Gallup: United States ‘More Liberal in Recent Years’

Buried below its rankings of the most conservative and liberal states, Gallup declared that “Americans have become slightly less conservative and more liberal in recent years.”

The polling group did hedge the judgment by also stating that state-by-state, the ideological bends have “generally remained quite stable.”

The declaration of America’s leftward lean has been a consistent theme in Gallup’s annual state-by-state surveys. In 2014, Gallup said the nation’s “Conservative advantage down from last year.”

Their 2013 judgment was nearly identical to this year’s:

“America has become a slightly more liberal and a slightly less conservative nation than it was in 2011 -- based on residents' self-reports of their ideology…”

Beyond the state-by-state trends, this survey seems to indicate that while President Obama might have fallen short of “fundamentally transforming” America, he has tilted the nation leftward, at the very least.

Gallup’s 2015 “State of the States” series revealed the list of the most conservative and liberal states in the country. Mississippi was named the most conservative, while Massachusetts was deemed the most liberal.

Gallup also determined the most “moderate” state in the U.S. was Delaware, due to the state’s high percentage of self-described moderates.

The comprehensive survey polled 177,034 adults in all 50 states and Washington, DC.

SOURCE

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Obama's Morally Confused Prayer Breakfast Lecture

By David Limbaugh

I find it very odd that a president notably lacking in humility and frequently riding his own high horse would lecture American Christians about those subjects -- because they presumably condemn acts of barbarism by Islamists.

Talk about a string of disconnects. While we're at it, let's note one more. Obama, at the National Prayer Breakfast, also exhorted us to "uphold the distinction between our faith and our governments — between church and between state." Last time I checked, it was not Christians, unless you believe that Obama is a Christian, who were using government power to restrict religious liberties of others.

Obama, however, has conspicuously infringed on the conscience rights of Christians in supporting mandates that require religious organizations to pay for contraception and abortifacients.

Indeed, Obama was too busy lecturing Christians about "theocracies that restrict people's choice of faith" — though there are no Christian theocracies in the world — to note that many Muslim nations in the world are theocratic and under Shariah.

Is Obama's moral compass so skewed that he is utterly blind to the rampant theocratic oppression that routinely occurs in Muslim nations in the world? This takes moral equivalency to new levels.

But that wasn't even his worst moral distortion of the morning. On the heels of the Islamic State group's burning alive a captured Jordanian pilot, Obama's instinct was not to decry ISIS' depraved murder but to caution us not to judge the religion of Islam. Was anyone doing that, by the way?

As usual, Obama's first impulse to another atrocity committed in the name of Islam was to defend Islam — and attack Christianity and Christians, who Obama apparently believes are holding their noses in the air thinking they don't engage in such behavior in the name of their religion.

Foremost on his mind was to correct the record on Islam, kind of a pre-emptive defense of the religion he holds dear from his childhood, against any attempts to tar it based on thousands of "isolated" incidents. Here's where his moral equivalence reared its ugly head again.

He said, "We ... see faith being twisted and distorted, used as a wedge or, worse, sometimes used as a weapon." That was his predicate for chronicling the recent despicable actions of ISIS — an acronym, by the way, that, in his moral bewilderment, he refuses to utter — and then glibly transitioning into certain regrettable actions committed by or with the support of Christians in history.

Of course, he was compelled to invoke the Crusades, which in his view were unprovoked acts of aggression by Christians against Muslims but which in reality were far more complex than that. And of course, he had to mention the Inquisition, as if that is somehow relevant, even microscopically, to what's going on today.

But no blanket condemnation would be complete without Obama's obligatory and habitual denunciation of slavery and Jim Crow, only this time he cited them as examples not of America's evil past but of evils committed in the name of Christianity.

As long as we're talking about "wedges" and "weapons," it sure seems to me as if that's precisely how Obama continues to use slavery and Jim Crow. He just will not let these go. It obviously never occurs to him that Christianity was one of the main driving forces in eradicating slavery in this country. But we can hardly expect him to give us a fair reading of Christianity's role when he is on a mission to demonize it.

Obama is the one who needs to demonstrate a little humility and dismount his own elevated steed. He needs to put aside the pride that contributes to clouding his judgment about acts of terror committed by Islamists. He needs to recognize that it is nothing short of an act of moral cowardice to suggest that the multitudinous atrocities committed in the name of Islam today, whether or not they are representative of the true religion of Islam, bear any comparison to acts of Christians — today or in the past.

He needs to reset his own bias-riddled perception and open his willfully closed eyes to the fact that we have real enemies today who are killing us in the name of their religion and that, regardless of how representative they are of the faith that fuels their war cry, they see themselves as faith-driven and they are not going to be deterred or pacified by craven denunciations of Christianity or fervent defenses of Islam proper.

This is not about the Islamists' grievances over poverty or injustice or any of the other pet causes with which Obama can identify but about conquering the world for a global caliphate and subjugating or killing everyone who will not submit. There is no appeasing this mindset.

Americans are in greater danger now than we have been in decades because we have a leader who simply will not recognize that our allies and we are under attack around the world by untold numbers of people acting under the banner of Islam. No matter how many peaceful Muslims there are in the world, it doesn't change the fact that we're threatened by many who aren't.

If Obama spent one-tenth of the time focusing on these radical enemies as he does apologizing for the religion they claim to represent, Americans would be much safer.

SOURCE

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Lessons From an Unenduring Majority

A 2002 book, “The Emerging Democratic Majority,” posited, as the title suggests, an “enduring Democratic majority” in the wake of “permanent changes” to America’s demography. Co-authored by John B. Judis and Ruy Teixeira, the book’s central idea – the heart of the Emerging Democratic Majority (“EDM”) theory – was that the Democrat Party had amassed such a solid coalition of voters over the decades that the party could endure occasional bad election cycles and still retain control of the levers of government over the long haul. Recently revisiting his book, Judis noted it is, well, wrong. How times change.

Sadly for EDM – and every other Democrat-ideology theory forced into sustained contact with reality – the theory was flawed. It turns out – to paraphrase Mark Twain – news of the Republican Party’s death was greatly exaggerated. What hasn’t been exaggerated is the magnitude of just how far the authors' theory missed the mark. The theory wasn’t just wrong: It was exactly wrong – a feat extremely difficult even for Democrats to pull off. As Noah Rothman notes at Hot Air, the fatal flaw in EDM is, “Voters expected results from the party in which they had vested new authority.” After the better part of a decade getting none – or should we say the wrong results – voters learned to vote with their feet, walking out on Democrats at the polls.

The results of that reality check have been telling. Americans do not believe Democrats can provide economic security, let alone national security. The Democrat Party has become the party of racial, social and economic division, promoting class warfare as a primary means to gain political power, at the expense of all. It has accelerated national spending to a point of unfathomable debt, reincarnated the permanent welfare state, and turned public education into a 12-year babysitting service in which children simply bide time until they are turned out onto the streets of reality, lacking critical skills to become productive members of society.

In broad brushstrokes, in the wake of the contentious Barack Obama Era, Democrats have lost both the House and the Senate, lost control of 69 of 99 state-level legislative chambers, and lost countless officeholder seats. In short, the Democrat Party is in its worst position in 90 years. Americans no longer believe Democrats can deliver on any of their Pollyanna visions of the future.

Lest Republicans succumb to the same ruinous party-in-majority arrogance that (at least for the time being) wiped out the Democrats, we should warn that there’s a lesson here for every politician. The lesson is this: Ignoring or mistaking the will of the people can be hazardous to one’s political health.

Surveying the Democrat debris in the wake of the 2014 midterm Republican wave, the Chosen One commented, “To everyone that voted, I want you to know that I heard you.” The problem is that in his arrogance he didn’t hear. Immediately following his seemingly conciliatory statement, he punchlined, “To two-thirds of voters that chose not to participate in the process yesterday, I hear you, too.” Sure, Barry: It wasn’t popular will, it was just all those eeevil Republicans holding “the people” back from the polls. Any wonder why Democrats went 0-for-2 in Obama’s midterm cycles?

Summarizing the myriad lessons-learned littering the landscape of Democrats' political destruction, we offer the same advice to Democrats as we do to Republicans: Take time to do the hard thinking to connect the dots between our nation’s core founding principles and today’s voters. The notion that a party can have an enduring majority without understanding the fundamental principles upon which America was founded is mistaken. The same is true for a party that ignores or misunderstands the will of America’s voters. Listen to the Founders. Then listen to the voters. That’s how to create an “enduring majority.” Anything else is just another political theory on the ash heap of history.

SOURCE

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There Is a Simple Formula for Unleashing Economic Prosperity

The age old question in economics is this: how does a nation or state create economic growth and rising living standards for its citizens? Once upon a time superstitious economists believed that growth was a function of the constellation of the stars.

That kind of belief in astrology as a predictor of growth was no more misguided than many of the fad economic theories that are peddled today by charlatan economists who preach more government interventionism.

President Obama takes a victory lap for the economic recovery of the last five years despite in being the slowest since the Great Depression. Median household incomes have collapsed by $1,500 in real terms during the Obama recovery. That’s some rebound. Obama’s stimulus plans have created fewer jobs than would have been created by doing nothing – and that is according to his own analysis.

