Economic Delusions, Political Demagoguery, and Ideological Deceptions

By economist Richard Ebeling

We live in a time, as, indeed, mankind has lived already for a long time, in which economic delusions, political demagoguery, and ideological deceptions abound due to the power lusting of those who wish to gain control of government to serve their own ends at others’ expense.

Suppose someone were to ask you the easiest and quickest way to drive by car from New York City to San Francisco, California. Since the shortest distance between two points is a straight line, the most reasonable answer would be for this person to take Interstate Highway 80, which runs East-West between these two cities.

Now suppose that this person, instead, starts driving south from New York City on Interstate Highway 95, which would get him, eventually, to Miami, Florida. You tell him that he is on the wrong route; not only will it take him much longer to get to California if he stays on Interstate 95, but he may end up never getting to San Francisco at all.

Rather than thanking you for correcting him and figuring out the best and most timesaving way to get back onto Interstate 80, he accuses you of not wanting him to get to California. He wants to know what you have against him and the people of California. Why are you sabotaging his chance to finally find “happiness” in California?

You assure him that you have nothing against either him or California. Indeed, you explain, you’ve even been to California and it’s a very nice place to visit and maybe even to live. You are just pointing out that he is following the wrong route to get to his desired destination, and in that easiest and quickest way as he had originally asked.

He responds by asserting that you clearly have something against him and have some hidden agenda to prevent people from getting to California.

Accusations Thrown at the Free Market Advocate

A person saying such things would, to most of us, seem strange or even bizarre. It is, however, the way many critics of the free market respond when an economist or some other proponent of economic liberty explains that government intervention in the market, regulation of business enterprises or redistribution of income and wealth are not the best and most efficient policies to provide an economic and social climate most conducive to opportunity, prosperity, and freedom for as many people in society as is possible.

Free market critics frequently assert that the free market advocate “hates the poor,” “doesn’t care for humanity,” is “insensitive to human suffering,” and only wants to help “the rich.” And how can we know this? Because he dissents from the governmental interventionist, regulatory, and redistributive policies proposed to cure the ills of society.

In other words, they impugn the motives and benevolence of the advocate of individual liberty and free markets because of his disagreement with the proposed means to achieve the stated end – improvement in the personal and material conditions of mankind.

Why has this been so frequently the case over the years and decades? Let me suggest some of the possible reasons. To begin with, there are those who may very well confuse a disagreement over means as meaning a disagreement over the desired ends.

What is Seen and Not Seen in Government Policies

This harks back to the argument made long ago by the French classical liberal economist of the 19th century, Frederic Bastiat, when he said that people often only see what is seen and not what is unseen. If the government hires workmen to build a bridge, or repair a road, or to reroof a schoolhouse the jobs created are “seen.” Here are people working on these government projects, earning an income, and able to buy things from others that improves their family’s circumstances.

What is not seen are the jobs that would have come into existence, the income that would have been earned and the improvements in some other peoples’ lives if, instead, the taxes collected to pay for the bridge to be built or the schoolhouse to be reroofed had remained in the hands of the taxpayers.

With more money left in their pockets those taxpayers would have demanded a new pair of shoes for their son or daughter, or used that money to do some improvement around their own home, or, maybe, used it to invest in an existing or new business enterprise. Any or all of these, would also have put people to work.

But in this latter case it would have been work reflecting the private consumer desires and demands of those who had earned that money in earlier productive activities in the competitive marketplace.

Because some people fail to think beyond what is right in front of them, they conclude that the only person who would be against helping people get a job and earning a living are those who callously don’t care about the misfortune of others looking for employment. Why else would someone oppose a humane, government “stimulus” program to put people to work?

They don’t see that either the income earners themselves can use the dollars for consumption or investment activities, or the government can spend them after taxing or borrowing them away from private hands. So either private citizens create a demand for labor, or the government does, but there need be no net gain in jobs opportunities and that is what focusing only on what is easily seen prevents many people from understanding.

Plunder-Lusting, Not Just Economic Ignorance

If it was only a matter of economic ignorance and conceptual misunderstanding, then one could hope that better ways of sharing and communicating what are sometimes difficult and counter-intuitive ideas could win over more people to an appreciation as to why such government policies as “make-work” projects and minimum wage laws do not help many of those the proponents say they wish to assist, and in fact end up making the circumstances of some even worse.

However, there are those who may or may not understand the reality of how the market works and that such interventionist policies are false routes to where the policy advocate says he wants to go. They don’t really care.

Their concern is with using the “what is seen” arguments as steppingstones to power, influence, and wealth. They are the policy demagogues, the political opportunists, who merely wish to play upon the fears, misunderstandings, resentments and envies of others in society to acquire government position and authority.

They will lie, distort, manipulate, and confuse as their stock and trade to win elections, gain positions in government, or get on the government gravy train that follows from economic policies resulting in more and more taxed or borrowed dollars being offered at the trough of government spending.

The Plunder-Lusters Offer False Policy Elixirs

They are like the huckster in the old west who stood on the back of the wagon promising the naïve and gullible listeners in the crowd that the “magic elixir” that he was holding in his hand would cure their rheumatism, make hair grow again on their bald head, guarantee they would be more attractive to the opposite sex, and slow down the aging process. “And, yes, my friends,” the huckster assures the crowd, “this can all be yours for a only a mere $2 a bottle. And, my friends, if you buy more than one bottle, I will also sell you for the low price of ‘four bits’ this diving rod that is guaranteed to find water under the ground where it has never been found before.”

The only difference between the old west huckster and the modern-day democratically elected politician is that the huckster would clear out of the town as soon has it had gotten people’s money for those phony bottles of colored and scented water before they figured out the truth of how they had been taken in by “the con.”

The democratic demagogues not only don’t leave town, they stick around hoping and planning to keep fooling the naïve and gullible voter so they can be elected again and again, rationalize bigger budgets in the government departments in which they are employed, or keep the government subsidies, contracts and regulatory benefits continuing and growing over time for their special interest purposes at taxpayers’ and consumer’s expense.

These democratic demagogues have their task made that much easier precisely because the untrained eye can be fooled into thinking and believing that there is only “what is seen” in terms of the apparently beneficial and immediate effects of the snake-oil economic policy elixirs promised and imposed by government.

The free market opponents of these policies can be tarred and feathered as either themselves ignorant or the paid apologists for “greedy businessmen,” the “one-percent,” or the “selfish and profit-grabbing,” who care nothing for “the people.”

Far Worse are the Collectivist Ideologues

But worse are the ideological demagogues. They are the ones who hate freedom, despise the free choices of the ordinary citizen, who have contempt for the individual, and believe all should be made to submit to a greater design and plan for humanity which they see, consider good, and know they are called to impose on all in society for the well-being of mankind whose real and true interest they just know they know.

They are the philosophical and political collectivists. They want to rule and control. They want all to submit to their power and will. They are the face of evil. They are “Big Brother,” who is not only to be obeyed but also worshipped, as the secular divinities, the elect and the elite, to whom all in society are to submit and praise as their saviors and paternalistic good guardians.

Theirs is the personality of the psychopath and the sadist, who really cares about nothing other than their own desire for power and enjoy it, like it, that all others must bow and grovel before them.

And just like many psychopaths and sadists they are able to successfully hide their perverse power- and pain-giving lusting behind a mask of crusading for “social justice” or desire to “serve mankind,” and wish to “give back to society,” by accepting the “sacrifice” of holding political office or governmental position for the betterment of their fellow men.

To return to the original analogy about the traveler claiming he wanted to go to California but set out on a route going to Florida, neither the democratic demagogues nor the philosophical and political collectivists want to reach the destination to which they publicly give lip service – a “free, just, and prosperous society.” They are merely using the words as the rhetorical means to their actual power-lusting and power-abusing ends.

This is what makes the task of the friends of freedom so crucially important. Our fellow citizens must understand that what they are being promised cannot be achieved with the means offered by those pursuing their own ends in government.

Bastiat’s insight and lesson about “what is seen, and what is not seen” must be explained, persuasively clarified and applied to all of the current interventionist, regulatory, and redistribution policies in place and being advanced. More of our fellow citizens must be made to see them for the snake oil and phony elixir that they all are.

Equally if not more importantly, the friend of freedom must challenge others in society to ask why they should have to sacrifice their life, their liberty, and their pursuit of happiness for illusionary and vacuous assertions about a collectivist “common good,” or “general welfare,” or “national interest.”

By what right does the collectivist assert that the individual cannot peacefully and productively live for himself in his own way guided by his own reason, values and beliefs? By what right does that collectivist claim to know when and how that individual should be required – even compelled – to sacrifice his own dreams, hopes and valued purposes for those of the group, tribe, or “society” that the collectivist says he speaks for and represents?

