Is your blood pressure too high?

I don't intend to make this blog a medical one but I do at times mention findings from medical research that are of particular interest -- and blood pressure is very widely attended to.  Many doctors measure it every time you visit. So it is clearly of some importance.  In particular, high blood pressure is often a precursor to heart attacks and stroke -- which are no fun at all.

So it attracted a lot of controversy recently when the American medical authorities (The American College of Cardiology/American Heart Association (ACC/AHA)) increased the level at which blood pressure becomes a problem.  Previously the maximum "safe" level was 140/90, which happens to be about where my blood pressure levels are. The new "safe" level is 130/80.  Above that level you should receive treatment to bring your pressure down.  That has of course thrown tens of millions into the "diseased" basket -- which produced howls of outrage from many sources -- including me.

A recent article In JAMA by a Dr. Philip Greenland has however hit back and said that the problem is the high level of unhealthy lifestyles among Americans -- including unhealthy diets.  He said that the critics are shooting the messenger -- and his article is overall a good defence of the new guidelines

An article by the ever-skeptical Prof. John  Ioannidis is more cautious, however.  He doesn't altogether disagree with the new guidelines but points out that the reseasrch on whih it is based has some rather large flaws if used to guide policy.  It is good reseearch but as a basis for public policy guidelins, extraordinary rigor is required in the research.  The big flaw in the existing research being that it is based on an unrepresentative sample of people who already had heart symptoms.  How far can we generalize from them?  Possibly not at all and probably only weakly,

I would like to add some further criticisms:  Some of the benefits of therapy were tiny.  Adding one extra drug to a conventional regime, for instance, gave an improvement in health outcomes of just one half of one percent (0.54). That could well be illusory.  The authors appear to rely on the finding being statistically significant but, given the large sample size (9361) practically everything is guaranteed to be significant. Statistical significance in that case means nothing.

One also has to be pretty suspicious about the proportion of the population who have ideal cardiovascular health -- from 0.5% in a population of African American individuals to 12% in workers in a South Florida health care organization. One understands that Africans do tend to die younger but saying that 99.5% of that population has some degree of risk seems extreme -- perhaps extreme enough for the finding to be ignored.

A final difficulty I see lies principally with Dr Greenland's article.  He stresses the importance of a "healthy" diet in getting heart attacks down.  That's a very conventional view  but is it right?  And if it is right, how do we know our diet is healthy?  Up until a couple of years ago fat was regarded as bad and sugar as safe, but that has now been stood on its head. The opposite is now the accepted wisdom.  So color me skeptical.  If there is such a thing as a healthy diet, I doubt if anyone knows what it is.  So what do I eat to avoid a heart attack?  I don't think Dr Greenland or anyone else knows.

So I come down to the conclusion by Prof.  Ioannidis, who states, "The ability to generalize these gains across diverse settings in clinical practice and to use limited resources wisely remains an open challenge."  In other words, we don't know when someone would be helped by the new guidelines.  They are a long way from gospel   -- JR

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A treasonous President leaves a treasonous legacy>/b>

Peter Stzrok was the Deputy Assistant Director of the FBI and second in command over counterintelligence, since demoted.  He is a liberal progressive who supported O.  He felt that Trump was a security risk to the United States.  He took it upon himself to ensure that Trump could never be elected.  Once elected, he did everything in his power to undermine his presidency.  He became a leading member of the Mueller team to indict Trump.  He had a secret, untraceable phone with a direct link to Hillary Clinton.

We now know via text messages that Stzrok met with the Deputy Director of the FBI, Andrew McCabe, to discuss his "insurance policy" against Trump.  This happened.  This is direct evidence that our government colluded by overt acts to prevent Trump from being elected, and, once elected, to be unable to govern.  It is an attempt to subvert the election process and to overthrow the existing government of the US.

Stzrok may have the best intentions and may think he knows what is best for the US, but he is guilty of treason.  It is not his decision.  He also intervened in the Clinton email scandal changing the phrase "grossly negligence" to "extremely careless."  It was to ensure Clinton was not indicted, leaving Trump as the only choice.  It is believed that he took the Trump dossier to the FISA court and knowingly used this fabricated document as justification to spy on Americans and the opponent's campaign.

Trying searching Bruce Orh on Google.  The first time I did, I had to check a box indicating I was not a robot.  There were no hits in the top ten.  Bruce Ohr, the number four man in the DOJ, was recently demoted because of his collusion with the law firm and the British spy who fabricated the Trump dossier.  As it turns out, his wife, Nellie, works for the law firm and worked with the US DOJ on Russian affairs.  She was part of the team digging up dirt on Trump.  This dossier was paid for by Clinton and the DNC as opposition research, then dressed up by the FBI and the DOJ as justification to spy on Americans.  It appears the DOJ colluded with Hillary Clinton, the DNC, and the Russians to fabricate the Trump dossier.  It is likely that Orh authorized payment for further research against Trump.  Orh used his wife to dig up dirt on Trump then used the dossier to spy on members of the Trump team before and after the election.

Then we have the Mueller team.  It is constructed primarily of Clinton supporters.  The same posse that tried its best to prevent Trump from being elected is now its judge, jury, and executioner.

What we have here is the US government--namely the DOJ, FBI, and the CIA--picking winners and losers.  We have a government willing to subvert the law and the US election process to prevent someone whom it believes is detrimental to leading the US from being elected.  We have, in fact, a political campaign fabricating documents against its opponent and using the vast resources of the US government to use these documents to illegally spy on Americans and undermine a political opponent and to undermine the legitimate government of the United States.  It is ironic that the government, in fact, was the one colluding with the Russian.  It was not the Russians undermining the US election process; it was the Clintons, DNC, DOJ, FBI, and the CIA.  This is the biggest political scandal ever, bar none.   I don't even mention Sanders.

I won't go into the Uranium One deal here either, but it is another example of treason, selling out our national interest to the highest bidder for personal profit.

We are at an inflection point with the Deep State. The Deep State either wins and Trump is impeached, or the Deep State gets cleaned out.  An Inspector General is looking into the allegations.  I suspect it will find nothing, not because there is nothing there to find; it has to ensure that nothing is found.  The Mueller investigation may turn out to be the best event ever for Trump.  He may well be able to keep his promise to clean out the Deep State.  In the end, only one will be left standing.  It will either be Trump or the Deep State.  Place your bets now.  Who do I think will win?  It is one man against the vast resources of the state and mainstream media.  I think the odds of Trump winning are similar to him winning the election--highly improbable.  If Trump wins, could it spell the end of the FBI as we know it?  Its corruption knows no bounds.  It must change.

For those liberal progressives that don't care as long as Trump is booted out of office, be careful what you wish for.  What the liberal progressives can do at this point can be done against them in the future.  It is treason of the highest order.  It is a political scandal orders of magnitude above Watergate.  People of all political persuasions should be concerned.  Put your partisan politics aside and be objective.  This cannot end well.

 SOURCE

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The FBI: Has it Become the Secret Police?

Let’s not miss the most damning dimension of the texts between Strzok and Page. If you read all of their texts it becomes clear that their complaints about candidate Trump and his supporters are nothing more than ad hominem slurs - no different, really, than Hillary’s “deplorables” remark or Obama’s dismissal of Americans who "cling to their guns and religion" in bitterness. They are an attempt to dismiss a legitimate political movement and the, human aspirations behind, it with irrelevant but pungent slander. They are not texting about policy differences, social problems or even constitutional issues. In fact, these are law officers at the highest levels, who took an oath to protect The Constitution of the United States and they are actively engaged in discussing ways of denying a legitimate political movement its constitutional right to a free and fair election. This is dangerous and disturbing and it is a

This text from Strzok is the proof:

"I want to believe the path u threw out 4 consideration in Andy's office-that there's no way he gets elected-but I'm afraid we can't take that risk.It's like an insurance policy in unlikely event u die be4 you're 40”

The very idea of these three sitting in the office of the deputy director of the most powerful law enforcement agency spinning ideas for an insurance policy against the unlikely election of True against the howling headwinds of the mainstream press and other efforts of the establishment should scare anyone interested in preserving The Constitution. There are only two possible explanations for their behavior and the sinister direction of this and other tweets. One might be that they are so sure that they know better what is best for this nation and all her people that they feel it incumbent upon them to become our unseen benefactors - manipulating the results of elections and saving us from our own stupidity. The other, which I find more likely, is that they knew that they are not the pure hearted “public servants” that they portray themselves as and that they are at personal risk if the status quo of and the established power structure are shaken up.

