New Book Investigates Failures of Health Care Industry‏

HealthScare: Why Health Care Is NOT About Your Health is a controversial new book looking into the failures of the health care industry.

How well do you understand what defines your health? Can you wake up one morning and make the decision to go purchase good health? Where would you go? Can you tell Santa Claus that you want him to bring you the gift of good health for Christmas? The federal government and health insurance companies want us to believe that having “health care” can make you healthy. They have presented health care as a means to your health, but it has turned out to be a con job to take over each American’s access to medical care—decimating health professionals’ ability to treat their patients effectively and at a reasonable cost.

HealthScare: Why Health Care Is NOT About Your Health details the history and ultimate failure of government and insurance involvement in the health industry. Using over four decades of experience in the health industry as a pharmacist, Fritz Scheffel argues that we can make the health system efficient, cost effective, and beneficial to all by regaining power over our own health from power-hungry politicians.

With HealthScare, Fritz Scheffel offers a balanced and honest appraisal of the history and politics of the health industry; Fritz Scheffel provides us a path to saving our health and, ultimately, our nation.

Press release.  $14.95 on Amazon

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 An odd thing

I have watched on video many American patriotic occasions and noted the songs sung.  But I have never seen "I vow to thee my country" sung on such occasions. Have I missed performances of it?   It is both intensely patriotic and intensely Christian.  It basically says how unreservedly the singers love their country but also goes on to say that the Kingdom of God is better still.  I welcome email from readers to enlighten me about it.  It is of course massively popular in Britain, where it originated just after WWI.  Below is a video of a beautiful young British soprano singing it. And the wonderful music was written by Gustav Holst, an eminent British composer.



There is also a choral performance here where just about everybody who is anybody in British politics can be seen.

The words:

I vow to thee, my country, all earthly things above,
Entire and whole and perfect, the service of my love;
The love that asks no question, the love that stands the test,
That lays upon the altar the dearest and the best;
The love that never falters, the love that pays the price,
The love that makes undaunted the final sacrifice.

I heard my country calling, away across the sea,
Across the waste of waters, she calls and calls to me.
Her sword is girded at her side, her helmet on her head,
And around her feet are lying the dying and the dead;
I hear the noise of battle, the thunder of her guns;
I haste to thee, my mother, a son among thy sons.

And there's another country, I've heard of long ago,
Most dear to them that love her, most great to them that know;
We may not count her armies, we may not see her King;
Her fortress is a faithful heart, her pride is suffering;
And soul by soul and silently her shining bounds increase,
And her ways are ways of gentleness, and all her paths are peace.

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Liberalism Is Your Crotchety, Judgmental Aunt Wagging Her Finger At You

Ever been pinned down at Thanksgiving Dinner by a crabby relative who goes on a tirade about trivial complaints which are laced with biting criticism? "Why are skirts so short these days?" "You've gained a few pounds." "Ugh, next you'll be talking to those 'negroes!' You're barely able to tolerate it because she's old, out of it and you only have to be around her for a few hours before she goes home to her 12 cats and you don't have to see her for another year.

Well, liberals have become the equivalent of your b*tchy spinster aunt, but the worst offenders are young, their self-righteous whining is incessant and they never seem to go away.

Don't believe it? Well, you already do if you're not a liberal because you've long since gotten tired of their nagging.

"The Redskins’ name is unfair to Indians! It must be changed!" "How dare you refuse to bake a cake for a gay wedding! We're going to run you out of business!" "You disagree with a black man! That means you're rraacccisssst!"

Pretty much EVERYTHING is racist these days. In fact, half the time when you hear something called racist, you have to wait for the explanation to figure out why it's supposed to be bigoted. One of my recent favorites is a claim that hoop skirts are racist. Why? Who knows? Maybe it’s the same reason that The Lord of the Rings or Devil’s Food Cake is supposedly racist. Even if there isn't a professional race hustler around who's creative enough to come up with something you've done or said that's supposedly racist, they tag you as a bigot anyway because of some supposed "white privilege" you have.

If the incessant cries of racism don’t get to you, then the increasingly hyper-sensitive feminists will. That pack of harpies ruining men’s lives for putting up a swimsuit calendar at work was annoying enough in the sixties, but if anything, they have even more trivial, pampered, first world complaints to nag everyone about today.

Of course, they can’t say that; so everything is “rape culture.” Men and women are having sex drunk? That’s rape. You’re anti-abortion? Probably because you want women to bear the children of men that raped them. You think rapes on college campuses should be investigated by the police instead of women’s studies professors? You must be pro-rape!

Liberals complain incessantly about racism because almost everyone in America is against it and they constantly accuse people for fomenting “rape culture” for the same reason. As long as people they don’t like are spending all their time defending themselves against charges that they’re racist and love rape, they’re hoping everyone else won’t notice that liberals have gone CRAZY.

Crazy enough that the word “mansplaining” is actually a thing. That’s when a man explains something to a woman that she already knows. There are even whole TUMBLR pages dedicated to criticizing “manspreading,” which is men who spread their legs on the subway, presumably because they don’t want to squash their junk. By doing that, they’re apparently asserting their male privilege…or something. Then there’s “Gamergate,” which long story short, is a gaggle of liberal hens incessantly clucking at men who want to play video games in peace because guys who spend all their free time playing Madden and Street Fighter apparently aren’t sufficiently deferential to the nagging of a bunch of harpies who want to lecture them about feminist trivia.

Of course, the list of issues that set off liberals goes far beyond race and feminism. Lefties demanded that Mozilla CEO Brendan Eich lose his job for being opposed to gay marriage. The liberals at Planet Fitness banned a woman at the gym because the women’s bathroom should be for women as opposed to men who identify as women. A liberal Muslim at the University of Missouri demanded that the incredibly popular war movie American Sniper be banned because it made her feel “unsafe.” Support for the 2nd Amendment was declared “homophobic” at Kalamazoo College.

Libs block conservative speakers at college campuses when possible and often throw things. They chant and try to disrupt their speeches if that doesn’t work because their tender liberal ears can’t handle a contrary opinion. Asking someone from another country where he’s from is considered a “micoaggression” by liberals, which basically is just another term for, “We don’t have enough things to cry about already.” Mount Holyoke College is even pulling The Vagina Monologues because it’s not sensitive enough to men with vaginas. I know, I know, if you have a vagina, you’re not a man, but you have to humor these loons a bit; they’re coo coo for Cocoa Puffs.

As you’re discussing all these issues, you have to be careful because you might accidentally use a “trigger” word that upsets some terribly sensitive liberal soul. Oberlin College can tell you all about it.

Oberlin College has published an official document on triggers, advising faculty members to "be aware of racism, classism, sexism, heterosexism, cissexism, ableism, and other issues of privilege and oppression," to remove triggering material when it doesn't "directly" contribute to learning goals….

That’s no small matter because once liberals, the world’s most easily offended people, have been “triggered” by something you’ve done, then they view themselves as victims who have a right to go to insane lengths to fight back against your grievous attack.

Last March at University of California–Santa Barbara, in, ironically, a “free-speech zone,” a 16-year-old anti-abortion protester named Thrin Short and her 21-year-old sister Joan displayed a sign arrayed with graphic images of aborted fetuses. They caught the attention of Mireille Miller-Young, a professor of feminist studies. Miller-Young, angered by the sign, demanded that they take it down. When they refused, Miller-Young snatched the sign, took it back to her office to destroy it, and shoved one of the Short sisters on the way.

Speaking to police after the altercation, Miller-Young told them that the images of the fetuses had “triggered” her and violated her “personal right to go to work and not be in harm.” A Facebook group called “UCSB Microaggressions” declared themselves “in solidarity” with Miller-Young and urged the campus “to provide as much support as possible.”

Incidentally, those last two paragraphs are from liberal writer Jonathan Chait who wrote a column complaining about how intolerant liberalism has become now that his fellow travelers have moved on from going after Duck Dynasty and Rush Limbaugh to *** gasp *** targeting liberals like him, too.

Liberals are like Iran’s morality police, but instead of screaming at women for showing their ankles or going out in public without a male relative, libs yell at you for wanting to play video games without feminist jargon in them or wanting to only have women in the women’s bathroom. They’re nasty, quarrelsome and many of them are young, which means they may have those sticks wedged in their behinds for life. Maybe Obamacare should be authorized to yank them out – at least until we get rid of it and give the whiners something to REALLY complain about.

SOURCE

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It's Election 'Day' for a reason

by Jeff Jacoby

EXCEPT FOR diplomats posted abroad, early voting isn't an option in Israeli elections. So when Israel's election day dawned on Tuesday, with impressions of the campaign's home stretch fresh in voters' minds, no one in the country had yet cast a ballot. The giant pre-election rallies in Tel Aviv, the final flurry of ads, the polls showing the main opposition party in the lead, the prime minister's unexpected repudiation of a Palestinian state: Together Israelis had taken it all in, and together Israelis would put it all to a vote.

