Liberals Beyond Stupid

Read the excerpt from an article by Ray Kraft below.  It sets out well a problem that conservatives constantly encounter:  Why are Leftists so unreachable by reason? You can point out holes in their arguments but they are unmoved.  And some of their claims are entirely out of touch with reality. "All men are equal", being the prime example of that.  And they can change positions on a dime -- as Mr. Obama did: In the Senate he was against gay marriage. As president he was for it.

I think I can explain why they are like that.  Freud understood. Sometimes people NEED false beliefs to make them happy with themselves and with life.  Not everyone can face reality head-on. The use of mind-altering dugs is proof of that.  Even in prehistoric times they brewed beer.  Men have always needed to blunt the harsh impact of reality.  Some of us can come down from delusions and finally face the real world and others can do that only partially or not at all.

And the Leftist has a particularly strong need that he has to cope with.  He is a born-angry person; Born-miserable; Born unhappy. And the happiness research is very clear:  You are largely born with your level of happiness/unhappiness. Some things can lift you up and some things can drag you down but it is transient.  You soon revert to your chronic level of unhappiness.

The Leftist could take anger management classes or prayerfully approach the wisdom of Christ but he does not do that.  He does what Freud called displacement.  He explains his anger as caused by something outside himself  -- as caused by "injustice", for instance.  But the world is awash with injustice.  Just the fact that 50% of the population is of below average IQ is a huge injustice. So conservatives just accept that while doing what little they realistically can do to ameliorate problems.

But the Leftist does not want to solve any problem.  He wants to mentally bathe and luxuriate in problems.  Even if some problem is solved, there will always be more problems.  He needs injustices to explain to himself why he is so angry.  So he sees himself as living in a world of evil, conniving people.  "I'm not mad. There really are lots of bad people out there" is his message to himself.

And as Freud pointed out, such false beliefs tend to be deeply entrenched. The defensive person cannot afford to let go of his false beliefs.  Lose too much of his protective belief system and he will have to face his own unfortunate nature head-on.  He would have to face the reality that there are no sufficient grounds for his unhappiness.

So, in a word, the Leftist NEEDS his angry beliefs.  He cannot afford to let go of them.  Compared to his needs, logic and reason is a very weak force


I am coming to suspect that liberalism may be a genetic defect, or at least a congenital defect, because in the correspondence I get froms libs I observe that most of them are completely unable to grasp even the most rudimentary concepts of logic and reason, and also completely unable to grasp the idea that they are not grasping the most rudimentary concepts of logic and reason.

I am not sure that it is merely beyond their will, I am coming to suspect it is beyond their ability.

Those who are able to think more or less rationally and logically tend to become conservative and Republican, while those who are unable to think more or less rationally and logically tend to become liberal and Democrat.

Which makes the Democratic party (as it is today) by definition the party of illogic and unreason, the party of emotionalism rampant.

This may have something to do with the fact that Logic, as a subject, is no longer taught in most schools.

The libs who are not thinking coherently always think (or feel) that they are thinking coherently, no matter how clearly and cogently one points out that they are not. They are apparently unable to recognize (much less understand, or analyze) the inconsistencies and non sequiturs in their own thinking -

For instance, if one points out that the observed one degree of global atmospheric warming over the last century (per the IPCC report) is hardly conclusive proof of catastrophic runaway global warming, and probably within the margin of measuring error (!) the response is Yes! There is Global Warming! Didn't you see Al Gore's movie?! . . . so there really is Global Warming, Toto, I guess, even if we can't actually see it.

Yes, some glaciers are melting, but the fact that glaciers have been melting for the last ten or fifteen thousand years since the beginning of the end of the last ice age is an uncomprehended, or incomprehensible, idea, that cannot possibly have any relevance at all to the faith and doctrine of Global Warming!

SOURCE 

*********************************

Anglosphere governance is the Gold Standard

MARTIN HUTCHINSON

Assuming Britain finally manages to edge its way out of the EU, it will look for other affiliations. The obvious one is with the core Anglosphere of the United States, Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. At first sight, this looks like a model driven by mere nostalgia. Not so: the governance of the Anglosphere is the best in the world, in terms of assuring the happiness and prosperity of its citizens. Thus, a loosely associated Anglosphere can serve as a global model.

The concept of global association of the Anglosphere countries was first postulated by James C. Bennett in his 2004 book “The Anglosphere Challenge.” At that time it appeared quixotic. Britain was locked into an ever closer European Union with countries clearly outside the Anglosphere, the United States was becoming increasingly ethnically diverse and moving away from its founding model, while Canada, Australia and New Zealand were surely too small and insignificant to be more than bit-players in the future world. Overall, the world was becoming increasingly globalist, economically and politically, so nation states seemed anachronisms as modern communications bound the world together in an ever-improving, increasingly democratic whole.

For both positive and negative reasons, the Anglosphere has become more real, and should be taken seriously. The seemingly inevitable process of democratic globalization has gone into reverse. The dream of global government came closer and was revealed to be an authoritarian nightmare. The EU has shown itself both economically feeble and increasingly reminiscent of the centrally planned economies of pre-1991 Eastern Europe. China, far from becoming more democratic as it became richer, has become more authoritarian and an increasing threat to the interests of its neighbors and the world.

On the other hand, the Anglosphere has become more real, not less. Canada and Australia have grown rapidly in population, so they are no longer mere appendages of the largest Anglosphere members, but weighty participants in their own right. The United States, having flirted with Wilsonian attempts to dominate the world and globalist attempts to immerse itself in supranational governance, has reasserted its independence and its unique national personality. Britain, much to everybody’s surprise, has voted to leave the European Union and, if it indeed emerges, can reclaim its place as a substantial mid-range world power with a unique policy approach. In a hostile and dangerous world, the Anglosphere countries will increasingly be drawn to work together, as they already do in intelligence collection through the Five Eyes system.

For several reasons, the Anglosphere countries represent a “Gold Standard” in global governance. Most important, all the Anglosphere countries except New Zealand operate “first past the post” (FPTP) electoral systems, in which the winner in each constituency needs only a plurality of votes. The United States also operates such a system on a state-by-state basis for its Presidential elections. New Zealand operated its electoral system on this basis until 1996, when it switched to a mixture of FPTP and proportional representation.

The effect of FPTP is to suppress the representation of minor parties, preventing the legislature from becoming fissiparous. Accordingly, nearly all governments in an FPTP system are formed through decisions of the electorate, and not by horse-trading between political groups after the election has ended.

Contrast this with proportional representation systems as used in most continental European countries. Here, there are several major parties, and governments are formed by negotiation between the parties to put together a majority after the election has ended. This has two effects. First, shifts in public opinion have almost no impact on the composition of governments; a group can have a very good election, increasing its representation substantially, and still be left out of government if other parties combine against it. Second, new parties with views outside the mainstream are often ostracized by traditional parties, with “grand coalitions” being formed to exclude them even when they gain a substantial percentage of the vote.

Thus, voters with policy priorities not represented among centrist governing parties are essentially disfranchised, leading to their further alienation. Apart from being undemocratic, this is highly dangerous; it was the principal mechanism by which the Nazi party took power in Germany in 1930-33. In FPTP countries, one or other of the main parties has every incentive to pick up an issue on which a substantial part of the electorate feels strongly and act upon it, as evidenced by the election of President Trump in 2016 on the issues of opposing heavy low-skill immigration and opposing globalization.

As countries grow larger (or amalgamate into larger units) the need for FPTP becomes greater. New Zealand, with a population of only 4.8 million and only 120 members of its House of Representatives, can rest assured that its elected representatives will be sufficiently close to the electorate and to each other that political changes can be accommodated, even with a partly proportional system (the populist nationalist New Zealand First party holds the balance of power and has in the past allied with both major parties).

Conversely the European Union, with a population of 512 million in 28 countries, 751 MEPs and no effective union-wide political parties, is an extreme case of a proportional representation system in which the same centrist parties are always in power by coalition with each other, voters’ opinion is completely ignored, and MEPs elected by populist voters are determinedly shunned by the groups that run the parliament. It is thus a wholly undemocratic and very dangerous government system, leading in practice to rule by a self-selecting cadre of unelected anti-democratic bureaucrats. George Soros’ Open Society in Eastern Europe has attempted to reproduce the governance of the EU rather than of the Anglosphere; it is thus the enemy of true openness and democracy.

