New scare about hormone replacement therapy and breast cancer

HRT is very beneficial to many women as they cease menstruation.  It relieves the many physical problems they experience at that time. So, as with anything popular,  the elites had to find something wrong with it.  And there was a big scare around the beginning of this century saying that it caused breast cancer. Subsequent research, however, largely cleared the HRT pill of that danger and official guidance these days is that there is little to worry about.

A new study just out (summary and journal abstract below), however, has renewed the scare. And the new study is methodologically strong.  It takes careful account of things not well considered in previous studies.  There are a couple of reasons not to be too bothered by the findings, however.  The first is that, as with most medical research, only the relative risk is reported, not the absolute risk.  I had to scratch fairly deeply to find the absolute risk behind the current results.  It was about 40 in 1,000.  Out of 1,000 old ladies, 40 will get cancer from taking the HRT pill. That is not negligible but it is not a great risk either.  Most of us do more risky things with some regularity -- like driving a car.

The second thing to note is that not all HRT pills are the same.  What is most lacking in old ladies is the female hormone estrogen.  Those old ladies who get around in masculine haircuts have lost most of their female hormones so are in a sense post-female.  So replacing the estrogen is all that should be required to restore the old  balance in the woman's life.  And that is what most HRT pills do.

For women whom the estrogen doesn't help much, however, there is another sort of pill: estrogen plus progestogen. And that is inherently risky.  Progestogens produce progesterone, which is a major pregnancy hormone.  Worldly-wise men know why their women  get irritable once a month (PMT).  It is when her ovaries are producing progesterone to prepare the womb for conception.  So progesterone is vital for conception but it is also the bad-mood hormone. I once saw a rather spectacular example of progesterone-induced rage myself. The woman concerned was deeply embarrassed afterwards. That increased progesterone levels  might have other problems is therefore easily understood.

And it appears that it does.  The research below found absolutely no problem with the estrogen-only pill but did find problems with the combined pill. The progestogen-containing pill does slightly elevate the risk of breast cancer.  Giving old ladies a pregnancy hormone is pretty wild to start with so it is no surprise that it might have some ill effects.

But there is a BIG problem with the causal arrow here.  As is deplorably common in the medical literature, the authors assume that correlation is causation, which is a gross statistical fallacy.

What they have not done is ask WHY the women concerned were put on the combined pill in the first place?  Were they less healthy in various ways from the beginning?  Would they have got more cancer anyway, with or without the pill?   So being put on the combined pill may be an  indicator that the old ladies were from the beginning more likely to get cancer rather than the pill causing the cancer.

So this research is not conclusive at all.  Only a before-and-after experimental design could answer questions about cause.  Even the combined pill could be completely harmless.

Nonetheless, I agree with the most common medical advice, that women should by and large stick to the estrogen-only pill.  We KNOW that it is harmless


HRT raises the risk more than threefold for women who had taken it for 15 years, the Institute of Cancer research found Credit: Press Association

Hormone replacement therapy can triple the risk of breast cancer, the biggest ever study has found, following more than a decade of controversy.

Last year the National Institute of Health and Care Excellence (Nice) changed guidance to encourage more doctors to prescribe HRT claiming too many menopausal women had been left suffering in silence.

HRT is used to treat uncomfortable symptoms of the menopause - such as hot flushes, migraines, disrupted sleep, mood changes and depression - by topping up the decreased levels of hormones produced by the body.

But doctors were reluctant to prescribe it after a study in 2002 suggested it could raise the risk of cancer, a claim later widely disputed.

Now new findings by the Institute of Cancer Research and Breast Cancer Now suggest the original risk had actually been underestimated.

A study of 100,000 women over 40 years found those who took the combined oestrogen and progestogen pill for around five years were 2.7 times more likely to develop cancer compared to women who took nothing, or only the oestrogen pill.

The risk rose to 3.3 times for women who took the drugs for 15 years or more.

Around 14 in 1,000 women in their 50s are expected to develop breast cancer, but that rises to 34 in 1000 for women taking the combined pill, the study suggests.

"Our research shows that some previous studies are likely to have underestimated the risk of breast cancer with combined oestrogen-progestogen HRT," said study leader Professor Anthony Swerdlow, of The Institute of Cancer Research.

"We found that current use of combined HRT increases the risk of breast cancer by up to threefold, depending on how long HRT has been used.

"Our findings provide further information to allow women to make informed decisions about the potential risks and benefits of HRT use."

Women taking the oestrogen-only pill have no greater risk

HRT was first developed in the 1940s and was first made available to women in Britain in 1965.

However in 2002 the British Millennium Women Study published findings claiming that HRT raised the risk of cancer. Many doctors immediately withdrew prescriptions while the Medical Healthcare and Regulatory Agency (MHRA) issued new guidance recommending all women be given the "lowest effective dose should be used for the shortest time."

Since then the number of women taking HRT has more than halved with around one in 10 eligible patients now using the drugs, approximately 150,000 women.

More recently a review by Imperial College and a 10-year study by New York University found no evidence of a link, adding further to the confusion and last year the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (Nice) changed its guidance to encourage doctors to offer HRT claiming one million women were suffering in silence.

At the time Nice said that the cancer risk was 27 in 1,000 so the new research, which followed 100,000 women for 40 years, increases that risk by 54 per cent.

The health watchdog said that the new study should not change how doctors prescribed HRT.

We found that current use of combined HRT increases the risk of breast cancer by up to three fold, depending on how long HRT has been usedProfessor Anthony Swerdlow, Institute of Cancer Research

Professor Mark Baker, director of the Centre for Guidelines at NICE, said: "As with Nice guidance this study recognises there is no increased risk of breast cancer with oestrogen-only HRT but the combined HRT can be associated with an increased risk of breast cancer.

"The guideline makes clear that menopausal women should be informed that the impact of HRT on the risk of breast cancer varies with the type of HRT used.

"The message from our guidance to women is clear - talk about the menopause with your clinician if you need advice on your symptoms - it's very important to discuss the options to find what might help you."

The new study also found that the risk declined when women stopped taking HRT and there was no danger at all for women only taking oestrogen, which accounts for half of all prescriptions.

Baroness Delyth Morgan, chief executive at Breast Cancer Now, said: "Whether to use HRT is an entirely personal choice, which is why it's so important that women fully understand the risks and benefits and discuss them with their GP. We hope these findings will help anyone considering the treatment to make an even more informed decision.

"On balance, some women will feel HRT to be a necessity. But in order to minimise the risk of breast cancer during treatment, it is recommended that the lowest effective dose is used for the shortest possible time.

"The good news is that the increased risk of breast cancer begins to fall once you stop using HRT."

SOURCE

Menopausal hormone therapy and breast cancer: what is the true size of the increased risk?

Michael E Jones et al.

Abstract

Background:  Menopausal hormone therapy (MHT) increases breast cancer risk; however, most cohort studies omit MHT use after enrolment and many infer menopausal age.

Methods: We used information from serial questionnaires from the UK Generations Study cohort to estimate hazard ratios (HRs) for breast cancer among post-menopausal women with known menopausal age, and examined biases induced when not updating data on MHT use and including women with inferred menopausal age.

Results:  Among women recruited in 2003-2009, at 6 years of follow-up, 58?148 had reached menopause and 96% had completed a follow-up questionnaire. Among 39,183 women with known menopausal age, 775 developed breast cancer, and the HR in relation to current oestrogen plus progestogen MHT use (based on 52 current oestrogen plus progestogen MHT users in breast cancer cases) relative to those with no previous MHT use was 2.74 (95% confidence interval (CI): 2.05-3.65) for a median duration of 5.4 years of current use, reaching 3.27 (95% CI: 1.53-6.99) at 15+ years of use. The excess HR was underestimated by 53% if oestrogen plus progestogen MHT use was not updated after recruitment, 13% if women with uncertain menopausal age were included, and 59% if both applied. The HR for oestrogen-only MHT was not increased (HR=1.00; 95% CI: 0.66-1.54).

Conclusions:  Lack of updating MHT status through follow-up and inclusion of women with inferred menopausal age is likely to result in substantial underestimation of the excess relative risks for oestrogen plus progestogen MHT use in studies with long follow-up, limited updating of exposures, and changing or short durations of use.

British Journal of Cancer (2016) 115, 607-615. doi:10.1038/bjc.2016.231

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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),  a Coral reef compendium and an IQ compendium. (Both 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.

