Napoleon

Napoleon is something of a puzzle.  Almost every family in France lost a son in his wars -- and for what?  What did France gain for all that blood?  Nothing.  He was as bad for France as Hitler was for Germany.

And yet Napoleon is still a hero in France while Hitler is decried in Germany.  Why?  They both lost so it can't be that.  And there was a lot about Napoleon that one might normally dislike.  He ran a police state, for instance.  Dissent from his rule was swiftly  dealt with.  It was Napoleon who invented Fascism, not Mussolini.  Mussolini just supplied the word for it.  And like later fascists (including Hitler), Napoleon built up a personality cult around himself.  Like later Communist dictators, he also circulated heroic images of himself.



But unlike Hitler, Napoleon was not much of a patriot. Hitler undoubtedly was a fervent German patriot and lover of his people but Napoleon was not.  Largely because he was Corsican and not French, he spoke quite ill of France and the French -- at least in his early days.  He shut up about that later on however.

Arthur Silber has put up some excerpts from the  biography of Napoleon by Paul Johnson that show how very Fascist Napoleon indeed was:

"The [French] Revolution was a lesson in the power of evil to replace idealism, and Bonaparte was its ideal pupil. Moreover, the Revolution left behind itself a huge engine: administrative and legal machinery to repress the individual such as the monarchs of the ancien regime never dreamed of; a centralized power to organize national resources that no previous state had ever possessed; an absolute concentration of authority, first in a parliament, then in a committee, finally in a single tyrant, that had never been known before; and a universal teaching that such concentration expressed the general will of a united people, as laid down in due constitutional form, approved by referendum. 

In effect, then, the Revolution created the modern totalitarian state, in all essentials, if on an experimental basis, more than a century before it came to its full and horrible fruition in the twentieth century."

And another of Bonaparte's policies shows him as a forerunner even in the racist aspects of Fascism:

"In Le Crime de Napoleon the historian Claude Ribbe recalls that the emperor brought back slavery in the French empire in 1802, a decade after it had been abolished by the Revolution. The decision led to brutal fighting in France's Caribbean colonies in which thousands died. Less well known, according to the book, is his imposition of racial laws in metropolitan France, which led to the internment of blacks and the forced break-up of inter-racial marriages".

And Napoleon was as brutal and unscrupulous as any other Far-Leftist (whether Fascist or Communist).  We read:

In 1799 Napoleon was in the Middle east. He took 2,000 prisoners in Gaza. At Jaffa 3,000 defenders surrendered to the French on condition that their lives would be spared.  Once in possession of Jaffa, Napoleon ordered the execution of all the prisoners from Jaffa and most of those from Gaza.  To save bullets and gunpowder, Napoleon ordered his men to bayonet or drown the prisoners. There were reports of soldiers wading out to sea to finish off terrified women and children.

And more from Ribbe:

A French historian has caused uproar by claiming Napoleon provided the model for Hitler's Final Solution with the slaughter of more than 100,000 Caribbean slaves.

In The Crime of Napoleon, Claude Ribbe accuses the emperor of genocide, gassing rebellious blacks more than a century before the Nazis' extermination of the Jews.

His accusations refer to the extreme methods used to put down a ferocious uprising in Haiti at the start of the 19th century. Then known as San Domingo, the colony was considered a jewel of the French empire and to save it troops launched a campaign to kill all blacks aged over 12.

"In simple terms, Napoleon ordered the killing of as many blacks as possible in Haiti and Guadeloupe to be replaced by new, docile slaves from Africa," Ribbe said yesterday.

He said he had found accounts from officers who refused to take part in the massacres, especially the use of sulphur dioxide to kill slaves held in ships' holds.

Since Napoleon is still a French national hero, it is no wonder that the Nazis found it relatively easy to get the French to "collaborate" in World War II.

So what is it, then, that the French still like about Napoleon?  There can be only one answer:  He gave a string of victories to a nation much more accustomed to defeats.  At Crecy, Poitiers and Agincourt the English gave France a hard time in the late medieval era and, much later, even the Sun King could not prevail against the first Duke of Marlborough.  And we won't mention the humiliation at Sedan or Von Manstein's Blitzkrieg. The idolization of Napoleon is then rather pathetic: Clinging to the memory of a very bad man simply because French military victories are so rare.

And was he a military genius?  Not really.  The French revolution had produced a Volksturm (the whole nation at war) long before Hitler thought of it and the enthusiasm of such troops for a while swept all old-fashioned armies before it.  And his disastrous  invasion of Russia was plainly hubris, not genius.  Even his acclaimed victory at Austerlitz was enabled by a very old stratagem.  He secretly  brought up fresh troops overnight so surprised his adversaries next morning.  Using secrecy to surprise your enemy is of course as old as Hannibal at Trasimene and even Hannibal was not the first to think of it.

And his half-day hesitation at Waterloo gave the Prussians time to come up and turn the tide against him.  The military genius in that affair was Gneisenau, the Prussian strategist.

So Napoleon is very much an idol with feet of clay.  The continued high regard for him in France bespeaks a very flawed national morality.  Americans go into spasms of indignation over just a word -- "nigger" -- but to the French a genocidal tyrant is a cool guy.  And they think of themselves as a civilized people!  They have considerable claims of cultural excellence. It's a pity that they can't be satisfied with that

UPDATE:  Some amusing info about Napoleon's personal life here.  And for the French view of Napoleon, see here

**************************

Why Doctors Quit

By Charles Krauthammer

About a decade ago, a doctor friend was lamenting the increasingly frustrating conditions of clinical practice. “How did you know to get out of medicine in 1978?” he asked with a smile.

“I didn’t,” I replied. “I had no idea what was coming. I just felt I’d chosen the wrong vocation.”

I was reminded of this exchange upon receiving my med-school class’s 40th-reunion report and reading some of the entries. In general, my classmates felt fulfilled by family, friends and the considerable achievements of their professional lives. But there was an undercurrent of deep disappointment, almost demoralization, with what medical practice had become.

The complaint was not financial but vocational — an incessant interference with their work, a deep erosion of their autonomy and authority, a transformation from physician to “provider.”

As one of them wrote, “My colleagues who have already left practice all say they still love patient care, being a doctor. They just couldn’t stand everything else.” By which he meant “a never-ending attack on the profession from government, insurance companies, and lawyers … progressively intrusive and usually unproductive rules and regulations,” topped by an electronic health records (EHR) mandate that produces nothing more than “billing and legal documents” — and degraded medicine.

I hear this everywhere. Virtually every doctor and doctors' group I speak to cites the same litany, with particular bitterness about the EHR mandate. As another classmate wrote, “The introduction of the electronic medical record into our office has created so much more need for documentation that I can only see about three-quarters of the patients I could before, and has prompted me to seriously consider leaving for the first time.”

You may have zero sympathy for doctors, but think about the extraordinary loss to society — and maybe to you, one day — of driving away 40 years of irreplaceable clinical experience.

And for what? The newly elected Barack Obama told the nation in 2009 that “it just won’t save billions of dollars” — $77 billion a year, promised the administration — “and thousands of jobs, it will save lives.” He then threw a cool $27 billion at going paperless by 2015.

It’s 2015 and what have we achieved? The $27 billion is gone, of course. The $77 billion in savings became a joke. Indeed, reported the Health and Human Services inspector general in 2014, “EHR technology can make it easier to commit fraud,” as in Medicare fraud, the copy-and-paste function allowing the instant filling of vast data fields, facilitating billing inflation.

That’s just the beginning of the losses. Consider the myriad small practices that, facing ruinous transition costs in equipment, software, training and time, have closed shop, gone bankrupt or been swallowed by some larger entity.

This hardly stays the long arm of the health care police, however. As of Jan. 1, 2015, if you haven’t gone electronic, your Medicare payments will be cut, by 1 percent this year, rising to 3 percent (potentially 5 percent) in subsequent years.

Then there is the toll on doctors' time and patient care. One study in the American Journal of Emergency Medicine found that emergency-room doctors spend 43 percent of their time entering electronic records information, 28 percent with patients. Another study found that family-practice physicians spend on average 48 minutes a day just entering clinical data.

Forget the numbers. Think just of your own doctor’s visits, of how much less listening, examining, even eye contact goes on, given the need for scrolling, clicking and box checking.

The geniuses who rammed this through undoubtedly thought they were rationalizing health care. After all, banking went electronic. Why not medicine?

Because banks deal with nothing but data. They don’t listen to your heart or examine your groin. Clicking boxes on an endless electronic form turns the patient into a data machine and cancels out the subtlety of a doctor’s unique feel and judgment.

Why did all this happen? Because liberals in a hurry refuse to trust the self-interested wisdom of individual practictioners, who were already adopting EHR on their own, but gradually, organically, as the technology became ripe and the costs tolerable. Instead, Washington picked a date out of a hat and decreed: Digital by 2015.

The results are not pretty. EHR is health care’s Solyndra. Many, no doubt, feasted nicely on the $27 billion, but the rest is waste: money squandered, patient care degraded, good physicians demoralized.

Like my old classmates who signed up for patient care — which they still love — and now do data entry.

SOURCE

******************************

Chartmanship and the jug man

Leftist economist Krugman is well know for being able to find somewhere support for most Leftist causes.  Below we see he uses a well known chartmanship technique: carefully choosing the beginning and endpoints of a series.  You can "prove" almost anything that way. It's a technique much loved by Warmists

Someone sent me an email this evening with some details on the Paul Krugman response to James Montier which I discussed here. I had previously stated that the Krugman response was lacking meat. But it’s actually worse than that. It’s actually highly misleading and appears intentionally so.

