The cradle of conservatism

Comment from a British historian.  She does not quite seem to see that political orientation can only be explained at the psychological level but she makes some interesting points  -- particularly about Britain's infamous North/South divide -- a prosperous Conservative South and a raddled socialist North

Austerity has sharpened the perception of an incurable North-South divide: Tories fret about their appeal to the North and Midlands and a vanishing footprint in the great northern cities. Ed Miliband’s “One Nation” Labour still fails to ignite enthusiasm in the aspirational Home Counties.

Yet one of the compelling aspects of Britain’s political history is how settled wisdoms have been disrupted over time and the political geography of the country transformed as a result. So much so that the map we see today is pretty much the inverse of an older North-South divide, in which the centres driving economic prosperity were Lancashire, Yorkshire and the clanking foundries of Manchester and the mills of Bradford.

Many of the big ideas we associate with conservatism today were forged not in the sleepy, rural, hide-bound South, but in the North of England, crucible of noisy arguments about conservatism and its responses to economic change. I have just finished a quest to find its roots and turning points for a Radio 4 documentary - a grand tour of the idea of what we sometimes call “small c conservatism” – a recognition that its ideas and instincts wield influence whichever party is in office.

As a native north-easterner, one of the pleasures of the odyssey has been indulging in political archeology over more than two centuries. Whether we are naturally inclined to conservatism in its political clothing or suspicious of it, the country we live in has been shaped by the power of centre-Right ideas – and Tory-led governments have held power for well over half of the period since the French Revolution as a result .

One definition of conservatism is a resistance to change – or, as Michael Oakeshott, the post-war political philosopher put it, preferring “the familiar to the unknown, the tried to the untried, fact to mystery”. In essence, this has been true since the philosopher Edmund Burke resisted the lure of revolution in 1789, diagnosing the moral weaknesses of the French Revolution, when so many leading minds of the day were inspired by its radical ideas. “At the groves of their academy, at the end of every vista,” the sagacious Burke prophesied, “you see only the gallows.”

But the view of conservatism as opposing change is very far from its whole story. A less well-understood side is a crafty readiness to accept and adapt to challenges – even the ones it originally resisted or feared, from the extension of voting rights to today’s rows about gay marriage.

The 19th-century Reform Acts and the extension of the vote to more working men and the fast-growing population centres of the North looked like disaster for those Tory landowners of the kind we might now deride as the toffs of Camp Cameron. But a main reason why Britain has a history rich in reform rather than the bloodshed of radical upheaval is that since the Civil War, conservatives have adapted to social and economic changes, rather than waiting until the resentments blew up into street-fights or revolutions.

The question of how we should respond morally to changes that affect what the policy wonks would now call “social cohesion” between the well-off and the less fortunate has long inspired great conservative political thinkers. Contrary to the caricature of a creed interested only in self-advancement or selfish preservation of wealth, it is fascinating to revisit the ferocity with which thinkers such as Thomas Carlyle, the “sage of Chelsea”, responded in the first half of the 19th century to the rampant materialism of his era.

The reduction of links between different social groups to a mere “cash nexus,” was abhorrent to Carlyle, who, like another (small c) conservative, the Victorian critic John Ruskin, was horrified at the vulgarity of new money and its corrosive effect on the feudal ties that had bound the rich to the poor. So off Ruskin went to address Bradford mill-owners in 1864, denouncing “the goddess of 'Getting-on’ ”, and taking his audience to task for being so foolishly money-driven (not that they took much notice).

The political battles of the 19th century, as conservatism sought to maintain its relevance beyond the world of Jane Austen’s genteel rural society, were ferocious and produced some stomping sorts, ripe for the Matt cartoons of their day. Lord George Bentinck, who allied himself with Disraeli in opposition to Free Trade, had sat in the Commons for nearly a decade, without tousling it with a speech. He suddenly burst into life in the 1840s as a sort of Nigel Farage of his day, with an appeal against reforms and to the “stomach conservatism” of tradition.

Bentinck appeared in Parliament in his hunting gear and muddy boots in order to make his point that the fate of an established social system depended on maintaining the status quo of the Corn Laws. If we think that today’s alliance of David Cameron and Nick Clegg is an odd couple, imagine the sight of the horsey backwoodsman Bentinck and flamboyant “Dizzy” making common cause in swashbuckling speeches against Peel’s free traders. In the end, the Corn Laws were repealed because the economic case behind them had withered – another turning point for conservatives, coming to terms with an altered world – not for the last time.

Today, we watch the Tory party writhing in its uncertainties about foreign intervention in Syria, arguments about a foreign entanglement and its risks that would have seemed wholly familiar to Disraeli, opposing Gladstone’s resistance to action over the Turkish atrocities in Bulgaria. But if resisting interventions is nothing new for the conservative-minded, the wider world has often created fresh dividing lines. The Boer War became the focus of fierce patriotism, and one of its best-known Liberal opponents, Joseph Chamberlain, was routed by an angry conservative crowd of working men at a meeting in Birmingham, protesting in favour of the imperialist war (the real “Occupy” movement).

An intriguing aspect of my grand tour has been the interplay of place and culture in this story. Much of it lies buried below layers of arguments about the modern Left and Right. From the Lake District’s famous son, William Wordsworth, abandoning his revolutionary radicalism in favour of reverence for the “genius of Burke” and his gentler pursuit of reform, to the powerful undercurrents of causes such as Irish Home Rule, which attracted Unionists allied to the Conservative Party in the north-east in the first decade of the 20th century. Political history has its eddies and flurries, not all of which follow the kind of ideological straight lines we tend visit on them.

It seems important to me to avoid every exploration of politics ending up as a “which side are you on?” question. Sometimes we learn a lot more about ourselves – our beliefs and aversions – by digging into half-remembered periods of political history and tracing back the roots of our views. My grandfather disagreed with the generally pro-Boer War sentiments of most working men in his youth and would rail in favour of the “poor bloody Boers” facing the might of England’s armies. I now understand a bit more about why that was and the mental map of politics that shaped him.

So many themes recur, such as old arguments between protectionism and free trade that lurked at the heart of the rise of Ukip and our strained relations with the European Union.

Immigration, with its benefits and disadvantages, has long divided conservatives. A stirring figure in that story hailed from the industrial Midlands – Enoch Powell, the grammar-school boy from Wolverhampton, whose 1968 speech attacked immigration from the Commonwealth. Powell was, thankfully, wrong about the inability of Britain to absorb immigrants peacefully. The “rivers of blood” analogy was as over-stated as it was disagreeable.

But behind that speech lies a wider conservative anxiety – a suspicion that people lower down the social pecking order were suffering from the whims of elites and that change was being foisted on people without their agreement. For that reason, Powell’s questions echo today, ranging through the politics of immigration on the Right to Ed Miliband’s attempt to woo back Labour voters anxious about the impact of incomers on their jobs and services.

We end the grand tour looking at the ideas that shaped the young Margaret Thatcher on a trip to Grantham. These days, you approach Alderman Roberts’s sturdy red-brick chapel via a long road of Polish and Ukrainian shops, a testament to the single European market she helped create. The strong religious non-conformism of her upbringing, with the emphasis on individual responsibility as a spiritual, as well as a political value, accounts for a lot of her self-belief. And if she later adapted that creed to gain prominence on the national and world stage with convenient additions and subtractions along the way, then that is firmly within the flexible tradition of conservatism: the most elastic belief system of them all.

SOURCE

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It's Super-Media! With the Power to Detect Non-Existent Racism

Ann Coulter

The media's fixation on the Trayvon Martin case, while ignoring much more brutal crimes with clearer racial motivations, is a return to pre-O.J. America.

The thesis of my book, "Mugged: Racial Demagoguery From the Seventies to Obama" -- out in paperback this week! -- is that after decades of liberals play-acting Racist America, wherein they cast themselves as civil rights champions, and other, random white people as Bull Connor (a Democrat), it all ended with the O.J. verdict.

That's when white America said, That's it. The white guilt bank is shut down. It was one of the best things that ever happened to America -- especially for black people.

But then in 2007, Barack Obama brought it all back. In order to immunize the most left-wing presidential candidate the nation has ever seen, the Non-Fox Media went into overdrive reporting their fantasies of an America full of racists, constantly terrorizing innocent blacks.

Of course, once Republicans got the Democrats to stop terrorizing black people, there was no one else doing it. Nonetheless, for decades, the media would highlight every apparent white-on-black crime, treating each such incident as the Crime of the Century.

White-on-black crimes were, and are, freakishly rare. But the media weren't showcasing these one-off events as man-bites-dog stories, but rather as dog-bites-man stories in a universe brimming with packs of rabid dogs. According to liberals, whites attacking blacks was an epidemic -- a nationwide "cancer," in the words of erstwhile New York City Mayor Ed Koch.

In December 1986, a gang of white toughs were roaming around Howard Beach, Queens, brawling with anyone they met. They beat up an off-duty white fireman. They attacked a couple of Hispanics. But it was only when the young delinquents fought with three black men -- Cedric Sandiford, Timothy Grimes and Michael Griffith -- that they secured their place in history and became the literary event of the season!

After the initial encounter between the black and white punks -- there were epithets exchanged and criminal records on both sides -- the white gang returned with a baseball bat, spoiling for a fight. Grimes ran off unharmed, Sandiford got beaten, and Griffith tried to flee by climbing through a hole in a fence -- and ran directly into a busy six-lane highway, where he was hit by a car and killed.

The police summarily concluded that the white gang's other fights that night had "no racial overtones." Only the fight with the blacks constituted a hate crime. The FBI opened an investigation and 50 police officers were assigned to investigate. Hollywood made a movie about Howard Beach. The New York Times still celebrates anniversaries of the Howard Beach attack.

