In the last 10,000 years, humans have got smaller and our brains have shrunk
I suppose I should say a few words about the story below. The facts as given are sound but they omit to mention that the decrease in brain size in late prehistoric times was linked to known brain mutations (genes MCPH1 and ASPM) taking place at that time which seem to have led to an increase in IQ -- as indicated by the sudden arrival of early civilization in the Middle East. What presumably happened was an increase in the degree of folding in the brain, thus giving a bigger surface area even while overall size decreased. In short, human brains with the mutation became more efficient at that time.
And once civilization had arrived, selection for hunter characteristics (height, muscle etc.) diminished greatly, leading to a shrinking in those attributes. Social characteristics (e.g. verbal ability) were selected for instead
Having conquered Everest and landed on the Moon, it is tempting to think we are bigger and better than our ancestors. But on a purely physical basis, it seems, we just don’t measure up. Mankind is actually shrinking.
Cambridge University experts say humans are past their peak and that modern-day people are 10 per cent smaller and shorter than their hunter-gatherer ancestors.
And if that’s not depressing enough, our brains are also smaller.
The findings reverse perceived wisdom that humans have grown taller and larger, a belief which has grown from data on more recent physical development.
The decline, say scientists, has happened over the past 10,000 years. They blame agriculture, with restricted diets and urbanisation compromising health and leading to the spread of disease.
The theory has emerged from studies of fossilised human remains found in Africa, Europe and Asia. The earliest, from Ethiopia, date back 200,000 years, and were larger and ‘more robust’ than their modern-day counterparts, said Dr Marta Lahr, an expert in human evolution.
Fossils found in Israeli caves and dating from 120,000 to 100,000 years ago, reveal a people who were tall and muscular, a pattern that continued uninterrupted until relatively recent times. An average person 10,000 years ago weighed between 12st 8lb and 13st 6lb. Today, the average is between 11st and 12st 8lb.
Dr Lahr, who last week presented her findings to the Royal Society, Britain’s most prestigious scientific body, described the changes as ‘striking’. ‘We can see that humans have continually evolved but in body size it is not until the last 10,000 years that they have changed substantially, so the question is why this should have happened.’
The male brain of 20,000 years ago measured 1,500 cubic centimetres. Modern man’s brain averages just 1,350 cubic cm – a decrease equivalent to the size of a tennis ball. The female brain has shrunk by about the same proportion. It doesn’t mean we are less intelligent – rather we have learnt to make the best use of our resources.
Dr Lahr said: ‘Over evolutionary time there would have been huge energy savings in making the brain smaller but more efficient – as we see today with computer processors.’
Robert Foley, a Cambridge University professor of human evolution, said: ‘Becoming human, in an evolutionary sense, is a continuous and gradual process. Our species, rather than being a fixed entity, is more like a piece of putty, changing shape and dimensions all the time.’
SOURCE
*******************
Deadly Prescription Drug Shortages Caused by Regulation
Doctors at the Johns Hopkins cancer center are rationing cytarabine, a drug used to treat leukemia and lymphoma. They are literally deciding who will live and who will die. The drug is also in short supply at the Stanford, Wisconsin and Nebraska university medical centers. Large medical centers, in Oklahoma and Maryland have completely run out.
All of this might be dismissed as an unfortunate turn of events were it not for the fact that a lot of other drugs are also in short supply. About 90 percent of all the anesthesiologists in the country report they are experiencing a shortage of at least one anesthetic, for example. Drug shortages are also endangering cancer patients, heart attack victims, accident survivors and a host of other ill people. The vast majority involve injectable medications used mostly by medical centers, in emergency rooms, ICUs and cancer wards.
Currently, there are about 246 drugs that are in short supply and as the chart shows, the number has been growing for some time. There were 74 newly reported drug shortages in 2005; the number dipped slightly to 70 in 2006, then rose to 129 in 2007, 149 in 2008, 166 in 2009, and 211 in 2010.
So what’s going on? Industry insiders point to numerous causes of the problem, including the fact that the generic drug market may be inherently more volatile than the market for brand-name drugs. Others point to supply chain problems. Then there is government regulatory policy.
Output Controls. The Federal Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has been stepping up its quality enforcement efforts — levying fines and forcing manufacturers to retool their facilities both here and abroad. Not only has this more rigorous regulatory oversight slowed down production, the FDA’s “zero tolerance” regime is forcing manufacturers to abide by rules that are rigid, inflexible and unforgiving. For example, a drug manufacturer must get approval for how much of a drug it plans to produce, as well as the timeframe. If a shortage develops (because, say, the FDA shuts down a competitor’s plant), a drug manufacturer cannot increase its output of that drug without another round of approvals. Nor can it alter its timetable production (producing a shortage drug earlier than planned) without FDA approval.
Even the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) has a role — because minute quantities of controlled substances are often used to make other drugs. This is the apparent reason for a nationwide shortage of ADHD drugs, for example, including the generic version of Ritalin. And like the FDA, DEA regulations are rigid and inflexible. For example, if a shortage develops and the manufacturers have reached their preauthorized production cap, a manufacturer cannot respond by increasing output without going back to the DEA for approval.
The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) also has a role – levying large fines for “overcharging,” forcing some companies to leave the generic market altogether.
Price Controls. Also contributing to the problems of many facilities is a little known program that forces drug manufacturers to give discounts to certain end users. The federal 340B drug rebate program was created in 1992 to provide discounted drugs to hospitals and clinics that treat a high number of indigent patients, clinics treating patients on Medicaid, hospitals and clinics in the Public Health Service and certain Federally Qualified Health Centers (more listed here). Currently, the law requires drug companies to provide rebates of 23.1 percent for brand drugs; and 13 percent for generic drugs off of their average manufacturer’s price on qualifying outpatient drug use. States have the right to negotiate further discounts and actual rebates negotiated are typically much steeper than the federal requirement.
Economics teaches that when prices are kept artificially low, shortages develop. People cannot get all of the care they try to obtain at the existing rate. Also, regardless of the apparently multiple causes of the shortages, certain patterns tend to emerge. People respond to persistent shortages by doing things that invariably make the problem worse.
Stockpiling. Buying organizations will typically respond by trying to stockpile quantities of drugs where supply is uncertain. That is, they will try to hoard more of the drugs than they ordinarily would keep in inventory in order to try to make sure they are available when needed. As the Healthcare Alliance Report explains, “drug shortages have been exacerbated by stockpiling on the part of providers,” who are trying to “protect themselves from the instability of the drug supply chain by placing orders that exceed normal requirements.”
Cascading Effects on Other Markets. Another consequence of shortages is that the effects in one market begin to cascade to other markets. In general, when hospitals cannot get a drug, they will turn to the next best alternative drug that creates the least adverse effects for patients. But as a Premier healthcare alliance analysis explains, when a shortage of one drug causes increased demand for a therapeutically similar product, the substitute product may also then be in short supply because it “is not normally produced in quantities sufficient to meet unanticipated market needs.” This scenario occurred last year with the morphine and subsequent hydromorphone shortages.
Solutions. Again, the Obama administration did not create this problem. But up till now, its preference for regulation rather than market forces to solve safety problems is making the entire health care system less safe than it otherwise would have been.
SOURCE
****************************
Reactionary Progressives
They desparately hang on to the status quo
No one seems to be more conservative and backward-looking than the modern day, self-described "progressive." Their modes of thought and rhetoric reflects what they themselves would call a reactionary conservatism if spotted in others. Today I will explore three of these modes:
1. Argument by Appeals to Authority
2. Complete lack of imagination when it comes to social change
3. A profound intellectual inconsistency
* Appeals to Authority
The most obvious example here is the "scientific consensus" on "climate change" (what they used to call Global Warming). Perhaps there is one – progressives keep insisting that there is one. Nevertheless, the idea of human-made carbon emissions changing the planet's climate seems both plausible yet conter-intuitive when one considers other often-extreme changes in climate only over the past thousand years, not to mention in Earth's overall history.
Their position would be FAR more credible if almost all of research on the topic would be privately funded, not government-funded, and that the scientists involved worked in non-State institutions. Oftentimes, the most progress in science was accomplished by those who worked outside of the System and dissented from the status quo. As long as science is directly or indirectly funded by the State, why should we believe scientific claims? "Because scientists say so!" isn't much of an argument.
This isn't the only example of the Progressive Appeal to Authority. They blame "corporate greed" and rich people for the world's problems, but when a rich guy says that taxes should be raised, progressives treat him as a wise, public-spirited man of conscience who we should believe. And, they are often at best skeptical toward religion, but will gladly trot out pastors who claim that Jesus wanted higher taxes and more regulation.
"Question authority" is not part of the Progressive vocabulary. At least not anymore.
* Lack of Imagination
Progressives seem more interested in just throwing tax dollars into public education bureaucracies, and doing nothing about overpriced universities. They'd rather coerce people into overpriced health insurance schemes than give doctors, hospitals, and insurance companies the freedom and flexibility to provide quality care at lower prices.
They are more concerned with the nation's economy as measured by "Gross Domestic Product" in terms of dollars, than they are with allowing individuals to start their own businesses and to make exchanges by non-dollar means.
In other words, their institutions and insistence on regulatory control of our lives and the economy is more important than the idea that these institutions might not actually work. In other words, Progressives are resistant to change.
* Intellectual Inconsistency
The most famous inconsistent position of Progressives is that women should be "free to choose" abortion, but that women (or anyone else) can't buy a gun to protect herself, smoke marijuana, give money freely to a political candidate, or send kids to a school of her choice. While Progressive causes on behalf of gay rights, women's rights, and civil rights for minorities may be admirable, they meanly seem to want mere "equality" for these groups, NOT more freedom.
Perhaps the most significant inconsistency is the Progressive view of the environment and economy. They constantly speak of "jobs" and believe that economic "stimulus" can be achieved by creating money through increased government spending.
This is inconsistent with the environmental stewardship they claim they want. Creating money out of nothing encourages consumers to spend money, and for investors to invest money, they didn't earn. The obsession with home ownership is just one example of what can happen. When homes are built that people can't afford, the earth's raw resources are taken to build it, and the earth's energy supplies are similarly taken.
Wouldn't it have been better for the planet for the home buyer to have stayed in his existing rental residence, then consume more resources – with unearned money – to build a house he didn't need?
Consumerism, environmentalism, and inflationary policies don't mix. Progressives can't artificially overheat the economy and then blame business for the resulting emissions. The truly environmentally-friendly economy is the free economy. Without the promise of monetary inflation, individuals would have greater incentive to make more efficient use of the earth's resources.
SOURCE
**************************
ELSEWHERE
MI: TSA “apologetic” for patdown of disabled man: "A Detroit father said agents with the Transportation Security Administration singled out his special-needs son for a pat-down while the family was headed to Disney World, an incident that the TSA admitted was a 'case of bad judgment.' David Mandy said agents at Detroit Metro Airport took his son Drew, 29, and asked him about the padding underneath his pants, which turned out to be adult diapers. Drew, who is severely mentally disabled, had trouble understanding the agents’ orders because his family said he has the mental capacity of a 2-year-old. ... The agents confiscated a six-inch plastic hammer, something Drew had carried with him for 20 years for comfort [and] ... called it a security threat."
Freedom must include right to die: "Who owns your body? Judging from our nation’s body of law, the ruling class wrongly believes the government does. However, you own your body and, with that ownership, you have a God-given natural right to do what you will with it, even if that means ending your life."
Virginia is not for small businesses: "No matter how bad the economy gets, governments at all levels will always put their own petty authority ahead of productive market activities. An example is the Batesville Store in rural Albermarle County, Virginia, which was closed — without notice or due process — by a local bureaucrat who decreed the store, which was being used primarily as a restaurant and live music venue, had too many seats."
There is a new lot of postings by Chris Brand just up -- on his usual vastly "incorrect" themes of race, genes, IQ etc.
My Twitter.com identity: jonjayray. My Facebook page is also accessible as jonjayray (In full: http://www.facebook.com/jonjayray). For more blog postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, EYE ON BRITAIN and Paralipomena
List of backup or "mirror" sites here or here -- for readers in China or for everyone when blogspot is "down" or failing to update. Email me here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or here (Pictorial) or here (Personal)
****************************
The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist" (Nationalsozialist) and the full name of Hitler's political party (translated) was "The National Socialist German Workers' Party" (In German: Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei)
****************************
Monday, June 13, 2011
Sunday, June 12, 2011
More on the "student loan" SWAT raid at Stockton, CA
I originally posted a report on this on EDUCATION WATCH, on 9th. I headed the story: "CA: An education Dept. SWAT raid???". I added the subhead: "SWAT teams have become America's Taliban. They can brutalize you without trial and on suspicion only. Now even the Education Dept. is deploying them"
Clearly, what troubled me was the fact of the raid, not its justification. I did note the official claim that the raid was "not related to student loans".
Yesterday on DISSECTING LEFTISM, I posted a wide-ranging post about the steady transmogrification of the USA into a police state. In that report the claim was repeated that the raid was related to student loan repayments. I included that despite the official denials. Anybody who takes official denials at face value is naive, in my opinion. The claim that student loans were the issue apparently came from the man who was raided and I make no apology for preferring his word over the word of anybody in the Obama administration.
A regular reader of this blog has however been digging further into the matter and offers some interesting observations. I reproduce his comments below. You will note that the reason for the raid given on the search warrant has been deleted. That seems to me to be remarkably poor practice and great grounds for suspicion of impropriety or folly. Until that part of the document is revealed, nothing is certain about the motive for the raid.
You will also note my reader's conclusion that the raid WAS related to student loans -- albeit the fraudulent obtaining of them rather than being in default on repayments. One wonders how that squares with the statement by U.S. Department of Education spokesman Justin Hamilton that the search was "not related to student loans". Dishonesty abounding is what I see.
*******************
Sarah Palin email frenzy backfires on her media antagonists
This whole affair is extraordinary. When have all the emails of any other politician been released to the public? What a wonderful precedent it sets, however. It should now be possible to demand ALL the emails of ANY politician! I doubt that many of the current crop of Democrat politicians could survive that!
The trove of more than 13,000 emails detailing almost every aspect of Sarah Palin’s governorship of Alaska, released late on Friday, paints a picture of her as an idealistic, conscientious, humorous and humane woman slightly bemused by the world of politics.
One can only assume that the Left-leaning editors who dispatched teams of reporters to remote Juneau, the Alaskan capital, to pore over the emails in the hope of digging up a scandal are now viewing the result as a rather poor return on their considerable investment.
If anything, Mrs Palin seems likely to emerge from the scrutiny of the 24,000 pages, contained in six boxes and weighing 275 pounds, with her reputation considerably enhanced. As a blogger at Powerline noted, the whole saga might come to be viewed as “an embarrassment for legacy media”.
Mrs Palin, who suddenly resigned as Alaska governor in July 2009, is no longer a public official. She holds no position in the Republican party. Despite the media hubbub that surrounds her every move, she is unlikely to be a candidate for the White House in 2012.
She is, however, viewed with a kind of horrified fascination by many in the media, who faithfully records everything she says and does while at the same time decrying her as ignorant and even evil.
Whether or not she runs for the White House – and the solid consensus among Republican leaders is that she won’t – the scramble over the Palin emails confirms her status as a pivotal figure in the race to challenge President Barack Obama next year.
It comes at a moment when the battle for the Republican nomination appears set to be transformed by the late entry of Governor Rick Perry of Texas, a social conservative and Palin ally who could almost immediately leap to the front of a currently lacklustre field.
Sources close to Mr Perry have confirmed that he is “highly likely” to announce a presidential run in the coming days. Intriguingly, they have also hinted at a something they believe would increase immeasurably Mr Perry’s chances of winning the White House – an endorsement from Mrs Palin.
On policy, Mrs Palin and Mr Perry, who succeeded George W Bush in 2000 and has since become the longest-serving governor in Texas history, are in almost perfect alignment. In addition, they are both beloved of the Tea Party, highly suspicious of Washington and physically attractive (Mr Perry is often likened to the Marlboro Man), charismatic figures.
Mrs Palin has repeatedly said that she believes Mr Obama can be defeated and that she will do everything to achieve that. With her popularity among independent voters very low, despite the intensity of her core support, throwing her weight behind a stronger candidate would be a better way of preserving her political capital and earning power than being one of the losing candidates in the Republican primaries.
The notion of Mrs Palin as White House kingmaker would have seemed wildly improbable if anyone had raised it before August 2008.
It was then that she was catapulted to international fame by Senator John McCain’s surprise decision to make her his vice-presidential running mate. Her reaction? “Can you flippinbelieveit?!”
This was a world, as the emails reveal, in which the then Alaska governor fretted about things like there being alcohol in her official residence, that might be a temptation to the teenage friends of her children.
