Leftists are born unhappy

A reader has drawn to my attention a journal article from 2010 that suppports my contention that Leftists are born miseries. The author tries to put a leftist spin on it but the facts pretty well speak for themselves.  The abstract is below. I will add some comments at the foot of it

Political leanings vary with facial expression processing and psychosocial functioning 

Jacob M. Vigil

Abstract

Conservative, Republican sympathizers show heightened threat reactivity, but greater felt happiness than liberal, Democrat sympathizers. Recent evolutionary models interpret these findings in the context of broader perceptual and expressive proclivities for advertising cues of competency (Republicans) and trustworthiness (Democrats) to others, and in ways that facilitate the formation of distinct social networks, in coordination with individuals’ life histories.

Consistent with this perspective, I found that Republican sympathizers were more likely to report larger social networks and interpret ambiguous facial stimuli as expressing more threatening emotions as compared to Democrat sympathizers, who also reported greater emotional distress, relationship dissatisfaction, and experiential hardships. The findings are discussed in the context of proximate and ultimate explanations of social cognition, relationship formation, and societal cohesion. Keywords evolution, group identity, neuroscience, political psychology, social cognition

SOURCE

So let us look at the findings and not the interpretations

Conservatives are happier.  That always comes out and Leftists hate it.  They claim that conservatives are maladjusted misfits but happy misfits is not a very persuasive notion.

"Threat reactivity"? A fancy way of saying conservatives are more cautious, which we already knew.

Conservatives have more friends.  "Laugh and the world laughs with you.  Cry and you cry alone"

Democrat sympathizers reported greater emotional distress, relationship dissatisfaction, and experiential hardships.

My case rests:  Conservatives are the happy people. Leftists are the angry people.

These findings derive from a survey of students so are not authoritative by themselves but they do confirm what we see  in Leftist politics all the time.

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Apparently, white Americans should either feel ashamed, guilty or apologetic — simply for being white 

“Common hatred unites the most heterogeneous elements.” —American philosopher Eric Hoffer

Something repellently “uniting” is emerging from the more feverish fever swamps of progressive ideology: White Americans should either feel ashamed, guilty or apologetic — simply for being white.

That’s the premise behind “White Racism,” a course taught by professor Ted Thornhill at Florida Gulf Coast University. Thornhill believes a color-blind society is “a myth” that keeps both whites and misguided people of color “from recognizing the everyday realities that show the United States is white supremacist in nature.”

Unsurprisingly, Thornhill has a decidedly one-sided view of those who colonized America, insisting they “practiced all manner of inhumanity against non-whites,” including “genocide, slavery, murder, rape, torture, theft, chicanery, segregation, discrimination, intimidation, internment, humiliation and marginalization.”

That every group of human beings was guilty of all manner of inhumanity at various times in history? That Thornhill has a platform on a college campus and in the media to disseminate his twisted worldview, due to those same colonists establishing a republic where freedom of speech remains a bedrock principle? That they wrote a Declaration of Independence and Constitution establishing inalienable human rights that laid the groundwork for ending inhumanity best exemplified by slavery — slavery practiced by every ethnic group — at a cost of 360,000 lives? That this nation has gone even further, establishing affirmative action programs that continue redressing inequality, or the pernicious concept of disparate impact that presumes discrimination even where none is evident, based on nothing more than disproportionately negative impacts on protected classes of individuals?

Thornhill insists American is little more than a nation “comprised of laws, policies, practices, traditions and an accompanying ideology … that promotes the biological, intellectual and cultural superiority of whites to dominate other groups.”

What about non-white racism? Thornhill concedes non-whites can have “prejudices,” but racism accrues solely to whites because they are beneficiaries of “systemic privilege.”

Such mindless absolutism might surprise many whites whose systemic privilege consists of enduring decades of Rust Belt hopelessness — sometimes relieved by tuning into multi-millionaire black athletes taking a knee during the Star-Spangled Banner portion of an NFL football game. Yet for those who believe skin color is the sole arbiter of privilege, it is not surprising.

It’s not new, either. Critical Race Theory, a philosophy established by Harvard professor Derrick Bell, has long asserted that America is a permanently racist nation whose legal structures are invalid because they are designed to support white supremacy.

Meritocracy, equal opportunity, and colorblindness? Nothing more than illusory concepts used to maintain the racist status quo.

Another club in the assault on whiteness is “cultural appropriation,” as in the idea that the dominant culture inappropriately adopts or utilizes elements of a minority culture — with the attendant subtext that such appropriation is driven by colonial impulses, and an imbalance of power violating the “collective intellectual property rights” of the minority culture.

This separatism-on-steroids is another one-way street whereby certain aspects and/or manifestations of culture are reserved solely from minorities, even as those minorities are free to embrace any aspect of the dominant culture, absent similar recriminations for doing so.

And in a nation where progressive ideology far too often substitutes for a genuine education, such contemptible nonsense is becoming part of the classroom experience. “Social justice activists at a New York high school successfully shut down a production of ‘The Hunchback of Notre Dame’ after a white student landed a lead role,” Fox News reports.

The protests began when Maddi Carroll, a black 17-year-old senior, quit the production as a result. “It shows you that theater wasn’t made for you,” she insisted. “And it shows you that, if you can’t get the parts that are written for you, what parts are you going to get?”

Perhaps the role of Angelica Schuyler, a white woman portrayed by 2016 Tony Award winning actress Renee Elise Goldsberry in “Hamilton,” the hit Broadway play where the nation’s white Founding Fathers were also played by minority actors.

Regardless, students banded together in a group called Students United Ithaca, and they wrote a letter that reveals how twisted their thinking has become. While they insisted the white student who landed the role “is a stellar actor, singer, and dancer” that “any stage, would be lucky to have” she is nonetheless the “epitome of whiteness.” Thus, casting her in this role is at best “cultural appropriation,” and at worst “whitewashing, a racist casting practice which has its roots in minstrelsy.”

The group doubled down on its Facebook page, posting a list of demands aimed at the Ithaca City School District. Two of them stood out. “STOP the racist and openly stated policy of ‘color blind’ casting in the ICSD,” stated one. “STOP ignoring and denying that you have created a white centered program run by white adults for the benefit of white children. White children should also be educated about interrupting these practices of White supremacy,” stated the other.

In other words, meritocracy be damned, along with anything else that doesn’t accord itself with progressivism’s racialist, bean-counting, cultural fiefdom worldview.

Moreover, when color-blindness is deemed racist, that worldview is plumbing Orwellian depths.

But, but, but… acting, singing and dancing talent is subjective and thus open to interpretation, right? “The U.S. Olympic Committee says it’s taking its most diverse team ever to a Winter Games, an impressive and deserved boast that requires a caveat of sorts,” The Washington Post reports. “Yes, USOC officials are pleased the team includes more African-Americans and Asian-Americans — and even the first two openly gay men — than recent winter squads. But they also realize this year’s U.S. Olympic team, not unlike those of most other nations gathering in Pyeongchang this week, is still overwhelmingly white.”

The paper added, “‘We’re not quite where we want to be,’ said Jason Thompson, the USOC’s director of diversity and inclusion. … ‘I think full-on inclusion has always been a priority of Team USA. I think everybody’s always felt it should represent every American.’”

One might be forgiven for assuming that full-on ability would be the priority for an Olympic team. Moreover, the notion that every American can’t be represented by any Olympian — utterly irrespective of ethnicity, sex or sexual orientation — reveals how obsessed the American Left is with identity politics.

“I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia, sons of former slaves and the sons of former slaveowners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood,” declared Martin Luther King in 1963.

Fifty-five years later, that dream is in danger of being exterminated by an American Left’s “common hatred” for America’s common culture. It is a common hatred that demands E Pluribus Unum give way to a hodgepodge of cultural fiefdoms where contempt for “the other” is the common currency, and where identity politics arrives at its most repugnant and virulent destination.

The destination where whiteness per se is tantamount to the Original Sin.

SOURCE

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A big audience for Peterson in Edmonton Feb. 11

The more they try to block him, the bigger his audiences get

Dr. Jordan Peterson’s every move sprouts another interview or article that sparks miles-long Twitter brawls and sharp YouTube comment section duels. The controversial clinical psychologist is on tour promoting his new self-help book, 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos.

His event, scheduled in Edmonton on the 11th, was declined by the Citadel on the grounds of his rhetoric not aligning with the theatre’s “mandate, values or vision statement,” which they further explained later.

His event was then moved to the Hyatt, which quickly sold out, and was rescheduled yet again to be held at the Clarion Hotel and Conference Centre in Sherwood Park, which has again, sold out.

SOURCE

Peterson tweeted:  "Finished my talk to a packed house of 750, 3x the size of the max audience at the canceled Citadel appearance, to a welcoming Alberta audience. Thanks Edmonton."

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For over a year we’ve heard…

A)Trump is unpopular.

B)Trump is not just unpopular, but historically unpopular.

C)Trump is the most unpopular president in his first year ever.