News stories were brimming with references to Birmingham and Selma. Columnist Jimmy Breslin wrote, "Howard Beach suddenly has become what Birmingham once meant." (A few years later, the ethnically sensitive Breslin was suspended for denouncing a young Korean-American colleague in the newsroom as a "slant-eyed b***h.")

In an op-ed for The New York Times, Atlantic editor Jack Beatty blamed Howard Beach on the Republican Party: "From Richard M. Nixon's 'Southern strategy' to Ronald Reagan's boilerplate about 'welfare queens,' the legatees of the party of Lincoln have wrung political profit from the white backlash. Howard Beach shows that the politics of prejudice may have some vile life left in it yet."

In 1986, only 2.6 percent of all homicides in the entire country were white-on-black killings. Black criminals killed nearly three times as many white people (949) as whites killed blacks (378) and they killed 16 times as many black people (6,235) as whites did.

Mayor Koch called the Howard Beach attack "the most horrendous incident of violence in the nine years I have been mayor."

Earlier that year, a 20-year-old white design student, Dawn Livecchi, answered the doorbell at her Fort Greene, Brooklyn, townhouse and was shot dead by a black man, Anthony Neal Jenkins, who had followed her home from the grocery store.

One Queens woman interviewed by the Times about the Howard Beach attack mentioned that her husband had been beaten so badly by a group of blacks that he remained in a coma two years later.

In one of dozens of "retaliatory" attacks that invariably follow these media-created racial incidents, the day after the attack, a black gang beat and robbed a white, 17-year-old boy sitting at a Queens bus stop, shouting, "Howard Beach! Howard Beach!" "He's a white boy, and they killed a black boy at Howard Beach."

Just a week before the Howard Beach attack there was another interracial crime in a neighborhood only slightly farther away from The New York Times' building than Howard Beach is. A 63-year-old white woman, Ann Viner, was attacked at her home in New Canaan, Conn., savagely beaten, dragged to her swimming pool and drowned by two 20-year-old black men.

It was the first murder in the affluent town in 17 years. That seems like a newsworthy event to me.

But the Times mentioned Viner's murder only in three short news items, totaling less than a thousand words. The longest piece, 500 words, was an initial report on the murder -- when there was still hope that the killers were white! No other major news outlets in the country mentioned Viner's murder.

So if you're confused by the blanket coverage of the Trayvon Martin case -- attracting even the attention of the president of the United States! -- while far more common and more vicious black-on-white murders are ignored, try to understand that liberals are frightened by change. They are desperately clinging to a world that never existed.

Their fantasy of an America bristling with racists allows them to portray any criticism of our massively incompetent and dangerous president as just another sad episode of oh-so-typical white racism. They have to protect Obama, so the rest of us have to get Mugged .

SOURCE

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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)

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Why did liberals stop being patriotic?

Stalin fought WWII as "The Great Patriotic War"; JFK told people  to ask what you could do for your country;  The Communist Woody Guthrie wrote "This land is your land".  TR rejoiced in  battleships and seized slices of the old Spanish empire for America. Friedrich Engels (of Marx & Engels) was a furious German patriot who wanted Germany to seize neighbouring lands.  And in Australia Communist poet John Manifold wrote a memorial to an heroic Australian soldier.  ....  I could go on.

The Left of today, however, are almost unrecognizable as the heirs of the historic Left.  They still hate rich people and business and want to control everybody but these days they seem to have a visceral hatred of their own country.  America can do nothing right.  Far Leftists even condemn Obama.

So why?  It's simple.  Up until the great postwar surge in affluence, Leftists always saw themselves as the champions of the working class.  Working class people up until that time did have often difficult lives, with putting bread on the table a real challenge at times.  Things stayed that way for hundreds of years.  And Leftists had a solution to all that:  Government control of the means of production, socialism, communism.

But the gradual unwinding of the Soviet myth made their solution sound like the crap it was  -- while capitalism steadily made almost everyone middle class by the standards of the past.  Capitalism rescued the workers and the workers thoroughly enjoyed it.  The workers came to live a life not greatly different from the hated middle class.

Leftists had always seen the working class as the real people -- as the backbone of the nation. Eulogizing the nation was to eulogize the working class.  The middle and upper classes were seen as being simply parasites on the work of the working class.

So the transformation of the working class left the Left with nothing in the country to admire.  Even the workers are complacent and doing well.  And now they often vote Republican.

There is still the (non-working and welfare dependent) underclass, of course, but even Leftists find it had to see anything to idealize or hope for in them.  Leftists who advocate busing, for instance, make sure that their own kids don't get bused.  But the existence of the underclass is still handy.  It has the advantage that it enables the old Leftist warcry of "poverty" still to ring out as an explanation of all social ills.  It rings out more as a tic than as an attempt at thought but it still fills the speaker with a warm feeling of virtue.

So Leftist hatred now extends to the working class as well as the middle and upper classes.  EVERYBODY is complacent, they wail.  So they now hate us all and do their best to impose destructive policies (such as Obamacare and Greenie regulations) on the whole country.

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When fascism came to America, it was wrapped in the clothes of tolerance and health

Dennis Prager

I cannot count the number of times I heard liberal professors and liberal writers quote the phrase: "When fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross."

The phrase is brilliant. There is actually no threat to America of fascism coming from the right. The essence of the American right, after all, is less government; and fascism, by definition, demands ever larger government.

Therefore, if there is a real fascist threat to America, it comes from the left, whose appetite for state power is essentially unlimited. But because the left has so long dominated American intellectual, academic, artistic, and media life, it has succeeded in implanting fear of the right.

I have never written that there is a threat of fascism in America. I always considered the idea overwrought. But now I believe there really is such a threat -- and it will come draped not in an American flag, but in the name of tolerance and health.

Before explaining what this means, let's be clear about what this does not mean.

First, it does not mean, or have anything in common with, Nazism. Nazism may have been a form of fascism. But Nazism was a unique form of fascism and a unique evil. It was race-based and it was genocidal. No other expression of fascism was race-based. And not all fascism is genocidal. So my fear that the American left is moving America toward an expression of fascism in no way implies anything Nazi-like or genocidal.

Second, it is not liberals or liberalism that presents a threat of fascism. It is the left. Liberals of the 1940s to 1970s such as John F. Kennedy, Harry Truman, Hubert Humphrey, Henry "Scoop" Jackson, Daniel Patrick Moynihan and so many others were not leftists. They were liberals.

But liberalism has been taken over by the left. There are virtually no non-left liberals.

The left now has a president who is a true leftist who is asserting unprecedented presidential power through his cabinet and myriad other agencies (such as the Environmental Protection Agency) and through presidential decrees. The left has taken over the universities and, increasingly, high schools and elementary schools. It dominates the news and entertainment media. And many judges and courts are leftist -- meaning that their decisions are guided by leftism more than by the law or the Constitution.

With all this power, the left controls more and more of the life of the American citizen. And when nothing stops the left, the left doesn't stop.

Take tolerance.

Last week, the New Mexico Supreme Court ruled that an event photographer's refusal on religious grounds to shoot the commitment ceremony of a same-sex couple amounted to illegal discrimination.

The photographer had never objected to photographing gays. She did not, however, wish to be part of a ceremony to which she religiously objected. In America today, thanks to myriad laws and progressive justices, people can go to prison for refusing to participate in an event to which they object.

This is what happened to a florist in Washington state who had always sold flowers to gay customers but refused to be the florist for a gay wedding: sued and fined.

This is what happened to a baker in Oregon who had always sold his goods to gays but refused to provide his products to a gay wedding: sued and fined.

This is what happened in Massachusetts, Illinois and elsewhere to Catholic Charities, historically the largest adoption agency in America. Their placing children with married (man-woman) couples, rather than with same-sex couples, was deemed intolerant and a violation of the law. In those and other states, Catholic Charities has left adoption work.

In the name of tolerance -- and fighting sexual harassment -- five- and six-year-old boys all over the country are brought to the police for innocently touching a girl.

In the name of tolerance, girls' high school teams in California and elsewhere must now accept male players who feel female.

In the name of tolerance, businesses cannot fire a man who one day shows up on the sales floor dressed as a woman.

For the left, tolerance does not mean tolerance. It means first, acceptance. And second, celebration. That is totalitarianism: You not only have to live with what you may differ with, dear citizen, you have to celebrate it or pay a steep price.

Meanwhile, in the name of health, there is a similar intrusion into the life of the individual. We saw it in New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg's call for a law limiting the amount of soda a person can order at one time.

In the name of health, people are banned from smoking outdoors, cigar stores are prohibited from allowing customers to smoke inside, and, incredibly, California is about to ban electronic "cigarettes" as if they were real cigarettes, even though they contain no tobacco, nothing is burning, and they emit only water vapor.

In the name of health, some businesses, like the Bert Fish Medical Center in Florida and Kids II, Inc. (Baby Einstein, Disney Baby) do not hire those who smoke at home. In the name of health, for the first time in American history, what you do -- legally -- at home will be reason for companies not hiring or terminating employees.

In the name of safety, first-grade boys are suspended from schools for playfully aiming a pencil at another boy and "shooting" him.

And then there are the ubiquitous "re-education" and "rehabilitation" seminars that the allegedly insensitive need to take at both private and government workplaces and the speech codes at nearly all universities.

The only question is: Will Americans awaken to the increasingly rapid deprivation of their freedoms -- not draped in an American flag but draped in tolerance and health?