In May 2007, she sought help from her staff in keeping the alcohol in the governor’s mansion away from young people, stating that it should be boxed up and “removed from the People’s House” – both for practical reasons and as a statement about her administration.
“Here’s my thinking: with so many kids and teens coming and going in that house, esp during this season of celebrations for young people – proms, graduations, etc, I want to send the msg that we can be – and ‘the People’s House’ needs to be – alcohol-free. There’s a lot of booze there – its too accessible and may be too tempting to any number of all those teens coming and going.”
In a February 2007 exchange, one adviser recommended that when she was in Washington she meet Pete Rouse, a Senate official who had lived in Alaska. “He’s now chief-of-staff for a guy named Barack Obama,” the aide wrote, adding that Mr Rouse “wants to help Alaska however he can”. Far from shrinking at the idea of conferring with a Democrat, Mrs Palin replied: “I’m game to meet him.”
The emails will finally confirm – in all but the darkest recesses of the world of Left-wing conspiracy theories – that Mrs Palin is, in fact, the mother of her youngest son Trig, who has Down’s Syndrome.
After relentless promotion by Andrew Sullivan, the British blogger who now works for Daily Beast/Newsweek, of the proposition that the mother was in fact Mrs Palin’s daughter Bristol, a teenager at the time, the subject had become part of mainstream debate.
The emails show Mrs Palin’s determination to protect Bristol but also her desire for a degree of privacy. “I wish I could shame people into ceasing such gossip about a teen, but I can’t figure out how to do that,” she wrote.
Communications from her children and husband make her family appear close and loving. An email from Bristol, referring to her younger sister, said: “Hello Mother, Um, I’m sitting in library and I really thing you need to get Piper a cell phone!! Wouldn’t that be so adorable! She could text me while she was in class!! It’s a done deal right?! Perfect! Ok, I will talk to you later and I need some cash flow! Love ya!”
To an extent, the emails remind Americans of the person they saw take the state at the Republican National Convention in Minnesota nearly three years ago – refreshing, plain-speaking, open and uncomplicated.
Since then, her image has hardened into one of a brittle, even paranoid, politician who seethes with resentment, feels aggrieved and entitled and is intent on pursuing celebrity even at the expense of her family.
Mrs Palin as a person has become so remote that it is hard for to assess how much, if any, of that widely-held caricature has a basis in truth. The email release could mark the end of a chapter of what conservatives have termed “Palin Derangement Syndrome”. Her enemies in the media appear to have overplayed their hand.
Expressing a sentiment that will resonate with many, Greta Van Susteren, a Fox News anchor who is close to Mrs Palin, argued that she had been subjected to “a media colonoscopy” by news organisations on “a mission to destroy”.
With a film entitled The Undefeated, chronicling Mrs Palin’s rise to prominence, about to air, the former Alaska governor is doubtless hoping that harsher perceptions of her can be blunted.
Probably the person who has damaged her most, apart from perhaps the CBS anchor Katie Couric who elicited blank stares when she asked what Mrs Palin read, was Tina Fey, the Saturday Night Live comedienne and impersonator.
It was Fey who seared into the popular imagination the Palin phrase: “I can see Russia from my house!” Mrs Palin had never said any such thing but it encapsulated the feeling that she was frivolous and lacked any foreign policy credentials.
Three days later, a staffer called Patrick Galvin emailed Mrs Palin saying: “My suggestion is you offer to go on SNL and play Tina Fey, and you interview her as she plays you.”
Fey’s impersonation was so powerful that the two women are inseparable in some minds. Fox News, for which Mrs Palin works on a lucrative contract as a commentator, recently aired a picture of Fey instead of Mrs Palin by mistake. Perhaps now might the time for Mrs Palin to take up Mr Galvin’s suggestion.
SOURCE
My Twitter.com identity: jonjayray. My Facebook page is also accessible as jonjayray (In full: http://www.facebook.com/jonjayray). For more blog postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, EYE ON BRITAIN and Paralipomena
List of backup or "mirror" sites here or here -- for readers in China or for everyone when blogspot is "down" or failing to update. Email me here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or here (Pictorial) or here (Personal)
****************************
The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist" (Nationalsozialist) and the full name of Hitler's political party (translated) was "The National Socialist German Workers' Party" (In German: Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei)
****************************
I originally posted a report on this on EDUCATION WATCH, on 9th. I headed the story: "CA: An education Dept. SWAT raid???". I added the subhead: "SWAT teams have become America's Taliban. They can brutalize you without trial and on suspicion only. Now even the Education Dept. is deploying them"
Clearly, what troubled me was the fact of the raid, not its justification. I did note the official claim that the raid was "not related to student loans".
Yesterday on DISSECTING LEFTISM, I posted a wide-ranging post about the steady transmogrification of the USA into a police state. In that report the claim was repeated that the raid was related to student loan repayments. I included that despite the official denials. Anybody who takes official denials at face value is naive, in my opinion. The claim that student loans were the issue apparently came from the man who was raided and I make no apology for preferring his word over the word of anybody in the Obama administration.
A regular reader of this blog has however been digging further into the matter and offers some interesting observations. I reproduce his comments below. You will note that the reason for the raid given on the search warrant has been deleted. That seems to me to be remarkably poor practice and great grounds for suspicion of impropriety or folly. Until that part of the document is revealed, nothing is certain about the motive for the raid.
You will also note my reader's conclusion that the raid WAS related to student loans -- albeit the fraudulent obtaining of them rather than being in default on repayments. One wonders how that squares with the statement by U.S. Department of Education spokesman Justin Hamilton that the search was "not related to student loans". Dishonesty abounding is what I see.
As recently pointed out by no less than eminent sociologist Peter Berger, symbols of tyranny are on the rise in America -- such as the body pat downs at airports, the legal "degradation rituals" of putting criminal suspects through a "perp walk" even though there is supposedly a presumption of innocence, the revival of old fashioned "chain gang" prisoner work crews, and the arrangements of Congressional hearings where the interrogators sit on raised platforms over the "serfs" who are summoned to appear before them.
Of greater concern are the reported tragic cases of SWAT team raids where nervous police have targeted the wrong person and ended up killing them.
But the recent report at NetRightDaily.com is also symbolic of a widespread paranoia initially triggered by liberal-tabloid TV broadcast media that spreads virally through both Right and Left-wing websites without any fact checking on the truth.
Let's take a look at the case in Stockton, California where KXTV Channel 10 in Sacramento initially reported that a local police SWAT Team had raided a home purportedly because the "estranged wife" of the male occupant of a home had failed to pay student loans.
First, I called the Stockton PD and they told me they only had a backup "black and white" unit at the scene and that the raid was conducted by theFederal Office of Inspector General (OIG) acting on a search warrant. The Stockton PD public affairs officers told me that an unpaid student loan would be a civil, not criminal, matter and would not ever trigger a police raid on a home.
I checked online and KXTV had already issued a correction on their online webpage indicating that the raid was not by the Stockton Police but they stuck to their erroneous story about an unpaid student loan as the legal grounds for the raid.
I then found online the actual Search Warrant issued by U.S. Magistrate Judge Gregory G. Hollows on June 3.
I had a retired prosecutor friend of mine look at the warrant. Here is what he indicated: He noted that the Search Warrant is missing the statement of the Affiant (officer who describes the basis for why the warrant is necessary). This statement should include a factual rundown of the alleged criminal activity, how the activity was executed, and why the criminal activity is reasonably ties to the suspect, etc.
Later, the Inspector General's Office released a statement that the raid did not involve a mere unpaid student loan but a case involving student aid "fraud, bribery and embezzlement."
This squared with what both the Stockton PD and my prosecutor friend told me. He said that his reading of the warrant and his experience suggests that the suspect was using phony I.D.'s and documents to obtain a large number of student loans. "The total amount of the student loans obtained probably constitutes a very significant amount of money, which is what triggered such a major response for serving the warrant," my source said. He added that it is "just a guess, but I'll bet the figure is in the millions. It also may be part of a larger ring."
My prosecutor source also said he doubted whether you could find a judge anywhere that would issue a "no knock" search warrant on a civil matter of an unpaid student loan, which would be a violation of the 4th Amendmentagainst illegal searches and seizures.
The alleged female defendant in this case was not at home at 6 a.m. and no one reported whether she had fled, been detained and was being held in jail, or had failed to appear or produce records in response to a bench warrant. It later was reported in the media that the alleged victim of the raid, a male ex-spouse, was also named as a suspect in the case.
Coincidentally, I also found online that on June 8 in South Carolina a different woman had pled guilty of student loan fraud she had pulled off while an inmate at the Leath Correctional Institute in Greenville, South Carolina. She used phony I.D.'s to apply for 23 student loans totaling $467,500 while working as an inmate in the educational department of the prison.
Apparently under the Obama Administration, student loans are so easy to apply for if you use a false ID that it is being used as a form of welfare. My guess is that there is a widespread informal criminal network involved with the Internet being the facilitator both with how to apply for student loans and how to pull the crime off.
Coming back to the situation in Stockton, it is now apparent that the raid involved gathering information about stolen IDs used to obtain fraudulent student loans. The media story about a raid aid on an ex-spouses home for unpaid student loans was in error. And the so-declared victim boyfriend was an apparent accomplice in this case. How much more could you get wrong in a news story?
The initial media story of the Stockton SWAT raid was overblown but was great "news" for a slow TV news day. It resonated with a fearful audience overloaded with debts.
I followed up on the story and could not find one media source that has come out with the true context of the SWAT raid in Stockton.
In a scene from some sort of parallel universe, coincidentally a Florida couple that had erroneously had their house foreclosed on by a bank were able to secure a court judgment to "raid" branch of the Bank of America to seize furniture, computers and cash on the premises to recover their legal fees. The legal system in the U.S. isn't entirely broken or corrupted.
There is a bigger story here about institutional corruption that breeds both loan fraud and police raids, albeit legal. What the Stockton SWAT case reflects is the metastasizing of a government loan program into what political scientist Walter Russell Mead calls a Great White Hope, then into a Great White Father, then into a Great White Elephant, and finally aGreat White Shark. At the "shark" stage of such government programs they turn criminal and deadly. Recipients turn into criminal plunderers of the system and those that administer the program have to turn into police or hire paramilitary units to keep the criminality in check. But the criminality is so widespread that they mainly focus on only the most flagrant violators involving the largest sums of money.
This is reminiscent of what we just experienced with the sub-prime loan scandal and Bank Panic of 2008, only with foreclosures instead of police raids. There is an institutional basis to both. This is what we can expect with Obamacare.
Here we seem to be facing what historian Klaus Bringmann describes in his book A History of the Roman Republic where free distribution of grain hastened the collapse of the empire.
*******************
Sarah Palin email frenzy backfires on her media antagonists
This whole affair is extraordinary. When have all the emails of any other politician been released to the public? What a wonderful precedent it sets, however. It should now be possible to demand ALL the emails of ANY politician! I doubt that many of the current crop of Democrat politicians could survive that!
The trove of more than 13,000 emails detailing almost every aspect of Sarah Palin’s governorship of Alaska, released late on Friday, paints a picture of her as an idealistic, conscientious, humorous and humane woman slightly bemused by the world of politics.
One can only assume that the Left-leaning editors who dispatched teams of reporters to remote Juneau, the Alaskan capital, to pore over the emails in the hope of digging up a scandal are now viewing the result as a rather poor return on their considerable investment.
If anything, Mrs Palin seems likely to emerge from the scrutiny of the 24,000 pages, contained in six boxes and weighing 275 pounds, with her reputation considerably enhanced. As a blogger at Powerline noted, the whole saga might come to be viewed as “an embarrassment for legacy media”.
Mrs Palin, who suddenly resigned as Alaska governor in July 2009, is no longer a public official. She holds no position in the Republican party. Despite the media hubbub that surrounds her every move, she is unlikely to be a candidate for the White House in 2012.
She is, however, viewed with a kind of horrified fascination by many in the media, who faithfully records everything she says and does while at the same time decrying her as ignorant and even evil.
Whether or not she runs for the White House – and the solid consensus among Republican leaders is that she won’t – the scramble over the Palin emails confirms her status as a pivotal figure in the race to challenge President Barack Obama next year.
It comes at a moment when the battle for the Republican nomination appears set to be transformed by the late entry of Governor Rick Perry of Texas, a social conservative and Palin ally who could almost immediately leap to the front of a currently lacklustre field.
Sources close to Mr Perry have confirmed that he is “highly likely” to announce a presidential run in the coming days. Intriguingly, they have also hinted at a something they believe would increase immeasurably Mr Perry’s chances of winning the White House – an endorsement from Mrs Palin.
On policy, Mrs Palin and Mr Perry, who succeeded George W Bush in 2000 and has since become the longest-serving governor in Texas history, are in almost perfect alignment. In addition, they are both beloved of the Tea Party, highly suspicious of Washington and physically attractive (Mr Perry is often likened to the Marlboro Man), charismatic figures.
Mrs Palin has repeatedly said that she believes Mr Obama can be defeated and that she will do everything to achieve that. With her popularity among independent voters very low, despite the intensity of her core support, throwing her weight behind a stronger candidate would be a better way of preserving her political capital and earning power than being one of the losing candidates in the Republican primaries.
The notion of Mrs Palin as White House kingmaker would have seemed wildly improbable if anyone had raised it before August 2008.
It was then that she was catapulted to international fame by Senator John McCain’s surprise decision to make her his vice-presidential running mate. Her reaction? “Can you flippinbelieveit?!”
This was a world, as the emails reveal, in which the then Alaska governor fretted about things like there being alcohol in her official residence, that might be a temptation to the teenage friends of her children.
In May 2007, she sought help from her staff in keeping the alcohol in the governor’s mansion away from young people, stating that it should be boxed up and “removed from the People’s House” – both for practical reasons and as a statement about her administration.
“Here’s my thinking: with so many kids and teens coming and going in that house, esp during this season of celebrations for young people – proms, graduations, etc, I want to send the msg that we can be – and ‘the People’s House’ needs to be – alcohol-free. There’s a lot of booze there – its too accessible and may be too tempting to any number of all those teens coming and going.”
In a February 2007 exchange, one adviser recommended that when she was in Washington she meet Pete Rouse, a Senate official who had lived in Alaska. “He’s now chief-of-staff for a guy named Barack Obama,” the aide wrote, adding that Mr Rouse “wants to help Alaska however he can”. Far from shrinking at the idea of conferring with a Democrat, Mrs Palin replied: “I’m game to meet him.”
The emails will finally confirm – in all but the darkest recesses of the world of Left-wing conspiracy theories – that Mrs Palin is, in fact, the mother of her youngest son Trig, who has Down’s Syndrome.
After relentless promotion by Andrew Sullivan, the British blogger who now works for Daily Beast/Newsweek, of the proposition that the mother was in fact Mrs Palin’s daughter Bristol, a teenager at the time, the subject had become part of mainstream debate.
The emails show Mrs Palin’s determination to protect Bristol but also her desire for a degree of privacy. “I wish I could shame people into ceasing such gossip about a teen, but I can’t figure out how to do that,” she wrote.
Communications from her children and husband make her family appear close and loving. An email from Bristol, referring to her younger sister, said: “Hello Mother, Um, I’m sitting in library and I really thing you need to get Piper a cell phone!! Wouldn’t that be so adorable! She could text me while she was in class!! It’s a done deal right?! Perfect! Ok, I will talk to you later and I need some cash flow! Love ya!”
To an extent, the emails remind Americans of the person they saw take the state at the Republican National Convention in Minnesota nearly three years ago – refreshing, plain-speaking, open and uncomplicated.
Since then, her image has hardened into one of a brittle, even paranoid, politician who seethes with resentment, feels aggrieved and entitled and is intent on pursuing celebrity even at the expense of her family.
Mrs Palin as a person has become so remote that it is hard for to assess how much, if any, of that widely-held caricature has a basis in truth. The email release could mark the end of a chapter of what conservatives have termed “Palin Derangement Syndrome”. Her enemies in the media appear to have overplayed their hand.
Expressing a sentiment that will resonate with many, Greta Van Susteren, a Fox News anchor who is close to Mrs Palin, argued that she had been subjected to “a media colonoscopy” by news organisations on “a mission to destroy”.
With a film entitled The Undefeated, chronicling Mrs Palin’s rise to prominence, about to air, the former Alaska governor is doubtless hoping that harsher perceptions of her can be blunted.
Probably the person who has damaged her most, apart from perhaps the CBS anchor Katie Couric who elicited blank stares when she asked what Mrs Palin read, was Tina Fey, the Saturday Night Live comedienne and impersonator.
It was Fey who seared into the popular imagination the Palin phrase: “I can see Russia from my house!” Mrs Palin had never said any such thing but it encapsulated the feeling that she was frivolous and lacked any foreign policy credentials.