In sum, confusion reigns on how to regenerate growth.

But there is a simple and time-tested formula for unleashing economic prosperity – here at home and abroad. This formula is not complicated. The Heritage Foundation’s 2015 Index of Economic Freedom – which ranks 186 nations – shows conclusively that growth is a byproduct of free enterprise policies and limited government interference.

Adjusted for purchasing power, gross domestic product (GDP) per capita is more than 6 times higher in “free” vs. “repressed” economies. So for example, the per capita income is over $50,000 in a free nation like the United States. It is $11,610 in a repressed nation like Cuba. Israel has a per capita income of $34,770 versus $14,845 in Lebanon. Israel is far more economically free than Lebanon.

Take two nations that start at the same place economically. After two decades, the citizens in the nations with economic freedom will enjoy a standard of living one third greater than their counterparts in the less free zone. Poverty rates will also fall in the free nations much faster than the command and control economies. Health, education and environmental improvement are also closely tied to economic freedom. Free markets are the path to fairness. That’s a lesson even Pope Francis, a recent critic of capitalism, needs to learn.

Economic freedom isn’t hard to achieve: it means low taxes, free trade, limited government spending, a sound currency, the rule of law, and a light hand of regulation. Cronyism, which is too often regarded as a partner of capitalism, is exposed as a deterrent to growth. Russia is a nation not of free market capitalists, but of cronyism – and its economy has floundered. In other words, countries that grow reward citizens for how hard they work and what they know, not who they know.

The United States is ranked by Heritage as only the 12th economically freest nation in the world today, behind places like Hong Kong, Switzerland and even Canada. Only a decade ago, the U.S. consistently ranked in the top ten or higher of most free nations – but that all predated stimulus plans, bailouts, tax hikes on the rich, and Obamacare.

While many nations in the rest of the world tragically flirt with proven failed big government strategies and cheap money, the U.S. has an opportunity to win the global competition for jobs, businesses and capital investment. The low hanging fruit in Washington is to chop our highest in the world corporate income tax, reform our welfare system to reward work over handouts, approve free trade deals and drill for our domestic energy resources. That would be a good start to raising worker incomes and it may even move America, the Land of the Free, back into the economic freedom top 10 – where we belong.

SOURCE

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For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, 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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Do the Jordanian strikes on Daesh (ISIS) prove that Daesh are "Bad" Muslims?

Mr Obama says so  but that is pretty good evidence that the truth lies elsewhere.  And the truth is in fact the exact opposite. The Middle East is very tribal and  Muslims are always fighting with one another:  Nation against nation (Iran/Iraq); Sect against sect (Sunni/Shia) and tribe against tribe (Libya).  And the big Jordanian attacks on Daesh are very tribal -- motivated by revenge, nothing else. Jordanian Major General Mansour al-Jabour has said as much.

Muslims are like Catholics.  Most Catholics don't do what the Pope tells them (contraception, divorce).  They are "bad" Catholics.  Likewise most Muslims don't do what the Koran tells them (Jihad).  They are "bad" Muslims. It is Daesh who are the "good" Muslims.  They are in fact engaged in Jihad, as the Koran commends.

The Muslim religion is a great problem wherever there are Muslims.  Most Muslims find their religion's commandments at least as difficult as Catholics find the commandments of their religion so they are no problem to anyone much.  But some Muslims DO follow their commandments and they are a  BIG problem.  It is because of that minority that we need to send ALL Muslims back to their ancestral hellholes.  Any Muslim could become "good" and we have no way of telling which.

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The Western press is now the PR wing of the Islamic State

In poring over its murder-stunt videos, we give IS exactly what it wants -- says Brendan O’Neill below.  He has a point but I am not sure that it could be otherwise

Here’s a question for the Western media: if you really think the Islamic State is morally bankrupt, monstrous, one of the worst movements of recent times, then why are you doing its PR work for it? Why are you spreading its propaganda, and by extension its brand, and effectively acting as its unofficial press officer? For make no mistake — when Western media outlets splash the Islamic State’s sordid snuff movies across their front pages, complete with tantalising screengrabs of the seconds just before the really bad thing happens, that is what they are doing: conniving, almost, with the terrorists; certainly helping to complete their acts of terrorism through dutifully advertising them to jaw-dropped Western publics.

It takes two to tango — it also takes two to terrorise: the terrorist himself and the interpreter of his act, the media, which can spread far and wide the fear that the terrorist longs to strike into our hearts but is incapable of disseminating on his own.

Yesterday, IS released yet another capital-punishment video, its worst yet. No details of its contents are necessary here, not least because you can turn to any newspaper in Britain, and elsewhere, and see on the front pages gruesome, gory info about what IS did, and even photos of the dead man walking. Some papers show the milliseconds before the true horror occurs, and the effect is like a Victorian freakshow: you find yourself wondering what happened next, how bad it was; did he scream, did he writhe?

The coverage acts as an invitation to Google, to hunt down the reality horror movie online, where of course it’s available. It’s a modern version of the old haunting cry of ‘Roll up, roll up’: ‘See what happens to the man in the cage!’

Some media outlets will defend their eye-watering descriptions of what happens in the video, and their use of copious shots from it, as newsworthy and possibly even a blow for press freedom. Now, spiked is as absolutist about free speech as it’s possible to get, but I just don’t buy this justification.

Of course it is in the public interest to tell us that a Jordanian citizen was executed by IS and that Jordan has promised that its retribution will be ‘swift’ — these are important global matters. But the creative writing-style descriptions of every wound on the prisoner’s face? The Wes Craven-style poring-over of the moment the thing happens? The depressing detail about what the man does as he’s dying? Is that stuff necessary?

It seems to me that the aim of much of the press coverage of IS’s warped snuffism is less to inform than to titillate, to provoke, to provide people with outrage porn they can morally get off on. Many newspapers now feel a bit like those cheap Victorian news-sheets that claimed to be raising awareness about the scourge of child prostitution but conveniently came with loads of lurid detail about what was done to such children: now, as then, dubious claims of newsiness act as a cover for the publication of moral pornography.

The worst thing is that this is exactly what IS wants — for its self-consciously pre-modern, super-violent brand to be broadcast as far and as frequently as possible. It especially wants this PR boost now, after the harsh reality of its defeat in Kobane at the hands of the Kurds and its suffocation in Mosul by the various Iraqi and external forces that have reportedly surrounded and isolated that city. A rattled IS wants to remind the West of its menace, and what better way to do that than by videoing something truly shocking, in the knowledge that a Western media hungry for gorno will lap it up.

Some have asked why IS makes such abhorrent videos. Partly it’s because this group seems to float free of the moral and political universe inhabited by most other political groupings, even violent ones; but it’s also because it knows its videos will get a good response, ‘hits’, be dutifully obsessed over by the Western media. For very little outlay — a couple of cameras, some walk-on jihadists in menacing masks, a few hours in the editing suite — IS knows it can grab the world’s attention and hold our minds hostage courtesy of the media’s response to its murder-stunts. In this sense, it’s possible the Western media provides IS with an incentive to keep executing people on film: maybe it makes these videos because, at some level, some in the West want them.

There’s a real danger that today’s fearful Western societies amplify acts of terrorism by overreacting to them. We saw this over the past 10 years, when Western politicos and media outlets responded to acts of Islamist terrorism in Western cities by doing the things that the usually small groups of terrorists could never achieve on their own: rewriting laws, limiting liberty, overhauling the justice system, and instituting a culture of fear.

The impact of terrorism is very often determined, not by what the isolated, unrepresentative terrorist does, but by how we respond to what he does. The moral resourcefulness, or otherwise, of a target society is ultimately the deciding factor in whether terrorism will just have a temporary bloody impact or a longer-lasting political, legal and moral impact. And too often we have enabled the latter impact to occur. And so it is with the Islamic State today: if Jihadi John and the rest haunt our dreams, it’s because of what the media has made them into, because of how our own societies have made monsters of these pathetic killers.

There are two possible consequences of the Western media’s lapping-up of IS snuff movies. The first is that they will help IS recruit more nihilistic Westerners. As George Packer of the New Yorker said of last week’s execution of the Japanese journalist Kenji Goto, there is ‘an undeniable attraction in this horror for a number of young people around… Europe and America, who want to leave behind the comfort and safety of normal life for the exaltation of the caliphate’.

It’s a sad fact that, for complicated reasons, we live in societies in which fairly significant numbers of young people feel estranged from mainstream politics and morality and drawn towards nihilistic ways of thinking, and these media-spread videos act as an invitation to some of these youngsters to pursue their nihilistic urges with the one global group devoted to such despicable behaviour.

The second consequence of the media’s publicity for IS horrors is that IS will feel encouraged, incited in fact, to up the ante. Its horrendous new video suggests it is learning the lesson of diminishing returns — that the media had tired somewhat of its beheading videos and so IS needed to do something new and spectacular to get back on the front pages. So it did, and it worked. What will it do next? Who knows. But it will have to be extra atrocious if IS wants the Western media to carry on doing it a favour by making a global spectacle of its squalid murders.

