Tuesday, September 17, 2019
The Leftist censors have grabbed another social media site: imgur.com
Imgur.com is the biggest image-hosting site that there is these days. It is very easy to use so has left other image-hosting platforms -- such as Tinypic and Photobucket -- for dead. It also offers permanence. It says that pictures you have uploaded there will stay up.
But that has now fallen by the wayside. Some pictures I have housed there have been replaced by an angry and unpleasant looking cartoon, presumably under the pretext that my pictures were "offensive"
One of the pictures I had up was of General Pinochet, who is/was a great Leftist boogeyman. He did solve Leftist terrorism in Chile by killing off a couple of thousand of the livelier Chilean Leftists. So I can understand his image being "disappeared". But for most of the pictures no offensiveness is obvious. A table of statistics that disappeared would seem inoffensive. But it WAS a table of IQ statistics -- and IQ is as unpopular among the Left as General Pinochet.
But the deletion that really amuses me is that they have taken down a picture I had up of myself! I make no claim to being good-looking but I didn't think I was that bad! They have also taken down images of my discharge certificate from my time in the Australian army and photocopies of my university degrees. So they have been rather systematic.
Anyway, I keep very comprehensive backups so have simply rehoused all deleted images on another site so all images I had up are now back up.
So the question arises of what to do about this latest transmogrification. In my case, I can't see any form of protest as being needed. It is simplest just to replace the lost images from backups. And I do have archive copies of all my blogs online which already include self-hosted picture backups. My practice of putting up backup copies of my blog entries has probably seemed like overdoing conservative caution but it has clearly now come into its own.
Nonetheless, I will have to think in future about where I house pictures online. I will probably host the more incendiary ones on one or another of my own sites and use imgur for the more mundane ones
It is something of an irony that I have a regular blog -- TONGUE-TIED -- devoted to coverage of censored content -- only to be censored myself
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Fellow Millennials: Here’s Why We Must Reject Socialism
Reaghan Waites
Have you ever looked at your paycheck and thought, “Man, I really wish I earned less money!” I’m going to take a wild guess and say, “Probably not.”
Here’s a similar thought: Do you like big government? It seems like a loaded question, but it really isn’t.
For the vast majority of Americans, a mention of “government” or “politics” doesn’t usually elicit a warm, fuzzy feeling. It’s usually controversial, often divisive. Bring it up at Thanksgiving dinner, and you’ll likely be met with at least one eye-roll.
So, for those of us who don’t want less money and aren’t huge fans of big government, why are so many of us casting ballots for people who want us to have just that?
That’s the stark reality of socialism: less money in our wallets and more lining the pockets of congressmen and senators who complain about income equality, all while earning annual salaries of about $175,000.
You’ve probably heard the criticism before: Capitalism is about greed. Socialism is about charity. But the exact opposite is true. It is socialism that inherently fosters greed.
As noted by Andy Puzder, former CEO of CKE Restaurants Holdings Inc., socialism forces individuals to compete for the limited supply offered by the government. It fosters a scarcity mentality, rather than a healthy community mindset.
Free-market capitalism, on the other hand, is focused on providing for the needs and wants of society, creating a symbiotic relationship between businesses and consumers.
Every credit card swipe is an individual vote determining which businesses succeed and which do not. If a company is not providing value for customers, it will go out of business. That compels entrepreneurs to think of the customer first.
Generally speaking, socialism is a system in which the government owns and controls the means of production. But “free stuff” is now the trendy catchphrase associated with socialism, with the result that it is rising in popularity despite being largely misunderstood.
In fact, a New York Times study found that only 16% of millennials could adequately define the term.
What many erroneously embrace as “socialism” is actually welfare-state capitalism as practiced in Nordic countries.
Advocates of socialism deceptively point to nations such as Denmark and Sweden, but those nations are both ranked as free-market friendly as the U.S.
Then-Danish Prime Minister Lars Lokke Rasmussen in 2015 noted that “some people in the U.S. associate the Nordic model with some sort of socialism,” but he disputed the assertion.
“Denmark is far from a socialist, planned economy,” he said. “Denmark is a market economy.”
Citing Denmark and Sweden as successful examples of “socialism” only blinds us to the horrific effects of actual socialism.
“Health care for all”—the signature promise from socialists—sounds compassionate. Eliminating income inequality has an almost moral vibe to it. However, promises of “free stuff” are at once unrealistic and accompanied by a hefty price tag.
When added together, so-called “Medicare for All” ($32 trillion), Social Security expansion ($188 billion), “free” college ($807 billion), paid family leave ($270 billion), and student debt forgiveness ($1.6 trillion), all proposed by Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., would collectively add nearly $35 trillion to the national debt over the next decade alone.
That’s in addition to the $12.4 billion baseline deficit increase projected over the next decade and $22.4 trillion in current national debt.
The hard fact is that nothing is free. What some may perceive as a “win,” such as single-payer health care or “free” college, has to be funded by taxes taken out of our own paychecks.
So, how much more in taxes would we be looking at? Under a Sanders presidency, middle-class Americans making $75,000 to $100,000 a year would likely pay $13,000 in additional taxes each year.
Just ask residents of Europe in general and France in particular about the true cost of a large welfare state. Europeans have to work on average more than two months longer each year than Americans to pay their tax bills. Those in France have to work more than six months of the year for their government—twice as long as Americans labor for Uncle Sam.
Do we have so little confidence in ourselves and our fellow Americans that we think the government can spend our money better than we can ourselves? That’s where socialism begins—but unfortunately, not where it ends.
Socialism is a failed experiment—it has laid waste to economies around the world. Moreover, it has come hand-in-hand with human rights abuses at the hands of totalitarian governments.
“We lived in a world swarming with invisible eyes and ears,” said a defector from the Soviet Union when asked about the constant state surveillance he lived under there.
The testimonies of the victims of socialism are chilling and provide cautionary tales of the true cost of socialism.
Take Daniel Di Martino. He grew up in socialist Venezuela and penned an opinion piece for USA Today recounting the failure of socialism in his home country. Di Martino recalls how the socialist regime imposed price controls and nationalized private industries, causing production to plummet. In response, the government placed rations on food and basic supplies. It was common for Di Martino to have to wait hours in line to buy even staples such as flour and toothpaste.
The Venezuelan government began to print more money in an attempt to compensate for massive spending increases. That added fuel to the inflationary fire, and prices began to double every few weeks.
Failing to learn from Venezuela’s experience (or perhaps being unaware of it), Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., has endorsed requiring the Federal Reserve to print more money for her spending proposals. But according to Di Martino, “this is exactly what produced Venezuela’s nightmare.”
The failure of socialism is widespread, and the stark differences between socialist utopia and socialist reality is the worst-kept secret of its advocates.
A recent example of socialist reality—this one from closer to home—underscores the point: Sanders had to cut the working hours of his own campaign staffers in order to pay them the $15 an hour minimum wage he has advocated other employers should be required to pay.
Therein lies the problem: What sounds good theoretically doesn’t always work in the real world. Let’s not choose that grim reality for America.
SOURCE
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The 'moderates' in the Democrat field
An 18-year-old college freshman and the graduate student teaching assistant in her Women's Studies class are talking politics as they enter the campus coffee shop, and they have this exchange:
FRESHMAN: What exactly is "socialism"?
GRAD STUDENT: Oh, you have had a sheltered life, haven't you? Socialism is what people need; it keeps things working by telling people what to do.
FRESHMAN: But you said you did whatever you pleased.
GRAD STUDENT: (chuckle) Touché. Well, some people know what's best for them, and some people don't. Besides, socialists don't tell people what to do in a mean, petty way; they tell them what to do in a kindly way...to keep them out of danger. Latte or cappuccino?*
One of the tactics that socialists use when they discuss their creed with normal people, like conservatives, is to define "socialism" very narrowly. They stipulate that socialism requires state ownership of the means of production. Such an explanation, which comes to us straight out of Marxist theory, would mean that Soviet communists were socialists, while Nazi fascists weren't. But, just as the word "socialist" is part of "USSR," it's also part of "Nazi." Also, both regimes were totalitarian police states, but let's not get sentimental.
Regardless of who "owns" the means of production, what all forms of socialism share is central control by the central government. Central control of the means of production means that the central government must also be in charge of the distribution of its products, its goods and services. It's this aspect of socialism that those running for the Democrat presidential nomination are pushing.
This year's Democrat candidates are all about thousand-dollar checks each month from the feds (Universal Basic Income), universal pre-K, free college, Medicare for All (including foreigners), you name it. Whatever folks "need," the government will provide. But most of the central government's spending is already distribution: the "welfare state." Democrats will tell you you've paid for your benefits, but most Americans get far more in benefits than what they paid in taxes.
The difference between the two major parties is that while Republicans want to get some control over the growth of the social programs that we already have, the Democrats are out-and-out statists who want to expand the welfare state, take over the means of production, and control everything.
The most collectivist, most "Sovietic" candidate in the Democrat field is Bernie Sanders. Bernie will not be outdone by any of the other Democrat candidates; whatever they propose, he'll go farther. He now wants to cancel all medical debt. And, like Attlee in Britain after WWII, he'll attempt to nationalize key industries. Under Bernie, the feds will own the means of production, although his apologists might call it "social ownership" or some such.
On August 23, the Washington Examiner ran "Bernie Sanders wants to nationalize at least 30% of the American economy" by Tiana Lowe, who opined: "In the ideal America outlined by 2020 hopeful Bernie Sanders, the majority of the economy would be centralized and socialized." Under his cockamamie Green New Deal, Bernie would "nationalize most of the energy sector." Lowe's article is very short, but she gets at the heart of what a Sanders presidency would mean for America.
One thing about Sanders that is better than the other top-tier candidates in the Democrat field is that he doesn't seem quite as much of a liar as the others. But for Americans concerned about Russia, Sanders should be the most unattractive candidate in the Democratic field; he even took his honeymoon in Mother Russia. For those concerned about Pres. Trump's alleged collusion with Russia, voting for Bernie would seem most inconsistent.
If a commie candidate like Sanders isn't your preferred type of socialist, then Liz Warren might be your cup of tea. Ms. Warren is a proponent of "dirigism," a sort of soft fascism. Warren claims to be a capitalist, but then she also claimed to be an Amerind. (Forget the blue eyes; a gal's gotta do what a gal's gotta do; how else to break the glass ceiling?) And Liz has a plan for everything. Why, even now, she's designing your life for you; you should be grateful.
Over at National Review, Kevin Williamson writes that of the Democrat field, Warren is supposedly "the smart one." Williamson is a NeverTrump, but his article is worth reading. He shows us why Warren is such an unregenerate fraud and gives us a delicious little history of "dirigisme." (Williamson's position on "economic nationalism" may be less to your liking.)
And then there's Mayor Pete Buttigeek (sic), who's onboard with all the Dems' radical plans for transforming America. What's different about Mayor Pete is that he has a Marxist pedigree. You see, Pete's papa was an admirer and a biographer of Antonio Gramsci, the Marxist who theorized that the way to undo capitalism is not by violent revolution, but from within. Gramsci, one of the architects of the West's current problems, was a much more prescient predictor than old Marx. So Mayor Pete is a "red diaper baby," but the Dems want you to ignore that.
In April, the Examiner ran "Pete Buttigieg's father was a Marxist professor who lauded the Communist Manifesto" by Emily Larsen and Joseph Simonson. It's an informative article, especially if one isn't up on Gramsci. What's astounding is how a socialist like the elder Buttigieg could find employment at Notre Dame, even ascending to chair the English Department. It appears Catholic colleges have the same rot as public universities.
