Great Moments in Socialism

Socialism is an economic failure. International socialism didn’t work in the Soviet Union. National socialism didn’t work in Germany. And democratic socialism, while avoiding the horrors of its communist and Nazi cousins, also has been a flop.

Socialism fails because it attempts to replace market-determined prices with various forms of central planning based on government-dictated prices.

Moreover, socialism channels self-interest in a destructive direction. In a free market, people get income and improve their lot in life by satisfying and fulfilling the needs of other people. In a socialist system, by contrast, people squabble over the re-slicing of a shrinking pie.

There’s a famous Winston Churchill quote that basically says that the ostensible problem with capitalism is that people aren’t equally rich, whereas the supposed attractiveness of socialism is that people get to be equally poor.

Sure, the masses are equally impoverished by socialist systems, but a handful of people escape this fate. You probably won’t be surprised to learn that the government elites have very comfortable lives. And that may be the understatement of the century, as indicated by this report in the U.K.-based Daily Mail. Here are some very relevant passages.

“The daughter of Hugo Chavez, the former president who once declared ‘being rich is bad,’ may be the wealthiest woman in Venezuela, according to evidence reportedly in the hands of Venezuelan media outlets. Maria Gabriela Chavez, 35 … holds assets in American and Andorran banks totaling almost $4.2 billion. … Others close to Chavez managed to build up great personal wealth that was kept outside the petrostate. Alejandro Andrade, who served as Venezuela’s treasury minister from 2007 to 2010 and was reportedly a close associate of Chavez, was discovered to have $11.2 billion in his name …

During his lifetime, Hugo Chavez denounced wealthy individuals, once railing against the rich for being ‘lazy.’ ‘The rich don’t work, they’re lazy,’ he railed in a speech in 2010. ‘Every day they go drinking whiskey – almost every day – and drugs, cocaine, they travel.’”

What a bunch of hypocrites. They denounce successful people who presumably earn money honestly, yet they amass huge fortunes by pilfering their nation.

And what’s been happening in Venezuela is no different, I’m sure, than what happened in the past in Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union, and other socialist regimes.

And I’m sure it’s still happening today in other socialist hell holes such as North Korea and Cuba. The elite enjoy undeserved and unearned wealth while ordinary people live wretched lives of deprivation.

Everyone’s equal, but some are more equal than others.

Let’s close by citing some wise words about the impact of socialism on ordinary people from Kevin Williamson of National Review.

“The United Socialist party’s disastrous economic policies have led to acute shortages of everything: rice, beans, flour, oil, eggs, soap, even toilet paper. Venezuela is full of state-run stores that are there to provide the poor with life’s necessities at subsidized prices, but the shelves are empty. …

While Venezuela has endured food riots for years, the capital recently has been the scene of protests related to medical care. Venezuela has free universal health care — and a constitutional guarantee of access to it. That means exactly nothing in a country without enough doctors, medicine, or facilities. Chemotherapy is available in only three cities, with patients often traveling hours from the hinterlands to receive treatment. But the treatment has stopped.”

Now ask yourself whether you think the party bosses are suffering like other citizens because of a lack of food and health care (or toilet paper!).

And that giant gap between the treatment of the elite vs. the peasantry tells you everything you need to know about socialism, whether it’s the brutal kind practiced in places such as Venezuela or the kinder, gentler (but equally hypocritical) versions found elsewhere.

SOURCE

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Senator  Embraces ‘Nativist’ Slur: What’s Wrong with Favoring Americans?

Alabama’s Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-AL) is pro-American, and he doesn’t care if he’s called a “nativist” by post-national advocates for massive immigration.

“What’s wrong with that? … What’s wrong with putting America[ns] first?” he told a reporter for Roll Call, which published an article headlined as “Sessions Feels Vindicated by [Donald] Trump’s Nativist Surge.”

Sessions’ focus, however, isn’t on just the people born in the United States. He’s looking beyond ancestry and birthplace to include immigrants and their kids who’ve been welcomed legally into the United States. “We [politicians] represent the people who voted for us. That’s who our duty is owed to. To them…we should be doing what’s in their best interest,” he stated.

The mere existence of the would-be “nativist” slur shows the deep contempt that internationalists have for ordinary Americans, said a Hill staffer. “It should go without saying that the country exists to serve the interests of its citizens… so that fact that we have the [sneering] term ‘nativist’ implies that some people think the citizens shouldn’t have that priority,” the staffer said.

So far, populists haven’t developed their own term to trump the would-be slur of ‘nativist’ for the politicians who put Americans’ interests ahead of other people’s interests. Americans First, Americans’ Pride, citizenist, pro-American, and nativist are all being thrown about in conversation.

Sessions — and Trump — are pushing that conversation along. “It is important for people to see a politician to turn a word around on its head,” said the staffer.

Washington’s political class unfortunately caters to the post-national, globalist business groups, Sen. Sessions says. “They spend too much time in fundraisers with rich people and they don’t deeply understand the pain of middle-class, salaried people,” he said.

“The idea of somebody sitting in Wall Street, a million-plus dollars a year in income, saying ‘This is all right to bring in an unlimited number of people,’ to cause trouble and you know, financial difficulties for our schools and our hospitals? They don’t live with that. It’s easy for them to say that. Who are these people? Who’s speaking for the average person?”

Each year, the federal government invites or accepts roughly 2.5 million new immigrants, guest-workers, and illegal migrants to compete for jobs sought by the four million Americans who turn 18. The resulting glut of labor thins Americans’ wages and strains taxpayer’s anti-poverty programs, while also fattening company revenues, profits, Wall Street stock prices, and progressives’ career opportunities.

Populist champion Donald Trump recognizes the issue, Sessions noted. “He met with us and certainly adopted a lot of the suggestions that I’ve been making over the years and all of a sudden he’s surged to the top of the polls.”

Trump is the first or second choice of roughly 40 percent of GOP primary voters. In contrast, the GOP establishment candidates are stuck below 10 percent or five percent.

But Sessions thinks there’s time for the GOP to redeem itself. “People like confession,” he said, offering up a script for politicians to get on the right side of history. He says:

    "We [politicians] need to say, ‘We’ve been too pure in this trade business. … You are right, American people — we have not defended you sufficiently on the world stage in these trade agreements and we’re going to negotiate tougher and we’re going to defend our interests more effectively. And yes, you’re right. You’ve been asking for 30 years to end this [immigration] lawlessness. We don’t have enough jobs for our own people. We’re not going to keep bringing in millions of people, legal and illegal, until you have a better chance to get your children, your family, a job. And I care about you, and I don’t care what Wall Street money says.’"

Trump’s roaring success has been a surprise to the establishment, Sessions’ said. Now, the shocked GOP leaders and lobbyists “ought to be a little more humble in their political prognosticating,” he said. So far, however, “I haven’t had a lot of people [in D.C.] say I was right,” he said.

SOURCE

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Equal opportunity will not give equal results

By Thomas Sowell

A hostile review of my new book — “Wealth, Poverty and Politics” — said, “there is apparently no level of inequality of income or opportunity that Thomas Sowell would consider unacceptable.”

Ordinarily, reviewers who miss the whole point of a book they are reviewing can be ignored. But this particular confusion about what opportunity means is far too widespread, far beyond a particular reviewer of a particular book. That makes it a confusion worth clearing up, because it affects so many other discussions of very serious issues.

“Wealth, Poverty and Politics” does not accept inequality of opportunity. Instead, it reports such things as children raised in low-income families usually not being spoken to nearly as often as children raised in high-income families. The conclusion: “It is painful to contemplate what that means cumulatively over the years, as poor children are handicapped from their earliest childhood.”

Even if all the doors of opportunity are wide open, children raised with great amounts of parental care and attention are far more likely to be able to walk through those doors than children who have received much less attention. Why else do conscientious parents invest so much time and effort in raising their children? This is so obvious that you would have to be an intellectual to able to misconstrue it. Yet many among the intelligentsia equate differences in outcomes with differences in opportunity. A personal example may help clarify the difference.

As a teenager, I tried briefly to play basketball. But I was lucky to hit the backboard, much less the basket. Yet I had just as much opportunity to play basketball as Michael Jordan had. But equal opportunity was not nearly enough to create equal outcomes.

Nevertheless, many studies today conclude that different groups do not have equal opportunity or equal “access” to credit, or admission to selective colleges, or to many other things, because some groups are not successful in achieving their goal as often as other groups are.