 SOURCE

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Turning Ukraine into a stage for Western preening

Western interventionists are do-gooders who think they have the moral high ground in waging cold war on Russia, but where is the high ground in obstructing the independence struggle of Eastern Ukraine? Mr Putin is assisting cautiously something that everyone should be supporting

Since a ceasefire was agreed in early September between the Ukrainian government and pro-Russian rebels in eastern Ukraine, little has actually ceased. The rebels continued to push for independence, even staging de facto national elections in November; the government continued to try to quash the rebellion, declaring the rebels’ political moves illegitimate; and the firing and fighting have continued unabated. According to recent United Nations figures, since April the death toll has reached 5,300, with 12,000 more wounded, and 1.2million having fled their homes.

And now it appears the conflict is entering a far more dangerous phase. In recent weeks, the rebels have made significant territorial gains - 500sq kilometres, according to NATO estimates - and the talk now is of them pushing on towards Mariupol so as to connect the rebel-held regions to Crimea, annexed by Russia in March last year. There is talk also of raising mass armies. Rebel leader Alexander Zakharchenko has spoken of rallying together 100,000 troops, while Ukrainian president Petro Poroshenko has promised to draft an army of 200,000.

Much of the Western media focus, though, has not been on the conflict itself, exactly; it has been on Russia’s role in proceedings. Russia has been presented as the shady protagonist in the conflict, the military power behind the scenes, taking advantage of the massive political instability in Ukraine to advance its own territorial and political interests. And no doubt, Russia’s role is significant. Russian weaponry and Russian soldiers do seem to be involved in the conflict, with anecdotes, satellite imagery and corpses dragged out by the Ukrainian government and its allies as evidence.

Russian president Vladimir Putin denies military involvement, claiming that the Russian soldiers killed or captured in eastern Ukraine were there voluntarily, unofficially. But this seems unlikely, not least because Putin seems to be actively profiting from the escalating conflict on Russia’s borders. Fighting back the West’s supplicants in Ukraine plays well to a domestic audience: it bolsters Putin’s authority. Russia’s willingness to back the rebels in eastern Ukraine is not just a territorial exercise, then; it’s a reputation-building one, too. And it is making the situation in Ukraine worse, deepening antagonisms, unsettling a region, and rendering a federal solution to the split even more unlikely.

But, as spiked has argued from the beginning of Ukraine’s descent into civil war, while Russia’s actions are making things worse, the West’s role has been more destructive. At every stage of the recent conflict, from the Maidan Square protests towards the end of 2013, which eventually brought down the democratically elected government of President Yanukovych, to the constant cosying up to his pro-Western successors, too many in Europe and the US have recklessly, cluelessly upped the ante.

In fact, even before the recent conflagration, before the Maidan protests, the West, be it through NATO’s two-decades-long flirtation with Russia’s neighbours or the European Union’s entreaties to Ukraine through its Eastern Partnership scheme, has constantly threatened to pull Russia’s old allies into its orbit, all in the name of promoting ‘democratic’ or ‘Western’ values. Indeed, Western provocation, raising the stakes in Russia’s old Eastern Bloc backyard, has a history that extends back to the end of the Cold War.

So, Western leaders, cheered on by a braying, Russia-stereotyping commentariat, have not only helped to create the situation in Ukraine - they have also ceaselessly used it to haul themselves on to the moral high ground, issuing condemnations of Russia, and pushing through new rafts of economic sanctions with one hand, while beckoning Ukraine’s government to come ever closer to the European Union with the other.

And now, as Russia responds ever more dangerously, ever more unpredictably, to what it perceives to be a threat on its border, how are Western leaders and an increasingly excited media responding? By upping the ante yet further. Elite opinion, such as it is, is now becoming increasingly, myopically martial. The talk is now of backing the Ukrainian government, not just with Russia-baiting, Putin-demonising rhetoric, and yet another new regime of sanctions, but with actual military assistance.

One Financial Times columnist urges the West to arm the Ukrainians; the Washington Post says the ‘clear answer is direct military support’; a collection of US think tanks and politicians has just released a report urging similar. Western politicians, with the exception of the likes of Republican senator John McCain, may not have been quite so forthright so far; but the prospect of military intervention is now firmly circulating in the policymaking air.

And the most incredible aspect to this slow-motion slippage into something approaching international warfare in Ukraine is that those calling for the West to get stuck in are doing so for the most abstract, most self-aggrandising, and therefore most dangerous reasons. Theirs is not a geopolitical calculation. It is not a matter of realpolitik balancing of power blocs. No, theirs is a vain comic-book calculation. It is a matter of fighting the bad guy, of doing battle with the forces of Russian irrationality and reaction.

Former US secretary of state Hillary Clinton likened Russia’s actions to those of Hitler in the 1930s. Others, incredibly, have displayed even less subtlety. One US commentator blamed everything on, variously, ‘Putin the Thug’ and ‘Czar Putin’; one UK commentator said that the West was dealing with ‘classic psychopathic behaviour’; and in the Guardian, columnist, policy adviser and laptop bombardier Timothy Garton Ash decided to invoke his own Kosovo-era version of Hitler: ‘Vladimir Putin is the Slobodan Milošević of the former Soviet Union: as bad, but bigger.’

This is what the conflict in Ukraine has been rendered up as: a battle between the West and Putin the Bad Man. It is a chance, once more, for Western commentators and politicians to act out their liberal interventionist fantasies, to do battle with a psychopath, a thug, a man intent on doing wrong. Those venting their anti-Putin diatribes no doubt feel terribly good about themselves. Those calling for the West to do more no doubt remain convinced that, abstractly, as a moral decision, it is the Right Thing To Do.

And that is the problem. This same unthinking, politically dumb impulse has already wreaked immeasurable damage across the globe, pulling down social arrangements and civic structures from Iraq to Libya, and leaving behind little but massive instability. And yet, because it always looks like the right thing to do, especially when the antagonist is conjured up as a psychopathic wrongdoer, the clueless interventionists continue to call cluelessly for intervention. They up the ante, selfishly, vainly and, ultimately, barbarically.

Russia’s destabilising involvement in Ukraine cannot be ignored. But just as significant is the equally deleterious role of the bumbling, purpose-seeking West and its international institutions. Their culpability in Ukraine’s disintegration has been ignored for far too long.

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, 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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Fascist Scotland

Jealousy has always been the key to understanding Scots. Perhaps because they have always been poor relative to the English, they have a hatred of anybody richer than them. The name of Scotland's largest landowner, the Duke of Buccleuch (pronounced "baklew) is not so much uttered as spat out in most of Scotland. So they have always been very jealous of one another and that has made them very socialist.  It's only by going abroad and escaping envious eyes that Scots can prosper.

But socialism plus nationalism is the recipe for Fascism -- and Scottish nationalism is more than mere patriotism.  It has morphed  into national self-assertiveness and new and improved hatred of their Southern neighbour.  And so a form of Fascism does seem to have emerged.

The recent referendum on Scottish independence seems to have been the flash-point.  It pumped up nationalism to new heights and the failure of the referendum has left nationalists seething with anger.  And anger is of course behind most Leftist policies.  So Scotland is getting some severely Leftist policies.  And the MAJORITY of Scots who voted to stay united with England are simply not respected.  Nationalists are not accepting their defeat graciously. And since they do have control of the Scottish parliament, they can do a lot of damage.  See below.  -- JR


By Allan Massie

The smell of blood is in the Scottish air – and the nationalist daggers are out once again. No matter that they lost the referendum. SNP membership is surging, and so is the spiteful abuse of their opponents, openly branded quislings and collaborators for daring to disagree.

The nationalists are on aggressive form, set to rule not just the Scottish parliament but a majority of Scotland’s 59 Westminster seats. New polling funded by Conservative peer Lord Ashcroft has predicted a 21 per cent swing to the SNP, which would mean Labour losing 35 of their 41 seats.

If that seems like a distant issue from south of the border, then consider this: if the SNP performs as the polls suggest, an overall Labour majority in May will be almost impossible. But a Labour-SNP coalition becomes an increasingly likely scenario – and a worrying one. Because the SNP could influence the whole of the UK with what has become a divisive brand of state socialism.

Just look at what they plan in Scotland, harrying the great estates – and their owners – with taxes and forcible land sales. The nationalists even want to meddle in family life with sinister new measures promising government supervision of all Scottish children.

This might chime well in Left-wing cities such as Glasgow and Dundee, the new nationalist heartland, but many see the proposed land reform as fuelled by class envy and socialist dogma.

The SNP’s claim to a monopoly on Scottish patriotism infuriated many unionists during the referendum campaign, but its Stalinist identification of the party with the state is worrying even more.

For now, the guns have mostly fallen silent, as this is the close season for game birds and stalking, but for landowners and their employees there is a feeling that the guns are being turned on them, and that the traditional social and economic pattern of country life is in danger of being torn up.

Under the bureaucratic slogan of ‘sustainable development’, First Minister Nicola Sturgeon has proposed a raft of separate measures that she believes will attract the support of the Scottish Left, and which landowners believe is a class-based attack on the great estates and centuries of tradition.

