.

A simple solution for this issue is a voter ID law. Not only should people be required to show ID at the polls, but voter registrations should be cross checked more frequently. Hiring an outside group to do this, not only will help with voter fraud, but provides business to a non-governmental group. These numbers need to be greatly reduced before November.

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, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated) and Coral reef compendium. (Updated as news items come in).  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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Bundy update

The battle lines are hardening in Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy's so-called "range war" against the federal government over his right to graze cattle on public lands.

Arguments have moved from the Nevada desert to the nation's capital, where Nevada's two US senators, Republican Dean Heller and Democrat Harry Reid, recently faced off on a television public affairs show in Las Vegas.

Heller described Bundy's cadre of armed supporters as "patriots," during the show, What's the Point. Reid repeated his claim that the so-called militia men are "domestic terrorists."

Officials from the Bureau of Land Management say Bundy is illegally running hundreds of head of cattle in the 600,000-acre Gold Butte area, habitat of the federally protected desert tortoise. Bundy, 68, has refused to pay BLM grazing fees since 1993, arguing in court filings that his Mormon ancestors worked the land long before the BLM was formed, giving him rights that predate federal involvement. For years, he has threatened to forcefully protect his cattle.

Federal officials moved in to remove the animals, but called off the round-up nine days ago, saying they wanted to avoid violence, a spectre presented when dozens of supporters - many armed with rifles and automatic weapons - gathered at the Bundy ranch 90 miles (144 kilometres) north of Las Vegas.

For now, the standoff has remained a war of words, with Bundy seen as a modern folk hero among free speech advocates and others who believe that the federal government has no right to tell a Nevada rancher how to run his cattle on state land. Environmentalists call Bundy an illegal squatter.

In the television interview, Heller called for a Senate hearing on the dispute.

For his part, Reid appeared to get testy when asked on the show to explain his remark. "Just what I said," he responded tersely.

Heller then prompted another face-off, saying: "What Senator Reid may call domestic terrorists, I call patriots. We have a very different view on this."

"If they are patriots, we are in trouble," Reid shot back, criticising the supporters for showing up with assault weapons and boasting about putting children in the front of the pack.

Heller says the BLM amped up tensions in the long-simmering dispute over Bundy's cattle by dispatching armed officials to help round up the animals. "I want to talk about the fact that they have this kind of authority and the ability to bully and come in with 200 armed men into a situation like this," he said.

Reid replied that the armed supporters were breaking federal laws: "These characters walk around with their Constitution in their pocket. They should read the Nevada Constitution."

Reid refused to speculate on what will happen next. "I don't think it is going to be tomorrow that something is going to happen, but something will happen."

The government has said the cattle round-up was a "last resort" to enforce court orders ruling that Bundy has failed to pay more than $US1 million in fees since 1993 for his cattle to graze on public land. Forcing him either to pay or to give up his cattle is a matter of fairness to the 16,000 ranchers who do follow the rules, US officials say.

On his own blog, Bundy has posted the creed of a national militia movement that has come to his support. Over the weekend, he also posted pictures of cattle that had been killed and buried during the BLM collection earlier this month.

"Digging up 1 of the HUGE holes where they threw the cows that they had ran to death or shot," reads a website caption under the picture of a bulldozer removing an animal carcass. "I feel that this NEEDS to be put out for the public to see."

Bundy says he has as much right to graze his cattle on public lands as those who hike, camp or even advocate the protection of the threatened desert tortoise and other wildlife.

For years Bundy has insisted that his cattle aren't going anywhere. He acknowledges that he keeps firearms at his ranch and has vowed to do "whatever it takes" to defend his animals from seizure.

"I've got to protect my property," he has told the Los Angeles Times. "If people come to monkey with what's mine, I'll call the county sheriff. If that don't work, I'll gather my friends and kids and we'll try to stop it. I abide by all state laws. But I abide by almost zero federal laws."

But environmentalists said on Monday that his actions set a bad precedent.

"It's not just about the desert tortoise. The precedent this sets is dangerous - to let people like Bundy have free rein over public lands," said Ken Cole, National Environmental Policy Act coordinator for the nonprofit Western Watershed Project.

"It's very clear that these public lands are not his. Under a public trust doctrine, the BLM and National Park Service manage these lands for the American people."

SOURCE

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The High Cost of Liberalism

Thomas Sowell

Liberals advocate many wonderful things. In fact, I suspect that most conservatives would prefer to live in the kind of world envisioned by liberals, rather than in the kind of world envisioned by conservatives.

