Does being fat give you heart disease?

The study below reports only two very weak associations.  The association between diabetes and obesity is no surprise.  It is known that diabetics tend to overeat and put on weight.  But that does NOT prove that being overweight gives you diabetes.

The correlation between coronary artery disease and obesity is potentially meaningful but the association is marginal and tends to be undermined by the finding that obesity is unrelated to stroke incidence. Obesity is in other words associated with a stroke precursor but not with stroke itself.  The only reasonable response to that pattern of effects is that obesity is harmless

The authors below, however, draw the conclusions that they wanted to draw  -- as is very common in research reports


Association Between Obesity and Cardiovascular Outcomes: A Systematic Review and Meta-analysis of Mendelian Randomization Studies

Haris Riaz et al.

Abstract

Importance:  Although dyslipidemia has been consistently shown to be associated with atherogenesis, an association between obesity and cardiovascular disease outcomes remains controversial. Mendelian randomization can minimize confounding if variables are randomly and equally distributed in the population of interest.

Objective:  To assess evidence from mendelian randomization studies to provide a less biased estimate of any association between obesity and cardiovascular outcomes.

Data Sources:  Systematic searches of MEDLINE and Scopus from database inception until January 2018, supplemented with manual searches of the included reference lists.

Study Selection:  Studies that used mendelian randomization methods to assess the association between any measure of obesity and the incidence of cardiovascular events and those that reported odds ratios (ORs) with 95% CIs estimated using an instrumental variable method were included. The 5 studies included in the final analysis were based on a consensus among 3 authors.

Data Extraction and Synthesis:  Two investigators independently extracted study characteristics using a standard form and pooled data using a random-effects model. The Meta-analysis of Observational Studies in Epidemiology (MOOSE) reporting guideline was followed.

Main Outcomes and Measures:  Obesity associated with type 2 diabetes, coronary artery disease, or stroke. The hypothesis was formulated prior to data collection.

Results:  Of 4660 potentially relevant articles, 2511 titles were screened. Seven studies were included in the systematic review, and 5 studies with 881 692 participants were eligible to be included in the meta-analysis. Pooled estimates revealed that obesity was significantly associated with an increased risk of type 2 diabetes (OR, 1.67; 95% CI, 1.30-2.14; P < .001; I2 = 93%) and coronary artery disease (OR, 1.20; 95% CI, 1.02-1.41; P = .03; I2 = 87%). No association between obesity and stroke was found (OR, 1.02; 95% CI, 0.95-1.09; P = .65; I2 = 0%).

Conclusions and Relevance:  The present meta-analysis suggests that obesity is associated with type 2 diabetes and coronary artery disease. Although this analysis of mendelian randomization studies does not prove causality, it is supportive of a causal association. Hence, health care practitioners should continue to emphasize weight reduction to combat coronary artery disease.

SOURCE 

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There Is No 'Surge' in Right-Wing Violence
   
A Washington Post “analysis” of domestic terrorism argues that attacks from white supremacists and other “far-right attackers” have been on the rise since Barack Obama’s presidency and “surged since President Trump took office.” It’s a familiar storyline meant to assure liberals that yes, Trump-motivated right-wing terrorists are running wild. There are, however, a few problems with this proposition.

For one thing, even if we accept the numbers the Post offers, the use of the word “surge” — meaning a sudden, powerful forward or upward movement — strains credibility. There’s no evidence of a “surge,” either in historical context or as a matter of ideological preference.

That is to say, we have good reason not to accept the numbers. According to The Washington Post, which relies on Global Terrorism Database data, there were zero acts of right-wing terrorism in the entire nation in 2002. Since then, we have seen a “surge,” to 36 in a nation of 325-plus million people in 2017. Among those acts, there were 11 fatalities.

In other words, fewer homicides were committed by political terrorists of any stripe in the United States in 2017 than were committed by undocumented immigrants in the state of Texas alone — which, I am assured, is an incredibly low number that shouldn’t worry us very much. If one of these “surges” is scaremongering, why not the other?

Then again, even if we use the criteria offered by the GTD, we need to be exceptionally generous to even get to 36 incidents of right-wing violence in 2017. (I could find only 32.)

For example, although the Post acknowledges that the Las Vegas shooter’s motivations are still unknown, the GTD had no problem categorizing the murderer of 58 people as an “anti-government extremist.” And it takes these sorts of assumptions to get in the vicinity of a “surge” in right-wing terrorism.

Of the 32 incidents I was able to find, 12 featured perpetrators who were merely “suspected” of being right-wing terrorists. Some of these incidents could have been the work of one person, as in the pellet gun shootings of Muslims in New York. In other incidents, we are asked to treat patently insane people as if they had coherent political agendas.

Still other events are even more opaque. In San Juan, Puerto Rico — apparently a hotbed of white supremacy — an incendiary device was thrown into a gay nightclub. No one was injured, thank goodness. Also, no one was caught, and no one claimed responsibility for the act. Yet the episode doesn’t even earn a “suspected” designation from GTD.

If the definition of domestic terrorism is muddy at best, the definition of right-wing terrorism is often arbitrary and self-serving.

To help bolster right-wing terrorist stats, for instance, we would have to perfunctorily include every anti-Semitic act. The Washington Post even mentions an Anti-Defamation League study showing “a 57 percent surge in anti-Semitic incidents in 2017.”

If anything, the ADL study should be cautionary, as it demonstrates how difficult it is to not only quantify these incidents but also categorize them ideologically. The ADL’s faulty data were self-reported, for instance, and most of the “surge” can be attributed to a single Jewish teen in Israel calling in a number of bomb threats to Jewish centers.

In the real world, a Jewish American is probably likelier to encounter anti-Semitism at a college campus than anywhere else.

Then there is the matter of inconsistently defining terrorism. If throwing a rock through the window of an Islamic center is an act of right-wing terrorism, why isn’t it an act of left-wing terrorism for anti-capitalists to throw rocks through the window of a business in Oregon? Surely, both fall under the description of terror, which the GTD defines as “the threatened or actual use of illegal force and violence by a non-state actor seeking to attain a political, economic, religious or social goal through fear, coercion, or intimidation.” As far as I can tell, only one of these genres actually makes the cut for the GTD.

This is what happens when reporters work backward from a predetermined premise.

You’ll notice, as well, that these analyses typically begin in 2002, seeing as the 2,977 Americans murdered on 9/11 are inconvenient to the white-supremacy-is-more-dangerous-than-radical-Islam narrative. The reason we don’t have a real-life “surge” of attacks by Islamic extremists since 2001, incidentally, is that the United States has spent billions yearly to stop it.

Of course, political violence isn’t the monopoly of any one group. Although there have been flare-ups of leftist violence in the 1900s and the 1960s and ‘70s, for the most part, this kind of violence is still rare. That could change. And none of this is to say horrible events aren’t happening. Nor is it to say that haters don’t exist. But exaggerating the problem for political reasons doesn’t help anyone. Covering your partisan work with a bogus veneer of scientific analysis doesn’t make it any more useful.

SOURCE

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Former Baptist President Ed Young: Democrat Party is 'Some Kind of Religion ... Basically Godless'

Ed Young, the senior pastor of Houston's Second Baptist Church and a former president of the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC), said the Democrat Party is some kind of "godless" religion and, because of the sin of abortion, "God will not bless America."

Young, host of The Winning Walk, made his remarks during an impromptu speech following the electoral defeat of Rep. John Culberson (R-Texas) on Nov. 6.

In his remarks, picked up by KHOU 11 News,  Pastor Young said the Democrat Party is "no longer a party -- it's some kind of religion that is basically godless."

He also condemned abortion and criticized the courts for leglaizing the killing of children by abortion. "[a]s long as America -- and this is represented by every Democrat I know -- does not believe in the sacredness of the life in the mother's womb, God will not bless America or make us a great nation."

Pastor Young is a strong defender of the natural law and Christian morality. As reported in One News Now, for instance, Young was involved in a 2015 effort to overturn an ordinance in Houston that allowed transgender women -- males pretending to be females -- to use bathrooms used by biological females.

At the time, Young said, "The bottom line is, if we open up our facilities when someone can choose their sexual orientation -- those who believe that men should use men's facilities, and women should use women's facilities – we will be discriminated against."

"It is totally deceptive, and it is deadly," he said, "and I trust that you will vote no, no, no, because it will carry our city further and further and further down the road of being totally, in my opinion, secular and godless."

The transgender bathroom ordinance was overturned by city voters.

SOURCE

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In the Middle East, You Win with Fear

The past six months have brought us violent demonstrations along the Gaza Strip border, cross-border infiltration, rocket fire and incendiary kites and balloons. This means that a so-called "agreement" or truce is not a viable option.