In the post Dr. Krugman tries to show how much interest rates matter by comparing the Fed Funds Rate with Housing Starts. He shows a chart and declares that there appears to be a strong correlation. Except, as this emailer notes, he appears to have shifted the chart to make it appear as though there’s a correlation where there isn’t one. Here’s the Krugman chart:



And here’s the version that would have originally shown up when the data is pulled from FRED:



See what was done there? The period in the early 1960’s was removed and so was the period from 2000 on. In other words, out of a 55 year time period Dr. Krugman decided to remove 20 years worth of data because it fit his argument better. For those keeping track that’s removing almost 40% of an entire data set just because the data didn’t fit the narrative. And when you add those years back in you get a result that shows a very weak correlation

I can understand why he might remove the period from 2008 on. But why remove the 1960’s data and the early 2000’s? After all, the 2000’s were the period of Alan Greenspan’s famous “conundrum” where interest rates appeared to have no correlation with the housing market.  That’s not just an important part of this discussion, it’s a critical part given that it includes the housing bubble and is outside of the mythical Liquidity Trap era….

This is why people often complain about economics. When economists take a data set and just blatantly alter it to fit their argument it doesn’t do much to help build credibility for their work. Especially when you do it within a post that basically declares economists are smarter than everyone else who says they might not have the whole world figured out.

SOURCE. ("Krug" is German/Yiddish for "jug")

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

****************************

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)

****************************

Why Doctors Quit

By Charles Krauthammer

About a decade ago, a doctor friend was lamenting the increasingly frustrating conditions of clinical practice. “How did you know to get out of medicine in 1978?” he asked with a smile.

“I didn’t,” I replied. “I had no idea what was coming. I just felt I’d chosen the wrong vocation.”

I was reminded of this exchange upon receiving my med-school class’s 40th-reunion report and reading some of the entries. In general, my classmates felt fulfilled by family, friends and the considerable achievements of their professional lives. But there was an undercurrent of deep disappointment, almost demoralization, with what medical practice had become.

The complaint was not financial but vocational — an incessant interference with their work, a deep erosion of their autonomy and authority, a transformation from physician to “provider.”

As one of them wrote, “My colleagues who have already left practice all say they still love patient care, being a doctor. They just couldn’t stand everything else.” By which he meant “a never-ending attack on the profession from government, insurance companies, and lawyers … progressively intrusive and usually unproductive rules and regulations,” topped by an electronic health records (EHR) mandate that produces nothing more than “billing and legal documents” — and degraded medicine.

I hear this everywhere. Virtually every doctor and doctors' group I speak to cites the same litany, with particular bitterness about the EHR mandate. As another classmate wrote, “The introduction of the electronic medical record into our office has created so much more need for documentation that I can only see about three-quarters of the patients I could before, and has prompted me to seriously consider leaving for the first time.”

You may have zero sympathy for doctors, but think about the extraordinary loss to society — and maybe to you, one day — of driving away 40 years of irreplaceable clinical experience.

And for what? The newly elected Barack Obama told the nation in 2009 that “it just won’t save billions of dollars” — $77 billion a year, promised the administration — “and thousands of jobs, it will save lives.” He then threw a cool $27 billion at going paperless by 2015.

It’s 2015 and what have we achieved? The $27 billion is gone, of course. The $77 billion in savings became a joke. Indeed, reported the Health and Human Services inspector general in 2014, “EHR technology can make it easier to commit fraud,” as in Medicare fraud, the copy-and-paste function allowing the instant filling of vast data fields, facilitating billing inflation.

That’s just the beginning of the losses. Consider the myriad small practices that, facing ruinous transition costs in equipment, software, training and time, have closed shop, gone bankrupt or been swallowed by some larger entity.

This hardly stays the long arm of the health care police, however. As of Jan. 1, 2015, if you haven’t gone electronic, your Medicare payments will be cut, by 1 percent this year, rising to 3 percent (potentially 5 percent) in subsequent years.

Then there is the toll on doctors' time and patient care. One study in the American Journal of Emergency Medicine found that emergency-room doctors spend 43 percent of their time entering electronic records information, 28 percent with patients. Another study found that family-practice physicians spend on average 48 minutes a day just entering clinical data.

Forget the numbers. Think just of your own doctor’s visits, of how much less listening, examining, even eye contact goes on, given the need for scrolling, clicking and box checking.

The geniuses who rammed this through undoubtedly thought they were rationalizing health care. After all, banking went electronic. Why not medicine?

Because banks deal with nothing but data. They don’t listen to your heart or examine your groin. Clicking boxes on an endless electronic form turns the patient into a data machine and cancels out the subtlety of a doctor’s unique feel and judgment.

Why did all this happen? Because liberals in a hurry refuse to trust the self-interested wisdom of individual practictioners, who were already adopting EHR on their own, but gradually, organically, as the technology became ripe and the costs tolerable. Instead, Washington picked a date out of a hat and decreed: Digital by 2015.

The results are not pretty. EHR is health care’s Solyndra. Many, no doubt, feasted nicely on the $27 billion, but the rest is waste: money squandered, patient care degraded, good physicians demoralized.

Like my old classmates who signed up for patient care — which they still love — and now do data entry.

SOURCE

******************************

Chartmanship and the jug man

Leftist economist Krugman is well know for being able to find somewhere support for most Leftist causes.  Below we see he uses a well known chartmanship technique: carefully choosing the beginning and endpoints of a series.  You can "prove" almost anything that way. It's a technique much loved by Warmists

Someone sent me an email this evening with some details on the Paul Krugman response to James Montier which I discussed here. I had previously stated that the Krugman response was lacking meat. But it’s actually worse than that. It’s actually highly misleading and appears intentionally so.

In the post Dr. Krugman tries to show how much interest rates matter by comparing the Fed Funds Rate with Housing Starts. He shows a chart and declares that there appears to be a strong correlation. Except, as this emailer notes, he appears to have shifted the chart to make it appear as though there’s a correlation where there isn’t one. Here’s the Krugman chart:



And here’s the version that would have originally shown up when the data is pulled from FRED:



See what was done there? The period in the early 1960’s was removed and so was the period from 2000 on. In other words, out of a 55 year time period Dr. Krugman decided to remove 20 years worth of data because it fit his argument better. For those keeping track that’s removing almost 40% of an entire data set just because the data didn’t fit the narrative. And when you add those years back in you get a result that shows a very weak correlation

I can understand why he might remove the period from 2008 on. But why remove the 1960’s data and the early 2000’s? After all, the 2000’s were the period of Alan Greenspan’s famous “conundrum” where interest rates appeared to have no correlation with the housing market.  That’s not just an important part of this discussion, it’s a critical part given that it includes the housing bubble and is outside of the mythical Liquidity Trap era….

This is why people often complain about economics. When economists take a data set and just blatantly alter it to fit their argument it doesn’t do much to help build credibility for their work. Especially when you do it within a post that basically declares economists are smarter than everyone else who says they might not have the whole world figured out.

SOURCE. ("Krug" is German/Yiddish for "jug")

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

****************************

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)

****************************

More Wikipedia arrogance -- and Anja Katharina Wigger

As if their political imbalance were not enough, they also seem to have some stuffed-shirt editors.  But let me begin at the beginning:

Frequent readers of this blog will have gathered along the way that I have a lifelong devotion to classical music.  And two thirds of the classical repertoire emanates from the German  lands, mostly Austria.  So the fact that I have some command of German comes in handy. Translations are never as good as the original -- and I have done many translations -- so where dialogue is featured I do have a useful advantage,

In recent times I have been taking a particular interest in Austro-Hungarian operetta.  It was very popular in English-speaking lands around a century ago and still has a substantial following in the German lands. And when I am looking for more information about the singers, I have found Wikipedia to be a generally useful resource.

One singer I particularly like, however, is Anja Katharina Wigger, a most feminine person.  So I was a little peeved that Wikipedia had no entry for her -- despite the fact that she has had a substantial career as a soprano in Germany.



So I resolved to put that right.  I found a site with substantial information about her in German and did an English summary of it.  I put the summary up as Wikipedia article.  But some Wikipedia "editor" named "Jimfbleak", who seems to spend most of his day  deleting Wikipedia contributions, deleted my entry. So there is no Wikipedia entry about Wigger now and no reference-style information about her available to the many people who speak only English.  Quite stupid, I think. The information I  provided would have been helpful to fans of the lady who wished to locate recordings of further performances by her.

I am in a position to make a number of useful contributions to Wikipedia but I will not waste my time doing so whiie the pompopus and hypercritical "Jimfbleak" is around.

Anyway, in the days of the internet nobody has a monopoly on information so I am putting my "Wikipedia" entry up below.  Let anybody interested judge whether it is a good basic reference entry for a singer or not:

Anja-Katharina Wigger - Soprano

Born in Hamburg, Wigger first came to widespread attention for her role as Ottilie in the 2008 Moerbisch performance of  "Im Weißen Rössl", with notable performances of  "Die ganze Welt ist himmelblau"  and "Mein Liebeslied muss ein Walzer sein".  She portrayed there an ultra-feminine lady.

She did her initial singing studies in Hamburg but later moved to Munich to study under KS Ingeborg Hallstein.