Over the past two decades, early voting has become routine in American elections, with citizens in 36 states and the District of Columbia permitted to cast their ballots well in advance of Election Day, either by mail or at early-voting polling stations. In 2012, according to the United States Election Project at the University of Florida, at least 32 million votes were banked early, a whopping one-fourth of all ballots cast nationwide that year. Other calculations range even higher: A presidential commission on election administration reported last year that the number of votes cast before Election Day in 2012 was 47 million, nearly one-third the US total.

Is this wise? Does the metamorphosis of Election Day into Election Month strengthen the machinery of democratic self-government? Plainly, many Americans think so. "Whenever we have a law that expands access to the ballot and makes it easier for people to register and to vote," former Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick said last year after signing a law to authorize early voting in the state beginning in 2016, "it makes our democracy better."

Except that it doesn't. At best, it only makes it more convenient — and that convenience comes with downside tradeoffs.

First, far from motivating more citizens to participate in elections, early-voting laws actually decrease turnout. Researchers at the University of Wisconsin, in a study published in the American Journal of Political Science, have shown that early voting "lower[s] the likelihood of turnout by three to four percentage points." Why? Because by dragging out for weeks what had been the concentrated, communal experience of a single decision day, early-voting laws wind up "dissipating the energy of Election Day" and "reducing the civic significance of elections for individuals." The Tuesday after the first Monday in November used to be a climactic moment when the nation turned out to choose its leaders. Now it's merely when the voting stops.

A second tradeoff, even more unfortunate, is the loss of informational equality. In some states, the early-voting window opens more than six weeks before Election Day — a month and a half! Think of what can happen in the last 45 days of a campaign: a high-stakes debate, an outrageous gaffe, an international crisis, a late-in-the-game promise, a surge of momentum, a demoralizing admission, a spectacular endorsement.

"Early voters are in essence asked a different set of questions from later ones," argued Eugene Kontorovic and John McGinnis, law professors at Northwestern University, in an essay in Politico last year. "They are voting with a different set of facts." That isn't the way to make democracy better.

Like a jury retiring to consider its verdict, Israel turned out en masse to elect a new parliament — and only after all the testimony was in. No voters had cause to regret a vote cast weeks earlier, or to wish they had known then what they knew now. Israelis don't vote when they decide they've heard enough. They vote, as Americans used to vote, on Election Day.

You don't have to look to Israel to know that a campaign's last innings are often the most enlightening or game-changing. Just think of the revelation, days before the 2000 election, of George W. Bush's drunk-driving arrest. Or John Silber's prickly interview with Natalie Jacobson as the 1990 Massachusetts governor's race neared its climax. Or Lyndon Johnson's bombing halt in North Vietnam on the eve of the razor-sharp election in 1968. Or Ross Perot's wild claim, late in the 1992 campaign, of his daughter's wedding being sabotaged by Republicans.

Elections are more meaningful when voters act collectively, coming together at one time to make their political choices. We may disagree sharply over whom ultimately to choose, but the choosing should be done when the campaign ends — on a clearly defined Election Day, not a long-drawn-out election season.

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 and each day I gather together my most substantial current writings on A WESTERN HEART.

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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Race And The American Millennial’s Brain Rot

Ilana Mercer is an expert at writing scarifying prose. She is supreme at ripping people to pieces verbally.  So what she writes below seems rather exaggerated to me. She grew up in Israel so may be more critical because of that. I am also in no doubt however that there is a large element of truth in what she writes below.  The Left have been dumbing down and distorting American education for so long that any other state of affairs could hardly be  expected.

I am more optimistic than she appears to be, however.  And I am optimistic because of one thing:  IQ.  IQ is largely hereditary so is not readily susceptible to destruction by the Fascists that American "liberals" have become. So I think that, as they grow up, the brighter part of the Millennial cohort will work things out pretty well for themselves.  That will be assisted by the large gap that always exists between Leftist beliefs and reality.

And societal progress is not strongly dependant on the mental state of the masses.  It very largely depends on the "smart fraction" of society.  As long as the top 5% of any population are on the ball, the society as a whole will do well.

Israel is a prime example of the centrality of the smart fraction.  Largely because of the Sephardi and Mizrachi element in the overall population, the average IQ in Israel is just that:  average, around 100 IQ points.  But the Ashkenazim are another matter.  They average out roughly half a standard deviation above the mean, which is a lot. And it is primarily they who have made Israel into the brilliant society that it is

So I think that, where it exists, American talent will continue to thrive

“Silence; We’re Studying for Our Pregnancy Test” (2008), “Your Kids: Dumb, Difficult and Dispensable” (2010), “Higher Education Is A Hard Row To Ho” (2014): The author of such titles is well aware of how stupid, on average, American millennials are. She has been for some time.

The 2010 piece aforementioned warned that “the electronic toys our dim, attention-deficient darlings depend on to sustain brain waves are made, for the most, by older people,” and that “the hi-tech endeavor consist in older Americans and Asians uniting to supply young, twittering twits with the playthings that keep their brainwaves from flatlining.”

According to my sources in the high-tech industry, for every useless, self-aggrandizing Gen Yer, a respectful, bright, industrious (East) Asian, with a wicked work ethic, waits in the wings. The millennial generation will be another nail in the coffin of the flailing American productivity.

Encounters over the years with a relatively smart cohort, through this column, have solidified these impressions. Oh yes: I did my patriotic part. I attempted to employ a Millennial or two. I found them to be incapable of following simple written instructions. Their interactions were, moreover, pathologically personal, never professional.

Now, confirmation of these anecdotal impressions comes courtesy of researchers at the Princeton-based Educational Testing Service (ETS). Sponsored by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, the ETS researchers found that, “Not only do Gen Y Americans trail their overseas peers by every measure, but they even score lower than other age groups of Americans.”

Millennials in the U.S. lag in literacy, “including the ability to follow simple instructions, practical math, and—hold on to your hat—a category called ‘problem-solving in technology-rich environments.’” Worse yet: “Even the best-educated Millennials stateside couldn’t compete with their counterparts in Japan, Finland, South Korea, Belgium, Sweden, or elsewhere. … Altogether, the top U.S. Gen Yers, in the 90th percentile, scored lower than their counterparts in 15 countries.”

This includes millennials with masters degrees and doctorates. Our best and brightest managed to best their peers in only three countries: Ireland, Poland and Spain. Much as Charles Murray has documented in his seminal “Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010,” the results obtain irrespective of class and race.

Rejoice! America is becoming an egalitarian Idiocracy.

Let us anchor these general findings about the nature of the Gen Y Beast in particular examples from the passing week.

A few students at the University of Oklahoma were caught in flagrante, singing a racist ditty while white. The cretins of cable were in high dudgeon. CNN’s Brianna Keilar crisscrossed a black student, Meagan Johnson, about her experience with racism on the UO campus.

Oh yes, replied the girl. She had indeed endured the indignities of racism at the UO. “We experience forms, different forms of racism on our campus all the time. It wasn’t shocking at all.” Keilar requested examples. Right away, the student replied that her “overall experience at OU has been a great one.” It was vital, she added, for “the University of Oklahoma … to focus on diversity across our campus. … it needs to be a campus wide effort to make OU [a] more diverse and more inclusive place.”

Here was an example of an educated lass who was incapable of comprehending and answering a straightforward question. Encouraged by Keilar’s effusive praise—”I love your perspective on this Meagan,” she gushed—the girl went on to cop to experiencing “racial microaggression”: She had been asked for lessons in twerking and complimented on her weave.

A pedagogue, presumably, had taught the girl about “microaggression.” Race Robocop Keilar responded with compliments. Thus was this Millennial’s mindlessness reinforced.

Millennials have been pre-programmed and praised for stupidity. They’ve acquired an education yet they remain uneducated. For an educated young American would know that racist speech, too, is constitutionally protected speech. And an educated young American would know that, as professor Eugene Volokh teaches, “It’s unconstitutional for the University of Oklahoma to expel students for racist speech.”

It would appear that when the neocortex is underused, the reptilian brain takes over.

Hysteria and heightened emotions are the hallmarks of the Millennial Mind. They can “whip up a false sense of mass outrage” with ease. The Spectator’s Brendan O’Neill calls these walking dead dodos “The Stepford Students.” They sit “stony-eyed in lecture halls or surreptitiously police beer-fueled banter in the uni bar. They look like students, dress like students, smell like students. But their student brains have been replaced by brains bereft of critical faculties and programmed to conform. To the untrained eye, they seem like your average book-devouring, ideas-discussing, H&M-adorned youth, but anyone who’s spent more than five minutes in their company will know that these students are far more interested in shutting debate down than opening it up.”

Black, liberal and bright—oops; I committed a “microaggression”—comedian Chris Rock recently confessed that he avoids doing his stand-up routine in front of millennial audiences. “You can’t say ‘the black kid over there.’ No, it’s ‘the guy with the red shoes.’ You can’t even be offensive on your way to being inoffensive.”