We cannot trust Hamas to keep the calm. Only when Hamas is afraid of IDF retaliation, which has yet to come, will calm prevail. Israelis tend to overlook the fact that in the Middle East, it is fear, above everything else, that governs how people act.

Unfortunately, from time to time, we must give our enemies a violent reminder, lest they continue terrorizing us. The very fact that Hamas continues its actions unabated shows a lack of deterrence, without which no truce is worth the paper it is signed on. Expecting Hamas to honor agreements with the Jewish state it wants to annihilate is inexcusably naive. Extortion that leads to an "agreement" is a prelude to more extortion.

The assumption that boosting the quality of life for Gazans will reduce Hamas' violence and hatred is fundamentally flawed. There is no place on this planet where there is a direct correlation between quality of life and terrorism. This holds true in the Palestinian case as well.

Recent polls show that Gazans are actually less hostile toward Israel than are their brethren in Judea and Samaria, where the quality of life is better. Perhaps the suffering in Gaza has taught them that prolonged conflict with Israel comes with great pain. While it is true that it takes time to change the behavior of large groups of people, what ultimately makes a population embark on a new political path is the degree to which it suffers. Germans suffered immensely during the two world wars and have since shed their violent past. Egypt also realized that a peace deal with Israel trumps more violence.

The goal of war is to inflict pain on the other side, to make it change its behavior. There is no point in giving Hamas candy while it fights against us. The exact opposite is true: It should be forced to pay a heavy price for its aggressive behavior. This is the message Israel should be sending Hamas, the Palestinian Authority and other enemies. To survive in the Middle East, Israel has to make it clear that it will inflict unimaginable pain on anyone who attacks it.

Only a crushing and devastating blow to Hamas will pave the way for a truce that would not be a victory for the terrorists. Such a truce would survive much longer than a half-baked truce that survives only several months until another extortion scheme.

SOURCE

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House Dems Out to Get Religion
   
One of the most important religious freedom laws in America turns 25 this Friday. But will it make it to 26? House Democrats are doing everything it can to ensure it doesn’t.

A quarter of a century ago, nothing about religious liberty was controversial. In fact, the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA) was so popular that all but three members of Congress voted yes. When Bill Clinton signed RFRA into law, no one dreamed that two decades later, his same party would be trying to sanctimoniously kill the law.

For most Americans, the Democrats’ shift hasn’t exactly been subtle. A party platform that mentioned God seven times in 2004 kicked him out in 2012. A senator who said, “We worship an awesome God” in 2004 declared war on faith as president a few years later. Now, a party that almost unanimously agreed that the government shouldn’t undermine religion in 1993 has 172 cosponsors to scrap RFRA and take a sledgehammer to our First Freedom. And they’ll have control of the House to advance their attack.

In an important column for the Washington Examiner, Ernest Istook points out that one of the people behind this push is about to become the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-N.Y.). Of course, he and the rest of his party want you to believe that Democrats wouldn’t destroy RFRA, they’d just carve out areas where it wouldn’t apply — like marriage, sexual orientation, gender identity, abortion, health care, and any other area where long standing religious beliefs clashed with the vogue values of the Left’s agenda.

“In short,” Istook explains, “an explicit constitutional right would be declared less important than other claims never mentioned in the Constitution and often not even legislated by elected officials.” The repeal of RFRA, he warns, would be a nightmare for men and women of faith – especially Christians, who just want the freedom to live out their beliefs in peace. That’ll be incredibly hard to do, Istook warns, since the Democrats’ bill would wipe out the Supreme Court victories in the Hobby Lobby and Masterpiece Cakeshop cases. The world that Chai Feldblum envisioned will have finally arrived. Asked what should happen when religious liberty clashed with the LGBT agenda, Obama’s EEOC chief said she’d have “a hard time coming up with any case in which religious liberty should win.” The modern Democratic Party agrees.

The good news, for now, is that the GOP-controlled Senate would never go along with something as extreme as gutting the Religious Freedom Restoration Act. The bad news — at least for the Democratic party — is that neither will their heartland base. Not everyone is on board with the Left’s hard turn on religion. As Yale’s Stephen Carter wrote, “When you mock Christians, you’re not mocking who you think you are.” And if Democrats aren’t careful, they’ll fall right down the God gap they’ve created.

“Spend much time in secular progressive circles,” David French writes, “and you’ll quickly encounter the kind of sneering, anti-Christian elitism evident in pieces such as the recent New Yorker creed against Chick-fil-A. But this culture is fundamentally at odds with the lived experience of the Democratic party’s black and Latino base.” In their beliefs, Pew Research Center warned earlier this year, “nonwhite Democrats more closely resemble Republicans than white Democrats.” That’s significant — not just because it creates tension in the Democratic Party, but, as French points out, “to the extent that faith informs politics, it could crack open the progressive coalition.”

Just last week, exit polling showed how misguided the Democrats’ war on religious expression is. Of all the competing social values — life, marriage, privacy, gender identity — religious liberty was far and away the most popular consensus issue. When McLaughlin & Associates asked 1,000 Americans if the government “should leave people free to follow their beliefs,” a whopping 70 percent of the respondents said yes. Only 18 percent agreed with this radical crusade to end religious liberty as we know it.

In a lot of ways, it’s the Democrats’ liberal agenda that’s boxed them into a godless corner. They’ve had to become hostile to public faith because it acknowledges a moral standard. And when you embrace policies that are antithetical to the stated values of any orthodox religion — like same-sex marriage or abortion — there’s only one way to reconcile it. You get rid of faith — or, at the very least marginalize it.

Make no mistake: The threat to RFRA from Democrats is real. But so is the threat to Democrats if they keep alienating faith and the voters who embrace it.

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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The Left’s Demented Hatred of President George H.W. Bush

The Left is an ever-fuming volcano of hate

George Herbert Walker Bush, America’s 41st president, passed away on Friday night at the age of 94. The last of the World War II generation to occupy the Oval Office, this great patriot devoted his life to serving his country. President George Herbert Walker Bush represented all the best that defines America – courage under fire in the continuing fight for freedom, generosity of spirit, faith in a higher purpose than oneself, and belief in individual dignity and liberty.

It is no surprise, therefore, that the America-hating Left wasted no time following George H.W. Bush’s death to savage him. Indeed, they have used all the epithets against the late President Bush as they regularly use against America itself – warmonger, racist, sexist, etc.

George H. W. Bush’s understanding of the perils and tragedy of war was forged as a young torpedo bomber pilot during World War II. He nearly lost his life when forced to bail out of his squadron plane over the Pacific Ocean after coming under attack by Japanese anti-aircraft guns. Building on years of post-war government experience as a congressman, ambassador to the United Nations, Chief of the Liaison Office in China, Director of Central Intelligence, and Ronald Reagan’s vice president, he was perhaps the best qualified person to have ever run for president when he campaigned successfully in 1988 to succeed Ronald Reagan.

As president and leader of the free world, he presided over the fall of the Soviet Union, the historic reunification of Germany as the linchpin of a more stable Europe, and the first Gulf War that liberated Kuwait from the rapacious grip of Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein. Domestically, he was responsible for a new civil rights law protecting the disabled. He signed the Civil Rights Act of 1991, making it easier for employees to sue employers on grounds of discrimination, after having vetoed a bill that he believed would have imposed unreasonable quotas. He worked to improve educational standards and environmental protections.

George H. W. Bush served only one term as president, undone by a weak economy and his breaking of a campaign pledge not to raise taxes. Nevertheless, as former Secretary of State James Baker, one of the late president’s closest friends, said in tribute on Sunday, "I think that, no doubt, he will be remembered as our most-successful one-term president and, perhaps, one of the most successful presidents of all time." Not to the America-hating leftists, however. They wasted no time in cursing the deceased former president.

 “F*** him,” tweeted feminist activist Anita Sarkeesian. “And f*** media's historical erasure.” She was particularly disturbed at the late President George H.W. Bush for his launching of the first Gulf War to force Saddam Hussein’s invading forces out of Kuwait. “He was a warmonger whose violence created unliveable (sic) conditions in Iraq hurting civilians, like my family who didn’t have access to life saving drugs or basic food,” she wrote in her tweet. In another tweet, she wrote, “The first gulf war helped solidify the demonization of Muslims and Arabs in the mind's (sic) of (mostly white) Americans creating far reaching consequences. It also set the stage for Bush Jr to launch another racist war WHICH IS STILL HAPPENING IN CASE YOU FORGOT.”