Unfortunately, the only kind of world that any of us can live in is the world that actually exists. Trying to live in the kind of world that liberals envision has costs that will not go away just because these costs are often ignored by liberals.

One of those costs appeared in an announcement of a house for sale in Palo Alto, the community adjacent to Stanford University, an institution that is as politically correct as they come.

The house is for sale at $1,498,000. It is a 1,010 square foot bungalow with two bedrooms, one bath and a garage. Although the announcement does not mention it, this bungalow is located near a commuter railroad line, with trains passing regularly throughout the day.

Lest you think this house must be some kind of designer's dream, loaded with high-tech stuff, it was built in 1942 and, even if it was larger, no one would mistake it for the Taj Mahal or San Simeon.

This house is not an aberration, and its price is not out of line with other housing prices in Palo Alto. One couple who had lived in their 1,200 square foot home in Palo Alto for 20 years decided to sell it, and posted an asking price just under $1.3 million.

Competition for that house forced the selling price up to $1.7 million.

Another Palo Alto house, this one with 1,292 square feet of space, is on the market for $2,285,000. It was built in 1895.

Even a vacant lot in Palo Alto costs more than a spacious middle-class home costs in most of the rest of the country.

How does this tie in with liberalism?

In this part of California, liberalism reigns supreme and "open space" is virtually a religion. What that lovely phrase means is that there are vast amounts of empty land where the law forbids anybody from building anything.

Anyone who has taken Economics 1 knows that preventing the supply from rising to meet the demand means that prices are going to rise. Housing is no exception.

Yet when my wife wrote in a local Palo Alto newspaper, many years ago, that preventing the building of housing would cause existing housing to become far too expensive for most people to afford it, she was deluged with more outraged letters than I get from readers of a nationally syndicated column.

What she said was treated as blasphemy against the religion of "open space" -- and open space is just one of the wonderful things about the world envisioned by liberals that is ruinously expensive in the mundane world where the rest of us live.

Much as many liberals like to put guilt trips on other people, they seldom seek out, much less acknowledge and take responsibility for, the bad consequences of their own actions.

There are people who claim that astronomical housing prices in places like Palo Alto and San Francisco are due to a scarcity of land. But there is enough vacant land ("open space") on the other side of the 280 Freeway that goes past Palo Alto to build another Palo Alto or two -- except for laws and policies that make that impossible.

As in San Francisco and other parts of the country where housing prices skyrocketed after building homes was prohibited or severely restricted, this began in Palo Alto in the 1970s.

Housing prices in Palo Alto nearly quadrupled during that decade. This was not due to expensive new houses being built, because not a single new house was built in Palo Alto in the 1970s. The same old houses simply shot up in price.

It was very much the same story in San Francisco, which was a bastion of liberalism then as now. There too, incredibly high prices are charged for small houses, often jammed close together. A local newspaper described a graduate student looking for a place to rent who was "visiting one exorbitantly priced hovel after another."

That is part of the unacknowledged cost of "open space," and just part of the high cost of liberalism.

SOURCE

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The High Cost of Liberalism: Part II

Thomas Sowell

Liberals can be disarming. In fact, they are for disarming anybody who can be disarmed, whether domestically or internationally.

Unfortunately, the people who are the easiest to disarm are the ones who are the most peaceful -- and disarming them makes them vulnerable to those who are the least peaceful.

We are currently getting a painful demonstration of that in Ukraine. When Ukraine became an independent nation, it gave up all the nuclear missiles that were on its territory from the days when it had been part of the Soviet Union.

At that time, Ukraine had the third largest arsenal of nuclear weapons in the world. Do you think Putin would have attacked Ukraine if it still had those nuclear weapons? Or do you think it is just a coincidence that nations with nuclear weapons don't get invaded?

Among those who urged Ukraine to reduce even its conventional, non-nuclear weapons as well, was a new United States Senator named Barack Obama. He was all for disarmament then, and apparently even now as President of the United States. He has refused Ukraine's request for weapons with which to defend itself.

As with so many things that liberals do, the disarmament crusade is judged by its good intentions, not by its actual consequences.

Indeed, many liberals seem unaware that the consequences could be anything other than what they hope for. That is why disarmament advocates are called "the peace movement."

Whether disarmament has in fact led to peace, more often than military deterrence has, is something that could be argued on the basis of the facts of history -- but it seldom is.

Liberals almost never talk about disarmament in terms of evidence of its consequences, whether they are discussing gun control at home or international disarmament agreements.