SOURCE

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High Time to Stop Dignifying Liberal Fraud

by CHRISTOPHER ADAMO

Among the most infuriating aspects of the leftist/Alinsky strategy is that it has been so effective, given it can only succeed with the tacit participation of its intended victim. On those occasions when a conservative, who has been targeted by the left for isolation and eventual political destruction, responds by going on the attack, the leftist onslaught quickly implodes. The surest sign of total retreat by the left is that the entire topic is never again mentioned, either by liberal politicians or their parrots in the "mainstream" media.

In September of 2007, Rush Limbaugh made a derogatory reference to "phony soldiers" during his daily radio broadcast. In context, Limbaugh was absolutely clear that he was discussing an ongoing controversy involving individuals who bogusly claimed to have witnessed or committed atrocities while deployed in Iraq. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D.-NV), perceived the situation as an opportunity to create controversy with which to discredit Limbaugh. So Reid found the nearest media microphone and denounced Limbaugh for ostensibly denigrating any soldier who opposed the Iraq War as being a "phony soldier." Believing he had the momentum of public opinion on his side, Reid then drafted a letter to Limbaugh's radio syndicator, signed by forty one of his Senate colleagues (all Democrats of course) demanding that Limbaugh be censured.

Rather than play along with the ruse, Limbaugh obtained the letter, auctioned it off on E-Bay, and donated the $2.1 million proceeds from it (which he matched with an out-of-pocket donation) to the Marine Corps Law Enforcement Foundation. In the wake of this audacious turnabout, it was Senator Reid who had to essentially do a mea culpa and publicly offer an insipid and insincere tribute to Limbaugh for his philanthropy.

Sadly, too many Beltway Republicans simply cannot grasp the lesson of this episode, or the countless others like it. Instead, whenever attacked, they are nearly reflexive in their efforts to back-peddle and grovel their way into the good graces of their accusers. Consequently, if the current pattern remains unchanged, few Republican agenda items will ever succeed, since all of them will assuredly be mischaracterized by the leftist media and the Democrat Party (to the degree that any distinction between the two groups exists). Whether in minority or majority status, the typical Republican reaction to such criticism shortly degenerates into little more than the advocacy of something similar, but presumably less costly, than that demanded by the Democrats. And even then, Republicans and their proposals are excoriated for "mean spiritedness" and callous indifference to the little guy.

How much of the nation's current mess could have been avoided, had the Republican Party merely been honest and objective, and denounced the premises of the liberal agenda? Certainly, far too much of the liberal expansion of government, both in its cost and its ominous reach, was enabled by an "opposition" party that was neither conservative, nor possessing the necessary courage to actively oppose anything the Democrats want to do.

The latest slow softball pitch that the Republicans could be hitting out of the park (They only lack the willingness to swing the bat) is the erupting controversy over voter identification laws. The simple, incontestable fact is that proper voter identification is the only means by which elections can be conducted honestly and objectively. And it is for this reason alone that the political left abhors the entire concept.

Attorney General Eric Holder is aggressively working to undermine any and all laws across the nation that might infringe on the ability of ACORN style organizations to stuff the ballot boxes on behalf of their leftist/statist candidates. Holder defended his actions with an August 22 allegation that a North Carolina law requiring proper identification "was adopted for the purpose, and will have the result, of denying or abridging the right to vote on account of race, color, or membership in a language minority group." It is almost comically ironic that Holder feigns such deference to voting rights for these selected groups, having essentially given his blessing to his cohorts in the "New Black Panthers" who blatantly engaged in real voter intimidation and vote suppression in Philadelphia in 2008.

Holder is likewise suing the state of Texas over its implementation of voter identification laws. Displaying complete disdain for the recent Supreme Court decision that removed state elections from federal jurisdiction, he proffered the notion that it might be wrongly interpreted, invoking the deliberately incendiary phrase "open season" for states to "pursue measures to suppress voting rights." Exhibiting complete contempt for every honest American, Holder likened the requirement for mere legal validation of a voter's identity at the polling place to vigilantism.

In reality, voter identification laws only infringe on the ability to cheat by those who intend to cast multiple ballots, or who do not meet the qualifications to vote in a particular district. Regardless of how eloquently they rationalize it, Democrats who oppose voter ID support vote fraud. Intellectually honest Republicans that believe in the American ideal would simply say so as many times as liberals attempt to portray them as something sinister. Eventually, the left would be forced to defend its duplicity, at which point its artificial firestorm would collapse. Unfortunately, few among the current crop of "Republicans" in public office seem capable of grasping the simple yet nearly infallible success of dealing with leftist tactics in this manner.

Worse yet, by their own complicity in other outright frauds currently being perpetrated against the American people, Republicans thoroughly undermine their own credibility on those rare occasions when they try to stave off liberal attacks on the fabric of the nation. How can the Republican Party credibly make the case that the integrity of the nation and the Constitution is of any consequence when so many of its members refuse to confront the devastating influx of tens of millions of illegal aliens from Mexico? Here again, the only issue of significance is border security. And anyone who is truly concerned about the quality of life in this country for all of its citizens will singularly focus on securing the border.

Those who make border security secondary, under any pretense, are actually making it irrelevant. Whether for votes or cheap labor, they pursue a course of traitorous pragmatism. All other discussion can and should wait until border security is achieved. Case closed. Yet the mere mention of setting this common sense goal immediately elicits hysterical but tediously predictable accusations of racism against those who would keep America American.

America's problems are far from irreparable. However, those who couch their discussion in evasive and inflammatory terms, in order to suppress honest and open debate, prove by their very words that their only concern is a perpetuation of the duplicity that has wreaked so much damage to the nation we love.

SOURCE

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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)

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Does a lack of money make you less intelligent? Financial worries reduce measured IQ (problem-solving ability)

This story has been getting a lot of press  -- mainly because there is very little that has any permanent impact on the IQ you are born with.  The point to note however is that the effect below is temporary, and the direction is down, not up.

It is precisely because psychologists have long been aware of the potential negative effect of extraneous factors on test performance that they do their best to exclude all distractions during test-taking, with testing normally being done under formal examination conditions. So the authors below have to a degree rediscovered the wheel.  That any task will be performed poorly if your mind is elsewhere is no surprise.

The interesting finding, though, is that money worries have a negative  effect only when they are very salient.  Test performance is not affected under normal conditions where such matters are in the background.  

That does confirm something I have myself noticed in many years of observing poor people:  They worry too little.  Their poor circumstances rarely seem to motivate them to efforts at bettering those circumstances.  They tend to be happy living from day to day.  They  often seem happier than many middle-class people.  That they have nothing in the bank is just accepted as normal and of no real concern.

The superficial message in the article is that giving the poor more money will make them smarter but there is no evidence for that and the findings actually contradict it.  What is in fact shown is that the problem solving ability of the poor is temporarily reduced when they are preoccupied by other things:   Quite unsurprising.  It has no implications for their basic underlying problem-solving abilities.

In normal IQ testing, the tester makes every effort NOT to  distract the testees, unlike the deliberately distracting procedure reported below.

The journal article is Poverty Impedes Cognitive Function

The size of your pay packet dictates more than just your holiday choice or the size of your car - it also influences your intelligence.  Financial worries tax the brain of those on low incomes, reducing their IQ by up to 13 points, scientists have found.

As a result, those with limited means are more likely to make bad decisions, such as taking on too much debt, which perpetuate their financial woes.

But researchers discovered when low-income individuals had their financial burdens removed, their intelligence returned to the same levels as higher earners.  The findings suggests that far from low intellect resulting in reduced pay, it is our financial woes that render us less clever.

‘Our results suggest that when you’re poor, money is not the only thing in short supply. Cognitive capacity is also stretched thin,’ said Harvard economist Sendhil Mullainathan.

‘That’s not to say that poor people are less intelligent than others. What we show is that the same person experiencing poverty suffers a cognitive deficit as opposed to when they’re not experiencing poverty.

‘It’s also wrong to suggest that someone’s cognitive capacity has gotten smaller because they’re poor. In fact, what happens is that your effective capacity gets smaller, because you have all these other things on your mind, you have less mind to give to everything else.’ He said individuals with financial worries are like a computer that has slowed down because it is carrying out more than one function.

‘It’s not that the computer is slow, it’s that it’s doing something else, so it seems slow to you. I think that’s the heart of what we’re trying to say,’ he added.

In the study, published in the journal Science, the team from US and British universities carried out a series of experiments in a US shopping mall.

Researchers selected 400 people at random and divided them into a ‘poor’ or ‘rich’ group based on their income, before subjecting them intelligence testing.

Prior to the experiment, half of the participants were asked to think about how they would pay for $1,500 of urgent repairs on their car if it had broken down. The aim was to get participants to focus on their own financial worries.

The study found poor participants performed much worse in the IQ test if they first considered their economic circumstances, but the better off were unaffected.

However, the group that was not primed to think about their finances scored similarly in the intelligence tests irrespective of their income.

‘For the poor, because these monetary concerns are just below the surface, the question brings them to the top,’ said Professor Mullainathan. ‘The result was, for that group, the gap between the rich and the poor goes up, in both IQ and impulse control. There was no gap in the other group, but ask them anything that makes them think about money and you see this result.’

In a second set of tests, the scientists travelled to rural India, where sugar cane farmers are paid the majority of their income once a year.

They found they performed significantly better at intelligence tests in the month after being paid - the equivalent of 10 IQ points - than just before, when their savings had dwindled.

‘The month after the harvest, they’re pretty rich, but the month before - when the money has run out - they’re pretty poor,’ Professor Mullainathan said. ‘What we did is look at the same people the month before and the month after the harvest, and what we see is that IQ goes up, cognitive control, or errors, goes way down, and response times go way down.’