On a side note, Democrats would be foolish to nominate Mayor Pete, because much of the Dem's base is socially-conservative minorities, and they won't be in the mood to vote for a "queer." With Queer Studies in colleges and LGBTQ, that term can't be pejorative anymore, can it? I mydamnself could vote for a queer were he a true conservative. What's repels me about Mayor Pete is his know-it-all attitude and his presumption. He can't even run a small city properly, yet he presumes to run a superpower. Amazing!
When has America ever had to endure such a field of sanctimonious, morally superior clowns as the current crop of candidates for the Democrat nomination? And here's the thing: All of them are socialists who want to take America even further into that fetid cesspool of misery. All of them want bigger and bigger government, even though time and again Big Government has shown itself to be the problem. There are no "moderates" in the Democrat field.
Why are we supposed to think that government is more moral, more competent, and more admirable than the private sector? After all, it was the government that put us $22T in debt. It was government that sent our kids off to die in stupid foreign wars that were a result of stupid foreign policy. It was government that didn't protect American citizens from being killed, raped, and brutalized by illegal aliens. Rather than nationalizing the private sector, maybe we should privatize the whole damn federal government.
With control of both the means of production and the means of distribution, socialists would pretty much control something else -- our lives. But then, some people just don't know "what's best for them."
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 (Personal). My annual picture page is here
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Monday, September 16, 2019
Wake up, GOP challengers: This is Trump’s party now
The Trump campaign in 2016 did not transform the Republican Party: It revealed the Republican party.
The elements of Trumpism already were there: the skepticism of trade and the loathing of multilateral trade pacts; the hostility toward immigration, which is not limited to illegal immigration; the nickel-and-dime attitude toward US leadership abroad and our relationships with our allies; the hysterical dread of China as an economic competitor; the implacable hatred of the commanding heights of American life from Silicon Valley to the Ivy League; the cable-news histrionics; and, above all, the desire to be led in a social-media Kulturkampf against progressive condescension and self-righteousness.
Trump’s union with the Republican Party was neither a hostile takeover nor a marriage of convenience — the embrace was mutual and ecstatic.
And that is why the half-hearted primary challenges to Trump are going nowhere. The GOP is not William Weld’s party of WASP propriety and Chamber of Commerce libertarianism, and it hasn’t been for a long time. (Alas.) Neither is it the party of former South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford, with his quaint scruples about debt and the deficit. Sanford is typical of the craven posture of contemporary conservatives: He already has vowed to vote for Trump just as soon as he loses to him.
Former Republican contender Carly Fiorina may complain about Trump on social media, but she apparently has no interest in challenging him. (Making a big noise on Twitter while doing approximately squat in the real world — who does that remind you of?) It is not John Bolton’s party, even on foreign policy, as Bolton has been forcibly shown.
On the other hand, Dan Bishop just enjoyed a come-from-behind victory in a North Carolina congressional race by promising to make himself as abject and slavish as possible in service to Trump, whom he celebrates as “the greatest fighter ever” to serve as president, Generals Washington and Eisenhower be damned.
Trump was a genuine celebrity before he was president, and Republicans have a weakness for that kind of thing. (Cf. Nugent, Ted.) But, personality cult aside, the Republicans are victims of their own success: They succeeded with Trump’s nationalist-populist agenda in 2016 and may very well succeed with that again in 2020. So, that becomes the playbook. They didn’t win on balanced budgets, constitutionalism or George W. Bush’s foreign policy.
The question for Republicans going forward will be whether “Build the Wall!” and the talk-radio drum circle will be sufficient to carry them forward without the novelty and celebrity of Trump.
A smaller related question is whether Buckley-Goldwater-Reagan conservatives can be kept in the Republican coalition and whether there are enough of them to bother with.
Those of us who saw Trump as an aberration in 2016 were wrong. A predominant number of Republicans hunger for exactly what Trump is serving up. We’ll see how that tastes to them on Nov. 3, 2020.
SOURCE
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Here Are 4 Ways the Left Is Grabbing Power in America
The left is setting aside constitutional norms in a ruthless power grab according to a recently retired Congressman.
Former Rep. Jason Chaffetz, R.-Utah, who served on and chaired the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform and is now a Fox News contributor, made the case that the left is using a variety of underhanded strategies to fundamentally change American elections and tilt them in their favor.
Chaffetz lays out his argument in a new book, “Power Grab: The Liberal Scheme to Undermine Trump, the GOP, and Our Republic.” He argues that the left is using underhanded strategies to fundamentally alter the nature of U.S. elections, making them less stable and subject to rigging.
Chaffetz explained his argument in a talk at the Heritage Foundation on Tuesday. Here are four of the tactics he highlighted on the left.
1. Trolling at Town Halls
One of the left’s more effective tactics, Chaffetz said, is using activists and media allies to go after conservative politicians at town hall events.
That’s what happened to Chaffetz during his last term in Congress.
He said Democrats mobilized a group called Indivisible Utah, which “had a specific manual to take over a town hall meeting.'”
Their strategy was to create the impression that Chaffetz was being attacked by his own constituents on account of President Donald Trump, even though he represented a predominantly conservative district.
“[T]hey wanted to create this illusion that a conservative Republican in a safe district—who just happened to be chairman of the Oversight Committee with the newly minted president of the United States, Donald Trump—that his voters were mad,” Chaffetz said.
“It was used as a tool and a prop. They paid people to come in. There were people from all kinds of states there,” Chaffetz said. “But they wanted to create this media illusion that it was an organic Utah phenomenon in a conservative Republican’s district.”
2. Weaponizing Nonprofits for the Democratic Party
In addition, the left has been effective at manipulating loopholes to weaponize nonprofit groups, Chaffetz said.
Nonprofit groups often hire for-profit groups to do fundraising using what’s called a 990 form, and one of the most prominent fundraisers for liberal groups is Grassroots Campaigns Inc.
“They will put on t-shirts—ACLU, Southern Poverty Law Center, Planned Parenthood—and then they’ll start knocking on doors,” Chaffetz said.
“Planned Parenthood will say ‘Hey, we’re raising money, 50 bucks, you know, for Planned Parenthood. You with us or against us?”
The person then might reply: “Oh, I love Planned Parenthood. Yeah I’ll give you $100.’ What does that tell you about that voter? … You think they are going to vote for a Democrat or do you think they are going to vote for the Republican?”
This process allows Grassroots Campaigns Inc. to collect data on voters that can help predict voting behavior. The problem, Chaffetz said, is that people working for these groups can then carry the collected voter data when they go to work for campaigns or a political party, like the Democratic National Committee, “bypassing all of the campaign finance rules.”
3. Nationalize and Skew Elections
Another big initiative of the left, according to Chaffetz, is to change the rules of elections to stack the deck in favor of Democrats and progressives.
This strategy can be seen in the legislative priorities of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. Chaffetz said:
“If you look at the priorities that they have put forward in Congress and you look through any poll that’s out there about what are the most important issues, you’re going to hear about health care, you are going to hear about the economy, you’re going to hear about immigration.”
But this isn’t what the Democrat-controlled House of Representatives prioritized.
“Why is it that Nancy Pelosi has H.R. 1, House Resolution 1 … what is her first bill? Does it have anything to do [with] Pew’s top 20 or top 50 issues? No, it doesn’t,” Chaffetz said.
“H.R. 1 is about how to reconfigure elections. [Pelosi] wants to reconstitute how we do elections in this country because it’s their calculus. This is my theory that I lay out in the book, that they have to reconfigure how we do voting in this country for them to win long-term.”
H.R. 1, which the House passed but was never brought up for a vote in the Senate, would have made a number of changes to America’s election system. Among them are mandatory voter registration, a mandate that states allow felons to vote, and a ban on states setting their own rules about voting by mail.
These are just a few of the bill’s many proposals. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell called the bill a “naked attempt to change the rules of American politics to benefit one party.”
4. Ballot Harvesting
A fourth strategy is the practice of “ballot harvesting,” which H.R. 1 did not address, Chaffetz said.
Ballot harvesting is when an individual doesn’t have to be present to cast a vote. Instead, their vote can be cast by someone else.
“Democrats, in legislation, have supported the idea. They want to make this [the] law everywhere you go, that you do not actually have to be present to vote,” Chaffetz said.
“Vote harvesting allows someone [to] go around … collecting ballots from all of you. [They] can go knock on your door and say, ‘I know that you didn’t get to the poll, I know that you didn’t fill out your ballot, I know it’s inconvenient for you, but if you just give me your ballot, you know, fill it out, I’ll turn it in for you.”
A lot can go wrong with this process, Chaffetz said. He noted that even in Utah, thousands of votes for Democrats are alleged to have rolled in “after the deadline.”
Ballot harvesting made a huge impact in recent California elections, where the tactic threw a huge number of House Republican seats to Democrats. Thousands of new and unexpected voters showed up to certain districts and flipped seats.
“I don’t know how you win an election in California when Democrats play by different rules than Republicans and engage in this type of vote harvesting,” Chaffetz said.
SOURCE
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Democrats Finally Fly Their Gun-Control Fascist Freak Flag in the Open
In all of the decades that the modern version of the contentious debate in America over guns, freedom, and the Second Amendment has been going on, the gun-control advocates have repeatedly assured gun owners of one thing: they don't want to take our guns away from us.
My, what a difference one presidential primary full of unabashed Democratic statists makes.
After years of being told that we are paranoid for saying that the anti-gun Left wants to confiscate our weapons, the anti-gun Left is letting us know in no uncertain terms that they want to confiscate our weapons.
Loudest among them is Robert Francis "Horse Mouth" O'Rourke who, seeing his relevance as a candidate dwindling by the hour, has decided to go all-in on making a pitch for being America's gun-grabber-in-chief:
This Soviet turn marks a departure for Beto in a couple of ways.
Last year, when the only constituency he was trying to woo consisted of residents of the great state of Texas, O'Rourke was still paying lip service to being a supporter of legal gun owners.
So much for that.
As recently as a few weeks ago, Beto was talking about a federal "buy-back" of AR-15s. Yes, that's euphemistic garbage -- the government can't buy back something it never owned in the first place. It's semantic whitewashing of what the program really would be: a huge first step to federal gun confiscation.
As of Friday, Cory Booker was still pretending a bit, but tipping the Democrats' hands nonetheless:
"Yeah, it’s mandatory. You have to set up a system to pull them off. But this idea, this imagery that the fearmongers and demagogues try to say of somehow armed police officers showing up & confiscating weapons, that’s the fear mongering."
So...it's a mandatory surrendering of the guns to the federal government that will no doubt be unpopular with 99.9999999999% of the people it targets and we're supposed to believe that there will be no heavy-handed enforcement by the feds.
Has this clown even met the Internal Revenue Service?
Kamala Harris got out in front of everything earlier in the year when she promised that she would almost immediately become an executive-action nightmare on gun control if Congress didn't give her what she wanted.
While the Democrats keep referring to the AR-15 specifically, they also repeatedly use the phrase "weapons of war," which puts the slippery in "slippery slope."
"Weapons of war" is a catch-all that can also refer to sidearms, knives, and anything else ever used in a battle. They used to use rocks back in the catapult days, you know.
They naturally dismiss this idea as just more paranoia, even as they work to prove that none of us are actually paranoid.