Email me  here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or  here (Pictorial) or  here  (Personal)

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Hillary Clinton Denounces the ‘Alt-Right,’ and the Alt-Right Is Pleased

Below is the NYT take on the Alt-Right.  Since I am often seen as Alt-Right, I think I am in a position to give a more accurate perspective.

For a start, in its best misleading style, the NYT lumps together all sorts of quite different interest groups.  If there is a discernible common theme in Alt-Right writings, it is probably a belief that racial differences are real and that some of those differences matter.  And I think you just have to walk around with your eyes open to see that.  But where you go from there is quite various.  Stormfront, for instance, is clearly neo-Nazi and I never go there.  Vdare, on the other hand, I do read occasionally and I have donated to them.  But I see Vdare as just old-fashioned conservatives.  They would be Republicans if Republicans could bring themselves to mention racial differences.  But Republicans have been thoroughly cowed by the Left so that is not going to happen.

I myself think that most racial differences are trivial or temporary but some are not.  And I don't think America will have good public policy until the real differences between blacks and whites are acknowledged and integrated into public policy.  For instance, there should be special schools using high-discipline policies for those blacks who are unable to adapt to traditional white classrooms.  White education would thus no longer be held back and the blacks concerned might actually learn something for a change.

And let there be no doubt that the real racists are the Left.  They never stop agitating about black "inequality" and they have in place a whole raft of laws and regulations that are as racially discriminatory as Jim Crow.  And they are consistent in that Jim Crow laws were the work of Democrats too.  Race, race, race dominates their thinking.  It has got to the ridiculous stage in some schools where blacks cannot be punished for misbehavior unless whites and Asians are being punished at a similar rate.  And since black kids are much more unruly, that leads to a very serious breakdown of order and means that all the students learn very little in the course of their education.

So, as usual, Leftists have turned reality on its head.  They are themselves the most zealous racists but, with their unending torrents of abuse, they have managed to pin the racist label on other people.  Leftists DO see differences between blacks and whites but no-one else is allowed to.  Crazy.

So, one thing that would unite all those described as Alt-Right is the view that the "forgiveness" of disruptive and violent black behavior should end.  There should be one law for all, impartially enforced.

The only other commonality that I see in the alleged "Alt-Right" is a respect for traditional European values.  Britain, Western Europe and their derivative societies have created modern civilization and the modern world generally.  Western European culture (including U.S. culture) has been enormously creative and its influence extends worldwide.  A trivial but instructive example of that is that young Japanese females these days sometimes blond their hair!  The European example is a powerful influence in just about everything these days



But where you go from acknowledging that is another matter.  Most Alt-Righters would simply be pleased to have their membership of a dominant civilization generally acknowledged. They don't seek "white supremacy" at all.  Why?  Because they already have it!  Their culture and laws already rule the roost.  The Left devote demonic energies trying to tear down the dominant culture and its systems but they can only  nibble at the edges.  Alt-Righters would mostly be happy if the Left simply became constructive rather than destructive -- but that is an impossible dream, of course.

The Alt-Right does however explore a variety of possibilies for protecting European-descended people from hostile minorities.  The phenomenon of "white flight" suggests that most Americans have some wishes in that direction.

And even Abraham Lincoln wanted to send all the blacks back to Africa.  So was the Great Emancipator a racist?  In the addled thinking of the modern Left, he was. What the Left will not see is something well-accepted in law -- that motives matter.  Wanting to protect yourself and those like you from harm is radically different from wanting to do harm to others.  And such different motives will produce quite different behaviour sets.

But because the thinking categorizes people by race, it is racist, according to the Left.  You can categorize people in all  sorts of ways but the one way in which you must not categorize people is by race, according to the Left.

In all political movements there is a considerable diversity of viewpoints.  Among the far-Left they can be  quite vicious to one-another over what to us would seem like very tiny differences of doctrine.  And insofar as there is such a thing as the Alt-Right there is even less unity.  Mrs Clinton was attacking a paper tiger.  She has form on that. In 1998 she was attacking a "vast Right-wing conspiracy" to account for opposition to the Clinton with the overactive penis.

There is also a libertarian take here on the Alt-Right.  Again it is over-inclusive.  Very little of what it says would apply to all Alt-Right thinkers.

For instance, it says: "What is the alt-right theory of history? The movement inherits a long and dreary tradition of thought from Friedrich Hegel to Thomas Carlyle to Oswald Spengler to Madison Grant to Othmar Spann to Giovanni Gentile to Trump’s speeches"

That is an amazing lumping together of disparates, mostly Communists and Fascists. Hegel, for instance, was the inspiration of Karl Marx, not the Alt-right. And the article goes downhill from there.

So let people do a bit of Googling and read for themselves what the various Alt-Right sites say.  You won't agree with them all but you may agree with some -- JR


As Hillary Clinton assailed Donald J. Trump on Thursday for fanning the flames of racism embraced by the “alt-right,” the community of activists that tends to lurk anonymously in the internet’s dark corners could hardly contain its glee.

Mrs. Clinton’s speech was intended to link Mr. Trump to a fringe ideology of conspiracies and hate, but for the leaders of the alt-right, the attention from the Democratic presidential nominee was a moment in the political spotlight that offered a new level of credibility. It also provided a valuable opportunity for fund-raising and recruiting.

Jared Taylor, editor of the white nationalist publication American Renaissance, live-tweeted Mrs. Clinton’s remarks, questioning her praise of establishment Republicans and eagerly anticipating her discussion of his community.  “Come on, Hillary,” he wrote. “Talk about Alt Right.”

In an ode to Mr. Trump’s characterization of Jeb Bush, Mr. Taylor described her speech as “low energy.”

Other white nationalists mocked Mrs. Clinton, saying she sounded like a neoconservative and a “grandma,” while welcoming the publicity.

Mr. Trump has publicly kept his distance from the alt-right, but his critics have accused him of offering subtle cues to invite its support. His appointment of Stephen K. Bannon, the head of Breitbart News, to be chief executive of his campaign was cheered by alt-right members who are avid readers of the Breitbart website.

The alt-right claims to support the preservation of white culture in the United States, and many of its members want to see an overhaul of the entire political system. However, its views are widely seen as white supremacist and anti-Semitic.

Many who align themselves with alt-right philosophies say that they do not subscribe to all of Mr. Trump’s policies, but that electing him would be a step in the right direction because of his “America First” worldview and his hard line on immigration. This week, some expressed disappointment that Mr. Trump appeared to be softening his tone on deporting people who are in the country illegally.

Richard B. Spencer, the president of the white-nationalist National Policy Institute, who is credited with coming up with the name “alt-right,” pushed back against claims that the group promotes violence and said in a statement that there was a double standard at play.

“While Hillary & Co. condemn the alt-right — nonviolent activists seeking social change, largely through a vibrant internet presence — she allows noted supporters of terror to attend her rallies and has never once disavowed the actions of domestic terrorists associated with Black Lives Matter,” Mr. Spencer said.

Mrs. Clinton’s public criticism of the alt-right could turn out to be a boon for the movement, and its members did their best to capitalize on the moment.

Some, in an effort to show a lighthearted side, circulated footage of Mr. Taylor playing the saxophone at the group’s most recent conference. The white nationalist website VDare published a “What Is the Alt-Right?” video and blasted out a fund-raising pitch warning, “Hillary wants to ignite a witch hunt against the alt-right because she knows we are finally starting to make an impact on the public’s thinking about immigration.” And the Stormfront forum set up an online thread for potential new members.

After Mrs. Clinton’s speech, one group of white nationalists convened a 90-minute videoconference that was broadcast on YouTube. The consensus was that Mrs. Clinton was “toothless” and “lackluster,” and they expressed disappointment that she had not mentioned alt-right leaders by name. She made reference only to David Duke, the former Klansman whose support Mr. Trump was slow to disavow.

Although the alt-right tried to put its best foot forward, there was plenty of venom directed at Mrs. Clinton, and the conspiracy theories ran wild. A popular attack was the continuing effort to raise questions about her health.

By addressing the alt-right in such a prominent setting, Mrs. Clinton ran the risk of helping its cause. But Richard Cohen, the president of the Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks hate groups, dismissed the idea that Mrs. Clinton was doing the public a disservice by drawing attention to the alt-right.

