The NIV as a servant of Protestant theology

The "New International Version" translation of the Bible has been very widely adopted in Protestant circles but its claim to be a faithful rendering of the original texts is hollow. I am not alone in seeing it as the servant of Protestant theology, as the examples here show --but I thought it might be useful to add a couple of other examples which I regard as rather gross and which may be a bit clearer than the examples given in the link above.

In Genesis 2:4 the KJV refers to "the day that the LORD God made the earth and the heavens". That is of course a bit inconvenient -- did creation take one day or seven days? -- so my 1978 edition of the NIV simply replaces "the day that" with "when". That is a perfectly reasonable theological interpretation of the original text but it is not what the original text actually says. The Hebrew word concerned means simply "in the day". See here.

And the revised NIV issued last year seems to be even worse than my original 1978 edition. As soon as I heard that it featured "inclusive" language I resolved not to buy it. When political correctness steamrollers what the Bible writers actually wrote, we know we are in the Devil's hands. If they cannot translate pronouns accurately, what hope is there for accuracy in more difficult passages?

As it happens, however, a reader has sent me an excerpt, apparently from the new edition, which renders 1 Corinthians 20, 21 as:

"So then, when you come together, it is not the Lord’s Supper you eat, for when you are eating, some of you go ahead with your own private suppers. As a result, one person remains hungry and another gets drunk".

But the word "private" is a complete interpolation that is not even in the 1978 NIV edition. There is no such word in the original Greek -- only the word "idion" (own). The point of the interpolation is an attempt to undermine the meaning of verse 20, which rather clearly denies that the communal meals of the early Christians constituted a celebration of the Lord's Supper -- as I pointed out on 17th..

So the NIV is thoroughly polluted. It is a work of theology as much as a translation and should be avoided by anyone interested in what the Bible writers actually said.

But not everybody can go back to the original languages so what translation do I recommend? Perverse as it undoubtedly seems, I use the original KJV version from the year 1611. It is actually a pretty literal translation. I think that they had more respect for what the Bible actually said back then.

The recensions of the original texts that they had back then -- such as "Stephanus" -- were undoubtedly inferior to modern recensions such as Nestle but all recensions are around 99% identical anyway. I wish I could say the same for translations.

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If This Is Recovery, Who Needs Recession?

President Barack Obama and fellow Democrats meeting in Charlotte for their national convention danced around the answer to the question, “Are you better off than you were four years ago?”

If they were dancing Friday, it was probably to a dirge.

Economists had been expecting 125,000 new jobs in the August jobs report. Friday’s report showed only 96,000 jobs created in August and an unemployment rate that dropped to 8.1 percent. But the real unemployment rate is in the double digits, because people are not included in the jobs stats if they’ve become so frustrated at failing to find a job they’ve stopped looking.

“The most important answer to the ‘better off’ question is this: Americans on the whole are better off than they would have been without the stimulus. But (yes, there’s always a but) many are worse off than they were four years ago, and that means more work needs to be done,” writes the editorial board of Bloomberg News in an editorial headlined, “Are You Better Off? There’s No Easy Answer.”

This, Dear Reader, is in an editorial defending the president’s record. It’s the meme adopted by Obama and his apologists.

Many of us can remember the 1970s economy and its recessions, Arab oil embargoes, and “stagflation”—a combination of economic stagnation and rapid price inflation. By the time of the 1980 presidential campaign between incumbent Jimmy Carter and challenger Ronald Reagan, the nation had double-digit interest and inflation rates and unemployment rates between 7.5 and 8 percent. This compares to the 7.8 percent rate in 2009, when Obama took office, and inflation rates of about 2 percent and interest rates that have been at or near record lows throughout his presidency.

Reagan won that election and took office early in 1981. The federal budget in 1981 was cut nearly 5 percent, the first of several cuts in tax rates occurred, and deregulation begun late in the Carter presidency continued. By November 1982 a strong recovery was underway.

Inflation, unemployment, and interest rates all fell to the single digits during Reagan’s reign. Real per-capita disposable income grew 18 percent from 1982 to 1989.

Contrast those results with the Obama regime’s record of more spending and regulation, calls for higher taxes on high-income earners, and new taxes in the Obamacare law:

* Median family income down approximately $4,000 and per-capita disposable income down from $33,229 during the 2008 campaign year to $32,677 in 2011. There was no growth in per-capita income during the first half of 2012, leaving it just $511 higher than the $32,166 when the so-called recovery began in 2009, according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis.

* Nearly 12 million more people on food stamps.

* 43 months with official unemployment above 8 percent, the longest streak with such high unemployment since the Great Depression.

* More than 800,000 people added to the ranks of long-term unemployed since the start of the “recovery” in 2009.

This is not to suggest Reagan (and the Congresses he worked with) did everything right, or that government can start and stop an economy like a machine. The national economy is made up of hundreds of millions of persons making billions of decisions and interacting with billions of others around the world. People don’t necessarily act the way governments want or expect.

But experience shows lower taxes and less regulation make for happier people and better economic performance. For you anti-Reagan scoffers, remember the Kennedy tax cuts that helped boost the economy in the 1960s.

Sharp tax increases loom beginning January 1 if Congress allows the tax cuts of the early 2000s to expire. Financial and health care industry laws passed during the Obama presidency cover thousands of pages each, with thousands more pages of regulations to be written. The national debt has virtually tripled in the last 10 years. And whether we go with the Romney-Ryan budget projections or the Obama-Biden projections, trillions more dollars of debt will be added.

People have good reason to feel pessimistic—and very good reason to doubt more spending, regulation, and “monetary stimulus” will make things better.

SOURCE

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Obama leaves the rule of law in tatters

If he's reelected, the 2,000-year-old ideal will be pushed beyond the tipping point.

Whether you are 21 or 81, or whether you work on the factory floor or in the front office, you know something is fundamentally wrong with our great country. Today, we live in a society where uncertainty and economic stagnation are off the charts, causing financial pain for just about everyone. How did we descend to such depths? What can we do to right this great ship called America?

Don’t look for answers in the latest poll, but in the Obama administration's relentless attack on this country's DNA: the rule of law. Before Election Day, we need to know why a Obama second term will be the tipping point for the rule of law, and why its destruction will take your wallet and personal freedom down with it.

The rule of law, which is the cornerstone of our Constitution, has over 2,000 years of history behind it. This cherished ideal stands for the proposition that a free and prosperous society must be based on “a government of laws and not men.” Instead of nurturing this time-tested ideal, President Obama has acted as if the rule of law is an impediment to be dispensed with at will.

Since this nation’s founding, the formal rule of law ideal in the U.S. means that laws are supreme and apply both to the rulers and the ruled. As a safeguard to protect the ideal, all laws and lawmakers should meet constitutional safeguards at a minimum. To prevent politicians from picking winners and losers, laws should have the stabilizing attributes of “generality,” “certainty” and “equality of application.”

What most people do not know is that Barack Obama learned how to undermine the traditional rule of law ideal at Harvard. His march to undermine the rule of law – which has brought with it the uncertainty and stagnation we now take for granted in our personal or business decisions – has been on full display for the last four years. If he’s reelected, it will only get worse.

Obamacare is a glaring example. This law makes end runs around the rule of law with draconian cradle-to-grave domination and increased costs and taxes built on a class-warfare foundation. The adminstration's virtual takeover of the auto industry, which arbitrarily pushed aside its bondholders in favor of the United Auto Workers, adds to the narrative of a government that mocks the laws of bankruptcy. And think of the presidential fiat that deep-sixed the Keystone XL pipeline, resulting in potentially thousands of lost jobs. Think also of Obama’s National Labor Relations Board that arbitrarily blocked Boeing from building a plant in South Carolina, a “right to work” state. Also, Obama simply ignored federal immigration law when he used executive authority in June to defer deportation of up to 1.7 million young illegal immigrants, effectively passing the DREAM Act, which had failed in Congress.

Without question, your wallet will lose in an Obama second term. Our national debt is now over $16 trillion and climbing. The confiscatory taxation that goes along with picking winners and losers in a rule-of-law-challenged welfare state will surely grind our country’s economy to a near halt before 2016. As MIT researchers have found, based on a panel of over 80 countries, this is the prescription for becoming a second-class nation. On government policies, MIT’s research proves that Obama could not be more wrong. Contrary to Obama’s view, the MIT data concluded that “Better maintenance of the rule of law … and less government spending and the associated taxation … are key determinants of economic growth.”

