Can Americans discuss race?

There is a Newsweek article here under the title 'FEEL HOW THAT FEELS' A young woman of color’s take on why the fight against racism has to start with owning it written by a black woman called Nadira Hira.  It starts from the view that we are all racists to some degree, a view long held by most psychologists.  She includes herself and other blacks in that. And she thinks we should talk about it.

The article is long and rambling so I won't reproduce any of it here but I think I can see a large problem in it. A large part of what she writes hinges on definitions.  There are many ways you can define racism and it matters. She strongly argues that whites normally define racism too narrowly -- as bad things done by bad people -- and that blacks tend to disown their racial biases also.  So she wants all of us to discuss openly the many ways we are racist -- in the view that we will make it less harmful by doing so.

But there is a big obstacle to that.  Leftists ALREADY define racism very broadly and, the way they do it, no dialogue will ever come out of it. Leftists call just about EVERYTHING they disagree with racist and condemn it sweepingly.  If she wants to get any dialog about race going, she has somehow to shut up the race-baiting Left. And that will be hard -- as the Left are so bereft of ideas that they would often be left with nothing to say if you took that robotic insult away from them.

So it's an essay that I mostly agree with but it is pissing into the wind.  The Left have effectively shut down almost all intelligent dialog about race in America. Just mentioning the word "race" will normally expose you to a tirade of abuse. And the claim that blacks are racist too will cause many of them them to go completely off their brains

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Did Trump Rallies Really Increase Hate Crimes by 226%?

The short answer is "of course not." And you don't even have to work very hard to debunk it.

After the tragedy in El Paso, the media went absolutely berserk.

Reason:

"The president cannot be absolved of responsibility for inciting the hatreds that led to El Paso," read a  New York Times piece. Democratic presidential contenders echoed this sentiment, with Beto O'Rourke  saying Trump's rhetoric "has a lot to do with" the shooting and Kamala Harris  alleging that Trump was "tweeting out the ammunition" used by the El Paso shooter.

Blaming the words of controversial politicians for the acts of terrorists and lunatics without hard evidence is not new. However, a recent academic paper, reported on by numerous outlets before it went through the peer-review process, suggests that Trump actually is to blame.

What the...? Read on, Macduff:

Studying the effects of Trump's many campaign rallies on reported hate incidents, three professors at the University of North Texas and Texas A&M—Ayal Feinberg, Regina Branton, and Valerie Martinez-Ebers— claim that Trump rallies are associated with a 226 percent  increase in such incidents.

Naturally, their study went viral. Vox, The Washington Post, the San Francisco Chronicle, and CNN all published articles reporting that Trump's words are so bad that exposure to them leads to a wave of hate crimes.

What in the wide, wide, world of sports are those numbskulls saying?

Using the same data and statistical procedures as Feinberg et al.,  we replicated their study's headline result. Since we did not have access to the original paper's data and code, this involved collecting each of the variables mentioned in the original paper, and then independently performing the same analysis. Wherever possible, we copied the decisions that are mentioned in the original paper. Our headline results were very close to those reported in the original paper.

So Trump rallies really do increase "hate crimes"? In the immortal words of Defense Secretary Albert Nimziki from Independence Day, "that's not entirely accurate":

Using additional data we collected, we also  analyzed the effect of Hillary Clinton's campaign rallies using the identical statistical framework. The ostensible finding: Clinton rallies contribute to an  even greater increase in hate incidents than Trump rallies.

This should be enough to give any reader pause. The implied reasoning of those who cited the initial study was that Trump's caustic and seemingly racist rhetoric contributed to a crueler, more discriminatory climate, ripe for hate crimes.

If this interpretation is correct, why did Clinton inspire as many, if not more, hate incidents as Trump did? Did calling millions of Americans "deplorables" promote violence?

Heh.

As you can see, the left brings Mark Twain's words to life: "There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics." In this case, you have to ask are the professors that stupid? Or do they think that we are?

Trump makes use of the phrase "fake news" all too often. But this is definitely one instance that Trump would be correct in calling out the media for reporting "fake news." It's not only "fake," it's an outright lie.

SOURCE 

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Josh Hawley and Rick Scott’s bizarre support for socialist price controls

Democrats are reaching as far to the Left as possible to appease their radical liberal base heading into the 2020 presidential primaries, whether it’s through "Medicare for all," the Green New Deal, or Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s plans for “big, structural change” in America. Unsurprisingly, Republicans are attempting to frame the 2020 election cycle as a fight to defeat socialism. But are they really committed to that effort?

Not all of them. Senate Republicans such as Josh Hawley of Missouri and Rick Scott of Florida are pushing for socialist price controls on prescription drugs that would cause shortages and make it financially impossible for drug innovators to invent new life-saving medications. Both of these senators were strongly opposed to a government healthcare takeover at the beginning of this year, but have since changed their positions.

Welcome to the swamp.

Hawley and Scott want the Department of Health and Human Services to control drug prices under Medicare Part B using an International Pricing Index. The index would set drug prices based on their costs in other countries, many of which have socialized healthcare systems. This includes the cost of lifesaving medications such as vaccines and cancer treatments.

In other words, they’re basically saying, “Believe in the principles of small government and free markets, but only sometimes.” This is not a message that will inspire the Republican base to show up at the ballot box in 2020. When Republicans abandon their small government principles, they take a beating at the polls

This is more GOP hypocrisy: Price controls are the antithesis of a free market.

Hawley and Scott are trying to have it both ways, but they cannot support individual freedom in one breath and call for a government takeover of the healthcare market in the next. Republicans understood this when they unified in strong opposition to Obamacare. Why the sudden change in position? Why are state-mandated price controls suddenly fine now?

The Republican Party needs to get its policy agenda in order, or they risk heading into the 2020 elections missing one key component that will make or break their success on election night: credibility.

When Republican lawmakers seeking reelection stand for nothing, their words mean nothing on the campaign trail. This is the root of frustration among our entire FreedomWorks community of grassroots activists — it’s the reason why citizens are putting their support behind dedicated free market conservatives who will take the fight to big government policies put forward by either party.

Many of these principled conservatives, and future leaders of the Republican Party, are members of the House Freedom Caucus. They understand the swamp has a way of making lawmakers forget what ideas got them sent to Washington in the first place. They are committed to holding each other accountable to the promises they made to constituents back home.

If the Republican Party wants to restore its credibility with fiscal conservatives in 2020, it needs to stop echoing the ideas of socialist Democrats and strengthen its commitment to free markets by going back to its small government roots. When it comes to healthcare, Hawley and Scott offer a perfect example of what not to do.

SOURCE 

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With Their 'Wealth Tax' Plan, Democrats Put A Bull's Eye On Those Without It

Taxing the rich is to tax investment and there is no economic progress without investment.  And investment means job creation

Who knows who coined the phrase, but “W-2 wealth” and “you don’t get rich off of W-2 income” is increasingly a thing. Or it seems that way. Executives (W-2) are often extraordinarily well-to-do, but if you want to be truly, filthy rich you must have an equity stake in something. Professional baseball players are W-2 rich and can sometimes claim tens of millions worth of annual income, but their employers are generally billionaires.

There’s rich, and then there’s superrich.

All of this rates discussion in consideration of how prominent Democrats increasingly view taxation. A recent Wall Street Journal report explained their vision for taxing the rich, and it's apparent that income will no longer be enough. Democrats recognize that size amounts of wealth can’t really be found in W-2 income, but in ownership wealth. Ownership of a business, equity in a certain business, or highly appreciated shares in a company. About the rich, the Journal reports that the “Democrats want to shift toward taxing their wealth, instead of just their salaries and the income their assets generate." Translated, the Democrats want to go after the wealth of billionaire MLB owners. The millionaire players aren't rich enough.

Voters should be worried. Or skeptical. Or something. There’s no escaping taxation, and that’s true even if the vast majority of us won’t be taxed. If the Democrats ever succeed in imposing a “wealth tax” that actually succeeds in confiscating the wealth of the richest, watch out. No one will be spared.

Many moons ago Joseph Schumpeter observed that the “means required in order to start enterprise are typically provided by borrowing other people’s savings.” This shouldn't require explanation, but companies and the jobs they must create in order to grow are a consequence of abstinence. That's why everyone is victimized when politicians go after the rich. Think about it.

The above runs counter to what’s taught in economics class, or what’s read in the newspaper. What we read and what we're taught is that tax cuts only work if they're directed toward middle earners and the poor since each demographic will spend a lot of the untaxed income. But consumption doesn’t power economic growth. Investment is the source of growth. Tax the rich who have enormous unspent wealth, and you're taxing investment.

Readers should remember this the next time some dopey economist or economist-worshipping pundit claims that consumption powers economic growth. To believe what is absurd is the equivalent of believing that Haiti’s poverty is a function of the people not getting the consumption memo from economists. No, Haitians consume very little precisely because they produce very little.

Importantly, another economic truth that cannot be refuted is Schumpeter’s about savings being a requirement for starting a business. For there to be entrepreneurs there must be abstinence on the part of someone or many someones so that an idea can morph into reality. And if anyone disagrees with any of this, please produce the list of prominent businesses that got that way sans copious investment.

So the Democrats want to tax wealth? That’s what they say. Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, and others say they want to go after the wealth of the superrich. It’s only fair, or something like that. They’re only going after the big fortunes. Ok, but if they do they’re saying they want to tax opportunity for everyone else. Sorry, but it’s true. Those with immense wealth have the means to invest immense amounts of wealth. Behind every great business is a story of a visionary founder or CEO finding the investment necessary to stave off bankruptcy. If wealth is taxed as the Democrats claim they’d like to do, there will necessarily be fewer dollars finding their way to innovative businesses with expansive visions for growth.