The latest respected Rasmussen poll was released on February 7th of last week. Trump was at 48% approval. That makes President Trump MORE popular than Obama at the exact same date of his presidency.

On Feb 7th, 2010 Obama was at 44% approval.

On Feb 7th, 2018 Trump was at 48% approval.

How is this possible? I thought Trump was universally hated? I thought he had the lowest approval ratings in history? Yet he’s four points more popular than Obama at the exact same time of his presidency.

If Trump is “historically unpopular” and he’s four points higher rated than Obama, what does that make Obama? But we never heard a word back then from the media.

By the way, by week's end Trump was even higher- at 49%.

More problems for the Democrats. The latest Quinnipiac Poll shows Americans now give Trump credit for the economy 48% to 41%.

The latest Real Clear Politics average of many respected polls shows Democrats have lost dramatic ground on the issues of economy, jobs, immigration and national security. The GOP now leads 45-36 on the economy, 43-37 on jobs, 46-33 on national security, and 43-37 on immigration. Blue wave? Sounds like a red tsunami to me.

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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Who are Jordan Peterson’s followers?

Justin Murphy is a self-described Left-libertarian who has collected some statistics from Reddit which enable him to see who are the supporters of Peterson.  He does some analyses which I don't entirely agree with but it is clear that the most popular politician among Peterson supporters is Donald Trump, followed by Gary Johnson, the libertarian party candidate who many other libertarians dismissed as too Leftist (on gun control etc.)



So Murphy shows that there is a large silenced population and that Peterson has picked up the ones who are put off by Trump's very simplistic approach.  He sees both Peterson and Trump as having similar messages but with Peterson being the intellectual and impeccably scholarly representative of the same basic ideas.  And from Murphy's eigenvector analysis it seems clear that the suppressed ideas are on the whole simply traditional conservative ones

I wrote a book in 1974 under the title "Conservatism as heresy".  It seems that not much has changed since.  Excerpt only below


In many educated circles, support for Donald Trump is seen as somewhere between insane and evil, quite seriously. Yet, about 50% of the Americans who voted did so for him, so we know at least a non-trivial number of educated people voted for him. But who are they? I haven’t really had strong intuitions about this, and my sense is you just don’t really see or hear from educated and highly thoughtful Trump supporters. I’m aware this could definitely be “my bubble,” but I don’t think it’s just that. I think there exist thoughtful educated Trump supporters, but I think they are systematically unlikely to appear in mainstream culture.

But I have been watching closely the explosion of popularity enjoyed by academic psychologist Jordan Peterson, and it has seemed to me that his constituency might just be some of the educated Trumpians. It is also consistent with my “long-term mass suppression” thesis, because this helps to explain how a random academic psychologist achieved genuinely extraordinary, anomolous levels of fame, all of a sudden. It’s the same pattern with Trump (though I’m not, at all, equating the two individuals): a massive unexpected and rise-to-power indicating a massive reservoir of public interest in something that has hitherto been systematically under-supplied by the status quo.

As an ultralefty who is also 90% on board with Peterson’s key messages, I honestly did not expect this many of the Peterson disciples to be Trump supporters. I was thinking I’d find a sizable minority and say “Aha! A little evidence for my hypothesis.” But Trump is far and away the most favored candidate.

The reason this is important, in my view, is that Trump and Trump supporters are genuinely seen as unworthy of intellectually serious debate in progressive educated circles. But Peterson is an undeniable intellectual master of the most authentic kind. What this means is that genuinely educated progressives who are opposed to Trump need (if they are serious and sincere) to go through Peterson and his intellectual community. In other words, educated progressives cannot pretend there are no serious intellectual forces associated with Trump. There is at least one, and it’s the cluster of ideas Peterson has been working on for decades.

To be clear, I am not saying Peterson has caused support for Trump and I’m not saying Peterson himself supports Trump (I don’t know, but he generally avoids naïve blanket identifications.) I am just saying that, as far as I can tell, his perspective represents a major, public intellectual force that coincides with at least some vectors of support for Trump.

And the sizable minority of left libertarians makes sense to me (because that’s me, basically). So it’s interesting that left-libertarians are communicating thoughtfully in a community with many Trump supporters. I want to show this to all the left libertarian activists I know (who are very different than left libertarian people in general). To show them there is serious intellectual content in the new seeming “right-wing” ecology of ideas and figures

More HERE 

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From the 'Settled Science' Files: USDA Nutrition Guidelines Upside Down

New research finds that high carbohydrate intake is worse for one's health than a diet high in fats. 

Go ahead and put a slice of cheese and extra bacon on that burger. A recently published study in The Lancet calls into question the long-running nutritional guidelines advocated by the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) since its formation in 1960. The study, which followed 135,335 people in 18 countries on five continents, found that “high carbohydrate intake was associated with higher risk of mortality, whereas total fat and individual types of fat were related to lower total mortality.” It was also concluded, “Total fat and types of fat were not associated with cardiovascular disease, myocardial infarction, or cardiovascular disease mortality, whereas saturated fat had an inverse association with stroke.” The researchers suggest, “Dietary guidelines should be reconsidered in light of these findings.”

This research seems to corroborate a 2010 study published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition that asserted, “There is no significant evidence for concluding that dietary saturated fat is associated with an increased risk of coronary heart disease.”

Yet the USDA nutritional guidelines continue to promote the notion that a low-fat, high-carbohydrate diet is healthier. Meanwhile, the obesity problem in America has only been getting worse. Of course, government-recommended dietary guidelines on food consumption may not be the primary culprit for America’s obesity epidemic, as lower average activity levels since the 1980s may be the greater cause. But the point is that the science is not settled on this issue, even though the USDA has projected it as such for decades.

Might there be a lesson here for those who think “the science is settled” on global climate fluctuations?

SOURCE

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Our Infrastructure Is Not 'Crumbling'
   
One of the great myths of American politics, no matter who is president and no matter who runs Congress, is that our infrastructure is “crumbling.” Former President Barack Obama repeatedly warned us about our “crumbling infrastructure.” President Donald Trump now tells us that our infrastructure is “crumbling.” The next president is going to hatch a giant plan to fix our crumbling infrastructure as well, because most voters want to believe infrastructure is crumbling.

The infrastructure is not crumbling. Ask someone about infrastructure and his thoughts will probably wander to the worst pothole-infested road he traverses rather than the hundreds of roads he drives on that are perfectly safe and smooth. That’s human nature.

So “crumbling infrastructure” peddlers play on this concern by habitually agonizing over things like the impending outbreak of tragic bridge collapses that will kill thousands. They bring up tragedies like the 2007 disaster with the Interstate 35 bridge over the Mississippi River in downtown Minneapolis even though, according to federal investigators, the collapse was due to a design flaw rather than decaying infrastructure. Many outlets and politicians simply ignore the inconvenient fact that the rare fatality involving infrastructure typically has nothing to do with “crumbling” and everything to do with natural elements or human error.

In reality, the number of structurally deficient bridges, never high to begin with, has been dropping over the past 30 years despite all the hand-wringing. The overall number has fallen from over 22 percent in 1992 to under 10 percent in 2016. According to a Reuters analysis of those bridges, only 4 percent of those that carry significant traffic need repairs. Of the nation’s 1,200 busiest bridges, the number of those structurally deficient falls to under 2 percent — or fewer than 20 bridges in the entire country. And none of those bridges need repair to save them from collapse.

That has never stopped politicians from fearmongering, however. “Our roads and bridges are falling apart; our airports are in Third World condition,” Trump claimed during his 2016 campaign. Yet as The Heritage Foundation’s Michael Sargent points out, the percentage of airport runways deemed as poor has fallen from 4 percent in 2004 to 2 percent in 2016. And for the past 30 years, the number of “acceptable” or above roads has remained relatively consistent at approximately 85 percent.

Perhaps because they’re constantly being told that America’s roads are on the verge of disintegrating into dust, some voters aren’t aware that federal, state and local governments spent $416 billion on transportation and water infrastructure in 2014 — around the same 2.4 percent of gross domestic product they’ve been spending for decades. About $165 billion of that $416 billion, incidentally, was spent on highways. (This doesn’t count the bipartisan Fixing America’s Surface Transportation Act of 2015, which added another $305 billion over five years.)

It’s also worth remembering that when liberals talk about infrastructure, they don’t necessarily mean roads or bridges or airports or water-processing plants. They mean expensive social engineering projects and Keynesian job-creation schemes. In 2017, Senate Democrats unveiled their own $1 trillion infrastructure plan, claiming the additional spending would create 15 million jobs over 10 years. Despite years of hearing otherwise, there is still no evidence that infrastructure bills create self-sustaining jobs — or any jobs, for that matter.

According to a 2010 Associated Press analysis, the first 10 months of Obama’s economic stimulus plan showed virtually no effect on local unemployment rates, which rose and fell regardless of money spent on infrastructure projects. It barely even helped construction jobs. What it did do was fund cronyistic ventures and debt-padding waste.