“I think every public official ought to denounce racism, and that is what Secretary Clinton did,” Mr. Cohen said, noting that the alt-right ideology opposes the notion that all people are equal.

Referring to the term “alt-right,” which was trending on Twitter, he added, “It is a fancy, almost antiseptic term for white supremacy in the digital world.”

SOURCE

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VA Whistleblower Gets the Boot

When it comes to the Department of Veterans Affairs, miracles do happen. Just ask Anthony Salazar. The Los Angeles-based VA employee was fired last year for ostensibly violating the agency’s code of conduct. Great news, right? Well, not exactly. Even when miracles like this do happen at the VA, they’re shrouded in malicious ulterior motives. According to the Office of Special Counsel, a few years ago “Mr. Salazar described how 30 of the 88 agency vehicles were unaccounted for, explained how ten fleet cards were suspected of fraudulent purchases, and pressed the urgent need for the VA to get the situation under control.”

That’s pretty alarming stuff, and an ensuing investigation found Robert Benkeser, who oversees the VA Greater Los Angeles Healthcare System, culpable. According to The Daily Caller, “The department convened an ‘administrative investigation board’ (AIB) that resulted in ‘a letter of counseling’ to Benkeser for mismanaging the motor pool.” But instead of rectifying the situation and moving on, a vengeful Benkeser terminated Salazar … for exposing his own misdeeds. As the Caller goes on to note, “The ease with which Salazar was fired … stands in contrast to the many employees who unambiguously committed egregious misconduct and are still on the job.” No joke.

Meanwhile, The New York Times reports, “A 76-year-old veteran committed suicide on Sunday in the parking lot of the Northport Veterans Affairs Medical Center on Long Island, where he had been a patient, according to the Suffolk County Police Department.” An anonymous source said the man, Peter A. Kaisen, “went to the ER and was denied service. And then he went to his car and shot himself.” If the VA put as much effort into helping folks like Mr. Kaisen as it does looking to retaliate against whistleblowers — a problem that’s systemic — perhaps fewer vets would be killing themselves.

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),  a Coral reef compendium and an IQ compendium. (Both 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.

Email me  here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or  here (Pictorial) or  here  (Personal)

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I don't normally put anything up on Saturday but I am doing so now because I missed a few days during the week due to another encounter with a surgical scalpel.  It all went well in the end.  Details here

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Diversity: History's Pathway to Chaos

Victor Davis Hanson

Emphasizing diversity has been the pitfall, not the strength, of nations throughout history.

The Roman Empire worked as long as Iberians, Greeks, Jews, Gauls and myriad other African, Asian and European communities spoke Latin, cherished habeas corpus and saw being Roman as preferable to identifying with their own particular tribe. By the fifth century, diversity had won out but would soon prove a fatal liability.

Rome disintegrated when it became unable to assimilate new influxes of northern European tribes. Newcomers had no intention of giving up their Gothic, Hunnish or Vandal identities.

The propaganda of history’s multicultural empires — the Ottoman, the Russian, the Austro-Hungarian, the British and the Soviet — was never the strength of their diversity. To avoid chaos, their governments bragged about the religious, ideological or royal advantages of unity, not diversity.

Nor did more modern quagmires like Iraq, Lebanon, Syria, Rwanda or Yugoslavia boast that they were “diverse.” Instead, their strongman leaders naturally claimed that they shared an all-encompassing commonality.

When such coerced harmony failed, these nations suffered the even worse consequences of diversity, as tribes and sects turned murderously upon each other.

For some reason, contemporary America believes that it can reject its uniquely successful melting pot to embrace a historically dangerous and discredited salad-bowl separatism.

Is there any evidence from the past that institutionalizing sects and ethnic grievances would ensure a nation’s security, prosperity and freedom?

America’s melting pot is history’s sole exception of E pluribus unum inclusivity: a successful multiracial society bound by a common culture, language and values. But this is a historic aberration with a future that is now in doubt.

Some students attending California’s Claremont College openly demand roommates of the same race. Racially segregated “safe spaces” are fixtures on college campuses.

We speak casually of bloc voting on the basis of skin color — as if a lockstep Asian, Latino, black or white vote is a good thing.

We are reverting to the nihilism of the old Confederacy. The South’s “one-drop rule” has often been copied to assure employers or universities that one qualifies as a minority.

Some public figures have sought to play up or invent diversity advantages. Sometimes, as in the cases of Elizabeth Warren, Rachel Dolezal and Ward Churchill, the result is farce.

Given our racial fixations, we may soon have to undergo computer scans of our skin colors to rank competing claims of grievance.

How does one mete out the relative reparations for various atrocities of the past, such as slavery, the Holocaust, the American Indian wars, the Asian or Catholic exclusion laws, indentured servitude, or the mid-18th-century belief that the Irish were not quite human?

Sanctuary cities, in the manner of 1850s Richmond or Charleston invoking nullification, now openly declare themselves immune from federal law. Does that defiance ensure every city the right to ignore whatever federal laws it finds inconvenient, from the filing of 1040s to voting laws?

The diversity industry hinges on U.S. citizens still envisioning a shrinking white population as the “majority.” Yet “white” is now not always easily definable, given intermarriage and constructed identities.

In California, those who check “white” on Orwellian racial boxes are now a minority. Will white Californians soon nightmarishly declare themselves aggrieved minorities and thus demand affirmative action, encourage Viking-like names such as Ragnar or Odin, insert umlauts and diereses into their names to hype their European bona fides, seek segregated European-American dorms and set up “Caucasian Studies” programs at universities?

Women now graduate from college at a higher rate than men. Will there be a male effort to ensure affirmative action for college admissions and graduation rates?

If the white vote reaches 70 percent for a particular candidate, is that really such a good thing, as it was considered to be when President Obama was praised for capturing 95 percent of the black vote?

It is time to step back from the apartheid brink.

Even onetime diversity advocate Oprah Winfrey has had second thoughts about the lack of commonality in America. She recently vowed to quit using the word “diversity” and now prefers “inclusion.”

A Latino-American undergraduate who is a student of Shakespeare is not “culturally appropriating” anyone’s white-European legacy, but instead seeking transcendence of ideas and a common humanity.

Asian-Americans are not “overrepresented” at premier campuses. Their high-profile presence should be praised as a model, not punished as aberrant by number-crunching bureaucrats.

African-Americans who excel in physics and engineering are not “acting white” but finding the proper pathways for their natural talents.

Being one-half Southeast Asian or three-quarters white is not the touchstone to one’s essence and is irrelevant to one’s character and conduct.

No one is impinging on anyone’s culture when blacks dye their hair blond, or when blondes prefer to wear cornrow braids.

Campuses desperately need unity czars, not diversity czars.

Otherwise, we will end up as 50 separate and rival nations — just like other failed states in history whose diverse tribes and races destroyed themselves in a Hobbesian dog-eat-dog war with one another.

SOURCE

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Trump racist?

Things got uncomfortable on “CNN Tonight with Don Lemon," when New York Times columnist Charles Blow flipped out on Donald Trump’s National Diversity Coalition chairman Bruce Lavell.

Blow and Lavell, who are both African-American, were guests on Lemon’s show. Their exchange almost immediately turned hostile once Blow began speaking in rebuttal to Lavell.

“Donald Trump is a bigot,” said Blow. “Anyone who accepts that, supports it… and that makes you part of the bigotry itself.”
Laval attempted to take the debate back to Donald Trump’s actual statements.

“Name one [negative] statement that you’ve heard Donald Trump say about African-Americans,” countered Lavell.
Blow did not have an answer, and attempted several times to avoid answering.

“If he doesn’t want to answer your question, he doesn’t have to,” interjected Lemon, as the sparring escalated.
Lavell responded with: “Because he can’t, that’s why.”

“I don’t know you and I don’t want to talk to you,” said Blow finally, towards the end of the segment, on his final attempt to avoid the question. “And I don’t want to answer your question.”

As Blow continued to call Donald Trump a “bigot"—and tried to link Lavell to bigotry because of his support for the Republican nominee—Lavell attempted to take the debate back to the issues.

After listing several of the biggest issues facing our nation—issues that have been cornerstones of Trump’s campaign thus far—Lavell skewered Blow on playing the race card: “Our nation is crumbling and the only thing we can keep bringing us is this stuff about race all the time…”

Blow angrily responded, "That’s called a deflection, because you don’t want to understand you’re supporting that bigotry.”
"I would like to debate substantive policies, not fantasy,” replied Lavell, as the segment ended.

