The U.S. unemployment rate

Table 15 BLS Alternate Measures of Unemployment



Table A-15 is where one can find a better approximation of what the unemployment rate really is.  Notice I said "better" approximation not to be confused with "good" approximation.

The official unemployment rate is 7.4%. However, if you start counting all the people who want a job but gave up, all the people with part-time jobs that want a full-time job, all the people who dropped off the unemployment rolls because their unemployment benefits ran out, etc., you get a closer picture of what the unemployment rate is. That number is in the last row labeled U-6.

U-6 is much higher at 14.0%. Both numbers would be way higher still, were it not for millions dropping out of the labor force over the past few years.

Were it not for people dropping out of the labor force, the unemployment rate would be over 9%. In addition, there are 8,245,000 people who are working part-time but want full-time work.

Digging under the surface, much of the drop in the unemployment rate over the past two years is nothing but a statistical mirage coupled with a massive increase in part-time jobs starting in October 2012 as a result of Obamacare legislation.

More HERE

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

Is Liberalism Keeping The Poor, Poor?

There is a new study out with the finding that urban sprawl contributes to inequality, making it more difficult for the poor to climb the income ladder.

Okay, let's accept that idea for a moment. Why is there urban sprawl? Isn't it directly tied to liberal policies that have prevailed over the past 40 years? Federal judges and the teachers unions combined to destroy the inner city schools. So middle class families who wanted a decent education for their children had no choice but to turn to private schools or retreat to the suburbs. Then, minimum wage laws, labor monopolies and the lure of welfare made the inner city increasingly unattractive to employers seeking a productive workforce.

As the tax base shrinks and taxpaying voters disappear, city government becomes completely captured by the public sector unions. They use their power to pad their own compensation at the expense of deteriorating city services and to wrest promises of post-retirement benefits that can only be paid by an (unlikely) influx of new taxpayers. Thus starts a downward political death spiral that can only end in bankruptcy.

So what's the obvious public policy conclusion? Don't adopt policies that chase the middle class and the job creator community away. Or at least that would be obvious unless you write for The New York Times. Here is Paul Krugman, who does a decent job of describing the study's conclusions:

    "Atlanta looks just like Detroit gone bust: both are places where the American dream seems to be dying, where the children of the poor have great difficulty climbing the economic ladder. In fact, upward social mobility — the extent to which children manage to achieve a higher socioeconomic status than their parents — is even lower in Atlanta than it is in Detroit…

    And in Atlanta poor and rich neighborhoods are far apart because, basically, everything is far apart; Atlanta is the Sultan of Sprawl, even more spread out than other major Sun Belt cities…As a result, disadvantaged workers often find themselves stranded; there may be jobs available somewhere, but they literally can't get there."

As it turns out, the sprawl theory of perpetual poverty may be completely wrong. Randal O'Toole says it won't hold water and notes that only a few years ago Krugman blamed the housing bubble on anti-sprawl policies.

Even so, what are the solutions? All Krugman has to offer is:

    "[T]his observation clearly reinforces the case for policies that help families function without multiple cars."

Cars? What about the teachers unions? Not a word. What about the lack of school choice? Nada. Minimum wage laws, labor union monopoles, and other restrictions on the right to work? Not a peep. A culture of welfare dependency that erodes the willingness to work? Zero. City governments doing what private companies are no longer allowed to do: promising post-retirement benefits without funding them? Zilch.

What about the fact that the policies routinely advocated on the editorial pages of the Times are far more harmful to social mobility than the automobile could ever be? Not a word about that either.

What's true of cities is also true of states. People and capital move where they are welcome. As Travis Brown and I wrote the other day in the Dallas Morning News:

    "Texas is the nation's No. 1 job creator. Since the official end of the recession in 2009, Texas has been responsible for almost one out of every two jobs created in the entire country."

This is not a new phenomenon. For decades, Texas has been creating jobs faster than other states. Between 2001 and 2011, while many other states were hemorrhaging jobs, Texas increased private-sector employment by 732,800…

Why has Texas been so successful at job creation? We're a very labor-friendly state — meaning that government doesn't very often get between job creators and job seekers. The Mercatus Center at George Mason University ranks Texas No. 1 in labor market freedom.

I don't know what it is about the left, but they can't see the connection between the policies they advocate and the harmful results they decry.

Take President Obama. He is now talking about the economy. But the way he talks about it is as though (after 4 ½ year in office) he bears no personal responsibility for anything that's happened. As Charles Krauthammer pointed out the other night, Obama talks about the economy "as if he has been a bystander," as someone who "just arrived on a boat." "It's his economy and he's pretending he just stumbled on it."

Hmmm. Maybe we should send them all back to school for a course in mainstream economics.

SOURCE

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

Is Populism Dead?

There is a strange lack of effective agitation about some big issues

Victor Davis Hanson

Occupy Wall Streeters claimed that they were populists. Their ideological opposites, the Tea Partiers, said they were, too. Both became polarizing. And so far populism, whether on the right or left, does not seem to have made inroads with the traditional Republican and Democrat establishments.

Gas has gone up about $2 a gallon since Barack Obama took office. Given average yearly rates of national consumption, that increase alone translates into an extra $1 trillion that American drivers havencollectively paid in higher fuel costs over the last 54 months.

Such a crushing burden on the cash-strapped commuter class is rarely cited in the liberal fixation on cap-and-trade, wind and solar subsidies, and the supposed dangers of fracking.

When the president scaled back the number of new gas and oil leases on federal lands over time, he was appealing to his boutique base -- not to those who can scarcely meet their monthly heating and cooling bills.

Should there not be an opening for a conservative populist response?

Unfortunately, pro-drilling conservatives sound more like spokesmen for oil companies than grassroots champions for strapped motorists.

Total student debt is approaching $1 trillion. That is an unsustainable burden for recent graduates under 25 facing an adjusted youth unemployment rate of over 20 percent.

Yet the well-off are more interested in ensuring that their children get into tony, name-brand colleges than in fretting about how to pay for it -- a fact well known to our price-gauging universities.

On the other end, need- and ethnic-based scholarships and waivers have made college more affordable for the poor than it is for the middle classes. The parents of the latter make enough to be disqualified from most government help, but not enough to afford soaring tuition.

Banks find student loans backed by government guarantees profitable.

Top-heavy universities assume that there will always be more income from the subsidized poor and the rich. Again, middle-class students are caught up a creek without the paddles of wealthy parents or a generous government.

There is also a populist argument to be made against the farm bill.

There are more than 48 million Americans on food stamps, an increase of about 12 million since the beginning of the Obama presidency. At a time of record-high crop prices, the U.S. government still helps well-off farmers with some $20 billion in annual crop payouts and indirect subsidies.

The left mythicizes food-stamp recipients almost as if they all must be the Cratchits of Dickensian England.The right romanticizes corporate agriculture as if the growers all were hardscrabble family farmers in need of a little boost to get through another tough harvest. Those in between, who pay federal income taxes and are not on food stamps, lack the empathy of the poor and the clout of the rich. Can't a politician say that?

Illegal immigration is likewise not a left vs. right or Republican vs. Democrat issue, but instead mostly one of class.

The influx of millions of illegal immigrants has ensured corporate America access to cheap labor while offering a growing constituency for political and academic elites. Yet the earning power of poorer American workers -- especially African-Americans and Hispanic-Americans -- has stagnated.

The common bond between the agendas of La Raza activists and the corporate world is apparently a relative lack of concern for the welfare of entry-level laborers, many of them in America’s inner cities, who are competing against millions of illegal workers.

Given the slow-growth, high-unemployment economy, and the policies of the Federal Reserve, interest on simple passbook accounts has all but vanished.

The poor are not so affected. They are more often borrowers than lenders, and they are sometime beneficiaries of federally subsidized debt relief. The rich have the capital and connections to find more profitable investments in real estate or the stock market that make them immune from pedestrian, underperforming savings accounts.

In other words, this administration's loose money policy has been good for the indebted and even better for the stock-invested rich. But it is absolutely lousy for the middle class and for strapped retirees with a few dollars in conservative passbook accounts.

The aftermath of the 2008 financial meltdown followed the same script. The crisis arose from a strange connivance between loans to the unqualified and huge profits for Wall Street. Its remedy was to have the lowly taxpayer pick up the walk-away debt of the former while offering bailouts for the latter.

Polls show the president's approval numbers are tanking. Congress can hardly become any more unpopular. Maybe one reason is that neither seems to care much about those who are not rich and not poor.

America has plenty of community organizers and agitators, and even more smooth corporate lobbyists, but populist politicians disappeared long ago.