Notable here is that some Dems are allegedly more moderate, claim their vision is one of boosting the middle class, but their message is really no different from those more up front about their redistributive visions. Joe Biden comes to mind here. Though it’s unlikely he touches a fraction of the common hands he claims to, Biden fancies himself a man of the people. Apparently the truly naïve believe him. Eager to curry favor with the regular people, Biden argues that the “middle class” built America, not Wall Street. Actually, that’s not true. Wall Street’s core function is directing the savings of others to today’s and tomorrow’s companies. What investment bankers do is kind of heroic with the latter in mind, and very pro-middle class. Businesses are endlessly in search of unspent wealth, and Wall Street’s crucial role is one of skillfully helping large, small, and in-between corporations to attain capital in ways that maximize their ability to grow.

Biden is making the same argument as Sanders and Warren, but in stealth fashion. Yet anyone with a pulse should be able to see through the argument. They’re all saying they love jobs and opportunity, but with forked tongues. Out of the mouth’s other side, they’re saying opportunity will somehow be abundant in concert with the confiscation of wealth held by the proverbial MLB owner. Except that what they promise cannot be.

It’s the unspent wealth that is the source of all company formation, expansion, innovation. Abstinence once again fuels economic growth and the Democrats want to tax abstinence. Unknown is if any of the Democrats promising to tax savings will be asked about this obvious contradiction during the debates. The question is rhetorical.

Still, readers shouldn’t be fooled by the Dems' rhetoric. Opportunity springs not from the W-2 rich, but from the owner/investor/inherited wealth rich. Keep this in mind the next time some politician promises to spread the wealth around through force. We all suffer taxes levied on those with the most.

SOURCE 

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Socialism Runs Wild: NYC Mayor Bill De Blasio Mulls Requiring Licenses For Bicyclists

From the same man who brought “Meatless Monday” to New York City schoolchildren, Mayor Bill de Blasio seeks to expand the choking death grip of socialism to Big Apple residents with another authoritarian idea.

Hizzoner’s 2020 presidential run has imploded like the farce that it always was and now that he has inhaled the gaseous emissions from other socialist candidates, he has plenty of time to focus on additional ways to inflict misery on his own constituents.

Now de Blasio is mulling mandating bicycle riders to be licensed by his crooked big city government and to face serious consequences if they fail to comply with his coming decree.

“We have to think about what’s going to be safe for people first, but also what’s going to work,” the mayor said of the helmet requirement. “Is it something we could actually enforce effectively? Would it discourage people from riding bikes? I care first and foremost about safety

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 one thing everybody missed in Brexit chaos

Although I have always followed British politics closely, I have usually found the Brexit discussions far too boring to comment on.  There is however what I see as a particularly insightful comment below by Australian commentator Joe Hildebrand

The British Prime Minister has lost three key Brexit votes in parliament in just two days — and they potentially just scored him an election win.

George W. Bush once profoundly observed: “Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me … er, you can’t get fooled again.”

What the eloquent former president meant to say was: “Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.” In other words, if you get tricked by someone once it means they’re an a**ehole. But if you get tricked twice it means you’re a sucker.

This handy saying came back to me amid the rolling wall-to-wall coverage of Boris Johnson’s “humiliating defeat” this week.

Indeed, the phrase “humiliating defeat” was used so universally you’d think a memo had gone out. Not even the Chinese media has such remarkable editorial consistency.

Needless to say, it is not the first time the media and political commentariat has reached such a consensus. It pretty much universally declared that Donald Trump could not be elected US President and Scott Morrison could not be elected Australian Prime Minister.

I should know — I was one of those commentators.

And of course, it was only three years ago that virtually the entire UK political establishment was convinced that the Brexit referendum would not succeed — indeed, so convinced that they were the ones who put it to a referendum in the first place.

Now those same voices are saying that Mr Johnson’s Brexit plans are in tatters and his prime ministership has been dealt a crushing blow. As George W. Bush said: “Fool me once …”

In a world where all the smart people keep getting it wrong, sometimes it takes an idiot to get it right. And this is where I come in.

I am far from an expert in the ancient art of British politics, but for the life of me I cannot see a scenario in which Johnson’s position isn’t manifestly stronger after his supposed “humiliating defeat”.

Indeed, it is hard not to suspect that Boris planned the whole thing himself.

Before the predictable accusations of bias come out, let me state yet again that I am anti-Brexit, I have always been anti-Brexit and even if I was pro-Brexit, I would be anti-Hard Brexit. The only difference between me and the current rump of Remainers is that I am also pro-democracy.

And it seems to me that a bunch of politicians trying to stop the result of a referendum being enacted, trying to stop an election being called to resolve the matter and, failing that, trying to make one of its two potential outcomes illegal is not exactly democratic. But we’ll get to that later.

There are three very good reasons Boris Johnson would dearly love an election.

The first is the natural human instinct of a newly installed party leader wishing to give his prime ministership legitimacy, an instinct that is obviously amplified in both narcissists and populists (and Boris is at least one of those two things).

The second is that by almost every measure, the Conservative Party is enormously likely to win majority government under Mr Johnson — something it spectacularly failed to do under Theresa May in yet another poll shock that defied all expectations.

And, thanks to the expulsion of all the Tory MPs who crossed the floor, all newly preselected Conservative candidates would be, by definition, Johnson loyalists, thus tightening his grip on the party.

The third, and most critical, is that an election campaign under Mr Johnson would serve as a defacto second referendum on Brexit and give him an undeniable mandate to press ahead with Britain’s departure from the EU under any circumstances — not to mention the numbers to do so — without having to resort to an absurd “do-over” referendum that would be harder for the Leave camp to win.

And so an election for Mr Johnson is the ultimate magic bullet. It would strengthen his leadership, his party and his cause. It would be his political Holy Trinity.

The only thing standing in his way is that the UK has fixed five-year terms and so Mr Johnson would need an extraordinary trigger for being able to justify calling one. Something like, for example, a “constitutional crisis”.

This is almost certainly what Mr Johnson intended to manufacture when he announced his shock parliamentary shutdown and, sure enough, the hysteria of his opponents gave him precisely the crisis he wanted. They even christened it for him.

Now, instead of looking like he’s making a cynical power play to prop up his parliamentary numbers, Boris can play the reluctant hero, appearing befuddled and besieged and attempting to resolve this historical impasse by humbly submitting to the judgment of the people — a judgment that virtually every poll shows will deliver him a thumping win.

But Boris’ bonanza doesn’t end there. The technical process for forcing the election requires a two-thirds majority of parliament, a safeguard designed to ensure it is a bipartisan decision and prevent precisely the sort of political opportunism Mr Johnson is trying to engineer.

Any half-smart political leader would of course deny an ascendant opponent the chance to go to the polls, which was the genesis of Paul Keating’s magnificently sensual pledge to John Hewson: “I want to do you slowly.”

Hand-in-hand with this concept goes the other universal rule of Westminster politics: that is, you want to avoid an ascendant opponent in the first place. You want to keep your opponent weak enough to get beaten on polling day but not so weak that their own party replaces them with someone who could beat you.

This is precisely why the Coalition never went for the jugular on Bill Shorten.

But of course both these concepts are far too complex for Jeremy Corbyn, a man whose density is rivalled only by the bottom half of the periodic table.

The UK Labour leader’s refusal to co-operate with Theresa May on a soft Brexit both dramatically increased the likelihood of a hard one and rendered her position so untenable that it effectively ensured her replacement by the far more popular Boris Johnson.

Not only that, Mr Corbyn’s own position on Brexit was so hopelessly compromised and confused that his only tactic of the past two years was to loudly and constantly demand the Conservatives go to the polls, apparently blissfully unaware of the possibility that when they finally granted his wish, it might be under a different leader.

Now of course his bluff has been called and sooner or later, he will have no choice but to send himself to his doom. Honestly, anyone who ever gets the chance to play cards with this guy should immediately take him up on it and chuck their car keys in the pot. A five-year-old could beat him with pair of deuces.

As a result, Corbyn has already been forced to declare that he will support the election bill once another bill has passed — banning the UK from “crashing out” of the EU — which is a rather strange caveat given that that’s precisely what a huge number of people voting in the election will be voting for.

Yet even this oddly anti-democratic act — waved through in a bizarre tableau of sleeping bags and toothbrushes by the House of Lords — is utterly meaningless.

Notwithstanding the UK’s somewhat unusual understanding of democracy, a re-elected Conservative government with a majority in the House of Commons could simply reverse the legislation — and it would take a very suicidal or very sleepy Lord to stand in the way of that.

In short, it appears right now that Mr Johnson will get the election he wants, will win that election with party unquestionably loyal to him, will have a mandate to do what he wants and will have the numbers to do it.

If that’s a humiliating defeat then I’ll have a double.

The only thing it looks like Mr Johnson might not get at this stage is his preferred exit date of October 31. Hopefully he will be able to come to terms with this with therapy and time.

The far more disturbing thing to emerge from this whole sorry sh*tshow is the outrageously elitist attitude that the masses were not educated enough to know what they were voting for in the 2016 referendum and their error must be corrected by their intellectual betters.

Even Orwell himself would marvel that in 21st century Britain, supposedly enlightened politicians are arguing that people should be able to vote any way they want as long as it’s the right one. Some pigs are indeed more equal than others.

The good news is that if these people really want a government that decides what’s good for them without the pesky nuisance of democracy, then there’s a very big and powerful country they can move to.

The only catch is it’s not in Europe.