At the end of the day, the collectivist’s claims lead to nothing but political nooses around the necks of the citizenry with the end of the ropes in the hands of the political charlatans and psychopathic power lusters who want to break the spirit of the free individual and make him the implicit slave to self-selected “demigods” wishing to rule over mankind.

 SOURCE

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The machine that is waiting to take over when politicians raise the minimum wage

A lot of minimum wage workers work in hamburger joints

A company called Momentum Machines has built a robot that could radically alter the fast food industry and have some line cooks looking for new jobs.

The company’s robot can “slice toppings like tomatoes and pickles immediately before it places the slice onto your burger, giving you the freshest burger possible.” The robot is “more consistent, more sanitary, and can produce ~360 hamburgers per hour.” That’s one burger burger every ten seconds.

The next generation of the device will offer “custom meat grinds for every single customer. Want a patty with 1/3 pork and 2/3 bison ground to order? No problem.”

Momentum Machines co-founder Alexandros Vardakostas told Xconomy “our device isn’t meant to make employees more efficient. It’s meant to completely obviate them.” Indeed, marketing copy on the company’s site reads that their automaton “does everything employees can do, except better.”

This directly raises a question that a lot of smart people have contemplated: Will robots steal our jobs? Opinion is divided, of course. Here’s what Momentum Machines has to say on the topic:

The issue of machines and job displacement has been around for centuries and economists generally accept that technology like ours actually causes an increase in employment. The three factors that contribute to this are 1. the company that makes the robots must hire new employees, 2. the restaurant that uses our robots can expand their frontiers of production which requires hiring more people, and 3. the general public saves money on the reduced cost of our burgers. This saved money can then be spent on the rest of the economy.

If we are to undertake the lofty ambition of changing the nature of work by way of robots, the fast food industry seems like a good place to start, considering its inherently repetitive tasks and minimal skill requirements. Any roboticist worth his or her salt jumps at tasks described as repetitive and easy — these are perfect undertakings for a robot.

Here’s a schematic of what the burger-bot looks like and how it works. It occupies 24 square feet, much smaller than most assembly line fast food operations. It boasts “gourmet cooking methods never before used in a fast food restaurant” and will even deposit your completed burger into a bag. It’s a veritable Gutenberg printing press for hamburgers.

SOURCE

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For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, 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. I also put up occasional updates on my Personal blog

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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Is giving more significant than we think?

“Civilization begins as human beings 'reach for the stars'. The development of civilization did not grow out of survival needs; was not based upon practical motives (Marshall Sahlins called hunters and gatherers the 'original affluent society'). Civilization begins when human beings project their existence into structures that contain the possibility of immortality. Herein lies the essence of the motive to sacrifice.”

In the world of fantasy, human beings initiate wars because they seek to “gain” something. In reality (scroll down and look at the table below), warfare generates extraordinary, monumental loss. What is the meaning of this human tendency to create events that result in monumental loss?

Economists analyze human activity typically in terms of the desire for gain, an assumption that underlies the theory of “rational choice.” Norman O. Brown, on the other hand, suggests that the desire to possess is superimposed over a deep psychology of giving. The archaic institution of the gift, Brown says, leads to an understanding of the “sacred superfluous.”

Prestige and power are conferred by the ability to give. Gifts are sacred and the gods exist to receive gifts (do ut des). The compulsion to produce an economic surplus is created in order to have something to give.

Archaic gift giving, according to Brown (the famous potlatch being only one example) refutes the notion that the psychological motive of economic life is utilitarian egoism. Archaic man gives because he wants to lose; the psychology is not egoist, but self-sacrificial. Hence there is an intrinsic connection between economic life and the sacred. The gods exist “to receive gifts,” that is to say, sacrifices. Gods exist in order to “structure the need for self-sacrifice.”

The ambition of civilized man, Brown says, is revealed in the pyramids. In their creation, we see how economic activity may have little to do with practical considerations or survival. In the case of the pyramids, monumental efforts were directed toward creation of the “sacred superfluous.”

Egyptians devoted a large proportion of their wealth and psychic energy toward creating these gigantic structures—that are essentially useless. Pyramids serve no practical purpose whatsoever. The creation of these useless structures lay at the dawn of civilization.

Civilization begins as human beings “reach for the stars.” The development of civilization did not grow out of survival needs; was not based upon practical motives (Marshall Sahlins called hunters and gatherers the “original affluent society”).

Civilization begins when human beings project their existence into structures that contain the possibility of immortality. Herein lies the essence of the motive to sacrifice.

The workmen who built the pyramids devoted a large proportion of their lives toward the creation of these gigantic structures that symbolized the immortality of the Pharaoh. They sacrificed their concrete existence in order to feed the Pharaoh’s fantasy. Death was overcome, Brown says, on condition that the “real actuality of life pass into these immortal and dead things.”

Civilization began with the creation of these “dead things;” monumental stone structures that had no purpose whatsoever. The pyramids represented an escape from concrete existence—denial of death. The pyramids were built based on the fantasy that the Pharaoh might live forever.

Pyramids are the place in which “history” begins. Kings create history as they carve out a space or domain into which fantasies of immortality may be projected. The sacred space of history provides the illusion that it is possible to escape everyday (mortal) existence.

Brown suggests that much of civilized activity takes the form of “sublimation:” energy deflected away from the “real, actuality of life” in devotion to symbols of immortality. He writes of the poet Horace, who viewed poetry as a career characterized by self-sacrifice.

Horace felt, however, that renunciation was worthwhile—if success would allow him to “strike the stars sublime.” At the end of his third book, he celebrates his success:

"I have wrought a monument more enduring than bronze, and loftier than the royal accumulation of the pyramids. Neither corrosive rain nor raging wind can destroy it, nor the innumerable sequence of years nor the flight of time. I shall not altogether die."

Horace’s motive for writing poetry was not unlike the motivation that generated the building of pyramids. Brown comments on the passage from Horace above: “I shall not altogether die—the hope of the man who has not lived, whose life has been spent conquering death, whose life has passed into those immortal pages.”



Source: An email from Richard Koenigsberg at The library of social science

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Obamacare's 1095-A Nightmare

By Michelle Malkin

Tax season is stressful enough. But if you are like countless miserable Americans trapped in the Obamacare 1095-A abyss, it's hell on stilts on a Segway teetering over the South Rim of the Grand Canyon.

The screw-ups, incompetence and bureaucratic blame avoidance over the health insurance exchange tax forms make the healthcare.gov website fiasco look like a flawless product launch.

How do I know? My family inexplicably got ensnared in the 1095-A paperwork pit. It's a government roach motel: Taxpayers check in, but they can never check out.

In 2013, our private high-deductible PPO from Anthem Blue Cross got canceled because of "changes from health care reform (also called the Affordable Care Act or ACA)." Millions of others like us in the individual market for health insurance -- including self-employed people, small-business owners, writers, artists and home-based entrepreneurs -- suffered the same fate.

My husband reluctantly contacted Colorado's state health insurance exchange, "Connect for Health Colorado," just to see what our options were. Months later, we settled on purchasing a new non-Obamacare plan directly from a different private insurer, Rocky Mountain Health.

The provider network is much narrower than the Anthem plan we had before the feds intervened. Our two kids' dental care is no longer covered, and we've had our insurance turned down at an urgent care clinic -- something that had never happened before.

Better off? Bullcrap. But wait, it gets worse.

Somewhere along the way, the worker bees at Connect for Health Colorado dragooned us into an Obamacare exchange plan offered by Rocky Mountain Health without our knowledge or consent. (How else has the White House inflated Obamacare enrollment figures? Things that make you go "hmm.")

Last month, we received an IRS 1095-A form, which, much to our shock and chagrin, indicated that we had paid Obamacare premiums every month during 2014.

It took hours of time on the phone and Internet to receive an explanation from Connect for Health Colorado on how exactly this happened. Here was the government's response, word for incomprehensible word:

"We apologize for the delay in responding to your email. After checking your account we are showing you might have had coverage from October 2014 to June 2014. Please call the number below to speak with a Customer Service Representative if this information is incorrect."

"Might" have had coverage? From "October 2014 to June 2014"?

The saga continues. We were finally able to un-enroll after being auto-enrolled in the Obamacare plan. Then, after being bounced around by the state government health exchange to various voicemail dead ends and back, with hours of migraine-inducing, on-hold music in between, we were told there's absolutely nothing wrong with the 1095-A form -- which shows payment of premiums we didn't pay to an Obamacare plan we never enrolled in and didn't want in the first place!

This is just one little horror story. In Minnesota, thousands are still waiting for 1095-A forms that were supposed to arrive on Jan. 31. In California, at least 800,000 taxpayers received screwed-up 1095-As. As a result, some 50,000 people filed the wrong form. Another 750,000 are being told they'll get corrected forms this month. Hah. Good luck with that.

The costs in time, money and anxiety to hardworking families dealing with this paperwork perdition are enormous. Unknown numbers of people are still waiting for their forms as the April 15 tax-filing deadline looms. More face the added expense and aggravation of filing amended returns through no fault of their own.