The very possibility that not all groups have the same skills or other qualifications is seldom even mentioned, much less examined. But when people with low credit scores are not approved for loans as often as people with high credit scores, is that a lack of opportunity or a failure to meet standards?

When twice as many Asian students as white students pass the tough tests to get into New York’s three highly selective public high schools — Stuyvesant, Bronx Science and Brooklyn Tech — does that mean that white students are denied equal opportunity?

As for inequality of incomes, these depend on so many things — including things that no government has control over — that the obsession with statistical “gaps” or “disparities” that some call “inequities” is a major distraction from the more fundamental, and more achievable, goals of promoting a rising standard of living in general and greater opportunity for all.

There was never any serious reason to expect equal economic, educational or other outcomes, either between nations or within nations. “Wealth, Poverty and Politics” examines numerous demographic, geographic, cultural and other differences that make equal outcomes for all a very remote possibility.

To take just one example, in the United States the average age of Japanese Americans is more than 20 years older than the average age of Puerto Ricans. Even if these two groups were absolutely identical in every other way, Japanese Americans would still have a higher average income, because older people in general have more work experience and higher incomes.

Enabling all Americans to prosper and have greater opportunities is a far more achievable goal than equal outcomes. Internationally, the geographic settings in which different nations evolved have been so different that there has been nothing like a level playing field among nations and peoples.

Comparing the standard of living of Americans at the beginning of the 20th century with that at the end shows incredible progress. Most of this economic progress took place without the kind of heady rhetoric, social polarization or violent upheavals that have too often accompanied heedless pursuits of unachievable goals like the elimination of “gaps,” “disparities” or “inequities.”

Such fashionable fetishes are not helping the poor.

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. I also put up occasional updates on my Personal blog and each day I gather together my most substantial current writings on A WESTERN HEART.

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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Population predictions are crap

What I want to say here is mostly 4th grade stuff but vast numbers of people don't seem to get it.

What I want to talk about is the folly of straight line projections.  People who are used to graphs should know immediately what I am going to say but people with more  literary inclinations probably will not.

Perhaps the most hilarious example of the folly concerned is the repeated prediction that we are going to run out of oil soon.  People have been making that prediction ever since oil was discovered and they have always been wrong.  Up until fracking was implemented, Greenies used to make that prediction.  But fracking has mostly silenced them on that issue.  Now they say we will run out of food!

So why has that prediction always been wrong?  Because it assumes that all the influences on the thing concerned will stay the same. In the case of oil, it assumes there will be no more discoveries.  The reasoning goes like this:  "We have reserves of 10,000 barrels of oil and we are using 1,000 barrels each year so therefore we will run out in 10 years".

It's great arithmetic but totally ignorant of almost everything in nature.  Nature is complex.  Things are always changing.  And if there is any predictability at all in nature the trend will be in the form of an ogive or some other curvilinear trend.  In an ogive, things rise for a while and then flatten out.  In statisticians' terms, they "approach an asymptote".

So it should by now be clear why all the current  predictions of future population will be wrong.  I am in fact here and now going to issue a prophecy!  Bold, I know, but it's a pretty safe one. And neither the Book of Daniel nor the Book of Revelation is involved!  So: This is my prophecy:

"In 50 years time, all the current predictions of various national populations will be shown to have been wrong"

The birthrates in various nations at the moment are very low.  So low that the straight-line wise-heads are predicting that the populations of countries like Japan, Italy and Russia will be only half of what they are now.  Why is that prediction foolish?  Because it assumes that birthrates will remain the same.  Yet anybody who remembers the world before the 1960s should know how absurd that is.

Take Italy, one of the doomed populations according to the straight-line wiseheads. Italy was once the land of large families.  Lots of Italian families had an Ottorino (eighth child).  Now, of course, one child is the norm.  So does not a change as drastic as that tell you something?  Does it not tell you that all the influences on the given phenomenon (in this case the birthrate) will NOT remain the same?  It surely should.

Let us be a little more insightful about population than doing silly arithmetic.  What caused the Italian birthrate collapse?  The same thing that has caused a birthrate collapse in most of the developed world:  The contraceptive pill. Children are expensive but up until about 1960 people had no easy way of stopping them coming.  So they kept coming.

OK.  The pill was an unexpected factor that threw out all the straight line "population explosion" projections made in the early  20th century.  Paul Ehrlich take a bow.  So what other influences could come along and ditch all the present predictions?

There is an obvious one: An evolutionary one. All the non-maternal women are currently being removed from the gene pool by reason of the simple fact that they now rarely have children. Women like them will become rarer and rarer. So all the births of the not too distant future will come from maternally-inclined women. And how many children will those women have? As many as they can afford (and then some in some cases). Some wonderful stories about maternal women here and here and here and here and here.

So the birthrates in advanced nations will recover and the  population will start growing again -- albeit off a lower base.

And there are other influences that may have an effect -- even ones that I have not thought of!  France, for instance, has long had pro-natalist government policies and that has propped up the French birthrate.  Similar policies will probably be adopted by other nations.  Russia and Singapore have already stepped up to the plate with policies of that nature.

And here's a way-out one:  It seems to have become fashionable for celebrity women to have children, multiple children in most cases.  You would not think that women who live by their looks would risk  their figures by having children, but they are in fact doing it -- the Kardashians, for instance.  Children now seem to have become a sign of affluence.  They are the ultimate luxury -- even better than big yachts and Gulfstream jets.  And lots of people DO emulate celebrities.  Many women in the near future may start having children because it is fashionable or simply because they want to show off.  One can imagine the conversations:  "I've got three.  How many have you got?"

So who knows what the future holds?

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Jonathan Haidt and friends are tackling the issue of the Leftist monoculture in academe

Haidt has been working on this for a while.  I thought he would get burnt by it and fall silent but he seems instead  to have made it a major focus of his work.  My take is that he is a moderate Leftist with a secret fascination for conservatism.  He may even be an old-fashioned liberal.  Anyway, he has enlisted quite a few creditable friends to his endeavour and below is the first slice of their most recent publication.

I took him at his word that he wanted more conservative input to the social sciences and offered my services as a referee for papers in the field of social psychology.  He responded favourably so it will be interesting to see if anything comes of that  -- JR

HeterodoxAcademy has its origins in a collaborative effort by five social psychologists and a sociologist to study a problem that has long been noted in psychology: nearly everyone in the field is on the left, politically. We have been working together since 2011 to write a paper explaining how this situation came about, how it reduces the quality of science published in social psychology, and what can be done to improve the science. (Note that none of us self-identifies as conservative.)  In the process we discovered the work of the other scholars in other fields who joined with us to create this site.

Our paper is finally published this week! A preprint of the manuscript was posted last year, but now we have the final typeset version, plus the 33 commentaries. Here is a link to the PDF of the final manuscript, on the website of Behavioral and Brain Sciences. (Thanks to Paul Bloom for his wise and patient editorship.) Here’s a link to a page linking to HTML versions of all the documents. But because our article is long (13 dense pages) and the 33 commentaries are longer (another 31 pages) — and then there’s our response (another 7 pages) — we recognize that few people will ever read the whole package. Plus, its behind a paywall (so you might just want to read the preprint that was posted last year.)

For all these reasons, we offer here a “CliffsNotes” version, giving the basics of our argument using excerpts copied directly from the paper.  [Occasional comments from me–Jonathan Haidt–are interspersed in brackets] Please also see this post by Lee Jussim, explaining why we think this problem is so serious. In a later post we’ll list the commentaries and summarize our response article.

CITATION: Duarte, J. L., Crawford, J. T., Stern, C., Haidt, J., Jussim, L., & Tetlock, P. E. (2015). Political diversity will improve social psychological science. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 38, 1-13.DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S0140525X14000430

ABSTRACT

Psychologists have demonstrated the value of diversity – particularly diversity of viewpoints – for enhancing creativity, discovery, and problem solving. But one key type of viewpoint diversity is lacking in academic psychology in general and social psychology in particular: political diversity. This article reviews the available evidence and finds support for four claims: (1) Academic psychology once had considerable political diversity, but has lost nearly all of it in the last 50 years. (2) This lack of political diversity can undermine the validity of social psychological science via mechanisms such as the embedding of liberal values into research questions and methods, steering researchers away from important but politically unpalatable research topics, and producing conclusions that mischaracterize liberals and conservatives alike. (3) Increased political diversity would improve social psychological science by reducing the impact of bias mechanisms such as confirmation bias, and by empowering dissenting minorities to improve the quality of the majority’s thinking. (4) The underrepresentation of non-liberals in social psychology is most likely due to a combination of self-selection, hostile climate, and discrimination. We close with recommendations for increasing political diversity in social psychology.