The first Gulf War was in fact a multinational effort, including Muslim countries in the Middle East region, that liberated the Muslim country of Kuwait from a Stalin-admiring dictator. When that objective was achieved, the war stopped. No further effort was made to topple Hussein from power in Iraq itself. Hussein’s monstrous crimes against his own people dwarfed any civilian casualties that may have been caused by the U.S.-led coalition to oust his forces from Kuwait.

The unlivable conditions Sarkeesian complained about were Saddam Hussein’s own doing. He lived in the lap of luxury while his people lived in grinding poverty. Following the end of the first Gulf War, the horrible living conditions and Saddam Hussein’s campaign of genocide within his country continued, along with his defiance of a succession of UN Security Council resolutions.

The second Iraq war was launched more than a decade later by President Bush 41’s son, George W. Bush, to finally remove the dictator. Saddam Hussein was the author of his own destiny after having failed miserably the chance to redeem himself following the first Gulf War. As usual, leftists like Anita Sarkeesian will choose the side of the brutal dictator over Americans fighting for freedom and human dignity.

Leftists have also not forgiven a controversial ad used during the late President George H.W. Bush’s 1988 presidential campaign against former Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis. The ad featured William Horton, a convicted murderer released in 1986 under a weekend pass program that Dukakis continued to defend even after Horton subsequently kidnapped and raped a woman. Horton happened to be black, which to leftists means that any ad using his picture in a true account of the crime he committed after his release, and noting Dukakis’ unwillingness to change the weekend pass program that made this crime possible, is unforgivably racist.

Amanda Marcotte of Salon was a particularly fierce critic of the Horton ad, accusing George H.W. Bush within hours of his death of being “willing to embrace racial demagoguery from the beginning.” Irrespective of the truth of the ad, she would sacrifice freedom of speech at the altar of identity politics and political correctness that must stamp out all vestiges of so-called white privilege.

“Free speech,” she tweeted last April in a foreshadowing of her denunciation of George H.W. Bush after his death for the Horton ad, “is now being used primarily, perhaps exclusively, as a right wing code for white nationalism.”

Marcotte would be wise to do some background reading, including of her own Slate publication back in 1999. It was Al Gore who first introduced the issue of “weekend passes for convicted criminals” in his primary debate with Dukakis, Slate admitted, although it tried to portray Gore’s use of the issue as an innocent act because he did not explicitly identify Horton.

Marcotte also claimed it was of no consequence that an independent expenditure group, not the Bush campaign itself, was responsible for airing the ad with Horton’s picture. She said that the late president was “a grown man, responsible for his campaign decisions.”

The late president was indeed responsible for his campaign decisions and never claimed to be a saint when campaigning. He was at times a “hard-knuckled politician,” wrote Jon Meacham, presidential historian and the author of Destiny and Power: The American Odyssey of George Herbert Walker Bush. “To serve he had to succeed; to preside he had to prevail,” Mr. Meacham added.

“For Mr. Bush the impulses to do in his opponents and to do good were inextricably bound. He was at once ferocious and gracious — a formidable combination. What mattered was whether one was principled and selfless once in command. And as president of the United States, Mr. Bush was surely that. For every compromise or concession to party orthodoxy or political expedience on the campaign trail, in office Mr. Bush ultimately did the right thing.”

If this sounds like an ends-justify-the means philosophy, welcome to the world of U.S. politics. As Mark Twain said, “If we would learn what the human race really is at bottom, we need only observe it in election times.” Leftists, who play dirty in exploiting the race card, have no business feigning moral indignation regarding George H.W. Bush’s presidential campaign.

Their voices were silent, for example, when NAACP ads were running against Bush 41’s son, George W. Bush, in 2000 showing a pickup truck with a chain dragging James Byrd, a black man, to his death. The ad played on race by using Renee Mullins, Byrd’s daughter, to denounce George W. Bush, who had been Texas’s governor before running for president, for opposing new hate crime legislation. "It was like my father was killed all over again," she said, leaving out the fact that two of the three killers had already been sentenced to death by a Texas court, while the third was serving a life sentence.

Gore, who had first raised the racially charged issue of weekend passes for convicts against Dukakis in 1988, not only did not denounce the NAACP racially exploitative ad. He proudly told his audience at the annual convention of the NAACP in October 2000, “I am a member of the NAACP. It’s good to be home.”

Leftists traffic in hate for everything decent about America, including its Constitution, democratic institutions, traditions, and heroes. Sadly, but not unexpectedly, they have shamelessly gone out of their way to slander the good name of George Herbert Walker Bush within hours of the death of this great American patriot.

These narcissistic ideologues on the Left care nothing about the feelings of the late president’s grieving family, friends, colleagues, and the many millions of Americans who admired his heroism and devotion to public service. They care only about imposing their own twisted political pathology on the rest of us.

SOURCE 

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Grand theft election in California

Back on election night, Republicans were heading for victories in California. Three weeks later, Paul Ryan lamented, “we lost every close race.” For the outgoing House Speaker, it “defies logic,” and quite possibly election law as well. 

This year California legalized “ballot harvesting,” which empowers a third party to collect ballots and deliver them to election officials. The more than 250,000 election day vote-by-mail drop-offs were also the result of ballot harvesting. And the Election Integrity Project California found discrepancies in the totals of poll and mail ballots cited by the state and four counties in southern California.

“It shouldn’t ‘defy logic’ that elections officials are meticulous in counting every eligible ballot,” California secretary of state Alex Padilla told reporters.  “California works to ensure every ballot is counted properly and every ballot is accounted for. In the most populous state in the nation — and the state with the largest number of registered voters — this takes time.”

According to Padilla, “in California, we believe in an inclusive and accessible democracy,” and

“provide voters as many opportunities as possible to cast their ballots.” These include “no-excuse vote by mail, automatic voter registration, same-day voter registration, and early voting.”

Padilla talked up the “accuracy and integrity of our elections” but wasn’t about to allow any independent group to investigate the possibility of voter fraud. This was not a new development.

California’s 2015 “motor voter” law empowered the Department of Motor Vehicles automatically to register as voters those who get driver’s licenses. Secretary of State Alex Padilla claimed that protocols and “firewalls” would keep ineligibles from voting, but there was room for reasonable doubt. After the 2016 election, Padilla refused to release any information to a federal probe of voter fraud, which he called a “false and debunked” claim.

For the 2018 election, Padilla expected “millions of new voters on the rolls in the state of California.” True to form, by March, 2018, the DMV had issued licenses to more than one million illegals and from April to August registered 182,000 “new voters.” Padilla isn’t saying how many illegals actually voted or how many illegal ballots were among those “harvested” to flip close races for Democrats.

Instead of investigating, the state’s slavishly pro-Democrat establishment media pins the results on anti-Trump backlash. Politicians and pundits also ignore the state’s voting history.  California voted for Ronald Reagan as governor and except for Lyndon Johnson in 1964, Republican presidential candidates won California in every election from 1952-1988. That includes Reagan’s two victories and George H.W. Bush in 1988.

In 1986, California passed Proposition 63, the Official Language of California Amendment. This measure directs the state legislature to “preserve the role of English as the state’s common language” and refrain from “passing laws which diminish or ignore the role of English as the

state’s common language.” A full 73 percent of California voters approved the measure but state officials ignored it. English proficiency is required for citizenship but in 2016, the California voter guide came in English and six other languages: Spanish, Korean, Chinese, Japanese, Tagalog, and Vietnamese.

In 1996 voters passed Proposition 209, the California Civil Rights Initiative, by a margin of 54 to 46 percent. This measure ended racial, ethnic, and gender preferences in college admissions, state employment, and state contracting. The worst offender had been the University of California and current UC president Janet Napolitano still gives preference to false-documented illegals, who get in-state tuition and even legal services.

In 1998, 60 percent of California voters passed Proposition 227, which barred bilingual education, which was really instruction entirely in Spanish for the children of illegals. By 2016, Democrats had enough votes to repeal the measure, and they looked to incoming illegals as their expanding electoral college.

According to an MIT study, the number of illegals in the United States is not 11 million but 22 million. Last year the Public Policy Institute of California pegged the number in the Golden State between 2.35 and 2.6 million, but the true figure, following the MIT model, is surely more than double.

California is a sanctuary state and offers illegals the most lavish benefits, including voter registration. That’s why the latest “caravan” is headed for California, the farthest place from Central America on the U.S.-Mexican border. Democrats are eager for a new shipment of voters. That’s why razaist attorney general Xavier Becerra threatens legal action against the Border Patrol, not the mobs of violent criminals who attack U.S. federal agents.

Meanwhile, secretary of state Alex Padilla claims accuracy and integrity in elections. On the other hand, Padilla refuses to cooperate with probes of voter fraud, declines to open up the voter rolls, and will not allow independent inspection of election results.