Around $90 billion of Obama’s infrastructure-heavy “stimulus” plan went to green energy companies (many of which are now in bankruptcy) rather than repairing bridges. Another $1.3 billion went to subsidize Amtrak rather than repairing the roads you actually drive on. Another $8 billion went to various other rail projects (with a priority on high-speed rail) rather than highways or byways or your local street.

Now, though one expects Trump’s $1 trillion infrastructure bill to focus more on traditional projects, the case for the new spending is predicated on the same chilling and misleading rhetoric we’ve been hearing for years. Although still nebulous, the White House’s plan apparently features some attempt to reduce the regulatory burden that the private sector must wade through before gaining approval for building permits. This is a positive step considering the vast majority of infrastructure is still built by the private sector. This should be a goal of the administration with or without the massive infrastructure bill.

How we fund the infrastructure, and who builds these projects, is certainly a debate worth having. But it’s a debate worth having without ever using the word “crumbling.”

SOURCE

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Public Utility Avoids Fixing Damage by Paying Fancy Law Firm Triple the Money

To dodge its obligation, a state utility company paid a fancy law firm triple the amount of money required to fix damages caused by one of its trucks. It’s yet another example of government wasting taxpayer dollars, a senseless misuse of public funds that is all too common in government at all levels. It’s also a bizarre—and costly—struggle between one of the nation’s largest public power utilities and a small business owner whose security cameras captured the truck crushing the drainage system under the asphalt of her parking lot. The utility truck, which weighs nine tons, left a hole in the pavement and a broken drain pipe underground when it used the parking lot to turn around.

The case comes out of Phoenix Arizona where a single mother and respected professional is simply trying to get the parking lot of her chiropractic business fixed. The culprit is the Salt River Project (SRP), which has served central Arizona since 1903 and provides electricity to approximately 1 million customers in a 2,900-square-mile area, including most of metropolitan Phoenix. In addition to four officers and eight executive managers, SRP has more than 40 elected board members, directors and council members. The utility’s website describes it as a “community-based, not-for-profit organization”  that has adopted a “leaner, greener and even more customer-centric” strategy that meets customers’ needs. SRP assures the public that funds that it is committed to foundational values that have the best interest of the communities it serves.

SRP’s strategy in the Phoenix chiropractor case seems to contradict its promises and certainly cannot be considered in the best interest of the taxpayers who sustain it. The damage to the property is estimated to be $43,000, according to licensed experts hired by the chiropractor, Melody Jafari. She has spent about $20,000 trying to get the utility company to pay for the damage to her parking lot, including legal costs, an expert witness and temporary repairs to keep her business running. Rather than pay for the repairs, SRP has blown $129,000 so far to avoid taking responsibility. The public utility hired a multi-million-dollar national law firm called Jennings Strouss with offices in Phoenix, Peoria, Tucson and Washington D.C. The law firm boasts of leveraging its resources regionally and nationally and having a litigation department that stands as one of the most respected in the Southwest.

Jafari and SRP have been engaged in a tug of war since the incident occurred in early August 2015. The Phoenix area had just been hit with a fierce monsoon storm and power outages were occurring throughout the region. A utility truck was in the area tending to power lines that had been damaged by the storm, though none were in the vicinity of Jafari’s business. The SRP truck making rounds simply used the parking lot to turn around and that’s when the weight of the truck crushed the drainage system under the asphalt parking lot, leaving a large hole in the pavement and a broken drain pipe. Jafari has numerous security cameras monitoring her property and the entire incident was captured on video. When Jafari initially contacted SRP she says they seemed responsive and she was optimistic the utility would fix the damage. Instead, SRP chose to lawyer up and pay three times the cost of conducting the repairs on attorneys’ fees. Judicial Watch reached out to SRP through its media relations department but never heard back.

In the meantime, Jafari has been left to fend for herself. Her unbelievable years-long ordeal with the utility caught the attention of the local police labor counsel, Phoenix Law Enforcement Association (PLEA), which is litigating on her behalf. PLEA’s attorney of four decades, Mike Napier, has partnered with Judicial Watch numerous times to address rule of law and conservative issues in the nation’s fifth-largest city and fastest growing county, Maricopa. Napier told Judicial Watch that back in December 2015 SRP offered to compensate Jafari $750 for a hot patch repair of the pavement, which doesn’t begin to cover the magnitude of the damage.

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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Capitol Hill GOP Spending Like Obama Is Still President

I was not going to comment on this until I see what actually gets enacted but all the comments I have seen from others miss an important point. Obama and the Donks made an amazing discovery:  At least for the USA, you can spend all you like without raising taxes and nothing bad happens!  According to conventional economic theory, Obama & Co. should have caused a roaring inflation that made the greenback as worthless as the Venezuelan Bolivar.  It didn't happen.  Inflation remained within normal low bounds.

Why did it not happen?  There has been much scratching of heads about it among economists of both the Right and the Left and various theories have been put up.  I have put up attempted explanations myself.  But basically no-one knows.  It's a mystery on a par with the Holy Trinity.

And Trump has pushed the mystery even further. He is betting that you can actually CUT taxes and still spend as much as you like.  On form, he will almost certainly get away with it, if only because his spending will increase employment and hence tax revenue.

So, basically, while we seem to be in this happy state of suspension from reality, Trump and the GOP are saying "Let the good times roll.  Why should Obama have all the fun?  Let US get credit for looking after all sorts of special interests with all of this magic money".

Unless there's a whole new economic truth somewhere that we have not yet discovered, the whole show has got to come down to earth some time but when that will be nobody knows.  But Trump and the GOP are right to take advantage of our strange new fiscal state while they can.


In the aftermath of the 2010 Tea Party wave that returned Republicans to the majority in the House conservatives proposed a plan to reduce spending and balance the budget called “Cut, Cap and Balance.”

The plan would have cut and capped spending and brought the budget into balance after a period of time, and it federal debtwould have worked – except the Republican leaders in the House and Senate never gave it their support or a vote.

Instead they championed a plan worked out between Mitch McConnell, Harry Reid and Barack Obama that put spending caps in place through a process known as “sequestration” that placed most of the spending cuts on the defense budget.

Fast forward to 2018 and the three-day government shutdown over amnesty for illegal aliens that was a PR disaster for the Democrats.

Claiming to want to avoid another government shutdown, the Senate’s Republican leader Mitch McConnell and Democratic leader Chuck Schumer announced a bipartisan deal to increase defense and domestic spending by roughly $300 billion over two years, according to administration and congressional sources quoted by Politico's Burgess Everett and John Bresnahan. The deal will also lift the debt ceiling through the election and include tens of billions of dollars in disaster aid.

Everett and Bresnahan report the agreement would increase defense spending this year by $80 billion and domestic spending by $63 billion beyond strict budget caps, according to a summary of the deal they obtained for POLITICO. Next year, defense spending would increase by $85 billion and domestic funding by $68 billion beyond the caps. The deal also includes $140 billion for defense and $20 billion for domestic in emergency spending over two years.

President Trump quickly announced his support tweeting, "The Budget Agreement today is so important for our great Military," he wrote. "It ends the dangerous sequester and gives Secretary Mattis what he needs to keep America Great. Republicans and Democrats must support our troops and support this Bill!" However, conservatives were equally quick to pan the Schumer – McConnel deal.

Our friends at The Club for Growth issued a statement saying, “…now that the BCA spending caps are busted under this deal yet again, it’s clear that McConnell and the GOP establishment want to speed up the big government freight train with the help of big spending liberals on the other side of the aisle. As if that’s not bad enough, this deal also includes $80+ billion in so-called disaster relief spending, cronyist tax extenders, an expansion of farm subsidies, and another suspension in the debt ceiling, conveniently timed to expire after the mid-term elections.”

Nowhere in this deal, the Club for Growth noted, are the $54 billion in spending cuts outlined in President Trump’s budget. Instead, the big government freight train is running out of control.

The deal ends sequestration caps on the Pentagon without acceding to Democratic demands for equal boosts to domestic spending, but it still raises spending by nearly $300 billion over the next two fiscal years.

That was a bridge too far for the Freedom Caucus reported Victor Morton of The Washington Times.

The principled limited government constitutional conservatives of the House Freedom Caucus tweeted Wednesday night that they officially oppose the budget deal struck by McConnell and Schumer earlier in the day.

“Official position: HFC opposes the caps deal. We support funding our troops, but growing the size of government by 13 percent is not what the voters sent us here to do,” the conservative group posted on Twitter.

The loss of the Caucus, which is believed to have a membership of almost 40 representatives, basically ensures the Senate deal cannot pass the House without significant support from House Democrats.

SOURCE

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Obsessed with Trump

Michael Reagan

You watch Fox News - "We love President Trump."

You watch MSNBC or CNN - "We hate President Trump."

Is there any other news going on in the world that isn't about Trump? I swear, if the World Trade Center had come down yesterday, the top story today in the mainstream media would be all about Donald Trump. What did he do wrong or not do? Say or not say?

While Trump and his daily reality TV show have become a profit center for the media, the rest of us can't even mention his name.

Trump has become a cuss word - "Trump you! Trump you and your whole family!"

