“TRUMP?! HOW DID THIS HAPPEN??”

An answer from Brendan O’Neill

It happened because you banned super-size sodas. And smoking in parks. And offensive ideas on campus.

Because you branded people who oppose gay marriage ‘homophobic’, and people unsure about immigration ‘racist’.

Because you treated owning a gun and never having eaten quinoa as signifiers of fascism.

Because you thought correcting people’s attitudes was more important than finding them jobs.

Because you turned ‘white man’ from a description into an insult.

Because you used slurs like ‘denier’ and ‘dangerous’ against anyone who doesn’t share your eco-pieties.

Because you treated dissent as hate speech and criticism of Obama as extremism.

Because you talked more about gender-neutral toilets than about home repossessions.

Because you beatified Caitlyn Jenner.

Because you policed people’s language, rubbished their parenting skills, took the piss out of their beliefs.

Because you cried when someone mocked the Koran but laughed when they mocked the Bible.

Because you said criticising Islam is Islamophobia.

Because you kept telling people, “You can’t think that, you can’t say that, you can’t do that”.

Because you turned politics from something done by and for people to something done to them, for their own good.

Because you treated people like shit. And people don’t like being treated like shit.

Trump happened because of you.  

SOURCE

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Must not call out Leftist elitism

Liberal fans of William Shatner admonished the legendary television star on Sunday after publicly stating that 'Social Justice Warriors' (SJW) in America stand for 'inequality.'

Shatner, who became a household name for his work on 'Star Trek' more than 50 years ago, took to Twitter to express his disdain for SJWs that compare themselves to activists in the reform movement of the 1960s.

'Why is it that SJW's think they can align themselves with those that demanded social reform in the ['60s]?' Shatner wrote.

'SJWs stand for inequality, where they are superior to any one else, hence my use of Misandry and Snowflake,' he added.

Some in the progressive movement in the US see the terms 'SJW'  or 'snowflake' as a derogatory attacks.

Social Justice activists, most prominent on college campuses, have been accused of using illiberal means to make their views known including shutting down public speaking events by guest lecturers and personalities by force.  

The tweets by Shatner, 86, garnered a wave of criticism, with many social media users reproaching the actor for his views.

'So speaks an elderly white man secure and sheltered in his fame, wealth, and privilege. I expected better of you,' one person wrote. 'You are so wrong about this... I don't even know where to begin,' another social media user posted.

Shatner's comments also led to online media personalities writing features over his rebuke of the SJWs.

Gizmodo writer Matt Novak claimed Shatner had 'aligned himself with the so-called alt-right,' a nationalist white-supremacy movement, in an article which featured Shatner in Nazi regalia, an image taken from an episode of Star-Trek

Shatner, whose grandparents fled the antisemitic pogroms of Eastern Europe, is Jewish.

Matthew Rozsa of Salon also took Shatner to task, claiming in an article that: 'It seems pretty clear that there has been a decline in Shatner’s character, at least when it comes to his past support for equal rights.'

'That doesn’t mean that we should struggle with cognitive dissonance over how the man who courageously opposed racism in 1968 can now argue for right-wing establishment views in 2017,' he added.

Shatner has been a vocal supporter of equal rights since becoming a public figure more than five decades ago. In 2013, Shatner publicly stated that he was 'appalled by some of the immature, horrifically racist, sexist (and) homophobic' rhetoric posted by users on the social media site Reddit.

SOURCE

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Jeff Sessions Set to Block Millions in Funding to Sanctuary Cities

The Department of Justice announced last week that sanctuary jurisdictions will lose access to certain federal law enforcement grants in 2017 if they prohibit officials from communicating with Immigration and Customs Enforcement, if they block ICE from interviewing jail inmates, or if they fail to notify ICE of the pending release of criminal aliens ICE is seeking to deport.

These particular grants, known as the Byrne Justice Assistance Grants, are the largest source of federal criminal justice funds for state, local, and tribal authorities.

This move is helping fulfill one early promise of the Trump administration: to impose consequences on the most egregious of the more than 300 sanctuary jurisdictions.

It is significant because a large share of the funds awarded in this program go to sanctuary jurisdictions. For example, according to Justice Department records, the four largest grants, and seven out of the top 10 recipients of the Byrne/JAG grants are sanctuaries.

Under the new rules announced by Attorney General Jeff Sessions, these four top grant-getters (New York City; Cook County, Illinois; Los Angeles; and Philadelphia) are likely to be disqualified from these grants in the future if they maintain their current policies toward ICE.

These cities received more than $10 million in grants in 2016.

Ten sanctuaries are already at risk of debarment based on an initiative launched last year by Rep. John Culberson, R-Texas, chairman of the House Appropriations subcommittee that controls the Justice Department’s budget.

Last year, the department notified 10 of the worst sanctuaries that their Justice Department law enforcement grants could be pulled if they did not come into compliance with the federal law prohibiting sanctuary policies.

The jurisdictions are California; Connecticut; Cook County, Illinois; Chicago; Milwaukee County; New York City; New Orleans; Philadelphia; Miami-Dade County, Florida; and Las Vegas.

A few months later, Miami-Dade County reversed its sanctuary policy and began cooperating fully with ICE.

In April 2017, the Justice Department sent letters to nine of the jurisdictions (all but Connecticut) reminding them that by a deadline of June 30, they had to send documentation of compliance with the law or lose certain funding (and potentially face clawbacks of previously awarded funding).

The documentation of “alleged compliance” is currently under review and the results are expected soon. Sessions has said their statements will be reviewed carefully: “It is not enough to assert compliance, the jurisdictions must actually be in compliance.”

Last Tuesday’s announcement makes clear that the Justice Department is not looking merely at bare minimal compliance with the letter of Section 1373, the federal law that prohibits policies that block communication between local officials and federal immigration agencies, which many sanctuaries dubiously claim to meet.

It also signals that if a jurisdiction feels constrained by the legal controversies surrounding detainers (see discussion here), they can still demonstrate satisfactory cooperation by giving ICE 48 hours advance notice of criminal alien releases.

The following jurisdictions have extreme sanctuary policies that, if maintained, are likely to lead to disqualification from Byrne/JAG grants under the new rules: New York City; Chicago; Cook County, Illinois; Philadelphia; San Francisco County, California; Orleans County, Louisiana; Newark, New Jersey; Travis County, Texas; Taos County, New Mexico; Lycoming County, Pennsylvania; and Butler County, Pennsylvania.

Some jurisdictions have milder versions of sanctuary policies that may not lead to disqualification from grants under the Justice Department rules announced Tuesday.

For example, the following jurisdictions do not honor detainers but already provide ICE with adequate notification of criminal alien releases: Chesterfield County, Virginia; Erie County, Pennsylvania; Bedford County, Pennsylvania; Montgomery County, Pennsylvania; and Lebanon County, Pennsylvania.

Under the new rules, these counties and others may still maintain eligibility for grants if they continue to cooperate fully with ICE.

A new map shows the jurisdictions that are most likely to fail to meet the new requirements, those that likely can meet requirements with their current policies, and a large number that could go either way.

The Byrne/JAG grants are one of three programs now off limits to sanctuaries. Last year, Culberson imposed requirements for basic compliance on the State Criminal Alien Assistance Program, which offers partial reimbursement for the costs of incarcerating illegal aliens, and the Community Oriented Policing grant program.

How much money is at stake in the Byrne/JAG program? The Trump administration reportedly is seeking $380 million for the program in 2018.

SOURCE

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Stalin lives: Huffington Post Writer Calls For “Purge” of Conservatives

Huffington Post contributor and author Dan Arel, who last week advocated violence against Mike Cernovich, has called for a “purge” of conservatives while also labeling Dave Rubin, a gay Jewish man, “Nazi f**king trash”.

The exchange began when I tweeted about YouTube’s temporary removal of Jordan Peterson’s channel, remarking, “The purge begins.”

“Oh Paul, when the left begins its purge, it will be much different than this…” responded Arel, meaning that the “purge” would be something different to just silencing free speech.
When asked to clarify what he meant and whether it constituted a threat of violence, Arel deleted the tweet.

After being called out on the tweet, Arel began to backtrack, subsequently claiming that by “purge” he meant to ban conservatives from the Internet, although his initial deleted tweet suggested an alternative to censorship.

On Sunday, Arel also tweeted an endorsement of violence against Mike Cernovich, remarking that a troll who physically approached Cernovich should have assaulted him. That tweet was subsequently deleted too.