Without transparency, Paul Ryan has reason to doubt the results of the close races long after election night. Legitimate citizens and legal immigrants have good cause to suspect massive voter fraud, the best explanation for the electoral changes in California since the 1980s.

SOURCE 

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Fascist de Blasio shows why socialistic impulses are not made for America

New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio, as you may have heard, made the biggest mistake any elite leftist can. He admitted what he really believes. Lamenting the inability of his government to plan every aspect of real estate in New York City “to determine which building goes where, how high it will be, who gets to live in it, what the rent will be,” de Blasio identified property rights as the great obstacle to his ambitions. “What’s been hardest,” he said, “is the way our legal system is structured to favor private property.” His comments have attracted a wide range of criticism.

First of all, the mayor of New York City, the financial capital of the world, complaining about capitalism is much like the mayor of Los Angeles complaining about the entertainment industry holding his town back. If not for the centuries long embrace of private property rights in New York City, de Blasio would be mayor of an impoverished fishing village. Second, his indictment of private property seems to stop just short of trespassing his own. There is nothing stopping de Blasio from handing his multiple rental properties over to the New York City government, yet these rental properties continue to net him thousands of dollars every month.

But as out of touch and hypocritical as his statement may have been, it serves as a valuable reminder of what is really behind the current “socialist moment” within the Democratic Party. The media has made cult heroes of left wing radicals like Bernie Sanders, who are hard at work trying to create new generation of socialist extremists by extolling the virtues of failed Texas Senate candidate Beto O’Rourke and New York representative elect Alexandria Ocasio Cortez. De Blasio attributes this radical energy to a “socialistic impulse” in communities of people seeking “things to be planned in accordance” to their needs.

There is an impulse, but it is not socialistic. It is tyrannical, and it is not new. This tyrannical impulse lives within all of us. The desire to set ourselves apart and write special rules for others is the dark side of human nature. It is that immutable impulse, which ever leads men and nations toward ruin, that our Founding Fathers set out to harness and neutralize with the Constitution. They knew no power on earth could turn people into angels. So they consciously devised a political system of divided government and dispersed powers, and cultivated an economic system of free market capitalism, anchored in equal individual property rights.

De Blasio is absolutely right that the great threat to his ideological goals are private property and the rule of law that protects it. What really frustrates him is that in America, everyone else enjoys the same rights he does. That is the real story about the lament of the New York City mayor, and the reason that boomlet socialism is enjoying a surge on the left.

Despite what “fake news” tells you, there is nothing populist about socialism. It has never empowered the “little guy.” In socialist systems, the little guy always ends up in bread lines or behind bars.

SOURCE 

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November Jobs Report: 155,000 Jobs Added, Unemployment Steady at 3.7%

The U.S. economy added 155,000 jobs in the month of November and the unemployment rate held steady at 3.7 percent, according to Department of Labor (DOL) data released Friday. Wages hit 3.1 percent growth over a year in November, the first time in nearly a decade that wages have broken the 3 percent benchmark. Wage growth held steady at 3.1 percent through November from a year before.

The 3 percent benchmark has not been hit in year-over-year wage growth since April 2009. The increase in wages is an effect of the historically tight labor market as employers offer better pay to attract workers, The Wall Street Journal reported.

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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Our Ignorance of Socialism Is Dangerous

Walter E. Williams

A recent Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation survey found that 51 percent of American millennials would rather live in a socialist or communist country than in a capitalist country. Only 42 percent prefer the latter.

Twenty-five percent of millennials who know who Vladimir Lenin was view him favorably. Lenin was the first premier of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Half of millennials have never heard of communist Mao Zedong, who ruled China from 1949 to 1959 and was responsible for the deaths of 45 million Chinese people.

The number of people who died at the hands of Josef Stalin may be as high as 62 million. However, almost one-third of millennials think former President George W. Bush is responsible for more killings than Stalin.

By the way, Adolf Hitler, head of the National Socialist German Workers’ Party, was responsible for the deaths of about 20 million people. The Nazis come in as a poor third in terms of history’s most prolific mass murderers. According to professor Rudolph Rummel’s research, the 20th century, mankind’s most brutal century, saw 262 million people’s lives destroyed at the hands of their own governments.

Young people who weren’t alive during World War II and its Cold War aftermath might be forgiven for not knowing the horrors of socialism. Some of their beliefs represent their having been indoctrinated by their K-12 teachers and college professors.

There was such leftist hate for Bush that it’s not out of the question that those 32 percent of millennials were taught by their teachers and professors that Bush murdered more people than Stalin.

America’s communists, socialists, and Marxists have little knowledge of socialist history. Bradley Birzer, a professor of history at Hillsdale College, explains this in an article for The American Conservative titled “Socialists and Fascists Have Always Been Kissing Cousins.”

Joseph Goebbels wrote in 1925, “It would be better for us to end our existence under Bolshevism than to endure slavery under capitalism.” This Nazi sentiment might be shared by Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., and his comrade Rep.-elect Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y. Goebbels added, “I think it is terrible that we and the communists are bashing in each other’s heads.”

When the tragedies of socialist regimes—such as those in Venezuela, the USSR, China, Cuba, and many others—are pointed out to America’s leftists, they hold up Sweden as their socialist role model. But they are absolutely wrong about Sweden.

Johan Norberg points this out in his documentary “Sweden: Lessons for America?” Americans might be surprised to learn that Sweden’s experiment with socialism was a relatively brief flirtation, lasting about 20 years and ending in disillusionment and reform.

Reason magazine reports:

Sweden began rolling back government in the early 1990s, recapturing the entrepreneurial spirit that made it a wealthy country to begin with. High taxation and a generous array of government benefits are still around. But now it’s also a nation of school vouchers, free trade, open immigration, light business regulation, and no minimum wage laws.

School vouchers, light business regulation, and no minimum wage laws are practices deeply offensive to America’s leftists.

Our young people are not the first Americans to admire tyrants and cutthroats. W.E.B. Du Bois, writing in the National Guardian in 1953, said, “Stalin was a great man; few other men of the 20th century approach his stature.” Walter Duranty called Stalin “the greatest living statesman” and “a quiet, unobtrusive man.”

There was even leftist admiration for Hitler and fellow fascist Benito Mussolini. When Hitler came to power in January 1933, George Bernard Shaw described him as “a very remarkable man, a very able man.” President Franklin Roosevelt called Mussolini “admirable,” and he was “deeply impressed by what he [had] accomplished.”

In 1972, John Kenneth Galbraith visited communist China and praised Mao and the Chinese economic system. His Harvard University colleague John K. Fairbank believed that America could learn much from the Cultural Revolution, saying, “Americans may find in China’s collective life today an ingredient of personal moral concern for one’s neighbor that has a lesson for us all.”

Are Americans who admire the world’s most brutal regimes miseducated or stupid? Or do they have some kind of devious agenda?

SOURCE 

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Allen West: Progressive, Socialist Left Will Use and Forget Anyone to Attain Control, Power/b>

I have previously shared on this platform the three branches of rule for the progressive, socialist left. If you recall, they are, academia, courts, and the media. It is vital to have an organization like the Media Research Center (“MRC”), for whom I am a Senior Fellow, that evidences the bias emanating from the liberal, progressive media. There can be no further debate that the leftist media has become nothing more than a mouthpiece for the progressive, socialist left. They have seemingly lost their sense of objectivity and focus more on being a propaganda wing of the Democratic Party, and their distortions of the truth enable the leftist mob.

Case in point: last weekend the leftist media was up in arms about our U.S. Border Patrol agents using a non-lethal means, tear gas, to disperse violent protests at our southern border. These were protests where rocks and bottles were being thrown, and our border was forcibly breached. What did the left-leaning media focus on? Yes, they used a picture of a woman and two kids running away from a tear gas canister. First, whomever threw that canister that far needs to be a quarterback in the NFL. However, it was a branch of the MRC, Newsbusters, that reminded us all that during the Obama administration they used tear gas and pepper spray along the border against rioters.

Ya know, it’s just another little fact that it appears the left-leaning media did not want to disclose.

And so, it is, we are just about a month away from having a new Congress sworn in, one which will include a Democratic House majority. So, during my Sunday morning five mile run, I thought about it: How much will the liberal, progressive media not disclose as we go into this new House majority?

I remember a 1985 song by one of my favorite rock bands, Simple Minds, called “Don’t You (Forget About Me).” It was a song on the soundtrack to the movie “The Breakfast Club.” But as I pondered this new Democratic House majority, I had some interesting thoughts.

