Amazing! Scientists find that conservatives are more cautious

The findings below can all be summarized as showing conservatives to be more cautious, which is hardly news.   But there is a bit more to it than that.  It shows that conservative  caution is inbuilt  -- in that conservatives show quicker and stronger responses to things that require caution

Thomas Jefferson was a smart dude. And in one of his letters to John Adams, dated June 27, 1813, Jefferson made an observation about the nature of politics that science is only now, two centuries later, beginning to confirm. "The same political parties which now agitate the United States, have existed through all time," wrote Jefferson. "The terms of Whig and Tory belong to natural, as well as to civil history," he later added. "They denote the temper and constitution of mind of different individuals."

Tories were the British conservatives of Jefferson's day, and Whigs were the British liberals. What Jefferson was saying, then, was that whether you call yourself a Whig or a Tory has as much to do with your psychology or disposition as it has to do with your ideas. At the same time, Jefferson was also suggesting that there's something pretty fundamental and basic about Whigs (liberals) and Tories (conservatives), such that the two basic political factions seem to appear again and again in the world, and have for "all time."

Jefferson didn't have access to today's scientific machinery—eye tracker devices, skin conductance sensors, and so on. Yet these very technologies are now being used to reaffirm his insight. At the center of the research are many scholars working at the intersection of psychology, biology, and politics, but one leader in the field is John Hibbing, a political scientist at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln whose "Political Physiology Laboratory" has been producing some pretty stunning results.

"We know that liberals and conservatives are really deeply different on a variety of things," Hibbing explains on the latest episode of the Inquiring Minds podcast (stream above). "It runs from their tastes, to their cognitive patterns—how they think about things, what they pay attention to—to their physical reactions. We can measure their sympathetic nervous systems, which is the fight-or-flight system. And liberals and conservatives tend to respond very differently."

This is not fringe science: One of Hibbing's pioneering papers on the physiology of ideology was published in none other than the top-tier journal Science in 2008. It found that political partisans on the left and the right differ significantly in their bodily responses to threatening stimuli. For example, startle reflexes after hearing a loud noise were stronger in conservatives. And after being shown a variety of threatening images ("a very large spider on the face of a frightened person, a dazed individual with a bloody face, and an open wound with maggots in it," according to the study), conservatives also exhibited greater skin conductance—a moistening of the sweat glands that indicates arousal of the sympathetic nervous system, which manages the body's fight-or-flight response.

It all adds up, according to Hibbing, to what he calls a "negativity bias" on the right. Conservatives, Hibbing's research suggests, go through the world more attentive to negative, threatening, and disgusting stimuli—and then they adopt tough, defensive, and aversive ideologies to match that perceived reality.

In a 2012 study, Hibbing and his colleagues showed as much through the use of eye-tracking devices like the one shown above. Liberals and conservatives were fitted with devices that tracked their gaze, and were shown a series of four-image collages containing pictures that were either "appetitive" (e.g., something happy or positive) or "aversive" (showing something threatening, scary, or disgusting). The eye-tracking device allowed the researchers to measure where the research subjects first fixed their gaze, how long it took them to do so, and then how long they tended to dwell on different images.

Here's an example of an aversive, disgust-evoking image, one that just happens to also feature Hibbing himself. He says worms are actually "quite tasty." (This picture wasn't actually used in the study, but a very similar one was.)

And you can see an example of a four-image collage used in the study here. One of the images is adorable, the rest are varying degrees of disgusting and aversive. Which image does your eye go to first, and how long did you focus on it?

The results of Hibbing's study were clear: The conservatives tended to focus their eyes much more rapidly on the negative or aversive images, and also to dwell on them for a lot longer. The authors therefore concluded that based on results like these, "those on the political right and those on the political left may simply experience the world differently."

"Maybe you've had this experience, watching a political debate with somebody who disagrees with you," says Hibbing. "And you discuss it afterwards. And it's like, 'Did we watch the same debate?' And in some respects, you didn't. And I think that's what this research indicates."

One of the biggest differences clearly involves the emotion of disgust. Hibbing isn't the only one to have found a relationship between conservatism and stronger disgust sensitivity—this result is also a mainstay of the very influential research of moral psychologist Jonathan Haidt, who studies how deep-seated moral emotions divide the left and the right (see here). In one study, Hibbing and his colleagues showed that a higher level of disgust sensitivity is predictive not only of political conservatism but also disapproval of gay marriage. It is important to underscore that your disgust sensitivity is involuntary; it is not something under your control. It is a primal, gut emotion.

That word, "primal," helps us begin to understand what Hibbing and his colleagues now think ideology actually is. They think that humans have core preferences for how societies ought to be structured: Some of us are more hierarchical, as opposed to egalitarian; some of us prefer harsher punishments for rule breakers, whereas some of us would be more inclined to forgive; some of us find outsiders or out-groups intriguing and enticing, whereas others find them threatening. Hibbing and his team have even found that preferences on such matters appear to have a genetic basis.

Thus, the idea seems to be that our physiology, who we are in our bodies, may lead us to experience the world in such a way that basic preferences about how to run society emerge naturally from more basic dispositions and habits of perception. So, if you have a negativity bias, and you focus more on the aversive and disgusting, then the world seems more threatening to you. And thus, policies like supporting a stronger military, or being tougher on immigration, might feel very natural.

And when you combine Hibbing's research on the physiology of ideology with waves of other studies showing that liberals and conservatives appear to differ when it comes to genetics, hormones, moral emotions, personalities, and even brain structures, the case for politics being tied to biology seems pretty strong indeed.

So how do we then live with the other side—with those who disagree with us, for reasons over which they may not have full control? Hibbing believes that understanding that you don't fully control your political orientation, any more than you do your sexual orientation or your left-hand/right-hand orientation, promotes political tolerance. "My dad was left-handed," says Hibbing, "and he got beat on the hand with a ruler when he was a kid." Nowadays, Hibbing continues, that would never happen—we've grown much more tolerant because we recognize that left-handed is just the way some people are.

So maybe the same can happen for politics. "We have this silly and naive hope, maybe it's more than that," says Hibbing, "that if we could get people to see politics in the same light [as left-handedness], then maybe we would be a little bit more tolerant, and there will be a greater opportunity for compromise."

SOURCE

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France shows what not to do

Tax-and-spend politics has driven Paris to the brink

While commentators remain captivated by the bleak saga of such Eurozone basket cases as Greece, Portugal, Spain, and Italy, another European Union member is quietly slipping into economic despair. After years of fiscal mismanagement, France is in a bad, bad place.

France spends more of its GDP on government-57 percent-than any other country in the Eurozone. The country's unemployment rate is at a 16-year high of 11 percent, and a startling number of richer and younger French people are leaving for more hospitable economic environments abroad.

It has gotten so bad that France's crisis-wracked neighbors might be catching up: A November 2013 Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development report warned that Paris is "falling behind southern European countries that have cut labor costs and become leaner and meaner."

The data is even more striking when compared to Germany. With an unemployment rate of 5 percent and a private savings rate of 12.1 percent, Germany has been growing at 1 percent annually while France sputters along at 0 percent.

It is tempting to blame this on the 2007 recession, but the reality is that France hasn't been doing well in years. Since the creation of the Eurozone in 1999, France has only managed a 0.8 percent annual growth rate. Germany, by contrast, has grown three times faster over those 15 years.

Across all available indexes of national economic freedom, France scores very poorly for a developed nation. The 2013 Economic Freedom of the World Index, published by the Fraser Institute and Cato Institute, aggregates and weighs national data on five broad categories-size of government, rule of law and property rights protection, sound money, freedom of international trade, and regulation. How does France rank? An unimpressive 40th, down from 25th in 1980.

This effect is echoed in a similar but more qualitative survey from The Wall Street Journal and the Heritage Foundation. Their Index of Economic Freedom for 2013 ranks France 62nd in the world, right between Thailand and Rwanda. And the trendlines in both studies are similar: The country's good or average scores in the areas of rule of law, regulation, and free trade are dragged down by bloated government and high taxes. Economic freedom is a good indicator of prosperity, and France's is sorely lacking.

Unfortunately, the French government's response to anemic growth and higher unemployment has been to tack toward less economic freedom, not more. Loyal to his promises on the campaign trail, President Francois Hollande of the Socialist Party has refused to trim France's social-welfare spending-the highest of all developed economies-and has chosen instead to chip away at the country's huge deficit by raising taxes.