It is not surprising that Anglosphere political systems are more representative, less dangerous and more economically successful; they all descend from the systems put in place by the immensely successful generation of statesmen that contained William Pitt the younger, the 2nd Earl of Liverpool and the U.S. Founding Fathers. That generation of statesmen were repelled by the violence and irrationality of the French Revolution, so established systems in their own countries that allowed the maximum freedom while discouraging violent upheaval. Through their intelligent, benign governance, they also gave full rein to the emerging forces of industrialization that were in the long run to enrich their people beyond all imagination.

Even before 1789, the British and U.S. systems had shown themselves more flexible than that of France, for example. In the late 17th century, both Britain and France were believers in Thomas Mun’s theory that successful statesmen try to accumulate “treasure” by exporting more than they import. However, the French application of this principle, by Jean-Baptiste Colbert, involved import substitution, making the French economy uncompetitive, while the British version involved colonization and developing addictive export crops of sugar and tobacco, which could be taxed to produce revenue. Then in the years to 1720 France followed the Keynesian madman John Law into dumping its people’s savings into notes of a bankrupt bank, while the British restricted themselves to stock market speculation, a less damaging activity when it went wrong.

Outside Europe, there have been a few examples of fine governance that did not follow European models. Song dynasty China, for example, was undoubtedly the world’s best run society of the 11th and 12th Centuries, with a mandarinate selected on merit through open examinations. While that society did not lend itself to entrepreneurship or technological innovation, it was by far the most satisfactory home for ordinary people before the Renaissance, including Greece and Rome. Alas, it succumbed to Mongol conquest, and subsequent iterations of Chinese governance have been greatly inferior, more tyrannical and even less capable of dealing with innovation. China’s current regime, while economically fairly successful (though nowhere near as successful as it claims) is hopelessly repressive and a major threat both to its people’s liberty and that of its neighbors.

Even Anglosphere countries have seen their political systems degraded since their apogee in 1800-25. The German invention of socialism was avoided in the United States (until now) but badly affected the other Anglosphere countries, making their economies far more sluggish than they needed to be, and working against the small government with light, transparent regulation that epitomizes the Anglosphere tradition. In the United States, Democrats, Whigs, Republicans and Progressives replaced the wholly admirable Federalists. In Britain, the Whigs forced through their gerrymandering 1832 Reform Act after which the Tories, heirs to the finest traditions of government, engaged in pre-emptive surrender to the left for the next 150 years, until Margaret Thatcher brought at least a temporary halt to the decline.

Thus, the traditions of Anglosphere government are now not so clearly superior as they might be. Nevertheless, non-Anglosphere countries such as India that have adopted an Anglosphere political structure have seen some success in recent years as they have developed two viable political parties that can alternate in power and around which political forces can gather. It is however still unclear whether this healthy political structure can overcome India’s “permit raj” bureaucracy that is EU-like in its density and opacity. Counterexamples like Argentina, with one dominant party of the left and perpetual economic decline, will also encourage their neighbors to move in an Anglospheric direction.

Now Brexit offers Britain an opportunity to work with other countries of similar political traditions. Federation is not an option — Britain has seen enough of the disadvantages of that in the last 46 years and will not want to repeat them. But a loose trade and political backscratching agreement, which allows each of the parties to gain benefits from the capabilities of the others, is an attractive way forward. The eventual structure will not be an Empire, but if carefully designed it can gain for all parties concerned many of the advantages and few of the disadvantages of that much-maligned entity.

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  (Personal).  My annual picture page is here

**************************

Belief in magic thrives in the modern world

"California," argues Victor Davis Hanson, is "becoming pre-modern" despite ballooning government solutions. Like fictional pre-modern societies, it is becoming a two-tier society; a landscape of fantastical castles amid a sea of peasants. It is as if the technologically sophisticated components of the Golden State were creating its shadow of poor, homeless, drug-addicted and unskilled populations.

Huge global wealth in high-tech, finance, trade and academia poured into the coastal corridor, creating a new nobility with unprecedented riches. Unfortunately, the new aristocracy adopted mindsets antithetical to the general welfare of Californians living outside their coastal enclaves. The nobodies have struggled to buy high-priced , pay exorbitant power bills and deal with shoddy infrastructure -- all of which resulted from the policies of the distant somebodies.

Yet in some respects, not only California but the whole global world is morphing into a similar two-tier arrangement. This may be driven by something called knowledge inequality. The processes by which a society produced its goods and governed itself were once common knowledge to a large percentage of the population. But they are not now.

Relative technological simplicity and cultural homogeneity made knowledge equality easier. This, in turn, facilitated rational governance. At the time of the American Revolution, the knowledge of what was possible and affordable was within the grasp even of a farmer or workman. However today -- and California may be an extreme example -- society is reliant on processes only a tiny few understand. Under these circumstances public policy and even economics become recondite.

Annie Lowrey of The Atlantic writes that "California is becoming unlivable" and suggests solving the wildfire/electricity outage problem by banning development. "One solution ... is to build more dense housing in urban areas ... California isn’t doing enough to discourage building in fire-prone areas." Yet regulation is what caused the problem in the first place.

The bulk of wildfire destruction in California happens in the Wildlife Urban Interface (WUI) ... Although much of the WUI is naturally vulnerable to fire, human behavior is primarily to blame for the destruction. People start more than nine in 10 fires ... If building in the WUI is so dangerous, why do it? In part because building new housing is so very difficult in many urban regions in California, due to opposition from existing homeowners and strict building codes.

Is California Becoming Premodern?

Knowledge inequality makes "magical" solutions inevitable because an ever-smaller fraction of the public know how things work or are paid for. Healthcare woes? Medicare for All. Housing crisis? Make affordable housing a "right." Students choking under loans? Write it off. Graduates without literacy or numeracy? Teach Woke Math.

Fix the wildfires by tightly regulating development sounds like a solution. Following Arthur C. Clarke's famous adage that "any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic," many things are now solved by linguistic legerdemain. Ever since, Apollo politicians have been invoking associative magic as political spells:

"Nothing is impossible in this age of miracles. If we can put a man on the Moon, we surely are capable of seeing that our temporary surplus agricultural products are placed in many hungry stomachs of the world.” ...

Nixon’s Democratic opponent, Vice President Hubert Humphrey, used the phrase in his standard stump speech: “If we can put a man on the Moon, certainly we can afford to put man on his feet on Earth.”

Sending a spacecraft to the lunar surface and solving homelessness might be different problems, but with a few similes and metaphors, they can be "magically" connected and thus solved. Associative magic is especially strong in Bernie Sanders, who uses it to solve housing. "This is the richest country in the history of the world. No one in America should be homeless." With it, he can set salaries. "In the richest country in the world, our teachers should be the best-paid, not among the worst-paid." The same magic can pay for healthcare: "In the richest country in the world, it is obscene that millions of people are pushed into poverty and insolvency because they had the bad luck of getting sick and needing to see a doctor."

There's no objection to magic because many people, especially in or from the Third World, are surrounded by found marvels like cell phones, machine learning, GPS, CRISPR therapies, etc. They are used to things that simply work -- though none but the sages know how. Immigrants can be forgiven for thinking, as they wander in their misery through the technological wonders of California, why the magi have simply not waved their wands and created the same level of comfort for them. In a world of magic, what's one more spell, because that's all it takes, right? It must be because -- and the politicians never tire of telling them -- the wizards are selfish and holding back.

The difference between science and magic, noted Chaz Orzell, is that in the world of sorcery some people are born with amazing powers. Wealth does not come from the application of truths external to humanity but rather from birth powers, celebrity, or beauty.

The primary distinction between these magic systems and science is that magic relies on inborn talent in a way that science doesn't-- science and the products thereof will work for anyone, but only certain special people are able to do magic ... magic ... is fundamentally not amenable to scientific investigation-- something not bound by easily discoverable rules.

In such a world the solution to every problem is redistribution. To effect this political parties ceaselessly put up magical people as candidates whose powers derive from certain associative properties. Nobody runs anymore on the strength of competence but because they are gay, lesbian, disabled, a person of color, or imbued with some other property. Only with this talisman can they approach the tower of capitalism to demand more of who abides within.