As we know, Representative Jerrold Nadler (D-NY) will be the incoming Chairman of the House Judiciary Committee. Rep. Nadler has already made it rather clear that he will be seeking an investigation, and potential impeachment, of newly seated Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh. Hmm, has anyone thought about how abjectly absurd that would be? On what grounds, basis, would Chairman Nadler seek to impeach Justice Kavanaugh? At this time there have been no rulings issued from this current court. Oh, that’s right, the left still believes Justice Kavanaugh is guilty of something. How very perplexing, and odd, that we have not heard the media chirping about Christine Blasey Ford, Deborah Ramirez, and Julie Swetnick? These women, who were front and center in the leftist news, have, it seems, all been forgotten. But there is one thing we can say, these allegations brought forward appear to have been false. So, will Chairman Nadler be looking into that or is this just to be forgotten. Based upon what we have seen in the leftist news media, they have moved on, forgotten it.

Then there is incoming House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (HPSCI) Chairman, Representative Adam Schiff (D-Calif.). Lord knows this guy will be all over the TV cameras even more so now. His focus will certainly be on the illusive, “Bigfoot”-like, Russian collusion story. I mean, two years into this and what has been revealed? Ahh, but ‘We are so close,’ the leftist media will tell you, to the impeachment of President Trump and the infamous smoking gun. Most recently, the liberal, progressive media has been salivating over the guilty plea of former Trump businessman attorney Michael Cohen. However, this is an individual who has just about as much credibility as a hungry rattlesnake telling a mouse it is on a diet.

For some odd reason, I do not think we will hear Chairman Schiff talking at all about these names – Andrew McCabe, Peter Strzok, Lisa Paige, Bruce and Nellie Ohr, Christopher Steele, and Fusion GPS.

Yes, these are more names that it appears the liberal, progressive media has forgotten. As a matter of fact, if you try and enter into a discussion with someone who patronizes the leftist media and ask them of these names, you will get the most disturbing “deer in the headlights” look. And of course, the response will be, “that’s just a Fox News made up lie.” Let’s be honest, the only folks who had anything to do with Russian collusion were those who coordinated with Russian operatives to produce what appears to have been a false, politicized, dossier that was used to create a FBI investigation by way of presenting to the FISA court under omission of certain disclosures.

I just do not think this will be a priority for Chairman Adam Schiff or incoming House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform Chairman Elijah Cummings. And thanks to a complicit leftist media and the social media platforms that undoubtedly are censoring constitutional conservative speech, thoughts, perspectives, and insights, the message will be controlled as to what the progressive socialists want disclosed.

These are very dangerous times in these United States of America. I will go back and reiterate that we still have no one being held responsible for Americans being abandoned to die in a combat zone attacked by Islamic jihadists – four Americans lost their lives: Amb. Christopher Stevens, Sean Smith, Ty Woods, and Glen Doherty. Their souls still cry out, “Don’t you forget about me.” But when it comes to the progressive, socialist left, it is all about their ideological agenda. They will use and forget anyone they please in their quest for one simple objective: control, power.

I admonish you to remember these names. Don’t forget them, as you will not be hearing of them anymore, but they must resonate.

Those names are Christine Blasey Ford, Deborah Ramirez, Julie Swetnick, Andrew McCabe, Peter Strzok, Lisa Paige, Bruce and Nellie Ohr, Christopher Steele, and Fusion GPS. We hear at the Media Research Center will not forget those names, and we will continue to stand guard against the liberal, progressive media and their insidious propaganda machine.

Yes, our First Amendment advocates for a Free Press, but only we can ensure that we have a responsible press. Don’t you forget about that.

Allen West is a retired Lieutenant Colonel in the United States Army. Mr. West is a Senior Fellow at the Media Research Center to support its mission to expose and neutralize liberal media bias and is the author of  “Hold Texas, Hold the Nation: Victory or Death.” He pens a daily column for his personal website at theoldschoolpatriot.com.

SOURCE 

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Is It Time to Punish False Accusers?

Should deliberately false reports of sexual assault be subject to the same legal penalties as false reports of other felonies? Right now, accusers who lie about sexual abuse are criminally liable for filing a false report and perjury, as well as civil sanctions for defamation, but legal consequences rarely occur.

The question was spotlighted by the accusations surrounding Supreme Court Judge Brett Kavanaugh. It was clear during Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearing: An accusation of sexual assault can devastate a man’s life, family and future. Those who reject the account of his main accuser, Christine Blasey Ford, don’t suggest bringing legal proceedings against her. A sincere report of sexual abuse should not be penalized for being confused or mistaken.

Jeffrey Catalan and Julie Swetnick are different stories; in the wake of Ford’s accusations, Catalan and Swetnick claimed to have witnessed sexual abuse by Kavanaugh; Catalan quickly recanted. But the chairman of the Senate Committee that presided over Kavanaugh’s hearing has asked for an official review of the claim as a possible crime. In a NBC interview Swetnick contradicted a sworn statement to the Committee, which had implicated Kavanaugh in gang rapes. Harvard law professor emeritus Alan Dershowitz has called for Swetnick to be investigated and then prosecuted for perjury, if appropriate.

The debate on how to handle blatantly false accusations of sexual abuse has re-opened. Feminists argue that punishing any accuser chills the willingness of victims to come forward. Rule-of-law advocates counter that false accusations are not victimless crimes. In most cases a real person is named as an attacker and he or she confronts severe consequences. Genuine victims are also damaged by false allegations. Every lie casts a shadow of doubt over every future report of sexual assault. So legal disincentives should attach to the act of lying not merely to protect those falsely accused but also to encourage real victims to make reports.

False accusations on crime are everyday events

The danger of using the Kavanaugh hearing as a springboard for discussing false accusations is threefold: the session was highly politicized, with unrelated agendas attached; it was played out in the Senate, with the Supreme Court as a backdrop; and the true context of false accusations in everyday life may be lost. False accusations are not partisan, elite, or recent occurrences.

The recent re-evaluation grows out of a backlash that has raged on college campuses for over seven years. At some universities the battle has been much longer. In 2011, President Obama’s Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights sent a letter to every college that received federal funding. To continue the flow of funds colleges needed to dilute the due process that on-campus hearings offered to students accused of sexual misconduct.

The purpose: To combat sexual misconduct and to protect victims who were overwhelmingly female. Accused students were denied legal representation and the presumption of innocence, as well as standard protections of justice such as facing an accuser and questioning witnesses. As a matter of policy, accusers were to be believed.

As a result, false accusations increased—at least, that was a widespread assessment. Legal experts signed petitions in protest; lawsuits proliferated from students who had been found “guilty;” high-profile cases of false accusations rocked the media.

Finally, new Title IX guidelines were recently drawn up by the DOE’s new administration and they will be unrolled shortly. The guidelines direct colleges to restore due process rights to students accused of sexual misconduct.

The human cost of false accusations

Petitions and guidelines do not capture the human suffering that caused a rebellion against the imperative to #BelieveWomen. For that real stories are required. Consider the Flood family of Pennsylvania and their teenage son, whom the media identifies as T.F.

According to a local newspaper five girls at T.F.’s high school “terrorized” him with accusations of sexual molestation. T.F. was fired from his part-time job, “tortured in school by the other students and investigators,” expelled and “forced to endure multiple court appearances, detention in a juvenile facility, detention at home, the loss of his liberty and other damages.”

Finally, the girls confessed to lying. Why did they? One explained, “I just don’t like him...I just don’t like to hear him talk...I don’t like to look at him.” The girls have not been punished. Meanwhile, the boy is under the care of a psychologist and being schooled at home. Devastated by the experience, his parents are suing.

The Kavanaugh hearing brought the question of false accusations into people’s living rooms. That’s where the issue belongs because average and disadvantaged people need due process far more than the elite of society.

Average people have fought through centuries to gain and maintain these protections against imperious government and bad actors. The protections benefit both men and women because they stand in defense of common people. No sincere accuser, mistaken or not, should have anything to fear from impartial justice. But no intentionally false accuser should be able to bypass the protections of justice in their own self-interest.

Conclusion

#BelievetheWomen is the culmination of a push that began decades ago to achieve much-needed reform within the justice system. In the 1960s feminists crusaded against rape laws that brutalized women by treating them as though they were responsible for their own assaults. They weren’t and they aren’t, but the reform has gone too far. It is not an insult to ask for evidence when a crime is alleged. It is a sign of taking the accusation seriously and that’s what feminists crusaded for in the first place.

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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Apologies

Because of some minor but pesky health problems, I  will not be blogging for a while
I hope to be back on Sunday

Apartheid warriors

The American Left have revived apartheid.  Apartheid had at its core a classification of races and the application of disadvantageous policies to some of them.  With their constant obsession with race, the American Left are their heirs.  They are constantly trying to drive ethnic groups in America into antagonism towards one another -- with cries of racism, discrimination, white supremacy, white privilege etc.  In that they are actually worse than the old South Africans.  The original apartheid was designed to keep the peace between the races.  The American Left does its darndest to promote antagonism.