SOURCE

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

Al Qaeda is Back

By all accounts, the attack was planned with care and executed with precision. At two notorious Iraqi prisons, Abu Ghraib and Taji, al-Qaeda combatants last week used mortars, small arms, suicide bombers, and assault forces to free 400 prisoners, including several who had been on death row. AQ spokesmen hailed those released as “mujahedeen,” holy warriors, who will rejoin the jihad on battlefields throughout the Middle East and beyond.

Soon after, we were seeing headlines such as this: “Al Qaeda Is Back.”

Where had al-Qaeda gone? Dig deep in the memory hole — all the way to last summer. At the prestigious Aspen Security Forum, Peter Bergen, CNN’s national-security analyst and a director at the New America Foundation, gave a talk titled, “Time to Declare Victory: Al Qaeda Is Defeated.”

Lieutenant Colonel Thomas Lynch III (retired), a distinguished research fellow at the National Defense University, was writing and speaking widely on the same theme. And President Obama’s reelection campaign was making similar claims, e.g. “The tide of war is receding,” “Osama bin Laden is dead and General Motors is alive.” Mitt Romney hardly attempted to rebut the thesis.

I don’t like to say “I told you so” — oh, who am I kidding? Of course I do. But in this instance there is more than ample justification. Scholars at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, in particular Thomas Joscelyn and Bill Roggio, have argued consistently and forcefully, based on solid evidence, that the May 2011 killing of Osama bin Laden, followed by the elimination of other al-Qaeda leaders, did not, by any stretch of the imagination, mean the demise of al-Qaeda.

Instead, it led AQ to adapt, evolve, and morph. It is essential to study these changes and probe their strategic significance — an assignment unlikely to be seriously undertaken by those convinced al-Qaeda swims with the fishes.

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

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

For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC,  AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated) and Coral reef compendium. (Updated as news items come in).  GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten.

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)

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

Understanding the Left

From an Australian Jewish viewpoint

I might have finally understood the Left. The stance of the Left is best explained by one of my favourite jokes – the social worker joke:

"Two social workers are walking down the street late at night. As they turn a corner, they see a man lying in the gutter. He is bruised and bleeding, his clothes torn, and he is moaning with pain; clearly he has been attacked. He sees the two people and calls to them “Please, someone help me!”

And one of the social workers turns to the other and says: “Whoever did this to him needs help!”"

This joke epitomizes the seemingly inverted attitude of the Left towards so many things today.

The Left love the victim or underdog in any conflict. In particular, they love someone they think they can help (whether they can is another question). In the joke, the man lying in the gutter is clearly a victim but can he be helped by a social worker? What he needs is urgent medical assistance. Instead the social worker wants to seek out the ‘root cause of the conflict’ and fix that. Why did the perpetrator of the attack do such a thing?

In the world of the Left there is no absolute good or bad. There’s actually not much free choice either. People are a product of their upbringing and the circumstances they find themselves in. These circumstances are what forces people to do what they do. So the perpetrator is the one truly deserving of help – that person is the true victim of their circumstance who was forced into crime. If only we can fix that person and people like them, crime would disappear!

For the Left, there is no such thing as a terrorist. They are ‘militants’ or ‘freedom fighters’ – heroes fighting for the most noble cause of freedom. Can there be a greater calling? Being ‘freedom fighters’ means their enemy are those who are depriving them of freedom, which in turn causes their ‘despair’, which forces them to do terrible things, like murder innocent civilians by blowing themselves up.

If Islamist leaders hate Jews and Israel and openly declare their intent to destroy them, the view of the Left is that it could not be because they have some twisted ideology, or are just plain bad folks. Rather, it must be because of something Israel did which causes them to be radicalized. Therefore, the onus is entirely on Israel to change, and/or to appease them. Whether it’s truly in Israel’s power to do anything about this is irrelevant. Nothing is ever asked of a victim. Israel is expected to free convicted murderers in order for the Palestinians will agree to come to the negotiating table!

In 1948 and 1967, Israel was the victim. That ‘plucky little country’ was surrounded by enemies seeking her destruction. The Left rallied behind Israel back then, but not any more. Why? Israel made the terrible mistake of defeating her enemies at war, then building a successful country instead of wallowing in self-pity and victim-hood. Jewish refugees expelled from Arab countries made new lives for themselves. They can no longer be helped – they fixed themselves! What’s the Left to do except turn the tables and turn David into the new Goliath?

Asylum seekers try to reach Australia by the boat-load. They take huge risks to escape their home countries and seek out a safer, better life in a first world country like Australia, which is signatory to conventions governing the way we must deal with refugees. So if only they can get here, all will be well. We have a view of the tail end of their journey – the final boat leg across treacherous waters from Indonesia and thereabouts. But in fact, their journey starts well before that. We have no idea how much they have paid, how many have died along the way and what they have been told by people smugglers. Yet the view of the Left is that we are entirely responsible for providing first world refugee settlement services wherever they need them. Their view is that they are forced by their circumstance to take a dangerous boat ride and we must do whatever we can to help them.

Is taking out full page ads in newspapers declaring that they will not be settled in Australia the answer? I doubt it. For all we know, they may choose to believe the people smugglers instead. Will establishing refugee assessment centres in Asia fix the problem? It will fix it for some, but is unlikely to make a serious dent nor to stop the people who don’t want to be processed in Indonesia from taking a boat. Because as many refugees as we help, there will always be many more we cannot. But the Left will not stop campaigning until they help everyone in the world.

This bizarre inversion comes from from a fundamental view on the nature of people. If you believe that all people are essentially good, then you are stuck with a question: why do good people do really bad/dangerous/risky things? The only possible answer is that it’s because they have been provoked; because some ‘root cause’ has led them down this path.

By maintaining this view of people the Left believe they can fix the whole world. But in a world where there is no shortage of bad, what if the Left’s view of the world is flawed? What if there are people who are genuinely evil? People who view appeasement as weakness and either pounce on it, or shift the goalposts so that consensus is never reached, or until their true motives are revealed? What if wars must be fought and won to defeat those who wish our destruction? Unfortunately, we cannot count on the Left to fight these wars.

SOURCE

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

Bureaucratic overkill again

13 Wisconsin officials raid animal shelter to kill baby deer.  No goodwill at all

Two weeks ago, Ray Schulze was working in a barn at the Society of St. Francis no-kill animal shelter in Kenosha, Wis., when officials swarmed the shelter with a search warrant.

“[There were] nine [Department of Natural Resources] agents and four deputy sheriffs, and they were all armed to the teeth,” Mr. Schulze told WISN 12. “It was like a SWAT team.”

The agents were there to retrieve a baby deer named Giggles that was dropped off by a family worried she had been abandoned by her mother, the station reported. Wisconsin law forbids the possession of wildlife.

“I said the deer is scheduled to go to the wildlife reserve the next day,” Mr. Schulze told the station. “I was thinking in my mind they were going to take the deer and take it to a wildlife shelter, and here they come carrying the baby deer over their shoulder. She was in a body bag. I said, ‘Why did you do that?’ He said, ‘That’s our policy,’ and I said, ‘That’s one hell of a policy.’”

Department of Natural Resources Supervisor Jennifer Niemeyer told WISN 12 that the law requires DNR agents to euthanize wild animals because of their potential danger.

The station asked if the raid could have been done in a less costly manner by making a phone call first.

“If a sheriff’s department is going in to do a search warrant on a drug bust, they don’t call them and ask them to voluntarily surrender their marijuana or whatever drug that they have before they show up,” the supervisor responded.

Shelter president Cindy Schultz said she plans to sue the agency.  “They went way over the top for a little, tiny, baby deer,” Miss Schultz said.

SOURCE

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

Living the dream?   Record Number 21 Million Young Adults Living With Parents

 A record number of young adults are living with their parents. A new study from Pew Research finds that 36 percent of Millennials – young adults ages 18 to 31 – are living at their parents’ homes, the highest number in four decades. A record 21.6 million young adults were still living at home last year.

“Most of my friends that have graduated end up living back home because even if they have a job they can’t afford to pay rent and pay back their loans at the same time,” Stephanie Levonne, a 20-year-old college student living at home, told CBS News. “I know a lot of people that took out almost half or more of their tuition in loans which is $50,000 so it’s impossible to pay rent and live in New York City while paying off your loan.”

The number rose from 32 percent at the beginning of the Great Recession in 2007 and 34 percent in 2009.

Declining employment led more young adults to stay with their parents. Sixty-three percent of Millennials had jobs in 2012, down from 70 percent in 2007.

SOURCE

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

Obama's Creeping Authoritarianism

Imposed law replaces checks and balances

If we learned anything about Barack Obama in his first term it is that when he starts repeating the same idea over and over, what's on his mind is something else.

The first term's over-and-over subject was "the wealthiest 1%." Past some point, people wondered why he kept beating these half-dead horses. After the election, we knew. It was to propagandize the targeted voting base that would provide his 4% popular-vote margin of victory—very young voters and minorities. They believed. He won.