The Heritage Foundation’s 2012 Index of Economic Freedom study unequivocally confirms the MIT findings. As Heritage tells us, “the “rule of law” and “limited government” are key components of economic growth and prosperity.

Finally, we can only conclude that America's seemingly unsolvable problems – skyrocketing debt, high unemployment, tax class-warfare, and a pitiful housing market – have either been caused or exacerbated by Obama's disregard for the rule of law. When Obama no longer has to worry about reelection, things will only get worse in a second term.

If voters choose to once again make this country a “government of laws” over the cult of personality, all is not lost. Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan showed us that limited government based on rule of law principles can make a sick economy thrive again.

SOURCE

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How republics fall

The Fourth Estate’s degrading hero worship trivializes an election



The weird ecstasy of the media-political complex at the convention in Charlotte last month was the first sign that its attachment to President Obama, always fawning, had become morbid.

In spite of the anemic economy and a real unemployment rate above 11 percent, the high priests of pontificating liberalism were giddy with euphoria. The Democrats “put on a nearly flawless convention,” Paul Begala opined, and it was soon all but incontrovertibly established that, come November, the president — beautiful, magical, and lovable as he was — would vanquish his boring opponent.

The media savants sympathized with the delirium of Charlotte because they worship at the same altar and feed at the same trough. Two and a half centuries ago Edmund Burke said the reporters’ gallery in Parliament was an estate “more important far than” the other three put together. Today America’s Fourth Estate is not merely predisposed, as it has been for generations, to favor a particular political party: It is deeply engaged in the hero worship of a particular political leader.

The closeness of mainstream journalists to President Obama has debauched their integrity. Some of them give the White House veto authority over their stories. Others look to be rewarded with plum jobs or stimulus-funded ads. This abasement before power presages a return to a time when political writers, among them Swift and Defoe, were the professed protégés of statesmen and relied on Whig or Tory patronage for their bread; it also leaves the country vulnerable to the distortions of ostensibly neutral journalists who are too fervently committed to the leader to tell the truth about him.

Obama worship, once the quaint foible of Grub Street liberalism, has become its opium, perhaps its bath salts. The unhinged quality of its analysis was painfully evident during the interval of bounce-talk that followed Charlotte. When, after days of media cheerleading, Obama rose modestly in the polls, the acolytes instantly sounded the death knell for Romney. The election was all but over, the princes of palaver declared. Time’s Mark Halperin spoke of the Romney campaign’s “death stench,” and MSNBC’s Steve Benan said that the president was now “exactly where he wants to be.”

Would a less prejudiced observer claim that the president was exactly where he wanted to be in early September, with a credit downgrade looming, a miserable jobs report on the wires, and a strike by Chicago schoolteachers trash-talking the generous, even lavish deal they had been offered, the kind of deluxe package that induced liberal Wisconsin to rise in revolt against public-sector irresponsibility?

Then came Cairo and, still more terribly, Benghazi. The “Gang of 500,” as Halperin styles the bigwigs with whom he shares the liberal soapbox, was duly outraged . . . by Mitt Romney. The Republican nominee had the lèse-majesté to criticize Obama’s foreign policy.

The president’s own statement on Benghazi, which he delivered in the Rose Garden before departing for a campaign event in Las Vegas, went largely unscrutinized by the media gang: “Libyans helped some of our diplomats find safety, and they carried Ambassador Stevens’s body to the hospital, where we tragically learned that he had died.”

The president’s air of certainty contrasted sharply with the reticence of his underlings. The State Department has consistently said it does not know what happened to Ambassador Stevens that night, and grim photographs cast doubt on the notion that he had been innocently conveyed from the bloody scene.

The Beltway clerisy failed to ask the obvious question: Was the president’s version of his emissary’s death a self-serving attempt to salvage a failing foreign policy? Three years ago Obama went to Cairo “to seek a new beginning between the United States and Muslims around the world.” Should we learn that the men in the Benghazi photographs were not good Samaritans generously carrying an American to safety but thugs snapping trophy pictures of a Yankee infidel, Obama’s “new beginning,” if it came at all, will not have made much of a difference. The “new” Middle East in which American diplomats are abused and murdered and black flags fly over American embassies may prove to look a lot like the Old Middle East.

Which raises another question: If the administration’s Islamic policy has failed to pacify Islam and “make us safer,” why didn’t the president act forcefully in the months preceding the tragedy to protect American diplomats? Yet other than the British Independent and Matt Drudge, no big journalistic enterprise pressed for an explanation. Rather than probe the most devastating assault on the diplomatic corps since 1979, the media-political complex blithely turned its collective attention to happier matters, among them the president’s rising poll numbers in the swing states.

Like the decadents of France’s ancien régime, the liberal literati of mainstream journalism are convinced that the party will go on forever. Islamic zealots can be talked out of making nuclear bombs; stagnant growth and high unemployment can be counteracted with a Caesarian policy of bread and shows, free food and even free cell phones; a moribund economy can be propped up with the saline drip of Ben Bernanke’s liquidity transfusions.

As detached from reality as Marie Antoinette milking cows with Sèvres buckets, liberal journalists fail to grapple in any serious way with the “crisis of liberalism” at home and abroad, preferring instead to compose billets-doux to Barack praising his basketball prowess and panegyrics on Michelle’s dexterity as a horticulturalist....

More HERE

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My Twitter.com identity: jonjayray. I have deleted my old Facebook page as I rarely accessed 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 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 Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist" (Nationalsozialist) and the full name of Hitler's political party (translated) was "The National Socialist German Workers' Party" (In German: Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei)

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They're still lying with statistics

In 1954 Darrell Huff wrote a book called "How to lie with statistics". It is well-known and has often been used as an introductory college textbook. The point of the book was of course to alert people to statistical skullduggery so that they were not deceived by it.

But even though it sold a lot of copies the book has been an almost complete failure. In most academic fields where statistics are used (e.g. medical research, psychological research, climate research) statistics are still routinely misused. I spent 20 years getting papers published in the academic journals of the social sciences pointing out the defective reasoning in other articles in my field and, more recently, my FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC blog has tackled the outlandish conclusions that prevail in much of medical research. It's all a very sad tale. A lot of so-called "science" is basically corrupt.

So I would very much like readers to take the time to listen to a breezy video below by statistican W.M. Briggs in which he gives examples of corrupt statistical reasoning from psychological, medical and environmental research.



And the lesson from the above? Don't accept ANY scientific statement until you have seen what people say who don't agree with that statement. Corrupt science is so common that the odds are that the critics will be right.

So why is statistically-based science so corrupt? Briggs gives you some answers but I will give you another one that you may not see elsewhere: Most users of statistics are Left-leaning academics and for them "There is no such thing as truth". There is however a desperate need for them to defend their ideology. Their egos depend on it.

Even medical science has become heavily politicized with the "war on obesity" and the general elitist view of the Left that anything popular is either wrong or bad for you (cue cellphones).

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The Media's Rape of Reality

I didn’t want to write this column. I definitely didn’t want to use these words. I wanted to write about something else, but after the events of this week, I had no choice.

I am here to report a rape. To protect President Obama from the failure of his administration to anticipate or respond appropriately to the attacks on our embassies in the Middle East, the media has absolutely raped the truth.

Americans were targeted and murdered by radical monsters around the globe. The president did nothing about it. The White House had at least a 48-hour advance warning this was coming. It told no one. It didn’t warn the diplomats or increase security at the embassies. It didn’t warn the complicit governments – and they are as involved in this as the mobs and murderers themselves – of potential consequences.

And when the attacks were over? The president took all of one hour of out of his busy fundraising/campaign schedule to address this matter. Then, it was off to Las Vegas and back to his rich friends to shake the money maker.

Let me be clear, every drop of blood spilled by Americans as a result of the actions of these monsters drips through the hands of this administration before it hits the ground.

There’s no need to recount the story now, except to say the president, the secretary of state and their auditioning second-term press secretaries in the media burnt more calories this week attacking an American in California for exercising his First Amendment right to free speech than they did condemning the murderous mobs or their enablers in their respective governments.

Whatever outrage they had leftover was reserved for Mitt Romney for committing the unforgivable sin of standing up for American values in the face of terrorism and speaking out against it hours before the President did. That the President’s campaign attacked Romney for standing up for American values a full 8 hours before the President condemned the attacks on and murder of Americans isn’t a story.

Until a better word is invented, disgusting will have to do.

Within 48 hours of the first attacks the Justice Department had tracked down the filmmaker and leaked his name to the media. The media dutifully reported it as if they’d found an escaped Nazi. Of course that analogy doesn’t fit perfectly as escaped Nazi are granted the presumption of innocence.