Three days later, a staffer called Patrick Galvin emailed Mrs Palin saying: “My suggestion is you offer to go on SNL and play Tina Fey, and you interview her as she plays you.”
Fey’s impersonation was so powerful that the two women are inseparable in some minds. Fox News, for which Mrs Palin works on a lucrative contract as a commentator, recently aired a picture of Fey instead of Mrs Palin by mistake. Perhaps now might the time for Mrs Palin to take up Mr Galvin’s suggestion.
SOURCE
My Twitter.com identity: jonjayray. My Facebook page is also accessible as jonjayray (In full: http://www.facebook.com/jonjayray). For more blog postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, EYE ON BRITAIN and Paralipomena
List of backup or "mirror" sites here or here -- for readers in China or for everyone when blogspot is "down" or failing to update. Email me here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or here (Pictorial) or here (Personal)
****************************
The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist" (Nationalsozialist) and the full name of Hitler's political party (translated) was "The National Socialist German Workers' Party" (In German: Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei)
****************************
Saturday, June 11, 2011
Police State Brutality: On The Rise
The next door to be violently knocked down could very well be yours. Innocence of any offense is no protection
Earlier this year in Tucson, Arizona a shooting rampage targeting U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords made international news – and prompted a coordinated effort to demonize Tea Party supporters (and free speech itself).
Without knowing the details of the case, Pima County Sheriff Clarence Dupnik immediately blamed the shooting on “the vitriol that comes out of certain mouths about tearing down the government.”
“The anger, the hatred, the bigotry that goes on in this country is getting to be outrageous,” Dupnik said, calling Arizona “a mecca for prejudice and bigotry.”
Obviously, the world quickly learned that Dupnik was flat out wrong in his assessment of the situation. The violence in Tucson was the product of a deranged madman – not a discernible ideology. But that didn’t stop Democratic leaders like U.S. Rep. Jim Clyburn from saying that government should “rethink the parameters of free speech” in the wake of the shooting.
Five months after the Giffords’ tragedy, another fatal shooting took place in Tucson – only this one didn’t make international headlines. It has also failed to produce so much as a peep of disapproval from those who were so outraged earlier this year.
On May 5, 2011 – deputies and “operators” of the Pima County Sheriff’s Office raided the home of 26-year-old Jose Guerena, a U.S. Marine who served two tours in Iraq in 2003 and 2005. Having just fallen asleep after working the night shift at a local mine, Guerena was roused by his wife, Vanessa – who saw a man with a gun outside of the couple’s bedroom window. Thinking his home was being invaded, Guerena grabbed his rifle.
What happened next?
SWAT “operators” – executing a narcotics warrant – broke into Guerena’s home and fired 72 rounds within a matter of seconds, hitting him 22 times. Guerena’s five-year-old son, Joel, watched his father die. Initially, Pima County Sheriff’s investigators said that Guerena had fired his weapon at police officers. That report turned out to be patently false. In fact, Guerena never removed the safety from his rifle.
Also Guerena’s wife is adamant that the officers did not identify themselves as law enforcement agents until after the raid was completed. No drugs were found in the home – and it was later revealed that Guerena’s brother was the real target of the investigation.
Sadly, these fatal mistakes are occurring with increasing frequency. Last September in Utah, a SWAT team fatally shot Todd Blair three times in the head and chest during a hastily-planned raid – even though he wasn’t the person sought by the narcotics warrant. Last May in Detroit, 7-year-old Aiyana Jones was shot and killed while sleeping on the sofa during a raid filmed by reality TV cameras.
Part of the problem is obviously the vast expansion of the police state in America. According to Americans for SWAT Reform, more than 50,000 raids take place annually in the United States. Thirty years ago, there were less than 3,000 raids a year.
Another contributing factor is the steady militarization of local law enforcement.
“The war on drugs has done incalculable damage to the character of law enforcement by encouraging police officers to forget they are civilians,” writes David Rittgers, a legal analyst at the Cato Institute who served three tours in Afghanistan.
“When police officers refer to their fellow citizens as civilians and mean to exclude themselves from that category, they’ve mentally leapt from enforcing the law to destroying the enemies of the state,” Rittgers continued. “That’s incompatible with a free society.”
Also, the definition of what constitutes a “SWAT-worthy” offense has broadened considerably – as multiple federal agencies now reserve the right to knock down your door for virtually any reason.
For example, earlier this week a SWAT team raided a home in California – roughing up a man whose estranged wife had failed to pay back her student loans. What agency issued the warrant for this raid? The U.S. Department of Education – which recently purchased more than two dozen 12-gauge shotguns to help prevent “waste, fraud, abuse and other criminal activity involving federal education funds, programs and operations.”
Government apologists can deny it all they want, but the fact is that we are witnessing a massive build-up of the American police state at all levels of government – with repercussions that diminish our liberties and threaten our very lives.
After all, the next door to be knocked down could very well be yours.
SOURCE
*************************
Affordable Housing Means Your House Is Worth Less
Consumer advocates have their priorities backwards
Martin Luther King famously once proclaimed, “I have a dream, that one day my children would not be judged by the color of the skin, but by the content of their character, and that they would have a right to a home at an affordable price.”
Okay, that’s not exactly what he said. But an unusual coalition of financial institutions and community housing advocates has been arguing this.
The Dodd-Frank Act, passed last year revamping rules for financial institutions, directed all bank regulators to issue a joint regulation defining a reasonably safe, well-underwritten mortgage. Their recent proposed definition for such a “qualified residential mortgage” has created a stir because it has strict guidelines such as a 20 percent down payment requirement and tight limits on the collective debt of the borrower.
Rather than praising the definition of a good mortgage for ensuring borrower safety, consumer groups have criticized the regulation as being too strict, since banks would have to hold more capital against any loans that are riskier than qualified residential mortgages, meaning that financial institutions would charge more for mortgages with lower down payments.
“This is a civil rights issue,” John Taylor, president of the National Community Reinvestment Coalition, said recently.
Mortgage Bankers Association CEO David Stevens echoed the sentiment: “We still need to be able to make affordable mortgages that don’t just go to the wealthy, who can afford the biggest down payments and who have the most positive credit ratings.” Such a kind heart from a man whose organization has lost significant business in the past few years as mortgages to less qualified borrowers have dried up.
Stevens, Taylor, and the leaders of other groups such as the Center for Responsible Lending and the National Council of La Raza (not to mention the realtors and homebuilders associations) have been teaming up to fight the qualified residential mortgage definition on the grounds that it will cause low-income households to spend more time saving up for a down payment while increasing the cost of mortgages.
But why is access to affordable homes equated with access to affordable mortgages, i.e. debt? They are not the same thing.
This coalition is nothing new. Such groups were also aligned in the late-1980s hawking a similar product. MLK’s wife even gave a speech in 1989 encouraging President George H.W. Bush to push for “affordable housing” as a part of her late husband’s dream for civil rights.
Ultimately, the Government Sponsored Enterprise Reform Act of 1992 was passed creating “affordable housing goals” targeted at increasing lending to low-income families. But the trade-off for access to cheaper mortgage debt—often through a subprime loan—was that housing prices increased.
Affordable mortgages replaced affordable housing.
As Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac expanded their purchases of subprime mortgages throughout the 2000s, the prices of homes kept growing and growing—requiring more and more federal subsidies to keep pace. That is partly because as mortgage prices fell, demand increased for homes, and prices rose. It was basic economics at work.
Sure, increased mortgage rates can be quite the deterrent to homebuyers, especially first-time homebuyers. But so can high housing prices.
Yet Janis Bowdler, a research project director at La Raza, still argues that the new Dodd-Frank authorized regulations will “so significantly deter the ability of first-time buyers to break into the market that we will see a real decline in home ownership.”
The issue of whether increased homeownership is a good thing is a matter for a different column. The confusing part of Bowdler’s comment is why she isn’t pushing for lower housing prices if she is worried about first-time buyers.
With virtually ever other commodity, innovation that improves quality and lowers price is seen as a good thing. Only because of the misperception that owning a home is a universally good investment for households do we favor rising home prices. (Well, that and the politics of housing prices.)
But historically, home prices on a national level have generally grown just at the rate of inflation. Only during the recent housing bubble did prices break from their historical trend and double over the course of 10 years. It is a myth that homeownership inherently creates wealth.
Now, home values have been falling since 2006 as the bubble has deflated and we are almost back to the historical trend line that dates back to the end of World War II for housing prices. But a host of federal policies—like the First-time Homebuyers Credit and the Fed’s quantitative easing programs—have slowed the decline in prices; though they have not stopped it.
It's not that Washington should force prices to go lower, it's that La Raza and other consumer organizations should be clamoring for the government to get out of the way to let prices finish their fall back to natural levels. That would help first-time homebuyers since housing would become more affordable.
Plus the households would have less mortgage debt with less needed to borrow.
But if La Raza and their cohorts could write the rules, they’d keep the government involved while lowering the threshold for getting a federal subsidy.
When the homeownership mob—to borrow a John Carneyism—won the day in 1992, the results were 1) government supported housing finance that put taxpayers on the line; 2) lower underwriting standards for housing finance supported by Fannie and Freddie; and 3) a bubble created by an artificial boost in housing prices. Ultimately, millions of low-income families were stuck with high and unsustainable debt, leading to the millions of foreclsoures we are wrestling with today.
The same thing will happen again if the consumer groups win again. Crippling overnment-subsidized debt is not a civil right.
SOURCE
***************************
The Suicide of another historic Denomination
It was a long, slow, painful death. In the end, the patient pulled strongly on the plug and what little life was left exited the body with a tragic gasp. May the Presbyterian Church, USA rest in peace. But there will be very little peace in this pathetic death. Ratified by a majority of presbyteries one month ago and effective one month from today (July 10), the church has abandoned its denominational commitment to traditional marriage. Gone is the standard for ordination that requires pastors, “to live either in fidelity within the covenant of marriage between a man and a woman …, or chastity in singleness.”
Conservatives within the denomination had narrowly, but successfully resisted similar efforts over the past 15 years, but the diminished and beleaguered traditionalists lost the 87thand 88thpresbyteries in last month’s effort to change the constitution. “Progressives” had reached the needed majority and the constitution has been amended to allow for ordination of non-celibate gays and lesbians.
For centuries, the Presbyterian Church stood on the proud heritage and legacy of men like John Knox who fearlessly and valiantly stood for the truth of scripture. Today, the modern Presbyterian Church (USA) (also “PCUSA”) bears little resemblance to its noble ancestry. While some in the movement had worked hard for and held out hope for some kind of spiritual awakening, a renewed commitment to orthodoxy, it seems that hope is now gone. Let this be clear: The issue here is not homosexuality. The core of the matter is the authority of scripture.
It was indeed a long and arduous death. The real beginning of the death spiral began with what has been called the “Auburn Affirmation” in 1924. A controversy had arisen between the forces of “fundamentalism” and “modernism.” Once again, the issue was the authority of scripture. Among other things, the infamous affirmation denied the Bible’s inerrancy. The document was quickly signed by 1,274 of the denomination’s leaders and contributed to a decline in membership along with a decline in the number of churches and influence that—with a few exceptional years and a few exceptional churches—has continued to the present. The PCUSA has showed a constant, measurable decline for at least 40 continuous years. At the current rate, the PCUSA will be extinct in another 40 years. One could make the argument that they have been “dead” for years. The recent decision by the majority of the presbyteries simply made the death official.
What we have witnessed is a “Christian” denomination making a complete 180 degree turn from their founding principles and reaping the consequences. The PCUSA has denied what their spiritual founding fathers fought for and willingly died for. In its place, they have substituted a pathetic forgery. John Knox and others proclaimed that Christ died to set people free from their sins. The PCUSA decision provides space in the presbytery for affirmation of sin —even ordination as minister for those who chose to remain in sin.
From the Auburn Affirmation onward, the denomination has showed signs of death. Year after year, as their attendance numbers declined, they have held their annual gathering to try to diagnose the disease. A prescription that included a return to the simple teaching of scripture was desperately needed —a return to founding principles. What we have witnessed instead is more liberalism, in larger doses. The more liberal the denomination has become, the faster it has declined. And yet every year the cry is the same: “Let’s become more liberal and (in effect) deny more scripture!” Didn’t someone say the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result?
One of the proclamations in the Auburn Affirmation was, “Division is deplored, unity and freedom are commended.” In other words, unity was far more important than truth. What they did not understand is that there is no true unity without truth! They turned Christ’s teaching concerning freedom on its head: He taught that His death would bring freedom from sin, denominational liberalism like what we’re witnessing in the PCUSA offers freedom in sin.
On May 10, 2011 the PCUSA made clear to the world that, for them, an orthodox view of scripture, man’s sin and the salvation offered through Christ alone are now irrelevant and even divisive. They have again rejected the authority of scripture. The denomination has left its proud heritage and has signed its own death certificate. Following in the footsteps of the liberals of 1924, the modern PCUSA has divided in the name of unity. Schism is the likely result of the presbyteries’ recent decision. Perhaps in dividing, conservative elements of the domination will rise again: Presbyterians that genuinely believe the Bible.
SOURCE
I am pleased to say that my old Presbyterian church is a traditional one with a good outreach that regularly fills its pews pretty well. It is 45 years since I was a member there but it still feels just the same as ever on the now rare occasions when I drop in for a service there (mostly Easter or Christmas) -- JR
My Twitter.com identity: jonjayray. My Facebook page is also accessible as jonjayray (In full: http://www.facebook.com/jonjayray). For more blog postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, EYE ON BRITAIN and Paralipomena
List of backup or "mirror" sites here or here -- for readers in China or for everyone when blogspot is "down" or failing to update. Email me here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or here (Pictorial) or here (Personal)
****************************
The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist" (Nationalsozialist) and the full name of Hitler's political party (translated) was "The National Socialist German Workers' Party" (In German: Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei)
****************************
The next door to be violently knocked down could very well be yours. Innocence of any offense is no protection
Earlier this year in Tucson, Arizona a shooting rampage targeting U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords made international news – and prompted a coordinated effort to demonize Tea Party supporters (and free speech itself).
Without knowing the details of the case, Pima County Sheriff Clarence Dupnik immediately blamed the shooting on “the vitriol that comes out of certain mouths about tearing down the government.”
“The anger, the hatred, the bigotry that goes on in this country is getting to be outrageous,” Dupnik said, calling Arizona “a mecca for prejudice and bigotry.”
Obviously, the world quickly learned that Dupnik was flat out wrong in his assessment of the situation. The violence in Tucson was the product of a deranged madman – not a discernible ideology. But that didn’t stop Democratic leaders like U.S. Rep. Jim Clyburn from saying that government should “rethink the parameters of free speech” in the wake of the shooting.
Five months after the Giffords’ tragedy, another fatal shooting took place in Tucson – only this one didn’t make international headlines. It has also failed to produce so much as a peep of disapproval from those who were so outraged earlier this year.
On May 5, 2011 – deputies and “operators” of the Pima County Sheriff’s Office raided the home of 26-year-old Jose Guerena, a U.S. Marine who served two tours in Iraq in 2003 and 2005. Having just fallen asleep after working the night shift at a local mine, Guerena was roused by his wife, Vanessa – who saw a man with a gun outside of the couple’s bedroom window. Thinking his home was being invaded, Guerena grabbed his rifle.
What happened next?
SWAT “operators” – executing a narcotics warrant – broke into Guerena’s home and fired 72 rounds within a matter of seconds, hitting him 22 times. Guerena’s five-year-old son, Joel, watched his father die. Initially, Pima County Sheriff’s investigators said that Guerena had fired his weapon at police officers. That report turned out to be patently false. In fact, Guerena never removed the safety from his rifle.
Also Guerena’s wife is adamant that the officers did not identify themselves as law enforcement agents until after the raid was completed. No drugs were found in the home – and it was later revealed that Guerena’s brother was the real target of the investigation.
Sadly, these fatal mistakes are occurring with increasing frequency. Last September in Utah, a SWAT team fatally shot Todd Blair three times in the head and chest during a hastily-planned raid – even though he wasn’t the person sought by the narcotics warrant. Last May in Detroit, 7-year-old Aiyana Jones was shot and killed while sleeping on the sofa during a raid filmed by reality TV cameras.
Part of the problem is obviously the vast expansion of the police state in America. According to Americans for SWAT Reform, more than 50,000 raids take place annually in the United States. Thirty years ago, there were less than 3,000 raids a year.
Another contributing factor is the steady militarization of local law enforcement.
“The war on drugs has done incalculable damage to the character of law enforcement by encouraging police officers to forget they are civilians,” writes David Rittgers, a legal analyst at the Cato Institute who served three tours in Afghanistan.
“When police officers refer to their fellow citizens as civilians and mean to exclude themselves from that category, they’ve mentally leapt from enforcing the law to destroying the enemies of the state,” Rittgers continued. “That’s incompatible with a free society.”