In 1926 the French sociologist Lucien Levy-Bruhl wrote: "The primitive mind does not differentiate the supernatural from reality, but rather uses 'mystical participation' to manipulate the world. According to Levy-Bruhl, moreover, the primitive mind doesn't address contradictions." Except for the wizards we are, most of us, primitives now.

In an ironic sort of way, the more technologically advanced a society becomes the more medieval and superstitious its governance can become. Then we will truly become pre-modern, supplanting nuclear power plants with windmills and electricity with candles. Perhaps the biggest problem of the 21st century will not be income, but knowledge inequality.

SOURCE 

******************************

California’s Disastrous State Illustrates Limits of Progressivism

Victor Davis Hanson

More than 2 million Californians recently were left without power after the state’s largest utility, Pacific Gas and Electric—which filed for bankruptcy earlier this year—preemptively shut down transmission lines in fear that they might spark fires during periods of high autumn winds.

Consumers blame the state for not cleaning up dead trees and brush, along with the utility companies for not updating their ossified equipment. The power companies in turn fault the state for so overregulating utilities that they had no resources to modernize their grids.

Californians know that having tens of thousands of homeless in their major cities is untenable. In some places, municipal sidewalks have become open sewers of garbage, used needles, rodents, and infectious diseases.

Yet no one dares question progressive orthodoxy by enforcing drug and vagrancy laws, moving the homeless out of cities to suburban or rural facilities, or increasing the number of mental hospitals.

Taxpayers in California, whose basket of sales, gasoline, and income taxes is the highest in the nation, quietly seethe while immobile on antiquated freeways that are crowded, dangerous, and under nonstop makeshift repair.

Gas prices of $4 to $5 a gallon—the result of high taxes, hyper-regulation, and green mandates—add insult to the injury of stalled commuters. Gas tax increases ostensibly intended to fund freeway expansion and repair continue to be diverted to the state’s failing high-speed rail project.

Residents shrug that the state’s public schools are among the weakest in the nation, often ranking in the bottom quadrant in standardized test scores. Elites publicly oppose charter schools, but often put their own kids in private academies.

Californians know that to venture into a typical municipal emergency room is to descend into a modern Dante’s Inferno. Medical facilities are overcrowded. They can be as unpleasant as they are bankrupting to the vanishing middle class that must face exorbitant charges to bring in an injured or sick child.

No one would dare to connect the crumbling infrastructure, poor schools, and failing public health care with the non-enforcement of immigration laws, which has led to a massive influx of undocumented immigrants from the poorest regions of the world, who often arrive without fluency in English or a high school education.

Stores are occasionally hit by swarming looters. Such Wild West criminals know how to keep their thefts under $950, ensuring that such “misdemeanors” do not warrant police attention. California’s permissive laws have decriminalized thefts and break-ins. The result is that San Francisco now has the highest property crime rate per capita in the nation.

Has California become premodern?

Millions of fed-up middle-class taxpayers have fled the state. Their presence as a stabilizing influence is sorely missed. About one-third of the nation’s welfare recipients live in California. Millions of poor newcomers require enormously expensive state health, housing, education, legal, and law enforcement services.

California is now a one-party state. Democrats have supermajorities in both houses of the Legislature. Only seven of the state’s 53 congressional seats are held by Republicans. The result is that there is no credible check on a mostly coastal majority.

Huge global wealth in high-tech, finance, trade, and academia poured into the coastal corridor, creating a new nobility with unprecedented riches. Unfortunately, the new aristocracy adopted mindsets antithetical to the general welfare of Californians living outside their coastal enclaves.

The nobodies have struggled to buy high-priced gas, pay exorbitant power bills, and deal with shoddy infrastructure—all of which resulted from the policies of the distant somebodies.

California’s three most powerful politicians—House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Sen. Dianne Feinstein, and Gov. Gavin Newsom—are all multimillionaires. Their lives, homes, and privileges bear no resemblance to those of other Californians living with the consequences of their misguided policies and agendas.

The state’s elite took revolving-door entries and exits for granted. They assumed that California was so naturally rich, beautiful, and well endowed that there would always be thousands of newcomers who would queue up for the weather, the shore, the mountains, and the hip culture.

Yet California is nearing the logical limits of progressive adventurism in policy and politics.

Residents carefully plan long highway trips as if they were ancient explorers charting dangerous routes. Tourists warily enter downtown Los Angeles or San Francisco as if visiting a politically unstable nation.

Insatiable state tax collectors and agencies are viewed by the public as if they were corrupt officials of Third World countries seeking bribes. Californians flip their switches unsure of whether the lights will go on. Many are careful about what they say, terrified of progressive thought police who seem more worried about critics than criminals.

Our resolute ancestors took a century to turn a wilderness into California. Our irresolute generation in just a decade or two has been turning California into a wilderness.

SOURCE 

************************************

U.S. economic growth continues, recession pundits proven wrong again

Americans for Limited Government President Rick Manning today issued the following statement reacting to the latest GDP numbers from the Bureau of Economic Analysis showing a 1.9 percent inflation-adjusted increase in economic growth in the third quarter of 2019:

“The Recessionistas have been proven wrong yet again as the economy continues to sustainably grow in the third quarter by 1.9 percent. While this growth rate is not spectacular, it’s not horrible either and in view of the perpetually wrong economic pundits’ gloom and doom prognostications, it should be viewed as a repudiation of those who attempted to talk down the Trump economy.

“Fewer Americans are unemployed right now than at any time since 2000, and the unemployment rate is lower than at any time in the past 50 years. Americans are working, wages are on the rise, and the only people unhappy are the Never Trumpers and those with Trump derangement syndrome who are perpetually mad.”

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  (Personal).  My annual picture page is here

**************************

Media-Democrat Tantrum a Fear Response

In 1776, 56 men signed the Declaration of Independence, knowing that their actions would be viewed as treason by the prevailing power.

Fast-forward a mere 240 years. A group of corrupt and craven people gathered in secret to once again consider radical actions.  But, unlike the Declaration's signers, they were the prevailing power and intended to remain so, fully confident in their complete control of government, the media, the Judiciary, academia, entertainment, and nearly every form of cultural power.

They feared no consequences.  It was simply inconceivable to them that with so many hands on the scales, they could possibly lose an election.

And then they did.  All of their treasonous misdeeds that were supposed to not only be covered up, but rewarded by the queen of corruption were suddenly a real vulnerability.  They weren't just shattered by the election loss.  They were genuinely afraid.

But they weren't defenseless.  They had lost the presidency and did not control Congress, but they still controlled the other pillars of power.  So they doubled down on lawlessness and planned a coup under the most ridiculous pretenses, knowing that an administration under siege would be much less likely to uncover and expose their villainy.

I believe that the active intervention of Admiral Mike Rogers, the then-director of the National Security Agency, may have prevented its success.

Their efforts certainly delayed any day of reckoning, and the jury is still out on whether that reckoning can still come in this country where the Left has such control of the bureaucracy and media.

But President Donald Trump is a rare politician.  Despite all the churn and seditious efforts, he remained the happy warrior, never losing sight of the importance of uncovering the origins of the coup attempt.  And, in the appointment of William Barr as attorney general, he finally had the right guy, a kindred spirit with the moral courage to ignore the noise and see it through.

That brings us to today. The media-Democrat establishment is increasingly reacting like a cornered feral beast.

The Schiff show secret impeachment hearings, the Nancy Pelosi decision to move forward on impeachment procedures, the media meltdown over President Trump's success in sending Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi to justice, and the increasing comical chorus of calls for William Barr to recuse himself can all be understood as a collective Democrat fear response.

They are pushing their poker chips to the center of the table in a last desperate attempt to discredit the real investigation that is proceeding methodically and relentlessly forward: U.S. attorney John Durham's now criminal probe into alleged misconduct at the Justice Department.  The leftist noise is going to only get louder.

It is no coincidence that after this news came out, Adam Schiff amped up his lies, phones in every defense attorney office in Washington lit up like a Christmas tree, and the media screeds became even more of a parody.

