The Secret Lives of Liberals and Conservatives: Personality Profiles, Interaction Styles, and the Things They Leave Behind
The above is the title of a 2008 academic journal article by Carney, Jost, Gosling and Potter. I can't remember commenting on it previously so better late than never.
It regurgitates an approximately 80 year old theory that Leftists are more "open" to experience and conservatives are not. I found something similar in my own research. I found that Leftists were sensation-seekers across the board. They even liked the sensations offered by the consumer society.
But being "open to experience" and being "sensation seekers" are broadly opposite in tone, however. The same behaviour could merit either description depending on your point of view and your value set. The same behaviour could also merit either condemnation or praise depending on your point of view and value set. Carney et al might perhaps have delved into that a bit but were really concerned only to document the politics/personality comparison. And the reason they worked so hard at it is that the previous psychological research on the relationship is pretty inconclusive.
And one reason why it is inconclusive is that nearly all the so-called "research" on the subject is based on handing out a bunch of questionnaires to college students in the classes you teach. A poorer environment in which to study conservatism would be hard to imagine!
In that connection I found the following report from Carney et al amusing: "In the context of the experimental situation, conservatives behaved in a more detached and disengaged manner in general. Although this behavior was not indicative of conscientiousness, it did reflect the kind of withdrawn, reserved, inhibited, and even rigid interaction style".
If Carney et al. had the slightest inking of sociological sophistication, they would have understood that finding very well. A conservative in the far-Left environment of an American university would have every reason to act in a withdrawn manner. A conservative speaking his mind in that setting could bring no end of trouble down on his head!
But Carney et al were apparently unfazed by all that and did the usual: handed out a bunch of questionnaires to college students as the basis for their research. So I have to confess amusement at their findings. On the "sample" they used which had most demographic variety, their set of personality measures accounted for only 4% of the variance in social conservatism. To portray that in another way, if you had 100 people who were open to experience, 52 would be Leftists and 48 would be conservatives. Knowing a person's personality gave you essentially zero chance of guessing their social conservatism, in other words.
The authors hyped their findings way beyond that but that 4% is their most well-founded result.
My study on the subject was based on a proper random sample of the general population so if it is people at large that we are talking about, we do well to look at the results there. I also found correlations that explained little of the variance in political attitudes. So the various versions of "openness" have been a red herring when it comes to explaining political stance. And my study looked at actual vote, as well as one's political self-description -- which is a big step beyond what Carney et al did. And what did I find? I found that personality gave ZERO prediction of vote!
Leftist psychologists have been grinding away at that "liberals are more open" theme for decades. They desperately want it to be true but it isn't! It is other personality types that we will have to look at to predict vote. How about tendency to rage? The amount of rage that we conservative bloggers get directed at us from Leftists answers that question without need for further research, I think.
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The Obama birth certificate
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What really happened in the Pennsylvania "zombie Mohammed" case?
The story that flew around the blogosphere last week was guaranteed to cause an uproar: A Muslim assaults an atheist for mocking Mohammed, and a Muslim judge dismisses the charges and berates the victim-and it all happens here in America. Suddenly, warnings about the threat of Sharia law on our shores got a strong boost.
In fact, there was no "Sharia court," and the judge is not a Muslim. But, however egregious the misreporting of the story and the vilification of the judge-Cumberland Country, Pennsylvania magistrate Mark W. Martin, who graciously answered my queries in an email exchange-the actual facts of the story are troubling. Judge Martin's intent may have been entirely benign, but his handling of the case sends a bad message not only about freedom of speech, but about the place of Islam in American culture.
It is not unusual for judges to admonish the parties in a case, sometimes harshly, about their conduct. In this instance, though, the lecture was startlingly one-sided. Judge Martin lambasted Perce for his disrespect for other people's culture and faith while not one critical word was spoken to Elbayomy.
There is nothing wrong with telling someone that just because he has a constitutional right to say something doesn't mean he should say it (which Judge Martin told me was his point). Yet there is something inherently disturbing about a public official chastising a citizen for engaging in constitutionally protected expression, however obnoxious. It is especially troubling when it's a matter of criticizing or even lampooning religion, an area in which free speech has so often been trampled.
Meanwhile, Judge Martin had before him a defendant who, by his own and his lawyer's admission, was grossly ignorant of the protections for free speech in America. Surely, a lecture on civics would not have been amiss.
When I posed this question to the judge, he replied that his remarks about First Amendment rights were addressed to both parties: "It was a dual message . that the victim was within his constitutional rights to do what he did." But, given that Perce was the one being chided, that message was likely lost on the defendant-particularly since it came with the disclaimer that these rights should not be used to "piss off other people and other cultures" and with the baffling statement that Perce was "outside [his] bounds on First Amendment rights."
The case has another worrisome aspect. While no religion has a monopoly on fanaticism, it is no secret that, for many complex reasons, religious intolerance is at present far more entrenched, more common, and more extreme in Islam than in other major religions. Some argue that violent suppression of dissent is in the nature of Islam, and insinuate that every Muslim in the West is a potential agent of sharia tyranny.
Judge Martin did not, of course, invoke sharia law as a basis for his ruling; nor did he suggest that Elbayomy would have been justified in assaulting Perce because his religion commanded it. But he did seem to suggest that insults to the Muslim faith are especially bad because of how impermissible blasphemy is in many Muslim countries and because of the role religion plays in Muslims' lives. Indeed, he specifically drew a distinction between "how Americans practice Christianity" and how Muslims practice Islam: "Islam is not just a religion, it's their culture . it's their very essence, their very being."
Of course, there are many different ways in which Americans practice Christianity and Muslims practice Islam. Some American Christians respond to perceived slights to their faith in ugly ways (such as threats of violence against productions of Terence McNally's play, Corpus Christi, featuring a gay Jesus). But American religious practice, overall, is strongly tied to a hard-won tradition of freedom of religion-and irreligion. Judge Martin's comments seem to suggest that Muslims are far less capable than Christians of dealing sensibly with insults or challenges to their faith. That does a serious disservice both to American democracy and to American Muslims.
Already, this case has given ammunition to peddlers of "Muslim menace" panic (some of whom are now spinning the paranoid fantasy that Judge Martin really is a Muslim but is hiding it to mislead the infidels). The main culprits are those who would sensationalize and twist facts to advance their agenda, be it atheism or Muslim-bashing. But a misguided notion of cultural sensitivity that amounts to a special concern to avoid giving religious offense to Muslims can only lead us further down that path.
More HERE
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The Pill is a Taxing Matter
Dick McDonald
I must admit I have paid little attention over the years to the condom-pill and birth control issues. So it was a great awaking when the current flap came to light. I saw a 30-year old Georgetown law student advocating for the university to supply her with birth control pills free of charge. Later I heard Debbie Wasserman Schultz claim that the birth control pill is an expensive $3,000 a year issue.
It came as quite a shock that government and insurance companies were involved. In my day it was an private matter handled by the individual. I knew there were debates on it I just didn’t pay much attention.
Hearing more about it I learned that Obamacare mandates that insurance companies must supply women with free birth control pills. As a mandate transfers the insurance company obligation from - a risk they can refuse to cover to one they have no choice but must cover - it changes the nature of the cost to that of an indirect tax imposed by Congress.
Rather than get exercised over a new tax or my lack of knowledge on the subject I first called my Rite Aid pharmacy to check on a few things. First of all they asked if I had insurance. My antenna immediately went up only to find out that most health insurance policies already cover birth control pills.
Needless to say I realized that if insurance already covered it why didn’t a $3,000 a year bill or $250 a month “tax” raise some public concerns before. The pharmacist had the answer. She had generic birth control pills that ran about $30 a month or $360 a year not $3,000. Further almost all women bought the generic passing up the brands which cost up to $113 month.
Received via email
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Israeli Confidence-Building Measures: An absurdity
The perennial Arab war on Israel — which we dignify with neutral titles like “Arab/Israeli conflict” — tries the patience of bystanders, yet politicians are continually tantalized at the prospect of another round of talks, and predictably support what are termed Israeli “confidence-building measures.” Two recent examples:
* Jerusalem Post, February 3: “Quartet envoy Tony Blair is involved in intensive talks with Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu about putting together a package of economic gestures to keep the Palestinians directly engaged with Israel in low-level talks in Jordan.”
* Agence France Presse, February 2: “[UN Secretary-General] Ban [Ki-moon] has this week urged Israel to make ‘goodwill gestures’ to tempt the Palestinians back to talks.”
Note that Israel is not being asked to make these “gestures” in return for anything. It is urged to do so merely to entice the Palestinian Authority (PA) to negotiate with it. In other words, the intended “gestures” are unilateral Israeli concessions. Unfortunately, peace has never been facilitated by Israeli unilateral concessions. Quite the contrary.
Last October, Israel freed 1,027 Palestinian prisoners — including hundreds of convicted terrorists — in exchange for kidnapped Israeli serviceman Gilad Shalit. Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Hamas leader Khaled Meshaal greeted this not as a step on the road to peace but as a great victory over Israel.
Note: this was the reaction of Israel’s enemies to a negotiated (though stunningly lopsided) deal. Following this behavior, imagine how unilateral Israeli concessions are received by the same people: not as laudable efforts to bring peace closer, but as acts of weakness heralding eventual Israeli defeat.
Take the biggest Israeli unilateral concession of them all — the 2005 evacuation of Gaza. How was this received? Here is the view of senior PA official Muhammad Dahlan: "The withdrawal from the Gaza Strip is a victory for the Palestinian people’s will. … The withdrawal should take place without an agreement and with no political gains [for Israel]."
The estimate of Hamas spokesman Sami Abu Zuhri: "We are completely confident that … the Palestinian resistance will kick them out of the Palestinian territories, and we will continue our resistance."
In 2009 came another major — indeed, “unprecedented” (Hillary Clinton’s description) — Israeli confidence-building measure at the behest of President Barack Obama: a 10-month unilateral freeze on the construction of Jewish homes in the West Bank. Did negotiations take off? No. The PA stayed away from talks until well into the tenth month, spoke across the table to the Israelis for a few days, and then broke off — and demanded a permanent freeze.
Worse than failure, Israeli confidence-building gestures can also be dangerous. Freed terrorists have often returned to terrorism and murdered more Israelis. Removing security checkpoints and roadblocks have enabled terrorists to carry out attacks and escape. A study by the Almagor Terror Victims Association showed that 177 Israelis were killed in 30 terrorist attacks since 2000 by previously freed terrorists — many of them freed within the framework of confidence-building gestures.
More HERE
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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. I have deleted my Facebook page as I rarely access it. 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)
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Monday, March 05, 2012
Sunday, March 04, 2012
Hating Republicans In Southern California
“We are not the same. I equate Republicans’ political views with thoughtlessness, intolerance and narcissism. They’re neither kind nor empathetic.”
The preceding words are a direct quote, written by Diana Wagman, a novelist, in an Op-Ed piece she penned for the Los Angeles Times, on February 21, 2012.
Ms. Wagman, who describes herself and her husband as, “…both bleeding heart liberals”, related her tale of an inadvertent discovery of the political views of the couple who own a vacation cabin across the street from the Wagman’s own spread, in the Sierra Nevada, just outside of Fresno, California. Ms. Wagman described her shock when, after an evening spent playing poker and sipping scotch, she found, to her horror, that the aforementioned couple across the street were conservative-Tea Partying Republicans. Your humble Townhall correspondent assumed that the rest of this piece would become a rather commonplace “can’t judge a book by its cover”, missive, but at that point it spun off in exactly the opposite direction.
Ms. Wagman informed her readers that her across-the-street acquaintances were the perfect neighbors. They were pleasant, helpful, and friendly. As Ms. Wagman put it, “They are a lovely family: husband, wife, and four smart, funny, polite children. I was sure they were Democrats.” They were also an interracial family, with an African-American mother and a White father.
The trouble began when the Wagmans invited their new friends in for a final drink after the annual Camp Sierra Association poker game. The friends announced that they were members of the Tea Party, and for good measure, they added that the Tea Party was not racist because, they, an interracial couple, had been eagerly welcomed and accepted by their Tea Party compatriots. In Wagman’s own words, “…I was shouting, his wife was trying to calm him down, my husband was trying to calm me down, and our other friends-all Democrats- were trying to keep everybody from breaking the furniture.”
Ms. Wagman goes on to describe the downward spiral of the evening. She states that they argued about healthcare, welfare, Obama’s religion and citizenship, and the war on terror. Things soon descended to name-calling; “He called me a spoiled idiot and worse. I called him selfish, shortsighted and worse. It was awful, and it went on until after 3 AM.”
It is sad when friends sometimes fall out over politics, but it does happen. Thomas Sowell may have been correct in the late 1980s when he argued that political bickering masked deep divisions of a cultural and sociological nature, and that these divisions could never really be bridged.
Be that as it may, in this particular case apologies were proffered, but not really accepted. “The next morning, they knocked on our door and we apologized to each other and laughed sheepishly…But my feelings about them are changed. I cannot respect them as I did before…I don’t want to be friends with someone who is a member of the Tea Party, or is a Newt Gingrich Republican. We are not the same. I equate their political views with thoughtlessness, intolerance and narcissism. I think they are neither kind nor empathetic.”
Ms. Wagman goes on to express her wish for conservatives: “If only they would all go live in Gingrich’s moon colony.” She then rattles off a listing of her certified liberal views and argues that they “…seem so logical to me…these are no-brainers to me, and it kills me that my neighbor disagrees.” She idly wonders if any number of bitter misfortunes, such as having a son killed in Afghanistan, a daughter turning up pregnant, or a sister announcing that she was a lesbian would change her neighbor’s opinions. She finishes her article by stating, “Next time I drive to our cabin, I’m going to make sure I take everything I could possibly need. I don’t want to ask my neighbors for help. I hope it’s their weekend to stay home.”
Let us hope that Ms. Wagman is speaking for herself, and does not represent the views and attitudes of the modern American liberal. It seems quite bigoted, small-minded and petulant to argue that simply discovering that the neighbors are anti-Obama Tea Partiers precludes the possibility of friendship, or even cordiality between their respective families. This is pretty incendiary stuff. Whatever became of the Hubert Humphrey School of “Happy Warrior” type liberalism?
The material point in this column is quite simple. Diana Wagman is likely the type of liberal who bemoans the polarized nature of our politics, the divisive state of our culture, and the vanishing of civility from our public discourse. Yet, in her Op-Ed piece she freely admits that she is a liberal and that she essentially hates Republicans because they are conservatives.
Certainly Ms. Wagman would argue that Rush Limbaugh should be censored, that Ann Coulter is a national disgrace, and that George W. Bush was the worst President in American history. She does not consider these views over the top. On the contrary “they seem so logical” to her. (Perhaps these attitudes represent the worldview of regular readers of the Los Angeles Times.) It goes without saying that she considers hating conservatives to be quite logical, too. If Ms. Wagman really wants to pin the “polarizing” and “divisive” tails on the political donkey she can start with herself.
SOURCE
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Obama's dithering is dangerous for Israel
President Obama responded calmly and masterfully to a heckler at one of his New York fundraisers this week. “Hold on there, young lady, nobody’s announced a war just yet,” he said. The protester demanded the U.S. not take military action against the escalating threat of Iran’s nuclear arms program.
No such action is in the offing. Mideast adviser Dennis Ross, who is forever counseling administrations of both parties on how to make nice with Israel’s not-so-nice neighbors, assures us that Iran will not be able to “surprise” the West during any negotiations. He says Iran is not like Japan.
Really? How does he know that? Aggressive. Insular. Driven by a sense of the superiority of their own culture and religion. Willing to engage in suicide bombings. That’s an apt description of the pre-Pearl Harbor Japan, or Iran under the Mullahs today.
The president tells his heckler not to “jump the gun” in assuming that he, Barack Obama, has decided on military action against Iran. “Nobody’s announced a war just yet.” That reminds us of the slogan of the anti-war Left in the 1970s: “Suppose they gave a war and nobody came?”
Mr. Obama’s riposte makes about as much logical sense as that bumper sticker mentality from the Age of Aquarius. Suppose, Mr. President, Iran gave a war and you didn’t notice? Starting in 1979 with the seizure of our embassy in Tehran and the 444 days of captivity for our 52 hostages, Iran has been engaged in acts of war against the United States. The murder of 241 Marines and Navy Corpsmen in Beirut in 1983 was an act of war against us by proxies widely assumed to be acting on instructions from Tehran.
What kind of reassurance can Israel take from the statements of Mr. Obama’s Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff? Gen. Martin Dempsey said Iran is a “rational actor” on the world stage. If you assume that that means they have taken this president’s measure and will act accordingly, the general may actually be right.
Recall President Obama’s first act in foreign policy. He signed an Executive Order requiring closing within one year of the U.S. detention facility at Guantà namo Bay. That was more than three years ago.