Also, the definition of what constitutes a “SWAT-worthy” offense has broadened considerably – as multiple federal agencies now reserve the right to knock down your door for virtually any reason.
For example, earlier this week a SWAT team raided a home in California – roughing up a man whose estranged wife had failed to pay back her student loans. What agency issued the warrant for this raid? The U.S. Department of Education – which recently purchased more than two dozen 12-gauge shotguns to help prevent “waste, fraud, abuse and other criminal activity involving federal education funds, programs and operations.”
Government apologists can deny it all they want, but the fact is that we are witnessing a massive build-up of the American police state at all levels of government – with repercussions that diminish our liberties and threaten our very lives.
After all, the next door to be knocked down could very well be yours.
SOURCE
*************************
Affordable Housing Means Your House Is Worth Less
Consumer advocates have their priorities backwards
Martin Luther King famously once proclaimed, “I have a dream, that one day my children would not be judged by the color of the skin, but by the content of their character, and that they would have a right to a home at an affordable price.”
Okay, that’s not exactly what he said. But an unusual coalition of financial institutions and community housing advocates has been arguing this.
The Dodd-Frank Act, passed last year revamping rules for financial institutions, directed all bank regulators to issue a joint regulation defining a reasonably safe, well-underwritten mortgage. Their recent proposed definition for such a “qualified residential mortgage” has created a stir because it has strict guidelines such as a 20 percent down payment requirement and tight limits on the collective debt of the borrower.
Rather than praising the definition of a good mortgage for ensuring borrower safety, consumer groups have criticized the regulation as being too strict, since banks would have to hold more capital against any loans that are riskier than qualified residential mortgages, meaning that financial institutions would charge more for mortgages with lower down payments.
“This is a civil rights issue,” John Taylor, president of the National Community Reinvestment Coalition, said recently.
Mortgage Bankers Association CEO David Stevens echoed the sentiment: “We still need to be able to make affordable mortgages that don’t just go to the wealthy, who can afford the biggest down payments and who have the most positive credit ratings.” Such a kind heart from a man whose organization has lost significant business in the past few years as mortgages to less qualified borrowers have dried up.
Stevens, Taylor, and the leaders of other groups such as the Center for Responsible Lending and the National Council of La Raza (not to mention the realtors and homebuilders associations) have been teaming up to fight the qualified residential mortgage definition on the grounds that it will cause low-income households to spend more time saving up for a down payment while increasing the cost of mortgages.
But why is access to affordable homes equated with access to affordable mortgages, i.e. debt? They are not the same thing.
This coalition is nothing new. Such groups were also aligned in the late-1980s hawking a similar product. MLK’s wife even gave a speech in 1989 encouraging President George H.W. Bush to push for “affordable housing” as a part of her late husband’s dream for civil rights.
Ultimately, the Government Sponsored Enterprise Reform Act of 1992 was passed creating “affordable housing goals” targeted at increasing lending to low-income families. But the trade-off for access to cheaper mortgage debt—often through a subprime loan—was that housing prices increased.
Affordable mortgages replaced affordable housing.
As Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac expanded their purchases of subprime mortgages throughout the 2000s, the prices of homes kept growing and growing—requiring more and more federal subsidies to keep pace. That is partly because as mortgage prices fell, demand increased for homes, and prices rose. It was basic economics at work.
Sure, increased mortgage rates can be quite the deterrent to homebuyers, especially first-time homebuyers. But so can high housing prices.
Yet Janis Bowdler, a research project director at La Raza, still argues that the new Dodd-Frank authorized regulations will “so significantly deter the ability of first-time buyers to break into the market that we will see a real decline in home ownership.”
The issue of whether increased homeownership is a good thing is a matter for a different column. The confusing part of Bowdler’s comment is why she isn’t pushing for lower housing prices if she is worried about first-time buyers.
With virtually ever other commodity, innovation that improves quality and lowers price is seen as a good thing. Only because of the misperception that owning a home is a universally good investment for households do we favor rising home prices. (Well, that and the politics of housing prices.)
But historically, home prices on a national level have generally grown just at the rate of inflation. Only during the recent housing bubble did prices break from their historical trend and double over the course of 10 years. It is a myth that homeownership inherently creates wealth.
Now, home values have been falling since 2006 as the bubble has deflated and we are almost back to the historical trend line that dates back to the end of World War II for housing prices. But a host of federal policies—like the First-time Homebuyers Credit and the Fed’s quantitative easing programs—have slowed the decline in prices; though they have not stopped it.
It's not that Washington should force prices to go lower, it's that La Raza and other consumer organizations should be clamoring for the government to get out of the way to let prices finish their fall back to natural levels. That would help first-time homebuyers since housing would become more affordable.
Plus the households would have less mortgage debt with less needed to borrow.
But if La Raza and their cohorts could write the rules, they’d keep the government involved while lowering the threshold for getting a federal subsidy.
When the homeownership mob—to borrow a John Carneyism—won the day in 1992, the results were 1) government supported housing finance that put taxpayers on the line; 2) lower underwriting standards for housing finance supported by Fannie and Freddie; and 3) a bubble created by an artificial boost in housing prices. Ultimately, millions of low-income families were stuck with high and unsustainable debt, leading to the millions of foreclsoures we are wrestling with today.
The same thing will happen again if the consumer groups win again. Crippling overnment-subsidized debt is not a civil right.
SOURCE
***************************
The Suicide of another historic Denomination
It was a long, slow, painful death. In the end, the patient pulled strongly on the plug and what little life was left exited the body with a tragic gasp. May the Presbyterian Church, USA rest in peace. But there will be very little peace in this pathetic death. Ratified by a majority of presbyteries one month ago and effective one month from today (July 10), the church has abandoned its denominational commitment to traditional marriage. Gone is the standard for ordination that requires pastors, “to live either in fidelity within the covenant of marriage between a man and a woman …, or chastity in singleness.”
Conservatives within the denomination had narrowly, but successfully resisted similar efforts over the past 15 years, but the diminished and beleaguered traditionalists lost the 87thand 88thpresbyteries in last month’s effort to change the constitution. “Progressives” had reached the needed majority and the constitution has been amended to allow for ordination of non-celibate gays and lesbians.
For centuries, the Presbyterian Church stood on the proud heritage and legacy of men like John Knox who fearlessly and valiantly stood for the truth of scripture. Today, the modern Presbyterian Church (USA) (also “PCUSA”) bears little resemblance to its noble ancestry. While some in the movement had worked hard for and held out hope for some kind of spiritual awakening, a renewed commitment to orthodoxy, it seems that hope is now gone. Let this be clear: The issue here is not homosexuality. The core of the matter is the authority of scripture.
It was indeed a long and arduous death. The real beginning of the death spiral began with what has been called the “Auburn Affirmation” in 1924. A controversy had arisen between the forces of “fundamentalism” and “modernism.” Once again, the issue was the authority of scripture. Among other things, the infamous affirmation denied the Bible’s inerrancy. The document was quickly signed by 1,274 of the denomination’s leaders and contributed to a decline in membership along with a decline in the number of churches and influence that—with a few exceptional years and a few exceptional churches—has continued to the present. The PCUSA has showed a constant, measurable decline for at least 40 continuous years. At the current rate, the PCUSA will be extinct in another 40 years. One could make the argument that they have been “dead” for years. The recent decision by the majority of the presbyteries simply made the death official.
What we have witnessed is a “Christian” denomination making a complete 180 degree turn from their founding principles and reaping the consequences. The PCUSA has denied what their spiritual founding fathers fought for and willingly died for. In its place, they have substituted a pathetic forgery. John Knox and others proclaimed that Christ died to set people free from their sins. The PCUSA decision provides space in the presbytery for affirmation of sin —even ordination as minister for those who chose to remain in sin.
From the Auburn Affirmation onward, the denomination has showed signs of death. Year after year, as their attendance numbers declined, they have held their annual gathering to try to diagnose the disease. A prescription that included a return to the simple teaching of scripture was desperately needed —a return to founding principles. What we have witnessed instead is more liberalism, in larger doses. The more liberal the denomination has become, the faster it has declined. And yet every year the cry is the same: “Let’s become more liberal and (in effect) deny more scripture!” Didn’t someone say the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result?
One of the proclamations in the Auburn Affirmation was, “Division is deplored, unity and freedom are commended.” In other words, unity was far more important than truth. What they did not understand is that there is no true unity without truth! They turned Christ’s teaching concerning freedom on its head: He taught that His death would bring freedom from sin, denominational liberalism like what we’re witnessing in the PCUSA offers freedom in sin.
On May 10, 2011 the PCUSA made clear to the world that, for them, an orthodox view of scripture, man’s sin and the salvation offered through Christ alone are now irrelevant and even divisive. They have again rejected the authority of scripture. The denomination has left its proud heritage and has signed its own death certificate. Following in the footsteps of the liberals of 1924, the modern PCUSA has divided in the name of unity. Schism is the likely result of the presbyteries’ recent decision. Perhaps in dividing, conservative elements of the domination will rise again: Presbyterians that genuinely believe the Bible.
SOURCE
I am pleased to say that my old Presbyterian church is a traditional one with a good outreach that regularly fills its pews pretty well. It is 45 years since I was a member there but it still feels just the same as ever on the now rare occasions when I drop in for a service there (mostly Easter or Christmas) -- JR
My Twitter.com identity: jonjayray. My Facebook page is also accessible as jonjayray (In full: http://www.facebook.com/jonjayray). For more blog postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, EYE ON BRITAIN and Paralipomena
List of backup or "mirror" sites here or here -- for readers in China or for everyone when blogspot is "down" or failing to update. Email me here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or here (Pictorial) or here (Personal)
****************************
The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist" (Nationalsozialist) and the full name of Hitler's political party (translated) was "The National Socialist German Workers' Party" (In German: Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei)
****************************
Capitalism as art
Government certainly isn't!
One criticism raised against capitalism is that it turns us all into pale imitations of real human beings by taking all the creativity and individuality out of life. This criticism usually focuses on how capitalism creates standardized, “processed,” and inferior products that we gladly consume (think of McDonald’s as the archetype here). The act of production is seen as rote and mechanical, perhaps indirectly due to mainstream economic models that portray the economy as merely an optimization problem lacking any creativity. The result, say the critics, is a bland, gray, highly imitative society.
This perception is misguided. In fact capitalism is fueled by creativity and makes possible a level of individuality never before seen in human history. The anthropologist Grant McCracken recently wrote that “capitalism is art, a transformational exercise that turns meaning into value and value back into meaning.” I think he’s onto something there, and viewing capitalism as creating meaning, like art, is a useful way to respond to the criticism noted above.
Creation of Value
That capitalist production is a “transformational exercise” should be fairly obvious: What entrepreneurs do is to take inputs and attempt to transform them into an output that is valued more highly than the sum of the values of the separate inputs (accounting for the time involved in production as well). A ladder is more valuable than a bunch of wood, some nails or screws, and some tools. Profit is the creation of value.
Note too the idea of “turning meaning into value.” The simplicity of the ladder example might hide it, but the hard part for the entrepreneur is figuring out what people value. One way of expressing this is that producers need to know what has meaning for potential buyers.
The goods and services we purchase are not really the ends we seek in the market — they are means for satisfying our various wants. The challenge for producers is to figure out what those wants are. This requires producers to try to understand the things that have meaning to consumers and then find ways to create them out of available resources. As McCracken says, producers try to transform meaning into value, which requires some elements of art in figuring out what carries meaning and how best to provide people with objects or services that embody it.
On the consumption side, the reverse is true. Capitalism makes it possible for us to better differentiate ourselves from others by providing an enormous variety of goods and services. This variety not only enables us to better fine-tune our purchases to our particular wants — which is itself a way of creating meaning in our lives — but it also lets us create and define who we are by the kinds of products we buy. As entrepreneurs create value by trying to anticipate what we want, we turn that value back into meaning by the patterns of consumption we undertake.
In the West most of us are wealthy enough that our day-to-day needs for food, clothing, and shelter are not pressing concerns. One consequence is that we can afford to make purchases that satisfy not just some particular want, but also the desire to create meaning in our lives. We spend money on our hobbies and interests, no matter how unusual they might be. We buy product lines that say something about who we think we are, or who we want to be, such as Apple products, hybrid cars, all kinds of clothing, and things like tattoos and hairstyles. We are artists creating ourselves through individualized consumption decisions.
Idiosyncratic Tastes
Market economies also produce goods that cater to the most idiosyncratic of tastes. Those with “minority” tastes, such as wearing Hawaiian shirts all the time or ties that look like fish, can find products that satisfy those tastes in the market. Imagine instead that we had to vote on what to produce according to majority rule. Much of what markets now produce to satisfy strange, unusual, or weird wants would never get produced. Markets make possible forms of creative individuality that alternative systems would not, and do not, tolerate.
Consumers take the values that entrepreneurs create and transform those products back into meaning for themselves. In some fundamental sense the creation of value and the creation of meaning are just two ways of looking at the very same process of production and consumption in a market economy. In other words, both entrepreneurship and consumption are acts of creativity, imagination, and art.
SOURCE
***************************
Simply Madness
Jonah Goldberg
"Live simply so that others may simply live," Gandhi famously proclaimed. Some vegetarians see their diet as the truest expression of Gandhi's advice. But these days, the slogan has been embraced most passionately by those who wish to say goodbye to economic growth.
That's not an exaggeration. The so-called "steady-state economy" movement holds that "We will have to get beyond growth as a society in order to realize a sustainable future."
That's from the website steadystaterevolution.org. Its logo features a typical jagged trend line (representing the traditional ups and downs of economic progress) that suddenly flatlines at a high level, sort of like what an EKG would look like if you had a heart attack and died while jogging (death, after all, is the steadiest of states).
The idea behind the steady-state economy should be familiar to anyone who's heard the lament that capitalism is bad for the environment because it rapaciously consumes resources faster than they can be replaced.
It's an ancient idea, really, a kind of millenarian paranoia that keeps getting gussied up to fit the latest headlines. My favorite example is the 1968 book "The Population Bomb" by Paul R. Ehrlich. "The battle to feed all of humanity is over," prophesized Ehrlich. "In the 1970s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now."
It was a "certainty" that even in America, famine would claim millions. Ehrlich desperately claims that his predictions were mostly right and that hundreds of millions of people did indeed die of hunger over the ensuing decades. That's not exactly true. Global population has doubled and the amount of food available for humanity has grown as well.
But, yes, people have died of hunger since 1968. Why? It wasn't because markets failed or resources ran out. It was because government planners failed. That's why countries like India and China have introduced markets -- because their central planning was killing their own people.
A few years ago, a special issue of New Scientist magazine was dedicated to the steady-state economy. In it, Herman Daly, a leading guru behind the movement, explained that in his new ideal "sustainable economy," "scientists set the rules."
Translation: If the ecologists don't like an idea, that idea is out. Daly's hardly the only person out there imagining a kind of Plato's "Republic" where the philosopher-kings are replaced with environmental and climate scientists. The 2007 book "The Climate Change Challenge and the Failure of Democracy" makes a similar argument, though its enemy is liberal democracy rather than economic growth.
Either way, the problem becomes clear: When people start talking about capping or halting or managing economic growth, what they really mean is capping, halting and managing freedom. Hence Thomas Friedman, New York Times columnist and avowed envier of China's authoritarian regime, declares that "The Earth is Full" and we must therefore embrace a version of the steady-state economy.
Economic growth is an enemy of all central planners for the simple reason that growth jumps the guardrails of The Plan; it changes the aesthetically appealing flatline of the steady state and makes it jagged. Growth creates new products, destroys old ones and allows people to behave in ways that render PowerPoint projections dismayingly obsolete. Worse, it takes power from the planners.
In order to herd people back onto the official path, planners must tell them that what exists outside the guardrails is too terrifying to contemplate. "Beyond here there be monsters" is the posted sign at every guardrail.
For the record, America has more forests than it did a century ago. Our air, water and food are cleaner than at any time since industrialization. That is not because we lived simply, but because we pursued economic growth and accumulated the wealth and expertise to mend our problems. Over the long run, the same pattern holds true for every country that embraces economic growth.
That's why climate change is such a useful bogeyman -- because it is non-falsifiable, at least in our lifetimes. The "scientists set the rules," and there's no room for appeal. And -- surprise! -- in order to avoid catastrophe, the same old adages apply.
"Live simply so that others may simply live" has never made any sense save in this light. To live simply means to live predictably -- predictably poor (or to not live at all). When India came closest to following Gandhi's mantra, untold millions lived and died -- albeit "simply"! -- in abject poverty.
What America needs desperately today is massive economic growth. That's what will pay off our debt, sustain our entitlements and continue to improve the environment. Almost as important, it will annoy all the right people.