SOURCE 

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Protesters at Chick-fil-A greatly outnumbered by a throng of customers

Chick-fil-A opened its first franchised location in Canada on Friday and was met by both a line of eager customers and a crowd of protesters.

The popular fast-food chain, famous for its Christian values, is no stranger to protests. For years, the company has been met with opposition from LGBT activists and others on the left.

Despite extensive criticism, however, Chick-fil-A has continued to prove wildly popular, besting In-N-Out this year as America’s favorite fast-food restaurant, according to one major survey.

When the company’s new Toronto location opened at 10:30 a.m. local time, customers “streamed in,” the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation reported.

Meanwhile, protesters chanted “shame” at the waiting customers and waved signs that read “Cluck-off” in the restaurant’s signature font. Local LGBT activists denounced Chick-fil-A’s arrival in the Canadian city.

“The fact that Chick-fil-A is opening on the streets of Toronto is something that is quite alarming,” Justin Khan, who works at Toronto LGBT organization The 519, told the CBC.

Protester Tommy King said that the company has “fought against equal rights in the states, and if they’re here, they’re probably going to do the same.”

Protesters also chanted “we will not be silenced,” though it was not clear who, if anyone, was attempting to silence them.

SOURCE 

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Farmers are facing persecution in South Africa

A delegation of 30 South African farming families has arrived in Russia’s farmbelt Stavropol region, Rossiya 1 TV channel reports. The group says it is facing violent attacks and death threats at home.

Up to 15,000 Boers, descendants of Dutch settlers in South Africa, are planning to move to Russia amid rising violence stemming from government plans to expropriate their land, according to the delegation.

“It’s a matter of life and death — there are attacks on us. It’s got to the point where the politicians are stirring up a wave of violence,” Adi Slebus told the media. “The climate here [in the Stavropol region] is temperate, and this land is created by God for farming. All this is very attractive.”

The new South African government lead by President Cyril Ramaphosa has pledged to return the lands owned by white farmers since the 1600s to the black citizens of the country. The government said it is planning to put an end to what it calls the legacy of apartheid, where most of South Africa’s land is still in the hands of its minority white population.

Rights groups have said the initiative incites violence. There were 74 farm murders and 638 attacks, primarily against white farmers, in 2016-17 in South Africa, according to data by minority rights group AfriForum.

The farmers are ready to make a contribution to Russia’s booming agricultural sector, according to Rossiya 1. Each family is ready to bring up to $100,000 for leasing the land.

Russia has 43 million hectares of unused farmland. The country has recently begun giving out free land to Russian citizens to cultivate farming. The land giveaway program, which began in 2014, has been a huge success

SOURCE 

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Students who never go on dates are happier and more sociable than their peers in relationships

Score 1 for Christians

Teenagers who avoid dating aren't necessarily socially awkward, experts have found.

In fact, they sometimes have better mental health than their romantically-linked peers and are equally well-adjusted.

That's the conclusion reached by researchers at the University of Georgia, who studied nearly six-hundred tenth grade students. 

As a result, experts say schools should promote being single as a viable option of healthy development among adolescents.   

HOW WAS THE STUDY CONDUCTED?
 
Researchers at the University of Georgia studied nearly six-hundred tenth grade students.

They first identified four distinct dating trajectories from 6th to 12th grade: low, increasing, high middle school and frequent.

Investigators then compared the four dating groups using teacher ratings and student questionnaires. 

The researchers identified four distinct dating trajectories from 6th to 12th grade: low, increasing, high middle school and frequent.

Investigators compared the four dating groups using teacher ratings and student questionnaires. 

The data found that adolescents who were not in a romantic relationship had good social skills and low depression, and fared better or equal to peers who dated.

'In the end, school health educators, mental health professionals, and teachers should affirm social norms that support adolescents' individual freedom to decide whether to date or not, indicating that both are acceptable and healthy options,' said lead author Brooke Douglas, of the University of Georgia.

The study was published in the Journal of School Health.

Meanwhile, a separate study from February 2019 found that a woman's willingness to engage in casual sex at college depends on how romantically active they were at school.

Dr Laurie Hawkins from the University of Essex conducted 45 interviews with undergraduate women at a large public Western United States.

They were asked to give their views on sexuality in adolescence as well as their sexual and romantic relationships in college.

Classified into five categories - religious, relationship seekers, high school partiers, late bloomers and career women - the late bloomers were the most frivolous with sexual partners, suggesting they were making up for lost time.

Meanwhile, women who were sexually experienced in high school were less concerned about casual encounters. 

Dr Hawkins told MailOnline: 'The late bloomers were an interesting group. They pretty much ignored sex but once they did engage in sex/hookup culture at university, they jumped into it more than others and were among the most sexually active of all the groups.

'However, since they had fairly negative feelings about the appropriateness of sex, they needed a way to justify their own behaviour so they engaged in slut shaming of other women in order to make themselves feel better about their own behaviour – they might be having sex, but others were doing it more and therefore their sexual behaviour was better.

'I think they talked about it more as it was a way to engage in social comparison so they could bolster their feelings about their own participation in casual sex 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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Sharpie President? Alabama National Guard Mobilized for Hurricane Dorian

On Thursday, Twitter lit up with the hashtag #SharpiePresident, as people mocked President Donald Trump for drawing a circle around the path for Hurricane Dorian, showing the hurricane threatening the Great State of Alabama. The memes are hilarious, but the hurricane really did threaten Alabama, as Rear Admiral Peter J. Brown said in a letter defending the president. In fact, the Alabama National Guard mobilized for the hurricane days before Trump's infamous Sharpie snafu.

On Wednesday, Trump shared the original projections, to which someone added a circle in Sharpie to emphasize the threat to Alabama. Note: in the video, Trump does not claim that Dorian was still headed toward Alabama, only that the original projections suggested it would be.

The president told The New York Times he did not know who added the Sharpie circle to the map. Liberals rushed to mock the president on Twitter, however, sharing memes about "President Sharpie."

Liberal commentators had a field day, with Stephen Colbert joking that Trump would be going to "weather jail." Democratic members of Congress also attacked the president over the image, claiming he had committed an illegal act by doctoring the map.

Rear Admiral Peter J. Brown, Trump's homeland security and counterterrorism advisor, released a statement explaining the president's position.

"As the Homeland Security and Counterterrorism Advisor, I briefed President Donald J. Trump multiple times concerning the position, forecast, risks, and Federal Government preparations for and response to Hurricane Dorian," Brown wrote. He noted that Trump's comments on September 1 "were based on that morning's Hurricane Dorian briefing, which included the possibility of tropical storm force winds in southeastern Alabama. In fact, from the evening of Tuesday, August 27 until the morning of September 2, forecasts from the National Hurricane Center showed the possibility of tropical storm force winds hitting parts of Alabama."

Yet perhaps the most important piece of evidence came from the Alabama National Guard itself. The state's National Guard started mobilizing for Hurricane Dorian because the storm was projected to hit their state.

"[Hurricane Dorian] is projected to reach southern Alabama by the early part of the week. We are watching closely and [ready] to act. Are you?" the Alabama National Guard tweeted.

SOURCE 

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DNC Resolution Takes Aim at Christians, Warning Against 'Religious Liberty'

Last month, the Democratic National Committee (DNC) passed a resolution praising the religiously unaffiliated, saying their values align with those of the Democratic Party and recognizing them as the largest religious group in that party. Yet the resolution also took up arms against "misplaced claims" of "religious liberty," warning that religious freedom threatens the "civil rights and liberties" of many liberal interest groups.

"[T]hose most loudly claiming that morals, values, and patriotism must be defined by their particular religious views have used those religious views, with misplaced claims of 'religious liberty,' to justify public policy that has threatened the civil rights and liberties of many Americans, including but not limited to the LGBT community, women, and ethnic and religious/nonreligious minorities," the DNC resolution states.

The DNC likely intended this clause to appeal to the religiously unaffiliated — better known as "nones" — but it also represents the cementing orthodoxy of the Democratic Party. Democrats have united around H.R. 5, the so-called "Equality Act," which would enshrine in American law a vision of gender identity as more important than biological sex. A broad coalition of feminists, pro-lifers, and religious freedom advocates have united to oppose this bill, including outspoken Democrats like feminist lawyer Kara Dansky.

Senate Democrats have launched attacks on the religious faith of Trump nominees, with Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) infamously saying, "the dogma lives loudly within you." Former Sen. Al Franken (D-Minn.) compared a conservative Christian law firm to the Cambodian dictator Pol Pot, and many Democrats have repeated the Southern Poverty Law Center's (SPLC) "hate group" accusation against conservative Christian groups, something that's  been outed as a cynical fundraising scheme.

The type of religious liberty the DNC attacked as "misplaced" likely refers to the very public court battles over whether or not religious artistic professionals can opt out of endorsing same-sex weddings.

Christian baker Jack Phillips, for example, refused to bake a custom cake for a same-sex wedding, although he gladly sells all sorts of pre-made cakes to LGBT people in his shop. Yet the Colorado Civil Rights Commission ruled that he had discriminated against people on the basis of sexual orientation. He appealed the case all the way to the Supreme Court and won — because members of the commission displayed animus against his religious faith, comparing his views to those of the Nazis.

Even after this Supreme Court victory, Phillips again faced the commission. A transgender lawyer asked him to bake an obscene custom cake celebrating the lawyer's gender transition. Phillips refused, citing his free speech right not to be forced to endorse a view with which he disagrees. The commission again found him guilty of discrimination, but it dropped the complaint in March 2019. The lawyer promptly sued Phillips.

Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) represented Phillips and many similar cases. The SPLC has accused this group of being a "hate group," leading Franken to demonize it on the scale of Pol Pot. Yet ADF's ideological opponents — former ACLU president Nadine Strossen and Mikey Weinstein, current head of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation (a secularist group) — have insisted that ADF is not a "hate group." The demonization rapidly gaining steam in the Democratic Party goes too far for some outspoken secular lawyers.

Of people like Phillips and those who defend them, like ADF, LGBT mega donor Tim Gill said, "We're going to punish the wicked."

The DNC also mentioned attacks on women, likely a reference to the religious liberty of doctors, nurses, and Catholic medical facilities to opt out of performing or assisting in abortions in violation of their consciences. Yet pro-abortion activists have dressed up as handmaids from The Handmaid's Tale in protest of such liberties, suggesting that any restriction on abortion is tantamount to a misogynistic dystopia where women are ritualistically raped in order to bear children at the dictates of a conservative Christian government.

Former Rep. Beto O'Rourke (D-Texas), a 2020 Democratic presidential contender, compared the Trump administration's refusal to pay for an illegal immigrant woman's abortion to — you guessed it — The Handmaid's Tale.

According to research by sociologists George Yancey and David Williamson, animus against conservative Christians is just as strong as animus against other religious groups besides atheists. This "Christianophobia" is mostly directed against "fundamentalism," and those with such animus "are more likely to be white, well educated, and wealthy." The factor most connected to Christianophobia in their study was politics: "Nearly half of the anti-fundamentalists in our sample were political progressives."

Jack Phillips Opens Up About Being Compared to a Nazi, Though His Dad Liberated a Concentration Camp
In fact, one of Yancey's studies showed that some people who did not have a high view of LGBT people nonetheless supported LGBT activism while reporting high levels of animus against conservative Christians. Yancey suggested that "hatred of Christians" can lead to "support for sexual minorities."

Many liberals do genuinely fear that religious liberty protections will make it impossible for LGBT people to find and keep a job, to find a place to live, and to flourish in society. Current activism goes far beyond these legitimate concerns, however.

Cases like that of Jack Phillips represent an overreach far beyond a "live and let live" compromise. These cases are less about making sure that LGBT people can thrive and more about forcing Christians to violate their consciences.

Liberals often claim that religious liberty is a tool to protect religious minorities, and it seems that argument is on full display in the pro-nones resolution. Indeed, it is fundamentally important to protect the religious liberty of all.

But the logic of opposing religious liberty for Christians — who are nominally a majority in the U.S. despite the stigma against conservative Christians — would also result in a loss of religious liberty for religious minorities like Muslims, Jews, and even nones.

Last year, lawyers for the State of Minnesota argued that the state should be able to force a Christian media company to make videos celebrating same-sex weddings in violation of its Christian beliefs. In arguments before the 8th Circuit Court of Appeals, those lawyers admitted that if the state could force Christian filmmakers to violate their religious beliefs, it could force a Muslim tattoo artist to write a message that tattoo artist disagrees with, like inking "Jesus Christ is the Son of God" on a Christian customer.

Religious liberty must be for everyone or no one. Democrats want to excoriate Christians when they want to live according to their consciences, but they want to champion religious minorities in the same struggle. This is rank hypocrisy.

The DNC could have welcomed religious nones into the party without a gratuitous attack on the religious liberty claims of conservative Christians. Instead, it arguably appealed to a Christianophobia that has gone too far, even for prominent secular lawyers like Mikey Weinstein.

And some people wonder why evangelicals are flocking in droves to Donald Trump.

SOURCE 

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The Left Has a $500 Million Dark Money ‘ATM Machine’ Called Arabella

A largely unknown, massively funded strategy company pushing the interests of wealthy leftist donors has been quietly behind a hydra-like dark money network of pop-up groups designed to look like grassroots activist organizations. These front groups push everything from opposition to President Trump’s proposed border wall to support for Obamacare to gun control to government control of the Internet to pro-abortion activism and other leftwing causes.

The secretive Arabella Advisors may be one of the most impactful and sophisticated leftist funding outfits that you never heard of, a centralized hub that runs nonprofit arms that in turn have spawned a nexus of hundreds of front organizations outwardly designed to appear grassroots but that evidence the common theme of more government control in the lives of Americans.

Arabella’s vast network was unmasked in an extensive exposé by conservative watchdog Capital Research Center, which documents the shadowy system developed by, housed in, and staffed by the for-profit, privately held Arabella Advisors.

The Arabella firm in turn manages four nonprofits: the New Venture Fund, Sixteen Thirty Fund, Windward Fund, and Hopewell Fund. It is these nonprofit entities that play host to hundreds of groups and projects that promote interests and political movements strategically deployed in an ongoing campaign to nudge the country to the left.

Arabella’s nonprofits spent a combined $1.16 billion from 2013-2017 alone with the aim of advancing “the political policies desired by wealthy left-wing interests through hundreds of ‘front’ groups,” according to the report. “And those interests pay well: the network’s revenues grew by an incredible 392 percent over that same period.”

“Together, these groups form an interlocking network of ‘dark money’ pop-up groups and other fiscally sponsored projects, all afloat in a half-billion-dollar ocean of cash,” states the report. “The real puppeteer, though, is Arabella Advisors, which has managed to largely conceal its role in coordinating so much of the professional Left’s infrastructure under a mask of ‘philanthropy.’”

A specialty of the Arabella network seems to be the quick turnover of hundreds of “front” groups, especially websites timed to impact current events and designed to look like “grassroots” Astroturf organizations but that actually function as part of an orchestrated movement to advance the political interests of hidden leftist donors.

“At a glance, these groups — such as Save My Care and Protect Our Care — appeared to be impassioned examples of citizen activists defending ObamaCare,” according to the report. “In reality, neither ‘not-for-profit’ advocacy group appears to have paid staff, held board meetings, or even owned so much as a pen.”

In one case, an organization calling itself Demand Justice, founded by former members of Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign, quickly thrust itself into the center of opposition to Trump’s Supreme Court pick Brett Kavanaugh.

Even before Trump announced Kavanaugh as his nominee, Demand Justice committed to spending about $5 million to oppose the eventual pick. As soon as Kavanaugh’s name was selected, the organization immediately deployed an anti-Kavanaugh website and helped lead news making national activism during the confirmation hearings.

Yet what the news media missed is that Demand Justice is fiscally sponsored by the Sixteen Thirty Fund, one of Arabella’s nonprofits, as the Capital Research Center report reveals.

The report shows similar setups have spawned organizations that serve as the backbone of the Obamacare support network, promote gun control, support pro-abortion activism, champion open border policies, and even advocate for a centralized government role on the Internet.

Arabella nonprofits also evidence close financial workings with initiatives for the Democracy Alliance, another network of highly influential donors, including billionaire George Soros. Democracy Alliance itself coordinates funding to even more leftist outfits.

Arabella Advisors was founded by Eric Kessler, whose bio on the firm’s website identifies him as “a serial entrepreneur who has started, led, and advised organizations pursuing social change across the country and around the globe.”

Curiously missing from his official bio, but documented in the Capital Research Center report, is the detail that Kessler served as a member of the Clinton Global Initiative, an arm of the controversial Clinton Foundation.

The report concludes by asking, “Given that many of the groups managed by Arabella frequently call for transparency in the funding of campaigns and policy advocacy, they may first consider voluntarily disclosing their own funding sources. Why shouldn’t transparency begin at home?”

SOURCE 

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$3 Billion State Stem Cell “Flop” Now Wants $5.5 Billion More

This month, the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine (CIRM), California’s state stem-cell agency, hands out its final grants. By the count of Anna Ibarra of California Health Line, that marks $3 billion CIRM has spent—“6 billion with interest”—with scant returns for California taxpayers. In 2004 Proposition 71, which authorized CIRM, promised a host of life-saving cures for cancer, Alzheimer’s and other diseases, but the FDA has yet to approve “any treatments funded by CIRM.”

In similar style, founder Robert Klein, a wealth real-estate developer, promised a stream of fees and royalties that would make CIRM self-supporting. The stem-cell agency reported no royalties until 2018, and only in the amount of $190,345.87. That is less than the salary of former state senator Art Torres, whom CIRM hired when it had a biotech professional willing to work for no salary. With royalties amounting to chump change, and none of the promised cures in the offing, CIRM bosses have a plan.

“Supporters already plan to go back to voters in November 2020 to ask for even more money than last time,” Ibarra explains, “$5.5 billion, plus interest.” As Marcy Darnovsky of the Berkeley Center for Genetics and Society told Ibarra, “it’s a lot of money, even for the state of California.” The original $3 billion was redistributed to cronies.

In 2012, it emerged that CIRM was handing out more than 90 percent of its grants to institutions with representatives on its governing board. That was the sort of thing that got state education superintendent Bill Honig busted on felony conflict-of-interest charges in 1993. In 2012, state Attorney General Kamala Harris looked the other way at CIRM, and so did legislators. Klein wrote Proposition 71 to install himself as chairman, and he kept CIRM from legislative oversight by requiring a 70 percent supermajority of both houses to make any structural or policy changes.

As it happens, Robert Klein was also the prime mover of the California Housing Finance Agency, the state’s “affordable housing lender.” CalHFA claims to be “a completely self-supporting state agency, and its bonds are repaid by revenues generated through mortgage loans, not taxpayer dollars.” CalHFC’s 15-member board of directors includes former assemblywoman and current state treasurer Fiona Ma, who is also on the “audit committee.” CalHFA does not indicate whether it ever directed public funds to projects in which board members have a financial interest, and Gov. Gavin Newsom has not tasked state auditor Elaine Howle to investigate.

