Another mass attack by car; Ban all cars!

UK: A mother and her four children are fighting for their lives after being mowed down by a car 'doing 100mph' as they strolled to the park.

Five ambulances and an air ambulance rushed to Grove Lane in Handsworth, Birmingham, following the horrific collision at 12.05pm today.

Paramedics found a woman in her 30s, a four-year-old boy, a seven-year-old girl, a 12-year-old girl and a 14-year-old boy had been hit by a grey Seat Leon.

Witnesses said the two youngest children were sent flying '20 to 30 metres down the road' due to the force of the impact as the family crossed the road.

Police have arrested a 35-year-old man on suspicion of dangerous driving.

A West Midlands Ambulance Service spokesman said the youngsters were taken to Birmingham Childrens' Hospital, where their conditions are described as life-threatening.

He said: 'Crews arrived to find a car that had been in collision with a group of pedestrians.

'Five pedestrians were injured in the collision; a girl believed to be seven years old suffered serious head injuries and went into cardiac arrest at the scene. Advanced life support was carried out by medics.

'A boy, believed to be four years old, suffered serious head injuries and was resuscitated by medics at the scene after he stopped breathing for a short time.'

He added: 'A woman in her 30's suffered serious head and pelvic injuries in the crash. She received emergency treatment at the scene from medics and was transferred to Queen Elizabeth Hospital Major Trauma Unit for further emergency treatment.

'A girl, believed to be 12 years old, suffered serious head injuries and also back injuries. She also received emergency treatment at the scene by medics to stabilise her condition.

SOURCE

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California:  Destroyed by Green/Left idiocy

by Victor Davis Hanson

I offer another chronicle, a 14-hour tour of the skeleton I once knew as California.

8:00 AM

I finally got around to retrieving the car seat that someone threw out in front of the vineyard near my mailbox. (Don’t try waiting dumpers out — as if it is not your responsibility to clean up California roadsides.)

An acquaintance had also emailed and reminded me that not far away there was a mound of used drip hose on the roadside. That mess proved to be quite large, maybe 1,000 feet of corroded and ripped up plastic hose. I suppose no scavenger thinks it can be recycled. I promise to haul it away this week. One must be prompt: even a small pile attracts dumpers like honey to bees. They are an ingenious and industrious lot (sort of like the cunning and work ethic of those who planted IEDs during the Iraq War). My cousin’s pile across the road has grown to Mt. Rushmore proportions. Do freelance dumpers make good money promising to take away their neighborhood’s mattresses and trash without paying the $20 or so county dumping fee? And does their success depend on fools like me, who are expected to keep roadsides tidy by cleaning up past trash to make room for future refuse?

9:00 AM

My relative has sold her 20 acres to a successful almond grower; that was the last parcel other than my own left of my great great grandmother’s farm. All that remains is the original house I live in and 40 acres. Almost all the small farming neighbors I grew up with — of Armenian, Punjabi, German, or Japanese descent — are long gone. Goodbye, diversity. And their children either sold the parcels and moved away (the poorer seem to head to the foothills, the middle class go out of state, the better off flee to the coast) or rent them out. Most of the surrounding countryside, piece-by-piece, is being reconstituted into vast almond groves. I plan to rent out mine next year for such conversion.

Almonds can net far more per acre than raisins and do not require much more water and require almost no labor. Tree fruit, given its expenses and risks, can lose your farm. The last vestiges of small, agrarian farming in these parts died sometime in the 1990s. Oddly, or perhaps predictably, the land to the naked eye looks better in the sense that the power of corporate capital and savvy scientific expertise has resulted in picture-perfect orchards. The old agrarian idea that 40 acres also grows a unique family, not just food, is — how do we say it? No longer operative?