One is a plan to give rural communities the right of compulsory purchase over the land they farm – even if the landowner, whose family may have been custodians of it for generations, doesn’t want to sell it.

The SNP also want to change the inheritance laws of primogeniture that would fragment the ownership of the great estates within a few generations by ensuring the division of property among all of a landowner’s children. Then there is the removal of the tax breaks that make many estates viable and investment in them possible.

In truth, however, the country sports that the SNP so despises are all that makes many of the estates economically viable.

The party is fond of preaching that the ownership of much of the land is concentrated in comparatively few hands. Some 400 individuals or trusts (family or commercial) are said to own most of Scotland. Yet much of the country is mountain and moorland. A 500-acre chunk of arable land in, say, Berwickshire, is far more profitable than 5,000 or even 15,000 acres in the Highlands.

Jamie Williamson, laird of Alvie and Dalraddy, near Aviemore, tells me wryly that his 13,000 acres are MAMBA – ‘more and more of b***** all’.

‘We farm cows, sheep, trees and tourists,’ he adds. ‘Field sports are more important – we offer grouse-shooting and deer-stalking – because the Highlands are less favourable for agriculture.

‘The poorer the land, the more you need to live off it. Round here, that’s a minimum of 2,000 to 5,000 acres.

‘We’re faced with people who have a politically motivated agenda and don’t realise what they’re doing. It could end up like Ireland, where sub-division means that everyone has a quarter-acre potato patch. The attitude now is, “You’ve got it, we want it.” '

Lack of respect for property rights is characteristic of all socialist regimes, so it is not surprising that the SNP’s land reform will render property insecure.

Actually, Scots already have a Land Reform Act, passed in the first Scottish Parliament with little controversy. It established a statutory right to roam throughout the countryside with a few designated exceptions. That right had always existed, as trespass on private property was not an offence in Scotland unless there was damage or malicious intent.

The Act also gave a community the right to buy an estate if the owner was willing to sell, and provided public funds to make this possible. There have been a handful of buyouts, some apparently successful. In a warning to the SNP, however, others have proved far more problematic.

The 94-strong community on the beautiful Hebridean island of Gigha became the best-known beneficiaries of the legislation when they bought their seven-mile-long island from businessman Derek Holt in 2002 with £4 million of public money in the form of a grant and a loan. The population has since swollen to 160 people, but the island is reported to be £3 million in debt, and looking to the Government for further help.

Highland estates change hands frequently; the land is unproductive, country sports are labour and investment-intensive. They swallow money. It’s why any community that benefits from a buyout – whether voluntary or as part of a socialist land-grab – is likely to be going back to Holyrood soon, holding out the begging-bowl.

This isn’t true of all parts of Scotland, I should add. The fertile estates in the Borders , where I live, rarely change hands, because they are not loss-making. Estates such as those of the Duke of Buccleuch, the Marquess of Lothian and the Duke of Roxburghe make a huge contribution to the social, economic and cultural life of the region. They offer access and provide employment for tens of thousands.

It is estimated that ten per cent of Scottish jobs are in agriculture and activities related to it, such as shooting. They are generally a force for good, and for prosperity, and only a fool would want to break them up. However, that is exactly what the SNP plans.

It’s easy to see that such measures might have a rabble-rousing appeal for city-dwellers to whom the big estates are bad and the poor, embattled workers are victims.

These are also, of course, people who have no idea of how the rural economy works. It is private spite dressed up as public interest.

The final nail in the coffin of the sporting estates would be the SNP plan to remove the ‘de-rating’ tax-break brought in by the Major Government 20 years ago.

On the face of it this may seem a more justifiable change, as most businesses pay rates, but the consequences might be damaging.

Jamie Williamson is quite clear about that. His estate employs 19 people directly and as many again indirectly, while overheads are huge and the profit on field sports is meagre enough to be tipped into the red if the new taxes are too high. If that happens, many estates will abandon shooting, and with it will go the tourism and hospitality industries that rely on it.  ‘It could,’ he adds, ‘have an impact all the way down the line.’

Williamson is a landowner, a laird, so the response may be ‘he would say that, wouldn’t he?’  But his views are echoed and put even more forcibly by Alex Hogg, who is a gamekeeper, not a landowner. In fact, he’s chairman of the Scottish Gamekeepers Association.

He says: ‘Local businesses are supported by the estates and shooting brings in millions.  ‘Why would you want to drive away that investment?

‘The SNP keeps talking about public interest. But surely the public interest is served by having a thriving community that’s not subsidised. I’m dumbfounded by these proposals. The SNP has gone far-Left, and it scares me.’

Since it came into office, the SNP has weakened local democracy in favour of enforcing its own ideologically driven diktats. It has overridden, for example, local objections to wind farms. It has created a single Scottish police force, free of any local democratic control. Worse still, the SNP state has no regard for the individual.

Another SNP measure hits at the autonomy of the family. This is the Named Persons Act, which provides for the state to appoint a named guardian, usually a social worker or teacher, for every child and adolescent in Scotland.

This is, of course, dressed up as a means of providing protection for vulnerable children and young people. Who, they say, could possibly object to this?

The answer is anyone who believes parents are better judges of their children’s interests than the state or social workers. The SNP claims parents and children have asked for these guardians but, for me, the assumption is clear: parents can’t be trusted and children belong not to their parents but to the state, just as in Mao’s China.

Meanwhile the intrusion of the state into private life gathers pace.

The SNP is planning a new ‘SuperID database’, effectively a computerised Big Brother, that would store a great deal of confidential information including health details, tax payments, even whether someone is a member of the Royal Botanic Gardens in Edinburgh.

This information can be shared among government bodies – including, bizarrely, Quality Meat Scotland.

Willie Rennie, leader of the Scottish Liberal Democrats, says: ‘This needs to be stopped. They plan to take information on people using the health service and allow access to 120 organisations.’

The East German Stasi would have loved to have a database that linked health, tax and much other private information on its citizens. It could become reality in Scotland.

And yet, despite its contempt for individuals, for families, for property rights and for liberty, the SNP is riding high in the polls. Its dream is that it will hold the balance of power at Westminster where, Sturgeon insists, they would do a deal with Labour, but on no account with the Tories.

This is rank hypocrisy. When the SNP ran a minority government between 2007 and 2011, they happily did deals with the Scottish Conservatives to get budgets through.

Actually the SNP’s intentions in Westminster are absolutely clear. They aim to make a bloody nuisance of themselves.

They hope to exasperate the English to such an extent that eventually they will tell the Scots to clear out – even though 55 per cent of us voted to remain part of the United Kingdom. As Salmond, defeated in September but hoping to return to the Commons as an MP, charmingly put it, he hopes ‘to hold England’s feet to the fire’.

There is talk in Scotland of Labour, the Tories and Liberal Democrats doing a deal to keep Salmond out, or at least encouraging voters to back the candidate most likely to beat the SNP.

If that happens, the Nationalists will surely shriek foul. But considering what they plan for the rest of us, the laugh will be on them.

SOURCE

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The Prime Minister of New Zealand gets the hypocrisy of the Left



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Perry's Claim to Fame Is Simple: Jobs

Texas is where the jobs are

Texas Gov. Rick Perry is considering another run for the White House in 2016, and his platform is strong in the primary concern of voters. As political strategist James Carville so memorably put it during Bill Clinton’s first campaign, “It’s the economy, stupid.”

In his State of the Union, Barack Obama crowed about the jobs he created since 2010: “America has put more people back to work than Europe, Japan and all advanced economies combined. Our manufacturers have added almost 800,000 new jobs.”

But Obama didn’t give credit where it’s due. Since the start of the Great Recession in 2007, the 1.169 million increase in jobs nationwide up to December 2014 can be attributed entirely to the roaring Texas economy. The other 49 states and Washington, DC, altogether have lost about 275,000 jobs. Texas enjoyed its 51st consecutive month of growth in December, adding more that 2,000 jobs every business day. And while the nationwide headline unemployment rate stands at 5.6%, the rate in Texas dropped to 4.6%. Pretty impressive numbers for a candidate’s résumé.

Of course, Texas owes much of its boom to fracking on privately owned land. Fracking has sparked a recovery in other industries, including construction. From January to November, more building permits for single-family houses were issued in Houston alone than in all of California in the same period.

Unfortunately, some of Texas' job growth came because of crony capitalism – sweetheart tax deals and so forth. That shouldn’t play well with free-market conservatives, but the average voter probably won’t care much about that angle when Perry can say, “Yeah, but Texas under my leadership is responsible for virtually all the job growth in the nation.”

One issue that will tickle conservative heart strings is that leftists are labeling Perry a “tenther.” Like the supposedly pejorative “denier,” the Left now labels anyone who believes in the Tenth Amendment a “tenther”. We’re mighty proud to be in that club.

Interviewed by Heartland magazine, Perry said that he wants to be a strong Tenth Amendment leader, working with other governors who share his passion. “We need to get back to 50 states competing against other … to become a powerful country, a powerful economy again.” He continued, “We need to … make the states … into laboratories of innovation [again to] put America back on the road to recovery.”

A push to restore the federalism our Founders established is long overdue and we hope the next president and governors have the wisdom to restore the Tenth Amendment as we have the Second.