In the Orwellian universe in which your kids are suspended, words speak louder than actions. Drunken youths sang a nine-second ditty while white—they did not defraud, steal, vandalize, beat, rape or murder anyone; they merely mouthed ugly words.

Unkind cuts, however, called for an exorcism. On cue, a petrified Waspy man, OU President David Boren, proceeded to perform the rituals that would soothe his unhinged charges. While Boren failed to fumigate the fraternity, tear his clothes; rub earth and ashes on his noggin and dress in sackcloth—he did shutter the doors to the dorm and board up its windows. A vice president of diversity was appointed. Soviet-style investigations launched, and summary expulsions sans due process carried out.

Tyranny, as we know, strives for uniformity.

In synch with their pedagogic pied piper, University of Oklahoma students gathered for prayer vigils, marches, demonstrations and lamentation. Burly athletes wept. One Oklahoma football lineman “decommitted,” or was committed.

This menagerie of morons—this institutionalized stupidity—would be comical were it not so calamitous, as shown by the research commissioned by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development.

SOURCE

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Here’s a classic conversation that perfectly demonstrates what liberals really mean when they talk about “rights”:



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Obama’s Private Army: Militarizing the Federal Agencies

Currently there are 73 federal agencies that have full-time armed officers with arresting authority. According to a 2008 report by the Department of Justice, there were 120,000 full-time law enforcement officers working for federal agencies and 24 different federal agencies employed at least 250 full-time officers. Federal agencies with at least 250 full-time officers included the U.S. Forest Service, U.S. Mint, U.S. Postal Inspection Service and the Veterans Health Administration.

While speaking before the Constitutional Convention in 1787, James Madison said, “A standing military force, with an overgrown Executive will not long be safe companions to liberty.” Despite this strong warning from our founders more than 200 years ago, today’s federal government has quietly accrued significant policing powers in a wide array of agencies.

These federal enforcement officers are authorized to carry weapons and make arrests from Section 812 of the 2002 Homeland Security Act. This law authorizes the Offices of the Inspector General within each federal agency, which traditionally look for fraud and waste within the agency, to have officers that carry firearms, seek and execute warrants for arrests and makes arrests without a warrant while engaged in official duties. This section is rarely discussed because the actual language seems somewhat inconsequential. But in practice this law has changed how law enforcement is carried out at the federal level.

While there are federal agencies that should carry weapons and have arresting authority, such as the FBI, Secret Service, DEA and US Marshals, these agencies had this authority before the 2002 Homeland Security Act. They would keep this authority even if the agencies not traditionally involved in law enforcement activities lost their arresting powers. Unfortunately, the expansion of federal enforcement authority has been accompanied by an increase in the abuse of that power. There have been many examples of abuses by different agencies that have not traditionally had law enforcement officers and have been in a rush to use their new authority:

*  The Department of Education raided the home of Kenneth Wright looking for his estranged wife who was accused of misusing federal aid for students. Officers from the Department dragged Mr. Wright out of his house in his boxers at 6 a.m., threw him to the ground and handcuffed him. While this occurred his children -- ages 3, 9 and 11 -- were left in a patrol car for two hours. His estranged wife no longer lived at the house and was not there at the time of the raid.

*  Officers in full SWAT gear from the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service stormed the home of Kathy and George Norris. The agents instigated the raid for George’s failure to file the proper paperwork for orchids he imported. Kathy and George were grandparents in their 60s when the raid took place.

*  The EPA led a joint raid along with the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service, the Bureau of Land Management, the Coast Guard, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (the guys that predict the weather) and the U.S. Park Service on a mining operation for possible violations of the Clean Water Act.

*  The Bureau of Land Management had a long standoff with Cliven Bundy, a rancher, over his use of federal land to graze his cattle.

*  In 2010 the FDA raided Dan Allyger’s Rainbow Acres Farm, an Amish farm in Pennsylvania, because he had been selling unpasteurized milk across state lines.

The potential for abuse increases as more federal agencies establish armed law enforcement officers. In addition to those already mentioned, agencies with police power include: the Small Business Administration, Social Security Administration (which three years ago asked to purchase 174,000 rounds of .357 Sig 125 grain bonded jacketed hollow point bullets), Federal Reserve Board, Department of Energy, Office of Personnel Management and the Railroad Retirement Board, among others.

This is not to say that these agencies do not encounter circumstances where armed officers would be prudent, or even necessary, but under such circumstances they should call federal agencies with experience, such as the FBI, or coordinate with local law enforcement.

Like Madison, the rest of our Constitution’s framers would be extremely uncomfortable with federal executive agencies carrying out police raids. Most were students of history and recalled the horrors that a standing militarized police force brought to Europe and ancient Rome. The framers were especially concerned with the British practice of sending troops to the Colonies, and using them as a police force to harass the Colonists. The Third Amendment was as much a response to the use of the military to police the citizenry as it was a response to the forced housing of soldiers.

Last year, Rep. Chris Stewart (R-Utah) sponsored the Regulatory Agency Demilitarization Act, which would have removed arresting authority from agencies not traditionally authorized to carry weapons or make arrests.

In a press release announcing the bill, Rep. Stewart said, “When there are genuinely dangerous situations involving federal law, that’s the job of the Department of Justice, not regulatory agencies like the FDA or the Department of Education. Not only is it overkill, but having these highly-armed units within dozens of agencies is duplicative, costly, heavy handed, dangerous and destroys any sense of trust between citizens and the federal government.” The president and a majority in both houses of Congress should be able to support this sentiment.

Under the 2002 Homeland Security Act we have seen a massive expansion of police activities carried out by federal agencies. The agents carrying out these activities generally take the form of militarized SWAT teams. This has left Americans wondering why officials from the Department of Education or EPA are barging into their homes and businesses dressed in full SWAT gear.

Our framers faced these same abuses at the hands of the British military during the lead up to the Revolutionary War. They designed the Constitution to protect us from these abuses. We should support a commonsense law, like the Regulatory Agency Demilitarization Act, because it would do much to protect us from these abuses.

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 and each day I gather together my most substantial current writings on A WESTERN HEART.

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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Which was worse, WWI or WWII?

I understand that the death toll in WWI was greater than WWII but I am not going to base anything on that. Instead I want to submit that the major tragedy of WWI was the Bolshevik revolution and that the major tragedy of WWII was the holocaust.  That is of course arguable but, given that, I think the answer is clear.

But first let me spell out why the Bolshevik revolution was attributable to WWI.  There are two reasons.  The first is that Germany deliberately and with malice aforethought transported the exiled Lenin in a sealed train across Europe to Russia.  The German High Command rightly assessed Lenin as a major threat to the Russian war effort and therefore facilitated his trouble-making in that country as part of their own war effort.

Secondly, before the Bolshevik takeover, Russia had become a real parliamentary democracy.  The Mensheviks were democrats who believed in elections.  The overthrow of the Mensheviks during the war  by the Bolsheviks was therefore a violent overthrow of democracy -- which resulted in many millions of deaths both then and across the next 70 years -- and also condemned the world's largest country to tyranny and poverty for all that time.

I am the last to minimize the death of 6 million Jews. But it seems clear to me that the Bolshevik revolution was much more widely harmful.

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A leftist mind on display



Feel the hate.  The image is from Australia.  Tony Abbott is the conservative Prime Minister of Australia

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Western press hasn’t noticed Israel’s rapidly growing clout around the world

“Two years from now, Obama will be gone, to be remembered as the worst president in American memory”

Benjamin “Bibi” Netanyahu’s triumph in Israel’s election this week, so shocking and appalling to the Western press, is many other things, too.

It is a recognition by Israelis of Netanyahu as the Churchill of our times, a statesman who stands apart from virtually all other Western leaders who, whether out of cravenness or wilful blindedness, downplay the gathering storm from Iran.

It is a repudiation by Israelis of those same Western leaders, who funded the “anyone-but-Netanyahu” campaign that tried to install in his place a compliant Jew to endorse their policies of appeasement.

And it is a back of the hand to monopolies and other special interests that oppose Netanyahu’s march to freer markets. At root, Israelis understand that they’re better off with Bibi.

Israel under the rule of socialist parties, which dominated the country’s first half century of existence, was a country of heavy handed state control and of Big Labour — the Histradrut labour federation represented 85 percent of all wage earners in the 1980s. Under Netanyahu’s influence, starting in the late 1990s with his first term as prime minister, Israel systematically began dismantling the welfare state, tackling both the social safety net and the vested corporate interests.

He sold off Israel’s interests in state enterprises, abolished foreign exchange controls and otherwise liberalized the economy, attracting foreign capital and turning Israel into an entrepreneurial marvel that, according to The Economist, has the world’s highest density of startups and, next to Silicon Valley, the largest number of startups. High tech companies now beat a path to this Start-Up Nation’s door — an astonishing 250 from the U.S. alone have made Israel home to their R&D centres.