Gitmo remains open. It should remain open. In one of its last acts, the Lame Duck 111th Congress—one of the most liberal Congresses in history—required by law that Gitmo remain open. Mr. Obama’s flourishing left-handed signature of Executive Order Zero is proof that you don’t need to take what this president says too seriously.
The Iranians obviously don’t take him seriously. Neither should the Israelis. President Obama recently told an interviewer from The Atlantic magazine:
"We, immediately upon taking over, mapped out a strategy that said we are going to mobilize the international community around this issue and isolate Iran to send a clear message to them that there is a path they can follow that allows them to rejoin the community of nations, but if they refused to follow that path, that there would be an escalating series of consequences."
“Mobilize the international community?” Would that include Russia and China? Sec. of State Hillary Clinton recently called their non-cooperation at the UN on the matter of sanctions against Syria “despicable.” Syria is a client state of Iran. If we cannot rely on Russia and China to help us with a non-nuclear Syria, how can we ever expect genuine cooperation with them on Iran? So far, both of these permanent members of the UN Security Council have been busy pulling the teeth of every UN sanctions resolution they see.
Barack Obama may worry about rejoining “the community of nations.” That was, ostensibly, the rationale for all his bowing with apologies tours of foreign capitals.
But the Iranian Mullahs have shown no concern about rejoining the community of nations. They are happy enough dealing with Castro Cuba and Venezuela’s anti-American dictator Hugo Chavez.
Contrast the feckless Obama administration’s handling of nuclear threats to Israel with that of Ronald Reagan in 1981. When the Israelis struck the Osirak reactor being built by Saddam Hussein, Israeli military leaders were invited to the Pentagon. Instead of being censured for their unilateral action, Reagan military chiefs wanted to know how they achieved such a stunning success.
Amos Yadlin, former chief of Israel’s military intelligence, argues in this week’s New York Times that now may be the Jewish state’s “last chance” to stop Iran’s nuclear bomb.
We should never have allowed it to come to this. As Charles Krauthammer says, “Israel was founded to prevent a second Holocaust, not invite one.”
SOURCE
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The steady "Progressive" march towards a Fascist America
When big government becomes all-embracing you have Fascism. America is nearly there
The archbishop of Philadelphia. The president of Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary. The head of the Union for Traditional Judaism.
What do these three eminent religious leaders have in common? They’re among more than 300 distinguished individuals who have signed a statement by the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty protesting the Obama administration’s infamous “contraception mandate.”
Their beliefs fall from one end of the theological spectrum to the other. But all agree that government has no business forcing every health insurance plan to provide “free” abortion-inducing drugs, contraception and sterilization.
In reality, of course, these things aren’t free. The costs will be passed on to employers, including those who have moral objections to them. Apparently they’re expected to just check their First Amendment rights at the door. Welcome to the land of the not-so-free.
The White House tried to sell a promised “accommodation” of the objections lodged by religious groups at an unspecified later date. But the Becket Fund group, among others, wasn’t fooled.
“This is a grave violation of religious freedom and cannot stand,” the group wrote. “It is an insult to the intelligence of Catholics, Protestants, Eastern Orthodox Christians, Jews, Muslims, and other people of faith and conscience to imagine that they will accept an assault on their religious liberty if only it is covered up by a cheap accounting trick.”
The true importance of this issue goes deeper than many people realize. Anyone who thinks this is merely a scuffle over religion should think again. Atheists should be just as alarmed as the most devout Catholics, Protestants, Jews or Muslims. That’s because this fight really amounts to the latest skirmish in a larger battle over how free we Americans are today.
We’re living in the age of Unelected Bureaucrats. They can run our lives in minute detail, from the moment we wake up in the morning to the moment we go to bed at night. In the name of “progress,” no area of our lives, no aspect of society is left untouched.
“All is subject to government control, regulatory dictate and administrative whim,” writes Matthew Spalding, vice president of American Studies at The Heritage Foundation. “Nothing will be allowed outside of the new regulatory scheme: no independent state programs, no individuals or businesses permitted not to participate, no true private market alternatives.”
Today, it’s clear that one of the sharpest distinctions between conservatives and progressives lies in our contrasting attitudes to civil society. Conservatives, following Edmund Burke and Alexis de Tocqueville, see hope and renewal coming from families, churches and civic groups. Progressives see them as fomenting prejudice and ignorance.
For conservatives, social justice is best pursued by restoring community, familial love, self-respect and responsibility, all products of a robust civil society. Progressives, by contrast, believe that social justice means redistributing material wealth.
Today the “clash of visions” between conservatives and progressives over civil society is most apparent in their contrasting responses to the Tea Party movement. For conservatives, the Tea Party movement is a classic example of Edmund Burke’s “little platoons” springing into action.
Ordinary Americans, appalled by the sudden, massive expansion of Big Government, and by the equally sudden, explosive growth of the national debt, have spontaneously organized into associations demanding change. Were Burke alive today, he surely would cite the rise of the Tea Party movement as vital to the health and well-being of democracy.
It’s obvious, though, that progressives are unwilling to give up yet. They’re still trying to mold society in their image. But can they succeed by alienating every major religious group in the country?
When Barack Obama ran for president in 2008, he said he wanted to be a “uniter.” It looks as if he finally got his wish.
SOURCE
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Obama Rolls Out the Red Carpet for Terrorists
In CNN’s Arizona Republican presidential debate, Newt Gingrich commented that under Obama’s presidency, “if you’re America’s enemy, you’re safe.” Newt added “I believe this is the most dangerous president on national security grounds in American history.”
Newt is absolutely right. For more than 11 months, Syria has been embroiled in a bloody, civil war, where over 6,000 people have been killed by President Assad’s orders. What has the Obama administration done? Virtually nothing but stand back and try to work through the useless body called the United Nations where China and Russian vetoed the UN Security Council’s resolution condemning the violence in Syria. Where was the Obama administration calls for Assad to resign months ago?
While Syria burns, the terrorist nation of Iran has been ramping up threats on its intentions to become a nuclear brandishing regime that would not only take aim at American but said it wants “to wipe Israel off the face of the earth.” Again the Obama administration has been slow to act, only recently hitting Iran with economic sanctions. Remember this was the same president who said nothing about Iran’s 2009 rigged elections which allowed President Ahmadinejad to remain in office.
Obama seems to be coddling our enemies more like they are our friends. After jacking up our debt to $15 trillion in three short years, Obama thought now was a good time to build a $750,000 playground at the Guantanamo Bay detention camp (GITMO) so terrorists would feel comfortable. According to military police, the new soccer field was built because that’s the sport of choice for most of the detainees and because they deserve to be rewarded for crimes committed against the United States. Detainees are granted 20 hours a day access to the field.
It’s also worth noting, this soccer field will compliment the already existing indoor recreation field and outdoor field because evidently, the Obama administration feels a terrorist’s well being is a terrible thing to waste. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta said he “wasn’t aware of it.” I guess the next thing American taxpayers will be paying for is spa treatments for detainees at GITMO.
More HERE
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My Twitter.com identity: jonjayray. I have deleted my Facebook page as I rarely access it. 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)
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“We are not the same. I equate Republicans’ political views with thoughtlessness, intolerance and narcissism. They’re neither kind nor empathetic.”
The preceding words are a direct quote, written by Diana Wagman, a novelist, in an Op-Ed piece she penned for the Los Angeles Times, on February 21, 2012.
Ms. Wagman, who describes herself and her husband as, “…both bleeding heart liberals”, related her tale of an inadvertent discovery of the political views of the couple who own a vacation cabin across the street from the Wagman’s own spread, in the Sierra Nevada, just outside of Fresno, California. Ms. Wagman described her shock when, after an evening spent playing poker and sipping scotch, she found, to her horror, that the aforementioned couple across the street were conservative-Tea Partying Republicans. Your humble Townhall correspondent assumed that the rest of this piece would become a rather commonplace “can’t judge a book by its cover”, missive, but at that point it spun off in exactly the opposite direction.
Ms. Wagman informed her readers that her across-the-street acquaintances were the perfect neighbors. They were pleasant, helpful, and friendly. As Ms. Wagman put it, “They are a lovely family: husband, wife, and four smart, funny, polite children. I was sure they were Democrats.” They were also an interracial family, with an African-American mother and a White father.
The trouble began when the Wagmans invited their new friends in for a final drink after the annual Camp Sierra Association poker game. The friends announced that they were members of the Tea Party, and for good measure, they added that the Tea Party was not racist because, they, an interracial couple, had been eagerly welcomed and accepted by their Tea Party compatriots. In Wagman’s own words, “…I was shouting, his wife was trying to calm him down, my husband was trying to calm me down, and our other friends-all Democrats- were trying to keep everybody from breaking the furniture.”
Ms. Wagman goes on to describe the downward spiral of the evening. She states that they argued about healthcare, welfare, Obama’s religion and citizenship, and the war on terror. Things soon descended to name-calling; “He called me a spoiled idiot and worse. I called him selfish, shortsighted and worse. It was awful, and it went on until after 3 AM.”
It is sad when friends sometimes fall out over politics, but it does happen. Thomas Sowell may have been correct in the late 1980s when he argued that political bickering masked deep divisions of a cultural and sociological nature, and that these divisions could never really be bridged.
Be that as it may, in this particular case apologies were proffered, but not really accepted. “The next morning, they knocked on our door and we apologized to each other and laughed sheepishly…But my feelings about them are changed. I cannot respect them as I did before…I don’t want to be friends with someone who is a member of the Tea Party, or is a Newt Gingrich Republican. We are not the same. I equate their political views with thoughtlessness, intolerance and narcissism. I think they are neither kind nor empathetic.”
Ms. Wagman goes on to express her wish for conservatives: “If only they would all go live in Gingrich’s moon colony.” She then rattles off a listing of her certified liberal views and argues that they “…seem so logical to me…these are no-brainers to me, and it kills me that my neighbor disagrees.” She idly wonders if any number of bitter misfortunes, such as having a son killed in Afghanistan, a daughter turning up pregnant, or a sister announcing that she was a lesbian would change her neighbor’s opinions. She finishes her article by stating, “Next time I drive to our cabin, I’m going to make sure I take everything I could possibly need. I don’t want to ask my neighbors for help. I hope it’s their weekend to stay home.”
Let us hope that Ms. Wagman is speaking for herself, and does not represent the views and attitudes of the modern American liberal. It seems quite bigoted, small-minded and petulant to argue that simply discovering that the neighbors are anti-Obama Tea Partiers precludes the possibility of friendship, or even cordiality between their respective families. This is pretty incendiary stuff. Whatever became of the Hubert Humphrey School of “Happy Warrior” type liberalism?
The material point in this column is quite simple. Diana Wagman is likely the type of liberal who bemoans the polarized nature of our politics, the divisive state of our culture, and the vanishing of civility from our public discourse. Yet, in her Op-Ed piece she freely admits that she is a liberal and that she essentially hates Republicans because they are conservatives.
Certainly Ms. Wagman would argue that Rush Limbaugh should be censored, that Ann Coulter is a national disgrace, and that George W. Bush was the worst President in American history. She does not consider these views over the top. On the contrary “they seem so logical” to her. (Perhaps these attitudes represent the worldview of regular readers of the Los Angeles Times.) It goes without saying that she considers hating conservatives to be quite logical, too. If Ms. Wagman really wants to pin the “polarizing” and “divisive” tails on the political donkey she can start with herself.
SOURCE
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Obama's dithering is dangerous for Israel
President Obama responded calmly and masterfully to a heckler at one of his New York fundraisers this week. “Hold on there, young lady, nobody’s announced a war just yet,” he said. The protester demanded the U.S. not take military action against the escalating threat of Iran’s nuclear arms program.
No such action is in the offing. Mideast adviser Dennis Ross, who is forever counseling administrations of both parties on how to make nice with Israel’s not-so-nice neighbors, assures us that Iran will not be able to “surprise” the West during any negotiations. He says Iran is not like Japan.
Really? How does he know that? Aggressive. Insular. Driven by a sense of the superiority of their own culture and religion. Willing to engage in suicide bombings. That’s an apt description of the pre-Pearl Harbor Japan, or Iran under the Mullahs today.
The president tells his heckler not to “jump the gun” in assuming that he, Barack Obama, has decided on military action against Iran. “Nobody’s announced a war just yet.” That reminds us of the slogan of the anti-war Left in the 1970s: “Suppose they gave a war and nobody came?”
Mr. Obama’s riposte makes about as much logical sense as that bumper sticker mentality from the Age of Aquarius. Suppose, Mr. President, Iran gave a war and you didn’t notice? Starting in 1979 with the seizure of our embassy in Tehran and the 444 days of captivity for our 52 hostages, Iran has been engaged in acts of war against the United States. The murder of 241 Marines and Navy Corpsmen in Beirut in 1983 was an act of war against us by proxies widely assumed to be acting on instructions from Tehran.
What kind of reassurance can Israel take from the statements of Mr. Obama’s Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff? Gen. Martin Dempsey said Iran is a “rational actor” on the world stage. If you assume that that means they have taken this president’s measure and will act accordingly, the general may actually be right.
Recall President Obama’s first act in foreign policy. He signed an Executive Order requiring closing within one year of the U.S. detention facility at Guantà namo Bay. That was more than three years ago.
Gitmo remains open. It should remain open. In one of its last acts, the Lame Duck 111th Congress—one of the most liberal Congresses in history—required by law that Gitmo remain open. Mr. Obama’s flourishing left-handed signature of Executive Order Zero is proof that you don’t need to take what this president says too seriously.
The Iranians obviously don’t take him seriously. Neither should the Israelis. President Obama recently told an interviewer from The Atlantic magazine:
"We, immediately upon taking over, mapped out a strategy that said we are going to mobilize the international community around this issue and isolate Iran to send a clear message to them that there is a path they can follow that allows them to rejoin the community of nations, but if they refused to follow that path, that there would be an escalating series of consequences."
“Mobilize the international community?” Would that include Russia and China? Sec. of State Hillary Clinton recently called their non-cooperation at the UN on the matter of sanctions against Syria “despicable.” Syria is a client state of Iran. If we cannot rely on Russia and China to help us with a non-nuclear Syria, how can we ever expect genuine cooperation with them on Iran? So far, both of these permanent members of the UN Security Council have been busy pulling the teeth of every UN sanctions resolution they see.
Barack Obama may worry about rejoining “the community of nations.” That was, ostensibly, the rationale for all his bowing with apologies tours of foreign capitals.
But the Iranian Mullahs have shown no concern about rejoining the community of nations. They are happy enough dealing with Castro Cuba and Venezuela’s anti-American dictator Hugo Chavez.
Contrast the feckless Obama administration’s handling of nuclear threats to Israel with that of Ronald Reagan in 1981. When the Israelis struck the Osirak reactor being built by Saddam Hussein, Israeli military leaders were invited to the Pentagon. Instead of being censured for their unilateral action, Reagan military chiefs wanted to know how they achieved such a stunning success.
Amos Yadlin, former chief of Israel’s military intelligence, argues in this week’s New York Times that now may be the Jewish state’s “last chance” to stop Iran’s nuclear bomb.
We should never have allowed it to come to this. As Charles Krauthammer says, “Israel was founded to prevent a second Holocaust, not invite one.”
SOURCE
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The steady "Progressive" march towards a Fascist America
When big government becomes all-embracing you have Fascism. America is nearly there
The archbishop of Philadelphia. The president of Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary. The head of the Union for Traditional Judaism.
What do these three eminent religious leaders have in common? They’re among more than 300 distinguished individuals who have signed a statement by the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty protesting the Obama administration’s infamous “contraception mandate.”
Their beliefs fall from one end of the theological spectrum to the other. But all agree that government has no business forcing every health insurance plan to provide “free” abortion-inducing drugs, contraception and sterilization.
In reality, of course, these things aren’t free. The costs will be passed on to employers, including those who have moral objections to them. Apparently they’re expected to just check their First Amendment rights at the door. Welcome to the land of the not-so-free.
The White House tried to sell a promised “accommodation” of the objections lodged by religious groups at an unspecified later date. But the Becket Fund group, among others, wasn’t fooled.
“This is a grave violation of religious freedom and cannot stand,” the group wrote. “It is an insult to the intelligence of Catholics, Protestants, Eastern Orthodox Christians, Jews, Muslims, and other people of faith and conscience to imagine that they will accept an assault on their religious liberty if only it is covered up by a cheap accounting trick.”
The true importance of this issue goes deeper than many people realize. Anyone who thinks this is merely a scuffle over religion should think again. Atheists should be just as alarmed as the most devout Catholics, Protestants, Jews or Muslims. That’s because this fight really amounts to the latest skirmish in a larger battle over how free we Americans are today.
We’re living in the age of Unelected Bureaucrats. They can run our lives in minute detail, from the moment we wake up in the morning to the moment we go to bed at night. In the name of “progress,” no area of our lives, no aspect of society is left untouched.