1. Introduction

In the last few years, social psychology has faced a series of challenges to the validity of its research, including a few high-profile replication failures, a handful of fraud cases, and several articles on questionable research practices and inflated effect sizes… In this article, we suggest that one largely overlooked cause of failure is a lack of political diversity. We review evidence suggesting that political diversity and dissent would improve the reliability and validity of social psychological science…

We focus on conservatives as an underrepresented group because the data on the prevalence in psychology of different ideological groups is best for the liberal-conservative contrast – and the departure from the proportion of liberals and conservatives in the U.S. population is so dramatic. However, we argue that the field needs more non-liberals however they specifically self-identify (e.g., libertarian, moderate)…

The lack of political diversity is not a threat to the validity of specific studies in many and perhaps most areas of research in social psychology. The lack of diversity causes problems for the scientific process primarily in areas related to the political concerns of the Left – areas such as race, gender, stereotyping, environmentalism, power, and inequality – as well as in areas where conservatives themselves are studied, such as in moral and political psychology.

2. Psychology is less politically diverse than ever

[In this section we review all available information on the political party identification of psychologists, as well as their liberal-conservative self descriptions. The graph below says it all. Whichever of those two measures you use, you find a big change after 1990. Before the 1990s, academic psychology only LEANED left. Liberals and Democrats outnumbered Conservatives and Republican by 4 to 1 or less. But as the “greatest generation” retired in the 1990s and was replaced by baby boomers, the ratio skyrocketed to something more like 12 to 1. In just 20 years. Few psychologists realize just how quickly or completely the field has become a political monoculture.

More HERE  (See the original for links).  There is also a good commentary here by William Reville, an emeritus professor of biochemistry in Ireland.

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The British scene

In Britain, the Tories think all their Christmases have come at once.  Labour Party activists have overwhelmingly chosen as their new leader a Marxist, Jeremy Corbyn, who has the support of barely 10% of his own MPs.  He has in turn appointed a shadow cabinet comprising long-term comrades like new Shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer, John McDonnell, plus a smattering of faint-hearted fellow travellers from the Blair and Brown years.  He has given the agriculture portfolio to a vegan!

The Tories believe Labour under Corbyn is unelectable (some even paid £3 to register as Labour supporters so they could vote for Corbyn in the leadership ballot).

Economically, Corbyn's Labour will be 'anti-austerity'.  Rather than reducing the huge government deficit, Corbyn and McDonnell would force the Bank of England to buy billions of pounds of new debt by creating money ('People's Quantitative Easing') to fund more government spending.  They also want to increase taxes on high earners, scrap student fees, renationalise the railways and energy supply industries, control the banks and clobber private landlords.

Foreign policy would be vehemently anti-American and anti-Israel.  Corbyn wants Britain out of NATO and says he would scrap the Trident nuclear weapons system.  He would refuse to deploy any British forces to fight in the Middle East.  He and McDonnell claim they are long-term peacemakers, but theirs is a one-eyed pacifism: in Ireland they befriended Sinn Fein/IRA (McDonnell even called for IRA bombers to be "honoured") and in the Middle East their chums are Hamas and Hezbollah.

But are the Tories right that Labour is now unelectable?

Much of Corbyn's program will be popular.  There is already strong support among voters for renationalising the railways, taxing 'the rich', bashing the bankers and scrapping student fees.  Next year the government starts cutting tax credits (top-ups for low-paid workers) and this will fuel 'anti-austerity' sentiment.  There is also widespread weariness with foreign wars.

The assumption that parties can only win elections 'from the centre' is also suspect.  Corbyn's friend, Ken Livingstone, won the London Mayorality on a hard-left platform, and in May the anti-austerity SNP took 56 of Scotland's 59 seats at Westminster.  Emotive, populist leftism is surging across Europe; there is no reason to believe the UK is immune.

Worse, the Tories themselves could soon be in trouble.  The referendum on Britain's membership of the EU, due in 2017, is almost bound to rupture party unity (there have already been mutinous rumblings as Cameron has tried to gerrymander the voting rules).  And with China's growth flagging and Europe tanking, another slump in the world economy seems almost inevitable before 2020, when the next general election is due.

If that happens, Britain will suffer badly, for the asset bubble -- fuelled by public and private borrowing -- is bigger than ever.  If and when the economy crashes, the Tories will forfeit their reputation as competent economic managers, and with the centre party Lib Dems now almost wiped out, voters will turn to Corbyn.

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. I also put up occasional updates on my Personal blog and each day I gather together my most substantial current writings on A WESTERN HEART.

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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How your tweets can betray your politics: Liberals use swear words on Twitter while those on the right discuss religion

This will be no news to conservatives who have had interactions with Leftists.  Abuse is about all they are capable of if you point out anything that undermines any of their claims.  Civil disagreement and rational argument mostly seem to be beyond them.

Like an earlier study, the study below found that profanity is much more common on Leftist social media. The earlier study of the matter found profanity to be TWELVE TIMES more common on Leftist blogs. Profanity is of course proverbially the sign of a weak mind trying to express itself forcibly.

It has to be that way.  Reality is so inimical to Leftist views  that a balanced consideration of all the evidence would make conservatives out of them.  So emotional responses to any undermining of their positions are all that is left to them. They are a sad lot -- ruled by their own hostile emotions


For many users of social media, figuring out their political stance is simple as they broadcast their views for all to see. However, it seems it is possible to discern someone's politics purely from the language they use on Twitter.

Researchers have found liberals, like supporters of the Democrats in the US, were more likely to use swear words.

They were also more likely to use emotionally charged language and express positive emotions than Conservative and Republican tweeters, but also use language associated with anxiety.

Conservatives were more likely to discuss religion, with 'god' and 'psalm' being among their most popular words.

Dr Matthew Purver, one of the authors of the study at Queen Mary University of London, said: 'Open social media provides a huge amount of data for use in understanding offline behaviour.

'The way people talk and interact on Twitter can provide a more robust and natural source for analysing behaviour than the traditional experiments and surveys.'

The researchers studied tweets sent between 15 and 30 June 2014 by followers of either the Republican or Democrat party Twitter accounts.

As might be expected, there were clear differences in the discussion of politics and topical issues.  Liberals were more likely to discuss international news, frequently mentioning 'Kenya', where 60 people were killed in violent attacks during the time of the study, and 'Delhi' which was also regularly in the news at the time.

However, while Democrats would be expected to mention Barack Obama, Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi regularly it was actually Republicans who talked about their opposition most.

Democrats conversely were more likely to talk about former Vice President Dick Cheney.

The study, published in the journal Public Library of Science One, showed Democrats were also more likely to swear, with 'f***' and 's***' in their top ten most used words after common English words were removed.

Democrats were also more likely than conservatives to use words like 'I' and 'me', while Republicans used words like 'we' and 'our'.

Previous studies have suggested liberals have a greater sense of their own uniqueness while conservatives are more likely to emphasis group identify and consensus.

SOURCE

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Anatomy of a Failed Liberal State

When I grew up in the north suburbs of Chicago in the 1960s and ‘70s, Illinois was still a financial and industrial powerhouse. The Land of Lincoln had a low-rate flat income tax, the property taxes were reasonable, the state ran budget surpluses, and Illinois was the home of such iconic mega-employers as Caterpillar, Sears Roebuck and the Chicago Mercantile Exchange.

The public schools were pretty good back then and a dedicated corps of teachers put kids first — they didn’t walk out on strike, and they didn’t have the fat pensions they can get now when retiring at age 55.

Mayor Richard Daley (“the Boss”) ruled Chicago for decades, and it was “the city that works.” Yes, you had to pay off the unions to get things done, but this was a cost of doing business. Things did get done.

Fast forward to today, and what a sad state of affairs. Last week the state had to sheepishly announce that it doesn’t even have the money in the bank to pay lottery winners. Now jackpot winners are suing the state to get their rightful money.