International disarmament agreements flourished between the two World Wars. Just a few years after the end of the First World War there were the Washington Naval Agreements of 1921-1922 that led to the United States actually sinking some of its own warships. Then there was the celebrated Kellogg-Briand Pact of 1928, in which nations renounced war, with France's Foreign Minister Aristide Briand declaring, "Away with rifles, machine guns, and cannon!" The "international community" loved it.

In Britain, the Labour Party repeatedly voted against military armaments during most of the decade of the 1930s. A popular argument of the time was that Britain should disarm "as an example to others."

Unfortunately, Hitler did not follow that example. He was busy building the most powerful military machine on the continent of Europe.

Nor did Germany or Japan allow the Washington Naval Agreements to cramp their style. The fact that Britain and America limited the size of their battleships simply meant that Germany and Japan had larger battleships when World War II began.

What is happening in Ukraine today is just a continuation of the old story about nations that disarm increasing the chances of being attacked by nations that do not disarm.

Any number of empirical studies about domestic gun control laws tell much the same story. Gun control advocates seldom, if ever, present hard evidence that gun crimes in general, or murder rates in particular, go down after gun control laws are passed or tightened.

That is the crucial question about gun control laws. But liberals settle that question by assumption. Then they can turn their attention to denouncing the National Rifle Association.

But neither the National Rifle Association nor the Second Amendment is the crucial issue. If the hard facts show that gun control laws actually reduce the murder rate, we can repeal the Second Amendment, as other Amendments have been repealed.

If in fact tighter gun control laws reduced the murder rate, that would be the liberals' ace of trumps. Why then do the liberals not play their ace of trumps, by showing us such hard facts? Because they don't have any such hard facts. So they give us lofty rhetoric and outraged indignation instead.

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, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated) and Coral reef compendium. (Updated as news items come in).  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 New Zealand difference

3 yr-old Hannah on her way to the river, she knows the way.. Enough to make you weep if you live in some other parts of the world

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Yes, IQ Really Matters

Critics of the SAT and other standardized testing are disregarding the data.  Leftists hate it because it shows that all men are NOT equal

By David Z. Hambrick and Christopher Chabris writing in "Slate" (!)

The College Board—the standardized testing behemoth that develops and administers the SAT and other tests—has redesigned its flagship product again. Beginning in spring 2016, the writing section will be optional, the reading section will no longer test “obscure” vocabulary words, and the math section will put more emphasis on solving problems with real-world relevance. Overall, as the College Board explains on its website, “The redesigned SAT will more closely reflect the real work of college and career, where a flexible command of evidence—whether found in text or graphic [sic]—is more important than ever.”

A number of pressures may be behind this redesign. Perhaps it’s competition from the ACT, or fear that unless the SAT is made to seem more relevant, more colleges will go the way of Wake Forest, Brandeis, and Sarah Lawrence and join the “test optional admissions movement,” which already boasts several hundred members. Or maybe it’s the wave of bad press that standardized testing, in general, has received over the past few years.

Critics of standardized testing are grabbing this opportunity to take their best shot at the SAT. They make two main arguments. The first is simply that a person’s SAT score is essentially meaningless—that it says nothing about whether that person will go on to succeed in college. Leon Botstein, president of Bard College and longtime standardized testing critic, wrote in Time that the SAT “needs to be abandoned and replaced,” and added:

"The blunt fact is that the SAT has never been a good predictor of academic achievement in college. High school grades adjusted to account for the curriculum and academic programs in the high school from which a student graduates are. The essential mechanism of the SAT, the multiple choice test question, is a bizarre relic of long outdated 20th century social scientific assumptions and strategies."

Calling use of SAT scores for college admissions a “national scandal,” Jennifer Finney Boylan, an English professor at Colby College, argued in the New York Times that:

"The only way to measure students’ potential is to look at the complex portrait of their lives: what their schools are like; how they’ve done in their courses; what they’ve chosen to study; what progress they’ve made over time; how they’ve reacted to adversity.
Along the same lines, Elizabeth Kolbert wrote in The New Yorker that “the SAT measures those skills—and really only those skills—necessary for the SATs.”

But this argument is wrong. The SAT does predict success in college—not perfectly, but relatively well, especially given that it takes just a few hours to administer. And, unlike a “complex portrait” of a student’s life, it can be scored in an objective way. (In a recent New York Times op-ed, the University of New Hampshire psychologist John D. Mayer aptly described the SAT’s validity as an “astonishing achievement.”)