I think the second explanation much more likely- because of the lack of substantive reasons and complaints in their texts and because the slander they throw at Mr Trump and his supporters fairly reeks of hatred, anger and vengeance. These are the blind feelings of a threatened animal who feels attacked or perhaps the cringing of a fraud in danger of being exposed. Whatever the case, they are not the arguments of a passionate believer in something good.

How did it come to this? How did the supposed protectors of our laws and civil order come to feel entitled to despise us and contemplate (we still don’t know the extent to which they did or didn’t carry them out) plans to thwart our political wishes? It is the arrogance of Progressivism, the entrenched interest of a class of political actors who see themselves as entitled to be our leaders  and the loss of faith in any ethical, moral or constitutional standard.

SOURCE

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Trump Undoing Obama's 'Secret List of More Than 600 Regulations,' OMB Offical Says

In an Op-Ed on Wednesday, an Office of Management and Budget (OMB) administrator declared that the Trump Administration is undoing the “needlessly ‘secret’ list of more than 600 regulations" created by President Barack Obama before leaving office.

Neomi Rao, administrator of OMB’s Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs also said the Trump deregulation effort is ahead of schedule, in her Wall Street Journal column detailing plans to further eliminate burdensome government red tape:

“This week, the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs released a status report on agencies’ progress on regulations. In only its first 10 months, the Trump administration has far exceeded its promise to eliminate two existing regulations for each new one—an unprecedented advance against the regulatory state.

“By comparison, in his final eight months, President Obama saddled the economy with as much as $15.2 billion in regulatory costs, while hiding from the public a needlessly “secret” list of more than 600 regulations. Reversing this trend sends a clear message to families and businesses: It’s OK to plan for the future without the looming threat of red tape.

“On Thursday OIRA will publish the administration’s first Regulatory Plan and Agenda, which covers all federal agencies for fiscal year 2018. The plan calls for the administration to drive already substantial reductions in regulatory costs even further. This is a fundamental shift from the policies of the past.”

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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Let's Liberate Blacks From Left-Wing Politics

Star Parker
   
A new Quinnipiac University poll shows yet another perspective on the deep racial division in our country.

According to the poll, 86 percent of blacks compared to 50 percent of whites say that President Trump does not “respect people of color as much as he respects white people.”

However, the partisan divide is even greater than the racial divide.

Ninety-one percent of Democrats compared to 12 percent of Republicans agree with the statement that President Trump is racially biased against people of color.

Bottom line: What we call a racial divide today is really a partisan divide.

Consider the remarks of Rep. John Lewis, who decided to not attend the opening of the new Civil Rights Museum in Mississippi because Trump announced he would attend. Lewis called Trump’s attendance “an affront to the veterans of the civil rights movement.”

Or the president of the NAACP who also announced he would not attend because of Trump’s attendance. NAACP President Derrick Johnson called Trump’s attendance at the museum’s opening “a distraction from us having the opportunity to honor true Americans who sacrificed so much to ensure that democracy works.”

But the “insult” to civil rights comes today from these very black leaders who claim to represent this movement.

The leaders who fought in the 1960s for civil rights fought for freedom and against stereotyping any individual because of their race. Freedom means living and thinking freely according to one’s judgment and conscience. That is, blacks may have conservative as well as liberal views.

In 2016, 8 percent of black voters, or 1.2 million people, voted for Donald Trump. But these 1.2 million blacks don’t exist in the view of today’s “civil rights” leaders.

Like the Dred Scott decision in 1857, which declared blacks inhuman and therefore not eligible to be American citizens, so-called black leaders of 2017 declare the same status for black Republicans and black conservatives.

About 15 percent of black men between ages of 18 and 54 voted for Donald Trump.

A black leadership whose primary interest is black freedom, rather than left-wing politics, would be asking why this many black Americans voted for Donald Trump.

More careful reasoning would shine light among black voters that we have a president who is an independent thinker and who has the courage to fight against an entrenched status quo. And fighting against an entrenched status quo is something African-Americans need.

As Housing and Urban Development secretary, Dr. Ben Carson is creatively finding new approaches to the largely failed government housing programs.

Republican Sen. Ted Cruz introduced an amendment to the tax bill just passed in the Senate that expands 529 college savings plans, which enables tax-free savings to pay for college, to include K-12 education. This will allow all parents to save tax-free and spend up to $10,000 per year on expenses for public school, private school, religious schools and home schooling.

This has huge implications for black parents and children. America’s most famous homeschooled American is Simone Biles, who won four gold medals in the 2016 Olympic games.

Soon the Trump administration and Congress will move on reforming our bloated and inefficient welfare programs. We are spending some $900 billion annually on anti-poverty programs that are helping to bankrupt the country and doing a very poor job improving the quality of life for the Americans these programs are designed to help. Black leaders should be anxious to participate in this vital and historic effort to do a much better job in how we assist low-income Americans.

It’s in the interest of every African-American to start thinking about freedom. This is what the civil rights movement was about. Not left-wing politics.

SOURCE

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Whistleblower Says CFPB Falsified Documents to Fine Payday Lender

A former employee of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is calling for an investigation after accusing managers of falsifying documents to impose fines on a payday lender.

Cassandra Jackson, a former CFPB examiner in the southeast division, sent a letter last week to Attorney General Jeff Sessions also accusing managers of "widespread racism and gender discrimination."

Jackson said her superiors at the CFPB asked her to falsify documents during her investigation into a Texas-based payday lending company, Ace Cash Express.

"During the course of this examination, I was asked to change, remove, and otherwise falsify documents connected with this examination," Jackson said.

Jackson said she was asked to remove document evidence proving Ace Cash Express was complying with CFPB rules and to write a report including findings she knew to be "false and fabricated."

"I was specifically told to cite Ace Cash Express for a violation for which I had verified the company was in compliance and to state that Ace Cash Express did not provide, and that the CFPB did not receive, documents that would have satisfied the CFPB's guidelines, despite having received that information from Ace Cash Express," Jackson said.

Jackson refused to follow management's orders and said she was retaliated against for not falsifying the report. Managers then "proceeded to modify the report" and used it to "garner" a $10 million settlement with the company, even though Jackson said her report "did not find significant violations by the lender."

The CFPB took enforcement action against Ace Cash Express in July 2014. The CFPB said the company pushed "payday borrowers into a cycle of debt" and forced the company to offer $5 million in refunds and pay a $5 million fine.

Jackson said after refusing to falsify records, managers informed her she was "not performing" at grade level and subjected to disciplinary action.

"I encourage you to initiate an investigation into this matter, as well as civil rights violations at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau," Jackson said. "During my nearly five years at the Bureau, I encountered widespread racism and gender discrimination from management."

Jackson said she was ultimately forced out of the CFPB due to an "incredibly hostile work environment and the retaliation I continued to receive from management at the CFPB due to the Ace Cash Express incident."

The U.S. Consumer Coalition, a consumer advocacy group, released the whistleblower letter.

"Ms. Jackson is a dedicated public servant who believes in the mission of the CFPB," said Brian J. Wise, president of the U.S. Consumer Coalition. "Unfortunately, her claims are all too familiar to the dedicated employees serving under the direction of CFPB management."

"We join Ms. Jackson in calling on U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions to initiate an investigation into this case as well as the dozens of cases of civil rights abuses we are aware of at the CFPB," he said.

SOURCE

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Congress must end Chain Migration and the Visa Lottery program

By Printus LeBlanc

On Monday, there was yet another terrorist attack in New York City. Luckily the incompetence of the extremist led to only five injuries, with many speculating it could have been much worse. This attack comes on the heels of another attack on Halloween day that left eight dead and 11 injured. Both attackers were brought to the country legally, thanks to an outdated immigration system. Congress knows what the problem is, why have they not fixed it?

The Department of Homeland Security has confirmed Akayed Ullah, the zealot from Monday’s attack, came to the U.S. in 2011 via an F43 “fourth preference” family immigration visa, also known as chain migration. F43 means he was in the most distant family-relationship eligibility category, i.e., the brother or sister of an adult citizen. It gets worse, the sibling that allowed Ullah to immigrate entered the U.S. via the Visa Lottery program. The Visa Lottery program is the same program that brought Sayfullo Habibullaevich Saipov to the U.S. In case you don’t remember; he is the terrorist from the Halloween day attack.

Why has Congress failed to act on chain migration and the Visa Lottery?

The latest immigration numbers show more than 60 percent of new legal arrivals to the U.S. since 1981 came here via chain migration. These are people who came here because they knew someone, not because they were a doctor, engineer, or scientist, but because they were related to someone else. At a time when Silicon Valley is screaming for higher skilled workers, does it make sense to prioritize loose family connections instead of labor market needs?