It is within this environment that the Washington Post ran one of the most appalling headlines of all time.  How dare President Trump ruthlessly kill an austere religious scholar, and one with such beautiful wire-rimmed glasses?

The full media are in one of the craziest spin cycles on record as they desperately try to drown out any favorable news for the president.  Every shred of positive news damages their desperate discrediting effort.

This is why the media quickly pivoted to gleefully reporting that government bureaucrats and D.C. elitists booed President Trump at the Washington Nationals baseball game shortly after he oversaw the elimination of the world's most wanted terrorist.

Sometimes, it really does feel as if Trump is playing 4-D chess — or perhaps a more apt description would be that his opponents are playing hangman against themselves.

He could not have better scripted a display of out-of-touch Washington anti-American elitism.  A person is known even more by his enemies than by his friends, and Trump has made all the right ones.

It is also within this environment that Nancy Pelosi is moving forward on impeachment procedures.  This is not a step she wanted to take.  Her preference was to bleed this impeachment façade out behind closed doors, where Democrats could slowly drip out hand-selected soundbites between now and the 2020 election.  Pelosi did not want to actually vote on impeachment, when her more vulnerable members would need to go on record.  Even worse, she does not want to send this to the Senate, where she knows there are not the twenty Pierre Delectos she would need.  Democrats would lose control of the narrative.

But the secret tribunal effort is already losing steam, thanks to the Republicans successfully drawing attention to what is going on.

With the I.G. report and investigations looming over their heads like a guillotine blade, Pelosi took the plunge.

The media-Democrat establishment has a limited window to keep public interest in their own false investigation, which they are trying to time to do the most damage to the credibility of the real investigation unfolding.

If Republicans had tried to hold a secret partisan trial of President Barack Obama, swooning reporters would have chained themselves in front of the door and screamed about democracy dying in darkness in their most self-righteous Tom Hanks voices.  Republican villainy would have been the only story on the news until they backed down in shame.

Media bias comes in many forms, but one of the most effective forms is in their ability to frame stories.  There is an entire cottage industry in "Republicans pounce" stories to frame even terrible Democrat news as somehow harmful to Republicans.  But to frame this story the way the media want to frame it, they needed help.

This is why we now have dueling investigations, one a complete façade and the other deadly serious.  There is no secret in how these will be covered by the media.  The fraud impeachment circus will be treated with full gravity and seriousness, while what might be the most important investigation in U.S. history will be treated as political payback.

But this is an investigation that is essential to restoring faith in the republic.  There is so much we already know.  We know that a decorated Soldier, Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, was set up in an obscene miscarriage of justice by corrupt and evil FBI agents.  We know that the appointed leadership of nearly every intelligence agency illegally spied on and attempted to remove a duly elected president.

The inconvenient fact for the Left is that a secret group of plotters at the highest level of government, perhaps including the then-president himself, committed some of the most outrageous crimes in U.S. history that threatened to forever destroy constitutional governance.

That decision set in motion the news and drama that we hear today.  And every single media-Democrat resource is being thrown into the fight to prevent and discredit the justice they fear is coming ever closer.

SOURCE 

*************************************

Poll: Most Americans Oppose Reparations for Slavery

Few Americans are in favor of giving reparations to descendants of enslaved black people in the United States, a poll shows, even as the idea has gained momentum among Democratic presidential contenders.

Only 29% of Americans say the government should pay cash reparations, according to the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll.

But the poll reveals a large divide between Americans of different racial and ethnic backgrounds.

Most black Americans, 74%, favor reparations, compared with 15% of white Americans. Among Hispanics, 44% favor reparations.

Interestingly, the percentage of whites who support the U.S. government apologizing for slavery is just 35 percent. 77 percent of blacks support an apology.

Younger people are far more likely to support an apology or reparations. 45 percent of those 18-29 think we should pay the descendants of slaves while 60 percent feel the government should apologize.

Those kids are the children of parents who mostly oppose reparations. The radicalization of America's children by schools is now complete. The issue of reparations was a radical, fringe idea 15 years ago. It has been brought into the mainstream by a far-left school curriculum that stresses "social justice" instead of critical thinking.

If they had learned anything about critical thinking, they'd know that the is impossible to quantify and a nightmare to administer. Who gets what? Do African immigrants that have been in the U.S. for a few years get any? And how "black" do you have to be. One quarter? One eighth?

And then there's the question of "justice." Former Clinton aide Stuart Eizanstat, who negotiated a Holocaust settlement, thinks reparations are a bad idea.

But reparations in the form of cash payments for descendants of slaves are not the way to right this grievous wrong. I write this having spent decades of my life negotiating more than $17 billion in reparations for Holocaust survivors. What I learned as chief negotiator for both the U.S. government, across several presidential administrations, and for the Jewish Claims Conference, a group representing Holocaust survivors in compensation negotiations with the post-war German government, is that reparations are complicated, contentious and messy, and work best when the crime was recent and the direct victims are still alive.

Based on my experience, I believe that trying to repay descendants of slaves could end up causing more problems than reparations would seek to solve, and that there are better ways to end racial disparities.

It is likely that reparations will become an important issue in the coming presidential elections as candidates look to get support of black voters by promising the undeliverable. But at bottom, reparations are a massive transfer of wealth, confiscated from the innocent that, as Eizenstat suggests, would cause more problems than they would solve.

SOURCE 

************************************

Demonizing Police & Trump's Crime Commission

Over the weekend, Biden and Sanders intentionally stoked racial discord and hatred of the police.

Over the weekend, a number of presidential candidates attended the Second Step Presidential Justice Forum at Benedict College, a historically black college in South Carolina.

Former Vice President Joe Biden was asked by one of the attendees, “If I were your daughter, what advice would you give me the next time I am stopped by the police?” Biden responded, “If you were my daughter, you’d be a Caucasian girl and you wouldn’t be pulled over.”

Translation: The police are discriminating against young black people, and they never pull over young white people for speeding, drunk driving, or any other issues.

Not to be outdone, Sen. Bernie Sanders took it to whole other level with this response to the same question: “I would respect what [the police] are doing so that you don’t get shot in the back of the head.”

This is now the difference between a moderate and a radical in the Democrat Party. Both Biden and Sanders are intentionally stoking racial discord and hatred of the police. Biden does it by suggesting that police are discriminating against blacks, while Sanders does it by suggesting that cops are deliberately executing blacks.

Biden and Sanders should be ashamed of themselves. Their disgusting comments come at a time when there is a surge in police suicides.

Again, I must ask independents, reasonable Democrats, and my Never-Trump friends: Exactly how are either of these men and today’s Democrat Party supposed to bring America together?

While leading Democrats were demonizing the police and stoking racial divisions, President Trump on Monday addressed the International Association of Chiefs of Police in Chicago. The president told his audience:

You don’t hear it enough: You do an incredible job … and the people of this country love you… Every day of my presidency, I will be your greatest and most loyal champion.

The president also announced that he was issuing an executive order establishing a commission to examine “some of the systemic challenges that burden law enforcement.” It is the first serious review of the criminal justice system in decades.

Among the many issues the commission will study, I was pleased to see this one: “The need to promote public respect for the law and law enforcement officers.” Perhaps Colin Kaepernick, Joe Biden, and Bernie Sanders will learn something!

What a striking contrast! Democrats are fanning the flames of racial tension while the president is trying to come up with ideas to make minority communities safer.

SOURCE 

********************************



A wardog indeed

********************************

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

**************************

Conservative caution

The most distinctive thing about the Left/Right clash in the world today is liberty-loving conservatives versus an authoritarian Left.

Authoritarianism goes to the heart of Leftism.  What Leftists believe and advocate is constantly changing but a belief that they have a right to tell others what to do never changes. They want to make us do things we do not want to do and stop us doing things we would normally do.  The extreme authoritarians of C20 (Stalin, Hitler, Mao) were all extreme socialists and socialists elsewhere are constrained only by what they can get away with. To get their jollies, socialists in a democracy have to invent stories that will convince a large slice of the population that restricting their liberty will do some good. Global warming is a great story of that kind, hence its total resistance to disproof. The black heart of Leftism is a furious hunger for power and domination over other people but authoritarianism is the everyday manifestation of that

So what is the heart of conservatism?  Is it a love of liberty?  Any libertarian will dispute that.  Unlike libertarians, conservatives do permit some infringements on individual liberty -- with taxation being the prime example of that. Taxation is unavoidably authoritarian.  It is ultimately enforced on unwilling people by police and the courts.  So why do conservatives resist the authoritarian initiatives of the Left?  What makes the difference between a good law and a bad law to conservatives?  The difference is obviously one of degree but what is the criterion that guides what is acceptable and what is not?