2014 set records for Israeli high-tech and biotech startups — 52 Israeli startups sold to the tune of some $15-billion plus 18 IPOs worth another $10-billion — according to end-of-year reports by accounting firm PricewaterhouseCoopers and Ethosia Human Resources, who expect 2015 to be even bigger. This January alone saw foreign giants such as Microsoft and Amazon shell out $900-million for companies rich in Israel’s only abundant renewable resource: ingenuity.

The Western press, operating as it does from its echo chamber, likes to describe Israel as increasingly isolated in the world due to its supposed failure to make peace with the Palestinians. Israel has never been less isolated, never been more embraced. In its immediate neighbourhood, Israel for the first time has de facto allies in Egypt and Saudi Arabia, the leaders of the Arab Sunni world.

In black Africa, Israel now is tight with countries such as Nigeria, Kenya and Rwanda. In Asia, Israel is becoming tight with India, the world’s largest democracy, and with China, the world’s second largest economy, both of which are establishing free trade deals with Israel. Israel has been expanding trade with Japan, the world’s third largest economy. And Israel has close relations with countries of the former East Bloc, including Russia, once a Cold War adversary, now a partner in countering Islamic terrorism.

The watchful Arab press knows exactly why Israel has become so welcome around the world, even if the blinkered Western press doesn’t. As explained earlier this year in Al-Araby al-Jadid, a London-based Qatari daily, “Israel’s advanced technology developments have become its most prominent soft power tool for boosting diplomatic ties and improving its position in the world, enhancing its own security in the process.”

Because of Israel’s prowess in both military and civilian fields, it explained, China is cozying up to Israel, India is relying on Israeli instead of U.S. weaponry, and African countries are supporting Israel at the United Nations. Also because of this prowess, Al-Araby al-Jadid expects to see countries that once diplomatically sided with the Palestinians to flip and take pro-Israeli positions.

Israel’s technological prowess, and thus the welcome mat it now enjoys in ever-growing regions of the world, comes as a byproduct of Netanyahu’s dismantling of the welfare state. That dismantling may now accelerate because in this week’s election another dismantler shone — Moshe Kahlon, the Kulanu party leader who ran on an unabashedly pro-business, pro-competition “economic freedom” platform predicated on downsizing government while breaking up Israel’s remaining public monopolies and private oligopolies. The Western press may be surprised to learn that Kahlon, who is widely expected to become Netanyahu’s next finance minister, is considered centrist in Israeli politics.

Israel, once the darling of the Socialist Internationale, is fast becoming the darling of all but Socialist-leaning Europe, Iran and the ISIS wannabe set. Australia is stalwartly in Israel’s corner; Canada’s commitment to Israel is at an all-time high; America’s remains as strong as ever, President Obama and the American left notwithstanding.

Two years from now, Obama will be gone, to be remembered as the worst American president in memory. Prime Minister Netanyahu will remain in power and on the world stage, to be seen as one of Israel’s greatest prime ministers and one of the world’s few true statesmen.

SOURCE

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Sanctimony and Grandstanding Are More Fun Than Free Speech

By Ann Coulter

After police officer Darren Wilson fatally shot Michael Brown last summer in Ferguson, Missouri, the media erupted in terror at the prospect of young black men being gunned down by over-excitable white cops.

After two separate, wide-ranging, phenomenally expensive, months-long investigations, including one by Eric Holder’s Justice Department, it turned out: Brown had attacked Officer Wilson, he did not have his hands up, he was charging the officer when he was shot, and Wilson acted in justifiable self-defense.

Frustrated at their inability to locate evidence of the endemic racism in America we keep hearing so much about, liberals have turned with a vengeance on the kids. Instead of armed policemen gunning down blacks, we got a secretly recorded video of few drunk 19- and 20-year-olds at the University of Oklahoma singing the n-word. (Everyone assumes the students were racists, but my theory is they were trying to record their own rap video.)

Apparently, the new national sport is destroying the lives of young people.

Today’s adults are held responsible for nothing. The president and attorney general aren’t held accountable for ginning up frenzied mobs based on a lie, leading to two cops being assassinated in New York City and two cops being shot in Ferguson, in addition to the $250 million in property damage.

Hillary Clinton isn’t responsible for Americans being murdered at our embassy in Benghazi as a result of her incompetence.

Democratic senators aren’t accountable for passing Obamacare without reading it, and Republican senators aren’t accountable for promising voters they’d stop Obama’s amnesty and then voting to fully fund it.

Even people who commit violent crimes are given a second chance – especially if they’re athletes at the University of Oklahoma, as the Daily Caller has reported.

But 19- and 20-year olds must be punished without mercy for their drunken song using an ugly word. To quote Hillary Clinton, WHAT DIFFERENCE, AT THIS POINT, DOES IT MAKE?

Mr. Third Chance, David Boren, president of the university, proudly rushed to violate the First Amendment rights of these students. Even observers who condemned Boren’s laughably unconstitutional move felt compelled to vilify the louts.

Protesters have shown up at the kids' homes in Texas to rail against their parents. (As always, I marvel at the protesters' ability to get so much time off of work.)

I don’t remember adults caring this much about what college kids said when we were trying to get their attention with pompous editorials, manifestos and lists of demands. This wasn’t a college thesis – and even a college thesis wouldn’t be worth so much national angst. This was drunk college kids singing on a bus.

Is this the kind of society we want to live in, where a student can record his intoxicated friends singing a nasty song, and the whole country applauds the Nazi block-watcher and joins in the denunciation of his marks?

Liberals were hopping mad about Linda Tripp secretly recording Monica Lewinsky, but at least she was exposing the wildly felonious obstruction of justice by the president of the United States in a sex discrimination case. She wasn’t recording Monica to prove the president had used a bad word.

But no one objects to the aspiring Stasi member recording his friends' drunken song, then broadcasting it to the world, allowing us a joyous round of universal condemnation.

Instead of judging society by the inebriated songs of 19- and 20-year olds, perhaps we should judge it by how cultural and political elites treat their young people.

SOURCE

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Finally, A Bank Stands Up To Obama's Shakedown

After 16 banks caved in to White House demands to refund billions in losses to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, one outlier remains unrepentant. Nomura Holdings refuses to succumb to the political shakedown.

The Japanese bank's U.S. unit won't give in to the extortionist regulators protecting Fannie and Freddie who claim it hoodwinked the toxic twins into buying pools of subprime mortgages, like it claimed Bank of America, JPMorgan and other U.S. banks did in the run-up to the mortgage crisis.

The government demands $1 billion in damages. Nomura says it won't give a dime toward the $18 billion ransom the feds already have shaken out of other banks who settled with the Federal Housing Finance Agency. Instead, it will make government prove it in court.

In opening arguments this week, the defendants argued Fannie and Freddie bought the mortgages knowing they were subprime and did so to meet "affordable housing" quotas of their political masters at HUD.

Unfortunately for Nomura, the game is rigged. The federal judge hearing the case — Clinton appointee Denise Cote — is a ringer for the administration.

In recent filings, Cote has shown extreme prejudice in her decisions — virtually all rendered against Nomura.

Even though she concedes that, in buying subprime securities from Nomura, "Freddie Mac considered the extent to which the underlying mortgage loans satisfied these housing goals," Cote claims such evidence is "immaterial" to the case. She argues the regulatory mandates, purchasing quotas and other political pressures heaped on Fannie and Freddie were merely "idiosyncratic" and therefore irrelevant.

Please. The HUD goals are highly relevant to this case. Internal documents from both HUD and Fannie and Freddie show the goals were driving them deeper into the subprime securities market and both complained about a growing risk of losses. So clearly, they understood the risks. There was no "misrepresentation."

And if they failed to perform the proper due diligence, it's because it wouldn't have mattered — they had to buy risky subprime securities to meet HUD quotas for loans to low-income borrowers with bad credit. They were culpable in the recklessness, and therefore culpable in the losses they suffered when those loans defaulted. Nomura shouldn't be on the hook for those losses.

In its defense, Nomura plans to call former Fannie and Freddie officials, including former Fannie CEO Daniel Mudd, to testify about how it was Fannie and Freddie who on orders from HUD lowered underwriting standards, not Nomura.

SOURCE

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Guess What Canada’s Oh-So-Wonderful Single-Payer System Doesn’t Cover?

Canadian Alheli Picazo is a writer and former elite gymnast who has suffered from a severe digestive tract problem. Her condition caused her to suffer “from severe acid reflux. This wore down the enamel of her teeth and caused the equivalent of osteoporosis in her oral cavity.

The 30-year-old needs urgent oral surgeries, including bone and tissue grafts, to remove and replace what she described painfully as ‘the increasingly diseased bone.’”  Unfortunately, “Picazo has to wait until she can amass the $100,000 needed to pay for the procedures” because Canada’s system does not cover dental care.