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 THE PSYCHOLOGIST.

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

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HITLER NOTE

Around 15 years ago, I was contacted by Michael Miller, who was in the process of compiling a very comprehensive set of historical notes which would cover all the major aspects of Nazi doctrine.  He asked me to do the chapter on Nazi socialism.  The resultant site was a very useful one that quite a few people consulted from time to time.  A couple of years ago, however, the free website hosting the material deleted it all.  "Free" websites are like that in my experience.  I did however keep a full backup of everything and I have now reloaded it all here.  I have also  put a link to it towards the bottom of my sidebar here.  I have lost touch with Michael Miller.

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New Report Exposes Thousands of Illegal Votes in 2016 Election

A new bombshell study released by the Government Accountability Institute shows why President Donald Trump’s Advisory Commission on Election Integrity has such an important job ahead of it.

The institute concluded in its report that thousands of votes in the 2016 election were illegal duplicate votes from people who registered and voted in more than one state.

The Government Accountability Institute, founded by Peter Schweizer, author of “Clinton Cash,” seeks to “investigate and expose crony capitalism, misuse of taxpayer monies, and other governmental corruption or malfeasance.”

Over the last few months, the institute sought to obtain “public voter information” from every state in order to search for duplicate votes. This is the same type of information the president’s election integrity commission has requested.

With this report, we may have a clue as to why some states are resisting providing this data.

The Government Accountability Institute was able to obtain voter registration and voter history data from only 21 states because while some states shared it freely, “others impose exorbitant costs or refuse to comply with voter information requests.”

These 21 states represent “about 17 percent of all possible state-to-state comparison combinations.”

The institute compared the lists using an “extremely conservative matching approach that sought only to identify two votes cast in the same legal name.” It found that 8,471 votes in 2016 were “highly likely” duplicates.

Extrapolating this to all 50 states would likely produce, with “high-confidence,” around 45,000 duplicate votes.

The institute obtained this level of confidence by matching not only names and birthdays—which can be the same for different individuals—but also by contracting with companies, such as Virtual DBS, that have commercial databases to further cross-check these individuals using their Social Security numbers and other information.

According to the Government Accountability Institute’s experts, “the probability of correctly matching two records with the same name, birthdate, and Social Security number is close to 100 percent.” In fact, “using these match points will result in virtually zero false positives.”

The probability of 45,000 illegal duplicate votes is the low end of the spectrum, and it does not even account for other types of fraud such as ineligible voting by noncitizens and felons and absentee ballot fraud.

To put this number of fraudulent votes in perspective, Hillary Clinton won New Hampshire by fewer than 3,000 votes out of over 700,000 cast. Just this number of duplicate votes alone has the power to swing state results and, in turn, elections.

Unfortunately, New Hampshire refused to turn over its data for this study.

There have been other razor-tight elections in recent years. In 2000, the presidency was decided by 537 votes out of a total of 105 million cast. In 2008, Al Franken won his Minnesota Senate race by a mere 312 votes. He ended up being the deciding vote that gave this country Obamacare.

Though the institute did not look at the 2008 elections in this study, there is little doubt that the 2016 numbers show that duplicate voting and voter fraud are a real problem that can have serious consequential effects.

The Government Accountability Institute also used the state of Rhode Island as a test case. Over 30 percent of all registered voters in Rhode Island have no Social Security or driver’s license number on file.

While it is legal to register without providing this information, the institute notes that “confirming the identities of some of these voters is impossible using only the data contained in the state’s voter registration system.”

Without this “uniquely identifying information … there is no way to confirm a voter’s identity or citizenship … ” This shows the vulnerabilities that are ripe for any person or group wanting to take advantage of them.

The institute also found more than 15,000 voters registered at prohibited addresses “such as post office boxes, UPS stores, federal post offices, and public buildings.” In some cases, more than 100 voters “were registered to the same UPS store locations.”

They also found voters whose registered addresses were “gas stations, vacant lots, abandoned mill buildings, basketball courts, parks, warehouses, and office buildings.”

The institute tried to bring some of these problems to the attention of Rhode Island election officials as part of its test case. It provided officials with a list of 225 voters who “were registered using prohibited addresses.”

But Rhode Island refused to do anything about the problem beyond sending a letter to the voters. If a voter did not respond, the state refused to take any further action.

Instead, in an obvious attempt to deter the Government Accountability Institute, the state said that the institute would have to file a “voter challenge” and would be subject to a misdemeanor penalty if it filed a “false challenge.”

The fact that these election officials did not want to thoroughly investigate possible voter fraud illustrates one of the problems in this area: Too many election officials don’t want to know about these problems, and refuse to do anything when it is brought to their attention.

The Government Accountability Institute points out that the quality of the voter registration data in some states is very poor, with missing and obviously incorrect information. The institute found 45,880 votes cast by individuals whose dates of birth were more than 115 years before the election.

Several hundred votes were cast by individuals whose registration birthdates “indicated they were under 18 years old at the time of the election,” although some of these were through provisional ballots.

All of this is just the latest evidence that we have serious, substantive problems in our voter registration system across the country and that voter fraud is, without a doubt, real.

The Heritage Foundation has a database that is being constantly updated. It documents nearly 1,100 proven instances of voter fraud, including cases where elections were overturned because of proven fraud.

This kind of work, which the Government Accountability Institute has done, will be invaluable to the Election Integrity Commission as it researches the registration and voting process and looks for ways to fix its vulnerabilities and security problems, enhance our democratic process, and make sure every eligible American votes and is not disenfranchised by illegal votes.

Election integrity and public confidence in the election process are fundamental to preserving our democratic republic.

SOURCE

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The Obamacare Facts That Liberals Don’t Want You to Know

Perhaps too often, Americans take the findings of independent government agencies—whether executive or congressional—as fact.

The Congressional Budget Office, which has impacted the health care debate, has consistently said that repealing Obamacare would lead to around 22 to 23 million Americans losing their insurance by 2026.

This has been a frequent talking point for those that would like to keep President Barack Obama’s signature health care law.

But a recent commentary by health care expert Avik Roy pointed out how this number may be misleading at best.

Roy wrote in Forbes that according to leaked information he received from a congressional staffer, this 22 million number is in fact mostly coming from the projection of a repeal of the individual mandate.

The individual mandate is one of the most controversial parts of Obamacare that essentially forces Americans to buy health insurance, or receive a fine. Republican-backed repeal proposals to repeal universally aim to eliminate this regulation.

Roy wrote that “of the 22 million fewer people who will have health insurance in 2026 under the Senate [health care] bill, 16 million will voluntarily drop out of the market because they will no longer face a financial penalty for doing so: 73 percent of the total.”

Unlike the progressive narrative that repealing Obamacare will lead to tens of millions of Americans getting booted from their plans, it shows that nearly three-quarters of those leaving their plans will voluntarily withdraw from the ones they have.

An enormous 73 percent of the 22 million number will simply stop buying the product they are forced to purchase under current law.

This important fact has been mostly left out of the debate, as the CBO has not been entirely transparent with how its numbers are calculated. So far, the CBO has essentially refused to explain the primary reason so many Americans will go uninsured.

The CBO has been consistently praised for its purportedly unbiased analysis. A recent commentary for Wired said that “since its inception four decades ago, the CBO has occupied a rarified space in which the objectivity of data reigns.”

Americans are simply given a presumably nonpartisan number that pours out of the inner sanctums of a tight-knit agency as they debate the merits of policy that impacts all Americans and generations to come.

But in the messy space of politics, opaqueness of methodology can return skewed or incomplete results.

Drew Gonshorowski, a health care expert for The Heritage Foundation, wrote about the CBO’s transparency problem in The Hill. He wrote:

The CBO could better serve legislators, media and researchers if their models and methods were made public. Lifting this veil would allow more discussion around the effects of various proposals without having to wait for an explicit CBO score … [And] maybe one of the most important aspects of such a change, this would allow legislators to have real conversations about the effects of their legislation, publicly, with less delay.

Reps. Mark Walker, R-N.C., and Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, wrote in a commentary for the Washington Examiner how often CBO projections have been wrong and why it’s wrong for Congress to “blindly follow” its estimates.

For instance, they noted how the original 2010 CBO projections for Obamacare claimed that “21 million Americans would enroll in the insurance exchanges by 2016.” The real number ended up being around 10 million and is one of the reasons the market is so unstable.

The American people deserve an open debate on one of the most important policy issues of our generation.