In a study published in Psychological Science, University of Minnesota researchers Paul Sackett, Nathan Kuncel, and their colleagues investigated the relationship between SAT scores and college grades in a very large sample: nearly 150,000 students from 110 colleges and universities. SAT scores predicted first-year college GPA about as well as high school grades did, and the best prediction was achieved by considering both factors.

Botstein, Boylan, and Kolbert are either unaware of this directly relevant, easily accessible, and widely disseminated empirical evidence, or they have decided to ignore it and base their claims on intuition and anecdote—or perhaps on their beliefs about the way the world should be rather than the way it is.

Furthermore, contrary to popular belief, it’s not just first-year college GPA that SAT scores predict. In a four-year study that started with nearly 3,000 college students, a team of Michigan State University researchers led by Neal Schmitt found that test score (SAT or ACT—whichever the student took) correlated strongly with cumulative GPA at the end of the fourth year. If the students were ranked on both their test scores and cumulative GPAs, those who had test scores in the top half (above the 50th percentile, or median) would have had a roughly two-thirds chance of having a cumulative GPA in the top half. By contrast, students with bottom-half SAT scores would be only one-third likely to make it to the top half in GPA.

Test scores also predicted whether the students graduated: A student who scored in the 95th percentile on the SAT or ACT was about 60 percent more likely to graduate than a student who scored in the 50th percentile. Similarly impressive evidence supports the validity of the SAT’s graduate school counterparts: the Graduate Record Examinations, the Law School Admissions Test, and the Graduate Management Admission Test. A 2007 Science article summed up the evidence succinctly: “Standardized admissions tests have positive and useful relationships with subsequent student accomplishments.”

SAT scores even predict success beyond the college years. For more than two decades, Vanderbilt University researchers David Lubinski, Camilla Benbow, and their colleagues have tracked the accomplishments of people who, as part of a youth talent search, scored in the top 1 percent on the SAT by age 13. Remarkably, even within this group of gifted students, higher scorers were not only more likely to earn advanced degrees but also more likely to succeed outside of academia. For example, compared with people who “only” scored in the top 1 percent, those who scored in the top one-tenth of 1 percent—the extremely gifted—were more than twice as likely as adults to have an annual income in the top 5 percent of Americans.

The second popular anti-SAT argument is that, if the test measures anything at all, it’s not cognitive skill but socioeconomic status. In other words, some kids do better than others on the SAT not because they’re smarter, but because their parents are rich. Boylan argued in her Times article that the SAT “favors the rich, who can afford preparatory crash courses” like those offered by Kaplan and the Princeton Review. Leon Botstein claimed in his Time article that “the only persistent statistical result from the SAT is the correlation between high income and high test scores.” And according to a Washington Post Wonkblog infographic (which is really more of a disinfographic) “your SAT score says more about your parents than about you.”

It’s true that economic background correlates with SAT scores. Kids from well-off families tend to do better on the SAT. However, the correlation is far from perfect. In the University of Minnesota study of nearly 150,000 students, the correlation between socioeconomic status, or SES, and SAT was not trivial but not huge. (A perfect correlation has a value of 1; this one was .25.) What this means is that there are plenty of low-income students who get good scores on the SAT; there are even likely to be low-income students among those who achieve a perfect score on the SAT.

Thus, just as it was originally designed to do, the SAT in fact goes a long way toward leveling the playing field, giving students an opportunity to distinguish themselves regardless of their background. Scoring well on the SAT may in fact be the only such opportunity for students who graduate from public high schools that are regarded by college admissions offices as academically weak. In a letter to the editor, a reader of Elizabeth Kolbert’s New Yorker article on the SAT made this point well:

The SAT may be the bane of upper-middle-class parents trying to launch their children on a path to success. But sometimes one person’s obstacle is another person’s springboard. I am the daughter of a single, immigrant father who never attended college, and a good SAT score was one of the achievements that catapulted me into my state’s flagship university and, from there, on to medical school. Flawed though it is, the SAT afforded me, as it has thousands of others, a way to prove that a poor, public-school kid who never had any test prep can do just as well as, if not better than, her better-off peers.

The sort of admissions approach that Botstein advocates—adjusting high school GPA “to account for the curriculum and academic programs in the high school from which a student graduates” and abandoning the SAT—would do the opposite of leveling the playing field. A given high school GPA would be adjusted down for a poor, public-school kid, and adjusted up for a rich, private-school kid.