The article, which appeared in Vox, noted that “This is similar to a gap in Obamacare: health plans on the exchange aren’t required to offer dental coverage.”  Guess what? There is another plan in the U.S. that doesn’t cover dental care.  Here’s a hint: it’s the program that activists point to when they want to promote single-payer here in America.

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 and each day I gather together my most substantial current writings on A WESTERN HEART.

List of backup or "mirror" sites here or  here -- for when blogspot is "down" or failing to  update.  Email me  here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or  here (Pictorial) or  here  (Personal)

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A very good sign

Google have put some sort of caution on access to A WESTERN HEART.   It must be causing heartburn where I want it to cause heartburn!

Fun!

JR

A problem vocabulary -- and a partial solution

Many stages in my life have added to my vocabulary.  I was born into an Australian working class home so I speak the vivid Australian slanguage with joy -- but I don't usually write it.

And I am basically a literary type so I know the difference between a dactylic and an anapaestic rhythm.  And neither "eleemosynary" nor "emoluments" are mystery words to me

And I have studied 3 languages so have many words from them in my brain. For instance, I can use Volk and Reich with accuracy and sometimes use words of Latin origin in their Latin meaning.  And a lot of people don't like the ungracious English name "Eggplant" for a rather desirable fruit so call it by the French name instead:  "Aubergine".  But I don't like much about the French but do rather like Italians.  The vastly "incorrect" Silvio Berlusconi is something of a hero of mine.  So I call the vegetable "Melanzane", which is both the Italian word and a version of its botanical name (Solanum melongena).

My odd food words mostly oppress Anne, the lady in my life.  But she has got used to them and even makes her own Liptauer these days -- and has even tried to make cevapi. But she and I share similar geographical and social  origins so I can talk to her in broad Australian -- which is pleasing to us both. When I call someone a "galah" or a "drongo" she knows what I mean.

And my early very intensive studies of the Bible have left me with an extensive knowledge and appreciation of the wonderful words and phrases of the King James Bible, plus a knowledge of theology and textual criticism.  So I know what Masoretic and paraclete means.

And at university I did some studies in linguistics and came out of that with an appreciation of both Old English and Middle English.  So I occasionally use constructions from those sources.  One of my favourite proverbs in fact uses Middle English:  "If ifs and ans were pots and pans, there'd be no room for tinkers" ("an" means "if" in Middle English).  And I am prone to reciting Chaucer in the original Middle English.

And my doctorate in the social sciences has left me with a useful statistics vocabulary -- so I am inclined to talk about "orthogonal" factors and "leptokurtic" curves, for instance.

So with that wonderful treasure of words available to me, I am inclined to use it, where appropriate. The big problem with that, however, is that if I used my vocabulary as I am inclined to do, I would render a lot of what I write barely intelligible a lot of the time.  Most people have backgrounds quite different from mine.

So what I have long done is to write something out fairly spontaneously and then go back through it replacing the uncommon  words with simple words of mainly Anglo-Saxon origin.  And I am pleased to say that such simplification often clarifies my thought and rarely obscures it.

But I am getting old and no longer have the time and energy I once did so lately I have tended on some occasions to let my original words stand rather than revise them.  And that will probably get gradually worse as time goes by.

So this is just an apology if what I write is not immediately clear.  I am however consoled by the thought that everybody has Wikipedia and various online dictionaries at their fingertips these days so can clarify any obscure words with considerable celerity (Latin: "celer" = "quick").

Just for fun, here are a few odd words I have been using lately -- either in writing or in speech:  narthex, vietato, endorheic, spinto, exegesis, rhotic.

Another small matter:  Most of what I put up on my various blogs is articles from others that say something I like.  Most days however I also write my own comments on some subject.  It is unpredictable on which blog I will burst into prose, however, so lately I have been putting up on A WESTERN HEART the stuff that I have currently been writing -- regardless of which blog was its originally intended home. So if you want to see what I personally have been writing lately, you only have to go to one place.

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Another exoneration for aspartame

The bad effects were found to be all in the mind of the food-freaks concerned.  I had a considerable correspondence once with the anti-aspartame brigade and they were definitely a kooky lot

Aspartame, the controversial sweetener linked to a range of health problems, does not cause harm.

A study commissioned by Britain’s food watchdog found eating the sweetener had no impact on the body or behaviour of people who claimed to be sensitive to it.

The artificial sweetener, used in fizzy drinks and diet products, has been at the centre of critical reports dating back decades linking it to everything from cancer to premature birth.

Despite this, it has been ruled a safe food ingredient by food watchdogs in Britain, the EU, the USA and around the world.

These assurances have failed to convince many people, who continue to report adverse reactions, such as headaches and nausea after consuming foods containing the sweetener.

As a result, the Food Standards Agency (FSA) commissioned experts from Hull York Medical School to examine people who reported just such problems to establish if their fears were backed up by medical evidence.

The trial involved 48 people who self-reported as being sensitive to aspartame and another 48 control participants who have never had any problem.

All received two specially prepared cereal bars, one of which contained aspartame, on two separate sessions at least one week apart.

The human guinea pigs were put through a series of biological and psychological tests, which included taking blood and urine samples.

Participants rated a range of 14 symptoms over four hours after eating the bars, including headache, mood swings, hot or flushed sensation, nausea, tiredness, dizziness, nasal congestion, visual problems, tingling, bloating, hunger and thirst.

Participants were also asked to rate levels of happiness and arousal, which are the two main dimensions of their mood.

Today, the FSA said: ‘The study concluded that the participants who were self-diagnosed as sensitive to aspartame showed no difference in their response after consuming a cereal bar, whether it contained aspartame or not.’

The experts who carried out the research suggested those people who were self-reported aspartame sensitive (SRAS) tended to be more emotional.

SOURCE

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Ruinous 'Compassion'

It is fascinating to see brilliant people belatedly discover the obvious – and to see an even larger number of brilliant people never discover the obvious.

A recent story in a San Francisco newspaper says that some restaurants and grocery stores in Oakland’s Chinatown have closed after the city’s minimum wage was raised. Other small businesses there are not sure they are going to survive, since many depend on a thin profit margin and a high volume of sales.

At an angry meeting between local small business owners and city officials, the local organization that had campaigned for the higher minimum wage was absent. They were probably some place congratulating themselves on having passed a humane “living wage” law. The group most affected was also absent – inexperienced and unskilled young people, who need a job to get some experience, even more than they need the money.

It is not a breakthrough on the frontiers of knowledge that minimum wage laws reduce employment opportunities for the young and the unskilled of any age. It has been happening around the world, for generation after generation, and in the most diverse countries.

It is not just the young who are affected when minimum wage rates are set according to the fashionable notions of third parties, with little or no regard for whether everyone is productive enough to be worth paying the minimum wage they set.

You can check this out for yourself. Go to your local public library and pick up a copy of the distinguished British magazine “The Economist.”

Whether it is the current issue or a back issue doesn’t matter. Spain, Greece and South Africa will be easy to locate in the table near the back, which lists data for various countries. Just look down the unemployment column for countries with unemployment rates around 25 percent. Spain, Greece and South Africa are always there, whether or not there is a recession. Why? Because they have very generous minimum wage laws.

While you are there, you can look up the unemployment rate for Switzerland, which has no minimum wage law at all. Over the years, I have never seen the unemployment rate in Switzerland reach as high as 4 percent. Back in 2003, “The Economist” magazine reported: “Switzerland’s unemployment neared a five-year high of 3.9% in February.”

In the United States, back in what liberals think of as the bad old days before there was a federal minimum wage law, the annual unemployment rate during Calvin Coolidge’s last four years as president ranged from a high of 4.2 percent to a low of 1.8 percent.

Low-income minorities are often hardest hit by the unemployment that follows in the wake of minimum wage laws. The last year when the black unemployment rate was lower than the white unemployment rate was 1930, the last year before there was a federal minimum wage law.

The following year, the Davis-Bacon Act of 1931 was passed, requiring minimum wages in the construction industry. This was in response to complaints that construction companies with non-union black construction workers were able to underbid construction companies with unionized white workers (whose unions would not admit blacks).

Looking back over my own life, I realize now how lucky I was when I left home in 1948, at the age of 17, to become self-supporting. The unemployment rate for 16- and 17-year-old blacks at that time was under 10 percent. Inflation had made the minimum wage law, passed ten years earlier, irrelevant.

But it was only a matter of time before liberal compassion led to repeated increases in the minimum wage, to keep up with inflation. The annual unemployment rate for black teenagers has never been less than 20 percent in the past 50 years, and has ranged as high as over 50 percent.

You can check these numbers in a table of official government statistics on page 42 of Professor Walter Williams' book “Race and Economics.”

Incidentally, the black-white gap in unemployment rates for 16-year-olds and 17-year-olds was virtually non-existent back in 1948. But the black teenage unemployment rate has been more than double that for white teenagers for every year since 1971.

