The Kids Aren't All Right

Younger Americans are being suffocated by spending, subsidies, and debt

A word of caution for kids heading off to college this year: Your degree may be worth less and cost more than you think. Your job prospects will likely be grim, whether or not you get that sheepskin. Oh, and you're on the hook for trillions in federal debt racked up by your parents and grandparents.

Washington has willfully ignored the looming crisis of entitlement spending, knowingly consigning young Americans to a future of crushing debt, persistent underemployment, and burdensome regulation. Politicians on both sides of the aisle share the blame.

This summer, Congress made a big bipartisan show of cutting student loan rates to 3.4 percent from an already artificially low 6.8 percent. But even that seemingly helpful gesture will wind up hurting the Americans it claims to help. Federal student aid, whether in the form of grants or loans, is the main factor behind the runaway cost of higher education. Subsidies raise prices, leading to higher subsidies, which raise prices even more. This higher education bubble, like the housing bubble before it, will eventually pop. Meanwhile, large numbers of students will graduate with more debt than they would have in an unsubsidized market.

And when those new, debt-laden graduates head out into the labor market with their overpriced diplomas, they may not be able to find a job. According to data provided to me by my Mercatus Center colleague, former Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) commissioner Keith Hall, fewer than half of Americans today between the ages of 18 and 25 are employed. For those in that cohort actively on the job market, the unemployment rate is 16 percent, versus 6 percent for job-seekers aged 25 and above.

These young folks are also more likely to be long-term unemployed: While accounting for just 14 percent of the labor force, they make up 19 percent of the long-term unemployed, defined by the BLS as 27 weeks or longer.

The lucky few young'uns with jobs of some kind also suffer from rampant underemployment. In a recent blog post, Diana Carew of the Progressive Policy Institute wrote: "In July 2013, just 36 percent of Americans age 16-24 not enrolled in school worked full-time, 10 percent less than in July 2007." In other words, of these 17 million young Americans, 5.6 million were working part-time, 3.2 million were unemployed, and 8.4 million were out of the labor force altogether.

This jobs crisis will have long-term consequences for young Americans. A forthcoming paper in the American Economic Journal: Applied Economics on Canadian college graduates by the economists Philip Oreopoulos, Till Von Wachter, and Andrew Heisz shows that in economies like ours, during normal times, the average person sees 70 percent of career wage growth in the first 10 years on the job. That is terrible news for people who are unemployed or underemployed at the start of their careers. The study also shows that those unlucky enough to graduate during a recession will suffer a 9 percent pay hit from the start of their careers-and it will likely take them a decade to climb out of that hole.

Weak economies always hit younger people hard, but this weak recovery is taking a particularly heavy toll, despite the massive government intervention in the form of stimulus and job programs. In fact, much of the uncertainty that gets in the way of employers hiring new full-time workers can be traced to government policies.

Take the president's health care law. Because ObamaCare requires employers with more than 50 workers to provide health insurance to all employees or pay a $2,000 penalty per worker, the law will likely increase the cost of current and future employees (those working at least 30 hours per week). There is increasing evidence that the new rules are leading employers to hire more part-time workers and/or to cap their workers' time at 30 hours, especially in the retail and fast-food industries. Outfits ranging from Walmart and Forever 21 to Virginia community colleges have already started increasing their share of part-time employees.

Health insurance premiums are also going up, thanks to ObamaCare's requirement that health insurers accept everyone who applies, that they never charge more based on preexisting medical conditions, and start paying for many medical conditions that previously went uncovered.

But not everyone is equally affected by the increase in premiums. In fact, while some Americans-mostly older and sicker-will benefit from lower rates, others (mostly younger and healthier) will see their rates go up significantly, even after accounting for federal subsidies. A 2013 study by Society of Actuaries fellows Kurt Giesa and Chris Carlson in the latest issue of Contingencies, the American Academy of Actuaries' bimonthly magazine, shows that 80 percent of Americans in their 20s will face higher costs under the law.

That fact is rather ironic: Since about two-thirds of the uninsured population is under the age of 40, this law, too, could end up hurting the very uninsured Americans it was supposed to help. As the Manhattan Institute's Avik Roy wrote of the study in a blog post at Forbes, because "premiums for younger, healthier individuals could increase by more than 40 percent," some will choose to pay the individual-mandate penalty rather than get coverage. In other words, they still won't be insured, the job market will still be constricted by ObamaCare, and they'll be poorer by the amount of the penalty.

Even if lawmakers repeal provisions in the new health care law, younger people will still not be out of the woods. That's because before Obama­Care, there was Medicare. And in addition, there is Social Security. Spending on these programs will explode in the near future, creating a massive pile-up of debt and unfunded liabilities. Medicare is the bigger ticking time bomb, with a projected shortfall of more than $30 trillion. Social Security's unfunded liabilities total about $7 trillion.

According to a Cato Institute report published this year by economist Jagadeesh Gokhale, making these two programs sustainable would require payroll taxes to be more than doubled immediately. Alternatively, the Cato report implies that Social Security and Medicare benefits would have to be cut immediately by more than 60 percent. In either case, ensuing payroll tax surpluses would have to be invested in securities that earn annual average real returns of about 3.5 percent. These calculations imply that for each year that passes without such fiscal policy adjustments, the combined fiscal imbalance of these two programs would grow by about $2.4 trillion.

While the entitlement problem represents the largest and most visible example of how younger Americans will be penalized by government overreach, it is far from the only trouble spot. Take farm subsidies: Not only do they artificially jack up the price of food, they also increase the value of farm lands, making it harder for young farmers to buy or rent land. The same can be said of the mortgage interest deduction, which artificially increases the value of homes, making it harder for first-time buyers. Like student loan subsidies, the mortgage interest tax deduction gives people an incentive to get deeper into debt than they would have otherwise.

From poor public schools to the minimum wage, well-intentioned policies tend to backfire. In addition, we are about to embark on a massive transfer of wealth from younger to older Americans. It is today's youth who will take the brunt of punishment from Washington's decades of "helping" previous generations of Americans. It is today's youth who will most likely see their own federal benefits cut dramatically, their taxes increased, or some combination of the two. And it is today's youth who will find it harder to get a good job (let alone start a company), buy a home, support a family, or do many of the things that were long considered a near-certainty for college graduates.

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Census: 49% of Americans Get Gov’t Benefits; 82M in Households on Medicaid

In the fourth quarter of 2011, 49.2 percent of Americans received benefits from one or more government programs, according to data released Tuesday by the Census Bureau.

In total, the Census Bureau estimated, 151,014,000 Americans out of a population then estimated to be 306,804,000 received benefits from one or more government programs during the last three months of 2011. Those 151,014,000 beneficiaries equaled 49.2 percent of the population.

This included 82,457,000 people--or 26.9 percent of the population--who lived in households in which one or more people received Medicaid benefits.

Also among the 151,014,000 who received benefits from one or more government programs during that period: 49,901,000 who collected Social Security; 49,073,000 who got food stamps; 46,440,000 on Medicare; 23,228,000 in the Women, Infants and Children program, 20,223,000 getting Supplemental Security Income;13,433,000 who lived in public or subsidized rental housing; 5,098,000 who got unemployment; 3,178,000 who got veterans' benefits; and 364,000 who got railroad retirement benefits.

SOURCE

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Michigan  store owner fights the feds

Store owner takes on federal government over $35,000

Imagine having federal officers come into your home or office, flash their badges, and they tell you they've seized a bank account holding $35,000 of your money.

That's exactly what a Fraser grocery store owner says happened to him in January. He said it happened without warning, no questions, no court hearing, and he was stunned.

"I said, what do you mean you took my account? How am I going to pay my supplier ... This is the capital we work with! She said, 'I don't care,'" Terry Dehko, owner of Schott's Market on 14 Mile Road, told Local 4.

What could have happened to trigger this seizure of property? Dehko's attorneys say the IRS used an anti-money laundering statute, triggered because the store made frequent deposits of less than $10,000. Federal law requires banks to report deposits of more than $10,000 to the IRS.

Dehko says his deposits had nothing to do with skirting IRS regulations. He says it's all about his insurance policy.

"Well, we can't keep $10,000 in cash in the store either because of our insurance," he said. In addition to insurance concerns, Dehko says it’s also store policy to not allow the cash to build up in the store to prevent a robbery.

Sandy Thomas helps her dad run the store. She says the policy of seizing money makes sense if the government has evidence of wrongdoing. However, her father has never been charged with any wrongdoing, and she says the government shouldn't be able to hold the money for so long without providing evidence of any wrongdoing.

Thomas says having that much money in the government's hands has made running their family business more difficult. "We have a business to run and it’s a struggle. It's embarrassing that some of the companies that we've had credit with have pulled our credit," she said.

Dehko hired an attorney soon after the seizure in January. He says he spend about $10,000 in legal fees. Currently, the Institute for Justice, a Virginia-based non-profit, public-interest law firm, is representing Dehko. They have asked a judge to speed up this process, which has already taken 10 months. They are currently waiting for the judge's ruling.

The United States Attorney's Office in Detroit says the process is moving along as required by law, and it cannot comment further on pending litigation. The IRS referred any questions to the United States Attorney's Office.