It is a debate over the priorities and outcomes of a health care system that favors the individual and the family over the collective—one that throws vast decision-making power to government and bureaucracies, or is limited and placed closest to the hands of the people.

This is why transparency over potential policy outcomes is so essential.

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 THE PSYCHOLOGIST.

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

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10 Milton Friedman quotes that will make liberals melt with rage

It’s Milton Friedman Day! Born July 31, 1912, the Nobel Prize winner and libertarian economist revolutionized the world and was a major influence on the economic policies of U.S. President Ronald Reagan and U.K. Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher.  He also served as an economic adviser to Barry Goldwater in 1964.

In honor of his birthday, here are 10 Milton Friedman quotes that will make liberals melt with rage.

1) The most important single central fact about a free market is that no exchange takes place unless both parties benefit.

2) If you put the federal government in charge of the Sahara Desert, in 5 years there’d be a shortage of sand.

3) I am favor of cutting taxes under any circumstances and for any excuse, for any reason, whenever it’s possible.

4) We have a system that increasingly taxes work and subsidizes nonwork.

5) One of the great mistakes is to judge policies and programs by their intentions rather than their results.

6) There is no place for government to prohibit consumers from buying products the effect of which will be to harm themselves.

7) With some notable exceptions, businessmen favor free enterprise in general but are opposed to it when it comes to themselves.

8) The society that puts equality before freedom will end up with neither. The society that puts freedom before equality will end up with a great measure of both.

9) The great virtue of a free market system is that it does not care what color people are; it does not care what their religion is; it only cares whether they can produce something you want to buy. It is the most effective system we have discovered to enable people who hate one another to deal with one another and help one another.

10) If a tax cut increases government revenues, you haven’t cut taxes enough.

SOURCE

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What caused the Middle East to flare up?

The culprit is Obama and his policies of appeasement, betrayal and retreat.

During the eight years of the Obama administration, half a million Christians, Yazidis and Muslims were slaughtered in the Middle East by ISIS and other Islamic jihadists, in a genocidal campaign waged in the name of Islam and its God. Twenty million others were driven into exile by these same jihadist forces. Libya and Yemen became terrorist states. America - once the dominant foreign power and anti-jihadist presence in the region – was replaced by Russia, an ally of the monster regimes in Syria and Iran, and their terrorist proxies. Under the patronage of the Obama administration, Iran - the largest and most dangerous terrorist state, with the blood of thousands of Americans on its hands - emerged from its isolation as a pariah state to re-enter the community of nations and become the region’s dominant power, arming and directing its terrorist proxies in Lebanon, Syria, Gaza and Yemen.

These disasters are a direct consequence of the policies of  appeasement and retreat of the Obama administration. Beyond that, they are a predictable result of the Democratic Party’s long-standing resistance to the so-called war on terror, and its sabotage of George Bush’s  efforts to enforce 17 UN Security Council resolutions in Iraq, aimed at maintaining international order and peace in the Middle East.

In fact, the primary cause of the disasters in the Middle East is the Democratic Party’s sabotage of the War in Iraq. Democrats first voted to authorize the armed overthrow of Iraq’s terror regime but within three months of its inception reversed their position 180 degrees and declared the war “immoral, illegal & unnecessary.” The reason for the Democrats’ reversal on the war had nothing to do with the war itself or the so-called absence of weapons of mass destruction, but was rather a political response to the fact that an anti-war Democrat, Howard Dean, was running away with their presidential nomination. It was this that caused John Kerry and his party to forget that the war was about Saddam’s defiance of 17 UN Security Council resolutions, and refusal to allow the UN inspectors to carry out their efforts to ascertain whether he had destroyed his nuclear and chemical arsenals.

Beginning in June 2003, Democrats began claiming – falsely – that Bush had lied to secure their support for the war. “Bush lied, people died,” became the left’s slogan to cripple the war effort. Bush couldn’t have lied because Democrats had access to every bit of intelligence information on Iraq that he did. But this false narrative began what became a five-year campaign to demonize America’s commander-in-chief and undermine his efforts to subdue the terrorists and pacify the region.

The Democrats’ anti-war crusade climaxed with the election of Barack Obama, a leftwing activist and vocal opponent of the war, and of the majority of Senate Democrats who voted for it. At the time of Obama’s election, America and its allies had won the war and subdued the terrorists by turning the Sunnis in Anbar province against them. But the new commander-in-chief refused to use American forces to secure the peace, and instead set out to withdraw all American military personnel from Iraq. This was a fatal step that created a power vacuum, which was quickly filled by Iran and ISIS.

Obama’s generals had advised him to maintain a post-war force of 20,000 troops in country along with the military base America had built in Baghdad. But Obama had made military withdrawal the centerpiece of his foreign policy and ignored his national security team’s advice. Had he not done so, American forces would have been able to effectively destroy ISIS at its birth, saving more than 500,000 lives and avoiding the creation of nearly 20 million refugees in Syria and Iraq.

Instead of protecting Iraq and the region from the Islamic terrorists, Obama surrendered the peace, turning Iraq over to Iran and the terrorists, and betraying every American and Iraqi who had given their lives to keep them out. The message of the Obama White House – to be repeated through all eight years of his tenure - was that America was the disturber of the peace, and not “radical Islamic terrorism” – words he refused to utter. Instead he even removed the phrase “war on terror” from all official statements and replaced it with “overseas contingency operations.”

Second among the causes of the Middle East’s human tragedy was Obama’s support for the Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad whom his secretaries of state, Clinton and Kerry both endorsed as a democratic reformer on the very eve of his savage war against his own people. This was followed by Obama’s refusal to enforce the red line he drew to prevent Assad from using chemical weapons on the Syrian population. When Assad did use them, Obama averted his eyes and papered over his culpability by arranging a phony deal with Russia to remove Assad’s chemical arsenal. Six years later, Assad was again using chemical weapons on Syrian civilians, the exposing Obama’s ruse.

This capitulation to the Syrian tyrant was a powerful reiteration of Obama’s signature message: The United States is the problem and is therefore committed to taking itself out of the picture. In other words, anti-American dictators and genocidal maniacs in the Middle East can have their way.

The third cause of the Middle Eastern morass was Obama’s failure, early on in his Obama administration, to support the green revolution in Iran, when its brave citizens poured into the streets in 2009 to protest a rigged election and the totalitarian regime. Obama’s silence was in effect support for the Jew-hating and America-hating regime, into whose ruling group Secretary of State Kerry’s daughter soon married. Obama’s betrayal of the Iranian people was a reiteration of his signature message to the region: America no longer cares to support freedom, and is willing to support its enemies, even those who kill Americans in the name of Islam.

The fourth cause of the Middle Eastern morass was Obama’s intervention in Egypt - his overthrow of an American ally, Hosni Mubarak, and his open support for the Muslim Brotherhood, the spawner of al-Qaeda and Hamas and the chief sponsor of the Islamic jihad against the West. Obama’s support for the Brotherhood was so strong that when it was overthrown by the Egyptian military following massive protests of the Egyptian people, the White House opposed the new regime of the pro-American General, Abdel Fattah el-Sisi. Through these policies, Obama alienated America’s most important Arab ally in the Middle East and opened the door to Russia’s influence in the region, and to the Kremlin’s alliance with its most barbaric regimes, Syria and Iran.

The fifth cause of the terrorist upsurge that has shattered the peace of the Middle East was Obama’s unauthorized, illegal intervention in Libya and murder of its ruler Gaddafi – a ruthless dictator no doubt – but a dedicated enemy of al-Qaeda with whom he was actively at war. The result of this naked American aggression, whose chief advocates were Hillary Clinton and Samantha Power, was a Libya devoured by the terrorist wolves who now rule it – a failed state and a haven for the bloodthirsty savages of al-Qaeda and ISIS.

The sixth reason the Middle East is now in flames is Obama’s policy of what he calls “strategic patience” but is in effect strategic cowardice and worse. Obama’s failure to act decisively against ISIS – to take only one example - allowed the Islamic State (which Obama has even refused to concede is Islamic), to become the largest terrorist force ever, and to provide its armed missionaries with a free hand to destroy the oldest Christian community in the world in Iraq, exterminating 200,000 members of the faith, while driving many more into exile.

By way of contrast and showing what the Obama White House could have done, sixth months into the Trump administration, the ISIS stronghold of Mosul is liberated and Raqqa is about to fall, spelling the end of the Islamic State. The blood of those slaughtered Christians, as well as the Yazidis and Muslims, is squarely on the head of Barack Obama and his White House enablers – the Democratic Party and the Democrats’ kept press.