This is just one of many policies that allow liberals to go around feeling good about themselves, while leaving havoc in their wake.

SOURCE

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Minimum wage folly in Britain too

We’ve the sad news that the minimum wage is being raised yet again: "The national minimum wage will increase by 20p an hour to £6.70 from October, the government has announced. The changes will benefit more than 1.4 million workers."

And will disbenefit some unknown number of workers who will lose their jobs. True, a modest rise will leave only a modest number losing their jobs but as they therefore lose 100% of their income that’s still quite a large effect. However, we also have another report today:

"The number of young people from ethnic minority backgrounds who have been unemployed for more than a year has risen by almost 50% since the coalition came to power, according to figures released by the Labour party. There are now 41,000 16- to 24-year-olds from black, asian and minority ethnic [BAME] communities who are long-term unemployed – a 49% rise from 2010, according to an analysis of official figures by the House of Commons Library."

The effects of a minimum wage will be hardest felt where that minimum wage actually binds. Among the young and untrained and among those who are unfavoured for any other reason (like, here, perhaps ethnicity for all that we would desire that there is no such discrimination). Which make this news about the new minimum wage even worse:

The hourly rate for younger workers will also rise, and for apprentices it will go up by 20% – or 57p – to £3.30 an hour.
Yes, of course the correct minimum wage is a rate of zero. But we’re unlikely to win that argument but at least we can argue for a rate that doesn’t do so much damn damage to the least favoured portions of our society. The minimum wage discriminates against those black, asian and minority ethnic youths. Indeed, such discrimination was a stated reason for the introduction of the minimum wage in the United States back in the times of Jim Crow. It’s actually a racist government policy. We should therefore end it.

Every time the NMW increases, another rung is cut from the bottom of the societal ladder leaving more people out in the cold.

SOURCE

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Twenty Blacks Victimized in Shootings

You’ve probably heard about the 20 black victims in numerous shootings between Sunday afternoon and Monday morning. The violence helped propagate the “hands up, don’t shoot” narrative and further riled Barack Obama, Eric Holder and their co-conspirators in the Leftmedia, all of whom raised alarm over the recent deaths of blacks involving white police officers.

Well, the first part is true anyway – though you’d be forgiven for having no idea what we’re talking about. The shootings, all of which took place during a 24-hour period, bloodied the streets of Chicago but were largely absent from the headlines.

Obama hasn’t said a word about these deaths, probably because it was black-on-black crime, which doesn’t translate into political constituency race-bait like a good cop killing a street thug does.

Here’s what we know about Chicago murder rates from the latest year of data: The black murder rate was approximately 34 per 100,000, the Hispanic rate was 11 per 100,000, and the white rate 3 per 100,000. Translation: This isn’t a “gun problem”; it’s a young black male problem. And it’s a cultural epidemic the mainstream media largely ignores.

Of course, if this recent black-on-black bloodletting had instead been white-on-black crime, Al Sharpton and Co. would be there faster than you can say “Racist!”

More HERE

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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 and each day I gather together my most substantial current writings on A WESTERN HEART.

List of backup or "mirror" sites here or  here -- for when blogspot is "down" or failing to  update.  Email me  here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or  here (Pictorial) or  here  (Personal)

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The disgusting Leftist media again -- campaigning hard against the Prime Minister of Israel  -- but Bibi had the last laugh

MSNBC Denounces Netanyahu as a 'Panicking' 'Racist'



Reporting live from Tel Aviv and campaigning hard against the re-election of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on her MSNBC show on Tuesday, host Andrea Mitchell invited on one guest after another to denounce the Likud party leader.

Turning to New York Times Tel Aviv bureau chief Jodi Rudoren, Mitchell declared of Netanyahu: "He's clearly fearing that this center-left coalition and the prominence of, for the first time, a united Arab voting policy, Arab-Israelis who can vote, might make a difference."

Rudoren replied: "This morning he posted on his Facebook a video saying that Arabs were flocking to the polls and he called on right-wing supporters to come out and block them. And the left came and said that that was a racist remark, sort of comparing it to suppressing African-American votes in the United States. So it's been a very provocative and ugly last few days..."

Moments later, Mitchell spoke to former Congresswoman and president of the liberal Wilson Center Jane Harman:

Let's talk about what Netanyahu has done in the last forty-eight hours, which is to reverse decades and decades of U.S./Israeli policy, which is negotiations towards a two-state solution. A Palestinian homeland and of course Israel. And by reversing that, if he sticks – let's say he wins – and he sticks with his commitments of the last forty-eight hours, there'll be hell to pay.

Harman said of the Jewish leader: "I would call it a Hail Mary pass."

In a separate segment later on the program, Mitchell brought on former Israeli General Danny Yatom and touted his opposition to Netanayhu: "You are one of more than a hundred retired generals who came out against Netanyahu because you don't think that his positions are good for security....You just said to me he's panicking."

Yatom argued: "Yes, it looks to me that he feels as if the polls that were published until two days ago are real, realistic, and that he's going to lose....So it looks as if I don't have any other explanation but to say that probably he's caught in panic."

Mitchell then teed up James Zogby, president of the Arab-American Institute: "I know that you've been a long proponent of having a two-state solution....What is going to be the reaction in the Palestinian community – let's say that Netanyahu is elected or is in part of a unity government, a coalition government – to the end of any hope of having their own state?"  Zogby ranted:

"In the animal kingdom there's nothing more dangerous than a panicked politician and Netanyahu is panicking. And so he's scaring people about foreign conspiracies, about security threats, and about the Arabs. And if you take his words about the Arab vote and translate it into American politics and call it "the black vote," you see how racist this is. And it's – it's, I think, a very difficult problem right now for Israel is to deal with this bigotry towards the Arab population, which is just 20% of the country"

SOURCE


Not a quote but maybe a thought

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The courts will again strike down attempts by the FCC to regulate the internet

It's just another attempt by the Obama administration to do an end-run around Congress

This FCC Title II legal case and process is an obvious mess. It is the functional legal equivalent of a parent getting caught doing something wrong and then scolding an inquisitive child with “because I say so” answers — over and over again.

In a nutshell, the FCC’s core purpose for asserting Title II authority is to permanently ban any price/compensation for edge downstream Internet service, which is illegally confiscatory. And the FCC’s Title II legal case is built upon de facto claims of legal immunity to disregard due process, the law, facts, definitions, precedents, fair notice, reliance interests and proportionality.

Simply the FCC seeks an illegal end via multiple illegal means, and serial sweeping “Chevron Deference” to evade legal and constitutional accountability. Multiple wrongs do not make a right.

The rest of this analysis will answer three questions central to anticipating the likely legal outcome of the FCC’s assertion of Title II authority. How could this FCC legal charade happen? Why is the FCC’s core purpose illegal? And what are the FCC’s Title II serial ends-justify-the-means violations of due process?

How could this FCC legal charade happen?

This is actually not the third, but the FCC’s fourth proposed legal theory to assert direct authority to regulate the Internet. The first three cases, by three different FCC Chairman and their General Counsels — Martin in 2008, Genachowski in 2010, and Wheeler initially in early 2014 — all decided that Title II reclassification was not likely a legally sustainable source of FCC authority.

The first two legal cases failed in court, Chairman Martin’s in Comcast v. FCC in 2010, and Chairman Genachowski’s in Verizon v. FCC in 2014.

Many forget that the third proposed FCC legal case was Chairman Wheeler’s in February of last year.

In response to the FCC’s loss in Verizon v. FCC, FCC Chairman Wheeler stated February 19, 2014 that the FCC would not appeal and would accept the Court’s “invitation by proposing rules that will meet the court’s test for preventing improper blocking of and discrimination among Internet traffic…” under Section 706 of the Telecommunications Act of 1996.

Thus Chairman Tom Wheeler and his General Counsel Jonathan Sallet originally did not believe that Title II reclassification was a legally sustainable legal alternative to solve the FCC’s net neutrality legal authority problem. In late April 2014, FCC Chairman Wheeler continued to reject Title II reclassification as a source of FCC legal authority in his proposed draft NPRM for his fellow commissioners’ review.

However, after a widely-reported lobbying campaign for Title II reclassification of broadband, the FCC passed an NPRM 3-2 in May 2014, which included consideration of Title II reclassification as a potential source of FCC legal authority.

In a November 2014 public call for FCC regulation of the Internet as a utility, President Obama publicly and specifically urged: “I believe the FCC should reclassify consumer broadband service under Title II of the Telecommunications Act,” which is exactly what the FCC majority dutifully voted to do February 26th.

Simply, the FCC decided to reclassify the Internet as “telecommunications” not based on its independent, objective, expert legal opinion, but based on outside political pressure.

Here is the crux of my 90% confidence that the FCC’s legal case will crumble under scrutiny in court.