Hollande's more right-wing predecessor, Nicolas Sarkozy, was only slightly better on taxes. In fact, data compiled by tax-watchdog groups and the media in 2012 show that during Sarkozy's rule, from 2007 to 2012, taxpayers were subjected to 205 separate increases, including excise taxes on televisions, tobacco, and diet sodas, multiple increases in capital taxation, and a wealth-tax hike. Sarkozy is also responsible for increasing the top marginal income tax rate from 40 to 41 percent in 2010, and again to 45 percent in 2012.

Analyzing data from the Ministry of Finance since 2009, the center-left newspaper Le Monde published a special report in September 2013 showing that 84 new taxes have been instated under both presidents. The article also noted that Sarkozy increased tax revenue by €16.2 billion in 2011 and €11.7 billion in 2012, while Hollande added another €7.6 billion shortly after his election and planned to raise an additional €20 billion in 2013. That's €55.5 billion in new tax revenue in four years, with more than half of the total collected from businesses.

France's tax haul stands at more than 45 percent of GDP-one of the highest in the Eurozone. Sarkozy did implement some small but beneficial pension reforms, which Hollande promptly overturned and replaced with a measly and insufficient increase in the pension contribution period. Not only is the new president unconcerned with the sustainability of the French pension system, but he refuses to follow the example of Europe's periphery by liberalizing French labor and product markets.

Hollande's commitment to big government hasn't won him any friends. The French rank him as the least popular president of the Fifth Republic, and young people are voting with their feet. According to the data from French consulates in London and Edinburgh, the number of French people living in London is probably somewhere between 300,000 and 400,000. That's more than the number of French people living in Bordeaux, Nantes, or Strasbourg.

In a stunning display of hubris, Hollande responded to this tax flight not by implementing beneficial reforms but by beefing up the exit tax that Sarkozy created in 2012. Sarkozy's penalty taxes capital gains at the rate of 19 percent, plus a 15.5 percent payroll-tax-like penalty, payable when exiles sell their assets any time within eight years after leaving the country. Under Hollande, that period is now being expanded up to 15 years.

For cockeyed optimists, there are still slivers of hope. During his New Year address, Hollande turned into a rhetorical supply-sider, making the case for cutting taxes and public spending, improving competitiveness, and creating a more investor-friendly climate. He also promised French businesses a "responsibility pact" to cut labor-force restrictions and thus promote increased hiring.

While free market economists don't believe a word of this, it is worth noting that France has reformed successfully before. Both the 1980s and the '90s saw large waves of privatization, marginal tax cuts, and slighter spending increases. To secure robust prosperity for new French generations, leaders should extend the lessons of these brief shining moments by seriously tackling government spending and reining in destructive tax rates.

Is it possible? Maybe. Many of the countries that have managed to engage in true reforms were led by left-leaning parties at the time. In Canada, the Liberal Party reduced the debt-to-GDP ratio from 67 percent to 29 percent in a few years by cutting spending in absolute terms and engaging in serious structural reforms. And while it's not exactly the same, President Bill Clinton kept the size of government in check in a way Republicans didn't when they were in control. He signed welfare reform, too.

If we're lucky, Hollande will want to make history by being the Socialist who turned France around. If not, the next Greece may well speak French.

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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Sabbath

I am taking Sunday off as my Sabbath this week.  I have been battling a pesky cold this week but hope that I am well enough recovered by now to get out and about later today

Whose Side Is God on Now?  Putin?

Pat Buchanan speaks some unpopular truths below, as usual.  I must say I find myself much more at ease with Mr. Putin than with the Western Left.  That could change if some of the dire prophecies about him come true but so far I see a man who proceeds with great caution.  I see nothing wrong with Russian patriotism.  The Russians are a great people -- JR



In his Kremlin defense of Russia's annexation of Crimea, Vladimir Putin, even before he began listing the battles where Russian blood had been shed on Crimean soil, spoke of an older deeper bond.

Crimea, said Putin, "is the location of ancient Khersones, where Prince Vladimir was baptized. His spiritual feat of adopting Orthodoxy predetermined the overall basis of the culture, civilization and human values that unite the peoples of Russia, Ukraine and Belarus."

Russia is a Christian country, Putin was saying.

This speech recalls last December's address where the former KGB chief spoke of Russia as standing against a decadent West:

"Many Euro-Atlantic countries have moved away from their roots, including Christian values. Policies are being pursued that place on the same level a multi-child family and a same-sex partnership, a faith in God and a belief in Satan. This is the path to degradation."

Heard any Western leader, say, Barack Obama, talk like that lately?

Indicting the "Bolsheviks" who gave away Crimea to Ukraine, Putin declared, "May God judge them."

What is going on here?  With Marxism-Leninism a dead faith, Putin is saying the new ideological struggle is between a debauched West led by the United States and a traditionalist world Russia would be proud to lead.

In the new war of beliefs, Putin is saying, it is Russia that is on God's side. The West is Gomorrah.

Western leaders who compare Putin's annexation of Crimea to Hitler's Anschluss with Austria, who dismiss him as a "KGB thug," who call him "the alleged thief, liar and murderer who rules Russia," as the Wall Street Journal's Holman Jenkins did, believe Putin's claim to stand on higher moral ground is beyond blasphemous.

But Vladimir Putin knows exactly what he is doing, and his new claim has a venerable lineage. The ex-Communist Whittaker Chambers who exposed Alger Hiss as a Soviet spy, was, at the time of his death in 1964, writing a book on "The Third Rome."

The first Rome was the Holy City and seat of Christianity that fell to Odoacer and his barbarians in 476 A.D. The second Rome was Constantinople, Byzantium, (today's Istanbul), which fell to the Turks in 1453. The successor city to Byzantium, the Third Rome, the last Rome to the old believers, was -- Moscow.

Putin is entering a claim that Moscow is the Godly City of today and command post of the counter-reformation against the new paganism.

Putin is plugging into some of the modern world's most powerful currents. Not only in his defiance of what much of the world sees as America's arrogant drive for global hegemony. Not only in his tribal defense of lost Russians left behind when the USSR disintegrated.

He is also tapping into the worldwide revulsion of and resistance to the sewage of a hedonistic secular and social revolution coming out of the West.

In the culture war for the future of mankind, Putin is planting Russia's flag firmly on the side of traditional Christianity. His recent speeches carry echoes of John Paul II whose Evangelium Vitae in 1995 excoriated the West for its embrace of a "culture of death."

What did Pope John Paul mean by moral crimes?

The West's capitulation to a sexual revolution of easy divorce, rampant promiscuity, pornography, homosexuality, feminism, abortion, same-sex marriage, euthanasia, assisted suicide -- the displacement of Christian values by Hollywood values.

Washington Post columnist Anne Applebaum writes that she was stunned when in Tbilisi to hear a Georgian lawyer declare of the former pro-Western regime of Mikhail Saakashvili, "They were LGBT."

"It was an eye-opening moment," wrote Applebaum. Fear and loathing of the same-sex-marriage pandemic has gone global. In Paris, a million-man Moral Majority marched in angry protest.

Author Martha Gessen, who has written a book on Putin, says of his last two years, "Russia is remaking itself as the leader of the anti-Western world."

But the war to be waged with the West is not with rockets. It is a cultural, social, moral war where Russia's role, in Putin's words, is to "prevent movement backward and downward, into chaotic darkness and a return to a primitive state."

Would that be the "chaotic darkness" and "primitive state" of mankind, before the Light came into the world?

This writer was startled to read in the Jan-Feb. newsletter from the social conservative World Council of Families in Rockford, Ill., that, of the "ten best trends" in the world in 2013, number one was "Russia Emerges as Pro-Family Leader."

In 2013, the Kremlin imposed a ban on homosexual propaganda, a ban on abortion advertising, a ban on abortions after 12 weeks and a ban on sacrilegious insults to religious believers.

"While the other super-powers march to a pagan world-view," writes WCF's Allan Carlson, "Russia is defending Judeo-Christian values. During the Soviet era, Western communists flocked to Moscow. This year, World Congress of Families VII will be held in Moscow, Sept. 10-12."