Where's the rest of the media -- most of whom have been insulated from these problems because they get their health insurance through their employers?

At least one other journalist smacked head first into reality. Laura Krantz, a former NPR staffer, is now a Scripps Fellow in environmental journalism at the University of Colorado, Boulder. Earlier this month, she found out that Connect for Health Colorado had mysteriously canceled her health and dental insurance. After four days and eight hours in Obamacare Phone Hell (OPH), she learned she had lost her insurance coverage and her tax credit -- and had to redo all of her paperwork.

Poor Krantz still believes the ultimate solution is "single payer." But another liberal who encountered 1095-A hell has seen the light. San Francisco resident and former Obama supporter Melissa Klein exposed her ordeal with Covered California last week. The state exchange botched her 1095-A and then insisted she had never enrolled despite invoices she showed them documenting her premium payments.

After hours in OPH, her case remains unresolved, and she can't file her taxes. How is it, she wondered, that "Amazon can ship something to NYC in an hour," but the White House and Covered California "can't create a health care system that functions"?

Klein concluded, better late than never: "I no longer believe that the government should mandate health care. ... A great idea is just an idea if you can't execute. And the government has proved time and time again, it can't execute.

Feelin' your pain, sister. Is D.C. listening?

SOURCE

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Right-to-Work comes to lucky Wisconsin

Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker on Monday signed right-to-work legislation, making “America’s Dairyland” the 25th state with laws preventing mandatory union membership and payment of dues. It’s both good for Wisconsin’s economy and is a feather in Walker’s presidential cap.

Through a section of the 1947 Taft-Hartley Act, states were permitted to enact legislation that allowed contracts to be signed between unions and businesses requiring workers at the particular company to pay labor fees, and legally binding those companies to fire workers who refused to join the union. Section 14B of this Act specifically noted that a right-to-work law would prevent such extortion.

Union members make up about 8% of Wisconsin’s current labor force. Just 30 years ago that number was 22%. Indeed, nationwide, labor unions are losing the muscle that once made them mighty – because their numbers have dwindled for the last three decades.

Walker’s tenure as Wisconsin governor has been marked by freeing the entire labor market from the chokehold of union membership. Upon his initial election in 2010, Walker went to work with the State Assembly to dismantle public-sector unions. The Wisconsin Act 10 eliminated collective bargaining for state workers, including teachers, addressed extravagant benefits and pension promises, and protected the state from a $3.6 billion budget deficit. That battle sent Walker to national prominence.

The 2011 Republican-led reform successfully implemented by Walker hit the same funding mechanism in public-sector unions as will now impact private-sector unions: forced dues payment.

Currently, detractors of right-to-work laws argue wage suppression will result without mandatory labor union representation. But that’s just not backed up by the facts.

For example, in 2012, Michigan became a right-to-work state under the leadership of Republican Governor Rick Snyder, also elected in 2010, and the Michigan Legislature. By 2013, its per-capita personal income rose to $39,215 from $38,291 in 2012. And by 2014, more than 8,000 teachers had made the decision not to pay union dues, while total union membership dropped almost two percentage points in the first full year of the law’s implementation.

It’s certainly interesting that as soon as people have the right to work without union interference union participation drops and incomes rise. It implies that, unless unions have some legal leverage enabling forced participation and extortion, they are undesirable and ineffective.

The reason is simple: Right-to-work laws give workers the opportunity to pursue employment without having to pay dues to unions, who frequently use that money to secure political power at the expense of worker protections. Right-to-work allows for greater access to jobs, while a government mandated minimum wage prices some prospective workers out of those jobs. Which one makes more sense if creating jobs is the objective?

SOURCE

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Walker and Obama Tussle Over Right-to-Work

After Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker signed right-to-work legislation Monday, Barack Obama bashed the Republican presidential hopeful. “Wisconsin is a state built by labor, with a proud pro-worker past,” Obama said. “So even as its governor claims victory over working Americans, I’d encourage him to try and score a victory for working Americans – by taking meaningful action to raise their wages and offer them the security of paid leave. That’s how you give hardworking middle-class families a fair shot in the new economy – not by stripping their rights in the workplace, but by offering them all the tools they need to get ahead.”

Walker quickly fired back. “On the heels of vetoing Keystone Pipeline legislation, which would have paved the way to create thousands of quality, middle-class jobs, the President should be looking to states, like Wisconsin, as an example for how to grow our economy,” Walker replied in a statement.

“Despite a stagnant national economy and a lack of leadership in Washington, since we took office, Wisconsin’s unemployment rate is down to 5.0 percent, and more than 100,000 jobs and 30,000 businesses have been created.”

Obama has spent more than six years undermining working Americans all while claiming to be in their corner – his magic “middle-class economics.” But higher taxes based on class warfare aren’t going to grow the economy. Encouraging work will.

SOURCE

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For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, 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. I also put up occasional updates on my Personal blog

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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Was Hitler rational?

I have taken various courses in history over the years but sitting and listening to someone lecturing on a given historical period is in my view at best merely an introduction to that period.  I like to do what all historians are supposed to do -- go back to the original documents and actually read them.  And by doing that I often come to conclusions which are well outside what is popularly believed.

For instance, I have remarked at times on this blog that both the American Declaration of Independence and the Magna Carta are quite different to how they are popularly conceived and that the generally unknown content is in fact very enlightening and gives us a different view of the times.

And the same goes for an understanding of Hitler.  It is quite clear to me that many historians of the period have not read Mein Kampf.  Yet that is where Hitler explains himself at great length.  Is how he himself saw the world of no interest when we want to explain what he did?   Reading Mein Kampf certainly kicks the legs out from under the usual tale about Hitler and the Vienna art school -- and that tale  still seems to be the most usual account of Hitler's motivations.

But my reading in the history of the Nazi period rather pales into insignificance compared with the massive reading that psychohistorian Richard Koenigsberg has undertaken.  I have put up some of his articles here.  And Koenigsberg  comes to some clear conclusions that are well supported in Nazi writings.  Like the earlier American Progressives of the late 19th and early 20th century, Hitler was much seized with the analogy between a nation and a human body.  He saw Germany as a living body that had been infected by a dangerous Jewish parasite that had to be removed for the sake of the nation's health.

Koenigsberg goes further, however.  He says that Hitler had no rational objectives as they would normally be conceived.  I think I need to quote him at some length here:

In spite of Hitler’s nearly psychotic anti-Semitism, historians often write about his decision to go to war as if it grew out of "rational" considerations. Questions are posed regarding Hitler’s strategies and tactics: Why did he attack the Soviet Union in the midst of Germany’s struggle to defeat Great Britain? Why were British forces allowed to escape at Dunkirk? Why did Hitler gratuitously declare war against the United States? Why did Hitler launch the Final Solution in the midst of war—causing massive diversion of human and material resources?

These kinds of questions grow out of the assumption that Hitler more-or-less knew what he was doing. He sought to achieve certain objectives, but made "mistakes" along the way that prevented him from reaching his goals. In my view, the assumption that Hitler understood why he wished to wage war—and knew what he expected to accomplish by doing so—is unfounded.

Hitler’s words and thoughts on warfare bear an eerie resemblance to the words and thoughts of Saddam Hussein. Like Hussein, Hitler rarely spoke of warfare in terms of winning or "victory." Rather, Hitler’s thinking about war revolved around the idea that individuals are obligated to sacrifice their lives for their nation.

Hitler asserted that any man who loves his people proves it solely by the "sacrifices which he is prepared to make for it." To be "national," Hitler said, was to be willing to act with a "boundless and all-embracing love for the people" and if necessary "to die for it." Giving one’s life for one’s country, Hitler believed, constituted the "crown of sacrifice."

Hitler declared war on September 1, 1939. Speaking before the Reichstag as German planes and troops crossed the Polish borders in a devastating Blitzkrieg, he said:

As a National Socialist and a German soldier, I enter upon this fight with a stout heart! My whole life has been but one continuous struggle for my people, and that whole struggle has been inspired by one single conviction: Faith in my people! I ask of every German what I myself am prepared to do at any moment: to be ready to lay down his life for his people and for his country. If anyone thinks that he can evade this national duty directly or indirectly, he will perish.

Hitler does not begin the Second World War by telling the German people that he is embarking on a quest to conquer the world. Rather, insisting that his fight is inspired by "faith in his people," he asks every German to be willing to: "lay down his life" for his people and country. Hitler goes on to say that if anyone tries to evade this national duty (to lay down one’s life), this person would "perish."

In his declaration of war, Hitler tells everyone what he is going to do—what will happen. What he said he was going to do—eventually is what did happen. The Second World War provided the occasion for the German people to sacrifice their lives for Germany. What’s more, Hitler acted to bring about the death of anyone whom he imagined refused to embrace the sacrificial imperative. The essence of Hitler’s ideology was: die for Germany—or we will kill you.