Meanwhile, should Perry emerge as a viable candidate, the Left will simply lie to destroy him. Lies, character assassination, mudslinging. The Left’s stock in trade.

Indeed, this is why he had a run-in last year with Travis County Democrat District Attorney Rosemary Lehmberg after she was arrested for drunk driving with three times the legal limit of blood alcohol. During her arrest and booking, she behaved like a bratty eighth grader. Sentenced to 45 days, she served half. Because she heads the Public Integrity Unit of the DA’s office, Perry asked her to resign. Like any good disgraced Democrat, she refused, causing Perry to cut funding to her office until she was replaced.

Smelling blood in the water, special prosecutor Michael McCrum took the matter to a grand jury and got an indictment for two class A misdemeanors: abuse of official capacity and coercion of a public servant. Got that? Perry allegedly “abused” Lehmberg by demanding her resignation. And he “abused” the power of the veto. That’s rich.

The Leftmedia lost no time headlining: GOVERNOR INDICTED. Unfortunately, the case will drag on for months, keeping Perry’s “sullied” name in the news. He could lose campaign contributors, as ridiculous as that might seem, but Democrats have been at this game for decades, and they know their stuff. Let’s hope the voters show more sense than the media hounds.

In terms of campaigning, two things will work to Perry’s advantage this time: He’s no longer governor and can focus all his energy on the campaign, and he’s not coming off back surgery, which many think put him off his game in 2012. And, again, that job-creation résumé is going to play well in a nation sloughing along under Obamanomics.

SOURCE

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For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, 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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Just another Leftist psychopathic liar

Remember Bill Clinton claiming that Hillary was named after Sir Edmund?  Problem:  Edmund Hillary was just a New Zealand sheep farmer at the time she was born. Climbing Everest came years later.  A typical psychopathic lie



Longtime residents of French Quarter say the NBC News anchor’s vivid claims about Katrina since the August 2005 hurricane have been overblown.

Williams’ past reporting has come under new scrutiny after revelations earlier this week that he had peddled a false story about what he described as a near-death experience in which a US army helicopter he was riding in in Iraq in 2003 came under RPG and AK-47 fire. The story was exposed by US soldiers as false. Williams called it a “mistake” and apologized.

Longtime residents of New Orleans’ French Quarter say they believe Williams’ vivid claims about his Katrina reporting in the years since the devastating August 2005 storm have also been overblown. They shake their heads at Williams’ having said that he saw a body floating face-down outside his hotel. They say it is highly unlikely that Williams’ hotel was “overrun with gangs”, as the anchor has said. They say there was no dysentery, a disease Williams has said that he caught while he was in the city reporting, and that bottled water was plentiful in the area – despite Williams’ claims to the contrary.

“I saw one of his tapes last night. He said he was told not to drink bottled water in front of people because people would kill you for it?” said Dr Brobson Lutz, a former director of the New Orleans city health department who is a longtime resident of the French Quarter and who ran an EMS station there after the storm. “That’s absolutely hogwash.”

SOURCE

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Fallout hits Hildabeest



There’s an emerging consensus among some political gabbers that Brian Williams’ long-running misrepresentations about his time in Iraq does serious damage to a major national figure.

The twist: The figure being skewered is not the embattled NBC anchorman but Hillary Rodham Clinton.

Why would misstatements by Williams — that a helicopter he rode in a dozen years ago in Iraq came under enemy fire — damage the once and likely future presidential candidate?

Because the former secretary of state and frontrunner-in-waiting for the 2016 Democratic presidential nomination had her own Williams-esque flight of war-zone “misspeak.”

Clinton’s error came in the thick of her 2008 run for the presidency, when she claimed in a speech that she and her party once ducked sniper fire on an airport tarmac in Bosnia. It wasn’t true.

The NBC anchor’s career-threatening failure on the Iraq story now has commentators, particularly on the political right, saying Clinton should be in just as much trouble.

At least one seasoned hand in Clintonworld theorizes, though, that Hillary’s 2008 campaign trail plotz will not ultimately be as damaging as Williams’ meltdown. Here’s why: Williams has told the tale of the attack on a U.S. military helicopter many times over the years since he embedded with the Army during the 2003 Iraqi invasion. His problem is that he has expanded and embellished the alleged brush with danger many times.

According to reporting led by the military journal Stars & Stripes, aviators on the scene at the time said the copter carrying Williams was an hour behind another Chinook forced to land, after being hit by a rocket-propelled grenade.

In multiple retellings over the years, though, the NBC anchor has gone from saying he was “on the ground” when he learned about the RPG threat to suggesting the copter immediately in front of his took the hit to saying his own chopper was battered by both the RPG and AK-47 fire.

Williams told Stars & Stripes he “misremembered” the incident and that he doesn’t “know what screwed up in my mind that caused me to conflate one aircraft with another.” An on-air apology Wednesday night has done little to quell the furor.

Flashing back a couple of campaign seasons, NBC News was among the outlets that hit hardest when Hillary Clinton got her own war story wrong. Though Williams was on the periphery of that reporting, his network reported Clinton’s flub and how it took her a week to correct it.

When first learning of Williams’ own veracity problem this week, one former Clinton aide said he was “chagrined,” thinking, “This will bring back something from that campaign, and those parallels will be drawn as if what she did was exactly like what Brian Williams did.”

Clinton had said during a March 2008 speech that, while visiting Bosnia in 1996 as first lady, she remembered “landing under sniper fire.” A greeting ceremony had to be cancelled, she said, as her party “ran with our heads down to get into the vehicles to get to our base.”

Videotape instead showed Clinton, her daughter Chelsea and their entourage simply striding across a tarmac with smiles and greeting a retinue of well-wishers.

SOURCE

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The Big Unemployment Lie

The U.S. economy added 257,000 jobs in January, but the headline unemployment rate rose one-tenth of a point to 5.7%. The broader measure, known as the U-6 rate, also climbed from 11.2% to 11.3%. That’s mixed good news, since slight growth in record-low labor participation likely caused the rate spike. Even when we create jobs in the Obama economy, we seem to lose ground.

One of the problems is that each month’s jobs report pushes the same fraudulent narrative embraced by Barack Obama’s administration since before his re-election. To hear Obama tell it, the country’s current unemployment rate is pretty much back to where it was before the Great Recession. Therefore, the economy is on the mend, and we have the Great One’s policies to thank for it.

None of this is true.

The so-called official unemployment rate that is recorded and made public by the Bureau of Labor Statistics is known as the U-3 rate, but it doesn’t provide the full jobs picture for the country. The U-3 number records only those people who are currently out of work, not receiving any employment income and actively seeking new employment.

Yet there is an alarmingly vast swath of people who aren’t counted in these “official” unemployment numbers. Skilled laborers who have been out of work for a sustained period of time who earn at least $20 in a week are not considered unemployed under U-3. Nor are people working part-time but seeking full-time work to support their families.

Jim Clifford, Chairman and CEO of Gallup, wrote this week, “The official unemployment rate, which cruelly overlooks the suffering of the long-term and often permanently unemployed as well as the depressingly underemployed, amounts to a Big Lie.”

In fact, the unemployment rate “goes down” when more people leave the workforce than continue looking for work. So the worse reality gets, the better the headlines can be.

If we want a true sense of the unemployment picture, we should focus on the U-6 rate. This unemployment figure is publicly available, though it never receives the fanfare or public scrutiny that the U-3 number does. Indeed, one has to dig for the U-6 number; the Obama administration would never deliberately bring it up in a press release or a news conference. The U-6 rate is a look at real unemployment – not just those who are out of work, but also those who’ve been out of work so long that they’re no longer counted in the U-3 report.

That’s why we note the U-6 rate every month.

The underemployment picture is even worse. This group, including those mentioned above who are working but not at the level they should be based on skill or economic need, is 15.9%. If you adhere to Gallup’s definition of a good job as 30-plus hours per week with a regular paycheck, then only 44% of the eligible adult population is working full-time. (Stay-at-home moms and certain others aren’t counted in the working population, but 44% is still a shockingly low rate in a supposedly healthy economy.)

Politicians in Washington can’t seem to understand why unemployment is down and people just aren’t “feeling it.” Well, they’re not feeling it because most of them aren’t seeing it. Regardless of the rosy picture that the White House paints with its misleading data, Clifton notes, “Right now, as many as 30 million Americans are either out of work or severely underemployed. Trust me, the vast majority of them aren’t throwing parties to toast ‘falling’ unemployment.”

If we continue to gloss over this very real jobs problem, we can’t create the conditions that are necessary for a real economic recovery.

Dictators and leftists often embrace the old saw that if a lie is repeated often enough, it becomes reality. Such is the case with our “official” unemployment rate. The White House embraces it for the sake of political expediency. The Leftmedia embrace it because they love to report good news when there’s a Democrat in the White House. Wall Street embraces it because they want investors to keep buying stocks. And so, the rest of the country is led to believe that all is well and getting better.

The time has come to face the facts as they exist, not as the Leftmedia want us to see them.

SOURCE

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Obama Wants to Remove Funding for Veterans!