I can remember when everybody in the media loved Trump before they hated Trump. CNN loved to have him on their air because he could be counted on to bring higher ratings.

Going back five, 10 or 15 years ago, when Trump was a celebrity billionaire golfer from New York, every TV network or cable channel courted him because they knew he'd drive up their audience numbers.

Now you have two angry Love Trump/Hate Trump camps holed up in their own media bunkers, talking only to their hardcore followers.

For me, it's sad to see that nobody is willing to have a fruitful conversation with the other side the way they did when my father was in Washington.

On Tuesday, when we marked my dad's 107th birthday at the Reagan Library, his chief of staff, James Baker III, reminded us how my father dealt with his opponents.

He never demeaned or degraded them or called them names. And even if they didn't agree with him politically, or were supporting some other Republican for president, they liked him personally.

Baker was a perfect example. My father hired him to be his chief of staff after he had run two tough presidential primary campaigns against him, one for Gerald Ford in 1976 and one for George H.W. Bush in 1980.

Unlike Trump, who constantly uses tweets to attack his critics and opponents, my father always took the high road.

When he was in a debate he didn't try to destroy people. He knew at some point he'd have to go back and work with them to get things done. That's how he and Tip O'Neill were able to get the largest tax break in American history passed through Congress in 1981.

It's almost impossible to make that kind of deal anymore in Washington. We live in a very angry, angry time, and President Trump doesn't seem to want to do anything to make people get along any better.

Meanwhile, both parties in Congress want 100 percent of everything they desire, and when they do come to a rare agreement like they did Wednesday on the bipartisan budget deal, there are people who can't control their anger.

The two-year budget, which adds $300 billion in spending to the federal deficit, has made the military and national security folks happy, but it has set some fiscal hawks' hair on fire.

It'd be nice to think that the rare display of bipartisanship on the federal budget is a sign that good things are going to start happening in Congress.

But it's really just the latest proof that there's only one thing that can consistently bring the two parties in Congress together - spending money it doesn't have.

SOURCE

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"Armageddon" continues: CVS to hike wages, introduce paid parental leave with windfall from new tax law

CVS Health will increase employee pay and sweeten benefits to some employees using a portion of the company's windfall from the new tax law.

CVS will boost starting pay for hourly employees to $11 per hour from $9 per hour, starting in April. Pay ranges and rates will be adjusted for many of its retail pharmacy technicians, front store associates and other hourly retail employees later in the year. Full-time employees will qualify for as much as four weeks of paid parental leave, and worker health-care premiums will hold steady at current rates.

The health-care company has more than 240,000 employees.

Retailers have started hiking their minimum wages to remain competitive in a tightening labor market. Numerous big names have announced raises and added benefits since President Donald Trump signed the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act in December.

Walmart, the world's largest private employer, last month said it would increase its starting pay to $11, give one-time bonuses to some employees and expand its parental and maternity leave policy.

CVS' stores are key to its proposed $69 billion acquisition of health insurer Aetna. The pair want to create an integrated health system that combines pharmacy and health benefits while delivering preventive care services through the drugstore chain's retail clinics. Shareholders are slated to vote on the deal on March 20.

The news came as CVS reported its fourth-quarter results, which were better than analysts expected on both the top and bottom line.

Net income in the latest quarter rose to $3.29 billion, or $3.22 per share, from $1.71 billion, or $1.59 per share, in the year-earlier quarter.

Earnings in the latest period, included a $1.5 billion benefit related to the new tax law. After stripping out special items, such as the tax gain and a $56 million charge related to the proposed acquisition of Aetna, the company earned $1.92 per share, above analysts' estimates of $1.89 cents per share.

CVS' revenue grew 5 percent to $48.39 billion from $45.97 billion in the year earlier. Its pharmacy services revenue surged 9.3 percent from the year-ago quarter, reaching $34.15 billion, up from $31.26 billion.

Same-store sales for the pharmacy chain's front store, which doesn't include pharmacy, dipped 0.7 percent in the quarter, though a particularly bad cold and flu season helped boost traffic a bit.

"As much as CVS is forward thinking and innovative in health, it is an extraordinarily unimaginative and backward-looking retailer," said Neil Saunders, managing director of GlobalData Retail. "This is one of the reasons why front of store sales are still in negative territory despite very weak prior year comparatives and a boost to sales from remedies for a particularly nasty flu and cold season."

Shares of CVS fell about 5 percent on Thursday.

CVS said the employee investments will total about $425 million annually. This spending includes the wage increases and improved benefits.

The company also anticipates spending at least $275 million of the tax windfall on investments in the business, including data analytics, care management solutions and pilot programs.

"The only thing we can think of for why the stock is down today is because a lot of these investments are going to be long-term phenomenons," said Edward Jones analyst John Boylan. "We think over the long-term they will help the company, but we think that's already reflected in the stock price."

As a result of these investments, the company expects operating profit for the year to be in the range of down 1.5 percent to up 1.5 percent. Previously, CVS expected growth between 1 percent and 4 percent.

For the first quarter, CVS now anticipates operating profit growth between 0.5 percent and 4.5 percent. CVS expects the tax law changes to add $1.2 billion to its cash flow.

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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Trump – Middle American Radical

Pat Buchanan below has some good points but I think he is still too general in his analysis of Trump's thinking.  The key to Trump is that he is not a policy wonk of any kind.  He goes by instinct and common sense only.  But his instincts are conservative so he does a lot of good.  So while Buchanan makes a brave attempt to categorize him I think all such attempts will fail. He is "sui generis", one of a kind.  There are no others like him or even nearly like him.

President Trump is the leader of America's conservative party.  Yet not even his allies would describe him as a conservative in the tradition of Robert Taft, Russell Kirk or William F. Buckley.

In the primaries of 2016, all his rivals claimed the mantle of Mr. Conservative, Ronald Reagan. Yet Trump captured the party's heart.

Who, then, and what is Donald Trump? In a Federalist essay, "Trump Isn't a Conservative — And That's a Good Thing," Frank Cannon comes close to the mark.

Trump, he writes, "would more accurately be described as a 'radical anti-progressive'" who is "at war with the progressives who have co-opted American civil society." Moreover, Trump "is willing to go further than any other previous conservative to defeat them."

Many "elite conservatives," writes Cannon, believe the "bedrock institutions" they treasure are "not subject to the same infectious politicization to which the rest of society has succumbed."

This belief is naive, says Cannon, "ridiculous on its face."

"Radical anti-progressives" recognize that many institutions — the academy, media, entertainment and the courts — have been co-opted and corrupted by the left. And as these institutions are not what they once were, they no longer deserve the respect they once had.

Yet most conservatives will only go so far in criticizing these institutions. We see this in how cradle Catholics find it difficult to criticize the Church in which they were birthed and raised, despite scandals and alterations in the liturgy and doctrine.

Trump sees many institutions as fortresses lately captured by radical progressives that must be attacked and besieged if they are to be recaptured and liberated. Cannon deals with three such politicized institutions: the media, the NFL and the courts.

Trump does not attack freedom of the press but rather the moral authority and legitimacy of co-opted media institutions. It is what CNN has become, not what CNN was, that Trump disrespects.

These people are political enemies posturing as journalists who create "fake news" to destroy me, says Trump. Enraged media, responding, reveal themselves to be not far removed from what Trump says they are.

And, since Trump, media credibility has plummeted.

Before 2016, the NFL was an untouchable. When the league demanded that North Carolina accept the radical transgender agenda or face NFL sanctions, the Tar Heel State capitulated. When Arizona declined to make Martin Luther King's birthday a holiday in 1990, the NFL took away the Super Bowl. The Sun State caved.

This year, the league demanded respect for the beliefs and behavior of NFL players insulting Old Glory by "taking a knee" during the national anthem.

Many conservative politicians and commentators, fearing the NFL's almost mythic popularity in Middle America, remained mute.

But believing instinctively America would side with him, Trump delivered a full-throated defense of the flag and called for kicking the kneelers off the field, out of the game, and off the team.

"Fire them!" Trump bellowed.

And Trump triumphed. The NFL lost fans and viewers. The players ended the protests. No one took a knee at the Super Bowl.

Before Trump, the FBI was sacrosanct. But Trump savaged an insiders' cabal at the top of the FBI he saw as having plotted to defeat him.

Trump has not attacked an independent judiciary, but courts like the Ninth Circuit, controlled by progressives and abusing their offices to advance progressive goals, and federal judges using lifetime tenure and political immunity to usurp powers that belong to the president — on immigration, for example.

Among the reasons Congress is disrespected is that it let the Supreme Court seize its power over social policy and convert itself into a judicial dictatorship — above Congress.

Trump is no Beltway conservative, writes Cannon.

"Trump doesn't play by these ridiculous rules designed to keep conservatives stuck in a perpetual state of losing — a made-for-CNN version of the undefeated Harlem Globetrotters versus the winless Washington Generals. Trump instead seeks to fight and delegitimize any institution the Left has captured, and rebuild it from the ground up."