SOURCE

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France's second Dreyfus case

Moral corruption runs deep in France

The supposed death of 12 year old Mohammed Al Dura on September 30, 2000, captured in the famous video that showed him clinging to his father in terror at the Netzarim junction in the Gaza Strip as Israeli soldiers shot them both, has become the enduring image of the Second Intifada launched by Arafat--which was in part justified by that image in the world's media.

First in line are the Arabs who staged the fake atrocity and the Arab cameraman working for France 2 who took  the video and vouched for its accuracy.   It's hard to get too worked up about them--this is what Arabs do.  It's up to those to whom they feed this material to be wary and if they are taken in,  to correct their mistake as soon as they discover it--and fire those who mislead them.

Much more serious is the behavior of Charles Enderlin, the "respected" journalist who was bureau chief for France 2 in Israel, and that of France 2 itself, one of the three stations constituting publicly owned France Television, meaning that the government bears ultimate responsibility for what it broadcasts.  Born in France, Enderlin moved to Israel at the age of 22, served in the Israeli army, later taking Israeli citizenship.  He is one of those quondam Israelis whose attachment to Israel is supposedly attested by the vigor of his criticism of it. (His 2003 book  Shattered Dreams blamed Israel for Oslo's failure.) Enderlin, who provided the dramatic narration for the video clip,  may have been initially taken in by his cameraman--Enderlin was in Ramallah, not on the scene--but soon enough had to realize he was dealing with phony footage and dug in, misrepresenting the footage and clinging to the story.

The struggle to bring out the truth has become identified with the name of Philippe Karsenty who has been engaged in a court battle over the story for the last nine years.  But it should be remembered that in 2005 Nidra Poller wrote an article about the case in Commentary which didn't even mention Karsenty, yet was already able to document major holes in the story. Poller herself had not then seen the France 2 cameraman's raw rushes, but she had seen the outtakes of Reuters and AP cameramen who had been filming at the same place at the same time.

But instead of acknowledging error, France 2 circled the wagons.  Indeed, in the name of "French honor," the entire French media and political establishment circled the wagons.  While the al Dura case is customarily referred to by its critics as a blood libel, the parallels to the Dreyfus case are equally compelling. Then it was French military honor, now French media honor that was at stake.  The parallel to the second trial of Dreyfus, five years after the first, is especially striking.  By that time it took the most determined willful blindness not to know that Dreyfus had been blamed for the crimes of Esterhazy, yet Dreyfus was again condemned.  This time, with Israel in the dock, French behavior is in some ways even worse.  At least in the Dreyfus case the French intellectual and political class split, with large numbers rallying around Dreyfus.  In the al Dura case, the establishment has rallied so solidly behind Enderlin that most of the small minority of Frenchmen well-informed enough to be familiar with the controversy relegate it to a few "nutcases."

The reaction to the 2008 court decision in Karsenty's favor is instructive.  The Paris Court of Appeal--which to France 2's dismay had demanded to see the  original raw footage--ruled  that Karsenty was within his rights to call the al Dura video a hoax, overturning a 2006 decision that had found him guilty of defaming the network and Enderlin.  The footage was key.  The only shot in it relating to the al Dura tale that had not been aired showed the boy, after being pronounced dead,  lifting his head, looking around, moving his leg and shielding his eyes from the sun.  Even without the footage, the video's absurdities were obvious--supposedly blasted with high velocity bullets, the bodies of father and son showed no trace of blood.  (It should be noted that the supposed "hard" evidence of al Dura's death, the body of a boy brought that day to Shifa Hospital in Gaza, was "soft" to put it mildly.  One doctor at the hospital said he was brought in at eleven in the morning, another at one in the afternoon.  The al Dura incident occurred at 3 p.m.  Moreover photos showed this was clearly a different boy.)

As for the French government, clearly to signify support for the al Dura story, in 2009 Minister of Foreign Affairs Bernard Kouchner awarded Enderlin France's highest award, the Legion of Honor.

The most recent court decision, earlier this year, has gone against Karsenty.  France 2 appealed the 2008 decision to the Supreme Court which ruled the Paris Court of Appeals should not have demanded to see the raw rushes.  To get at the truth was apparently not the sort of thing the Supreme Court thought a judge was supposed to do. Nor was truth a defense. The Supreme Court sent the case back to be heard by a new panel of judges where Karsenty (without benefit of the footage) would not only have to show Enderlin and France 2 had perpetrated fraud but also that he had the evidence to prove it when he first denounced the video (i.e. before he had seen the raw footage which made the fraud incontrovertible).  In the ensuing trial, the Avocate Generale, an independent figure in the French judicial system, reminded the judges that the truth of the al Dura story was not the issue.   Mr. Bumble's remark in Oliver Twist, "The law is a ass" is tailor made for French libel rules.  And indeed the new panel found Karsenty lacked sufficient evidence for his charge of fraud at the time he first made it and so was guilty of defamation.  The court fined him 8000 euros ($14,000).

No one reads the Paris court's (absurd) justification for its decision.  What matters is that France 2 and Enderlin can claim vindication since Karsenty was found guilty of defamation.  Karsenty plans to appeal, and the case can go on indefinitely, bouncing yo-yo like from court to court as did Jarndyce versus Jarndyce in Bleak House, a case that had gone on for so many generations Dickens tells us, that no man alive knew what it meant.

More HERE

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ELSEWHERE

Wal-Mart to include same-sex partners in company benefits:  "Wal-Mart Stores Inc. (WMT) will now allow workers’ same-sex partners to participate in its company health benefits, bringing policies at the largest private employer in the U.S. in line with most of the nation’s top businesses. Full-time associates’ spouses and domestic partners will be eligible for coverage in medical, dental, vision, life, critical illness and accident plans, the Bentonville, Arkansas-based company said in a postcard to employees this week that was provided to Bloomberg."

Obama, the Great Defunder:  "Obama has announced that he will defund the entire government rather than sign a bill that does not contain funding for ObamaCare. Senator Harry Reid has said he will not let the U.S. Senate pass a continuing resolution that does not contain funding for the program that he rammed through despite the opposition of the majority of Americans."

Little to celebrate this Laborless Day: "5.3 million.  That is the net increase in population of those aged 16 to 64 from January 2009 to present -- data compiled by the Bureau of Labor Statistics from the month of July. Guess how many of them found jobs. Go on. I dare you.  720,000.  The rest of them are not even in the labor force — that is, looking for work. Those not participating in the labor force aged 16 to 64 has increased by more than 5 million since Barack Obama took office."

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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)

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The root of all evil? Money fosters a spirit of COOPERATION by encouraging strangers to trust each other, claim experts

Academic economists discover what market advocates have long said

Money may be considered the root of all evil, but it fosters a spirit of cooperation in modern society, according to new research.

Scientists conducted experiments which showed how spontaneous cooperation ebbs away as societies get larger.  Money overcomes this tendency by encouraging anonymous strangers to trust each other.

Without it, large industrialised societies may never have evolved, the research suggests.

The team, led by Professor Gabriele Camera, from the Economic Science Institute at Chapman University in Orange, California, wrote: ‘This study has identified a behavioural reason for the existence of money.

‘Our research suggests that norms of voluntary co-operation are difficult to use in a society of strangers, unless they are mediated by some institution.'

Historically, humans have only survived by binding together in close-knit groups - yet modern society depends on the cooperation of complete strangers.

The U.S. study involved 448 volunteers playing a ‘helping game’ designed to examine the impact of money.

In one of a series of experiments, participants could choose whether or not to offer ‘help’ to fellow players in the form of gifts of ‘consumption units’ (CUs).  Later the CUs were swapped for real money, providing an incentive to acquire more of them.

Being generous increased the chances of receiving reciprocal help and units in the future.

But this voluntary ‘give and take’ system only worked when groups were small and individuals dealt personally with each other.

Co-operation fell from almost 80 per cent in groups of two to 49.1 per cent in groups of four, 34.2 per cent in groups of eight and 28.5 per cent in groups of 32.

The introduction of worthless tokens brought about a dramatic change.  Volunteers instinctively started using the tokens as ‘money’ - rewarding help with a token or demanding one in exchange for help.

With tokens included in the game, the average rate of co-operation remained a constant 52.1 per cent even when groups increased in size, the scientists reported in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Professor Camera said: 'In the experiment, monetary exchange, one of the most basic economic institutions, emerged endogenously and supported a stable level of co-operation in small as well as large groups.

‘Inherently worthless tokens acted as a catalyst for co-operation, acquiring value because of a self-sustaining belief that they could be exchanged for future co-operation.’

But the study also exposed the dark side of money, showing how it led to a social cost. Voluntary helpfulness was replaced by mercenary values.

‘Once the convention of money took hold, participants replaced norms of voluntary co-operation with a norm of exchange, i.e. trading co-operation for a token, quid pro quo,’ said the researchers.  ‘This damaged co-operation whenever monetary trade was unavailable.’

SOURCE

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When 'never again' turns into 'yet again'

DURING A VISIT last week to Dachau, the former concentration camp near Munich, German Chancellor Angela Merkel laid a wreath in memory of the tens of thousands the Nazis murdered there. The memory of their fate, she said, "fills me with deep sadness and shame."

Dachau — the original concentration camp, established in March 1933 — radiates a constant reminder about the bottomless human capacity to commit evil, or to look away when evil is committed. "How could Germans go so far as to deny people human dignity and the right to live?" Merkel asked. "Places such as this warn each one of us to help ensure that such things never happen again."

Never?

As Merkel spoke, Copts and other Christians in Egypt were reeling from a wave of attacks more savage than any in modern Egyptian history. Islamist mobs across the country torched scores of churches — some more than 1,000 years old — along with convents, monasteries, and Christian-owned homes and businesses. A Franciscan school near Cairo was looted and burned, said Sister Manal, the principal; then she and other nuns were paraded through the streets "like prisoners of war" to the jeers and abuse of the mob.