Hitler’s concept of self-sacrifice for Germany does not differ substantially from the Islamic concept of martyrdom for Allah. Willingness to forfeit one’s life—in each instance—is understood as a way of demonstrating the depth of one’s faith in and devotion to a sacred object. The individual gives witness to the sincerity of his belief by virtue of his willingness to make the "supreme sacrifice."

People become attached to ideologies conceived as absolutes. These ideologies or symbolic objects have names such as "Communism," or "Germany," or "Allah." Collective forms of violence— warfare, genocide and terrorism—come into being when a group (inspired by a leader) seeks to demonstrate its devotion to the ideology or symbolic object with which the group identifies. By killing and dying in the name of a sacred ideology, the group "gives witness" to the significance of its ideology.

So all Hitler was trying to do was to assert the rightness of a belief system.  I would put it slightly differently by saying that Hitler was trying to prove that Germany was lovable, or at least respect-worthy.  And as a response to the shame of defeat in WWI that is understandable.  The obvious retort to that, however, is that Hitler sure had a strange way of getting Germany loved and respected!  But, don't forget, Leftists often achieve the opposite of what they appear to want.  So Hitler can be seen as just a typical muddle-headed socialist.

One cannot dispute Koenigsberg's reading.  Hitler did say the things that Koeingsberg says he said. But Koenigsberg is Left-leaning so we also have to look at the other things that Hitler said to get a balanced picture.  And Hitler's Drang nach Osten (push Eastwards) is justified by him quite lucidly -- in a way that every Greenie would understand.  He saw that Germany's population was growing while resources were fairly static so thought that famine loomed for Germany. To this day, Greenies are still screeching about how we are about to run out of various resources.  Hitler was a good Greenie.

So Hitler was in fact quite clear about his war objectives.  He was a shallow thinker but not an irrational one. He wanted to get Lebensraum (Living space, agricultural land, food resources) for Germany by taking it off Poland and Russia.  And it was of course his attack on Poland that caused the reluctant Neville Chamberlain and others to declare war on Germany.

I have shown elsewhere that Hitler was not insane but I think it is clear that he was not particularly irrational either.  Sane people can do irrational things at times and perhaps Hitler did too, but his going to war was not irrational.

I think that Koenigsberg has to a degree been misled by Hitler's propaganda.  Hitler justified his demands in various ways and many of them were emotional appeals rather than anything that stood up to rational analysis.  He pulled every trick out of the hat that he could in order to get Germans to go along with him. He was even a great preacher of "peace", for instance, and antisemitism was popular worldwide at the time. And he succeeded brilliantly, to our everlasting horror. And Leftism IS very emotional and in slight touch with reality.  Remember the ecstasy of Obama's first Presidential campaign?  "We are the ones we have been waiting for".  Very Hitlerite. -- JR

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Another Illegal ObamaCare Action - This Time Bailing Out Insurers

While the Supreme Court is considering the King v. Burwell case about the IRS illegally funding a part of ObamaCare (the subsidies), last week it was revealed that the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) has… illegally funded another part of ObamaCare.

At issue is nearly $3 billion in payments made to insurers to help cover losses caused by ObamaCare’s various regulations and insurance mandates – effectively a bailout to prevent insurers from raising prices as much next year. The Washington Examiner’s Philip Klein writes:

“The U.S. Treasury Department has rebuffed a request by House Ways and Means Chairman Rep. Paul Ryan, R- Wis., to explain $3 billion in payments that were made to health insurers even though Congress never authorized the spending through annual appropriations.”

As Klein also notes, the Obama Administration itself acknowledged that they needed Congressional funding for this bailout money, by including a request for that money in its annual budget. Thus, the Treasury's response to Ryan, which was effectively a middle finger to Congress.

All this is just the latest instance of the Obama Administration blatantly ignoring the law with respect to their signature accomplishment, ObamaCare. As previously mentioned, the IRS chose to literally rewrite the law to allow them to distribute tens of billions of dollars in insurance subsidies to 36 states. And the White House has made over two dozen other unilateral changes to the law since its passage in 2010.

Congress has the clear, unambiguous, and sole legal power to authorize how much and where the federal government may spend our money. This illegal bailout should not even be a partisan issue - it is about whether Congress is any longer relevant in a government increasingly dominated by the executive branch.

SOURCE

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Social Security Continuing to Implement Amnesty Actions

It was the logical next step. If illegal immigrants are getting Social Security numbers, then they are going to collect benefits. Stephen Goss, chief actuary for the Social Security Administration, wrote a letter to Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) claiming that by 2017 some 16,000 illegal immigrants amnestied by Barack Obama's executive action would start receiving Social Security benefits.

Furthermore, Goss admitted the agency is ignoring the injunction blocking the implementation of Obama's executive decrees. In the letter, Goss wrote, "Based on the best advice and counsel we have gotten, we're working on the assumption that these [mass amnesty actions] will persist. Most indications we seem to get are that it's likely that this will get back on track, with some delay."

SOURCE

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SCOTUS Upholds Religious Liberty in ObamaCare Case

Before the Hobby Lobby case, the court system told the University of Notre Dame it had to comply with ObamaCare’s contraception mandate – even if doing so violated the Catholic university’s collective conscience. But in a ruling by the Supreme Court Monday, the case was sent back to the lower court with instructions that the court must decide the case based on the Hobby Lobby ruling.

Mark Rienzi, senior counsel of the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, said, “This is a major blow to the federal government’s contraception mandate. For the past year, the Notre Dame decision has been the centerpiece of the government’s effort to force religious ministries to violate their beliefs or pay fines to the IRS. As with the Supreme Court’s decisions in Little Sisters of the Poor and Hobby Lobby, this is a strong signal that the Supreme Court will ultimately reject the government’s narrow view of religious liberty.”

SOURCE

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IG Audit: 6.5 Million People With Active Social Security Numbers Are 112 or Older

Many people are living longer, but not to age 112 or beyond -- except in the records of the Social Security Administration.

The SSA's inspector general has identified 6.5 million number-holders age 112 -- or older -- for whom no death date has been entered in the main electronic file, called Numident.

The audit, dated March 4, 2015, concluded that SSA lacks the controls necessary to annote death information on the records of number-holders who exceed "maximum reasonable life expectancies."

"We obtained Numident data that identified approximately 6.5 million numberholders born before June 16, 1901 who did not have a date of death on their record," the report states.

Some of the numbers assigned to long-dead people were used fraudulently to open bank accounts.

And thousands of those numbers apparently were used by illegal immigrants to apply for work:

"During Calendar Years 2008 through 2011, SSA received 4,024 E-Verify inquiries using the SSNs of 3,873 numberholders born before June 16, 1901," the report said. "These inquiries indicate individuals' attempts to use the SSNs to apply for work."

“It is incredible that the Social Security Administration in 2015 does not have the technical sophistication to ensure that people they know to be deceased are actually noted as dead,” said Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.), chairman of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee.

“Tens of thousands of these numbers are currently being used to report wages to the Social Security Administration and to the IRS. People are fraudulently, but successfully, applying for jobs and benefits with these numbers. Making sure Social Security cleans up its death master file to prevent future errors and fraud is a good government reform we can all agree on,” Johnson said.

Sen. Tom Carper (D-Del.), the committee's ranking member, called the findings a "major problem" that wastes taxpayers' money, exposes citizens to identity theft and undermines confidence in government:

SOURCE

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For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, 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. I also put up occasional updates on my Personal blog

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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Intellectuals

Why are there few conservative intellectuals?  I guess George Will and the late Bill Buckley qualify but that's about it, as far as I can see.  Thomas Sowell is a great treasure that we are lucky to still have with us (he is 84) but what he says flows directly from his academic background as a Chicago school economist.

And that brings me swiftly to my main point. Intellectuals are actually shallow thinkers.  They are gifted amateurs who use popular knowledge -- or at least easily accessible knowledge -- to create new explanations of something or other.  It is of course a talent to be able to do that but in the absence of specialized knowledge the conclusions reached are rarely profound or very innovative.  And that is how Leftists think.  They don't accept that they actually need to learn stuff.  They think that they know it all already.  They think the truth is obvious.

Conservatives, by contrast, are acutely aware of how complex and unpredictable the world is and so mostly confine their writing to matters where they have detailed knowledge.  In my own case I often comment on economics -- but I am a former High School economics teacher.  I sometimes comment on issues in psychology, but I have a doctorate in it.

I often talk about dubious research methods that I see in environmentalism and in the medical literature  -- but I taught research methods and statistics for many years in a major Australian university and the thinking in both the medical and climatological literature violates some of the most basic principles about what research should be and do.   And the statistics I see in climatology and in the medical literature are frankly ludicrous.  Their errors could hardly be more basic -- ignoring statistical significance, assuming correlation is causation etc.