Furthermore, contrary to what Boylan implies in her Times piece, “preparatory crash courses” don’t change SAT scores much. Research has consistently shown that prep courses have only a small effect on SAT scores—and a much smaller effect than test prep companies claim they do. For example, in one study of a random sample of more than 4,000 students, average improvement in overall score on the “old” SAT, which had a range from 400 to 1600, was no more than about 30 points.

Finally, it is clear that SES is not what accounts for the fact that SAT scores predict success in college. In the University of Minnesota study, the correlation between high school SAT and college GPA was virtually unchanged after the researchers statistically controlled for the influence of SES. If SAT scores were just a proxy for privilege, then putting SES into the mix should have removed, or at least dramatically decreased, the association between the SAT and college performance. But it didn’t. This is more evidence that Boylan overlooks or chooses to ignore.

What this all means is that the SAT measures something—some stable characteristic of high school students other than their parents’ income—that translates into success in college. And what could that characteristic be? General intelligence. The content of the SAT is practically indistinguishable from that of standardized intelligence tests that social scientists use to study individual differences, and that psychologists and psychiatrists use to determine whether a person is intellectually disabled—and even whether a person should be spared execution in states that have the death penalty. Scores on the SAT correlate very highly with scores on IQ tests—so highly that the Harvard education scholar Howard Gardner, known for his theory of multiple intelligences, once called the SAT and other scholastic measures “thinly disguised” intelligence tests.

One could of course argue that IQ is also meaningless—and many have. For example, in his bestseller The Social Animal, David Brooks claimed that “once you get past some pretty obvious correlations (smart people make better mathematicians), there is a very loose relationship between IQ and life outcomes.” And in a recent Huffington Post article, psychologists Tracy Alloway and Ross Alloway wrote that

IQ won’t help you in the things that really matter: It won’t help you find happiness, it won’t help you make better decisions, and it won’t help you manage your kids’ homework and the accounts at the same time. It isn’t even that useful at its raison d'être: predicting success.

But this argument is wrong, too. Indeed, we know as well as anything we know in psychology that IQ predicts many different measures of success. Exhibit A is evidence from research on job performance by the University of Iowa industrial psychologist Frank Schmidt and his late colleague John Hunter. Synthesizing evidence from nearly a century of empirical studies, Schmidt and Hunter established that general mental ability—the psychological trait that IQ scores reflect—is the single best predictor of job training success, and that it accounts for differences in job performance even in workers with more than a decade of experience. It’s more predictive than interests, personality, reference checks, and interview performance. Smart people don’t just make better mathematicians, as Brooks observed—they make better managers, clerks, salespeople, service workers, vehicle operators, and soldiers.

IQ predicts other things that matter, too, like income, employment, health, and even longevity. In a 2001 study published in the British Medical Journal, Scottish researchers Lawrence Whalley and Ian Deary identified more than 2,000 people who had taken part in the Scottish Mental Survey of 1932, a nationwide assessment of IQ. Remarkably, people with high IQs at age 11 were more considerably more likely to survive to old age than were people with lower IQs. For example, a person with an IQ of 100 (the average for the general population) was 21 percent more likely to live to age 76 than a person with an IQ of 85. And the relationship between IQ and longevity remains statistically significant even after taking SES into account. Perhaps IQ reflects the mental resources—the reasoning and problem-solving skills—that people can bring to bear on maintaining their health and making wise decisions throughout life. This explanation is supported by evidence that higher-IQ individuals engage in more positive health behaviors, such as deciding to quit smoking.

IQ is of course not the only factor that contributes to differences in outcomes like academic achievement and job performance (and longevity). Psychologists have known for many decades that certain personality traits also have an impact. One is conscientiousness, which reflects a person’s self-control, discipline, and thoroughness. People who are high in conscientiousness delay gratification to get their work done, finish tasks that they start, and are careful in their work, whereas people who are low in conscientiousness are impulsive, undependable, and careless (compare Lisa and Bart Simpson). The University of Pennsylvania psychologist Angela Duckworth has proposed a closely related characteristic that she calls “grit,” which she defines as a person’s “tendency to sustain interest in and effort toward very long-term goals,” like building a career or family.  

Duckworth has argued that such factors may be even more important as predictors of success than IQ. In one study, she and UPenn colleague Martin Seligman found that a measure of self-control collected at the start of eighth grade correlated more than twice as strongly with year-end grades than IQ did. However, the results of meta-analyses, which are more telling than the results of any individual study, indicate that these factors do not have a larger effect than IQ does on measures of academic achievement and job performance. So, while it seems clear that factors like conscientiousness—not to mention social skill, creativity, interest, and motivation—do influence success, they cannot take the place of IQ.