Shades of Kristallnacht.

Merkel's speech also coincided with the latest evidence of a chemical-weapons attack by the regime of Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad. Graphic video clips posted online by anti-Assad rebels east of Damascus showed rows of corpses, including those of women, children, and babies. Hospitals in the area described a sudden influx of patients gasping for breath and suffering from convulsions, nausea, and vomiting — symptoms consistent with chemical-weapons poisoning. The humanitarian group Doctors Without Borders put the death toll at 355; other estimates ranged far higher. The massacre took place one year to the week after President Obama's warning that any use of chemical weapons by Assad would be a red line. In fact, as even the Obama administration has conceded, Assad crossed that line months ago. Last week's attack was not the first, only the most brazen.

Shades of Halabja.

While Merkel was recalling the lessons of history in Dachau, a United Nations commission of inquiry was holding hearings on human rights abuses in North Korea. Survivors of Pyongyang's ghastly network of slave-labor camps recounted the horrors that take place there: starvation, torture, rape, public executions. There is nothing secret about the camps' existence or location; detailed satellite images have long been available in the West. So have accounts of unspeakable atrocities the North Korean regime inflicts on its victims. Among those testifying before the UN panel was Shin Dong-hyuk, who spent the first 22 years of his life in the North Korea's notorious Camp 14 before a miraculous escape in 2005. Shin told the harrowing story of a six-year-old girl, a classmate, who was publicly beaten to death by her teacher for stealing five kernels of corn. Other witnesses testified to other savageries, from forced abortions to medical experiments performed on dwarfs.

Shades of Auschwitz. Of the Gulag. Of the Cambodian killing fields.

"Can this really be happening? In the 21st century?" exclaimed the Israeli columnist Ari Shavit as news broke last week of the latest chemical-weapons attack in Syria. "No decent person can ignore what's happening."

That's what we always tell ourselves when "never again" turns into "yet again." But man's inhumanity to man is no more unthinkable in the 21st century than it was in the 20th. Decent people can and usually will ignore what's happening, and the indecent count on their apathy.

"Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?" Adolf Hitler is said to have remarked in 1939.

There are always reasons not to act in the face of a growing evil. There are always reasons to believe that atrocities are being overstated, or that tyrants can be persuaded to reform, or that common sense will prevail, or that meddling in the "internal affairs" of others will only make things worse. Then we are shocked to find we have enabled monsters.

The burning of houses of worship didn't end with Kristallnacht, nor the gassing of civilians with Halabja, nor concentration-camp butchery with Dachau. And we aren't finished building memorials to the dead, and solemnly declaring, as we lay our wreaths, that next time we won't forget the lessons of history.

SOURCE

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Judge Strikes Down Obama’s ‘Improper’ NLRB Recess Appointment

A federal judge struck down one of President Obama’s highly controversial recess appointments to the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB).

U.S. District Judge Benjamin Settle ruled in a case involving a Washington State firm charged with unfair labor practices that that “the Board is without power to act because it lacks a properly appointed quorum.”

On August 12, four new NRLB members appointed by President Obama and confirmed by the Senate were sworn-in, but Settles' August 13th decision invalidates all previous actions taken by Obama’s recess appointees.

In July, Obama was forced to withdrew his 2012 “recess” appointees, Sharon Block and Richard Griffin, because they were named to the NLRB while the Senate was still in session and their appointments were subsequently ruled unconstitutional in federal court.

Obama named Lafe Solomon acting general counsel in 2010, then re-nominated him as the agency’s top lawyer in 2011 and 2013, although he was never confirmed by the Senate. (See NLRB press release.pdf)

But Settle ruled that Solomon’s appointment was invalid because the Federal Vacancies Reform Act requires that the appointee serve “as a personal assistant to the departing officer” within the year prior to the appointment, which  Solomon did not do.

The ruling “recognizes what the NLRB has failed to acknowledge: that former acting general counsel Lafe Solomon’s authority was questionable and came at an extreme cost to America’s job creators, like Boeing and Wal-Mart,” Dan Epstein, executive director of government accountability organization Cause of Action, commented.

Solomon came under fire by business groups after filing a 2011 complaint against Boeing, claiming that the aviation giant’s opening of a production plant in right-to-work South Carolina was an improper response to threats of a strike by its unionized employees in Washington State.

Judicial Watch released documents revealing emails about a deal the NLRB offered Boeing, in which it would drop the complaint if Boeing agreed not to lay off unionized workers. The union employees were later granted a contract extension and the complaint was formally withdrawn.

Last year, the NLRB’s Office of the Inspector General reported on a conflict of interest case involving Solomon, who held a substantial amount of Wal-Mart stock but participated in a decision on whether to file a complaint against Wal-Mart’s social media policy.

NLRB personnel polices prohibit individuals “from participating personally and substantially” in matters in which they have a financial interest.

Noting that “The DOJ can bring criminal or civil actions against Solomon,” Cause of Action condemned the OIG’s decision not to hold Solomon accountable because of “defects in the ethics process at the NLRB."

SOURCE

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ELSEWHERE

Are you a “potential terrorist?”:  "Are you a conservative, a libertarian, a Christian or a gun owner? Are you opposed to abortion, globalism, Communism, illegal immigration, the United Nations or the New World Order? Do you believe in conspiracy theories, do you believe that we are living in the 'end times' or do you ever visit alternative news websites (such as this one)? If you answered yes to any of those questions, you are a 'potential terrorist' according to official U.S. government documents."

The French model:  "Sometimes the impact of a set of policies is not obvious immediately. When Japan was riding high in the late 1980′s, a lot of people suggested that their model was one to emulate. Their public/private partnership with lifetime employment seemed to be working well. Japan had high growth rates and their future seemed limitless. It was only a matter of time before their economy surpassed America’s. It didn’t turn out that way. France is another example."

FL: Zimmerman will seek to recover legal fees from state:  "George Zimmerman's attorney said Tuesday that he is going to ask the state of Florida to pay for some of his client's non-lawyer legal bills, including for experts, printing and court reporters, and that the price tag could reach $300,000. Zimmerman was acquitted last month of all charges in the 2012 fatal shooting of Miami teenager Trayvon Martin. The decision in the nationally televised trial touched off protests across the country. Since he was found not guilty, Zimmerman is entitled under a Florida law to recoup the defense costs, minus private attorney fees, said his lawyer Mark O'Mara. It also says that any costs already paid can be refunded with the approval of a judge, he said."

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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)

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A Truly Great Phony

Thomas Sowell

Many years ago, I was a member of a committee that was recommending to whom grant money should be awarded. Since I knew one of the applicants, I asked if this meant that I should recuse myself from voting on his application.  "No," the chairman said. "I know him too -- and he is one of the truly great phonies of our time."

The man was indeed a very talented phony. He could convince almost anybody of almost anything -- provided that they were not already knowledgeable about the subject.

He had once spoken to me very authoritatively about Marxian economics, apparently unaware that I was one of the few people who had read all three volumes of Marx's "Capital," and had published articles on Marxian economics in scholarly journals.

What our glib talker was saying might have seemed impressive to someone who had never read "Capital," as most people have not. But it was complete nonsense to me.

Incidentally, he did not get the grant he applied for.

This episode came back to me recently, as I read an incisive column by Charles Krauthammer, citing some of the many gaffes in public statements by the President of the United States.

One presidential gaffe in particular gives the flavor, and suggests the reason, for many others. It involved the Falkland Islands.

Argentina has recently been demanding that Britain return the Falkland Islands, which have been occupied by Britons for nearly two centuries. In 1982, Argentina seized these islands by force, only to have British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher take the islands back by force.

With Argentina today beset by domestic problems, demanding the return of the Falklands is once again a way for Argentina's government to distract the Argentine public's attention from the country's economic and other woes.

Because the Argentines call these islands "the Malvinas," rather than "the Falklands," Barack Obama decided to use the Argentine term. But he referred to them as "the Maldives."

It so happens that the Maldives are thousands of miles away from the Malvinas. The former are in the Indian Ocean, while the latter are in the South Atlantic.

Nor is this the only gross misstatement that President Obama has gotten away with, thanks to the mainstream media, which sees no evil, hears no evil and speaks no evil when it comes to Obama.

The presidential gaffe that struck me when I heard it was Barack Obama's reference to a military corps as a military "corpse." He is obviously a man who is used to sounding off about things he has paid little or no attention to in the past. His mispronunciation of a common military term was especially revealing to someone who was once in the Marine Corps, not Marine "corpse."

Like other truly talented phonies, Barack Obama concentrates his skills on the effect of his words on other people -- most of whom do not have the time to become knowledgeable about the things he is talking about. Whether what he says bears any relationship to the facts is politically irrelevant.

A talented con man, or a slick politician, does not waste his time trying to convince knowledgeable skeptics. His job is to keep the true believers believing. He is not going to convince the others anyway.

Back during Barack Obama's first year in office, he kept repeating, with great apparent earnestness, that there were "shovel-ready" projects that would quickly provide many much-needed jobs, if only his spending plans were approved by Congress.

He seemed very convincing -- if you didn't know how long it can take for any construction project to get started, after going through a bureaucratic maze of environmental impact studies, zoning commission rulings and other procedures that can delay even the smallest and simplest project for years.

Only about a year or so after his big spending programs were approved by Congress, Barack Obama himself laughed at how slowly everything was going on his supposedly "shovel-ready" projects.

One wonders how he will laugh when all his golden promises about ObamaCare turn out to be false and a medical disaster. Or when his foreign policy fiascoes in the Middle East are climaxed by a nuclear Iran.