Will Vladimir Putin give the keynote?  In the new ideological Cold War, whose side is God on now?

SOURCE

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Noah COULD have floated his boat, say scientists: Ark really could have coped with two of every animal

The story of a man building a giant wooden boat to help his family and the entire animal kingdom survive a terrifying flood is one of the more contentious parts of the Bible.

But research by physics students suggests that a structure on the scale of Noah's ark as described in the ancient text could have been built.  And what's more, they say it would have been buoyant even with two of every animal on Earth on board.

However, while the ark would have stayed afloat they're not sure if every animal would have fit inside.

In the book of Genesis, Chapter 6:13-22, Noah is commanded to build an ark to survive a flood.

- The dimensions for the ark were provided in cubits in the Bible, an archaic measure based on the distance between the elbow and the tip of the middle finger.

- Noah was commanded to make the boat out of ‘gopher wood’ and in order to calculate the weight of the empty ark they needed to know the density of the material the boat was constructed out of, but there is no modern-day equivalent of gopher wood.

- English translations of the Bible refer to cypress wood instead, so this was the material that the students used.

- In order to calculate the overall downward force of the ark, the students needed to know the mass of the animals on board; previous research has suggested that the average mass of an animal is approximately equal to that of one sheep, 23.47kg, which was the figure used.

- 'Our conclusions were that the ark would support the weight of 2.15 million sheep without sinking and that should be enough to support all of the species that were around at the time.'

Noah was provided with exact dimensions for the boat which should be 300 cubits long, 50 cubits wide and 30 cubits high.

It was built to hold Noah, his family, and at least two of every species of animal for the duration of the flood.

Using these dimensions and suitable approximations, University of Leicester physics students Oliver Youle, Katie Raymer, Benjamin Jordan and Thomas Morris tested the instructions and were surprised with their results.

Student Thomas Morris, 22, from Chelmsford, said: 'You don’t think of the Bible necessarily as a scientifically accurate source of information, so I guess we were quite surprised when we discovered it would work.  'We’re not proving that it’s true, but the concept would definitely work.'

The students based their calculations on a book by Dr Morris and Dr Whitbomb called The Genesis Flood, which suggested that Noah would have needed to save approximately 35,000 species to repopulate Earth.

This enabled the students to conclude that the dimensions given in the Bible would have allowed Noah to build an ark that would float with all of the animals on board.

They added that it was a separate matter whether all of the animals would fit inside an ark of these dimensions  – the physics students were simply calculating the buoyancy of the ark.

SOURCE

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We'll Probably End Up Just Dumping Obamacare's Employer Mandate

As you read this, keep in mind that Robert Gibbs isn't some marginal figure. He is as close to Barack Obama's inner circle as anyone in America, and served as the administration's official mouthpiece for years. So when he starts talking about significant changes to Obamacare, people should sit up and listen. These remarks could reasonably be considered White House-planted trial balloons:

 “I don’t think the employer mandate will go into effect. It’s a small part of the law. I think it will be one of the first things to go,” he said to a notably surprised audience. The employer mandate has been delayed twice, he noted. The vast majority of employers with 100 or more employees offer health insurance, and there aren’t many employers who fall into the mandate window, he said. Killing the employer mandate would be one way to improve the law — and there are a handful of other “common sense” improvements needed as well, he said...And, most importantly, Gibbs said “health care has to add an additional layer of coverage cheaper than the plans already offered.”

A few points: (1) Yes, the employer mandate has already been delayed twice, tacit admissions that the law is bad for business. Will the administration keep punting it, or will they simply declare it dead? The mandate is built into the law. The White House's postponements of this provision are legally dubious at best; they absolutely do not have the authority to excise entire sections of the law permanently. Will Congress act? I'd also imagine that many employers would dispute Gibbs' characterization of this mandate as "small." (2) How would the demise of the employer mandate impact the mechanics of the law? Its existence has been baked into CBO estimates on revenues and coverage. If a portion of the law designed to ensure coverage for millions, which obviously impacts revenues, goes away, what then? CBO already projects that 31 million Americans will remain uninsured under Obamacare.

(3) Absent a federal mandate to provide coverage, and facing rising costs, many businesses could be incentivized to just dump employees into Obamacare's exchanges. A 2012 Deloitte survey indicated that one in ten American businesses were already planning to stop providing coverage -- and that was with the mandate fully intact. Such a move would add countless Americans to the roster of those burned by Democrats' "keep your plan" lie, and could heap major additional costs onto taxpayers (who fund the law's subsidies). It would also rapidly expand the individual healthcare market, which is where the sharpest cost increases are taking place. And are Democrats prepared to cancel a mandate on corporations while keeping the individual mandate tax in place for families?

(4) To that end, Gibbs floats the idea of eventually adding a cheaper coverage level into the exchange mix, below the "bronze" level -- which has proven unaffordable for many people. This, like the administration's expansive "hardship waivers," is a concession that the "Affordable" Care Act is no such thing for many Americans. It would also re-establish an group of bare-bones plans that Obamacare defenders have dismissed as "sub-standard" or "junk" coverage. Healthcare expert Bob Laszewski has been advocating this change, which he argues must be implemented immediately, despite the risk of "anti-selection." Significant premium increases are expected in 2015 and beyond.

SOURCE

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ELSEWHERE

Minimum Wedge:  "Raising the minimum wage is a key Democrat election issue this year, and they're waging class warfare around the nation. They seek to raise the minimum wage from $7.25 to $10.10 -- a 40% hike that could kill 500,000 jobs. Democrats are subtly signaling, however, that they'd be willing to settle for a smaller increase just to pass one. They need all the help they can get this election year, after all. So naturally, Barack Obama stepped in to add his conciliatory message. "You would think this would be a no-brainer," the president said of raising it. But "Republicans in Congress don't want to vote to raise it all. In fact, some just want to scrap the minimum wage." That's right, because it destroys jobs. "Next think you know," he jabbed, "they'll say, 'Get off my lawn.'" And next thing we know, he'll be quoting taunts from Monty Python.

Numbers Games:  "An unpublished RAND Corporation study on ObamaCare enrollment has been kept under wraps and it's not hard to see why. While the White House trumpeted meeting its goal of 7.1 million enrollees this week, RAND says the number actually enrolled -- having paid their premium -- could be as few as 858,000. Just 23% of enrollees were previously uninsured. Even if the true number is somewhere in the middle, Democrats running for election in November will rue the day 7.1 million was mentioned. And how did the administration get its numbers so fast anyway? A couple of months ago Jay Carney stonewalled, saying, "I'm not going to cherry-pick numbers," meaning, tell you any. Now he says they know to the decimal point because "our system has gotten a lot better." Color us skeptical.

How did people find out that Mozilla’s CEO donated to support Prop 8?:  "Rumors are floating around Twitter that proof of Brendan Eich’s donation was illegally leaked by people in government sympathetic to the cause of gay marriage. Not so. I’d forgotten about it, but friends reminded me that the LA Times obtained a list of people who gave, for and against, to the fight over the Prop 8 referendum in 2008. They put the whole database online and made it searchable. Search it today and, sure enough, there’s Eich with a $1,000 donation in favor. Under California law, that disclosure is perfectly legal: The state is authorized to provide certain personal information about anyone who donates more than $100 to a ballot measure. Why the state is allowed to do that, I’m not sure.

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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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"Alles muss anders sein"

Everyone I know sees things in the world about them that they would like to see changed.  So the idea that conservatives are opposed to change is ludicrous.  The changes they oppose are the hate-driven changes that the Left want, not change in general.

And the changes that the Left want are extreme. The depths of Leftist discontent are to my mind best encapsulated in a saying from prewar Germany: Alles muss anders sein.  Hitler used that slogan and so did most of the German Left of the 1920s and 30s

So what does it mean?  It is a very simple statement but it needs some thought to get the full impact of it in English.  My translation:  "Everything must be changed".  Everything.  You can't get more discontented than that.  A Leftist really does have the fires of Hell burning inside him.  No wonder Leftist behaviour is so reckless and beyond reason.

Obama's wish to "fundamentally transform" America is saying the same thing using more formal words.

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British tax cut pays off

The amount of tax paid by the best-off has soared since George Osborne slashed the top rate of tax from 50p to 45p, according to a new analysis.