 The seventh cause of the humanitarian crisis in the Middle East – and the one with the most long-lasting consequences - is Obama’s embrace of the terrorist regime in Iran. Iran has killed more Americans than any other enemy of this country. Its kill list goes back to the Marine bombing of 1983 and includes the supply of every I.E.D. in Iraq used to blow up several thousand American soldiers.

Yet Obama built his entire Middle East policy around the so-called “deal” with Iran, which provides that nation with a path to nuclear weapons, and has no realistic inspection or enforcement mechanisms. The “Iran deal” lifted the sanctions that had been placed on a regime whose leaders were so openly contemptuous of Obama that they led chants of “Death to America” in the middle of the negotiations. The Iran deal brought America’s mortal enemy out of international isolation, provided it with the opportunity to acquire nuclear weapons, turned a blind eye to its ballistic missile development and stuffed its war chest with $200 billion in cash payments used to fund its weapons programs, and to support terrorist armies, including Hizbollah, Hamas and the Yemenite Houthis, busy creating havoc throughout the Middle East.

The Obama regime’s role in the human disasters in the Middle East is a warning about what happens when American leaders sympathize with our enemies, hamstring our armed forces and abandon our responsibilities to help maintain the peace and defend freedom in a fractious, authoritarian and bloody-minded world. The Obama administration’s enabling of the most barbaric forces in the Middle East is a national disgrace, and the most shameful episode in America’s post-World War II experience.

The path to rectifying these disasters and to stopping Islamic genocides of “infidels” in the Middle East, is first of all to restore America’s active presence in the region, taking a firm stance against radical Islamic terrorism. This is an effort which, thankfully, the Trump administration has already begun. Second, it is to make America’s policy firmly and consistently anti-terrorist, which the Trump administration has not yet done. This would mean, for example, cutting off all funds to the terrorist Palestinian Authority and the Hamas government in Gaza, and halting all “peace” negotiations until the Palestinians renounce terror and support Israel’s right to exist.

The lesson to remember in all this is that despite its human weaknesses and flaws, America is still the only great power in the world today that cares about human dignity and decency and has the wherewithal to defend them and the peace.

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 THE PSYCHOLOGIST.

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

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More nonsense research on IQ. Are high IQ people more racist?

Maybe I am missing something but I think that the research below has simply shown that people who are good at recognizing patterns are good at recognizing patterns.

It is true that the Raven's IQ test is a test of pattern recognition.  Pattern recognition is a major part of IQ. So the geniuses below did a study in which people were presented with some graphics that were patterned in a certain way.  They then tested the people who had been shown the patterned graphics  to find out if they had seen and learned the pattern in the graphics.  Some had seen it. Some had not.

They found that high scorers on the Ravens pattern recognition test were more likely to have learned the pattern that had been presented to them in the graphics of the experiment. People who were good at detecting one lot of patterns were good at detecting other patterns. In other words, they confirmed that good pattern recognition was part of IQ -- which  we already knew.

So what the heck is going on?  Why did this tomfoolery get published?  It is because pattern recognition is RACIST!  If you see a pattern in people who cry "Allahu Akhbar" when they kill other people and conclude that Muslims might be more dangerous than others, that is PREJUDICE.  I would argue that it is POSTJUDICE -- judging from experience -- but that makes me a racist apparently. Recognizing patterns is BIAS!  You are not allowed to learn from experience


A new study complicates the narrative that only unintelligent people are prejudiced. The paper, published recently in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, suggests smart people are actually more at risk of stereotyping others.

The study consisted of a series of experiments, all of which suggested that people who performed better on a test of pattern detection—a measure of cognitive ability—were also quicker to form and apply stereotypes.

First, researchers from New York University showed 271 participants a series of pictures of red, blue, and yellow cartoon aliens with different facial features, paired with a statement of either a nice behavior (“gave another alien a bouquet of flowers”) or a rude one (“spat in another alien’s face”):

Most of the pairings were random, but two were skewed so that keen observers might pick up on a pattern: 80 percent of the blue aliens were paired with unfriendly behaviors, and 80 percent of the yellow aliens were paired with nice ones. The subjects didn’t know if the statements about the aliens were true or false. In this way, the study tried to mimic how people actually form prejudices about certain groups, like through anecdotes in the media or through portrayals in TV shows.

Later, the subjects were asked to pick which alien had committed a given behavior from a lineup:

The participants then took a test called the Raven’s Advanced Progressive Matrices, a pattern-based exam that’s a common measure of human intelligence.

The participants who were better pattern detectors were more likely to make stereotypical errors: They tended to ascribe the friendly behaviors to the wrong yellow alien, and the unfriendly behaviors to the wrong blue alien. Meanwhile, they were less likely to ascribe the behavior to a different-colored alien.

A second study showed similar results, but for measures of implicit bias. That is, smarter participants were quicker to stereotype the aliens in the course of a word-sorting task, even if they didn’t realize they were doing it.

Next, the researchers tried it with human faces, showing a new set of participants a series of computer-generated pictures of men with either wide or narrow nose bridges:

Here too, 80 percent of the narrow nose-bridge men were paired with friendly behaviors, while 80 percent of the wide nose-bridge men were supposedly unfriendly. The participants were then partnered with a new set of pictures of men for a trust game using fake money. Again, superior pattern detectors gave more money to the characters with narrow nose bridges, suggesting they had learned the stereotype about friendliness and employed it in judging the new men.

These depressing results suggest there’s a downside to being smart—it makes you risk reading too much into a situation and drawing inappropriate conclusions.

SOURCE  

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The Democrats' “Rising Star”. A look at the radical record of Kamala Harris

The pictures of Harris generally make her look quite light-skinned.  Yet she is of Southern Indian and Jamaican descent.  Do picture editors deliberately lighten her skin?  If so, is that not racism?

As House and Senate Democrats press forward with their quest to destroy Donald Trump's presidency by any means necessary, they are simultaneously focused on finding someone in their ranks who could be an effective presidential candidate for their own party in 2020. Fifty-three-year-old Kamala Harris, who served as the Attorney General of California from 2011-16 and then filled the vacant U.S. Senate seat that had been occupied for a quarter-century by Barbara Boxer, is someone whom they will undoubtedly look at very closely. To be sure, Harris possesses all the qualifications necessary to be a Democratic leader, insofar as she is a far leftist in the mold of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton — but without the baggage of Obama's extensive ties to domestic terrorists, anti-Semites, and America-hating Marxists, or of Hillary's status as a money-grubbing thief who feloniously violated the Espionage Act more times than anyone can count.

Consider, for instance, Harris's stance on immigration. In December 2012, during her tenure as California's Attorney General, she issued a memo informing all the executives of law-enforcement agencies statewide that they could “make their own decisions about whether to fulfill” Immigration & Customs Enforcement detainers, which are temporary holds that federal immigration authorities place on municipal prisoners who are suspected of being eligible for deportation.

After an illegal alien named Juan Francisco Lopez-Sanchez — a convicted felon who had been deported from the United States on five separate occasions — was released from prison in April 2015 and subsequently murdered a 32-year-old San Francisco woman named Kathryn Steinle, Harris backed up the city sheriff's decision to release Lopez-Sanchez without first calling immigration authorities.

During Harris's Senate run in 2016, her campaign website stated that “everyone should have access to public education, public health, and public safety regardless of their immigration status”; that Harris, if elected, would “fight for comprehensive immigration reform that creates a fair pathway to citizenship” for America's “11 million undocumented immigrants”; that she would “protect President Obama’s immigration executive actions,” which shielded several million illegals from deportation; and that the U.S. had a duty to “responsibly resettle refugees” from Syria and other war-torn, terrorism-infested nations around the world.

But then again, America's national security has never been high on Kamala Harris's list of priorities. In September 2015, for instance, she spoke out in support of the nuclear deal that the Obama administration had negotiated with the government of Iran — an agreement that allowed the Islamist regime in Tehran to enrich uranium, build advanced centrifuges, purchase ballistic missiles, fund terrorism, and be guaranteed of having a near-zero breakout time to the development of a nuclear bomb approximately a decade down the road. But by Harris's reckoning, the accord represented “the best available option for blocking Iran from developing nuclear weapons capability and to avoid potentially disastrous military conflict in the Middle East.”