And, as in South Africa, the aim is to tear down one particular ethnic group: In this case whites.  They have very limited success at that but it's not for want of trying.  Any disadvantage that a minority person experiences, is automatically blamed on racism.  Leftists are constantly telling poor blacks: "You bin discriminated against".  "White racism is what is holding you back".  And that of course generates anger.

And the residential discrimination that characterized the original apartheid is strongly in place in America too.  Whites try to minimize their contacts with blacks by "white flight" --living in outer suburbs and exurbs and leaving blacks to the inner cities.  "Apartheid" means "apartness" and blacks and whites do largely live apart in America today.

It's not exactly the same as the old apartheid but the results are similar: White fear and black anger.  It's all part of the Leftist hatred of America and their wish to tear it down.  It parades as compassion for the less fortunate but if it there were any real compassion there, colorblind interpersonal harmony would be the aim.  Who benefits from America's racial tensions?  Nobody.  And that is the way the Left likes it.  They will stoke the flames of division any time they can.

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Teaching Americans to Despise America

"Congratulations to the leftists who've taken over the nation's public education system. They're now producing generations of Americans who know little about their own country, other than that they hate it." —editorial, Investor's Business Daily

Investor's Business Daily is referring to the latest YouGov poll conducted by the Foundation for Liberty and American Greatness (FLAG). It questioned 1,078 Americans aged 14 and up about their knowledge of America's history, institutions and patriotism, and one suspects most Patriot Post readers know where this is going. Like this writer, regular readers at this site are beginning to realize that younger generations of Americans increasingly see us all as anachronistic pariahs with wholly illegitimate values that must be "fundamentally transformed" — out of existence. The idea expressed by John Adams that our Constitution "was made only for a moral and religious people" and is "wholly inadequate to the government of any other" no longer resonates.

Today, morality is "relative," religion is for "bitter clingers," and it's likely a majority of young Americans have never heard of John Adams. Older generations of Americans have been reduced to being proverbial keepers of the flame, hoping this nation can outlast the tsunami of orchestrated ignorance so all-encompassing that even "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer" is cannon-fodder for the terminally offended.

Thus, the survey's key findings are completely unsurprising:

Half of those surveyed believe the United States is sexist (50%) and racist (49%)

46% of younger Americans do not agree that "America is the greatest country in the world"

38% of younger Americans do not agree that "America has a history that we should be proud of"

One in eight (14%) of Millennials agree that "America was never a great country and it never will be"

46% of younger Americans agree that "America is more racist than other countries"

84% of Americans do not know the specific rights enumerated in the First Amendment

19% of Millennials believe that the American flag is "a sign of intolerance and hatred"

44% of younger Americans believe Barack Obama had a "bigger impact" on America than George Washington

There is a political agenda underlying every activity — an agenda historian Victor Davis Hanson accurately describes as a "progressive synopticon" where the 40-45% of traditional Americans are "relentlessly lectured, sermonized, demonized, and neutered by a 360- degree ring of prying institutional overseers."

Overseers determined to institutionalize contempt for America in general, and its exceptional nature in particular.

The late Andrew Breitbart once observed that politics is "downstream" from culture. Everything is downstream from education, and four years of "seed planting" has been expanded to 13 years, if one goes from kindergarten through the 12th grade, and 17 years if one goes on to attend one of the Marxist finishing schools purporting to be colleges.

In a column entitled, "Here's What College Freshmen Are Reading," NPR reveals how the bedrock principles of Western civilization and our constitutional republic have been supplanted by a curriculum of identity politics. The classic literature that used to be the backbone of a legitimate education? As the National Association of Scholars reveals, "67 percent of common reading books assigned were published after 2011."

Of course they were. One can only imagine the consternation that might arise if those same students were required to read something like the collection of 85 articles and essays written by Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay known as The Federalist Papers. No doubt they would be astonished to discover that men routinely dismissed by many of their "woke" professors as "dead, white slave owners" had incredibly keen insight with regard to human nature. Those same students might even be embarrassed to discover that such complex ideas were published in newspapers and read by ordinary citizens.

Yet barring self-discovery, they will never know any of it. Today it is far more important to be well-versed in the politics of victimization, group grievances, genderism, racism, white supremacy, etc. Better to hate America for the sin of slavery than celebrate the enormous effort undertaken to eradicate it. Better to celebrate the "glory" of socialism while remaining largely contemptuous of the capitalism that lifted more people out of poverty than any other economic system in the history of the planet. Better to be so bereft of economic acumen that the idea of "free" anything actually resonates. Better to be younger Americans obsessed with "rights" even as only 11% of high schoolers could name those enumerated in the First Amendment.

Better to assume that anyone who disagrees with you is not wrong, but evil.

Given the popularity of moral relativism, the irony is stupendous. Nonetheless, reducing one's opponents to evil is, by far, the most useful convention employed by those invested in upending everything that does not align itself with progressive dogma. If one is evil, debate becomes unnecessary, and the ends of eradicating such evil justify the means for doing so — even when those means engender a justice system wholly contaminated by double standards.

"We suspected that we would find decreasing numbers of Americans well-versed in our nation's most important principles and young people less patriotic than the generations that came before, but we were totally unprepared for what our national survey reveals: an epidemic of anti-Americanism," stated FLAG founder Nick Adams.

Adams is naive. The opposite of anti-Americanism is pro-globalism, and it's time Americans (who still want to be Americans) realize the ongoing bastardization of traditions, morals, law, language, culture, and borders — along with the unconscionable student data collection taking place in America's classrooms — is all part of the same agenda. One cannot make a globalist omelet without breaking nationalist eggs, and nothing is more important than making sure America's youth are ready to "transition" from being proudly American to being "citizens of the world."

As the survey demonstrates, it is a transition well under way.

While the Senate is still controlled by Republicans, it would behoove those members of the GOP who still believe in national sovereignty to conduct nationally televised hearings exposing this agenda. Hearings that should be considered the beginning of a wholesale pushback. A pushback that must continue until the restoration of our founding principles takes hold. We have abided the wholesale inculcation of ideological conformity in lieu of independent thinking, as well as the legitimization of emotion over reason, for far too long.

SOURCE 

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Judge Gets Federalism Backwards on Sanctuary Cities

A NY judge blocks Trump's withholding of federal funding from "sanctuary" cities and states.

Yet again, a judicial despot has blocked one of President Donald Trump’s immigration actions. This time, a federal judge in New York ruled against Trump’s decision to withhold federal funding from cities or states that enact illegal-alien-harboring “sanctuary” policies. Again, Trump isn’t trying to change those laws; he’s just defunding cities and states that have them. In the ruling, however, Judge Edgardo Ramos wrote that “the separation of powers acts as a check on tyranny and the concentration of power.” Unfortunately, Ramos’s understanding and application of the Constitution’s separation of powers principle is, well, unconstitutional.

Separation of powers begins from the understanding that everything is under state and local jurisdiction unless specifically delineated by the Constitution to be a responsibility of the federal government. In this case, the issue of immigration — who is and is not allowed entry into the nation — comes under the purview of the federal government, not that of the individual states — much less cities. Logically, if individual states are free to set their own policies on immigration enforcement, what’s to stop one state’s polices from colliding with that of another state? Confusion and conflict will abound. Like national defense, immigration enforcement rightly falls under the authority of the federal government. Ramos gets federalism backwards.

Democrats and leftists are disingenuously using federalism in a bid to gain power. The irony is that their globalist agenda would end federalism, replacing it with a top-down elitist form of globalist socialism, which they love to preach as being more democratic. Communists have been playing the one-party-rule game for a long time now.

Meanwhile, Texas just filed a lawsuit against the city of San Antonio and its police chief for violating the state’s 2017 law banning sanctuary cities. According to Ramos’s understanding, would a city government have greater authority than the state government to create laws that impact the entire state, not to mention the entire country?

SOURCE 

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Barmaid Sandra attacks Sarah Sanders For No Reason At All, Implies She’s A Liar

I believe she was popular as a barmaid.  With all due respect to barmaids that is about her level

New York Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez attacked White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders and implied she’s a liar for no reason at all.

On Friday, Ocasio-Cortez compared her election victory to “establishing civil rights” and the United States landing on the moon.

“We went to the moon. We electrified the nation,” Ocasio-Cortez said. “We established civil rights. We enfranchised the country. We digged deep and we did it. We did it when no one else thought that we could. That’s what we did when so many of us won an election this year.”