New figures from HM Revenue & Customs show the total income tax collected on earnings over £150,000 has shot up from £40 billion last year to £49 billion this year.

Former Conservative Cabinet minister John Redwood, who produced the figures, said it appeared the Chancellor’s tax cut was having dramatic results in what would be a ‘shock to many of the conventional pundits’ who criticised the measure.

‘Total income tax collected from people earning more than £150,000 has surged from £40bn to £49bn this year compared to last.

'It has more than made up for the loss of tax revenue from lower earners following the big increase in tax thresholds,’ Mr Redwood said.

He said the 50p rate introduced by Labour in its final weeks in power was clearly ‘costly’.

Britain lost high earners overseas, and saw the richest use tax loopholes to declare less income when the rate was high.

‘The rareified group of people earning more than £2m declared income of £12.2bn in 2012-13, but paid tax on £26bn of income the following year with the lower rate.

‘This small group of people alone more than paid for the rise in threshold to take many lower earners out of tax altogether.

‘The top one per cent of earners now earn 13 per cent of the income but pay 28 per cent of the total income tax. The top five per cent earn one quarter of the income but pay around half the total income tax.

‘This progressive structure works as long as the government does not get too greedy, setting a higher rate which means the rich pay less because they either go or they earn and declare less.

‘I wonder how much more revenue the Treasury would enjoy if the top rate were set at a more competitive rate?  'I suspect that too would see a further surge in revenue, money the state clearly needs to end the deficit.’

A Tory spokesman said: ‘The Government is clear that in clearing up Labour’s economic mess those with broadest shoulders should bear the biggest burden.’

David Cameron will today hail the Government’s tax changes taking effect this week as the most radical for two decades.

On Tuesday, corporation tax came down to 21 per cent, the tax-free annual investment allowance for businesses was doubled, business rates [property taxes] were capped at two per cent and fuel duty was frozen.

From Sunday, over one million businesses will benefit from up to £2,000 ‘cashback’ on their National Insurance contributions.

The personal income tax allowance will be raised this weekend from £9,440 to £10,000, cutting tax for the typical basic rate taxpayer by £705 this year.

SOURCE

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Millionaires Need Your Help!

Ann Coulter

Last Sunday, The New York Times published a front-page article about the heartfelt need of California farmers for more illegal aliens.

The first tip-off that heinous public policy ideas were coming was that the Times introduced farmer Chuck Herrin, owner of a farm-labor contracting company, as a "lifelong Republican." That's Times-speak for "liberal."

Herrin admitted that he employs a lot of illegal aliens and bitterly complained that they lived in fear of "Border Patrol and deportations." (But, apparently, he doesn't live in fear of admitting he's violating our immigration laws.)

Sorry that running a country inconveniences you, Chuck.

He said his illegal alien employees deserved amnesty because if "we keep them here and not do anything for them once they get old, that's really extortion."

As the punch line goes, "What's this 'we,' paleface?"

Taxpayers have been subsidizing Chuck Herrin's underpayment of his illegal labor force for decades, with skyrocketing taxes to pay for schools, roads, bridges, food stamps, health care and so on. Now Herrin thinks "we" are supposed to support his illegal employees in their old age, too.

Here's another idea: How about a federal law mandating that employers of illegal aliens take responsibility for the people they hire? Why is the taxpayer on the hook for illegal aliens' food, housing and medical care, when Chuck Herrin got 100 percent of the profit from their cheap labor?

We don't allow chemical companies to dump pollutants in rivers, walk away and then say, "If we dump chemicals in rivers and we don't clean them once the plant is gone, that's really criminal."

No, you dumped the chemicals -- not "we." And you, Chuck Herrin, got the cheap labor -- not "we."

"We" got hospital emergency rooms jammed with illegal aliens when we came in with heart attacks. "We" got the crime, drunk-driving and drug trafficking associated with illegal aliens. "We" got the overcrowded schools filled with kids whose illegal alien parents don't pay property taxes. "We" got to press "one" for English.

This is even worse than the Wall Street bailouts -- another example of fat cats pocketing 100 percent of the profits when business is good, but demanding a taxpayer handout when their investments go south. At least the Wall Street bailouts didn't alter the country forever by giving the Democrats 30 million new voters.

According to the California Hospital Association, health care for illegal aliens is costing state taxpayers well over $1 billion a year.. Eighty-four hospitals across California have already been forced to close because of unpaid bills by illegal aliens.

Last year alone, California taxpayers paid $32 million for indigents' health care at hospitals located in Fresno County-- which happens to be where Chuck Herrin's company is based. How about submitting a portion of that cost to Herrin?

Not only should employers of illegal aliens be responsible for their employees' becoming public charges, but they ought to be legally responsible for any crimes their illegal workers commit, just as parents can be for the crimes of their minor children, and bars can be for the behavior of their over-served customers.

Why should employers of illegal aliens be allowed to externalize their costs, while keeping 100 percent of the profits?

The very fact that the American taxpayer is required to subsidize illegal alien farm labor -- to say nothing of anti-competitive marketing orders, tariffs and subsidies given to farmers -- proves that we're propping up an industry the country doesn't need.

If Mexican farm labor is so much cheaper, maybe we should be growing our fruits and vegetables in Mexico. There's absolutely no reason to import Mexicans to do something they could do at home and then sell to us. I believe this is what economists call "competitive advantage."

The Times quotes a report by two pro-amnesty farmers groups, Partnership for a New American Economy and the Agriculture Coalition for Immigration Reform, complaining that American consumption of foreign-grown produce has increased by 80 percent since the late 1990s.

I see why rich farmers are alarmed by that, but why should Americans care? If food can be grown cheaper in other countries, isn't it the very essence of libertarian free trade principles to buy it from them?

No. Apparently, we're required to wreck the country by bringing in millions upon millions more poor people so we can save the buggy whip industry.

We didn't do that with oil. We didn't do it with steel. We must be "Fortress America" only when it comes to asparagus!

Hey! Where's the Cato Institute on this? Busy drafting another philippic against our drug laws?

I care more about my fellow Americans who can't get well-paying jobs than I do about multimillionaire farmers, demanding that the rest of us pay to support an industry that claims it can't compete without taxpayer-subsidized illegal alien labor.

SOURCE

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One California for Me, Another for Thee

Victor Davis Hanson

No place on the planet is as beautiful and as naturally rich as California. And few places have become as absurd.

Currently, three California state senators are either under felony indictment or already have been convicted.

State Sen. Leland Yee (D-San Francisco) made a political career out of demanding harsher state gun-control laws. Now he is facing several felony charges for attempting to facilitate gun-running. One count alleges that Lee sought to provide banned heavy automatic weapons to Philippines-based Islamic terrorist groups.

State Sen. Ron Calderon (D-Montebello), who had succeeded one brother, Thomas, in the state Assembly and was succeeded by another brother, Charles, now faces felony charges of wire fraud, bribery, money laundering and falsification of tax returns.

State Sen. Roderick Wright (D-Inglewood), originally entered politics as a champion of social justice. Not long ago, the Democratic leaders of the California Senate in secretive fashion paid $120,000 in taxpayer funds to settle a sexual-harassment suit against Wright. But this time around, not even his fellow senators could save Wright, who was convicted earlier this year on eight felony counts of perjury and voter fraud.

What is the common denominator with all three California senators -- aside from the fact that they are still receiving their salaries?

One, they are abject hypocrites who campaigned against old-boy insider influence-peddling so they could get elected to indulge in it.

Two, they assumed that their progressive politics shielded them from the sort of public scrutiny and consequences that usually deter such deplorable behavior.

Criminal activity is the extreme manifestation of California's institutionalized progressive hypocrisy. Milder expressions of double standards explain why California has become such a bizarre place.

The state suffers from the highest combined taxes in the nation and nearly the worst roads and schools. It is home to more American billionaires than any other state, but also more impoverished residents. California is more naturally endowed with a combination of gas, oil, timber and minerals than any other state -- with the highest electricity prices and gas taxes in the nation.

To understand these paradoxes, keep in mind one common principle. To the degree a Californian is politically influential, wealthy or well-connected -- and loudly progressive -- the more he is immune from the downside of his own ideology.

Big money is supposed to be bad for politics. But no money plays a bigger role in influencing policy than California's progressive cash, from Hollywood to Silicon Valley. Billionaire hedge-fund operator Tom Steyer is canonized, but he is on track to rival the oft-demonized Koch brothers in the amount of money spent on influencing policymakers and getting his type of politicians elected.