Throughout history, conservatives have always been seen as more cautious and that is what I see as the deep level of conservatism.  It is caution that limits what laws will be accepted and which will not be.  Leftist laws are deliberately aimed at being destructive in some way -- despite their alleged benefits.  The vast costs imposed by the global warming myth are an example of such destruction.  And it generally takes little for thinking people to foresee the destructive impact of Leftist laws.  So cautious conservatives reject such laws.  Conservative caution leads conservatives to resist initiatives that will destroy their society in various ways. Conservative caution means that conservatives value stability in their world. Stability is safety. If something must be changed, there has to be good evidence that it will be beneficial on the whole.

So we come to an objection to that account.  A reader has written to say that caution is an insufficient explanation for what conservatives do and value.  His email follows. It was written in response to my claim that a cautious disposition was more basic than the Heritage list of conservative principles:

1) "The Heritage Foundation list of of conservative principles would be met with broad agreement by the people who founded the American Republic, yet they were violent revolutionaries. They had radical ideas, not the least of which was that ordinary people should be free to conduct their lives as they saw fit. The vast majority of mankind for the vast majority of human history lived under significant constraints by church and state and most people thought that is the way it should be.

2). In my opinion because America was founded on limited government, private property, rule of law and individual freedom, conservatives often appear seeking to preserve the status quo or go back in time. Yet if America started as an unlimited monarchy I think many people who count themselves as conservatives would be liberals (in the old sense, arguing for more individual liberty) even though that would be disrupting the way things were and are.

3). Voltaire would find a lot to agree with in the list of conservative principles and he was a great disrupter.  The conservative you describe seems more to me like Confucius who lived in a time of social decline and sought to preserve past glories and stability no matter the political content."

My Reply:

1).  I have long maintained something that is anathema to most American conservatives.  I won't go over the whole grounds for it here but it seems clear to me that the war of independence was in most ways a typically Leftist revolution.  You really just have to read the Declaration of Independence to see that.  It starts out with the flowery language that most people know but the body is a series of complaints that the king has inhibited the powers of the colonial legislators. He has limited what they can enact and has on occasions overruled them.

The revolutionaries wanted the King's powers for themselves and they had to tell a good story to get that. The colonial grandees had to tell a story good enough to get ordinary Americans to take up arms on their behalf.  They did that by convincing people that they would give the ordinary man more rights than the King did.  Not everyone was convinced.  New York, for instance, was almost wholly against the revolutionaries.  But the  revolutionary promises were lapped up by enough people to win the day.  Lenin, Hitler and Mao also came to power via great promises to their people

The difference between the American revolutionaries and the European socialists was that the Americans were led by grandees who already had their own well-established parliaments and legal systems so, rather than wanting to upend everything, they just wanted to remove constraints on their existing powers and authority. Which they did. So there is a sense in which the American revolution was a conservative revolution -- in that it reinforced the existing American power structure rather than overturning it.  There was substantial stability in the arrangements before and after the war.

The revolutionaries did in fact claim that their revolution was a conservative one -- in that the list of rights and privileges that they offered did have substantial continuity with traditional English liberties as understood by Burke and others.  They claimed that the King was not respecting those liberties and they, the revolutionaries, were restoring those liberties

And note that the Mayflower founders were communists.  They based their communism on religion rather than politics but they were such fanatical communists that a third of them had to starve before they reverted to traditional ways. So the thinking they left to their successors was heavily laden with Leftist suspicion of the status quo and belief in their own righteousness.

So it is no surprise that the American revolutionaries were typical Leftists in many ways.  That the high-flown radical  principles that brought them to power have since become widely admired does not detract from their origin as war propaganda.

So my reply to point 1 is to agree that the revolutionaries were neither cautious nor conservative.  The conservatives, mostly from New York, were defeated in that war.

2).  The second point above is undoubtedly correct.  Conservatives have never felt unable to resist restrictions on their liberty.  Having other people in power over you is dangerous and it is perfectly cautious to want to reduce dangers.

3). It flows from point 2 that conservatism is not necessarily passive.  It can be active and strong in defence of its liberties.  And indeed it needs to be.  Leftist energies never seem to tire so conservatives have to act constantly to resist that.  Stability needs to be continually fought for.

Readers who are interested in continuing the discussion about  the Leftist influence throughout American history will find a serial discussion of that here, here and here, including some substantial disagreements with me.

**************************************

Polls Suggest Impeachment Will Help Trump Reelection in Swing States

Democrats took a tremendous gamble by formally voting for an impeachment inquiry into President Donald Trump on Thursday. While polls suggest Americans support the inquiry, the general public is divided on whether or not Trump should be impeached and removed from office. Those in key swing states are more likely to oppose impeachment and removal, suggesting that the impeachment battle may help Trump's reelection in 2020.

"We’ve known for a long time that everybody in California and New York want Trump to be impeached, they’ve wanted that since the day he came into office," an anonymous Trump campaign official told The Hill. "But in these states where the election is really going to be fought, we’re seeing that voters oppose impeachment, and there’s an intensity to that opposition."

Indeed, a New York Times/Siena College poll released Wednesday showed that voters in six key swing states oppose impeaching and removing President Trump, 52 percent to 44 percent.

Most voters in Arizona (52 percent to 45 percent), Florida (53 percent to 42 percent), Michigan (51 percent to 42 percent), North Carolina (53 percent to 43 percent), Pennsylvania (52 percent to 45 percent), and Wisconsin (51 percent to 45 percent) say they oppose Congress's potential removal of Trump from office.

Most voters in those states also support the impeachment inquiry, however — though by smaller margins.

Other polling found that even the inquiry is unpopular in some swing states. Last week, a Marquette University Law School survey of Wisconsin found 49 percent of voters oppose the inquiry while 46 percent support it. Most voters (51 percent) also opposed removing Trump from office, while 44 percent supported it. Independents proved colder to impeachment and to the inquiry, with only 33 percent supporting Trump's removal and 35 percent supporting the Congressional investigation.

Trump won Wisconsin by a mere 23,000 votes — out of roughly 3 million. Late-breaking undecided voters went his way on Election Day.

In New Hampshire, a state Hillary Clinton won by fewer than 3,000 votes — out of roughly 700,000 — impeachment is similarly unpopular. Most voters oppose removing Trump (51 percent to 42 percent), according to a CNN-University of New Hampshire poll.

Respondents also oppose impeachment and removal in Arizona, a state Trump won by 3.6 percent but which Democrats have targeted for pick-up. Fifty percent of Arizona residents oppose "impeaching Donald Trump," while 44 percent support it, according to a recent Emerson College poll.

Impeachment is a two-step process, and no president in U.S. history has been impeached and removed by Congress. The House of Representatives opens the process, with a bare majority of representatives required to impeach a president, opening the case up for a trial in the U.S. Senate. Only the Senate can remove the president, and that requires a two-thirds majority — extremely unlikely with the current Republican majority.

Polling on the issue can center on three separate issues: whether the House should open the impeachment inquiry; whether the House should vote to impeach Trump; and whether the Senate should vote to remove him.

Sadly, due to America's stark partisan divide on the president, many Democrats and liberals have long wanted to remove Trump and were merely seeking an excuse to do so.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi was correct when she said, "Impeachment is a very serious matter. If it happens it has to be a bipartisan initiative." On Thursday, not a single Republican voted for the impeachment inquiry, while two Democrats voted against it.

As The New York Times's Nate Cohn reported, different polls have come to different conclusions about the nationwide sentiment on removing Trump from office. Trump criticized a Fox News poll showing 51 percent supporting removal and only 43 percent opposing it, while a Wall Street Journal survey found 49 percent opposed to removal and 43 percent supporting it.