The second-term over-and-over, elevated in his summer speech tour, is the shafting of the middle class. But the real purpose here isn't the speeches' parboiled proposals. It is what he says the shafting of the middle class is forcing him to do. It is forcing him to "act"—to undertake an unprecedented exercise of presidential power in domestic policy-making. ObamaCare was legislated. In the second term, new law will come from him.

Please don't complain later that you didn't see it coming. As always, Mr. Obama states publicly what his intentions are. He is doing that now. Toward the end of his speech last week in Jacksonville, Fla., he said: "So where I can act on my own, I'm going to act on my own. I won't wait for Congress." (Applause.)

The July 24 speech at Knox College in Galesburg, Ill., has at least four references to his intent to act on his own authority, as he interprets it: "That means whatever executive authority I have to help the middle class, I'll use it." (Applause.) And: "We're going to do everything we can, wherever we can, with or without Congress."

Every president since George Washington has felt frustration with the American system's impediments to change. This president is done with Congress.

The political left, historically inclined by ideological belief to public policy that is imposed rather than legislated, will support Mr. Obama's expansion of authority. The rest of us should not.

The U.S. has a system of checks and balances. Mr. Obama is rebalancing the system toward a national-leader model that is alien to the American tradition.

To create public support for so much unilateral authority, Mr. Obama needs to lessen support for the other two branches of government—Congress and the judiciary. He is doing that.

Mr. Obama and his supporters in the punditocracy are defending this escalation by arguing that Congress is "gridlocked." But don't overstate that low congressional approval rating. This is the one branch that represents the views of all Americans. It's gridlocked because voters are.

Take a closer look at the Galesburg and Jacksonville speeches. Mr. Obama doesn't merely criticize Congress. He mocks it repeatedly. Washington "ignored" problems. It "made things worse." It "manufactures" crises and "phony scandals." He is persuading his audiences to set Congress aside and let him act.

So too the judiciary. During his 2010 State of the Union speech, Mr. Obama denounced the Supreme Court Justices in front of him. The National Labor Relations Board has continued to issue orders despite two federal court rulings forbidding it to do so. Attorney General Eric Holder says he will use a different section of the Voting Rights Act to impose requirements on Southern states that the Supreme Court ruled illegal. Mr. Obama's repeated flouting of the judiciary and its decisions are undermining its institutional authority, as intended.

The three administration nominees enabled by the Senate's filibuster deal—Richard Cordray at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, Thomas Perez at the Labor Department and EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy—open a vast swath of American life to executive authority on steroids. There won't be enough hours in the day for Mr. Obama to "act on my own."

In a recent Journal op-ed, "Obama Suspends the Law," former federal judge Michael McConnell noted there are few means to stop a president who decides he is not obligated to execute laws as passed by Congress. So there's little reason to doubt we'll see more Obamaesque dismissals of established law, as with ObamaCare's employer mandate. Mr. Obama is pushing in a direction that has the potential for a political crisis.

A principled opposition would speak out. Barack Obama is right that he isn't running again. But the Democratic Party is. Their Republican opponents should force the party's incumbents to defend the president's creeping authoritarianism.

If Democratic Senate incumbents or candidates from Louisiana, Alaska, Missouri, Arkansas, North Carolina, Montana and Iowa think voters should accede to a new American system in which a president forces laws into place as his prerogative rather than first passing them through Congress, they should be made to say so.

And to be sure, the other purpose of the shafted middle-class tour is to demolish the GOP's standing with independent voters and take back the House in 2014. If that happens—and absent a more public, aggressive Republican voice it may—an unchecked, unbalanced presidential system will finally arrive.

A final quotation on America's system of government: "To ensure that no person or group would amass too much power, the founders established a government in which the powers to create, implement, and adjudicate laws were separated. Each branch of government is balanced by powers in the other two coequal branches." Source: The White House website of President Barack Obama.

SOURCE

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

For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC,  AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated) and Coral reef compendium. (Updated as news items come in).  GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten.

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)

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

Philosophical reductionism

It's probably time I left problems in analytical philosophy alone.  Such problems are a real brain-strain and my last academic publications on such topics were in my '20s.  I am now 70.  Yet what time has eroded perhaps time has also replaced.  Maybe more knowledge has replaced less-keen reasoning.  So I am going to say a few words about an old philosophical problem in the manifestly absurd belief that I have a solution to it.

There is a good and up to date account of the problem here.  As science has progressed, it has become clear that a lot of what we do can be explained in terms of atoms and molecules in our brains interacting.  We seem to be just protein machines entirely at the mercy of influences within ourselves and influences acting on us from outside.  We have no freewill. All our decisions are mechanistically foreordained.

But that seems wrong.  We certainly feel that we have choices and make decisions.  And that is the problem of philosophical reductionism.

In both philosophy and psychology (I have an academic background in both) reductionism has long been debated, with passionate committment common on either side.  A complication is that theism/atheism seems to get dragged into it.  Christians triumphantly declare that their beliefs correspond to reality whereas what the mechanists say is clearly absurd.  And that does burn up the mechanists, who are generally atheists.  Do we need a "soul" to make the explanation of human behaviour complete?

The reference given above stresses that point.  The mechanists feel that if they let go of their reductionistic explanations, they will be in danger from religion  -- a most feared and abhorred  fate.

I am actually, I think, going to make it easier for them.  I am the most utter atheist you have ever met (like Carnap, I don't even believe that the word "God" is meaningful) but I am also profoundly grateful for the lessons I learned from Christianity in my youth.  I was a very fundamentalist Christian in my teens but my readings in philosophy converted me to atheism when I was about 19.  Unlike most who have undergone such a conversion, however, I still have the warmest memories of my time as a Christian and have a very high regard for Christianity.

So there is a sense in which I straddle both camps and I can therefore think about the issues without fear of what I might conclude.

And I can give my conclusion in a single sentence:  Mechanists mistake how we work for what we are.

To illustrate:  I may be looking close-up at a bit of canvas and see with utter clarity that it is made up of a series of coloured dots with no rhyme or reason evident in their placement.  That is the sort of thing that the mechanists quite accurately see.  But I cam also take a few steps back and look at the canvas as a whole.  And what I see then is a French pointillist painting worth millions of dollars.  Both views are of course accurate within their own context.  The painting is BOTH of the things seen about it.

So what comes of all those atoms and molecules swimming about in our brains is both a literal reality and an EMERGENT reality.  Our  brain activity CONSTRUCTS something real and important.  That, by and large, is what brains do.  And that construction is both wonderful and of supreme importance.  God doesn't come into it.  We just need to accept that the whole can be more than the sum of its parts.  And it is the existence and interactions of those higher order constructs that injects the indeterminacy into our behaviour.  What is contructed will vary slightly between people and that generates debate and uncertainty.  It is the EXPLANATION of our world that is important, not the atoms and molecules that enable patterns in our world to be seen and used.  We really are more than what makes us work.  Concentration on our internal machinery is  useful for some things but for most everyday purposes it is silly and fruitless.

The concept of emergent properties is a hoary one in philosophy  so one could ask why it is not widely seen as an answer to the  problems of reductionism.  For many (but not all) the answer to that question would seem to be a matter of ideology.  Leftists in particular (and most philosophers are Leftist) find reductionism  an important prop for their rejection of everything in the world about them.  And declaring that we are just a collection of molecules does seem a good rationale for their gospel that "There is no such thing as right and wrong".  How can there be if we are simply the product of chemical reactions?

The hilarious thing about that nihilistic account of morality, however, is that nobody believes it.  Just listen to Leftists talk about apartheid, George Bush, Israel or racism and you will hear the moral language coming thick and fast.  Racism is wrong even though there is no such thing as right and wrong!  I pointed out long ago how attached to moral judgments Leftists are, despite their philosophy.  Reason is wasted on such people.

I hasten to reiterate that reductionism is not of itself a folly. I have after all done a bit of it myself. It has its place in understanding how we work but how we work gives rise to a much bigger story.

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

Fox Versus the Islam-Boosting 'Mainstream'

They may find it scandalous for someone to say so, but our secular liberal media are playing favorites with religion. They have a spoiled child, Islam. Journalists see Islam as a bullied, minority faith for brown people. Draw a cartoon of Mohammed with dynamite on his head, and you are the worst kind of trouble-making hater.

But write a book declaring that Jesus isn't God? That's not picking a fight or making trouble. That actually delights media elitists. They see America as too identified with Christian-nation "intolerance," a bond that needs to be broken.

Look no further than Lauren Green's Foxnews.com interview with Muslim author Reza Aslan, who wrote a book titled "Zealot," which wildly claims that Jesus wasn't God, and (scriptural evidence be damned) Jesus never said or thought that he was.