We receive emails on a daily basis calling us racists for opposing Obama. The President’s race and skin color has absolutely NOTHING to do with it. Here’s an example of why we oppose this man’s Presidency:

This past August, Obama signed the Veterans Choice Program into law, allowing military veterans to seek medical assistance outside the VA instead of waiting on endless lines. It set aside $10 Billion to pay for veterans’ medical care outside the VA.

We praised the President and Congress for getting the ball rolling and fixing at least some of the problems plaguing the VA for years.

Well, yesterday Obama sent his proposed budget to Congress for consideration. And guess what… he wants to DEFUND this important program!

As I said, this legislation was signed into law last August. It passed through the GOP-held House of Representatives and then the Democrat-controlled Senate. This was bipartisan legislation the American people DEMANDED.

And now, Obama wants to let the Department of Veterans Affairs to raid this $10 billion fund and allocate this money towards programs that only seem to fail our vets!

I will confess that in the past, I have held off from placing the blame where it was due. I have been desperately trying to convince myself that Obama’s policies were the result of his weakness or stupidity. I think that many of his decisions still are. I didn’t want to believe that the President of the United States was doing these things on purpose.

But this is undeniable. For the President to submit a budget that dismantles an entire program for serving veterans is unacceptable. That wasn’t an accident… Obama and his staffers deliberately chose to dismantle this crucial aid program.

When I find out about treachery like this, it immediately gives me pause. I understand that this makes it easy to become discouraged. All in all, we sent close to 100,000 faxes to Congress demanding that they alleviate the fatal wait times at VA hospitals. And it worked. We helped get legislation signed into law.

But now, just 6 months after this law was passed, the President wants to cannibalize it to fund other failing VA policies. He touted this program as a success in August but now apparently it is too successful for his liking.

If anything, this is just more proof of how Barack H. Obama doesn’t care about our veterans. How else do you explain the President signing this into law and then wanting to defund it a few months later?

We fought so hard to reform the VA and get our veterans the medical care they deserve outside the VA hospital system. Now, Obama wants to throw these veterans back into a failed system so they can die while waiting months to be seen by a doctor!

SOURCE

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What French McDonald’s Restaurants Tell Us About the Pros and Cons of a Minimum Wage Hike

President Obama said in a YouTube interview last month that he wanted to focus, during his last two years as president on helping people get ahead.

“In particular, how can I make sure that folks who are working hard…cannot just survive, but how can they thrive? How can they get ahead?” Obama said.

Many think the answer to helping Americans thrive and get ahead is to increase the minimum wage—and Obama has often talked about his support for hiking it. But it’s a mistake to think hiking the minimum wage will help.

In fact, a hiked minimum wage could harm people, not help them thrive.

The Heritage Foundation’s James Sherk says  that raising wages would have a particular impact on the fast food industry, where many low skilled and young workers get their start in a journey to better and higher paying jobs.  Sherk states that by raising worker wages, “many fast-food restaurants would respond by restructuring dramatically in order to use less labor.” In other words, there would be fewer jobs as a result of the mandated higher wages—and fewer opportunities for low-skilled and young-workers to be employed.

The president only has to look at McDonald’s restaurants in France to see the impact a higher minimum wage would have. France’s minimum wage is $10.60 an hour. Not surprisingly, every McDonald’s has resorted to using touch screen ordering rather than workers. It simply doesn’t make sense, when minimum wage starts that high, to employ people when machines can do the job.

This is reality. When faced with high operating costs, corporations such as McDonald’s will find ways to cut costs, whether by substituting technology for labor or forgoing improvements and investments in the company’s future.

Ultimately passing a minimum wage hike would provide fewer, not more, opportunities to Americans. If Obama wants to see all Americans thrive, he should make sure they have as many opportunities to do so as possible—and stop promoting a minimum wage hike.

SOURCE

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For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, 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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Conservatives have a better sense of humor

This is an article from a few years back but it reinforces much that I have been saying for many years.  And it is in the NYT!

We begin by asking you to rate, on a scale of 1 (not funny at all) to 9 (hilarious) the following three attempts at humor:

A) Jake is about to chip onto the green at his local golf course when a long funeral procession passes by. He stops in midswing, doffs his cap, closes his eyes and bows in prayer. His playing companion is deeply impressed. “That’s the most thoughtful and touching thing I’ve ever seen,” he says. Jake replies, “Yeah, well, we were married 35 years.”

B) I think there should be something in science called the “reindeer effect.” I don’t know what it would be, but I think it’d be good to hear someone say, “Gentlemen, what we have here is a terrifying example of the reindeer effect.”

C) If you saw two guys named Hambone and Flippy, which one would you think liked dolphins the most? I’d say Flippy, wouldn’t you? You’d be wrong, though. It’s Hambone.

Those were some of the jokes rated by nearly 300 people in Boston in a recent study. (You can rate some of the others at TierneyLab, nytimes.com/tierneylab.) The researchers picked out a variety of jokes — good, bad, conventional, absurdist — to look for differences in reactions between self-described liberals and conservatives.

They expected conservatives to like traditional jokes, like the one about the golfing widower, that reinforce racial and gender stereotypes. And because liberals had previously been reported to be more flexible and open to new ideas, the researchers expected them to get a bigger laugh out of unconventional humor, like Jack Handey’s “Deep Thoughts” about the reindeer effect and Hambone.

Indeed, the conservatives did rate the traditional golf and marriage jokes as significantly funnier than the liberals did. But they also gave higher ratings to the absurdist “Deep Thoughts.” In fact, they enjoyed all kinds of humor more.

“I was surprised,” said Dan Ariely, a psychologist at Duke University, who collaborated on the study with Elisabeth Malin, a student at Mount Holyoke College. “Conservatives are supposed to be more rigid and less sophisticated, but they liked even the more complex humor.”

Do conservatives have more fun? Should liberals start describing themselves as humor-challenged? To investigate these questions, we need to delve into the science of humor (not a funny enterprise), starting with two basic kinds of humor identified in the 1980s by Willibald Ruch, a psychologist who now teaches at the University of Zurich.

The first category is incongruity-resolution humor, or INC-RES in humor jargon. It covers traditional jokes and cartoons in which the incongruity of the punch line (the husband who misses his wife’s funeral) can be resolved by other information (he’s playing golf). You can clearly get the joke, and it often reinforces stereotypes (the golf-obsessed husband).

Dr. Ruch and other researchers reported that this humor, with its orderly structure and reinforcement of stereotypes, appealed most to conservatives who shunned ambiguity and complicated new ideas, and who were more repressed and conformist than liberals.

The second category, nonsense humor, covers many “Far Side” cartoons, Monty Python sketches and “Deep Thoughts.” The punch line’s incongruity isn’t neatly resolved — you’re left to enjoy the ambiguity and absurdity of the reindeer effect or Hambone’s affection for dolphins. This humor was reported to appeal to liberals because of their “openness to ideas” and their tendency to “seek new experiences.”

But then why didn’t the liberals in the Boston experiment like the nonsense humor of “Deep Thoughts” as much as the conservatives did? One possible explanation is that conservatives’ rigidity mattered less than another aspect of their personality. Rod Martin, the author of “The Psychology of Humor,” said the results of the Boston study might reflect another trait that has been shown to correlate with a taste for jokes: cheerfulness.

“Conservatives tend to be happier than liberals in general,” said Dr. Martin, a psychologist at the University of Western Ontario. “A conservative outlook rationalizes social inequality, accepting the world as it is, and making it less of a threat to one’s well-being, whereas a liberal outlook leads to dissatisfaction with the world as it is, and a sense that things need to change before one can be really happy.”

Another possible explanation is that conservatives, or at least the ones in Boston, really aren’t the stiffs they’re made out to be by social scientists. When these scientists analyze conservatives, they can sound like Victorians describing headhunters in Borneo. They try to be objective, but it’s an alien culture.

The studies hailing liberals’ nonconformity and “openness to ideas” have been done by social scientists working in a culture that’s remarkably homogenous politically. Democrats outnumber Republicans by at least seven to one on social science and humanities faculties, according to studies by Daniel Klein, an economist at George Mason University. If you’re a professor who truly “seeks new experiences,” try going into a faculty club today and passing out McCain-Palin buttons.

Could it be that the image of conservatives as humorless, dogmatic neurotics is based more on political bias than sound social science? Philip Tetlock, a psychologist at the University of California, Berkeley, who reviews the evidence of cognitive differences in his 2005 book, “Expert Political Judgment,” said that while there were valid differences, “liberals and conservatives are roughly equally closed-minded in dealing with dissonant real-world evidence.”

So perhaps conservatives don’t have a monopoly on humorless dogmatism. Maybe the stereotype of the dour, rigid conservative has more to do with social scientists’ groupthink and wariness of outsiders — which, come to think of it, resembles the herding behavior of certain hoofed animals. Ladies and gentlemen, what we have here is a terrifying example of the reindeer effect.

SOURCE

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Obama Versus America

By Thomas Sowell

In his recent trip to India, President Obama repeated a long-standing pattern of his – denigrating the United States to foreign audiences. He said that he had been discriminated against because of his skin color in America, a country in which there is, even now, “terrible poverty.”