Some other roles she has played include  Konstanze in Die Entführung aus dem Serail, Königin der Nacht in "Die Zauberflöte", Micaela in "Carmen", Baronin Freimann inDer Wildschütz", Rosalinde in "Die Fledermaus", Sylva Varescu in "Die Csárdásfürstin", Hanna Glawariin "Die lustige Witwe", Laura in"Der Bettelstudent", Evelyne Valera in "Maske in Blau", Julia in "Vetter aus Dingsda",  Regine in "Hochzeitsnacht im Paradies" und die Kurfürstin Marie in "Der Vogelhändler".

She has had other stage appearances at: Mainfranken Theater Würzburg,   Pfalztheater Kaiserslautern,  Theater Görlitz,  Stadttheater Passau,  Operetten-Theater Hannover,  Kornmarkttheater Bregenz,   Schlossgartenfestspiele Neustrelitz and  Freilichtspiele Tecklenburg and Prager Staatsoper.

She is also an active concert singer.

Acknowledgement:  http://www.agentur-wiemer.de/wigger.html

A video excerpt of her here.  Watch and I suspect that you will agree that she is gorgeous.

***************************


Where is the left on corporate bailouts?

Conservatives have been leading the charge to end an outdated corporate welfare program. The question everyone should be asking is: where have all the anti-corporation liberals gone?

We’re always told that Republicans are the Party of Big Business, forever eager to sell out ordinary middle-class families to the interests of megacorporations run by billionaire tycoons. And most people still believe it. But when it comes to ending actual corporate welfare, a lot of Democrats are mysteriously silent. Exhibit A: the U.S. Export-Import Bank.

The Ex-Im Bank is an 80-year-old, $2-billion boondoggle created as part of FDR’s New Deal program. It supposedly exists to support U.S. exports, but in reality it is “little more than a fund for corporate welfare.” That quote, by the way, comes from then-Sen. Barack Obama in 2008. He was right then, but big corporate lobbies have now convinced him that the bank is, in fact, a pretty good idea. And he’s not alone.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), well-known for standing against Wall Street bailouts and corporate cronyism when these issues were firing up the Occupy movement, has apparently taken leave of her populist principles in order to support special interests.

“Democrats don’t like Wall Street bailouts,” she said in a speech last year. Don’t they, though? When Bloomberg Business asked her about the Ex-Im Bank, a spokesperson for Warren responded:

“Senator Warren believes that the Export-Import Bank helps create American jobs and spur economic growth.” Since then, she has hardly uttered a word about the bank, apparently hoping we would all forget about it.

Sen. Harry Reid (D-Nev.) and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton have also both expressed support for the Ex-Im Bank. What’s going on here? The Ex-Im Bank offers loans primarily to Boeing, General Electric, Caterpillar and other huge corporations that certainly don’t need the help. In fact, in 2010, General Electric posted domestic profits of more than $5 billion, yet claimed $3.2 billion in tax benefits, which Sen. Warren herself decried as unfair.

The Ex-Im Bank also funds foreign companies that have no business receiving American tax dollars. It funds corruption and favoritism and special interests. Aren’t Democrats supposed to be against those things?

Conservatives have chosen to tackle this issue because corporate cronyism flies in the face of our belief in free markets, free trade, and responsible stewardship of taxpayer dollars. But opposition to corporate welfare fits just as nicely into the liberal tenets of fairness, rooting for the underdog, and curbing corporate power.

The word “progressive” means moving forward, making progress, embracing change. Why, then, are progressive Democrats clinging to an 80-year-old failure that stands against everything they supposedly believe?

The Ex-Im Bank Termination Act, to end the bank’s charter once and for all, has been introduced in the House by Rep. Justin Amash (Mich.) — a Republican. To date, no Democrats have deigned to cosponsor the bill. Last year, the same bill was introduced in the Senate by Sen. Mike Lee (Utah) —another Republican. But Elizabeth Warren was nowhere to be seen on the issue.

So, to Warren and all her progressive colleagues, I issue the following invitation: Come join us! We actually hate bailouts of big companies as much as you claim to. Let’s work together to stop the abuse of taxpayer money to prop up corporate behemoths.

I know it’s hard to say no to those lobbyists and their fancy money, but I promise, it feels better to stay true to your principles and do the right thing. Think of what a progressive warrior you could be if you actually ended a crony bank that does all of the things you ought to oppose.

The Ex-Im Bank’s charter expires at the end of June. If Congress does nothing, it goes away. With everything else on their plate, you would think that asking Congress to sit on their hands would not be that heavy of a lift.

Unfortunately, there are a lot of powerful people with skin in the game trying to keep their juicy government subsidies. This gives us — both those of us on the right who believe in free markets, and those on the left who oppose corporatism — an opportunity to work together against a common enemy, and actually accomplish something real. Sen. Warren, where are you? We could really use your help.

SOURCE

**********************************

Ann Coulter on illegal immigration

I finally found a Mexican willing to do a job no American will do! I have an explosive book on the No. 1 issue in the country coming out next week, I’ve already written 10 New York Times best-sellers — I’d be on a postage stamp if I were a liberal — but can’t get an interview on ABC, NBC or CBS.

Only Mexican-born Jorge Ramos would interview me on his Fusion network. Yay, Jorge!

After a spellbinding interview, Ramos ended by asking this excellent question — which I had suggested myself for all authors, most of whom write very boring books, harming the marketability of my own books: “Is there anything in your book that isn’t already generally known?”

My soon-to-be-released book, “Adios, America! The Left’s Plan to Turn Our Country into a Third World Hellhole,” is jam-packed with facts you didn’t already know. Don’t even think of using it as a coaster, like those other books.

These are just a few:

— Teddy Kennedy’s 1965 Immigration Act was expressly designed to change the demographics of our country to be poorer and more inclined to vote Democratic.

— It worked! Post-1970 immigrants vote 8-2 for the Democrats.

— Citing this dramatic shift in the Democratic Party’s fortunes, Democratic consultant Patrick Reddy called the 1965 Immigration Act “the Kennedy family’s greatest gift to the Democratic Party.”

— Immigrants admitted before 1970 made more money, bought more houses and were more educated than Americans. The post-Kennedy immigrants are astronomically less-educated, poorer and more likely to be on welfare than the native population.

— With no welfare state to support them, about a third of pre-1965 Act immigrants returned to the places they came from. British and Jewish immigrants were the least likely to go home — less than 10 percent did.

— Although America is admitting more immigrants, they are coming from fewer countries than they did before 1970. On liberals’ own terms, the country is becoming less “diverse,” but a lot poorer and a lot more Latin.

— America has already taken in one-fourth of Mexico’s entire population.

— In 1970, there were almost no Nigerian immigrants in the United States. Our country is now home to more Nigerians than any country in the world except Nigeria.

— America takes more immigrants from Nigeria than from England.

— The government refuses to tell us how many prisoners in the United States are immigrants. That information is not available anywhere. But the ancillary facts suggest that the number is astronomical.

— There are more foreign inmates in New York state prisons from Mexico than from the entire continent of Europe.

— Hispanics are less likely to be in the military than either whites or blacks, and a majority of Hispanic troops are women. On the other hand, Hispanics are overrepresented in U.S. Prisons.

— In Denmark, actual Danes come in tenth in criminals’ nationality, after Moroccans, Lebanese, Yugoslavians, Somalis, Iranians, Pakistanis, Turks, Iraqis and Vietnamese.

— At least 15 percent of all births in Peru and Argentina are to girls between the ages of 10 and 15. In the U.S., only 2 percent of births are to girls that young, and those are mostly Hispanics, who are seven times more likely to give birth at that age than white girls are.

— Sex with girls as young as 12 years old is legal in 31 of the 32 states of Mexico.

— In all of Western Europe, the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and Israel combined, there have been eight reported births to girls aged 10 or younger. Seven of the eight were impregnated by immigrants.

— In some areas of America, law enforcement authorities have given up on prosecuting statutory rape cases against Mexican men in their 30s who impregnate 12- and 13-year-old girls, after repeatedly encountering parents who view their little girls’ pregnancies as a “blessing.”

— The same North Carolina newspapers that gave flood-the-zone coverage to a rape that never happened at a Duke lacrosse party completely ignore real rapes happening right under their noses, being committed against children by immigrants providing cheap labor to the state’s farming and meat-packing industries.

— Since 2004, Mexicans have beheaded at least a half-dozen people in the United States.

— Mexican drug cartels — not ISIS — pioneered the practice of posting videotaped beheadings online.

— An alleged “ISIS” beheading video making the rounds in 2014 was actually a Mexican beheading video from 2010.

— Post-1970 immigrants have re-introduced slavery to America. Indian immigrant Lakireddy Bali Reddy, for example, used the H1-B visa program, allegedly for “high-tech workers,” to bring in 12-year-old girls he had bought from their parents for sex.

— The above story was missed by the San Francisco Chronicle. It was broken by a high school journalism class.

— The ACLU took Reddy’s side.

— We’re still letting in Hmong immigrants as a reward for their help with the ill-fated Vietnam War, which ended 40 years ago.

— Between 2000 and 2005, nearly 100 Hmong men were charged with rape or forced prostitution of girls in Minneapolis-St Paul, according to the Minneapolis Star Tribune. The vast majority of the victims were 15 years old or younger. A quarter of the victims were not Hmong.

— Proponents of the 1965 immigration bill swore up and down that it would not alter this country’s demographic mix. In fact, Kennedy’s immigration policy has brought about the greatest demographic shift of any nation in world history.

— In 1980, Reagan won the biggest electoral landslide in history against an incumbent president, Jimmy Carter. Without the last 40 years of immigration, in 2012, Mitt Romney would have won a bigger landslide than Reagan did. He got more of the “Reagan coalition” than Reagan did.