The FCC’s decision to reclassify is wholly predicated on the FCC political imperative (or “end”) to find some new assertable FCC legal authority to ban paid prioritization or fast-lanes (i.e. economically impose a permanent “price of zero” for edge downstream traffic without cost recovery). That’s because Verizon v. FCC (page 60) ruled that the FCC did not have authority under Section 706 “to impose per se common carrier obligations.”

Political pressure to turn currently-illegal zero-price regulation into legal anti-discrimination regulation without the involvement of Congress or new legislation, created immense political pressure for FCC lawyers to justify using most any “means” necessary to justify the desired political “end.”

Thus whenever the FCC encounters a fact, definition, precedent, law or constitutional principle that contradicts or thwarts the FCC’s desired end, the FCC serially dismisses them with claims of agency discretion allowed by various court precedents.

However, the FCC’s expectation of deference in this case is so cumulatively serial and sweeping — in reversing a plethora of legally-settled findings of fact, definitions, precedent, law and constitutional interpretation — that a court could ask sarcastically what role the FCC believes remains for the Judicial Branch to adjudicate?

Much more HERE  (See the original for links)

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Obamacare’s Second Open Season: Average Premium Up 23 Percent – After Subsidies

With enrollment data through February 22, the administration finally declared Obamacare’s second enrollment season closed and released its report on the results. (Although, people who have to pay Obamacare’s mandate/penalty/fine/tax as a result of information disclosed in their 2014 tax returns will have a special open enrollment in April).

Obamacare’s supporters cheered that enrollment hit 11.7 million people, exceeding the low-ball estimate of 9.1 million the administration made last November. Lost in the enthusiasm for Obamacare’s new high-water mark are a few uncomfortable facts.

First, the average premium — net of subsidies — has jumped 23 percent from 2014. In both years, insurers covering almost nine in ten Obamacare subscribers received subsidies to reduce premiums. The average monthly premium, before insurers receive subsidies, across all “metal” plans, is $364 in 2015. The average subsidy is $263, resulting in a net premium of $101 (Table 6). In 2014, the administration reported an average premium of $346, less an average tax credit of $264, for a net premium of $82 (Table 2). Therefore, the gross premium increased 5 percent but the subsidy declined by a scratch. Due to the power of leverage, this resulted in subscribers seeing an average premium jump of 23 percent.

Second, Obamacare continues to “churn” peoples’ insurance coverage. Like last year, we can expect a significant share of this year’s 11.7 million enrollees will never pay a premium, often because they will receive employer-based coverage if they move up in the world, or fall into Medicaid dependency if they drop.

For the states using healthcare.gov, only 4.2 million of the 8.8 million 2015 enrollees were enrolled at the end of 2014. After Obamacare’s first open season closed, the administration reported that 5.4 million of the 8.1 million enrollees had signed up through healthcare.gov (Table 1). (That figure was later revealed as somewhat contaminated by the inclusion of standalone dental plans.).

So, over one fifth of those who were enrolled by April 2014 had vanished from Obamacare by February 2015. Maybe some of them did re-enroll for 2015: Someone could have signed up in April 2014, dropped out during 2014 and signed up again this time around. This fragmentation of coverage in working and lower middle-class households is surely frustrating to them and harms the quality of care.

Third, a loss for the administration in the Supreme Court’s King vs. Burwell lawsuit will deal a mortal blow to Obamacare. This is the lawsuit asserting what the Administration is paying out of subsidies to insurers in state-based exchanges is illegal. Of the 11.7 million new enrollees, 8.8 million enrolled through healthcare.gov and only 2.8 million through state exchanges. The Supreme Court is expected to make a decision by July. If the administration loses, three quarters of Obamacare beneficiaries will be in states in which insurers lose their subsidies. To resolve the resulting inequity between states, Congress will have to respond with amendments to the Affordable Care Act that President Obama will sign.

Third, Obamacare subscribers are less satisfied with their plans than beneficiaries of other government or private health plans are:

The 29 percent of re-enrollees who switched plans is higher than that seen in other programs. For example, studies show approximately 13 percent of Medicare Part D enrollees change plans in a given year; 12 percent of those active employees with Federal Employee Health Benefit Plan coverage switch plans each year and only about 7.5 percent of those with employer sponsored coverage switch plans for reasons other than a job change during a given year. (p. 6)

Fourth, both the Obamacare subsidies and the Affordable Care Act’s big increase in Medicaid spending are higher than necessary to get people covered. Although the average net premium jumped 23 percent, subscribers were nevertheless willing to pay up for a higher level of coverage. While 77 percent of the 7.65 million subsidized subscribers who used healthcare.gov could have bought plans for less than $50, only 38 percent did. While 89 percent could have bought plans for less than $100, only 63 percent did (Table 7). Obamacare subscribers have enough discretionary income to pay for health insurance and need not be so dependent on taxpayers.

This is strikingly apparent among low-income households, which are eligible for Medicaid in states that chose to expand that type of welfare. (Medicaid is a joint state-federal welfare program that provides health coverage.) Table 5 (page 14) shows the income distribution of households enrolling in Obamacare, broken down into states that did or did not expand Medicaid.HA

Two cells are highlighted: Households between 100 percent and 150 percent of the Federal Poverty Level (FPL) in states that expanded Medicaid dependency, and those that did not. Many of the latter would be in Medicaid if their states had expanded the program. In such states, only 47 percent of Obamacare enrollees are within this income range, versus only 22 percent in states that expanded Medicaid. This indicates that Medicaid expansion has trapped people into complete government dependency for health care, who would be able to buy private health insurance with some government subsidy.

Despite a successful headline number of subscribers, Obamacare is still deeply flawed.

SOURCE (See the original for links and graphics)

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Seattle Eateries Are Dying and Minimum Wage Killed Them

It’s just going to be that much harder to get some authentic Seattle salmon. Due to the city’s minimum wage hike that’s set to slam the city April 1 (April Fools!), Seattle restaurants are closing because they can’t pay workers the $15 an hour minimum wage.

Seattle Magazine reports, “Washington Restaurant Association’s [Anthony] Anton puts it this way: ‘It’s not a political problem; it’s a math problem.’ He estimates that a common budget breakdown among sustaining Seattle restaurants so far has been the following: 36 percent of funds are devoted to labor, 30 percent to food costs and 30 percent go to everything else (all other operational costs). The remaining 4 percent has been the profit margin, and as a result, in a $700,000 restaurant, he estimates that the average restaurateur in Seattle has been making $28,000 a year.”

While restaurants are not the economic lifeblood of any city, a city without good food is tasteless. This is a tangible example of what’s happening to Seattle’s economy with a government-mandated wage.

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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Congratulations to Israel's Prime Minister Netanyahu

He has been returned to office with an increased plurality for his Likud party and should have little trouble (by Israeli standards) in forming a new governing coalition

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Breastfeeding and IQ

There is an elegantly done study just out in Lancet Which shows that, among Brazilians, children who were breastfed for some time grew up to have slightly higher IQs.  The study title is "Association between breastfeeding and intelligence, educational attainment, and income at 30 years of age: a prospective birth cohort study from Brazil".

I really hate to demolish such extensive and careful work but the study has a fatal flaw:  Maternal IQ was not measured.  And, surprising though it may seem IQ is hugely important to breastfeeding. High IQ mothers breastfeed a lot more.  And IQ is of course mainly genetically transmitted.  So all that the study really shows is that high IQ mothers have high IQ children, which is no news at all.

In the statistics section of the paper I was delighted to come  across a word that I had forgotten I knew:  "Heteroscedasticity".  I must use it sometime.

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Western civilisation at stake amid growing threats

By Greg Sheridan, writing from Australia

WESTERN civilisation is in the midst of a profound crisis. Let me tell you how I get to that ­conclusion.

The most difficult task in any serious strategic analysis is to integrate factors from wholly different spheres of activity and to see how they play on each other. A failure to recognise the depth of the old Soviet Union’s economic crisis, for example, led many traditional Western strategic analysts, accustomed to measuring Soviet arsenals against US arsenals, to miss altogether the impending collapse of the entire Soviet system.

Today, the West, of which Australia is manifestly part, is beset by intractable, diverse challenges, each one of which could provide existential threat. It is solving none of them at the moment. Each threat multiplies the force of the others. Taken together, they constitute a long, systemic crisis. The West might solve these problems. But it might not, too.

First, Islamist terrorism. There are three ways this can be an existential threat. Terrorists could get material for a mass destruction attack, either a nuclear weapon or, much likelier, a radiation weapon, a dirty bomb. So far this hasn’t happened. But a strategic threat is not the common law. It’s not governed by precedent. A lot of determined and intelligent terrorists want to do this. Their chances increase radically when terrorists control the mechanisms of a state, as they do now in parts of Iraq and Syria, and as they did once in Afghanistan. This is one reason ungoverned space is so dangerous.

Second, terrorism could cripple social cohesion in Western societies. It’s impossible to know what social effects a few mass atrocity attacks would have.