The Trump supporters who most relish the wars he is waging are the "Middle American Radicals," of whom my columnist-colleague and late friend Sam Francis used to write.

There was a time such as today before in America.

After World War II, as it became clear our long-ruling liberal elites had blundered horribly in trusting Stalin, patriots arose to cleanse our institutions of treason and its fellow travelers.

The Hollywood Ten were exposed and went to jail. Nixon nailed Alger Hiss. Truman used the Smith Act to shut down Stalin's subsidiary, the Communist Party USA. Spies in the atom bomb program were run down. The Rosenbergs went to the electric chair.

Liberals call it the "Red Scare." And they are right to do so.

For when the patriots of the Greatest Generation like Jack Kennedy and Richard Nixon and Joe McCarthy came home from the war and went after them, the nation's Reds had never been so scared in their entire lives.

SOURCE 

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A British parallel to the FBI v Trump saga

Last week saw political eruptions on either side of the Atlantic about a similar issue: whether government officials are neutral. The row over the leaked forecasts for Brexit, and whether civil servants were being partisan in preparing and perhaps leaking them, paralleled the row in America about the declassified Congressional memo on the FBI and Donald Trump. “Trump’s unparalleled war on a pillar of society: law enforcement”, said TheNew York Times. “Brexit attacks on civil service ‘are worthy of 1930s Germany’ ” said The Observer.

To summarise, in London a government forecast that even a soft Brexit would be slightly worse for the economy than non-Brexit was conveniently leaked. This happened just as some politicians and commentators were trying to shift the country towards accepting a form of customs union with the European Union — that is to say, not really leaving at all.

In Washington, the president declassified a memo prepared by Devin Nunes, the chairman of the House intelligence committee. It alleged that the FBI got a warrant from a secret court to bug a Trump campaign executive, using as evidence mainly a “salacious and unverified” dossier (the former FBI director James Comey’s words) prepared by a British ex-spy paid by the Democratic Party, a fact that the FBI apparently failed on three occasions to tell the court. The FBI also allegedly leaked the dodgy dossier to the press.

There are two sides to both stories. In Washington, the Democrats and some Republicans see a president prepared to break secrecy to make the FBI look bad, presumably as a distraction from its investigation of his alleged links with Russia. In London, Remainers focus on the fact that it is unusual and wrong for politicians to attack civil servants who are not allowed to answer back.

Nobody disputes, surely, that civil servants have views. Since 91 per cent of Washington DC voted for Hillary Clinton in 2016, and a similar percentage of public servants here probably voted Remain, we can guess what those views are in most cases. Former mandarins in the House of Lords and on Twitter are among the most outspoken opponents of Brexit in any form. In the FBI case, several key people (including the British
ex-spy, Christopher Steele) are on record as having been passionately opposed to Mr Trump’s election.

As chancellor, George Osborne set up the Office of Budget Responsibility precisely to remove economic forecasting from political pressure. Yet the Treasury returned to economic forecasting during the referendum campaign. It said that “a vote to leave would represent an immediate and profound shock to our economy. That shock would push our economy into a recession and lead to an increase in unemployment of around 500,000, GDP would be 3.6 per cent smaller” and so on. This turned out to be based on ridiculous assumptions and was utterly discredited by what actually happened.

This case is different, however. By all accounts the Treasury was stung by the humiliating failure of Project Fear (which would never have been exposed if Remain had won the referendum, remember). This latest forecast is not from a Treasury model at all but a “cross-departmental tool”, as Amber Rudd said yesterday. Nor is it based on the discredited “gravity” assumption, that trade decreases with the square of distance. It is thought to be a “computable general equilibrium model” of the kind that the Treasury’s critics have long recommended.

It is not clear who developed the model. It might have been contracted from an outside consultant. There is no evidence it has been “back-tested” on the British economy’s past performance to see if it works. More problematically still, the model does not test the government’s preferred policy at all, and makes ludicrous assumptions about what would happen under its three scenarios.

For example, if we leave on World Trade Organisation terms, it assumes we would keep the external tariffs of the EU that inflate the household costs of British consumers. Given that trade with the EU is about 12 per cent of British GDP, in order to achieve an 8 per cent hit to GDP, the model has to assume we would lose at least half that trade, which is for the birds. Garbage in, garbage out, as they say in modelling.

Who commissioned the forecasts? It appears it was not Treasury officials but nor was it a politician. The relevant ministers have distanced themselves. It looks increasingly like a freelance operation from within the top layers of the civil service. If so, this might indeed justify criticism not so much for doing analysis, but in who they got to model it. Being culturally averse to Brexit and free markets, they just would not think of going to economists like Roger Bootle, Gerard Lyons, Ryan Bourne, Liam Halligan and Patrick Minford, who see opportunities in leaving. They do not even realise they are being biased.

The pass-the-smelling-salts shock of those leaping to the defence of civil servants is excessive, as was their comparison of the critics to Hitler and snake-oil salesmen. Civil servants get secure, well-paid jobs with early retirement and excellent pensions. And when they screw up, politicians generally carry the can for them. An occasional question from a politician about whether they are letting their prejudices get in the way of doing their job may be uncomfortable, but it’s hardly unreasonable.

If they mount a freelance operation that frustrates a democratic mandate then all bets should be off, just as if it emerges that the FBI was freelancing to undermine a presidential candidate (either of them), then it would be a major scandal.

Britain faces its greatest decision in decades. If we leave the customs union, keep its tariffs and do nothing else, of course there will be pain. But if we also open up our economy more to the growing markets of Asia, Africa, Australasia and the Americas, and take measures to encourage investment and innovation, we will blow away any pessimistic forecasts. Civil servants should be modelling those possibilities.

SOURCE 

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Fake News and the Tet Offensive

Leftist fake news goes back a long way

Seemingly out of nowhere, a shock wave hit South Vietnam on Jan. 30, 1968. In a coordinated assault unprecedented in ferocity and scale, more than 100,000 North Vietnamese and Viet Cong soldiers stormed out of their sanctuaries in Laos and Cambodia. They went on to attack more than 100 towns and cities across South Vietnam.

The following 77 days changed the course of the Vietnam War. The American people were bombarded with a nightly stream of devastating television and daily print reporting. Yet what they saw was so at odds with the reality on the ground that many Vietnam veterans believe truth itself was under attack.

The Tet Offensive had ambitious objectives: cause a mass uprising against the government, collapse the South Vietnamese Army, and inflict mass casualties on U.S. forces. The men in the Hanoi Politburo—knowing the war’s real center of gravity was in Washington —hoped the attack ultimately would sap the American people’s will to fight.

A key component of this strategy was terror. Thousands of South Vietnamese government officials, schoolteachers, doctors, missionaries and ordinary civilians—especially in Hue City—were rounded up and executed in an act of butchery not often seen on the battlefield.

Despite their ferocity, by most objective military standards, the communists achieved none of their goals. U.S. and South Vietnamese forces held fast, regrouped and fought back. By late March they had achieved a decisive victory over the communist forces. Hanoi wouldn’t be able to mount another full-scale invasion of South Vietnam until the 1972 Easter offensive.

But in living rooms across America, the nightly news described an overwhelming American defeat. The late Washington Post Saigon correspondent Peter Braestrup later concluded the event marked a major failure in the history of American journalism.

Braestrup, in “Big Story: How the American Press and Television Reported and Interpreted the Crisis of Tet 1968 in Vietnam and Washington” (1977), attributed this portrayal to television’s showbiz tradition. TV news editors put little premium on breadth of coverage, fact-finding or context.

The TV correspondent, Braestrup wrote, like the anchorman back home, had to pose on camera with authority. He had to maintain a dominant appearance while telling viewers more than he knew or could know. The commentary was thematic and highly speculative; it seemed preoccupied with network producers’ insatiable appetite for “impact.”

Braestrup criticized print media with equal vigor. The great bulk of wire-service output used by U.S. newspapers did not come from eyewitness accounts. Rather, he wrote, it was passed on from second- or third-hand sources reprocessed several times over.

He was stridently critical of “interpretive reporting,” in which editors allowed reporters to write under the rubric of “news analysis” and “commentary.” This, he asserts, produced “pervasive distortions” and a “disaster image.” The misinformation, fixed in the minds of the American people, played a role in shifting public opinion against the war.

“At Tet,” Braestrup assessed, “the press shouted that the patient was dying, then weeks later began to whisper that he somehow seemed to be recovering—whispers apparently not heard amid the clamorous domestic reaction to the initial shouts.”

Braestrup suggested that the press committed journalistic malpractice by taking sides against the Johnson administration and not correcting the record once the fog of the battle had lifted. These hasty assumptions and judgments, he documented, “were simply allowed to stand.”

Braestrup’s exhaustive analysis remains controversial. His friend and colleague at the Washington Post, the late Don Oberdorfer, attributed the erosion of public support to the credibility of the Johnson administration. The president’s office regularly issued rosy pronouncements at odds with the tactical ebb and flow on the battlefield.

But even to this day it’s difficult to find fault with Braestrup’s concluding insight: The professional obligation of journalists in a free society is to stay calm and get the story straight. It is not, as Walter Lippmann admonished, to conflate “truth” with the assembly and processing of a commodity called “news.”