In 2015 as well, Harris launched an investigation of journalist/anti-abortion activist David Daleiden, who had recently made headlines by releasing undercover videos demonstrating that Planned Parenthood routinely violated federal law by collecting and selling fetal tissue and body parts. As National Review reports: “The basis for investigating Daleiden was his appearing to have used a fake California driver’s license to hide his identity from Planned Parenthood, and the suspicion that he violated Planned Parenthood’s privacy. Those trivial allegations were enough for Harris to have eleven police officers raid Daleiden’s house, confiscate his computers and hard drives, some private documents, and all the yet-unreleased Planned Parenthood footage Daleiden had shot over two years. When Daleiden called his lawyer, Harris’s raiders tried to confiscate his phone too.”

It should be noted that Harris is no disinterested observer in matters involving Planned Parenthood and the abortion movement at large. When she ran for the Senate in 2016, for instance, her campaign website featured a petition to “protect” the “important work” of Planned Parenthood, which, along with its affiliates and employees, contributed at least $30,000 to the Harris campaign. Other pro-abortion groups and their affiliates, meanwhile, donated at least $50,000 more.

In environmental matters as well, Harris does not deviate one iota from left-wing orthodoxy. In 2016, she was one of 17 Attorneys General who joined “AGs United for Clean Power” (AGUCP), a group launched by former Vice President Al Gore. AGUCP's objective is to file criminal fraud charges against fossil-fuel companies (and their supporters) that fail to explicitly endorse the notion that greenhouse gas emissions associated with human industrial activity are chiefly responsible for potentially catastrophic “climate change.” Most notably, Harris and New York AG Eric Schneiderman together launched an investigation into ExxonMobil for allegedly funding research that questioned the validity of climate-change alarmism.

When Harris subsequently ran for the Senate, her campaign website assured voters that she would “stand up to the climate change deniers and fight to pass national climate change legislation that promotes innovation like establishing a carbon tax or creating a cap-and-trade market for carbon pollution.”

That same campaign website also vowed that Harris would seek to:

    “make the minimum wage a living wage and tie it to inflation” – notwithstanding the reams of evidence that minimum-wage hikes invariably lead to increased unemployment among young people and unskilled, low-income workers;
   
“support President Obama's “plan for making community colleges free” – with no explanation as to how a new entitlement like this could be justified in light of the fact that we are a nation already bearing the crushing burden of a $20 trillion fiscal operating debt, and at least $220 trillion in unfunded future liabilities;

    support “expanding access to Head Start [and] Early Head Start, and creating national universal pre-kindergarten” — even though large bodies of empirical evidence have exposed Head Start as an ineffective, virtually useless boondoggle;

    “make it a priority to pass the Paycheck Fairness Act,” legislation rooted in the thoroughly discredited notion that “women earn about 21 percent less” than equally qualified, equally credentialed men in the workforce;

    end “mass incarceration” by “roll[ing] back draconian sentencing laws for nonviolent drug offenses” — a proposal founded on the baseless premise that America's criminal-justice system discriminates against nonwhites;

    “end federal bans on student loans, food stamps, housing, and voting rights for ex-offenders”; and

    “stop voter suppression” measures like Voter ID laws.

When President Trump nominated Judge Neil Gorsuch to the U.S. Supreme Court four months ago, Harris said: “Judge Gorsuch has consistently valued legalisms over real lives. I won't support his nomination.” As the American Thinker aptly pointed out at that time: “'[L]egalisms' (aka what the law actually says) are the very basis of the rule of law. When [Harris] touts 'real lives,' [and] not the law, as the proper basis for SCOTUS rulings, she openly endorses a political system based on favoritism, not the rule of law.”

Kamala Harris has frequently been called one of the Democratic Party's “rising stars.” Given her steadfast commitment to open borders, her utter contempt for the rule of law, her low regard for American national security, her radical stance in favor of unrestricted taxpayer-funded abortion rights, her endorsement of environmental policies that would cripple the American economy while doing nothing to promote clean air or water, her support for massive government deficit spending as the all-purpose solution for every social and political challenge facing mankind, one can only conclude that Harris is, indeed, a rising Democrat star. With credentials like these, what else could she possibly be?

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 THE PSYCHOLOGIST.

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

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Evolutionary biology:  Three theories

Evolutionary biology is an inherently speculative field and new fossil finds seem regularly to upset such theories. So I am going to concentrate on theories for which we have some solid data -- in the form of IQ scores.  I am going to look at just 3 populations for which average IQ has now been fairly securely assessed: East Asians, Europeans and Australian Aborigines. Why do the scores decline so markedly across those three groups? I think the main key is warfare or the lack of it.

Europeans are an interesting example of balance.  They have had frequent and ferocious wars with one-another but have also had substantial periods of peace. And they seem to have benefited from both.  Wars are often won by guile rather than by numbers  but that is never easy and requires ever-changing tactics.  So a general problem solving ability was selected for.  Europeans developed their IQs to help them win their many wars. A smarter tribe tended to win and therefore prosper, with more children being born for that tribe.

But the periods of peace were long enough for the pursuits of peace to thrive from time to time also.  And one of the most interesting peaceful pursuit is enquiry, scholarship, finding things out.  And because of that scholarship tends to be highly regarded.  Even in ancient Sumeria there is a record of a father bringing a fleece to give to a teacher. Which is something of an advance on an apple but we can see the same motive and the same respect.

So scholarly people tended to be well supported and hence were an economically successful group.  Sadly, many of the European scholars were celibate monks so the effect was probably much less than it might have been. The monks did however help to make scholarship prestigious so that was a useful function.

An interesting special case is the Germans.  For most of history, there was no German nation.  Germany was a geographical concept only.  It was a place where many large and small independent nations lived who all spoke a form of German.  And, ever since the Roman republic and probably before, Germans have always been warlike. And they as often made war on one-another as they did on others.  So they were heavily selected for martial ability.  Only good warriors survived.  And that selectivity did result not only in a healthy IQ but also in other advantageous attributes.  Their average IQ did not become outstanding compared with their neighbors because it was supplemented by other advantages, one of which is extreme: innovativeness.

It was probably the desirability of military flexibility that made Germans into master innovators, something I have written at length about previously. Leftist psychologists go to great lengths to isolate important intellectual abilities that are not captured by IQ tests but their suggested alternatives mostly reduce to absurdity.  So it is amusing that one of the few genuine alternatives is innovativeness.  That Germans are the masters in that attribute must grind a few gears, however.

Hollywood war movies portray German troops as rigid and robotic bunglers so my characterization of them as flexible will no doubt be a surprise to non-historians.  In fact however, flexibility in tactics was preached in Vom Kriege,  that great Prussian bible of military doctrine by Clausewitz, written early in the 19th century.  The big bunglers of WWII were allied troops.

Particularly in the case of the Prussians (North-Eastern Germans), their martial tendencies were channeled in another direction as well:  into a military personality, with self-discipline being a major part of that. For instance, punctuality requires self discipline and Germans are famous for that.

Speaking more generally, it once used to be said that you just had to drop any German into a military uniform and he immediately became the perfect soldier.  And the exploits of the Wehrmacht in WWII were amazing.  Although heavily outnumbered they very nearly won, despite the large handicap of Corporal Hitler's overall inept leadership.

Just to give you the flavor of that, the British air ace with the highest number of enemy aircraft shot down was "Johnnie" Johnson, with 38 "kills". By comparison, Erich Hartmann of the Luftwaffe had 352 "kills". A similar ratio was not unknown in WWII tank battles.

But Germany did have periods of peace so the arts of peace thrived there as well.  It might be noted that the contributions to the arts made by Germans as a group were however very unevenly distributed, with Austria being by far the greatest contributor -- particularly in music -- and Prussia the least. To this day, about two thirds of the classical repertoire in music was composed in Austria (Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert etc.).

So what is distinctive about Austria?  It was a large empire that got big not by war but by intermarriage of its royal family with other royal families.  They did have wars -- particularly with invading Prussians -- but life in the empire was mostly peaceful.  So "useless" but beguiling things like music and literature could thrive.

And up to WWII, Vienna, the capital of Austria, was THE great city.  It was the intellectual capital of the world.  Most of the eminent philosophers (e.g. Schlick, Wittgenstein), psychologists (e.g. Freud, Jung), Economists (e.g. Boehm von Bawerk, Mises) and artists (e.g. Klimt, Klee) were there. And Vienna was also prominent in new music. It was the home of a great new musical artform, the operetta -- with operettas by composers such as Strauss and Kalman generating many perennially popular songs.  Dutch musical entrepreneur Andre Rieu is a great user of songs from operetta.