Make no mistake about it, there is no society of human beings in which there are no rotten people. But for a President of the United States to be smearing America in a foreign country, whose track record is far worse, is both irresponsible and immature.

Years after the last lynching of blacks took place in the Jim Crow South, India’s own government was still publishing annual statistics on atrocities against the untouchables, including fatal atrocities. The June 2003 issue of “National Geographic” magazine had a chilling article on the continuing atrocities against untouchables in India in the 21st century.

Nothing that happened to Barack Obama when he was attending a posh private school in Hawaii, or elite academic institutions on the mainland, was in the same league with the appalling treatment of untouchables in India. And what Obama called “terrible poverty” in America would be called prosperity in India.

The history of the human race has not always been a pretty picture, regardless of what part of the world you look at, and regardless of whatever color of the rainbow the people have been.

If you want to spend your life nursing grievances, you will never run out of grievances to nurse, regardless of what color your skin is. If some people cannot be rotten to you because of your race, they will find some other reason to be rotten to you.

The question is whether you want to deal with such episodes at the time when they occur or whether you want to nurse your grievances for years, and look for opportunities for “payback” against other people for what somebody else did. Much that has been said and done by both President Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder suggests that they are in payback mode.

Both have repeatedly jumped into local law enforcement issues, far from Washington, and turned them into racial issues, long before the facts came out. These two men – neither of whom grew up in a ghetto – have been quick to play the role of defenders of the ghetto, even when that meant defending the kinds of hoodlums who can make life a living hell for decent people in black ghettos.

Far from benefitting ghetto blacks, the vision presented by the Obama administration, and the policies growing out of that vision, have a track record of counterproductive results on both sides of the Atlantic – that is, among low-income whites in England as well as low-income blacks in the United States.

In both countries, children from low-income immigrant families do far better in schools than the native-born, low-income children. Moreover, low-income immigrant groups rise out of poverty far more readily than low-income natives.

The January 31st issue of the distinguished British magazine “The Economist” reports that the children of African refugees from Somalia do far better in school than low-income British children in general. “Somali immigrants,” it reports, “insist that their children turn up for extra lessons at weekends.” These are “well-ordered children” and their parents understand that education “is their ticket out of poverty.”

Contrast that with the Obama administration’s threatening schools with federal action if they do not reduce their disciplining of black males for misbehavior.

Despite whatever political benefit or personal satisfaction that may give Barack Obama and Eric Holder, reducing the sanctions against misbehavior in school virtually guarantees that classroom disorder will make the teaching of other black students far less effective, if not impossible.

For black children whose best ticket out of poverty is education, that is a lifelong tragedy, even if it is a political bonanza to politicians who claim to be their friends and defenders.

The biggest advantage that the children of low-income immigrants have over the children of native-born, low-income families is that low-income immigrants have not been saturated for generations with the rhetoric of victimhood and hopelessness, spread by people like Obama, Holder and their counterparts overseas.

SOURCE

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Obama is Just Doing a Jim Dandy Job!

By Rich Kozlovich

While 54% of voters want no new taxes and more budget cuts, President Obama is expected to propose a near $4 trillion federal budget that includes tax and spending increases. However, 16% actually do favor a federal budget that increases spending and 21% think we should continue spending like drunken sailors at the same level. Only that would “be an insult to drunken sailors – at least they’re spending their own money”.

So now we absolutely know one thing from that poll - we have 37% of the American population that never took arithmetic in school. Is possible that reading, writing and arithmetic isn't taught in American schools any longer?

Rasmussen polls show society isn’t all that thrilled with their health care and don’t expect Obamacare to fix it. Furthermore they think society is better off without government interference in the nation’s health care system. All these things Americans don't like are foundational to everything Obama is doing and yet Rasmussen’s Daily Presidential Tracking Poll gives Obama a 51% performance approval rating. Does that make sense to anyone?

I don’t really know if Rasmussen can be trusted any more than other pollsters, but I put pollsters as a whole in the same category as snake oil salesmen. They ask questions in ways that will generate affirmation versus reality. Having said that - I've followed the Rasmussen polls for some time now and I keep seeing a majority who claim they dislike Obama's policies and yet think he's just doing a Jim Dandy job. Is that rational? Is that a case of cognitive dissonance or was Gruber right – people are stupid?  The second question we need clarity on is  this - if so many people are stupid, did they get that way on their own?

I think it’s a combination of the following. An American educational system that's turned into an expensive failure, cognitive dissonance is rampant, the pollsters are corrupt, people are largely misinformed and uninformed by choice, a corrupt media wants to keep them that way - and Gruber was right. There is only one question I think needs to be answered. Since Gruber was attacked as ‘arrogant’ by various writers – we need to clearly define in our minds if he was being arrogant or was he merely making an observation of reality that no one liked?

Here’s an insight to the correct answer. Newsweek gave a test to 1000 people and found that 29% of Americans didn’t know who the Vice President was, 27% didn’t know the President of the U.S. was in charge of the executive branch and 70% didn’t know the supreme law of the land was the U.S. Constitution. One commenter made the observation that perhaps they thought it was the Prime Directive from the United Federation of Planets. I would be willing to bet if that question was part of the test a fair number would have agreed – and believed it! Is that an indication the American educational system has failed to teach history and civics?

Apparently 33% don’t know the official date for the signing of the Declaration of Independence was July 4, 1776. Hummmm, I wonder if they go around asking why July 4th is a national holiday. Oh wait….I know….I know…..it’s a national holiday created to lend economic support to fireworks manufacturers…Right?

But that’s only a third of the population, perhaps I’m just being picky since 65% didn’t know the Constitution was written by the Founding Fathers at the Constitutional Convention – that’s 65%, - and only 12% could name one of the writers, 43% didn’t know the first ten amendments to the Constitution is called the Bill of Rights and 63% didn’t know there were nine justices on the U.S. Supreme Court. Now, perhaps I'm just being picky again, but is this another indictment of American education?

Now for those who are snickering– how many amendments are there to the U.S. Constitution? Answer without looking it up!

Eighty percent didn’t know who the President of the U.S. was during WWI and 40% didn’t know the U.S. was fighting Germany, Italy and Japan during WWII, with a full 73% being unaware the “cold war” was over the spread of communism. Now does all of this give anyone the impression that someone in American education is clearly dropping the ball?  Is it any wonder why so many believe "going green" is good, in spite of the fact the green movement has been responsbible for more death and suffering than the socialist monsters of the 20th century.

And 51% believe Obama, who increased the national debt from a little over ten trillion dollars to a little over eighteen trillion dollars in six years without having much of an impact of the "Great Recession", is just doing a Jim Dandy job!

Have a really good day!

SOURCE

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For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, 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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Why we should cut Russia some slack

I admire the Russian people.  They suffer a generally dreadful climate and have almost always had atrocious government.  Yet through all that they have not only  survived but have made great contributions to human civilization.  One only has to mention the names of Tchaikovsky and Stravinsky to know how much of our classical music we owe to Russians.  And there are other notable Russian composers too:  Rachmaninoff, Rimsky-Korsakoff, Gliere, Borodin, Mussorgsky Scriabin, Glazunov, Prokofiev etc.  The list goes on.

And in literature we think of Tolstoy, Pushkin, Dostoyevsky, Gogol, Turgenev, Pasternak, Nabokov, Gorky etc.  Perhaps because of limits imposed by their climate, Russians are great readers.

And in science and technology too Russians have much to their credit.  Sikorsky invented the helicopter as we know it today; the first earth satellite was Russian, and Russia's military industries are legendary.  If there were a war tomorrow, the absurd F35 fighter would be rapidly blasted out of the sky by the latest products of the Mikoyan and Sukhoi design bureaux.  Multi-role aircraft rarely perform any role well and the F35 is an extreme example of that. It is a political compromise and is as good as you would expect from that.

And I admire the Russian people for not losing their patriotism.  Most of the Western intelligentsia have lost theirs under Leftist influence but not even Communism could suppress Russian patriotism.  Despite the theoretical internationalism of Communism,  Stalin in fact had to name what we call WWII as "The great patriotic war" in order to get maximum support from the Russian people.  Patriots stand ready to support and defend their own people.  It is only nationalists who want to subdue other people.

So why has the Western world declared a new Cold War on Russia?  Because of typical Leftist meddling in other people's affairs. Ukraine is in the midst of a civil war. America has had a couple of those too so can hardly criticize. Ukraine is a botch of a country and the war is an attempt to remedy that.  Ukrainians dislike Russians greatly -- about as passionately as Scots loathe the English.  And the "United" Kingdom went within a hairsbreadth of breaking up over that just last year.  So the Russians of Ukraine want to get out from under a Ukrainian majority who despise them and, sadly, war is usually needed for that.

And Mr Putin is cautiously supporting Ukraine's Russians.  No Russian leader would do less, given Russian patriotism. The West should encourage  the independence movement in Eastern Ukraine, not condemn it.  Didn't America have a war of independence once?  So why aren't Americans sympathetic to the independence desires of others?