Frequent shoppers who were buying groceries at Schott's said they were standing by their favorite local grocer. "I love the store, along with other people. It always has many people in here. The IRS is wrong!" said Debbie Koslowski, of Fraser.

"I think it’s terrible," said customer Mary Ann Kuechle, "How can you seize property without any proper paperwork?"

Given the expense of a long legal fight, Sandy Thomas says if the Institute for Justice hadn't stepped in, they probably would have made a business decision to give up the fight. She fears that's what happens to many people caught in similar situations, they can't afford to right, give up, and the government keeps the money.

Her father says he's standing up for a principle.  "I'm fighting for myself and fighting for all America!"

SOURCE

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BDS antidote may come from China

An apparent antidote to the anti-Israel Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement is coming from a once unlikely source. Chinese magnate Li Ka-Shing, among Asia’s richest businessmen, recently donated $130 million to Israel’s Technion University, as part of a joint venture with Shantou University that will establish the Technion Guangdong Institute of Technology (TGIT).

The gift, one of the largest ever to an Israeli university, is indicative of a pervasive deepening in the connection between Israel and one of the world’s emerging powers, China. This is the first time a school from any other country has been invited to establish an entirely new academic college based in China.

In addition to the $130 million gift to Technion, for strengthening Technion’s home campus in Haifa, Guangdong Province will invest approximately $150 million to develop the new Technion Guangdong campus.....

“China wants to make the transition from being a manufacturing power to becoming innovators, and they believe that the Israeli innovative spirit can help them accomplish that goal,” Witte said.

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, 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 Tyranny of Electronic Systems

Some eight years ago the media was excited that Hillary Clinton and Newt Gingrich had formed an alliance about reforming health care. In 2005 Dana Milbank wrote in the Washington Post about a joint appearance in gushing terms –

Clinton, asked about electronic medical records, deferred, again, to her friend. “Newt has a very dramatic way of saying this,” she said, “which is ‘Paper kills.’” Gingrich sent the praise right back at her, hailing Clinton’s legislation on medical records as a “major breakthrough” in Congress. “This is absolutely the case that Hillary is making,” he said.

Of course, they were not alone. President Bush had already embraced the idea in his State of the Union speech to Congress.

Later, President Obama built the HITECH Act into his 2009 stimulus package and appropriated some $20 billion to make it happen. All promised to get everyone’s complete medical records in digital form by 2014.

Man, this is going to be GREAT! A model of modern efficiency! Bipartisan support! Interoperable! WOWSA!

Now, of course there were the usual naysayers and Gloomy Gusses. I was one of them in this research and commentary I wrote for the Heartland Institute. Dr. Bruce Landes, who comments here frequently, was another. Dr. Scott Silverstein at Drexel University was also skeptical. And Dr. Deborah Peele was very concerned about patient privacy in a digital era.

Most of these concerns were not about whether digital technology is a good thing. Of course it is, or can be, a very good thing. But the track record of top-down, politically imposed solutions is abysmal. And when you add vast amounts of money to the mix, chaos is inevitable. Great Britain went through a similar, though more modest, exercise and recently concluded that the whole thing was a failure, but only after spending some $12 billion.

But we skeptics were not able to overcome the hordes of advocates who were eager to get their hands on a bit of the $20 billion.

Now the results of all this are coming to the fore. The Washington Post recently ran an op-ed piece by Dr. Dan Morhaim, who is also a Democrat member of Maryland’s House of Delegates. (One of the refreshing things about bipartisan ideas is that the opposition can also be bipartisan.) He writes –

These systems tend to be fantastically complex. One doesn’t have to be intimately familiar with, say, Hertz or Enterprise to rent a car online. But many electronic health record systems have pull-down screens listing each of the 68,000 possible diagnosis codes in the World Health Organization’s International Classification of Diseases and 87,000 possible procedure codes.

Or consider what happens when I write a prescription: Every potential drug interaction or side effect listed generates a warning prompt. Inevitably, recognizing that the warnings are generally inapplicable and take time to sort out, clinicians start to bypass the alerts. Sooner or later, ignoring one will lead to serious complications.

Dr. Morhaim concludes –

"Perhaps the most pernicious side effect is the erosion of the provider-patient relationship. When I first began working with electronic health records, I caught myself staring at the computer screen instead of engaging patients, who rightly felt ignored. Like many colleagues, I’ve reverted to the practice of talking with the patient and taking notes with pen and paper. After the evaluation is over and the patient has left, I type in the data. This takes much more time, but it is the only way to complete a proper history and exam."

The result is decreased productivity and frustrated providers — and a lack of meaningful data to manage patient care.

And The American Journal of Emergency Medicine published a study finding that ER physicians are now spending 43% of their time on data entry and only 28% on direct patient care.

So we have spent well over $20 billion (that was the appropriation for the first year alone), and are left with a system that reduces productivity, fails to provide “meaningful data,” and destroys the patient/physician relationship. From 2011 to 2012 there was a 21% reduction in the number of family physicians who had “meaningful use” of electronic medical records, according to the American Association of Family Physicians. Yet the mandate to use this system continues.

Boy, isn’t it great to have policies with bipartisan support?

Meanwhile, I don’t know about you, but I think it would be swell to have a simple wallet-sized card that listed my emergency contacts, personal physician, allergies, and current medications. But that isn’t grandiose enough for the Washington elite.

SOURCE

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This Is What a Health Insurance Death Spiral Looks Like

A handful of reports last night suggested that the Obama administration had moved to delay the health law’s individual mandate—the penalty the law imposes on those who are uninsured. That’s not quite right: Instead, the administration will align the 2014 penalty date, which had been February 15, with the end of Obamacare’s open enrollment period, March 31.

It had been possible to buy insurance between February 15 and March 31 next year and still pay a pro-rated uninsurance penalty—something the Obama administration only found out a few weeks ago when a tax prep firm let them know.

Delaying the individual mandate might seem like an obvious response to the ongoing failure of the federal exchange system. But it’s a rather drastic step. And, in isolation, a potentially problematic one.

That’s because the premiums that health insurers calculated for the exchanges this year were determined based on the assumption that the penalty for remaining uninsured would be in effect, and would encourage people to buy into the market.

If you change the enrollment requirements—by, for example, ditching the mandate—while leaving the law’s preexisting condition rules in place, health plan participation will likely be lower. The result, as one insurance official told NPR yesterday, is that insurers will want to change their premiums. And in this case, “change” means “raise.”

That’s where the real trouble starts. Insurers raising prices as a result of lower than anticipated enrollment is an early step toward an insurance death spiral, in which premiums spike and enrollment figures drop until the only participants who remain in the market are very people paying very high premiums. We know because we’ve seen it before—in New York, Washington, and handful of other states that enacted preexisting condition regulations similar to Obamacare’s but without an individual mandate.

New York state’s guaranteed issue and community rating rules—the two regulations that limit how insurers can charge based on health history and require them to sell policies to all comers—took effect in 1994. At the time, there were about 752,000 policyholders in the state’s individual market, or about 4.7 percent of the non-Medicare population. But by 2009, according to a Manhattan Institute report by Stephen Parente and Tarren Bragdon, the state’s individual market had practically disappeared, leaving just 34,000 participants, or about 0.2 percent of the non-elderly population. Individual insurance premiums, meanwhile, were among the highest in the nation—about $388 on average in 2007, compared with just $151 in California, another big Democratic-leaning state. In New York City, the annualized premium cost for individuals was more than $9,300 and more than $26,400 for a family.

The result, in other words, was a combination of sky-high premiums and far fewer insured individuals.

Around the same time that New York was overhauling its insurance market, Washington state was implementing a similar set of health plan rules. Insurers faced new regulations regarding plans sold to individuals with preexisting conditions, and the requirement that they sell to everyone. For a brief period, there was a coverage mandate, but that never went into effect. The state’s individual market deteriorated. One insurer raised premiums by 78 percent in a three year period. As premiums rose, relatively healthier people left the market, and insurers were left covering a lot of very sick, very expensive individuals. In the end, many insurers simply dropped out of the market rather than lose money. According to a report on the reforms commissioned by the insurance industry, there were 19 carriers in the individual market in 1993. By 1999, there were just two—and they weren’t taking new applicants.

The individual market was effectively killed off by the reforms.

A delay of just the individual mandate would likely put the federal exchange system—which facilitates the sale of guaranteed issue, community-rated plans—on the same track.

(The administration, it should be noted, has made it quite clear that it thinks the mandate is absolutely essential to the larger insurance scheme, arguing repeatedly in court that the law cannot function without it.)

Now, it’s true, as The Incidental Economist’s Adrianna McIntrye points out, that there are risk adjustment mechanisms built into the law designed to protect insurers who end up with too many sick individuals. But as a Health Affairs brief on the law’s risk adjustment provisions makes clear, those provisions are designed to make sure that no one plan gets stuck with too many sick individuals. Plans with fewer sick people pay into a fund that creates a backstop for plans with a greater than expected share of sick policyholders.  That helps mitigate individual plan risk. But it doesn’t really solve the problem if the entire pool, across most all of the insurance plans, is smaller and sicker than expected. A death spiral that shifts some premium income around is still a death spiral.