Amnesty advocates and the mainstream media will tell you there is no problem with chain migration or the Visa Lottery. It could be because they are too busy reporting on the diet coke habit of the President to notice, but if they opened their eyes, they would see a problem:

In 2002, Imran Mandhai pled guilty to conspiring to bomb a National Guard Armory and electrical power substations near Miami. Mandhai was in the country because his parents were Visa Lottery winners from Pakistan.

Syed Haris Ahmed was convicted of terrorism-related activities in the United States and abroad in 2009. Ahmed was another winner of the Visa Lottery system in Pakistan.

A few days before Sayfullo Habibullaevich Saipov’s truck attack on Halloween day in New York City, another Visa Lottery winner, Abdurasul Hasanovich Juraboev, was sentenced to 15 years in prison after pleading guilty to conspiring to provide material support to Islamic State terrorists.

In one of the more egregious examples of poor immigration management, a leader of Hamas, Mousa Mohammed Abu Marzook, received a Green Card through the predecessor program to the Visa Lottery. He was finally deported for terrorist activities in 1997.

In July 2002, Egyptian national, Hesham Mohamed Ali Hedayet, opened fire at the El Al Airlines ticket counter at LAX airport, murdering two ticket agents and wounding three others. He came here via tourist visa in 1992, claimed political asylum, then granted Lawful Permanent Resident status after his wife won the Visa Lottery in 1997. This happened despite being arrested in Egypt for being a member of Al-Gama’a al-Islamiyya, a group supported by Al-Qaeda.

Another falsehood spread by amnesty radicals is the economic argument. Activists will often argue that immigration legal and illegal is a net positive for the economy. When you look at the data, the case doesn’t hold up.

Illegal immigration alone is costing the U.S. taxpayer $135 billion a year in medical care, education, and law enforcement costs. A 2012 study found that 51 percent of households headed by an immigrant used welfare. The federal government spent almost $500 billion on welfare programs in the same year the study was done. How much of that went to immigrant households?

Despite the glaring need to end chain migration and the Visa Lottery program, Congress has yet to act. The Democrat Party is happy with the status quo because they get to import people that need government assistance, and people that need government assistance are more likely to vote Democrat. Republican leadership is in love with the 2012 election autopsy report, even though Trump proved everything in the report wrong with his election.

However, thanks to the election of President Trump the idea of a common-sense immigration policy that puts the needs of Americans first is on the horizon. While the pro-amnesty crowd want the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program to be made into law, President Trump is standing firm. Any deal that includes DACA must include the elimination of chain migration, the Visa Lottery, and a border wall.

In an interview with Laura Ingraham, Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) seemed to be coming around to the idea also stating, “I agree with Cotton and Perdue…Chain Migration, doing something about the Diversity Visa Lottery, there are plenty of changes to the legal immigration system that should be added to any kind of a DACA fix that we do.”

McConnell was referring to the RAISE Act. Legislation introduced earlier this year by Sens. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) and David Perdue (R-Ga.) that would slash chain migration, eliminate the Visa Lottery program, and return the U.S. to a merit-based immigration system.

Americans for Limited Government President Rick Manning has long been a proponent of overhauling the failing immigration system stating, “Yesterday’s horrific attempt at mass murder by a person who came from Bangladesh via chain migration underscores the importance of ending both the visa lottery system and chain migration. It is absurd that when one member of a family wins the lottery to be able to legally come to the U.S. that every extended relative is put to the front of the line for future immigration. It is in both U.S. national security and economic interests to have an immigration system that prioritizes those with needed skills and experience. Any discussion of immigration law changes must begin with ending chain migration, building the wall and securing the border before any other considerations.”

Chain Migration and the Visa Lottery program, two pieces of a broken immigration system coming together to put American lives in danger. U.S. immigration policy must be based on what is best for the U.S., not what is best for the incoming immigrant. Local, state, and federal resources are stretched too thin as it is. It makes no sense economically to import people that cannot support themselves and are going to depend on a system on the verge of collapse. President Trump won the election with a message of putting Americans first, it is time for Congress to live up to their end of the deal.

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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Is it possible to boost your intelligence by training?

Some actual science from Salon

Scientists achieved astonishing results when training a student with a memory training program in a landmark experiment in 1982. After 44 weeks of practice, the student, dubbed SF, expanded his ability to remember digits from seven numbers to 82. However, this remarkable ability did not extend beyond digits – they also tried with consonants.

The study can be considered the beginning of cognitive training research, investigating how practice in areas ranging from music to chess and puzzles impacts our intelligence. So what’s the state of this research 35 years later – have scientists discovered any foolproof ways to make us smarter? We reviewed the evidence to find out.

The topic of cognitive training is still very controversial, with scientists expressing opposing views about its effectiveness. Enthusiastic claims about the effects of cognitive training programs usually follow the publication of a single experiment reporting positive findings.

Much less attention is paid when a study reports negative results. This phenomenon is quite common in many areas of social and life sciences and often provides a biased view of a particular research field. That is why systematic reviews such as ours are essential to rule out the risk of such bias.

Making sense of conflicting evidence

In a new paper, published in Current Directions in Psychological Science, we synthesize what the reviews say about several cognitive training programs. Our main method was meta-analysis – that is, a set of statistical techniques for estimating the true overall effect of a treatment.

To begin with, music expertise has been associated with superior memory for music material (notes on a stave). Remarkably, music experts exhibit a superior memory even when the musical material is meaningless (random notes). In the same vein, musical aptitude predicts music skills such as pitch and chord discrimination.

However, music instruction does not seem to exert any true effect on skills outside of music. Indeed, our meta-analysis shows that engaging in music has no impact on general measures of intelligence, when placebo effects are controlled for with active control groups. Music training does not affect either cognitive skills – fluid intelligence, memory, phonological processing, spatial ability and cognitive control – or academic achievement. These outcomes have been recently confirmed by other independent labs.

The field of chess presents an analogous pattern of findings. Chess masters’ exceptional memory for chess positions is renowned. However, to date, chess training appears to exert only a small effect on cognitive and academic skills. What’s more, almost none of the studies reporting such effects actually used a control group – suggesting that the results were mainly due to placebos (such as being excited about a new activity).

Similar results have been observed in the field of working memory training. Working memory is a cognitive system, related to short-term memory, that stores and manipulates the information necessary to solve complex cognitive tasks. Participants undergoing working memory training programs systematically improve their performance in several working memory tasks. However, experimental groups consistently fail to show any improvement over active controls in other skills such as fluid intelligence, cognitive control or academic achievement. These findings were confirmed in three independent meta-analyses about children, adults, and the general population.

Video game training also fails to enhance cognitive function. In another recent meta-analysis, to be published in Psychological Bulletin, we show that video game players outperform non-gamers on a variety of cognitive tasks. However, when non-players take part in video game training experiments, no appreciable effect is observed in any of the outcome measures. This suggests the video game players may just have been better at those tasks to start with.

Another group of scientists also recently carried out a systematic review on general brain training programs (often including puzzles, tasks and drills). While the researchers reported some effects, they found an inverse relationship between the size of the effects and the quality of experimental designs of training programs. Put simply, when the experiment includes essential features such as active control groups and large samples, the benefits are very modest at best.

The problem with misinterpretation

A pervasive problem with cognitive training studies is that improved performance in isolated cognitive tasks is often seen as a proof for cognitive enhancement. This is a common misinterpretation. To provide solid evidence, it is necessary to investigate the effects of training programs on “latent cognitive constructs” – the variables underlying the performance in a set of cognitive tasks.

For example, working memory skill is a cognitive construct and can be measured by collecting data such as digit span. But if the training exerts an actual effect on the cognitive skill (construct) you should see the effects on many different tasks and latent factors – multiple measures of the same cognitive skill. And it is rare that these training programs are set up to do that.

That means that, to date, cognitive training programs do not even necessarily boost those cognitive functions that the trained tasks are supposed to involve. What is enhanced is just the ability to perform the trained task and similar tasks.

Researchers and the general public should be fully aware of the limits of benefits from training the brain. However, these negative findings shouldn’t discourage us from searching for ways to boost intelligence and other skills. We do know that our cognition is extraordinarily malleable to training. What we need now is more promising pathways to general cognitive enhancement rather than domain-specific enhancement. Our best bet for achieving that is probably by carrying out research on genetics and neuroscience.

SOURCE

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The Bureaucratic Blind Eye

A brand new scandal has broken out at the Department of Veterans Affairs, where the fingerprints of the department’s bureaucrats are all over the latest evidence of misconduct. USA Today’s Donavan Slack broke the story:

Neurosurgeon John Henry Schneider racked up more than a dozen malpractice claims and settlements in two states, including cases alleging he made surgical mistakes that left patients maimed, paralyzed or dead.