None of this is to say that IQ, whether measured with the SAT or a traditional intelligence test, is an indicator of value or worth. Nobody should be judged, negatively or positively, on the basis of a test score. A test score is a prediction, not a prophecy, and doesn’t say anything specific about what a person will or will not achieve in life. A high IQ doesn’t guarantee success, and a low IQ doesn’t guarantee failure. Furthermore, the fact that IQ is at present a powerful predictor of certain socially relevant outcomes doesn’t mean it always will be. If there were less variability in income—a smaller gap between the rich and the poor—then IQ would have a weaker correlation with income. For the same reason, if everyone received the same quality of health care, there would be a weaker correlation between IQ and health.

But the bottom line is that there are large, measurable differences among people in intellectual ability, and these differences have consequences for people’s lives. Ignoring these facts will only distract us from discovering and implementing wise policies.

Given everything that social scientists have learned about IQ and its broad predictive validity, it is reasonable to make it a factor in decisions such as whom to hire for a particular job or admit to a particular college or university. In fact, disregarding IQ—by admitting students to colleges or hiring people for jobs in which they are very likely to fail—is harmful both to individuals and to society. For example, in occupations where safety is paramount, employers could be incentivized to incorporate measures of cognitive ability into the recruitment process. Above all, the policies of public and private organizations should be based on evidence rather than ideology or wishful thinking.

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, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated) and Coral reef compendium. (Updated as news items come in).  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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Goldwater lost in a landslide – and won the GOP future

by Jeff Jacoby

TO THE RECENT spate of 50th-anniversary reflections on key political and cultural milestones — the 1963 March on Washington, the assassination of John F. Kennedy, the Beatles' appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show — here's one to add: The presidential campaign of Barry Goldwater, the most influential also-ran in modern American politics.

Goldwater was nicknamed "Mr. Conservative," but now even liberals adore him. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. penned an essay a few years back effusive in its praise for Goldwater, whom he described as an exemplar of civility, decency, and integrity. Goldwater was "neither mean-spirited nor racist," wrote Kennedy; he challenged the liberals of his time through "sensible argument and honest conviction." A 2006 documentary produced by CC Goldwater, Barry's liberal's granddaughter, is strewn with such liberal tributes; Hillary Clinton, James Carville, and Walter Cronkite are among those who attest to the man's statesmanship and charm.

How things have changed.

In 1964, Goldwater appalled the political establishment. Though the blunt-spoken Arizonan's bestseller, "The Conscience of a Conservative," had made him a hero on the right even before his White House run, liberal commentators seemed shocked to discover that his conservatism was for real. When he declared, in his acceptance speech at the Republican convention in San Francisco, that "extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice, and … moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue," they were aghast.

What followed was one of the most ruthless campaigns of invective in US political history. Goldwater and his conservative supporters were repeatedly likened to Nazis, madmen, and warmongers. Jackie Robinson said he knew "how it felt to be a Jew in Hitler's Germany." Lyndon Johnson's notorious "daisy" commercial showed a little girl picking flower petals, until she is overwhelmed by the mushroom cloud of a nuclear explosion. A month before the election, the cover of Fact magazine blared: "1,189 Psychiatrists Say Goldwater is Unfit to be President!"

Conventional wisdom said Goldwater didn't have a prayer, and conventional wisdom was right. On Election Day, the Republican ticket suffered a crushing defeat. Johnson amassed 61 percent of the popular vote, the highest percentage in presidential campaign history; Democrats at every level swept to lopsided majorities reminiscent of the FDR landslide of 1936. Goldwater — the most ideologically conservative GOP nominee since Calvin Coolidge — hadn't just lost, he'd been buried.

What that meant, said the nation's most respected political analysts, was obvious: Conservatism was political poison, and the GOP had just swallowed a near-fatal dose.

"Barry Goldwater not only lost the presidential election yesterday, but the conservative cause as well," pronounced James Reston of The New York Times. "He has wrecked his party for a long time to come." Time magazine said Republican conservatives had been so completely humiliated "that they will not have another shot at party domination for some time to come."

But about that, conventional wisdom was dead wrong. So were the Eastern liberal Republicans who had long dominated the GOP. They didn't seek to roll back the vast increase in government programs that Democrats since the New Deal had embraced; their pitch to voters was that they could manage those programs with more businesslike efficiency. Many establishment Republicans were as turned off by Goldwater's ardent conservatism as Democrats and media liberals were. The chairman of the New York Republican Party called the Election Day debacle the "shattering price" the GOP had paid for its "erratic deviation from our soundly moderate 20th-century course." The voters had spoken, and conservatism had been "decisively vetoed."