Perhaps the state will need a second lottery to raise money to pay off the winners from the first lottery.

Chicago is so broke that its bonds are junk status, and Mayor Rahm Emmanuel had to go hat in hand last week to the state capital, Springfield, for bailout money to pay the bills.

According to Forrest Claypool, the new chief executive for the Chicago school system: “We are really now at a point where further cuts would reach deep into the classroom.” Teachers have been laid off, and extracurricular activities have been cut. Yes, the financial crisis is wreaking havoc, but to ask the state to kick in money is a laughable proposition — like Puerto Rico asking Greece for a loan. Springfield is plum out of money, too.

To protest additional service cuts, The Wall Street Journal reports, parents are going on hunger strikes. But it will take more than divine intervention for the cash inflow to meet expenditures.

Why should residents of other states care about this financial meltdown in Chicago and Illinois? The answer is that Chicago is the canary in the coal mine when it comes to the government pension crisis. Pensions for teachers and state employees are bleeding the state dry. A state budget office spokesman tells me that “nearly one of three state tax dollars now goes to paying pensions for retired municipal and state employees.”

Meanwhile, tax increases on the rich under the previous governor failed to raise much money, but did accelerate an exodus of money and talent out of the state. A new Illinois Policy Institute study, based on latest IRS data, finds a record number of people have been fleeing Cook County, home to Chicago. “The income of the people who left Cook County in 2012 was $2 billion more than the income of the people who moved into Cook County. … The 2011 and 2012 outmigration will cost the county nearly $30 billion in taxable income over the next decade.”

It couldn’t get much worse, right? Wrong. The state has been operating without a new budget for more than two months. Vendors are routinely going two or three months without getting paid because the vault is empty. The Democrats who rule the state Legislature and serve their masters, the Illinois teachers unions, passed a $34 billion budget this summer that is $5 billion in the red, flouting the state’s balanced budget requirement.

Republican Gov. Bruce Rauner, who inherited this calamity, is the state’s last best hope. He has vetoed the state budget and rejected the unions’ demands for more taxes. Property taxes and sales taxes (which can reach 10 percent in Cook County) are already nearly the highest in the nation.

The rich whom the unions want to tax have been leaving for Florida, Arizona and Texas. Rauner argues that Illinois already has one of the five worst business environments in the nation.

Worst of all, the Illinois Supreme Court ruled that pensions can’t be touched because they are contractual obligations. So funding for schools, roads, and public safety get shortchanged so that public employees can keep cashing in on benefits far more generous than what private sector workers/taxpayers receive. This is justice? No wonder residents are going on hunger strikes.

It’s a battle royale that pits the union bosses against the taxpayers. And it’s a fight that Mr. Rauner can’t lose. If he does, the exodus from the state will look like the floods of Middle Eastern refugees trying to get to Western Europe.

The shame of all this is that Chicago is a world-class city. It is the capital of the Midwest and by far the most desirable city in the region to live in. It should be, and could be, America’s Hong Kong if it weren’t for the labor agreements that are shredding basic government services and making the city unaffordable.

What is scary is that the fiscal virus that has incapacitated this once-great city and state may soon spread to a city or town near you.

Amazingly, national Democrats are saying with straight faces that to help American workers and make the country great again we need more powerful unions.

SOURCE

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Walker's Plan to Take Down Federal Unions

As Republican presidential candidates prepare for the debate Wednesday, several have taken on specific issues that are viewed as either important to voters or important to the candidate. To name a few, Donald Trump’s focus, as always, is immigration, while Marco Rubio tackled college reform and Mike Huckabee's fighting against abortion and Planned Parenthood. And now, Scott Walker has made ending federal labor unions a top priority for his campaign. Considering that public employee unions are one of the things that make the federal government as inefficient as it is, Walker's proposal is intriguing.

Walker has had enormous success as governor of Wisconsin on this issue. In fact, the battle garnered national attention and is essentially the reason he's a presidential candidate. After being in office for only six weeks, he proposed and succeeded in ending collective bargaining for public employees in the state. Democrats in the legislature literally fled the state to avoid a losing vote. They returned when it became clear defeat was inevitable, but they also forced Walker into a recall election in 2012. Despite protests from union supporters and millions in special-interest money flooding into the state, he won — by a wider margin than his initial victory. He then won re-election in 2014. Earlier this year, he made Wisconsin a right-to-work state.

With all of the issues facing our nation, however, why is Walker choosing to focus on eliminating federal labor unions? There are a couple of factors to consider here. First, we repeat: He had great success fighting against Big Labor in the state of Wisconsin. It worked at the state level, so why not try it at the federal level?

Second, taking on Big Labor has not been talked about much amongst the GOP candidates thus far and Walker needs an issue that separates him from the pack. As The Wall Street Journal notes, “[T]he plan to severely limit labor-union rights nationwide is Mr. Walker’s attempt to force other candidates to respond to his proposals, rather than the other way around.”

The campaign spotlight is no longer on Walker like it is on Trump, Carly Fiorina or Ben Carson. In fact, Walker has plummeted in the polls. Early in the race, he was the frontrunner in Iowa. Now he has fallen to 10th place with just 3% support in a recent poll. He is no doubt hoping that taking on federal labor unions as a big part of his campaign platform — returning to his roots, as it were — will boost his numbers.

Walker highlighted several reasons that labor unions are detrimental to the federal government — and America.

“In 2012, American taxpayers shelled out some $156 million to do the bidding of big-government union bosses. Federal workers spent more than 3.3 million hours that year doing union work, instead of serving the government.”

Further, he explains that political donations from federal unions overwhelmingly go to leftist candidates and causes, and that's been true "for decades." The reason is simple: Unions have a self-interest in growing government, and Democrats promise to deliver.

Federal unions are also a “force for making our government less efficient and accountable,” Walker said, as evidenced by union bosses who have a grip on the Department of Veterans Affairs. Several employees at the VA should have been demoted or fired for poor performance or misconduct in the wait-time scandal, but because of labor unions they were allowed to stay — and even received back pay.

Walker contends that federal unions “interfere with the ability of government to serve people.” He specifically points to the IRS, which has "more than 200 employees work[ing] full-time for big-government union bosses at taxpayer expense" — all while the agency is targeting conservative political groups.

So what exactly does Walker intend to do to fight against federal labor unions if he is elected president? Reason’s Scott Shackford points out five key areas:

*    Eliminate the National Labor Relations Board — He will transfer power to the National Mediation Board and the courts, but he will need cooperation from Congress to change existing federal law.

*    Eliminate federal unions — He promises to end taxpayers subsidizing millions of hours of union lobbying.

*    Establish nationwide right-to-work — He proposes that all states be made right-to-work unless a state enacts a law saying it is not a right-to-work state.

*    Prohibit forced dues from government workers for political purposes — He'll end forced dues from those who don’t want to pay, and would protect employees from harassment and threats from union organizers. He would also protect whistleblowers who report union wrongdoing.

*    Dump regulations that drive up federal construction costs — He proposes a repeal of the Depression-era Davis-Bacon Act, which forces the federal government to pay artificially inflated "prevailing wages" for construction projects, as well as ending labor agreements that guarantee highway construction projects to union-only labor.

Walker has gone from frontrunner to long shot, and while the issue may not hit home with all voters, it will resonate well with those who despise the corrupting power of labor unions. We will see on Wednesday how much attention Walker devotes to the issue during the debate. And we will know soon whether focusing on this issue makes or breaks his campaign.

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. I also put up occasional updates on my Personal blog and each day I gather together my most substantial current writings on A WESTERN HEART.

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 so many self-hating Jews?

Zionism was never limited to physically living in Israel. Jews have always lived in Israel. Nor is it limited to Jewish self-government. The ghetto was also a form of Jewish self-government in which Jews oppressed other Jews in order to avoid upsetting the powers outside the ghetto.

An Israeli ghetto whose court Jew leaders are always pleading for mercy from the world while beating their own people to appease the masters outside the borders of the ghetto is worthless.

It is worse than worthless. It is a perversion of what Israel was meant to be.

Zionism was the physical resettlement of the land and the spiritual transformation of the people. Neither is fully realizable without the other. A resettlement in which Jews retain the habits of their old condition only creates another ghetto and no meaningful internal transformation from dependence to independence is possible without a physical relocation to an independent nation.