SOURCE
***************************
Slash spending and the economy will bloom
by Jeff Jacoby
FOR THREE YEARS, under presidents of both parties, the federal government has pumped trillions of borrowed dollars into stimulus, bailout, and recovery spending. The results have been woeful: Two years after the recession formally ended, the country is mired in a bleak economic lassitude from which it seems unable to rouse itself.
With 14 million Americans still unemployed, President Obama is presiding over the weakest economic recovery in more than 60 years.
Now the wretched news of recent weeks -- feeble GDP growth; painful foreclosure rates; slipping car sales; a drop in factory orders; ever more Americans on food stamps -- has grown even worse.
First, Standard & Poor's reported that home prices have fallen to their lowest level in more than two years, confirming a "double dip" in a housing collapse more severe than the one during the Great Depression. Then came the government's latest employment numbers: only 54,000 jobs added in May, the fewest in eight months, and a rise in the unemployment rate to 9.1 percent. This has been the lousiest recovery in more than 60 years, and by a wide margin.
Last week, speaking at the Chrysler plant in Toldeo where the Jeep Wrangler is produced, President Obama tried to put a brave face on things. "There are always going to be bumps on the road to recovery," he said. "We're going to pass through some rough terrain that even a Wrangler would have a tough time with." The audience booed. If that's the reaction Obama's keep-your-chin-up rhetoric gets from a friendly union crowd, how will it play with the rest of the country?
In a new strategy memo, Democratic pollster Stan Greenberg warns his party that voters have lost confidence in Democrats when it comes to the economy, and that harping on the past -- insisting that "Democrats did right and brave things" to promote growth -- will not win votes in 2012.
"'The economy' is not the recovery," Greenberg writes, "but a set of powerful on-going realities: a middle class smashed and struggling, American jobs being lost, the country and people in debt. . . . Voters are desperate for leaders who understand the scope of what is happening. . . . They want serious plans, not triumphalism about jobs reports."
To Greenberg and other Democrats, "serious plans" to revive the economy presumably don't include dramatic cutbacks in the government's astronomical spending. But what if that spending -- projected to reach $3.8 trillion this year, $1.6 trillion of it borrowed -- is the very thing inhibiting economic growth? Keynesian economists and pundits have argued that what the economy craves is even more stimulus spending and government debt. But history suggests something altogether different.
Writing last year in the Cato Policy Report, economists Jason Taylor and Richard Vedder showed that the great post-World War II economic boom was ushered in by the swift rollback of what had been the largest economic "stimulus" in US history. At the time, leading Keynesians cautioned that the abrupt withdrawal of federal dollars would plunge the economy into a new depression.
Their warnings were ignored.
"Government canceled war contracts, and its spending fell from $84 billion in 1945 to under $30 billion in 1946," Taylor and Vedder wrote. "By 1947, the government was . . . running a budget surplus of close to 6 percent of GDP. The military released around 10 million Americans back into civilian life. Most economic controls were lifted, and all were gone less than a year after V-J Day. In short, the economy underwent . . . the 'shock of de-stimulus.'"
Fearful predictions of massive unemployment -- 14 percent, Business Week said -- never materialized. Far from collapsing, "labor markets adjusted quickly and efficiently once they were finally unfettered." Even with millions of demobilized soldiers re-entering the workforce, "unemployment rates . . . remained under 4.5 percent in the first three postwar years." Workers who lost government-funded jobs quickly replaced them in the surging private sector. "In fact," Taylor and Vedder add, "civilian employment grew, on net, by over 4 million between 1945 and 1947 when so many pundits were predicting economic Armageddon. Household consumption, business investment, and net exports all boomed as government spending receded."
America's postwar experience indicates that vibrant growth is generated not by massive government interference in the economy, but by the reverse. The way to revive a gasping private sector is for government to get out of its way, not to choke it with trillions of dollars in new spending.
Washington's response to the recession -- unprecedented, intrusive, costly -- has been ruinous. The stimulus hasn't restored the economy to health. The "shock of de-stimulus" just might.
SOURCE
***********************
ELSEWHERE
FCC taking “Fairness Doctrine” off the books: "Under GOP pressure, the Federal Communications Commission has agreed to strike from its books an outdated yet still controversial regulation of political speech on the airwaves known as the Fairness Doctrine. FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski said in a letter to a House Republican leader this week that the agency's effort to identify and eliminate 'antiquated and outmoded rules that unnecessarily burden business, stifle investment and innovation, or confuse consumers and licensees' will include a recommendation to delete the Fairness Doctrine."
To fix fiscal mess, follow Texas: "So what example should America follow, that of deficit-slaughtering, budget-cutting, seriously limited government in Texas, which has added 730,000 jobs in the past decade, or that of regulation-happy, spend-mercilessly, owe-everything, flee-this-place-quickly California, which has lost 600,000 jobs during the same period?"
The Trojan Horse of “happiness research”: "A very large literature has built up over the past several decades in the area of so-called 'happiness research.' Such research is based on several very dubious assumptions: namely, that utility is cardinal and measurable after all; that interpersonal utility comparisons can therefore be made; and that the great unicorn of economic theory — the 'social welfare function' — has finally been spotted. Armed with these assertions, socialists around the world believe they have finally discovered their holy grail." [See also here]
My Twitter.com identity: jonjayray. My Facebook page is also accessible as jonjayray (In full: http://www.facebook.com/jonjayray). For more blog postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, EYE ON BRITAIN and Paralipomena
List of backup or "mirror" sites here or here -- for readers in China or for everyone when blogspot is "down" or failing to update. Email me here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or here (Pictorial) or here (Personal)
****************************
The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist" (Nationalsozialist) and the full name of Hitler's political party (translated) was "The National Socialist German Workers' Party" (In German: Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei)
****************************
Government certainly isn't!
One criticism raised against capitalism is that it turns us all into pale imitations of real human beings by taking all the creativity and individuality out of life. This criticism usually focuses on how capitalism creates standardized, “processed,” and inferior products that we gladly consume (think of McDonald’s as the archetype here). The act of production is seen as rote and mechanical, perhaps indirectly due to mainstream economic models that portray the economy as merely an optimization problem lacking any creativity. The result, say the critics, is a bland, gray, highly imitative society.
This perception is misguided. In fact capitalism is fueled by creativity and makes possible a level of individuality never before seen in human history. The anthropologist Grant McCracken recently wrote that “capitalism is art, a transformational exercise that turns meaning into value and value back into meaning.” I think he’s onto something there, and viewing capitalism as creating meaning, like art, is a useful way to respond to the criticism noted above.
Creation of Value
That capitalist production is a “transformational exercise” should be fairly obvious: What entrepreneurs do is to take inputs and attempt to transform them into an output that is valued more highly than the sum of the values of the separate inputs (accounting for the time involved in production as well). A ladder is more valuable than a bunch of wood, some nails or screws, and some tools. Profit is the creation of value.
Note too the idea of “turning meaning into value.” The simplicity of the ladder example might hide it, but the hard part for the entrepreneur is figuring out what people value. One way of expressing this is that producers need to know what has meaning for potential buyers.
The goods and services we purchase are not really the ends we seek in the market — they are means for satisfying our various wants. The challenge for producers is to figure out what those wants are. This requires producers to try to understand the things that have meaning to consumers and then find ways to create them out of available resources. As McCracken says, producers try to transform meaning into value, which requires some elements of art in figuring out what carries meaning and how best to provide people with objects or services that embody it.
On the consumption side, the reverse is true. Capitalism makes it possible for us to better differentiate ourselves from others by providing an enormous variety of goods and services. This variety not only enables us to better fine-tune our purchases to our particular wants — which is itself a way of creating meaning in our lives — but it also lets us create and define who we are by the kinds of products we buy. As entrepreneurs create value by trying to anticipate what we want, we turn that value back into meaning by the patterns of consumption we undertake.
In the West most of us are wealthy enough that our day-to-day needs for food, clothing, and shelter are not pressing concerns. One consequence is that we can afford to make purchases that satisfy not just some particular want, but also the desire to create meaning in our lives. We spend money on our hobbies and interests, no matter how unusual they might be. We buy product lines that say something about who we think we are, or who we want to be, such as Apple products, hybrid cars, all kinds of clothing, and things like tattoos and hairstyles. We are artists creating ourselves through individualized consumption decisions.
Idiosyncratic Tastes
Market economies also produce goods that cater to the most idiosyncratic of tastes. Those with “minority” tastes, such as wearing Hawaiian shirts all the time or ties that look like fish, can find products that satisfy those tastes in the market. Imagine instead that we had to vote on what to produce according to majority rule. Much of what markets now produce to satisfy strange, unusual, or weird wants would never get produced. Markets make possible forms of creative individuality that alternative systems would not, and do not, tolerate.
Consumers take the values that entrepreneurs create and transform those products back into meaning for themselves. In some fundamental sense the creation of value and the creation of meaning are just two ways of looking at the very same process of production and consumption in a market economy. In other words, both entrepreneurship and consumption are acts of creativity, imagination, and art.
SOURCE
***************************
Simply Madness
Jonah Goldberg
"Live simply so that others may simply live," Gandhi famously proclaimed. Some vegetarians see their diet as the truest expression of Gandhi's advice. But these days, the slogan has been embraced most passionately by those who wish to say goodbye to economic growth.
That's not an exaggeration. The so-called "steady-state economy" movement holds that "We will have to get beyond growth as a society in order to realize a sustainable future."
That's from the website steadystaterevolution.org. Its logo features a typical jagged trend line (representing the traditional ups and downs of economic progress) that suddenly flatlines at a high level, sort of like what an EKG would look like if you had a heart attack and died while jogging (death, after all, is the steadiest of states).
The idea behind the steady-state economy should be familiar to anyone who's heard the lament that capitalism is bad for the environment because it rapaciously consumes resources faster than they can be replaced.
It's an ancient idea, really, a kind of millenarian paranoia that keeps getting gussied up to fit the latest headlines. My favorite example is the 1968 book "The Population Bomb" by Paul R. Ehrlich. "The battle to feed all of humanity is over," prophesized Ehrlich. "In the 1970s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now."
It was a "certainty" that even in America, famine would claim millions. Ehrlich desperately claims that his predictions were mostly right and that hundreds of millions of people did indeed die of hunger over the ensuing decades. That's not exactly true. Global population has doubled and the amount of food available for humanity has grown as well.
But, yes, people have died of hunger since 1968. Why? It wasn't because markets failed or resources ran out. It was because government planners failed. That's why countries like India and China have introduced markets -- because their central planning was killing their own people.
A few years ago, a special issue of New Scientist magazine was dedicated to the steady-state economy. In it, Herman Daly, a leading guru behind the movement, explained that in his new ideal "sustainable economy," "scientists set the rules."
Translation: If the ecologists don't like an idea, that idea is out. Daly's hardly the only person out there imagining a kind of Plato's "Republic" where the philosopher-kings are replaced with environmental and climate scientists. The 2007 book "The Climate Change Challenge and the Failure of Democracy" makes a similar argument, though its enemy is liberal democracy rather than economic growth.
Either way, the problem becomes clear: When people start talking about capping or halting or managing economic growth, what they really mean is capping, halting and managing freedom. Hence Thomas Friedman, New York Times columnist and avowed envier of China's authoritarian regime, declares that "The Earth is Full" and we must therefore embrace a version of the steady-state economy.
Economic growth is an enemy of all central planners for the simple reason that growth jumps the guardrails of The Plan; it changes the aesthetically appealing flatline of the steady state and makes it jagged. Growth creates new products, destroys old ones and allows people to behave in ways that render PowerPoint projections dismayingly obsolete. Worse, it takes power from the planners.
In order to herd people back onto the official path, planners must tell them that what exists outside the guardrails is too terrifying to contemplate. "Beyond here there be monsters" is the posted sign at every guardrail.
For the record, America has more forests than it did a century ago. Our air, water and food are cleaner than at any time since industrialization. That is not because we lived simply, but because we pursued economic growth and accumulated the wealth and expertise to mend our problems. Over the long run, the same pattern holds true for every country that embraces economic growth.
That's why climate change is such a useful bogeyman -- because it is non-falsifiable, at least in our lifetimes. The "scientists set the rules," and there's no room for appeal. And -- surprise! -- in order to avoid catastrophe, the same old adages apply.
"Live simply so that others may simply live" has never made any sense save in this light. To live simply means to live predictably -- predictably poor (or to not live at all). When India came closest to following Gandhi's mantra, untold millions lived and died -- albeit "simply"! -- in abject poverty.
What America needs desperately today is massive economic growth. That's what will pay off our debt, sustain our entitlements and continue to improve the environment. Almost as important, it will annoy all the right people.
SOURCE
***************************
Slash spending and the economy will bloom
by Jeff Jacoby
FOR THREE YEARS, under presidents of both parties, the federal government has pumped trillions of borrowed dollars into stimulus, bailout, and recovery spending. The results have been woeful: Two years after the recession formally ended, the country is mired in a bleak economic lassitude from which it seems unable to rouse itself.
With 14 million Americans still unemployed, President Obama is presiding over the weakest economic recovery in more than 60 years.
Now the wretched news of recent weeks -- feeble GDP growth; painful foreclosure rates; slipping car sales; a drop in factory orders; ever more Americans on food stamps -- has grown even worse.
First, Standard & Poor's reported that home prices have fallen to their lowest level in more than two years, confirming a "double dip" in a housing collapse more severe than the one during the Great Depression. Then came the government's latest employment numbers: only 54,000 jobs added in May, the fewest in eight months, and a rise in the unemployment rate to 9.1 percent. This has been the lousiest recovery in more than 60 years, and by a wide margin.
Last week, speaking at the Chrysler plant in Toldeo where the Jeep Wrangler is produced, President Obama tried to put a brave face on things. "There are always going to be bumps on the road to recovery," he said. "We're going to pass through some rough terrain that even a Wrangler would have a tough time with." The audience booed. If that's the reaction Obama's keep-your-chin-up rhetoric gets from a friendly union crowd, how will it play with the rest of the country?
In a new strategy memo, Democratic pollster Stan Greenberg warns his party that voters have lost confidence in Democrats when it comes to the economy, and that harping on the past -- insisting that "Democrats did right and brave things" to promote growth -- will not win votes in 2012.
"'The economy' is not the recovery," Greenberg writes, "but a set of powerful on-going realities: a middle class smashed and struggling, American jobs being lost, the country and people in debt. . . . Voters are desperate for leaders who understand the scope of what is happening. . . . They want serious plans, not triumphalism about jobs reports."
To Greenberg and other Democrats, "serious plans" to revive the economy presumably don't include dramatic cutbacks in the government's astronomical spending. But what if that spending -- projected to reach $3.8 trillion this year, $1.6 trillion of it borrowed -- is the very thing inhibiting economic growth? Keynesian economists and pundits have argued that what the economy craves is even more stimulus spending and government debt. But history suggests something altogether different.
Writing last year in the Cato Policy Report, economists Jason Taylor and Richard Vedder showed that the great post-World War II economic boom was ushered in by the swift rollback of what had been the largest economic "stimulus" in US history. At the time, leading Keynesians cautioned that the abrupt withdrawal of federal dollars would plunge the economy into a new depression.
Their warnings were ignored.
"Government canceled war contracts, and its spending fell from $84 billion in 1945 to under $30 billion in 1946," Taylor and Vedder wrote. "By 1947, the government was . . . running a budget surplus of close to 6 percent of GDP. The military released around 10 million Americans back into civilian life. Most economic controls were lifted, and all were gone less than a year after V-J Day. In short, the economy underwent . . . the 'shock of de-stimulus.'"
Fearful predictions of massive unemployment -- 14 percent, Business Week said -- never materialized. Far from collapsing, "labor markets adjusted quickly and efficiently once they were finally unfettered." Even with millions of demobilized soldiers re-entering the workforce, "unemployment rates . . . remained under 4.5 percent in the first three postwar years." Workers who lost government-funded jobs quickly replaced them in the surging private sector. "In fact," Taylor and Vedder add, "civilian employment grew, on net, by over 4 million between 1945 and 1947 when so many pundits were predicting economic Armageddon. Household consumption, business investment, and net exports all boomed as government spending receded."
America's postwar experience indicates that vibrant growth is generated not by massive government interference in the economy, but by the reverse. The way to revive a gasping private sector is for government to get out of its way, not to choke it with trillions of dollars in new spending.
Washington's response to the recession -- unprecedented, intrusive, costly -- has been ruinous. The stimulus hasn't restored the economy to health. The "shock of de-stimulus" just might.
SOURCE
***********************
ELSEWHERE
FCC taking “Fairness Doctrine” off the books: "Under GOP pressure, the Federal Communications Commission has agreed to strike from its books an outdated yet still controversial regulation of political speech on the airwaves known as the Fairness Doctrine. FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski said in a letter to a House Republican leader this week that the agency's effort to identify and eliminate 'antiquated and outmoded rules that unnecessarily burden business, stifle investment and innovation, or confuse consumers and licensees' will include a recommendation to delete the Fairness Doctrine."