China

Compared with Europe, China had long periods of peace under the various dynasties.  So peaceful pursuits could flourish.  And one of those pursuits was scholarship, a much respected pursuit. So China developed its famous civil service examinations, which gave you access to the Chinese elite.  You reached the top in China not by the sword but by the ink brush. And that made scholarship universally respected and aspired to.

And a major factor in scholarly achievement is IQ. So it was the high IQ section of the Chinese population who got all the gravy. They flourished economically and thus tended to have more children.  So IQ was heavily selected for in China over many generations. And so we have the finding today that the Chinese are roughly half a standard deviation higher in average IQ than are Westerners.

And Chinese civilization was much admired in Korea and Japan.  Confucian thinking was adopted there. Chinese bureaucracy, culture, religion, and philosophy were closely studied.  Japan had a particular advantage there.  The Tokugawa shogunate gave Japan over 200 years of peace, an unprecedented achievement. So peaceful pursuits were of particular interest there as well. The Chinese model was largely adopted, with similar results.  So China, South Korea and Japan are closely similar in IQ.

Which leads to an interesting contrast:  Other East Asians, such as the Chinese and Vietnamese do quite poorly on average IQ.  How come?  They all look the same to us!  The Philippines is an easy answer. They are separated from China by rather a lot of ocean.  China did have some influence but the Filipinos mostly went on with their own ways.

And for Vietnam, the problem was the neighborhood bully:  China.  Vietnam was a minor issue in China but China was a big issue in Vietnam.  Little Vietnam kept being invaded from next-door China.  And because China could muster far more troops than Vietnam, Vietnamese had to develop as warriors if they wanted to keep China at bay. And they did.  Like Germans, the Vietnamese became a warrior race -- as both France and the USA found out in the 20th century.  So there was much less scope for peaceful pursuits in Vietnam. Keeping out foreigners became the Vietnamese specialty. And they are still good at that.

Aborigines

And so on to Australian Aborigines, who register one of the lowest average IQs that have been found.  And their unusual situation was very clear: isolation. They had virtually no contact with the outside world for as much as 60,000 years. So they developed with reference to the Australian environment only. And Australia as it was before white settlement tended to be an unforgiving place.  It was hard to make a living there.  For a primitive people the food supply was always precarious.  So the environment was the big challenge and the big shaping influence.  And shape them it did.

Aborigines are not inferior to others intellectually.  They have just deveoloped different intellectual skills.  The skills they have are a very poor at dealing with IQ tests or modern life generally but are superbly adapted to their lives before the white men came along.  Each tribe usually had a fairly wide geographic range that they wandered over.  They had to.  They were hunter/gatherers, not farmers.  So food was scarce everywhere, particularly in the large dry areas of Australia.  So detecting from afar and creeping up on juicy herbivores was the big requirement for life.

So Aborigines developed a quite eerie ability to "read" and remember the landscape. If a few leaves on the ground had moved in the last day or two, an Aborigine would notice that as a message that there was an animal nearby.  He could probably even say which sort of animal. You have to see it to believe it.  They just have enormous visual abilities and a vast visual memory.

That extraordinary skill was in fact very useful to the white man in earlier days. It was useful in tracking down fugitives and criminals.  So the phenomenon of the "black tracker" arose.  Aborigines were hired by police to find people who would otherwise be unfindable.  An evildoer might think that he had made good his escape and he would be right in thinking that -- UNTIL the police put a black tracker on his trail.  The black tracker would see a clear trail that was invisible to whites.  Just a slightly turned leaf would be enough. So crooks who thought they were safe were often surprised to find police knocking on their door.

I could go on.  The way the environment often underlies human differences is fascinating.  I will forbear from mentioning Africans however.

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Another set of findings showing that IQ scores are firmly grounded in DNA

Note that a particular DNA profile correlated .78 with educational attainment and .86 with IQ. That is about as high as you get in explaining human variation

A genome-wide association study for extremely high intelligence

D Zabaneh et al.

Abstract

We used a case–control genome-wide association (GWA) design with cases consisting of 1238 individuals from the top 0.0003 (~170 mean IQ) of the population distribution of intelligence and 8172 unselected population-based controls. The single-nucleotide polymorphism heritability for the extreme IQ trait was 0.33 (0.02), which is the highest so far for a cognitive phenotype, and significant genome-wide genetic correlations of 0.78 were observed with educational attainment and 0.86 with population IQ. Three variants in locus ADAM12 achieved genome-wide significance, although they did not replicate with published GWA analyses of normal-range IQ or educational attainment. A genome-wide polygenic score constructed from the GWA results accounted for 1.6% of the variance of intelligence in the normal range in an unselected sample of 3414 individuals, which is comparable to the variance explained by GWA studies of intelligence with substantially larger sample sizes. The gene family plexins, members of which are mutated in several monogenic neurodevelopmental disorders, was significantly enriched for associations with high IQ. This study shows the utility of extreme trait selection for genetic study of intelligence and suggests that extremely high intelligence is continuous genetically with normal-range intelligence in the population.

Molecular Psychiatry advance online publication 4 July 2017; doi: 10.1038/mp.2017.121

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A real man holds his own umbrella


Donald Trump speaks with reporters on Friday



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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 THE PSYCHOLOGIST.

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

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Who is the Ruling Class? They Exposed Themselves Last Night

Let me start by saying that I have a deep reverence for John McCain as an American hero of the last century. In his currently stricken state, it might seem that he is a poor choice of starting point for this particular argument. I would argue that exactly the opposite is true. For more on the other side of Senator McCain, here is a good primer.

Last night he and two other Republicans drove a stake through the heart of the attempt to stop the nationalization of health care. He left the care of his own doctors and flew to Washington for that express purpose. This is the very pinnacle of ruling class hubris. Whilst engaged in a battle for his own life and taking advantage of a level health care that most Americans can only dream of, he flew across the continent to cast a vote against the tide of failed government interference in the market for medical care that has succeeded only in breaking the system to the point that we are on the brink of an irresistible movement to take freedom out of health care altogether and institute “single payer” government control.

Leaving aside the illogic of increasing the control of the government in order to “fix” what the government broke in the first place, I want to focus on the people whose ”leadership” keeps us digging while it becomes more and more improbable that we could ever climb out of this hole into which we have all, leaders and constituents, dug ourselves.

The most privileged people in our country are arrogant and self-important. But they are still dependent on the votes and confidence of the public. To convince the voting public, themselves and each other that they are magnanimous and trustworthy, they make public shows of “compassion”. They crusade to expand insurance coverage for “the uninsured”. They open our borders without discrimination both to those who will enrich our culture and those who will impoverish it. They grant subsidies for all manner of anti-social and counter-productive behavior: low interest financing and tax benefits for useless degrees at schools that offer not much more than “party campuses” and breeding grounds for political unrest, welfare benefits that encourage families without fathers and multi-generational dependance the list is endless. The bottom line is that The United States of America is turning into a modernized reproduction of the Ancient Regimes of pre World War I.

Instead of “The Church”, The Royal Families and the Landed Aristocrats, we now have Politicians, Academics, Journalists and Money Manipulators as our “betters” but the result is very similar. If I had the artistic talent, I would do an updated version of the Heinrich Kley drawing showing the new worthies loading up the backs of our working people and entrepreneurs with illegal immigrants, affirmative action, alternative energy, relaxed mortgage requirements for people designed to encourage minority home ownership, single payer health care and all the other vanity projects of our ruling class.

John McCain is sick and he is fighting, once again, for his life but let’s get this straight because it is life and death for the rest of us. He had the opportunity to get treatment and his operation at the VA. He is entitled and deserving of that for his service. As a grateful nation, we should ensure that the VA gives the best care possible to our veterans. He, however, chose not to get that treatment but to go to The Mayo Clinic. I cannot fault that decision personally but politically, it is very telling.

 More and more our “public servants” send their children to private schools, use government paid transportation, live behind security walls with armed guards, ignore laws and ethical practices the rest of us are held to, avoid taxes with impunity, amass private wealth at the public trough and, in general, live lives that are entirely unlike ours.

They keep pushing the idea that they are compassionate, not by living compassionate lives or even by helping the poor achieve better lives, but by posing as compassionate people. It is an illusion! The programs they create do nothing but continually decrease the difference between those who work and those who don’t work. They take our tax money and create federal fiefdoms (EPA, HUD, BLM, Education, etc…,) that create and exacerbate more problems than they solve.