Hardly.

Conservatism was no suicide pill, it was the Republican future. "In your heart, you know he's right" had been a much-mocked Goldwater campaign slogan ("In your guts, you know he's nuts" was one rejoinder), but it became increasingly clear that the heart of the Republican Party did indeed incline rightward. Goldwater may not have been a very good presidential candidate, but millions of Americans found his conservative ideals refreshing and inspiring.

Even as Goldwater was losing 44 states, there were remarkable signs of grassroots enthusiasm for his political message. Historian Steven Hayward points out that the Goldwater campaign received more than 1 million contributions, 400,000 of them in amounts under $10. Four years earlier, Richard Nixon's campaign had received only 40,000 contributions.

In 1964, the GOP's center of gravity began its decisive shift to the West and South. Of the 12 presidential elections that followed 1964, Republicans have won seven, and every GOP ticket since the Goldwater campaign has included a conservative. Who doubts today that conservatives constitute the party's base? Until 50 years ago, Republican presidential hopefuls competed for the imprimatur of the party's liberal establishment. Now, even the Republican establishment calls itself conservative — while Goldwater, savaged by Democrats in 1964, is described with affection and admiration by Democrats in 2014.

Goldwater lost a presidential election, but he changed the face of American politics. All winning candidates appeal to the mainstream. But only the most influential redirect it.

SOURCE

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Homofascism widespread

On the Friday, April 18, All In show, during a discussion of the firing of former Mozilla CEO Brendan Eich for simply donating to a political campaign opposing same-sex marriage, guest Richard Kim of the far left The Nation magazine intoned that he found it "disturbing" that gay activist friends of his have expressed interest in "targeting" more people who have made similar donations, and who have declared they should "find out where they live." Kim:

Here's a disturbing thing. I did ask some of my gay activist friends, I was like, "Look, here's a list; 6,500 people gave the same amount that he did or more in California. Should we go down the list and sort of start targeting all these people?" And I asked this facetiously, and people were like, "Let's do it. Let's find out where those people live. It's all-" To me, that's a disturbing level of targeting people.

Hayes, who had earlier expressed reservations about Eich's firing, exclaimed, "Yes," to Kim's view that such talk was "disturbing."

SOURCE

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Liberals Announce Plan to ‘Purge’ Christians

They were always deadly serious about criminalizing Christianity and killing free speech, but now the American left has stopped pretending otherwise. In a recent column titled, “Why Are They Called ‘Homofascists’? Here’s Why,” I wrote that “progressive,” “Christian-hating fascists” – but I repeat myself – are “hell-bent on criminalizing Christianity and pushing to the fringes anyone who publicly acknowledges natural human sexuality and the age-old, immutable institution of legitimate marriage as created by God.”

I was referring specifically to the left’s well-organized and highly disturbing character assassination of former Mozilla CEO Brendan Eich for his private support of natural marriage. I was also addressing the larger goal of the American left to completely shut down free speech and freedom of religion and to severely punish anyone who maintains both biblically and biologically correct views on human sexuality.

I closed with this: “They smell blood in the water. I’ve often said that these folks want those who speak biblical truth about human sexuality and legitimate marriage either 1) dead, 2) imprisoned or, if they can have neither of these, 3) marginalized to the point where they can’t even support their families.

“Check No. 3 off the list. I guess they’re working backwards.”

The very next day, and as if right on cue, lefty rag Slate magazine vomited evidence of my claims. It could not have been better scripted if I’d written it myself.

In an article titled, “Purge the Bigots,” Slate writer William Saletan penned these chilling words: “Some of my colleagues are celebrating. They call Eich a bigot who got what he deserved. I agree. But let’s not stop here. If we’re serious about enforcing the new standard, thousands of other employees who donated to the same anti-gay ballot measure must be punished.

“More than 35,000 people gave money to the campaign for Proposition 8, the 2008 ballot measure that declared, ‘Only marriage between a man and a woman is valid or recognized in California,’” he continued. “Why do these bigots still have jobs? Let’s go get them.”

Now, to be fair, Saletan later claimed that his article was intended as satire to illustrate the hypocrisy of his own “progressive” movement. Many, if not most, of his readers seemed to miss the joke,and the article’s comments section quickly filled with people agreeing that it was, indeed, time to “purge the bigots” (read: Christians).