Nowhere are there more Mercedes and BMWs per capita than in California's tony coastal enclaves. And nowhere will you find more anti-carbon activism or more restrictive laws against new oil production that ensure the highest gasoline prices in the continental United States for the less well off.

California's reserves of natural gas exceed those of nearly every other state. And in California, electricity prices are the highest in the nation. The cost falls on those in the interior and Sierra who suffer either from scorching summertime temperatures or bitterly cold winters. Those who set energy policies mostly live in the balmy coastal corridor where there is no need for expensive air conditioning or constant home heating.

In drought-stricken California, building new Sierra Nevada dams and reservoirs was long ago considered passé, but not the idea of diverting precious stored water from agricultural use to help out fish.

Yet the waters of the Sierra Nevada Hetch Hetchy reservoir are exempt from such fish diversions, apparently because they supply 80 percent of San Francisco's daily water supply. Those who wish to either stop more dam construction or divert dammed reservoir water from its original intended use draw the line on restricting their own quite unnatural water sources.

High-speed rail is billed as the transportation of the future in California. But its progressive coastal boosters believe that it should first be tried out on farmers in sparsely settled rural areas rather than in their own precious high-density Bay Area or Los Angeles.

In California, open borders and non-enforcement of existing immigration law are also popular progressive causes. But the immediate impact of illegal immigration on public schools is circumvented for the elite by the growing number of private prep schools along the coast.

Professing that you are progressive can be wise California politics. It means you sound too caring ever to do bad things, while the costly consequences of your ideology usually fall on someone else. And that someone is usually less hip, less wealthy and less powerful.

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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Releaser-in-Chief

ICE engages in catch & release instead of interior enforcement; 68,000 convicted criminal aliens released in one year

Public safety is threatened by the Obama administration's deliberate suppression of immigration law enforcement through abuse of prosecutorial discretion. A study released by the Center for Immigration Studies - based on internal data from Immigration and Customs Enforcement - reveals that this practice has led to ICE charging only 195,000, or 25 percent, out of 722,000 potentially deportable aliens they encounter and releasing convicted criminal aliens 68,000 times in 2013. The releases are troubling, as is the revelation that more than 870,000 aliens who have been ordered removed still remain in the country in defiance of the law.

Just as the president has ordered a review of U.S. deportation practices with the intent of lowering the number of deportations, this study highlights the public safety issues that have resulted from the dramatic downturn in interior enforcement on his watch. ICE targeted 28 percent fewer aliens for deportation from the interior in 2013 than in 2012, despite sustained high numbers of encounters in the Criminal Alien and Secure Communities programs.

"The Obama administration's deliberate obstruction of immigration enforcement, in which tens of thousands of criminal aliens are released instead of removed, is threatening the well-being of American communities," said study author Jessica Vaughan. "It's not a matter of if, but how many families will suffer harm as a result. Every day, I read accounts of crimes that could have been prevented if ICE officers had been allowed to do their jobs. DHS Secretary Jeh Johnson should be reaching out to these victims and their families to better understand the impact of his actions. And, Congress should initiate a review of the public safety implications of the administration's abuse of prosecutorial discretion."

View the entire report at: http://www.cis.org/catch-and-release

Key findings include:

In 2013, ICE charged only 195,000, or 25 percent, out of 722,000 potentially deportable aliens they en-countered. Most of these aliens came to ICE's attention after incarceration for a local arrest.

ICE released 68,000 criminal aliens in 2013, or 35 percent of the criminal aliens encountered by officers. The vast majority of these releases occurred because of the Obama administration's prosecutorial discretion policies, not because the aliens were not deportable.

ICE targeted 28 percent fewer aliens for deportation from the interior in 2013 than in 2012, despite sus-tained high numbers of encounters in the Criminal Alien and Secure Communities programs.

Every ICE field office but one reported a decline in interior enforcement activity.

ICE reports that there are more than 870,000 aliens on its docket who have been ordered removed, but who remain in defiance of the law.

Under current policies, an alien's family relationships, political considerations, attention from advocacy groups, and other factors not related to public safety can trump even serious criminal convictions and result in the termination of a deportation case.

Less than 2 percent of ICE's caseload was in detention at the end of fiscal year 2013. About three-fourths of the aliens ICE detained in 2013 had criminal and/or immigration convictions so serious that the detention was required by statute.

Email from CIS

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Obama is anti-American -- always has been

Thomas Sowell

Japan recently turned over to the United States enough weapons-grade nuclear material to make dozens of nuclear bombs. This was one of President Barack Obama's few foreign policy "successes," as part of his nuclear disarmament initiative. But his foreign policy successes may be more dangerous than his "failures." Back in 2005, Senator Barack Obama urged the Ukrainians to drastically reduce their conventional weapons, including anti-aircraft missiles and tons of ammunition. Ukraine had already rid itself of nuclear missiles, left over from the days when it had been part of the Soviet Union.

Would Vladimir Putin have sent Russian troops so boldly into Ukraine if the Ukrainians still had nuclear missiles? The nuclear disarming of Japan and Ukraine shows how easy it is to disarm peaceful nations -- making them more vulnerable to those who are not peaceful.

Ukraine's recent appeal to the United States for military supplies, with which to defend itself as more Russian troops mass on its borders, was denied by President Obama. He is sending food supplies instead. He might as well send them white flags, to facilitate surrender.

Critics who say that President Obama is naive and inexperienced in foreign policy, and blame that for the many setbacks to American interests during this administration may be right. But it is by no means certain that they are.

Another and more disturbing possibility is that Barack Obama, in his citizen-of-the-world conception of himself, thinks that the United States already has too much power and needs to be deflated. Rush Limbaugh, Dinesh D'Souza and some other critics have seen Obama's repeated sacrifices of American national interests as deliberate.

Monstrous as that possibility might seem, it is consistent not only with many otherwise hard to explain foreign policy setbacks, but also consistent with Obama's having been raised, literally from childhood, with anti-American mentors, beginning with his mother. He continued to seek out such people as an adult.

The ranting Reverend Jeremiah Wright was just one of these anti-American mentors.

President Obama's undermining of stable and unthreatening governments in Egypt and Libya, opening both to Islamic extremists, while doing nothing that was likely to keep Iran from going nuclear, seems more consistent with the views of Rush Limbaugh, Dinesh D'Souza, et al., than with the views of most other critics.

What is also more consistent with the Limbaugh and D'Souza thesis are such personal quirks as Obama's gross rudeness to Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu in the White House and his otherwise inexplicable public debasement of himself and the United States by bowing low to other foreign leaders.

There was nothing to be gained politically by such actions. Nor by such things as his whispered statement to Russian president Dmitry Medvedev that he should tell "Vladimir" that he -- Obama -- could follow a more "flexible" foreign policy after his last election was behind him.

What could be more "flexible" than denying Ukraine the military supplies needed to deter further Russian aggression? Or leaving Japan without material needed to create a nuclear deterrent quickly, while an aggressive China is expanding its military forces and its territorial demands in the region?

Domestically, the unbroken string of Barack Obama's grievance-mongering mentors included Professor Derrick Bell at the Harvard Law School, author of rantings on paper similar to Jeremiah Wright's rantings in his church.

Professor Bell was a man cast in the role of a scholar at top tier universities, who chose instead to take on the pathetic role of someone whose goal was -- in his own words -- to "annoy white people."

Derrick Bell was not a stupid man. He was a man placed where he should never have been placed, where there was no self-respecting role for him to play, without going off on some strange tangent. That Barack Obama literally embraced Professor Bell publicly in law school, and urged others to listen to him, says much about Obama.

It says much about those who voted for Obama that they paid so little attention to his life and so much attention to his rhetoric.

SOURCE

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Official Policy: Male Federal Workers Can Use Women's Restrooms, Locker Rooms

When an expectant mother visits her doctor for an ultrasound, the doctor invariably asks: Do you want to know the sex of your child?

The Obama administration, however, does not believe an unborn child has a sex -- even when a doctor sees indisputable physical evidence.

Obama's Office of Personnel Management has published what it calls "Guidance Regarding the Employment of Transgender Individuals in the Workplace." This document speaks of "sex" as something a person has "assigned" to them only after they make it through the birth canal.