Green's first question? "This is an interesting book. Now, I want to clarify: You are a Muslim, so why did you write a book about the founder of Christianity?"

That's hardly a ridiculous question. It is actually the necessary first question. I have written a book charging that the liberal press stole the 2012 election. Were I to appear on CNN, would it not be correct to establish from the start that I am a conservative?

But liberals sniffed "bigotry" in Green's open-ended question (which she asked several times and couldn't get a straight answer). They sensed she was saying Aslan and Muslims should somehow be banned from writing about Christianity.

In responding to Green's question, Aslan arrogantly lectured Green like she was a little girl, dismissing her question as impudent. He claimed, "I am an expert with a Ph.D. in the history of religions. ... To be clear, I want to emphasize one more time, I am a historian. I am a Ph.D. in the history of religions."

That is emphatically false. The Ph.D. was in sociology, something entirely different. He also has a master of arts in fiction. That qualification seems more appropriate here. In an interview on NPR's "Weekend Edition," Aslan had another "cringe worthy" moment that even NPR felt pressed to correct on its website: "Our guest incorrectly says the first Gospel, the Gospel of Mark, contains no statement of messianic identity from Jesus. In fact, in Mark 14:62, Jesus responds affirmatively when asked if he is the Son of God."

NPR didn't say "inadvertently." Not "mistakenly." The word they chose — "incorrectly" — speaks volumes. Aslan was pushing a falsehood.

Reverse this media phenomenon: What if it were a Muslim who converted to Christianity claiming Mohammed wasn't a prophet? For starters, no one in today's press would ever give him the time of day; or if they did, the first question would certainly be Lauren Green's question: Aren't you biased?

The adjectives piled up to describe this interview filled a thesaurus of trash talk. MSNBC midday host Alex Wagner made a list of liberal blog babble: "It's been called absolutely demented, cringe worthy, excruciating, breathtakingly incurious, a complete car crash, the most embarrassing interview Fox News has ever done."

As she interviewed Aslan, Wagner boasted "Fox has revealed two biases; anti-Muslim and also anti-fact." Fact-challenged Aslan announced his interview was a "jump the shark" moment marking the decline and fall of Fox News.  Soon, MSNBC will be number one?

A professor named Jeffrey Scholes exemplified perfectly the liberal superiority dance against "Christian privilege" on the blog Religion Dispatches

"Many of us want to see the scholar vs. the dilettante; the open-minded vs. the close-minded; the objective vs. the subjective; the facts vs. values." These people actually believe liberalism is objective, and liberals deal in facts, unlike conservatives. He continued: "More to the point, the interview presents us with a real shot at projection: We finally get the chance to stick it to Fox News, especially as it shows itself to be less than 'Fair and Balanced.'"

No one mocking Fox and Green gave them any credit for extending an interview to Aslan in the first place. And no one acknowledged the sad fact that Green is the only religion correspondent at a national TV news network. The boob-tube "news" crews don't darken church doors and feel no need to have any expertise in any religion's sacred texts or theology.

But Aslan can be hailed on every liberal outlet, with hosts shamelessly aiming to "juice" his book sales, as MSNBC's Wagner put it. "Please do read the book," she pleaded. In an interview on "The Daily Show," substitute host John Oliver was over the top: "I loved this book," he said in the first minute. At interview's end, he repeated: "I absolutely love this book! You gotta get it. ... The fantastic Reza Aslan!"

This might be obvious, since mocking the divinity of Jesus Christ from Jon Stewart to "South Park" is the daily bread of Comedy Central. And mocking Mohammed is banned.

SOURCE

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

The Great Defunding Obamacare Debate

by ALAN CARUBA

Congress is going on vacation in August and the President will be taking another one in Martha's Vineyard where the very rich and the extremely rich pass a summer's day. When both return they will have until September 30 to pass a continuing resolution; the way the government has been funded for many years.

On the table will be the need to raise the debt ceiling to allow the U.S. to borrow enough money to pay off the largest debt in U.S. history. In his first term, Obama borrowed more than all preceding Presidents combined. His "stimulus" package didn't work and neither has anything else that might pass for an economic policy. The nation has been stuck in a rut of very low, inadequate growth for five years during which Obama spent the first four blaming George W. Bush and the last year blaming the Republicans.

Looming ahead to further exacerbate the nation's economic decline is the implementation of Obamacare. Nobody seems to like it much. Major unions have written Obama, telling him to "fix" it and hardly a day goes by that we don't learn some new horrid thing about it. Nearly half the states refused to set up the insurance exchanges it requires. By nearly everyone's assessment, it is unworkable.

How bad is Obamacare? As far back as 2009 the Democrats in Congress tried to get themselves and their staffs exempted from it.

There is a debate raging among Republicans over whether to defund Obamacare as a way of avoiding its full implementation and driving a stake through its heart until it can be repealed. The White House is, as usual, lying to the public, saying this would "shut down" the government. It would not. The only services that would be affected would be those deemed "non-essential."

Rep. John Boehner, the Speaker of the House, has maintained that repeal of Obamacare is the only solution. It is not the only answer. Defunding its implementation has been an option since it was signed into law. Boehner (R-OH) has been sharply criticized for not putting this option before the House. Now there's a momentum growing in both the House and Senate to defund Obamacare.

"Republicans in the Senate and Republicans in the House need to stand on this issue, need to refuse to budge," says Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah), "because we will be complicit in Obamacare...if we provide funding for the administration to do that." Defunding would be a victory for the Tea Party movement that was instrumental in electing Senators Ted Cruz (R-Cruz), Marco Rubio (R-FL), and others.

Leading the effort to defund Obamacare, the Heritage Foundation reports that it is closing in on securing enough co-sponsors of the Defunding Obamacare Act of 2013 to achieve "critical mass in the House", but notes that "the Washington Establishment is more interested in striking a deal with President Obama on immigration, taxes, and spending than fighting to defund Obamacare."

The House, which has passed any number of bills to repeal Obamacare at this point, controls the "purse strings" because all laws involving spending can only be initiated there. The bills, however, never go farther than the House.

Obama knows that the last thing Republicans on Capitol Hill want is to be blamed for causing the government to "shut down." Political pundits recall that when it happened in 1995 everyone blamed then-Speaker Newt Gingrich and the GOP, but what they don't remember is that, in 1996, the party picked up seats in the Senate and continued its control of the House. That could be a 2014 scenario, but these are different times with different players involved.

The problem the Republican Party has, in addition to a whole bunch of very squishy members in Congress, is a media that will defend Obama and Obamacare by framing the situation as one of intransigence and a blind desire to punish the President who bested them in 2012 by getting reelected.

The bigger problem, however, is Obamacare.

In my opinion, the Republicans in the House will likely not vote to defund it because they are looking ahead to the 2014 midterm elections. It is easier to fuss about the debt ceiling, get a few spending cuts, and use Obamacare as an issue to secure political control of Congress next year. Only then would the GOP be in a position to repeal Obamacare. To politicians on Capitol Hill, it is a less scary scenario. I would never bet on the courage of politicians.

One possible outcome for Obamacare would be something comparable to the fate of Prohibition, the national ban on the sale, production, and transportation of alcohol that was the law of the land from 1920 to 1933. It was enacted by the 18th Amendment and repealed by the 21st due to its unpopularity. It too was unworkable.

The only thing we know for sure about Obamacare is that it will ruin the best healthcare system in the world and it will end up killing people.

SOURCE

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

For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC,  AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated) and Coral reef compendium. (Updated as news items come in).  GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten.

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)

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

Why Won't the Media Cover Huma Abedin's Ties to Global Jihad Movement?

Nationalized health care was one of the first programs enacted by the Bolsheviks after they seized power in 1917. Nearly a century later, the U.S. enacted "Obamacare."

Who won the Cold War again? This is one of the questions I work over in my new book, "American Betrayal: The Secret Assault on Our Nation's Character" (St. Martin's Press). Can we realistically claim liberty and free markets triumphed over collectivism when today there is only a thin Senate line trying to fend off Obamacare's totalitarian intrusions into citizens' lives? We see perhaps a dozen or so patriots led by conservative ace Republican Sen. Mike Lee of Utah, gallantly mustering forces to defund further enforcement of this government behemoth aborning. (Call your senators and ask them to join - or tell you why they didn't at the next town hall.) How can we maintain that the republic endured when a centralized super-state has taken its place?

So, once more, who really won the Cold War? The question is better framed when we realize that the battleground where the Free World met Marx was also psychological. Consciously or not, we struggled against an insidious Marxist ideology that was always, at root, an assault on our nation's character.