The mainstream media has long been accused of being in the tank for Hillary Clinton, and biased against conservatives—but, in 2016, it’s clear they’ve dropped even the pretense of impartiality.


SOURCE

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Here's More Bad News for Obamacare

Obamacare was supposed to save the American economy.

Back in 2009, when President Obama decided to push for healthcare reform in the midst of a financial crisis, he justified the decision by arguing that healthcare reform was economic reform, stating that the Affordable Care Act would “build a new foundation for lasting and sustained growth.”

One of the ways that healthcare reform was supposed to boost the economy was ending the phenomenon of “job lock,” whereby workers are scared of leaving a job for a potentially better opportunity out of fear of losing their health insurance. But according to a new study by the National Bureau of Economic Research, Obamacare isn’t actually solving that problem.

Economists Pauline Leung of Cornell University and Alexandre Mas of Princeton studied states that recently expanded Medicaid under the law and found no evidence that there was a reduction in employment lock in response to these expansions. Admittedly, researchers only studied the effects of the Obamacare-related Medicaid expansion, which is offered to Americans with incomes below 138% of the poverty line. It’s possible that these folks are working in jobs that don’t offer health care in the first place, and so obtaining medicaid benefits has no affect on their decisions to leave their current job for a new one.

At the same time, these results should lead us to question the lasting economic benefits of the law, given the fact that new Medicaid enrollees have exceeded expectations while fewer middle-class Americans are enrolling through subsidized exchanges than was previously expected. And though this trend doesn’t represent an existential threat to the law itself (see this recent post for some of those), it does underscore the need for continued health care reform if the U.S. economy is to remain competitive with other wealthy nations.

And this is actually one area where the right and the left agree. President Obama himself took to citing research from the Heritage Foundation—which praised Senator John McCain’s 2008 health reform plan for its ability to tackle the job lock problem by offering tax credits to workers so that they could afford to buy insurance on the private market—as evidence for the need to address the problem.

So why are health care wonks so worried about job lock? If workers are scared to leave their job to look for new prospects or even start their own businesses out of fear of losing insurance, they are not going to be in the position to produce as much as they can. And a lack of productivity growth, which ending job lock would help to reverse, is one of the fundamental problems affecting the U.S. economy today. The latest reading shows productivity falling in the second quarter year-over-year, while the Conference Board predicts that this measure will fall for the full year for the first time since 1982.

Finding a way to solve this crisis of slow productivity will be a priority for lawmakers of both parties, given that productivity growth is widely assumed to be necessary if average workers are to see their wages rise. The problem is that Obamacare—with its mix of public subsidies and regulations with the private provision of health insurance—is the only conceivable model that could get both Democratic and Republican support. Of course, the Republican Party, after supporting forms of the law in places like Massachusetts, abandoned this model after President Obama took office in 2009 and began pushing it nationally.

Now, the Republican Party will accept nothing short of the law’s repeal, mixed with new free-market reforms. Meanwhile, the Democratic Party is increasingly hostile to the idea of reform that doesn’t include greater government involvement, as evidenced by Bernie Sanders support for a single-payer, “Medicare for all” plan and Obama’s renewed push for a public option. It’s conceivable that either of these approaches could work to help make the U.S. labor market more flexible, but there is little chance that either plan will actually be tested given the growing and intractable polarization of American politics.

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),  a Coral reef compendium and an IQ compendium. (Both 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.

Email me  here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or  here (Pictorial) or  here  (Personal)

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Direct measurement of IQ advancing

Tuning inside the brain is the difference between normal and super smart people, researchers have found.  They say general cognitive ability may be the result of a 'well-tuned brain network' - and may even be able to develop to tune up the mind of those less intelligent.

They found the brains of those with higher intelligence were extremely similar at rest and while carrying out  tasks.

'Specifically, we found that brain network configuration at rest was already closer to a wide variety of task configurations in intelligent individuals,' the Rutgers University team wrote in The Journal of Neuroscience.

'This suggests that the ability to modify network connectivity efficiently when task demands change is a hallmark of high intelligence.

The study suggests greater similarity between brain connectivity at rest and on task may be associated with better mental performance.

It shows that general cognitive ability may be the result of well-tuned brain network updates, said study author Michael Cole of Rutgers University.

'The results also suggest that if we can figure out how to better tune these networks, we can possibly influence cognitive ability generally.'

Different types of cognitive tasks spur activity in various regions of the brain, as indicated by studies using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI).

The regions activated depend on the specific task, and scientists believe regions active at the same time work together as a network.

Even when our brains are at rest, collections of regions remain active in 'resting-state networks.'

To test the theory, Schultz and Cole analyzed brain imaging data obtained by researchers at Washington University in St. Louis and the University of Minnesota as part of the Human Connectome Project.

One hundred healthy adults had their brains scanned with fMRI while they rested quietly and while they performed various cognitive tests.

To study brain network reconfiguration, the Rutgers scientists compared participants' resting-state networks to the networks active during language, reasoning, and memory tasks and computed how similar each task-related network was to the resting-state network.

When they compared these similarity ratings to the participants' performance on each task, they found individuals who performed better had more similar resting and task networks.

The researchers also compared the networks active during each of the three cognitive tasks and created a composite generalized task network pattern.

They found that the more similar this generalized task network pattern was to the resting-state network pattern, the better the participant performed on each task, suggesting individuals who performed well had resting-state networks optimized to switch to any of a variety of new tasks.

In other words, high performers appeared to use their brains more efficiently, only needing to make small changes when switching tasks.

However, Cole and study author Douglas Schultz previously found the resting and on-task networks were highly similar.

This led the researchers to propose that the brain has an intrinsic network that reconfigures itself when we switch from resting to performing a task, and they hypothesized the reconfiguration of this intrinsic network relates to how well we perform a given task.

The results of the study suggest that 'people's performance on various cognitive tasks is better the fewer changes they have to their brain connectivity,' said John Dylan Haynes, a neuroscientist at the Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience in Berlin who studies cognition and was not involved in the study.

'The efficiency with which a brain engages in a task might be a predictor of intelligence.'

The researchers are planning additional studies to examine how training may improve cognitive abilities by influencing the brain's intrinsic network and its reconfiguration during different tasks. [Fat chance!]

SOURCE

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National Security Expert on Why He's Voting for Trump

Former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations John Bolton dropped by The Hugh Hewitt Show, where the diplomat said that between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, it’s an easy choice: Donald Trump all the way. He also discussed the lack of evidence to suggest that Clinton will be more hawkish on foreign policy than Obama, adding that she’s “comfortable” with the worldview that has given us a disaster in Syria, Libya, and Iran.

Concerning the possible ethics problems the former secretary of state faces from the Clinton Foundation, Bolton said that it just showed how Hillary just ignored every pledge/promise she made upon her confirmation hearing, where she said that no special treatment would be afforded to donors should she be confirmed. Bolton said that exiting and re-entering public life is sort of like a monastery-type mentality. You need to resign or cut connections to every private sector connection you have for the time being. The only acceptable connection to maintain from your former life is your church. Yet, the former ambassador did note that there was a grey area in this regard because regulations didn’t include spouses or children that are also part of the same non-profit, which has been called a slush fund by the non-partisan Sunlight Foundation watchdog.

Oh, and of course, Bolton feels like a Clinton presidency would constitute nothing but a third term for Obamaism, albeit a tad more to the left on some issues, like trade. Nevertheless, should Trump win in November, Bolton said he would consider it very seriously since it's a service to the country:
HH: So first question, are you going to vote for Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton?

JB: (laughing) That, to me, is an easy choice. I am going to vote for Donald Trump. And I think that’s something that a lot of our friends around the country still need to come to grips with. You know, the Republican field for the nomination had 17 candidates, which means there are supporters out there of 16 disappointed candidates. But compared to the prospect of four years of Hillary and Bill back in the White House, or even worse, eight years, really, I hope everybody just thinks about that a little bit more.

SOURCE

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American journalism is collapsing before our eyes

Hillary's impossible DNC task: reinvent herself — now
Donald Trump may or may not fix his campaign, and Hillary Clinton may or may not become the first female president. But something else happening before our eyes is almost as important: the complete collapse of American journalism as we know it.