"Transgender individuals are people with a gender identity that is different from the sex assigned to them at birth," says the guidance. "Someone who was assigned the male sex at birth but who identifies as female is a transgender woman. Likewise, a person assigned the female sex at birth but who identifies as male is a transgender man."

OPM discretely expresses its theory in the passive voice. It does not blame the mom or the dad for insensitively exclaiming, without any qualification: It's a boy!

But OPM's guidance does allow qualifications for federal workers. "Some individuals will find it necessary to transition from living and working as one gender to another," says OPM.

The guidelines say the last phase in this transition is called "real life experience." "As the name suggests, the real life experience is designed to allow the transgender individual to experience living full-time in the gender role to which he or she is transitioning," say the guidelines. "Completion of at least one year of the real life experience is required prior to an individual's being deemed eligible for gender reassignment surgery."

The guidelines call for the government to take certain steps to accommodate a federal worker going through a transition.

This can involve educating co-workers. "If it would be helpful and appropriate, employing agencies may have a trainer or presenter meet with employees to answer general questions regarding gender identity," say the guidelines.

It means allowing the person to dress differently. "Once an employee has informed management that he or she is transitioning," say the guidelines, "the employee will begin wearing the clothes associated with the gender to which the person is transitioning."

It means having co-workers use gender-correct terminology. "Managers, supervisors, and co-workers should use the name and pronouns appropriate to the employee's new gender," say the guidelines.

Then there is the point in the guidance governing restrooms and locker rooms.

"For a transitioning employee, this means that, once he or she has begun living and working full-time in the gender that reflects his or her identity, agencies should allow access to restrooms and (if provided to other employees) locker room facilities consistent with his or her gender identity," say the guidelines.

According to the guidance, access to a restroom or locker room should not be conditioned on anatomy.

"While a reasonable temporary compromise may be appropriate in some circumstances," say the guidance, "transitioning employees should not be required to have undergone or to provide proof of any particular medical procedure (including gender reassignment surgery) in order to have access to facilities designated for use by a particular gender."

On Sept. 4, OPM published a proposed regulation based on the same prefatory language as its guidance -- i.e. to provide a federal workplace free from discrimination based on "sex (including gender identity and pregnancy)."

This regulation would extend federal civil rights laws, insofar as they protect federal workers, to cover discrimination based on "gender identity" and "sexual orientation."

The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops has submitted well-reasoned comments on the proposed rule. After noting there is no statutory basis for it, and that some politicians are trying to enact the Employment Non-Discrimination Act to create a statutory basis for it, the USCCB's comments deal with the issues of privacy and freedom of speech.

"Employees have, for example, a legitimate expectation of privacy in workplace restrooms and locker rooms," says the USCCB. "Inclusion of gender identity in the OPM regulations would violate those reasonable expectations. In addition, a government prohibition on all differential treatment based on gender identity would almost certainly be used to squelch speech in the workplace that is not morally approving of efforts to 'identify with' the opposite sex or of the purported 'change' of one's given sex."

But it is in a footnote, quoting the Catholic Catechism, that the bishops get to the heart of the matter: "'Being man' or 'being woman' is a reality which is good and willed by God."

"Everyone, man and woman, should acknowledge and accept his sexual identity," says the USCCB's comment, continuing to quote the Catechism. "Physical, moral, and spiritual difference and complementarity are oriented toward the goods of marriage and the flourishing of family life. The harmony of the couple and of society depends in part on the way in which the complementarity, needs, and mutual support between the sexes are lived out."

The people who now run our federal government not only deny the basic facts of life, they are trying to force the consequences of their denial on the world that all the innocent little boys and girls born today must inhabit tomorrow.

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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Judaism, Christianity, Environmentalism

Dennis Prager

As I have often noted, the most dynamic and influential religion of the past hundred years has not been Christianity, let alone Judaism, the two religions that created the Western world. Nor has it been Islam. It has been Leftism.

Leftism has influenced the literary, academic, media, and, therefore, the political elite far more than any other religion. It has taken over Western schools from elementary through graduate.

For most of that time, various incarnations of Marxism have been the dominant expressions -- and motivators -- of Leftism: specifically, income redistribution, material equality and socialism. They are still powerful aspects of the left, but with the downfall of most communist regimes, other left-wing expressions have generated even more passion: first feminism and then environmentalism.

Nothing comes close to environmentalism in generating left-wing enthusiasm. It is the religion of our time. For the left, the earth has supplanted patriotism. This was largely inevitable in Europe, given its contempt for nationalism since the end of World War I and even more so since World War II. But it is now true for the elites (almost all of whose members are on the left) in America as well.

This was most graphically displayed by the infamous Time magazine cover of April 21, 2008 that altered the most iconic photograph in American history -- Joe Rosenthal's picture of the marines planting the flag on Iwo Jima. Instead of the American flag, the Time cover depicted the marines planting a tree. The caption on the cover read: "How to Win the War on Global Warming." In other words, just as German and Japanese fascism was the enemy in World War II, global warming is the enemy today. And instead of allegiance to the nation's flag, now our allegiance must be to nature.

This is the antithesis of the Judeo-Christian view of the world that has dominated Western civilization for all of the West's history. The Judeo-Christian worldview is that man is at the center of the universe; nature was therefore created for man. Nature has no intrinsic worth other than man's appreciation and (moral) use of it.

Worship of nature was the pagan worldview, a worship that the Hebrew Bible was meant to destroy. The messages of the Creation story in Genesis were that:

1) God created nature. God is not in nature, and nature is not God. Nature is nothing more than His handiwork. Therefore it is He, not nature, that is to be worshipped. The pagan world held nature in esteem; its gods were gods of nature (not above nature).

2) Nature cannot be worshipped because nature is amoral, whereas God is moral.

3) All of creation had one purpose: the final creation, the human being.

With the demise of the biblical religions that have provided the American people with their core values since their country's inception, we are reverting to the pagan worldview. Trees and animals are venerated, while man is simply one more animal in the ecosystem -- and largely a hindrance, not an asset.

On February 20, a pit bull attacked a 4-year-old boy, Kevin Vicente, leaving the boy with a broken eye socket and a broken jaw. Kevin will have to undergo months, perhaps years, of additional reconstructive surgeries. A Facebook page was set up to raise funds. But it wasn't set up for Kevin. It was set up for the dog. The "Save Mickey" page garnered over 70,000 "likes," and raised more than enough money to provide legal help to prevent the dog from being euthanized. There were even candlelight vigils and a YouTube video plea for the dog.

The non-profit legal group defending Mickey is the Lexus Project. According to CBS News, "the same group fought earlier this year for the life of a dog that fatally mauled a toddler in Nevada."

This is the trend. Nature over man.

This is why environmentalists oppose the Keystone pipeline. Nature over man. The pipeline will provide work for thousands of people and it will enable Canada and the United States to increasingly break away from dependence on other countries for their energy needs. But to the true believers who make up much of the environmentalist movement, none of that matters. Just as they didn't care about the millions of Africans who died of malaria as a result of those environmentalists' efforts to ban DDT.

One of the fathers of the green movement is James Lovelock, the scientist who originated the Gaia hypothesis of the earth as a single living organism. This past Sunday, the British newspaper, the Guardian, reported that, "Talking about the environmental movement, Lovelock says: 'It's become a religion, and religions don't worry too much about facts.'"

He also told the interviewer "that he had been too certain about the rate of global warming in his past book ... that fracking and nuclear power should power the UK, not renewable sources such as wind farms."

As G.K. Chesterton prophesied over a hundred years ago: "When people stop believing in God, they don't believe in nothing -- they believe in anything."

Now it's the environment.

 SOURCE

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How Foreign is Our Policy?

Thomas Sowell

Many people are lamenting the bad consequences of Barack Obama's foreign policy, and some are questioning his competence.

There is much to lament, and much to fear. Multiple setbacks to American interests have been brought on by Obama's policies in Libya, Egypt, Syria, Crimea and -- above all -- in what seems almost certain to become a nuclear Iran in the very near future.

The president's public warning to Syria of dire consequences if the Assad regime there crossed a "red line" he had drawn seemed to epitomize an amateurish bluff that was exposed as a bluff when Syria crossed that red line without suffering any consequences. Drawing red lines in disappearing ink makes an international mockery of not only this president's credibility, but also the credibility of future American presidents' commitments.