The Fox News Channel observed that the piece “may or may not be tongue-in-cheek.” Satire is traditionally somewhat clever, witty and fairly easy to recognize as such. Mr. Saletan’s piece was none of these things. Nevertheless, I will give him the benefit of the doubt.

Laurie Higgins of the Illinois Family Institute noted, “The problem with Saletan’s satirical piece is that, unlike Swift’s ‘A Modest Proposal,’ Saletan’s is not outrageous enough. It should be outrageous enough for a satire, but unfortunately, homosexual activists and their allies are tyrannical enough to do just what he’s proposing.

“I know there are many progressives who think such a proposal is defensible,” she observed. “In fact, eight years ago, a colleague (AMM) at Deerfield High School told me that she is so sure conservative beliefs about homosexuality are wrong that they shouldn’t be allowed to be spoken in public schools – even if kids are studying homosexuality-affirming resources. And she was not speaking satirically.”

So here we have Mr. Saletan playing the role of today’s Joseph Goebbels, Adolf Hitler’s Nazi propaganda minister, in an effort, albeit a clumsy one, to underscore how utterly out of control his own “progressive” movement has become and, in the spirit of argumentum ad absurdum, gently coax his fellow bohemians from madness.

Slate was apparently in on the fun too, pretending, for a day, to be “Nationalsozialistischen Briefe,” Goebbels’ parallel publication, in an equally awkward attempt to use the power of metaphor as a scrub brush to wash away the stench of totalitarianism from an American left bathed in it.

But as you read the article a frightening reality quickly rises to the surface. It’s neither funny nor untrue. None of it. The cultural Marxist American left is 100-percent serious about “purging” Christians from society.

They’re as serious as Josef Stalin’s heart attack.

Continued Saletan: “To organize the next stage of the purge, I’ve compiled the financial data into three tables” (he actually did this). He then listed details from, and linked to, the Proposition 8 hit list reportedly leaked by the Obama IRS and meticulously assembled and published by the Los Angeles Times.

This was all by design. It’s what led to Brendan Eich’s career beheading. But Eich was just the opening act. The list provides the exact names, employers, places of residence and dollar amounts of every single person in America who donated even a dime to the Golden State’s campaign to protect natural marriage (I realize it’s hopelessly symbolic, but as matter of principle I will not link to the list).

This is a level of voter intimidation and journalistic terrorism on the part of the Obama administration and the L.A. Times that is unprecedented in American history.

Joking or not, Herr Saletan then gave the rainbow-shirts their jackbooted marching orders: “If we’re serious about taking down corporate officers who supported Proposition 8, and boycotting employers who promote them, we’d better get cracking on the rest of the list,” he said, concluding, “otherwise, perhaps we should put down the pitchforks.”

You do understand this, right? Obama, the L.A. Times and America’s larger “progressive” movement are dead serious about purging Christians and other traditionalists from both the workplace and society at large. It’s coming. Mozilla was just the opening salvo.

In the very same way Eich’s forced resignation was deliberately calculated to terrorize any American who might resist the left’s sexual anarchist agenda, and support some future, legally executed pro-family ballot initiative, the clear purpose behind releasing the Prop 8 donor list was to instill terror in the hearts of Christians and other traditionalists who support natural marriage, family and human sexuality. It was a not-so-subtle shot over the bow.

It was also a call to arms. It’s fight or flight time, America.  I’ve made my choice.

I say that if we once crushed fascism from without … we can sure as hell crush it from within.

SOURCE

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Black activist mocks people hurt by Obamacare

On the Sunday, April 20, Melissa Harris-Perry show on MSNBC, as host Harris-Perry chastised Democrats for not bragging about ObamaCare for the year's midterm elections, she at one point mocked Americans angry about having their health insurance plans cancelled, which she referred to as "crappy plans," as she lamented that Democrats are not boasting about ObamaCare or declaring, "Yeah, you can't keep your crappy plans. Just deal with that!"

Her mockery of the ObamaCare-induced insurance cancellations came as she compared Republicans to people who flip houses and brag about doing only a little work, as she characterized Democrats, by contrast, as people who do substantial work on houses but fail to boast about it adequately to potential buyers. Harris-Perry:

You can have some people -- let's call them Republicans -- who will go into a fallen down blighted house, slap on some granite counter tops, while ignoring real problems, and declare their work is the best thing ever.

After boasting about Democrats passing ObamaCare, she lamented:

And they're not even owning it. No confidence, no swagger. No, "Yeah, you can't keep your crappy plans. Just deal with that!"

SOURCE

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, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated) and Coral reef compendium. (Updated as news items come in).  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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