The frenzy to bury Trump is not limited to the Clinton campaign and the Obama White House. They are working hand-in-hand with what was considered the cream of the nation’s news organizations.

The shameful display of naked partisanship by the elite media is unlike anything seen in modern America.

The largest broadcast networks — CBS, NBC and ABC — and major newspapers like The New York Times and Washington Post have jettisoned all pretense of fair play. Their fierce determination to keep Trump out of the Oval Office has no precedent.

Indeed, no foreign enemy, no terror group, no native criminal gang, suffers the daily beating that Trump does. The mad mullahs of Iran, who call America the Great Satan and vow to wipe Israel off the map, are treated gently by comparison.

By torching its remaining credibility in service of Clinton, the mainstream media’s reputations will likely never recover, nor will the standards. No future producer, editor, reporter or anchor can be expected to meet a test of fairness when that standard has been trashed in such willful and blatant fashion.

Liberal bias in journalism is often baked into the cake. The traditional ethos of comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable leads to demands that government solve every problem. Favoring big government, then, becomes routine among most journalists, especially young ones.

I know because I was one of them. I started at the Times while the Vietnam War and civil-rights movement raged, and was full of certainty about right and wrong.

My editors were, too, though in a different way. Our boss of bosses, the legendary Abe Rosenthal, knew his reporters leaned left, so he leaned right to “keep the paper straight.”

That meant the Times, except for the opinion pages, was scrubbed free of reporters’ political views, an edict that was enforced by giving the opinion and news operations separate editors. The church-and-state structure was one reason the Times was considered the flagship of journalism.

Those days are gone. The Times now is so out of the closet as a Clinton shill that it is giving itself permission to violate any semblance of evenhandedness in its news pages as well as its opinion pages.

A recent article by its media reporter, Jim Rutenberg, whom I know and like, began this way: “If you’re a working journalist and you believe that Donald J. Trump is a demagogue playing to the nation’s worst racist and nationalistic tendencies, that he cozies up to anti-American dictators and that he would be dangerous with control of the United States nuclear codes, how the heck are you supposed to cover him?”

Whoa, Nellie. The clear assumption is that many reporters see Trump that way, and it is note­worthy that no similar question is raised about Clinton, whose scandals are deserving only of “scrutiny.” Rutenberg approvingly cites a leftist journalist who calls one candidate “normal” and the other ­“abnormal.”

Clinton is hardly “normal” to the 68 percent of Americans who find her dishonest and untrustworthy, though apparently not a single one of those people writes for the Times. Statistically, that makes the Times “abnormal.”

Also, you don’t need to be a ­detective to hear echoes in that first paragraph of Clinton speeches and ads, including those featured prominently on the Times’ Web site. In effect, the paper has seamlessly ­adopted Clinton’s view as its own, then tries to justify its coverage.

It’s an impossible task, and Rutenberg fails because he must. Any reporter who agrees with Clinton about Trump has no business covering either candidate.

It’s pure bias, which the Times fancies itself an expert in detecting in others, but is blissfully tolerant of its own. And with the top political editor quoted in the story as ­approving the one-sided coverage as necessary and deserving, the prejudice is now official policy.

It’s a historic mistake and a complete break with the paper’s own traditions. Instead of dropping its standards, the Times should bend over backwards to enforce them, even while acknowledging that Trump is a rare breed. That’s the whole point of standards — they are designed to guide decisions not just in easy cases, but in all cases, to preserve trust.

The Times, of course, is not alone in becoming unhinged over Trump, but that’s also the point. It used to be unique because of its adherence to fairness.

Now its only standard is a double standard, one that it proudly ­confesses. Shame would be more appropriate.

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),  a Coral reef compendium and an IQ compendium. (Both 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.

Email me  here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or  here (Pictorial) or  here  (Personal)

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Hallelujah!

My facial swelling has retreated somewhat overnight.  So I am now on the mend and out of pain and discomfort.  The clindamycin I buy is a Swiss formulation called Calindamin and I have had good results with it before.  Clindamycin is out of patent so most formulations of it come from India.  Most formulations of most out-of-patent drugs come from India these days so if you buy generic drugs, you may want to read this.

I used to use Indian formulations of clindamycin but got no discernible benefit from them. I am generally very pro-Indian so it grieves me to say that but "facts are chiels that winna ding", as the Scots say.

So I am going to be doing a lot of reading for the rest of the day with a view to re-starting blogging first thing tomorrow.  You can't keep a good blogger down!

Many thanks to the people who sent me "get well" messages -- and a particular thanks to those who told me that I will be remembered in their prayers.  I always feel particularly supported to hear that. And my recovery was after all swift.

UPDATE 2

I have a lot of facial swelling this morning

I have taken Clindamycin for it so that may help

But if it is no better tomorrow morning I will have to go into hospital and be put on a Vancomycin drip

I have been through all this before so I now expect to be up and running again early next week

UPDATE

I had my surgical procedure today and it was as bad as I thought it was going to be.  I went to a good public hospital so I was treated as well as they reasonably could in the circumstances.I ended up with a piece the size of a quarter chopped out of my right cheek near my  nose. Fortunately my plastic surgeon is brilliant and managed to put my face back together again.  I am now out of hospital but am experiencing some pain and discomfort.  So I would  not be clear enough in mind to attempt much in the way of blogging today

NOTE:  I am going into hospital later today for a rather complex procedure -- so I may not be blogging for a couple of days -- JR

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Dozens of Fascists yell, push and SPIT on Donald Trump donors as nominee attends private fundraiser in Minneapolis

Largely peaceful protests turned ugly after nightfall as masked demonstrators arrived and confronted donors trying to leave
They also jumped on Trump's motorcade and punched the car's windows

Demonstrations turned nasty at a private Donald Trump fundraiser in Minneapolis on Friday as masked activists pushed and spit on donors attending the event.

Police were forced to push crowds back as scenes turned ugly, with demonstrators blocking Trump's motorcade as it left the building, hitting the windows and jumping on the hood of one SUV.

Among the peaceful demonstrators were those from Minneapolis's large Somali community, angered by Trump's anti-Muslim rhetoric.

Jaylani Hussein, director of the Minnesota chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, criticized Trump for 'anti-Muslim and anti-Somali rhetoric.'

Giselda Gutierrez, a demonstrator from the Minnesota Immigrants Rights Action Committee, also hit out at Trump, telling the Star Tribune that his anti-immigrant stance is 'dangerous for our country'.

The Republican nominee was in town to try and bolster his war chest accumulated from the state, having raised just $110,000 so far compared to Clinton's $2million.

Suggested donations for couples attending the event ranged between $1,000 and $100,000, though it is not clear how many people attended, or how much was raised.

Trump, who was making his first visit to Minnesota on the campaign trail, did not appear or speak in public at the event.

Some of his remarks were broadcast on streaming app Periscope from inside. He said: 'If I could win a state like Minnesota, the path is a whole different thing. 'It becomes a much, much different race. We’re going to give it our ­greatest shot.'

While many prominent Minnesota Republicans stayed away from the event, former congresswoman Michele Bachmann did attend, and had harsh words for the demonstrators.

She told Breitbart: 'The deranged left was on hand at the Trump event last night in Minneapolis looking for pre-planned, predictably choreographed trouble.

'They were swearing at attendees as we arrived, spitting at whomever they could reach. They weren’t protesting as much as they were looking to beat people up.

'After Donald Trump had our wildly enthusiastic crowd riled up and on our feet with multiple standing ovations, the crowd tried leaving the building.

'Police officers told us protesters had physically attacked people as they were leaving the building and we were instructed to leave through alternative exits.'

SOURCE

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Prominent Conservative Joins Team Trump

Tea Party firebrand Michele Bachmann says she is advising Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump on foreign policy. The former Minnesota House representative attended a fundraiser in the state for Trump on Saturday, where she revealed to the press that she has his ear on foreign policy.

“He also recognizes there is a threat around the world, not just here in Minnesota, of radical Islam,” she said, according to MPR. “I wish our President Obama also understood the threat of radical Islam and took it seriously.”

“He’s a common-sense guy, not into political correctness,” Bachmann added, according to the Star Tribune.

Bachmann is already part of Trump’s Evangelical Advisory Board, providing “support” to Trump on “issues important to Evangelicals and other people of faith in America.”