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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When kindness made a hate-filled Leftist think again

But she still can see no good in Trump

I went to the Women’s March in Washington, D.C., and I arrived home feeling heartbroken. It was the last way I expected to feel.

I had spent the morning sitting on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial with my 16-year-old daughter, Katherine, whose silent tears on election night in 2016 had marked the beginning of this national nightmare for me. She had insisted we drive from Charlotte to D.C. this year so that we could "protest in front of the president’s house." We heard all of the inspiring speakers; we relished the creativity of the posters and slogans. Being among so many like-minded people was comforting. I heard one woman say, "I love being here today. It makes me feel less alone."

I wanted to be with people who shared my anger. Because I have been so angry about Donald Trump this past year. I have been angry at my country for electing this man, angry at my neighbors who support him, angry at the wealthy who sacrificed our country and its goodness for tax breaks, angry at the coal miners who believed his promises.

My fury has been bottomless. I drink my morning coffee from a cup that says, "I hate to wake up when Donald Trump is President." The constancy of my outrage has been exhausting, yet I have not yet found a way to quell it — nearly each day has brought a new reason to stoke the fire. But a day with my daughter, communing with the angry and the aggrieved, seemed a good way to try.

After the march, Katherine and I hit the road in the late afternoon, feeling good; we had done our part to express our outrage. We were about 90 minutes south of D.C. when I heard a terrible popping sound. I assumed I had blown a tire and headed toward the nearest exit. The popping was followed by screeching — were we now driving on metal? Luckily, there was a gas station right off the exit.

Before I could do anything but park my gray Prius, a man rushed over. "I heard you coming down that road," he said. Before I could say much he started surveying the situation. He didn’t so much offer to help us as get right to work.

It turned out that I hadn’t blown a tire; a huge piece of plastic under the front bumper had come loose, causing the screeching as it scraped along the road. After determining that he couldn’t cut the plastic off, he ran over to his car to grab some zip ties so that he could secure the piece back in place.

He did all of this so quickly that I didn’t have time to grab the prominent RESIST sticker on the side of my car, which suddenly felt needlessly alienating. As this man lay on the ground under my car with his miracle zip ties, I asked if he thought they would hold for four more hours of driving.

"Just ask any redneck like me what you can do with zip ties — well, zip ties and duct tape. You can solve almost any car problem. You’ll get home safe," he said, turning to his teenage son standing nearby. "You can say that again," his son agreed.

The whole interaction lasted 10 minutes, tops. Katherine and I made it home safely.

Our encounter changed the day for me. While I tried to dive back into my liberal podcast, my mind kept being pulled back to the gas station. I couldn’t stop thinking about the man who called himself a "redneck" who came to our rescue. I sized him up as a Trump voter, just as he likely drew inferences from my Prius and RESIST sticker. But for a moment, we were just two people and the exchange was kindness (his) and gratitude (mine).

As I drove home, I felt the full extent to which Trump has actually diminished my own desire to be kind. He is keeping me so outraged that I hold ill will toward others on a daily basis. Trump is not just ruining our nation, he is ruining me. By the end of the drive, I felt heartbroken.

When my husband and I first moved to Charlotte eight years ago, I liked to tell people that our neighborhood represented the best impulses of America. In our little two-block craftsman-home development, we had people of every political persuasion from liberal to moderate Republican to tea party, and we all got along. We held porch parties in the summer and a progressive dinner at Christmas. We put being a cohesive neighborhood above politics.

But this year, I realize, I retreated from my porch. Trump’s cruelty and mendacity demand outrage and the most vigorous resistance a nation can muster. Yet the experience with the man at the side of the road felt humbling. It reminded me that we are all just people trying to get home safe. It felt like a sign, that maybe if we treat one another with the kindness and gratitude that is so absent from our president and his policies, putting our most loving selves forward, this moment can transform into something more bearable? I want to come away from the march with that simple lesson, but it begs this question: How do we hold onto the fire fueling our resistance to the cruelty Trump unleashes, but also embrace the world with love? I wish I knew.

SOURCE

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We have to Limit Spending, not taxes

Walter E. Williams

Some people have called for a balanced budget amendment to our Constitution as a means of reining in a big-spending Congress. That's a misguided vision, for the simple reason that in any real economic sense, as opposed to an accounting sense, the federal budget is always balanced. The value of what we produced in 2017 — our gross domestic product — totaled about $19 trillion. If the Congress spent $4 trillion of the $19 trillion that we produced, unless you believe in Santa Claus, you know that Congress must force us to spend $4 trillion less privately.

Taxing us is one way that Congress can do that. But federal revenue estimates for 2017 are about $3.5 trillion, leaving an accounting deficit of about $500 billion. So taxes are not enough to cover Congress' spending. Another way Congress can get us to spend less privately is to enter the bond market. It can borrow. Borrowing forces us to spend less privately, and it drives up interest rates and crowds out private investment. Finally, the most dishonest way to get us to spend less is to inflate our currency. Higher prices for goods and services reduce our real spending.

The bottom line is the federal budget is always balanced in any real economic sense. For those enamored of a balanced budget amendment, think about the following. Would we have greater personal liberty under a balanced federal budget with Congress spending $4 trillion and taxing us $4 trillion, or would we be freer under an unbalanced federal budget with Congress spending $2 trillion and taxing us $1 trillion? I'd prefer the unbalanced budget. The true measure of government's impact on our lives is government spending, not government taxing.

Tax revenue is not our problem. The federal government has collected nearly 20 percent of the nation's gross domestic product almost every year since 1960. Federal spending has exceeded 20 percent of the GDP for most of that period. Because federal spending is the problem, that's where our focus should be. Cutting spending is politically challenging. Every spending constituency sees what it gets from government as vital, whether it be Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid recipients or farmers, poor people, educators or the military. It's easy for members of Congress to say yes to these spending constituencies, because whether it's Democrats or Republicans in control, they don't face a hard and fast bottom line.

The nation needs a constitutional amendment that limits congressional spending to a fixed fraction, say 20 percent, of the GDP. It might stipulate that the limit could be exceeded only if the president declared a state of emergency and two-thirds of both houses of Congress voted to approve the spending. By the way, the Founding Fathers would be horrified by today's congressional spending. From 1787 to the 1920s, except in wartime, federal government spending never exceeded 4 percent of our GDP.

During the early '80s, I was a member of the National Tax Limitation Committee. Our distinguished blue-ribbon drafting committee included its founder, Lew Uhler, plus notables such as Milton Friedman, James Buchanan, Paul McCracken, Bill Niskanen, Craig Stubblebine, Robert Bork, Aaron Wildavsky, Robert Nisbet and Robert Carleson. The U.S. Senate passed our proposed balanced budget/spending limitation amendment to the U.S. Constitution on Aug. 4, 1982, by a bipartisan vote of 69-31, surpassing the two-thirds requirement by two votes. In the House of Representatives, the amendment was approved by a bipartisan majority (236-187), but it did not meet the two-thirds vote required by Article 5 of the Constitution. The amendment can be found in Milton and Rose Friedman's "Tyranny of the Status Quo" or the appendix of their "Free to Choose."

SOURCE

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Pseudo-Christians Promote Open Borders And A Gender Neutral God

The governing body of the Episcopalian Diocese of Washington, D.C., approved measures to adopt gender neutral pronouns for God, embrace transgenderism, and a push for open borders.

The 123rd Diocesan Convention of the Episcopal Church in D.C. passed a trifecta of resolutions Saturday to replace all gendered pronouns referring to God with gender neutral pronouns, oppose laws against illegal immigration, and open traditionally gender restricted congregational roles and facilities, like bathrooms, to transgender individuals. The convention, held at the Washington National Cathedral, passed the resolutions within an hour, according to The Institute On Religion & Democracy.

The resolutions, entitled “On Becoming a Sanctuary Diocese: Offering Sacred Welcome to Immigrants,” “On the Gendered Language for God,” and “On Inclusion of Transgender People,” garnered support from Rev. Kimberly Lucas, who sponsored all three, and Rev. Alex Dyer, who proposed two of the resolutions. Lucas serves as rector of St. Margaret’s Episcopal Church in D.C. and Dyer serves as rector of St. Thomas’ Episcopal Parish in D.C., both of which have suffered a massive decline in member participation within the last decade, according to parochial reports.

Dyer also garnered attention for installing banners around construction fences depicting Jesus face-palming with sarcastic quips like “The President said what?” and the tagline “a progressive church for a progressive city.”

The D.C. diocese resolved, in their “Sacred Welcome To Immigrants,” to “oppose the policies of the incumbent Executive Branch that target undocumented immigrants for deportation while also placing undue restrictions on refugees seeking safe haven in the U.S.” Those who drafted the resolution said they intended it as a message of solidarity to illegal immigrants within the diocese.