To fix fiscal mess, follow Texas: "So what example should America follow, that of deficit-slaughtering, budget-cutting, seriously limited government in Texas, which has added 730,000 jobs in the past decade, or that of regulation-happy, spend-mercilessly, owe-everything, flee-this-place-quickly California, which has lost 600,000 jobs during the same period?"
The Trojan Horse of “happiness research”: "A very large literature has built up over the past several decades in the area of so-called 'happiness research.' Such research is based on several very dubious assumptions: namely, that utility is cardinal and measurable after all; that interpersonal utility comparisons can therefore be made; and that the great unicorn of economic theory — the 'social welfare function' — has finally been spotted. Armed with these assertions, socialists around the world believe they have finally discovered their holy grail." [See also here]
My Twitter.com identity: jonjayray. My Facebook page is also accessible as jonjayray (In full: http://www.facebook.com/jonjayray). For more blog postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, EYE ON BRITAIN and Paralipomena
List of backup or "mirror" sites here or here -- for readers in China or for everyone when blogspot is "down" or failing to update. Email me here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or here (Pictorial) or here (Personal)
****************************
The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist" (Nationalsozialist) and the full name of Hitler's political party (translated) was "The National Socialist German Workers' Party" (In German: Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei)
****************************
Thursday, June 09, 2011
The Audacity of Progressivism
by Andrew Mellon
Recently, I got into a big fight with my cube-mate. After attacking him for his listening to Bill Maher during the workday, he shot back and mocked my Glenn Beck listening. As if there was some moral equivalence between the two.
“But Beck’s predictions have been right throughout the last two years. Why would you not at least give him a listen?” I questioned. My Georgetown-educated cube-mate shot back: “Because most of the people that listen to Glenn Beck are uneducated mid-westerners.”
Infuriated, I protested “Do you have any idea how arrogant and elitist you sound right now?” Leave aside the irony that I was attacking his condescension while as a colleague of ours pointed out, showing beneath my loafers were our company holiday gift socks dotted with various currencies.
As my cube-mate went on to say, though he conceded that government should not be all-encompassing, “I want smart people to make decisions for people.” In other words, us silly hicks are incapable of governing ourselves. This is the fatal conceit of which F.A. Hayek wrote that reflects the attitude of the intellectual class today.
Why is it fatal? First, the “highly educated intellectual” today routinely receives a subpar education. Believe me, I went through it at Columbia, one of the few remaining schools with any semblance of a valuable curriculum. A real education is about teaching the pupil to think critically. Routinely, education today is more about spending time in science classes listening to professors talk about the merits of joining the Peace Corps (yes, this happened to me), iconoclastic gender, race and political studies courses and cultural Marxist programming of the heirs apparent of the political, economic and cultural hierarchy of the country.
Of those who graduate from these institutions and matriculate to the political realm, the progressive ethic pervades. And what is this ethic? The elite must decide for the sheep.
Progressivism argues that man should play G-d, organizing society as he sees fit, “nudging” people as Cass Sunstein advocates towards making the right decision of a governmentally-defined set of choices and socially engineering swaths of society.
Never mind that central planning fails given that the planners can never make the decisions that self-reliant and self-interested individuals acting freely would make, and that central planners lack the specialized information of the millions of actors that make up the economy.
Never mind that even if you don’t buy this argument on theoretical grounds, every nation guided by central planning has ended in mass poverty, mass genocide or both.
The manifest defects of central planning are not nearly as bad as its dehumanizing nature. For the progressive central planner is a regressive tyrant. What he seeks to do by regulation is only different than what the master does by the whip in his coyness.
The progressive enslaves as he believes that there is no value in the individual — there are only masses of malleable animals that must be shaped and coddled by paternalistic wise men in government.
Egalitarianism must reign. Natural differences, desires and ambitions must be discarded for the greater good. Social welfare is but a small price to pay for the fat cat, selfish innovators, entrepreneurs, job creators and investors who subsidize it.
Forget about the fact that practically every good and service around us was provided by the very system the progressives seek to destroy, to the disproportionate detriment of the lower classes.
Yet the question is never posed, is such a system moral? Should you by virtue of living in America be forced by law to live to support your fellow man through government? Should you be an indentured servant for months each year in effect working for the government middle man so that he can bribe and satisfy his constituents? Should the politician be able to compel you by law to plan your retirement by paying into an insolvent Ponzi scheme like social security; to at the point of the gun make you cut a check each year for failing public schools that teach the very principles to the nation’s youth that most disgust you?
And is it moral that these progressives who would be the first to attack religious advocates impose their own leftist religion through the involuntary mechanism of brute government force?
The progressive philosophy, an economic failure, is also a massive blight on our souls. For it enchains man to his fellow man and impoverishes all of society by taking away man’s individualism, his sense of responsibility and his self-worth. The progressive state dehumanizes and demoralizes man, leaving him an apathetic and impotent slave.
There is no compassion in such a system. There is no morality in such a system. All that there is is man ruling over his fellow man, throwing bread crumb benefits at various faceless voting blocs unable to see through such a scheme after so many years of socialist ideological subversion.
Shame on the progressives for their disdain for their fellow man, their hubris in thinking that they are right to rule over him and their disgusting glee in molding society for their own political gain. And shame on us for sanctioning such a system.
SOURCE
****************************
'Bumps on the Road'
The choice is more jobs reports like Friday's or a growth agenda.
You've got to hand it to President Obama and his White House economic team. Faced with yesterday's dreary May jobs report, they did their best and rolled out the old "bump in the road" analogy for comfort. As chief White House economist Austan Goolsbee put it, "there are always bumps on the road to recovery, but the overall trajectory of the economy has improved dramatically over the past two years."
Nice try, but there's no way to spin news that the economy in May created only 54,000 new jobs, which is about one-third the number necessary to keep up with the growth in the labor force. The jobless rate rose for the second straight month to 9.1%, which is especially depressing nearly two years after the end of a very deep recession.
At this stage in the Reagan expansion, after a comparably deep 1981-82 recession, the economy was growing by 7% a year and the jobless rate was plunging. This time the economy is growing by less than 2%, and we still have 6.8 million fewer jobs than when the recession began in late 2007.
In other bad news, the average duration of those out of work jumped by 1.4 weeks to 39.7 in May, and the percentage of those jobless for at least six months climbed by 1.7% to 45.1%. The overall labor participation rate stayed the same at 64.2%, but as the nearby chart shows that rate has now fallen to its lowest rate since the mid-1980s.
This is an important economic measure because it reflects the opportunities that Americans perceive in the marketplace. In the long boom from the Reagan years through 2000 or so, the labor participation rate took a historic leap upward as women, immigrants and others entered the job market. The rate dipped after the 2001-2002 downturn, and we recall the media giving much attention to a Federal Reserve study raising alarms even as the rate began to climb again in mid-decade. It has now fallen off a cliff, and we doubt this is what Mr. Goolsbee means when he hails the "trajectory of the economy."
Chances are that job creation will improve in future months after the effects of Japan's earthquake and Midwest tornadoes and if oil prices level off or fall. But the longer the jobs slowdown continues, the greater the danger that the U.S. settles into a new normal of high "structural" unemployment, with employers reluctant to hire workers until they absolutely must. This is a symptom of Eurosclerosis.
The same economists and pundits who promoted the economic policies of the last four years are now lamenting the jobs bust and demanding that Washington double down: More stimulus spending, more Federal Reserve easing, more temporary tax rebates. They can't explain why these policies have failed to date, but we are supposed to rinse and repeat.
The real "bumps on the road" to recovery are these policies and the larger climate of hostility toward job creators that still prevails in Washington. A National Labor Relations Board that wants to stop businesses from moving plants; a $20 billion political raid on banks over foreclosures; hundreds of major new regulations from ObamaCare, Dodd-Frank and the EPA's war on carbon energy; federal deficits that Mr. Obama says require higher taxes; near-zero interest rates for 30 months that have sent commodity prices soaring, and so much more.
The economy doesn't need more of this. It needs a return to the growth agenda that created the long post-1982 boom.
SOURCE
*************************
Liberal vs Conservative: A Spiritual Battle
Lloyd Marcus
Without beating around the bush, I believe the battle being fought in America today goes beyond politics; right vs left. It is a spiritual battle; good vs evil.
“For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places.” -- Ephesians 6:12
The mindset of the American left is a spirit of Antichrist which is man making himself God.
Before writing me off as a Bible nut, please hear me out. Understanding this reality will explain much of the left's behavior. Because they believe man is God, in their insane arrogance, the left think they can fix everything; legislate equal outcomes and even save or destroy the planet.
Make no mistake about it folks, we are in a spiritual battle. Ask yourself. Specifically, what about Sarah Palin inspires such visceral hatred from the left? The word is “wholesome”.
For the most part, Palin promotes love for God, family and country. She is passionately determined to thwart Obama's plan to “fundamentally transform America”.
While realizing Palin is human and does not walk on water, Palin epitomizes heartland principles and values embraced by most Americans. Thus, we are Palin and Palin is us.
The large number of Christians in the Tea Party believe in right and wrong. The left has a huge problem with the concept of right and wrong. Their religion of Liberalism embraces Moral Relativism.
For these reasons, Palin and the Tea Party are as repulsive to liberals as showing Dracula the cross.
There is definitely an anti-wholesome, anti-goodness vibe coming out of Hollywood. Hollywood leftists are vehemently anti death penalty. They rally around convicted murderers. They think anyone harming a puppy should be beaten within any inch of their life. These Hollywood libs pride themselves as being Lords of Compassion and Tolerance.
And yet, these same libs have a cow whenever someone merely suggests to a woman that she think twice before aborting her baby. Tell me there “ain't” something spiritually wrong with such a mindset.
Because liberal elitists think man is God, they assume moral authority to confiscate as much control over our lives we simple minded god fearing peons will allow, including procreation.
I picked up a government funded brochure at my local library which basically said birthing babies is an irresponsible abuse of the planet.
Folks, this is leftist control freak hogwash! The seven billion people who live on the planet could fit in Texas enjoying about the same amount of living space as residents of New York.
God said be fruitful and multiply. But then, what the heck does God know?
In her book, “Godless”, Ann Coulter said, “If a Martian landed in America and set out to determine the nation's official state religion, he would have to conclude it is Liberalism, while Christianity and Judaism are prohibited by law”.
I concur with Ms Coulter. The mainstream media is controlled by zealots of Liberalism who I believe are driven by a spirit of Antichrist; man is God. Thus, only man can and will fix everything.
Why does the left aggressively demand that we show utmost respect for every religion under the sun except Christianity? Remember when libs Whoopi Goldberg and Joy Behar stormed off the set of The View TV program when they concluded Bill O'Reilly dissed Muslims?
And yet, Rosie O'Donnell outrageously stated “Radical Christianity is just as threatening as radical Islam in a country like America”. Not one peep of disagreement or disapproval from the left.
Islam suppresses women. And yet, liberal self proclaimed feminists Goldberg, Behar and O'Donnell illogically defend Islam. These three feminists despise the extraordinarily successful Christian liberated woman, Sarah Palin. Rosie O'Donnell even lamented that Osama bin Laden did not get a fair trial.
Unquestionably, these women have issues with America and Christians; a spirit of Antichrist. At the center of Christianity is a divine Jesus. If Jesus is God, the left is not.
Even our most liberal president ever, Obama, dissed heartland Americans for “bitterly clinging to their god and guns”. Would a true Christian berate folks for finding security in trusting God?
Like an episode of Star Trek, the left believes universal peace can be achieved via America apologizing and admitting to the world that “we suck”, surrendering our power, signing treaties and singing a few verses of“Kumbaya”.
They believe the greatest source of evil in the world is warmongering Christian white guys like George Bush. If only Bush had, “Given peace a chance”.
Liberals always cater to man's lowest base instincts. They hate standards for behavior, labeling all rebuke of bad behavior as being intolerant and judgmental. And yet, they believe without divine influence, man is capable of someday achieving universal peace. Totally absurd.
Christians believe that though we strive to do the right thing, the heart of man is critically flawed which is why we were in need of a savior, Jesus Christ.
Obama's promise to “fundamentally transform America” is a spiritual attack on our freedom, liberty and culture.
Despite the left's relentless attempts to ban God from America's public square, the emergence and power of the Tea Party tells me God is still on our side.
Mr. Obama, though your liberal zealots perceive you to be “the messiah”, God is still on the throne. Come November 2012, you're fired!
SOURCE
My Twitter.com identity: jonjayray. My Facebook page is also accessible as jonjayray (In full: http://www.facebook.com/jonjayray). For more blog postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, EYE ON BRITAIN and Paralipomena
List of backup or "mirror" sites here or here -- for readers in China or for everyone when blogspot is "down" or failing to update. Email me here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or here (Pictorial) or here (Personal)
****************************
The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist" (Nationalsozialist) and the full name of Hitler's political party (translated) was "The National Socialist German Workers' Party" (In German: Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei)
****************************
by Andrew Mellon
Recently, I got into a big fight with my cube-mate. After attacking him for his listening to Bill Maher during the workday, he shot back and mocked my Glenn Beck listening. As if there was some moral equivalence between the two.
“But Beck’s predictions have been right throughout the last two years. Why would you not at least give him a listen?” I questioned. My Georgetown-educated cube-mate shot back: “Because most of the people that listen to Glenn Beck are uneducated mid-westerners.”
Infuriated, I protested “Do you have any idea how arrogant and elitist you sound right now?” Leave aside the irony that I was attacking his condescension while as a colleague of ours pointed out, showing beneath my loafers were our company holiday gift socks dotted with various currencies.
As my cube-mate went on to say, though he conceded that government should not be all-encompassing, “I want smart people to make decisions for people.” In other words, us silly hicks are incapable of governing ourselves. This is the fatal conceit of which F.A. Hayek wrote that reflects the attitude of the intellectual class today.
Why is it fatal? First, the “highly educated intellectual” today routinely receives a subpar education. Believe me, I went through it at Columbia, one of the few remaining schools with any semblance of a valuable curriculum. A real education is about teaching the pupil to think critically. Routinely, education today is more about spending time in science classes listening to professors talk about the merits of joining the Peace Corps (yes, this happened to me), iconoclastic gender, race and political studies courses and cultural Marxist programming of the heirs apparent of the political, economic and cultural hierarchy of the country.
Of those who graduate from these institutions and matriculate to the political realm, the progressive ethic pervades. And what is this ethic? The elite must decide for the sheep.
Progressivism argues that man should play G-d, organizing society as he sees fit, “nudging” people as Cass Sunstein advocates towards making the right decision of a governmentally-defined set of choices and socially engineering swaths of society.
Never mind that central planning fails given that the planners can never make the decisions that self-reliant and self-interested individuals acting freely would make, and that central planners lack the specialized information of the millions of actors that make up the economy.
Never mind that even if you don’t buy this argument on theoretical grounds, every nation guided by central planning has ended in mass poverty, mass genocide or both.
The manifest defects of central planning are not nearly as bad as its dehumanizing nature. For the progressive central planner is a regressive tyrant. What he seeks to do by regulation is only different than what the master does by the whip in his coyness.
The progressive enslaves as he believes that there is no value in the individual — there are only masses of malleable animals that must be shaped and coddled by paternalistic wise men in government.
Egalitarianism must reign. Natural differences, desires and ambitions must be discarded for the greater good. Social welfare is but a small price to pay for the fat cat, selfish innovators, entrepreneurs, job creators and investors who subsidize it.
Forget about the fact that practically every good and service around us was provided by the very system the progressives seek to destroy, to the disproportionate detriment of the lower classes.
Yet the question is never posed, is such a system moral? Should you by virtue of living in America be forced by law to live to support your fellow man through government? Should you be an indentured servant for months each year in effect working for the government middle man so that he can bribe and satisfy his constituents? Should the politician be able to compel you by law to plan your retirement by paying into an insolvent Ponzi scheme like social security; to at the point of the gun make you cut a check each year for failing public schools that teach the very principles to the nation’s youth that most disgust you?
And is it moral that these progressives who would be the first to attack religious advocates impose their own leftist religion through the involuntary mechanism of brute government force?
The progressive philosophy, an economic failure, is also a massive blight on our souls. For it enchains man to his fellow man and impoverishes all of society by taking away man’s individualism, his sense of responsibility and his self-worth. The progressive state dehumanizes and demoralizes man, leaving him an apathetic and impotent slave.
There is no compassion in such a system. There is no morality in such a system. All that there is is man ruling over his fellow man, throwing bread crumb benefits at various faceless voting blocs unable to see through such a scheme after so many years of socialist ideological subversion.