He was accused of costing one patient bladder and bowel control after placing spinal screws incorrectly, he allegedly left another paralyzed from the waist down after placing a device improperly in his spinal canal. The state of Wyoming revoked his medical license after another surgical patient died.

Schneider then applied for a job earlier this year at the Department of Veterans Affairs hospital in Iowa City, Iowa. He was forthright in his application about the license revocation and other malpractice troubles.

But the VA hired him anyway.

He started work in April at a hospital that serves 184,000 veterans in 50 counties in Iowa, Illinois and Missouri.

Some of his patients already have suffered complications. Schneider performed four brain surgeries in a span of four weeks on one 65-year-old veteran who died in August, according to interviews with Schneider and family members. He has performed three spine surgeries on a 77-year-old Army veteran since July—the last two to try and clean up a lumbar infection from the first, the patient said.

Schneider’s hiring is not an isolated case.

Slack goes on to document several other instances in which the VA’s bureaucrats knowingly overlooked the history of the medical professionals they hired, where evidence and findings of malpractice, license suspensions and other misconduct were either ignored or dismissed, where the consequences of those hiring decisions have negatively impacted the quality of treatment that America’s miltary veterans receive at the VA. The new scandal has already drawn bipartisan attention on Capitol Hill demanding an investigation.

Alas, the knowing hiring of individuals with shady track records is not an isolated to the bureaucrats at the VA. The scandal-plagued Internal Revenue Service has behaved similarly. Accounting Today‘s Michael Cohn reports:

The Internal Revenue Service rehired more than 200 employees with previous conduct and performance issues, according to a new government report.

The report, from the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration, found that 10 percent of the more than 2,000 former employees rehired by the IRS between January 2015 and March 2016 had been previously fired while under investigation for a substantiated conduct or performance issue.

Of the more than 200 rehired employees, 86 had been “separated” from the IRS while they under investigation for absences and leave, workplace disruption, or failure to follow instructions. Four had been terminated or resigned for willful failure to properly file their federal tax returns; while another four employees had been separated from their jobs while under investigation for unauthorized accesses to taxpayer information. On top of that, 27 former employees didn’t disclose a previous termination or conviction on their application, as required, but were nonetheless rehired by the IRS.

Both hiring scandals can be considered to be evidence of a culture of corrupt cronyism within the U.S. government, where its bureaucrats care first and foremost about putting their own interests before all others and to the exclusion of serving the interests of regular Americans. A third case of insider cronyism within a U.S. government agency can be found in recent news headlines involving the largely redundant Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, where the quitting head of the bureau attempted to install his deputy as his replacement in defiance of federal laws governing the filling of permanent vacancies, where the deputy’s legal claim to the position was subsequently refused by a federal court.

To quote Ian Fleming from his James Bond novel Goldfinger: “Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. Three times is enemy action.” At what point will regular Americans receive both the answers and accountability they deserve from the bureaucrats in these agencies who claim to serve the public?

SOURCE

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Contra Activist Judges, It’s Not Discriminatory to Prohibit Transgender Individuals From Joining Military

On Dec. 11, a federal lower court judge in Washington, D.C., refused to stay her earlier Oct. 30 order blocking President Donald Trump’s Aug. 25 directive regarding transgender military service.

That directive, transmitted to the departments of Defense and Homeland Security, put to a halt the Obama administration’s June 2016 plan to allow transgender individuals to serve openly in the U.S. armed forces, beginning in July 2017 (but put on hold until Jan. 1, 2018, by Defense Secretary James Mattis).

If allowed to stand, Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly’s decision—coupled with similar Nov.  21 and Dec. 11 holdings in separate case by federal judges in Maryland and Seattle—would have enormous negative consequences.

It would mean that effective Jan. 1, 2018, the U.S. armed services would have to begin admitting transgender individuals, subject to certain guidelines. The armed services also (based on the ruling by the Maryland judge) would have to fund sex reassignment surgical procedures for military personnel—on the taxpayer’s dime.

As a legal matter, these federal court decisions are deficient. Judges have no business displacing the reasoned decision of the president, under his constitutional authority as commander-in-chief, to promote military readiness by establishing sound principles for eligibility to serve in the armed forces.

The lower court decisions acknowledge this presidential authority, but nevertheless claim that, by being prevented from serving in the military, transgender individuals would be denied “equal protection of the law” guaranteed by the Constitution.

But equal protection prohibits invidious discrimination based on immutable characteristics such as race—discrimination lacking any rational justification. It does not apply to rationally based noninvidious differentiation among classes of individuals needed to advance national goals, such as a strong military.

Rules denying military service opportunities to individuals who have serious medical problems (for example, heart disease, chronic asthma, or cancer) are not invidious discrimination—they are fully rational efforts to promote well-run and effective military services. Because individuals suffering from significant medical difficulties drive up costs and tend to impair combat effectiveness, it is perfectly rational to bar them from military recruitment.

These medical considerations apply directly to transgender individuals, who often must cope with serious physical and psychological problems

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 THE PSYCHOLOGIST.

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

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Republicans are the workers

I don't think it is a big stretch to say that only the workers would buy an extended-cab pickup truck and those are the vehicles most seen in Republican neighborhoods.  The idea that the car you buy tells you about the person is an old one.  I think we have all heard that a man who drives a big, ostentaatious car is small somewhere else.  And in my observation, short men almost always drive big cars. And in her classic book "Watching the English: The Hidden Rules of English Behaviour", anthropologist Kate Fox gives a very detailed account of what cars the various social classes in England drive.  So the report below sounds pretty informative to me.


In a paper published earlier this year, Stanford computer scientist Timnit Gebru wrote about how neighborhoods can be evaluated by the makes and models of the cars parked in their driveways. The paper appeared in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and it's an interesting read.

By analyzing the images already available as part of Google Street Views, the research team was able to identify which neighborhoods were Republican and which were Democrat as well as many other characteristics.

It determined that in those areas where the number of sedans is higher than pickup trucks, there’s an 88 percent chance of the district voting Democratic. Where there are more pickup trucks, there’s an 82 percent chance it’s a Republican-voting district.

The project devised an automated methodology that estimated the social characteristics of regions covering 200 U.S. cities based on analyzing 50 million images from Street Views. The images were originally created by Google sending cars through every neighborhood in the country, capturing images that are then displayed and accessed on Google Maps. Their automated process took two weeks, compared to 15 years if the images had been analyzed by hand.

The automated process to analyze the images was accomplished using computers and artificial intelligence software called “convolutional neural networks” that learned to recognize the vehicles by identifying unique features on each. That allows the computer to identify the make and model, year, value, and fuel efficiency of the vehicle.

To characterize the automobiles, they hired Amazon Turk workers to develop a library of car images from Edmunds.com, Cars.com, and Craig’s List. Their data came up with 2,657 visually distinctive categories, covering cars found in the U.S. since 1990.

So, what else did their analysis show from the automobile information? They came to the following conclusions, as quoted from the report:

Hondas and Toyotas most strongly indicate an Asian neighborhood.
Chryslers, Buicks and Oldsmobiles “are positively associated with African-American neighborhoods.”

Pickup trucks and Volkswagens are associated with white neighborhoods.

Sedans are most associated with Democratic voter precincts; Republican-leaning precincts are most associated with extended-cab pickup trucks.

The researchers noted how this process could be a supplement or even a substitute for the way census data is now acquired because they found good agreement between their findings and those from the manual surveys.

They also noted that the U.S. spends more than $250 million each year on the American Community Survey (ACS) that sends workers door-to-door to interview the residents in each home in order to gather statistics relating to race, gender, education, occupation, and more. The Census Bureau conducts their survey once every 10 years. While both are more accurate, they each take a long time to analyze and don't pick up recent trends.

While a fascinating discovery, it will require a leap of faith and more validation for us to believe we are what we drive.

SOURCE

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More on Giovanni Gentile

Dinesh D'Souza breaks down the socialist history of fascism for Prager University.
   
“He’s a fascist!” For decades, this has been a favorite smear of the left, aimed at those on the right. Every Republican president — for that matter, virtually every Republican — since the 1970s has been called a fascist; now, more than ever.

This label is based on the idea that fascism is a phenomenon of the political right. The left says it is, and some self-styled white supremacists and neo-Nazis embrace the label.

But are they correct?  To answer this question, we have to ask what fascism really means: What is its underlying ideology? Where does it even come from?