SOURCE

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Liberal Governor Praises Donald Trump

While President Obama played golf this week, Donald Trump went down to Baton Rouge. Louisiana to help with the recovery, offering moral support and an 18 wheeler full of supplies. The state's liberal governor took notice, and it seems he's changed his tune on Trump:

Louisiana Gov. John Bel Edwards (D) said Sunday that Donald Trump has helped draw attention to recovery efforts after the recent devastating floods in his state.

In an interview on CNN's "State of the Union," the governor downplayed critical remarks he made before the Republican presidential nominee visited his state.

"I didn't dismiss his trip as a photo-op. Before he came down, I said we welcome him here, we want him to be helpful," Edwards said. "And we hope that it doesn't turn into a mere photo-op."

Edwards said Trump's visit to the state was positive for Louisiana.

SOURCE

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Trump is appeals to Black Voters

For the fourth straight rally, Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump made an overt appeal to black voters, promising to make the Republican Party "inclusive" and the "home" of African-Americans moving forward.

Trump, who was speaking in Virginia, a key swing state that voted for President Obama twice, made the renewed pitch a day after vowing to win more than 95 percent of the African-American vote in 2020 after his first term in the White House. He also railed against the "bigotry" exhibited by former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, arguing that she uses African-Americans for their vote and nothing more.

"The GOP is the party of Lincoln, and I want our party to be the home of the African-American vote once again," Trump told his supporters. "I want an inclusive country, and I want an inclusive party.

"We reject the bigotry of Hillary Clinton, who sees people of color only as votes, not as human beings worthy of a better future. We've seen what the Democratic policies have done in cities like Detroit, Baltimore and Chicago," Trump continued, adding that he wants upward mobility for African-Americans in poor communities.

SOURCE

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Donald Trump Should Go for the Black Vote—NOW!

If you want proof of the validity of those infamous nicknames for our two major political parties-- the Evil Party and the Stupid Party—look no further than the way the Stupid Party (i.e. the GOP) leaves minority votes on the table year after year.

This is particularly true of the African-American community, whose lot seems to get worse and worse the more liberal the administration. And yet the Republicans do nothing to attract their support, especially on a national level, beyond the slightest lip service. An excuse often given is that Repubs don't want to engage in execrable identity politics, an idealistic view that may be intellectually defensible, but does little if you would like to see real-world change.

Meanwhile, under Obama, the situation of African-Americans has become increasingly miserable with disastrous unemployment numbers, the further decimation of the black family, and a tragic growing murder epidemic in many of their neighborhoods mixed with a monumentally self-destructive war on cops. Accompanying all this has been the rise of #blacklivesmatter, a noxious reworking of the separatist black power movements of the sixties and seventies with, like those earlier groups, less than zero to offer the actual lives of the people it purports to be helping and plenty to hurt them, as we have seen just this weekend in Milwaukee.

At the outset of his campaign I had hopes Donald Trump, in his unconventionality, might reverse this pattern, but other than making blustering pronouncements that large numbers of African-Americans and Latinos actually would be voting for him (when polls say they're not), he has done hardly anything at all.

I have a suggestion for Donald. Change that—now!

You have several reasons to do it. A few are: 1. The obvious, you might get a few votes. 2. It undercuts the MSM meme that you are a bigot. (Yes, they won't stop, but so what?) 3. It will impress independent voters that you are a serious person out to solve one of the country's most important problems and not just the blowhard celebrity portrayed by that same media 4. It will make Democrats nervous (even though they will claim they're not.). 5. It puts you on offense. You're a sports fan.  You know why that's important and... 6. It's genuinely a good thing to do.

Okay, but how?

First, have a plan. The economic speech in Detroit was an excellent start but something more specific to this assignment is needed. Famed quarterback and Republican politician Jack Kemp came up with an approach decades ago that, though Rand Paul has talked about it and Mort Kondracke and Fred Barnes wrote a book about it timed to come out for the election, fortunately for Trump, has only barely been tried.

In essence, Kemp's idea was to make disadvantaged communities tax-free opportunity zones encouraging entrepreneurship and outside investment and putting people to work. This would then take those same people off welfare and food stamps and start making them feel better about themselves. Who knows? Real change could follow. It's certainly worth a try. The old liberal methods, dating back to LBJ, have been a demonstrable failure.

There are a million permutations to Kemp's approach, of course, but they are not important to this discussion.  What should be important is this sounds like an idea Donald Trump, of all people, is ideally placed to get behind and encourage, to make an integral part of his campaign.

If he  does.... if you do, Donald.... you have to go directly into the black communities to promote it.  Take Dr. Carson and Tim Scott with you—the South Carolina senator hasn't been your fan, but I bet a phone call on this idea would turn him around in a second—plus any other of those bravest of Americans known as black conservatives who would want to come.

It's hard to say what's prevented Trump from making a move like this so far. Inertia? Habit? A fear of alienating his supporters?

I often think one of Trump's problems is he underestimates his supporters. Even though he professes to despise the media, on some level he buys their view of the people backing him as angry white people. I have spent a fair amount of time among these supporters at rallies from Iowa to New Hampshire and back to California. Perhaps I'm blind, but I didn't get one inkling of racism from a single person. Nor did I see all that much anger.

By going into black communities Trump wouldn't be alienating his supporters.  He'd be honoring them.

SOURCE

There is a  new  lot of postings by Chris Brand just up -- covering most of his usual themes

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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),  a Coral reef compendium and an IQ compendium. (Both 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.

Email me  here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or  here (Pictorial) or  here  (Personal)

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Trump Beginning To Meet Viguerie’s Foolproof Test

Movement conservatives are now in charge of the Trump campaign

Richard Viguerie

“Who you walk with tells me a lot about who you are” is an aphorism that I have long applied as a foolproof test of whether a candidate or elected official is going to govern as a conservative. This might be seen as a Richard Viguerie companion or corollary to another one of my favorite rules of politics – personnel is policy.

When Ronald Reagan was running for President every time I saw him, and I saw him quite a bit, he was surrounded by people I knew from conservative politics: Senator Paul Laxalt, Jeff Bell, Lyn Nofziger, Marty Anderson, Dick Allen, Judge Clark, Ed Meese, etc.

This gave me confidence that when Reagan was elected he would look to the conservatives with whom he had surrounded himself to staff his White House, and the Cabinet and sub-cabinet appointments in his Administration.

And, with a few notable exceptions, that’s what he did.

On the other hand, when I looked at Mitt Romney, John McCain and Bob Dole, or both Bushes, what I saw were lobbyists, industry insiders, professional political operatives and other “rented strangers” as columnist George F. Will once called those of the professional political class.

So when we look at who Hillary Clinton walks with; Leftwing financier George Soros, Muslim Brotherhood-connected aide Huma Abedin, Planned Parenthood President Cecile Richards and other radical Leftists we know where she is going to lead the country.

But what of Donald Trump?

Trump has spent the past three decades in the company of the show business stars, sports legends, and pop culture figures that promote his business ventures.

He’s readily admitted that, as part of his business strategy, he’s supported both political parties and their candidates – he even donated to Hillary Clinton in one of her past campaigns.

However, since he began to the think about running for President, and once he announced, he has walked mostly with people from the right-of-center, from Senator Jeff Sessions, to Jerry Falwell, Jr., to conservative icon Phyllis Schlafly, to his National Co-Chairman Sam Clovis and economic advisors Steve Moore and Larry Kudlow, Trump’s major supporters and many of his inner circle have been from the conservative movement.

Now, the hiring of Kellyanne Conway as campaign manager and Steve Bannon as chief executive of the campaign brought two more movement conservatives into the leadership of Trump’s campaign.

Donald Trump’s recent economic speech, his national security speech and his law and order speech in Wisconsin were full of sound conservative policy prescriptions and were reflective of a strong conservative governing philosophy.

Most importantly, through the ups and downs of his campaign, contrary to the conventional wisdom espoused by the DC political class and the establishment media, Trump has not “moved to the center,” but marched steadily to the right.

With Kellyanne Conway and Steve Bannon at the top of the campaign, Mike Pence as Vice President and Senator Jeff Sessions at Donald Trump’s side, the Trump campaign is shaping up to be the most ideological campaign since Ronald Reagan’s 1980 campaign against Jimmy Carter.

Does this mean that Donald Trump, the secular businessman, has suddenly erased his glitzy past – of course not. Trump is still Trump with all that comes with that.