The larger worry is that we may be on track for an insurance market meltdown no matter what happens with the individual mandate. If too few young and healthy people sign up for insurance through the exchanges, for whatever reason, insurers will have to adjust their prices eventually. The access problems in the exchanges exacerbate this risk by making it more frustrating to buy policies; as a result, only the most motivated people—which is to say, the sickest and most desirous of coverage—will end up buying coverage. The same goes for the high individual market premiums that many young adults will be faced with. A mandate delay would make the risk even higher. But it may be the case that Obamacare is heading toward a death spiral no matter what, and that if it remains in place, no plausible policy response will avoid it.

SOURCE

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Vulnerable Democrats: No, Seriously, Who's Up For an Obamacare Delay?

And they're not talking about the White House's two-bit non-delay delay either. West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin's working on a bill that would delay Obamacare's individual mandate tax for a full year (bipartisanship!), while North Carolina Sen. Kay Hagan wants the law's enrollment period extended by a few months. It's easy to understand the political instincts at play here: Obamacare is unpopular, the individual mandate tax is extremely unpopular, and the idea that the government might end up fining people for failing to enroll through the government's broken website is outright toxic. We've got to do something to at least buy ourselves some time, these Democrats are muttering to themselves, shell-shocked as the law for which they've taken major political risks implodes. Alas, as I've noted previously, these "solutions" are untenable. They're worse than that, actually; they're counter-productive. Do these Democrats -- who've voted to pass and protect this law repeatedly -- even understand how it works? It seems not. An education:

*  Delay the individual mandate. On top of the incredible political embarrassment that would come from delaying a provision the Obama administration spent years defending in federal court, policy-wise, this would only exacerbate the problem mentioned above. If Americans aren't penalized for failing to purchase insurance, the young and healthy ones will have even less incentive to buy it. Insurers, who agreed to take on individuals with pre-existing conditions in concert with an individual mandate, would no doubt have something to say about this. If Obama bypasses Congress to impose this delay, perhaps injured insurers could craft a legal challenge. Heck, they could even borrow the Obama administration’s own briefs about how inextricably linked the individual mandate is to the greater regulatory scheme of the law.

* Extend open enrollment. Though the White House has emphasized that the enrollment period extends until March 31, the penalty for not purchasing insurance would hit people after Feb. 15 — including those who purchase insurance after that date. So even if the enrollment period is extended past March 31, it may not pull in that many more customers because those who haven't purchased by that point would have to choose to pay premiums on top of the penalty. It's also important to keep in mind why the time to enroll is limited. It seems counterintuitive at first. Wouldn't insurers want individuals to be able to buy their product all year round? The problem is that if there were no such limitation, then healthy people — knowing insurers could never legally deny them coverage — could simply pay the fine and only purchase insurance if they became sick or injured. How do you think the car insurance business would work if people could sign up for coverage after they were involved in an accident? Obviously, there’s a difference when extending open enrollment in the first year of the program’s operation, but for this scheme to work, it’s also important to instill in younger Americans a sense of urgency to buying insurance by setting a hard deadline and sticking with it.

If Washington delays the mandate tax and/or extends open enrollment without passing parallel delays of other elements of the law like guaranteed issue and community rating, the so-called "insurance death spiral" threat only becomes more acute.

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, 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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Did Obama win the battle only to lose the war?

Janet Daley has some good points below but what she overlooks is that the shutdown should have SEARED into everybody's mind that the GOP fought tooth and nail against Obamacare.  And as Obamacare implodes, the GOP should get some credit for being right and the Donks should get the blame that they deserve.  But then again:



One hesitates to ascribe too much credit to Boehner & Co. but it could be that an awareness of how quicky Obamacare was crumbling lay behind abandonment of the shutdown -- JR


There is now virtually no one in Washington who does not believe that Barack Obama's army won the Battle of the Shutdown. The Republicans took a big hit in the opinion polls and their Tea Party faction was particularly reviled for its bloody-minded insistence on demanding the delay of Obamacare as the price for allowing the federal government to function. That was then.

This is now. That flagship policy on which the White House refused to accept any delay or conscientious doubt is turning into a political car crash for the administration.  So hopelessly unfit for purpose is the website which was supposed to be the portal to a new reformed healthcare future, that it has permitted only a trickle of users to enroll in the brave new venture of universal health insurance. This might have been excused as an early-days teething problem if the White House had not been so vindictively adamant about its refusal to consider any deferment of the rollout. Having insisted that there could be absolutely no relenting on the date of launch of what proved to be an untested, faulty system, makes them look as if they were putting political gamesmanship above responsibility to the citizen.

In fact, the scale of the inadequacy of this programme is raising a pantheon of criticisms of the entire principle on which it is based which could have real long-term consequences for the credibility Obama's policy. Is is right that the federal government should be operating such an enormous universal programme? Is the premise on which it relies – that young, healthy people can be coerced into sharing the health insurance burden against their inclinations – even viable? Is this bizarre mix of state enforcement and private provision in which people are made to buy a product they do not want under threat of legal penalty, the right answer to the problem of escalating American healthcare costs? Even the Obama loyalists in the media and the Leftwing satirists are having a rip-roaring time tearing into the disaster of the Obamacare launch.

So how is this for irony? Now that the Republicans' "shutdown" farrago is over, the delay that they were demanding in the Obamacare programme might become necessary after all. And now that everyone is forgetting about the politically disastrous attempt to undermine it, the president's radical healthcare reform might collapse under the weight of its own contradictions.

SOURCE

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Rollout Was Bad, but the Law Is Worse



Barack Obama had just the solution to the train-wreck rollout of Healthcare.gov: He gave a speech. He assured us Monday in the Rose Garden that "nobody's more frustrated by that than I am" about his own website not working. Small comfort. "There's no excuse for the problems," he said. "There's no sugarcoating it." He had, of course, just spent 10 minutes trying to sugarcoat it and would continue to do so for the remainder of his lengthy remarks. In fact, the president spent 30 minutes not explaining what happened or why.

Not to worry, though, there's good news: "The product is good," he says, and even though the website doesn't work, people "can still buy the same quality affordable insurance plans available on the marketplace the old-fashioned way, offline -- either over the phone or in person." So he gave an 800-number to call, but, if callers didn't get a busy signal, they were redirected to ... the website. And the website refers people to the phone number. Press "3" for the Pony Express.

The speech was certainly little more than an infomercial intended for low-info voters. Obama was flanked by a baker's dozen people out of whom only a couple had successfully signed up for coverage, though he claimed, "Thousands of people are signing up and saving money as we speak." No, that was actually just one guy in Iowa trying a hundred times. And by all means, let the successful few tell us how much they've "saved."

Obama's magnetic personality isn't going to fix the law's implementation just because he says the law is great. Because of the massive failure, the White House is even seemingly open to more delay while a "tech surge" works to rewrite millions of lines of code in some indeterminate time. How many more millions of dollars will that cost?

HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius admitted that the site had "almost no testing" -- the consumer end wasn't tested fully until Sept. 26, five days before rollout, and it failed those tests -- and that Obama didn't know of the problems until after the rollout. Republicans calling for Sebelius' resignation, however, are missing the point: To suggest she should be held responsible for the Healthcare.gov debacle implies that a better HHS Secretary might have made it work. Fact is, the failure of the rollout is but a metaphor for the reality that no government bureaucracy is ever going to successfully manage 18% of the U.S. economy, much less a basic commerce website for insurance comparisons.

Obama did say one thing Monday that was more true than he perhaps intended: "The Affordable Care Act is not just a website." Indeed, as The Wall Street Journal notes, ObamaCare's "real goal ... is to centralize political control over health care," and conservatives should keep that in mind as we continue to oppose the law and Democrats are saddled with full ownership of health care.

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Some fun

About 4 hours ago, I tried to log on (from Australia) to healthcare.gov.  I did get on but after a couple of steps, this is what I got:

The System is down at the moment.
We're working to resolve the issue as soon as possible. Please try again later.
Please include the reference ID below if you wish to contact us at 1-800-318-2596 for support.
Error from: https%3A//www.healthcare.gov/marketplace/global/en_US/registration%23signUpStepOne
Reference ID: 0.cd7755b8.1382607921.61cbcc.238110

Impressive, no?  JR

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Interpol Chief: Fight Terrorism With Armed Citizens

In September, terrorists waged a days-long attack on a Kenyan mall, killing dozens. This week, Ronald Noble, secretary general of the international policing agency Interpol, discussed the problem of “soft targets,” using the mall as an example. “Societies have to think about how they're going to approach the problem,” he said. “One is to say we want an armed citizenry; you can see the reason for that. Another is to say the enclaves are so secure that in order to get into the soft target you're going to have to pass through extraordinary security.”

But here's where we did a double take: “Ask yourself,” he added, “If that [mall attack] was Denver, Colorado, if that was Texas, would those guys have been able to spend hours, days, shooting people randomly? What I'm saying is it makes police around the world question their views on gun control. It makes citizens question their views on gun control. You have to ask yourself, 'Is an armed citizenry more necessary now than it was in the past with an evolving threat of terrorism?' This is something that has to be discussed.”