The most recent manifestation of victory over the American character shows through the Anthony Weiner-Huma Abedin scandal. This scandal is a paradoxical double whammy of both exposure and cover-up.

Everyone knows (too much) about the exposure part: Anthony Weiner, candidate for mayor of New York City, turns out to be a recidivist pervert. The fatuous conversation that has followed this "news" has turned on the decision of Weiner's wife, Huma Abedin, to step forward to try to salvage her husband's bid for public office. The Wall Street Journal's response to Abedin's decision was typical: "Watching the elegant Huma Abedin stand next to her man Tuesday as he explained his latest sexually charged online exchanges was painful for a normal human being to watch."

The media want to know why the "elegant Huma" - Hillary Clinton's longtime aide and former deputy chief of staff - would do such an inelegant thing. Was this couple's therapy writ large? Was it for their child? Was it ... love?

True, the barbs of Huma's ambition - as naked as her husband's dirty pics - have broken through the gauzy chatter. But cut off from context, they, too, end up perpetuating what is, in fact, the great Huma Abedin cover-up.

It is not enough to analyze Huma Abedin as a "political wife." Abedin is also a veritable Muslim Brotherhood princess. As such, the ideological implications of her actions - plus her long and privileged access to U.S. policy-making through Hillary Clinton - must be considered, particularly in the context of national security.

But talk about paradoxes. In an era when the most minute and lurid descriptions of her husband's anatomical and sexual details are common talk, Huma Abedin's familial and professional connections to the world of jihad are unspeakable.

In a nutshell - quoting former federal prosecutor Andrew C. McCarthy writing at National Review this week - Huma Abedin "worked for many years at a journal that promotes Islamic supremacist ideology that was founded by a top al-Qaida financier, Abdullah Omar Naseef." That would be for at least seven years (1996-2003), by the way, during which Abedin also worked for Hillary Clinton.

Let this sink in for just a moment. The journal Huma worked for - which promotes Islamic supremacism and was founded by al-Qaida financer Naseef, who also headed the Muslim World League, a leading Muslim Brotherhood organization - is called the Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs. It was edited first by Huma's father, Syed Abedin, and now by her mother, Saleha Abedin. Saleha is a member of the Muslim Sisterhood. Mother Abedin also directs an organization (the International Islamic Committee for Woman and Child) that comes under the umbrella of the Union for Good, another U.S.-designated terrorist organization. As McCarthy reminds us, "the Union for Good is led by Sheikh Yusef al-Qaradawi, the notorious Muslim Brotherhood jurist who has issued fatwas calling for the killing of American military and support personnel in Iraq as well as suicide bombings in Israel."

Given these alarming professional and family associations, it is hard to imagine how Huma Abedin ever received the security clearance necessary to work closely with the secretary of state. But she did, and from her powerful post, she undoubtedly exerted influence over U.S. policy-making. (In his National Review piece, McCarthy lists specific actions that bespeak a shift in U.S. foreign policy to favor the Muslim Brotherhood.)

Isn't the Abedin-Clinton national security story at least as newsworthy as Weiner's private parts?

At this point, only McCarthy's National Review piece reprises these well-documented facts. In other words, it is not only CNN and the New York Times that draw blanks for their readers. Most "conservative" outlets, including Fox News, the New York Post, The Blaze, Breitbart.com and Rush Limbaugh, are ignoring this story, too.

If the Abedin-Muslim Brotherhood story rings any bells, it is probably because of Rep. Michele Bachmann, R-Minn. Last summer, Bachmann, along with four other House Republicans, raised the issue of Huma Abedin among other examples of possible Muslim Brotherhood penetration of the federal policy-making chain. They asked inspectors general at five departments, including the State Department, to investigate their concerns, but nothing happened - nothing, that is, except that Bachmann was crucified, by Democrats and Republicans alike for asking urgently important questions about national security.

This made the entire subject, already taboo, positively radioactive - with Huma Abedin becoming the poster victim of this supposed "McCarthyism" redux. End of story. Never mind facts. Never mind also that in his day, Sen. Joseph McCarthy was asking urgently important questions about national security, too.

But don't worry. We "won" the Cold War. Obamacare, here we come. At this rate, we'll declare "victory" in the so-called war on terror and, before you know it, become a leading outpost of the caliphate.

SOURCE

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

Take your jobs plan and shove it, Mr. President: Your policies have harmed Chattanooga enough

I always thought that Chattanooga was mainly famous for its choo choo but it seems that they have an excellent newspaper editorialist too. On Tuesday, Obama pitched a new 'grand bargain' on jobs in Chattanooga

President Obama,

Welcome to Chattanooga, one of hundreds of cities throughout this great nation struggling to succeed in spite of your foolish policies that limit job creation, stifle economic growth and suffocate the entrepreneurial spirit.

Forgive us if you are not greeted with the same level of Southern hospitality that our area usually bestows on its distinguished guests. You see, we understand you are in town to share your umpteenth different job creation plan during your time in office. If it works as well as your other job creation programs, then thanks, but no thanks. We’d prefer you keep it to yourself.

That’s because your jobs creation plans so far have included a ridiculous government spending spree and punitive tax increase on job creators that were passed, as well as a minimum wage increase that, thankfully, was not. Economists — and regular folks with a basic understanding of math — understand that these are three of the most damaging policies imaginable when a country is mired in unemployment and starving for job growth.

Even though 64 percent of Chattanooga respondents said they would rather you hadn’t chosen to visit our fair city, according to a survey on the Times Free Press website, it’s probably good that you’re here. It will give you an opportunity to see the failure of your most comprehensive jobs plan to date, the disastrous stimulus scheme, up close and personal.

The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 helped fund the Gig to Nowhere project, a $552 million socialist-style experiment in government-owned Internet, cable and phone services orchestrated by EPB — Chattanooga’s government-owned electric monopoly.

• • •

The Gig to Nowhere is a Smart Grid, a high tech local electricity infrastructure intended to improve energy efficiency and reduce power outages. After lobbying for, and receiving, $111.6 million in stimulus money from your administration, EPB decided to build a souped-up version of the Smart Grid with fiber optics rather than more cost-effective wireless technology. This decision was supposed to allow EPB to provide the fastest Internet service in the Western Hemisphere, a gigabit-per-second Internet speed that would send tech companies and web entrepreneurs stampeding to Chattanooga in droves.

In reality, though, the gig, like most of the projects funded by your stimulus plan, has been an absolute bust.

While the Smart Grid will cost taxpayers and local electric customers well over a half-billion dollars when all is said and done, there has been little improvement in the quality of EPB’s electric service. Worse, despite being heavily subsidized, EPB’s government-owned Internet, cable and telephone outfit that competes head-to-head against private companies like AT&T and Comcast is barely staying afloat, often relying on loans from electric service reserve funds to afford its business expenses.

Further, there has been no credible evidence to suggest that EPB can even provide a gig of service consistently and reliably. Any companies hoping to utilize the Gig to Nowhere are quoted monthly billing costs that make the service unfeasible. As a result, Chattanooga has remained a relative ghost town for technological innovation. Almost no economic development whatsoever has resulted from the gig.

• • •

What the gig has brought, however, is that shocking price tag. Because of your unwillingness to balance the budget, Mr. President, the $111.6 million federal handout to subsidize the Gig to Nowhere will actually cost federal taxpayers $158.2 million, due to interest. Once EPB received the stimulus infusion to fund the pork project, the electric monopoly took out a $219.8 bond that will balloon to $391.3 million by the time Chattanoogans are done paying it off.

The bond’s first payment comes due this fall and there remain significant questions about how EPB can manage to pay the debt without hiking electric rates on EPB customers.

Building a Smart Grid to get into a telecom sector already well-served by private companies was a bad idea from the start. But getting government involved in places it doesn’t belong is a hallmark of your administration. As a result, you and your policymakers were happy to fund the Gig to Nowhere.

You claimed that the Smart Grid would create jobs for Chattanooga. But in reality, all it did was push America deeper in debt and lure a local government agency into making a terrible financial decision that will weigh on Chattanoogans like a millstone for decades to come.

So excuse us, Mr. President, for our lack of enthusiasm for your new jobs program. Here in Chattanooga we’re still reeling from your old one.

SOURCE

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

CT Newspaper Compares the KKK to Ted Nugent, Fox News and All Republicans

But the KKK were Democrats!

The New Haven Register’s recent editorial piece, ““The KKK, Ted Nugent, and ‘mainstream’ racism,” is a must-read.

No, not for the interesting facts or intellectual stimulation; you won’t find any of that. It is a very important read though, as it illustrates the new era of liberal media; a time when unfounded, libel accusations are made against conservatives, with little to no worry of the consequences.

On Monday, The Register’s editorial article accused The Republican Party, Fox News and individuals such as Ann Coulter of holding and promoting the same beliefs as the KKK.