Meanwhile, $5.5 billion is a lot of money, even for California, and especially for a state agency that Marcy Darnovsky describes as “a flop.”

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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Sirach 44

A Roman Catholic Bible has a number of books that Protestant Bibles do not have.  The church calls them deutero-canonical books: ancient books of wisdom that do not have the same authority as the rest of the Bible. The acceptance of some of these books among early Christians was widespread, though not universal. Martin Luther considered these books very good and useful reading; John Calvin considered them as work of Satan.

They are clearly later than the generally accepted books of the Old Testament.  For a start, they have mostly come down to us in Greek, with only fragments extant in Hebrew.  They also recount events much closer to the time of Christ. -- such as the revolt of the Maccabees

For the first thousand years of Christianity, there was no general agreement about what books rightly belonged in the Old Testament.  The various church fathers all had their own lists and some of the deutero-canonical books were normally included -- though not always the same deutero-canonical books.

But when Jews formulated their Masoretic text -- ending in the 10th century -- their selection of books gradually gained authority.  Protestant Bibles are based on it. Since the deutero-canonical books were widely accepted among early Christians, however, they are clearly part of the Christian tradition and deserve respect for that.

I am not well-read in the deutero-canonical books but I rather like chapter 44 of Sirach. Below is an excerpt in a modern translation:

1 Now allow us to praise famous people and our ancestors, generation by generation.

2 The Lord created great glory, his majesty from eternity.

3 They ruled in their kingdoms, and made a name with their power, some giving counsel by their intelligence; some making pronouncements in prophecies;

4 some leading the people by their deliberations, and by their understanding of the people’s learning, giving wise words in their instruction;

5 others devising musical melodies, and composing poems;

6 rich people endowed with strength, living in peace in their dwellings—

7 all of these were honored in their generation, a source of pride in their time.

8 Some of them left behind a name so that their praises might be told.

9 For some there is no memory, and they perished as though they hadn’t existed. These have become as though they hadn’t been born, they and even their children after them.

10 But these were compassionate people whose righteous deeds haven’t been forgotten.

11 This will persist with their children; their descendants will be a good legacy.

12 Their descendants stand by the covenants, and their children also, for their sake.

13 Their descendants will last forever, and their glory will never be erased.

14 Their bodies were buried in peace, but their name lives for generations.

15 The people will tell of their wisdom, and the congregation will proclaim their praise.

It seems to me that this passage constitutes an exact repudiation of Leftism. Leftists want everybody to be equal and loathe success wherever they find it.  Far from praising and remembering great men, they mock them as "dead white males".  Leftists envy great men.  They do not honour them. As Gore Vidal said:  "Every time a friend succeeds, I die a little"

But I agree with Sirach.  We SHOULD remember great men -- because we may be able to learn from them.  They represent excellence and we should aspire to excellence.  So the passage above is an emphatic expression of values that we may never hear so strongly put today but which should be part of a healthy scale of values.  It is wisdom from the Christian tradition.

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The trade war may not be worth it for Wall Street, but it is worth it to Americans who have lost their jobs and towns

If you Google Peter Navarro, President Donald Trump’s trade guru (he is actually called “assistant to the president and director of trade and manufacturing policy,”) you might read that he is considered a “heterodox” economist. We suppose this means out of sync with many or most professional and academic economists. They regard “free trade” or unregulated, un-negotiated trade, as an article of faith.

But shouldn’t economists, of all people, be the opposite of doctrinaire? Should economics not be utterly empirical? And shouldn’t the national interest outweigh any abstract doctrine?

As the national media piles on regarding Mr. Trump’s trade policy — protectionist in the words of some pundits and negatively nationalist in the minds of others — Mr. Navarro has become the whipping boy for an approach to trade that we are told is impractical, naive and bound to trigger a recession.

Actually, to assume that any market will entirely regulate itself, righting any and all unfairness or inequality, has long been thought naive by liberal economists and social critics. And the result of most of the “free trade” agreements made in the last 30 years would seem to verify that critique.

In truth, the gradual and structural recession that has plagued the American worker for those same years — known as deindustrialization — is the permanent recession; the recession that keeps on hurting.

Mr. Navarro is portrayed by some of the media as an economic gadfly (read “nut”) when he is actually a Harvard Ph.D. whose views were, for a long time, very much in the mainstream. They may again become the prevailing common sense. That is because they are sensible.

“This country is built on manufacturing,” he has said again and again. “I’m talking about a constant renewal of manufacturing. High-tech manufacturing. And what we’ve seen since 2000, 2001, is we’ve seen the exodus of our factories and jobs.”

This is fact. It is empirical. This nation had some 17 million manufacturing jobs in 2000, considered the (down) turning point, and has a little under 12 million now. We’ve lost 5 million factory jobs in less than 20 years.

At one point — the late 1970s — almost 20 million Americans worked in manufacturing. In 1960, 1 in 4 Americans were factory workers. Today, 1 in 10 are.

Mr. Navarro, a liberal Democrat, makes what used to be a classical liberal Democratic argument about the multiplier effect of manufacturing jobs. “A manufacturing job,” he told NPR a few months ago, “has inherently more power to create wealth.”

“If you have the manufacturing job as the seed corn, then you have jobs in the supply chain. Then towns spring up around that where you have the retail, the lawyers, the accountants, the restaurants, the movie theaters. And what happens is when you lose a factory or a plant in a small- or medium-sized town in the Midwest, it’s like a black hole. And all of that community gets sucked into the black hole and it becomes a community of despair and crime and blight rather than something that’s prosperous.”

This, too, is simply true.

He makes a second classical liberal Democratic argument — that by surrendering in the trade war, the U.S. government transferred wealth overseas and from American workers to foreign companies. If calling that stupid and irresponsible is“protectionist,” so be it. If our government is not here to protect us, what is it here for?

Finally, Mr. Navarro makes the point that deindustrialization is a national security issue. During World War II we vastly outproduced Germany and Japan. This would not be possible today. We could not — we probably would not have the resources or the heart — fight the war today.

To view the industrial base as central to the nation’s defense is not radical or new. It is rational and traditional. In 1952, when faced with a strike by the United Steelworkers, Harry Truman issued an executive order for the secretary of commerce to seize the nation’s steel mills to ensure the continued production of steel. Our industrial base is our security base.

Finally, some 60 years ago, when the writer Michael Harrington’s book “The Other America” (praised by John F. Kennedy) was published, it was considered enlightened, or simply decent, to have concern for the poverty of rural America, though there was no power elite there. Yet when Mr. Navarro and Mr. Trump seek to revive the emptied out heartland, and its silent factories, we are told they are selling empty promises.

Why should this be so? Why shouldn’t America build things again, even if it cannot regain its once overwhelmingly dominant position in manufacturing? Why should it not be considered mainstream to protect the economic future of Americans who are not powerful and progressive to seek to create jobs, real jobs, for Americans who have, for so long, been forsaken?

We are told that fighting the trade war just isn’t worth it. It makes Wall Street nervous. Maybe if your job and town are gone, the fight is worth it.

SOURCE 

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Nothing Protects Tenants Better than Adding Supply
   
Many Californians are clamoring for more tenant protection legislation. Lawmakers are currently considering AB1482, which aims to limit rent hikes and unfair evictions. Last year, California tenant advocates failed to pass Proposition 10, which aimed to expand rent-control.

Earlier this month, Alameda landlords Margaret and Spencer Tam made news for attempting to evict 87-year-old Holocaust survivor Musiy Rishin in order to replace him with higher-paying tenants. Then in late August police arrested a Mountain View landlord and her friends after they staged a violent home invasion in order to scare a family out of the home they were renting.

Keeping low-income families in their homes is a worthy goal. Displacement separates families from their jobs and social support systems. It exacerbates poverty and increases homelessness.

More than 16,000 households in San Francisco depend on rent control to stay in their homes. Ending it immediately would consign every low-income family in SF to either homelessness or crushing commutes. But keeping it going traps families in apartments which may or may not suit their current needs and raises rents (by a small amount) on average.

Rent control is a Band-Aid solution to the growing, nationwide problem of rent burden. Incomes among the bottom half of earners haven’t grown since the Great Recession. Rents, meanwhile, are skyrocketing across the US. They’re growing fastest in the cities that are creating the majority of new jobs.

Rents are increasing because high-demand cities aren’t building enough new homes. Rent control attempts to keep long-term residents in their homes, but rent control without new supply creates a huge gap between market rate rents and what low-income families pay.

This disparity pits landlords against rent-control tenants. Unfortunately, when landlords go up against tenants, they nearly always win. For example, landlords are nearly always represented in wrongful eviction cases, whereas tenants can rarely find a lawyer. And where they can’t prevail in court, they can always make life miserable for tenants by cutting off power like the Mountain View landlords. Or failing to maintain the property in the instance of the Ghost Ship fire that killed 36 people in Oakland in 2016. Rent control also tends to benefit older, wealthier tenants who are better able to fight evictions and don’t have to move as often for work or family changes.

Limits on when and why landlords can evict tenants are supposed to protect them from displacement. But until market rates come down, landlords will be strongly incentivized to remove tenants who pay far below-market rates and replace them with market-rate tenants. And they’re likely to often prevail, as the above cases show. Unfortunately, even the strongest tenant protections can’t do the job of a housing market where landlords compete for tenants and not the other way around.

Rent control and tenant protections in San Francisco raise rents less than 10% on average, according to Stanford Researchers. They’re the only thing keeping low-income tenants in their homes in SF. But they alone will not be enough to keep low-income renters safe. The only thing that will work for all families, long-term, is to build more housing.