But the Ghetto Jew has proven much more difficult to uproot from the psyche than all the stones and thorns of the land of Israel. The Ghetto Jew has been freed from the ghetto, but it still exists inside his head.

The abused wife eventually loses her identity and comes to see herself from her husband's perspective. In Stockholm Syndrome, the captive takes on the captor's point of view.

The Ghetto Jew has internalized anti-Semitism. He has become his own oppressor. What little identity he has is tied up in fighting anti-Semitism in a futile and misdirected effort. The real anti-Semite isn't living in an ADL newsletter. He has taken up residence inside his own head.

When the Ghetto Jew looks at his own people, he sees a twisted tribe of grotesques. This is reflected in his literature, his plays, his jokes and his television shows. Goebbels couldn't possibly assemble a more disgusting collection of Jewish caricatures than Philip Roth, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Woody Allen and your average Jewish television executive or comedian.

This is not the Jewish view. It is the view of the thing living inside his head. The thing can't be fought by mailing a check to the ADL. It can't be driven out in a Holocaust museum. A far worse thing than the anti-Semitism of the non-Jew is the anti-Semitism of the Jew. It is easier for the anti-Semite to come to love than the Jews than it is for the Ghetto Jew to come to a healthy love of being Jewish.

What the Ghetto Jew thinks of as his identity is really a vacuum filled with historical experiences of oppression. The reaction to these experiences are his identity. He doesn't have a Jewish identity. What he carries with him inside his head is Hitler's view of Jews and Stalin's view of Jews and Obama's view of Jews. Some of these views terrify him. Others he struggles to appease.

The Ghetto Jew views Jews through a funhouse mirror that magnifies each flaw and offense. He is constantly seeing Jews as he imagines others see them and the sight makes him anxious. He battles the anti-Semite living in his head by rushing to apologize for things he never did and mounting overarching defenses against attacks that most others would shrug off.

Pride to him is this cycle of justification and apology. He rushes from one to the other. He hysterically defends against all sorts of accusations and then, when confronted with a Jew who has committed some crime, he wails, "What will they think" and hysterically denounces them and apologizes to the entire world.

This, "What will they think" defines him.

He has no thoughts of his own on the matter. He does not even wonder what other Jews think.

He is other-directed. He cares little what Jews think of Jews. What interests him is what everyone else thinks of Jews. He will enthusiastically fight for the causes of others, rather than for his own, to avoid any accusations of selfishness. He will generously build hospitals and engage in feats of philanthropy. In doing so he thinks that he is helping Jews, because to him the Jews can only be helped by changing how others see them. His Jews don't have a separate existence or identity.

For all his sophistication, erudition and education, he is an empty house with no one living inside.

To the Ghetto Jew, Jewish history is an extended trial, not by G-d, by the collective public opinion, which has cast Jews as the worst of the worst, a charge that can only be met by being the best of the best. Since no man and no nation can ever achieve this, it is a doomed project. In the eyes of the Ghetto Jew, the Jews can only be found innocent through their helplessness, and if given power, through a pure dedicated altruism bordering on sainthood. Israel complicates this will to martyrdom.

Israel said that victimhood is not the Jewish ideal. That there can be redemption without the innocence of helplessness. That we cannot truly help anyone until we help ourselves.

Most of all it claimed that Jews were not mere defendants in a trial lasting for thousands of years, that their mission in this world was not to constantly defend themselves against accusations by dedicating themselves to helping others, but that they were a nation and a people with their own history.

Jewish identity did not have to be a mirror of persecution. It was something unique and authentic.

Zionism was an attempt at a clean sweep. It sought to empty out the clutter of thousands of years of exile and replace it with simple sand and earth, with the clean lines of low buildings and water towers. It wanted a fresh start in an old land where the Jews had last been a free people.

It told the Jew that his models were kings and prophets, that he was the inheritor of David and Samson, of the warriors who fought to the last against Babylon and Rome. And an old people found their strength and fought wars against terrible odds. And this time they won.

They were no longer victims. There was no one living in their heads. They were free.

And it almost succeeded.

But the Ghetto Jew has brought things full circle again. He is endlessly obsessed with how the rest of the world sees Israel. He has reduced the reborn Jewish State to another ghetto, forever in peril and unable to escape from it, dependent on the goodwill of its masters outside the ghetto.

The survival of this large ghetto depends not on fighting those trying to kill Jews, but averting any misbehavior by Jews who might make the other residents of the ghetto look bad. To the Ghetto Jew, the greatest threat to Israel is not in Iran or in Gaza, it's that somewhere in Israel one lone Jew will do something or say something that will make make all the Jews look bad and lose the world's sympathy.

"What will they think," the leaders of the ghetto wail.

And so the Ghetto Police are dispatched, not to fight the terrorists (this is a task they are increasingly forbidden from tackling lest they too lose the sympathy of the world), but to hunt down any Jews who might make Israel look bad.

None of this has anything to do with Israel or Zionism. It is the old twisted ritual of the Ghetto Jew who sees his own people through the eyes of those who hate them.

The Ghetto Jew is the Jew who has not found a Jewish identity. He has let his enemies define him. His efforts go to fight a losing battle because he has allowed the enemy inside his head. He has failed to build a positive Jewish identity. In its place he has a mass of congealed suffering, neurotic anxieties and fears for the future living inside his head.

Over time the Ghetto Jew gives birth to an even more twisted creature, the Jewish Anti-Semite.

The Ghetto Jew has turned his insecurities and lack of independent identity into an external perspective. He sees from the imagined perspective of the "Other" while still suffering as a Jew. He is both the anti-Semite who sneers and the Jew who is sneered at. He suffers a thousand deaths with these neurotic preoccupations over the great undying question of, "What will they think?"

The Jewish Anti-Semite, sometimes wrongly called a self-hating Jew, has completely externalized the Jew. He has become the anti-Semite and driven out the Jew. Now he attacks the external Jew with the relentless compulsiveness of a maniac. Actual Anti-Semites shake their heads at his deranged antics.

The Ghetto Jew wrestles with his projection of an anti-Semite and that projection's projection of the Jew. The Jewish Anti-Semite cuts to the chase by becoming the anti-Semite and attacking the Jew.

The Jewish Anti-Semite adopts the worst possible assumptions of the anti-Semite. The Ghetto Jew is caught between the Jew and the anti-Semite. The Jewish Anti-Semitic adopts the latter's perspective wholly. In the redemptive fires of rage, he attempts to destroy his Jewishness by attributing the worst possible behaviors and ideas to Jews. Sometimes he lives a perfectly happy malicious life of BDS and angry letters to the editor. In the more extreme cases, he destroys himself in some spectacular fashion.

This demented state is one path of liberation for the Ghetto Jew. The Ghetto Jew can either liberate himself of the anti-Semite or the Jew.

To liberate himself of the anti-Semite, all the Jew needs to do is become a Jew again. Instead of renting space in his head to Hitler and Obama and a thousand petty critics and tyrants, he needs to find a better class of tenant. He needs to stop seeing himself from the perspective of others, he must stop being other-directed and become self-directed. He must become a Jew.

Judaism and Zionism, in their proper applications, are better tenants than the neurotic anti-Semite whispering in the ear of the Ghetto Jew at night. They concern him with the task of building the spirit and the land, rather than quivering at every taunt and threat.

The Ghetto Jew can either become a Jew or a Jewish anti-Semite. Israel can either be a Jewish State or it can be a ghetto. It cannot and will not be both for long.

The Jew is proud of what he is. He is not defined by those who hate him or by pleasing others. He does not waste his time apologizing and justifying his existence to them and the voices in his head. He does not take on collective responsibility for the crimes or virtues of his people.

The Ghetto Jew instinctively sets up a ghetto. His defining organizations are communal institutions whose top leadership plead on behalf of the community to the rulers of the land. These are not democratic institutions. They dispose of some for the supposed good of the many. This was the way of the Jews of Poland who died at Cossack hands rather than risk the wrath of both Poles and Ukrainians by defending themselves, of the Kahal which rounded up children for the Czars or the Judenraats which collaborated with the Nazis in the hope that some might be spared.

This was not what Israel was meant to be. The guard towers of this land were never meant to face inward. When they do, it is not a free land, but another ghetto.

A free Israel requires free Jews. It is easier to conquer a city, as the Sages said, than to control the self. It is easier to transform land, than to transform the mind. It is easier to free land than to free Jews.