And I have in fact myself had papers published in the medical journals and I have also had research reports on environmentalism published in the academic journals.  So I am NOT an intellectual.  I have specialized knowledge in the areas that I write most about.

V.I. Lenin is quite a good example of an intellectual.  He wrote at length about the issues of his day but without any evident benefit of detailed knowledge in any field.  But he was bright.  He even started out as something of a libertarian. He once wrote:  “The bureaucracy is a parasite on the body of society, a parasite which ‘chokes’ all its vital pores…The state is a parasitic organism”.  Lenin wrote that in August 1917, before he set up his own vastly bureaucratic state in Russia.  He could see the problem but had no clue about how to solve it when he had the chance to do so.

How could he be so stupid?  How could he do what he himself saw as a huge problem?  Leftist stupidity is a special class of stupidity. The people concerned are mostly not stupid in general but they have a character defect (mostly arrogance) that makes them impatient with complexity and unwilling to study it.  So in their policies they repeatedly shoot themselves in the foot;  They fail to attain their objectives.  The world IS complex so a simplistic approach to it CANNOT work.

At the time of the 1917 revolution, Russia was a rapidly modernizing country with railways snaking out across the land and a flourishing agricultural sector that made it a major wheat exporter.  After the revolution agricultural production dropped by about one third and right through the Soviet era Russia never managed to feed itself.  Europe's subsidized food surpluses were a Godsend to it.  A lot of those food surpluses went East.

And Lenin really had no excuse for his stupidity.  There were both writers and practical men in his era who DID understand how economies work and how to get the best out of them. Eugen Böhm,  Ritter von Bawerk, was even a market-oriented economic theorist who was a practical man as well.  He was the Austrian Minister of Finance in the late 19th century and also wrote a series of extensive critiques of Marxism.  And the Austrian economy worked unusually well while he was in charge.  But Böhm's ideas were non-obvious and even counter-intuitive from a layman's viewpoint and it was only a layman's viewpoint that Lenin had.  How sad.

UPDATE: A few additional thoughts about Lenin's disastrous  stupidity

Austria in general and Wien (Vienna) in particular was arguably the world's greatest intellectual and cultural center in Lenin's day -- so a prominent Austrian thinker and politician like Böhm should have come to the attention of Lenin.

And if that general context is not enough, the fact that Böhm was an influential teacher who politely shredded Marxism should have drawn Lenin's attention Austria-ward  --  if genuine intellectual exploration had been of interest to Lenin.

And people forget that famous American "Progressive" thinkers such as Croly and President Woodrow Wilson had to be major inputs into Lenin's thinking.  They had well-developed ideas about the importance of the State and were also enthusiasts for world government.  Lenin wanted that too -- as Leftists do to this day. Bolshevism was to a significant extent American.  Even Marx and Engels were fascinated by America. Marx wrote over 300 articles for American newspapers -- writing which was his main livelihood for a time.  Did you know that?

Lenin was disappointed by "socialism in one country" but he and his successors made unstinting efforts to  expand their reach. It took Ronald Reagan to terminate that.

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The Liberal Circus

V.D. Hanson

Lately liberalism has gone from psychodrama to farce.

Take Barack Obama. He has gone from mild displeasure with Israel to downright antipathy. Suddenly we are in a surreal world where off-the-record slurs from the administration against Benjamin Netanyahu as a coward and chickensh-t have gone to full-fledged attacks from John Kerry and Susan Rice, to efforts of former Obama political operatives to defeat the Israeli prime minister at the polls, to concessions to Iran and to indifference about the attacks on Jews in Paris. Who would have believed that Iranian leaders who just ordered bombing runs on a mock U.S. carrier could be treated with more deference than the prime minister of Israel? What started out six years as pressure on Israel to dismantle so-called settlements has ended up with a full-fledged vendetta against a foreign head of state.

Hillary Clinton likewise has gone from a rather run-of-the-mill liberal grandee to a political grafter. She apparently solicited donations from foreign government officials and wealthy foreign nationals to contribute to the Clinton Foundation — and this was while she was secretary of State conducting the foreign policy of the United States. If those charges are proven accurate, how could she ever be trusted to become commander in chief? Unfortunately, in the last year almost every cause that Hillary Clinton has taken up has been belied by her own actions.

Inequality and fairness? At time when students struggle under a collective $1 trillion-plus student debt, much of it because of universities hiking fees and tuitions above the inflation rate, Hillary has serially charged universities well over $200,000 for 30-minute boilerplate speeches.

Women’s issues? We learn that women on Senator Clinton’s staff once made considerably less than their male counterparts. Had Bill Clinton worked at a university, corporation or government bureau, his sexual peccadillos long ago would have had him thrown off the premises. The latest disclosures about his junkets with convicted pedophile Jeffrey Epstein are so bizarre that no one quite knows what to make of them — the would-be first female and feminist president married to a man who serially cavorted with a convicted sexual pervert?

Transparency? Consider the recent disclosures that Hillary knew almost immediately that the Benghazi killings were the preplanned work of terrorists and not due to spontaneous rioters angry over a video — and yet continued to deceive the public that just the opposite was true. The problem with Hillary’s scandals are not just that they reveal a lack of character, but that they are illiberal to the core on hallmark progressive issues of concern for equality, transparency and feminism.

We no longer live in an age of debate over global warming. It has now transmogrified well beyond Al Gore’s hysterics, periodic disclosures about warmists’ use of faked data, embarrassing email vendettas, vindictive lawsuits, crony green capitalism, and flawed computer models. Now Congressman Raul Grijalva (D-AZ), the ranking Democrat on the House Natural Resources Committee, has taken the psychodrama to the level of farce in a two-bit McCarthyesque effort to demand from universities information about scientists who do not embrace his notions of manmade global warming. Where are the ACLU and fellow Democratic congressional supporters of free speech and academic freedom to censure such an Orwellian move? Finally, even the American Meteorological Society had to condemn the unhinged Grijalva for his bizarre efforts.

Attorney General Eric Holder came into office alleging racism and calling the American people cowards, and six years later is exiting, still blaming racism for his own self-inflicted failures. In between, Holder became the first attorney general to be cited for contempt by Congress. He stonewalled the Fast and Furious investigations. His plans to try terrorists in federal civilian courts were tabled almost immediately. He ordered electronic taps and surveillance on the communications of Associated Press and Fox reporters for supposed leaks.  He ignored wrongdoing in the IRS mess, a scandal that continues to grow. He got caught using his government jet to take his daughters and their boyfriends to the Belmont Stakes.

But Holder will be remembered largely for his racialist tenure. He dropped a strong case of voting intimidation by armed Black Panthers at the polls. In congressional testimony, he referred to blacks as “my people”; anyone else — except Joe Biden — who had said the same would have been asked to resign. He promised federal action on Ferguson and the Trayvon Martin shootings — and then quietly backed off when the evidence for civil rights violations did not meet his own rhetorical excesses. The problem, he pleaded, was not that his targets were not guilty under the law, but that the law itself had to be changed to make them guilty.  Holder claimed repeatedly that opposition to Obama was race-based, and he leaves office as a caricature of incompetence and racial divisiveness.

The IRS scandal likewise went from melodrama to farce. The president said there was not a “smidgeon” of corruption in the selective targeting of conservatives. Lois Lerner, the focus of investigations, pled the Fifth Amendment after having received over $100,000 in merit bonuses. When congressional investigators wanted to subpoena her computer records, IRS officials claimed both that her hard drive  had crashed and that its data was unrecoverable. The latter proved untrue; but then so far so has everything the IRS has said. The only lesson is that any private citizen who replied to IRS inquiries in the manner that the IRS responded to public subpoenas would be jailed.

Debt? Barack Obama stated out in 2008 calling George W. Bush unpatriotic for piling up nearly $5 trillion in eight years; he may be on target to double that amount — and trump the combined red ink of all prior presidents. Obama raised taxes, slashed defense, and still ended up with over a $500 billion annual deficit, as he declared the age of austerity over.

So it has become with most liberal issues. The debate over illegal immigration has gone from arguments over closing the border to Social Security cash rebates to illegals and presidential threats to punish Border Patrol officers who enforce existing law. State Department deputy spokeswoman Marie Harf assures us that poverty and unemployment are catalysts to terrorism, just as so-called Jihadi John, the psychotic ISIS beheader, is revealed to be a preppie British subject from the upper middle class. The president brags that gas prices have gone down because frackers ignored his efforts to stop them — and then vetoes the Keystone Pipeline.

The Trayvon Martin controversy descends from the purportedly preteen of released photos who was shot down in cold blood by a white vigilante into doctored NBC tapes, airbrushed photos, the New York Times’ invented rubric “white Hispanic,” the president weighing in on Trayvon’s shared racial appearance, girlfriend Rachel Jeantel’s explanation of Trayvon’s violence as a sort of homophobic act of “whoop ass” — only to be echoed by MSNBC talking head Melissa Harris-Perry’s ugly sanction of violence on Martin Luther King Day with the amplification of Jeantel’s term “whoop”:  “I hope [Martin] whooped the sh-it out of George Zimmerman.” It would be hard for a satirist to make all that up.