SOURCE 

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Unions are the enemies of the people

I didn't have a choice about joining a union when I was hired by CBS and then ABC. They told me that if I wanted to work, I had to pay dues to AFTRA (the American Federation of TV and Radio Artists). "I'm not an 'artist'!" I complained. "I don't want to pay a middleman, and I don't want some actor setting my working conditions."

"Too bad," was the answer. "This is a union shop."

Today, 28 states no longer force workers to join unions. Last year, the Supreme Court declared that unions forcing government workers to pay dues is unconstitutional. After that, hundreds of thousands of workers stopped paying union dues. Good. Unions tend to be enemies of workplace innovation and individual choice.

Also, some of their leaders are thieves. Last week, the FBI raided homes of United Auto Workers leaders. The investigation, begun by the Obama administration, suggests Fiat Chrysler Automobiles paid union leaders millions in bribes to stay "fat, dumb and happy," as prosecutors put it, instead of protecting union members' interests.

Yet, this week, Elizabeth Warren (now the clear Democratic presidential frontrunner), said that "more than ever, America needs a strong labor movement."

This is a popular argument, fueled by the media's bashing of President Donald Trump and anyone else who supports markets. A recent Gallup poll found labor unions now have a 64% favorability rating -- the highest in 16 years.

Warren went on to say that America needs unions because "the playing field today is tilted against working families."

That's utter nonsense. The playing field is better for working families today because the animal spirits of capitalism create more wealth and opportunities in spite of unions.

Of course, unions were once needed. More than 100 years ago, the Colorado Fuel and Iron Company got the National Guard to send men with machine guns into tents occupied by strikers. They killed at least 20 people, including children and wives of miners who were burned alive.

Today, however, violence is more likely to be initiated by unions.

When I worked for ABC, delivery trucks for the New York Daily News were attacked with sticks, stones and fire on the first day of a strike. Some drivers were beaten.

Not satisfied with attacking the company and threatening violence against "scabs" who want to work, union protestors threatened newsstands that continued to sell the Daily News. Protestors seized copies of the paper and set them on fire.

Police did little to quell the violence.

No wonder many companies prefer to work with nonunion labor.

The legally mandated bureaucracy, and all the lawyers surrounding labor disputes, is another infuriating obstacle to anyone who just wants to work out a contract or get a project done.

One-size-fits-all union contracts aren't great for all workers, either. They make it tough for individuals to have their own way.

If the union at your workplace says everyone works an eight-hour day, you can't make your own deal to work a 12-hour day with higher pay. You and your boss might prefer that, but you don't get the option. The union might even call you a troublemaker, saying you put pressure on everyone to work longer hours.

In a pure free market, every entity -- whether individual or a group of individuals -- is able to make whatever contracts they like, so long as the other party agrees.

That system would include you getting to decide whether you want to join a union or remain a free individual operator.

More controversially, it would also include the right of business owners to fire people for trying to organize unions.

In a true free market, workers and management are both allowed to be tough negotiators and make demands. But neither side should have the right to get the government to dictate the terms of a contract.

Keep government out of it, so long as people stick to their contracts and refrain from violence.

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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Just TWO glasses of diet drinks each day raises the risk of an early death, reveals study by the World Health Organisation

I append the original journal abstract below. My comments at the foot of the abstract

The global study of more than 450,000 adults in 10 countries - including the UK - found that daily consumption of all types of soft drinks was linked with a higher chance of dying young.

But the rates for those drinking artificially-sweetened beverages were significantly higher than those consuming full sugar versions.

The scientists, from the WHO International Agency for Research on Cancer in Lyon, said it would be 'prudent' to cut out all soft drinks and have water instead.

And they said taxing sugary drinks – as is done in the UK – could boost diet drink uptake for which the 'long-term' health implications' are unknown.

The research, published in the JAMA Internal Medicine journal, is the largest study to examine links between soft drink consumption and mortality. Previous smaller studies have suggested a link, but have not found such dramatic differences.

The new research found those who consumed two or more 250ml glasses of diet drink a day had a 26 per increased risk of dying within the next 16 years. And deaths from cardiovascular disease went up 52 per cent. [Off a very small base]

For those who had two or more sugary soft drinks a day, the risk of death in the same period was raised by eight per cent.

Study leader Dr Neil Murphy, said: 'The striking observation in our study was that we found positive associations for both sugar-sweetened and artificially-sweetened soft drinks with risk of all-cause deaths.'

He said it is 'unclear' exactly why this is, but pointed to previous studies which suggest the artificial sweeteners in diet drinks 'may induce glucose intolerance' and trigger high blood insulin levels.

'Additional studies are now needed to examine the long term health consequences of specific artificial sweeteners that are commonly used in soft drinks, such as aspartame and acesulfame potassium,' he said.

Similar studies in the past have been criticised because experts said people who drink diet products are more likely to be unhealthy to start with.

But the new study found the link between diet drinks and death rates persisted among those of a healthy weight.

The study also raised concerns about policies that drive people from sugary drinks to diet drinks.

The authors wrote: 'Reformulation of sugar-sweetened soft drinks, in which sugar is replaced with low- or no-calorie sweeteners, is being driven by consumer awareness and fiscal instruments, such as taxes.

'Artificially sweetened soft drinks have few or no calories; however, their long-term physiological and health implications are largely unknown.'

Gavin Partington, director general of the British Soft Drinks Association, said: 'This study reports a possible association between higher consumption of soft drinks and an increased risk of mortality, but does not provide evidence of cause, as the authors readily admit.

'According to all leading health authorities in the world, as well as Cancer Research UK and Diabetes UK, low- and no-calorie sweeteners are safe.'

SOURCE 

Association Between Soft Drink Consumption and Mortality in 10 European Countries

By Amy Mullee plus Uncle Tom Cobleigh and all

Abstract

Importance:  Soft drinks are frequently consumed, but whether this consumption is associated with mortality risk is unknown and has been understudied in European populations to date.

Objective:  To examine the association between total, sugar-sweetened, and artificially sweetened soft drink consumption and subsequent total and cause-specific mortality.

Design, Setting, and Participants:  This population-based cohort study involved participants (n = 451 743 of the full cohort) in the European Prospective Investigation into Cancer and Nutrition (EPIC), an ongoing, large multinational cohort of people from 10 European countries (Denmark, France, Germany, Greece, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Spain, Sweden, and the United Kingdom), with participants recruited between January 1, 1992, and December 31, 2000. Excluded participants were those who reported cancer, heart disease, stroke, or diabetes at baseline; those with implausible dietary intake data; and those with missing soft drink consumption or follow-up information. Data analyses were performed from February 1, 2018, to October 1, 2018.

Exposure:  Consumption of total, sugar-sweetened, and artificially sweetened soft drinks.

Main Outcomes and Measures:  Total mortality and cause-specific mortality. Hazard ratios (HRs) and 95% CIs were estimated using multivariable Cox proportional hazards regression models adjusted for other mortality risk factors.

Results: In total, 521 330 individuals were enrolled. Of this total, 451 743 (86.7%) were included in the study, with a mean (SD) age of 50.8 (9.8) years and with 321 081 women (71.1%). During a mean (range) follow-up of 16.4 (11.1 in Greece to 19.2 in France) years, 41 693 deaths occurred. Higher all-cause mortality was found among participants who consumed 2 or more glasses per day (vs consumers of <1 glass per month) of total soft drinks (hazard ratio [HR], 1.17; 95% CI, 1.11-1.22; P < .001), sugar-sweetened soft drinks (HR, 1.08; 95% CI, 1.01-1.16; P = .004), and artificially sweetened soft drinks (HR, 1.26; 95% CI, 1.16-1.35; P < .001). Positive associations were also observed between artificially sweetened soft drinks and deaths from circulatory diseases (≥2 glasses per day vs <1 glass per month; HR, 1.52; 95% CI, 1.30-1.78; P < .001) and between sugar-sweetened soft drinks and deaths from digestive diseases (≥1 glass per day vs <1 glass per month; HR, 1.59; 95% CI, 1.24-2.05; P < .001).

JAMA Intern Med. Published online September 3, 2019. doi:10.1001/jamainternmed.2019.2478

There is a constant attempt in the medical literature to discredit fizzy drinks.  They are very popular so must be wrong. Sadly, most effects observed are very weak and hopelessly confounded with other factors.

The report below is of that ilk.  The hazard ratios are all close to 1.0, indicating very weak effects, too weak to support sound policy prescriptions.  Given such weak effects, any differences could be traceable to third factors, such as income, social class  and IQ, factors not controlled for in the present research.  In other words, dumb, lower class and poor people in the study probably drank more fizz so what was observed was not the characteristics of fizz drinkers but the result of the drinkers being poor etc. Without comprehensive demographic controls, the study proves precisely nothing.  Enjoy your fizz!  I do

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The Left Can’t Stop Lying About the Tea Party

“In the late summer of 2009, as the recession-ravaged economy bled half a million jobs a month, the country seemed to lose its mind,” The New York Times says, kicking off its 10th anniversary retrospective of the tea party movement. As you can imagine, the rest of the article continues in this vein, portraying conservatives who organized against Obamacare as a bunch of vulgar radicals.

Yet even this kind revisionism wasn’t enough for most contemporary leftists, who see everything through the prism of race.

“A fundamental flaw in this analysis is there is no mention of race and how much racism drove the tea party movement,” ABC’s Matthew Dowd claimed. “You can’t talk about the rage politics and leave out race.”

“How do you write a 10-years-later piece on the tea party and not mention–not once, not even in passing—the fact that it was essentially a hysterical grassroots tantrum about the fact that a black guy was president?” asked nonbiased Washington Post reporter Wesley Lowery, calling it journalistic “malpractice.”