10:00 AM

I drive on the 99 freeway past Kingsburg on the way to Visalia. It is a road-warrior maze of construction and detours. The construction hazards are of the sort that would earn any private contractor a lawsuit. (How do you sue Caltrans — and why is it that four or five men always seem to be standing around one who is working?) Only recently has the state decided to upgrade the fossilized two-lane 99 into an interstate freeway of three lanes. But the construction is slow and seemingly endless. Could we not have a simple state rule: “no high-speed rail corridors until the 101, 99, and I-5 are three-lane freeways, and the neglected Amtrak line achieves profitable ridership?” It is almost as if California answers back: “I am too bewildered by your premodern challenges, so I will take psychological refuge in my postmodern fantasies.”

12:00 Noon

I try to drive by the Reedley DMV on the way home to switch a car registration. Appointments take a long waiting period, but the line of the show-ups is still far out the door and well into the parking lot. I pass. The state announced that it was surprised that “unexpectedly” (the catch adverb of the Obama era) nearly 500,000 illegal aliens have already been processed with new driver’s licenses. The lines at the office suggest that many DMVs simply have transmogrified into illegal alien license-processing centers.

The last time I had visited the office, I noticed the customers were also dealing with fines, tickets, or fix-it citations as part of the process. I thought, how will they pay for all that, given that “living in the shadows” and ignoring summonses and threats is far easier than paying what the state wants? And then, presto, the governor just announced a wish that the poor should be given “ticket amnesty.” So much for Sacramento’s idea of fining California drivers into becoming a reliable revenue source for a broke state, given that it has affected far more drivers than the shrinking and hated middle class that could supposedly afford the new sky-high tickets.

It reminds me of Obamacare: after my accident last May, I had lots of procedures and hours in waiting rooms. I discovered something listening to the desk people deal with Obamacare signups: a vast number apparently have not regularly paid the monthly or quarterly premiums. An even larger group has no idea what a deductible is, or that it actually applies to themselves. And some had no notion of a copayment. The reality of all three sends many into a near frenzy, reminiscent of the idea that a driver’s license means keeping up with registration, smog rules, and paying outstanding warrants — until the state provides the expected amnesties.

2:00 PM

I’m at the local supermarket two miles away. Three observations: many of the shoppers seem to be here for the air conditioning (the forecast is for 105 degrees by 5 PM). No one in the Bay Area, whose green agenda has led to the highest power rates in the country, seems to have thought that all of California does not enjoy 65-75 degree coastal corridor weather. My latest PG&E bill reminds me to apply for income-adjusted reduced rates — if I qualify. I don’t, so keep the air conditioner off all day.

Obesity among the shoppers seems epidemic and no one is talking about it. It is striking how young the overweight are! Almost all our small towns now have new state/federal dialysis clinics. Is this not a state emergency? Cannot the state at least offer public health warnings to the immigrant community that while diabetes is alarming among the population at large, it is becoming epidemic among new arrivals from Latin America and Mexico?

Stories that 25 percent of all state hospital admittances suffer from high blood sugar levels circulate. I argue in a friendly way with a customer in line about the new “green” Coke. He claims it is diet, but tastes like regular Coke. I remind him that it is so only because the artificial sweetener has been energized by some cane sugar and it is not so diet after all. (He is buying eight six-packs in fear of shortages.)

I don’t understand the EBT system. How is it that customers ahead of me pull out not one, but often go through three or four cards before they cobble together enough plastic credit for the full tab? Where does one acquire multiple cards?

4:00 PM

I am talking ag pumps at home with some farmers. The water table here has gone from 40 feet in 2011 to 82 feet now — the result of four years of constant pumping combined with below-average rain and snow runoff, and the complete cut-off of contracted surface water from the Kings River watershed (don’t ask why). I lowered one 15-hp submersible to 100 feet (the well is only 160, which used to be called “deep” when the water table was 40 feet). “Lowering” means less water pumped, more energy costs, a waiting list for the pump people, and sky-high service charges. The renter promises to lower the other one, whose pump is pumping air, now well above the sinking water table. My house well is only 140 feet deep. I just lowered the pump to a 110-foot draw, and decided to get on the “waiting list” for a new domestic well. (Prices for drilling by the foot have increased fivefold, and are said to go up monthly).