Michael Brown goes from the icon of a “gentle giant” in vain calling out “hands up, don’t shoot” only to be gunned down by a white racist cop — to a thug who strong-armed a store clerk, walked out into the middle of the road under the influence and then attacked a police officer. Conspiracists once warned us that the government was buying up ammo to prevent private gun owners from purchasing it; now we learn that Obama by executive order may ban the most popular type of sporting ammunition. Is there one element of Obamacare that has not been modified, delayed, or ignored — from the employer mandate to the fine for noncompliance?

Why this descent into travesty?

The liberal left got what it wanted in 2009 with a supermajority in the Senate and large majority in the House, a subservient mainstream media, the good will of the American people, and the most liberal president in American history. It only took that liberal hierarchy six years to erode the Democratic Party to levels that we have not seen since the 1920s. Almost every policy initiative we have seen — whether climate change, foreign policy, health care, or race relations — has imploded.

The answer to these failures has not been introspection, humility, or reevaluation why the liberal agenda proved unpopular and unworkable, but in paranoid fashion to double-down on it, convinced that its exalted aims must allow any means necessary — however farcical —  to achieve them.

The logical result is the present circus.

SOURCE

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Another long-overdue hit at statins

Taking statins can increase your chance of developing diabetes by up to 46 per cent, research has shown.

The cholesterol-lowering drugs are thought to prevent the hormone insulin from working properly, which can trigger type 2 diabetes.

The risk, which is far higher than previously believed, has prompted fresh concern about the side effects of the pills.

The findings are particularly worrying as last year the NHS recommended that up to 17million adults should be on statins to prevent heart attacks and strokes.

The drugs’ rationing body NICE published guidance last July urging GPs to prescribe them to anyone with a 10 per cent risk of developing heart disease in a decade.

This represents around 40 per cent of adults in the UK, and academics said the advice was ‘foolhardy’ when so little was known about the side effects.

In the latest study, scientists from the University of Eastern Finland studied 8,749 men aged 45 to 73 over a six-year period.

Just under a quarter were taking statins when the study started. Some had only been on the pills for a few months, others for several years.

Over the course of the study, the scientists found that taking statins increased the risk of developing type 2 diabetes by 46 per cent.

Their research, published in the journal Diabetologia, found that statins reduced the ability of insulin to break down blood sugar.

This is known as insulin sensitivity, and was on average 24.3 per cent lower in men who were taking statins.

The researchers believe that if insulin does not break down blood sugar, and the body’s sugar levels rise too high, then it can trigger type 2 diabetes.

They concluded: ‘Statin therapy was associated with a 46 per cent increased risk of type 2 diabetes.

'The association of statin use with increased risk of developing diabetes is most likely directly related to statins decreasing both insulin sensitivity and secretion.’

Dr Aseem Malhotra, a consultant cardiologist in London, said that contrary to the NHS guidance, healthy adults should not be taking statins, adding: ‘I personally wouldn’t take it or recommend it to friend or family member who is otherwise healthy but let them make up their own minds after giving them all the information.

‘Eating a handful of nuts or four tablespoons of olive oil may be a more effective way at reducing risk of a heart attack, stroke or death and without the side effects.’

Professor Peter Weissberg, Medical Director at the British Heart Foundation, said healthy patients prescribed statins to prevent heart disease should take the ‘lowest possible dose’.

He went on to warn that people with existing heart conditions should not stop taking the pills, saying: ‘It is important that people taking statins because of existing cardiovascular disease should continue to take them as the benefits will outweigh the risks.’

SOURCE

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For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, 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. I also put up occasional updates on my Personal blog

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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Governments use fear to sabotage liberties

I have always wondered why people seem so impressed by the line "the only thing we have to fear is fear itself".  It has always seemed to me to be both glib and utter BS.  So it is interesting to see it put into context below-  JR

"[F]irst of all, let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself—nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance. In every dark hour of our national life a leadership of frankness and vigor has met with that understanding and support of the people themselves which is essential to victory"

Many people will recognize these as the words of former President Franklin D. Roosevelt. After taking the oath of office on Saturday, March 4, 1933, Roosevelt delivered his inaugural address, containing the now famous line. In his speech, the President spoke to a crowd in the early throws of the Great Depression. High unemployment and an uncertain future had many Americans wondering, “What’s next?”

My late grandfather was 21 at this time, the only one in his family with a job, making a small wage—even for the time. Put simply, this experience would impact him for the rest of his life.

He was reluctant to throw anything away or buy anything new. In fact, he didn’t like to spend money if he could avoid it and saved all that he could. He had a lifelong distrust of the stock market and banks. In 1999, at the height of the Y2K scare, my grandfather withdrew some five figures from his bank and stashed it in his house. (Upon learning this, my mother and my aunt managed to convince him that the bank was in fact a safe place for his savings, and he re-deposited the money in his account.)

The fact of the matter is that my grandfather wanted to make sure he could provide for his family (and he did). As much as I hate to think of it this way—I think my grandfather was afraid. He was afraid of once again being in a position of having practically nothing, of being that 21 year old kid and knowing that, if he lost his job, his family was in trouble.

In reading FDR’s speech, in hearing his discussion about fear, I think about my grandfather.

I also think about the complete and utter—uh, bologna—contained in FDR’s famous address.

I’m referring to the President’s attempt to discourage fear among U.S. citizens. The fact is, FDR, like members of government before and after him, thrived on fear to push his agenda. Government uses fear as a means to expand the scale and scope of its power in unprecedented ways. FDR is their poster child.

As Robert Higgs has discussed, the growth and maintenance of government requires fear on the part of U.S. citizens. Fear means people will clamor for the government to “do something” to assuage their anxiety. As a result, the government steps in to supposedly provide a remedy. He states:

 [Governments] exploit it [fear], and they cultivate it. Whether they compose a warfare state or a welfare state, they depend on fear to secure popular submission, compliance with official dictates, affirmative cooperation with the state’s enterprises and adventures.

Fear is useful for government actors for two distinct but related reasons. First, fear has a “neutralizing” effect on citizens. If someone is afraid of X, for example, they are more likely to tolerate, or even demand expansions in state activities to control or eliminate X. This includes the use of methods, which, under other circumstances, would not be tolerable.

Second, those working within and with the state to provide security and defense (i.e., government actors or private contractors, etc.) will actively look to promote people’s fear and exploit it for their own personal advantage.

Examples of this abound. FDR, despite his message of “freedom from fear,” cultivated fear throughout his presidency and set the stage for future executives to do the same. On March 6, 1933, President Roosevelt issued Proclamation No. 2039 and declared a state of emergency in the U.S. (it was continued by Proclamation No. 2040 on March 9, 1933). Over the next several years, FDR would push through some of the worst policies in U.S. history (despite what your high school civics teacher told you).

These proclamations have become a staple of U.S. presidencies since this time. They grant the President hundreds of powers normally reserved for the Congress. Patrick Thronson, a J.D. candidate at University of Michigan Law School, identified at least 160 laws that immediately expand the President’s authority to act during an “emergency.”

Since 1976, 53 states of emergency have been declared, not counting those issued in the wake of natural disasters. Most of these orders remain in effect, including the one issued by President Roosevelt—in 1933.

Clinton enacted states of emergency in 1995 and 1998. President Bush continued these orders, and he added a healthy crop of his own. Not to be outdone by his predecessors, Obama continued both Clinton AND Bush’s declarations, while adding his own. In fact, Obama has issued or continued a state of emergency regarding terrorism in 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012, and 2013.

The result of these declarations is disastrous for civil liberties. These orders, all “necessary” in the face of crisis, allow the President to freeze an individual’s assets, confiscate private property, and limit trade. These directives can force retired veterans into military service, and allow for unlimited, secret patents for the military. In some cases, these laws allow the suspension of Habeas Corpus, meaning that the President can arrest, imprison, and detain individuals without review.

Fear is a powerful tool. This is not only well-known by those in positions of power, but exploited. Just like a child makes a parent check under his bed for the monster, U.S. citizens, out of fear, have called upon their elected leaders to be “proactive” against monsters like “drugs” and “terrorism.” Except, while a parent encourages teaches her child to reason, to not fear his imagination, the government tells the child the monster is not only real, but has friends. At any moment, these friends are going to come from under the bed, the closet, and the bedroom door to devour you. Unless, of course, Big Brother steps in to save you.

SOURCE

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We Can Deport 11 Million Illegal Aliens

The Obama Administration, Jeb Bush, John McCain, Lindsay Graham and the media's take on why Congress needs to enact "comprehensive immigration reform" is that it's impossible to deport the 11 million plus illegal aliens here, or as the president calls them, "Americans in waiting."