Cohn drew attention to the group of swing-state voters who support the inquiry but oppose removing Trump. This 7 percent of voters skew younger (33 percent are 18 to 34) and independent (nearly half). A majority of them (51 percent) said Trump's conduct is typical of most politicians — and indeed, Senate Democrats also pressured Ukraine to investigate their political opponent, Trump himself. Cohn noted that these voters "hold a jaded view of politics that would tend to minimize the seriousness of the allegations against him."

Because Democrats have called for Trump's impeachment since shortly after his inauguration, a jaded view of this latest push is warranted.

While Trump may be tainted with scandal if the House votes to impeach him, he will also be able to decry the blatantly partisan nature of the push to remove him from office. The Senate is extremely unlikely to remove him, and the impeachment charade may actually help the president in the swing states he needs to win for reelection.

This impeachment battle could backfire on the Democrats, badly.

SOURCE 

**************************************

IN BRIEF

BOLTON SUMMONED: Former national security advisor John Bolton summoned to testify in House impeachment inquiry (Associated Press)

"WEAPONIZED IMPEACHMENT": Nancy Pelosi targeted in ethics complaint filed by 40 conservative groups (Fox News)

MYSTERY SOLVED: "The co-chairman of a Turkish-American advocacy group with close ties to Ankara contributed $1,500 last month to the campaign for Rep. Ilhan Omar, who is under fire this week over votes she cast supporting Turkish government positions." (The Daily Caller)

NO MORE ADS: Twitter bans political ads ahead of 2020 election (Associated Press)

MIND-BOGGLING: Police blew up an innocent man's house in search of an armed shoplifter. Too bad, court rules. (The Washington Post)

JOB GROWTH PREVAILS: October job creation comes in at 128,000, easily topping estimates even with GM auto strike (CNBC)

COUNTERING THE NARRATIVE: Latest impeachment witness contradicts Alexander Vindman's claim that key details were left out of Ukraine call transcript (National Review)

"I HAVE BEEN TREATED VERY BADLY": Trump makes Florida his primary residence, but says New York will "have a special place in my heart" (Fox News)

PLAYING WITH FIRE: Trump admin again gives Iran green light to conduct sensitive nuclear work (The Washington Free Beacon)

NUCLEAR OVERTURES: North Korea launches missile test, prompting escalation fears (U.S. News & World Report)

AID BLOCKED: U.S. withholding $105 million in security aid for Lebanon (Reuters)

POLICY: States can use funny math on Medicaid expansion economic claims (The Heartland Institute)

BETO BEATEN:  "Former Texas congressman Beto O’Rourke has announced he is ending his presidential campaign. “Though it is difficult to accept, it is clear to me now that this campaign does not have the means to move forward successfully,” O’Rourke wrote (Medium)

********************************

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

**************************

The J Street Democrats

Ben Shapiro
 
This week, four of the top candidates for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination — Pete Buttigieg, Amy Klobuchar, Julian Castro and Bernie Sanders — gathered at the J Street Conference to explain why the United States ought to pressure the state of Israel to make concessions to terrorists, why the Obama administration was correct to appease the Iranian regime and why American Jews ought to value the opinions of Bernie Sanders over those of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on the future of Jewish safety. Two other top Democrats — Elizabeth Warren and Joe Biden — sent video messages in support of the group.

By contrast, when the American Israel Public Affairs Committee held its annual conference in March, not a single Democratic presidential candidate showed up. The Democrats are, by and large, simply too ashamed to stand with an actual pro-Israel group, although prominent congressional leaders still show up to mouth nostrums about bipartisan support for Israel.

But the heart of the Democratic Party has moved against Israel. That’s because Israel is economically successful, while its enemies are not; Israel is liberal, while its enemies are not; Israel is the tip of the spear of Western civilization in an area known for its tribalism and brutality. This means that according to the radical left, Israel is an exploitative country hell-bent on domination, despite its lack of territorial ambition — Israel has signed over large swaths of land won through military victory to geopolitical enemies, and offered much more repeatedly.

So the Democrats built up and gave credence to J Street, a Trojan horse group dedicated to undermining American support for Israel and justifying left-wing hatred of the Jewish state. J Street was founded by Clinton operative Jeremy Ben-Ami and Israeli far-left political figure Daniel Levy in late 2007. One of its chief sources of funding — a source obscured in the early years by its founders — was anti-Israel radical George Soros.

The media quickly began treating J Street as a legitimate representative of mainstream Jewish opinion on Israel, and so did Democrats, particularly in the anti-Israel Obama administration: Rather than having to deal with those troublesome actually pro-Israel voices at AIPAC, it was easier to bring in a few ringers from J Street to pretend that advocating for negotiations with Hamas represented an acceptable opinion in the pro-Israel community.

And those sorts of positions routinely crop up at J Street. J Street repeatedly urged the Obama administration to abstain from anti-Israel resolutions at the United Nations. Proponents of the anti-Semitic Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement have found comfort at their events. J Street was an adamant backer of Barack Obama’s Iran deal when the pro-Israel community unanimously opposed it. J Street has refused to condemn a government deal between the Palestinian Authority and Hamas and has even undermined Israeli self-defense in conflicts with Hamas. On campus, J Street regularly hosts groups dedicated to smearing the Israel Defense Forces.

So it was no wonder that Bernie Sanders arrived at the J Street conference and quickly suggested aid to Israel be redirected to the Gaza Strip, run by Hamas, to the cheers of attendees. It was no surprise when Buttigieg suggested that the Iran deal correctly ignored Iran’s terrorist funding and ballistic missile testing, while also suggesting that America reconsider aid to Israel if Israel continues to build in disputed areas of Judea and Samaria. It was no shock when Julian Castro pledged to open an embassy in East Jerusalem for the Palestinians — despite the fact that no solution has been negotiated with regard to the final status of Jerusalem.

Leaders in the Democratic Party may maintain that their anti-Israel turn is due to Benjamin Netanyahu. Those who understand Israeli politics know better. There is wide consensus in Israel that no negotiation can be expected with Hamas, Islamic jihadis or the Palestinian Authority; those negotiations have ended in blood too many times. Absent a peace partner, there can be no peace. Democrats must know this. But they’d prefer to blind themselves to that knowledge — and use J Street to cover their tracks.

SOURCE 

************************************

More Laws Equal Less Justice

There are way too many laws on the books, making unsuspecting Americans into "criminals."

Most Americans are law-abiding citizens, or so they think. Yet they would be shocked to discover they are likely criminals, since the average American commits three felonies per day!

In their defense, the vast majority of these “criminals” have no idea they are breaking the law. How could they? When the federal government can’t even provide an accurate count of how many statutes and regulations carrying criminal penalties are on the books, how can the average American possibly know?

The current best estimate is that there are more than 300,000 laws and regulations carrying criminal penalties. Three. Hundred. Thousand. As Professor John Baker once said, “There is no one in the United States over the age of 18 who cannot be indicted for some federal crime. That is not an exaggeration.”

Thanks to Congress and its habit of passing laws with little or no requirement for mens rea (a consciousness of guilt, meaning the person knows that what they are doing is wrong), it is literally impossible for any American to know whether some action they take is violating the law.

This is wrong on many levels.

One, it creates anger and contempt for the law. James Madison warned of this in Federalist 62, declaring “It will be of little avail to the people that the laws are made by men of their own choice, if the laws be so voluminous that they cannot be read, or so incoherent that they cannot be understood; if they be repealed or revised before they are promulgated, or undergo such incessant changes that no man who knows what the law is today can guess what it will be to-morrow.”

Second, it is immoral to deprive a man of life, liberty, or property for an activity that he was not even aware was a crime. Yet it happens every single day in America.

For example, most Americans know (even if only from watching crime dramas) that bank deposits of $10,000 or more have to be reported to the IRS. This is supposed to be a tool to crack down on tax evasion, drug dealing, and money laundering. But did you know you can be fined and go to jail for making deposits of less than $10,000 as well?

Lyndon McLellan didn’t, and he paid the price … literally.

McLellan is the owner of L&M Convenience Mart, a small mom-and-pop convenience store in poor, rural North Carolina. The very nature of the business means most of his customers paid in cash for the gas, drinks, home-cooked food, cigarettes, and other goods they purchased. Each day he worked long hours to make a success of a business where long hours and low profit margins are the norm.