Fortunately, there were a couple of armed citizens who took action in Nairobi, saving many lives. But for a European bureaucrat to understand something that the American Left vociferously opposes is really something. Armed citizens can't always prevent attacks, but they can at least be equipped to respond to evil. Our Founders certainly understood that national security begins with armed citizens. That's why they codified that God-given right in the Second Amendment.

SOURCE

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What Isn't Racist? According to the Media, Nothing

President Obama's election was supposed to usher in an era of racial unity greater than any Americans had previously experienced. By making the historic move to place the first black president in the White House, Americans signified that they were ready to move beyond the racial conflicts of the past and move forward, arm-in-arm.

At least that's what we were told.  So much for that.

In the last two weeks, MSNBC's Chris Matthews, official hot-air-trial balloon for the Obama administration's public relations strategy, has played the race card incessantly. First, he proclaimed that Republican New Jersey senatorial candidate Steve Lonegan was using a racist "dog whistle" when he stated that Cory Booker's Newark was a "black hole" for state tax funds. Then, Matthews said that tea partiers using the word "we the people" to describe the country signified racism, since not everyone agrees with the tea party program. Then, to top it all off, Matthews declared Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, who is of Cuban descent, a racist for joking upon his return to Texas, "Gee, it's great to be back in America." That led Matthews into this wild rant: "This 'We're Americans, we white people out here in Texas, as opposed to people who live in the big cities: the ethnics, the blacks, the browns. Those people in Washington, those liberals, they're not Americans.' This guy either has a total lack of understanding of American history and the hell we went through in the McCarthy period or he knows it damn well and is playing that card."

Matthews has not been strapped into the straitjacket yet, but he's getting close.

Meanwhile, Rep. Alan Grayson, D-Fla., went further than Matthews, declaring that the tea party was akin to the Ku Klux Klan. He put out a flyer to his constituents with a burning cross in place of the "t" in the word "tea." The flyer stated, "The Tea Party is no more popular than the Klan." When called on to disown this race-baiting trash, Grayson instead doubled down, stating, "there is overwhelming evidence that the Tea Party is the home of bigotry and discrimination in America today, just as the KKK was for an earlier generation. If the shoe fits, wear it." Grayson did not explain why the KKK was a group that voted unanimously Democrat, why progressive hero Woodrow Wilson was a huge fan of the KKK, and why KKK former honcho Robert Byrd was treasured by the Democratic Party until the day he died.

Charges of racism have echoed from nearly every left-leaning mouth of late. Opposition to Obamacare: racist. Opposition to President Obama on the shutdown: racist. Don't like the president's tie-shirt combination? Racist.

This is not what Americans were promised. What's worse, it's un-American drivel. Ascribing racial motives to those who have none has become a near pathological condition among those on the left who cannot come to terms that their beloved leader's second term is a policy disaster. Racism is the last bullet in the leftist arsenal. And they're running out of ammo quickly.

SOURCE

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ELSEWHERE

Greece: State funding cut off to Golden Dawn party:  "Greek lawmakers voted to cut off state funding to the far-right Golden Dawn party early on Wednesday, the latest effort by the government to clamp down on a party it has branded a 'neo-Nazi criminal gang.' Golden Dawn had steadily risen on the back of an anti-austerity and anti-immigrant agenda to become Greece's third-most popular party, until the killing of a left-wing rapper by a party supporter last month triggered the government crackdown."

Fascism in WA:  "An elderly woman has turned down the City of Seattle's offer to purchase her prime, waterfront parking lot. So, what does the city do? The Seattle City Council voted 8 to 0 to acquire 'through negotiation or condemnation' the waterfront parking lot that belongs to a 103-year-old Spokane woman."

Germany: Vatican suspends “bishop of bling”:  "The Vatican has suspended a senior German Church leader dubbed the 'bishop of bling' by the media over his alleged lavish spending. Bishop of Limburg Franz-Peter Tebartz-van Elst is accused of spending more than 31m euros (£26m; $42m) on renovating his official residence. The Vatican said it deemed 'appropriate ... a period of leave from the diocese' for the bishop. The suspension comes two days after he met the Pope to discuss the matter."

Obamacare’s real kink: Fuzzy math:  "At an event on Monday to boost the Affordable Care Act after its glitch-rich rollout, President Obama asserted that his signature healthcare plan is a hit because 'prices have come down.' That's the administration's big lie: that Washington can mandate universal healthcare with beefed-up benefits and somehow the plan will save everyone money."

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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, 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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Socialism and the individual

The extreme forms of socialism (Nazism, Communism, Fascism) show us vividly what lies beneath the "good intentions" of "Progressives" generally.  Writing below, Richard A. Koenigsberg shows us how inimical to conservative ideas of individual liberty socialist ideas are.

From their devotion to the collective rather than the personal, it is hard to avoid the impression that socialists must have dismal personal lives.  Love of family must be largely alien to them.  It is certainly true that Marx hated just about everybody; Hitler's largely unconnected personal life is well-known and Stuckart (excerpted below) appears to have been a "mother's boy" well into his adulthood

Incidentally,  the quote from Stuckart could well have been from Hegel, the philosophical tutor of Karl Marx.  The ideas are just about identical -- JR

Bob Dylan’s song “Like a Rolling Stone” —one of the most popular of the twentieth century—may contain esoteric meanings:

How does it feel
How does it feel
To be without a home
Like a complete unknown
Like a rolling stone?

However, it also serves as a description of one’s emotional reaction upon coming to live in New York City—the ultimate “Gesellschaft society.”

Sociologists define the “Gemeinschaft society” as one characterized by personal interaction: one’s relationship with other human beings defines the community. The Gesellschaft or urban society, on the other hand, is characterized by the absence of interaction and intimacy among people in the physical environment.

One of the first questions I asked myself when I began living in New York City was, “How can I connect with other human beings?” I knew no one on my block (West 95th Street near Central Park West) and barely spoke to people in my apartment building. What was my “community,” and how would I develop a relationship to it?

I began reading The New York Post and The New York Times—and following the Knicks. Like so many others, my relationship to the community came to be constituted by a relationship with the mass media and “famous people.”

The mass media are so ubiquitous now that we take them for granted. We forget that one has to learn—be socialized into—this feeling that we have an intimate and personal relationship with events and people in the “outer world.”

When I was young, there was a clear distinction between one’s personal life and life presented by the mass media. One had to be seduced into paying attention to “current events” (David Letterman uses the term current events in a satirical way, bringing us back to a time when we didn’t take public events so seriously). We clearly distinguished between our “real lives,” on the one hand, and what was happening “out there”: what we read about in newspapers, heard on the radio, and saw on television.

What is totalitarianism? It is an ideology insisting that public life—the national community—is far more significant than one’s personal life. Totalitarian ideologies insist that there is no such thing as private life: one’s personal existence should be subordinated—always and forever—to the “life” of one’s nation.

Hitler explained to his people, “You are nothing, your nation is everything.” Nazi legal expert Wilhelm Stuckart described the German “Volk community”:

"The community of the Volk is the primary value in the life of the whole as well as of the individual. National Socialism does not recognize a separate individual sphere which, apart from the community, is to be painstakingly protected from any interference by the state. The moral personality can prove itself only within the community. Every activity of daily life has meaning and value only as a service to the whole."

Totalitarian ideology revolves around the idea that there is no domain of life or sphere of reality separate from the national community. Totalitarianism means devotion to “the whole.” The significance of the individual is denied. Totalitarianism means denial of separateness and separation.

The development of the modern nation-state is dependent upon accepting the proposition that one’s own fate and destiny are intimately linked with the fate and destiny of one’s nation. Totalitarian ideology takes nationalism a step further, insisting that the fate of the individual and the nation are entirely bound together: there can be no domain of reality where individuals pursue desires unrelated to the state’s goals.

Embracing the Volksgemeinschaft, Hitler required that individuals identify absolutely with Germany. It was necessary to overcome “bourgeois privatism” in order to “unconditionally equate the individual fate with the fate of the nation.” The Volk would encompass each and every German: “No one is excepted from this crisis of the Reich,” Hitler declared. “There may not be a single person who excludes himself from this joint obligation.” The Volk, Hitler explained, “is but yourself.”

Karl Marx similarly embraced the proposition that separation of the individual from society was intolerable, explaining that “liberty as a right of man” is not founded on the relations between men, but rather upon the “separation of man from man.” Human rights were founded on the “right of such separation”—the right of the “circumscribed individual withdrawn into himself.”

“Man as a member of civil society,” Marx said, is an individual separated from the community—“wholly preoccupied with his private interest and private caprice.” Like Hitler, Marx disdained “bourgeois individualism”: a mode of existence insisting upon the individual’s freedom to pursue personal interests and private aspirations.

According to Marx, “Human life is the true social life of man.” Only by virtue of one’s relationship to society did one become a human being. The ideology of freedom or the “rights of man”—asserting the individual’s right to act in accord with private interests—produced an exclusion from societal life that was “more complete, unbearable and dreadful” than exclusion from political life.

The liberal idea of freedom, from Marx’s point of view—the right to become “released from the shackles and limitations imposed by man”—was the expression of man’s “absolute enslavement and loss of human nature.” Liberation from society was a form of slavery.