Of course, it's possible. The notion that this country can't find these people is simply ridiculous. Here's why.

According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, there are over 461,000 local, county, and State law enforcement officers in the country. There are also about 120,000 federal law enforcement agents. If Congress gave state and local police officers the authority to enforce federal immigration laws, most of the 11 million illegal aliens could be identified and deported in about a year. Let's do the math.

I'll round down to not count about 61,000 State and local officers who are probably managers, sheriffs or chiefs of police. Eleven million divided by the remaining 400,000 is 27.5. That's the number each law enforcement officer, on average, would have to apprehend to get to the 11 million goal. It's been my experience that uniformed police officers and sheriff's deputies encounter an illegal alien at least one a week, or often daily, during his or her normal work day. Most of those encounters result in the illegal alien's arrest for drunk driving or crimes such as shoplifting, drinking in public, vandalism, domestic violence, hit and run accidents, peace disturbance, driving without a license, drug possession and the like. Without even trying, an average uniform police officer will run across an illegal alien at least 52 times a year, based on my theory that they encounter illegals at least once a week. If all 400,000 police officers arrested just one illegal alien a week for a year, more than 20 million illegals could be identified and deported, far exceeding the estimated 11 million that are here.

The real challenge is to locate the estimated 40 percent of illegal aliens that have overstayed their visas. That's where the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), and other federal agents could concentrate their efforts.

In places where there are large numbers of illegal aliens such as in Los Angeles County, police encounter illegal aliens far more often than the police in say, Oshkosh, Wisconsin. According to the Los Angeles Times, L.A. is the "hit and run capital of the nation." Nearly half of the 40,000 traffic accidents reported in Los Angeles were hit and runs, well above the national average, according to the LAPD. I'd estimate that nearly all the hit and runs in Los Angeles were committed by illegal aliens who have no drivers license, no insurance, and fear they'll be deported. But, illegal aliens flourish where municipalities, such as Los Angeles, declare themselves "sanctuary cities" and won't allow their police officers to cooperate with immigration authorities. That needs to change. Congress should hold back federal funding to these cities until they stop running interference for illegal aliens.

Where I live in Monterey County, California, the largest industry besides tourism is agriculture. The National Agricultural Workers Survey estimates that 48 percent of farm workers in the country have no legal status. Mexican-American Cesar Chavez, the founder of the United Farm Workers, was very vocal about not hiring illegal aliens for farm work because it undermined the wages of legal immigrants and American Citizens. If there are not enough American workers available to plant and harvest the Salinas Valley, why not fill the void by allowing farmers to hire non-violent, volunteer state prisoners, at minimum wage, and pay for their correctional officer escorts. Paying these prisoners minimum wage would give them the ability to pay any court ordered restitution to their victims and provide them a nest egg for when they are eventually released.

Since California and other states have prison overpopulation problems, why not let convicted illegal aliens do their time in their home countries? About 30 percent of all federal prisoners are illegal aliens.

Altogether, federal, state and local governments spend about $338 billion dollars a year on illegal aliens. I think that money could be better spent on other things.

None of what I'm suggesting will happen during this current Administration. The U.S. immigration system isn't broken, it's being ignored. The country needs to get a handle on illegal immigration before promoting legal immigration, with very few exceptions.

Securing the southern border while deporting illegal aliens will go a long way in freeing up jobs, reducing crime, enhancing public education, reducing disease, and providing security for American Citizens.

We need a leader to take action so the rule of law and quality of life for American Citizens can be restored.

SOURCE

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You can live longer if you don't have kids (?)

The report below is another example of the old human dream that you can improve your lifespan by choosing what you put in your mouth.  The research is however a rodent study and relies therefore on the fairly ludicrous proposition that you can make generalizations about lifespan from how a short-lived creature like a mouse responds to how a long-lived creature like a human being responds.  Needless to say, most rodent/man generalizations fail

It may be possible to live longer and increase fertility by manipulating diet, according to world-first research in mice from the University of Sydney's Charles Perkins Centreand ANZAC Research Institute.

Researchers showed for the first time in mammals that there is an ideal balance of macronutrients (protein, carbohydrates and fat) for reproduction and another, different ideal balance for increasing lifespan.

The research, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), calls into question the long-standing theory that animals are forced to trade-off between reproduction and longevity when resources are limited. According to the researchers, it is possible to manage diet at different life stages to both optimise fertility and extend lifespan, rather than sacrificing either.

"This study takes a very big step in explaining why trade-offs between reproduction and longevity are not inevitable in mammals," said Dr Samantha Solon-Biet from the Charles Perkins Centre, who co-led the research with Dr Kirsty Walters from the ANZAC Research Institute.

"Rather than a trade-off, we now know that each evolutionary function has different nutrient requirements. That means that as our nutrient requirements change with our life stage, we can change our diet to suit our current requirements, for example by increasing our protein to carbohydrate ratio when in our reproductive prime and lifting our carbohydrate to protein ratio in later life.

"Animals don't have to choose between high fertility and a long life. By managing diet throughout our life cycle, we can have both."

The findings open the door for the development of dietary treatments for infertility in humans.

"As the findings based on insects are now shown to be true in mammals, we are hopeful that they will be equally true in humans," said Dr Solon-Biet.

"As women increasingly delay child-bearing, the demand for assisted reproductive technologies increases. With further studies, it's possible that instead of women with subfertility resorting immediately to invasive IVF techniques, an alternative strategy may be developed to change the ratio of dietary macronutrients to improve female fertility. This would avoid the need for medical intervention, except in the most severe cases."

The study is the most comprehensive nutritional trial ever conducted in mammals exploring the relationship between macronutrients, reproduction and lifespan.

Researchers placed 858 mice on one of 25 ad-libitum diets with varying levels of protein, carbohydrate, fat and energy content. At 15 months, they measured the male and female mice for reproductive function. In both male and female mice, they found that lifespan was enhanced on a high carbohydrate, low protein diet, and reproduction was enhanced on a high protein, low carbohydrate diet.

SOURCE

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, 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. I also put up occasional updates on my Personal blog

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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Obama's Canadian predecessor:  Pierre Trudeau showed how destructive Leftist leaders can be

David Frum

Canada today is a very successful country. It has suffered less from the global economic crisis than any other major economy.

So Canadians may be tempted to be philosophical about disasters in their own past. Hasn’t all come out right in the end? Of course you could say the same about the invasions of Ghengis Khan.

I don’t draw any personal comparison between Pierre Trudeau and Ghengis Khan, obviously. But I want to stress: Canada’s achievement overcoming Trudeau’s disastrous legacy should not inure Canadians to how disastrous that legacy was.

Three subsequent important prime ministers – Brian Mulroney, Jean Chretien and Stephen Harper – invested their energies cleaning up the wreckage left by Pierre Trudeau. The work has taken almost 30 years. Finally and at long last, nobody speculates any more about Canada defaulting on its debt, or splitting apart, or being isolated from all its major allies.

Yet through most of the adult lives of most people in this room, people in Canada and outside Canada did worry about those things.

And as you enjoy the peace, stability and comparative prosperity of Canada in the 2010s just consider – this is how Canadians felt in the middle 1960s. Now imagine a political leader coming along and out of ignorance and arrogance despoiling all this success. Not because the leader faced some overwhelming crisis where it was hard to see the right answer. But utterly unnecessarily. Out of a clear blue sky. Like a malicious child on the beach stomping on the sand castle somebody else had worked all morning to build.

That was the political record of Pierre Trudeau.

I want to examine the Trudeau record in 3 dimensions: What Trudeau did to the Canadian economy, what Trudeau did to Canada’s standing in the world, and what Trudeau did to Canadian political stability.

I’ll conclude by offering some thoughts about the personal and intellectual traits that animated Trudeau’s destructive career. And I hope you’ll agree with me at the end that Trudeau deserves at least this much credit: There was nothing small-scale or parochial about him. As a political wrecker, he was truly world class.

***

Pierre Trudeau inherited a strong, growing and diversified Canadian economy.

When Trudeau at last left office for good in 1984, Canadians were still feeling the effects of Canada’s worst recession since the Great Depression. Eight years later, the country would tumble into another and even worse recession.

The two recessions 1981-82 and 1992-93 can both fairly be laid at Trudeau’s door.

Pierre Trudeau took office at a moment when commodity prices were rising worldwide. Then as now, rising commodity prices buoyed the Canadian economy. Good policymakers recognize that commodity prices fall as well as rise. A wise government does not make permanent commitments based on temporary revenues. Yet between 1969 and 1979 – through two majority governments and one minority – Trudeau tripled federal spending.

Nemesis followed hubris. Commodity prices dropped. Predictably, Canada tumbled into recession and the worst federal budget deficits in peacetime history.