The process of liberation was not complete in 1948 or 1967. It may never be complete. But without it, there is no hope. As the land is renewed, so the people must be renewed. Renewal need not be a struggle. It is not all a matter of lifting rocks. It is more a matter of placing fresh earth over old earth. Of placing a living Jewish identity over the empty ghetto with the Ghetto Jew just outside its gates.

The Ghetto Jew does not have to be an abused woman forever waiting for her husband to come through the door. He does not have to be a saint or a victim. He does not have to live life from the perspective of the 'other'. He does not have to constantly worry, "What will they think?"

He must become again what he once was, before the lost wars, before slavery, before suffering went so deep into his bones that it became his identity until he could not envision being a Jew without being a victim.

The Ghetto Jew lacks his own identity. His identity is a scarecrow, a thing of scattered bits and pieces, fears and neurosis, a twisted version of a human being as seen from a twisted perspective. His redemption will come when he inhabits his own body as much as he inhabits the land, when he ceases to care what they will think and starts to think for himself, when he stops worrying how others see the Jews and fully comes into his own inheritance as a Jew

SOURCE

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The plane designed by a bureaucracy: Will the F35 ever work properly?

Mr Putin must be smiling.  As ever, aerobatic ability and speed will win the day in air war.  Russia's T-50 has that in spades. Mr Tupolev had a long record of designing very capable aircraft and his successors have not let him down.  Compared to the T50, the F35 has neither aerobatic ability nor speed -- when it works at all.  Mr Putin seemed very friendly with President Xi at China's big victory celebration recently.  What if Mr Putin gets China's huge industrial base to make T50s?  America's ability to project power beyond its own borders would be destroyed.  And the B3 bomber program is not looking good either

The controversial Joint Strike Fighter stealth jet is being dogged by new technical problems every week, the most senior British engineer working on the aircraft has revealed.

The Joint Strike Fighter (JSF) has already cost £5 billion and taken 15 years to develop.

It has suffered a series of setbacks including a freak fire which grounded the fleet and the admission earlier this year that it was beaten in a combat exercise by a jet designed 40 years ago.

Now, Lieutenant Commander Beth Kitchen, the senior UK engineering officer on the test team, has written in a Royal Navy journal: ‘Squadron technicians experience new technical faults for the first time weekly.

‘Most are as predicted by the [aircraft’s] designers; however technical faults still occur during flight where components did not perform as expected.’

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. I also put up occasional updates on my Personal blog and each day I gather together my most substantial current writings on A WESTERN HEART.

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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Europe follows Germany's lead to impose border controls against ilegals

Hungary has blocked the main crossing point from Serbia used by migrants as Austria, Slovakia and the Netherlands imposed border controls today.  Police closed a gap in the razor-wire barrier along the Hungary-Serbia border as other officers formed a human shield to block off railway tracks.

Meanwhile Hungary's transport authority said it has closed the country's airspace in a 12-mile area along the Serbian border up to a height of 4,500ft.  The moves come after it emerged that Hungary was bracing itself for a massive surge of up to 30,000 migrants in just one day.

A record 5,809 migrants entered Hungary in a new surge on Sunday, smashing the previous day's record of 4,330, Hungarian police have revealed.

The sharp increase came ahead of laws coming into force tomorrow under which people entering the EU country illegally can be jailed.

Germany, Slovakia and Austria have started to impose border controls in a bid to control the flow of migrants through Europe

Index.hu reported that Hungary's neighbour Serbia would try to 'push through' as many as 30,000 migrants on Monday before the new Hungarian laws come in to force. Hungarian official sources are quoted as saying Serbia would speed up the provision of buses for the migrants, who enter Serbia from Macedonia after leaving Greece.

Meanwhile, European Union members are on collision course today over proposals to distribute asylum-seekers across the continent - a plan backed by safe-haven Germany but resisted by several states in the east.

Once in Hungary, most migrants seek to travel onto western Europe, particularly to Germany and Sweden, via Austria.

But with tens of thousands crossing its frontiers, German authorities on Sunday decided to reinstate border controls, and all trains between Austria and Germany were temporarily suspended, leaving thousands effectively stranded in Austria.

This morning, Germany's Vice Chancellor Sigmar Gabriel said the country may take in one million refugees this year, up from the record 800,000 arrivals predicted so far.

SOURCE

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America for Americans: No Apology Necessary

Regarding immigration, the selling out of the American public now has a first-person account attached to it. In a scathing column, a pseudonym-bearing “Displaced Disney Cast Member” describes the despicable efforts of a once-iconic company to replace American workers with foreigners willing to work for lower pay. The author of the column is hardly an anomaly. Americans are not only losing their jobs to foreign replacements, they are underwriting both legal and illegal immigrants accessing America’s safety net.

“I used to have a dream career at one of America’s most iconic and admired companies,” the former employee writes. “Twenty years of hard work, technical skill building, the fostering of relationships and a bachelor’s degree in Information Technology guided me to a coveted position as an Information Technology Engineer for Walt Disney World in Orlando, Florida.”

Those 20 years of hard work essentially meant nothing, however, and the day that employee learned his fate was only 10 days after “Bob Iger, CEO of Disney, had just announced that the company’s earnings were up well over 20 percent for the quarter and this was just one among a long series of record breaking financial results for the company.” When the employee arrived at work the message he got was both devastating and infuriating. A “grim faced Disney Executive” told everyone in the room they would be losing their jobs within the next 90 days, with a final termination date of Jan. 30, 2015.

Why? Because their jobs had been given to a “foreign workforce.” Then came the ultimate insult. The executive told them, “In the meantime you will be training your replacements until your jobs are 100 percent transferred over to them and if you don’t cooperate you will not receive any severance pay.”

Thus the soon-to-be ex-employee was forced to endure the “disgraceful and demoralizing” experience of training his replacement. Adding insult to injury, this worker and his fellow former employees were “informed by several large IT recruiting firms that Disney has a policy in place that states all displaced Disney IT Cast Members will not even be considered as contractor workers for 12 months. Thus we have been essentially shut out and black listed by the largest employer in this very small Orlando job market.”

Disney and countless other companies have brought in foreign workers courtesy of the H-1B visa program. In March, the Senate Judiciary Committee held hearings on the abuses of that program, including expert testimony from Howard University’s Ron Hira and Rutgers' Hal Salzman, who told lawmakers the current system “has become primarily a process for supplying lower-cost labor to the IT industry.”

What did the Senate do about the problem? Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-UT), along with co-sponsors Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) and Sen. Jeff Flake (R-AZ), proposed a reincarnation of the 2013 “I-Squared” bill called the “Immigration Innovation Act of 2015.” Like its predecessor, the new act would increase the number of H-1B visas from the current level of 65,000 a year, plus 20,000 for holders of U.S. graduate degrees, to a whopping 115,000, “with the possibility of the cap rising as high as 195,000 depending on economic conditions,” Hatch said in April. Like many of his GOP and Democrat colleagues, Hatch has sold his soul to tech industry giants such as Qualcomm and Microsoft, which have laid off thousands of American workers even as they demand an increase in the number of H-1B visas. IBM, Amazon, Intel, Google and Oracle have also told Congress such visas are necessary because there is a shortage of skilled American workers.

This writer did a previous report on the subject. Those allegations are abject lies.

Regardless, the onslaught continues. A report from the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) released in June 2014 revealed that over the last 15 years all net job gains in the nation have gone to legal and illegal immigrants. And lest anyone think the trend is changing or leveling out in some respect, think again: A jobs chart posted by the website Zero Hedge reveals a damming reality contained in latest jobs report covering the month of August. It shows that a sky-high 698,000 native-born Americans lost their jobs last month — even as 204,000 foreign-born Americans got one.

As bad as that is, at least those immigrants are working. In another damning report released this month, CIS reveals that 2012 data show a whopping “51 percent of households headed by an immigrant (legal or illegal) reported that they used at least one welfare program during the year, compared to 30 percent of native households.”

Welfare usage by immigrants is not uniform. The report states, “Households headed by immigrants from Central America and Mexico (73 percent), the Caribbean (51 percent), and Africa (48 percent) have the highest overall welfare use. Those from East Asia (32 percent), Europe (26 percent), and South Asia (17 percent) have the lowest.”