SOURCE

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15 Moronic Things Liberals Call Racism Since Obama Was Elected

Bizarrely, racism in America is no longer mainly about race. Sure, race is involved in a peripheral manner, but racism has mainly become an excuse, a dodge, a way to escape responsibility.

When a black liberal is criticized, he cries racism. When liberalism fails, liberals cry racism. When the Democrat Party gets in trouble, liberals cry racism. It has become the ever present background noise of politics, like birds chirping in the forest.

Racism does still exist and always will, but once the Democrat Party joined the GOP in being opposed to racist policies, appealing to racism became a dead dog political loser in this country. The very fact that we've become so hypersensitive about it as a country is evidence of how far it has been pushed to the fringes.

Keep in mind that we live in a nation with a black President and a black Attorney General. Furthermore, the government is legally allowed to discriminate against white Americans based on the color of their skin and it happily does so; yet you can't go a day in this country without hearing liberals howling about what a racist country they live in. It has almost become a circular, faith-based argument. America is racist because so many liberals say it's racist because they've heard other liberals say the country is racist.

Well, if our country is so racist, why is it that the Left has to reach so far to find examples of racism? People didn’t have to do any reaching to find examples of racism in the fifties and sixties, did they? So, if racism is such an all powerful force in America today, how is it that liberals have gotten so desperate to see race in every issue that they've had to latch on to pitiful issues like these to support their claims?

    1) Criticizing the IRS: "Republicans are using [the IRS scandal] as their latest weapon in the war against the black man. ‘IRS’ is the new 'N****r.'" -- Martin Bashir

    2) Having a Republican National Convention during a hurricane: "They are happy to have a party with black people drowning." -- Yahoo News Washington bureau chief David Chalian on the Republican National Convention, which was going on at the same time as Hurricane Isaac.

    3) Wanting to own a gun to prevent break-ins: "I am loathe to bring up what is in our head because we don’t like to talk about it so much. But on this particular day, on Martin Luther King Day, I think this needs to be said. That imaginary person that’s going to break into your home and kill you, who does that person look like? You know, it’s not freckle-faced Jimmy down the street, is it really? I mean, that’s not what really, that’s not what really people, we never really want to talk about the racial or the class part of this, in terms of how it’s the poor or it’s people of color that we imagine that we’re afraid of. Why are we afraid? What is that, and it’s been a fear that has existed for a very, very long time." -- Michael Moore

    4) Mentioning the "Constitution" or "respect for the Founding Fathers:" "The language of GOP racial politics is heavy on euphemisms that allow the speaker to deny any responsibility for the racial content of his message,” Williams wrote. “References to a lack of respect for the ‘Founding Fathers’ and the ‘Constitution’ also make certain ears perk up by demonizing anyone supposedly threatening core ‘old-fashioned American values.’" -- Juan Williams

    5) Calling Obama "angry:" "That really bothered me. You notice (Romney) said anger twice. He’s really trying to use racial coding and access some really deep stereotypes about the angry black man. This is part of the playbook against Obama, the ‘otherization,’ he’s not like us. I know it’s a heavy thing, I don’t say it lightly, but this is ‘n*ggerization.’" -- Touré

    6) Saying that Barack Obama lies: "Surrounded by middle-aged white guys — a sepia snapshot of the days when such pols ran Washington like their own men’s club — Joe Wilson yelled “You lie!” at a president who didn’t. But, fair or not, what I heard was an unspoken word in the air: You lie, boy!" -- Maureen Dowd

    7) Noting that Obama is privileged: "Spotlighting his elite education is tantamount to racial bigotry because it insinuates that 'he took the place of someone else through affirmative action, that someone else being someone white.'" -- Jonathan Capehart

    8) Saying that unions boss Obama around: "The Republican Party is saying that the President of the United States has bosses, that the union bosses this President around, the unions boss him around. Does that sound to you like they are trying to consciously or subconsciously deliver the racist message that, of course, of course a black man can’t be the real boss?" -- Lawrence O’Donnell

    9) Supporting voter ID: “If you go back to the year 2000, when we had an obvious disaster and – and saw that our voting process needed refinement, and we did that in the America Votes Act and made sure that we could iron out those kinks, now you have the Republicans, who want to literally drag us all the way back to Jim Crow laws and literally – and very transparently – block access to the polls to voters who are more likely to vote Democratic candidates than Republican candidates. And it’s nothing short of that blatant.” -- Debbie Wasserman Schultz

    10) Saying "I want my country back:" "Do you remember tea baggers? It was just so much easier when we could just call them racists. I just don’t know why we can’t call them racists, or functionally retarded adults. The functionally retarded adults, the racists – with their cries of, ‘I want my country back. You know what they’re really saying is, ‘I want my white guy back.’ They apparently had no problem at all for the last eight years of habeas corpus being suspended, the Constitution being [expletive] on, illegal surveillance, lied to on a war or two, two stolen elections – yes, the John Kerry one was stolen too. That’s not tin-foil hat time. ” -- Janeane Garofalo

    11) Being fans of Herman Cain: "One of the things about Herman Cain is, I think that he makes that white Republican base of the party feel okay, feel like they are not racist because they can like this guy. I think he(he’s) giving that base a free pass. And I think they like him because they think he’s a black man who knows his place. I know that’s harsh, but that’s how it sure seems to me." -- Karen Finney

    12) Fighting for the 2nd Amendment: "I believe the NRA is the new KKK. And that the arming of so many black youths, uh, and loading up our community with drugs, and then just having an open shooting gallery, is the work of people who obviously don’t have our best interests [at heart]." -- Jason Whitlock

    13) Republicans trying to keep Obama from being reelected: "Look at, look, the Tea Partiers, who are controlling the Republican Party….Their stated policy, publicly stated, is to do whatever it takes to see to it that Obama only serves one term. What’s, what does that, what underlines that? ‘Screw the country. We’re going to (do) whatever we (can) do to get this black man, we can, we’re going to do whatever we can to get this black man outta here.’… It is a racist thing." -- Morgan Freeman

    14) Disliking the fact that Obama is President: "They can’t stand the idea that he’s president, and a piece of it is racism. Not that somebody in one racial group doesn’t like somebody in another racial group, so what? It’s the sense that the white race must rule, that’s what racism is, and they can’t stand the idea that a man who’s not white is president. That is real, that sense of racial superiority and rule is in the hearts of some people in this country." -- Chris Matthews

    15) Disliking Barack Obama: "I think an overwhelming portion of the intensely demonstrated animosity toward President Barack Obama is based on the fact that he is a black man, that he’s African-American." -- Jimmy Carter

SOURCE

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North Korea Shows The Pervasive Evil of Communism…and the Moral Bankruptcy of Communist Apologists

I spoke earlier today at the 2013 Liberty Conference in Lausanne, Switzerland. But I don’t think anybody is going to remember my speech about the collapse of the welfare state, even though I presented lots of powerful data from the BIS, OECD, and IMF, and also shared a very funny cartoon showing what happens when there’s nothing left for interest groups to steal.

At a normal conference, my remarks may have resonated, but I freely admit that I was completely overshadowed by the presentation of Shin Dong-Hyuk, who is the only person to have successfully escaped from the North Korean gulag.

In the future, if I ever get discouraged and think the fight for freedom is too difficult, I will watch this video and realize that nothing in my life will ever compare to the horror of living under communism. It’s not nearly as powerful as today’s first-person presentation, but the video will give you some sense of the utter barbarity of the North Korean government.

Keep in mind, by the way, that North Korea is an awful and repressive country even for the people who aren’t in the gulags. Malnutrition is such a problem, for instance, that children are stunted and the North Korean army had to lower its requirements to allow soldiers as short as 4’8?.

So perhaps now you understand why I get so upset when people in the west glorify communist thugs such as Che Guevara, or use the Soviet hammer and sickle as a cutesy marketing gimmick.

I hope nobody would ever think to wear a Hermann Göring t-shirt or use the swastika in a value-neutral fashion, so why should it be okay to whitewash and/or rehabilitate communists?

SOURCE

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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)

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MLK's 'Dream' at 50

Is THIS the dream?

Tens of thousands of people descended on the National Mall Saturday for the coming 50th anniversary of Martin Luther King's "I have a dream" speech. In King's 1963 speech, he eloquently declared, "I have a dream that my four children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character." Unfortunately, that day has not yet come.

The biggest reason for that is the professional race baiters like Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton who arose from MLK's socialist ranks to keep the embers of racial animosity burning. Martin Luther King III, MLK's grandson, shamefully pointed to Trayvon Martin's death as evidence that "the task is not done." King also decried the Supreme Court's June ruling striking down Section 4 of the Voting Rights Act (VRA), which the Court did because the law's formula for federal intervention in state election law hasn't been revised in 40 years. In many ways, that's the essence of the movement today -- it's still living in 1963.

Further evidence of that arrested development comes from Attorney General Eric Holder, whose Justice Department filed suit against Texas last week for allegedly violating the Constitution and the VRA through recently passed voter ID and redistricting laws. Holder justifies the suit under Section 2 of the VRA, which prohibits any voting qualification that "results in a denial or abridgement of the right of any citizens of the United States to vote on account of race or color." Pursuant to Holder's hostility toward voter ID laws, the Justice Department claims Section 5 authority to reimpose preclearance on Texas for the next decade.

Fortunately for Texas, the Supreme Court in 2008 upheld Indiana's similar voter ID law, and a lower court likewise upheld Georgia's. Neither law suppressed minority turnout, which certainly makes Holder's discrimination claim on that count difficult to prove. Voter fraud favors Democrats, which is why they oppose voter ID. It's also clear that Holder and the miscreants marching on the mall have turned King's dream on its head.