When some future President of the United States issues a solemn warning internationally, and means it, there may be less likelihood that the warning will be taken seriously. That invites the kind of miscalculation that has led to wars.

Many who are disappointed with what seem to be multiple fiascoes in President Obama's foreign policy question his competence and blame his inexperience.Such critics may be right, but it is by no means certain that they are.

Like those who are disappointed with Barack Obama's domestic policies, critics of his foreign policy may be ignoring the fact that you cannot know whether someone is failing or succeeding without knowing what he is trying to do.

Whether ObamaCare, for example, is a success or a failure, depends on whether you think the president's goal is to improve the medical treatment of Americans or to leave as his permanent legacy a system of income redistribution, through ObamaCare, and tight government control of the medical profession.

Much, if not most, of the disappointment with Barack Obama comes from expectations based on his words, rather than on an examination of what he has done over his lifetime before reaching the White House.

His words were glowing. He is a master of rhetoric, image and postures. He was so convincing that many failed to connect the dots of his past life that pointed in the opposite direction from his words. "Community organizers," for example, are not uniters but dividers -- and former community organizer Obama has polarized this country, despite his rhetoric about uniting us.

Many were so mesmerized by both the man himself and the euphoria surrounding the idea of "the first black president" that they failed to notice that there were any dots, much less any need to connect them.

One dot alone -- the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, whose church the Obamas attended for 20 years -- would have been enough to sink any other presidential bid by anyone who was not in line to become "the first black president."

The painful irony is that Jeremiah Wright was just one in a series of Obama's mentors hostile to America, resentful of successful Americans, and convinced that America had too much power internationally, and needed to be brought down a peg.

Anti-Americanism was the rule, not the exception, among Obama's mentors over the years, beginning in his childhood. When the young Obama and his mother lived in Indonesia, her Indonesian husband wanted her to accompany him to social gatherings with American businessmen -- and was puzzled when she refused.

He reminded her that these were her own people. According to Barack Obama's own eyewitness account, her voice rose "almost to a shout" when she replied:

"They are not my people."

Most of Barack Obama's foreign policy decisions since becoming president are consistent with this mindset. He has acted repeatedly as a citizen of the world, even though he was elected to be President of the United States.

Virtually every major move of the Obama administration has reduced the power, security and influence of America and its allies. Cutbacks in military spending, while our adversaries have increased their military buildups, ensure that these changes to our detriment will continue, even after Barack Obama has left the White House.

Is that failure or success?

 SOURCE

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Democrats: The REAL Party of the Rich

Democrats, led by the President, have resorted again and again to the rhetoric of class warfare -- you know, "the party of the rich" and all that.

That's why it's ironic that Democratic Party is the actual party of the rich. Democrats represent the richest district in the country -- and the richest Americans.

In shorthand, they represent the very rich and the very poor . . . those needing or wanting the benefits procured by a big, active, high-taxing government, and those who can pay those high taxes without even noticing (or find creative ways to prevent them from biting). They are also rich, powerful and connected enough to influence government policy in their favor, and often stand to benefit from government regulation that serves to stifle competition.

The GOP has become the party of the strivers, of the middle class, of small business, and of all those who have aspirations to prosperity. And sadly, they are the only ones who are serious about protecting what Paul Ryan has described as "the right to rise" -- what used to be universally known and embraced as "the American Dream."

 SOURCE

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New Virginia law protects farmers from meddling local officials

In a hard-fought and stunning victory for family farmers and property rights throughout the Commonwealth, Gov. Terry McAuliffe on March 5 signed into law legislation solidifying Virginia’s status as a right-to-farm state by limiting local officials’ ability to interfere with normal agricultural operations.

The governor’s signature marks the latest chapter in a swirling controversy that attracted nationwide attention in 2012 when the Fauquier County Board of Supervisors forced family farmer Martha Boneta to cease selling produce from her own 64-acre farm. No longer allowed to sell the vegetables she had harvested, Boneta donated the food to local charities lest it go to waste.

Fauquier County officials threatened Boneta with $5,000 per-day fines for hosting a birthday party for eight 10-year-old girls without a permit, and advertising pumpkin carvings. Seeing the county’s action against Boneta as a brazen effort to drive her off her land, Virginians from all walks of life rallied to her defense.  Supporters gathered in Warrenton, the county seat, for a peaceful “pitchfork protest” to vent their anger over what an out-of-control local government had done to a law-abiding citizen.

In the 2013 session of the General Assembly, Rep. Scott Lingamfelter, R-Prince William, spearheaded an effort to undo the injustice inflicted on Boneta, and to protect other small farmers from similar abuse, by strengthening Virginia’s Right to Farm Act.  What became known as the “Boneta Bill” passed the House by an overwhelming margin but was killed in a Senate committee.  Undeterred, Boneta and her supporters came back to the General Assembly in 2014 and won wide bipartisan approval for legislation protecting the rights of family farmers.

The bill signed by Gov. McAuliffe grew out of legislation developed by Rep. Bobby Orrick, R-Thornburg, and Rep. Richard Stuart, R-Montross, and supported by, among others, Sen. Chap Petersen, D-Fairfax.  Backed by the Virginia Farm Bureau, the new law protects customary activities at agricultural operations from local bans in the absence of substantial impacts on public welfare.  It also prohibits localities from requiring a special-use permit for a host of farm-related activities that are specified in the bill.  The law takes effect on July 1.

“I want to thank Gov. McAuliffe, the members of the General Assembly, and all those who have rallied to the defense of family farmers,” Boneta said.  “After all my family and I have been through, it is gratifying to know that an injustice can be undone, and the rights of farmers as entrepreneurs can be upheld thanks to the work of so many dedicated people.”

Successful Grassroots Effort

Passage of the Boneta Bill was all the more remarkable, because it was entirely a grassroots effort.  Supporters of the legislation, none of whom received any compensation for the time and effort they devoted to the cause, flooded the state capitol in Richmond with emails, phone calls, and personal visits with lawmakers to ensure enactment of the legislation.

By contrast, opponents of the bill, including well-funded environmental organizations and power-hungry county governments – both determined to preserve strict land-use controls – reportedly employed lobbyists to kill the bill.  In the end, highly motivated citizens triumphed over highly paid lobbyists.

 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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French voters swing Right

French voters dealt a severe blow to the Socialist government in Sunday's municipal elections, but the party saved face by retaining the crown jewel, Paris, which got its first female mayor.

The anti-immigration far right, which claims that France's large Muslim population is "Islamicizing" the nation, made solid advances, fulfilling National Front promises to begin building a grassroots base.

Socialist leaders conceded defeat in the final round of the voting seen as a referendum on unpopular President Francois Hollande, who was expected to reshuffle the Cabinet in an effort to give the government a boost. Hollande has earned record-low poll ratings for his failure to cure France's flagging economy or cut into the jobless rate, which hovers around 10 percent.

Interior Minister Manuel Valls announced deep losses for his Socialist Party, saying it lost to the mainstream right some 50 cities of more than 30,000 it had held previously, and about 155 towns and cities of all sizes. Toulouse, France's fourth-largest city, moved to the right.

The far right may win up to 15 towns in the voting, Valls said before results were complete. Party leader Marine Le Pen said the performance amounted to "an incontestably great success" that will give her National Front more than 1,200 local councilors — surpassing her goal.

"This vote is a defeat for the government and the (Socialist) majority," said Prime Minister Jean-Marc Ayrault. "This message is clear ... The president will draw conclusions, and he will do so in the interest of France," he added, in a clear reference to a Cabinet reshuffle. It was unclear when a new government might be announced, or whether Ayrault would keep his job.

Paris also gets a new look, as Anne Hidalgo defeated conservative right candidate Nathalie Kosciusko-Morizet. Hidalgo, 54, spent 13 years as deputy to outgoing Mayor Bertrand Delanoe. She was able to profit from popular programs he initiated such as the Velib bike-sharing and Autolib auto-sharing services, and the creation of a beachfront each summer on the banks of the Seine.

"I am the first woman mayor of Paris. I am aware of the challenge," Hidalgo said in a victory speech.