After all, all the filmmaker did was make a bad movie despotic governments we helped empower could use to incite rioting and direct the anger away from their own incompetence and toward the greatest force for freedom the world has ever known. Through state controlled media, they played this unknown video endlessly and spread it throughout the region. All the while, our President skipped nearly 60 percent his national security briefings. Turns out maybe you can’t get by on the Cliff notes on those briefings. Maybe you do have to show up.

But Mitt Romney spoke first, and that was the story the media covered.

It made little mention of how the Justice Department found and outed the anonymous American supposedly “responsible” for all this in just two days but, after looking for two years, still can’t find out who authorized Fast And Furious within their own ranks. It found no fault with the president returning to his real duties – campaigning and fundraising – after he’d devoted just an hour to the most significant security threat of his administration. Had a fiction writer scripted the media’s coverage even they wouldn’t have had the nerve to be so brazen as to attempt something so corrupt.

Now, the violence is spreading, and the president has no idea how to react. He’s sinking in concrete, campaigning and fundraising while the Middle East burns. But he thinks Mitt Romney spoke too soon? That’s it somehow a gaffe that Romney grasped the implications and the outrage of the situation a full workday before the president could be bothered even to release a statement? That’s somehow a Romney gaffe, but the President being uncertain if Egypt is our ally or not barely registers?

President Obama has learned well from great propagandists in the past: When the chips are down, invent a phony outrage to distract the public.

Follow the pattern:

As more stories of violence and dismissed warnings come in, more criticism of Romney comes out.

As our credit is downgraded again, more criticism of Romney comes out.

As the Federal Reserve announces plans to print $40 billion a month in a third attempt at “quantitative easing” to right the president’s broken economy, more criticism of Romney comes out.

No matter what happens, no matter how detached our president gets from the job he seeks to keep for four more years … no matter how many people die…we still haven’t seen enough of Mitt Romney’s tax returns.

That’s how sick the media has gotten.

Does the president defend our freedom? No. He asks YouTube to review the video to see if it violates the user agreement and can be taken down. Isn’t it amazing how the first instinct of liberals in any situation is to lionize extremists abroad and censor our speech at home? YouTube, showing a strong commitment to the Constitution than the man who swore an oath to “preserve, protect and defend” it, said it wouldn’t remove this horribly produced and acted Z-movie. Good for them standing up for the First Amendment. Bad for the media for trying to re-elect a man who turns his back on the very principle that protects its very existence.

The president has not acted like a president in this crisis, he’s acted more like a spoiled child told for the first time to eat his vegetables. Everything else he’s faced in office – abysmal economic data, the 2010 election, the unpopularity of his actions and policies – could be spun or somehow parsed to create whatever new data-metric reality he wanted because his media mouthpieces were only too happy to spread it.

But those events didn’t have smoke, fire, video and a body count the world can’t easily ignore.

The media’s spin will work on idiots, but the rape of reality can’t and won’t work on anyone with more IQ points than teeth. People, Americans, YOU, need to spend time every day between now and the election talking to anyone with at least one working ear who hasn’t yet decided how to vote and explain to them what is really happening. Donating money is great. Planning to vote yourself is key. But spreading the word to those open to hearing it and making sure they cast an educated vote is crucial.

Democrats don’t want voters to be educated or informed … thus the fight over voter ID laws. They want you to eat your gruel, take your medicine and re-elect the president because he knows more about what’s better for you than you do. With so many Americans now suckling the government teat, that easy message has a receptive and large audience. We have to be larger this November or our nation surely will be smaller in the future.

SOURCE

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With Obama policy crumbling, White House blames movie for Mideast unrest

With anti-American demonstrations exploding across the Muslim world, the White House is insisting that the deadly attack on U.S. diplomats in Libya and violent protests targeting U.S. facilities in Egypt and several other countries are entirely the result of an anti-Islamic video on YouTube.

Why would the White House heap blame on the movie — indeed, insist that it is the sole cause of the violence — when officials don’t actually know that to be true? There are, perhaps, two reasons. One is that the administration has put an enormous amount of faith in the idea that Arab Spring uprisings will lead to democracy in much of the Middle East. Current events suggest that faith might be misplaced. For the administration, blaming the movie is easier than admitting they were wrong about something so big and important.

The second reason is that Barack Obama has based much of his approach to Middle Eastern affairs on what he perceives as his own unique ability to reach out to Muslims. The entire point of the president’s June 2009 speech to the Muslim world, delivered in Cairo — the same city where protesters are condemning the United States today — was that Obama’s life story allowed him to understand the Muslim experience in a way that previous American leaders could not. The fact that he spent part of his childhood in a Muslim country (Indonesia) and had many family members who were Muslim, the president apparently believed, would make many previously hostile Muslims somehow like the United States more.

It didn’t. So now, with anger at the U.S. burning throughout the region — and showing on Americans’ wide-screen TVs — it’s easier for the administration to blame the movie than to admit the president’s personal initiative failed.

More HERE

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Why Do Swedes in America Earn Far More than Swedes in Sweden?

Sweden is a good example of a nation that has implemented some good reforms in recent years, such as school choice and partial Social Security privatization.

But I argue that these good reforms don’t fully offset the damage caused by excessive government spending. And now I have a new – and very pointy – arrow in my argumentative quiver. A study from the London-based Institute for Economic Affairs has found that Swedes in America earn significantly more money than Swedes in Sweden.

Here are a couple of excerpts from the IEA study.

"The 4.4 million or so Americans with Swedish origins are considerably richer than average Americans, as are other immigrant groups from Scandinavia. If Americans with Swedish ancestry were to form their own country, their per capita GDP would be $56,900, more than $10,000 above the income of the average American. This is also far above Swedish GDP per capita, at $36,600. Swedes living in the USA are thus approximately 53 per cent more wealthy than Swedes (excluding immigrants) in their native country (OECD, 2009; US Census database). It should be noted that those Swedes who migrated to the USA, predominately in the nineteenth century, were anything but the elite. Rather, it was often those escaping poverty and famine. …A Scandinavian economist once said to Milton Friedman, ‘In Scandinavia, we have no poverty’. Milton Friedman replied, ‘That’s interesting, because in America, among Scandinavians, we have no poverty, either’. Indeed, the poverty rate for Americans with Swedish ancestry is only 6.7 per cent: half the US average (US Census)".

This is remarkable information, and it reminds me that Thomas Sowell had similar stats for other groups in his great book, Ethnic America.

I’m not familiar with the methodological issues involved in this type of research, but is certainly seems like this is a good way of getting apples-to-apples comparisons of different economic systems.

Like many other people, I’ve argued that the success of the overseas Chinese community (compared to their counterparts stuck in Communist China) is a damning indictment of statism.

Now we see that Swedes do reasonably well when living in a country with a big welfare state, but they do even better when living in a nation with a medium-sized welfare state.

So you can imagine how prosperous they would be if a bunch of Swedes lived in places such as Hong Kong and Singapore!

More HERE

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New Woodward book shows how Obama made it worse

Bob Woodward knows a failed president when he sees one. The man who was instrumental in bringing down Richard Nixon has now covered eight presidents for the Washington Post while writing more than a dozen books about them.

Which is what makes the final verdict he renders on President Obama in his new book, "The Price of Politics," so damning. Woodward writes, "It is a fact that President Obama was handed a miserable, faltering economy and faced a recalcitrant Republican opposition. But presidents work their will -- or should work their will -- on the important matters of national business. ... Obama has not."

Over the course of almost 450 pages, Woodward depicts Obama as an arrogant, aloof and hyperpartisan president who manages to either alienate or disappoint everybody he needs to help govern Washington.

As a result of Obama's bumbling, Woodward concludes, "The mission of stabilizing and improving the economy is incomplete. First, the short-term federal fiscal problem has not been solved. Instead it has been pushed off to the future, leaving the United States facing what is now called the fiscal cliff. ... Second, the long-term problem of unsustainable entitlement spending on Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security, highlighted by Republican House Budget Chairman Paul Ryan and familiar to all informed politicians and economists including the president ... has been left largely unaddressed."

"Americans are now left with a still struggling economy in the midst of a presidential election," Woodward writes. "It is a world of the status quo, only worse."

"The status quo, only worse." What a perfect description of the Obama presidency. It even fits on a bumper sticker.

More HERE

There is a new lot of postings by Chris Brand just up -- on his usual vastly "incorrect" themes of race, genes, IQ etc.