SOURCE

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Why Your Boss is Dumping Your Wife

The United Parcel Service UPS +0.24%  will no longer cover employees' spouses on the company health plan. And while it's not the only company to have adopted the policy, it's among the largest. Some 15,000 UPS spouses who can obtain health coverage through their own jobs will be dropped from the plan. In a memo to employees, the company explained that the change was intended to offset the effects of the Affordable Care Act, which were expected to increase its health care costs by 4%. See: New Obamacare effect: working spouses taken off UPS health plans

By denying coverage to spouses, employers not only save the annual premiums, but also the new fees that went into effect as part of the Affordable Care Act. This year, companies have to pay $1 or $2 "per life" covered on their plans, a sum that jumps to $65 in 2014. And health law guidelines proposed recently mandate coverage of employees' dependent children (up to age 26), but husbands and wives are optional. "The question about whether it's obligatory to cover the family of the employee is being thought through more than ever before," says Helen Darling, president of the National Business Group on Health. See: When your boss doesn't trust your doctor

While surcharges for spousal coverage are more common, next year, 12% of employers plan to exclude spouses, up from 4% this year, according to a recent Towers Watson survey. These "spousal carve-outs," or "working spouse provisions," generally prohibit only people who could get coverage through their own job from enrolling in their spouse's plan.

Such exclusions barely existed three years ago, but experts expect an increasing number of employers to adopt them: "That's the next step," Darling says. HMS, a company that audits plans for employers, estimates that nearly a third of companies might have such policies now. Holdouts say they feel under pressure to follow suit. "We're the last domino," says Duke Bennett, mayor of Terre Haute, Ind., which is instituting a spousal carve-out for the city's health plan, effective July 2013, after nearly all major employers in the area dropped spouses.

But when employers drop spouses, they often lose more than just the one individual, when couples choose instead to seek coverage together under the other partner's employer. Terre Haute, which pays $6 million annually to insure nearly 1,200 people including employees and their family members, received more than 20 new plan members when a local university, bank and county government stopped insuring spouses, according to Bennett. "We have a great plan, so they want to be on ours. All we're trying to do is level the playing field here," he says.

SOURCE

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Abbott & Costello updated

COSTELLO: I want to talk about  the unemployment rate in America .

ABBOTT: Good Subject.  Terrible Times. It's 7.8%.

COSTELLO: That many people  are out of work?

ABBOTT: No, that's 14.7%.

COSTELLO: You just said 7.8%.

ABBOTT: 7.8%  Unemployed.

COSTELLO: Right 7.8% out of work.

ABBOTT: No, that's 14.7%.

COSTELLO: Okay,  so it's 14.7% unemployed.

ABBOTT: No, that's 7.8%.

COSTELLO: WAIT A MINUTE. Is it 7.8% or 14.7%?

ABBOTT: 7.8% are unemployed. 14.7% are out of work.

COSTELLO: If you are out of work you are unemployed.

ABBOTT: No, Congress said you can't count the "Out of  Work" as the unemployed.  You have to look for work to be  unemployed.

COSTELLO: BUT THEY ARE OUT OF WORK!!!

ABBOTT: No, you miss his point.

COSTELLO:  What point?

ABBOTT: Someone who doesn't look for work  can't be counted with those who look for work. It wouldn't be fair.

COSTELLO: To whom?

ABBOTT: The unemployed.

COSTELLO: But ALL of them are out of work.

ABBOTT: No, the unemployed are actively looking for  work. Those who are out of work gave up looking and if you give up,  you are no longer in the ranks of the unemployed.

COSTELLO: So if you're off the unemployment roles that  would count as less unemployment?

ABBOTT: Unemployment  would go down. Absolutely!

COSTELLO: The unemployment  just goes down because you don't look for work?

ABBOTT:  Absolutely it goes down. That's how it gets to 7.8%. Otherwise it  would be 14.7%.

COSTELLO: Wait, I got a question for you. That  means there are two ways to bring down the unemployment number?

ABBOTT: Two ways is correct.

COSTELLO:  Unemployment can go down if someone gets a job?

ABBOTT:  Correct.

COSTELLO: And unemployment can also go down if  you stop looking for a job?

ABBOTT: Bingo.

COSTELLO: So there are two ways to bring unemployment  down, and the easier of the two is to have people stop looking for  work.

ABBOTT: Now you're thinking like an Economist.

COSTELLO: I don't even know what I just said!

ABBOTT: Now you're thinking like  Congress.

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When Jews And Arabs Sunbathe Together

Just as there are observant and unobservant Jews in Israel, there are all sorts of Arabs. Just as some Jewish women wouldn’t ever be seen in a bikini on the beach, there are plenty of Israeli Arab women who take advantage of Israel’s liberal nature and sunbathe on Israel’s many fine beaches.

So while the picture of the woman walking on the beach in a burka that did the rounds on social media a few weeks ago is accurate, it’s quite possible the girl in the bikini is an Arab too.

It’s normal. Here’s a typical story from one of my Facebook acquaintances, Bat Zion:

Shabbat in Eretz Yisrael and as is my custom on this Shabbat and every Shabbat, I go to the beach to enjoy the cooling water and the refreshing sea breeze.

Next to me in bright colourful skimpy bikinis, there situated themselves two beautiful young Israeli Arab women.

We exchanged common greetings (I talk to anyone:-)) and set to deepen the already evenly golden brown tan all three of us seem to have acquired.

One of the city inspectors, patrolling the beaches, approached us and reminded us to drink water so that we do not get dehydrated.

I told him I had forgotten mine. My beautiful beach neighbours seem to have also forgotten theirs.

“I will get a popsicle as soon as the vendor gets here,” I answered.

“So will we,” answered one of the young ladies next to me.

“Ok, ” said the inspector, “I will send him your way.” And left.

A few minutes later, all three of us were left with out mouths open.

There, in front of us was the city inspector negotiating his way barefoot on the hot sand, coming towards us.

In his hands were three popsicles!

Welcome to an “Apartheid” state called Israel!

The truth is, when girls are wearing bikinis, it’s hard to tell if they’re Jew or Arab and few people really care. You’d only notice if you spoke or listened for an accent and then again, most of them speak perfect Hebrew and with far less accent than my crappy Hebrew.

Another fine tale of normal, intermingled life in Israel. It’s not quite what you may have been mislead to believe.

SOURCE

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The Price of a Preposterous Presidency

Just how much are we paying for the gooey warm glow of sanctimony liberals derive from Barack Obama’s “historic” presidency? The total cost is incalculable, but The Economic Collapse lists 33 documented facts that give a general idea in monetary terms, including:

    * When the Obama era began, the average duration of unemployment in this country was 19.8 weeks. Today, it is 36.6 weeks.

    * During the first four years of Obama, the number of Americans “not in the labor force” soared by an astounding 8,332,000. That far exceeds any previous four year total.

    * Median household income in America has fallen for four consecutive years. Overall, it has declined by over $4000 during that time span.

    * The poverty rate has shot up to 16.1 percent. That is actually higher than when the War on Poverty began in 1965.

    * When Barack Obama entered the White House, there were about 32 million Americans on food stamps. Today, there are more than 47 million Americans on food stamps.

    * When Barack Obama took office, the average price of a gallon of regular gasoline was $1.85. Today, it is $3.53.

    * Electricity bills in the United States have risen faster than the overall rate of inflation for five years in a row.

    * Health insurance costs have risen by 29 percent since Barack Obama became president, and Obamacare is going to make things far worse.

    * During Obama’s first term, the federal government accumulated more new debt than it did under the first 42 U.S presidents combined.

    * When you break it down, the amount of new debt accumulated by the U.S. government during Obama’s first term comes to approximately $50,521 for every single household in the United States.

Meanwhile, the media that put Obama in power and keeps him there despite his growing list of impeachable offenses tells us that we are in a recovery.

SOURCE

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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)

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Does a police officer's race matter?

by Jeff Jacoby

CAN YOU judge a police officer's abilities by the color of his skin?

When Boston Police Commissioner Edward Davis earlier this month promoted five officers to sergeant, the commotion it generated had everything to do with the officers' race. All five happened to be white, even though the pool of 21 officers eligible for promotion on the basis of their Civil Service test scores had included nine nonwhite candidates. The commissioner was blasted by a minority officers' advocacy group, which accused him of making a "conscious effort" to keep minorities from moving up.

Boston's mayoral hopefuls jumped on the issue. "How can we have a city of Boston that's 53 percent people of color," demanded City Councilor Charles Yancey, "and not have one person of color heading up any of the 11 police districts in the city of Boston?"

Davis pleaded in vain that there is more to police leadership than color. "I'm not going to promote every single time based on race, which is what they want me to do," he said. "I'm going to pick the best people for the positions." Nevertheless, he quickly added two black officers to the promotion list, and vigorously affirmed his commitment to a "diverse" police force. If his hands weren't tied by state law, which restricts most promotions to candidates who score well on the Civil Service exam, "our police force would look much more like the city in terms of diversity," the commissioner insisted.

The racial makeup of Boston's police force has long been a source of stress and frustration. For years critics have argued that the Civil Service exams —multiple-choice tests that reward memorized book knowledge — can't measure many of the qualities that effective police supervisors need, such as a knack for leadership, good communication skills, integrity, and sound judgment. Davis isn't the first commissioner to complain about the tests' inadequacy; his predecessors were vexed by them too. Last year Davis proposed spending $2 million on a project to overhaul the BPD's promotion system to advance more minority officers. Meanwhile, when it comes to his command staff — where he is free to disregard Civil Service scores — Davis has named the most diverse group in the department's history: White men account for fewer than half of the chiefs, superintendents, and deputy superintendents on his team.