Shame on the progressives for their disdain for their fellow man, their hubris in thinking that they are right to rule over him and their disgusting glee in molding society for their own political gain. And shame on us for sanctioning such a system.
SOURCE
****************************
'Bumps on the Road'
The choice is more jobs reports like Friday's or a growth agenda.
You've got to hand it to President Obama and his White House economic team. Faced with yesterday's dreary May jobs report, they did their best and rolled out the old "bump in the road" analogy for comfort. As chief White House economist Austan Goolsbee put it, "there are always bumps on the road to recovery, but the overall trajectory of the economy has improved dramatically over the past two years."
Nice try, but there's no way to spin news that the economy in May created only 54,000 new jobs, which is about one-third the number necessary to keep up with the growth in the labor force. The jobless rate rose for the second straight month to 9.1%, which is especially depressing nearly two years after the end of a very deep recession.
At this stage in the Reagan expansion, after a comparably deep 1981-82 recession, the economy was growing by 7% a year and the jobless rate was plunging. This time the economy is growing by less than 2%, and we still have 6.8 million fewer jobs than when the recession began in late 2007.
In other bad news, the average duration of those out of work jumped by 1.4 weeks to 39.7 in May, and the percentage of those jobless for at least six months climbed by 1.7% to 45.1%. The overall labor participation rate stayed the same at 64.2%, but as the nearby chart shows that rate has now fallen to its lowest rate since the mid-1980s.
This is an important economic measure because it reflects the opportunities that Americans perceive in the marketplace. In the long boom from the Reagan years through 2000 or so, the labor participation rate took a historic leap upward as women, immigrants and others entered the job market. The rate dipped after the 2001-2002 downturn, and we recall the media giving much attention to a Federal Reserve study raising alarms even as the rate began to climb again in mid-decade. It has now fallen off a cliff, and we doubt this is what Mr. Goolsbee means when he hails the "trajectory of the economy."
Chances are that job creation will improve in future months after the effects of Japan's earthquake and Midwest tornadoes and if oil prices level off or fall. But the longer the jobs slowdown continues, the greater the danger that the U.S. settles into a new normal of high "structural" unemployment, with employers reluctant to hire workers until they absolutely must. This is a symptom of Eurosclerosis.
The same economists and pundits who promoted the economic policies of the last four years are now lamenting the jobs bust and demanding that Washington double down: More stimulus spending, more Federal Reserve easing, more temporary tax rebates. They can't explain why these policies have failed to date, but we are supposed to rinse and repeat.
The real "bumps on the road" to recovery are these policies and the larger climate of hostility toward job creators that still prevails in Washington. A National Labor Relations Board that wants to stop businesses from moving plants; a $20 billion political raid on banks over foreclosures; hundreds of major new regulations from ObamaCare, Dodd-Frank and the EPA's war on carbon energy; federal deficits that Mr. Obama says require higher taxes; near-zero interest rates for 30 months that have sent commodity prices soaring, and so much more.
The economy doesn't need more of this. It needs a return to the growth agenda that created the long post-1982 boom.
SOURCE
*************************
Liberal vs Conservative: A Spiritual Battle
Lloyd Marcus
Without beating around the bush, I believe the battle being fought in America today goes beyond politics; right vs left. It is a spiritual battle; good vs evil.
“For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places.” -- Ephesians 6:12
The mindset of the American left is a spirit of Antichrist which is man making himself God.
Before writing me off as a Bible nut, please hear me out. Understanding this reality will explain much of the left's behavior. Because they believe man is God, in their insane arrogance, the left think they can fix everything; legislate equal outcomes and even save or destroy the planet.
Make no mistake about it folks, we are in a spiritual battle. Ask yourself. Specifically, what about Sarah Palin inspires such visceral hatred from the left? The word is “wholesome”.
For the most part, Palin promotes love for God, family and country. She is passionately determined to thwart Obama's plan to “fundamentally transform America”.
While realizing Palin is human and does not walk on water, Palin epitomizes heartland principles and values embraced by most Americans. Thus, we are Palin and Palin is us.
The large number of Christians in the Tea Party believe in right and wrong. The left has a huge problem with the concept of right and wrong. Their religion of Liberalism embraces Moral Relativism.
For these reasons, Palin and the Tea Party are as repulsive to liberals as showing Dracula the cross.
There is definitely an anti-wholesome, anti-goodness vibe coming out of Hollywood. Hollywood leftists are vehemently anti death penalty. They rally around convicted murderers. They think anyone harming a puppy should be beaten within any inch of their life. These Hollywood libs pride themselves as being Lords of Compassion and Tolerance.
And yet, these same libs have a cow whenever someone merely suggests to a woman that she think twice before aborting her baby. Tell me there “ain't” something spiritually wrong with such a mindset.
Because liberal elitists think man is God, they assume moral authority to confiscate as much control over our lives we simple minded god fearing peons will allow, including procreation.
I picked up a government funded brochure at my local library which basically said birthing babies is an irresponsible abuse of the planet.
Folks, this is leftist control freak hogwash! The seven billion people who live on the planet could fit in Texas enjoying about the same amount of living space as residents of New York.
God said be fruitful and multiply. But then, what the heck does God know?
In her book, “Godless”, Ann Coulter said, “If a Martian landed in America and set out to determine the nation's official state religion, he would have to conclude it is Liberalism, while Christianity and Judaism are prohibited by law”.
I concur with Ms Coulter. The mainstream media is controlled by zealots of Liberalism who I believe are driven by a spirit of Antichrist; man is God. Thus, only man can and will fix everything.
Why does the left aggressively demand that we show utmost respect for every religion under the sun except Christianity? Remember when libs Whoopi Goldberg and Joy Behar stormed off the set of The View TV program when they concluded Bill O'Reilly dissed Muslims?
And yet, Rosie O'Donnell outrageously stated “Radical Christianity is just as threatening as radical Islam in a country like America”. Not one peep of disagreement or disapproval from the left.
Islam suppresses women. And yet, liberal self proclaimed feminists Goldberg, Behar and O'Donnell illogically defend Islam. These three feminists despise the extraordinarily successful Christian liberated woman, Sarah Palin. Rosie O'Donnell even lamented that Osama bin Laden did not get a fair trial.
Unquestionably, these women have issues with America and Christians; a spirit of Antichrist. At the center of Christianity is a divine Jesus. If Jesus is God, the left is not.
Even our most liberal president ever, Obama, dissed heartland Americans for “bitterly clinging to their god and guns”. Would a true Christian berate folks for finding security in trusting God?
Like an episode of Star Trek, the left believes universal peace can be achieved via America apologizing and admitting to the world that “we suck”, surrendering our power, signing treaties and singing a few verses of“Kumbaya”.
They believe the greatest source of evil in the world is warmongering Christian white guys like George Bush. If only Bush had, “Given peace a chance”.
Liberals always cater to man's lowest base instincts. They hate standards for behavior, labeling all rebuke of bad behavior as being intolerant and judgmental. And yet, they believe without divine influence, man is capable of someday achieving universal peace. Totally absurd.
Christians believe that though we strive to do the right thing, the heart of man is critically flawed which is why we were in need of a savior, Jesus Christ.
Obama's promise to “fundamentally transform America” is a spiritual attack on our freedom, liberty and culture.
Despite the left's relentless attempts to ban God from America's public square, the emergence and power of the Tea Party tells me God is still on our side.
Mr. Obama, though your liberal zealots perceive you to be “the messiah”, God is still on the throne. Come November 2012, you're fired!
SOURCE
My Twitter.com identity: jonjayray. My Facebook page is also accessible as jonjayray (In full: http://www.facebook.com/jonjayray). For more blog postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, EYE ON BRITAIN and Paralipomena
List of backup or "mirror" sites here or here -- for readers in China or for everyone when blogspot is "down" or failing to update. Email me here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or here (Pictorial) or here (Personal)
****************************
The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist" (Nationalsozialist) and the full name of Hitler's political party (translated) was "The National Socialist German Workers' Party" (In German: Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei)
****************************
Wednesday, June 08, 2011
Obama Administration's Egghead Economic Saboteurs
Michelle Malkin
Official motto of the White House economic team: Those who can, do. Those who can't, fantasize in the classroom, fail in Washington and then return to the Ivy Tower to train the next generation of egghead economic saboteurs. Life is good for left-wing academics. Everyone else pays dearly.
Take Austan Goolsbee, please. President Obama's "fresh-faced" University of Chicago econ professor arrived in Washington in December 2008 to fill two slots: chief economist/staff director of the president's Economic Recovery Advisory Board and member of the Council of Economic Advisers. In September 2010, he replaced CEA head and fellow academic Christina Romer, who retreated to the University of California at Berkeley last August when unemployment hit 9.5 percent. (She infamously projected that the Obama stimulus would hold the jobless rate below 8 percent.)
Goolsbee's primary task: translating all of the administration's big-government theories for us dummies. As Goolsbee put it to his university's student newspaper: "We've certainly seen in previous crises that it's quite important to explain things to non-experts. The American people can confront any challenge if they're comfortable with the approach."
And what exactly was the nature of Goolsbee's vaunted expertise? Making money as a business rescue-and-recovery expert without ever having had to meet a payroll.
Goolsbee, the 15th wealthiest member of the Obama administration, has raked in assets valued at between $1,146,000 and $2,715,000. He also pulled in a University of Chicago salary of $465,000 and additional wages and honoraria worth $93,000, according to Washingtonian magazine. As I've noted before, the government research fellow and Obama campaign adviser was a champion of extending credit to the un-creditworthy. In a 2007 op-ed for The New York Times, he derided those who called subprime mortgages "irresponsible." He preferred to describe them as "innovations in the mortgage market" to expand the pool of homebuyers.
Goolsbee's most recent "innovation": the "White House White Board," a weekly video lecture teaching everyone else how to hitch what remains of America's free-market system to the wagon of the state and how much (or rather, how little) we should make doing it. He illustrated his grand interventionist strategy to pick and choose "Startup America" winners by drawing a trough of broken light bulbs (symbolizing entrepreneurial ideas) piling up in a "Valley of Death" because they lacked government support.
A comical choice of imagery given the Democrats' enviro-nutty ban on incandescent bulbs. But I digress.
When Goolsbee joined Team Obama, the unemployment rate was at around 6 percent. When he announced his resignation on Monday, the jobless rate stood at 9.1 percent. Romer and Jared Bernstein (former chief economist to Vice President Joe Biden) had predicted unemployment would drop every single month after August 2009 due to the Obama stimulus. Bernstein bailed on the administration in April 2011 for the sanctuary of a liberal think-tank. He'll also now ply his failed wares as a financial pundit.
These hapless command-and-control ideologues were preceded by Peter Orszag, who hung his "Mission Accomplished" banner over the White House budget office in June 2010 after fewer than two years on the job, and by former National Economic Council head and hedge fund manager Larry Summers, who was caught sleeping on the job -- literally -- more than once during his brief tenure. Summers packed his bags in September. He was followed by Princeton economics professor and former top Obama Treasury Department official Alan Krueger in October 2010.
White House aides have lamented that the economic team is "exhausted." Apparently, Obama is tired of hearing from them, too. The Hill newspaper reports that he has stopped receiving daily economic briefings that were once treated with the same emergency status as national security briefings. So, the central planners continue to be paid to fail -- while their boss looks the other way at the destruction, whistling into what he calls America's temporary "head winds." Nice non-work if you can get it.
SOURCE
**********************
The Cancer of Regulation
John Stossel
Politicians care about poor people. I know because they always say that. But then why do they make it so hard for the poor to escape poverty?
Outside my office in New York City, I see yellow taxis. It's intuitive to think that government should license taxis to make sure they're safe and to limit their number. It's intuitive to believe that if anyone could just start picking up passengers, we'd have chaos. So to operate a taxi in NYC, you have to buy a license, a "medallion," from an existing cab company (or at a once-in-a-blue-moon auction). Medallions are so scarce, they now cost hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Licensing prices poor people out of the business. "Compare New York City, where a license to own and operate a taxi is $603,000, to Washington, D.C.," George Mason University economist Walter Williams told me. "There are not many black-owned taxis in New York City. But in Washington, most are owned by blacks." Why? Because in Washington, "it takes $200 to get a license to own and operate one taxi. That makes the difference."
Regulation hurts the people the politicians claim to help. People once just went into business. But now, in the name of "consumer protection," bureaucrats insist on licensing rules. Today, hundreds of occupations require expensive licenses. Tough luck for a poor person getting started.
Ask Jestina Clayton. Ten years ago, she moved from Africa to Utah. She assumed she could support her children with the hair-braiding skills she learned in Sierra Leone. For four years, she braided hair in her home. She made decent money. But then the government shut her down because she doesn't have an expensive cosmetology license that requires 2,000 hours of classroom time -- 50 weeks of useless instruction. The Institute for Justice (IJ), the public-interest law firm that fights such outrages, says "not one of those 2,000 hours teaches African hair-braiding."
IJ lawyer Paul Avelar explained that "the state passed a really broad law and left it to the cosmetology board to interpret." Guess who sits on the cosmetology board. Right: cosmetologists. And they don't like competition.
One day, Jestina received an email. "The email threatened to report me to the licensing division if I continued to braid," she told me. This came as a shock because she had been told that what she was doing was legal.
"When I called (the commission) in 2005 on two separate occasions, they did tell me that, but then when I called (again) ... the cosmetology lady told me that the situation had changed and that I needed to go to school now and get a license."
No customers complained, but a competitor did. One cosmetologist claimed that if she didn't go to school she might make someone bald. But this is nonsense -- hair-braiding is just ... braiding. If the braid is too tight, you can undo it.
The cosmetology board told Jestina that if she wanted to braid hair without paying $18,000 to get permission from the board, she should lobby the legislature. Good luck with that. Jestina actually tried, but no luck. How can poor people become entrepreneurs if they must get laws changed first?! Jestina stopped working because she can't afford the fines. "The first offense is $1,000," she said. "The second offense and any subsequent offense is $2,000 each day."
"It is not unique to Utah," Avelar added. "There are about 10 states that explicitly require people to go get this expensive, useless license to braid hair."
Fortunately, IJ's efforts against such laws have succeeded in seven states. Now it's in court fighting for Jestina, which, appropriately, means "justice" in her native language.
Once upon a time, one in 20 workers needed government permission to work in their occupation. Today, it's one in three. We lose some freedom every day. "Occupational licensing laws fall hardest on minorities, on poor, on elderly workers who want to start a new career or change careers," Avelar said. "(Licensing laws) just help entrenched businesses keep out competition."
This is not what America was supposed to be.
SOURCE
*************************
Let's Not Forget About Obamacare
Democrats will often get irritable when some clingy philistine refers to Obamacare as "socialized medicine." It's simply not a precise phrase for the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. In any event, it's not socialized yet, you ignoramuses! Progress doesn't happen overnight. No worries, though, recent signs portend that Obamacare will give us the state-run plan we proles deserve.
A new study published in McKinsey Quarterly claims that in 2014, the provisions of Obamacare will induce 3 in 10 employers to "definitely or probably" stop offering health coverage to their employees. And we can only assume the companies have had the good sense not to read the legislation.
Sure, the president promised we could keep our insurance if we liked it. But why would you want to be mixed up with pitiless corporations that focus on profits, anyway? Obamacare courageously forces states to implement concocted "exchanges" so that someone much smarter than you can pick participants, regulate prices and keep an eye on things. Sounds like a vigorous marketplace. It's only a wonder that more Americans aren't clamoring for government-run supermarkets, smartphones and dating exchanges, as well.
You'll also recall that the un-socialized system allowed 20, 30, 40 million (please feel free to come up with any number you'd like; The New York Times won't care) people to go uninsured. Medicare's chief actuary estimated that 400,000 would sign up for these high-risk pools before Obamacare kicked in. The Congressional Budget Office estimated that the budget would be able to handle 200,000, and others claimed that the program would need eight times the funding to meet demand. This was the driving reason for Obamacare. But as Megan McArdle of The Atlantic points out, just as with the exchanges, folks have been standoffish, with only about 18,000 people signing up.
Victory, right? The success of a government handout is always measured by how little Americans need to use it, right? Well, judging from the food stamp administration's actions, that would be a big no. What this probably calls out for is more public service announcements or a wider net. Hey, we'll just get some toffee-nosed yacht jockeys to offset the cost.
That's not to say there aren't people out there who really need support. The president has generously handed out nearly 1,400 Obamacare waivers to the neediest among us. About 20 percent of them have been awarded to an upmarket district in San Francisco that, by pure chance, is represented by Nancy Pelosi. Others, such as the AARP and local unions, had demanded we pass Obamacare so they could not take part in it immediately.