“All is subject to government control, regulatory dictate and administrative whim,” writes Matthew Spalding, vice president of American Studies at The Heritage Foundation. “Nothing will be allowed outside of the new regulatory scheme: no independent state programs, no individuals or businesses permitted not to participate, no true private market alternatives.”
Today, it’s clear that one of the sharpest distinctions between conservatives and progressives lies in our contrasting attitudes to civil society. Conservatives, following Edmund Burke and Alexis de Tocqueville, see hope and renewal coming from families, churches and civic groups. Progressives see them as fomenting prejudice and ignorance.
For conservatives, social justice is best pursued by restoring community, familial love, self-respect and responsibility, all products of a robust civil society. Progressives, by contrast, believe that social justice means redistributing material wealth.
Today the “clash of visions” between conservatives and progressives over civil society is most apparent in their contrasting responses to the Tea Party movement. For conservatives, the Tea Party movement is a classic example of Edmund Burke’s “little platoons” springing into action.
Ordinary Americans, appalled by the sudden, massive expansion of Big Government, and by the equally sudden, explosive growth of the national debt, have spontaneously organized into associations demanding change. Were Burke alive today, he surely would cite the rise of the Tea Party movement as vital to the health and well-being of democracy.
It’s obvious, though, that progressives are unwilling to give up yet. They’re still trying to mold society in their image. But can they succeed by alienating every major religious group in the country?
When Barack Obama ran for president in 2008, he said he wanted to be a “uniter.” It looks as if he finally got his wish.
SOURCE
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Obama Rolls Out the Red Carpet for Terrorists
In CNN’s Arizona Republican presidential debate, Newt Gingrich commented that under Obama’s presidency, “if you’re America’s enemy, you’re safe.” Newt added “I believe this is the most dangerous president on national security grounds in American history.”
Newt is absolutely right. For more than 11 months, Syria has been embroiled in a bloody, civil war, where over 6,000 people have been killed by President Assad’s orders. What has the Obama administration done? Virtually nothing but stand back and try to work through the useless body called the United Nations where China and Russian vetoed the UN Security Council’s resolution condemning the violence in Syria. Where was the Obama administration calls for Assad to resign months ago?
While Syria burns, the terrorist nation of Iran has been ramping up threats on its intentions to become a nuclear brandishing regime that would not only take aim at American but said it wants “to wipe Israel off the face of the earth.” Again the Obama administration has been slow to act, only recently hitting Iran with economic sanctions. Remember this was the same president who said nothing about Iran’s 2009 rigged elections which allowed President Ahmadinejad to remain in office.
Obama seems to be coddling our enemies more like they are our friends. After jacking up our debt to $15 trillion in three short years, Obama thought now was a good time to build a $750,000 playground at the Guantanamo Bay detention camp (GITMO) so terrorists would feel comfortable. According to military police, the new soccer field was built because that’s the sport of choice for most of the detainees and because they deserve to be rewarded for crimes committed against the United States. Detainees are granted 20 hours a day access to the field.
It’s also worth noting, this soccer field will compliment the already existing indoor recreation field and outdoor field because evidently, the Obama administration feels a terrorist’s well being is a terrible thing to waste. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta said he “wasn’t aware of it.” I guess the next thing American taxpayers will be paying for is spa treatments for detainees at GITMO.
More HERE
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My Twitter.com identity: jonjayray. I have deleted my Facebook page as I rarely access it. 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)
****************************
Saturday, March 03, 2012
A most significant development: Central banks no longer trust money: Central banks begin to buy stocks instead
The article below sees it as a way of propping up the stockmarket but a student of history would see it as a belief that stocks will hold their value better than the Greenback, Euro or UK Pound will. That is certainly my belief and I have long ago put most of my money where my mouth is: Into blue chip shares
A small number of central banks around the world have begun investing their foreign exchange reserves in equities, according to Bloomberg News. These include the Swiss National Bank, the Bank of Israel, South Korea and others.
So far it’s not much, several billion in stock buys by central banks. But all over the world, there are about $10.2 trillion of foreign exchange reserves that could be tapped, according to the International Monetary Fund’s Currency Composition of Official Foreign Exchange Reserves (COFER) database.
Interestingly, the IMF notes that “COFER data for individual countries are strictly confidential.” So, when central banks flood equities markets with excess reserves, investors likely won’t know until after the fact, and then, only if such purchases are disclosed.
But why would central banks purchase stocks? Aren’t those… risky?
In 2000, none other than current Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke — then a professor — commenting on Japanese policies after their housing bubble popped in 1989, included corporate bond and equity purchases in his menu of options that might be pursued in an environment with near-zero interest rates.
Bernanke left no mistake that the reason to boost aggregate demand in this fashion is to raise prices: “The object of such purchases would be to raise asset prices, which in turn would stimulate spending”.
Vince Reinhart, then Fed Director of its Division of Monetary Affairs, at Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) meeting in June 2004 described the circumstances under which a central bank might engage in such purchases: “if the policymakers believed that deflationary forces were severe.”
Reinhart also dismissed the possibility at the time, saying, “These options would change how we are viewed in financial markets, involve credit judgments of a form we are not used to, perhaps smack of desperation, and pull us into a tighter relationship with other parts of government.”
But let’s leave that aside. Consider carefully the circumstances Reinhart outlined when this might actually happen: “if the policymakers believed that deflationary forces were severe.” Uh-oh.
Now that central banks are actively buying stocks, this could be an extremely bearish signal for investors. Central banks may not believe that the current market rally is sustainable and that the means to propping it up is to step in and forcefully monetize the markets.
That alone would be outrageous enough, if the object is to socialize risks in the private sector, and to artificially bolster the capital gains of a select few. But let’s examine some numbers to see what the impact might be if central banks let loose their $10.2 trillion of foreign exchange reserves on the stock market.
According to the World Federation of Exchanges (WFE), the total value of equities worldwide fell from a high of $56.8 trillion in May 2008 to $42.9 trillion in Sept. 2008. By the end of 2008 it was $32.8 trillion. And in Feb. 2009, it had dropped to a low of $29.1 trillion.
In less than a year, over $27.7 trillion of wealth was erased.
Since that time, there has been a considerable recovery. The total value of equities rose to $54 trillion in 2010, and then came down slightly in 2011 to $47 trillion, with the WFE citing collateral damage from the sovereign debt crisis.
In Jan., it stood at about $50.8 trillion. So, global equity markets are currently about 74.5 percent off their lows and climbing. To look at it from the perspective of the Dow Jones Industrial Average, it hit a low of 6594 in March 2009, and has risen to about 13000 today. It’s nearly 100 percent off its low.
Does that mean it is time for a correction? Or even a cyclical recession?
For certain, central banks stepping into stocks now will be buying the market at or near a high. Why would they do that unless “policymakers believed that deflationary forces were severe”?
Perhaps that is just a pretext. One effect of central banks buying at a high would be to allow favored shareholders of companies to realize profits on their stock holdings (i.e. capital gains). It’s important to note that the high percentage gains in equity values over the past three years were actually a low-volume trade.
In other words, not too many people appear to be buying the Dow at 13000.
Are financial institutions sitting on a lot of overvalued assets and need to sell them to book the gains before the correction comes? Hmmm.
There’s over $20 trillion of gains at stake since the markets’ collective lows of 2009. But don’t expect a bailout in your personal portfolio solely from central banks’ foreign exchange reserves. There are not enough of those to buy all of the world’s stocks.
So, the privileged few will get a bailout — and a preemptive one at that. And the worst part is there will be no way to stop the intervention.
Outraged yet? You should be. But then, this is what happens when value is completely severed from currency. It is time to seriously reconsider this Monopoly money scheme.
SOURCE
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20 Obvious Truths That Will Shock Liberals
John Hawkins
1) The Founding Fathers were generally religious, gun-toting small government fanatics who were so far to the Right that they'd make Ann Coulter look like Jimmy Carter.
2) The greatest evil this country has ever committed isn't slavery; it's killing more than 50 million innocent children via abortion.
3) Conservatives are much more compassionate than liberals and all you have to do to prove it is look at all the studies showing that conservatives give more of their money to charity than liberals do.
4) When the Founding Fathers were actually around, there were official state religions and the Bible was used as a textbook in schools. The so-called "wall of separation between church and state" has absolutely nothing to do with the Constitution and everything to do with liberal hostility to Christianity.
5) The biggest problem with our economy today is Barack Obama. His demonization of successful people, his driving up gas prices, his regulatory overload and threats to increase taxes have terrified businesses into hunkering down, refusing to spend money, and declining to hire new people. Replacing him would do more than any government policy to spur economic growth.
6) Not only are conservatives more patriotic than liberals, but most American liberals "love" America in about the same way that a wife-beater loves his wife.
7) Out of every 100 cries of “Racism” you hear these days, 99 are motivated by nothing other than politics.
8) Anyone paying income taxes is certainly paying his “fair share" -- and then some -- compared to the people who pay nothing.
9) You don't have a "right" to anything that other people have to pay to provide for you.
10) If we can ask people to present an ID to buy alcohol, drive a car, or get on an airplane, then asking them to present identification to vote is a no-brainer.
11) There's absolutely nothing that the government does smarter, better, or more efficiently than the private market with roughly equivalent resources.
12) The biggest problem with education in this country is liberals. They fight vouchers, oppose merit pay, refuse to get rid of terrible teachers, and bend over backwards to keep poor kids trapped in failing schools.
13) Fascism, socialism, and communism are all left-wing movements that have considerably more in common with modern liberalism than modern conservatism.
14) The Democratic Party was behind slavery, the KKK, and Jim Crow laws. It was also the party of Margaret Sanger, George Wallace, and Bull Connor. It has ALWAYS been a racist party. Even today, white liberals support Affirmative Action and racial set-asides because they still believe black Americans are too inferior to go up against whites on an even playing field.
15) A man with good morals who falls short and becomes a hypocrite is still a far better man than a liberal who can never be called a hypocrite because he has no morals at all.
16) The most dire threat to America's future and prosperity in the last 150 years hasn't been the Nazis, the Soviets, or Al-Qaeda;, it's the spending and overreach of our own government.
17) Greed isn't someone wanting to keep more of what he earns; it's people demanding a greater share of money that someone else earns.
18) Most of the time in American politics, the liberal "victim" is really a bad guy who is absolutely delighted by the opportunity to pretend to be "offended."
19) Jesus Christ was not a conservative, a liberal, or a politician. He was also not a capitalist or a socialist. Still, you can say this: Jesus drew sharp lines about what's right and wrong, he wasn't tolerant of what the Bible categorizes as sinful behavior, and there's absolutely no question that he would adamantly oppose abortion and gay marriage.
20) When you demand that other people fund your sexual escapades by buying your contraception, your sex life becomes their business.
SOURCE
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Islamic Rages Aimed at Enslaving the West
Six U.S. military men have been murdered by Afghan security forces seized by what may be labeled Quran-Burning Rage.
Quran-Burning Rage follows Pastor Jones Rage, which, after a Florida pastor burned a Quran in 2011, seized Afghan Muslims and inspired rioting. Some rioters overran a United Nations outpost and murdered seven U.N. personnel.
Pastor Jones Rage followed "Fitna" Rage, which seized Muslims worldwide even before the release of Dutch parliamentarian Geert Wilders' short 2008 film "Fitna." That film sparked rioting, arson, boycotts, death threats and, as a bonus, charges that led to the protracted trial in the Netherlands of Wilders for "insulting Muslims." (He was acquitted in 2011.)
"Fitna" Rage followed Teddy Bear Rage, which, in 2007, seized Muslims in Sudan after a British teacher, whose class named a teddy bear "Muhammad," was sentenced to 15 days for "insulting religion." Ten thousand Sudanese turned out to call for the teacher's head instead.
Teddy Bear Rage followed Pope Rage, which seized Muslims after a 2006 address in which Pope Benedict XVI noted a historic reference to Islam's propensity to spread by violence. Muslim rioting, arson (including church burnings) and the murder of a 65-year-old Italian nun in Somalia ensued.
All of these rages followed or coincided with the most sustained rage of all, Danish Muhammad Cartoon Rage, which, since the 2005 publication of a dozen Muhammad cartoons in a Danish newspaper, has seized countless Muslims in recurring waves of rioting, boycotts and arson. More than 100 deaths have resulted.
I could continue, but I think the pattern is clear. Critical discussion or representation of Islam -- including stated facts; satirical, political or religious commentary; or acts deemed by Islam to be "blasphemy" or "desecration" -- spur Muslims to violence. This violence spurs Westerners to apology. But apology is always an act of dhimmitude: submitting to Islamic definitions of crime or grievance that only under Islamic law require contrition.
Today, the pattern intensifies. Muslim violence is more brazen with the murders of American troops, and Western apologies are more exaggerated. The United States hasn't even quashed Afghan demands for a trial of those who last month disposed of several Qurans.
Meanwhile, the chorus for punishment grows. "After the first step of a profound apology, there must be a second step ... of disciplinary action," Jan Kubis, the United Nations representative in Afghanistan, said this week. "Only after this, after such a disciplinary action, can the international forces say, 'Yes, we're sincere in our apology.'"
Or, rather, yes, we're sincere in our dhimmitude.
Demonstrating his own "sincerity," Kubis continued: "We deeply, deeply, profoundly respect Islam. ... We were very hurt that the international military allowed the desecration of the Quran. We rejected and condemned this act; it doesn't matter that it was a mistake."
Kubis' example is most instructive. Speaking for the United Nations, he mimics the aggrievement of Islam. Indeed, Islam's aggrievement becomes the United Nations' own as it draws power from the demonstrably more kinetic Islamic position.
The fact is, this whole affair, like those that preceded it, is a power play. Feigned victimhood becomes a trap for the "perpetrator" -- in this case, the U.S. military. Falling for the trap means submitting to violent Islamic dictates for exactly the same reason a co-dependent family member submits to dictates of a mentally ill relative -- to stop the outburst, to make it all "better," even if "better" is only a lull before the next power play.
Just as such actions bring a co-dependent family member more closely into the behavioral orbit of the sick family member, they bring the United States more closely into the behavioral orbit regulated by Islamic law. They force the "perpetrator" into accepting the sacredness of an inanimate object; they force the "perpetrator" into accepting the Islamic position that a?Christian or Jew is unfit (unclean) to dispose of the sacred thing without desecrating it. They force the "perpetrator" to accept the Islamic belief that such "desecration" constitutes a crime of literally capital proportions.
They force the "perpetrator" to act Islamic. This is the pattern of dhimmitude, and we must break it.
SOURCE
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Weak U.S. Economy Still the Leading Issue for Voters
President Obama may be getting great pleasure from the Republicans' lengthening battle over who can beat him in November. But he faces a much stronger opponent between now and then: a weakened U.S. economy.
The 3 percent fourth-quarter growth rate in the nation's gross domestic product was welcome news, but the fact is that the Obama economy grew at a sluggish 1.7 percent for all of 2011.
And it isn't expected to do a great deal better this year, either, according to the National Association for Business Economics. It is predicting only modest growth of 2.4 percent for the rest of this year.
Americans may not follow the economic growth rate that closely, but they do follow the unemployment rate, which has always been a lagging economic indicator. And that in the end may be Obama's political undoing this fall.
The government's unemployment rate, which has to be taken with a large grain of salt, is 8.3 percent. But the daily surveys conducted by the Gallup Poll put the jobless rate at 9 percent, and worse, the "underemployment rate," which includes people who can't find full-time work or who have dropped out of the work force, at 19 percent.
In another gloomy economic forecast, Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke told lawmakers Wednesday that the nation still faced major economic challenges before it was going to fully regain its health.
He reiterated that the unemployment rate isn't likely to drop much more than it has so far, and any further decline will "edge down only slowly" in coming years.
More HERE
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My Twitter.com identity: jonjayray. I have deleted my Facebook page as I rarely access it. 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 article below sees it as a way of propping up the stockmarket but a student of history would see it as a belief that stocks will hold their value better than the Greenback, Euro or UK Pound will. That is certainly my belief and I have long ago put most of my money where my mouth is: Into blue chip shares
A small number of central banks around the world have begun investing their foreign exchange reserves in equities, according to Bloomberg News. These include the Swiss National Bank, the Bank of Israel, South Korea and others.
So far it’s not much, several billion in stock buys by central banks. But all over the world, there are about $10.2 trillion of foreign exchange reserves that could be tapped, according to the International Monetary Fund’s Currency Composition of Official Foreign Exchange Reserves (COFER) database.
Interestingly, the IMF notes that “COFER data for individual countries are strictly confidential.” So, when central banks flood equities markets with excess reserves, investors likely won’t know until after the fact, and then, only if such purchases are disclosed.
But why would central banks purchase stocks? Aren’t those… risky?
In 2000, none other than current Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke — then a professor — commenting on Japanese policies after their housing bubble popped in 1989, included corporate bond and equity purchases in his menu of options that might be pursued in an environment with near-zero interest rates.