Even -- let's just pretend for a moment -- if they were sincere and didn't intend to come after all firearms, when has the federal government ever shown restraint in matters like this? Give the bureaucratic behemoth an inch and it will immediately seek ways to take every mile on Earth.
The obvious takeaway from all of this is that we were right all along about the Democrats' intentions, which provides a perfect example for future debates when they're pretending to be anything other than what they truly are: Soviet-esque control-freak statists.
SOURCE
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A rare Trump fan in the media
Lou has always been big on immigration restrictions
On Friday evening, Fox Business Network host Lou Dobbs told his viewers, “Have a great weekend. The President makes such a thing possible for us all.” Dobbs did not elaborate as to why or how President Donald Trump makes weekends possible.
Dobbs is a strong supporter of the President and often praises him on his show Lou Dobbs Tonight. His show has faced controversy in the past; he has argued that a “deep state” exists in the Justice Department to undermine Trump and he has been criticized for using anti-semitic language against Democratic donor George Soros.
On Sept. 12, Dobbs concluded his broadcast by praising Trump and the White House, adding, “The joint is hopping.”
SOURCE
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Attacks on Saudi oil facilities by Iran-backed Shi-ites
Saudi Arabia's crown prince has told US President Donald Trump the kingdom was "willing and able" to respond to the latest attacks by Yemeni rebels on its oil facilities, state media reported.
"The kingdom is willing and able to confront and deal with this terrorist aggression," Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS) told Trump during a phone call on Saturday, according to the official Saudi Press Agency (SPA).
MBS was referring to Yemen's Houthi rebels, who earlier in the day attacked two state-owned Saudi Aramco oil plants, triggering enormous fires and disrupting global energy supplies.
According to a release by the Saudi embassy in Washington, Trump told MBS that Washington was ready to cooperate with the kingdom to protect its security in the wake of the drone attacks.
SOURCE
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Trump has confirmed Hamza bin Laden, son of slain Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden and suspected leader of the militant group, was killed in a US counterterrorism operation
In a statement issued by the White House, Mr Trump said the operation took place in the Afghanistan-Pakistan region, but he offered no further details.
"The loss of Hamza bin Laden not only deprives Al Qaeda of important leadership skills and the symbolic connection to his father, but undermines important operational activities of the group," Mr Trump said.
The group was responsible for orchestrating the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on the US, which remain the single deadliest terrorist attack in human history, with almost 3,000 casualties.
A US official said Hamza had been killed months ago near the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan. Mr Trump was briefed at the time on the operation.
Washington believes Hamza, who is thought to have been about 30 years old, had succeeded his father as the head of what remains of Al Qaeda, the official said. Osama was killed by US forces in 2011 at his Pakistan compound.
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 (Personal). My annual picture page is here
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Sunday, September 15, 2019
An evangelical Christian conservative versus a Catholic conservative
There are probably as many flavours of conservatism as there are conservatives. The attempt to categorize them is always going to be approximate. So the recent debates between David French and Sohrab Ahmari are interesting. Both seem to feel that they represent the REAL conservatism. French is the evangelical and Ahmari is the Catholic.
I think both have good points. The emphasis on civility and principle by French does indeed strongly distinguish conservatives from the abusive and unprincipled Left.
Ahmari thinks the times are too urgent to stand on such principles. He thinks we are in a war which we could lose unless we go for the jugular. He thinks we have to use every strategy we can if we are to win. I am inclined to agree with him. My own writings are pretty savage at times.
But I think the great mistake is to claim that there is such a thing as conservative politics. In the last few hundred years all sorts of doctrines have been identified as conservative and many of them would get little respect from modern-day conservatives. There are, for example, still some people concerned about the gold standard but not many. And who even knows about the silver standard?
So conservatism is not an unchanging ideology. It is a tendency. And that tendency can only be described at the psychological level. Liberals and Conservatives may agree or not about political policies but at the psychological level they are as different as chalk and cheese.
To put it most starkly, conservatives are the happy people and Leftists are the miserable people. Stark as that sounds, it is actually repeatedly shown in surveys of happiness. It is always the consevatives who are shown as happiest. So what might seem as a vague psychological statement is actually something verifiable by empirical research
And another common finding of happiness research is that happiness is dispositional: It changes little though your lifetime. As even Gilbert and Sullivan saw, you tend to be born either a liberal or a conservative. So the idea that a conservative is a constitutionally happier person is remarkably well grounded in the research. Conservatives are happier and happiness is dispositional, genetic .
Most people, of course fall somewhere in between but the poles are the ones I have identified. And it is the poles that we mostly encounter in political debates.
And given that psychological basis of politics, how those two types of personality play out in policy prescriptions will vary according to the time and place. So on neither side is there a fixed set of principles from which all policies can be deduced.
And that suits Leftists very well. They usually blame their unhappy feelings on things in the world about them rather than working on themselves. And because they are so unhappy, they want to tear down those things that they blame for their unhappiness. They think that if they could possibly get rid of that awful thing (e.g. Donald Trump) they would be happy or at least happier.
So they put great energies into their tearing-down activities. And the psychological accompaniment of their wish to tear something down is hate. Particularly if something resists being torn down, they come to hate it with a passion, as we see from the Leftist reaction to Trump. They loathe every little thing about him. Even his remarkably successful economic policies win him no praise from them. Their hate has become obsessive.
Because they do not have a fire of unhappiness burning inside them, conservatives, on the other hand, can pay more attention to the full picture and note both the good and the bad in a particular situation or policy. They see, for instance, that limited welfare for the poor is regrettable but also see that more generous welfare provisions would lead to "dole bludging": people who decide to live on the taxpayer's dime when they are perfectly capable of earning their own living. So conservatives seek a middle way. Just tearing down one side of the problem seems brain dead to them.
That is very much in evidence in America right now. The Democrats see a degree of suffering among illegal immigrants held at the Southern border and simply wish to tear down the border as a solution. No thought to how the USA would be overrun by people with little to contribute seems to occur to them. Conservatives, in the person of Mr Trump, take a middle way and say that only genuine refugees and not economic migrants will be accepted.
So that history leads up to where David French goes wrong and Ahmari is right. The old principles of a liberal order have served well in the past but it is now time to move on. New circumstances require new responses -- and conservatives are once again trying to be pragmatic and seek a middle ground. As an example, Mr Trump has responded to the continuing onslaughts on Americans by Jihadis not by trying to keep all Muslims out of America but by keeping out people from particularly troublesome Muslim nations. That was one of his first actions on coming to office.
I am particularly interested in Ahmari's comment on the First amendment. That Amendment must be the most regularly butchered law that there is. It has regularly been used to attack Christians when it says you must not do that and has been regularly defied by speech restrictions on American university campuses. So if the Left can regularly defy it, might not conservatives stretch it too?
I would pass Federal legislation to forbid any kind of political bias on campuses and allow speech and performances that offend public decency and morality to be banned whenever and wherever they occur. New circumstances can require new legal principles and that may possibly be done by modifying old laws. Traditions can be powerfully useful and informative but they are not a straitjacket.
And I might perhaps note in passing that this idea of a middle way being desirable is very Catholic. It underlay two encyclicals a century apart: De rerum novarum and Centesimus Annus. And, yes, I have read both of them, though not in the original Latin.
******************************
When Government Runs Health Care
DUBLIN—”When would you like to schedule your knee replacement surgery?” asked my American doctor before I left for Ireland?
I gave him a date that works for me (I’m calling it the result of an old basketball injury, not advancing age). His office scheduled it for that date.
Contrast this with a headline in the Irish Independent newspaper: “Surgery delays are ‘cheating elderly out of precious time.'”
While I’m not ready to claim “elderly status,” the story is a preview of what could happen in the U.S. if enough of us buy into the notion that government knows best when it comes to our health and longevity.
The head of the Irish Medical Organization, Dr. Padraig McGarry, is quoted as saying that older people are frequently waiting well over two years just to see a specialist before being consigned to another waiting list for surgery.
Ponder that for a moment. How would you react should your current doctor (assuming you are allowed to keep him/her) tell you to get in line and wait until further notice?
McGarry says he has seen patients deteriorate while waiting for surgery and many return to their general practitioner “who gives them medication which can affect their health in other ways…”
And Ireland isn’t even a part of Britain’s National Health Service. They’ve got their own system, part public, the Health Service Executive, and part private option. It’s the public system wherein the problems lie.
The most recent figures examined by the newspaper found 564,829 patients in the queue to see a specialist and another 68,807 patients waiting to have surgery.
Ireland’s population is less than 5 million. The population of the United States is just over 329 million. If tiny Ireland can’t make it work, what makes so many of our politicians think it will work in the U.S.?
Across the Irish Sea, the U.K. has its own horror stories about health care run by the government. Canadians who can afford it often come to the U.S. rather than wait for their government to approve and schedule surgery.
Adding to the dysfunction is the overregulated Irish system in which people don’t want to become doctors or serve in other health care capacities. Low pay is only one reason.
According to the Independent, there are “527 vacancies for hospital specialists,” as well as a “pay gap between newly recruited consultants and longer serving colleagues.”
The question endures: With governments doing so few things efficiently and at reasonable cost, why do so many turn to it first? Government has become its own type of religious cult. No matter the evidence to the contrary, many people continue to place their faith in it.
People who see government as a cure-all don’t always practice what they preach. We’ve seen that with some environmental activists who promote certain forms of transportation and alternatives to fossil fuels, along with more restrictive gun laws, while transporting themselves on gas-guzzling private jets and in SUVs, accompanied by armed guards.
One of the latest examples of such hypocrisy is the aging rock star Mick Jagger, who, as a British citizen, has access to his country’s National Health Service. Jagger apparently believes the National Health Service is for the “little people,” as the late hotel magnate Leona Helmsley said about income taxes.
When Jagger needed a heart valve replacement, he didn’t wait in line like so many others in Britain; he had the surgery in the United States. After recovering, he added criticism of President Donald Trump to his concerts, citing specifically the current administration’s policies on the environment and immigration.
How’s that for gratitude?
If I had to choose between the National Health Service and American health care, I’d stick with the system, if the government allows, where appointments can be made and kept and the only wait is in the doctor’s outer office.
SOURCE
*******************************
Once again the media blame Trump for things that began under Obama
Eager to unearth presidential misconduct, Maddow accused members of the United States Air Force of abandoning their “integrity.”
To a certain kind of Rachel Maddow viewer, there are few more titillating preludes to a news segment than the one she delivered Monday: “If you have not seen it yet, you are going to want to sit down.”
Maddow’s story began, as many of her stories do, with President Trump, this time focused on his hotel in Scotland. The Turnberry Resort, a Trump golf hotel, is located some 50 miles south of Glasgow. Not far from that resort is the charming, if small, Glasgow Prestwick Airport; with a population under 10,000, the town of Penwick is not exactly a tourist destination, and the town’s airport has teetered on the brink of financial insolvency for nearly a decade. Because Glasgow Prestwick Airport is relatively close to the Turnberry Resort, fiscal issues at the local airport would portend similar doom for the Trump hotel, which relies on potential customers who fly in and out of Prestwick.