If the drought continues, one will see two unimaginable things by next spring: thousands of abandoned older homes out in the countryside from Merced to Bakersfield, and tens of thousands of acres on the West Side (water table ca. 1,000 feet and dropping) will go fallow if they are row-crops. And if orchards and vineyards, a mass die-off will follow of trees and vines. (Note that Silicon Valley’s Crystal Springs reservoir on freeway 280 is “full.” No Bay Area green activist is arguing either that the deliveries through massive conduits should be stopped at the San Joaquin River to be diverted for fish restoration, or that the entire project is unnatural and a scar on Yosemite Park, warranting shutting down the huge transfer system in favor of recycling waste water for showers and gardens.)

5:00 PM

I’m on a PG&E off-peak rate schedule, so I’m waiting until evening to turn on the air conditioner. It is 104 degrees outside and 96 degrees inside the house. As a youth, we used a tiny window, inefficient air conditioner far more in the 1960s and 1970s than I ever do now with central air. Given power rates, the idea of a cool home in the valley is so 1970s.

6:00 PM

I take another walk around the farm. Good — no one has yet shot the majestic pair of red tail hawks yet, who greet me on their accustomed pole. But I do notice someone has forced open the cyclone fence around the neighbor’s vacant house. It was put up to stop the serial vandalizing. (What do you do after stealing copper wire? Go for the sheet rock? Pipes? Windows? Shingles?)

7:00 PM

A friend calls and mentions that local JCs had a spate of car vandalizations. This time targets are catalytic converters (for precious metal salvage?). I get the impression that today’s Gothic looter and Vandal is more ingenious than the state’s work force. Note the new California: the citizen is responsible for picking up trash or keeping a car running clean with a converter. The idea that a bankrupt state would create a task force to go after such thievery is absurd. I appreciate California logic: don’t dare suggest that massive new commitments to ensure social parity for millions of new arrivals through increased state legal, medical, criminal justice, and educational programs ever come at the expense of investments in roads, bridges, reservoirs, airports, or public facilities — or even the accustomed state services that one took for granted in 1970. To do so is nativist, racist, and xenophobic. What an illiberal state we’ve become.

8:00 PM

I’m on the upstairs balcony looking out over miles of lush countryside. It’s quite scenic, something in between verdant Tuscany and the aridness of Sicily. I can hear the ag pumps of the surrounding farms everywhere churning 24/7. In a normal year they would never be turned on, as river water irrigated the fields and recharged the water table.

Then come two sirens. Will the power go off? Quite often, someone after too much to drink goes airborne and hits a power pole on these rural roads. I got back inside in case things go dark to review the mail. The local irrigation district has not delivered water in four years (what do ditch tenders do when canals and ditches are empty?) and now wants a tax hike to keep up with increased expenses. In fact, half the mail seems to be drought information from various agencies. What was so awful about building just two or three one million acre-foot reservoirs, or raising Shasta Dam? We could begin today. When the taps at Facebook or the Google toilets go dry, will the state again invest in water storage?

10:00 PM

I turn on the local news and channel surf for 10 minutes. How well we take refuge in the absurd. This litany blares out: Bruce Jenner’s new sexual identity, the latest racial controversy, this time over the crashing of a private pool party and the police reaction, the Obama’s new stretch Air Force One jumbo jet, Marco Rubio’s one ticket every four years, Miley Cyrus’s bisexuality. I suppose if one cannot grasp, much less deal with, $19 trillion in debt, a foreign policy in shambles, the largest state in the union on the cusp of a disastrous drought, a Potemkin health care system, zero interest on passbook savings, and the end of all federal immigration law, then the trivial must become existential.