If the words “Central America” have a familiar ring, maybe it’s because the Obama administration is actively recruiting “refugees” from El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras — officially known as Central American Minors (CAM). A program initiated by the Department of Homeland Security and the State Department is providing these illegal aliens “with a safe, legal, and orderly alternative to the dangerous journey that some children are undertaking to the United States,” according to a DHS memo obtained by Judicial Watch. Once here, those children will be united with family members who may also be illegal aliens, benefiting from Obama’s amnesty or deferred action programs. In other words, the administration is actively adding to the number of illegals already in the nation. Illegals who already have and will continue to compete with Americans for jobs — when they’re not accessing taxpayer-funded entitlement programs.

Perhaps the only thing more maddening than the facts presented here is the contemptible notion pushed by the Obama administration, Democrats, establishment GOPers, pro-amnesty activists and a thoroughly corrupt media that any resistance to this agenda by native-born Americans is tantamount to bigotry, nativism and xenophobia. Don’t believe it for a second. There is nothing remotely wrong with the desire to preserve the nation’s borders, culture, language and traditions, better known as American exceptionalism. In fact, if anyone owes this nation an abject apology, it is those who would seek to undermine that exceptionalism for cheap labor and easy votes, even as they drape themselves in an aura of multicultural self-aggrandizement that is nothing less than an effort to marginalize our national identity. This is one American who will never apologize for desiring a nation that caters primarily — and overwhelmingly — to Americans. Neither should anyone else.

SOURCE

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U.S. Has Less Economic Freedom than Chile, Jordan, or Taiwan

Today the Fraser Institute in Vancouver, Canada, released the 2015 Economic Freedom of the World report (pdf) and it’s bad news for the United States, where economic freedom is falling. The U.S. ranks only 16th in economic freedom trailing Chile, Jordan, and Taiwan.

The EFW report measures the level of economic freedom in 157 countries by gathering country-specific data on 42 distinct variables in five broad categories: (1) size of government, i.e., taxes and spending; (2) legal structure and security of property rights; (3) access to sound money; (4) freedom to trade internationally; and (5) regulation of credit, labor, and business.

Researchers James Gwartney, Robert Lawson, and Joshua Hall crunched the numbers (here is the master data file) and found that Hong Kong and Singapore once again occupy the top two positions. The other nations in the top 10 are New Zealand, Switzerland, United Arab Emirates, Mauritius, Jordan, Ireland, Canada, and the United Kingdom. Venezuela is in last place.

A 16th-place ranking might not sound bad, but the U.S. once ranked 2nd and has trended downward consistently since 2000. The EFW report concludes: “Nowhere has the reversal of the rising [global] trend in economic freedom been more evident than in the United States.”

Today Chile, Georgia, Jordan, Qatar, and Taiwan have more economic freedom than the United States. The U.S. is now only slightly ahead of Armenia and Romania.

SOURCE

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Donald Trump strikes a chord — with evangelicals

Like most things about Donald Trump, his religion does not fit neatly into political tradition.

Trump says he can’t remember ever asking God for forgiveness for anything. If he has a favorite Bible verse, he refuses to name it. He has downplayed the importance of Holy Communion, flippantly saying, “I drink the little wine, which is about the only wine I drink, and I eat the little cracker.”

He does, at least sometimes, attend church; the Presbyterian church in Manhattan where Trump married his first wife is where he struck up a romance with the woman who would become his second wife.

And yet polls show the thrice-married longtime casino magnate who once posed on the cover of Playboy magazine with a lightly clothed woman is winning the backing of conservative evangelical voters in the GOP presidential primary.

National polls show him trouncing candidates who have much more actively courted Christian voters — such as Mike Huckabee, an ordained Southern Baptist preacher, Rick Santorum, who frequently evokes the Bible, and Ted Cruz, a preacher’s son who announced his campaign on the campus of Liberty University.

Why is Trump so attractive to conservative Christians? “Here’s a guy who is out there unfettered by the political correctness,” said Tony Perkins, who has not endorsed anyone and is president of the Family Research Council, a Washington conservative Christian organization. “He’s not afraid to say what he thinks. That’s attractive.”

In a national poll of Republicans, 32 percent of white evangelicals said they would vote for Trump. Carson was second, with 28 percent, according to the CNN poll released Thursday, with no other candidate even in double digits.

A Washington Post-ABC News poll released Monday showed that Trump’s numbers are better among white evangelicals than almost any other subgroup of voters. In the survey — which also showed Trump surging among voters overall — 54 percent of evangelicals support him on immigration, 62 percent think he is qualified to be president, and 50 percent think he is honest and trustworthy.

The Post-ABC poll found Trump to be the favorite of 33 percent of registered Republicans and Republican-leaning independents overall.

Starting in 2011, when Trump was weighing whether to run for president in 2012, he began talking more openly about his faith, mostly in a series of interviews with the Christian Broadcasting Network. He also cultivated a relationship with Franklin Graham, the son of evangelist Billy Graham, and nearly two years ago attended Billy Graham’s 95th birthday party in Asheville, N.C.

As an adult, Trump began attending Marble Collegiate Church in Manhattan, and it became the place for major family events. It’s where he was married to Ivana in 1977, where his sister was married, and where funerals for Trump’s father and mother were held.

“Believe me, if I run and I win,” Trump told the Christian Broadcasting Network in 2015, “I will be the greatest representative of the Christians that they’ve had in a long time.”

More HERE

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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. I also put up occasional updates on my Personal blog and each day I gather together my most substantial current writings on A WESTERN HEART.

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

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The sad state of the American worker

Obamanomics has yet to deliver jobs, while many incomes have declined



By Stephen Moore

My 22-year-old son lives at home, still depends on his old man for spending money, and my profoundest fear is that like Will Ferrell in the “Wedding Crashers,” he will never leave the nest. I’m not alone. There are some 20 million college grads living at home. A 2014 study reported by CNN Money found that half of kids who are two years out of college rely on their parents to pay some or all of their bills. It’s the new normal for 20-somethings.

Gee, parents sure are getting a great financial return on the $150,000 they’ve shelled out for four years of college.

Sure, some of this dependency is an entitlement mentality of millennials whose parents have given them almost everything they’ve ever wanted. But it also reflects how dismal the economy still is today. Today we have college grads — along with working moms and 60-somethings — flipping burgers at Wendy’s and stocking the aisles at Wal-Mart. Left-wing groups and union leaders are now demanding “a living wage” for jobs that were never intended to be for heads of households. Who’s against higher wages for American workers? But wasn’t this what Obamanomics was supposed to deliver?

Seven years ago, Barack Obama promised a progressive worker paradise — a recovery from recession that would leave no one behind. “Hope and change” would deliver high employment and rising wages, and no one bought into this idyllic vision more than college kids.

President Obama and his supporters proclaim that he has saved America from the second great depression — a message we will start to hear again over and over in the months ahead. But even his own voters don’t believe him anymore, now that we’re just ending the seventh summer of no real recovery.

Start with the jobless rate. Yes, unemployment is down to 5.1 percent officially. Raise your hand if you believe that number is even close to accurate. The real unemployment rate counting labor force quitters and those forced into part-time jobs is, according to Mr. Obama’s own Labor Department: 10.5 percent. That number is actually down from more than 15 percent recently, but these still feel like recession rates. Nearly 90 million Americans over the age of 16 are out of the full-time workforce, and many millions of them are plopped in front of the TV watching “Seinfeld” reruns and living off food stamps or their parents because they have given up looking for a good job.

If we had experienced a normal recovery from recession, we’d have roughly 5 million to 6 million more of these Americans working today. With a Reagan-style recovery, more than 8 million Americans would be working and collecting a paycheck.

The more than 100 million Americans who are working are feeling a financial crunch, too. Most of them haven’t seen a pay raise that keeps pace with inflation for a decade.

The Census Bureau has released the latest data on family income, and it has been analyzed by the statisticians at Sentier Research. Through this past June, the median income family has lost $1,700 in real income since Team Obama took the reins (see chart).

The sad irony is that the steepest declines in income have been suffered by blacks, Hispanics, single women and, of course, those stay-at-home millennials. Oddly enough, these are the Obama voters. They also tend to be concentrated on the lower rungs of the economic ladder. Imagine the scathing indignation and the cries of racism and sexism if this were the record of an incumbent Republican president rather than a liberal Democrat. Call it Mr. Obama’s “war on women.”