Three weeks ago, members of an Alabama-based group, called the United Klans of America, distributed flyers throughout Milford Connecticut which read: “You can sleep well tonight knowing the UKA is awake!” The UKA claims to be a new version of the Ku Klux Klan and their stunt is being investigated by Connecticut police and may lead to criminal charges.

The actions of a few, ideologically deranged people were dealt with appropriately by the state’s officials, elected representatives, city police and Milford citizens. They saw the stunt as a travesty; the editors over at the New Haven Register; however, saw it as an opportunity.

Three weeks after the event took place, The Register used the stunt in Milford as a faulty spring board to directly compare individual conservative voices, Fox News, and the National Republican Party to the KKK.

“The same basic message that the KKK has promoted for 148 years is embraced by the likes of…Fox News, Ann Coulter, a burgeoning array of fringe “conservative” media and members of our own community commenting on stories on the New Haven Register’s website." ...

It’s not an anomaly when a member of the liberal media or press says something unkind about the conservative base. It is rare; however, when a reputable news source like the New Haven Register publishes blatant libelous accusations against individuals, fellow news corporations and national parties without any evidence to back them up.

To compare any person or any entity to an organization like the KKK, or the UKA, one should have hard facts connecting them racist rhetoric—spouting ideas that inherent differences between races make one race superior to another- or promoting/actively engaging in the sought-out violence against African Americans.

The Register’s article was clearly a cheap attempt to deflect the tough conversations the country is starting to have about race relations. If liberals acknowledged the high crime rates and low graduation rates that exist in minority communities, they would be forced to realize that most of their social programs and highly-funded public schools are failing the African American community. So, instead, they create a false narrative of ‘conservative racism,’ and put off finding real solutions for those who are struggling.

If the Register has any evidence of The National Republican party promoting or advocating racism, by all means, bring it to light and let there be justice. But accusations of racism for the sake of deflecting tough issues is libel, irresponsible, and nothing short of morally wrong.

SOURCE

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

For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC,  AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated) and Coral reef compendium. (Updated as news items come in).  GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten.

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)

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

A failed Presidency already visible

Will history recall ANY positive accomplishments of the Obama regime?



Re-elected presidents always find it difficult to sustain first-term momentum for their agenda into a second four years. First terms are often capped by bruising re-election campaigns, making it tough to sustain political backing and public interest. Plus, significant turnover in the president's cabinet and among his senior advisors in the first year of a second term can create debilitating continuity of management challenges.

So the tendency is to stick with "what works," which is to say to keep talking about the same issues, programs and policies that prevailed in the first term. Put another way, presidents become prisoners of their own narratives. Thus, Obama's Galesburg address offered no genuinely new ideas, as indeed his advisers warned would be the case beforehand

One phrase captures the essence of Obama's second term domestic vision, "more of the same:" More stimulus spending, more green energy development boondoggles, more "investments" - i.e. federal spending and regulation - on student loans, mortgage refinance programs and Obamacare, and more tax "reforms" to make the top 1 percent of income earners pay "their fair share." Obama cannot deviate from this programmatic menu because doing so would be an admission of failure, one that is pointedly reflected in the declining number of Americans with jobs or still looking for jobs, the growing Food Stamp recipient rolls and a steady accumulation of evidence that the Obamacare train wreck is gathering speed.

Then there are the scandals. Obama suffered little damage in his first term when the headlines were about Solyndra, Fast and Furious and related matters. But it's different now because of Benghazi, NSA surveillance, and IRS harassment of the president's Tea Party critics. Virtually every president stumbles as a result of scandals, but they often become far more serious matters early in a second term (think Nixon's Watergate, Reagan's Iran-Contra and Clinton's Monica Lewinsky trials, all of which became major disruptions following their re-elections).

Second term scandals may intensify in part because presidents invariably dismiss them as unimportant, just as Obama yesterday referred to his troubles as "phony." But he likely won't be any more convincing with that line than Nixon was in calling Watergate "a second-rate burglary." Similarly, Obama's exasperated "I am here to say this needs to stop" recalled Clinton's finger-wagging order, "I want you to listen to me ... I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky ..."

But a presidential dalliance with an intern is a far cry from using the IRS to silence political opponents or covering up incompetence that killed four brave Americans in Libya, nor is there anything phony about the potential consequences for Obama.

SOURCE

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

How U.S. Steel Helped Break Down Racism

My economic historian friend, Jeff Hummel, has recommended for years that I read David M. Kennedy's Freedom from Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929-1945. Kennedy is a first-rate historian at Stanford. I'm enjoying the book as I'm working my way slowly through it. Jeff warned me that Kennedy is not an economist, but he is so careful with his facts that an economist can read it and sometimes substitute his own judgment, based on economics, for Kennedy's. Here's the first place in the book where I noticed that possible absence of economic knowledge. Although possibly not; maybe it's a tone thing. Judge for yourself.

Kennedy writes:

"Fancying themselves as labor's aristocracy, craft unionists ignored the problems of their unskilled co-workers. Ethnic rivalries exacerbated the troubles in the house of labor. Skilled workers tended to be old-stock, native-born white Americans, while the unskilled were mostly recent urban immigrants from the hinterlands of Europe and rural America. The AFL [American Federation of Labor], in thus insulating itself from the men and women who were fast becoming the majority of industrial workers, handed management a potent antilabor weapon. Management knew how to use it. U.S. Steel cynically exploited the ethnic divisions that were the bane of American unionism when the AFL in 1919 hesitantly abandoned its traditionally elitist attitudes and led a strike to organize an industrial union in steel. The corporation sent agents into the steel districts around Chicago and Pittsburgh to spawn animosity between native and immigrant workers. They excited the strikers' darkest anxieties by recruiting some thirty thousand southern blacks, hungry to possess previously forbidden jobs, to cross the picket lines. On these rocks of racial and ethnic distrust, the great steel strike of 1919 foundered miserably."

From everything I know about that era, Kennedy gets it exactly right. U.S. unions were highly racist in those days, a fact that former President Jimmy Carter's Secretary of Labor, economist F. Ray Marshall, spent much of his academic career documenting. And certainly it would make sense for U.S. Steel to cynically exploit this racism by the white unions. Finally, it's true that those jobs were traditionally off-limits to black people, largely because of the white unions' actions, sometimes including murdering their black competitors. That's why two early 20th-century black leaders, Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. DuBois, although strongly at odds with each other about strategy, agreed that unions were anti-black. As DuBois put it, unions are "the greatest enemy of the black working man."

So why am I highlighting this?

Over the years, I've taught myself to have two personae when reading: that of an economist and that of a normal, non-economically-literate person. The second of my personae reacted highly negatively to U.S. Steel. After all, U.S. Steel acted "cynically" and "exploited" ethnic divisions. Also, U.S. Steel was "antilabor." That's pretty damning, especially to one who picks up on emotive words.

But the economist in me thinks much differently. I'm perfectly willing to believe that U.S. Steel acted cynically and exploited ethnic divisions. But that doesn't mean U.S. Steel was anti-labor. It means that U.S. Steel was anti-union. U.S. Steel was profoundly pro a particular group of laborers, namely 30,000 black laborers who were "hungry to possess previously forbidden jobs."

It's possible that Kennedy knows all this. It's possible that he doesn't. I simply want to point out the bottom line that David Kennedy has shown: U.S. Steel helped break down racism.

SOURCE

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

Another lying Muslim

There is a bit of a hubbub in the interwebs about an interview conducted by Lauren Green, religion correspondent for Fox News Channel, with Reza Aslan, author of a new book on Jesus titled Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth. Our friend Joe Carter, over at GetReligion, has the basic story. Green launched the interview (available here in full) with a question about why a Muslim should want to write a book about Jesus. A reasonable question, and not a hostile one on its face–but by the end of the interview Green has returned to it in a somewhat more accusatory fashion. As Joe says, the interview is a mess. But as he also points out, Green’s critics are passing right by something far more interesting: that Aslan has misrepresented his scholarly credentials.

In fact, it is Aslan who immediately turns the interview into a cage match by reacting very defensively to Green’s first question. And here is where the misrepresentations begin. For roughly the first half of the interview Aslan dominates the exchange with assertions about himself that seem intended to delay the substance of the discussion:

I am a scholar of religions with four degrees including one in the New Testament . . . I am an expert with a Ph.D. in the history of religions . . . I am a professor of religions, including the New Testament–that’s what I do for a living, actually . . . To be clear, I want to emphasize one more time, I am a historian, I am a Ph.D. in the history of religions.

Later he complains that they are “debating the right of the scholar to write” the book rather than discussing the book. But the conversation took that turn thanks to Aslan, not Green! By the final minute he is saying of himself (and who really talks this way!?) that “I’m actually quite a prominent Muslim thinker in the United States.”