The diocese also agreed, via the gendered language resolution, to replace all references to the Father and the Son in the Book of Common Prayer with gender neutral pronouns, a move which some theologians decry as undermining the theology of the Trinity, that is one of the central tenets of Christianity. The resolution’s authors argued, in contrast, that “our current gender roles shape and limit our understanding of God.”

Rev. Linda R. Calkins, a diocesan delegate and proponent of the resolution, also urged the diocese to consider adopting the “The Inclusive Bible: The First Egalitarian Translation,” that removes all gender specific pronouns for God from scripture.

Calkins attempted to justify her position by arguing that El Shaddai, one of the Hebrew names for God in the Old Testament, really means “God with breasts.” The actual meaning of El Shaddai is widely debated among biblical scholars, as the most popular interpretation is “God Almighty,” though other historical translations come out to “God the Destroyer,” “God of the Mountain,” or “The God who is sufficient.” Scholars adhering to the “breasts” translation actually interpret the name as a depiction of God giving blessings of nourishment and fertility, rather than literally ascribing feminine qualities to God.

Parishes within the diocese will also “remove all obstacles to full participation in congregational life by making all gender-specific facilities and activities fully accessible, regardless of gender identity and expression,” according to the resolution on embracing transgender individuals. Those who wrote and proposed the resolution asserted that gender definitions had become fluid in modern society and that, rather than adhere to a biblical view of God’s intended natural order for creation, the church needed to adapt to the whims of culture.

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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Trump: Nancy Pelosi Is 'Our Secret Weapon'

In remarks at the Sheffer Corporation in Blue Ash, Ohio, Monday, President Trump criticized House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), calling her the Republicans' "secret weapon."

"Nancy Pelosi -- what she's doing to this country -- and she's gone so far left, and Schumer's gone so far left -- I look forward to running against them," Trump said, referring to both the midterm election in November and the presidential election in 2020.

Trump urged his audience to "start thinking about '18. Start thinking about November." He said Pelosi and her fellow Democrats want to raise taxes on Americans while depriving the military of funding. Then he mentioned the bonuses and rising family incomes created, he said, by the Republican tax cut legislation.

So Nancy Pelosi, again, said, 'That's crumbs.' Well, she's a rich woman who lives in a big, beautiful house in California who wants to give all of your money away, and she talked about crumbs.

And I really think her statement about crumbs -- because you're getting thousands and thousands of dollars, and you're getting it every year. So I think her statement, 'crumbs,' will be equivalent -- and I said this the other day for the first time. When I first heard the word 'deplorable,' I thought it was a bad thing. But I had no idea it was not going to be good for our opponent.

It was not good, because, about two days after she (Hillary Clinton) said it, I go to a rally, and everyone's wearing shirts: 'I am a deplorable.' 'We're all deplorables.' I said, what's going on with the word 'deplorable,' Rob?"

You know, we had that, right? It just went pretty wild. It was not a good day for her, and I think this is not a good day for Nancy Pelosi. She's our secret weapon.

The crowd laughed, and Trump continued:

"No, she's our secret -- I just hope they don't change her. There are a lot of people that want to run her out. She's -- she's really out there, and I'm supposed to make a deal with her."

Pelosi is insisting on an immediate immigration deal that gives legal status to dreamers, while deferring any action on chain migration or the diversity visa lottery. President Trump insists that any dreamer deal include three other elements -- border security, including a wall; and an end to chain migration and the diversity visa lottery.

SOURCE

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Remembering the Great Communicator on His Birthday

In his 1989 farewell address to the American people, President Ronald Reagan corrected the simplistic notion that he was simply a great communicator by saying: “I wasn’t a great communicator, but I communicated great things,” gathered from “our experience, our wisdom, and our belief in principles that have guided us for two centuries.”

But Reagan was, in fact, a superb orator—one of the most inspiring in American politics, at ease with a formal address to Congress or to the British Parliament, a “fireside chat” with the American people from the Oval Office or a blunt challenge to a foreign adversary.

As we celebrate his birthday this week, I offer some of the “secrets” about his public speaking I have discovered during my decades of writing about our 40th president.

In “Speaking My Mind,” a collection of his speeches, the president readily admitted he had honed his speaking ability while in Hollywood making movies and later as host of the TV program “GE Theater.” He was aware that his political success was due, in part, to his ability to give a good speech based on two things: “to be honest” in what you are saying, and “to be in touch with [your] audience.”

The president emphasized that it was not just “my rhetoric or delivery” that carried him into the White House but that his speeches contained basic truths that the average American instinctively recognized, like the necessity of preserving individual freedom. “What I said simply made sense to the [man] on the street,” he said.

In his early career as a radio broadcaster in Iowa, he discovered a basic rule that he followed all his life: “Talk to your audience, not over their heads or through them. Don’t try to talk in a special language of broadcasting or even of politics, just use normal everyday words.”

On the eve of his election as president, when a reporter asked Reagan what he thought other Americans saw in him, he replied: “Would you laugh if I told you that I think maybe, they see themselves and that I’m one of them.” And he added: “I’ve never been able to detach myself or think that I, somehow, am apart from them.”

Like a popular singer who happily sings a favorite song for his audience, Reagan was a “big believer” in stump speeches because, he explained, your message eventually “will sink into the collective consciousness” of the people. “If you have something you believe in deeply,” he said, “it’s worth repeating time and again until you achieve it. You also get better at delivering it.”

That proved to be the case for his famous “A Time for Choosing” TV address in support of Barry Goldwater, R-Ariz., which he had been delivering throughout California in the fall of 1964.

The choice before the people in the presidential campaign, Reagan said, was simple: “Whether we believe in our capacity for self-government or whether we abandon the American Revolution and confess that a little intellectual elite in a far-distant capital can plan our lives for us better than we can plan them ourselves.”

Has anyone ever presented a more concise argument against the progressive paradigm?

Reagan also addressed and rejected the liberal argument that “we have to choose between a left or right.” “There is no such thing as left or right,” he said. “There’s only an up or down, up to man’s age-old dream of individual freedom consistent with law and order, or down to the ant heap of totalitarianism.”

Is it any wonder that after hearing Reagan speak, voters flooded the Goldwater campaign headquarters with telegrams, letters, and checks totaling $1 million and urgently requesting copies of the Reagan address to replay in their towns and communities?

Here is another “secret” of the Great Communicator. Before his Oval Office talks, an aide would bring the president a glass of water wrapped in a small towel. Why wrapped? Because the water was warm—almost hot—calculated to relax his vocal chords. He had adopted this procedure on the advice of a Hollywood friend who knew something about the voice—Frank Sinatra.

And where did the quotations, aphorisms, and excerpts that Reagan used so effectively come from?

While some were provided by his speechwriters, most of them came from a private collection of 4×6 note cards personally written by the president. Presidential aides had long heard about the notes collection, but not until the spring of 2010 were the notes found by the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library staff in a cardboard box marked only “RR’s desk.”

We are indebted to historian and Reagan biographer Douglas Brinkley for arranging and publishing them as “The Notes: Ronald Reagan’s Private Collection of Stories and Wisdom.”

Taken from books, magazines, speeches, and even poems, the notes reflect Reagan’s firm faith and perennial optimism about work, marriage, and family. There are classic one-liners like “Flattery is what makes husbands out of bachelors” and “Money may not buy you friends, but it will help you to stay in contact with your children.”

There is historical wisdom like Winston Churchill’s observation that “when great forces are on the move in the world we learn we are spirits not animals. There is something going on in time and space and beyond time and space which whether we like it or not spells duty.”

There are quotes from surprising sources like the 19th-century French free-market economist Frederic Bastiat, who wrote: “People are beginning to realize that the apparatus of government is costly. But what they do not know is that the burden falls inevitably on them.”

And quotes from likely sources like the revolutionary American pamphleteer Thomas Paine who wrote, “We have it in our power to begin the world over again.”

And there is the Scottish ballad which Reagan quoted to his grieving campaign staff in 1976 after he narrowly lost the Republican presidential nomination to Gerald Ford: “I am hurt but I am not slain. I’ll lay me down and bleed a while and then I’ll rise and fight again.”

That’s exactly what he did four years later when he won the GOP presidential nomination and then the presidency, commencing upon eight years in the White House, which some historians have described as the “age of Reagan.”

As Reagan made clear, a good speech must be truthful. It must not pander to the emotions. It must take into account the audience’s mood and guide their passions and imagination, while using the words of the common man.

A great speech must be concerned with great things—first principles such as liberty, justice, and equality, principles that have shaped America from the very beginning, and still do today.

Here, then, are some of the secrets of the Great Communicator, Ronald Reagan, whose eloquent voice is not stilled but remains available to us any day and hour through YouTube and other social media.

SOURCE

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An interesting experiment

People don't like minorities near them

What I tried to do was change social geography and see how that changed people’s behaviors. We sent two Spanish-speakers to Grafton and other places that are very white and asked them to stand in randomly selected train stations and speak Spanish for a few minutes every day. What we wanted to know was how people reacted to a change in social geography, and whether that affected the way they thought about politics.

We surveyed people waiting for the train, who were largely upper class, liberal, and white, before and after the experiment, about their politics and attitudes on immigration.