Here, in Maddow’s telling, is the rub: The United States Air Force refueled one of their C-17 aircrafts at Prestwick Airport on a return flight from Kuwait this spring. Maddow insists that it would have been “much cheaper” to fuel up at a military base — a supposed fact that heightened her alarm about the propriety of the stop in the first place. If this seemingly strange choice in fuel station weren’t enough, the Air Force subsequently stayed overnight at the Trump-owned Turnberry Resort. Both of these actions, said Maddow, were highly unusual and enough to arouse suspicion of malfeasance. Indeed, it was proof that the “U.S. military is in on it now,” the “it” being the Trump administration’s “corruption” and violation of the emoluments clause. The event might even reveal endemic corruption in the armed forces and could serve as a broader indictment of “the U.S. military and its integrity.”
I’m glad I sat down.
Indicting “the U.S. military and its integrity” is a rather serious charge to levy against the nation’s most respected public institution, but Maddow doubled down, bringing on her show one of the co-authors of the initial story from Politico, Natasha Bertrand, who called Maddow’s summation of events “absolutely perfect.” But reporting from Byron York at the Washington Examiner has brought the “perfection,” and indeed, the basic accuracy of Maddow and Politico’s story, into question.
The Air Force replied to the Politico report by challenging several key assertions made by both Maddow and Politico. First, the Prestwick Airport was independently contracted by the Department of Defense, and both parties agreed to terms that would allow the department to refuel at “standardized prices” — precisely the going rate that Maddow scoffed would be available only at a military base. Next, the Air Force’s use of the airport adjacent to the Trump hotel does not appear to be a novel phenomenon meant, as the Politico article speculates, to “line the president’s pockets.” Instead, well before the president’s inauguration, records show that the Air Force had used the small airport 95 times in 2015 and 145 times in 2016. While the number of stops there has since increased — the Air Force reports stopping in Prestwick 259 times through August of this 2019 — it is not as though the location was unknown to the Air Force or the Department of Defense until the president roped them into a secretive money-funneling gambit. And there are strategic features that make the otherwise obscure airport in Prestwick a preferable location for refueling. From the Air Force’s statement:
Additionally, Air Mobility Command [AMC] issued a flight directive to mobility crews in June 2017 designed to increase efficiencies by standardizing routing locations, with Prestwick being among the top five locations recommended for reasons such as more favorable weather than nearby Shannon Airport, and less aircraft parking congestion than locations on the European continent that typically support AMC’s high priority airlift missions. By considering factors like these to save costs and increase operational efficiencies, Air Operations Center contingency planners have increasingly turned to Prestwick to develop route plans for lower priority contingency needs such as training, deploy/redeploy and Guard airlift missions.
York’s report at the Examiner examined documents sent by State Department inspector general Steve Linick to Congress, responding to members miffed by a presidential visit to the Turnberry Resort. The document cites lower relative costs at the Trump hotel, compared with other inns in the area. From York:
During the visit, Linick said, State rented three rooms at Turnberry for two nights. The total cost was $728. Citing invoices from the hotel, Linick said the room rate for the night was 95.06 pounds, or $121.40, per night. Linick said the State Department looked at other hotels, including the Blythswood Square Hotel in Glasgow, which charged 215 pounds per night; the Hilton Glasgow, which charged 249 pounds; the Hilton Glasgow Grosvenor at 229 pounds; the Grand Central Hotel in Glasgow at 185 pounds; and the Raddison Blu in Glasgow at 179 pounds per night. Other State Department employees detailed to the president’s trip stayed at some of those hotels.
As York observes, “at least on the president’s trip, Turnberry was a good deal.” The Air Force, which generally makes earnest attempts to be judicious in its use of taxpayer monies, likely made their lodging decision based on similar price realities.
None of this is to condone the prudence of staying at a Trump resort in such partisan and polarized times; York notes that “the publicity surrounding the new story appears to have made the Air Force nervous.” But it’s a stretch to insist that this is a coordinated Ponzi scheme to enrich the president, with the willing and eager help of the United States Air Force. Maddow finished the segment by insisting that “if this story were fiction, “you would walk out, because it’s too blunt.” It’s possible she was too clever by half.
SOURCE
************************************
Median income hit record high in 2018 while poverty declined
Median U.S. household income reached $63,200 in 2018, the highest figure on record, new data released Tuesday by the Census Bureau revealed.
The official poverty rate also reached its lowest level since at least 2001, dropping to 11.8% of Americans, or 38.1 million people who are in poverty, according to the Census Bureau measurements. The number of people in poverty in 2018 decreased by 1.4 million people from 2017 levels.
Between 2014-2018, the United States experienced the strongest four-year improvement in the official poverty rate in decades.
With the significant improvements to median income and poverty witnessed from 2015-2017, 2018 was not a particularly unusual year in terms of economic growth trends. It represents the cumulative effort of the economic recovery that started in 2009.
In 2015, for example, the poverty rate dropped from 14.8% to 13.5%, more than any other year since 1969. Also, the median household income rose by a record amount in 2015, with figures dating back to 1967.
California has the highest levels of poverty, with 18.2% of its people, or 7 million, in poverty. This is essentially due to the high cost of living in California versus other states.
SOURCE
**************************
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)
**************************
There are probably as many flavours of conservatism as there are conservatives. The attempt to categorize them is always going to be approximate. So the recent debates between David French and Sohrab Ahmari are interesting. Both seem to feel that they represent the REAL conservatism. French is the evangelical and Ahmari is the Catholic.
I think both have good points. The emphasis on civility and principle by French does indeed strongly distinguish conservatives from the abusive and unprincipled Left.
Ahmari thinks the times are too urgent to stand on such principles. He thinks we are in a war which we could lose unless we go for the jugular. He thinks we have to use every strategy we can if we are to win. I am inclined to agree with him. My own writings are pretty savage at times.
But I think the great mistake is to claim that there is such a thing as conservative politics. In the last few hundred years all sorts of doctrines have been identified as conservative and many of them would get little respect from modern-day conservatives. There are, for example, still some people concerned about the gold standard but not many. And who even knows about the silver standard?
So conservatism is not an unchanging ideology. It is a tendency. And that tendency can only be described at the psychological level. Liberals and Conservatives may agree or not about political policies but at the psychological level they are as different as chalk and cheese.
To put it most starkly, conservatives are the happy people and Leftists are the miserable people. Stark as that sounds, it is actually repeatedly shown in surveys of happiness. It is always the consevatives who are shown as happiest. So what might seem as a vague psychological statement is actually something verifiable by empirical research
And another common finding of happiness research is that happiness is dispositional: It changes little though your lifetime. As even Gilbert and Sullivan saw, you tend to be born either a liberal or a conservative. So the idea that a conservative is a constitutionally happier person is remarkably well grounded in the research. Conservatives are happier and happiness is dispositional, genetic .
Most people, of course fall somewhere in between but the poles are the ones I have identified. And it is the poles that we mostly encounter in political debates.
And given that psychological basis of politics, how those two types of personality play out in policy prescriptions will vary according to the time and place. So on neither side is there a fixed set of principles from which all policies can be deduced.
And that suits Leftists very well. They usually blame their unhappy feelings on things in the world about them rather than working on themselves. And because they are so unhappy, they want to tear down those things that they blame for their unhappiness. They think that if they could possibly get rid of that awful thing (e.g. Donald Trump) they would be happy or at least happier.
So they put great energies into their tearing-down activities. And the psychological accompaniment of their wish to tear something down is hate. Particularly if something resists being torn down, they come to hate it with a passion, as we see from the Leftist reaction to Trump. They loathe every little thing about him. Even his remarkably successful economic policies win him no praise from them. Their hate has become obsessive.
Because they do not have a fire of unhappiness burning inside them, conservatives, on the other hand, can pay more attention to the full picture and note both the good and the bad in a particular situation or policy. They see, for instance, that limited welfare for the poor is regrettable but also see that more generous welfare provisions would lead to "dole bludging": people who decide to live on the taxpayer's dime when they are perfectly capable of earning their own living. So conservatives seek a middle way. Just tearing down one side of the problem seems brain dead to them.
That is very much in evidence in America right now. The Democrats see a degree of suffering among illegal immigrants held at the Southern border and simply wish to tear down the border as a solution. No thought to how the USA would be overrun by people with little to contribute seems to occur to them. Conservatives, in the person of Mr Trump, take a middle way and say that only genuine refugees and not economic migrants will be accepted.
So that history leads up to where David French goes wrong and Ahmari is right. The old principles of a liberal order have served well in the past but it is now time to move on. New circumstances require new responses -- and conservatives are once again trying to be pragmatic and seek a middle ground. As an example, Mr Trump has responded to the continuing onslaughts on Americans by Jihadis not by trying to keep all Muslims out of America but by keeping out people from particularly troublesome Muslim nations. That was one of his first actions on coming to office.
I am particularly interested in Ahmari's comment on the First amendment. That Amendment must be the most regularly butchered law that there is. It has regularly been used to attack Christians when it says you must not do that and has been regularly defied by speech restrictions on American university campuses. So if the Left can regularly defy it, might not conservatives stretch it too?
I would pass Federal legislation to forbid any kind of political bias on campuses and allow speech and performances that offend public decency and morality to be banned whenever and wherever they occur. New circumstances can require new legal principles and that may possibly be done by modifying old laws. Traditions can be powerfully useful and informative but they are not a straitjacket.
And I might perhaps note in passing that this idea of a middle way being desirable is very Catholic. It underlay two encyclicals a century apart: De rerum novarum and Centesimus Annus. And, yes, I have read both of them, though not in the original Latin.
******************************
When Government Runs Health Care
DUBLIN—”When would you like to schedule your knee replacement surgery?” asked my American doctor before I left for Ireland?
I gave him a date that works for me (I’m calling it the result of an old basketball injury, not advancing age). His office scheduled it for that date.
Contrast this with a headline in the Irish Independent newspaper: “Surgery delays are ‘cheating elderly out of precious time.'”
While I’m not ready to claim “elderly status,” the story is a preview of what could happen in the U.S. if enough of us buy into the notion that government knows best when it comes to our health and longevity.
The head of the Irish Medical Organization, Dr. Padraig McGarry, is quoted as saying that older people are frequently waiting well over two years just to see a specialist before being consigned to another waiting list for surgery.
Ponder that for a moment. How would you react should your current doctor (assuming you are allowed to keep him/her) tell you to get in line and wait until further notice?
McGarry says he has seen patients deteriorate while waiting for surgery and many return to their general practitioner “who gives them medication which can affect their health in other ways…”
And Ireland isn’t even a part of Britain’s National Health Service. They’ve got their own system, part public, the Health Service Executive, and part private option. It’s the public system wherein the problems lie.
The most recent figures examined by the newspaper found 564,829 patients in the queue to see a specialist and another 68,807 patients waiting to have surgery.
Ireland’s population is less than 5 million. The population of the United States is just over 329 million. If tiny Ireland can’t make it work, what makes so many of our politicians think it will work in the U.S.?
Across the Irish Sea, the U.K. has its own horror stories about health care run by the government. Canadians who can afford it often come to the U.S. rather than wait for their government to approve and schedule surgery.
Adding to the dysfunction is the overregulated Irish system in which people don’t want to become doctors or serve in other health care capacities. Low pay is only one reason.
According to the Independent, there are “527 vacancies for hospital specialists,” as well as a “pay gap between newly recruited consultants and longer serving colleagues.”
The question endures: With governments doing so few things efficiently and at reasonable cost, why do so many turn to it first? Government has become its own type of religious cult. No matter the evidence to the contrary, many people continue to place their faith in it.