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My Twitter.com identity: jonjayray. I have deleted my old Facebook page as I rarely accessed 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 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 Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist" (Nationalsozialist) and the full name of Hitler's political party (translated) was "The National Socialist German Workers' Party" (In German: Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei)

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The Lord's supper

The Lord's supper is a central event in Christian life. Just about all Christian denominations commemorate it at Easter (though the Eastern Orthodox are a bit pesky about when Easter is) and, in the form of the Mass, devout Catholics can commemorate it every day if they wish.

So where does Christian practice in the matter come from? Is it Biblical? Sort of. Below are the commandments concerning it in the Bible.


Mark 14
[22] And as they did eat, Jesus took bread, and blessed, and brake it, and gave to them, and said, Take, eat: this is my body.
[23] And he took the cup, and when he had given thanks, he gave it to them: and they all drank of it.
[24] And he said unto them, This is my blood of the new testament, which is shed for many.
[25] Verily I say unto you, I will drink no more of the fruit of the vine, until that day that I drink it new in the kingdom of God.


Matthew 26
[26] And as they were eating, Jesus took bread, and blessed it, and brake it, and gave it to the disciples, and said, Take, eat; this is my body.
[27] And he took the cup, and gave thanks, and gave it to them, saying, Drink ye all of it;
[28] For this is my blood of the new testament, which is shed for many for the remission of sins.
[29] But I say unto you, I will not drink henceforth of this fruit of the vine, until that day when I drink it new with you in my Father's kingdom.


Luke 22
[14] And when the hour was come, he sat down, and the twelve apostles with him.
[15] And he said unto them, With desire I have desired to eat this passover with you before I suffer:
[16] For I say unto you, I will not any more eat thereof, until it be fulfilled in the kingdom of God.
[17] And he took the cup, and gave thanks, and said, Take this, and divide it among yourselves:
[18] For I say unto you, I will not drink of the fruit of the vine, until the kingdom of God shall come.
[19] And he took bread, and gave thanks, and brake it, and gave unto them, saying, This is my body which is given for you: this do in remembrance of me.
[20] Likewise also the cup after supper, saying, This cup is the new testament in my blood, which is shed for you.


1 Corinthians 11
[20] When ye come together therefore into one place, this is not to eat the Lord's supper.
[21] For in eating every one taketh before other his own supper: and one is hungry, and another is drunken.
[22] What? have ye not houses to eat and to drink in? or despise ye the church of God, and shame them that have not? What shall I say to you? shall I praise you in this? I praise you not.
[23] For I have received of the Lord that which also I delivered unto you, That the Lord Jesus the same night in which he was betrayed took bread:
[24] And when he had given thanks, he brake it, and said, Take, eat: this is my body, which is broken for you: this do in remembrance of me.
[25] After the same manner also he took the cup, when he had supped, saying, This cup is the new testament in my blood: this do ye, as oft as ye drink it, in remembrance of me.
[26] For as often as ye eat this bread, and drink this cup, ye do shew the Lord's death till he come.
[27] Wherefore whosoever shall eat this bread, and drink this cup of the Lord, unworthily, shall be guilty of the body and blood of the Lord.
[28] But let a man examine himself, and so let him eat of that bread, and drink of that cup.
[29] For he that eateth and drinketh unworthily, eateth and drinketh damnation to himself, not discerning the Lord's body.
[30] For this cause many are weak and sickly among you, and many sleep.
[31] For if we would judge ourselves, we should not be judged.
[32] But when we are judged, we are chastened of the Lord, that we should not be condemned with the world.
[33] Wherefore, my brethren, when ye come together to eat, tarry one for another.
[34] And if any man hunger, let him eat at home; that ye come not together unto condemnation. And the rest will I set in order when I come.


"This do in remembrance of me" is pretty plain but at the risk of sounding like Bill Clinton, I want to ask what "This" is. Was it not a Passover celebration and is it not a special celebration of the Passover that Jesus commanded? I think any Christian who was careful to obey Christ's commands would do so by observing the Passover. You can draw other inferences about what "This" is but why run the risk of getting it wrong?

Against that proposition, however, we have the account of early Christian practice from Paul in Corinthians. Theologians claim that it describes a celebration that went on whenever there were meetings of the original congregations. So it was much more frequent than the Passover, which is annual.

To me that seems however totally perverse. Paul starts out saying that "When ye come together therefore into one place, this is not to eat the Lord's supper". How plain can you be? Paul is saying exactly the opposite of what the theologians claim. Apparently, there was a custom of a communal meal at meetings of the early Christian congregations and Paul is CONDEMNING that. He says it defiles the SACRED meal of the Lord's supper. Read the passage with that understanding and see if it makes sense. To me it seems the only way to get a straightforward meaning out of it. Theologians really have to twist themselves into a pretzel to get their meaning out of it, particularly in the light of verse 20.

So the whole of Christian practice in the matter seems fundamentally flawed to me. And from that flow other perverse responses to Christ's command. The "this" that he commanded was a meal around some sort of table, probably where the meal was taken in the form of a Greek symposium -- that is, where the diners were reclining rather than sitting up straight. I gather that a Pesach seder in some Jewish circles is still done that way. Be that as it may, however, there was certainly no kneeling or standing involved, unlike common Christian practice.

And perhaps it's a minor point of detail but the passing out of the bread and the wine were two quite separate events with a separate prayer before each. That too seems to be unknown in Christian practice.

And I won't go on about the wafers, grapejuice etc. which various Christian denominations substitute for the perfectly straightforward unleavened bread and wine. Why are they so disrespectlful of their proclaimed Lord? The connection between Christianity and the Bible gets very slender at times.

So there is only one commemoration that Christ commanded -- not Easter and not Christmas -- and Christians bungle that. But I guess their Lord is merciful. It is a good thing that the Christian god is not as demanding as Yahveh, though. Religious Jews have a much tougher time than Christians.

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Judge rejects detention without trial

Shocking that this ever came to court. Huge arrogance in Obama's DOJ revealed

The Obama administration is battling to restore a controversial provision of a new federal law that it admits could have been used to arrest and detain citizens indefinitely – even if their actions were protected by the First Amendment.

A federal judge this week made permanent an injunction against enforcement of Section 1021 of the most recent National Defense Authorization Act, which was declared unconstitutional.

The Obama administration then took only hours to file an appeal of the order from U.S. District Judge Katherine Forrest, and attorneys also asked her to halt enforcement of her order.

In her order, Forrest wrote, “The government put forth the qualified position that plaintiffs’ particular activities, as described at the hearing, if described accurately, if they were independent, and without more, would not subject plaintiffs to military detention under Section 1021.”

But she continued, “The government did not – and does not – generally agree or anywhere argue that activities protected by the First Amendment could not subject an individual to indefinite military detention under Section 1021.”

The case was brought last January by a number of writers and reporters, led by New York Times reporter Christopher Hedges. The journalists contend the controversial section allows for detention of citizens and residents taken into custody in the U.S. on “suspicion of providing substantial support” to anyone engaged in hostilities against the U.S.

The lawsuit alleges the law is vague and could be read to authorize the arrest and detention of people whose speech or associations are protected by the First Amendment. They wonder whether interviewing a member of al-Qaida would be considered “substantial support.”

“Here, the stakes get no higher: indefinite military detention – potential detention during a war on terrorism that is not expected to end in the foreseeable future, if ever. The Constitution requires specificity – and that specificity is absent from Section 1021,” the judge wrote.

Dan Johnson, a spokesman with People Against the NDAA, told WND it took only hours for the government to file an appeal to the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals. “It most definitely tells us something about their intent,” he told WND.

He cited Obama’s signing statement, when the bill was made law, that he would not use the provision allowing detention of American citizens without probable cause in military facilities. “Just because someone says something doesn’t mean they’re not lying,” he said.

Bloomberg reports the Obama administration also is asking Forrest for a stay of the ruling that found the law violates the First, Fifth and 14th Amendments.

The judge expressed dissatisfaction with what one observer described as the arrogance of the Department of Justice in the case.

Forrest asked the government to define the legal term, noting the importance of how they apply to reporting and other duties. “The court repeatedly asked the government whether those particular past activities could subject plaintiffs to indefinite military detention; the government refused to answer,” she wrote.

“The Constitution places affirmative limits on the power of the executive to act, and these limits apply in times of peace as well as times of war,” she wrote.

She said the law “impermissibly impinges on guaranteed First Amendment rights and lacks sufficient definitional structure and protection to meet the requirements of due process.”