Most corrosive of all, they tell the undocumented aliens and the entrenched poor they have taken into their plantation that they are their benefactors. then the go home, with a wink to their fellow elitists, to their gated communities. This is where we are headed as a nation unless we can get the right leadership in place. We now have a president who gets it but the McCain, Collins, Alexander, Moore-Capito, Heller, Murkowski, and Portman votes of last evening just added more burden for us all, This virtue posing and false compassion is killing us. We need it to stop.

SOURCE

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The Staircase to Government Corruptocracy

In Toronto, common sense is severely lacking. A resident spent a relatively paltry $550 — provided through the benevolence of him and his community — to erect a park staircase on a dangerous slope. Apparently, government officials were upset over the initiative shown by the resident, who had serious and legitimate qualms with the city’s project estimate of at least $65,000 (and possibly as high as $150,000). Under the guise of safety requirements, the city considered destroying the stairway to install what it deems is a regulatory-compliant structure. Fortunately, new indications are that demolition is probably off the table and refinements will be pursued.

Update: The city moved forward with destroying the structure and a new one will be assembled for roughly $10,000. Which begs the question: Where in the world did the original estimate come from?
According to Mayor John Tory, “We just can’t have people decide to go out to Home Depot and build a staircase in a park because that’s what they would like to have.” The question is: Why not? To be fair, the mayor did also call his government’s price tag “completely out of whack with reality.” But that’s not stopping him from venting frustration. We’re literally talking about eight steps. Park-goers were getting injured. And for $550 residents solved two issues: unnecessary government expenditure and a dangerous situation that wasn’t being sufficiently remediated. It may not be the most well-built structure, but it’s better than government either doing nothing or wasting tax dollars. It would be easy to mock Canada for this uncanny situation, but it’s hardly a Canadian specialty. Taxpayers here in the U.S. know just how pitiful the government is when it comes to frugality.

John Stossel chronicles a similarly obnoxious case of government waste in his most recent column. He writes, “Did you see the $2 million dollar bathroom? That’s what New York City government spent to build a ‘comfort station’ in a park. I went to look at it. There were no gold-plated fixtures. It’s just a little building with four toilets and four sinks.” He adds, “No park bathroom needs to cost $2 million. An entire six-bedroom house nearby was for sale for $539,000.” But no matter: “Everything costs more when government builds it.” For the record, another bathroom located at nearby Bryant Park was constructed for a far more reasonable $300,000 — because, Stossel says, it’s privately managed. He notes, “Since government spends other people’s money, they don’t care that much about cost and they certainly don’t care much about speed.”

The fact is, government is just about the worst money manager there is. Take Barack Obama’s “stimulus,” for example. According to The Washington Free Beacon, some of the waste that occurred from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act included funding for studies analyzing duck penises, erectile dysfunction and obesity, alcoholic effects on mice, as well as funding for puppet shows vilifying free enterprise and, least but not least, the infamous Solyndra debacle.

Even Obama conceded that “shovel-ready was not as shovel-ready as we expected.” And no wonder — a good deal of it was spent on frivolous and unnecessary things. This underscores too the importance of making frugal decisions when it comes to infrastructure repairs. As Tony Caporale and Marc Poitras write at Real Clear Policy, “Infrastructure Spending Must Justify Itself.” And the private sector has to play a critical role. Otherwise, you risk outlandish outcomes. Like $2 million bathrooms, multi-thousand-dollar staircases and even research on duck private parts.

SOURCE

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Leftists Suddenly Worry About Politicizing Boy Scouts

What could be less controversial than the president of the United States addressing the Boy Scouts of America jamboree in West Virginia? Of all the public addresses given by President Donald Trump in the first seven months of his presidency, surely this one would keep Democrats and their media attack dogs from going into hysterics.

Think again. Leftists managed to characterize the speech with their typical vitriol, exaggeration and animosity. Some even compared the event to a Hitler Youth rally. But it doesn't take long to figure out that much of the criticism has less to do with Trump talking politics at the jamboree than it does with Trump talking about the "wrong" politics.

Case in point: New York Magazine's headline reads, "The 14 Most Inappropriate Moments From Trump's Speech at the Boy Scout Jamboree." The headline suggests that Trump invited the Scouts to join him for beer and poker after the event. Yet many of the 14 points are based on Trump criticizing Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and the press. Trump's speech was indeed political, and we could have done without his reference to a party in New York, but it was hardly inappropriate.

Opining in The Washington Post, Stephen Stromberg took issue with the ideological content and erratic nature of Trump's address. He remarked, "Sure, scout membership skews right. But those of us who did not fit that stereotype know that the organization is and should be open to all. I spent middle and high school in a small troop that met in a Mormon church but contained Jews, agnostics, a Seventh-day Adventist and various others." But Trump didn't say anything about religion. Talk about erratic.

Scroll down a few paragraphs and the real reason for the outrage over Trump's remarks comes to the surface. Stromberg adds: "When one of our fellow scouts came out of the closet, he left the troop. But the BSA has since revised its membership policies to better reflect its mission of offering guidance to all young men."

There you go. Stromberg and other leftists aren't as upset over Trump's partisan remarks as they are about his failure to touch on the issues that Democrats want the boys to hear. We doubt Trump would have been criticized had he stated that the Scouts need to be more diverse and inclusive. Had he called for more transgender Scouts, Democrats would be lauding his remarks.

Some of the criticism of Trump's speech is understandable. He should have focused more on the Scouts' history and core principles, or on American patriotism and civics more generally. But the most critical remarks have come from Democrats and Republicans who already have issues with the president.

While the content of Trump's address has been the focus, far less reporting has been done on the fact that the Scouts cheered just about everything he had to say, despite the fact that the president of the Scouts discouraged them from showing partisan support for Trump. But they couldn't resist. Despite his flaws, the Scouts know that Trump will defend and fight for their values.

Apparently, however, the organization's leadership wasn't pleased. On Thursday, Chief Scout Executive Michael Surbaugh stated, "I want to extend my sincere apologies to those in our Scouting family who were offended by the political rhetoric that was inserted into the jamboree."

But Surbaugh didn't mind getting political when transgender Scouts were admitted earlier this year. At the time, Surbaugh exclaimed, "Communities and state laws are now interpreting gender identity differently than society did in the past. And these new laws vary widely from state to state." It was no different when they accepted homosexual Scouts four years ago and homosexual leaders two years ago. In other words, some in the BSA are perfectly willing to change according to the shifting political winds, as long as those winds are blowing in a certain direction.

Surbaugh's apology seems hypocritical and one-sided. After all, where were the apologies to the Scouts offended by the Left's political and cultural ideology over the past generation? And did anyone apologize when delegates to the 2000 Democrat National Convention actually booed Boy Scouts when they walked on the stage?

There were no apologies then, just political attacks against the Scouts. Philip Wegmann writes in the Washington Examiner, "The Boy Scouts have come under fire in the last two decades because of their membership standards concerning gay boys and leaders. They were regularly attacked as bigots in the editorial pages of the New York Times. They were mocked by the likes of Madonna (the elderly Queen of Pop creepily proclaimed she knew 'how to scout for boys.') And they were assaulted in the courts again and again and again."

As for the media, it's beyond hypocritical that they're suddenly worried about the Boy Scouts of America. The Left has successfully forced the BSA to change core principles and beliefs for many years, but suddenly media types are worried that Donald Trump criticizing Barack Obama is somehow going to tarnish a century's worth of Boy Scout values. All this damage had been done long before Trump took the stage at this year's jamboree.

The Rules and Regulations of the Boy Scouts of America state that the organization "must not, through its governing body or through any of its officers, chartered councils, Scouters, or members, involve Scouting in political matters." The handbook should have been revised years ago, because the BSA is very much a political organization these days. All President Trump did was provide a different political view. And that's the real reason why his speech has been condemned.

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 THE PSYCHOLOGIST.

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

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Picture gallery

Every now and again I put up a retrospective of what I think are the "best" pictures from my various blogs.  I have just put up the selection for the second half of last year.  You can access it here or here

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Democrats' 'Better Deal' — Same as the Old New Deal

Rolling out 80-year-old socialist ideas isn't the way to chart a way forward for the party in the wilderness  

Donald Trump has been president for six months now and if you listen to Democrats and the Leftmedia, you might conclude that he and the Republican-controlled Congress are destroying America. But perhaps there is no better indicator of Trump’s performance thus far as president than to hear Democrats rail about how terrible a job he has done and how horrific his policies are.