In response, former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee — the father of Sarah Sanders — mocked Ocasio-Cortez for the absurd claim that her election victory in the deep blue New York district was comparable to some of America’s greatest achievements.

“Ocasio-Cortez compares her election to moon landing. Huh? Big difference. Moon landing was LUNAR, not LOONEY; Moon landing done by ppl who knew what they were doing…those who elected someone who thought there were 3 branches of Congress did NOT,” Huckabee wrote on Twitter.

Ocasio-Cortez responding by attacking Huckabee’s daughter and calling Trump’s press secretary a liar.

“A Green New Deal will take a level of ambition + innovation on the scale of the moon landing. We’ve been done it before, and can do it again. Leave the false statements to Sarah Huckabee. She’s much better at it. Also, you haven’t been a Governor of any state for 10+ years now,” Ocasio-Cortez wrote.

Ocasio-Cortez didn’t specify what “false statements” Sanders has made, but it’s just one of many bizarre claims the New York socialist has made recently.

SOURCE 

To use a popular Australian metaphor: She wouldn't know if you were up her.

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Trump’s $5B Border Wall Request Equals 0.11% of Federal Spending

President Donald Trump’s $5 billion request for funds to use building a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border equals 0.11 percent of the estimated $4.5 trillion the federal government is expected to spend this fiscal year.

According to the Monthly Treasury Statement for October, the Office of Management and Budget has estimated that the federal government will spend a total of $4,509,641,000,000 in fiscal 2019, which started on Oct. 1.

President Trump is now asking Congress to approve $5 billion in the fiscal 2019 Department of Homeland Security appropriation to fund border wall construction along the U.S.-Mexico border.

That $5,000,000,000 would equal 0.11 percent of the anticipated total federal spending of $4,509,641,000,000.

To put the president’s border wall request in perspective, the federal government spent $5.587 billion in the month of October alone for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, AKA food stamps. Thus, funding food stamps for just the first month of fiscal 2019 cost more than Trump’s entire fiscal 2019 request for border wall funding.

Over all of fiscal 2018, the federal government spent $68,493,00,000 on food stamps, according to the Monthly Treasury Statement. Thus, the most recent full year of the food stamp program cost about 13.7 times as much as Trump’s border wall request.

The Homeland Security Appropriation bill that the House Appropriations Committee approved in July included $5,000,000,000 for the border wall.

“The bill includes $5,000,000,000 for new border technology and the construction of over $200 miles of new barriers to fill critical gaps along our Southwest border,” says the committee’s report on the bill.

The version of the Homeland Security Appropriation approved by the Senate Appropriations Committee, however, says that only “$1,600,000,000 shall be available for approximately 65 miles of pedestrian fencing along the southwest border in the Rio Grande Valley Sector.”

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D.-N.Y.) indicated this week that he will not support $5 billion for the border wall.

“[T]he $1.6 billion for border security negotiated by Democrats and Republicans is our position,” Schumer said at a Tuesday press briefing. “We believe that is the right way to go. … [I]f there’s any shutdown, it’s on the President Trump’s staff.”

“The Republicans are in control of the presidency, the House and the Senate, a shutdown is on their back,” said Schumer. “Stick to the $1.6 billion.”

SOURCE 

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Mexico's new president signs deal to stop migrants

In one of his first acts in office, Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador has signed an agreement with his counterparts from three Central American countries to establish a development plan to stem the flow of migrants seeking asylum in the U.S.

The Foreign Ministry said Saturday that the plan includes a fund to generate jobs in the region and aims to attack the structural causes of migration from El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras.

Thousands of migrants, mostly Hondurans, have joined caravans in recent weeks in an effort to speed through Mexico to request refuge at the U.S. border.

Dozens of migrants interviewed by The Associated Press have said they are fleeing poverty and violence in their countries of origin.

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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The Left’s Election Day Analysis: If We Lost, They Must’ve Cheated

A disturbing trend is emerging from the political left: When their candidates lose elections, rather than accept lawful defeat, they denounce the election itself.

In 2016, they explained away President Donald Trump’s victory as the product of Russian meddling. Now, they are blaming election losses in Florida and Georgia on “voter suppression” and other sinister acts.

In Florida, Democrat gubernatorial candidate Andrew Gillum walked back his election night concession, claiming “tens of thousands of votes have yet to be counted,” and told supporters that a “vote denied is justice denied.”

Hillary Clinton, meanwhile, described the Georgia gubernatorial race as biased against Democrat Stacey Abrams, claiming that if Abrams “had a fair election, she already would have won.” Sen. Sherrod Brown, an Ohio Democrat, announced that Abrams’ apparent defeat was a sure sign that Republicans “stole” her election.

Sure enough, when the final tally gave the victory to Republican Brian Kemp, Abrams refused to concede, because “concession means to acknowledge an action is right, true or proper.” Instead, Abrams blamed her defeat on Kemp’s supposed “suppression of the people’s democratic right to vote.”

Such pronouncements are creating a dangerous perception within liberal ranks that electoral defeat automatically equals electoral theft. For years, the left has denounced election integrity measures as tantamount to disenfranchisement. Now they are saying the same thing about electoral defeats.

This sort of rhetoric can have profound — and dangerous — consequences. Democracy works only when the people have confidence that the electoral process is free and fair, and the outcome is valid. Sometimes, to be sure, this is not the case.

The Heritage Foundation election fraud database presently has 1,147 proven instances of fraud. Several of these cases involve elections that were overturned because enough fraudulent ballots had been cast to alter the outcome.

But there is a key distinction between those cases and liberals’ new accusations: proof.

Winning a court case to invalidate an election on the basis of fraud requires gathering significant evidence, and demonstrating, for example, that ballots were tampered with, that voters were bribed or coerced, or that elections officials rigged the results. Convicting someone on criminal election fraud charges requires proof beyond a reasonable doubt.

It’s a high bar to meet, leagues beyond the reckless and unsubstantiated allegations erupting after the Florida and Georgia elections. Consider the facts.

After a machine recount, in the Florida gubernatorial race, Ron DeSantis’ 33,683 vote lead over Gillum had hardly moved at all.

And in Georgia, the left’s claims that Kemp was overseeing insidious vote suppression efforts seem nonsensical, given that voter turnout actually skyrocketed.

According to FiveThirtyEight.com, 55 percent of all eligible Georgia voters cast a ballot: “21 points higher than the state’s 1982-2014 average. That was the biggest change from the average of any state.” Exit polls indicate that minority turnout in the state may also have set records.

Still, Abrams declared to supporters that “democracy failed Georgia.” Not quite. A more apt summation of the election would be that “liberals are failing democracy.”

Telling voters that elections are only fair when their party wins sets up every election to be discounted by one side or the other. It foments distrust and dissension, and it feeds the vitriol that already pervades so many aspects of modern politics.

Some political strategists might hope that de-legitimizing the electoral process will frighten and enrage the liberal base, increase turnout, and pay dividends in 2020. If true, then the left’s cynical gamble on “voter suppression” rhetoric would be a great irony.

But for all the temptations of that approach, we can and should hope that the rhetoric of the last few weeks — overheated, baseless, and reckless as it has been — will fall by the wayside.

Even today, in an age of division and zero-sum politics, there remains something more important than winning elections: keeping our democracy.

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Trump Keeps Promise to Farmers, China Folds in Negotiations

China will increase its purchases of a broad range of American products under an agreement that will stave off a tariff increase President Donald Trump had planned to impose on Jan. 1, officials announced Saturday.

China agreed to buy “a very substantial amount of agricultural, energy, industrial, and other products from the United States to reduce the trade imbalance between our two countries,” White House press secretary Sarah Sanders said in a statement, according to Politico.

China will “start purchasing agricultural product from our farmers immediately,” Sanders said.

In her statement, she said that Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping “agreed to immediately begin negotiations on structural changes with respect to forced technology transfer, intellectual property protection, non-tariff barriers, cyber intrusions and cyber theft, services and agriculture.”

Statement from the Press Secretary Regarding the President’s Working Dinner with China:

The President of the United States, Donald J. Trump, and President Xi Jinping of China, have just concluded what both have said was a “highly successful meeting” between themselves and their most...

“Both parties agree that they will endeavor to have this transaction completed within the next 90 days. If at the end of this period of time, the parties are unable to reach an agreement, the 10 percent tariffs will be raised to 25 percent,” she said.

Xi also agreed to designate fentanyl as a controlled substance, meaning that Chinese citizens selling the drug are subject to China’s maximum penalty, Sanders said in the statement, according to the White House media press pool.

The move represents a crackdown on the deadly synthetic opioid which kills well over 100 people a day in the U.S.