“This court rejects the government’s suggestion that American citizens can be placed in military detention indefinitely, for acts they could not predict might subject them to detention, and have as their sole remedy a habeas petition adjudicated by a single decision-maker (a judge versus a jury), by a ‘preponderance of the evidence’ standard,” she wrote. “That scenario dispenses with a number of guaranteed rights,” she said.

The Obama administration already has described those who hold a pro-life position or support third-party presidential candidates or the Second Amendment fit the profile of a domestic terrorist.

Obama stated when he put his signature to the legislative plan that his administration “will not authorize the indefinite military detention without trial of American citizens.”

Virginia already has passed a law that states it would not cooperate with such detentions, and several local jurisdictions have done the same. Arizona, Rhode Island, Maryland, Oklahoma, Tennessee and Washington also have considered similar legislation.

More HERE

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Don't Misplace Blame for Middle Eastern Mayhem

Jonah Goldberg

An incendiary video about the prophet Muhammad, "Innocence of Muslims," was blamed for the mob attacks on our embassies in Libya and Egypt (and later, Yemen). In Libya, Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three other Americans were murdered. The video stirred some passion here in America as well.

Over at MSNBC a riot of consensus broke out when contributors Mike Barnicle and Donny Deutsch as well as University of Pennsylvania professor Anthea Butler all agreed that the people behind the video should be indicted as accessories to murder. "Good Morning," declared Butler, "How soon is Sam Bacile [the alleged creator of the film] going to be in jail folks? I need him to go now."

Barnicle set his sights on Terry Jones, the pastor who wanted to burn the Koran a while back and who was allegedly involved in the video as well. "Given this supposed minister's role in last year's riots in Afghanistan, where people died, and given his apparent or his alleged role in this film, where ... at least one American, perhaps the American ambassador is dead, it might be time for the Department of Justice to start viewing his role as an accessory before or after the fact."

Deutsch helpfully added: "I was thinking the same thing, yeah."

It's interesting to see such committed liberals in lockstep agreement with the Islamist government in Egypt, which implored the U.S. government to take legal action against the filmmakers. Interestingly, not even the Muslim Brotherhood-controlled Egyptian government demanded these men be tried for murder.

Now, I have next to no sympathy for the makers of this film, who clearly hoped to start trouble, violent or otherwise. But where does this logic end? One of the things we've learned all too well is that the "Muslim street" -- and often Muslim elites -- have a near-limitless capacity to take offense at slights to their religion, honor, history or feelings.

Does Barnicle want Salman Rushdie, the author of "The Satanic Verses," charged with attempted murder, too? That book has in one way or another led to several deaths. Surely he should have known that he was stirring up trouble. Perhaps the U.S. Justice Department and the Iranian Ministry of Intelligence and Security could work together on a joint prosecution?

Perhaps Rushdie's offense doesn't count because he's a literary celebrity? Only crude attacks on Islam should be held accountable for the murderous bloodlust they elicit.

One might ask who is to decide what is crude and what is refined? But that would be fruitless because we know the real answer: the Islamist mobs and their leaders. Their rulings would come in the form of bloody conniptions around the world.

Are we really going to hold what we can say or do in our own country hostage to the passions of foreign lynch mobs?

If your answer is some of form of "yes," than you might want to explain why U.S. citizens aren't justified in attacking Egyptian or Libyan embassies here in America. After all, I get pretty mad when I see goons burning the American flag, and I become downright livid when a U.S. ambassador is murdered. Maybe me and some of my like-minded friends should burn down some embassies here in Washington, D.C., or maybe a consulate in New York City?

Of course we shouldn't do that. To argue that Americans shouldn't resort to mayhem, while suggesting it's understandable when Muslims do, is to create a double standard that either renders Muslims unaccountable savages (they can't help themselves!) or casts Americans as somehow less passionate about what we hold dear, be it our flag, our diplomats or our religions. (It's hardly as if Islamists don't defame Christianity, Judaism, moderate forms of Islam or even atheism.)

But, I'm sorry to say, that may in fact be the case. After all, with barely a moment's thought these deep thinkers on MSNBC were willing to throw out the First Amendment for a little revenge. It was a moment of voluntary surrender to terrorism.

Within 24 hours, however, it became increasingly clear that the video wasn't even the motive for the murders; it was a convenient cover for them. In effect, the terrorists behind the Libyan attack not only successfully played the Muslim street for suckers, they played Barnicle & Co. for suckers, too.

SOURCE

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Another vicious Federal bureaucracy

Lance Armstrong, one of the greatest endurance athletes of modern times, who won the grueling Tour de France bicycle race a record seven consecutive times from 1995 to 2005, has been stripped of all awards and prizes he won during his storied cycling career. The reason for these harsh sanctions against Armstrong was a finding by the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency (USADA) that the athlete had used illicit, performance-enhancing drugs during his cycling career. Yet, because of its status as unaccountable regulatory power, the USADA never had to prove its case against Armstrong.

Armstrong's unprecedented fall from grace has precipitated much gloating and smug cries of "we told you so" from the many jealous detractors his success inspired over the years. However, the manner in which the USADA conducted its prosecution of this athlete, should give serious pause to all Americans who believe fundamental fairness and basic due process should precede stripping a person of their career, their reputation, and their financial resources.

The USADA's actions also should precipitate action by the Congress, which annually appropriates $10 million taxpayer dollars for the Agency's operations -- operations which permit a small group of unelected, unaccountable men and women to investigate and punish athletes within its questionable jurisdiction, without so much as a passing tip of the hat to fairness or due process.

As a lawyer whose practice includes litigating cases in court, I rely on well-established rules of procedure to ensure fundamental fairness, so that both sides have a more-or-less equal opportunity to uncover and present evidence in behalf of their clients. Those procedures -- monitored and enforced by judges either elected or appointed as objective and uninterested umpires -- also permit both sides robust opportunity to challenge and test the credibility and strength of the other's witnesses and evidence. We inherited such procedures from Great Britain during the colonial era, and our Founding Fathers strengthened and enshrined them in our Constitution. Our Liberty rests on their continued viability.

But not for athletes subject to regulation by the United States Anti-Doping Agency, as outlined in depth in papers filed with the federal court by Bob Luskin, one of Armstrong's attorneys.

In the world as defined by, and in which the USADA operates (with the official imprimatur of the U.S. government since 2000), the deck is stacked heavily in favor of USADA and against the unfortunate athlete who finds himself in its regulatory crosshairs. In fact, there is so little room for the defendant-athlete to maneuver, that it is virtually impossible for any such individual to enjoy even a slim chance of defeating a USADA charge. Thus the recent decision by Armstrong to end his challenge to the charges against him by this rogue regulatory agency.

Unlike the real world, in which a person charged with an offense enjoys at least a fighting chance to defend themselves, a defendant facing USADA-defined charges essentially is presumed guilty unless he or she can prove the drug testing on which USADA based its indictment was faulty. That might sound like a manageable task, until one considers that the athlete has no real opportunity to test the evidence available to USADA, and cannot conduct any meaningful discovery to prepare and present a defense as they certainly would in a real legal proceeding.

Moreover, as in Armstrong's case, despite having been tested between 500 and 600 times -- both random and scheduled -- and never having failed a single USADA-sanctioned test for illicit substances, he still faced fatal sanctions. The actions which led to Armstrong being stripped of more than a decade of hard-won accolades that placed him at the pinnacle of world cycling, were based not on scientific tests, but on allegations leveled against him by others, including cyclists he beat over the years.

The manner in which Armstrong has been subject to a regulatory witch-burning is a disgrace to any notion of fairness or due process; and it ill-serves either the cycling profession or the American legal system.

Insofar as USADA operates with the blessing of the Congress and under the nominal supervision of the White House "Drug Czar," and considering the un-American manner in which it conducts its business, it is high time the Congress moves to revoke its charter and halt its access to American taxpayer dollars.

SOURCE

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My Twitter.com identity: jonjayray. I have deleted my old Facebook page as I rarely accessed 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 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 Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist" (Nationalsozialist) and the full name of Hitler's political party (translated) was "The National Socialist German Workers' Party" (In German: Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei)

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What's So Hard About Saying, "In the United States, we are not in the business of approving these messages"?



The U.S. State Department, and even its besieged embassy staff in Cairo, is receiving a barrage of criticism because of statements like this:

The Embassy of the United States in Cairo condemns the continuing efforts by misguided individuals to hurt the religious feelings of Muslims – as we condemn efforts to offend believers of all religions. Today, the 11th anniversary of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on the United States, Americans are honoring our patriots and those who serve our nation as the fitting response to the enemies of democracy. Respect for religious beliefs is a cornerstone of American democracy. We firmly reject the actions by those who abuse the universal right of free speech to hurt the religious beliefs of others

The criticism is well-deserved. As James Joyner succinctly put it,

In point of fact, making a movie commenting on the sexual proclivities of someone who died some fourteen hundred years ago in no way constitutes "incitement" under any meaningful use of the term.