Democrats remain dumbfounded at his election and they’re even more confused that the last four special elections ended with Republican victories. Their “progressive” proposals and the millions of dollars they’ve wasted on campaigns haven’t worked.

That said, at least Chuck Schumer has enough sense to tell Hillary Clinton to stop blaming everyone else. “When you lose to somebody who has 40% popularity, you don’t blame other things — Comey, Russia — you blame yourself,” Schumer said. “And the number one thing that we did wrong is … we didn’t tell people what we stood for.”

So, this week, Democrats introduced their “Better Deal” for America. But you’d be forgiven for thinking it sounds just like everything they’ve been saying for 80 years. As Jonah Goldberg quipped, “I mean, the word ‘Deal’ is hardly subtle.”

Their beloved highness Nancy Pelosi wrote an opinion piece in The Washington Post to lay out this supposedly better deal. Predictably, Pelosi starts by ripping Republicans for wanting to dismantle the (Un)Affordable Care Act, claiming that they’re “trying to raise Americans’ health costs to fund tax breaks for billionaires.” Naturally, she leaves out the details of the Democrats’ health care takeover. The mandate to buy health insurance policies that cover a long list of (often unwanted) required services caused premiums to skyrocket, squeezing the very voters she’s trying to reach with this noxious class warfare.

Trump wants ObamaCare gone, though Senate Republicans failed to accomplish any meaningful repeal and so, for now, we’re stuck with the Democrats’ terrible law.

Aside from this, Pelosi and her fellow Democrats are offering three empty slogans: better jobs, better wages and a better future. All of these sound like fantastic proposals for Americans, but the methods Democrats want to use to accomplish these goals are the same ideas that had the opposite effect and brought on the 2008 financial crisis.

On jobs, Pelosi writes, “Democrats are pledging ourselves to the goal of creating good-paying, full-time jobs for 10 million more Americans in the next five years.” When is the last time that a politician created a job? Government cannot create jobs without taking money from those who are already working in order to pay for it. Her proposal offers a new tax credit for companies that train and hire skilled workers and offer them a good wage (read: higher minimum wage). Aren’t successful companies already doing this and without a tax credit?

On better wages, beyond a higher, job-destroying $15/hour minimum wage, Pelosi wants government to crack down on large corporations and monopolies that she blames for Americans missing out on opportunities. Yet she calls for more of the same central planning that has never worked and never will work. In fact, to whip these large corporations into shape she wants tougher standards and even more regulations. Well, we just had eight years of excessive regulations and government standards, and such heavy-handed policy was the primary reason for the slowest decade of economic growth in our nation’s history.

On health care, Pelosi and her fellow Democrats want to take “unprecedented action to lower the costs of prescription drugs.” Prescription drugs are far more expensive than they should be, but the biggest reason is — you guessed it — government regulation. But, as usual, rather than rein in the overbearing regulatory commissars at the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), Pelosi proposes doubling down. “We will leverage the power of Medicare to negotiate lower drug prices,” she writes, “force drug manufacturers to open their books and justify cost increases, and create a strong, independent enforcement agency empowered to end outrageous and unjustified prescription drug price-gouging.”

Instead, the best way to reduce the cost of prescription drugs for consumers is to keep government out. Let the free market work the way it should and allow companies to compete for better prescription drugs and the costs will go down. Democrats won’t hear of such things.

Every proposal that Pelosi and the Democrat Party have is part of the same old socialist agenda that has already been tested and failed. They want more control over the economy, more regulations, more taxes to pay for their ideas and more power over Americans. That is the Democrats’ vision for a “better” future. Nowhere in Pelosi’s proposal are the ideas of less government, more freedom and more individual rights and responsibilities. Hers is the collectivist, statist vision that is the antithesis to what our Founders intended. And it is an agenda that will make America lose, not win.

But hey, at least Pelosi didn’t blame Vladimir Putin or James Comey.

SOURCE

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Is this anti-Soros European leader Trump's greatest ally?

Hungary's foreign minister came to Washington last week seeking something from the Trump administration that his government is being denied by the European Union (EU)-sympathy for its sovereign right to make its own internal decisions and laws.

He deserves a hearing.

Such a return to basic relations among nation-states-let alone treaty allies and friends-is also a radical departure from the previous administration. Foreign Minister P‚ter Szijj rt¢ said the Obama administration had failed to respect Budapest's right to self-determination.

At a speech at The Heritage Foundation last week, Szijj rt¢ shared an anecdote of a meeting he had in 2014 with Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland. The two were meeting because then-Secretary of State John Kerry refused to meet Szijj rt¢.

In the meeting, Nuland "threw" a piece of paper at Szijj rt¢ with a list of requirements that Hungary would have to meet before the administration would formally meet with the Hungarian Government.

"And do you know what was written on the paper?" Szijj rt¢ asked. "How to change the constitution, how to change the media laws, how to change the electoral laws, how to change regulation of churches, how to change regulation of constitutional courts."

These efforts to interfere in Hungary's domestic politics only served to alienate the Hungarian government, as is the case now with the EU.

What has Hungary done to deserve all this?

Its democratically elected prime minister, Viktor Orban, has fought for Hungary's right to self-govern. He has emphatically opposed the EU's overly permissive migrant policy, calling it "self-destructive and na‹ve."

More importantly, Orban has led the fight against the influence that left-wing billionaire George Soros wields in Hungarian domestic affairs. He's done that in several ways, but mainly by requiring the Central European University in Budapest, a university set up by Soros, to comply with current Hungarian law.

For daring to do all that, Orban has been vilified in the mainstream media and formally rebuked by the EU.

Most recently, the European Commission declared that the law passed by Hungary's parliament that is being used against the university is incompatible with "the right of academic freedom, the right to education, and the freedom to conduct a business."

Brussels declared that if Hungary did not respond to this declaration within one month, Hungary would face sanctions and could even lose its voting rights.

Despite Brussels's ham-handedness, Szijj rt¢ said Hungary will continue to press for deep reform in the EU.

"There is one consensus that is shared by everyone-that we want a strong European Union," he said. "The major debate is about how to get there."

Szijj rt¢'s five goals for the EU going forward are noteworthy in that they represent an attempt to turn the institution into less of a hidebound, anti-growth body:

    Continued enlargement of the EU

    Greater autonomy to member states to keep them strong and competitive

    Faster action on free trade agreements

    Stronger homeland security and immigration regulation; and

    A Brexit deal that imposes the least possible barriers to trade between the U.K. and the EU

As Szijj rt¢ describes it-and as is increasingly apparent to those studying the issue-EU nations are split on the question of sovereignty.

Some member states advocate for increased centralization of power at the EU headquarters in Brussels as the best path to European prosperity. Others, like Hungary, argue that Europe as a whole will be strongest with strong, sovereign member states.

Brexit is illustrative of this centralization vs. sovereignty debate. The U.K. proved unwilling to continue ceding its rights as a sovereign nation to centralized bureaucrats in Brussels.

Though some in Europe blame Brexit for the EU's current political uncertainty, Szijj rt¢ argues that these people have it backwards:

    We reject the position which says that Brexit is the reason for the serious challenges in the European Union. We say that Brexit is the outcome, is the consequence of the postponed and missed reforms.

There are good arguments behind Hungary's pro-sovereignty, anti-centralization stance. Americans can approve of it, as it both aligns with American principles and protects American interests. Stronger European countries mean stronger allies for the U.S.

It would also advance the idea that pursuing one's national interest is morally legitimate-a view that has all too often been derided.

Szijj rt¢ said that Trump's "America First" foreign policy "is much, much more important than people think."

Before President Trump used it, "if you thought or said that your country is the first for you, the interests of your nation is first for you, you had to feel ashamed, and you were considered as a dictator, as a nationalist, as in retrograde, as not modern enough and not internationalist enough, not globalist enough."

Now, according to Szijj rt¢, this has changed:

    Now we are happy to be free to say that for us Hungary is first. We always acknowledge the rights of nations to put themselves in the first place when it comes to interests, and now we are very happy that the leader of the number one superpower in the world said the same.

Szijj rt¢ sees in Trump's pro-sovereignty attitude a level of respect that was lacking in the Obama administration. According to Szijj rt¢: "Mutual respect was something that was really emphasized in the speech of your president in Warsaw, and I think that's a game changer."

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 THE PSYCHOLOGIST.

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

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