However, conservatives can look at Donald Trump’s campaign and draw more and more assurance that through the application of Viguerie’s Foolproof Test and its corollary Donald Trump is going to govern as a conservative, and that is, in the end, exactly what we conservatives want from this election

SOURCE

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Trump and Blacks

Thomas Sowell

Who would have thought that Donald Trump, of all people, would be addressing the fact that the black community suffers the most from a breakdown of law and order? But sanity on racial issues is sufficiently rare that it must be welcomed, from whatever source it comes.

When establishment Republicans have addressed the problems of blacks at all, it has too often been in terms of what earmarked benefits can be offered in exchange for their votes. And there was very little that Republicans could offer to compete with the Democrats' whole universe of welfare state earmarks.

Law and order, however, is not an earmarked benefit for any special group. It is a policy for all that is especially needed by law-abiding blacks, who are the principal victims of those who are not law-abiding.

Education is another area where something that is needed by all segments of the population is especially needed by blacks and other low-income minorities. In other words, here again there is no need for a divisive policy of earmarked benefits, in order to attract new voters into a “big tent.”

No matter what policy Republicans follow, they are not going to win a majority of the black votes this year, nor perhaps even this decade.

Nor is that necessary. Just an erosion of the Democrats' monopoly of the black votes can benefit both Republicans and the black community, who are currently taken for granted by the Democrats. Republicans may also get more white votes if they are no longer seen by some as racists.

Education is a slam dunk issue for Republicans trying to appeal to black parents with school-age children, as distinguished from trying to appeal to all black voters, as if all blacks are the same.

Education is an issue with little, if any, down side for the Republicans, because the teachers' unions are the single biggest obstacle to black youngsters getting a decent education — and among the biggest donors to the Democrats.

Among the few signs of educational success for low-income minority children in the public schools are the KIPP and Success Academy charter schools. But teachers' unions are bitterly opposed to increases in the number of such schools, and Democrats do what the teachers' unions want, because money talks.

As long as blacks vote automatically for Democrats, while the teachers' unions insist on getting their money’s worth, it is all but inevitable that the education of black children will be sacrificed in the public schools, wherever Democrats are in control.

Republicans have nothing to lose by taking on the teachers' unions, which donate more than 90 percent of their money to Democrats. Again, Republicans may not win a majority of the votes of even those parents who have children in the public schools. But that is where any inroads into the black vote can begin.

Here, as elsewhere, a journey of a thousand miles must begin with a single step. That step should include appeals not only to black parents with children in successful charter schools, but also the larger number of black parents on waiting lists for charter schools, and anyone else in the black community who understands that a good education is the key for the next generation to advance.

The black vote has not always been a monopoly of the Democrats. From the time of Abraham Lincoln to that of President Herbert Hoover the black vote was Republican. Even in the depths of the Great Depression of the 1930s, the black vote was one of the few that went to President Hoover in 1932.

Even after President Franklin D. Roosevelt won over black voters in FDR’s 1936 landslide, Republicans continued to get a significant share of the black vote over the next 20 years. But not in recent elections.

Someone on CNN said that if Trump were serious about wanting the black vote, he would address groups like the NAACP. That was in fact a big mistake that even President Reagan made.

Blacks voters are not the property of the NAACP, and they need to be addressed directly as individuals, over the heads of special interest organizations that have led blacks into the blind alley of being a voting bloc that has been taken for granted far too long.

Whether other Republicans will re-think their approach to attracting minority voters is a big unanswered question.

SOURCE

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Child Rape Case Inspires Lawmaker to Fight Philadelphia’s Sanctuary City Policy

An illegal immigrant living in Philadelphia has been charged with raping a child, spurring opponents of the city’s “sanctuary” policy to use his arrest to bolster their argument that such practices leave dangerous criminals on the streets.

Pennsylvania state Rep. Martina White, a Republican, says the alleged rapist, Ramon Aguirre-Ochoa, a 45-year-old Honduran national, avoided deportation only because of Philadelphia’s policy not to comply with most immigration-related requests from the federal government.

In an interview with The Daily Signal, White said she hopes the incident will inspire bipartisan support for her bid to hold sanctuary cities accountable for crimes committed by residents who are living in those municipalities illegally.

“There is a lot of support for the state of Pennsylvania to make sure sanctuary city policies do not continue, and that they do not spread,” White said, adding:

These policies are dangerous. Philadelphia, and cities like it, are basically encouraging illegal immigrant criminals to come there. And unfortunately, we are seeing that these policies impact citizens’ lives. These are very, very sad circumstances and repercussions from a flawed policy.

White’s bill would make any sanctuary city in Pennsylvania liable for “damages”—such as injury to a person or property—caused by illegal residents who have been convicted of a crime.

White introduced the bill in April in Pennsylvania’s Republican-controlled House, and she says the legislation will get a committee vote in September. She expects the bill, which has 41 co-sponsors, including two Democrats, to be approved by the House.

Inspired to help address the costs of higher education and health care, White, 28, was elected in 2015 to represent Pennsylvania’s 170th district. A financial adviser, she is a lifelong resident of Northeast Philadelphia.

White’s push to punish sanctuary cities comes at a time of division over Philadelphia’s policy, which opponents consider to be one of the most extreme in the country.

Under the policy, implemented by Mayor Jim Kenney, a Democrat, after he took office in January, the city in most circumstances does not respond to requests from federal immigration authorities to be notified of the release of an illegal immigrant from custody.

Michael Nutter, the city’s former Democratic mayor, had ended his own sanctuary policy before leaving office, but Kenney decided to quickly change course.

Now, Philadelphia will satisfy immigration requests only if the person in custody was convicted of a first- or second-degree felony involving violence. The policy requires Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), the federal authority in charge of deportations, to present a judicial warrant—the equivalent of an arrest warrant—for cases in which it seeks compliance from the city.

According to ICE, Philadelphia chose not to honor an earlier detainer request in 2015 against Aguirre-Ochoa after the dismissal of criminal charges of domestic aggravated assault.

A detainer is a request from ICE asking local law authorities to hold immigrant detainees it suspects of being in the country illegally for up to 48 hours after they were scheduled for release from jail.

Aguirre-Ochoa remained free until his arrest July 26 in the child rape case, when he was charged with involuntary deviate sexual intercourse and related offenses.

ICE has filed another detainer with Philadelphia, requesting Aguirre-Ochoa be transferred to the custody of federal immigration authorities after his case is resolved.

The case has drawn the attention of Pennsylvania’s national representatives, including Sen. Pat Toomey, a Republican, who is up for re-election.

In July, Senate Democrats blocked Toomey’s bill to strip congressional funding from sanctuary cities. Since the rape case, he has urged Kenney to repeal Philadelphia’s sanctuary policy.

Toomey’s Democratic opponent, Katie McGinty, also called on Kenney to increase his cooperation with ICE.

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),  a Coral reef compendium and an IQ compendium. (Both 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.

Email me  here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or  here (Pictorial) or  here  (Personal)

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People like people  -- but high IQ people need their solitude

The above heading encapsulates the findings of a paper from earlier this year by Li & Kanazawa.  Man is a social animal so the finding that people are happier if they have a lot of contact with friends is no surprise.  But why are high IQ people different?  I personally certainly fit the pattern described.  In a typical week I would see the lady in my life for an evening twice a week but have no other social contact in that week.  Since he lives in the same building as I do, my son drops in for a brief chat every few days but that is it.  I do however go to family birthdays and there are a few of them.

So can I offer an explanation of why high IQ people are so anti-social?  The easy answer is that high IQ people find normal people boring, and there is some truth in that.  But, on the other hand, people at all intelligence levels tend to choose their friends from people around their own IQ level.  So a high IQ  person would normally have pretty bright friends.  So boredom would be unlikely to be the crucial factor.

I am afraid that I can offer no general explanation but I note that in my own case, I consider my self-chosen "work" of keeping up with the politics of 3 countries -- the USA, the UK and Australia -- to be pretty engrossing and I need most of my time for that.  From my POV, I haven't got the time for a lot of socializing.  People do to a degree socialize when they have got nothing else to do.  I am rarely in that situation.

I do have both a brother and a son who see things very much as I do.  But that is not as good a thing as some might imagine.  Because we see eye to eye we basically  have nothing to say to one another.  Anything we say would just be a  repetition of something that the other believes. So there is surprising complexity in the way we high IQ people  behave.