What we found was that people who were exposed to these two Spanish-speakers — who weren’t doing anything unusual, just speaking Spanish, spending a few minutes on the train station every day — changed their attitudes toward immigration. They became sharply exclusionary, and they said they wanted to keep immigrants out of the country. The experiment was completely random, nothing else changed, and it was the mere presence of these other people, this change in social geography, that changed their attitudes about politics.

SOURCE

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For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated),  a Coral reef compendium and an IQ compendium. (Both updated as news items come in).  GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten. I also put up occasional updates on my Personal blog and each day I gather together my most substantial current writings on THE PSYCHOLOGIST.

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

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Even psychologists are now beginning to notice Leftist authoritarianism

With Antifa and many students marching in the footsteps of Hitler's brownshirts, it had become hard not to notice.After the summary and abstract below I add a few notes designed to recontextualize the article below

New research provides evidence that left-wing authoritarian attitudes exist in the United States. The preliminary findings, published in the scientific journal Political Psychology, suggest liberals could be just as likely to be authoritarians as conservatives.

“Political ideology in general is one of the most important and predictive variables in human psychology,” said study author Lucian Gideon Conway, an associate professor of psychology at the University of Montana.

“I became interested in left-wing authoritarianism in particular because some people have said it isn’t a very real or likely phenomenon — and yet I know people I would describe as left-wing authoritarians. So I was curious to figure that out.”

Conway and his colleagues developed a measure of left-wing authoritarianism, which was adapted from the right-wing authoritarianism scale developed by psychologist Bob Altemeyer.

The RWA scale asks participants how much they agree with statements such as: “It’s always better to trust the judgment of the proper authorities in government and religion than to listen to the noisy rabble-rousers in our society who are trying to create doubts in people’s minds” and “Our country desperately needs a mighty leader who will do what has to be done to destroy the radical new ways and sinfulness that are ruining us.”

The new LWA scale, on the other hand, asks questions such as: “It’s always better to trust the judgment of the proper authorities in science with respect to issues like global warming and evolution than to listen to the noisy rabble-rousers in our society who are trying to create doubts in people’s minds” and “Our country desperately needs a mighty leader who will do what has to be done to destroy the radical new ways and sinfulness that are ruining us.”

Both scales were tested on a group of 475 undergraduates at the University of Montana and a group of 305 U.S. adults who were recruited online from Amazon’s Mechanical Turk.

The researchers found that left-wing authoritarianism was associated with liberal views, dogmatism, and prejudice among both samples of participants, suggesting it is a valid concept.

“Our data suggest that average Americans on the political left are just as likely to be dogmatic authoritarians as those on the political right. And those left-wing authoritarians can be just as prejudiced, dogmatic, and extremist as right-wing authoritarians,” Conway told PsyPost.

SOURCE

Finding the Loch Ness Monster: Left-Wing Authoritarianism in the United States

Lucian Gideon Conway III et al.

Abstract

Although past research suggests authoritarianism may be a uniquely right-wing phenomenon, the present two studies tested the hypothesis that authoritarianism exists in both right-wing and left-wing contexts in essentially equal degrees. Across two studies, university (n = 475) and Mechanical Turk (n = 298) participants completed either the RWA (right-wing authoritarianism) scale or a newly developed (and parallel) LWA (left-wing authoritarianism) scale. Participants further completed measurements of ideology and three domain-specific scales: prejudice, dogmatism, and attitude strength. Findings from both studies lend support to an authoritarianism symmetry hypothesis: Significant positive correlations emerged between LWA and measurements of liberalism, prejudice, dogmatism, and attitude strength. These results largely paralleled those correlating RWA with identical conservative-focused measurements, and an overall effect-size measurement showed LWA was similarly related to those constructs (compared to RWA) in both Study 1 and Study 2. Taken together, these studies provide evidence that LWA may be a viable construct in ordinary U.S. samples.

SOURCE

COMMENT: This article was written from within the tight bubble of leftist political psychology so it is unusual only in that context.

Readers of history or observers of contemporary politics would know that ALL Leftism is authoritarian. Barack Obama was the chosen delegate of the Democratic party so when in his first campaign he said to wild cheers from his supporters that his aim was to "fundamentally transform" America he was presenting an ideology that was just about as authoritarian as you could get. And Leftism in general is about imposed change.

And in the French revolution and the Communist regimes of the 20th century we saw how brutally Leftists impose change when they get their hands of the levers of power. Fortunately, Congress was too big a block on change for Mr Obama to accomplish much of his aims.

But let us temporarily abandon reality and dive into the bubble of Leftist thinking about political psychology.

Leftist political psychology principally originated to meet a desperate need of the American Left immediately after the defeat of Hitler. Hitler had become a huge embarrassment. Anybody who knew well the Americam "Progressive" politics of the 1930's would be aware Hitler's ideas and what was preached by Americam "Progressives" were basically the same -- including the antisemitism and the eugenics. Hitler just applied German thoroughness to 1930s socialism.

But Hitler was now the great political failure so there was a desperate need to prevent any connections with him and his ideas. You could abandon some of your policies that you shared with hin -- such as eugenics -- but other policies -- such as hostility to business and a desire to control it -- were too basic to let go.

So where was a way out of that dilemma? One way out was to adopt the Communist claim that Hitler was "Rightist". And the Marxists were partly right about that. Hitler was less disruptive to the existing order than the Communists in Russia were so he was clearly to the right of Communism, but Leftist otherwise. But that in fact made him MORE like the American Progressives than less so that was not much of a solution.

But help was at hand. Some mostly German academics led by prominent Marxist theoretician, Theodor Wiesengrund (AKA Adorno) had a solution. They would use the methods of psychological research to show that it was really conservatives, not Leftists who threatened America with authoritarian rule. Reality could be flipped on its head and conservatives could be presented as the true heirs of Hitler.

One would have thought that such an absurdly counter-factual proposition would be laughed to death but the opposite happened. The whole American Left celebrated the revelation with gladsome hearts. They built an intellectual bubble wherein only conservatives could be authoritarian. And they never strayed from that bubble. The highpoint of that folly was probably when Robert Altemeyer claimed that he couldn't find a single Authoritarian Leftist in the whole of Canada! So you can see what brave skeptics Conway and his co-authors above are. It will be interesting to see if he has any influence.

Just a methodological note to conclude: Conway et al. used as their measure of authoritarianism the ludicrous Altemeyer RWA scale. That scale allegedly measures Right-wing authoritarianism. But the highest scores found on it were from Russian Communists. But if Communists are Right-swing, we would seem to be in a state of definitional collapse. If Communists are Right-wing, who are the Leftists? The RWA scale clearly does not measure what it claims to measure.

Altemeyer himself has backed down in response to that revelation and defined his RWA scale as measuring "submission to the perceived established authorities in one's life". It now measures neither authoritarianism nor anything Right wing! Looking at its items, I would say that it just measures political hostility but who knows what it measures, if anything?

In his future research Conway should clearly pay much more attention to the validity of the instruments he uses. As it stands, I doubt that he has proved anything

My academic publications on authoritarianism are here.  A comment on Altemeyer's more recent capers is here

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Britain fumes as Trump tweets insults about National Health Service crisis

America's health system gives pretty poor treatment to the poor.  Britain's health system gives poor treatment to most people.  But Brits still love their NHS because it is "free".  They overlook the dangerously long waits for treatment that they often have to suffer.  The truth is the NHS is at breaking point due in part to a population/immigration crisis. It hasn't got enough hospitals, doctors or facilities to cope.

HE MIGHT as well have insulted the Queen. Brits are fuming after Donald Trump slammed a beloved national institution.

JUST when the “special relationship” seemed to be back on track, President Trump has sparked a wave of anger in the UK over insulting a national point of pride; the healthcare system.

The US leader set his sights on Britain’s National Health Service (NHS) on Monday, tweeting that “thousands of people are marching in the UK because their U system is going broke and not working”.

The comment sparked a huge backlash from Brits over the accuracy of the claims — particularly as the march he referred to was designed to demand more funding for the NHS following a decade of austerity measures.

Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt said: “I may disagree with claims made on that march but not ONE of them wants to live in a system where 28m people have no cover” in reference to the Republican goal of repealing and replacing Obamacare.

“NHS may have challenges but I’m proud to be from the country that invented universal coverage — where all get care no matter the size of their bank balance.”

UK Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn simply tweeted: “Wrong. People were marching because we love our NHS and hate what the Tories are doing to it. Healthcare is a human right.”

Broadcaster Piers Morgan, who recently extracted an almost-apology from Trump for retweeting anti-Muslim videos shared by nationalist group Britain First, also called him out, writing “the US healthcare system is a sick joke & the envy of no-one.”

Others were not so diplomatic, calling the President an “absolute plank” and saying US-style policies are what has caused the chaos this winter that has seen operations cancelled due to beds being full in some places.

The NHS is widely seen as a point of national pride in the UK despite its funding problems and pressures, even included in the opening ceremony for the London 2012 Olympics.

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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