— If Romney had won 71 percent of the Hispanic vote, he still would have lost. If he’d gotten just 4 percent more of the white vote, he would have won.

Adios, America! In bookstores next Monday, June 1.

SOURCE

****************************

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)

****************************

New York Times Still Deceiving About Obamacare

The New York Times is at it again. In a front page story in Tuesday's print edition, the Times is dishonestly pushing an argument that they hope will result in a favorable Supreme Court decision for President Obama's so called Affordable Care Act. The mantra repeated over and over again is this: those four words in the Obamacare law-"established by the state"-were actually an accident, a drafting error. And those words, according to the Times and all of the sources they chose to comment on it for the article, are being misinterpreted by some who want to, shall we say, "degrade and defeat" the law.

The plain language of the law is that subsidies were only meant for those who purchase their plans through exchanges set up by the individual states. But that's not what the Times and their sources want you to believe. Even if the Times were to admit that is the plain meaning based on the language in the law, their argument is that it still wasn't the intent of the lawmakers and staffers who composed and approved of the legislation.

So now comes the Times, a month before the Supreme Court is planning to announce its decision, with a front-page article that is dishonest on many levels. If you are doing a news story, as opposed to a not-so-carefully disguised editorial, you would seek opposing points of view. In reading this article, you find that there is not one person among those interviewed who even knew that there was an issue regarding subsidies as they related to state exchanges versus the federal exchange.

First, the Times posed the questions: "Who wrote [those four words], and why? Were they really intended, as the plaintiffs in King v. Burwell claim, to make the tax subsidies in the law available only in states that established their own health insurance marketplaces, and not in the three dozen states with federal exchanges?"

Then it states: "The answer, from interviews with more than two dozen Democrats and Republicans involved in writing the law, is that the words were a product of shifting politics and a sloppy merging of different versions. Some described the words as ‘inadvertent,' ‘inartful' or ‘a drafting error.' But none supported the contention of the plaintiffs, who are from Virginia."

If this were a real news story, and not a front-page editorial disguised as a news article, these reporters would have sought out the opinion of people who disagree with those "more than two dozen Democrats and Republicans involved in writing the law."

I cited the evidence in a column last March when the King v. Burwell case was being argued, and the same narrative was being pushed at that time by the Times and other liberal news organizations. I linked to a National Public Radio (NPR) article that had actually practiced journalism by talking to one of the plaintiff's lawyers in this case; he pointed out that regarding this supposed drafting error, "those words are in the bill 11 times."

I also cited an article published in Politico, two months before the bill passed in 2010, that cited then-Senator Ben Nelson's opposition to a federal exchange: "Sen. Ben Nelson (D-Neb.) said Monday that he would oppose any health care reform bill with a national insurance exchange, which he described as a dealbreaker." If that isn't clear enough, Politico added this: "Nelson could have deprived House Democrats from securing what they have increasingly viewed as a must-have-a national exchange rather than a series of state exchanges."

My column cited an American Spectator piece that details Nelson's position on this issue. And then there's Jonathan Gruber. As I wrote at the time: "And don't forget Jonathan Gruber. He was one of the architects of Obamacare, and a close adviser to President Obama. He received millions of taxpayer dollars, from various states and the federal government. Gruber is the person who said that passing Obamacare depended ‘on the stupidity of the American voter,' and that it was ‘written in a tortured way' in order to deceive the voters about all the taxes they would have to pay.

Regarding the subsidies being paid only to state exchanges, Gruber said that was ‘to squeeze the states to do it [to set up exchanges].'"

So there you have it. After reading what Gruber said, what Politico wrote months before the bill became law, how NPR reported it, and what Sen. Nelson told Greta Van Susteren, it becomes clear that the Times is editorializing, and not reporting, in a front-page story intended to influence a Supreme Court decision.

SOURCE

******************************

Planned Rate Hikes Presage a Health Insurance ‘Death Spiral’

The Wall Street Journal has reviewed health plans’ rate filings for 2016 in Obamacare exchanges:

In New Mexico, market leader Health Care Service Corp. is asking for an average jump of 51.6% in premiums for 2016. The biggest insurer in Tennessee, BlueCross BlueShield of Tennessee, has requested an average 36.3% increase. In Maryland, market leader CareFirst BlueCross BlueShield wants to raise rates 30.4% across its products. Moda Health, the largest insurer on the Oregon health exchange, seeks an average boost of around 25%.

All of them cite high medical costs incurred by people newly enrolled under the Affordable Care Act. (Louise Radnofsky, “Health Insurers Seek Healthy Rate Boosts,” May 21, 2015)

The article also notes that Insurance Commissioners in some states have the power to roll back rates hiked too high (and the U.S. Secretary of Health & Human Services also asserts a similar power, although there is no legal basis for it). It is unlikely that Insurance Commissioners can protect people from these rate hikes: Excessive rollbacks will merely cause health plans to exit the market, which would be catastrophic for Obamacare’s political future.

Readers of this blog knew that this death spiral was coming. What is remarkable is that it is happening now. Things must be worse than insurers are disclosing to make them jack rates so high, so soon.

Think about it: Obamacare is the best possible scenario for health insurers. Obamacare is still very much at risk from the Supreme Court’s decision in King v. Burwell and Republican politicians who remain united in pledging to repeal and replace it with patient-centered health reform.

If anything, health plans should want to move public opinion in favor of Obamacare by keeping rate hikes low. Indeed, they should (collectively) be prepared to lose money in exchanges until Obamacare is secure. (The exchanges are still a small part of their book of business. They can subsidize losses in exchanges for a while without risking their solvency.)

A lot of the cost of the rate hikes will be borne by taxpayers instead of enrollees, because Obamacare’s tax credits to insurers operating in exchanges are based on the benchmark (second cheapest silver plan) and limited by beneficiaries’ household income. Nevertheless, that is also hardly good news for Obamacare’s political future, either.

Announcing these rate hikes in the summer of 2015 (and, likely, the summer of 2016) indicates that health plans’ experience in Obamacare exchanges is painfully expensive.

SOURCE

**********************************

Ann Coulter's War on illegal immigration

This week, iconoclastic master Ann Coulter released her new book, "Adios, America!" The book has already been labeled racist by the mainstream left, which fears her argument, and will undoubtedly be marginalized by the mainstream right, which doesn't want to hear it. Coulter's thesis is simple: Since Senator Teddy Kennedy, D-Mass., rammed through the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, America's immigration system has transformed from a device for enriching the nation for both native-born and immigrants into a scheme for importing anti-American voters.

What made America America, Coulter argues, was a particular blend of Protestant religion and European civilization that led to the rise of the greatest nation in human history. What will unmake America, she continues, is a deliberate attempt to poison that blend with a flood of immigrants with wildly different values.

Coulter points out that the real number of immigrants currently residing in America illegally far surpasses the 11 million consistently put forth by politicians and media. That 11 million springs from census data, which is notoriously unreliable, given that immigrants here illegally typically don't spend time answering government surveys. The real number, she argues, is far closer to 30 million. And those 30 million immigrants in America illegally drive down wages, shred social safety nets, drive up the crime rate and congeal the American melting pot into a melange of inferior cultural values competing for local dominance.

"The foreign poor are prime Democratic constituents because they're easily demagogued into tribal voting," Coulter points out. "Race loyalty trumps the melting pot. ... The American electorate isn't moving left — it's shrinking. Democrats figured out they'd never win with Americans, so they implemented an evil, genius plan to change this country by restocking it with voters more favorably disposed to left-wing policies than Americans ever would be."

And the Democrats have achieved their goals. America is more polarized than at any point since the civil rights era, and not by chance. Americans have been told that they have a responsibility to anyone who wants to enter the country, even as they are lectured that it would be gauche for them to ask just who wants to come in. "At what point will Americans remind their government that it has a responsibility to us, not to every sad person in the world?" Coulter laments.

The answer, if the left has its way: never. Bearing nostrums like "diversity is our strength" and "through no fault of their own," Democrats will browbeat Americans into accepting the demise of American values. The shock isn't that millions of foreigners want to get into the United States — that's always been true. The shock isn't even that Democrats want to open the floodgates to unchecked, unscreened immigration — that's been true for decades, given that the modern American left despises founding philosophy and the capitalist system more generally. The shock is that so many conservatives have capitulated, granted the left's premise in the hopes that America's new immigrants will resemble her old immigrants, even though the America that welcomes them has changed dramatically.

Coulter's argument — that the media and our politicians conspire to keep information from us about the effects of mass immigration from non-Western countries, and that such immigration will destroy the fabric of the country — is virtually unassailable. The only question left: Who will stand up to the tidal wave of political correctness to pursue a reasonable and sane immigration policy, rather than the insane combination of ignorance and bullying that currently dictates who gets to live in and help redefine the greatest country in the history of mankind?

SOURCE

****************************

Look at What Happened When Maine Forced Welfare Recipients To Work For Their Benefits

Maine finally took a bold step forward in welfare reform and it’s paying huge dividends.

Last year Maine passed a measure that would require recipients of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, otherwise known as SNAP, to complete a certain number of work, volunteer, or job-training hours before being eligible for assistance.

Main Governor Paul LaPage passed the measure last year and the resulting drop in food-stamp enrollees has been dramatic.

At the close of 2014 approximately 12,000 individuals were enrolled in the state assistance program. Keep in mind that these individuals are adults who aren’t disabled and who don’t have children at home and who are claiming the food-stamp benefits because of a lack of financial resources.