Three, terrorists could produce disorder in the Middle East so chronic and widespread that it leads to state-on-state war, pos­sibly involving nuclear weapons.

The West is not winning the war on Islamist terror. Since 9/11 al-Qa’ida has flourished in the Middle East and North Africa. It is now in danger of being supplanted by the even more murderous franchise of Islamic State. Tens, perhaps hundreds, of thousands of young men, including thousands from the West, have rallied to these banners.

The second big external threat to the West is the rise of new powers, or old powers newly emboldened, taking advantage of the weak and feckless leadership provided by Barack Obama. The US President is the de facto head of Western civilisation. Not since Jimmy Carter has there been a leader of such little strategic consequence. He is a President of fine words and strategic failure.

Russia is conquering slices of territory from its neighbours. There is no knowing what is the end of Vladimir Putin’s ambition. Reducing his “near abroad” to strategic subservience to Moscow is part of it. China is constructing military installations in disputed territories in the South China Sea hundreds of kilometres from the Chinese mainland.

Both Moscow and Beijing, and others, are testing not only American resolve but the whole efficacy of the US alliance system. China and Russia, and most nations in Asia, are ramping up military spending. In so far as there has been any principle of international security order since World War II, it has been the US alliance system.

Although the US is the leader of this system and does most of the heavy lifting, the power of its allies feeds into and magnifies US strategic power. If the US loses credibility the system becomes hollow.

The third big external threat is nuclear proliferation. There is no plausible economic justification for Iran’s big nuclear industry. Its true purpose is to acquire nuclear weapons, or the ability rapidly to produce nuclear weapons. It is about to secure relief from sanctions, already greatly watered down, in a deal with the US that will allow it to keep its nuclear establishment. Iran will get nuclear weapons in due course. Almost nothing is surer. Saudi Arabia has arrangements with Pakistan to follow suit when that happens. The governments of Egypt and some of the Gulf states will then face their own existential questions, especially if they feel they can no longer rely on the US.

Almost all the nuclear powers except the US are increasing the number of their nuclear warheads. The more these weapons proliferate, the greater the chance of their eventual use.

The fourth big external threat is the democratisation of destructive technology (beyond nuclear technology). The digital economy and all its associated inventions are a wonderful boon for humanity, not least in their applications to human health. But the power to use this technology destructively is also rising. The computing power of every smartphone in everybody’s pocket is greater than all the computing effort deployed to put a man on the moon in 1969. The most destructive people in our society so far have not been techno geniuses. But you wouldn’t need very many before terrorism and other antisocial movements switch to massive infrastructure disruption.

At the military level, asymmetry is the new reality, the power of numerically small and financially weak players to wreak enormous strategic damage. Size and money, which have traditionally helped the West, will be less decisive than they used to be, and are in any event moving against the West.

Then there are a series of internal factors that are hurting the West and its prospects. Western economies have recovered from the global financial crisis to some extent but they are not the primary sources of global economic growth. More than that, throughout the West there is an interlinked crisis of governance, budgets and social and economic sustainability.

In governance, the West is a terrible mess. Look at Europe, now a byword for chronic misgovernance and an inability to come to grips with the limitations of budgets and the excess of entitlements. Europe is one of the wealthiest regions of the planet, but its system cannot provide work for huge portions of its young ­people and cannot meaningfully integrate a large minority of immigrants. And it cannot match expenditure to income.

The US has a milder version of the same syndrome. Australia is running through prime ministers at a rate that would make postwar Italy proud.

Finally, there is this question: how long can the West live off the moral capital of religious conviction that it is now abandoning? The West is the only part of humanity abandoning religious belief. Can societies in which there is no overarching idea beyond the individual compete successfully in the long run?

Temperamentally, I’m an optimist. But no one should doubt a civilisational crisis exists.

SOURCE

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How One Man Turned Americans Against Government

Gallup conducted a poll of 1,025 Americans March 5-8 that captured the nation’s growing disgust with the federal government. But the Leftmedia stopped one question short of finding the real reason for this discontent.

“Dissatisfaction with government” now beats out concerns of the economy, terrorism, illegal immigration and unemployment, despite the direct influence of these pocketbook and kitchen-table issues. Don’t underappreciate these rankings. Survey participants most frequently respond to questions through the prism of, “I’m concerned because this issue impacts me directly.”

So why, Mr. or Mrs. American, do you have this increasing dissatisfaction with government?

It boils down to one word, and, no, it’s not racism. It’s “Obama.”

When Barack Obama declared with glee that we are “days away from fundamentally transforming the United States of America,” most voters failed to fully realize the magnitude of his plans. Few understood that a community organizer raised on the milk of anger, hate and socialist indoctrination would so quickly shred the Constitution. But our Founders warned of such tyranny.

How many Democrats or even Republicans back in 2008 imagined Obama would so egregiously overstep the jurisdiction of the executive branch through ObamaCare’s implementation and effective amnesty? Or that today he would be on the verge of a nuclear agreement with Iran, giving the world’s leading terrorist sponsor much of what it wants?

Have you ever dined at a restaurant described as some delightful experience or marketed to fulfill your culinary dreams only to leave with an excessive tab, disastrous service and a meal you could’ve cooked better at home?

Obama marketed himself with promises of transparency, a government that serves all Americans, and all-around, feel-good “Hope ‘n’ Change™.

Yet after six years, the American people have endured lie after lie. To name but a few:

"If you like your plan, you can keep your plan.”

“I didn’t set a red line on Syria.”

“I didn’t call the Islamic State a ‘JV team.’”

“Republicans have filibustered 500 pieces of legislation.”

“The sequester is not something I’ve proposed.”

“Here’s what happened [at Benghazi]. … You had a video that was released by somebody who lives here, sort of a shadowy character who – who made an extremely offensive video directed at – at Muhammad and Islam.”

And then there was, for example, the political targeting by the IRS and the politicization of the Department of Justice by his criminal co-conspirator, Attorney General Eric Holder.

The distrust that has been sown, watered, fertilized and is now at full harvest is a testament to Obama’s successful “transformation” of America. He has left Americans with buyer’s remorse of monumental proportions. Voters didn’t bargain for this mess – even if some of us tried to warn them.

Democrats were walloped in two straight midterm elections, which served notice to everyone but a petulant Obama that his policies, his tactics and his results were rejected. Those Democrats who remain in elected office either have to distance themselves from the radical in the White House, or they represent districts where voters embrace Obama’s radical policies.

The Obama approach to elections has been to place each voter in some interest group – black, homosexual, pro-abortion, illegal immigrant, etc. – and win by mobilizing those groups nationally. Identity politics worked for Obama but failed most Americans.

If there’s a silver lining, it’s that Chief Radical Obama’s failed policies have resulted in a weak bench of leftist extremists down the ballot. The Republican wave was so thoroughly successful that it wiped out vast numbers of state and local Democrats around the nation, from whom the next generation of the party’s leaders will come. It is by no means a permanent defeat, but it’s most certainly a real setback.

Americans are fed up by government because Obama overpromised and under-delivered. His solution to everything is a government program, and, increasingly, Americans are seeing that as the wrong approach.

Now, imagine a nation led by those who say what they mean, mean what they say, and follow through on principled policy. Americans want that type of government leadership and are waiting, impatiently.

SOURCE

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The apparent insanity of American liberals

Western liberals keep being so “open minded” about Muslims and Islam their brains have now completely fallen out of their heads.  They just don’t seem to get the fact they will be the first casualties of any kind of Islamic take-over anywhere in the world. As for these self-hating Jews that are part of the pseudo-religion movement of the left who continue to condemn Jews, Judaism, and Israel – what do they think would happen to them if any of the Islamic sects took over western cultures?

Since they’re all leftists they hate capitalism and will support any system that attacks the paragon of capitalism and its allies - the United States.

They work unendingly to destroy the system that gave the world the only stable moral foundation in the world. A system based on Judaic/Christian principles, which was the fertilizer for the only economic system the world ever knew that was capable of bringing so many people out of misery squalor, suffering, disease and early death – American capitalism.

They want to “fundamentally” change the only place in the world where they could spout their inflammatory nonsense without being thrown into jail or worse. I know, I know, they could spout their claptrap in many western nations, but does anyone really believe this would be tolerated anywhere else if America’s Constitution system wasn’t such a dominant force in the world? A system they’re trying to overturn.

Historically we know the concepts they believe in, subscribe to - and demand all others believe it - are worldwide failures, whether it involves religion, economics or the environment. These are concepts so stupid only intellectuals could believe in them. Is it any wonder leftism, in all of its manifestations, are the movements so heavily infested with so many intellectuals?

They reject history - they reject all the evidence of their failures and the devastatingly negative outcomes their policies have inflicted on humanity, and continue to passionately and adamantly promote those concepts! We can only conclude one thing by way of explanation.

The left must truly be insane!

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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