People who see government as a cure-all don’t always practice what they preach. We’ve seen that with some environmental activists who promote certain forms of transportation and alternatives to fossil fuels, along with more restrictive gun laws, while transporting themselves on gas-guzzling private jets and in SUVs, accompanied by armed guards.
One of the latest examples of such hypocrisy is the aging rock star Mick Jagger, who, as a British citizen, has access to his country’s National Health Service. Jagger apparently believes the National Health Service is for the “little people,” as the late hotel magnate Leona Helmsley said about income taxes.
When Jagger needed a heart valve replacement, he didn’t wait in line like so many others in Britain; he had the surgery in the United States. After recovering, he added criticism of President Donald Trump to his concerts, citing specifically the current administration’s policies on the environment and immigration.
How’s that for gratitude?
If I had to choose between the National Health Service and American health care, I’d stick with the system, if the government allows, where appointments can be made and kept and the only wait is in the doctor’s outer office.
SOURCE
*******************************
Once again the media blame Trump for things that began under Obama
Eager to unearth presidential misconduct, Maddow accused members of the United States Air Force of abandoning their “integrity.”
To a certain kind of Rachel Maddow viewer, there are few more titillating preludes to a news segment than the one she delivered Monday: “If you have not seen it yet, you are going to want to sit down.”
Maddow’s story began, as many of her stories do, with President Trump, this time focused on his hotel in Scotland. The Turnberry Resort, a Trump golf hotel, is located some 50 miles south of Glasgow. Not far from that resort is the charming, if small, Glasgow Prestwick Airport; with a population under 10,000, the town of Penwick is not exactly a tourist destination, and the town’s airport has teetered on the brink of financial insolvency for nearly a decade. Because Glasgow Prestwick Airport is relatively close to the Turnberry Resort, fiscal issues at the local airport would portend similar doom for the Trump hotel, which relies on potential customers who fly in and out of Prestwick.
Here, in Maddow’s telling, is the rub: The United States Air Force refueled one of their C-17 aircrafts at Prestwick Airport on a return flight from Kuwait this spring. Maddow insists that it would have been “much cheaper” to fuel up at a military base — a supposed fact that heightened her alarm about the propriety of the stop in the first place. If this seemingly strange choice in fuel station weren’t enough, the Air Force subsequently stayed overnight at the Trump-owned Turnberry Resort. Both of these actions, said Maddow, were highly unusual and enough to arouse suspicion of malfeasance. Indeed, it was proof that the “U.S. military is in on it now,” the “it” being the Trump administration’s “corruption” and violation of the emoluments clause. The event might even reveal endemic corruption in the armed forces and could serve as a broader indictment of “the U.S. military and its integrity.”
I’m glad I sat down.
Indicting “the U.S. military and its integrity” is a rather serious charge to levy against the nation’s most respected public institution, but Maddow doubled down, bringing on her show one of the co-authors of the initial story from Politico, Natasha Bertrand, who called Maddow’s summation of events “absolutely perfect.” But reporting from Byron York at the Washington Examiner has brought the “perfection,” and indeed, the basic accuracy of Maddow and Politico’s story, into question.
The Air Force replied to the Politico report by challenging several key assertions made by both Maddow and Politico. First, the Prestwick Airport was independently contracted by the Department of Defense, and both parties agreed to terms that would allow the department to refuel at “standardized prices” — precisely the going rate that Maddow scoffed would be available only at a military base. Next, the Air Force’s use of the airport adjacent to the Trump hotel does not appear to be a novel phenomenon meant, as the Politico article speculates, to “line the president’s pockets.” Instead, well before the president’s inauguration, records show that the Air Force had used the small airport 95 times in 2015 and 145 times in 2016. While the number of stops there has since increased — the Air Force reports stopping in Prestwick 259 times through August of this 2019 — it is not as though the location was unknown to the Air Force or the Department of Defense until the president roped them into a secretive money-funneling gambit. And there are strategic features that make the otherwise obscure airport in Prestwick a preferable location for refueling. From the Air Force’s statement:
Additionally, Air Mobility Command [AMC] issued a flight directive to mobility crews in June 2017 designed to increase efficiencies by standardizing routing locations, with Prestwick being among the top five locations recommended for reasons such as more favorable weather than nearby Shannon Airport, and less aircraft parking congestion than locations on the European continent that typically support AMC’s high priority airlift missions. By considering factors like these to save costs and increase operational efficiencies, Air Operations Center contingency planners have increasingly turned to Prestwick to develop route plans for lower priority contingency needs such as training, deploy/redeploy and Guard airlift missions.
York’s report at the Examiner examined documents sent by State Department inspector general Steve Linick to Congress, responding to members miffed by a presidential visit to the Turnberry Resort. The document cites lower relative costs at the Trump hotel, compared with other inns in the area. From York:
During the visit, Linick said, State rented three rooms at Turnberry for two nights. The total cost was $728. Citing invoices from the hotel, Linick said the room rate for the night was 95.06 pounds, or $121.40, per night. Linick said the State Department looked at other hotels, including the Blythswood Square Hotel in Glasgow, which charged 215 pounds per night; the Hilton Glasgow, which charged 249 pounds; the Hilton Glasgow Grosvenor at 229 pounds; the Grand Central Hotel in Glasgow at 185 pounds; and the Raddison Blu in Glasgow at 179 pounds per night. Other State Department employees detailed to the president’s trip stayed at some of those hotels.
As York observes, “at least on the president’s trip, Turnberry was a good deal.” The Air Force, which generally makes earnest attempts to be judicious in its use of taxpayer monies, likely made their lodging decision based on similar price realities.
None of this is to condone the prudence of staying at a Trump resort in such partisan and polarized times; York notes that “the publicity surrounding the new story appears to have made the Air Force nervous.” But it’s a stretch to insist that this is a coordinated Ponzi scheme to enrich the president, with the willing and eager help of the United States Air Force. Maddow finished the segment by insisting that “if this story were fiction, “you would walk out, because it’s too blunt.” It’s possible she was too clever by half.
SOURCE
************************************
Median income hit record high in 2018 while poverty declined
Median U.S. household income reached $63,200 in 2018, the highest figure on record, new data released Tuesday by the Census Bureau revealed.
The official poverty rate also reached its lowest level since at least 2001, dropping to 11.8% of Americans, or 38.1 million people who are in poverty, according to the Census Bureau measurements. The number of people in poverty in 2018 decreased by 1.4 million people from 2017 levels.
Between 2014-2018, the United States experienced the strongest four-year improvement in the official poverty rate in decades.
With the significant improvements to median income and poverty witnessed from 2015-2017, 2018 was not a particularly unusual year in terms of economic growth trends. It represents the cumulative effort of the economic recovery that started in 2009.
In 2015, for example, the poverty rate dropped from 14.8% to 13.5%, more than any other year since 1969. Also, the median household income rose by a record amount in 2015, with figures dating back to 1967.
California has the highest levels of poverty, with 18.2% of its people, or 7 million, in poverty. This is essentially due to the high cost of living in California versus other states.
SOURCE
**************************
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)
**************************
Friday, September 13, 2019
Image hosting
I don't put a lot of pictures up on this blog but I do put up some. I usually host the images on Imgur.com, the number one image host at the moment. An encouraging feature of their service is that in early 2015 they announced that all images will be kept forever and only removed if deletion is requested.
Someone must have requested that some of my images be deleted and Imgur has obliged, putting up an ugly and offensive replacement image instead of the original. I keep pretty good records, however so I have replaced the lost images with backup copies hosted on another server. I have so far noticed only about half a dozen affected images, however, so I would be obliged if people would let me know if they come across any other offensive images that I have not so far noticed.
We conservative bloggers are definitely under attack. There was nothing egregious in any of the deleted images. One was just a table of statistics. Facebook has also banned all posts that link to my Greenie Watch blog. Questioning global warming is the unforgiveable sin. All my graphs and tables of statistics were in vain. There are a lot of things that the Left don't want to know about.
********************************
Bruised Trudeau to call Canada election
Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, admired abroad for his progressive policies but damaged by scandals at home, will kick off a six-week re-election campaign- on Thursday with opinion polls suggesting his hold on power will be weakened.
Mr Trudeau, who swept to office- in November 2015 promising "sunny ways" and stressing the importance of gender equal-ity, gay rights and the environment, faces an electorate more focused on the economy and -affordability when it votes on October 21.
The 47-year-old married father- of three, whose classic good looks are often splashed across the global media, may have history on his side. Not since 1935 has a Canadian prime minister who won a majority in his first term been booted from office in the next election.
But Mr Trudeau may not win enough seats to govern by himself, after a series of missteps that called into question his leadership while cutting into his once sky-high popularity. That would leave him and his Liberal Party weakened, relying on opposition MPs to push through legislation.
A Nanos Research poll released- on Tuesday showed the Liberals at 34.6 per cent and the main opposition Conservatives, led by Andrew Scheer, at 30.7 per cent. That margin would not be enough to guarantee a majority in the House of Commons.
Senior Liberals say they are quietly confident of victory and predict Mr Trudeau will campaign more effectively than Mr Scheer, 40, who is fighting his first election as Conservative leader. But Canadian campaigns can produce major surprises. The Liberals trailed in third place when the 2015 election was called but steadily improved to pull off an outright victory.
"This is not a `Throw the bums out' election. This is a `Punish the bums' election," said analys-t Nik Nanos.
Mr Trudeau's challenge is that he is running on his record rather than the uplifting message of hope and change that helped the Liberals attract record- numbers of green, youth and indigenous voters in 2015.
Since then, Mr Trudeau has broken campaign promises by scrapping plans to introduce voter reform and allowing budget- deficits to mushroom. He angered environmentalists by buying an oil pipeline to ensure crude exports could increase.
The worst moment of his tenure- came in February, when former justice minister Jody Wilson--Raybould accused the Prime Minister and top officials of inappropriately pressuring her to ensure that construction firm SNC-Lavalin Group avoid a trial on corruption charges. Last month, a top watchdog ruled Mr Trudeau and his team had -indeed breached ethics rules.
Mr Scheer's popularity had surged after the SNC-Lavalin affair-, but he appears to be struggling in Ontario, the most populous of Canada's 10 provinces, where a conservative premier is pushing through unpopular spending cuts.
SOURCE
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Supreme Court allows Trump to deny asylum to almost all migrants at the Mexican border after he pledged to crackdown on immigration
The U.S. Supreme Court on Wednesday granted a request by President Donald Trump's administration to fully enforce a new rule that would curtail asylum applications by immigrants at the U.S.-Mexico border, a key element of his hardline immigration policies.
The court said the rule, which requires most immigrants who want asylum to first seek safe haven in a third country through which they traveled on their way to the United States, could go into effect as litigation challenging its legality continues.
Among the nine judges on the court, liberal Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ruth Bader Ginsburg dissented.
The court's ruling handed a victory to Trump at a time when much of his immigration agenda had been struck down by lower courts. BIG United States Supreme Court WIN for the Border on Asylum!' Trump said on Twitter.
The rule would bar almost all immigrants from applying for asylum at the southern border. It represents the latest effort by Trump's administration to crack down on immigration, a signature issue during his presidency and 2020 re-election bid.
The American Civil Liberties Union and others who challenged the administration's policy in federal court said it violates U.S. immigration law and accused the administration of failing to follow the correct legal process in issuing the rule, which was unveiled on July 15.
In her dissent, Sotomayor said that the government's rule may be in significant tension with the asylum statute.