After forcing these individuals to either work part-time for twenty hours each week, enroll in a vocational program, or volunteer for a minimum of twenty-four hours per month, the numbers showed a significant drop from 12,000 enrollees to just over 2,500.

Republicans in the state are calling it a major victory, while Democrats are infuriated and are calling for special measures to roll back some of the strict requirements.

However, even if the requirements lose some of their strictness, once an individual is removed from the Maine food-stamp program they cannot receive benefits from the program for three years.

This is a true victory for welfare reform, and, while opponents are continuing to push back, we can hope that other states will notice the effectiveness of Maine’s program.

Meanwhile, for all the naysayers who say that this program is unfairly targeting those in rural or extremely poor areas, let’s remind ourselves who this program is really affecting.

These individuals who were benefiting from the food-stamp law and who now can’t are able-bodied, capable adults. These aren’t people with physical or mental disabilities or raising growing children. These are regular Joes who don’t seem to want to get a job.

And while I will say that getting a job can be harder than it sounds, Maine’s program solves that difficulty beautifully. If individuals can’t get and hold a part-time job of twenty hours per week, they can qualify by enrolling in training program. If that doesn’t get them a job, they can still qualify by volunteering.

Do you see what Maine did there? They’re making people exhaust their possibilities for employment before giving them a handout. Finally a state government has hit upon a great way to reward people for trying to get jobs and to punish those who sit around feeding off the taxes of the rest of the country.

Now the struggle remains for the rest of the country to work to adopt similarly effective laws.

SOURCE

**********************************

Los Angeles Labor Leaders Want Minimum Wage Exemption

Oh the irony. Fourteen Los Angeles council members recently voted to incrementally raise the city’s minimum wage to $15 an hour. Considering a whopping 50% of the city’s workforce makes minimum wage, the new law is bound to have significant ramifications — which may explain this oddity from the Los Angeles Times: “Labor leaders, who were among the strongest supporters of the citywide minimum wage increase approved last week by the Los Angeles City Council, are advocating last-minute changes to the law that could create an exemption for companies with unionized workforces.”

Rusty Hocks with the Federation of Labor defended the proposed exemption by opining, “With a collective bargaining agreement, a business owner and the employees negotiate an agreement that works for them both. The agreement allows each party to prioritize what is important to them.” Yet, as the Times notes, “For much of the past eight months, labor activists have argued against special considerations for business owners, such as restaurateurs, who said they would have trouble complying with the mandated pay increase.”

In other words, labor leaders want the flexibility to negotiate a mutually fair hourly wage — one that may very well fall below $15 — while forcing non-unionized businesses to comply with an admittedly harmful law. The Left, it seems, doesn’t want to raise the minimum wage so much as coerce businesses into joining a union, which would then translate into political capital.

SOURCE

****************************

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)

****************************

Wake up! Mr Obama.   81% Of Al Jazeera Arabic Poll Respondents Support Islamic State

Where is the black jellyfish's claim that ISIS is not Islamic now?

In a recent survey conducted by AlJazeera.net, the website for the Al Jazeera Arabic television channel, respondents overwhelmingly support the Islamic State terrorist group, with 81% voting “YES” on whether they approved of ISIS’s conquests in the region.

The poll, which asked in Arabic, “Do you support the organizing victories of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS)?” has generated over 38,000 responses thus far, with only 19% of respondents voting “NO” to supporting ISIS.

SOURCE

********************************

Good News: 5th Circuit Denies Obama’s Amnesty Appeal!

Finally, good news… A panel of the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals has ruled 2-1 against the Obama administration’s appeal of Judge Andrew Hanen’s amnesty injunction.

The court decided that the injunction will stand and that the Obama administration will not be able to move forward with its amnesty plans.

This is truly excellent news and the judges couldn’t have been clearer in smacking down the President’s appeal.

“The public interest favors maintenance of the injunction,” the judges wrote in the majority opinion. “Because the government is unlikely to succeed on the merits of its appeal of the injunction, we deny the motion for stay.”

That is the key sentence. That tells you that an appellate court agrees that states like Texas have standing to sue.

But the Obama administration isn’t giving up and is promising to take this all the way to the Supreme Court.

Congress said earlier this year that they wouldn’t act until the courts weighed in. Well, not one but TWO courts have weighed in and believe the case has merit.

You MUST demand that Congress intervene and put a stop to this amnesty nonsense once and for all!

As much as I want to celebrate this ruling, I know that a court order will never stop Barack Hussein Obama from carrying out his agenda to radically transform this country.

And here’s the problem: now that Obama has been stopped at the appellate level, Republicans are taking this as an opportunity to push for “immigration reform.”

Instead of dismantling Obama’s amnesty, the GOP actually wants to legitimize it. Right now, as we stand on the brink of victory, Congressional leaders are waiting for their opportunity to strike and institutionalize Obama’s amnesty.

This isn’t the first time this has come up. The GOP wanted to do the same thing this past February and write Obama’s amnesty program into the law. We put a stop to it. We sent hundreds of thousands of faxes to Congress demanding that they put a stop to this. When the dust settled, the GOP said they were going to wait to see how the court battle plays out.

Well, that time has come. It’s time for the GOP to live up to its promise and put a stop to this once and for all. The courts won’t be able to stop this. When Judge Hanen issued his original injunction against the amnesty program, the Obama administration ignored it and processed amnesty applications anyway.

Don’t get me wrong… this is excellent news coming out of the 5th Circuit. But here is what the White House said in response to the ruling: “Today, two judges of the Fifth Circuit chose to misinterpret the facts and the law in denying the government’s request for a stay.”

They “chose to misinterpret the facts.” That is how arrogant the White House is. If they disagree with a court ruling, it’s not because of the merits. It is because the judges are insolent.

SOURCE

**********************************

7 Stages of the Progressive Agenda

STAGE 1: Identify the issue.

Any Progressive can make an issue out of anything. That's the Power of the People! Just name it and blame Republicans. Many issues never go beyond Stage 1 because they are so readily and widely embraced by the masses. Examples include free cell phones, free gas, and free Obama money from his stash. Whatever the issue, throw it at the wall and don't worry if it doesn't stick—there are at least six more ways to make sure it does!

STAGE 2: Promote the issue.

Exhort media minions to give saturation coverage to the latest issue, to build consensus, create buzz and subsequently demand. People who never thought this was something they should have, and have happily lived without it for years, will start thinking this is something they should have and absolutely cannot live without—especially if they're persuaded that not having it is why they've never been as happy as they previously and mistakenly believed. Blame Republicans. If it still shows signs of sliding down the wall, then proceed to the next stage.

STAGE 3: Say it's a MORAL issue.

Remember back in the 80's, when evangelical Christofascism was infecting the country at fever pitch, and Progressives tried to combat it by saying you can't legislate morality? When that didn't work, we simply expropriated the word and changed the definition like we do with everything else. Now, morality refers to support of the Progressive agenda, and you'd better believe we're going to legislate it to the hilt! Whatever it is Progressives want to do, it is the MORAL thing to do. Ergo, to oppose it is simply...immoral.

And who among us wants to be immoral? Don't we all want to do the right thing? The correct thing? All we want to do is help people so they can live better lives—what's wrong with that? It's moral, isn't it? Somewhere down the line, there are supposed to be grand and glorious rewards for being moral, for without them, who would bother?

To say it's a moral issue is like giving the masses a mild laxative—sometimes all people need is just a gentle little push, something to soften them and ease the passage. At this point, we usually get government funding, and maybe a czar to oversee it. The media continues to do its part to promote it, while celebrities begin sporting the appropriately colored awareness ribbons.

Yet there will still be those who are either too confused or ignorant to see the light. That, or they're simply...immoral. Or amoral. Either way, they're so not moral that they're perfectly happy to see that issue slide down the wall till it plops on the ground. Blame Republicans. But that's when we must implement the next stage.

STAGE 4: Declare the issue a CRISIS!

Sometimes Progressives will skip over the first three stages to Stage 4, in which case, this is where it really starts. You don't get anything through Congress or the courts simply by saying it's "nice to have." No. It is a CRISIS! Lives are in danger! Planet is in peril! Time is running out! We must start taking steps to begin taking action NOW!

A crisis receives even more funding, and the establishment of a government agency to impose regulations that will eventually bring it under control—but only as long as funding continues and keeps pace with inflation.

The media will continue beating their drums. In addition to the awareness ribbons, celebrities make speeches about it at awards shows, and start incorporating it into the plot lines of their movies and "Very Special Episodes" of TV shows, etc. The masses must be made aware of the CRISIS!

But there will still be scoffers. Skeptics. Deniers. Those who say there is no crisis. Those who say that no matter what the crisis, it's always been here and hasn't hurt anyone or anything. Those who say it's just another wealth redistribution scheme. Those, especially at the corporate level in the private sector, who spend millions, billions, and gazillions to convince the masses that there is no crisis, all to protect the ill-gotten profits they stole from those same masses! Why, they'll say that it isn't even an issue, let alone a crisis! Blame Republicans. People dependent on being told what to think will be tricked into believing these lies instead of the current truth.

That's what we Progressives call "a messaging problem." Therefore, we must double down and move to the next stage.

STAGE 5: Call it a HEALTH issue!

All we want to do is help people. All we want to do is help them make better decisions, the right choices, so they can live healthy, happy, productive lives without fear of death, disease, or destruction. How can anyone with an ounce of compassion be against that?