These are not easy questions to answer. We know the name of the philosopher of capitalism: Adam Smith. We know the name of the philosopher of Marxism: Karl Marx. But who’s the philosopher of fascism?

Yes — exactly. You don’t know. Don’t feel bad. Almost no one knows. This is not because he doesn’t exist, but because historians, most of whom are on the political left, had to erase him from history in order to avoid confronting fascism’s actual beliefs. So, let me introduce him to you. His name is Giovanni Gentile.

Born in 1875, he was one of the world’s most influential philosophers in the first half of the twentieth century. Gentile believed that there were two “diametrically opposed” types of democracy. One is liberal democracy, such as that of the United States, which Gentile dismisses as individualistic — too centered on liberty and personal rights — and therefore selfish. The other, the one Gentile recommends, is “true democracy,” in which individuals willingly subordinate themselves to the state.

Like his philosophical mentor, Karl Marx, Gentile wanted to create a community that resembles the family, a community where we are “all in this together.” It’s easy to see the attraction of this idea. Indeed, it remains a common rhetorical theme of the left.

For example, at the 1984 convention of the Democratic Party, the governor of New York, Mario Cuomo, likened America to an extended family where, through the government, people all take care of each other.

Nothing’s changed. Thirty years later, a slogan of the 2012 Democratic Party convention was, “The government is the only thing we all belong to.” They might as well have been quoting Gentile.

Now, remember, Gentile was a man of the left. He was a committed socialist. For Gentile, fascism is a form of socialism — indeed, its most workable form. While the socialism of Marx mobilizes people on the basis of class, fascism mobilizes people by appealing to their national identity as well as their class. Fascists are socialists with a national identity. German Fascists in the 1930s were called Nazis — basically a contraction of the term “national socialist.”

For Gentile, all private action should be oriented to serve society; there is no distinction between the private interest and the public interest. Correctly understood, the two are identical. And who is the administrative arm of the society? It’s none other than the state. Consequently, to submit to society is to submit to the state — not just in economic matters, but in all matters. Since everything is political, the state gets to tell everyone how to think and what to do.

It was another Italian, Benito Mussolini, the fascist dictator of Italy from 1922 to 1943, who turned Gentile’s words into action. In his Dottrina del Fascismo, one of the doctrinal statements of early fascism, Mussolini wrote, “All is in the state and nothing human exists or has value outside the state.” He was merely paraphrasing Gentile.

The Italian philosopher is now lost in obscurity, but his philosophy could not be more relevant because it closely parallels that of the modern left. Gentile’s work speaks directly to progressives who champion the centralized state. Here in America, the left has vastly expanded state control over the private sector, from healthcare to banking; from education to energy. This state-directed capitalism is precisely what German and Italian fascists implemented in the 1930s.

Leftists can’t acknowledge their man, Gentile, because that would undermine their attempt to bind conservatism to fascism. Conservatism wants small government so that individual liberty can flourish. The left, like Gentile, wants the opposite: to place the resources of the individual and industry in the service of a centralized state. To acknowledge Gentile is to acknowledge that fascism bears a deep kinship to the ideology of today’s left. So, they will keep Gentile where they’ve got him: dead, buried, and forgotten.

But we should remember, or the ghost of fascism will continue to haunt us.

SOURCE

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California Still Trashing Workers’ Rights

The California Supreme Court has ruled that the state can impose a contract on employers, in the style of Don Corleone, a deal they can’t refuse. News stories hailed the unanimous ruling as a victory for “farmworkers” but it isn’t. The case deals with Gerawan Farming, a fruit grower in Fresno and Madera counties. A full 99 percent of their employees never voted for representation by the United Farm Workers union and many of the workers were not even born 1990 when the UFW contended to represent them. The UFW then disappeared from the scene but Gerawan still payed the highest wages in California agriculture.

Some 20 years later, the UFW had plunged to about 5,000 members, about the same number of workers Gerawan employs. The UFW demanded that Gerawan workers pay 3 percent of their wages to the union or lose their jobs. In 2013, the state Agricultural Labor Relations Board, all political appointees, oversaw an election. The Board then impounded the ballots, set aside the election and imposed a contract. “Nothing in today’s opinion prevents the employees’ ballots from being counted,” Gerawan said in a statement. “We believe that coerced contracts are constitutionally at odds with free choice.” Gerawan will appeal to the U.S. Supreme court but some realities are already evident.

The ALRB’s refusal to release the workers’ ballots from 2013 should come as no surprise in a state that refuses to release voter data to a federal probe of election fraud. Boards of political appointees imposing contracts is more akin to the Soviet collective farm system than a free agricultural and labor market. Only 16 percent of California workers are union members, so unions do not represent “labor” in any meaningful sense. Millennials may not be aware that United Farm Worker icons Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta derided migrant workers as “wetbacks” and “illegals” and deployed union goons to attack them.

SOURCE

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Republicans Win Historic Race… In Massachusetts

Don’t count the Republican Party out yet: a GOP candidate narrowly won a special election for a Senate seat in deep-blue Massachusetts.

Dean Tran will be the first Republican in recent memory to represent the uber-liberal Worcester-Middlesex in the Massachusetts State Senate.

Tran defeated Democrat Sue Chalifoux Zephir by 607 of the 15,627 votes cast. His strength mainly came from rural areas, as well as from his hometown of Fitchburg. Tran attributed his success to “visiting [voters] at their doorstep, and speaking to them on a personal level.”

The historic victory and celebratory atmosphere were on display as Tran entered his victory party at the local River Styx Brewery, the standing-room-only crowd began chanting: “G-O-P.”

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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From disbelief to dismissal, Alabama women who support Roy Moore have their reasons

Note:  No One Ever Drowned in Roy Moore's Car



Patricia Brady remembers being in an elevator 50 years ago at her office building near Mobile. She was a young woman in her 20s, a graphic designer. A salesman stopped by her office with a product she’d been seeking — she can’t now recall what it was — but she remembers being so excited to get it. And then so terrified.

The salesman, she said, must have misread her enthusiasm for something else, and tried to grope her in the elevator on the way out. “I just said: ‘Whoa, whoa, what are you doing?’ ”  All these years later, the episode still bothers her. “It sticks with you,” said Brady, 74.

But it hasn’t changed her politics. Brady is going to vote for Roy Moore on Tuesday, joining with the 39 percent of women who are, according to polls, standing with the Republican Senate candidate in Alabama despite allegations that he sexually assaulted teenagers, including one who was 14.

During this US Senate race, the sensational has overshadowed the myriad problems in one of the nation’s poorest states.

These female Moore supporters have had the same #MeToo moments that, according to a new Quinnipiac University poll, nearly half of all US women have experienced and are now rehashing the episodes in conversations with co-workers and girlfriends.

But many here are drawing a line of tolerance that favors Moore, viewing the allegations against luminaries like movie titan Harvey Weinstein and NBC star Matt Lauer as far worse than Moore’s alleged trawling for teenage girls in his hometown of Gadsden, Ala., when he was in his 30s. Moore has denied the allegations against him.

Call it a collective forgiveness, or a tendency to protect your own tribe. But many women supporting Moore excuse the Senate hopeful’s behavior as more a boorish phase in his past than predatory, if they believe the allegations at all. They are offering him the benefit of the doubt, and it could well be enough to hand him a seat in the US Senate in a special election race Tuesday against Democrat Doug Jones that polls show is close.

“Anything that happened, if it did happen, happened so many years ago,” explained Brady, a retiree who spoke about the race at the Dragonfly Food Bar, a Mexican-Asian restaurant in downtown Fairhope. “He has been a happily married man for so many years,” she added, pointing to Moore’s 32-year marriage as proof that, whatever happened in his past, he did settle down and change.

It’s not that women necessarily like voting for Moore. “I’ll vote for him because I don’t want the other guy to win,” explained Rebecca Markham, 31, of Guin. She lined up with her family hours before a President Trump rally Friday in Pensacola, Fla., just 14 miles over the state line. She said she didn’t vote for Moore in the primary, but she questions the timing of the allegations. “If they happened so long ago,” she said, “why didn’t they come up then?”

Baldwin County — a suburban and exurban county on the southern tip of the state, just to the east of Mobile Bay — is a place so conservative that three out of every four voters cast a ballot for Trump in the 2016 presidential contest. But last week there were many yard signs for Jones, the Democrat, along major roads and precious few for Moore.

Women working in a Waffle House in Daphne got into a heated debate with their male customers, who backed Moore, when the Senate race came up. “All of a sudden now, after 40 years? They’re going to bring something up,” said one male customer who didn’t want to give his name.