Aslan does have four degrees, as Joe Carter has noted: a 1995 B.A. in religion from Santa Clara University, where he was Phi Beta Kappa and wrote his senior thesis on “The Messianic Secret in the Gospel of Mark”; a 1999 Master of Theological Studies from Harvard; a 2002 Master of Fine Arts in Fiction from the University of Iowa; and a 2009 Ph.D. in sociology from the University of California, Santa Barbara.

None of these degrees is in history, so Aslan’s repeated claims that he has “a Ph.D. in the history of religions” and that he is “a historian” are false.  Nor is “professor of religions” what he does “for a living.” He is an associate professor in the Creative Writing program at the University of California, Riverside, where his terminal MFA in fiction from Iowa is his relevant academic credential. It appears he has taught some courses on Islam in the past, and he may do so now, moonlighting from his creative writing duties at Riverside. Aslan has been a busy popular writer, and he is certainly a tireless self-promoter, but he is nowhere known in the academic world as a scholar of the history of religion. And a scholarly historian of early Christianity? Nope.

What about that Ph.D.? As already noted, it was in sociology. I have his dissertation in front of me. It is a 140-page work titled “Global Jihadism as a Transnational Social Movement: A Theoretical Framework.” If Aslan’s Ph.D. is the basis of a claim to scholarly credentials, he could plausibly claim to be an expert on social movements in twentieth-century Islam. He cannot plausibly claim, as he did to Lauren Green, that he is a “historian,” or is a “professor of religions” “for a living.”

It may be that Aslan sensed a tougher interview from Lauren Green than he is accustomed to. Hence he immediately went into high-dudgeon mode, and made the ten minutes all about her alleged disrespect of him and his alleged scholarly credentials. But in order to change the subject he told a string of gratuitous falsehoods about himself. Perhaps that master’s in fiction writing came in handy.

Is Aslan’s book worth reading? I have no idea. But he has earned enough distrust from me that I haven’t any interest in finding out.

SOURCE

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

From ‘Anti-Communist’ to ‘Counterjihadist’

Remember when “anti-Communist” was a preferred leftist term of abuse? “Oh, you’re an anti-Communist” — translation: you’re not one of the trendy people and, moreover, you probably harbor “McCarthyite” tendencies and think Ronald Reagan (the American cowboy) is more of a hero than Mikhail Gorbachev, the glamorous prophet of perestroika.

Think back to the 1980s. Was there any cool person you knew who didn’t glamorize Gorbachev? Every academic (near enough) did, and of course the media slobbered all over the guy. Was he a Communist to the very end?  Yes, but for Dan-Diane Sawyer-Rather, for the battalions of scribes who scribbled about such things in the pages of the New York Times, the New Yorker, the Washington Post and other approved outlets, Gorbachev was the hero, Reagan the crazy, trigger-happy anti-Communist.

“Star Wars”: Oh, with what contempt they uttered that dismissive phrase. “Evil Empire,” forsooth. What a dangerous clown he was. Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative, his plan to deploy a missile defense system (which, incidentally, he offered to share with the Soviet Union): what a joke, what a stupidity! It was ruinously expensive and [deep breath] would never work and destabilizing and why-would-we-need-to-protect-ourselves-from-a-cuddly-sophisticate-like-Mikhail-Gorbachev-with-his-chic-wife?

Then, quite suddenly, the Soviet Union was no more. It just, you know, vanished. “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down that wall.” Reagan said that one day in Berlin and, presto-change-o, down came the wall. Star Wars, SDI, had helped expose the empty, burnt-out shell that was the fag-end of the lumbering, senile Communist redoubt. And then at last all the beautiful, right-thinking (i.e., left-leaning) folk who had ridiculed Reagan and Star Wars and his repulsive talk of the Soviet Union being an “Evil Empire” — suddenly, they woke up and realized what fools they had been and thanked Reagan and those who had supported him for helping to end one of the most monstrous tyrannies in history …

Except, of course, they did no such thing. Reagan was still, must always be to blame, though enough water has passed under the bridge by now that he is no longer scary because he has receded into the impotence of history.

No one talks about anti-Communists now because that threat — under that name, anyway — has more or less passed. Today’s anti-Communists are the Islamophobes, those folks (like me) who think that the Islamic effort to spread Sharia (i.e., Islamic law) is fundamentally incompatible with liberal democracy with its principles of free speech, freedom of religion, and political equality of men and women.

“Islamophobia”: what sort of beast is that? A phobia, as I have been at pains to point out in this space and elsewhere, is an irrational fear or hatred. Is it irrational to fear and hate an ideology that denies the equality of the sexes, murders apostates and homosexuals, wishes to subjugate the non-Islamic world, and has consigned Jews and Christians to the perilous second-class citizenship of dhimmitude? (“First the Saturday People,” runs an Islamic slogan, “then the Sunday People”: first we’ll deal with the Jews, then move on to the Christians.)

Who rules the language, rules the world. Orwell knew that. And so does the Left. “Islamophobia” is a mendacious neologism designed to obscure the reality of Islamic ideology. Major Nidal Hasan shouts “Allahu Akbar” and murders 13 people at Fort Hood. What do you call that?  I call it “Islamic terrorism.” The Obama administration insists it’s “workplace violence.” In 2007, some young Muslim packs a Jeep Cherokee full of propane canisters and detonates it at the Glasgow airport. What do you call that? I call it “Islamic terrorism.” Jacqui Smith, then the British home secretary, insists that we call it “anti-Islamic activity.” (How’s that for an example of the “no-true-Scotsman” fallacy?)

In a brilliant, no-to-be-missed column for Frontpage.com, the Scandinavian-based Bruce Bawer reports on the Left’s latest piece of linguistic mendacity: “counterjihad.” Yesterday it was the anti-Communists who were the bad guys. Today, it’s the counterjihadists:

"The “counterjihadists”  are the villains — the hysterics, the fools, who see a Muslim under every bed, with a bomb in his turban. Meanwhile the good guys are the counter-counterjihadists — the journalists, activists, and others who make a career of slamming Islam’s critics, whom they frequently represent (especially over here in Scandinavia) as “conspiracy theorists.” For just as the anti-Communists of yesteryear were viewed not as sober, well-informed students of life behind the Iron Curtain but as obsessive, ignorant haters, we counterjihadists are viewed not as people who’ve read the Koran and studied Islamic societies and subcultures but as semi-literate morons and bigots."

More HERE

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

For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC,  AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated) and Coral reef compendium. (Updated as news items come in).  GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten.

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)

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

Leftism as a low information phenomenon

Exit interviews with voters leaving the ballot box have repeatedly shown huge ignorance and misunderstanding among Obama voters  -- so much so that ignorance must be held to be one of the major forces behind Leftism.  Hollywood actor Jon Voight has found that too:

Voight, previously a staunch left-winger and anti-war protester, has performed a spectacular U-turn. “I regret being caught up in the hysteria of the Sixties,” he says now, revealing a glimpse of the intensity I more readily associate with him. “The left have blood on their hands and I do too.”

He publicly backed Mitt Romney in the 2012 presidential election. “I think he would have made a wonderful president,” he sighs. “He is a man of great char­acter, but they demonised him, as they have done with other people before him.” He also spoke out against Barack Obama, in an open letter to The Washington Post in 2010, calling him a liar and accusing him of promoting anti-Semitism, leading many to denounce Voight as an inciter of hatred. Two years later he called the president a Marxist, compared him to Hugo Chavaz, and accused him of controlling the media.

Do his politics cause him any grief, in the left-leaning Hollywood community? "I have found that I have too much information for anyone to want to sit down and talk to me," he says. "They usually leave early. But it’s a family out here, we all respect each other. If people disagree with me, that’s no big deal to me, except that it is a very important disagreement.

"I will say: 'Would you like to talk about it?' And they say: 'Oh yeah, sure.' But then we get into it, and they will then say: 'Well, you know John, I don’t really know that much about it.' He smiles, benevolently. ‘And I understand that, because I was like that at the end of the Sixties. I thought these people were cool and I thought I knew a lot of things, and I knew nothing. So, I ask everybody to get educated. And as you get educated, you see things much more clearly.’

He was a great admirer of the late Baroness Thatcher, calling her "a great woman, the most influential since Catherine the Great". I wonder if he might ever consider following in the footsteps of Ronald Reagan and Schwarzenegger by taking up political office? “Oh, I think I am better as a fella on the sidelines,” he shrugs. “I think there are others much better equipped for office.”

SOURCE

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

The Royal Baby Is a Rejection of the Family Chaos Liberalism Feeds Upon

The birth of Prince George creates a problem for liberals. They love the idea of royalty because it validates their vision of an anointed elite with a divine right to the obedience of their subjects. However, this wonderful couple has created a traditional nuclear family that provides a powerful counterpoint to the kind of freak show dysfunction that liberalism requires to survive.