But sometimes it's not enough to say lives are in danger, or the planet is in peril. Sometimes we have to be more specific, because some people, dagnabbit, just aren't satisfied with vague generalities. This is why "individualism" is such a bad idea—it encourages people to dwell on the nitpicky details of how an issue, even when it's been elevated to the level of crisis, will personally affect them and their selfish little private world.

So let's make it personal! Bring on the testimonies! Call on those who will share their heartbreaking stories of how their health, and by extension their lives, have been ruined because of the crisis! Blame Republicans. Poverty, income inequality, climate change...all of these things have an adverse impact on a person's health and well being.

Show pictures of suffering children. Crumbling glaciers. Rising floodwaters. Drowning polar bears. Smokestacks belching out billows of black smoke. Oil-soaked baby animals with huge, sad brown eyes. Tearful Native Americans standing at the side of the road with heaps of garbage at their feet. Don't just tug on those heartstrings—yank 'em taut and play 'em like a Strad!

Then show the masses what it all leads to: Starvation! Disease! Non-breathable air! Undrinkable water! Carcasses! Stink! Gross! Death! Destruction! Doom!

Only one thing will solve these problems and reverse the inevitable before it's too late—more government funding! Yet there will still be those who don't care. Who just want others to die quickly. Who don't want to spend the mere few pennies a day per person it would cost to eliminate these horrors forever and ever and ever.

That's when we roll out the next stage.

STAGE 6: Enshrine it as a CIVIL RIGHTS issue!

Nothing shuts down dissent like calling it a civil rights issue, because anyone who opposes anything to do with civil rights can be labeled a bigot, a hater, or any kind of phobe. Civil rights always trump all other rights, and this allows us to shame the haters and bigots and make them feel like the outcasts they are, on the extreme fringe, the wrong side of history!

Once an issue is consecrated as a matter of civil rights, the masses will hold marches and rallies across the country to demand it. There may be riots and vandalism, and many innocents will be hurt or jailed, or even killed. Blame Republicans.

The issue will finally go before the people for a vote—and if it doesn't pass, no problem! The courts will overturn it because it is a civil right! And the people will keep marching and rallying and blaming Republicans until that happens!

Nothing is more sacred than a civil right...except, perhaps, the government that keeps it sanctified through continued funding and special protections and privileges for anyone the civil right touches.

In the meantime, there will still be bigots and haters who are just too shameless to be shamed. Haters gotta hate. There will still be those who insist that religious rights and so-called inalienable rights endowed by some mythical being should matter. And there will still be enough of them to block the march of progress, and with it the necessary funding, without which all will be lost if we don't make the decision to do something to take the needed steps to start action now, before it's too late!

Which brings us to the next stage...

STAGE 7: Dammit! Can't you people see the crisis is not just a moral issue or a health issue or a question of civil rights? It's a matter of NATIONAL SECURITY!

To not treat it as a matter of National Security is, as President Obama recently told graduates of the Coast Guard Academy, a "dereliction of duty." Members of the military can be court-martialed for it. Under conditions of war, they may be executed for it.

When something is declared a matter of National Security, anyone who does not treat it as such is willfully endangering millions of lives and the future of the entire planet. They are seditious. They are enemies of the State. They are guilty of treason and crimes against humanity. Therefore, they must forfeit all. We kept warning them millions would die, didn't we?

Throw them against the wall. Don't worry if they don't stick. This time, we want them to drop to the ground.

And don't forget to blame Republicans.

SOURCE

*******************************

Texas Senate Passes Anti-Sharia Bill

The Texas Senate last night passed and sent to Governor Greg Abbott a measure that would prevent any ‘international/sharia law’ from being used in Texas civil courts, a bill that Muslim detractors and some of their far left allies say is ‘Islamophobic.’

WOAI  State Sen. Donna Campbell (R-New Braunfels) doesn’t mention Islamic Koranic law, or ‘Sharia Law’ in her bill.  She simply says it guarantees that no laws from ‘foreign courts’ will be adopted by Texas civil court judges.

“It’s just to provide some belt and suspenders to make sure that, with judicial discretion, we don’t trump Texas law, American law, with a foreign law regarding family law,” Campbell said.

Muslim groups say the bill is a ‘solution looking for problem, and claim that the bill has its genesis in an anti Muslim demonstration on the steps of the Texas Capitol in January in which the proposal was cheered.

State Sen. Kirk Watson (D-Austin) grilled Campbell on examples she has seen of foreign law being used in Texas courts.  “What foreign law are you attempting to prevent being used, and can you give examples of where it has created a problem in the state?” Watson asked.

“No foreign law,” Campbell replied.  “This just provides a context for judicial discretion.”

 SOURCE

**********************************

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)

****************************

Differences Between Left and Right

What Dennis Prager says below is right but he fails to look more deeply.  He fails to ask WHY Leftists claim man is basically good.  And the answer is plain enough.  Leftists don't like the world they live in so want to change it.  And a claim about human goodness is very helpful in that cause.  It undermines conservative caution.  And it is conservative caution that stands in the way of them getting their perverse way.

If Leftists really believed in human goodness, would they slaughter the vast numbers of people that they do when they achieve untrammelled power (e.g. in the French revolution, the Soviet horror, Mao's China etc).  Clearly, they  have utter contempt for other people

Equally clearly, therefore, it is pointless to argue with Leftists about human nature. Their claim is a convenient pose, nothing more.  It makes them look good and undermines caution about the likely outcomes of their crazy schemes.  They are not going to abandon that in a hurry.  Their arguments do need to be refuted for the sake of the uncommitted middle but nothing will persuade them


Most Americans hold either liberal or conservative positions on most matters. In many instances, however, they would be hard pressed to explain their position or the position they oppose.

But if you can't explain both sides, how do you know you're right?

At the very least, you need to understand both the liberal and conservative positions in order to effectively understand your own.

I grew up in a liberal world -- New York, Jewish and Ivy League graduate school. I was an 8-year-old when President Dwight Eisenhower ran for re-election against the Democratic nominee, Adlai Stevenson. I knew nothing about politics and had little interest in the subject. But I well recall knowing -- knowing, not merely believing -- that Democrats were "for the little guy" and Republicans were "for the rich guys."

I voted Democrat through Jimmy Carter's election in 1976. He was the last Democrat for whom I voted.

Obviously, I underwent an intellectual change. And it wasn't easy. Becoming a Republican was emotionally and psychologically like converting to another religion.

In fact, when I first voted Republican I felt as if I had abandoned the Jewish people. To be a Jew meant being a Democrat. It was that simple. It was -- and remains -- that fundamental to many American Jews' identity.

Therefore, it took a lot of thought to undergo this conversion. I had to understand both liberalism and conservatism. Indeed, I have spent a lifetime in a quest to do so.

The fruit of that quest will appear in a series of columns explaining the differences between left and right.

I hope it will benefit conservatives in better understanding why they are conservative, and enable liberals to understand why someone who deeply cares about the "little guy" holds conservative -- or what today are labeled as conservative -- views.

Difference No. 1: Is Man Basically Good?

Left-of-center doctrines hold that people are basically good. On the other side, conservative doctrines hold that man is born morally flawed -- not necessarily born evil, but surely not born good. Yes, we are born innocent -- babies don't commit crimes, after all -- but we are not born good. Whether it is the Christian belief in Original Sin or the Jewish belief that we are all born with a yetzer tov (good inclination) and a yetzer ra (bad inclination) that are in constant conflict, the root value systems of the West never held that we are naturally good.

To those who argue that we all have goodness within us, two responses:

First, no religion or ideology denies that we have goodness within us; the problem is with denying that we have badness within us. Second, it is often very challenging to express that goodness. Human goodness is like gold. It needs to be mined -- and like gold mining, mining for our goodness can be very difficult.

This so important to understanding the left-right divide because so many fundamental left-right differences emanate from this divide.

Perhaps the most obvious one is that conservatives blame those who engage in violent criminal activity for their behavior more than liberals do. Liberals argue that poverty, despair, and hopelessness cause poor people, especially poor blacks -- in which case racism is added to the list -- to riot and commit violent crimes.

Here is President Barack Obama on May 18, 2015:

"In some communities, that sense of unfairness and powerlessness has contributed to dysfunction in those communities. ... Where people don't feel a sense of hope and opportunity, then a lot of times that can fuel crime and that can fuel unrest. We've seen it in places like Baltimore and Ferguson and New York. And it has many causes -- from a basic lack of opportunity to some groups feeling unfairly targeted by their police forces."

So, poor blacks who riot and commit other acts of violence do so largely because they feel neglected and suffer from deprivations.

Since people are basically good, their acts of evil must be explained by factors beyond their control. Their behavior is not really their fault; and when conservatives blame blacks for rioting and other criminal behavior, liberals accuse them of "blaming the victim."

In the conservative view, people who do evil are to be blamed because they made bad choices -- and they did so because they either have little self-control or a dysfunctional conscience. In either case, they are to blame. That's why the vast majority of equally poor people -- black or white -- do not riot or commit violent crimes.

Likewise, many liberals believe that most of the Muslims who engage in terror do so because of the poverty and especially because of the high unemployment rate for young men in the Arab world. Yet, it turns out that most terrorists come from middle class homes. All the 9/11 terrorists came from middle- and upper-class homes. And of course Osama bin Laden was a billionaire.

Material poverty doesn't cause murder, rape or terror. Moral poverty does. That's one of the great divides between left and right. And it largely emanates from their differing views about whether human nature is innately good.