Bernanke left no mistake that the reason to boost aggregate demand in this fashion is to raise prices: “The object of such purchases would be to raise asset prices, which in turn would stimulate spending”.
Vince Reinhart, then Fed Director of its Division of Monetary Affairs, at Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) meeting in June 2004 described the circumstances under which a central bank might engage in such purchases: “if the policymakers believed that deflationary forces were severe.”
Reinhart also dismissed the possibility at the time, saying, “These options would change how we are viewed in financial markets, involve credit judgments of a form we are not used to, perhaps smack of desperation, and pull us into a tighter relationship with other parts of government.”
But let’s leave that aside. Consider carefully the circumstances Reinhart outlined when this might actually happen: “if the policymakers believed that deflationary forces were severe.” Uh-oh.
Now that central banks are actively buying stocks, this could be an extremely bearish signal for investors. Central banks may not believe that the current market rally is sustainable and that the means to propping it up is to step in and forcefully monetize the markets.
That alone would be outrageous enough, if the object is to socialize risks in the private sector, and to artificially bolster the capital gains of a select few. But let’s examine some numbers to see what the impact might be if central banks let loose their $10.2 trillion of foreign exchange reserves on the stock market.
According to the World Federation of Exchanges (WFE), the total value of equities worldwide fell from a high of $56.8 trillion in May 2008 to $42.9 trillion in Sept. 2008. By the end of 2008 it was $32.8 trillion. And in Feb. 2009, it had dropped to a low of $29.1 trillion.
In less than a year, over $27.7 trillion of wealth was erased.
Since that time, there has been a considerable recovery. The total value of equities rose to $54 trillion in 2010, and then came down slightly in 2011 to $47 trillion, with the WFE citing collateral damage from the sovereign debt crisis.
In Jan., it stood at about $50.8 trillion. So, global equity markets are currently about 74.5 percent off their lows and climbing. To look at it from the perspective of the Dow Jones Industrial Average, it hit a low of 6594 in March 2009, and has risen to about 13000 today. It’s nearly 100 percent off its low.
Does that mean it is time for a correction? Or even a cyclical recession?
For certain, central banks stepping into stocks now will be buying the market at or near a high. Why would they do that unless “policymakers believed that deflationary forces were severe”?
Perhaps that is just a pretext. One effect of central banks buying at a high would be to allow favored shareholders of companies to realize profits on their stock holdings (i.e. capital gains). It’s important to note that the high percentage gains in equity values over the past three years were actually a low-volume trade.
In other words, not too many people appear to be buying the Dow at 13000.
Are financial institutions sitting on a lot of overvalued assets and need to sell them to book the gains before the correction comes? Hmmm.
There’s over $20 trillion of gains at stake since the markets’ collective lows of 2009. But don’t expect a bailout in your personal portfolio solely from central banks’ foreign exchange reserves. There are not enough of those to buy all of the world’s stocks.
So, the privileged few will get a bailout — and a preemptive one at that. And the worst part is there will be no way to stop the intervention.
Outraged yet? You should be. But then, this is what happens when value is completely severed from currency. It is time to seriously reconsider this Monopoly money scheme.
SOURCE
****************************
20 Obvious Truths That Will Shock Liberals
John Hawkins
1) The Founding Fathers were generally religious, gun-toting small government fanatics who were so far to the Right that they'd make Ann Coulter look like Jimmy Carter.
2) The greatest evil this country has ever committed isn't slavery; it's killing more than 50 million innocent children via abortion.
3) Conservatives are much more compassionate than liberals and all you have to do to prove it is look at all the studies showing that conservatives give more of their money to charity than liberals do.
4) When the Founding Fathers were actually around, there were official state religions and the Bible was used as a textbook in schools. The so-called "wall of separation between church and state" has absolutely nothing to do with the Constitution and everything to do with liberal hostility to Christianity.
5) The biggest problem with our economy today is Barack Obama. His demonization of successful people, his driving up gas prices, his regulatory overload and threats to increase taxes have terrified businesses into hunkering down, refusing to spend money, and declining to hire new people. Replacing him would do more than any government policy to spur economic growth.
6) Not only are conservatives more patriotic than liberals, but most American liberals "love" America in about the same way that a wife-beater loves his wife.
7) Out of every 100 cries of “Racism” you hear these days, 99 are motivated by nothing other than politics.
8) Anyone paying income taxes is certainly paying his “fair share" -- and then some -- compared to the people who pay nothing.
9) You don't have a "right" to anything that other people have to pay to provide for you.
10) If we can ask people to present an ID to buy alcohol, drive a car, or get on an airplane, then asking them to present identification to vote is a no-brainer.
11) There's absolutely nothing that the government does smarter, better, or more efficiently than the private market with roughly equivalent resources.
12) The biggest problem with education in this country is liberals. They fight vouchers, oppose merit pay, refuse to get rid of terrible teachers, and bend over backwards to keep poor kids trapped in failing schools.
13) Fascism, socialism, and communism are all left-wing movements that have considerably more in common with modern liberalism than modern conservatism.
14) The Democratic Party was behind slavery, the KKK, and Jim Crow laws. It was also the party of Margaret Sanger, George Wallace, and Bull Connor. It has ALWAYS been a racist party. Even today, white liberals support Affirmative Action and racial set-asides because they still believe black Americans are too inferior to go up against whites on an even playing field.
15) A man with good morals who falls short and becomes a hypocrite is still a far better man than a liberal who can never be called a hypocrite because he has no morals at all.
16) The most dire threat to America's future and prosperity in the last 150 years hasn't been the Nazis, the Soviets, or Al-Qaeda;, it's the spending and overreach of our own government.
17) Greed isn't someone wanting to keep more of what he earns; it's people demanding a greater share of money that someone else earns.
18) Most of the time in American politics, the liberal "victim" is really a bad guy who is absolutely delighted by the opportunity to pretend to be "offended."
19) Jesus Christ was not a conservative, a liberal, or a politician. He was also not a capitalist or a socialist. Still, you can say this: Jesus drew sharp lines about what's right and wrong, he wasn't tolerant of what the Bible categorizes as sinful behavior, and there's absolutely no question that he would adamantly oppose abortion and gay marriage.
20) When you demand that other people fund your sexual escapades by buying your contraception, your sex life becomes their business.
SOURCE
************************
Islamic Rages Aimed at Enslaving the West
Six U.S. military men have been murdered by Afghan security forces seized by what may be labeled Quran-Burning Rage.
Quran-Burning Rage follows Pastor Jones Rage, which, after a Florida pastor burned a Quran in 2011, seized Afghan Muslims and inspired rioting. Some rioters overran a United Nations outpost and murdered seven U.N. personnel.
Pastor Jones Rage followed "Fitna" Rage, which seized Muslims worldwide even before the release of Dutch parliamentarian Geert Wilders' short 2008 film "Fitna." That film sparked rioting, arson, boycotts, death threats and, as a bonus, charges that led to the protracted trial in the Netherlands of Wilders for "insulting Muslims." (He was acquitted in 2011.)
"Fitna" Rage followed Teddy Bear Rage, which, in 2007, seized Muslims in Sudan after a British teacher, whose class named a teddy bear "Muhammad," was sentenced to 15 days for "insulting religion." Ten thousand Sudanese turned out to call for the teacher's head instead.
Teddy Bear Rage followed Pope Rage, which seized Muslims after a 2006 address in which Pope Benedict XVI noted a historic reference to Islam's propensity to spread by violence. Muslim rioting, arson (including church burnings) and the murder of a 65-year-old Italian nun in Somalia ensued.
All of these rages followed or coincided with the most sustained rage of all, Danish Muhammad Cartoon Rage, which, since the 2005 publication of a dozen Muhammad cartoons in a Danish newspaper, has seized countless Muslims in recurring waves of rioting, boycotts and arson. More than 100 deaths have resulted.
I could continue, but I think the pattern is clear. Critical discussion or representation of Islam -- including stated facts; satirical, political or religious commentary; or acts deemed by Islam to be "blasphemy" or "desecration" -- spur Muslims to violence. This violence spurs Westerners to apology. But apology is always an act of dhimmitude: submitting to Islamic definitions of crime or grievance that only under Islamic law require contrition.
Today, the pattern intensifies. Muslim violence is more brazen with the murders of American troops, and Western apologies are more exaggerated. The United States hasn't even quashed Afghan demands for a trial of those who last month disposed of several Qurans.
Meanwhile, the chorus for punishment grows. "After the first step of a profound apology, there must be a second step ... of disciplinary action," Jan Kubis, the United Nations representative in Afghanistan, said this week. "Only after this, after such a disciplinary action, can the international forces say, 'Yes, we're sincere in our apology.'"
Or, rather, yes, we're sincere in our dhimmitude.
Demonstrating his own "sincerity," Kubis continued: "We deeply, deeply, profoundly respect Islam. ... We were very hurt that the international military allowed the desecration of the Quran. We rejected and condemned this act; it doesn't matter that it was a mistake."
Kubis' example is most instructive. Speaking for the United Nations, he mimics the aggrievement of Islam. Indeed, Islam's aggrievement becomes the United Nations' own as it draws power from the demonstrably more kinetic Islamic position.
The fact is, this whole affair, like those that preceded it, is a power play. Feigned victimhood becomes a trap for the "perpetrator" -- in this case, the U.S. military. Falling for the trap means submitting to violent Islamic dictates for exactly the same reason a co-dependent family member submits to dictates of a mentally ill relative -- to stop the outburst, to make it all "better," even if "better" is only a lull before the next power play.
Just as such actions bring a co-dependent family member more closely into the behavioral orbit of the sick family member, they bring the United States more closely into the behavioral orbit regulated by Islamic law. They force the "perpetrator" into accepting the sacredness of an inanimate object; they force the "perpetrator" into accepting the Islamic position that a?Christian or Jew is unfit (unclean) to dispose of the sacred thing without desecrating it. They force the "perpetrator" to accept the Islamic belief that such "desecration" constitutes a crime of literally capital proportions.
They force the "perpetrator" to act Islamic. This is the pattern of dhimmitude, and we must break it.
SOURCE
*************************
Weak U.S. Economy Still the Leading Issue for Voters
President Obama may be getting great pleasure from the Republicans' lengthening battle over who can beat him in November. But he faces a much stronger opponent between now and then: a weakened U.S. economy.
The 3 percent fourth-quarter growth rate in the nation's gross domestic product was welcome news, but the fact is that the Obama economy grew at a sluggish 1.7 percent for all of 2011.
And it isn't expected to do a great deal better this year, either, according to the National Association for Business Economics. It is predicting only modest growth of 2.4 percent for the rest of this year.
Americans may not follow the economic growth rate that closely, but they do follow the unemployment rate, which has always been a lagging economic indicator. And that in the end may be Obama's political undoing this fall.
The government's unemployment rate, which has to be taken with a large grain of salt, is 8.3 percent. But the daily surveys conducted by the Gallup Poll put the jobless rate at 9 percent, and worse, the "underemployment rate," which includes people who can't find full-time work or who have dropped out of the work force, at 19 percent.
In another gloomy economic forecast, Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke told lawmakers Wednesday that the nation still faced major economic challenges before it was going to fully regain its health.
He reiterated that the unemployment rate isn't likely to drop much more than it has so far, and any further decline will "edge down only slowly" in coming years.
More HERE
**************************
My Twitter.com identity: jonjayray. I have deleted my Facebook page as I rarely access it. 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)
****************************
Friday, March 02, 2012
More shackles for what was once the land of the free
I’ve got a new op-ed in the Daily Caller about one of the most significant employment-law initiatives out of Washington in years (also reported on by Melanie Trottman in today’s WSJ): the Obama administration is preparing to order federal contractors to comply with a quota (sorry, “required…hiring goal”) of disabled employees, perhaps as high as 7 percent. Businesses have flooded the Regulations.gov comments site with negative reactions to the idea, but to no seeming avail. As I explain, one of the scheme’s maddening aspects is that you’re supposed to achieve the quota even though you’re not allowed to ask employees whether or not they’re disabled:
The employment provisions of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) and its associated Rehabilitation Act are already rife with absurd results. Last week, after a Colorado school bus driver who hit three middle school students turned out to have been hired though recently in rehab, a spokesman for the school district explained that the law was at work: “It is illegal under state and federal disability laws to deny employment solely on the basis of a history of treatment for alcohol or substance abuse.” Non-discrimination against school bus drivers with a taste for booze is bizarre enough, but not bizarre enough for Washington. Time for preference!
SOURCE
*************************
Israeli oil and gas may be a game changer
In the first 25 years after Israel’s founding in 1948, it was repeatedly attacked by the large armies of its Arab neighbours. Each time, Israel prevailed on the battlefield, only to have its victories rolled back by Western powers who feared losing access to Arab oilfields.
The fear was and is legitimate – Arab nations have often threatened to use their “oil weapon” against countries that support Israel and twice made good their threat through crippling OPEC oil embargoes.
But that fear, which shackles Israel to this day, may soon end. The old energy order in the Middle East is crumbling with Iran and Syria having left the Western fold and others, including Saudi Arabia, the largest of them all, in danger of doing so.
Simultaneously, a new energy order is emerging to give the West some spine. In this new order, Israel is a major player. As well, apart from being an oil (from shale rock) and natural gas exporter in the near future, gas-fired power-stations using Israel's abundant offshore natural gas like the one near completion in the Israeli port of Ashdod (where the Turkish flotilla to Gaza was ordered to berth after misson was aborted). Ironically enough, in a strange twist of ever-changing shifting diplomatic relationships, the power-station at Ashdod was originally meant to use Egypt's rather limited gas export to transmit power via a short undersea cable to connect to the Cyprus-Greek-Europe grid.
The new energy order is founded on rock – the shale that traps vast stores of energy in deposits around the world. One of the largest deposits – 250 billion barrels of oil in Israel’s Shfela basin, comparable to Saudi Arabia’s entire reserves of 260 billion barrels of oil – has until now been unexploited, partly because the technology required has been expensive, mostly because the multinational oil companies that have the technology fear offending Muslims. “None of the major oil companies are willing to do business in Israel because they don’t want to be cut off from the Mideast supply of oil,” explains Howard Jonas, CEO of IDT, the U.S. company that owns the Shfela concession through its subsidiary, Israel Energy Initiatives. Jonas, an ardent Zionist, considers the Shfela deposit merely a beginning: “We believe that under Israel is more oil than under Saudi Arabia. There may be as much as half a trillion barrels.”
Because the oil multinationals have feared to develop Shfela, one of the world’s largest oil developments is being undertaken by an unlikely troop. Jonas’s IDT is a consumer-oriented telecom and media company that is a relative newcomer to the heavy industry world of energy development. Joining IDT in this latter-day Zionist Project is Lord Jacob Rothschild, a septuagenarian banker and philanthropist whose forefathers helped finance Zionist settlements in Palestine from the mid-1800s; Michael Steinhardt, a septuagenarian hedge fund investor and Zionist philanthropist; and Rupert Murdoch, the octogenarian chairman of News Corporation who uncompromisingly opposes, in his words, the “ongoing war against the Jews” by Muslim terrorists, by the Western left in general, and by Europe’s “most elite politicians” in particular.
Where others would have long ago retired, these businessmen-philanthropists have joined the battle on Israel’s side. While they’re in it for the money, they are also determined to free the world of Arab oil dependence by providing Israel with an oil weapon of its own. The company’s oil shale technology “could transform the future prospects of Israel, the Middle East and our allies around the world,” states Lord Rothschild.
To win this war, Israel Energy Initiatives has enlisted some of the energy industry’s savviest old soldiers – here a former president of Mobil Oil (Eugene Renna), there a former president of Occidental Oil Shale (Allan Sass), over there a former president of Halliburton (Dick Cheney). But the Field Commander for the operation, and the person who in their mind will lead them to ultimate victory, is Harold Vinegar, a veteran pulled out of retirement and sent into the fray. Vinegar, a legend in the field, had been Shell Oil’s chief scientist and, with some 240 patents to his name over his 32 years at Shell, revolutionized the shale oil industry.
Before oil met Vinegar, this was dirty business, a sprawling open mine operation that crushed and heated rock to yield a heavy tar amid mountains of spent shale. The low-value tar then needed to be processed and refined. The bottom line: low economic return, high environmental cost.
Vinegar boosted the bottom line by dropping the environmental damage. No open pit mining, no spent shale, no heavy tar to manage. In his pioneering approach, heated rods are inserted underground into the shale, releasing from it natural gas and light liquids. The natural gas provides the project’s need for heat; the light liquids are easily refined into high-value jet fuel, diesel and naphtha. The new bottom line: oil at a highly profitable cost of about $35-$40 a barrel and an exceedingly low environmental footprint. Vinegar’s process produces greenhouse gas emissions less than half that from conventional oil wells and, unlike open pit mining, does not consume water. The land area from which he will extract a volume of oil equivalent to that in Saudi Arabia? Approximately 25 square kilometers.