The Socialists also managed to save Lyon, France's third-largest city, from the conservative right UMP party of former President Nicolas Sarkozy, as well as large cities like Strasbourg and Montpellier. Significantly, the Socialists took the southern town of Avignon from the UMP and prevented a far-right victory in the town known worldwide for its summer theater festival.

Le Pen's National Front was using the two-round elections to sink local roots around France in view of national voting, including the 2017 presidential vote and May's European parliamentary elections. The party won the blighted northern town of Henin-Beaumont in last week's first round.

The far right took the Cote d'Azur town of Frejus and notably won the 7th district of Marseille, France's second-largest city with a large percentage of residents of immigrant origin, many from Muslim North Africa. The district's population is about 150,000 — the party's biggest win.

However, Marseille stayed in the hands of conservative right Mayor Jean-Claude Gaudin.

Le Pen said her party has ended "bipolarization" of French politics in which the traditional right and left divvy up votes.

"A third political force has been born," she said, adding that the party, which wants France to withdraw from the European Union, would begin campaigning immediately for elections for the European Parliament, where she is a deputy.

SOURCE

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The Problem Is Liberalism, Not Racism

Star Parker

When Rep. Barbara Lee, D-Calif, went off on Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Wis, for his remarks that “We have got a tailspin of culture, in our inner cities in particular, of men not working and just generations of men not even thinking about working or learning the value and the culture of work,” the wrong part what she had to say got all the attention.

The big buzz that Congressional Black Caucus member Lee generated was her accusation that Ryan’s remarks were a “thinly veiled racial attack.”

But the part of her remarks I found most interesting was “…Mr. Ryan should step up and produce some legitimate proposals on how to tackle poverty and racial discrimination in America.”

Paul Ryan has been one of the most creative and courageous policy thinkers in Washington in recent years.

Ryan sat down with me for an interview shortly before he ran for Vice President in 2012 (the interview is on my organization’s website www.urbancure.org). His thoughtfulness and compassion came through loud and clear and he zeroed in on the core of a problem I have been talking and writing about for more than 20 years – government programs that not only do not solve problems but make problems worse.

I stepped into this whole business of public policy from my own experience with welfare. I saw that the welfare program, which operated in this country from the 1960’s until it was reformed in 1996, that required women to not work, not save, and not get married in order to qualify for their welfare checks was a most efficient mechanism to destroy family and perpetuate poverty.

So it should come as no surprise that single parent black households tripled as a percentage of all black households from the 1960’s to today.

Where Barbara Lee is right is that this is not about race. What it is about is liberalism.

The racial aspect comes into play in that black political leaders, like Congresswoman Lee, overwhelmingly embrace liberalism, progressivism, welfare statism – whatever you want to call it – that has failed and caused untold damage in the very communities they claim to want to help. And they refuse to ever learn. Their answer to every problem, despite prior experience, is more government, more taxpayer’s dollars.

When real reformers like Paul Ryan come along, they get branded racist.

In a column I wrote a couple years ago, I pointed out that the 41 member Congressional Black Caucus were uniformly Democrats, had a 100% reelection rates, and the average poverty rate in these Congressional Black Caucus districts was 20.3% and the average child poverty rate 28.8% - both well above national averages.

Economist Walter Williams has pointed out that, in America’s top 10 poorest cities with populations more than 250,000, “…for decades, all of them have been run by Democratic and presumably liberal administrations. Some of them – such as Detroit (now the largest municipal bankruptcy in the nation’s history), Buffalo, Newark, and Philadelphia, haven’t elected a Republican mayor for more than half a century. What’s more is that, in some cases for decades, the mayors of six of these high-poverty cities have been black Americans.”

Again, the point is not that the mayors of these cities are black. It is that they are liberals. And black politicians, like Congresswoman Barbara Lee, overwhelmingly are liberals, and they remain liberals, despite a long and consistent track record of failure.

When welfare was reformed, liberals like Barbara Lee fought it.

It is pure self-absorption for any interest group to think it is all about them. America is in real trouble today and we’re all in this together.

Ms. Lee talks about “code words.” Her code word is “racist”, which means someone, like Paul Ryan, who wants to make Americans of all backgrounds better off by giving them more freedom, more choice, more responsibility, and less government.

SOURCE

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Northwestern University football players to receive maternity coverage under Obamacare
 
Some weekends, the stories just seem to write themselves. You probably heard by now that the National Labor Relations Board (NRLB), in their infinite wisdom, put the stamp of approval on college football players being treated as full time employees with the right to unionize. Well, I suppose everything comes with a few unintended consequences, as reported by Rare.

Northwestern University became the first school in the nation to deem its football players full-time employees, thus making them eligible for union representation and health insurance benefits including maternity coverage.

On Wednesday, the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) Region 13 director Peter Sung Ohr approved the players as employees of the school based on four prerequisite clauses. The team will now have the opportunity to vote on whether they want to unionize and join the College Athletes Players Association, according to Sports Blog Nation.

The kicker is that under Obamacare, the Evanston, Ill.-based team, comprised of more than 50 “employees,” is considered a “large employer” and Northwestern must provide pregnancy-related health care for the all-male team.

This is just fabulous. Of course, we probably should have anticipated that things like this would begin cropping up the moment we decided to take college students and transfer their status to that of employee because the college might be profiting from their activities. Sally Jenkins approaches the question from the 10,000 foot level.

Colter and his peers aren’t laborers due compensation; they are highly privileged scholarship winners who get a lot of valuable stuff for free. This includes first-rate training in the habits of high achievement, cool gear, unlimited academic tutoring for gratis and world-class medical care that no one else has access to. All of which was put into perspective by Michigan State basketball Coach Tim Izzo when he was asked about the ruling at the NCAA tournament East Region semifinals in New York.

“I think sometimes we take rights to a whole new level,” Izzo said. “ . . . I think there’s a process in rights. And you earn that. We always try to speed the process up. I said to my guys, ‘There’s a reason you have to be 35 to be president.’ That’s the way I look at it.”

Other questions remain to be answered. If the field hockey team has less than fifty players, does that make them a small business? If so, they may already qualify for some sort of exemption or mandate delay from Barack Obama. (Or, if not, one should be coming along shortly.) But the field hockey team doesn’t generate any money, so maybe that makes them a non-profit corporation. In that case, the IRS should be checking into their status shortly and denying them a needed classification.

And what of the cheerleaders? They’re probably as much a part of the “team” as anyone else out there, and they are almost entirely women. Sure, they might be able to use the Obamacare maternity services a bit more, but now we have to discuss the unpleasant fact that cheerleaders are making WAY less than 77 cents on the dollar compared to the male players when they both reach the NFL.

SOURCE

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Malfunctioning Asylum System Fosters Fraud

Executive action, agency inaction, and judicial activism at fault

The erosion of checks and balances in the U.S. asylum system, designed to prevent fraud, has led to the nearly tripling of claims for asylum. A Center for Immigration Studies report examines the increased applications as well as the rubberstamping of these applications. The number of applicants passing the preliminary “credible fear” test nearly tripled from 2012 to 2013, and has increased nearly 600 percent since 2007. Once the applicant receives asylum, they receive access to all major welfare programs.

Fraud accounts for much of the increase. According to a DHS internal report, 70 percent of asylum applications examined were fraudulent or had strong indicators of fraud. With such a high rate of fraud, it is alarming that DHS statistics show a positive credible fear finding in 92% of all cases decided on the merits. The CIS report finds that the Senate comprehensive immigration bill would do much to exacerbate the existing problem. Among the list of changes would be the allowing of previous asylum fraudsters to re-apply and allowing asylum to be granted instantly upon application, before any vetting occurs.

View the entire report here

Dan Cadman, author of the report and fellow at the Center, said, “Many illegal immigrants have learned how to game the system by applying for asylum as a means of prolonging their time in the United States. If a claimant can pass the preliminary credible fear test they can buy themselves months, often years, living and working legally in the United States. A system designed to stem fraud and abuse has been undone by executive action, agency inaction, and judicial activism.”

Cadman provides nine recommendations of how Congress and the Department of Homeland Security can curb abuses, and set the asylum program on track to function as it was intended. He endorses, for example, a program of routine audits of both credible fear findings and formal asylum grants, which would include investigations of cases found to involve fraud or the withholding of material information.

Press release from CIS

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

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For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC,  AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, 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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