The true achievement of “human emancipation,” Marx insisted, would occur only when the individual man had “absorbed into himself the abstract citizen.” Liberation would occur when the individual—in his everyday life, work and relationships—had become a “species being.”

What Nazism and Communism had in common, philosophically, was the idea that there could be no truly human existence unless one’s life was devoted to the life of the community or collective. “Society” was all. The individual was required to subordinate himself to, and live for, “the whole.”

Hitler’s life consisted of his determination to kill off the idea of separation or separateness. This is precisely what “the Jew” meant: someone who was incapable of integrating into a national society. The Jew symbolized a “free-floating individual,” unable to bind to a nation-state—like a bacterium that roamed within a body, but was unable to find a permanent, stable place within it.

In killing “Jewish bacteria,” Hitler, Himmler and Goebbels sought to kill off the idea of individuality: exterminate individuals who were imagined to exist in a condition of separateness from the nation-state. As one ideologue put it, “You will be a Nazi—or we will bash your head in.” “You are one of us—part of the German nation—or you have no right to exist.”

Hitler’s Official Programme (Feder, 1927) put forth as its central plank, “The Common Interest before Self-Interest,” condemning leaders of public life who “worship the same god—Individualism” and “make personal interest the sole incentive.” Nazi totalitarianism was a revolution against individualism—the idea that a human being can exist in a state of separateness from society, the national community.

Germany was everything. That which was or desired to become separate from Germany could not—would not—be permitted to exist. Hitler’s fantasy of mass-murder was generated by his desire or need to destroy anyone and everything that was not part of the German self.

Received via email from Richard A. Koenigsberg, author of "The Psychoanalysis of Racism, Revolution and Nationalism"

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"Cast thy bread upon the waters: for thou shalt find it after many days" -- Ecclesiastes 11:1.

For people not used to Biblical metaphors, the quote tells you to good deeds and you WILL be rewarded for them

A single mother has been repaid - and then some - after TV host Ellen DeGeneres heard about the generous act she performed for two National Guard members affected by the government shutdown.

Sarah Hoidahl, a waitress at a Hew Hampshire restaurant, made local headlines after paying the lunch bill for two women who were on furlough during the shutdown.

The bill had come to $27.75, and the 22-year-old, who is living with her mother and 15-month-old son, Ashton, covered it all.

“They were trying to decide what to get, they were looking through the menu ... they mentioned that with the government shutdown they were furloughed and not getting paid. That just got me thinking,” Hoidahl said.   “I just decided I’m going to do something good today, I’m going to buy their lunch for them.”

Paying for the lunch meant that Hoildahl would take home only around $8 - "not even enough to cover gas," she said - but she took care of the bill and left the women a note explaining why. "Thanks to the gov shutdown the people like you that protect this country are not getting paid. However I still am. Lunch is on me!" it said.

That note was later shared on Facebook by the National Guard members, where it was seen by thousands of people, before coming to the attention of Ellen producers. Hoidahl was then then flown to California to appear on the program.

“I always end each show by saying be kind to one another, and our first guest is a waitress from Henniker, N.H., who did just that,” DeGeneres said while introducing Hoildahl to the audience.

The TV host first paid Hoidahl back the $27.75, then gave her a large screen TV – a welcome change, as the family's TV was broken.

“She gave me a TV and I was like, ‘Oh my gosh, this isn’t happening ... I have a TV, I can watch Ellen now,’” she said.

“Then she brought the cheque book out.”  Hoidahl then sat in shock as DeGeneres signed a cheque for $10,000.

“In that moment when she opened it and I saw it, I just couldn’t even contain my emotions. I just started crying,” she said later.  "I have medical bills, student loans, some debt to pay off. Obviously, I have a 15-month-old.  “And I do plan on donating some of it to charity.”

It still all doesn’t feel real for the mum, who will be heading back to work as normal today.  “It feels like I’m dreaming and I’m going to wake up and I’m going to be like, ‘Oh man, I wish that was real,'” Hoidahl said.

SOURCE

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90,609,000: Americans Not in Labor Force Climbs to Another Record

What's 10 million people between friends?

The number of Americans who are 16 years or older and who have decided not to participate in the nation's labor force has climbed to a record 90,609,000  in September, according to data released today by the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

The BLS counts a person as participating in the labor force if they are 16 years or older and either have a job or have actively sought a job in the last four weeks. A person is not participating in the labor force if they are 16 or older and have not sought a job in the last four weeks.

In from July to August, according to BLS, Americans not participating in the labor force climbed from 89,957,000 to 90,473,000, pushing past 90,000,000 for the first time, with a one month increase of 516,000.

In September, it climbed again to 90,609,000, an increase of 136,000 during the month.

In January 2009, when President Barack Obama took office, there were 80,507,000 Americans not in the labor force. Thus, the number of Americans not in the labor force has increased by 10,102,000 during Obama's presidency.

The labor force participation rate, which is the percentage of the non-institutionalized population 16 years or older who either have a job or actively sought one in the last four weeks, was 63.2 percent in September. That was unchanged from August.

When President Obama took office in January 2009, the labor force participation rate was 65.7 percent.

More HERE

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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, 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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Stereotype threat

Putting it bluntly, Stereotype threat is an invented process to explain why blacks do poorly on IQ tests.  If blacks know that they are expected to do badly they allegedly get all anxious and do even worse than they otherwise would.  But shouldn't the knowledge that they are expected to do badly energize them and make them try harder -- just to prove the stereotype wrong?  I would have thought so but I am not a Leftist.

I have had a bit of a laugh at the theory before (e.g. here) and also see here

The theory has also been used to explain away the fact that women on average do badly on mathematical tasks (those nervous ladies!) and there has recently been some interesting work suggesting that the theory is wrong in that field too.  Steve Sailer summarizes:

"Although the social sciences are considered a bastion of progressivism, it's remarkable how few data-driven ideas they generate in support of their ideology. We can get a feel for this by noting how rare are the "exceptions to the rule" studies that become immensely popular due to bolstering the dominant worldview, such as Hart & Risley's finding that black people don't talk enough and Claude Steele's little study of Stereotype Threat in which he induces black students at Stanford to score lower on a low stakes test of his devising than their high stakes SAT scores would predict. (I wrote about Stereotype Threat in VDARE.com in 2004, suggesting it's not hard to get across the message to black or female students that the professor wants them to not exert themselves fully on this meaningless test. That you can "prime" groups of people to work less hard on an unimportant test does not prove that you know how to make them score higher on an important test.)

Lately, the evidence has been mounting that the existence of Stereotype Threat is quite dependent upon the file drawer function: studies finding its existence are quickly published while studies not finding its existence are in much less demand. A recent article:

An Examination of Stereotype Threat Effects on Girls' Mathematics Performance

By Colleen M. Ganley et al.

... Conclusion

Taken together, the findings from published research, unpublished articles, and the present studies reveal inconsistency in the effects of stereotype threat on girls’ mathematics performance. The discrepancy in results from published and unpublished studies suggests publication bias, which may create an inaccurate picture of the phenomenon. A recent review suggests that this publication bias may also be an issue in the literature on stereotype threat in adult women (Stoet & Geary, 2012). Overall, these results raise the possibility that stereotype threat may not be the cause of gender differences in mathematics performance prior to college. Although we feel that more nuanced research needs to be done to truly understand whether stereotype threat impacts girls’ mathematics performance, we also believe that too much focus on this one explanation may deter researchers from investigating other key factors that may be involved in gender differences in mathematics performance. For example, there are a number of factors (e.g., mathematics anxiety, mathematics interest, spatial skills; see Ceci & Williams, 2010) that have been shown to be consistently related to mathematics performance and mathematics-and science-related career choices and may warrant more research attention than does stereotype threat."

SOURCE

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Loving and Hating America

As I've documented in the past, many leftist teachers teach our youngsters to hate our country. For example, University of Hawaii Professor Haunani-Kay Trask counseled her students, "We need to think very, very clearly about who the enemy is. The enemy is the United States of America and everyone who supports it." Some universities hire former terrorists to teach and indoctrinate students. Kathy Boudin, former Weather Underground member and convicted murderer, is on the Columbia University School of Social Work's faculty. Her Weather Underground comrade William Ayers teaches at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Bernardine Dohrn, his wife, is a professor at Northwestern University School of Law. Her stated mission is to overthrow capitalism.

America's domestic haters have international company. 24/7 Wall St. published an article titled "Ten Countries That Hate America Most." The list includes Serbia, Greece, Iran, Algeria, Egypt and Pakistan. Ranking America published an article titled "The U.S. ranks 3rd in liking the United States." Using data from the Pew Global Attitudes Project, it finds that just 79 percent of Americans in 2011 had a favorable view of Americans, compared with Japan and Kenya, which had 85 and 83 percent favorable views, respectively. Most European nations held a 60-plus percent favorable view of Americans, compared with countries such as Egypt, Pakistan and Turkey, with less than 20 percent favorable views.