Although the Israeli shale project is still at an early stage, its massive potential and Vinegar’s reputation have already begun to change attitudes toward Israel. “We have been approached by all the majors,” Vinegar recently told the press, and for good reason. “Israel is very well positioned for oil exporting” to both European and Asian markets.
The majors have other reasons, too, for casting their eyes afresh at Israel. Through its natural gas finds in the Mediterranean’s Levant Basin, and with no help from the oil majors, Israel is becoming a major natural gas exporter to Europe. According to the U.S. Geological Survey, the Levant Basin has vast natural gas supplies, most of it within Israel’s jurisdiction.
Attitudes to Israel in some European capitals – those in line to receive Israeli gas — have already warmed and the shift to Israel may in time become tectonic, in Europe and elsewhere, when oil is at stake – 38 countries have an estimated 4.8-trillion barrels of shale oil, many of which would benefit from the shale oil technology now being pioneered in Israel. Speeding that shift could be the Arab Spring, which many fear will flip pro-Western Arab states into hostile camps. Long time U.S. ally Saudi Arabia is reportedly so distrustful of the U.S. following its abandonment of long-time Egyptian ally, President Hosni Mubarak, that it has pulled back its relationship with the West in favour of China.
SOURCE
********************************
More Anger over Obama's contraception mandate
Conservative talk show host Rush Limbaugh, already under fire from Democrats over his language in discussing a Georgetown University law student who testified about contraception, ratcheted up his rhetoric on Thursday, saying the student should post an online sex video if taxpayers are forced to pay for contraception.
Limbaugh on Wednesday had referred to student Sandra Fluke as a “slut” for supporting a requirement that health insurance cover contraception. On his radio show Thursday, Limbaugh went a little further:
"So Miss Fluke, and the rest of you Feminazis, here's the deal. If we are going to pay for your contraceptives, and thus pay for you to have sex. We want something for it. We want you post the videos online so we can all watch."
House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi had called on Limbaugh to apologize Thursday about the “slut” comment, made after Fluke testified recently about contraception before an unofficial Democratic committee.
Here's what Limbaugh said on Wednesday’s edition of Premiere Radio Networks' The Rush Limbaugh Show:
"What does it say about the college coed Susan Fluke [sic], who goes before a congressional committee and essentially says that she must be paid to have sex? What does that make her? It makes her a slut, right? It makes her a prostitute. She wants to be paid to have sex.
"She's having so much sex she can't afford the contraception. She wants you and me and the taxpayers to pay her to have sex. What does that make us? We're the pimps.
"The johns, that's right. We would be the johns -- no! We're not the johns. Well -- yeah, that's right. Pimp's not the right word."
Fluke had been turned away in February from testifying before the Republican-controlled House Oversight and Government Reform Committee on the Obama administration's policy requiring that employees of religion-affiliated institutions have access to health insurance that covers birth control.
Radio host Rush Limbaugh, one of the loudest voices of the conservative movement, had strong words for women who want contraception coverage. NBC's Anne Thompson reports.
The Health and Human Services Department ruled earlier this year that, under the new health care law, religious-affiliated institutions such as hospitals and universities must include free birth control coverage in their employee health plans.
That mandate has raised a storm of criticism and protests from Catholic leaders and others who disapprove of contraception on religious grounds. The issue continues to divide the Congress. On Thursday, the Senate defeated a proposal that would have allowed employers and health plans to opt out of paying for medical services that are contrary to their religious beliefs or moral convictions.
Fluke later testified at an unofficial Democratic-sponsored hearing on Feb. 23, where her comments about the importance of reproductive health care to women drew applause from a small group in attendance, including Pelosi.
She said that contraception can cost a woman more than $3,000 during law school.
On Thursday, Pelosi denounced Limbaugh's comments about Fluke and called on GOP leaders and members to denounce the “slut” remark:
"When Sandra Fluke testified before the House Democratic Steering and Policy Committee after Republicans attempted to silence, she courageously spoke truth to power. As a result, today, she has been subject to attacks that are outside the circle of civilized discussion and that unmask the strong disrespect for women held by some in this country. We call upon the Republican leaders in the House to condemn these vicious attacks on Ms. Fluke, which are in response to her testimony to the Congress. Democrats will always stand up for women's health and women's voices."
SOURCE
***********************
ELSEWHERE
A great loss: "Andrew Breitbart, a well-known conservative blogger, has died, his attorney said Thursday. He was 43. Joel Pollak, editor-in-chief and in-house counsel for Breitbart's website, Breitbart.com, confirmed his death."
Orgy of Leftist hate: "When an individual passes away, regardless of his of her ideological positions, one would expect he or she would receive respect. In the case of new media mogul Andrew Breitbart, who died early in the morning on Thursday, there has been a surge of vile commentary spewing across the Twitterverse. From comparisons to Hitler to individuals tweeting that they are content the pundit has passed, the messages are disturbing at best. Below, The Blaze has assembled some of the most disturbing messages we’ve seen on Twitter over the past few hours"
Senate Dems stop “conscience exemption” to Obama policy: "Senate Democrats have blocked an amendment that would have let insurers opt out of providing contraceptive coverage if employers had religious or moral objections. The Respect for Rights of Conscience Act, shorthanded as 'the conscience amendment' and authored by Sen. Roy Blunt, R-Mo., was 'tabled,' or set aside, on a 51-48 vote. Democrats needed 50 votes to prevail."
Arpaio: Obama’s birth certificate a “forgery”: "Arizona’s Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio announced on Thursday that his investigation into President Barack Obama’s birth certificate concluded the document was most likely a 'forgery.' ... 'President Barack Obama’s long-form birth certificate released by the White House on April 27, 2011, is suspected to be a computer-generated forgery, not a scan of an original 1961 paper document as represented by the White House when the long-form birth certificate was made public,' the sheriff said at a press conference."
Eurozone unemployment hits record high: "Unemployment in the 17-member eurozone jumped to an all-time high of 10.7 per cent in January, underlining the challenges facing European leaders as they gather in Brussels for a summit dedicated to finding ways to restart the continent’s economy. The figures represented the loss of an additional 185,000 jobs from December, according to Eurostat, the European Union’s statistics arm, and were slightly worse than the 10.4 per cent many economists had forecast."
Why not completely eliminate corporate income tax?: "Corporate tax reform as it's most often discussed these days sounds great in theory: Lower the overall tax rate and offset the budget impact by eliminating various special provisions. Who isn't in favor of that? ... Not surprisingly but largely overlooked in the reports on the plan announced by the White House several weeks ago, the biggest opponents ... to any substantial corporate tax overhaul come from the corporate world itself: They are the companies, industries, and sectors that currently benefit from the current system at the expense of the corporations, businesses, industries, and sectors that don't get the same special treatment."
Taxi regulations crush immigrant dreams: "A group of Ethiopian immigrants here in Nashville wants to start a taxicab collective in which the drivers operate independently, instead of being required to fork over thousands of dollars to one of the city’s cab cartels. The problem is that the Nashville Metro Board doesn’t trust that dastardly free market to determine how many cabs Nashville residents need. Instead, city planners determine this, after months of careful numbers-crunching and meticulous research, I’m sure."
**************************
My Twitter.com identity: jonjayray. I have deleted my Facebook page as I rarely access it. 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)
****************************
I’ve got a new op-ed in the Daily Caller about one of the most significant employment-law initiatives out of Washington in years (also reported on by Melanie Trottman in today’s WSJ): the Obama administration is preparing to order federal contractors to comply with a quota (sorry, “required…hiring goal”) of disabled employees, perhaps as high as 7 percent. Businesses have flooded the Regulations.gov comments site with negative reactions to the idea, but to no seeming avail. As I explain, one of the scheme’s maddening aspects is that you’re supposed to achieve the quota even though you’re not allowed to ask employees whether or not they’re disabled:
So the rules contemplate a fan dance of “invited self-identification” in which workers are given repeated chances at successive stages of the hiring process to announce that they are disabled. Unfortunately for quota compliance, even after getting the job an employee may be too shy to offer such a self-identification, which means the employer may lose any “credit” for the hire. Perhaps equally frustrating, an employee hired with the quota in mind may turn out not to have any disability at all (“Dang it! And she looked so disabled!”).
The employment provisions of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) and its associated Rehabilitation Act are already rife with absurd results. Last week, after a Colorado school bus driver who hit three middle school students turned out to have been hired though recently in rehab, a spokesman for the school district explained that the law was at work: “It is illegal under state and federal disability laws to deny employment solely on the basis of a history of treatment for alcohol or substance abuse.” Non-discrimination against school bus drivers with a taste for booze is bizarre enough, but not bizarre enough for Washington. Time for preference!
SOURCE
*************************
Israeli oil and gas may be a game changer
In the first 25 years after Israel’s founding in 1948, it was repeatedly attacked by the large armies of its Arab neighbours. Each time, Israel prevailed on the battlefield, only to have its victories rolled back by Western powers who feared losing access to Arab oilfields.
The fear was and is legitimate – Arab nations have often threatened to use their “oil weapon” against countries that support Israel and twice made good their threat through crippling OPEC oil embargoes.
But that fear, which shackles Israel to this day, may soon end. The old energy order in the Middle East is crumbling with Iran and Syria having left the Western fold and others, including Saudi Arabia, the largest of them all, in danger of doing so.
Simultaneously, a new energy order is emerging to give the West some spine. In this new order, Israel is a major player. As well, apart from being an oil (from shale rock) and natural gas exporter in the near future, gas-fired power-stations using Israel's abundant offshore natural gas like the one near completion in the Israeli port of Ashdod (where the Turkish flotilla to Gaza was ordered to berth after misson was aborted). Ironically enough, in a strange twist of ever-changing shifting diplomatic relationships, the power-station at Ashdod was originally meant to use Egypt's rather limited gas export to transmit power via a short undersea cable to connect to the Cyprus-Greek-Europe grid.
The new energy order is founded on rock – the shale that traps vast stores of energy in deposits around the world. One of the largest deposits – 250 billion barrels of oil in Israel’s Shfela basin, comparable to Saudi Arabia’s entire reserves of 260 billion barrels of oil – has until now been unexploited, partly because the technology required has been expensive, mostly because the multinational oil companies that have the technology fear offending Muslims. “None of the major oil companies are willing to do business in Israel because they don’t want to be cut off from the Mideast supply of oil,” explains Howard Jonas, CEO of IDT, the U.S. company that owns the Shfela concession through its subsidiary, Israel Energy Initiatives. Jonas, an ardent Zionist, considers the Shfela deposit merely a beginning: “We believe that under Israel is more oil than under Saudi Arabia. There may be as much as half a trillion barrels.”
Because the oil multinationals have feared to develop Shfela, one of the world’s largest oil developments is being undertaken by an unlikely troop. Jonas’s IDT is a consumer-oriented telecom and media company that is a relative newcomer to the heavy industry world of energy development. Joining IDT in this latter-day Zionist Project is Lord Jacob Rothschild, a septuagenarian banker and philanthropist whose forefathers helped finance Zionist settlements in Palestine from the mid-1800s; Michael Steinhardt, a septuagenarian hedge fund investor and Zionist philanthropist; and Rupert Murdoch, the octogenarian chairman of News Corporation who uncompromisingly opposes, in his words, the “ongoing war against the Jews” by Muslim terrorists, by the Western left in general, and by Europe’s “most elite politicians” in particular.
Where others would have long ago retired, these businessmen-philanthropists have joined the battle on Israel’s side. While they’re in it for the money, they are also determined to free the world of Arab oil dependence by providing Israel with an oil weapon of its own. The company’s oil shale technology “could transform the future prospects of Israel, the Middle East and our allies around the world,” states Lord Rothschild.
To win this war, Israel Energy Initiatives has enlisted some of the energy industry’s savviest old soldiers – here a former president of Mobil Oil (Eugene Renna), there a former president of Occidental Oil Shale (Allan Sass), over there a former president of Halliburton (Dick Cheney). But the Field Commander for the operation, and the person who in their mind will lead them to ultimate victory, is Harold Vinegar, a veteran pulled out of retirement and sent into the fray. Vinegar, a legend in the field, had been Shell Oil’s chief scientist and, with some 240 patents to his name over his 32 years at Shell, revolutionized the shale oil industry.
Before oil met Vinegar, this was dirty business, a sprawling open mine operation that crushed and heated rock to yield a heavy tar amid mountains of spent shale. The low-value tar then needed to be processed and refined. The bottom line: low economic return, high environmental cost.
Vinegar boosted the bottom line by dropping the environmental damage. No open pit mining, no spent shale, no heavy tar to manage. In his pioneering approach, heated rods are inserted underground into the shale, releasing from it natural gas and light liquids. The natural gas provides the project’s need for heat; the light liquids are easily refined into high-value jet fuel, diesel and naphtha. The new bottom line: oil at a highly profitable cost of about $35-$40 a barrel and an exceedingly low environmental footprint. Vinegar’s process produces greenhouse gas emissions less than half that from conventional oil wells and, unlike open pit mining, does not consume water. The land area from which he will extract a volume of oil equivalent to that in Saudi Arabia? Approximately 25 square kilometers.
Although the Israeli shale project is still at an early stage, its massive potential and Vinegar’s reputation have already begun to change attitudes toward Israel. “We have been approached by all the majors,” Vinegar recently told the press, and for good reason. “Israel is very well positioned for oil exporting” to both European and Asian markets.
The majors have other reasons, too, for casting their eyes afresh at Israel. Through its natural gas finds in the Mediterranean’s Levant Basin, and with no help from the oil majors, Israel is becoming a major natural gas exporter to Europe. According to the U.S. Geological Survey, the Levant Basin has vast natural gas supplies, most of it within Israel’s jurisdiction.
Attitudes to Israel in some European capitals – those in line to receive Israeli gas — have already warmed and the shift to Israel may in time become tectonic, in Europe and elsewhere, when oil is at stake – 38 countries have an estimated 4.8-trillion barrels of shale oil, many of which would benefit from the shale oil technology now being pioneered in Israel. Speeding that shift could be the Arab Spring, which many fear will flip pro-Western Arab states into hostile camps. Long time U.S. ally Saudi Arabia is reportedly so distrustful of the U.S. following its abandonment of long-time Egyptian ally, President Hosni Mubarak, that it has pulled back its relationship with the West in favour of China.
SOURCE
********************************
More Anger over Obama's contraception mandate
Conservative talk show host Rush Limbaugh, already under fire from Democrats over his language in discussing a Georgetown University law student who testified about contraception, ratcheted up his rhetoric on Thursday, saying the student should post an online sex video if taxpayers are forced to pay for contraception.
Limbaugh on Wednesday had referred to student Sandra Fluke as a “slut” for supporting a requirement that health insurance cover contraception. On his radio show Thursday, Limbaugh went a little further:
"So Miss Fluke, and the rest of you Feminazis, here's the deal. If we are going to pay for your contraceptives, and thus pay for you to have sex. We want something for it. We want you post the videos online so we can all watch."
House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi had called on Limbaugh to apologize Thursday about the “slut” comment, made after Fluke testified recently about contraception before an unofficial Democratic committee.
Here's what Limbaugh said on Wednesday’s edition of Premiere Radio Networks' The Rush Limbaugh Show:
"What does it say about the college coed Susan Fluke [sic], who goes before a congressional committee and essentially says that she must be paid to have sex? What does that make her? It makes her a slut, right? It makes her a prostitute. She wants to be paid to have sex.
"She's having so much sex she can't afford the contraception. She wants you and me and the taxpayers to pay her to have sex. What does that make us? We're the pimps.
"The johns, that's right. We would be the johns -- no! We're not the johns. Well -- yeah, that's right. Pimp's not the right word."
Fluke had been turned away in February from testifying before the Republican-controlled House Oversight and Government Reform Committee on the Obama administration's policy requiring that employees of religion-affiliated institutions have access to health insurance that covers birth control.
Radio host Rush Limbaugh, one of the loudest voices of the conservative movement, had strong words for women who want contraception coverage. NBC's Anne Thompson reports.
The Health and Human Services Department ruled earlier this year that, under the new health care law, religious-affiliated institutions such as hospitals and universities must include free birth control coverage in their employee health plans.
That mandate has raised a storm of criticism and protests from Catholic leaders and others who disapprove of contraception on religious grounds. The issue continues to divide the Congress. On Thursday, the Senate defeated a proposal that would have allowed employers and health plans to opt out of paying for medical services that are contrary to their religious beliefs or moral convictions.
Fluke later testified at an unofficial Democratic-sponsored hearing on Feb. 23, where her comments about the importance of reproductive health care to women drew applause from a small group in attendance, including Pelosi.
She said that contraception can cost a woman more than $3,000 during law school.