“What about Bill Cosby?” retorted waitress Lynda Sage, as she refilled coffee. “Bill Cosby was almost dead by the time it came out,” she said referring to allegations that the entertainer drugged and raped multiple women. “With all that’s going on,’’ Sage said, “when there is some smoke there’s fire.”

Jones’s campaign has attempted to capitalize on the discomfort many women here feel. His campaign ads feature quotes by prominent Republicans, including Ivanka Trump, disparaging Moore’s behavior. He holds weekly “Women’s Wednesdays” that focus on women’s issues. Last week the featured guest was Lilly Ledbetter, the Alabama native best known as the namesake of the Obama-era law reducing gender pay gaps.

Moore’s campaign, too, is trying to find prominent women to pitch its candidate. Gina Loudon, a former Trump media aide, spoke here last week at a Moore rally and reminded voters that Democrats, too, have a list of leaders who’ve treated women badly, labeling Democrats as hailing from the party of Bill Clinton, Senator Al Franken, Representative John Conyers, and former representative Anthony Weiner.

“Why would you listen to them about your own decision in this election?” Loudon asked supporters packed into a barn on a rainy evening. “I know the women of Alabama are just plain smarter than that.”

Many women do see their support for Moore as a political calculation, just as women have long tolerated poor male behavior as an unfortunate price to pay to achieve some other goal in business or social circles.

That’s the case for Donna Horn, the head of the Pike County Republican Party, who said the primary reason that she’s backing Moore is her deeply held views on abortion. Moore opposes abortion, and Jones supports abortion rights. “That is a line I could not cross,” she said.

Horn, 61, owns a Budweiser distribution company in Troy and has long worked in a male-dominated world. She says that she’s never had an experience she considers sexual harassment — but men have sometimes made comments, which she’s managed by swiftly shutting down the men who make them. “You have to handle that in a firm way,” she said.

With Moore, she believes today’s standards of behavior are being unfairly applied to his past, noting that her own grandmother was 17 years old when she married a man in his late 30s who became her grandfather. “It just wasn’t that uncommon,” Horn said. “I know it raises more eyebrows now than it did back then.”

There’s also a sense among some of Moore’s supporters that, in their own personal experience, they’ve put up with plenty of borderline behavior that they didn’t consider sexual harassment or assault. Allegations alone, they said, shouldn’t end a man’s career.

“Being in the military for 20 years, you see a lot of stuff,” said Cindy Dixon, 52, as she shivered in near-freezing weather in Pensacola, waiting outside the Trump rally on Friday night.

“I wasn’t sexually harassed,” said Dixon, who was in the Air Force until recently, when she and her husband retired to Brewton, Ala. “I think people make too much out of this. It’s life.”

And particularly since most of the allegations don’t include physical force, she doesn’t entirely blame Moore for his behavior. “I don’t see him as a child molester,” Dixon said. “When you have 16-year-old girls flaunting their stuff, they’re not acting like children.”

Blaming the accusers was a common theme among women voting for Moore. “If you run with the dogs, you’re going to get fleas,” said Therese Gilmore, 59, who attended a rally here for Moore last week and owns a hair salon near Mobile. “Most of them put themselves in those situations.”

More important to her, Gilmore said, is keeping a conservative vote in the Senate. Gilmore lamented the skyrocketing costs for health care — saying that friends are paying as much as $1,700 a month for coverage. And she’s worried about illegal immigration. She wanted the conversation to steer clear of the accusations.

“You need to get off all this bullcrap, because ain’t nobody interested,” Gilmore told a Globe reporter asking about the allegations of sexual assault.

The most troubling accusation, even for the women who said they are voting for Moore, was that of Beverly Nelson, who accused Moore of trying to force her to perform oral sex in a car when she was 16. She offered what she called proof of their contact: A yearbook that he’d inscribed, signing it “Love, Roy Moore, D.A.” (Nelson has since admitted adding her own notes below his signature.)

SOURCE

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‘Evil’ Tax Cuts? Nope, It’s Blue-State Panic

Wealthy blue-state foes of the GOP tax bill face a harsh look in the mirror

 Ah, the holiday season. It’s a magical time, bursting with joy and merriment, the laughter of children, jolly parties, twinkling lights, mildly terrifying mall-dwelling Santas . . . and the faint sounds of caterwauling blue-state politicians shrieking that the GOP tax bill signals the end of civilization as we know it. Can you hear it? Fire and brimstone! The weeping and gnashing of teeth!

But hark, New York Times: What have we here? Why, it’s an analysis from your own news pages, dated December 5, with a doozy of a headline: “Among the Tax Bill’s Biggest Losers: High-Income, Blue State Taxpayers.”

Well, this is certainly awkward. Let’s read on: “While the Republican tax overhaul would add up to an overall tax cut for individual taxpayers, at least through 2025, millions could still immediately receive a tax increase,” notes the report.

Interesting! Who might those people be? “For many, particularly those in Democratic areas who earn $200,000 or more, the increase would come from the repeal of the state and local tax deduction, known as SALT.”

If you know anything about California, you likely now know why good old Governor Moonbeam is freaking out. California may be filled with natural wonders, but it’s also a Democratic area chock full of people who earn $200,000 or more — and it’s also known for high state-level income taxes, with a top marginal rate of 13.3 percent. In the bad old days, Californians could count on simply deducting this highway robbery from their federal taxable income, masking the state’s shenanigans and blunting the financial pain. The GOP tax bill yanks what is essentially a federal subsidy away, forcing blue-state residents to face the reality of their local high-tax, high-spending regimes.

This is basic federalism at work. In theory, it should encourage accountability, particularly among high-tax states long dependent on the federal tax code to soften the blow. But as we all know, accountability is no fun. Public panicking and blaming “the rich” — this is all rather hilarious, given that high-income earners in blue states are the losers here, with middle-class taxpayers and small businesses largely on the winning end — is apparently a far more amusing use of time.

Thus, moving forward, when Jerry Brown moans about the tax bill benefiting “the rich,” please loosely translate it as this: “Quick! We need a distraction! California has long been soaking its upper middle class. The GOP tax bill will make it crystal-clear that a significant chunk of this tax burden is coming from . . . from . . . US!”

Meanwhile, when New York governor Andrew Cuomo claims that the tax bill will “rape and pillage” his state — yes, he actually said this — and somberly declares that the bill “taxes the taxes that New York families pay,” he’s laughably wrong, and he probably knows it.

Why should Americans who don’t live in New York have to cushion the state’s unwieldy, ossified tax-and-spend regime? True tax pillaging, after all, starts at home.

It’s not news to point out that people are fleeing blue states for red states. Recent reports show that Texas gained 1.3 million new residents over the past ten years. (Texas, of course, has no state income tax.) During the same time period, Illinois and New York lost more than 2 million.

The GOP tax bill, which rips the mask off of high state-tax regimes, could very well increase the bleeding. “High-income earners on the East Coast understand the implications of this,” a friend who works in finance told me this week. Some of his contacts on Wall Street, he added, are toying with the idea of voting with their feet.

If blue states can’t get their act together soon, perhaps that’s not such a shabby idea. It would certainly send a message, loud and clear: “It’s not the tax bill that’s the problem, dear high-tax state governments. It’s you.”

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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Major Leftist newspaper discredits itself

Do they WANT to be seen as purveyors of fake news? The reporter, Dave Weigel, is a deep-dyed Leftist from way back, previously involved in the Journolist hate-fest so his involvement now is no surprise

President Donald Trump took a Washington Post writer to task on Saturday after the reporter posted inaccurate photos of Trump's Friday Florida rally.

Dave Weigel, who writes about politics for the Post, tweeted a photo of a largely empty stadium with a quote from Trump: 'Packed to the rafters.'

Trump immediately hit back, quickly getting an apology out of Weigel - and demanded that the Washington Post fire him to boot.

Trump posted a screengrab of Weigel's Tweet, along with photos of him stood in front of a packed arena.

'@DaveWeigel @WashingtonPost put out a phony photo of an empty arena hours before I arrived @ the venue, w/ thousands of people outside, on their way in,' he wrote.

'Real photos now shown as I spoke. Packed house, many people unable to get in. Demand apology & retraction from FAKE NEWS WaPo!'

Weigel responded minutes later, saying he'd been notified of the error by DailyMail.com's US political editor, David Martosko, who attended the event.

'Sure thing: I apologize,' he wrote. 'I deleted the photo after @dmartosko told me I'd gotten it wrong. Was confused by the image of you walking in the bottom right corner.'

'An hour later he tweeted: 'It was a bad tweet on my personal account, not a story for Washington Post. I deleted it after like 20 minutes. Very fair to call me out.'