Well, you get the idea.

In the first draft of this column, I joked that The New York Times might add a line about tea party “racism” before the day was over to placate the Twitter mob. It did it before I could even publish.

But it doesn’t change the fact that there’s no evidence that a “good deal”—or any substantial deal, for that matter—of the tea party’s popularity was propelled by racism.

For one thing, the wealthy white leader of Congress at the time was just as unpopular among tea partyers as the black president. And as we’ve seen, had Hillary Clinton won the 2008 election, she would have generated no less anger among conservatives.

No, it was Barack Obama’s leftist rhetoric and unprecedented unilateralism—he had, after all, promised “fundamental change”—that ignited what amounts to a renewed Reaganism, a fusing of idealistic constitutionalism and economic libertarianism.

Tea party protesters not only felt like they were under assault from Democrats but that they had been abandoned by the GOP establishment. If you really wanted to hear them “rage,” though, you could always bring up the Caucasian former Republican president, George W. Bush, who had “abandoned free market principles to save the free market system.”

As with any spontaneous political movement, some bad actors glommed onto protests. The New York Times article, for instance, informs us that “one demonstrator at a rally in Maryland hanged a member of Congress in effigy” and that a “popular bumper sticker was ‘Honk If I’m Paying Your Mortgage'”—as if we’re supposed to be offended by the latter.

Left-wing protesters, no matter how puerile, hateful, or bigoted, are typically depicted as righteous agents of change. Conservatives and libertarians, on the other hand, “rage.” The “summer of rage” typically refers to the riots that swept a number of American cities in 1967.

The tea party protests never turned violent. There were no riots. No broken Starbucks windows. It was the most peaceful “rage” you’re ever going to see.

A CBS/New York Times poll at the time, in fact, found that the average tea party activist was more educated than the average American, and their concerns mirrored the mainstream. Although a majority was more socially conservative than the average voter—particularly on abortion—8 in 10 of them wanted their burgeoning movement to focus on economic issues rather than social ones.

Hardly the anarchists depicted in the media, a majority of tea partyers wanted to reduce the size of government rather than focus on cutting budget deficits or even lowering taxes, the poll found. A majority, in fact, believed that Social Security and Medicare were worthy taxpayer burdens.

Not even clamping down on illegal immigration, often the impetus for charges of racism these days, was a big topic among these activists.

The tea party had three main grievances: Obamacare, government spending, and “a feeling that their opinions are not represented in Washington.”

The protests were fueled by Democrats’ unprecedented action on a health care policy. A decade later, the tea party’s suspicion that the health care law was merely an incremental way to move toward socialist policies turned out to be correct, as most of the Democratic Party presidential field can attest.

One thing is true, though: The majority of tea partiers were white. You know what that means, right?

And as those of us who covered the Obama administration remember, no matter how historically detailed or ideologically anchored your position might be, the very act of opposing a black president was going to be depicted as act of bigotry.

This cheap and destructive rhetoric now dominates virtually every contemporary debate, most of which have absolutely nothing, even tangentially, to do with race. It’s a kind of rhetoric, in fact, that retroactively dominates our debates, as well.

SOURCE 

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Spice Company Says Republicans Are More 'Calculated' Than Nazis

Bill Penzey undoubtedly knows a lot about spices but his history is woefully lacking. That Hitler was a socialist seems to be unknown to him.  Whatever else he might be, Trump is no socialist. And that Donald Trump is as keen on deregulation as Hitler was keen on controlling all businesses also seems unknown to him.  So what is Left?  Whom has Trump gassed?  Nobody. Bill should stick to his spices.  He lives in his own little fantasy world where any mention of ethnicity leads directly to Auschwitz.  He would apperar to be a typical under-educated Leftist

He certainly would not understand why or how a conservative New Zealand blogger once started up a fake-Leftist site called Progressive Essays. The amusing part was that the content on the blog in fact consisted of recycled speeches by Hitler and various other Nazis and Fascists of history. Apparently no one spotted the difference. It was routinely linked as just another Leftist blog!
   
A Wisconsin-based spice company published a scathing attack on President Trump and the Republican Party — accusing them of leading the nation on a path towards “1930s German-style nationalism.”

“The reality of what America’s Republican Party has become stopped being deniable,” Bill Penzey of Penzey’s Spices wrote on the company’s Facebook page. He referenced the domestic-terrorist attack in El Paso.

“As the president’s intentional creation of fear and dehumanizing of Hispanic Americans turned into mass murder, what may well have been the last chance to turn the party away from the path towards 1930s Germany-style nationalism quite probably ended in the silence of Republican Party leaders,” he wrote.

Penzey, who has a history of using the company’s platform to attack gun-toting, Bible-clinging conservatives, called for an intervention.

“Yes, today’s republicans are not yet 1943 Nazis, but no one honest is denying the parallels between the two parties,” he wrote. “Today the only real debate is how far along the Nazi timeline republicans are. But as much as the 1930s Germany comparison is accurate, the value of the analogy is somewhat limited because no one in 1930s Europe had any successful idea on how to stop them.”

Penzey went on to suggest that Republicans are even more evil than the Nazis.

“Plus, for all the buffoonery of the president, the actual workings of the Republican Party in the age of unlimited political spending and targeted social media are far more calculated and far more sophisticated than anything the Nazis of eighty years ago ever dreamed of. We are up against something quite formidable,” he wrote.

Mr. Penzey and his company have every right to condemn President Trump and the Republican Party. But it should also be noted that President Trump and his supporters have every right to buy their spices someplace else.

And a personal note to Mr. Penzey — you might want to ease up on the smoked Paprika.

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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Labor Day outlook

Today is Labor Day, and that means the unofficial end of summer on a day of celebration of the American worker. The holiday originated in the late 19th century and was born of the labor movement, though many Americans, led by President Grover Cleveland, pushed for and secured a September date to distinguish it from the socialist/communist "International Workers Day," or "May Day," on May 1. Labor Day was made an official federal holiday in 1894.

As we mark the day, let's take a quick look at a few related topics.

First, Hurricane Dorian, currently a Category 5 monster, is heading for Florida, Georgia, and the Carolinas — not exactly a welcome holiday event. The days and weeks ahead with be filled with the extensive labor and massive expense of recovery, but Americans are a resilient lot.

As for the economy, as we've hammered home in recent weeks, the positive outlook is exactly why the Leftmedia is incessantly running reports of economic doom and gloom on the horizon. A good economy is bad news for Democrats. If their prophesies come true, it will be because they succeeded in undermining consumer confidence.

Well, here are the facts: The August jobs report won't be released until this Friday, but the employment picture is largely a good one — even if recent revisions are being used by Democrats and their Leftmedia propagandists to forecast a recession. The unemployment rate stands near a 50-year low of 3.7%, meaning one of the biggest hurdles for increasing employment is that companies are finding it difficult to fill jobs with workers. Manufacturing has taken a hit because of President Donald Trump's tariffs, which are also hurting American consumers with higher prices. But Trump is calculating that the U.S. economy can withstand a needed battle with China that he didn't start.

Third, wages are growing and consumers are generally confident. In fact, The Wall Street Journal reports, "American workers under 35 report being happier with their paychecks than people over 55 for the first time since at least 2011, according to a new report from the Conference Board, a business-research organization that polls U.S. employees about workplace satisfaction. Overall, the share of workers satisfied with their paychecks rose to 46.4% in 2018, from 43% in 2017, an increase that mirrors federal data showing that wage growth accelerated in 2018." Furthermore, "Nearly 54% of U.S. workers said they were satisfied with their jobs in 2018, the highest share reported in more than two decades."

SOURCE 

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Daring to suggest that all cultures aren't equal

The Acting Provost of DePaul University issues a formal censure against me

Jason D. Hill (Who is black)

It is a common canard among the educated cognoscenti that all cultures are equal. Indeed, a few weeks after writing an article in which I declared that not all cultures were equal, the Acting Provost of DePaul University—where I am a full tenured professor of philosophy—issued what I and many others considered to be a formal censure against me. She declared that at her university it is considered an accepted truism that all individuals are valued equally, and that she was truly disheartened that a member of the academic community would assert that “not all cultures are indeed equal.”

I had stated that some cultures are abysmally inferior and regressive based on their comprehensive philosophy and fundamental principles, or, lack thereof—that guide or fail to protect the inalienable rights of their citizens.

Therein lay the category mistake that an educated academic along with countless others commit conflating the individual with the cultural. A culture may be described as a multiplicity of complex systems that include the arts, laws, customs, practices, norms, mores, beliefs, knowledge, and human capabilities acquired by human-beings in society. Culture also includes language, ethical systems, and religious institutions. One can indeed say that all persons are endowed with equal and intrinsic moral worth as human beings which they may corrupt by committing morally egregious acts; but as human beings, they are possessed of inviolable moral worth and dignity.

It is, however, a category mistake to transfer this innate respect and reverence for the individual on to the landscape of culture which is not an indivisible whole, and which possesses none of the requisite attributes of individuals that make them deserving of such unassailable respect. Persons' identities are not reducible to the practices of their cultures. Some cultural practices are downright horrific and evil; some are better than others. Persons in their respective cultures are free to identify themselves with those cultural practices that align themselves with their moral identities, and distances themselves from those they find repulsive.