'It is especially concerning, moreover, that the rule the government promulgated topples decades of settled asylum practices and affects some of the most vulnerable people in the Western Hemisphere - without affording the public a chance to weigh in.'
Eight days after the rule went into effect in July, California-based U.S. District Judge Jon Tigar issued a nationwide injunction blocking it.
Then began a back-and-forth between Tigar and the 9th Circuit, which scaled back the injunction so that the Trump rule was blocked in the border states of California and Arizona while in effect in Texas and New Mexico.
Tigar ruled to restore the nationwide ban on Monday, but the 9th Circuit scaled it back again on Tuesday night.
They were both trumped by Supreme Court, which will allow the asylum restriction to remain in place until the underlying legality of the rule is determined at trial.
'This is just a temporary step, and we're hopeful we'll prevail at the end of the day,' ACLU attorney Lee Gelernt said. 'The lives of thousands of families are at stake.'
The Republican president's administration issued the rule in an attempt to reduce the surging number of asylum claims primarily by Central American migrants who have crossed the U.S.-Mexico border in large numbers during his presidency.
The rule would block nearly all families and individuals from countries like El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala from entering the United States as asylum seekers after crossing through Mexico. The rule would keep asylum protections for Mexican citizens.
The rule drew legal challenges including from a coalition of groups represented by the ACLU. They accused the administration of pursuing an 'asylum ban' and jeopardizing the safety and security of migrants fleeing persecution and seeking safety in the United States.
In the administration's request to fully enforce the rule, U.S. Solicitor General Noel Francisco asked the Supreme Court to issue a stay blocking the injunction while litigation over the issue proceeds because the judge's order interferes with the government's authority to establish immigration policy.
The administration said the rule screens out asylum claims that are unlikely to succeed and 'deters aliens without a genuine need for asylum from making the arduous and potentially dangerous journey from Central America to the United States.'
The Supreme Court in December rebuffed a bid by the administration to implement a separate policy prohibiting asylum for people crossing the U.S.-Mexican border outside of an official port of entry, with conservative Chief Justice John Roberts joining the four liberal justices in denying the request
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Polite Persuasion is Wasted on the Shrieking Left
Comment from Australia
Like Jordan Peterson's reputation, Lionel Shriver's conservative credentials were burnished by leftist idiocy. In Peterson's case it was his interview on the UK's Channel 4 by Cathy Newman. In Shriver's case it was Yassmin Abdel-Magied walking out of the Brisbane Writers' Festival in 2016 in protest at Shriver's views on identity politics and cultural appropriation.
Neither Peterson nor Shriver are my kind of conservatives and, to be fair, I am sure they would not claim to be or would want to be. That's fine. What I would like to say is that conservative warriors are now needed more than ever. Much less useful are prominent notables on the conservative side who come over all reasonable in the face of those intent on our destruction.
Peterson lost his standing with me when he suggested that Brett Kavanagh should first win his confirmation to the Supreme Court but then immediately resign to clear his name. That was a ridiculous suggestion, to put it extremely mildly. Clearly Peterson has no idea about the enemy we face.
I caught Shriver on Q&A last week. True, I could only stand five minutes or so before turning it off. Any longer spent watching Q&A is injurious to my peace of mind. Nevertheless, I saw enough to sense that Shriver was trying hard to appear "reasonable" to other panellists and to the usual green-leftist ABC audience. Hint for Shriver: Prostration is pointless. They'll always despise you. Look to, say, Michelle Malkin for a role model.
Did I get a false impression of Shriver's demeanour? I think not. The following evening I attended the Bonython Lecture in Sydney, where she explained that her engagement, front and backstage, with other Q&A panellists was civil; and, furthermore, she made a point of extolling the need for civility generally in political debate.
I want to be clear. Come the witching hour I believe I will find myself on the same side of the barricades as Peterson and Shriver. After all, where else could we be? But I would like to think that we can avoid arriving at the witching hour. And we won't if our side is populated by those falling over themselves to be civil.
Civility is paramount among people of sound mind and goodwill. Those of the new progressive Left don't qualify. They need to be fought, not reasoned with. Reasoning with a poisonous serpent is useless. You have to chop its head off. And, being religiously minded, I choose the metaphor of a serpent advisedly.
Go to the US to see the progressive Left at its most transparent. It's here in Australia, in the UK and in Europe in full-enough measure, but only in America has it the chutzpah to stand in the spotlight. Anyone who caught any of CNN's seven-hour town-hall meeting on the "climate crisis" with the top ten Democrat presidential candidates would know what I mean. They have no shame.
They tell blatant lies, like Hurricane Dorian is a product of climate change, which are easily exposed. Yet they will simply go on repeating them. It is lying in the name of saving the planet. Taqiya for Gaia. The destruction of America's economy, and, with it, Western civilisation, is collateral damage apparently. Or is that all part of the plan? It surely must be.
Run down the list (in no particular order and without attempting to be exhaustive): the `green new deal', pulling down border security, providing free health insurance to illegal immigrants, publicly funding abortion up till the moment of birth, slashing military spending, funding more and more `free stuff' through greatly increased taxation (and, no doubt, through untrammelled money printing as per leftist modern monetary theory[i]), persecuting those with the temerity to practice Christian beliefs, marginalising the traditional family, insidiously siding with Palestinians over Israel, and hiking minimum wages to add to the rampant unemployment which will follow, as night follows day, from the other ruinous environmental and economic policies.
Quite simply America as we know it would cease to exist. It would be crippled. America stands between Western civilisation and the Islamic and the Chinese-communist barbarians. We would fall as other civilisations have fallen. At some point the Islamists and Chinese would turn on each other. But, by that time, we would be vassal states watching the big boys duke it out. I will go back to my start.
I am generally polite and civil, even after a few drinks. But I ask this question. How civil is it proper to be to those who espouse policies which, if ever enacted, would put our grandchildren's lives at risk?
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Obsession: Broadcast coverage of Trump 11 times greater than Democratic hopefuls
And there's mostly no such thing as bad publicity
Trump-bashing has become a tradition in broadcast news, with anchors, correspondents and pundits supplying near non-stop negative coverage of President Trump and his administration. The coverage has been, on average, 90% negative according to a series of studies by the Media Research Center.
These days, the Democratic presidential hopefuls are paying a price for this obsession. Networks' "fixation on Trump" is leaving comparatively little airtime for his would-be presidential challengers, the conservative press watch dog says in a new analysis released Monday.
"From June 1 through August 31, analysts found the networks devoted 838 minutes of airtime - nearly 14 hours - to coverage of President Trump personally, the vast majority of which was negative," writes Rich Noyes, who led the study.
"The airtime devoted to Trump was eleven times greater than that spent on the leading Democratic candidate, former Vice President Joe Biden (just under 74 minutes), and vastly more than the networks gave California Senator Kamala Harris (30 minutes), South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg (15 minutes) or Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren (just under 14 minutes)," Mr. Noyes said.
"Overall, 21 Democratic candidates (including some who have since departed the race) shared 187 minutes of evening news airtime this summer, less than one-fourth of that of Trump alone," he continued.
"On the GOP side, former Congressman Joe Walsh received a scant 35 seconds of coverage after he announced his candidacy in late August, while the campaign of former Massachusetts Governor William Weld has yet to be acknowledged by any of the three evening newscasts."
The coverage, Mr. Noyes explains, is not meant to help Mr. Trump, with the content dwelling on "alleged scandals and racism" for the most part.
"The media mania over Trump is more intense than that of four summers ago, but the pattern is similar. After Trump joined the race in mid-June 2015, he immediately dominated network news coverage with 232 minutes of airtime, twice that of the leading Democrat, Hillary Clinton, and six times more than his nearest Republican challenger, Jeb Bush," Mr. Noyes said.
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One America News Files Defamation Lawsuit Against Rachel Maddow, MSNBC And Other Entities
One America News Network, a right-leaning cable news outlet, on Monday filed a $10 million defamation lawsuit against Rachel Maddow, Comcast Corporation, NBC Universal Media and MSNBC Cable in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of California.
According to the lawsuit, Comcast refused to carry OANN as part of their cable programming package because the conservative network frequently rebuked MSNBC's liberal politics. The lawsuit also claims that MSNBC host Rachel Maddow said OANN is "really literally is paid Russian propaganda." Her comments came after OANN's President, Charles Herring, sent a letter to Comcast objecting to their refusal to carry the conservative network. Herring referred to their refusal to carry OANN as "anti-competitive censorship."
OANN argues the defendants knew their statements about the conservative network were false but were made as a means of damaging OANN's business and reputation. Specifically, OANN states the comments were made in retaliation for calling out Comcast's refusal to carry the conservative cable network in its programming packages.
"One America is wholly owned, operated and financed by the Herring family in San Diego," said Skip Miller, a partner at Miller Barondess, who is representing OANN. "They are as American as apple pie. They are not paid by Russia and have nothing to do with the Russian government. This is a false and malicious libel, and they're going to answer for it in a court of law."
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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Thursday, September 12, 2019
The example of Zimbabwe refutes both Keynes and the monetarists
Where are the Zimbabweans? According to Financial Times reporter Joseph Cotterill, millions can be found in neighboring South Africa, along with other more economically vibrant locales. Cotterill notes that the Zimbabwean “diaspora” is the result of “decades of turmoil” within the formerly prosperous country.
That more and more Zimbabweans exit their country in order to work rates discussion in consideration of how all too many economists and politicians think of economic growth. According to those with a Keynesian orientation, it’s consumption that powers growth. Others, of the monetarist persuasion, believe that growth in so-called “money supply” is what keeps the economy moving. Neither religion acknowledges that both consumption and money aren’t instigators of growth as much as they’re a consequence of it.
If consumption and soaring money supply were certain growth ingredients, prosperity would be simple. Politicians could demand that the citizenry consume more, and to enable the buying, they would instruct a central monetary authority to boost money in circulation. Of course to anyone with a pulse, such a scenario would fail with blinding speed. Most of us intuitively know that our ability to consume is a function of our ability to produce. To pretend otherwise is the equivalent of assuming the only difference between Lake Forest and Cabrini Green is that government-engineered money supply increases in the former enable greater consumption than takes place in the latter. No, money supply is abundant in Lake Forest, and so is consumption, precisely because the residents of Lake Forest are rather productive. Zimbabwe instructs on the matter.
Zimbabweans are able to consume more and more thanks to production of Zimbabweans not working in Zimbabwe. This is an important distinction to make. Paul Krugman argues endlessly for increased government spending to boost economic growth, but does so without acknowledging that the growth already occurred. Governments can only spend insofar as economic growth showers them with revenues to spend. Production first, then the spending.
To Keynesians like Krugman, the answer is always more outlays from politicians. If there’s consumption, prosperity will ensue. Zimbabwe is a reminder of how unrealistic such a belief is. No doubt Zimbabweans are able to consume wealth to a greater degree than they produce wealth, but this ability to buy in greater amounts isn’t thanks to magic; rather it’s a consequence of the productivity of Zimbabweans toiling outside of the country. To be clear, there’s no such thing as consuming. Behind every act of consumption, whether it’s government enabled or enabled through remittances, is an act of production first.
Readers might consider the above the next time they witness some economist or politician on TV talking about boosting the economy through more government spending. They're confused, or they’re lying. They can do no such thing. The consumption they aim to generate through government largesse is only possible insofar as private actors produced the wealth first. Government spending can’t stimulate growth as much as government can arrogate to itself the right to allocate wealth already created; usually at the expense of entrepreneurs and businesses. Never forget that entrepreneurs compete with consumers (private individuals, along with governments that confiscate wealth in order to shift consumption to others) for always limited resources.