On Thursday, Pelosi denounced Limbaugh's comments about Fluke and called on GOP leaders and members to denounce the “slut” remark:
"When Sandra Fluke testified before the House Democratic Steering and Policy Committee after Republicans attempted to silence, she courageously spoke truth to power. As a result, today, she has been subject to attacks that are outside the circle of civilized discussion and that unmask the strong disrespect for women held by some in this country. We call upon the Republican leaders in the House to condemn these vicious attacks on Ms. Fluke, which are in response to her testimony to the Congress. Democrats will always stand up for women's health and women's voices."
SOURCE
***********************
ELSEWHERE
A great loss: "Andrew Breitbart, a well-known conservative blogger, has died, his attorney said Thursday. He was 43. Joel Pollak, editor-in-chief and in-house counsel for Breitbart's website, Breitbart.com, confirmed his death."
Orgy of Leftist hate: "When an individual passes away, regardless of his of her ideological positions, one would expect he or she would receive respect. In the case of new media mogul Andrew Breitbart, who died early in the morning on Thursday, there has been a surge of vile commentary spewing across the Twitterverse. From comparisons to Hitler to individuals tweeting that they are content the pundit has passed, the messages are disturbing at best. Below, The Blaze has assembled some of the most disturbing messages we’ve seen on Twitter over the past few hours"
Senate Dems stop “conscience exemption” to Obama policy: "Senate Democrats have blocked an amendment that would have let insurers opt out of providing contraceptive coverage if employers had religious or moral objections. The Respect for Rights of Conscience Act, shorthanded as 'the conscience amendment' and authored by Sen. Roy Blunt, R-Mo., was 'tabled,' or set aside, on a 51-48 vote. Democrats needed 50 votes to prevail."
Arpaio: Obama’s birth certificate a “forgery”: "Arizona’s Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio announced on Thursday that his investigation into President Barack Obama’s birth certificate concluded the document was most likely a 'forgery.' ... 'President Barack Obama’s long-form birth certificate released by the White House on April 27, 2011, is suspected to be a computer-generated forgery, not a scan of an original 1961 paper document as represented by the White House when the long-form birth certificate was made public,' the sheriff said at a press conference."
Eurozone unemployment hits record high: "Unemployment in the 17-member eurozone jumped to an all-time high of 10.7 per cent in January, underlining the challenges facing European leaders as they gather in Brussels for a summit dedicated to finding ways to restart the continent’s economy. The figures represented the loss of an additional 185,000 jobs from December, according to Eurostat, the European Union’s statistics arm, and were slightly worse than the 10.4 per cent many economists had forecast."
Why not completely eliminate corporate income tax?: "Corporate tax reform as it's most often discussed these days sounds great in theory: Lower the overall tax rate and offset the budget impact by eliminating various special provisions. Who isn't in favor of that? ... Not surprisingly but largely overlooked in the reports on the plan announced by the White House several weeks ago, the biggest opponents ... to any substantial corporate tax overhaul come from the corporate world itself: They are the companies, industries, and sectors that currently benefit from the current system at the expense of the corporations, businesses, industries, and sectors that don't get the same special treatment."
Taxi regulations crush immigrant dreams: "A group of Ethiopian immigrants here in Nashville wants to start a taxicab collective in which the drivers operate independently, instead of being required to fork over thousands of dollars to one of the city’s cab cartels. The problem is that the Nashville Metro Board doesn’t trust that dastardly free market to determine how many cabs Nashville residents need. Instead, city planners determine this, after months of careful numbers-crunching and meticulous research, I’m sure."
**************************
My Twitter.com identity: jonjayray. I have deleted my Facebook page as I rarely access it. 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)
****************************
Thursday, March 01, 2012
Another ill effect of US government meddling with corn
This is a bit overstated but it does have a point
Dr. Seth M. Holmes, a professor of Health and Social Behavior at the University of California -- Berkeley, identified the source of the problem in his watershed 2006 paper, “An Ethnographic Study of the Social Context of Migrant Health in the United States.” In the study we learn that 95 percent of agricultural workers in the United States were born in Mexico and 52 percent are undocumented. Most researchers agree that inequalities in the global market make up the primary driving force of labor migration patterns. Mexico’s current minimum wage is US$4.60 per day. In contrast, the US federal minimum wage is $7.25 per hour, while it is $7.65 in Arizona, $8 in California, $7.50 in New Mexico, and $7.25 in Texas.
The 2003 North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) deregulated all agricultural trade, except for corn and dairy products. The Mexican government complains that since NAFTA’s initial implementation in 1994, the United States has raised farm subsidies by 300 percent. As a result, Mexican corn farmers, who comprise the majority of the country’s agricultural sector, experienced drastic declines in the domestic price of their product. It should come as no surprise, then, that the United States began to experience an influx of Mexicans looking for employment in the latter half of the 1990s. Mexican farmers are now rightly protesting because they cannot compete against prices that are artificially deflated for the sake of protecting Americans from necessary market corrections.
Holmes explains that migrant and seasonal farm workers suffer the poorest health status within the agriculture industry. For example, migrant workers have increased rates of many chronic conditions, such as HIV infection, malnutrition, anemia, hypertension, diabetes, anxiety, sterility, blood disorders, and abnormalities in liver and kidney function. This population has an increased incidence of acute sicknesses such as urinary tract and kidney infections, lung infections, heat stroke, anthrax, encephalitis, rabies, and tetanus. Tuberculosis prevalence is six times greater in this population than in the general United States population. Finally, Holmes reports, children of migrant farm workers show high rates of malnutrition, vision problems, dental problems, anemia, and excess blood lead levels.
Economically speaking, Mexico's central bank recently announced that the $22.7 billion in remittances that Mexican migrant workers sent home from the United States in 2011 increased by 6.86 percent over the previous year. Remittances are Mexico's second-largest source of foreign income following oil exports. Nearly all of that the money comes from the United States, with a Mexican citizen population of 12 million.
Can you imagine what would happen if the United States had no farm subsidies, Mexican farms were flourishing, and $22.7 billion was generated within Mexico’s economy to catalyze more wealth creating opportunities? We can only dream at present, but one thing is for certain: Mexican migrant workers would be far better off. As such, through federal corn farm subsidies, America’s government is morally culpable for the oppression, dehumanization, and poor health of Mexican migrant workers.
SOURCE
************************
Some inequalities are inevitable
Rick Santorum's speech at the Detroit Economic Club stirred a bit of controversy when he said: "I'm not about equality of result when it comes to income inequality. There is income inequality in America. There always has been, and hopefully – and I do say that – there always will be." That kind of statement, though having merit, should not be made to people who have little or no understanding. Let's look at inequality.
Kay S. Hymowitz's article "Why the Gender Gap Won't Go Away. Ever," in City Journal (Summer 2011), shows that female doctors earn only 64 percent of the income that male doctors earn. What should be done about that? It turns out that only 16 percent of surgeons are women but 50 percent of pediatricians are women. Even though surgeons have many more years of education and training than do pediatricians, should Congress equalize their salaries or make pediatricians become surgeons?
Wage inequality is everywhere. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, Asian men and women earn more than white men and women. Female cafeteria attendants earn more than their male counterparts. Females who are younger than 30 and have never been married earn salaries 8 percent higher than males of the same description. Among women who graduated from college during 1992-93, by 2003 more than one-fifth were no longer in the workforce, and another 17 percent were working part time. That's to be compared with only 2 percent of men in either category. Hymowitz cites several studies showing significant career choice and lifestyle differences between men and women that result in income inequality.
There are other inequalities that ought to be addressed. With all of the excitement about New York Knick Jeremy Lin's rising stardom, nobody questions league domination by blacks, who are a mere 13 percent of our population but constitute 80 percent of NBA players and are the highest-paid ones. It's not much better in the NFL, with blacks being 65 percent of its players. Colleges have made diversity their primary calling, but watch any basketball game and you'd be hard-put to find white players in roles other than bench warming. Worse than that, Japanese, Chinese and American Indian players aren't even recruited for bench warming.
There's inequality in most jobs. According to 2010 BLS data, the following jobs contain 1 percent female workers or less: boilermaking, brickmasonry, stonemasonry, septic tank servicing, sewer pipe cleaning and working with reinforcing iron and rebar. Maybe the reason female workers aren't in these occupations is that too many are in other occupations. Females are 97 percent of preschool and kindergarten teachers, 80 percent of social workers, 82 percent of librarians and 92 percent of dietitians and nutritionists and registered nurses.
Anyone with one ounce of brains can see the problem and solution. Congress has permitted – and even fostered – a misallocation of people by race, sex and ethnicity. Courts have consistently concluded that "gross" disparities are probative of a pattern and practice of discrimination. So what to do? One remedy that Congress might consider is to require females, who are overrepresented in fields such as preschool and kindergarten teaching, to become boilermakers and brickmasons and mandate that male boilermakers and brickmasons become preschool and kindergarten teachers until both of their percentages are equal to their percentages in the population. You say, "Williams, that would be totalitarianism!" But if Americans accept that Congress can make us buy health insurance whether we want to or not, how much more totalitarian would it be for Congress to allocate jobs in the name of social equality and the good of our nation?
Nobel laureate Milton Friedman said: "A society that puts equality before freedom will get neither. A society that puts freedom before equality will get a high degree of both." Equality before the general rules of law is the only kind of equality conducive to liberty that can be secured without destroying liberty.
SOURCE
*****************************
Leftists have got a lot of hating to do
One good example is Mariellen Jewers offering 5 Tips to Being a Responsible Consumer to her fellow progressives. Here's a quick snapshot.
1. Don't shop Walmart. They won't unionize. But progressives never quite tell us whether the majority of Walmart employees are covered by their working spouse's benefits or how many use their Walmart training to move up to better jobs.
Walmart's first union-negotiated contract (in China) "resulted in an 8% pay increase for workers," yet progressives never consider if this means an 8% markup on prices for everyone, including Walmart employees themselves, and for the poor for whom they express so much unending angst.
2. Buying Brawny paper towels generates profits for the libertarian Koch brothers who lobby against climate change and its government-imposed regulations, but Seventh Generation paper towels are recycled and "has environmentally friendly practices." So progressives must mindlessly accept climate change? Has Al Gore been officially canonized?
3. Tom’s of Maine is part of Colgate-Palmolive who isn't environmentally pure but Arm & Hammer is, so always buy environmentally good products, including, apparently, those mercury-filled light bulbs.
4. "Shoppers who get a latte with anti-minimum wage rhetoric" (whatever that means) pay the salary of Whole Foods' CEO John Mackey, "an unabashed libertarian." So libertarians are definitely evil in Jewers' personal catechism. (Note to libertarians: Don't try to explain how a minimum wage harms the poor that progressives say they're concerned about. They neither comprehend nor care about the simple logic of it, they believe in it because it "feels right" to them.)
5. AT&T lobbying funnels millions into John Boehner's pockets but Credo Mobile’s lobbying funnels millions into "progressive organizations," thereby making lobbying okay.
So all non-progressive corporations are evil if they lobby for special laws or support wrong politicians, but progressives don't think the same way about "their" corporatist cronies.
Libertarians hold that all crony corporatism is evil because they and their political cronies seek power over all of society.
The only solution is the complete separation of government and the marketplace, thereby creating a true free market, not crony corporatism, not Marxist-defined capitalism, not progressive master-planned technocratic authoritarianism, not socialism, not fascism.
SOURCE
************************
What Is the Male Marriage Premium?
Married men make a lot more money than single men. In the NLSY [National Longitudinal Survey of Youth], married men make 44% extra, even after controlling for education, experience, IQ, race, and number of children. How is this possible?
There are three competing economic explanations. Each of the three may be partly true.
Explanation #1: Ability bias. The causal effect of marriage on male income is smaller than it seems. Even after adjusting for all the previously listed control variables, men with higher income are simply more likely to be married. Maybe income makes it easier to attract a spouse; maybe Puritan attitudes lead to both income and marriage. In a pure ability bias story, marriage has zero causal effect on earnings.
Explanation #2: Human capital. Marriage causally increases male income by making men more productive workers. Maybe marriage makes men work more hours; maybe it makes them work harder per hour; maybe it makes them control their tempers better; maybe all of these and more. In a pure human capital story, marriage actually causes men to become 44% more productive.
Explanation #3: Signaling. Marriage causally increases male income by changing employers' beliefs about worker productivity. As long as married men happen to be more productive, and employers can't costlessly see their productivity, employers will rationally (and profitably!) pay married men more. In a pure signaling story, marriage makes employers expect you to be 44% more productive, but has zero causal effect on productivity.
Economists who study the male marriage premium usually conclude that much of it is causal. This paper, for example uses shotgun weddings to isolate the causal effect of marriage on income, and finds:
"Using the statistical experiment of premarital conception as a potentially exogenous cause of marriage, about 90% of the marriage premium remains after controlling for selection."
So what is the male marriage premium? I'm still deciding, but here's my tentative opinion.
1. The shotgun wedding paper notwithstanding, I think that about half of the marriage premium stems from ability bias. Men who marry are just more conscientious, ambitious, and cooperative, and the NLSY lacks good measures of these traits. This remains true even when men have a shotgun wedding; the stand-up guys go through with the wedding, while the slackers skulk away.
2. At least in the modern American economy, the signaling channel explains no more than 10% (not 10 percentage-points) of the male marriage premium. My reasoning: When employers make hiring decisions, they heavily scrutinize educational credentials, but barely notice marital status. I can easily believe that the signaling channel was far more important in the past; when almost every man marries, the failure to marry raises a red flag. But nowadays?
My main doubt is that I know little about hiring in more traditional occupations and regions of the country. Do employers in Kansas still raise their eyebrows when they see that a 35-year-old male applicant is single? What about CBN?
3. If the male marriage premium is 50% ability bias, and less than 10% signaling, then human capital explains the rest: 40-50%. Much of this effect probably reflects longer work hours and lower unemployment. But it's quite plausible that marriage causally increases hourly productivity by 10%.
SOURCE
***********************
ELSEWHERE
CO: Polis mocks state’s new DEA chief: "Democratic Rep. Jared Polis of Colorado on Wednesday poked fun at his state’s new head drug enforcement agent, joking that the Drug Enforcement Agency’s new motto was 'protecting America from mold and water damage.' Barbra Roach, the chief of Denver’s Drug Enforcement Administration, recently told the Denver Post that medical marijuana was dangerous because it caused 'mold and water damage' in the homes of people who grew it."
Study: Upper classes “more likely to lie and cheat”: "Members of the upper classes are more likely to lie, cheat and even break the law than people from less privileged backgrounds, a study has found. In contrast, members of the 'lower' classes appeared more likely to display the traditional attributes of a gentleman. It suggests that the traditional notion of the upper class 'cad' or 'bounder' could have a scientific basis."
The insanity of health insurance: "It is insane that we get our health care from our employers. That happens because we have given a tax advantage to in-kind compensation such as health care. It’s a horrible idea and it leads people to complain about our employers deciding what health care we can receive. Our employers are just a conduit for government mandates, rent-seeking and inefficiency related to health care."
The price of employment “fairness”: "If you receive an application for a position requiring a lot of driving or operating heavy machinery, and the applicant has a known history of alcohol or substance abuse, you’d probably be justified in turning the applicant down for the job, right? You probably already know the answer to this, but: wrong."
**************************
My Twitter.com identity: jonjayray. I have deleted my Facebook page as I rarely access it. 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)
****************************
This is a bit overstated but it does have a point
Dr. Seth M. Holmes, a professor of Health and Social Behavior at the University of California -- Berkeley, identified the source of the problem in his watershed 2006 paper, “An Ethnographic Study of the Social Context of Migrant Health in the United States.” In the study we learn that 95 percent of agricultural workers in the United States were born in Mexico and 52 percent are undocumented. Most researchers agree that inequalities in the global market make up the primary driving force of labor migration patterns. Mexico’s current minimum wage is US$4.60 per day. In contrast, the US federal minimum wage is $7.25 per hour, while it is $7.65 in Arizona, $8 in California, $7.50 in New Mexico, and $7.25 in Texas.
The 2003 North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) deregulated all agricultural trade, except for corn and dairy products. The Mexican government complains that since NAFTA’s initial implementation in 1994, the United States has raised farm subsidies by 300 percent. As a result, Mexican corn farmers, who comprise the majority of the country’s agricultural sector, experienced drastic declines in the domestic price of their product. It should come as no surprise, then, that the United States began to experience an influx of Mexicans looking for employment in the latter half of the 1990s. Mexican farmers are now rightly protesting because they cannot compete against prices that are artificially deflated for the sake of protecting Americans from necessary market corrections.
Holmes explains that migrant and seasonal farm workers suffer the poorest health status within the agriculture industry. For example, migrant workers have increased rates of many chronic conditions, such as HIV infection, malnutrition, anemia, hypertension, diabetes, anxiety, sterility, blood disorders, and abnormalities in liver and kidney function. This population has an increased incidence of acute sicknesses such as urinary tract and kidney infections, lung infections, heat stroke, anthrax, encephalitis, rabies, and tetanus. Tuberculosis prevalence is six times greater in this population than in the general United States population. Finally, Holmes reports, children of migrant farm workers show high rates of malnutrition, vision problems, dental problems, anemia, and excess blood lead levels.