There is an extended discussion of the matter here.  Information on the sample used is here


Country roads, take me home… to my friends: How intelligence, population density, and friendship affect modern happiness

Norman P. Li & Satoshi Kanazawa

Abstract

We propose the savanna theory of happiness, which suggests that it is not only the current consequences of a given situation but also its ancestral consequences that affect individuals’ life satisfaction and explains why such influences of ancestral consequences might interact with intelligence. We choose two varied factors that characterize basic differences between ancestral and modern life – population density and frequency of socialization with friends – as empirical test cases. As predicted by the theory, population density is negatively, and frequency of socialization with friends is positively, associated with life satisfaction. More importantly, the main associations of life satisfaction with population density and socialization with friends significantly interact with intelligence, and, in the latter case, the main association is reversed among the extremely intelligent. More intelligent individuals experience lower life satisfaction with more frequent socialization with friends. This study highlights the utility of incorporating evolutionary perspectives in the study of subjective well-being.

SOURCE

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It's the Ideology, Stupid

Some advice for Trump in taking on not just Clinton, but her philosophy

Arnold Ahlert

“Mr. Trump’s advisers and his family want the candidate to deliver a consistent message making the case for change. They’d like him to be disciplined. They want him to focus on growing the economy and raising incomes and fighting terrorism.” —from The Wall Street Journal

“His advisers are still convinced of the basic potency of a sales pitch about economic growth and a shake-up in Washington…"—from The New York Times

Note to Donald Trump, his advisers and the self-aggrandizing media "experts” who purport to be helping him:

It’s the ideology, stupid.

With acknowledgements to James Carville for the paraphrasing, it’s time to wise up. There is no “focus” or “sales pitch” that can shake the American public out of the doldrums that attach themselves to a choice between two highly flawed presidential candidates.

Unless. Unless that focus and sales pitch goes to the heart of what ails the nation. On Monday, following two nights of rioting, burning, looting and assaults on police and white people by black American mobs in Milwaukee — mobs energized by a completely legitimate shooting of an armed black thug by a black police officer, captured on camera —Milwaukee County Sheriff David Clarke, who by the way is black, provided a stellar example of illuminating the roots of the problem:

“The Milwaukee riots should be the last time the policies of liberal Democrats are held up as anything other than misery-inducing, divisive, exploitative and racist manipulation of the urban populations. Unfortunately they won’t. As Sheriff of Milwaukee County, I am furious that the progressive left has put my citizens in harm’s way and that I had to send my officers into cauldrons of anarchy and hatred that were created by the left.”
This spot-on analysis moves seamlessly to other arenas. Thus a sales pitch about economic growth becomes the idea that the “progressive” Left, led by Barack Obama, has produced the weakest recovery of the post-WWII era, even as the national debt skyrocketed from $10.6 trillion when Obama took office, to $19.4 trillion today.

A shakeup in Washington? Elitist insiders in both parties embrace progressive ideology’s global ambitions of amnesty for millions of illegals, massive amounts of immigration — including more Syrian “refugees” than the entire EU took in — and multi-nation trade deals negotiated in top secret. Progressives favor the practically unlimited expansion of H-1B visas demanded by tech oligarchs, who prefer employing foreign workers that undercut American wage-earners.

Foreign affairs? It is progressive ideology, courtesy of Obama and Hillary Clinton, that gave the world an “Arab Spring” enabling the rise and expansion of the Islamic State, the slaughter of Christians at genocidal levels, and the murder of four Americans in Benghazi. Progressive ideology has also put Iran on a glide path to nuclear weaponry, fueled Russian thug Vladimir Putin’s ambitions for recreating a Soviet Empire, and given the Chinese every reason to believe their expansionism in the South China Sea will remain unchecked. And Obama’s preposterous, progressive-inspired promise to “degrade” the Islamic State has given them extended time to recruit and propagandize with impunity, leading directly to the atrocities in, among numerous other places, Paris, Brussels, San Bernardino and Orlando.

The progressive-inspired destruction of the nation’s moral fabric? “The failed progressive urban policy causes anger and resentment in people that simmers below the surface,” Clarke writes. “The officer-involved-shooting was simply a catalyst that ignited the already volatile mixture of inescapable poverty, failing K-12 public schools, dysfunctional lifestyle choices like father absent homes, gang involvement, drug/alcohol abuse and massive unemployment.”

Like Trump must do, Clarke makes it clear who’s to blame. “Here are the facts: Milwaukee is run by progressive Democrats,” he explains. “Their decades-long Democrat regime has done nothing to reduce these urban pathologies, in fact, their strategies have exacerbated the situation by expanding the welfare state.”

Clarke is talking about Milwaukee, yet that same progressive failure is replicated in cities like Chicago, Philadelphia, St. Louis, Baltimore, Detroit and countless other urban wastelands where Democrats have maintained uncontested power for decades. Decades of societal dysfunction engendered by a progressive utopian vision known as the “Great Society” and the massive expansion of the integrity- and incentive-sapping welfare state it inflicted on the nation. Moreover, the progressive effort to promote the equality of “lifestyle choices,” decimated the nuclear family to the point where nearly three out of four black American children and more than half of all children delivered by women under 30 are born out of wedlock.

Trump must remind Americans that out-of-wedlock births spawn far higher levels of poverty and increasing levels of economic inequality progressives bemoan — even as they are the chief enablers of it.

Delivering a consistent message making the case for change? How about reminding Americans that Obama’s and Clinton’s progressive version of change — as in the fundamental transformation of an “inherently flawed” nation — has inflicted on America a virulent expansion of Us vs. Them identity politics, playing people off each other on the basis of race, religion, gender and class for the primary purpose of maintaining power? How about reminding Americans that Hope and Change™ has given rise to countless grievance groups including La Raza, the New Black Panthers, Black Lives Matter, CAIR, ISNA, the Rainbow Mafia, etc., all of whom are determined to use government as a vehicle for punishing their enemies and rewarding their friends?

Trump should also remind Americans that progressive ideology has corrupted government to the point where the IRS can single out conservative groups for extra scrutiny, while denying them a voice in the political process. That the U.S. attorney general can meet with the husband of an investigation subject on an airport tarmac with no repercussions. That the FBI can take “testimony” from Hillary Clinton without recording it, or putting her under oath — and then subsequently defend her by insisting a former secretary of state wasn’t “sophisticated” enough to understand classified email markings. And that a progressive-dominated Supreme Court will eviscerate the Constitution, with one “living document” ruling after another.

It is one thing to criticize Hillary Clinton per se. It is quite another to consistently tie her to a bankrupt ideology in all its despicable, hypocritical and repressive permutations. His two recent speeches on terror and law and order were a good start. Hopefully he’ll continue hammering the messenger and the message. And hopefully he’ll accept the reality he must do so in the face of a hostile and corrupt media, a Democrat Party willing to win by any means necessary, and a segment of establishment Republicans who would sell out their base to maintain their own elitist status quo.

“There’s only one answer,” Clarke maintains, “which is for the citizens of America to expose and heap scorn on this lying and dangerous triad of big government, liberal mainstream media, and the lost souls of the urban ghettos both these institutions feed upon for their power.”

Make no mistake: Progressive ideology cannot prosper without sufficient numbers of lost souls mired in human misery and ignorance. Even worse, its adherents believe caring is all that’s required to justify the consistently catastrophic results of their “enlightened” machinations.

Tie it all together, Mr. Trump. It just might win you the White House.

SOURCE

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Obamacare Costs NY State Thousands of Jobs

One in five manufacturers in New York said they were reducing the number of their employees due to Obamacare, according to a survey from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.

The survey asked businesses how the Affordable Care Act has affected them, including questions about health coverage costs, how health plans would change under Obamacare, and how the Cadillac Tax would apply to their current health care plans.

The number of manufacturers who said they were cutting jobs totaled 20.9 percent. Nearly a third of New York manufacturers said they would increase prices they charge on their customers due to Obamacare. Almost 13 percent said they would increase the proportion of employees working part-time.

The survey asked service sector firms the same questions and found that 16.8 percent of them would cut workers, 21.4 percent would raise prices due to Obamacare, and 15 percent said they would increase the proportion of employees working part-time.

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),  a Coral reef compendium and an IQ compendium. (Both 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.

Email me  here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or  here (Pictorial) or  here  (Personal)

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