McLellan worked nearly every day since 2001, rarely taking a vacation, often running the register, sweeping floors, and cooking food from open to close. Every few days McLellan’s niece would deposit a few thousand dollars with his bank. After more than a dozen years of hard work, the IRS came in one day and seized his bank account, which amounted to just $107,702 — less than what many American families make in a single year.

The reason?

The IRS accused McLellan of “structuring” violations — intentionally making deposits of less than $10,000 in order to avoid federal reporting requirements. Lyndon pleaded his innocence, and pointed out that he had vendors to pay, which he could not do if his bank account was frozen. If he could not pay his vendors, then they would stop providing goods and his store would be forced to close. Even after his accountant meticulously matched receipts with deposits to show that the money was legitimate, the government dismissed the evidence.

Luckily, the Institute for Justice took on his case, and after several years McLellan prevailed in court. He was eventually able to get his money back — though the government initially tried to keep the money even after the charges were dismissed.

Sadly, this is just one of countless cases that keep our courtrooms and prisons packed, even when the “crime” is simply a transgression of a statute that as often as not makes no sense, prevents no crime, and protects no victim. Consider Barbara Horst, the Ohio grandmother charged with a felony for having 14 scrap tires in her truck, when the legal limit was 10.

Thanks to these miscarriages of justice, innocent Americans are becoming criminals faster than ever, even though violent crime and property crimes have been steadily dropping for years.

Though a rising number of prosecutors are pushing back on the criminalization of victimless crimes (or disproportionate punishment for minor offenses), it still leaves the average American at risk of prosecution for unwittingly committing a crime, the only hope of escape being a lucky draw of a reasonable prosecutor. The Institute for Justice does fantastic work, but they can only take on a handful of cases each year.

Our laws should be simple and easily understood by people of average intelligence. They should deprive citizens of liberty or property only as punishment and restitution for depriving others of the same. The more laws we have on the books, the less likely we are to see justice prevail, and the more likely we are to see the laws used by those in power to oppress the innocent.

So the next time you hear someone say, “There ought to be a law,” just remember — the next Lyndon McLellan or Barbara Horst could be you.

SOURCE 

************************************

NSC testimony reveals deep state arrogance

Americans for Limited Government President Rick Manning today issued the following statement in response to testimony by Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman that he was “uncomfortable” with President Donald Trump’s July 25 phone conversation with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky:

“Leaked testimony by Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman to the House Intelligence Committee is shocking in its revelation on three critical points. First and foremost, a career NSC employee somehow believes that his policy preferences supersede those of the elected President of the United States. This reveals the ongoing deep state battle where unelected bureaucrats resist the constitutional powers vested in the President with full belief that they have moral authority. One simple question to Vindman: Who the heck elected you?

The second troubling aspect of his testimony is that he clearly believes that the Democrats would engage in partisan retribution against the Ukraine government as a result of their help in getting to the bottom of the origins of the Russiagate scandal and any potential findings of corruption against former Vice President Joe Biden. Ironically, this is exactly what the Democrats falsely say they are impeaching Trump over, saying that exposing 2016 interference by Ukraine is in itself interference.

Third, as an officer in the U.S. military Vindman appears to be violating the military code of conduct that allows for disobedience of an unlawful order but does not allow testifying to the legislative branch in opposition to a presidential national security policy that he was uniquely privy to.

“It no wonder that the President of the United States cut out career foreign service and national security council personnel from decision-making related to Ukraine and presumably elsewhere in the world. And it begs the question as to what value any of these resister bureaucrats provide when the President cannot include them in the decision-making process due to their infidelity to their constitutional and legal duties. At this point, it is reasonable to question whether the entirety of the National Security Council should be required to submit their resignations and reapply for their jobs if they believe they can actually inform and in good faith implement the President’s policies.”

SOURCE 

***********************************

IN BRIEF

TEMPORARY HIATUS: DC Circuit halts disclosure of Mueller grand-jury materials to consider an emergency appeal (The Daily Caller)

SWAMP LEAKAGE: State Department launches investigation into "deep state" targeting Trump's top Iran official (The Washington Free Beacon)

SILENCE SPEAKS VOLUMES: House passes Armenian genocide measure — no thanks to Ilhan Omar (CNSNews.com)

HYPOCRISY: Elizabeth Warren pledges to crack down on school choice, despite sending her own son to elite private school (The Daily Caller)

WHAT COULD POSSIBLY GO WRONG? The NCAA will allow athletes to profit from their name, image, and likeness in a major shift for the organization (CNBC)

THE LAST STRAW: China dumped 27% more trash into the ocean in 2018 (New York Post)

MORE TO THE STORY? Forensic investigator: Jeffrey Epstein's autopsy more consistent with homicide (National Review)

BABY, IT'S WOKE OUTSIDE: John Legend and Kelly Clarkson remake "Baby, It's Cold Outside" after critics said it promoted date rape (CBS News)

POLICY: The needless trauma of active-shooter drills (National Review)

POLICY: Baghdadi is dead. But we're no closer to victory in the "forever war." (American Enterprise Institute)

HUMOR: Texas luring jobs away from California with promises of electricity (The Babylon Bee)

********************************

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 

**************************

New York Times Confirms: It's Trump Versus the Deep State

Even the Gray Lady admits the president is up against a powerful bureaucracy that wants him sunk

The New York Times on Thursday published a remarkable piece that essentially acknowledged the existence of an American “deep state” and its implacable hostility to Donald Trump. The Times writers (fully five on the byline: Peter Baker, Lara Jakes, Julian E. Barnes, Sharon LaFraniere, and Edward Wong) certainly don’t decry the existence of this deep state, as so many conservatives and Trump supporters do. Nor do they refrain from the kinds of value-charged digs and asides against Trump that have illuminated the paper’s consistent bias against the president from the beginning.

But they do portray the current impeachment drama as the likely denouement of a struggle between the outsider Trump and the insider administrative forces of government. In so doing, they implicitly give support to those who have argued that American foreign policy has become the almost exclusive domain of unelected bureaucrats impervious to the views of elected officials—even presidents—who may harbor outlooks different from their own.

This is a big deal because, even in today’s highly charged political environment, with a sitting president under constant guerrilla attack, few have been willing to acknowledge any such deep state phenomenon. When in the spring of 2018, The National Interest asked 12 presumed experts—historians, writers, former government officials, and think tank mavens—to weigh in on whether there was in fact such a thing as a deep state, eight said no, two waffled with a “sort of” response, and only two said yes. Former Colorado senator Gary Hart made fun of the whole concept, warning of “sly devils meeting in the furnace room after hours, passing out assignments for subverting the current administration.”

But now the Times’ Baker et al weigh in with an analysis saying that, yes, Trump has been battling something that some see as a deep state, and the deep state is winning. The headline: “Trump’s War on the ‘Deep State’ Turns Against Him.” There’s an explanatory subhed that reads: “The impeachment inquiry is in some ways the culmination of a battle between the president and the government institutions he distrusted and disparaged.”

As the Times reporters put it in the story text, “The House impeachment inquiry into Mr.Trump’s efforts to force Ukraine to investigate Democrats is the climax of a 33-month scorched-earth struggle between a president with no record of public service and the government he inherited but never trusted.” Leaving aside the requisite rapier thrust at the president (“with no record of public service”), this is a pretty good summation of the Trump presidency—the story of entrenched government bureaucrats and a president who sought to curb their power. Or, put another way, the story of a president who sought to rein in the deep state and a deep state that sought to destroy his presidency.

Baker and his colleagues clearly think the president is on the ropes. They quote Virginia’s Democratic Representative Gerald Connolly as saying the nation is headed toward a kind of “karmic justice,” with the House impeachment inquiry now giving opportunity to once-anonymous officials to “speak out, speak up, testify about and against.”

Connolly and the Times reporters are probably right. The House seems headed inexorably toward impeachment. The president’s struggle against the deep state appears now to be a lost cause. To prevail, he needed to marshal far more public support for his agenda—including curtailment of the deep state—than he proved capable of doing. He is a beleaguered president and is likely to remain so throughout the remainder of his term.