Here’s yet another bitter irony of this president’s labor policies. Mr. Obama obsesses over income inequality — almost as fanatically as he does climate change. But the standard measure of income inequality — the so-called Gini Coefficient — shows a wider gap between rich and poor than during the George W. Bush years. Using his own metrics, Obamanomics is a dismal failure.

The progressives think that the best way to drive up wages is to smack down businesses as greedy, self-serving and corrupt. But you need an employer before you can have an employee. Sorry, to be anti-business and pro-labor is like being anti-chicken and pro-egg. When Hillary Rodham Clinton said earlier this year that “businesses don’t create jobs,” she didn’t misspeak, she was expressing a profound ignorance of how the private sector hiring machine works. Donald Trump said it well: As a businessman, “if I have more money, I can hire more workers.”

The employment recession didn’t start with Mr. Obama but with George W. Bush. Voters are distrustful of both parties and justifiably so. Even the simplest reforms — like building pipelines, cutting the corporate tax rate, letting banks lend money to businesses and homebuyers, or requiring work for able-bodied welfare recipients — don’t get done. But this past week, the president was up in the Arctic lecturing us about climate change. The unemployed probably feel that if he relishes cold weather so much, he should stay there

SOURCE
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2015/sep/6/stephen-moore-the-sad-state-of-the-american-worker/

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The Iran deal bait-and-switch

Jeff Jacoby

BARACK OBAMA has never made a secret of his determination to reach a deal with Iran regarding its nuclear program. Very early in his run for the White House, he announced that he was prepared to meet, without preconditions, with the rulers of Iran and other hostile regimes. "I think it is a disgrace that we have not spoken to them," he said during a 2007 debate with Hillary Clinton. As president, Obama's outreach to Tehran began on Day 1. "We will extend a hand," he promised in his inaugural address, "if you are willing to unclench your fist." By 2011, he had dispatched then-Senator John Kerry to open a secret dialogue with Iran.

It has long been clear that Obama envisions a grand nuclear bargain with Iran as a cornerstone of his presidential legacy. "It's my name on this," he says. "I have a personal interest in locking this down."

But the terms of that bargain haven't been so clear. Far from being "locked down," the goals and guarantees of the Iran nuclear deal have been a moving target. In one critical area after another, the nuclear accord so enticingly advertised doesn't resemble the nuclear accord actually on the table. When unscrupulous merchants do that, it's called bait-and-switch. The seller may clinch the sale, but customers resent being conned.

Similarly, while Obama's nuclear deal will almost certainly survive a congressional vote of disapproval, public skepticism runs deep. A Pew Research poll released Tuesday found just 21 percent support for the agreement. Gallup reports only one in three Americans approve Obama's handling of US policy toward Iran. That's not typical — the public usually backs presidents on arms-control agreements. But voters don't like being conned any more than shoppers do.

How has the administration engaged in bait-and-switch on the Iran deal? Here are five ways.

Inspections. The White House claimed any agreement with Iran would supply international weapons inspectors with the ultimate all-access pass — round-the-clock authority to enter any suspected nuclear site. In a CNN interview in April, Obama's deputy national security adviser, Ben Rhodes, confirmed that "under this deal, you will have anywhere/anytime, 24/7 access as it relates to the nuclear facilities that Iran has." When a leading Iranian general scoffed at the suggestion that foreigners would be permitted to investigate possible nuclear activity at Iranian military sites, the Obama administration pushed back. "We expect to have anywhere/anytime access," Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz reiterated bluntly.

But in the final accord, "anywhere/anytime" is nowhere to be found. The administration claimed it had never existed. (Switch!) "We never sought in this negotiation the capacity for so-called anytime/anywhere," Rhodes told CNN's Erin Burnett. Secretary of State Kerry went even further. "There's no such thing in arms control as anytime/anywhere," he insisted. "This is a term that, honestly, I never heard."

Sanctions snap back. The administration acknowledged that stiff economic sanctions had brought the Iranians to the negotiating table. It repeatedly assured skeptics that sanctions would automatically "snap back" into effect if Iran violated any terms of the nuclear accord. "The UN sanctions that initially brought Iran to the table can and will snap right back into place," Kerry told reporters in Vienna. That echoed what his boss had been saying all along. "We can crank that dial back up," Obama told an interviewer in 2013. "We don't have to trust them."

Yet now they sell the deal as a last chance to salvage some Iranian compliance from a sanctions regime that is crumbling anyway. (Switch!) Our allies "certainly are not going to agree to enforce existing sanctions for another 5, 10, 15 years," Obama said in his American University speech last month. And in any case, "sanctions alone are not going to force Iran to completely dismantle all vestiges of its nuclear infrastructure." Snap back? That was merely bait.

Right to enrich. A deal with Iran absolutely would not invest the Islamic Republic with a right to enrich uranium, the administration firmly asserted. "No — there is no right to enrich," Kerry declared. "In the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), it's very, very clear that there is no right to enrich." This was a key point, since Iran insisted not only that it did have a right to enrich uranium, but that the West must acknowledge that right, or there would be no deal.

Before long, however, Kerry had changed his tune. "The NPT is silent on the issue," he conceded in testimony before a House committee. The final deal authorizes Iran to operate 6,000 centrifuges and to continue enriching uranium. "We understood that any final deal was going to involve some domestic enrichment capability," a senior administration official told The Wall Street Journal in April. "We always anticipated that." (Switch!)

Military option. Over and over and over, Obama proclaimed that he meant to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon and that all options — including military attack — were "on the table." But that assurance has gone down the memory hole. (Switch!) As he lobbied for the nuclear deal that was signed in Vienna, his message was reversed. A military option is not on the table and will not eliminate an Iranian nuclear threat, Obama told Israeli TV. "A military solution will not fix it. Even if the United States participates, it would temporarily slow down an Iranian nuclear program but it will not eliminate it."

Deal or no deal. But perhaps the most egregious bait-and-switch of all involves the standard by which any accord with a deadly regime like Tehran's should be assessed. From President Obama on down, administration officials used to affirm constantly that "no deal is better than a bad deal."

They were right. And the deal they produced is indeed a bad deal. It does not dismantle Iran's nuclear program, nor constrain its murderous ambitions, nor lessen its influence. It will not enhance the security of America and its allies, nor make the world more peaceful.

Yet the president and his allies have abandoned their old standard. Their case for this bad agreement comes down to: It could be worse. It may be flawed and far from what was promised, but any deal with Iran is better than no deal. Most Americans, and most members of Congress, don't agree. And the bait-and-switch that was used to clinch this sale is going to leave a bad taste in a lot of mouths for a long time to come.

SOURCE

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Report: Murder Arrests up 55%, Rape Arrests up 370%, in ‘Sanctuary City’ San Francisco

Arrests for murder in San Francisco jumped 55% and arrests for rape jumped 370% between 2011 and 2015, during the time the city expanded its sanctuary city policies, according to new figures obtained by Judicial Watch.

San Francisco has been a sanctuary city for nearly 30 years, and since 2009 has incrementally added sanctuary policies to the point that Juan Francisco Lopez-Sanchez–although five times previously deported and a seven-time convicted felon–was still in San Francisco to shoot and kill Kathryn Steinle on July 1 on the city’s Pier 14.

But numbers uncovered by Judicial Watch show that Steinle’s death–as tragic and shocking as it was–remains but one piece of a larger picture of skyrocketing arrests for murder and rape in the city.

According to CBS San Francisco, the city officially became a sanctuary city in 1989. Incremental expansions of the original sanctuary policies followed, such as a 2009 Board of Supervisors bill exempting juvenile illegals from deportation, even if they were “arrested for felonies.”

Then came 2013, the year in which San Francisco’s Sheriff and City Council changed policies via an ordinance requiring San Francisco law enforcement to ignore most U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detainers. That not only laid the groundwork for illegals like Lopez-Sanchez to remain in the city, but also correlated with a surge in arrests for murder and rape.

Upon releasing these arrest percentages, Judicial Watch told Breitbart News that the massive jump in arrests for murder and rape does not include all arrests. Rather, the percentages only include “charges for arrests and bookings.”

Judicial Watch’s Tom Fitton commented, “Citizens understand that when San Francisco and other sanctuary cities release illegal alien criminals onto the streets, crime is going to increase. These new crime statistics suggest that there are more murders and an epidemic of rape linked to San Francisco’s releasing illegal alien criminals in violation of law.”

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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