If families actually stayed together and raised their children, well, who would need the liberal elite?

Sure, the royal couple gets paid out of the British treasury, but it isn’t as if Prince William sits around being fanned and fed grapes. Besides cutting ribbons and promoting charities, he is a warrior who has proved his courage by seeking service on battlefields he could have easily avoided. Royalty is a bizarre concept, but he does work for a living.

By contributing to society, Prince William repudiates the basic premise of liberalism. If you vote for liberals they will redistribute free stuff to you from the people who contribute to society. This will allow you to wallow in the cesspit of social pathologies that led you to expect handouts in the first place, and thereby guarantee another generation of liberal constituents.

Liberalism depends on people continuing to do the things that ensure they will be poor. The most obvious among these bad decisions is to have kids out of wedlock. Yeah, we all know the single mom who is prospering or the gay couple with a great kid. That’s awesome, but it’s an anecdotal irrelevancy. The simple, unarguable fact is that the epidemic of broken families means a broken society, and liberalism feeds off the wreckage.

Society should stop being coy, and it needs to stop worrying that people will be offended. It should say, loudly and unequivocally, that you shouldn’t have kids if you aren’t married to a guy who’s not going to disappear when things get real.

A recent Huffington Post article buried the lede when it talked to a woman named Irene Salyers, who is currently living off of government disability checks while working at a fruit stand with her current boyfriend. Leaving aside that this makes her not disabled at all, Ms. Salyers was married and divorced three times. Her jobless, single-mom daughter, is living off her boyfriend’s disability checks and hoping “that employers will look past her conviction a few years ago for distributing prescription painkillers, so she can get a job.”

I’m guessing they all vote Democrat.

Liberalism, of course, must be in denial about the true causes of the poverty it exploits. “Marriage rates are in decline across all races,” the article notes. But in the very next paragraph it quotes some Harvard professor who “specializes in race and poverty” who says, “It's time that America comes to understand that many of the nation's biggest disparities, from education and life expectancy to poverty, are increasingly due to economic class position.”

Hmmmm. Maybe their “economic class position” comes from having multiple illegitimate kids and dealing Oxy, Professor Einstein. But identifying and addressing that problem would result in academics who specialize “in race and poverty” having to get real jobs.

Instead of validating this kind of lifestyle chaos with “understanding” and “help,” we ought to apply that ancient, time-honored means of enforcing positive social values: Shame. You should be ashamed if you are a jobless felon shacked up with some deadbeat sperm donor who is milking Uncle Sucker while your kids wonder what it’s like to have a real father.

You’re not a victim. You’re a loser.

Concurrently, we need to model good behavior. Prince William and Kate Middleton should use their position and their visibility to hammer home the truth that solid families are the model to be emulated instead of merely one option in a smorgasbord of equally valid familial arrangements.

Let me be clear: Having some random dude move into your Section 8 flat so you can get a cut of the SSI check he gets because of his bogus anger management disorder is not a valid familial arrangement. It’s a petri dish for growing future inmates and welfare cheats.

President Obama should step up, but he won’t. The only thing conservatives appreciate about this neo-socialist disaster of a president is his obviously close-knit and lovely family. He occasionally pays lip service to the importance of intact families, but the fact is that his party supports the status quo.

As Dr. Helen Smith observes in her terrific new book Men on Strike: Why Men Are Boycotting Marriage, Fatherhood, and the American Dream - and Why It Matters, government policy, the legal system and society have conspired to undercut marriage by making it unattractive to men. On the policy side, the welfare system has utterly cut men out of the picture by making their income unnecessary. Fathers are superfluous; for millions of Americans, government is their baby daddy.

Family courts are so tilted against men that when I was taking the Bar Exam, the joke about how to pass the family law question without studying was, “Give the kids to the mother.” Which I did, and I passed the first time.

Socially, radical feminist influence has led to men being viewed as incompetent buffoons when they aren’t violent exploiters. All men are either Homer Simpson or Ted Bundy. The only approved males are liberal icons, and they get a pass for over-enthusiastic hugging, genital sexting, Oval Office intern tapping and leaving women to drown in icy water.

No wonder, as Dr. Smith observes, men are simply opting out of the whole family thing. After all, what’s in it for them? Instead of changing the incentives that lead to this sorry result, Obama’s course of action is to chastise men even more. Apparently the floggings will continue until morale improves.

This is a huge opportunity for the GOP. It could fix the tax code so that getting married doesn’t cost people a fortune. If my wife started working, for example, her income on top of mine would be hit with a 50%+ marginal rate. Maybe in GOP states they could fix family law so that the man doesn’t lose before he walks into court. Maybe it could work to reduce welfare benefits so that having a man around actually means there is more money rather than less. But this is the GOP, so it will undoubtedly blow it by focusing on something else, like importing zillions of Democrat voters against the wishes of its base.

We need to make it so that the novelty of the birth of someone like Prince George is that he is part of a royal family, rather than that he is part of any family at all.

SOURCE

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

Liberalism Makes It Easier to be Bad

There are many liberals who lead thoroughly decent lives. And there are conservatives who do not.  But that is not the whole issue.

There is something about liberalism that is not nearly as true about conservatism. The further left one goes, the more one finds that the ideology provides moral cover for a life that is not moral. While many people left of center lead fine personal lives, many do not. And left-wing ideals enable a person to do that much more than conservative ideals do.

There is an easy way to demonstrate this.  If a married -- or even unmarried -- conservative congressman had texted sexual images of himself to young women he did not even know, he would have been called something Anthony Wiener has not been called -- a hypocrite.

Why? Because conservatives -- secular conservatives, not only religious conservatives -- are identified with moral values in the personal sphere, and liberals are not. Liberals rarely called Bill Clinton a hypocrite for his extramarital affair while president. George W. Bush would have been pilloried as such.

Simply put, we do not generally judge personal conduct the same when it comes to liberals and conservatives.

Both liberals and conservatives know this. As a result, as noted, liberal social positions can provide moral cover for immoral behavior in a way that conservative positions cannot.

Though there are many sincere liberals, it is likely that this ability to provide moral cover for a less than moral life is one source of liberalism's appeal.

I first thought about this when I saw how the left-wing students at my graduate school, Columbia University, behaved. Aside from their closing down classes, taking over office buildings, and ransacking professors' offices, I saw the way in which many of them conducted themselves in their personal lives. Most of them had little sense of personal decency, and lived lives of narcissistic hedonism. Women who were involved with leftist groups have told of how poorly they were treated. And one suspects that they would have been treated far better by conservative, let alone religious, men on campus.

My sense was that the radicals' commitment to "humanity," to "peace," and to "love" gave them license to feel good about themselves without having to lead a good life. Their vocal opposition to war and to racism provided them with all the moral self-esteem they wanted.

Consider the example of the late Sen. Edward M. Kennedy. He had been expelled from college for paying someone to take his exams. His role in the death of a woman with whom he spent an evening would have sent almost anyone without his family name to prison -- or would have at least resulted in prosecution for negligent homicide. And he spent decades using so many women in so public a way that stories about his sex life were routinely told in Washington. Read the 9,000-word 1990 article in GQ by Michael Kelly, who a few years later became the editor of the New Republic.

When this unimpressive man started espousing liberal positions, speaking passionately about the downtrodden in society, it recalled the unimpressive students who marched on behalf of civil rights, peace and love.

It is quite likely that Ted Kennedy came to believe in the positions that he took. But I also suspect that he found espousing those positions invaluable to his self-image and to his public image: "Look at what a moral man I am after all." And liberal positions were all that mattered to the left and to the liberal media that largely ignored such lecherous behavior as the "waitress sandwich" he made in a Washington, D.C. restaurant with another prominent liberal, former Senator Chris Dodd.

In addition to knowing that liberal positions provide moral cover for immoral personal behavior, liberals know that their immoral behavior will be given more of pass than exactly the same behavior would if done by a conservative.

Women's groups provided Bill Clinton with enormous moral capital because he supported their feminist agenda. One leading feminist famously said she would be happy to get on her knees and pleasure Clinton thanks to his pro-choice position on abortion.

Conservative politicians have the same sex drive as liberal politicians, the same marital problems and the same ubiquitous temptations and opportunities. And some will therefore engage in extramarital sex. But every conservative politician knows that should he be caught, his positions on issues not only do not provide moral cover for his conduct, those very positions condemn it. There is no benefit to the conservative sinner in being a conservative. There is great benefit to the liberal sinner in being a liberal.

SOURCE

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

For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC,  AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated) and Coral reef compendium. (Updated as news items come in).  GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten.

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)

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