I would add that my government has no business giving a whirl about "hurt[ing] the religious beliefs of others" (a standard both elastic and asymmetrical, virtually begging for a heckler's veto) and that there is no "universal right of free speech," at least in practice (as opposed to the philosophical principle, which I wholeheartedly endorse).

The fact is that the First Amendment, no matter how embattled, protects a range of expression unthinkable even in Western Europe. Because of that unique position, and because the U.S. seems doomed to play an outsized diplomatic and military role in the tumultuous Muslim world, it behooves the State Department to constantly explain the vast differences between state-sanctioned and legally protected speech in the so-called Land of the Free. If the U.S. government really was in the business of "firmly reject[ing]" private free-speech acts that "hurt the religious beliefs of others" there would be no time left over for doing anything else.

It's really not that hard. The values in that film (or "film") are not our values; our government respects religion, religious expression, and religious pluralism (including and especially that of Muslims, even in the wake of murderous Muslim-led attacks on American soil); and we are not in the business of approving or (for the most part) regulating the private speech of our citizens. To the extent that that message is not sufficient for rioters, the problem is theirs.

Some liberal Tweeters this morning are pointing out that, hey, the Bush administration condemned the Mohammed cartoons, too!, but this mostly goes to illustrate how bipartisan cravenness can be. We know that this issue will keep coming up; maybe it's about time the American government, and the rest of us, develop a more American response.

SOURCE

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House conservatives call for stripping aid to Libya, Egypt from spending bill

A group of House conservatives is calling for foreign aid to Libya and Egypt to be stripped from a six-month federal funding bill set for a vote on Thursday.

A handful of lawmakers voiced outrage Wednesday at the Obama administration's response to the attacks on the U.S. embassies in those countries, and suggested the inclusion of foreign aid could influence their votes.

"It makes it easier to vote ‘no' " on the spending bill, freshman Rep. Jeff Landry (R-La.) said at a press event with conservative House Republicans at the Capitol.

The House on Thursday plans to vote on a continuing resolution that would extend federal funding through March, preventing a government shutdown before the election or during a lame-duck session of Congress this fall. While conservatives pushed to avoid a shutdown fight, they have also raised alarms about the inclusion of additional welfare funding in the bill.

"It would show a tremendous amount of leadership from this administration, in light of the recent developments, if the president were to come back and demand that the amount of money that is in the [continuing resolution] for Libya and Egypt be stripped. That would be tremendous leadership," Landry said.

Lawmakers said they planned to bring up the issue at a meeting of the conservative Republican Study Committee on Wednesday, although they acknowledged it would be difficult to strip the foreign aid in so short an amount of time.

The stopgap spending bill is expected to pass with bipartisan support, including from Republican vice presidential nominee Rep. Paul Ryan (Wis.).

House Appropriations Committee Chairman Hal Rogers (R-Ky.) said that defunding Libya and Egypt in the continuing resolution (CR) would not be possible.

"The CR is closed for changes," he said Wednesday.

The chairman said the Foreign Affairs Committee should take up the matter, and suggested that moving on aid now would be "premature."

In a separate statement Wednesday, Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) said continued aid to Libya should be contingent on its government's help in finding those responsible for the attack on the U.S. embassy.

Rep. Scott Garrett (R-N.J.) said the administration should be asking several questions in the wake of the attacks, which killed four Americans at the consulate in Benghazi, including U.S. Ambassador to Libya Christopher Stevens.

"Why is it that the United States is bankrolling some of these countries?" he asked. "Why do we continue to bankroll them at the level that we are? We're waiting for that discussion from the administration."

SOURCE

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The Obama administration has engineered a “recovery” in name only

When this column was written, the smart money was once again saying that the bad times were behind us. “Nearly seven years after the housing bubble burst, most indexes of house prices are bending up,” David Wessel wrote in The Wall Street Journal in July. “Nearly 10 percent more existing homes were sold in May than in the same month a year earlier, many purchased by investors who plan to rent them for now and sell them later, an important sign of an inflection point.”

In the summer edition of the house magazine for Markit Group Ltd., a credit-default swap pricing firm, Bruce Kasman, head of economic research at J.P. Morgan, explained why he believes the American economy will triumph over “persistent lacklustre growth.” Kasman identified three hopeful trends: 1) “A competitive corporate sector that is willing to hire,” 2) “Consumer behaviour has turned neutral,” and 3) “Housing turns from drag to lift.”

But in the battle for hope, it’s no surprise that President Barack Obama has gained the highest ground. “The private sector is doing fine,” the president intoned in June. That phrase was immediately controversial, but it had the rare distinction of sounding even worse in context than standing alone. Obama’s real concern was for government employees facing “cuts initiated by, you know, governors or mayors who are not getting the kind of help that they have in the past from the federal government.”

So is economic health returning? The short answer is no. The mortgage crisis has become so grave that some city governments are threatening to deploy their eminent domain powers to seize loans at high risk of default. Seven municipal governments, including three of the 50 largest cities in California, have declared bankruptcy. Wealth creation in America has become so difficult, and wealth destruction so common, that in many respects the recovery, which is not a recovery at all but a period of indefinite stagnation, has become worse than the “Great Recession” that allegedly ended in 2009.

The long answer is also no. A June Federal Reserve study revealed that the median value of pretax family income fell 7.7 percent between 2007 and 2010; during the same period, median net worth declined a whopping 38.8 percent, and mean net worth dropped 14.7 percent. The Fed’s quarterly flow of funds reports have consistently shown flat household net worth since 2010. At $62.9 trillion in the first quarter of this year, household net worth is still almost $5 trillion below where it was in 2007.

As if having fewer dollars weren’t bad enough, the dollars have been, according to the strict definition of the word, decimated. Consumer Price Index inflation has robbed the dollar of 10 percent of its value since 2007. With the interest rate on a savings account below 1 percent, saving money in the bank has come to mean losing your money, and not slowly.

Under those conditions, who would save? Nobody. According to the Bureau of Economic Analysis, the U.S. personal savings rate (disposable personal income less outlays), which briefly topped 6 percent in 2009, has averaged below 4 percent throughout this year and is now close to 3 percent. That rate was 10 percent as recently as the late 1980s.

Also headed steadily downward is the equity portion of real estate owned: Mortgage debt makes up 55 percent (and growing) of all real estate assets in America. Again, the long-term trend is even more frightening: In 1983 American homeowners had more than 70 percent equity stakes in their homes.

According to a July report from Bianco Research, aggregate personal debt has increased since the recession ended. Total credit-market debt is nearly $54 trillion. Public-sector debt has increased from $21 trillion to $24 trillion during that period—and as the Golden State cities of Stockton, Vallejo, and San Bernardino show, government bankruptcy is no longer something that only happens in Rhode Island, nor is it a figment of alarmists’ imaginations.

Against this slow (and sometimes fast) dribbling away of wealth, we are supposed to believe the economy is improving because U-3 unemployment is “holding steady” at more than 8 percent, or because of a small spike in real estate settlements.

Don’t believe it for a minute. It’s a step in the right direction that lenders have finally increased the pace of foreclosures (according to RealtyTrac, foreclosures jumped 6 percent in the first quarter), but it will take many years to work through the backlog of distressed mortgages. The percentage of Americans even looking for jobs, let alone holding them, continues to fall, and the 80,000-a-month rate of private-sector job creation doesn’t come close to keeping up with population growth.

There’s something about old-fashioned print media that makes doomsday predictions all the more enjoyably awful. From Paul Erdman’s The Crash of ’79 and The Panic of ’89 to the late libertarian leader Harry Browne’s How You Can Profit From the Coming Devaluation through Nassim Taleb’s recession appetizer The Black Swan, people still love to curl up with dead-tree visions of hell in a handbasket.

So here’s my dire print prediction: By the time you read this, Americans will be feeling poorer than ever. And they won’t be wrong.

SOURCE

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The Brass Standard

Thomas Sowell

Politics takes a lot of brass. And Bill Clinton is a master politician. His rousing speech at the Democrats' convention told the delegates that Republicans "want to go back to the same old policies that got us into trouble in the first place."

That is world class brass. Bill Clinton's own administration, more than any other, promoted an unsustainable housing boom, which eventually and inevitably led to a housing bust that brought down the whole American economy.