The reporters note that Trump sought from the beginning to minimize the role of career officials. He gave more ambassadorships to political appointees—”the highest rate in history,” say the reporters (without noting that Franklin Roosevelt, John Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, and Ronald Reagan weren’t far behind). The result, they write, has been “an exodus from public service.” They quote a “nonpartisan organization” saying the Trump administration lost nearly 1,200 senior career service employees in its first 18 months—roughly 40 percent more than during President Barack Obama’s first year and a half in office.

The reporters reveal a letter from 36 former foreign service officers to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo complaining that he had “failed to protect civil servants from political retaliation” and citing the removal of U.S. ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch. Another letter signed by more than 270 former employees of the U.S. Agency for International Development expressed anger at the treatment of public servants and the president’s “cavalier (and quite possibly corrupt) approach to making foreign policy.”

The tone of the Times piece seems to suggest these expressions and actions constitute a kind of indictment of Trump. But a more objective appraisal would be that it is merely the outward manifestation of that “33-month scorched-earth struggle” the Times was talking about. Does a president have a right to fire an ambassador? How serious an offense is it when he appoints political figures to ambassadorships at a rate slightly higher than some previous presidents? If foreign policy careerists decide to leave the government because they don’t like the president’s effort to rein in foreign policy careerists, is that a black mark on the president—or merely the natural result of a fundamental intragovernmental struggle?

But the Times reporters give the game away more explicitly in cataloguing a list of instances where those careerists sought to undermine the president because they found his policy decisions contemptible. “While many career employees have left,” writes the Times, “some of those who stayed have resisted some of Mr. Trump’s initiatives.” When the president canceled large war games with South Korea, the military held them anyway—only on a smaller scale and without fanfare. Diplomats negotiated an agreement before a NATO summit to foreclose any Trump action based on a different outlook. When the White House ordered foreign aid frozen this year, agency officials quietly worked with Congress to get it restored. State Department officials enlisted congressional allies to hinder Trump’s efforts to initiate weapons sales to Saudi Arabia and other nations.

Further, as the Times writes, “When transcripts of [Trump’s] telephone calls with the leaders of Mexico and Australia were leaked, it convinced him that he could not trust the career staff and so records of subsequent call were stashed away in a classified database.” And that was very early in his presidency, about the time Trump also learned there was a nasty dossier out there that was designed to provide grist for anyone interested in undermining or destroying his presidency.

And of course, now governmental officials are lining up before the House impeachment panel to slam the president over his effort to get Ukraine to investigate his Democratic rival Joe Biden and Biden’s son, Hunter, and his apparently related decision to hold up $391 million in security aid to Ukraine. As I have written in this space previously, this outlandish action by Trump constituted a profound lapse in judgment that was a kind of dare for opposition Democrats to fire off the impeachment cannon. And fire it off they have. “Now,” writes the Times, “[Trump] faces the counteroffensive.”

But that doesn’t take away from the central point of the Times story—that Trump and the deep state have been in mortal combat since the beginning of his administration. And the stakes are huge.

Trump wanted to restore at least somewhat cordial relations with Russia, whereas the deep state considered that the height of folly.

Trump wanted to get out of Afghanistan, whereas the deep state totally opposed such a move.

Trump viewed America’s role in Syria as focused on defeating ISIS, whereas the deep state wanted to continue favoring the overthrow of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

Trump was wary of letting events in Ukraine draw America into a direct confrontation with Russia, whereas the deep state wants to wrest Ukraine out of Russia’s sphere of influence even if it means opening tensions with the Bear.

Trump wanted to bring China to account for its widespread abuse of normal trading practices, whereas the deep state clung to “free trade’’ even in the face of such abuse.

These are big issues facing America. And the question hovering over the country as the impeachment drama proceeds is: are these matters open to debate in America? Or will the deep state suppress any such debate? And can a president—any president—pursue the Trump policy options without being subjected to the powerful yet subtle machinations of a wily bureaucracy bent on preserving its status and outlook?

SOURCE 

***************************************

Why Not Try Free Market Health Care?

John C. Goodman

I’m often asked if the free market can work in health care. My quick answer is: that’s the only thing that does work.

Show me a health care sector where there is no Medicare, no Blue Cross and no employer and I bet that’s a market that works very well.

Lasik surgery is one example. Patients get a package price and they know what they are going to pay in advance. There are no “surprise medical bills.” As my colleague Devon Herrick has shown, there is price and quality competition here – unlike other health care markets.

Competition works. Over the past decade, the real price of Lasik surgery fell 25%, despite a huge increase in the number of procedures and all manner of technological change – the type of change we are told leads to cost increases everywhere else in medicine.

A similar story can be told about cosmetic surgery – another sector where the third-party payers have no role to play.

What about conventional procedures – like knee and hip replacements? Can the market work there? Where patients pay with their own money, it already is working. Canadian patients routinely come to the United States for these procedures (in order to avoid lengthy waits for surgery in their own country). They get package prices and they pay about the same amount that Medicare pays. That’s about one-half to one fourth of what employer plans typically pay.

By the way, there is nothing the Canadians are doing that you can’t do. There are three requirements: (1) you must be willing to travel, (2) you must pay in advance and (3) you can’t have an insurance company step in after the fact and argue about whether the entire procedure was really necessary.

MediBid is a company that puts patients and doctors together for all manner of procedures. It has created an online competitive market. Patients submit data and their need for a procedure. Providers bid on price. Patients can also check out quality information about the providers.

Then there is the international market for medical tourism. You can shave one-third off the cost of surgical procedures and maybe more by traveling to Health City Cayman Islands. The center posts quality information online (infection rates, readmission rates and mortality rates) and I suspect that their numbers easily beat comparable figures at the hospital nearest you.

It’s also worth noting that most of the cost-saving innovations in health care have emerged outside the third-party payer system – initially catering to people paying with their own money, even if the third-party payers eventually came around.

Walk-in clinics emerged for patients who bought primary care with their own health care dollars.

Firms like Teladoc began providing phone and email doctor consultations – completely outside the third-party payer system.
If the idea of letting employees participate in a free medical marketplace seems too radical for some employers, I have a more modest suggestion. Liberate primary care.

That is, put two or three thousand dollars in an account for the employee every year and let the employee be completely responsible for all primary care, all diagnostics tests and maybe even all generic drugs.

Who is ready to serve these employees? Walmart, for one. Beginning this month, Sam's Club is offering customers packages of healthcare services, including discounted dental care, free prescription drugs, and telephone health consultations in Michigan, Pennsylvania and North Carolina.

Also, Walmart has opened its first Health Center in Dallas Georgia, following its business model of “everyday low prices.” A dental cleaning costs $25, a doctor’s visit $40. A test for a urinary-tract infection is $10; a pap smear $50; a vitamin B-12 injection $18; and a flu shot $39.84.

Then there is concierge care. At one time only available to the very rich, a model of what is now called “direct primary care” has been developed by Atlas MD in Wichita and is rapidly spreading across the country.

The cost is $50 a month for an adult and $10 for a child. For that the family gets 24/7 access to a physician (including by phone and email), who provides all the services people traditionally expect from a family doctor. The family also gets access to generic drugs for prices lower than what Medicaid pays.

Ameriflex is a Dallas-based company that helps employers set up a platform for employees to connect with direct primary care doctors – bypassing insurance companies altogether.

A market for primary care is fast developing. Employers are foolish if they don’t take advantage of it.

SOURCE 

********************************

IN BRIEF

"SWINDLING FUTURITY ON A LARGE SCALE": Senate rejects Rand Paul's latest effort to cut spending (The Hill)

FOR THE RECORD: Confiscating the wealth of all billionaires wouldn't pay for three average years of Medicare for All (Washington Examiner)

DEFAMATION SUIT REOPENED: Judge reopens Covington Catholic High student's defamation suit against The Washington Post (Fox News)

TPS EXTENDED: U.S. to extend temporary protections for El Salvadorans for at least another year (CNN)

BREXIT: Britain set for an early election

INNOVATION, NOT REGULATION: MIT engineers develop a new way to remove carbon dioxide from the air (MIT News)

POLICY: Why millions are still uninsured despite government intervention (The Daily Signal)

********************************

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

**************************