Considering money, it too has no use absent production. Money can’t be eaten, or slept with; instead money is just an agreement about value among producers, along with those empowered to consume as producers do thanks to shifts of money. In Zimbabwe’s case, money has use there to a high degree because of production that doesn’t take place there. As Florence Ncube explained it to Cotterill, there “is no food that side," as in little food produced in Zimbabwe. Groceries are purchased in South Africa, and then sent to Zimbabwe. Money supply can be found in Zimbabwe not because some central bank decreed it, but once again because of production that didn't place in Zimbabwe. Money earned outside of Zimbabwe, and goods and services produced outside of the country, give money a purpose in Zimbabwe. Production first, then money supply. Monetarists, like Keynesians, get the drivers of economic growth backwards.
Readers might remember this the next time some wise pundit or economist in a developed country laments impossibilities like “money shortages” or “insufficient money supply” in countries they don’t live in. The reality is that money, like consumption, is a consequence of production. Where there’s production there will always be abundant money to facilitate exchange of it, and where there’s little production is where money will always be scarce. Politicians and central bankers can’t alter economic reality through magic despite what we’re told.
Bringing it back to Zimbabwe, it has neither a problem of insufficient demand nor insufficient money supply as the twin ideologies that are Keynesianism and Monetarism would contend. What really ails Zimbabwe is a lack of production; the latter increasingly being made up for by enterprising Zimbabweans living and working outside their home country.
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The Equation That Explains Evil
Our age loves scientific equations. Here's one you weren't taught at college but which affects you as much as the law of gravity:
GI - W = E
Good Intentions (GI) minus Wisdom (W) leads to Evil (E).
You weren't taught this rule at college because the modern university believes only science has rules. "Rules of life" is another term for wisdom, and there is no wisdom -- or even pursuit of wisdom -- at our universities.
Life has rules just like the natural sciences do. Examples include:
Ingratitude makes happiness impossible.
Corrupt people think everyone else is as corrupt as they are.
Human nature is not basically good.
Feelings are far less important than actions.
Most men need a woman to mature.
Most women need a man to mature.
The list is long. And the more life rules people know and live by the better people they'll be -- the better the world will be.
There is a reason Jordan Peterson's book "12 Rules for Life" has sold millions of copies, mostly to young people. It is the same reason PragerU has a billion views a year, mostly among people under 35. Many young people are sensing they have been cheated by the adults that have taught them, for example, to pursue self-esteem rather than self-control -- a "rule" guaranteed to lead to moral and professional failure.
But one rule almost no one was taught, that explains most organized evil and the left in particular, from the Bolsheviks to Mao to Castro to Chavez to your everyday leftist in New York or Iowa: Good intentions without wisdom leads to evil.
Communism, the greatest mass murder ideology in history, was for almost all its rank-and-file supporters rooted in their desire to do good. (This was rarely true for its leaders, whose greatest desire was power.)
The many millions of people all over the world who supported communism did not think they were supporting unprecedented levels of mass murder and torture or an equally unprecedented deprivation of the most fundamental human rights of a substantial percentage of humanity. They thought they were moral, building a beautiful future for humanity -- eliminating inequality, enabling people to work as hard or as little as they wanted, providing their fellow citizens "free" education and "free" health care. They were convinced that the moral arc of history was bending in their direction and that they were good because their motives were good.
That's why leftists have such moral contempt for those who differ with them. Because those on the left are so good, only bad human beings could possibly oppose them. That is the position of virtually every editor and columnist at The New York Times.
The problem with communists and with leftists who don't consider themselves communists is not that none of them mean well. It's that they lack wisdom. There are wise and foolish liberals, wise and foolish conservatives; but all leftists are fools. Every one of the Democrats running for president is a fool.
This is not, however, a description of their totality as a human being. Fools may be personally kind and generous, may be loyal friends and devoted spouses, and of course, they may be well-intentioned. But in terms of making the world worse, there is little difference between a well-meaning fool and an evil human being. Tens of millions of well-intentioned Westerners supported Stalin. The Westerners who supplied Stalin the secrets to the atom bomb were not motivated by evil. They were simply fools. But few evil people did as much to hurt the world as they did.
They are fools partly because they believe good intentions are all that matter. Therefore, they never ask perhaps the most important moral question one can ask: What will happen if my policy is enacted? Leftist supporters of communism never asked.
Democrats who push the country-bankrupting Green New Deal provide a contemporary example. They not only deny the economy and society-crushing consequences of the Green New Deal, they deny any price will be paid. Every home, office, hospital, school and business will be forced to stop using fossil fuels, yet only good will come from that. Giving that amount of coercive power to the state is of no consequence to leftists. In their make-believe world, no one will suffer. On the contrary, America will become richer, and millions of jobs will be created while we destroy our economy. Poor Africans trying to electrify their countries will be told not to -- yet they, too, will somehow become rich using only wind and sun.
If the Green New Deal is enacted, the American economy will tank -- and with it, much of the rest of the world. Tyrannies like China and Iran will be emboldened, as will dictatorships like Russia.
On every issue in which the left differs from conservatives (and often from liberals), they are fools. They push for a Palestinian state although even Israelis on the left know this would mean a Hamas-Hezbollah state on the Israeli border. But they know they mean well.
They routinely label the beacon of freedom on Earth racist, misogynistic, homophobic, imperialistic, genocidal; cheapen the label "Nazi"; promote all-black dorms and graduations; promote preteen boys' performing drag shows; tell young women career is more important to happiness than marriage; believe a country can remain a distinct nation with open borders; condemn parents who try to reassure their 3-year-old son that he is a boy; and ruin the university, the arts, late-night comedy, pro football and religion.
But they mean well.
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Border Apprehensions Plummet Thanks to Trump Deal with Mexico
Back in June, many on the left pooh-poohed Trump's deal with Mexico to avoid tariffs in exchange for stronger efforts by Mexico to curb the flow of immigrants through their country into the United States. While the positive impact of that deal became apparent almost immediately, we now have a much clearer picture of the impact of the deal Trump struck with Mexico, as border apprehensions have plummeted the past three months.
Immigration officials apprehended just over 64,000 migrants at the southern border in August – a dramatic drop that the Trump administration is presenting as a sign its diplomatic engagement with Mexico and other countries is having positive effects on the ground.
The 64,006 migrants apprehended or deemed inadmissible represents a 22 percent drop from July, when 82,055 were apprehended, and a 56 percent drop from the peak of the crisis in May, when more than 144,000 migrants were caught or deemed inadmissible. While the numbers typically drop in the summer, the plummet is steeper than typical seasonal declines.
Meanwhile, the number of caravans has also dropped. In May, 48 caravans of migrants were recorded coming to the U.S. In August, the tally was six. Border Patrol now has fewer than 5,000 migrants in custody, down from 19,000 at the peak in the spring.
The numbers are still technically at crisis levels, but nevertheless, the trend is clear and proves that Trump's policies are working. “That international effort is making an impact. Mexican operational interdiction is certainly [the] highlight of that effort, but the shared responsibility we’re seeing in the region, governments stepping up and saying we also own this,” said Homeland Security Secretary Kevin McAleenan on Monday while on Fox News. Another senior administration official said that "the tariff threat with Mexico changed the dynamic significantly with our partners."
Trump announced in May that he intended to impose tariffs on Mexico if it did not help the U.S. combat the migration crisis. Trump ultimately suspended the tariffs days before after a deal was reached that included Mexico taking “unprecedented steps” to boost enforcement, including deploying its National Guard, while the MPP, known informally as the “Remain in Mexico” policy, was expanded.
Mexico has now been giving those migrants a permit to remain, work authorizations and social security and providing free transportation to anyone who wants to return to their home countries.
A senior administration official pointed to engagement with countries in Central America and agreements made with Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador on issues such as human smuggling – the main countries sending migrants to the U.S. The official said that Honduras has so far more than doubled its border force after the U.S. requested they triple it.
A long-term solution to the problem of illegal immigration must still come from Congress, which seems unlikely as long as Democrats control the House. Thankfully Trump is doing something to solve the problem.
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Who's benefiting from Trump's economy? Minorities and the poor
The Washington Post reports, “For the first time, most new hires of prime working age (25 to 54) are people of color, according to a Washington Post analysis of data the Labor Department began collecting in the 1970s. Minority hires overtook white hires last year.” If, as the Leftmedia loudly insists, President Donald Trump is a racist only interested in promoting white nationalism, he’s evidently doing a terrible job of it. In fact, under Trump’s leadership, black unemployment has hit record lows. And it’s not just blacks; minorities in general are enjoying record employment levels, as are white Americans.
Meanwhile, as the economy under Trump has surged, the number of Americans on food stamps has dropped by over six million since January 2017. The Daily Caller notes, “In February 2017, the first month after Trump took office, 42,297,791 persons were participating in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. As of June 2019, 36,029,506 persons were participating in the program.”
Yet during Barack Obama’s long “recovery,” the number of able-bodied adults on food stamps doubled, from 1.9 million to 3.9 million. One of the main factors for this increase can be tied to Obama’s waiving of the 1996 Welfare Reform Act’s work requirements. While Obama increased the number of Americans who depended on the federal government (and, by extension, the Democrat Party), Trump’s actions have reversed this trend and now fewer Americans find themselves on the government dole.
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Roughly 6.2 million people have dropped off food stamps since President Donald Trump’s first month in office
Data from the USDA shows 6,268,285 individuals have left the food stamp program since Trump took office.
In February 2017, the first month after Trump took office, 42,297,791 persons were participating in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. As of June 2019, 36,029,506 persons were participating in the program.
Similarly, 20,937,903 households were participating in the program in February of 2017 – a number which slimmed down to 18,230,968 by June 2019 revealing that 2,706,935 households dropped out of the food stamps program since Trump took office.
Under the Obama administration as part of a 2009 stimulus package, states were allowed to waive work requirements for food stamps and the number of childless adults on food stamps doubled.
The number of able-bodied adults on food stamps doubled from 1.9 million in 2008 to 3.9 million in 2010 when Obama signed his stimulus bill and suspended a rule under the 1996 Welfare Reform Law that regulated how long able-bodied adults without dependents could collect food stamps.
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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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Wednesday, September 11, 2019
New York to commemorate 18th anniversary of the September 11 attacks by disciples of Satan
It's been 18 years since the September 11 attacks left nearly 3,000 people dead in the worst act of terrorism the nation has ever experienced. On Wednesday, the 9/11 Memorial and Museum will commemorate the lives lost with a ceremony honoring those killed at the World Trade Center, Pentagon and aboard Flight 93 — as well as the 1993 World Trade Center bombing.
CBSN New York will live stream the ceremony starting at around 8:25 a.m. ET from the 9/11 Memorial plaza in lower Manhattan
As has happened in years past, the names of those killed will be read during Wednesday's ceremony
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"The Trump “dynasty” will “last for decades”"
I think the Donald is a rare original with no member of his family a patch on him. Even his Veep is not up to his standard. It's early days but I like Ted Cruz as his successor -- JR
Paul Mirengoff
AP reports that Brad Parscale, President Trump’s reelection campaign manager, said yesterday that the president and his family are “a dynasty that will last for decades, propelling the Republican Party into a new party.” It never hurts for the campaign manager to flatter the candidate and his family, especially when the candidate’s two sons are key members of the campaign team.