The arguments for a more holistic means of screening officers for promotion sound plausible. Yet I never see the subject raised other than in the context of "diversity." The deficiencies of the existing test become an issue only when there are complaints about too few racial minorities being promoted. Does that mean that there is something wrong with the test? Maybe.

Or maybe what it means is that Boston's police department cannot readily escape the persistent racial gap in learning and test scores that has been so extensively documented in American life. The average black high school graduate reads and writes at the level of the average white 8th-grader; black students taking the SAT college entrance exam score (on average) 200 points below white students taking the same exam. It's easy to blame a test for the achievement gap it reveals. It's a lot harder to implant the educational values, habits, and skills necessary to actually close that gap.

It has become an unchallenged truism that police departments must "look like" the communities they serve, especially in cities with large minority populations. Plainly there is great value in having police officers who can move easily in minority neighborhoods or interview crime victims in a language they're most comfortable with. When there are minority cops patrolling the beat in minority neighborhoods, residents are less likely to resent the police as alien occupiers — and perhaps more likely to come forward with information that can prevent or solve a crime.

Yet it's one thing to say that a racially mixed police force can reduce public suspicion of law enforcement, or help in practical ways to make a city safer. It's something very different to suggest that racial diversity should be pursued for its own sake, and that there is something inherently foul about a promotion list that doesn't include a certain number of blacks or Hispanics. If the Civil Service test needs improving, improve it. But let's not be seduced by the false assumption that, ideally, the demographics of a police department should match those of the population.

On the contrary: Ideally, the demographics of a police department shouldn't matter. No one imagines that Boston's cops should mirror Boston's population in terms of religion or party registration. Boston needs to recruit and promote skilled, honest, and committed police officers; most residents would agree that it's irrelevant whether they happen to be Methodists or Mormons, Republicans or Democrats. Maybe it's still not possible to be quite so nonchalant when it comes to race. But shouldn't that be the goal? Fifty years after the March on Washington, shouldn't public officials be able to acknowledge that there is always a serious moral objection to treating skin color as a job qualification? Even if, for the moment, there is no easy way around it?

SOURCE

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Yes, Black Is the New ‘Transparency’

Cass Sunstein is on the NSA "review board" so Federal spying on Americans will only be done judiciously  -- or will it?

The recently released secret FISA [Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act] court opinion is supposed to promote the idea that the administration elected on a promise of "transparency" is now making good on that pledge. There’s just one problem: a good 20 percent of the 83-page document is redacted, including some key paragraphs. It is to a large extent unreadable. But what else are we to expect from this Bizarro World administration – the most secretive in our history – where black is the new "transparency"?

Yet that’s just the beginning of the White House’s weirdly inverted response to the public outcry against its massive domestic surveillance program. At his press conference promising to "reform" the spying machinery, President Obama announced a "review board" to be appointed that would supposedly reassure his critics there really is no domestic spying program: the goal, as he put it, would be to strike a "balance" between civil liberties and the safety of all Americans. A week or so later he made some appointments to this panel: former Counter-Terrorism Czar Richard Clarke, former special assistant for economic policy Peter Swire, former CIA Deputy Director Mike Morrell – and Cass Sunstein, a very close friend and confidant of the President.

Sunstein formerly headed up the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs: now a Harvard law professor, he has made something of a name for himself as an outspoken advocate of government spying. Being one of those really highbrow types, he calls it "cognitive infiltration." Sunstein wants paid government agents to penetrate ostensibly subversive “conspiracy minded” social networks: in other words, he wants to set up a police state system of government spies and provocateurs.

Sunstein is a singular figure: no one else in government (or academia, as far as I know) has pushed for measures so openly totalitarian in their implications. Here is part of the summary of an academic paper Sunstein published in 2008:

"Many millions of people hold conspiracy theories; they believe that powerful people have worked together in order to withhold the truth about some important practice or some terrible event."

What person in their right mind could possibly believe that powerful people are working together to withhold the truth about some important practice? Oh, wait! Isn’t that what the Snowden revelations have proved beyond what any "conspiracy theorist" I know of ever asserted? Thanks to the Snowden "leaks" we now know that is precisely what’s been happening.

According to Professor Sunstein, if you believe that, you’re creating "serious risks" for society at large, "including risks of violence." The mere existence of such people "raises significant challenges for policy and law."

James Clapper didn’t lie to Congress and the American people – you’re just imagining that, you conspiracy theorist wacko! Moreover, you’re a danger to society, and have to be combated by law enforcement agencies operating online and undercover. Sunstein proposes sending government spies into "chat rooms, online social networks, or even real-space groups" to provide a bit of Attitude Correction.

These agents would be paid to infiltrate and counteract any "conspiracy theories" the Harvard Professor and his co-thinkers deem "dangerous." Sunstein stresses the importance of the covert aspect of this program: these Attitude Correctors must at least appear to be independent, all the while taking their marching orders (and their checks) from Washington. Think of it as a "stimulus" job-creating program. Their targets: anyone who "attempts[s] to explain an event or practice by reference to the machinations of powerful people, who have also managed to conceal their role." In short, the enemy is anyone who believes the government has covered up illegality and egregious violations of the Fourth Amendment for years – and anyone who suspects what Sunstein and his online KGB are up to.

As an exercise in ideological ambidexterity, Sunstein’s proposal is Olympic quality stuff: he is, after all, the author of an entire book about the necessity for dissent in a free society. Well, then how can he possibly advocate the creation of a covert government program to infiltrate, combat, and discredit these very same dissenters? Well, you see, there are good dissenters and bad dissenters, and as long as the Good Guys are in charge of the government, it’s cool to deploy government resources against those who believe in the wrong "conspiracy theories." As he puts it in his paper, imaginatively titled "Conspiracy Theories":

Rulers throughout history, including especially the worst tyrants, have touted their virtuous motives, and proclaimed themselves the guardians of "social welfare" – an oleaginous phrase that’s a code word for those ideologues (left and right) who long for a system of effective social control. Yes, there must be dissent – there’s the "liberal" gloss on a very illiberal idea – but it must be the right kind, our kind. Those crazy Ay-rabs, Sunstein avers, are rife with conspiracism, it oozes from their very pores, and here in America we have the homegrown "antigovernment" types, the very kind who hate Harvard professors and are potentially just as violent as Al Qaeda: indeed, perhaps more dangerous in the long run.

Well, then, "What can government do about conspiracy theories?" he asks:

"Among the things it can do, what should it do? We can readily imagine a series of possible responses. (1) Government might ban conspiracy theorizing. (2) Government might impose some kind of tax, financial or otherwise, on those who disseminate such theories. (3) Government might itself engage in counterspeech, marshaling arguments to discredit conspiracy theories. (4) Government might formally hire credible private parties to engage in counterspeech. (5) Government might engage in informal communication with such parties, encouraging them to help. Each instrument has a distinctive set of potential effects, or costs and benefits, and each will have a place under imaginable conditions. However, our main policy idea is that government should engage in cognitive infiltration of the groups that produce conspiracy theories, which involves a mix of (3), (4) and (5)."

In Sunstein’s world, censorship is just another option, but "cognitive infiltration" of targeted groups – and the public square at large – by paid "credible" government covert agents on the Internet is definitely on the table. This is the person the President is appointing to his NSA review board, a body set up to reassure us that there’s no reason to fear for our privacy and that Big Brother isn’t watching us.  Really?

And it isn’t just the Fourth Amendment the new authoritarians are after: Sunstein opposes the First Amendment as presently constituted. Instead, he says, we need a "New Deal for speech," one that would recognize that technological changes have made the old marketplace-of-ideas conception of free speech outdated. What we need, says Sunstein, is a reformulated First Amendment because the current version isn’t "adequately serving democratic goals." And, no, he didn’t capitalize the "d" in democratic, but you get the idea.

Sunstein, in short, is the single most consistent academic representative of barefaced authoritarianism one could possibly find, short of unearthing some aging New Left Stalinist. Certainly he is the most highly placed, shuttling from Harvard to government and back again. His appointment to the NSA review board is an unabashed middle finger aimed directly at the Obama administration’s civil libertarian critics.

Sunstein’s extremism is on full display in an article published by Bloomberg News just the other day, which the editors gave the rather skeptical-sounding title of "Could Bowling Leagues and the PTA Breed Nazis?" In it, Sunstein tells us "social capital" – the links that bind us together socially – is not necessarily a good thing. There is a "dark side" to it. Citing a recent study by one of his fellow nutty professors, he avers that a "high level of social capital" led directly to the rise of …. wait for it! … Hitler and Nazism!

Citing this crackpot study, Sunstein points to a correlation between membership in the Nazi Party and membership in private social organizations – those German drinking societies! – to "prove" a definitive link between bowling leagues and the Holocaust. And, no, you can’t make this stuff up. Utilizing the methods of "sociological" pseudo-science and progressive anxieties about the rise of right-wing fascism, Sunstein posits that "dense social networks" in the US are a problem for our democracy:

Sunstein’s argument of last resort, you’ll note, is always the alleged threat of "terrorism": this is the Get-Out-of-Jail free card for our post-9/11 authoritarians, whether they be outright neocons or else "progressives" of Sunstein’s ilk: the deus ex machina of all their ideological morality plays is always the same. That theme is wearing a little thin, however, as the upsurge against the Surveillance State takes on momentum and the revelations continue – thank you, Edward Snowden! – in spite of recently stepped up strong-arm tactics to stanch the leaks.

In a halfway healthy society, Sunstein would be laughed out of polite society, and consigned to the margins, where fruit-juice drinking sandal-wearers and founders of utopian communes plot revolution in cheap cafeterias. In Barack Obama’s America, Sunstein divides his time between the halls of government and the lushest groves of academe, whispering in the ear of the President that the number of bowling leagues has grown quite alarmingly.

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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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)

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