The decision came after a meeting between American and Chinese officials at the G20 summit in Argentina.

“This was an amazing and productive meeting with unlimited possibilities for both the United States and China,” Trump said. “It is my great honor to be working with President Xi.”

At the summit meeting, Trump emphasized the positive nature of his relationship with Xi, New York Times reported. “The relationship is very special — the relationship that I have with President Xi,” he said. “I think that is going to be a very primary reason why we’ll probably end up with getting something that will be good for China and good for the United States,” he said.

Xi also offered an upbeat assessment of his partnership with Trump. “Only with cooperation between us can we serve the interest of world peace and prosperity.”

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These Liberal Hypocrites Build Walls Around Their Own Houses


Hillary Clinton has a border wall around her Chappaqua estate.

Although, in fairness, shouldn’t every crooked (former) federal official who houses an illegal email server in their basement spare no expense trying to keep intruders away from the classified information they’re mishandling?

I mean she can’t have anyone get in there and expose what really happened in Benghazi or what her State Department did to Julian Assange, can she?

In fact, it seems that Assange too might benefit from a wall around the Ecuadorian Embassy in London since a would-be intruder apparently tried to break in there the other day.

Maybe someone should ask Mrs. Clinton a question or two about that … under oath.

Further, the Clintons aren’t the only folks talking smack about President Donald Trump’s border wall from safely within their own fortresses of liberal hypocrisy.

Check out the walls surrounding many of the dorms at Harvard University.

I wonder, how many anti-border-wall antifa protesters “raise the drawbridge” before they retire there for the night.

Indeed, one wonders why Harvard built these walls in the first place given that the university already fields its own private deputized police force and has strategically placed emergency call boxes what seems like every 10 feet throughout its campus.

And Cambridge, Massachusetts is hardly as violent as other Democratic city strongholds like Chicago.

So, given that Harvard’s campus already seems better protected than the border, why the walls?

Regardless, for a bunch of people who are pretty outspoken against building walls, this group sure seems to like having their own.

I wonder, how would they feel about their walls, if it was them and their cohorts exposed to the whims of whoever decided to drop by unannounced — kind of like the rest of America?

Might they demand someone build something to protect them?

Methinks that they might.

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The House GOP Just Got a Whole Lot Trumpier

The RINOs are out and the Trumpies are ascendant. It’ll be good theater. But will it be good for the GOP?

With Rep. Kevin McCarthy poised to become the next minority leader in the House of Representatives, Donald Trump will get his first handpicked congressional leader.

Unlike Speaker Paul Ryan, whom Trump inherited, McCarthy has seamlessly transitioned from establishment “young gun” to being (as Trump has called him) “my Kevin.” He owes his position to Trump.

To skeptics who are wondering what might change (isn’t it already Trump’s party?), there will no longer even be the pretense that House Republicans will pursue an independent agenda. Trump now controls at least one-and-a-half branches of government.

The big question is whether Trump wants to wage war (as revenge for investigations) or whether he issues an edict to cut some deals on things like infrastructure (doubtful). If Trump chooses the former, he will have a loyal contingent in the House to serve as his surrogates. And remember, being in the minority can be fun. Absent the responsibility to actually prevent crisis (see the debt ceiling) a minority party can engage in high jinks and extract concessions and compromises.

Like a meddling NFL owner watching the game from above in a press box, Trump will be phoning in some of the plays.

Remember the days when Republican leaders and presidents had to deal with those pesky conservative insurgents? Yeah, that doesn’t exist anymore. In the House, Trump now owns both the conservative revolutionaries and the Republican establishment. That’s because most of anti-Trump Republicans either (a) decided against running for reelection or (b) were (ironically) defeated because of the anti-Trump backlash in the suburbs.

Although the percentage of Republicans in House will be smaller starting in 2019, the percentage of “Trumplicans” within the GOP caucus will have increased. The result is a leaner and (literally) meaner GOP caucus. It’s an Army of Trumps.

Jim DeMint once declared that he’d “rather have 30 Marco Rubios than 60 Arlen Specters.” That was when Rubio was considered a Tea Party conservative revolutionary and Specter a liberal Republican. But the premise—that purity and combativeness mean more than having a majority—is something that Donald Trump might endorse. Nobody said remaking the party in his image wouldn’t require sacrifices and setbacks.

McCarthy’s ascension, though, isn’t the only indicator for just how Trump-tastic we can expect the GOP House caucus to get. Given that Steve Scalise and Liz Cheney are both unchallenged for their leadership posts (minority whip and House GOP conference chair, respectively), there is likely no room for a more moderate "anti-Trump" alternative.

Trumpism, it seems, is the only game in town.

Trump also reportedly is helping Ohio Rep. Jim Jordan, former chairman of the House Freedom Caucus, become ranking member on the Judiciary Committee. As Politico noted, during a recent interview on Fox News, “Jordan cited conservative priorities like repealing the Affordable Care Act, building Trump's long-promised wall along the southern border…”

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The stomach-turning 'ballot-harvesting' that enabled Democrats to walk off with California

The picture emerging from California's election is grotesque. How again did Democrats engineer their strange midterm victory in Orange County and in other traditionally Republican areas? In that election, apparently winning Republican candidates were all unseated as the ballots just kept arriving, and arriving, and arriving, until the results flipped. Each and every time. And no such flips happened for Republicans, just Democrats, after they learned that Republicans were winning. And Democrats say it's just 'counting all the votes.'

Welcome to ballot-harvesting.

Attorney Robert Barnes, on Twitter, noted just how problematic that new practice is: "Cali new law for 2018 election "allow anybody to walk into an elections office and hand over truckloads of vote by mail envelopes with ballots inside, no questions asked, no verified records kept. It amounts to an open invitation to large-scale vote buying, voter coercion"

Which is why it's illegal almost everywhere in the world. California, on the other hand, back in 2016, passed AB1921, a law that actually permits it. Anyone can turn in ballots now, no questions asked, no chain of custody required. Back at the time, Democrats were hollering about low turnout and how getting more turnout was a priority, even though they were running a one-party state at that time, as they are now. They painted themselves as all concerned about 'democracy' given the low rates of turnout in their districts, many of which were known as 'rotton boroughs' full of non-citizen voters. But what they really had in mind was 'ballot harvesting.' Most of the attention at the time from Republicans was focused on the involuntary registration of voters through the Department of Motor Vehicles, which has led to what was feared: the registration of illegal immigrants. But the bigger thing was going on on the outside, with the mail-in ballots nobody asked for and the apparent real purpose for these unasked for and unwanted ballot, which was ... ballot-harvesting.

I sign up for every party mail list in order to read what all political sides are thinking, so I get lots of Democratic Party mail, including polls of members, which I answer, probably horrifying Democrats who open such returned polls, as I tell them to get rid of Obamacare. If they want to know what I think, I tell them. Could the fact that I am on those lists be the reason why I got a mail-in ballot when everyone else in my household gets sample ballots and goes to the polls on election day? Despite my Republican registration, it sure sounds like it.

This signals a grotesquely changed electoral landscape. Turns out the mail-in ballots are all that matters now, because all anyone has to do is harvest, and keep harvesting them, until Democrats get the result they want. I wrote about those lingering questions in the recent midterm here.

'Count all the ballots!' has been the Democrat rallying cry. Yet in reality, it was their defense of this sneaky little project, making anyone who doen't like it someone who wants to disenfranchise people.

It's a lie. It's not about counting all the ballots in the slightest, it's about selectively counting the ballots of only voters who fill in the Democratic slots. The Democratic operative who called herself 'Lulu' in the video clip wanted to collect only the ballot of the voter in the household who had no party affiliation, not the ballots of the Republicans, so it wasn't about counting all the ballots, it was about counting all the Democratic ballots and the ballots of those on the fence who could be muscled into voting Democrat. She after all, offered to 'help' that voter, which we all know means the ballot would be filled out a certain way. Oh and here's another goodie in this: Ballots can be harvested and mailed even on election day, when the counts are happening and Democrats can see which candidates are performing weakly.

The operatives can be dispatched like flying monkeys to those districts to intrude on the private spaces of voters who maybe didn't want to vote or who were planning to go to the polls in the evening, and 'harvest' those votes. And you can bet a certain number of those ballots would be cast by people who were afraid of consequences if they didn't vote the way that ballot harvestor standing at the door wanted them to vote. After all, the harvesters, by coming to the homes, signaled they knew where the voters lived, and theoretically, many of these voters could have been illegal immigrants registered whether they liked it or not by the DMV to vote. Oh, and could the operative have steamed open the ballots to see how those people voted and make sure they were delivering the votes? With zero chain of custody rules, they certainly could.

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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.

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