Trudeau’s Conservative successor Brian Mulroney balanced Canada’s operating budget after 1984. But to squeeze out Trudeau-era inflation, the Bank of Canada had raised real interest rates very high. Mulroney could not keep up with the debt payments. The debt compounded, the deficits grew, the Bank hiked rates again – and Canada toppled into an even worse recession in 1992. By 1993, default on Trudeau’s debt loomed as a real possibility. Trudeau’s next successors, Liberals this time, squeezed even tighter, raising taxes, and leaving Canadians through the 1990s working harder and harder with no real increase in their standard of living.

Do Canadians understand how many of their difficulties of the 1990s originated in the 1970s? They should.

To repay Trudeau’s debt, federal governments reduced transfers to provinces. Provinces restrained spending. And these restraints had real consequences for real people: more months in pain for heart patients, more months of immobility for patients awaiting hip replacements.

If Canada’s health system delivers better results today than 15 years ago, it’s not because it operates more efficiently. Canada’s health system delivers better results because the reduction of Trudeau’s debt burden has freed more funds for healthcare spending. The Canadian socialist Tommy Douglas anticipated the Trudeau disaster when he said that the great enemy of progressive government was unsound finance.

Pierre Trudeau was a spending fool. He was not alone in that, in the 1970s. But here’s where he was alone. No contemporary leader of an advanced industrial economy – not even the German Social Democrat Helmut Schmidt or the British socialist James Callaghan – had so little understanding as Pierre Trudeau of the private market economy. “Little understanding?” I should have said: “active animosity.”

Trudeau believed in a state-led economy, and the longer he lasted in office, the more statist he became. The Foreign Investment Review Agency was succeeded by Petro-Canada. Petro-Canada was succeeded by wage and price controls. Wage and price controls were succeeded by the single worst economic decision of Canada’s 20th century: the National Energy Program.

The NEP tried to fix two different prices of oil, one inside Canada, one outside.  The NEP expropriated foreign oil interests without compensation. The NEP sought to shoulder aside the historic role of the provinces as the owner and manager of natural resources. I’ll return in a moment to the consequences of the NEP for Canada’s political stability. Let’s focus for now on the economic effects.

Most other Western countries redirected themselves toward more fiscal restraint after 1979. Counting on abundant revenues from oil, the Trudeau government kept spending. Other Western governments began to worry more about attracting international investment. Canada repelled investors with arbitrary confiscations. Other Western governments recovered from the stagflation of the 1970s by turning toward freer markets. Under the National Energy Policy, Canada was up-regulating as the US, Britain, and West Germany deregulated. All of these mistakes together contributed to the extreme severity of the 1982 recession. Every one of them was Pierre Trudeau’s fault.

***

Pierre Trudeau had little taste for the alliances and relationships he inherited in 1968. Canada had taken a lead role in creating the institutions of the postwar world, from the North Atlantic Treaty Organization to the General Organization for Tariffs and Trade. Those institutions were intended in great part to contain the aggressive totalitarian regimes in the Soviet Union and China. In 1968, Canada remained a considerable military power and an important voice in the councils of the West.

Trudeau repudiated that inheritance. His spending spree did not include the military. He cut air and naval capabilities, pulled troops home from Europe, and embarked on morale-destroying reorganizations of the military services. In 1968, Canada was a serious second-tier non-nuclear military power, like Sweden or Israel. By 1984, Canada had lost its war-fighting capability: a loss made vivid when Canada had to opt out of ground combat operations in the first Gulf War of 1990-91.

Something more was going on here than a left-of-center preference for butter over guns. Throughout his life – now better known than ever thanks to John English – Pierre Trudeau showed remarkable indifference to the struggle against totalitarianism that defined the geopolitics of the 20th century.

Indifference may be too polite a word.

Pierre Trudeau opted not to serve in World War II, although of age and in good health. He traveled to Josef Stalin’s Soviet Union to participate in regime-sponsored propaganda activities. He wrote in praise of Mao’s murderous regime in China. Trudeau lavishly admired Fidel Castro, Julius Nyere, and other Third World dictators. The Soviet dissident Andrei Amalrik scathingly recalled Trudeau’s 1971 prime ministerial visit: Trudeau visited the Siberian city of Norilsk and lamented that Canada had never succeeded in building so large a city so far north – unaware, or unconcerned, that Norilsk had been built by slave labor.

As prime minister, Trudeau to the extent he could tried to reorient Canada away from the great democratic alliance.

It’s telling I think that Trudeau came to the edge of endorsing the communist coup against Solidarity in Poland in December 1981. Hours after the coup, Pierre Trudeau said: “If martial law is a way to avoid civil war and Soviet intervention, then I cannot say it is all bad.” He added “Hopefully the military regime will be able to keep Solidarity from excessive demands.”

Trudeau’s neutralism negated Canada’s former influence. Probably few remember now his farcical “peace initiative” of 1982. Convinced that Ronald Reagan was leading the world toward nuclear war, Trudeau shuttled between Western capitals to appeal for some kind of concession to soothe the Soviets. Results? Unconcealed disdain from the Americans, unconcealed boredom from the Soviets.

Canada had often before played an important go-between role. Not this time. Canada’s most important geopolitical asset is its unique relationship with the US. Trudeau had squandered that asset, and with it, his own influence.

Obviously, Canada and the United States will disagree sometimes. Canadians of different points of view will favor a more or less intimate relationship with the United States. But even the most US-skeptical Canadian nationalist would agree: it’s reckless and foolish to offend the Americans gratuitously. In fact, the more nationalist the Canadian prime minister, and therefore the more likely to conflict with the Americans on large issues – the more carefully you would expect that prime minister to avoid giving offense over inessentials.

Yet Trudeau made it clear to Presidents Nixon and Carter that he personally disliked them, and to President Reagan that he personally despised him. When it came to foreign affairs, there was always a deep strain of frivolity and irresponsibility in Pierre Trudeau.

What Trudeau did take seriously was our third ground of indictment: the stability and unity of the country. And it was here that he did perhaps his greatest harm.

***

Pierre Trudeau had a unique approach to national unity. He ascertained what each of Canada’s regions most dearly wanted – and then he offered them the exact opposite.

Did Quebeckers want to live and work in French in Montreal? Trudeau said no to that – and instead promised that they could live and work in French in Vancouver.

Did Albertans want a less exploitive economic deal within Confederation? Trudeau said no – and instead offered a more exploitive economic deal within Confederation.

Unsurprisingly, Trudeau’s flip-them-the-finger approach to national unity did not yield positive results.

In fact, he nearly blew apart the country – and his own party.

At the beginning of the Trudeau years, separatism was a fringe, radical movement in Quebec. A decade later, Canada faced a referendum on “sovereignty-association.”

In 1968, Trudeau’s Liberals won 25 seats west of Ontario. In 1980, they won 2.

And in the end it was Trudeau’s own policies that destroyed his vision of the country. By dramatically increasing immigration, Trudeau made irrelevant his vision of a bilingual Canada. Lester Pearson famously expressed a hope that he would be Canada’s last unilingual prime minister. It’s very possible that sometime in the 2040s Canada will see its last bilingual prime minister, at least if the second language is French. On current trends, by the 2040s the proportion of French speakers in Canada will be lower than the proportion of Spanish speakers in the United States today.

Defenders of Trudeau’s disastrous governance habitually rally around one great accomplishment: the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

Well, Herbert Hoover had some excellent wilderness conservation policies, but we don’t excuse the Great Depression on that account.

Would it really have been impossible to combine the adoption of the Charter with a less destructive economic policy, a less destructive foreign policy, a less destructive national unity policy?

Yet there is a sense in which the Charter of Rights and Freedoms is a very characteristic Trudeau project.

The Charter addressed a deficiency in Canadian constitutionalism: checking the powers of government. It’s possible to imagine a lot of solutions to that problem. The solution contained in the Charter is to give unelected judges the power to void acts of Parliament.

Unelected judges chosen by the prime minister at the prime minister’s sole discretion, unscrutinized by any elected body.

The Charter encapsulates the grand theme of Trudeau’s political life: his lack of respect for the people who returned him to office again and again – his instinctive sympathy for power, the less accountable the better.

SOURCE

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How the worm has turned: Salt is now good for you

As we age our skin looses elasticity and that means we’re more susceptible to cuts and then, infections and skin problems. However a team of German scientists from the University of Regensburg has found that one simple diet change could improve that.

A diet high in salt causes sodium levels to build up in the skin. This can boost the immune system to fight off the germs that cause infections. The research involved testing on mice and the team found that the bodies of mice with a high sodium diet cleared up infections on the feet faster than those who had less sodium in the diet.

Many years ago salt was used to prevent and rid infections in the body so this research could be supporting the practices of hundred of years ago.

The findings were published in the journal Cell Metabolism and late last year it was proven that salt doesn’t have an adverse affect on the heart condition and disease in older people making this a diet change that we can implement without too much fear of side effects!

SOURCE

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For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, 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. I also put up occasional updates on my Personal blog

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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