Economically speaking, Mexico's central bank recently announced that the $22.7 billion in remittances that Mexican migrant workers sent home from the United States in 2011 increased by 6.86 percent over the previous year. Remittances are Mexico's second-largest source of foreign income following oil exports. Nearly all of that the money comes from the United States, with a Mexican citizen population of 12 million.
Can you imagine what would happen if the United States had no farm subsidies, Mexican farms were flourishing, and $22.7 billion was generated within Mexico’s economy to catalyze more wealth creating opportunities? We can only dream at present, but one thing is for certain: Mexican migrant workers would be far better off. As such, through federal corn farm subsidies, America’s government is morally culpable for the oppression, dehumanization, and poor health of Mexican migrant workers.
SOURCE
************************
Some inequalities are inevitable
Rick Santorum's speech at the Detroit Economic Club stirred a bit of controversy when he said: "I'm not about equality of result when it comes to income inequality. There is income inequality in America. There always has been, and hopefully – and I do say that – there always will be." That kind of statement, though having merit, should not be made to people who have little or no understanding. Let's look at inequality.
Kay S. Hymowitz's article "Why the Gender Gap Won't Go Away. Ever," in City Journal (Summer 2011), shows that female doctors earn only 64 percent of the income that male doctors earn. What should be done about that? It turns out that only 16 percent of surgeons are women but 50 percent of pediatricians are women. Even though surgeons have many more years of education and training than do pediatricians, should Congress equalize their salaries or make pediatricians become surgeons?
Wage inequality is everywhere. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, Asian men and women earn more than white men and women. Female cafeteria attendants earn more than their male counterparts. Females who are younger than 30 and have never been married earn salaries 8 percent higher than males of the same description. Among women who graduated from college during 1992-93, by 2003 more than one-fifth were no longer in the workforce, and another 17 percent were working part time. That's to be compared with only 2 percent of men in either category. Hymowitz cites several studies showing significant career choice and lifestyle differences between men and women that result in income inequality.
There are other inequalities that ought to be addressed. With all of the excitement about New York Knick Jeremy Lin's rising stardom, nobody questions league domination by blacks, who are a mere 13 percent of our population but constitute 80 percent of NBA players and are the highest-paid ones. It's not much better in the NFL, with blacks being 65 percent of its players. Colleges have made diversity their primary calling, but watch any basketball game and you'd be hard-put to find white players in roles other than bench warming. Worse than that, Japanese, Chinese and American Indian players aren't even recruited for bench warming.
There's inequality in most jobs. According to 2010 BLS data, the following jobs contain 1 percent female workers or less: boilermaking, brickmasonry, stonemasonry, septic tank servicing, sewer pipe cleaning and working with reinforcing iron and rebar. Maybe the reason female workers aren't in these occupations is that too many are in other occupations. Females are 97 percent of preschool and kindergarten teachers, 80 percent of social workers, 82 percent of librarians and 92 percent of dietitians and nutritionists and registered nurses.
Anyone with one ounce of brains can see the problem and solution. Congress has permitted – and even fostered – a misallocation of people by race, sex and ethnicity. Courts have consistently concluded that "gross" disparities are probative of a pattern and practice of discrimination. So what to do? One remedy that Congress might consider is to require females, who are overrepresented in fields such as preschool and kindergarten teaching, to become boilermakers and brickmasons and mandate that male boilermakers and brickmasons become preschool and kindergarten teachers until both of their percentages are equal to their percentages in the population. You say, "Williams, that would be totalitarianism!" But if Americans accept that Congress can make us buy health insurance whether we want to or not, how much more totalitarian would it be for Congress to allocate jobs in the name of social equality and the good of our nation?
Nobel laureate Milton Friedman said: "A society that puts equality before freedom will get neither. A society that puts freedom before equality will get a high degree of both." Equality before the general rules of law is the only kind of equality conducive to liberty that can be secured without destroying liberty.
SOURCE
*****************************
Leftists have got a lot of hating to do
One good example is Mariellen Jewers offering 5 Tips to Being a Responsible Consumer to her fellow progressives. Here's a quick snapshot.
1. Don't shop Walmart. They won't unionize. But progressives never quite tell us whether the majority of Walmart employees are covered by their working spouse's benefits or how many use their Walmart training to move up to better jobs.
Walmart's first union-negotiated contract (in China) "resulted in an 8% pay increase for workers," yet progressives never consider if this means an 8% markup on prices for everyone, including Walmart employees themselves, and for the poor for whom they express so much unending angst.
2. Buying Brawny paper towels generates profits for the libertarian Koch brothers who lobby against climate change and its government-imposed regulations, but Seventh Generation paper towels are recycled and "has environmentally friendly practices." So progressives must mindlessly accept climate change? Has Al Gore been officially canonized?
3. Tom’s of Maine is part of Colgate-Palmolive who isn't environmentally pure but Arm & Hammer is, so always buy environmentally good products, including, apparently, those mercury-filled light bulbs.
4. "Shoppers who get a latte with anti-minimum wage rhetoric" (whatever that means) pay the salary of Whole Foods' CEO John Mackey, "an unabashed libertarian." So libertarians are definitely evil in Jewers' personal catechism. (Note to libertarians: Don't try to explain how a minimum wage harms the poor that progressives say they're concerned about. They neither comprehend nor care about the simple logic of it, they believe in it because it "feels right" to them.)
5. AT&T lobbying funnels millions into John Boehner's pockets but Credo Mobile’s lobbying funnels millions into "progressive organizations," thereby making lobbying okay.
So all non-progressive corporations are evil if they lobby for special laws or support wrong politicians, but progressives don't think the same way about "their" corporatist cronies.
Libertarians hold that all crony corporatism is evil because they and their political cronies seek power over all of society.
The only solution is the complete separation of government and the marketplace, thereby creating a true free market, not crony corporatism, not Marxist-defined capitalism, not progressive master-planned technocratic authoritarianism, not socialism, not fascism.
SOURCE
************************
What Is the Male Marriage Premium?
Married men make a lot more money than single men. In the NLSY [National Longitudinal Survey of Youth], married men make 44% extra, even after controlling for education, experience, IQ, race, and number of children. How is this possible?
There are three competing economic explanations. Each of the three may be partly true.
Explanation #1: Ability bias. The causal effect of marriage on male income is smaller than it seems. Even after adjusting for all the previously listed control variables, men with higher income are simply more likely to be married. Maybe income makes it easier to attract a spouse; maybe Puritan attitudes lead to both income and marriage. In a pure ability bias story, marriage has zero causal effect on earnings.
Explanation #2: Human capital. Marriage causally increases male income by making men more productive workers. Maybe marriage makes men work more hours; maybe it makes them work harder per hour; maybe it makes them control their tempers better; maybe all of these and more. In a pure human capital story, marriage actually causes men to become 44% more productive.
Explanation #3: Signaling. Marriage causally increases male income by changing employers' beliefs about worker productivity. As long as married men happen to be more productive, and employers can't costlessly see their productivity, employers will rationally (and profitably!) pay married men more. In a pure signaling story, marriage makes employers expect you to be 44% more productive, but has zero causal effect on productivity.
Economists who study the male marriage premium usually conclude that much of it is causal. This paper, for example uses shotgun weddings to isolate the causal effect of marriage on income, and finds:
"Using the statistical experiment of premarital conception as a potentially exogenous cause of marriage, about 90% of the marriage premium remains after controlling for selection."
So what is the male marriage premium? I'm still deciding, but here's my tentative opinion.
1. The shotgun wedding paper notwithstanding, I think that about half of the marriage premium stems from ability bias. Men who marry are just more conscientious, ambitious, and cooperative, and the NLSY lacks good measures of these traits. This remains true even when men have a shotgun wedding; the stand-up guys go through with the wedding, while the slackers skulk away.
2. At least in the modern American economy, the signaling channel explains no more than 10% (not 10 percentage-points) of the male marriage premium. My reasoning: When employers make hiring decisions, they heavily scrutinize educational credentials, but barely notice marital status. I can easily believe that the signaling channel was far more important in the past; when almost every man marries, the failure to marry raises a red flag. But nowadays?
My main doubt is that I know little about hiring in more traditional occupations and regions of the country. Do employers in Kansas still raise their eyebrows when they see that a 35-year-old male applicant is single? What about CBN?
3. If the male marriage premium is 50% ability bias, and less than 10% signaling, then human capital explains the rest: 40-50%. Much of this effect probably reflects longer work hours and lower unemployment. But it's quite plausible that marriage causally increases hourly productivity by 10%.
SOURCE
***********************
ELSEWHERE
CO: Polis mocks state’s new DEA chief: "Democratic Rep. Jared Polis of Colorado on Wednesday poked fun at his state’s new head drug enforcement agent, joking that the Drug Enforcement Agency’s new motto was 'protecting America from mold and water damage.' Barbra Roach, the chief of Denver’s Drug Enforcement Administration, recently told the Denver Post that medical marijuana was dangerous because it caused 'mold and water damage' in the homes of people who grew it."
Study: Upper classes “more likely to lie and cheat”: "Members of the upper classes are more likely to lie, cheat and even break the law than people from less privileged backgrounds, a study has found. In contrast, members of the 'lower' classes appeared more likely to display the traditional attributes of a gentleman. It suggests that the traditional notion of the upper class 'cad' or 'bounder' could have a scientific basis."
The insanity of health insurance: "It is insane that we get our health care from our employers. That happens because we have given a tax advantage to in-kind compensation such as health care. It’s a horrible idea and it leads people to complain about our employers deciding what health care we can receive. Our employers are just a conduit for government mandates, rent-seeking and inefficiency related to health care."
The price of employment “fairness”: "If you receive an application for a position requiring a lot of driving or operating heavy machinery, and the applicant has a known history of alcohol or substance abuse, you’d probably be justified in turning the applicant down for the job, right? You probably already know the answer to this, but: wrong."
**************************
My Twitter.com identity: jonjayray. I have deleted my Facebook page as I rarely access it. 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)
****************************
Wednesday, February 29, 2012
America has gone insane: Church Ordered to Stop Giving Away Free Water.
The land of the free has become the land of the Fascists. I don't think even Hitler and Mussolini were this keen on regulation
A Louisiana church was ordered to stop giving away free water along Mardi Gras parade routes because they did not have the proper permits. “We were given a cease and desist order,” said Matt Tipton, pastor of Hope Church in Metairie, LA. “We had no idea we were breaking the law.”
Tipton said volunteers from his church were handing out free coffee and free bottles of water at two locations along a Mardi Gras parade route when they were stopped by Jefferson Parish officials. The church volunteers were cited for failing to secure an occupational license and for failure to register for a sales tax.
“It kind of threw me for a loop because they weren’t in uniform,” he said. “But once they pulled the ticket out, I was conviniced.” “We apologized,” Tipton said. “We didn’t know the rules.”
The church had purchased about five thousand bottles of water labeled with the church’s name and website address. They gave the remaining bottles to a local drug rehab center.
A spokesman for the Jefferson Parish Sheriff’s Office confirmed to Fox News that the church had violated the law. The spokesman said the church was initially given a verbal warning – and then a written warning. He said it was not a citation – even though the warning clearly stated it was a “vendor warning citation.”
The sheriff’s department said there was “no validity to their complaint whatever their complaint may be.”
Ken Klukowski, a senior legal fellow at the Family Research Council, said the citation was absurd. “This is a perfect example of why so many people have a problem with big government,” Klukowski said. “The idea that a church needs a permit to hand out water to thirsty people is unfortunate.”
He said it’s hard to believe that the government would get in the way of citizens helping each other out – “especially a church which was just doing its duty to be good Samaritans and help those in need.”
Pastor Tipton said he sent an email to city leaders explaining that they were just trying to show their love to the city “and to serve the city.”
He offered to provide volunteers to clean up trash or even clean portable toilets. However, city leaders did not initially respond and Tipton said he was given the runaround – told to go through three different department heads.
Klukowski said the incident is outrageous. “The idea that you need an additional level of bureaucracy stopping a church from showing kindness to members of the community is a perfect example of a waste of taxpayer money and resources,” he said.
SOURCE
***********************
Pettiness and Mud
Thomas Sowell
The only good news for the Republicans coming out of the seemingly endless presidential candidate "debates" is that some Republican leaders are now belatedly thinking about how they can avoid a repetition of this debacle in future elections.
What could they possibly have been thinking about, in the first place, when they agreed to a format based on short sound bites for dealing with major complex issues, and with media journalists -- 90 percent of them Democrats -- picking the topics?
The conduct of the candidates made things worse. In a world with a record-breaking national debt and Iran moving toward creating nuclear weapons, they bickered over earmarks and condoms. I am against earmarks, but earmarks don't rank among the first hundred most serious problems facing this country.
Mud-slinging has replaced rational discussions of differences on serious issues -- not only during the debates themselves, where the moderators sic the candidates on each other, but even more so in the massive television character assassination ads in which Romney supporters seem to specialize.
Groups supporting Mitt Romney have turned character assassination almost into a science. You take something that most people, outside of politics, do not understand and twist it to sound terrible to those who are unaware of the facts.
Blanketing Florida with misleading ads attacking Newt Gingrich won that state for Romney, after Gingrich scored an upset victory in South Carolina. The ads made a big deal out of charges that the former Speaker broke tax laws -- charges that the Internal Revenue Service exonerated him of, after a long investigation.
When Rick Santorum suddenly surged after his upset victories in Minnesota, Missouri and Colorado, the Romney character assassination machine attacked him for having voted in the Senate for various things that conservatives don't like.
But, when it comes to voting in Congress, seldom do you get a pure bill that you can agree with in all its parts. If you never voted for bills containing anything you didn't like, you might get very little voting done.
But, if it is a bill to provide American soldiers with the equipment they need to fight a war, and somebody has put into it an earmark for a federal boondoggle in his district, are you going to vote against that bill and let American soldiers go into battle without all the equipment and supplies they need?
Taking advantage of the public's lack of knowledge is something that Barack Obama already does very effectively in his political propaganda. But is that something the Republicans want to imitate?
It has worked during the primary season, when the media are perfectly happy to see Republicans destroying each other. But it will not work in the general election campaign, when even truthful criticisms of the president will have a hard time getting out through the media, which hear no evil, see no evil and speak no evil when it comes to Obama.
The pettiness and mud-slinging during the Republican primary campaigns is especially irresponsible during a time when there are very serious problems, at home and abroad, that need to be addressed in a serious way.
Discussions of particular issues, one by one, often miss the larger point that goes beyond the issue at hand -- namely, this administration's steady movement toward arbitrary government that circumvents the restrictions of the Constitution.
Nothing demonstrates this more starkly than the president's arbitrary power to waive the requirement that employers have to provide ObamaCare coverage for their workers. That can be the difference between paying, or not paying, millions of dollars. What does that mean for anybody's other rights?
What does freedom of speech mean if criticizing the administration can mean you get no exemption, while your competitor who keeps quiet, or who praises the administration, gets a waiver? The Constitution requires "equal protection of the laws" for a reason.
And what about nuclear weapons in the hands of Iran, the world's leading sponsor of international terrorism? Is that not worth discussing in something other than sound bites?
SOURCE
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Christian Conservatives Guard Religious Liberty
The First Amendment to the United States Constitution contains two clauses addressing religious liberty: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof."
It's a shame that in their modern misguided zeal to read the first clause as mandating a complete separation of church and state, liberals do great damage to the second clause and defeat the overarching purpose of both: ensuring religious liberty.
Ever since the so-called Christian right began its organized activism during the 1980s, liberals (and some others) have become increasingly nervous about (and critical of) Christian influence in politics, let alone the public square.
This issue has reared its controversial head during the Republican presidential primary because of candidate Rick Santorum's unashamed and outspoken commitment to his Catholic faith and Christian values. It's not just leftists who are complaining; many on the right are, as well.
For years, there has been an uneasy alliance inside the Republican "big tent," between those who embrace social conservatism and those who would just as soon see it deleted from the party platform. With our anxiety about the national debt, economic issues are naturally at the forefront of people's concerns. Some believe that those who are still articulating social issues in this period of crisis are at least annoying and possibly detrimental to the cause of electing a Republican who can build a wide enough coalition to defeat the primary culprit in America's race to bankruptcy: President Barack Obama.
I think it's a false choice to say that we conservatives must pick between economic issues and social ones. It's also a mistake to believe there is a clear dichotomy between economic conservatives and social conservatives. As I've written before, Reagan conservatism is a three-legged stool -- economic, social and national defense issues -- and the three are compatible and probably embraced by most Republicans.
Our center-right tent is big enough to include libertarians, economic conservatives who either are indifferent to social issues or consider themselves socially liberal, and so-called neoconservatives, who tend to emphasize national defense issues over the other two -- although they might reject that characterization. We all must unite to defeat President Obama.