But apparently the mistake stuck in Trump's craw, and an hour after spotting the error he tweeted again

'.@daveweigel of the Washington Post just admitted that his picture was a FAKE (fraud?) showing an almost empty arena last night for my speech in Pensacola when, in fact, he knew the arena was packed (as shown also on T.V.),' he wrote. 'FAKE NEWS, he should be fired.'

At Friday's rally, Trump pointed to a CNN correction and other corrections and clarifications by news organizations in the past week.

The corrections came from stories that initially had been damaging to the president but didn't live up to the scrutiny.

SOURCE

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Another recent bit of fake news from the legacy media,/b>

The spectacle began on Friday morning at 11:00 am EST, when the Most Trusted Name in News™ spent 12 straight minutes on air flamboyantly hyping an exclusive bombshell report that seemed to prove that WikiLeaks, last September, had secretly offered the Trump campaign, even Donald Trump himself, special access to the DNC emails before they were published on the internet. As CNN sees the world, this would prove collusion between the Trump family and WikiLeaks and, more importantly, between Trump and Russia, since the U.S. intelligence community regards WikiLeaks as an “arm of Russian intelligence,” and therefore, so does the U.S. media.

This entire revelation was based on an email which CNN strongly implied it had exclusively obtained and had in its possession. The email was a smoking gun, in CNN’s extremely excited mind, because it was dated September 4 – ten days before WikiLeaks began promoting access to those emails online – and thus proved that the Trump family was being offered special, unique access to the DNC archive: likely by WikiLeaks and the Kremlin.

It’s impossible to convey with words what a spectacularly devastating scoop CNN believed it had.  There was just one small problem with this story: it was fundamentally false, in the most embarrassing way possible. Hours after CNN broadcast its story – and then hyped it over and over and over – the Washington Post reported that CNN got the key fact of the story wrong.

The email was not dated September 4, as CNN claimed, but rather September 14 – which means it was sent after WikiLeaks had already published access to the DNC emails online. Thus, rather than offering some sort of special access to Trump, “Michael J. Erickson” was simply some random person from the public encouraging the Trump family to look at the publicly available DNC emails that WikiLeaks – as everyone by then already knew – had publicly promoted. In other words, the email was the exact opposite of what CNN presented it as being.

SOURCE

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Not Tired of Winning Yet XXX

I am beginning to lose track of all the win gushing forth from the news headlines these days. This is number 30 in columns devoted to this topic.

In times gone by, whenever I was feeling too cheerful, I would listen to the news, until a proper sense of cynical gloom and despair and bitter wrath would settle on me as I watched everything I hold dear slowly or quickly being deconstructed by morally perverted Morlocks. Now, whenever I am feeling blue, I flip the news on, and wait for something to send my spirits soaring.

Here is a partial list of victories and wonders gathered in the last forty days.

A tax cut was passed by the House and Senate, and the politicians and pundits on the Left declare it to be Armageddon sure to result in thousands of deaths.  I swear by the tongue of Saint John Chrysostom that I am not making that up.

The sweet savor of covfefe hangs over all, because this is the last in an endless series of things the Left said Trump could not do, which he then did do.

Even the depressing sex scandals cheer me. This is not because the news that Leftists in Hollywood or in DC are lecherous perverts unmoored by common standards of chastity and decency: we all knew that since the Sexual Revolution. The point of the Sexual Revolution was to allow men to act like satyrs and for feminists to act like nymphs. But instead of the Arcadian charm of ancient Greek, what we get is the mainstreaming of uncivilized and unchristian sexual behavior, and the normalization of indecency.

But the nymphs are not happy with the bargain. They are apparently unwilling to don knee pads and perform acts of sexual gratification on adulterous rape-happy sexual predators any longer. They want to be treated with the dignity and civility Christian gentlemen owe to Christian ladies, and not to be treated as, well, Mohammedans treat their female chattels

Where this leads, heaven knows, but to see the downfall of tyrants is always a pleasure, even the petty tyrants of Hollywood moguls and their casting couch. Did I mention 28 Dem senators have called on Al Franken to resign? John Conyers has already been forced to resign.

The Senate tax-reform bill passed Dec. 1 eliminates Obamacare’s individual mandate, the linchpin of Obama’s government-controlled health-care system, which penalizes taxpayers for choosing not to buy health insurance. That nightmare is not over, but it is ending.

An official investigation into the riots on Charlottesville finally puts the blame surely where it belongs: instead of blaming Trump, as the news did and does, the investigation found that the city fathers and the mayor negligently if not maliciously arranged the protest and the violent counter protest to be held the same day, they forbade the police from donning riot gear, and the sheriff’s plan was to let the violence escalate sufficiently to declare the assembly unlawful, and unleash the riot squad.   Another fake news story found to be fake.

Remember the clearly Constitutional and unarguably legal and lawful order of the Trump administration to ban travel from certain nations with whose subjects we are currently at war? Now, it seems, the obstruction of the pro-Jihad Leftists posing as judges has been stayed by the Supreme Court. That such judges have not yet been reprimanded, disbarred, or hanged as traitors disappoints me: such lawless activity by those entrusted to interpret the law is unforgivable.The fruits of Trump’s recent visit to China include a decision by the Chinese to slash import taxes on some 187 consumer goods. This promises to open their markets to our goods.

While the previous three U.S. presidents promised during their election campaigns to recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, President Trump on Dec. 6 became the first to follow through. In his official order, Trump also ordered the U.S. Embassy to be moved to Jerusalem from Tel Aviv

Secretary of State Rex Tillerson announced Dec. 3 the Trump administration is withdrawing from the Global Compact on Migration

The Department of Homeland Security released figures Dec. 4 showing Trump is delivering on his pledge to more strictly control immigration and deter trespassers. I will not bore you with the numbers.

I will not bore you with economic numbers either, but do you remember when the Received Wisdom of the Elites all said Trump was a loon for saying his policies would usher in 3% growth? Do you remember all those voices telling us that stagnation was “the new normal”?

President Trump signed two executive orders Dec. 4 that gave back about 2 million acres of land to the state of Utah by modifying executive orders by President Obama. Trump reduced the federal government’s control of the Bear’s Ear National Monument to just 201,876 acres. He also reduced the Grand Staircase National Monument in Utah from nearly 1.9 million acres to about 1 million.

Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced Nov. 17 the Department of Justice will cease the practice initiated by President Obama of issuing “guidance memos” to enact new regulations that sometimes have had the effect of changing federal laws.

The federal government on Nov. 9 made public more than 13,000 additional documents from its files on President John F. Kennedy’s assassination, under orders from President Trump. It was the fourth released since October, when the president allowed the immediate release of 2,800 records by the National Archives.

EPA Director Scott Pruitt placed 66 new experts on three different EPA scientific committees who espouse more conservative views than their predecessors. Pruitt signed a directive Oct. 31 banning scientists who receive EPA grants from serving on the agency’s independent advisory boards.

SOURCE

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A great anecdote



Monica Crowley recently gave a speech at the David Horowitz Restoration weekend that has to be one of the best political speeches I have heard.  She was fabulous.  I reproduce below just her opening remarks

At lunch today, we had the great fortune to hear from Victor Davis Hanson who was talking about those of us who have been repeatedly judged for our support of Donald Trump by the self-righteous, self-described anti-Trump superiors, and it called to mind something that happened to me last July.  I had an exchange with a Hollywood heavyweight and no, it was not Harvey Weinstein.  That would have been an exchange of a different kind, and this Hollywood heavyweight approached me, and I got the whole condescending treatment about Donald Trump.  I got the condescending tap on the arm.  I got the look, like, feeling sorry for me that I was a Trump supporter, and he looked at me and he said, "Monica, you're a sweet girl and you're so smart.  You can't possibly be for Donald Trump," and I realized in that second that I had a decision to make.

Was I going to go through the usual excuses, like, well, you know, I know, but I still...? I decided in that split second to own it, and I leaned into this guy and I said, "Are you kidding me?  I freaking love Donald Trump," and to my great surprise, it completely disarmed him, and he stood back.  He wasn't expecting it.  I said, "Are you kidding me, I freaking love him, and if I had 100 votes, I'd spend all 100 votes on Donald Trump," and he was immediately taken aback, and he said, "Oh, no, no, no.  No, don't get me wrong.  I hate her.  I just don't know if I can vote for him," and it completely wrecked his entire line of argument.  It worked like a charm.