The cold war is hurting the great Russian people and it should cease at once.  While King Obama has been doing all he can to reduce American military preparedness, Mr. Putin has been steadily rebuilding his forces.  In the face of Western hostility he is well positioned to turn the cold war hot.  What if he decided to invade one or all of the Baltic states, with withdrawal being conditional on an end to the cold war and a large sum of monetary assistance as reparations for the damage to Russia's economy?

The West could do nothing militarily.  The USAF would not dare to deploy the F35 in its present bungled state, leaving only the ageing F22 Raptor to face the startling performance of the latest Russian military aircraft.  So Russian air superiority in the Baltic would be established from the start.  American aviators would get as rude a shock as they did in WWII when encountering Japan's Mitsubishi Zero fighter.

And no Western military would have the stomach for a fight with Russia anyway.  All that the Western militaries are good for these days for is to take on moronic Middle-Easterners  -- and they have had little success even at that.  Ever since Vietnam, the American army has lost all its wars.  There have been some battlefield successes but no lasting victories. Iraq, for instance, is now arguably more hostile to the West overall than it was under Saddam.  There would surely be enough warning in that to preclude a hot war with Russia.  Russia could do to American forces what it did to Napoleon and Hitler.

And there are substantial Russian populations in the Baltic States so Mr Putin could well declare that he was on another rescue mission.  Russians would rally to the cause.  It would take a very large sum indeed to buy the withdrawal of Russian troops under  those circumstances.  Yet the West would feel obliged to rescue the heroic people of the Baltic states from a war brought on by Western folly -- so would pay the Danegeld.  Western taxpayers would feel the pain resulting from the folly of their leaders.  The world desperately needs a leader who is a man of peace at the moment.

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Life isn't fair

This 4 year old has the sort of looks that most adult women could only dream of



But here's the challenging bit.  This girl will retain most of those looks into her early adulthood.

How do I know that?  Because her mother did.

Life isn't fair.  Wise people deal with that.  Foolish people whine about it

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Regulations Have Consequences

The article below by Daniel Greenfield was written 5 years ago but it is an exceptionally clear  analysis of its subject

It is part of the basic theory of government that when the regulators try to regulate the regulated, the regulated will in turn try to control the terms of their regulation by attempting to influence the regulators. In other words, that which government controls, will try to control it. Because regulation is a two way street. By regulating people, countries and industries-- you are entering into a relationship with that which you regulate.

To rule over the unrepresented creates an unstable situation. And so the regulated will either attempt to indirectly or directly influence the regulators, overthrow them or escape their control. This too is an inevitable outgrowth of the basic theory of government, one which liberals tend to deliberately ignore when complaining about corporate lobbying. Corporate lobbying and donations to both parties are a direct product of the growth of government regulation, interference in industries, bailouts, grants and other forms of corporate welfare. The more government interacts positively or negatively with business, the more business lobbyists will try to influence how those interactions go.

There is of course one easy way to end most corporate influence on politics. But it is not one that the very people agitating against corporate money in politics will champion. That is because it requires them to give up power. Corporations are motivated to spend money in the hopes of either earning a profit or avoiding a loss. Spending money on lobbying would dry up if there were no profits or losses to be gained from doing so. But the very politicians who wail about corporate money, still expect those donations to keep coming in. And they continue exercising power over entire industries and fields, which naturally summon the companies dealing in them to try to shape how that power is exercised.

What has the expanding network of government regulations wrought? First, it has created a vast industry of lobbyists from companies who either want to avoid regulation or want to exploit regulation in order to benefit themselves or harm their competitors. Companies who want the government to pass along taxpayer money to them or create monopolies for their benefit. Companies who want government contracts for items that the government doesn't need or doesn't need to buy at that price, but will anyway because companies find it cheaper to donate to congressmen than compete fairly for the contract. All this is the result of a system in which government regulations have made it increasingly entangled with the very businesses that government is regulating.

Secondly, it has convinced many companies that it is simply easier to opt out, and move their manufacturing facilities out of the control. This has been a boon for China, but a disaster for America. The manufacturing sectors of America have become depressed, and perfect fodder for Democratic politicians to bring home the dole by taxing America's remaining businesses. But as Thatcher once reputedly said, "The problem with socialism is that eventually you run out of other people's money." In America, if the process goes on, there will be two types of companies, government subsidized companies and companies that have relocated overseas. And America will finally have Europe's economy with everyone on the dole, including the companies themselves.

As government continues to press companies over overseas revenue, they will find it simpler to relocate their headquarters overseas. Some have already done it. This will deprive the system of another source of taxable revenue, which will only drive them to press down harder on the existing sources. Which will further accelerate the entire process. But the people behind it know exactly what they're doing.

The combination of regulation and taxation makes it gradually too expensive for companies to operate legitimately. That means the only possible way for them to continue operating is to either leave the country, or throw in with the system and get a grant to begin doing something absolutely useless. Under socialism, rent seeking behavior by a company is much safer than making a good product and selling it. And so the successful business strategy now relies on integrating business with government, to produce a socialist state, in which business is not simply regulated by government, but is an actual part of government.

Consider a system in which Cap and Trade can allow speculators hiding behind environmentalist credentials to rob existing companies of billions of dollars, and decimate entire industries-- through government regulation. Under such a system it makes no sense to own a factory. Instead it makes sense to visibly drive a Prius while flying a private jet around the country, talk about the shrinking icebergs while eating imported lobster, and lobbying for wealth redistribution from actual productive companies.

That is the socialist strategy. Not to destroy business. But to destroy legitimate and productive business. Business that does not rely on government for its moneymaking strategy. And in the end all that remains is a whitemarket economy that is tightly regulated, low priced, inaccessible and virtually useless for obtaining many basic products and services-- and a blackmarket economy that is unregulated, overpriced and where anything can be found. That doesn't just apply to the kind of health care system that the left would like to impose on America. That is the kind of system they want to impose comprehensively in every area of life, minus of course the blackmarket, which is of course an inevitable outgrowth of overregulation.

Regulation is inimical to economic diversity. The more you regulate a field, the less authentic economic diversity it can have, because economic diversity is a function of economic creativity and mobility. Regulation leads to central planning in the long run, and to a freeze on economic creativity in the short run. The more regulation you have, the less economic diversity remains and the economic ecosystem rewards only business strategies that are symbiotic or parasitic on government. Regulation steadily makes the government the key, and then eventually the only player in the marketplace, as it comes to control everything from manufacturing to the sale of the products all down the line.

The growing influence of corporate money on politics is not a sign of capitalism, but of socialism. Capitalism does not require buying politicians. Socialism does. And the influence of corporate money on politics parallels exactly the influence that politicians have on business. It is a two way street, and those that the regulators regulate will attempt to influence the regulators. The more this happens, the more it's a sign that there are too many regulations, not too few.

Regulators like to believe that they can absolutely control human behavior. But human beings respond in unexpected ways. And one of those ways is that they will strive to escape or seek to control, those who would control them. Democracy is the outgrowth of the practical recognition that the rule of the people is also the best way to maintain a civil and working society. It avoids the power struggle between the government and the governed. By trying to rule without representation, the power struggle resumes. Because regulations have consequences. And the first consequence of regulation is that those you rule over, will try to rule over you.

Via Rich Kozlovich

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AG Nominee Lynch's Claim Illegals Have 'Right' to Work in U.S. 'Just Absolutely Crazy'

Speaking about Attorney General nominee Loretta Lynch’s statement that illegal aliens have the “right to work” in the United States, Sen. David Vitter (R-La.) said he was “astounded” by Lynch’s comments, calling them “crazy” and “just not true.”
CNSNews.com asked Vitter, “Do illegal aliens have the right to work in the United States?”

“No, they do not, and more importantly, the law is very clear on the fact that they do not have the right to work in the United States,” Vitter answered.

“Ms. Lynch basically said illegal aliens have the same right to work in the United States as citizens and green card holders, which is just absolutely crazy and just not true. The law is very clear on that. And for her to say that is just…I was absolutely astounded.”

During her confirmation hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee, Lynch asserted that illegal aliens living in the United States shared the same right to work as U.S. citizens and legal residents.

Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) asked Lynch during the hearing, “Who has more right to a job in this country" – citizens and legal permanent residents or illegal aliens?

“I believe that the right and the obligation to work is one that's shared by everyone in this country regardless of how they came here,” Lynch responded.

CNSNews.com asked Vitter, “Do you believe Ms. Lynch’s comments reflect what the president believes about illegal aliens in the United States?”

“Absolutely, Ms. Lynch’s comments obviously reflect the president’s stance on immigration, and it’s clear she supports his position on it,” he responded.

“It’s a deciding factor for me,” Vitter continued. “I said weeks ago that I would vote against Ms. Lynch being confirmed as attorney general, specifically because of this issue. The fact that she would say something that is so contrary to U.S. law tells me she should not be the next attorney general.”

Vitter also said he was not surprised Lynch’s support for illegal aliens’ “right to work” in the United States did not get much airtime in the mainstream media last week.

“It doesn’t surprise me,” Vitter explained, adding that “the mainstream media has a history of not covering things or reporting things that are critical of the president’s agenda, and clearly it’s no different with this issue.”

SOURCE

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For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, 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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