Is Parscale’s prediction sound? Arguably, Trump by himself is propelling the GOP “into a new party.” Whether this effect will endure and whether it will be carried forward by members of his family may depend on how the Trump presidency ends.
Or it may not. George H.W. Bush’s presidency didn’t end well. Yet, one of his sons became president and another became a popular governor of a large state.
Bill Clinton’s presidency ended better. He served two terms and was popular at the end of the second. Yet, Hillary Clinton never became president and, in fairly short order, the Democratic party moved well to the left of where it was during the Clinton presidency.
But the Trump presidency represents a sharper break with his party’s past than the Bush 41 and Clinton presidencies did. So I do think the extent to which the Trump transformation endures and is carried further by members of his family depends on how successful his presidency is deemed.
In thinking about a Trump dynasty, we probably should distinguish among potential dynasts and, especially, between his two adult sons on the one hand and Ivanka/Jared on the other. Ivanka strikes me as clearly to the left of Don Jr. and Eric. Reportedly, she likes to tell people that she’s not a conservative.
Thus, the desirability of a Trump dynasty probably depends on which family members would ascend.
The Trump dynasty Parscale envisages is “one that will adapt to changing cultures.” “One must continue to adapt while keeping the conservative values that we believe in,” he explained.
That’s true. But a dynasty can’t maintain conservative values if it adapts too much to “changing cultures.”
Ivanka seems already to be adapting to changing sub-cultures. So if there is to be a Trump dynasty, I hope the dynasts won’t include her.
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Jobs Report Blows Away Recession Fears as Trump Economy Continues to Soar
Rick Manning
There were fewer people unemployed in America in August 2019 than there were in August 1975 when we were just shy of 69 million fewer people in the economy.
I graduated from Norco High School in 1975. I am now eligible to collect Social Security. And there are fewer Americans unemployed today than the summer I graduated high school.
If this doesn’t shock you, then nothing will.
Economies can be measured by many things, the number of people who want a job but can’t find one is perhaps the most important political and human measure.
To provide a shorter time frame, there are 4.2 million more Americans in the civilian labor force since January 2017, when Donald Trump became President, and there are 1.5 million fewer Americans who are unemployed today than then. Even as the labor participation rate (percentage of people 16 and older who are in the workforce) has risen from 62.9 percent to 63.2 percent.
A total 5.7 million more jobs have been created.
What we are witnessing is almost an economic miracle. More people are working today at 157.8 million than at any time in history. Fewer people are unemployed this August than in any August since 1974. The last time fewer Americans were unemployed during this month, the pet rock was a popular gift, the Godfather Part II and Blazing Saddles were the two most popular movies and the Vietnam War was still raging.
For all the economic doom and gloom Eeyores, try to find your inner Tigger, because America is working, wages continue to climb, and inflation remains low. And the economy is defying the gravitational expectations of the regular business cycle, largely because Americans are coming back into the workforce; and in spite of the constant negative Nancy news, they are positive about the future.
One final nail in the partisan pessimists down talking the economy coffin is the simple fact that the unemployment rate of 3.7 percent marks the fifteenth time in 18 months that the unemployment rate has been below 4 percent. The last time prior to this run that the unemployment rate was below 4 percent was in January of 1970, almost 50 years ago.
As proof, the much disliked Transportation Security Administration (TSA) with their intrusive blue gloves, reported that the nine busiest days in their history occurred this summer. Note to CNBC: People don’t decide to travel by plane when they believe that their incomes are in jeopardy. Instead they do the staycation which became so popular during the Obama era.
The simple fact is that Americans are not only working but they are making more money today than they have in the past. The household median income rose to a record $61,372 in 2017, as more Americans are benefitting from wage gains earned. The 2018 number will be reported in October, and given the on-going 3.2 percent year over year increases reported by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, it is obvious that 2018 and 2019 will have been even better years for American’s pocketbooks.
With all of the down talking of the economy by political and economic pundits, it is important for people to understand that what they are experiencing in the personal lives is what others are — this economy rocks. If you want a job, you can get a job, and you are getting paid more for the same work today than you were last year without inflation eating away all or more of your wage gains.
Yet, problems still remain. Opioid and other addictions continue to have a hollowing out effect on our workforce. As large as the labor force is, and it’s never been larger, there would be about 6.9 million more people aged 16-64 in the workforce today if the labor participation rate for that age group was the same today as it was in 1997. This addiction crisis is also fueling a homeless problem which HUD Secretary Ben Carson is striving to address.
Here’s the good news, that number used to be 9.7 million, meaning 2.8 million working age adults have reentered the labor force and have jobs, with 16-64-year-old labor participation rising from 72.7 percent in 2015 to 73.8 percent in 2018. The restored hope that this represents is the untold story of renewal that is hidden by a media animus toward Donald Trump that refuses to deliver good news.
But even in a time of unprecedented low unemployment rates, work still remains to be done to bring people who have been left behind, like those with disabilities, out of the shadows and into the workforce. The fact that almost 36 million Americans remain on food assistance programs shows that the economy has not yet lifted enough boats to self-sufficiency. The fact that 8.1 million fewer people are on food assistance than when President Trump took office shows that our nation is heading in the right direction.
America should be celebrating the Trump economic success story, and judging by the summer vacation travel reports, it appears that the people get it, even if the media doesn’t.
SOURCE
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Black Unemployment Rate Hits Record Low
Let's keep the MAGA train rolling, folks. After the great news that the Fed is not predicting a recession anytime soon, the latest jobs numbers also indicate that black unemployment is the lowest its ever been in the United States since the government began tracking this figure.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported Friday that black unemployment fell to 5.5% in August.
As Richard Walters of the GOP said, "New jobs report shows higher wages, higher labor participation rate, and lowest black unemployment ever on record. @realDonaldTrump continues to deliver for all Americans on the economy!"
Even CNN admitted this was good news. Here's part of the breakdown they gave:
The previous record low of 5.9% was set in May 2018.
The unemployment rate for black women fell to a record 4.4% from 5.2% in July. The unemployment rate for black men crept up to 5.9% from 5.8%. But the previous month's rate was a record, so the rate is still near its historic low.
Unemployment among workers who identify themselves as Hispanic or Latino also fell in August to 4.2%, which matched a record low set earlier this year.
Responding to this news, the president on Twitter said, "The Economy is great. The only thing adding to 'uncertainty' is the Fake News!"
SOURCE
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U.S. Announces Its Withdrawal From U.N. Human Rights Council
Happy days!
After more than a year of complaints and warnings — some subtle and others a little less so — the Trump administration has announced that the United States is withdrawing from the United Nations Human Rights Council. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Ambassador to the U.N. Nikki Haley announced the decision in a joint statement Tuesday.
"I want to make it crystal clear that this step is not a retreat from human rights commitments," Haley told the media. "On the contrary, we take this step because our commitment does not allow us to remain a part of a hypocritical and self-serving organization that makes a mockery of human rights."
The move comes as little surprise from an administration that frequently has lambasted the 47-member body for a gamut of perceived failures — particularly the dubious rights records of many of its member countries, as well as what Haley has repeatedly called the council's "chronic bias against Israel."
Haley harked back to a speech she delivered to the council one year ago this month, in which she laid down something of an ultimatum. At that point, she told members that they must stop singling out Israel for condemnation and must clean up their roster — which includes Venezuela, China and Saudi Arabia, among others — or the council could bid the U.S. farewell.
In remarks to the Graduate Institute of Geneva, given the same day as her council speech, Haley made the matter plain.
"If the Human Rights Council is going to be an organization we entrust to protect and promote human rights, it must change," she said. "If it fails to change, then we must pursue the advancement of human rights outside of the council."
In the year that has elapsed since those speeches, such reforms never happened. Instead, she said, the council stayed silent on violent repression in Venezuela, a member state, and welcomed another country with a problematic record of its own, the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
"The council ceases to be worthy of its name," Haley said, explaining the U.S. withdrawal. "Such a council in fact damages the cause of human rights."
SOURCE
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Who is Elizabeth Warren? her fundraising tactics provide a clue
Paul Mirengoff
It’s not easy to distinguish the policy positions of Elizabeth Warren from those of avowed socialist Bernie Sanders. Yet, the establishment fears Sanders and seems comfortable enough with Warren.
Why? I think it’s because they suspect that Warren’s radicalism isn’t nearly as sincere as Sanders’s.
This New York Times article about Warren’s fundraising confirms both the establishment’s comfort with Warren and her lack of sincerity. The Times documents that Warren raised large amounts of money from establishment donors during her campaign for reelection to the Senate in 2018:
"On the highest floor of the tallest building in Boston, Senator Elizabeth Warren was busy collecting big checks from some of the city’s politically connected insiders. It was April 2018 and Ms. Warren, up for re-election, was at a breakfast fund-raiser hosted for her by John M. Connors Jr., one of the old-guard power brokers of Massachusetts.
Soon after, Ms. Warren was in Manhattan doing the same. There would be trips to Hollywood and Silicon Valley, Martha’s Vineyard and Philadelphia — all with fund-raisers on the agenda. She collected campaign funds at the private home of at least one California megadonor, and was hosted by another in Florida. She held finance events until two weeks before her all-but-assured re-election last November"
Bernie Sanders has never raised that kind of money from this donor class. He hasn’t wanted to, and couldn’t if he did.
Soon after securing reelection, Warren announced her bid for the presidency. She funded her campaign, in the first instance, with the money she had raised from big donors when running for the Senate. At the same time, Warren made a splash with the Democratic left by announcing that her presidential campaign would not raise money from big donors:
"The open secret of Ms. Warren’s campaign is that her big-money fund-raising through 2018 helped lay the foundation for her anti-big-money run for the presidency. Last winter and spring, she transferred $10.4 million in leftover funds from her 2018 Senate campaign to underwrite her 2020 run, a portion of which was raised from the same donor class she is now running against"
The early money Warren transferred to her presidential campaign has made a big difference. According to the Times, Warren was able to invest early in a massive political organization — spending 87 cents of every dollar she raised in early 2019 — without fear of bankrupting her bid. The money also gave her a financial backstop to lessen the risk of forgoing traditional fundraisers.
Ed Rendell, the epitome of an establishment insider, says of Warren: “Can you spell hypocrite?” Rendell recruited donors to attend an intimate fund-raising dinner for Warren last year at a Philadelphia steakhouse where the famed cheese steak goes for $120. He said he received a “glowing thank-you letter” from Warren afterward.
But when Rendell co-hosted a fundraiser for Joe Biden this spring, the Warren campaign derided the affair as “a swanky private fund-raiser for wealthy donors.” Says Rendell:
"She didn’t have any trouble taking our money the year before. All of a sudden, we were bad guys and power brokers and influence-peddlers. In 2018, we were wonderful"
Warren’s hypocrisy bothers Rendell and, I assume, certain other donors who are supporting Biden. But there’s little evidence that they fear what she would do in the White House.
Sure, they would prefer Biden, whom they see as safer and more likely to defeat Trump. But Warren doesn’t alarm them the way Sanders does. Otherwise, presumably, they would not have been so generous to her in 2018.
Who is the real Elizabeth Warren, the friend of the Democratic establishment or its scourge? To me, she’s just an ambitious pol who, if elected president, will try to straddle the line. Just as she has with her fundraising.
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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