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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Profound Leftist loss of reality contact:  Obama says Trump=Hitler

How could a courageous defender of Israel be like Hitler? Obama also knows that Trump is a capitalist, not a socialist like Hitler and himself. Obama is of course not the first with the Trump=Hitler accusation.  I have commented on previous ones at length here

Obama's comment was enthusiastically and uncritically received in the media but it has its disturbing side.  Loss of reality contact is the prime symptom of psychosis (insanity) but this loss of reality contact is probably just deliberate propaganda. Remember Bush=Hitler?

Obama is eloquent and smart, but he is playing to the dumbed down emotional image-conscious lefties who know nothing, and to the smarter hateful lefties who know the truth but don’t care about it, only about gaining leftist power, even by deception. Obama is a deceiver, a manipulator, and treacherous. Leftism is treachery. It consists of looking good while being evil)

According to Crain’s Chicago Business, on Tuesday night former President Obama compared the era of President Trump to Adolf Hitler's.

Greg Hinz, writing for Crain’s, said Obama spoke in a Q&A session before the Economic Club of Chicago, back in his home town. Hinz wrote that Obama resorted to the usual leftist rhetoric, intoning that the United States has survived tough times before, referencing Joseph McCarthy and former President Richard Nixon. Then he segued to the need for a free press in order to ensure the country’s survival, saying that he had difficulties with the press, as has Trump, but what he himself understood was “the principle that the free press was vital."

Hinz wrote that Obama continued that the danger is "grow(ing) complacent. We have to tend to this garden of democracy or else things could fall apart quickly." Hinz then reached the crux of the matter:

"That's what happened in Germany in the 1930s, which, despite the democracy of the Weimar Republic and centuries of high-level cultural and scientific achievements, Adolph Hitler rose to dominate," Obama noted. "Sixty million people died. . . .So, you've got to pay attention. And vote."

The bald comparison of Trump to Hitler is not surprising coming from the avatar of the Left; the Left has been promulgating the lie that Hitler was to the political Right and not the Left for at least 70 years.

But what is truly ironic is that Obama’s tenure had more than a few similarities to the early phases of Hitler’s Germany. Guess which figure championed universal health care, increased taxes on the rich so social welfare programs could stay afloat, and more government oversight of corporations? Which figure’s party wanted to make college more affordable, saying in the party platform that “the state is to be responsible for a fundamental reconstruction of our whole national education program, to enable every capable and industrious [person] to obtain higher education.”

If you said both, move to the head of the class.

No one would accuse Obama of being Hitler, although the beginning of their tenures had some similarities. But for Obama to use the tired cliché that a right-wing leader resembles Hitler, whose own party referred to itself as the National Socialist German Workers’ Party, is nothing short of patently outrageous, false, and un-American.

SOURCE

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The real story about Roy Moore

Ann Coulter

Apparently, the GOP is now the party of CHILD MOLESTATION! At least the media tell me that’s the meaning of President Trump’s endorsement of Senate candidate Roy Moore.

Are we allowed to mention that Moore denies the charges?

It’s hard to disprove accusations from 40 years ago — that’s why we have statutes of limitations — but, despite that, there are a surprising number of problems with the allegations against Moore.

One accuser has been called a liar by her own stepson, who says he’s voting for Moore. Another neglected to mention that Moore sent her brother to prison.

In defense of one of Moore’s accusers, Gloria Allred produced a yearbook allegedly signed by Moore, apparently in two different inks and giving his title as “D.A.” He was not the district attorney and didn’t sign his name that way. Allred refuses to produce the yearbook for handwriting analysis or to deny that it’s a forgery.

Contrary to what you have heard one million times a day on TV, there aren’t “multiple accusers.” There are two, and that’s including the one with the fishy yearbook inscription whose stepson says she’s lying.

The other “accusers” claim he dated them when they were 16 to 19 years old and Moore was in his early 30s — or younger than Jerry Seinfeld was (39) when he dated 17-year-old Shoshanna Lonstein.

That would also make Moore 15 years younger than Bill Clinton when he had a 22-year-old intern performing oral sex on him in the Oval Office. Moore’s date “accusers” say he did nothing more than kiss them.

The media throw the dating claims in with the molestation claims so they can keep howling about “multiple accusers.” In fact, only two women are alleging anything that, if true, would merit national attention.

TV anchors think it’s very clever of them to ask anyone who isn’t bowled over by the claims of Moore’s (two) accusers: So you’re calling the women “liars”?

Checkmate!

There’s a lot of room between HE’S A CHILD MOLESTER and THE WOMEN ARE LIARS.

They could be misremembering. They could be confusing Moore with someone else. They could be suggestible. They could be delusional. They could have repeated the story to themselves so many times that they believe it. They could be really, really disgusted with Jerry Seinfeld.

The main accuser has gotten a lot of her facts wrong, such as where she was living at the time (she moved to another town 10 days after meeting Moore); the corner where she allegedly met Moore for their liaisons (she named a corner more than a mile away from her house, across a busy intersection); and when she began to get into trouble with boys and alcohol (it was before meeting Moore, not after).

It was 40 years ago! But it’s just weeks before the election and that’s the media’s favorite time to produce wild accusations against Republicans.

Four days before the 1992 presidential election, Independent Counsel Lawrence Walsh dropped an indictment of Reagan’s defense secretary, Caspar Weinberger, which seemed to implicate President George H.W. Bush in a lie. Bush lost the election, and about a month later a judge threw out the indictment.

In the middle of the 2004 presidential campaign, CBS’s Dan Rather produced forged documents allegedly proving that President George W. Bush had shirked his National Guard service decades earlier.

In September 2006, just before the midterm elections, the media released GOP congressman Mark Foley’s creepy emails to House pages. No physical contact was alleged. The corpus delicti was that Foley told pages they looked “hot” in their soccer shorts.

The entire GOP was crucified by the media for not having discovered this “pedophile” in its midst. Republican congressmen who had never met Foley lost their seats because of the media’s timing of the email release.

More than 20 years earlier, a Democratic congressman, Gerry Studds, who had actually buggered a 17-year-old page, indignantly defied his House censure and proudly stood for re-election. His outraged Massachusetts constituents elected him six more times. Washington Post columnist Colman McCarthy denounced the “witch hunt” against Studds, saying his critics wanted “to torch the congressman for his private life.”

When Studds died in 2006, The Washington Post’s headline on his obituary was: Gerry Studds; Gay Pioneer in Congress. The New York Times’ headline was, Gerry Studds Dies at 69; First Openly Gay Congressman.

Moore’s real crime is that he’s a believing Christian who goes around wantonly quoting the Bible on sodomy.

SOURCE

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Dershowitz: It's Not Obstruction of Justice for Trump to Exercise His Constitutional Authority

Retired Harvard Law School Professor Alan Dershowitz said a constitutional crisis would erupt if Congress tries to charge President Trump with obstruction of justice for exercising the authority granted to him under Article II of the Constitution.

He spoke to "Fox & Friends" on Monday morning:

You cannot charge a president with obstruction of justice for exercising his constitutional power to fire Comey and his constitutional authority to tell the Justice Department who to investigate, who not to investigate. That's what Thomas Jefferson did, that's what Lincoln did, that's what Roosevelt did. We have precedents that clearly establish that.

When George Bush the first pardoned Casper Weinberger in order to end the investigation that would have led to him, nobody suggested obstruction of justice. For obstruction of justice by the president, you need clearly illegal acts. With Nixon, hush money paid; telling people to lie; destroying evidence. Even with Clinton they said that he tried to influence potential witnesses not to tell the truth.

But there's never been a case in history where a president has been charged with obstruction of justice for merely exercising his constitutional authority. That would cause a constitutional crisis in the United States, and I hope Mueller doesn't do that and Senator Feinstein simply doesn't know what she's talking about When she says it's obstruction of justice, to do what a president is completely authorized to do under the Constitution.
Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) on Sunday told "Meet the Press" she believes Trump's firing of former FBI Director James Comey was obstruction of justice, and she said that appears to be the direction the investigation is heading.

Dershowitz on Monday said President Trump could have pardoned Flynn if he really wanted to end the special counsel's criminal investigation:

"He (Trump) would have pardoned Flynn and then Flynn wouldn't be cooperating with the other side, and the president would have had the complete authority to do so, and Flynn never would have been indicted, never would have turned as a witness against him," Dershowitz said.

"So I think the fact that the president hasn't pardoned Flynn, even though he has the power to do so, is very good evidence there's no obstruction of justice going on here."

Dershowitz also said Flynn was "right" to speak to the Russian ambassador during the transition and urge him to vote against a U.N. resolution criticizing Israel.

"I think he did absolutely the right thing by trying to stop the president, lame duck, from tying his hands."

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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