An interesting facet of foreigners liking or hating America can be seen in a poll Gallup has been conducting since 2007 asking the questions: "Ideally, if you had the opportunity, would you like to move permanently to another country, or would you prefer to continue living in this country? To which country would you like to move?" Guess to which country most people would like to move. If you said "the good ol' US of A," go to the head of the class. Of the more than 640 million people who would like to leave their own country, 23 percent -- or 150 million -- said they would like to live in the United States. The U.S. has been "the world's most desired destination for potential migrants since Gallup started tracking these patterns in 2007." The United Kingdom comes in a distant second, with 7 percent (45 million). Other favorite permanent relocations are Canada (42 million), France (32 million) and Saudi Arabia (31 million), but all pale in comparison with the U.S. as the preferred home.

The next question is: Where do people come from who want to relocate to the U.S.? China has 22 million adults who want to permanently relocate to the U.S., followed by Nigeria (15 million), India (10 million), Bangladesh (8 million) and Brazil (7 million). The Gallup report goes on to make the remarkable finding that "despite large numbers of people in China, Nigeria, and India who want to migrate permanently to the U.S., these countries are not necessarily the places where the U.S. is the most desired destination. Gallup found that more than three in 10 adults in Liberia (37 percent) and Sierra Leone (30 percent) would move permanently to the U.S. if they had the opportunity. More than 20 percent of adults in the Dominican Republic (26 percent), Haiti (24 percent), and Cambodia (22 percent) also say the same." That's truly remarkable in the cases of Liberia and Sierra Leone, where one-third of the people would leave. That's equivalent to 105 million Americans wanting to relocate to another country.

The Gallup poll made no mention of the countries to which people would least like to relocate. But I'm guessing that most of them would be on Freedom House's list of the least free places in the world, such as Uzbekistan, Georgia, China, Turkmenistan, Chad, Cuba and North Korea.

I'm wondering how the hate-America/blame-America-first crowd might explain the fact that so many people in the world, if they had a chance, would permanently relocate here. Maybe it's that they haven't been exposed to enough U.S. university professors.

SOURCE

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Judicial Benchmarks: Ending Discrimination

The Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment provides “No state shall … deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.” Nothing has been more of a muddle in the courtrooms than weak-kneed jurists' attempts to reconcile this clear language with the fundamentally discriminatory nature of “affirmative action.” The most recent groundbreaking cases have had to do with public universities.

In the 1978 case of Regents of the University of California v. Bakke, the Supreme Court held that racial quotas are unconstitutional but that educational institutions could legally use race as one of many factors to consider in their admissions process. However, the Supremes muddied the water in the companion cases of Grutter v. Bollinger and Gratz v. Bollinger. In Grutter and Gratz, the Court upheld both Bakke as a precedent and the admissions policy of the University of Michigan Law School. Nevertheless, in Grutter, it allowed schools to consider race as a factor in admissions for the purpose of diversity. But in Gratz, the Court invalidated Michigan's undergraduate admissions policy on the grounds that the undergraduate policy used a point system that was excessively mechanistic. Got that?

Fed up with convoluted rationalizing, 58% of Michigan voters supported a definitive policy by supporting Proposition 2, amending the state constitution to prohibit discrimination by race in education, government contracts or hiring. That amendment has been challenged in Schuette v. Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action now before the Supreme Court. At issue is a question both bizarre and laughable: Does it violate the U.S. Constitution's ban on racial discrimination for a state to ban racial discrimination?

The plaintiff, the Coalition for Affirmative Action, believes it does, arguing that Prop 2 disproportionately burdens minorities in education. The Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals agreed, in an 8-7 en banc decision, that Proposition 2 “placed special burdens on the ability of minority groups to achieve beneficial legislation.” Dissenting Judge Julia Smith Gibbons wrote that this logic contradicts “elementary principles of constitutional law” and that under the ruling “for the first time, the presumptively invalid policy of racial and gender preference has been judicially entrenched as beyond the political process.” Well said.

SOURCE

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Feds try to eliminate housing for the deaf -- at complex built for hearing-impaired

Obama just wants to hurt Americans (preferably white ones) any way he can.

Arizona is defying a federal order to eliminate apartments for deaf seniors at a housing complex built specifically -- for the deaf.

"I think it's about the most ridiculous thing I've heard in a while," said Sen. Jeff Flake, R-Ariz., who attempted to negotiate the impasse. "There are a lot of stories of out-of-control regulators, but this just seems to be going to the extreme."

A 2005 federal study found that the U.S. had virtually no affordable housing for the deaf. So the federal government helped build Apache ASL Trails, a 75-unit apartment building in Tempe, Ariz., designed specifically for the deaf. Ninety-percent of the units are currently occupied by deaf and deaf-blind seniors.

But now, the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development says Apache ASL Trails violates civil rights law -- because it shows a preference for the hearing-impaired.

"A preference or priority based on a particular diagnosis or disability and excluding others with different disabilities is explicitly prohibited by HUD's Section 504 regulations," says a HUD memo about the project. "There is no legal authority contained in any of Apache Trails funding to permit such a priority or preference."

HUD is threatening to pull all federal housing aid to Arizona unless it limits the number of hearing-impaired residents to 18 people. The agency would not forcibly remove current residents, but wants many of their units to be blocked off to deaf residents in the future once they leave.

However, when HUD approved and helped fund the project in 2008, it did so knowing that the property was specifically "designed for seniors who are deaf, hard of hearing and deaf blind."

"It's impossible to walk into this building and not see that real people were hurt and continue to be hurt," said Mary Vargas, an attorney for the residents.

The National Association for the Deaf has also stepped in, calling HUD's actions "atrocious" and "a tragic irony."  "HUD is forcing deaf and hard of hearing residents to live in isolation and firetraps," said the Association's CEO Howard Rosenblum in a letter to HUD Secretary Shaun Donovan. "There is no statute or regulation that mandates any 25 percent quota."

State housing director Michael Trailor refuses to comply with the federal orders. "Quite frankly, the attorneys I dealt with at HUD I would characterize as ignorant and arrogant and much worse, they are powerful," Trailor told Fox News. "And if they worked for me, I would have fired them a long time ago."

State taxpayers and the apartment's developer have spent $500,000 so far fighting HUD. After two years of negotiation, Trailor met with Donovan earlier this year hoping to resolve the dispute.

Trailor said: "He looked me in the eye and said, 'if you say we have taken too long to resolve this, you are right. If you say we haven't handled this very well, you're right. We're committed to solving this -- but to do so can you be patient?'"

Trailor asked "what patience means in terms of time," and was told it would be a matter of weeks.  "It's now been five months," he said.

All 74 units at Apache ASL Trails accommodate wheelchairs. Blinking lights signal when the doorbell rings and when utilities like the garbage disposal and air conditioning are running. A video phone lets residents "talk" with friends.

"It's nice to have a life that's equivalent to other people that are not deaf," said resident Linda Russell. "This building is designed for deaf people, by deaf people, and we know what is best for our needs. And people that don't understand our needs, should not be putting themselves in decision-making positions for us."

HUD provided the Arizona Deaf Senior Citizens Coalition and its developer $2.6 million in funds and tax credits to build the complex in 2008. It is now fully occupied, with 69 of the 74 rented to deaf and deaf-blind residents. They meet daily in a large events room to talk, watch television and play games. The room is largely silent but the residents are animated and busy talking in sign language.

"I've been living here for two and a half years," said 74-year-old Rose Marie Pryce. "I love the deaf environment. We have a great time together. I have lots of friends. (If forced to move) I would be devastated. I would cry. I want to stay here, we need this place."

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, 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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My First Multicultural Experience

The story of Billy Chubbs, an indoctrinated person

John Lennon was a great, great, GREAT man. He truly was the voice of the baby boomers, unarguably the greatest generation to have ever lived. His calls for world peace rang out from the windows of the high class building he lived in, echoing messages of hope across a gentrified Manhattan which at the time had an evil majority population of 70% white people. Lennon was such a great soul that he recognized the importance of ethnic cross breeding, choosing as his life mate Yoko Ono, a Japanese women from a high class family.

Ono’s family had spent their lives living in the lands of evil white men, having sent Yoko to a Christian school to be tutored by more evil white men – so she knew all about their evil by the time she moved to white cities and spent her time hanging out with white people. Evil, evil white people.



John Lennon and his ethnically safe soul mate Yoko Ono

And yes, Lennon had made mistakes in the past – perhaps biggest of all having married a woman from his own cultural and societal background, a white woman, and having fathered an evil white BOY with her. Of course Yoko Ono, who by the grace of not being Western or white was mentally and morally superior by default, quickly put that evil white boy in his place by helping Lennon cut off contact with him, making sure their inheritance was denied and squandered so they couldn’t hatch evil white man plans against the world.

Truly, Lennon and Ono were shining beacons of what a multicultural utopia could be. Just listen to the greatest song ever written.

Stirring is it not? Dig those lyrics brah…

Imagine there’s no countries, It isn’t hard to do.

We are so lucky. We truly are. John never got the chance to see how our evil nation states – created to protect and enrich JUST the lives of the people who lived within their borders – are morphing into borderless squares of politically correct corporate fiefdoms.

Imagine no possessions, I wonder if you can, No need for greed or hunger, A brotherhood of man.