But with Santorum's rise in the polls, many are expressing their anxiety about his perceived religiosity and are depicting him as a threat to religious liberty.
Some are abuzz about his interview this past weekend with George Stephanopoulos on ABC's "This Week," in which Santorum stated that he does not believe separation of church and state is absolute. He stated that the First Amendment's free exercise clause guarantees that the church and its members have as much right to try to influence policy as anyone else. And he's absolutely correct.
Not only are the words "separation of church and state" not contained in the Constitution but this phrase from Thomas Jefferson's letter to the Danbury Baptists does not mean what many people say it does.
The First Amendment's establishment clause says that Congress shall not establish a national church, because the Framers didn't want the government telling us whom or how to worship. Their overarching concern, then, was protecting religious liberty. The free exercise clause also strengthens the religious freedom guarantee.
The point is that both clauses are dedicated to religious liberty, and neither purports to ban religious expression from the public square or from the mouths of public officials.
No matter how expansively one reads the First Amendment's establishment clause, no one, including Jefferson, would have made the ludicrous argument that presidents (or other public officials) must leave their worldview at the door of the White House and govern apart from it, as if that would be possible. Advocating policy positions based on one's worldview is light-years away from establishing -- or even supporting -- a national religion.
Christian conservatives are not the ones demonstrating intolerance and threatening the freedoms of religion and religious expression. They would never consider being so presumptuous and tyrannical as to try to silence those who disagree with them, ban them from the public square, or advance the spurious argument that they are not entitled to advocate policies based on their worldview.
Ironically, it is probably the secular left that is most responsible for the dramatic rise and persistent influence of the Christian political right in politics, with their gross judicial activism in abortion jurisprudence and their judicial tyranny coercing states to accept same-sex marriage against the will of the people. They are the ones who demonize as "homophobes" and "bigots" those seeking to preserve traditional marriage. Christian conservatives don't try to shut them up, but many are now trying to shut us up -- through the specious application of the First Amendment, no less.
The last people anyone needs to fear on religious liberty are Christian conservatives, who are its strongest guardians. Above all others, they will fight to preserve everyone's right to express and practice his religion or non-religion as he pleases.
SOURCE
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The God Gap
There have been many "gaps" in modern politics. There is the gender gap, the generation gap and now the God gap, which is the gulf between people who take God's instructions seriously and those who don't. Which side of the gap you're on could influence your vote. The God gap is growing wider.
I asked Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum about this. In a telephone interview with me, Santorum, whose rhetoric is loaded with religious and cultural language, said, "While (such language) may be upsetting to some, there's a hunger out there for talking about what's true."
How, then, would he explain a recent New York Times story that reported for the first time in our history, that "more than half of births to American women under 30 occur outside marriage." Santorum acknowledged, "I'm probably talking to Republican audiences, so it's a little different. I'm not talking to the general audience at this point. Marriage is on the decline. The culture is changing."
The problem for presidential candidates -- and for President Obama, who occasionally appeals to Scripture to justify his policies -- is that fewer people are listening to the voice of God, or to voices claiming to speak for Him.
Not too long ago, a report about growing numbers of out-of-wedlock births would have produced sermons calling for repentance and set revival fires burning in churches across the land. Today, there's only the sound of silence.
The Times story, citing government data compiled by Child Trends, a Washington research group, noted that the shift in the makeup of American families was likely to produce children who face "...elevated risks of falling into poverty, failing in school or suffering emotional and behavioral problems." Yawn.
How is this social virus to be cured when older religious people speak a language and advocate a belief system that either many younger people don't understand, or do not wish to hear?
The failure to communicate across the God gap brings to mind something former president George H.W. Bush said about broccoli. Bush said his mother made him eat broccoli, but he never liked it. When he became president, he said it meant he no longer had to eat it.
So people who might have been taken to religious services as children are now grown up and many feel they no longer have to "stomach" faith, or conform to a standard outside themselves. Some who grew up in a secular household are spiritually deaf, if not biblically illiterate. A general cultural morality is fast disappearing.
The God gap will not be shrunk by politicians, though to rally "the base" they often talk as if it can. The goal of cultural transformation has historically been the work of clergy, whose "hellfire" messages scared people awake from their comfortable and what used to be called "sinful" lives. But this was before having a baby without a husband became an acceptable thing to do.
Too many of today's clergy seem preoccupied with building personal empires and monstrous buildings. They go on costly TV instead of investing in the less visible "work of the church," which is people, not brick and mortar. The first Christians met in homes, not megachurches. They took care of each other and did not rely on government to sustain them. Many pastors today dislike sermons about sin and repentance because it makes people uncomfortable. And so we get instead the discomfort of social decay and an ever-widening God gap.
Materialism and pleasure contribute to social rot. Social rot precedes national decline. These have become our twin false gods; contemporary "golden calves," as unable to produce satisfaction as the idols of biblical times. Most politicians won't urge restraint or personal sacrifice and too many ministers allow the secular world to set their agenda.
And so the God gap widens and the wisdom and understanding of the older generation goes unheard and unheeded.
SOURCE
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My Twitter.com identity: jonjayray. I have deleted my Facebook page as I rarely access it. 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)
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The land of the free has become the land of the Fascists. I don't think even Hitler and Mussolini were this keen on regulation
A Louisiana church was ordered to stop giving away free water along Mardi Gras parade routes because they did not have the proper permits. “We were given a cease and desist order,” said Matt Tipton, pastor of Hope Church in Metairie, LA. “We had no idea we were breaking the law.”
Tipton said volunteers from his church were handing out free coffee and free bottles of water at two locations along a Mardi Gras parade route when they were stopped by Jefferson Parish officials. The church volunteers were cited for failing to secure an occupational license and for failure to register for a sales tax.
“It kind of threw me for a loop because they weren’t in uniform,” he said. “But once they pulled the ticket out, I was conviniced.” “We apologized,” Tipton said. “We didn’t know the rules.”
The church had purchased about five thousand bottles of water labeled with the church’s name and website address. They gave the remaining bottles to a local drug rehab center.
A spokesman for the Jefferson Parish Sheriff’s Office confirmed to Fox News that the church had violated the law. The spokesman said the church was initially given a verbal warning – and then a written warning. He said it was not a citation – even though the warning clearly stated it was a “vendor warning citation.”
The sheriff’s department said there was “no validity to their complaint whatever their complaint may be.”
Ken Klukowski, a senior legal fellow at the Family Research Council, said the citation was absurd. “This is a perfect example of why so many people have a problem with big government,” Klukowski said. “The idea that a church needs a permit to hand out water to thirsty people is unfortunate.”
He said it’s hard to believe that the government would get in the way of citizens helping each other out – “especially a church which was just doing its duty to be good Samaritans and help those in need.”
Pastor Tipton said he sent an email to city leaders explaining that they were just trying to show their love to the city “and to serve the city.”
He offered to provide volunteers to clean up trash or even clean portable toilets. However, city leaders did not initially respond and Tipton said he was given the runaround – told to go through three different department heads.
Klukowski said the incident is outrageous. “The idea that you need an additional level of bureaucracy stopping a church from showing kindness to members of the community is a perfect example of a waste of taxpayer money and resources,” he said.
SOURCE
***********************
Pettiness and Mud
Thomas Sowell
The only good news for the Republicans coming out of the seemingly endless presidential candidate "debates" is that some Republican leaders are now belatedly thinking about how they can avoid a repetition of this debacle in future elections.
What could they possibly have been thinking about, in the first place, when they agreed to a format based on short sound bites for dealing with major complex issues, and with media journalists -- 90 percent of them Democrats -- picking the topics?
The conduct of the candidates made things worse. In a world with a record-breaking national debt and Iran moving toward creating nuclear weapons, they bickered over earmarks and condoms. I am against earmarks, but earmarks don't rank among the first hundred most serious problems facing this country.
Mud-slinging has replaced rational discussions of differences on serious issues -- not only during the debates themselves, where the moderators sic the candidates on each other, but even more so in the massive television character assassination ads in which Romney supporters seem to specialize.
Groups supporting Mitt Romney have turned character assassination almost into a science. You take something that most people, outside of politics, do not understand and twist it to sound terrible to those who are unaware of the facts.
Blanketing Florida with misleading ads attacking Newt Gingrich won that state for Romney, after Gingrich scored an upset victory in South Carolina. The ads made a big deal out of charges that the former Speaker broke tax laws -- charges that the Internal Revenue Service exonerated him of, after a long investigation.
When Rick Santorum suddenly surged after his upset victories in Minnesota, Missouri and Colorado, the Romney character assassination machine attacked him for having voted in the Senate for various things that conservatives don't like.
But, when it comes to voting in Congress, seldom do you get a pure bill that you can agree with in all its parts. If you never voted for bills containing anything you didn't like, you might get very little voting done.
But, if it is a bill to provide American soldiers with the equipment they need to fight a war, and somebody has put into it an earmark for a federal boondoggle in his district, are you going to vote against that bill and let American soldiers go into battle without all the equipment and supplies they need?
Taking advantage of the public's lack of knowledge is something that Barack Obama already does very effectively in his political propaganda. But is that something the Republicans want to imitate?
It has worked during the primary season, when the media are perfectly happy to see Republicans destroying each other. But it will not work in the general election campaign, when even truthful criticisms of the president will have a hard time getting out through the media, which hear no evil, see no evil and speak no evil when it comes to Obama.
The pettiness and mud-slinging during the Republican primary campaigns is especially irresponsible during a time when there are very serious problems, at home and abroad, that need to be addressed in a serious way.
Discussions of particular issues, one by one, often miss the larger point that goes beyond the issue at hand -- namely, this administration's steady movement toward arbitrary government that circumvents the restrictions of the Constitution.
Nothing demonstrates this more starkly than the president's arbitrary power to waive the requirement that employers have to provide ObamaCare coverage for their workers. That can be the difference between paying, or not paying, millions of dollars. What does that mean for anybody's other rights?
What does freedom of speech mean if criticizing the administration can mean you get no exemption, while your competitor who keeps quiet, or who praises the administration, gets a waiver? The Constitution requires "equal protection of the laws" for a reason.
And what about nuclear weapons in the hands of Iran, the world's leading sponsor of international terrorism? Is that not worth discussing in something other than sound bites?
SOURCE
***********************
Christian Conservatives Guard Religious Liberty
The First Amendment to the United States Constitution contains two clauses addressing religious liberty: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof."
It's a shame that in their modern misguided zeal to read the first clause as mandating a complete separation of church and state, liberals do great damage to the second clause and defeat the overarching purpose of both: ensuring religious liberty.
Ever since the so-called Christian right began its organized activism during the 1980s, liberals (and some others) have become increasingly nervous about (and critical of) Christian influence in politics, let alone the public square.
This issue has reared its controversial head during the Republican presidential primary because of candidate Rick Santorum's unashamed and outspoken commitment to his Catholic faith and Christian values. It's not just leftists who are complaining; many on the right are, as well.
For years, there has been an uneasy alliance inside the Republican "big tent," between those who embrace social conservatism and those who would just as soon see it deleted from the party platform. With our anxiety about the national debt, economic issues are naturally at the forefront of people's concerns. Some believe that those who are still articulating social issues in this period of crisis are at least annoying and possibly detrimental to the cause of electing a Republican who can build a wide enough coalition to defeat the primary culprit in America's race to bankruptcy: President Barack Obama.
I think it's a false choice to say that we conservatives must pick between economic issues and social ones. It's also a mistake to believe there is a clear dichotomy between economic conservatives and social conservatives. As I've written before, Reagan conservatism is a three-legged stool -- economic, social and national defense issues -- and the three are compatible and probably embraced by most Republicans.
Our center-right tent is big enough to include libertarians, economic conservatives who either are indifferent to social issues or consider themselves socially liberal, and so-called neoconservatives, who tend to emphasize national defense issues over the other two -- although they might reject that characterization. We all must unite to defeat President Obama.
But with Santorum's rise in the polls, many are expressing their anxiety about his perceived religiosity and are depicting him as a threat to religious liberty.
Some are abuzz about his interview this past weekend with George Stephanopoulos on ABC's "This Week," in which Santorum stated that he does not believe separation of church and state is absolute. He stated that the First Amendment's free exercise clause guarantees that the church and its members have as much right to try to influence policy as anyone else. And he's absolutely correct.
Not only are the words "separation of church and state" not contained in the Constitution but this phrase from Thomas Jefferson's letter to the Danbury Baptists does not mean what many people say it does.
The First Amendment's establishment clause says that Congress shall not establish a national church, because the Framers didn't want the government telling us whom or how to worship. Their overarching concern, then, was protecting religious liberty. The free exercise clause also strengthens the religious freedom guarantee.
The point is that both clauses are dedicated to religious liberty, and neither purports to ban religious expression from the public square or from the mouths of public officials.
No matter how expansively one reads the First Amendment's establishment clause, no one, including Jefferson, would have made the ludicrous argument that presidents (or other public officials) must leave their worldview at the door of the White House and govern apart from it, as if that would be possible. Advocating policy positions based on one's worldview is light-years away from establishing -- or even supporting -- a national religion.
Christian conservatives are not the ones demonstrating intolerance and threatening the freedoms of religion and religious expression. They would never consider being so presumptuous and tyrannical as to try to silence those who disagree with them, ban them from the public square, or advance the spurious argument that they are not entitled to advocate policies based on their worldview.
Ironically, it is probably the secular left that is most responsible for the dramatic rise and persistent influence of the Christian political right in politics, with their gross judicial activism in abortion jurisprudence and their judicial tyranny coercing states to accept same-sex marriage against the will of the people. They are the ones who demonize as "homophobes" and "bigots" those seeking to preserve traditional marriage. Christian conservatives don't try to shut them up, but many are now trying to shut us up -- through the specious application of the First Amendment, no less.
The last people anyone needs to fear on religious liberty are Christian conservatives, who are its strongest guardians. Above all others, they will fight to preserve everyone's right to express and practice his religion or non-religion as he pleases.
SOURCE
************************
The God Gap
There have been many "gaps" in modern politics. There is the gender gap, the generation gap and now the God gap, which is the gulf between people who take God's instructions seriously and those who don't. Which side of the gap you're on could influence your vote. The God gap is growing wider.
I asked Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum about this. In a telephone interview with me, Santorum, whose rhetoric is loaded with religious and cultural language, said, "While (such language) may be upsetting to some, there's a hunger out there for talking about what's true."
How, then, would he explain a recent New York Times story that reported for the first time in our history, that "more than half of births to American women under 30 occur outside marriage." Santorum acknowledged, "I'm probably talking to Republican audiences, so it's a little different. I'm not talking to the general audience at this point. Marriage is on the decline. The culture is changing."
The problem for presidential candidates -- and for President Obama, who occasionally appeals to Scripture to justify his policies -- is that fewer people are listening to the voice of God, or to voices claiming to speak for Him.
Not too long ago, a report about growing numbers of out-of-wedlock births would have produced sermons calling for repentance and set revival fires burning in churches across the land. Today, there's only the sound of silence.
The Times story, citing government data compiled by Child Trends, a Washington research group, noted that the shift in the makeup of American families was likely to produce children who face "...elevated risks of falling into poverty, failing in school or suffering emotional and behavioral problems." Yawn.
How is this social virus to be cured when older religious people speak a language and advocate a belief system that either many younger people don't understand, or do not wish to hear?
The failure to communicate across the God gap brings to mind something former president George H.W. Bush said about broccoli. Bush said his mother made him eat broccoli, but he never liked it. When he became president, he said it meant he no longer had to eat it.
So people who might have been taken to religious services as children are now grown up and many feel they no longer have to "stomach" faith, or conform to a standard outside themselves. Some who grew up in a secular household are spiritually deaf, if not biblically illiterate. A general cultural morality is fast disappearing.
The God gap will not be shrunk by politicians, though to rally "the base" they often talk as if it can. The goal of cultural transformation has historically been the work of clergy, whose "hellfire" messages scared people awake from their comfortable and what used to be called "sinful" lives. But this was before having a baby without a husband became an acceptable thing to do.
Too many of today's clergy seem preoccupied with building personal empires and monstrous buildings. They go on costly TV instead of investing in the less visible "work of the church," which is people, not brick and mortar. The first Christians met in homes, not megachurches. They took care of each other and did not rely on government to sustain them. Many pastors today dislike sermons about sin and repentance because it makes people uncomfortable. And so we get instead the discomfort of social decay and an ever-widening God gap.
Materialism and pleasure contribute to social rot. Social rot precedes national decline. These have become our twin false gods; contemporary "golden calves," as unable to produce satisfaction as the idols of biblical times. Most politicians won't urge restraint or personal sacrifice and too many ministers allow the secular world to set their agenda.
And so the God gap widens and the wisdom and understanding of the older generation goes unheard and unheeded.
SOURCE
**************************
My Twitter.com identity: jonjayray. I have deleted my Facebook page as I rarely access it. 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)
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