We'll also soon be hearing more about the lawsuits challenging Obamacare's individual mandate. Randy Barnett, a professor of constitutional law at Georgetown University Law Center, recently asked, "If Congress can impose this economic mandate on the people, what can't it mandate the people to buy?" Everything and nothing. And that's the beauty of it.
And let's not forget it was Obama, the newfound holy savior of Medicare, who pinned the key cost control component of health care reform on Medicare through his Independent Payment Advisory Board, or what bitter righties call a rationing board.
Rationing boards. Political favors. Lies. Coercion. Broken promises. Precedents that can force us to buy about anything. It might not be socialism, technically speaking. But really, what's not to like?
SOURCE
**************************
Leftist Lies and the Media That Enable Them
You might have seen the vicious Mediscare video by now entitled “America the Beautiful.” If you haven’t, you should. It’s from folks who just the other day were chanting the mantra of “civility.” It’s a taste of what the left will be serving up as 2012 approaches.
As the song “America the Beautiful” plays, a man in a dark suit with a likeness to Republican Rep. Paul Ryan (Wis.) pushes an elderly woman in a wheelchair down a sidewalk. The message on the screen informs us that the Republican Medicare reform proposal will “privatize” Medicare. The man diverts to a steep path as the woman’s smile turns to terror. She fights as he pushes her faster. He then dumps her headfirst off a cliff, which we see clearly from the front. The only thing missing is a vampire giving her a hickey on the way down.
Not since Barry Goldwater was smeared in 1964 with the famous "little girl with daisy and mushroom cloud" TV ad has there been such bald-faced character assassination.
The ad was produced by The Agenda Project, a leftist group that earlier made a similarly nasty Tea Party video whose title includes the f-word, and also "Hate Begets Hate", a hateful assault on public figures who oppose the Cordoba House Mosque at Ground Zero in New York City. That one has little Muslim girls crying and being comforted while photos of big, bad (and even some liberal) politicians are quoted. This is propaganda at its rawest. No, wait. They topped it with that lady pushed over a cliff.
More HERE
***********************
ELSEWHERE
When all you have is a hammer: "Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke is troubled by the unemployment rate that has crept back upwards, and the 'frustratingly slow' economic recovery. And so what does he propose? More of the same, of course. More liquidity and a base interest rate kept near zero. You see, this is practically the only tool he has: monetary stimulus, which is another word for inflation, if we define this in terms of a rising money supply rather than rising prices, the latter of which is properly seen as a natural consequence of the former."
The dark side of the welfare state: "There comes a point when elected leaders reach the end of their ability to tax, borrow, and inflate for funding. The United States is verging on that threshold. However, rather than acknowledge the folly of and dispense with unsustainable entitlements, U.S. leaders are, for the most part, endeavoring to preserve them."
Real cuts for the debt vote: "The House's overwhelming rejection of a clean debt-limit increase means that the two parties must now find major spending cuts. House Republicans say that they will not support a debt increase unless the Democrats agree to equal-sized spending cuts. If Congress raises the debt limit by $1 trillion, then it must also find budget savings of at least $1 trillion, over either five or ten years. The crucial question is: Will the proposed budget savings be real cuts or smoke-and-mirrors 'cuts?'"
Free trade can help the US grow: "The Obama administration’s economic policies thus far would suggest that it sees the only way to increase growth is to increase federal spending. However, Free Trade Agreements (FTAs) that increase competition by removing tariffs and other barriers to trade may do more to promote America’s economic recovery than billions of dollars of government stimulus ever could."
Take your little black box and shove it: "We all heard this week that from this moment onward, all new automobiles manufactured in or imported to the United States will be required to have 'litle black boxes' like the flight recorders in aircraft."
My Twitter.com identity: jonjayray. My Facebook page is also accessible as jonjayray (In full: http://www.facebook.com/jonjayray). For more blog postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, EYE ON BRITAIN and Paralipomena
List of backup or "mirror" sites here or here -- for readers in China or for everyone when blogspot is "down" or failing to update. Email me here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or here (Pictorial) or here (Personal)
****************************
The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist" (Nationalsozialist) and the full name of Hitler's political party (translated) was "The National Socialist German Workers' Party" (In German: Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei)
****************************
Michelle Malkin
Official motto of the White House economic team: Those who can, do. Those who can't, fantasize in the classroom, fail in Washington and then return to the Ivy Tower to train the next generation of egghead economic saboteurs. Life is good for left-wing academics. Everyone else pays dearly.
Take Austan Goolsbee, please. President Obama's "fresh-faced" University of Chicago econ professor arrived in Washington in December 2008 to fill two slots: chief economist/staff director of the president's Economic Recovery Advisory Board and member of the Council of Economic Advisers. In September 2010, he replaced CEA head and fellow academic Christina Romer, who retreated to the University of California at Berkeley last August when unemployment hit 9.5 percent. (She infamously projected that the Obama stimulus would hold the jobless rate below 8 percent.)
Goolsbee's primary task: translating all of the administration's big-government theories for us dummies. As Goolsbee put it to his university's student newspaper: "We've certainly seen in previous crises that it's quite important to explain things to non-experts. The American people can confront any challenge if they're comfortable with the approach."
And what exactly was the nature of Goolsbee's vaunted expertise? Making money as a business rescue-and-recovery expert without ever having had to meet a payroll.
Goolsbee, the 15th wealthiest member of the Obama administration, has raked in assets valued at between $1,146,000 and $2,715,000. He also pulled in a University of Chicago salary of $465,000 and additional wages and honoraria worth $93,000, according to Washingtonian magazine. As I've noted before, the government research fellow and Obama campaign adviser was a champion of extending credit to the un-creditworthy. In a 2007 op-ed for The New York Times, he derided those who called subprime mortgages "irresponsible." He preferred to describe them as "innovations in the mortgage market" to expand the pool of homebuyers.
Goolsbee's most recent "innovation": the "White House White Board," a weekly video lecture teaching everyone else how to hitch what remains of America's free-market system to the wagon of the state and how much (or rather, how little) we should make doing it. He illustrated his grand interventionist strategy to pick and choose "Startup America" winners by drawing a trough of broken light bulbs (symbolizing entrepreneurial ideas) piling up in a "Valley of Death" because they lacked government support.
A comical choice of imagery given the Democrats' enviro-nutty ban on incandescent bulbs. But I digress.
When Goolsbee joined Team Obama, the unemployment rate was at around 6 percent. When he announced his resignation on Monday, the jobless rate stood at 9.1 percent. Romer and Jared Bernstein (former chief economist to Vice President Joe Biden) had predicted unemployment would drop every single month after August 2009 due to the Obama stimulus. Bernstein bailed on the administration in April 2011 for the sanctuary of a liberal think-tank. He'll also now ply his failed wares as a financial pundit.
These hapless command-and-control ideologues were preceded by Peter Orszag, who hung his "Mission Accomplished" banner over the White House budget office in June 2010 after fewer than two years on the job, and by former National Economic Council head and hedge fund manager Larry Summers, who was caught sleeping on the job -- literally -- more than once during his brief tenure. Summers packed his bags in September. He was followed by Princeton economics professor and former top Obama Treasury Department official Alan Krueger in October 2010.
White House aides have lamented that the economic team is "exhausted." Apparently, Obama is tired of hearing from them, too. The Hill newspaper reports that he has stopped receiving daily economic briefings that were once treated with the same emergency status as national security briefings. So, the central planners continue to be paid to fail -- while their boss looks the other way at the destruction, whistling into what he calls America's temporary "head winds." Nice non-work if you can get it.
SOURCE
**********************
The Cancer of Regulation
John Stossel
Politicians care about poor people. I know because they always say that. But then why do they make it so hard for the poor to escape poverty?
Outside my office in New York City, I see yellow taxis. It's intuitive to think that government should license taxis to make sure they're safe and to limit their number. It's intuitive to believe that if anyone could just start picking up passengers, we'd have chaos. So to operate a taxi in NYC, you have to buy a license, a "medallion," from an existing cab company (or at a once-in-a-blue-moon auction). Medallions are so scarce, they now cost hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Licensing prices poor people out of the business. "Compare New York City, where a license to own and operate a taxi is $603,000, to Washington, D.C.," George Mason University economist Walter Williams told me. "There are not many black-owned taxis in New York City. But in Washington, most are owned by blacks." Why? Because in Washington, "it takes $200 to get a license to own and operate one taxi. That makes the difference."
Regulation hurts the people the politicians claim to help. People once just went into business. But now, in the name of "consumer protection," bureaucrats insist on licensing rules. Today, hundreds of occupations require expensive licenses. Tough luck for a poor person getting started.
Ask Jestina Clayton. Ten years ago, she moved from Africa to Utah. She assumed she could support her children with the hair-braiding skills she learned in Sierra Leone. For four years, she braided hair in her home. She made decent money. But then the government shut her down because she doesn't have an expensive cosmetology license that requires 2,000 hours of classroom time -- 50 weeks of useless instruction. The Institute for Justice (IJ), the public-interest law firm that fights such outrages, says "not one of those 2,000 hours teaches African hair-braiding."
IJ lawyer Paul Avelar explained that "the state passed a really broad law and left it to the cosmetology board to interpret." Guess who sits on the cosmetology board. Right: cosmetologists. And they don't like competition.
One day, Jestina received an email. "The email threatened to report me to the licensing division if I continued to braid," she told me. This came as a shock because she had been told that what she was doing was legal.
"When I called (the commission) in 2005 on two separate occasions, they did tell me that, but then when I called (again) ... the cosmetology lady told me that the situation had changed and that I needed to go to school now and get a license."
No customers complained, but a competitor did. One cosmetologist claimed that if she didn't go to school she might make someone bald. But this is nonsense -- hair-braiding is just ... braiding. If the braid is too tight, you can undo it.
The cosmetology board told Jestina that if she wanted to braid hair without paying $18,000 to get permission from the board, she should lobby the legislature. Good luck with that. Jestina actually tried, but no luck. How can poor people become entrepreneurs if they must get laws changed first?! Jestina stopped working because she can't afford the fines. "The first offense is $1,000," she said. "The second offense and any subsequent offense is $2,000 each day."
"It is not unique to Utah," Avelar added. "There are about 10 states that explicitly require people to go get this expensive, useless license to braid hair."
Fortunately, IJ's efforts against such laws have succeeded in seven states. Now it's in court fighting for Jestina, which, appropriately, means "justice" in her native language.
Once upon a time, one in 20 workers needed government permission to work in their occupation. Today, it's one in three. We lose some freedom every day. "Occupational licensing laws fall hardest on minorities, on poor, on elderly workers who want to start a new career or change careers," Avelar said. "(Licensing laws) just help entrenched businesses keep out competition."
This is not what America was supposed to be.
SOURCE
*************************
Let's Not Forget About Obamacare
Democrats will often get irritable when some clingy philistine refers to Obamacare as "socialized medicine." It's simply not a precise phrase for the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. In any event, it's not socialized yet, you ignoramuses! Progress doesn't happen overnight. No worries, though, recent signs portend that Obamacare will give us the state-run plan we proles deserve.
A new study published in McKinsey Quarterly claims that in 2014, the provisions of Obamacare will induce 3 in 10 employers to "definitely or probably" stop offering health coverage to their employees. And we can only assume the companies have had the good sense not to read the legislation.
Sure, the president promised we could keep our insurance if we liked it. But why would you want to be mixed up with pitiless corporations that focus on profits, anyway? Obamacare courageously forces states to implement concocted "exchanges" so that someone much smarter than you can pick participants, regulate prices and keep an eye on things. Sounds like a vigorous marketplace. It's only a wonder that more Americans aren't clamoring for government-run supermarkets, smartphones and dating exchanges, as well.
You'll also recall that the un-socialized system allowed 20, 30, 40 million (please feel free to come up with any number you'd like; The New York Times won't care) people to go uninsured. Medicare's chief actuary estimated that 400,000 would sign up for these high-risk pools before Obamacare kicked in. The Congressional Budget Office estimated that the budget would be able to handle 200,000, and others claimed that the program would need eight times the funding to meet demand. This was the driving reason for Obamacare. But as Megan McArdle of The Atlantic points out, just as with the exchanges, folks have been standoffish, with only about 18,000 people signing up.
Victory, right? The success of a government handout is always measured by how little Americans need to use it, right? Well, judging from the food stamp administration's actions, that would be a big no. What this probably calls out for is more public service announcements or a wider net. Hey, we'll just get some toffee-nosed yacht jockeys to offset the cost.
That's not to say there aren't people out there who really need support. The president has generously handed out nearly 1,400 Obamacare waivers to the neediest among us. About 20 percent of them have been awarded to an upmarket district in San Francisco that, by pure chance, is represented by Nancy Pelosi. Others, such as the AARP and local unions, had demanded we pass Obamacare so they could not take part in it immediately.
We'll also soon be hearing more about the lawsuits challenging Obamacare's individual mandate. Randy Barnett, a professor of constitutional law at Georgetown University Law Center, recently asked, "If Congress can impose this economic mandate on the people, what can't it mandate the people to buy?" Everything and nothing. And that's the beauty of it.
And let's not forget it was Obama, the newfound holy savior of Medicare, who pinned the key cost control component of health care reform on Medicare through his Independent Payment Advisory Board, or what bitter righties call a rationing board.
Rationing boards. Political favors. Lies. Coercion. Broken promises. Precedents that can force us to buy about anything. It might not be socialism, technically speaking. But really, what's not to like?
SOURCE
**************************
Leftist Lies and the Media That Enable Them
You might have seen the vicious Mediscare video by now entitled “America the Beautiful.” If you haven’t, you should. It’s from folks who just the other day were chanting the mantra of “civility.” It’s a taste of what the left will be serving up as 2012 approaches.
As the song “America the Beautiful” plays, a man in a dark suit with a likeness to Republican Rep. Paul Ryan (Wis.) pushes an elderly woman in a wheelchair down a sidewalk. The message on the screen informs us that the Republican Medicare reform proposal will “privatize” Medicare. The man diverts to a steep path as the woman’s smile turns to terror. She fights as he pushes her faster. He then dumps her headfirst off a cliff, which we see clearly from the front. The only thing missing is a vampire giving her a hickey on the way down.
Not since Barry Goldwater was smeared in 1964 with the famous "little girl with daisy and mushroom cloud" TV ad has there been such bald-faced character assassination.
The ad was produced by The Agenda Project, a leftist group that earlier made a similarly nasty Tea Party video whose title includes the f-word, and also "Hate Begets Hate", a hateful assault on public figures who oppose the Cordoba House Mosque at Ground Zero in New York City. That one has little Muslim girls crying and being comforted while photos of big, bad (and even some liberal) politicians are quoted. This is propaganda at its rawest. No, wait. They topped it with that lady pushed over a cliff.
More HERE
***********************
ELSEWHERE
When all you have is a hammer: "Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke is troubled by the unemployment rate that has crept back upwards, and the 'frustratingly slow' economic recovery. And so what does he propose? More of the same, of course. More liquidity and a base interest rate kept near zero. You see, this is practically the only tool he has: monetary stimulus, which is another word for inflation, if we define this in terms of a rising money supply rather than rising prices, the latter of which is properly seen as a natural consequence of the former."
The dark side of the welfare state: "There comes a point when elected leaders reach the end of their ability to tax, borrow, and inflate for funding. The United States is verging on that threshold. However, rather than acknowledge the folly of and dispense with unsustainable entitlements, U.S. leaders are, for the most part, endeavoring to preserve them."
Real cuts for the debt vote: "The House's overwhelming rejection of a clean debt-limit increase means that the two parties must now find major spending cuts. House Republicans say that they will not support a debt increase unless the Democrats agree to equal-sized spending cuts. If Congress raises the debt limit by $1 trillion, then it must also find budget savings of at least $1 trillion, over either five or ten years. The crucial question is: Will the proposed budget savings be real cuts or smoke-and-mirrors 'cuts?'"
Free trade can help the US grow: "The Obama administration’s economic policies thus far would suggest that it sees the only way to increase growth is to increase federal spending. However, Free Trade Agreements (FTAs) that increase competition by removing tariffs and other barriers to trade may do more to promote America’s economic recovery than billions of dollars of government stimulus ever could."
Take your little black box and shove it: "We all heard this week that from this moment onward, all new automobiles manufactured in or imported to the United States will be required to have 'litle black boxes' like the flight recorders in aircraft."
My Twitter.com identity: jonjayray. My Facebook page is also accessible as jonjayray (In full: http://www.facebook.com/jonjayray). For more blog postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, EYE ON BRITAIN and Paralipomena
List of backup or "mirror" sites here or here -- for readers in China or for everyone when blogspot is "down" or failing to update. Email me here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or here (Pictorial) or here (Personal)
****************************
The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist" (Nationalsozialist) and the full name of Hitler's political party (translated) was "The National Socialist German Workers' Party" (In German: Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei)
****************************
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