Wow. The world John envisions is so beautiful isn’t it? A world where no one feels hunger, no one feels the need to generate wealth, where we’ll all live in houses whatever size we want built by all of us just to see the smiles on our fellow humans. I mean, imagine a world where, like, we needn’t have to breathe so we could live in the water with whales and dolphins. Imagine a world where beautiful people had to pair up with ugly people so that in the end everyone just has plain and mediocre genes. Imagine a world with nothing that makes us feel any sort of emotion what so ever!

Imagine all the people, Sharing all the world…

John and you other baby boomers, you may have been a bunch of dreamers, but this dream of yours is finally coming true. It’s taken far, far too long but we’re almost there brother. We’re almost there. Thank you for leading we younger generations to it.

I was listening to the above video not too long ago, and it made me reflect on the joys of my own experiences in growing up in a small multiculturally diverse Canadian city. Multiculturalism has been getting a lot of bad rep lately and I honestly find this mind boggling.



I think most of the people saying how multiculturalism destroys peace within a nation or takes opportunity away from those whose parents, grandparents and greater ancestors who built the country are simply haters and bigots. I don’t think they’ve ever really lived in or experienced the joys of being in a multicultural community.

Well folks, old Billy Chubbs has. I spent my childhood growing up in a city that is a shining example of the multicultural utopia currently being created around us. Unfortunately my parents moved me away during 8th grade, so I never got to fully mature in that glorious rainbow of skin colour and differing religions. I think I am worse off for that lack of experience. I can, however, recount some lovely incidents I had during the golden age of my life that I spent within that multicultural Nirvana.
Billy Chubbs first experience with a different culture

There I was, fresh faced and precocious, ready for another day of 1st grade. My colouring books and lunch safely tucked away in my favourite Power Rangers backpack. After a kiss and hug from my mommy I was out the door. The day was bright and sunny. The leaves were beginning to change into their fall colours but for the end of September the weather was exceptionally warm. School was seven blocks away and I took my time meandering to it, watching squirrels gather their nuts, looking at the pretty flower gardens carefully kept in front of the middle class houses. I noticed a lot of them down this street had For Sale signs up but I thought nothing of it – in fact, I enjoyed those signs quite a bit that day, giving each one I passed a satisfying bonk with a stick.

Turning south two blocks away from the school I had my first multicultural experience.



A bit of background on my city first. For most of the 20th century my city was predominantly full of evil white men. It was truly a hell hole; no, there wasn’t much in the way of crime or uncomfortable experiences, but what we had in safety we lost in soul. The city council, baby boomer dreamers that they are, decided to do something about this. The 90s and early 00s were a rough period for the innocent parts of the world. Wars and genocides in African and the Middle East – caused by us evil white men of course – were ravaging the disenfranchised 2nd and 3rd worlds.

Realizing something needed to be done to help their fellow man, and to give our city some much needed culture, our council held several closed door meetings in their suburban McMansions and agreed to accept a lot of refugees from these culturally superior countries.

Our first big slice of multicultural utopia arrived in 1999 in the form of several hundred Somalians. The apartments right by the school had been rented out to them. I had walked this route last year with no incidents and boy howdy, was that ever boring! As a young man what I really craved a bit of excitement on my way to school, and a nice Somalian man provided it. He was sitting on the corner, swaying and smelling of mouth wash. That explained his big toothy white smile when he saw me walking by. He hopped right up and began stumbling over.

Now two weird things happened, which the doctors at the hospital later told me was probably just euphoria from me realizing I was about to experience a non-Western – and therefore superior – culture.

My body went numb and I froze. A voice inside my head said;

This is your brain Billy. I’m releasing Dopamine; it will make you numb.

To which I thought back; Are you trying to kill me?

No Billy, I’m making you not care.

And behind the nice man’s shoulder, there was a bright white light and suddenly an Angel appeared. Apparently, much like our encounter, at the time no one seemed to notice it. The Angel had a sad face and was stretching out his hand, mouthing; You’re going home my child.



Of course, being white AND a man, I knew the Angel did not have my best interests at heart and therefore could not be trusted. Besides, I wasn’t going home! I was going to school! I ignored the silly Angel and stood there waiting to see what the nice Somali man wanted.

He began by trying to teach me his language, and as was his culture’s way it involved yelling at me and pushing me around. As an evil white boy, I had some reservations about standing there absorbing the Somalian culture. For a long time afterward I thought I didn’t run because I was frozen from sheer fear and terror but recently some feminists explained how it was my duty to welcome all cultures, and that my refusal to run was my mind recognizing that simple fact of nature. They couldn’t explain why the Somali then took my back pack off, held it between us and unzipped it to shake all my books and lunch out onto the sidewalk. But those feminists assured me that, as an evil white man, it was my fault.

When I asked what he was doing with it he finally communicated with me in my own evil and inferior language.

“MONEY?!”

Oh! I thought, He is just a hungry hobo. John Lennon says nobody should be hungry, so I reached into my pocket and took out my two loonies for milk money (one dollar coins for the 98% of you reading this who aren’t Canadians) and happily held them out to the man.

The nice man then gave me a Somalian goodbye by kicking me in the stomach with his engineer boot before prying open my hand and taking my two dollars. I tried not to cry as the wind was knocked out of me. I shamefully admit I had a brief thought about why a grown man had struck me, a small child, and if he was white I suppose I would have thought the man a criminal. He was, however, a different colour then me and since I was the white male it was simply my duty to accept his culture.

The teacher made a big deal out of my being late and then of the massive red welt which turned into a 3 inch bruise on my stomach. Then my parents and the police made a big deal out of trying to get me to identify the attackers. When I did they stopped making such a big deal, recognizing that I was not the victim of a crime but just experiencing multiculturalism. They showed me a big binder with a lot of faces inside, asking me if I recognized any of them. There were lots of evil white men inside, a few disenfranchised brown Native Americans and black men but none matched the nice Somali that taught me about his ways. The incident was soon dropped.

I had many more enlightening multicultural encounters after that, the most shameful of which occurred in grade 6 when me and my friend committed a hate crime by attacking some Sikh kids that had earlier cornered my friend’s sister and tried to make her lift her skirt up for them. That was their culture, and we evil white boys should have known better by then. I felt absolutely no revulsion or hatred for the older men in my city and society in general as my Principal and Vice Principal, both evil white men who had fortunately embraced multiculturalism, forced my friend and I to shake hands with the Sikh boys we had attacked for no good reason.



It’s not a crime, it’s their CULTURE.

My friend’s family could not get over their evil whiteness and moved shortly thereafter. My own mother and father tried their best to avoid giving into their hatred, even as in my weaker moments I admit I begged them to leave as well. When our evil white neighbour got hit with a brick in the head walking to his car after work, I guess my mom and dad finally realized that multiculturalism can affect the morally superior baby boomers too, no matter how much they tried to make our city a Multicultural Utopia.

So, the cowards we are, the Chubbs shamefully retreated to a smaller town. The population was almost 90% white and I spent my boring high school years soullessly safe. My grades skyrocketed since my classes were full of calm, boring evil white people who didn’t scream at each other in different languages or bring pellet guns into class. To make up for my shameful ways I attended university, giving tens of thousands of dollars and three years of my life to further the feminist indoctrination institution.

And today, now that my country is thoroughly multicultural, I don’t have to worry about finding any more evil white communities! Chasing careers in a crowded job market saturated with affirmative action laws and immigrant driven wage undercutting, I get to relive my childhood every single day! I just hope those evil white people living in suburbs, gentrified neighbourhoods and gated communities get to experience the sheer joys of multiculturalism one day. After all, they’re the ones who instituted it in the first place and have spent so much time spouting how good it is for everyone. I know they’re afraid of affecting the rest of society with their evil whiteness, but it’s okay. Most of us Millennials and Generation Xers have paved the way for you baby boomers; we have met multiculturalism and it is us!

So come on folks. Erase those borders, open up those gates and for god sakes build a project or two in mostly white neighbourhoods. Multiculturalism ain’t so bad, and it’s-a-comin’ anyways – don’t you want to be ahead of the curve?

Maybe we just need some more examples; why don’t you, gentle reader, share some of your experiences with multicultural utopianism below?



SOURCE

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In another world



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I found the contrast above profoundly depressing.  So I retreated to my Christian past for strength  -- as under



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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, 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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Kees Jan can't

Kees-Jan Kan, a young Dutchman, has recently rediscovered one of the most basic facts in IQ testing: That it's easiest to detect IQ differences if the people you are studying (Ss) have a common background.  So if the Ss are all in the same class at school, for instance, a vocabulary test (finding out how many hard words they know) will give you a quick and easy way to sort them out.  And you will find that the guys who know lots of words are also good at a whole range of puzzles, even mathematical ones.

So a common background optimizes your chances of assessing IQ accurately. And to be a bit technical, vocab loads highly on 'g' (the general factor in intelligence), meaning that, where it can be used, it is a powerful predictor of other abilities.  Vocab is however convenient rather than essential in IQ measurement.  Tests designed for use among people who do not have a common background (such as the Raven PMs) don't use it but still work perfectly well.

On those basic facts, KJK has erected an elaborate theory, which comes to the conclusions that IQ is mostly cultural, with a genetic component much smaller that is generally thought.  And it is the cultural part which is hereditary.