Behind all the complex financial processes that reached to Wall Street and beyond, there is one fundamental fact: many people stopped making their mortgage payments.

Why did that happen? Because mortgage loans were made to people who did not meet the long-established qualification standards for getting a mortgage loan. And why did that happen? Because the Clinton administration threatened lawsuits against lenders who did not approve mortgage loans to minority applicants as often as to white applicants.

In other words, racial quotas replaced credit qualifications. A failure to have racial statistics on mortgage approvals that fit the government's preconceptions was equated with discrimination.

Attorney General Reno said that lenders who "closely examine their lending practices and make necessary changes to eliminate discrimination" would "fare better in this department's stepped-up enforcement effort than those who do not." She said: "Do not wait for the Justice Department to come knocking."

Clinton's Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) had similar racial quota policies, and began taking legal actions against banks that turned down more minority applicants than HUD thought they should.

HUD said that it was breaking down "racial and ethnic barriers" so as to create more "access" to home ownership. It established "goals" -- political Newspeak for quotas -- for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to buy mortgages that the original lenders had made to "the underserved population." In other words, the original lenders could pass on the increasingly risky mortgages to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac -- and, ultimately, to the taxpayers.

Other federal agencies warned mortgage lenders against having credit standards that these agencies considered too high. And these agencies had many powers to use against banks and other lenders who did not heed their warnings.

The Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, for example, issued guidelines for "non-discriminatory" lending which warned lenders against "unreasonable measures of creditworthiness." Lenders should have standards "appropriate to the economic culture of urban lower-income and nontraditional consumers" and consider "extenuating circumstances." In other words, when some people don't come up to the lending standards, then the lending standards should be brought down to them.

What was the evidence for all the lending discrimination that the government was supposedly trying to prevent? Statistics.

In the year 2000, for example, black applicants for conventional mortgage loans were turned down at twice the rate for white applicants. Case closed, as far as the media and the government were concerned. Had they bothered to look a little deeper, they would have found that whites were turned down at nearly twice the rate for Asian Americans.

Had they bothered to check out average credit scores, they would have discovered that whites had higher average credit scores than blacks, and Asian Americans had higher average credit scores than whites.

Such inconvenient facts would have undermined the whole moral melodrama, reducing it to a case of plain economics, with lenders more likely to lend to those who were more likely to pay them back. Once lending standards were lowered, in order to meet racial quotas, they were lowered for everybody. Deadbeats of any race could get mortgage loans, and most were probably not minorities.

Democrats like to blame the "greed" of business, rather than the policies of government, for problems. But lenders don't make money by lending to individuals who don't pay them back. That is what government forced lenders to do, beginning under the Clinton administration. And the eventual collapse took down the economy.

It takes brass to defy the facts. And Bill Clinton has brass.

SOURCE

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My Twitter.com identity: jonjayray. I have deleted my old Facebook page as I rarely accessed 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 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 Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist" (Nationalsozialist) and the full name of Hitler's political party (translated) was "The National Socialist German Workers' Party" (In German: Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei)

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Shana Tova Umetukah

To my Jewish readers -- if I still have any after the naughty things I have said about the holy book, the desirability of aliyah etc. I have borrowed the defiant video below from the inestimable Caroline Glick of Latma. More here. Caroline has a great name. "Glick" sounds a bit odd to us Gentiles but in Yiddish it means luck or happiness.

How U.S. leaders from JFK to Roosevelt and George W Bush share character traits with psychopaths

If you Google the term "subclinical psychopathy", my academic journal article on that topic -- which is also the topic below -- heads the list. So it would appear that I am in an unusually good position to comment on the research below.

And I think I should note at once a major elision in it. They in fact have no findings about psychopathy as such. They appear to have looked for a whole host of psychopathic traits in U.S. Presidents and found little that stood out. All they found was a tendency towards dominance (surely unsurprising in a President!) and an unusual degree of fearlessness.

But these are not central characteristics of psychopaths. The central attributes of psychopaths are a lack of moral anchors (Clinton?) and an untroubled ability to tell bald-faced lies (Obama?). I say more on those two characters here.

So the article below is the product of what statisticians call "data dredging". If you look at enough correlations, you are reasonably certain to find one that is significant by chance alone.

So it is not at all clear that the characteristics the researchers highlight below are at all villainous. Psychopathy is undoubtedly villainous but is fearless dominance villainous? I can't see it. It is probably a desideratum for leaders generally. So the whole story below rather falls in a heap when you look closely at it.

I cannot help being amused, however, by the inclusion of GWB, the total omission of Obama and the failure to highlight Bill Clinton. That will presumably enable Leftists to gloat that GWB was a defective while Obama and Clintion are paragons. That is what psychologists call an "artifact" -- a conclusion produced by the research method rather than something that is really in the data.

And I think I should in conclusion note that GWB was anything but a psychopath. He was a deeply sentimental man, which is just about the opposite of psychopathy. He made a point of not highlighting the sentimental side of himself during his presidency but the way he would make unpublicized visits to families of the war-dead just to sit and pray with them reveals a very emotional and sincere man indeed. He was a Christian gentleman rather than a conservative as such but he was above all a decent human being -- despite the foam-flecked "Bush=Hitler" rage from the Left -- -- JR

A character trait in psychopaths has been identified by scientists as a common thread in successful US presidents. Fearless dominance, which is linked to less social and physical apprehensiveness, boosts leadership, persuasiveness, crisis management and congressional relations, according to new research.

Theodore Roosevelt, regarded as one of the most influential US leaders even though he was in office more than a hundred years ago, ranked highest for this type of personality followed by John F Kennedy, Franklin D Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan.

Then came Rutherford Hayes, Zachary Taylor, Bill Clinton, Martin Van Buren, Andrew Jackson and George W Bush.

Fearless and dominant people are often a paradoxical mix of charm and nastiness. Cool and calm under pressure, they not easily rattled.

They lack the same kind of anticipatory anxiety that most people have so are not put off from taking dangerous actions.

They are usually intelligent and wealthy, relishing directing other people’s activities and basking in their admiration.

Psychologist Professor Scott Lilienfeld, of Emory University, Atlanta, said: 'Certain psychopathic traits may be like a double edged sword. 'Fearless dominance, for example, may contribute to reckless criminality and violence, or to skillful leadership in the face of a crisis.'

They are sexually adventurous and often takes risks.

It’s not that they can’t feel fear or anxiety, but it takes a much more extreme situation to elicit those emotions.

They live for the thrill, the excitement and the adrenaline rush and are attracted to jobs such as a fireman or policeman.

If you were assembling a Special Forces team, you would want to screen for people high in fearless dominance.

The analysis, published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology ["Fearless dominance and the U.S. presidency: Implications of psychopathic personality traits for successful and unsuccessful political leadership."], drew upon personality assessments of 42 presidents up to George W Bush and compiled by Steven Rubenzer and Thomas Faschingbauer for their book ‘Personality, Character and Leadership in the White House.’

More than a hundred experts including biographers, journalists and scholars who are established authorities on one or more US presidents evaluated their target presidents using standardised psychological measures of personality, intelligence and behaviour.

For rankings on various aspects of job performance, the analysis relied primarily on data from two large surveys of presidential historians.

The rich historical data on presidents, combined with detailed expert rankings, provided a window into an emerging theory some aspects of psychopathy may actually be positive adaptations in certain social situations.

Prof Lilienfeld said: 'The way many people think about mental illness is too cut-and-dried. 'Certainly, full-blown psychopathy is maladaptive and undesirable. 'But what makes the psychopathic personality so interesting is that it is not defined by a single trait, but a constellation of traits.'

A clinical psychopath encompasses myriad characteristics, such as fearless social dominance, self-centered impulsivity, superficial charm, guiltlessness, callousness, dishonesty and immunity to anxiety. Each of these traits lies along a continuum, and all individuals may exhibit one of more of these traits to some degree.

Prof Lilienfeld explained: 'You can think of it like height and weight. Everyone has some degree of both, and they are continuously distributed in the population.'

The results of the analysis raise the possibility that the boldness often associated with psychopathy may confer advantages over a variety of occupations involving power and prestige, from politics to business, law, athletics and the military.

The findings also add to the debate over the idea of the so-called 'successful psychopath,' an individual with psychopathic traits who rises to a position of power in the workplace.

Psychopathy is defined as a lack of empathy for others, or a conscience, and can be associated with extreme and manipulative behaviour. This is distinct from psychosis, a group of mental illnesses, including schizophrenia.