SOURCE

**************************

Progressivism: Rhetoric versus Reality

Contemporary supporters of an expanded role for government are increasingly moving away from calling themselves liberals and toward referring to themselves Progressives, so it is worth considering what the ideology of Progressivism entails.

Progressivism began in the late 1800s as a political movement that advocated expanding the role of government. Before the Progressive era, Americans viewed the role of government as protecting individual rights. The Progressive ideology argued that the proper role of government should go beyond protecting individual rights to include looking out for people’s economic well-being.

Progressivism is explicitly designed to use the force of government to take from some to give to others. In its early days, Progressives envisioned the state reining in the economic power of people like Rockefeller and Vanderbilt to prevent them from exploiting those with less economic power. Even this vision makes clear that the goal of Progressivism is to impose costs on some for the benefit of others.

The Progressive ideology is now firmly ingrained in the political system, and everybody recognizes that the government routinely takes from some to give to others. Because this is how our government now works, Progressivism encourages people to engage in politics to increase their chances that they can be on the receiving end of those transfers.

Meanwhile, the idea that some might be using their economic power to exploit others has fallen by the wayside. It’s not that Progressives don’t think this can happen; it’s that the Progressive transfer state recognizes claims made by anybody, regardless of whether they were harmed or exploited by others.

Welfare programs transfer wealth from taxpayers to recipients without any thought that the recipients deserve the transfers because they are being exploited by taxpayer. Instead, coercive wealth transfers are the “compassionate” thing to do. But the rich as well as the poor see Progressive government as a source of economic support. Giant corporations receive subsidies, tax breaks, and regulatory protection even though when Progressivism was born, its core idea was to transfer from them rather than toward them. Progressivism leads to cronyism.

While the idea of Progressivism was to expand the role of government to both protecting people’s rights and looking out for their economic well-being, the actual result of Progressivism has been that because it provides economic benefits to some by imposing costs on others, it violates people’s rights rather than protecting them. Progressive regulations limit people’s freedom of choice, and Progressive tax and transfer policies take the property of some for the benefit of others.

Despite its compassionate-sounding agenda of looking out for people’s economic well-being, the political philosophy of Progressivism justifies a government that violates the rights of some to provide economic benefits to others.

SOURCE

*******************************

Liberals Respect Me

By Walter E. Williams

During the early years of the Reagan administration, a Washington news conference was held for me for my first book, "The State Against Blacks." Before making summary statements about the book, I offered the reporters assembled that they could treat me like a white person. They could ask me hard, pressing questions. They could demand proof of the arguments that I was making.

People such as former NAACP President Kweisi Mfume and former Chairman Julian Bond and the Rev. Al Sharpton can make ludicrous statements. An intimidated news media just swallow the nonsense. They are probably afraid to challenge, lest they suffer guilt feelings of racism or be seen as racists for demanding that a black person back up his comments with facts.

You say, "Give us some examples of ludicrous statements." Sharpton, commenting on black history, said, "White folks was in caves while we was building empires." Mfume said of George W. Bush, "We have a president that's prepared to take us back to the days of Jim Crow segregation and dominance." Bond said, "The Republican Party would have the American flag and the swastika flying side by side." When those statements were made — and after other utterances of nonsense — I did not hear of any reporters demanding evidence. Racial etiquette or politeness requires that no pressing questions be asked of liberal blacks.

A number of people have made angry responses to statements made in my column a fortnight ago, titled "Some Odds and Ends." I pointed out that liberal Democrats claim that conservative Republicans have launched a war on women as a part of their overall mean-spirited agenda. Assault, rape and murder are the worst things that can be done to a woman. I said: "I would be willing to bet a lot of money that most of the assaults, rapes and murders of women are done by people who identify as liberals or Democrats, particularly in the cases of murderers.

Most crime, except perhaps white-collar crime, is committed by people who vote Democratic." People have demanded to know what my evidence is. There are bits and pieces of evidence that show that most murderers are people who politically identify as liberals or Democrats. Whether these people also vote their preferences is not so evident.

According to the U.S. Department of Justice report "Homicide Trends in the United States, 1980-2008," blacks accounted for 52.5 percent of homicide offenders from 1980 to 2008 (http://tinyurl.com/mb29bfa). It appears to be a fact that most murders are committed by blacks. The next fact appears obvious: Most blacks identify politically as liberals or Democrats. In fact, the 2008 and 2012 elections showed that at least 95 percent of blacks were Democrats. If one adds whites and Hispanics who also identify politically as liberals or Democrats, I think there is no question that liberals and Democratic Party sympathizers commit most of the murders in the U.S. None of this is to say that whites are crime-free. Whites are a greater percentage of our population and commit most of every type of crime except homicide and burglary (http://tinyurl.com/bzyzpk6).

I'm pleased that readers have demanded proof from me about my comments. Similar proof is not demanded from liberals who accuse Republicans of warring against women. I would ask several questions. Do Republicans include in this attack their mothers, wives and female children? What are the weapons Republicans use? Are failing to believe in late-term abortion and wanting to require parental knowledge and permission prior to a minor's receiving birth control medication or an abortion tantamount to warring against women? Finally, are Republican women involved in the war against women?

Far more important for me in all of this is that liberals unintentionally treat me like a white person. Unlike their response to other blacks, they demand that I back up my statements. For that, I thank them.

SOURCE

***************************

Drudge: Fast Track Authority for Obama is Republican Suicide

On Friday, the Senate voted 67-32 to give President Obama "fast track" negotiation authority for long anticipated deals with 11 other Pacific Rim nations.  Fast Track Authority is a powerful means of getting trade deals done quickly.  When a deal is negotiated Congress will have the ability to ratify or reject, but no ability to change any trade deals the President negotiates and presents for Congressional approval.

Internet-media mogul Matt Drudge blasted this development in a series of Tweets, calling this the "night of Republican Suicide" and quoting:

"Twisted DC: Electing Republicans is guarantee of MORE powers for Obama... Of course none of them read 'secret' bill!"

Drudge then attacked Republican Speaker of the House John Boehner, who supported this bill, characterizing this as "you have to pass the bill before you can know what's in it."

We tend to agree with Drudge, its a very bad idea to give Obama these powers.   The President has demonstrated many times he has a socialist philosophy and doesn't understand economics, trade nor capitalism, and his negotiating skills have proven wanting.  To put him in a position to make long term trade agreements is foolhardy.  But while Drudge laments the extra political power, we are anticipating long term disadvantage in international trade with our most dynamic trade partners.

SOURCE

**********************************

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)

****************************

THE AGE OF COMMUNISM LIVES ON

What is described below is reprehensible but it is not mysterious.  It is understandable if you realize that the only things important to Leftists are their hates.  Hitler's prime hate (the Jews) is not their hate. Stalin's prime hate (rich people) is  their hate.  So Stalin is to them a good guy, even if they are cautious about saying so

It was twenty-five years ago, but it feels like yesterday. When seeing the images of the fall of the Berlin Wall, I cried with joy, took out my best bottle of French wine, left the television on, and listened to Beethoven’s Ninth over and over and over. If you didn’t live through it, know that there was nothing like it. What we need to be reminded of, however, are the stakes and what didn’t happen in the wake of the fall.

In addition to the tyranny, the torture, and the assault upon the human spirit, the slaughtered victims of communism were not the thousands of the Inquisition, not the thousands of Americans lynched, not even the six million dead from Nazi extermination. The best scholarship yields numbers that the soul must try to comprehend: scores and scores and scores of millions of individual human bodies, which is what makes the work of Lee Edwards in keeping alive in our minds the victims of communism so morally essential, so morally vital.

Alexander Yakovlev, Gorbachev’s right hand man, who examined the archives for the last Soviet leader and who came away a deeply changed and heroic man, let us know that 60 million were slain in the Soviet Union alone. The Chinese author Jung Chang, who had access to scores of Mao Zedong’s collaborators and to the detailed Russian and local archives, reached the figure of 70 million Chinese lives snuffed out by Mao’s deliberate choices. If we count those dead of starvation from the communist ability and desire to experiment with human interaction in agriculture—20 million to 40 million in three years—we may add scores of millions more.

The communist Khmer Rouge under Pol Pot, who was educated in France and taught his politics by French communist intellectuals, butchered one-fifth to one-fourth of the entire Cambodian population. That would be as if an American regime had murdered some 50 to 70 million of its people. In each and every communist regime, countless people were shot and died by deliberate exposure, starved and murdered in work camps and prisons meant to extract every last fiber of labor before they die. No cause ever in the history of all mankind has produced more slaughtered innocents and more orphans than communism. It was a system of production that surpassed all others in turning out the dead.

What should one have expected after the fall of the Berlin wall? What didn’t occur? Where were the celebrations and the accountings? Where was the recognition of the ineffable value of a truly limited government? Our schools, universities and media do not teach our children any differently now about the human consequences of liberty, of voluntary economic societies, and of limited government in the real world. Our children do not know in any domain what happened under communism. Those who depend on our media and our films do not know. We live without self-belief and without any moral understanding of the extraordinary place of America, of its values, of its liberty, and of those leaders who won the Cold War for the dignity and the benefit of humankind.