To arrive at that, KJK goes via the concept of the "cultural load" of each IQ question -- which he assesses by looking at how often a question has to be altered when you are adminstering it to a new and different population.  And he finds that by removing (statistically) the influence of cultural load, all other correlations are much reduced.

When we look more closely at his data, however (e.g. Table 3.1 in KJK's doctoral dissertation) we find that only two out of 11 question types have a high cultural load:  Vocab and general knowledge.  And the cultural dependency of those two question types has been obvious to everyone since the year dot.

What is interesting however is that the remaining 9 question types have low to negligible cultural load.  In other words, we could remove the vocab and knowledge subtests from the overall test and still have a robust test.  So my conclusion is that what KJK should have done from the beginning is to remove those two flawed item types from his calculations altogether.  Once you do that all his exciting findings melt away.  His findings rely on items that he himself knows to be flawed.

There is a summary of KJK's dissertation at  The Unscientific American -- JR

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The New York Times: America Sucks

Dennis Prager

This past Saturday, the New York Times published an article, "Behind Flurry of Killing, Potency of Hate," on the roots of monstrous evil. The article largely concerned a former paramilitary member of the Irish Republican Army, and as such was informative.

But when it ventured into a larger discussion of evil, the moral confusion and contempt for America that characterize leftism were on display.

The article contains a breathtaking paragraph that exemplifies both qualities. After noting that atrocities against groups of people are often the result of the dehumanization of the victimized group, the writer gives four such examples:

"The Hutus in Rwanda called the Tutsis cockroaches, the Nazis depicted the Jews as rats. Japanese invaders referred to their Chinese victims during the Nanjing massacre as 'chancorro,' or 'subhuman.' American soldiers fought barbarian 'Huns' in World War I and godless 'gooks' in Vietnam."

This paragraph is noteworthy for its use of false moral equivalence to justify its anti-Americanism.

Let's begin with the moral equivalence -- equating how the Hutus viewed and treated the Tutsis, how the Nazis viewed and treated the Jews, and how the Japanese viewed and treated the Chinese with the Americans' views and treatment of the Germans in World War I and Vietnamese during the Vietnam War.

In 1994, over the course of about 100 days, Hutus slaughtered between half a million and a million Tutsis. This was not a war between armies, but against a civilian population marked for extinction.

The Nazis murdered about six million Jews, all of whom were civilians. Indeed more than a million were children. The Nazis had targeted the Jews for extinction.

The Japanese likewise slaughtered Chinese civilians en masse and regarded the Chinese as so subhuman as to be worthy of being systematically experimented upon in ghoulish medical experiments that paralleled those of the Nazis.

What do any of those examples have to do with Americans fighting in World War I or in Vietnam?

Nothing. Absolutely nothing about these other three examples applied to America in World War I or in Vietnam.

Nicknames -- even derogatory ones -- for enemies have probably been used in every war by every nation's soldiers. That is not at all the same as a serious view of another racial or national group as unworthy of life, as subhuman.

Unlike any of the other examples, Americans did not have a term that -- by definition -- meant that Germans or Vietnamese were not members of the human race, as are "cockroaches," "rats" and "subhumans."

Unlike any of the other examples, the killing by Americans in World War I and Vietnam was confined to war. No war, no killing. The Nazi and Hutu examples had nothing to do with waging war. The Tutsis and Jews were targeted for annihilation, period. And the Japanese committing of hundreds of thousands rapes, tortures, and medical experiments on Chinese civilians -- such as cutting them open without anesthetic or freezing people's limbs and then cutting them off, also without an anesthetic -- had nothing to do with war aims.

Moreover, what does "godless" have to do with subhuman categories? Again, nothing. Why, then, was it included in this article -- "godless 'gooks'"? Because the Times writer wanted to render the term "godless" as offensive as the term "subhuman." Being largely godless itself, and aiming for a godless West, the left detested the right's calling Communism "godless" -- even though Communists were vocal and proud of their godlessness.

Lumping America's actions in those two wars with the other three examples is typical of the left's defamation of America and of its facile use of false moral equivalence.

But that is how a generation of Americans who have attended college -- including most likely the Times author herself -- have been taught to think. And that is what is taught to your child today at the left's seminaries, our universities:

Nazis, Hutu murderers, Japanese rapists, Americans at war: All pretty much the same.

SOURCE

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Monks Slay Regulatory Monopoly in Louisiana Casket Case

Extremely tired reference to Jesus being a carpenter goes here.Courtesy of Institute for JusticeA five-year battle by Benedictine monks in Louisiana for the right to make and sell caskets is over, and the holy carpenters have won. The Supreme Court declined this week to get involved in the fight between St. Joseph Abbey and the Louisiana State Board of Embalmers and Funeral Directors, letting stand a ruling that declared a state-enforced industry monopoly illegal.

The law in question required anybody who wanted to sell caskets to undergo funeral director training and set up embalming equipment, rules that have nothing to do with creating or selling fancy wooden boxes with which to store dead bodies, but everything to do with making sure the funeral industry controlled the marketplace. Reason’s Damon Root had been following the case when the U.S. Court of Appeals struck it down in March, ruling “That Louisiana does not even require a casket for burial, does not impose requirements for their construction or design, does not require a casket to be sealed before burial, and does not require funeral directors to have any special expertise in caskets, leads us to conclude that no rational relationship exists between public health and safety and limiting intrastate sales of caskets to funeral establishments.”

The Louisiana State Board of Embalmers and Funeral Directors attempted to bring the case to the Supreme Court, but it is not to be. The Institute for Justice represented the monks. Like me, they are unable to avoid puns related to death when responding to the case being put to rest:

“The U.S. Supreme Court’s denial of review puts the final nail in the coffin for the state board’s protectionist and outrageous campaign against the monks,” said Institute for Justice Senior Attorney Scott Bullock.  “The Abbey’s victory in this case will not only protect their right to sell caskets, but the rights of entrepreneurs throughout the country.”

The monks’ victory is one of only a handful of cases since the 1930s in which federal courts have enforced the constitutional right to economic liberty.

Abbot Justin Brown, who heads the monastic community said, “Today is a good day for us at the Abbey.  Knowing that not only has our economic liberty been protected forever, but that we also helped secure the same rights for others makes this years-long battle worth it.”

SOURCE

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Calling Fraud for What It Is

It’s been well-documented that someone registered to vote in Washington, D.C. under the name Mr. Barry Soetoro at the White House address of 1600 Pennsylvania Ave, Washington, D.C. 20500.

If you are a liberal, this spoof is more proof that conservatives are spiteful racists who wish to remind the president of his somewhat obscure past.

If you are a conservative, however, you see the spoof for what it really is: an indictment of a voter registration process that allows anyone to register under any made up name and then vote under that name with the flimsiest of documentation.

When I go pick up my son from school early for a doctor’s appointment, I have to show a valid government I.D., even though presumably my son, who is well-known to me, wouldn’t call a stranger “dad” or get into a car with someone not his dad—at least I hope not.

When I check into a hotel, I have to show valid I.D. for the purposes of positive identification.

When I, as a naturally-born citizen of the United States, travel abroad, I have to stand in line to show U.S. Customs agents my passport that proves I’m an American citizen to regain entry to the country.

When I adopted my dog from the rescue shelter, I had to show I.D. DirecTV verifies who I am before setting up service for me, a hospital won’t admit me without knowing who I am. The list of activities that require the positive identification of a person is long.

It’s probably too long.

And yet, when it comes to voting, liberals support a system where anyone, with a made-up name, can successfully register and vote in the most important function of the ordinary citizen in our representative republic.

You and I and everyone else knows that this is just an attempt to allow fraudulent voting using as an excuse minority populations that tend to poll higher for Democrats.

That this practice of mass, fraudulent voter registration is supported by liberals by using arguments that are inherently racist and do not apply equal justice under the law, is just another example of liberal deconstructionism that turns the concept of “justice” into a tyranny.

 SOURCE

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ObamaCare's Third World Experience

Closer examination of the design and implementation of the ObamaCare enrollment website reveals a long list of mistakes that could have been avoided, but instead were compounded by politically motivated decisions made by the Obama administration. And problems likely won't be resolved for months.

Late in the design phase of the exchanges, the Department of Health and Human Services removed fundamental elements of the site that would have allowed consumers to actually see the cost of insurance so as to reduce “rate shock.” It had become apparent even to the true believers that ObamaCare wasn't affordable or flexible in its options. The truth would have led to reduced enrollment, so HHS opted to reject transparency for the sake of political expediency – and they still got low enrollment. HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius still refuses to reveal the true number of enrollees, which private sources estimate is a paltry 20% of the government's target for October.

The administration, fearing Republican and public criticism, opted to keep the construction and testing of the website in-house with trusted campaign tech gurus. Major decisions were made behind closed doors without oversight, like granting the no-bid contract to CGI Federal to build the site. CGI Group, the Canada-based parent company of CGI Federal, was fired by the Canadian government in 2012 for missing three years of deadlines and developing a substandard product that proved unworkable. It will now take several months of continuous patches to a half-billion-dollar website built with decade-old technology and rife with security problems just to gain basic functionality – like providing the correct information to insurers.

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, 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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