The Unites States of America is not a perfect civilization; however, as a rights bearing culture in which the inalienability of rights are observed, a country in which civil liberties such as freedom of speech ( for now) is still upheld, freedom of conscience, and freedom of religious association or lack thereof respected, it is vastly superior to barbaric and primitive cultures that have yet to discover the individual and his or her inviolate dignity. The United States is a republic devoted to the inalienability of those rights that are conducive to human survival and flourishing. The United States, through its Constitution and Bill of Rights, is the first political system to discover the direct correlation between the rational nature of man qua man, and the exact political milieu in which that nature has to properly live and function if it is to live rather than perish.

Sudan, Nigeria, Mauritania, Libya and Algeria —all countries which still practice and/or tolerate chattel slavery by Arab and black Muslims against other Muslims and Christians—are not the moral, political or cultural equals of the United States, Israel, Great Britain and, say, France. Those countries are vastly superior to Saudi Arabia or Iran, or North Korea and Gaza, which do not permit religious reciprocity. Its political leaders permit the beheading of homosexuals in the streets, legalize torture, and have some of the most egregious records of gender inequality in the world. In the cases of Iran, Qatar and Saud Arabia, we witness them as sponsors of world-wide terrorism, and of placing restrictions on civil liberties and a free press.

Cannibalistic Aztec culture could never and will never be the cultural equal of any civilized and free culture existing anywhere in the world today. Cultures that permit freedom of association, respect equality for all citizens and legal residents before the law, that uphold gender equality as an unsalable moral axiom, that allow  individuals to cultivate their unique life plans—generally speaking—cultures that have discovered the fact that that an environment in which freedom and liberty are the milieu in which the individual needs to cultivate his or her rational nature qua human being and live an optimal existence, are undoubtedly, superior cultures, morally, spiritually and politically speaking.

It is a mark of sheer cognitive malarkey to claim that all cultures are equal. Just as some cultures are technologically more advanced than others, so some are politically more distinguished in their record on individual rights and the protection of private property and personal liberties than others. Rape cultures, that is, cultures in which rape is sanctioned by law such as in several parts of Pakistan and Afghanistan, are not moral equivalents of any western democratic countries in which rape, though committed by moral deviants, is illegal and punishable by objective law.

Brunei practices a Sharia penal code under Islamic law that allows death or stoning for adultery, homosexuality and even apostasy. Hamas continues to pose an existential threat to Israel by pounding the latter, (unprovoked), with a barrage of deadly rockets so often that one can barely keep track of the war attacks. Hamas routinely arrests and tortures peaceful critics of its totalitarian government with impunity. It is a blatant advocate and practitioner of Jihadism. There is no culture, so to speak, inside Gaza. It is defined, incidentally, by its absence of any significant life and culture. Nevertheless, even countries that lack a significant culture can wreak havoc on the lives of others.  A rich culture is potent because it creates life. One that is an ecological sociopolitical   ballast, or worse, evil, can destroy life.

The question remains, too, of not only how to think about cultures that are unequal to others but: what to do about those that are evil; cultures that exist as moral rogue states that betray the civilizational maturity expected by an international order that protects the well-being of the global commons? We are talking here of morally inverted states that pose a serious threat to the international order; evil cultures that are political sinkholes that lie outside the process of history, and that are reverting to pre-modern ages. The goals of such cultures —among other things—are to eradicate the individual, and practices of freedom and liberty from the earth.

Evil cultures are drainage systems that tax the existential, spiritual and psychological resources of their citizens who must expend a disproportionate amount of energy just to stay alive—let alone flourish.

So, what is the antidote? In a forthcoming article on moral rogue states that pose existential  threats to the global commons, countries that violate the conditions of their own sovereignty which is secured by objective constraints of justice, I will outline and philosophically defend a process of what I call: global incarceration. This involves an ethical defense of placing intolerable, incorrigible and politically inverted countries into a state of political receivership by any free and civilized country willing and able to do so based on criteria of political expediency, and military and technological capability.

Until such time, let us rid ourselves of the simplistic egalitarian idea that all cultures are equal. That some are moral and political sinkholes from which millions seek to flee is obvious. That such escapees or freedom seekers aspire to self-actualize in other cultures that, in their judgments, are better suited to their aspirations, hopes and dreams constitutes enough proof that some cultures are inimical to human well-being, and others better suited for the development and practice of human agency.

SOURCE 

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America’s Poor Fare Better Than Average Persons in Canada, the UK

Sometimes the key to success is being “less worse” than your competitors. So while I’m critical of many bad policies in the United States, it’s worth noting that America nonetheless ranks #6 for overall economic liberty according to the Fraser Institute.

As such, it’s not surprising that America has higher living standards than most other developed nations according to the “actual individual consumption” data from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.

And America’s advantage isn’t trivial. We’re more than 46 percent higher than the average for OECD member nations.

The gap is so large that I’ve wondered how lower-income people in the United States would rank compared to average people in other countries.

Well, the folks at Just Facts have investigated precisely this issue using World Bank data and found some remarkable results.

“… after accounting for all income, charity, and non-cash welfare benefits like subsidized housing and Food Stamps—the poorest 20% of Americans consume more goods and services than the national averages for all people in most affluent countries. … In other words, if the U.S. 'poor' were a nation, it would be one of the world’s richest. … The World Bank publishes a comprehensive dataset on consumption that isn’t dependent on the accuracy of household surveys and includes all goods and services, but it only provides the average consumption per person in each nation—not the poorest people in each nation. However, the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis published a study that provides exactly that for 2010. Combined with World Bank data for the same year, these datasets show that the poorest 20% of U.S. households have higher average consumption per person than the averages for all people in most nations of the OECD and Europe … The high consumption of America’s 'poor' doesn’t mean they live better than average people in the nations they outpace, like Spain, Denmark, Japan, Greece, and New Zealand. … Nonetheless, the fact remains that the privilege of living in the U.S. affords poor people with more material resources than the averages for most of the world’s richest nations.”

There are some challenges in putting together this type of comparison, so the folks at Just Facts are very clear in showing their methodology.

They’ve certainly come up with results that make sense, particularly when comparing their results with the OECD AIC numbers.

Here’s one of the charts from the report:



You can see that the bottom 20 percent of Americans do quite well compared to the average person in other developed nations.

By the way, the report from Just Facts also criticizes The New York Times for dishonest analysis of poverty. Since I’ve felt compelled to do the same thing, I can definitely sympathize.

The bottom line is that free markets and limited government are the best way to help lower-income people enjoy more prosperity.

Daniel J. Mitchell is a top expert on tax reform and supply-side tax policy and is Chairman of the Center for Freedom an

SOURCE 

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The hazards of government healthcare: The Veterans Administration failed to stop pathologist who misdiagnosed thousands — and showed up drunk for work

It took more than three thousand misdiagnoses, a dozen or more patient deaths, and multiple alerts before the Veterans Administration caught up with its chief pathologist Robert Morris Levy. The Washington Post offers a lengthy exposé of the VA’s internal inertia as well as the ineffectiveness of its quality controls, all of which took a terrible human cost on thousands. And the worst part is that VA officials got warned repeatedly that Levy was a problem before finally getting fired last year … over a DUI.

On the Fayetteville campus, rated one of VA’s best, Levy’s supervisors failed to heed early warnings that he was endangering patients and then were slow to act, according to internal VA documents, court filings and interviews with 20 congressional officials, veterans and current and former VA employees.

Federal prosecutors charged Levy, 53, last week with three counts of involuntary manslaughter in the deaths of three veterans. VA officials now acknowledge that he botched diagnoses of at least 15 patients who later died and 15 others whose health was seriously harmed.

The number of those affected, however, is much greater, and the full repercussions of Levy’s actions may not be known for years. VA officials say Levy made 3,000 errors or misdiagnoses dating to 2005.

If Levy’s on trial for involuntary manslaughter, others should be charged as accomplices. VA officials got several warnings that Levy was working while intoxicated, records indicate, starting as early as 2012. One incident in 2016 showed Levy with a 0.4% blood alcohol reading, which is five times higher than needed in most states to get a DWI. Rather than put this together with all of the other alerts, the VA paid for a three-month inpatient treatment center and then put Levy back on the job.

It never occurred to anyone, apparently, to double-check Levy’s work after finding out that he showed up to work drunk. Supposedly Levy had a very low incidence of mistakes in his work, but the system used to determine competency was absurdly easy to game. The VA used a peer-review system to sample work by specialists, which meant that Levy’s work was spot-checked by the deputy who reported to him. Levy simply changed the conclusions of his deputy’s reports in order to maintain a very low error rate — and was rewarded with large bonuses based on those ratings.

When Levy began showing up impaired for work in 2017 and 2018, the VA finally did an independent check of his work. It turned up red flags — which the VA ignored until after he got dismissed:

In January 2018, after multiple staff reports that he was still impaired, the hospital’s professional standards board continued Levy’s suspension. Spot checks of his cases showed “no evidence of patient harm,” according to the minutes.

Still, Worley brought in a pa­thol­ogist from VA’s division headquarters for another review of Levy’s work. She found more than a dozen misdiagnoses.

“Dr. Levy’s actions have negatively impacted patient care outcomes,” Worley and the medical director at the time wrote in a memo on Jan. 11, 2018.

It would be six more months before VA began a deeper review of his work.

Even when the VA finally did get around to checking Levy’s work, it initially limited the review to his last year in the system. Only after the inspector general intervened did the VA conduct a full review and find the thousands of misdiagnoses Levy produced. The VA also waited months to alert medical boards in three states to Levy’s incompetence.

Unfortunately, this hardly qualifies as a shock. The VA has had so many scandals surrounding incompetence and corruption that it’s tough to keep track. This episode, as with others, demonstrates the lack of accountability in government-run single-payer systems, and the instincts of government bureaucracies to protect themselves rather than their patients.

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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