Imagine if World War II had ended in a stalemate with a European Nazi empire from the Urals to the English Channel soon to be armed with nuclear weapons and in mortal contest with the United States in a peace kept only by deterrence. Would progressive children have sung, “All we are saying is give peace a chance” beneath symbols of unilateral disarmament? Would our intellectuals have mocked the phrase “evil empire”? What were the differences? Deaths? Camps? The desolation of the flesh and of the spirit? Solzhenitsyn had it exactly right about the Soviets, “No other regime on earth could compare with it either in the number of those it had done to death, in heartiness, in the range of its ambitions, in its thoroughgoing and unmitigated totalitarianism—no, not even the regime of its pupil, Hitler” (from the Gulag Archipelago). What would the celebration have been like if after two generations the swastika at last had fallen in place of the hammer and the sickle?

The communist holocaust, like the Nazi, should have brought forth a flowering of Western art, witness, sympathy, and an ocean of tears, and then a celebration at its downfall. Instead, it has called forth a glacier of indifference. Kids who in the 1960s hung portraits of Lenin, Mao, and Che on their college walls—the moral equivalent of having hung portraits of Hitler, Goebbels, or Horst Wessel in one’s dorm—came to teach our children about the moral superiority of their generation. Every historical textbook lingers on the crimes of Nazism—rightly so—seeks their root causes, draws a lesson from them, and everybody knows the number six million. By contrast, the same textbooks remain silent about the catastrophe of communism, everywhere it held or holds power. Ask any college freshman—try it if you don’t believe me— how many died under Stalin’s regime and they will answer even now, “Thousands? Tens of thousands?” It is the equivalent of believing that Hitler killed hundreds of Jews.

The scandal of such ignorance derives from an intellectual culture’s willful blindness to the catastrophe of its relative sympathies. Most of Europe has outlawed the neo-Nazis, but the French Communist Party from 1999 to 2002 was part of a ruling government. One may not fly the swastika, but one may hoist the hammer and sickle at official events. The denial of Hitler’s dead or the minimization of the Jewish Holocaust is literally a crime in most of Europe. The denial or minimization of communist crimes is an intellectual and political art form, and the fast track to a successful academic career. “Anti-fascist” is a term of honor; “anti-communist” is a term of ridicule and abuse.

More HERE

***************************

Another medical backflip: Cholesterol scare dying at last

The truth has been known for decades but it takes a lot to get through to officialdom and attention-seeking researchers

For decades they have been blacklisted as foods to avoid, the cause of deadly thickening of the arteries, heart disease and strokes.  But the science which warned us off eating eggs – along with other high-cholesterol foods such as butter, shellfish, bacon and liver – could have been flawed, a key report in the US has found.

A growing number of experts have been arguing there is no link between high cholesterol in food and dangerous levels of the fatty substance in the blood.

Now, in a move signalling a dramatic change of stance on the issue, the US government is to accept advice to drop cholesterol from its list of 'nutrients of concern'.

The US Department of Agriculture panel, which has been given the task of overhauling the guidelines every five years, has indicated it will bow to new research undermining the role dietary cholesterol plays in people's heart health.

Its Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee plans to no longer warn people to avoid eggs, shellfish and other cholesterol-laden foods.

The U-turn, based on a report by the committee, will undo almost 40 years of public health warnings about eating food laden with cholesterol. US cardiologist Dr Steven Nissen, of the Cleveland Clinic, said: 'It's the right decision. We got the dietary guidelines wrong. They've been wrong for decades.'

SOURCE

*******************************

China is catching up.  Will it also forge ahead?

Will China stop getting richer once it has pulled level with the USA?  U.S. economic performance has become so poor that China may not have to do much to do better

U.S. productivity growth declined from 2.8% per annum in the period 1948-73 to 1.8% per annum in 1974-2010 to 0.6% per annum in 2011-15 – almost entirely owing to regulation rather than to public sector bloat, which has increased only moderately since 1970. However the EPA and other big regulatory agencies date to the 1970s, and coincide eerily with the end of the post-war U.S. productivity bonanza. Monetary policy, by distorting the free market's asset allocation process, undoubtedly bears part of the responsibility for the further post-2011 slump in productivity, but there's no question the Obama administration's thirst for regulation has made matters worse. Only in retrospect will we be able to allocate blame accurately between the two factors.

As well as a bloated public sector and excessive regulation, there are other ways in which rich countries increasingly diverge from the free-market ideal. Infrastructure projects' costs are outrageous in modern Western economies, a large multiple in real terms of their costs 50 or 100 years ago. That's not because we have got less efficient at laying concrete or building bridges. It's because of the tangled mass of regulations on safety, environmentalism, workforce and other matters, none of which are costed properly, each of which adds substantially to the expense and delay in building infrastructure, and the combination of which is devastating.

Another pernicious addition to modern Western economies is the charitable sector. This has expanded to about 7% of GDP in the United States, driven by innumerable unjustifiable tax exemptions that allow the very rich to pay a fraction of the taxes paid by middle class people. These charities mostly bring benefits of only a tiny fraction of their costs – the Clinton Foundation, devoting only 3% of their tax-deductible donations to genuine charitable purposes, is all too typical. However charities' activities in diverting resources to themselves and providing political support for the worst political boondoggles makes their cost to the economy far greater than even their direct absorption of resources. Western economists complain about the inefficiency of fuel subsidies in poor countries such as India and Venezuela; in reality charity tax subsidies in the West are just as economically damaging.

Modern intellectual property rules, with innumerable competing patents and copyright lives stretching towards a century, reduce the level of true innovation and turn the tech and creative sectors into pure rent seekers. In these sectors, profitability is maximized not through innovation but by forcing competitors out of the market through copyright and patent manipulation, thereby prolonging the super-profitable lives of old innovations and creative works.

Finally the ultra-low interest rates of the last 7 years have sapped Western savings (a tendency exacerbated by generous welfare systems).  With savings inadequate, the capital endowments of Western economies have shrunk and have also been diverted into unproductive speculation and asset investment. Anyone who thinks the current [high] level of London house prices does anything at all for the true wealth and productivity of the British economy is living in economic dreamland.

More HERE

*******************************

Entrepreneurs are not 'lottery winners'

America's inventors deserve credit for their work, but Obama dismisses them as lucky

There he goes again.  Barack Obama, who insists he is "president of all America," lashed out last week at well-off citizens. Peddling higher taxes to further fund the failed 50-year-old, $22 trillion War on Poverty, he singled out the "top 25 hedge fund managers" for scorn at Georgetown University, President Obama's class-envy diatribe applies to everyone who has earned too much for his taste. "You pretty much have more than you'll ever be able to use and your family will ever be able to use," Obama scoffed — as if capitalists stash their capital like toilet paper in the utility closet.

Our president then casually derided America's top achievers as "society's lottery winners" who need to stop being selfish and start being their "brother's keepers."

For radical progressives, life is a Powerball drawing. Success is random. Economic achievement is something to be rectified and redistributed to assuage guilt. Only those who take money, not those who make it by offering goods and services people want and need, act in the public interest. Those who seek financial enrichment for the fruits of their labor are cast as rapacious hoarders in Obama World — and so are the private investors who support them.

Wealth-shaming is a recurrent leitmotif in the Obama administration's gospel of government dependency.

In 2010, the president proclaimed, "I do think at a certain point you've made enough money." In the summer of 2012, he openly denigrated American's makers and builders because someone else "invested in roads and bridges." Team Obama argued that his "you didn't build that" remarks were taken out of context. But let's remember what he said immediately preceding that infamous sound bite:

Look, if you've been successful, you didn't get there on your own. You didn't get there on your own. I'm always struck by people who think, 'Well, it must be because I was just so smart.' There are a lot of smart people out there. 'It must be because I worked harder than everybody else.' Let me tell you something — there are a whole bunch of hardworking people out there.

The context then and now makes Obama's incurable contempt for private entrepreneurial accomplishments even clearer. Pushing to raise taxes even higher on wealthy Americans, Obama stoked you-think-you're-so-smart resentment of business owners. His intent was to humiliate those who reject collectivism. The president's message: Innovators are nothing special. Their brains and work ethics are no different from anyone else's. They owe their success to taxpayers, public school teachers, public infrastructure — and unfair dumb luck.

The progressives' government-built-that ethos is anathema to our Founding Fathers' first principles. They understood that the ability of brilliant, ambitious individuals to reap private rewards for inventions and improvements benefited the public good. This revolutionary idea is a hallmark of American exceptionalism and entrepreneurship. Alexis de Tocqueville observed that the doctrine of enlightened "self-interest rightly understood" was a part of America's DNA from its founding. "You may trace it at the bottom of all their actions, you will remark it in all they say. It is as often asserted by the poor man as by the rich," de Tocqueville wrote.

Francis Grund, a contemporary of de Tocqueville's, also noted firsthand America's insatiable willingness to work. "Active occupation is not only the principal source of their happiness, and the foundation of their natural greatness, but they are absolutely wretched without it. …Business is the very soul of an American," he wrote.

Here is the marvel Obama and his command-and-control cronies fail to comprehend: From the Industrial Age to the Internet Age, the concentric circles of American innovation in the free marketplace are infinite. This miracle repeats itself millions of times a day through the voluntary interactions, exchanges and business partnerships of creative Americans and their clients, consumers and investors. No federal Department of Innovation or Ten-Point White House Action Plan for Progress can lay claim to the boundless synergies of these profit-earning capitalists.

Of course, they benefit from the "help" of others. But America's best and brightest wealth creators deserve the ultimate credit for the fruits of their individual minds and the untold byproducts of their labor. And no, President Obama, they didn't just get a better roll of the dice. They were smarter, faster, more daring and more hardworking than everyone else, including you and me.

We owe them, not the other way around.

SOURCE

**********************************

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)

****************************