SOURCE

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Massive Government Cover-Up In Virginia?

by Lawrence A. Hunter

On September 6, 2012, Revolution PAC, which I chair, submitted Freedom-of-Information-Act (FOIA) requests to eight state and local agencies and offices of the Commonwealth of Virginia demanding release of all information and communications relating to the Brandon J. Raub case. Mr. Raub, a former, decorated Marine who served with distinction in Iraq and Afghanistan, was kidnapped on August 16 by a joint strike force of Virginia and Federal “law-enforcement” agents, after which they tried to “disappear” him into the Virginia psychiatric gulag without charging him with any wrongdoing.

What did Raub do to deserve this abuse and torment by the government? He posted comments on Facebook that were critical of the government, and it was a private Facebook page, to boot. It was only by the courageous efforts of his mother, a dedicated lawyer for liberty (John Whitehead of the Rutherford Institute), and widespread protest about this abuse of government power by average people across the nation that Raub was saved from being stashed away and subjected to psychotropic drugs and brainwashing by government shrinks.

According to Whitehead, something is rotten in the Commonwealth of Virginia that goes way beyond just the Raub case:

“Every year in Virginia, more than 20,000 people are detained for civil commitment and whisked away just like Raub. Brandon Raub’s case exposed the seedy underbelly of a governmental system that seems to be targeting Americans – especially military veterans – for expressing their discontent over America’s rapid transition to a police state.”

Is there a massive government cover-up involving the Raub case, and perhaps many others, going on in Virginia? It’s too early to tell but the early returns are not encouraging.

It took the Virginia State Police, through its Public Relations Director, exactly 36 minutes to respond to our 10-page FOIA request, which asked for much more than simply the “documents,” to which the pro forma response refers:

“The Virginia State Police has no documents responsive to your request, in accordance with Code of Virginia Section 2.2-3704. You may wish to contact the primary law enforcement agency involved in this incident: Chesterfield County Police Department. The Chesterfield County Police Department’s mailing address is P.O. Box 148, Chesterfield, VA, 23832.”

Clearly, this is not a serious, good faith response to a lengthy and detailed FOIA request that demands not only “documents” but also all electronically stored information and communications (ESI). The FOIA request reads, in part:

“Paper Preservation of ESI is Inadequate

“As hard copies do not preserve electronic searchability or metadata, they are not an adequate substitute for, or cumulative of, electronically stored versions. If information exists in both electronic and paper forms, agencies should preserve both forms.”

Unless the Virginia State Police are simply outright lying, they are playing word games designed to avoid having to come clean with what they knew, what they did and when they knew and did it. The PR Director clearly already had her orders and a prepared response in hand ready to go based on the old propaganda tactic of responding only to the questions they want to answer and ignoring the rest.

It strains credulity to accept at face value in this day and age that Virginia State Police were unaware and uninvolved in a joint Virginia-Federal strike force clearly planned and coordinated well before the fact and carried out with precision and cooperation among local police and several different federal “law-enforcement” agencies. At a minimum, one would expect the Virginia State Police to have audio records of police transmissions connected with the Raub case, which the FOIA request specifically included.

It took Governor Bob McDonnell’s Deputy Chief of Staff exactly 113 minutes to respond with this brush-off:

“Thank you for contacting the Office of the Governor with your request outlined below. This Office has no records responsive to your request. To the extent you seek documents that may or may not be in the possession of other state agencies or local law enforcement, please contact those agencies directly with your request.”

Either the Governor’s Office is lying or the Governor has totally ignored the high-profile Raub incidents and has not even been briefed on the matter, accounts and records of which would fall within the purview of the FOIA request. Mendacity or dereliction, I don’t know which is worse.

What about the Attorney General’s Office? Only this, 28 hours and 58 minutes and four separate submissions later from the AG’s FOIA Administrator:

"I can confirm that your FOIA request was received and passed on to me, the FOIA Administrator, for handling. We have begun the process of determining whether or not this Office has documents responsive to your request and will provide you with a response within the statutory time frame. Thank you."

Which at least reveals that the AG is aware of the case and probably has seen the complete file on it. The question now is, will he respond in good faith and reveal the contents of this file or will he use the period “within the statutory time frame” to construct a Nixonian modified limited hang-out. Time will tell.

In the meantime, though, the most revealing of all responses thus far came from the Clerk of the Circuit Court that ended up releasing Mr. Raub on August 23:

“Pursuant to Code of Virginia Section 37.2-818 which requires the Court to keep confidential any recordings, records, reports and documents, this file was sealed by Judge W. Allan Sharrett and as such I have no authority to unseal the file.”

This section of the Virginia code ostensibly is intended to protect the privacy of people caught up in the civil-commitment web, and it provides for the person held under civil-commitment proceedings to obtain the file. Additionally, however, the statute also provides that anyone else may request access to the Court’s file, in which case the Court is required to unseal the file “if it finds that such disclosure is in the best interest of the person who is the subject of the hearing or of the public.”

Whitehead has stated publicly that Raub intends to sue the FBI, and presumably during the process of discovery, Mr. Raub will seek access to the sealed file. But, as I wrote in this space earlier, and especially in light of the apparently promiscuous use of civil commitment in Virginia, much more is at stake than simply Mr. Raub’s civil suit against the FBI, notwithstanding its extraordinary importance:

"These Orwellian actions and this criminal conspiracy between Virginia and federal officials are so outrageous and so contrary to the precepts of American and Virginian justice that the ramifications of these unlawful acts go far beyond the harm done to Mr. Raub; they undermine the constitutional foundations of the United States of America and the Commonwealth of Virginia. Therefore, all communications related to these incidents that occurred among Virginia agencies and personnel and with federal officials should be released to the public without delay."

Therefore, the Circuit Court’s response to Revolution PAC’s FOIA request is far from adequate. Either the Court must open the file to public scrutiny or explain why, in its opinion such disclosure is not in the best interest of the public.

So far, we have not received any response to our FOIA request from either the Chesterfield Police or the Commonwealth Attorney for Chesterfield County. Stay tuned.

SOURCE

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ELSEWHERE

Russian ships displayed at DNC tribute to vets: "On the last night of the Democratic National Convention, a retired Navy four-star took the stage to pay tribute to veterans. Behind him, on a giant screen, the image of four hulking warships reinforced his patriotic message. But there was a big mistake in the stirring backdrop: those are Russian warships. While retired Adm. John Nathman, a former commander of Fleet Forces Command, honored vets as America’s best, the ships from the Russian Federation Navy were arrayed like sentinels on the big screen above. These were the very Soviet-era combatants that Nathman and Cold Warriors like him had once squared off against. “The ships are definitely Russian,” said noted naval author Norman Polmar"

MA: ROTC returns to Harvard after 41-year absence: "For the first time since Richard Nixon was president, Army cadets are training at Harvard University. The Reserve Officers’ Training Corps, better known as the ROTC, has been absent from the venerable Boston institution since 1971, when it was banned amid protests of the Vietnam War. But this week the program returned, as 25 cadets in gray shirts and black shorts -- including 10 Harvard students -- did an hour of calisthenics at McCurdy Outdoor Track behind Harvard Stadium. The school renewed its ties with ROTC after the military’s 'Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell' law, which effectively banned gays from the military, was repealed."

Judge tells Twitter to give up protester’s posts or face fine: "Twitter Inc. has to turn over information about an Occupy Wall Street protester’s posts or face a fine, a judge ruled, giving the company three days to show it isn’t in contempt of court. ... Sciarrino ruled June 30 that Twitter must turn over Twitter’s posts from Sept. 15 to Dec. 30 and user information linked to the '@destructuremal' account of Harris, who was arrested on Oct. 1 with about 700 protesters on the Brooklyn Bridge, denying the company’s request to quash the subpoena."

'New York Post' Runs Boldest Anti-Obama Ad Yet: "Even casual readers of the New York Post will find it hard to miss the full-page ad immediately following the paper’s must-read gossip section, Page Six, that claims President Obama’s biological father is not Barack Hussein Obama Sr., but rather poet and labor activist Frank Marshall Davis. Or as the ad puts it, “Communist Party Propagandist Frank Marshall Davis.” The ad, headlined “Obama’s Big Lie Revealed,” is a promotion for a DVD titled Dreams from My Real Father, which is billed as “Amazon’s #1 documentary.”

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My Twitter.com identity: jonjayray. I have deleted my old Facebook page as I rarely accessed 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 Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist" (Nationalsozialist) and the full name of Hitler's political party (translated) was "The National Socialist German Workers' Party" (In German: Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei)

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