Goodnight, once great state…

SOURCE

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Ripping off the kids: here's the difference between a Republican and a Democrat



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For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated) and Coral reef compendium. (Updated as news items come in).  GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten. I also put up occasional updates on my Personal blog and each day I gather together my most substantial current writings on A WESTERN HEART.

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

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Confiscate all cars.  More car control!  Toughen up car licensing! More car-free zones!

Mad Muslim uses a car to kill 3 and injure 34 in Austria.  Yesterday, President Obama gave a brief speech responding to the attack. “We don’t have all the facts, but we do know that once again innocent people were killed in part because somebody who wanted to inflict harm had no trouble getting their hands on a car.”

A four-year-old boy is reported to be one of three people killed after an SUV ploughed into a crowd of people in Graz, Austria.

Another 34 people were injured in the attack, with six - including two children - said to be in a serious condition.

Eyewitnesses say the driver rammed into crowds at up to 90mph before he got out and began randomly stabbing bystanders, which included the elderly and policemen.

The three victims killed in the attack have been described as a 28-year-old Austrian man, a 25-year-old woman and a four-year-old boy.

The woman and boy were both killed as the driver ploughed through crowds on the main Herrengasse shopping street before reaching the city's main square.

The National Police Director, Josef Klamminger, said the man, who is believed to be a 26-year-old Austrian truck driver, was suffering from 'psychosis' related to 'family problems'.

Police director Klamminger added that the man was under a restraining order keeping him away from the home of his wife and two children, after a domestic violence report was filed against him last month.

The driver did not resist when he was arrested by the police - who say he acted alone - and they have no reason to believe it was an act of terrorism.

The busy square was hosting an event relating to the Austrian Formula One Grand Prix which is being held 80km away, in the Red Bull Ring in Spielberg, in Steiermark.

The city council released a statement which read: 'At 12pm there was an appalling incident in the centre of Graz, which has caused major alarm and left the city deeply shaken.'

Provincial Governor Hermann Schuetzenhoefer said at least one of his injured victims is in a critical condition.

He added: 'We are shocked and dismayed... there is no explanation and no excuse for this attack.

'We have much to do to ensure cohesion in our community, which has clearly become difficult for many people.'

German-language website Krone reported that the man arrested by police is of Bosnian origin.

SOURCE

Apologies for the sarcasm in my heading and sub-heading above but the point is an important one.  I am of course deeply grieved at the senseless loss of life involved. As a great fan of Austro/Hungarian operetta, Austria is close to my heart

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The REAL reason for gun massacres?

Another mass killing is followed by the usual thoughtless political and media responses. The last time I looked, the southern states of the USA contained plenty of people with white supremacist views, most of them armed.

Indeed, this has been so for more than a century. At the same time, the past few years have seen gun massacres in Britain  (Hungerford and Dunblane), Finland, Norway, Germany and Switzerland, and knife massacres in China, a police state where guns are genuinely difficult to obtain.

So it would seem that blaming these events on widespread gun ownership and white racialism doesn’t quite work. If all these events were properly investigated (and few are, because conventional wisdom closes the minds of investigators), my guess is that almost all of the killers would be found to have been taking legal or illegal mind-altering drugs.

Often, as in the case of James Holmes, the Colorado cinema shooter, the facts don’t emerge for many months. Or the authorities refuse to release the killer’s medical history, as they have done in the Sandy Hook case.

Dylann Roof, the alleged Charleston murderer, was recently arrested for possession of Suboxone, a drug given to opioid abusers, and suspected of causing personality changes and violent outbursts. A student at his high school described him as a ‘pill-popper’.

It is the use of legal and illegal mind-altering drugs that has hugely increased in recent years. Gun ownership and racial bigotry haven’t. Please think about this.

SOURCE

Making drugs illegal promotes foolish use of them

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Donald Trump Brings Levity to Presidential Race

Donald Trump would be a mere sideshow curiosity in the 2016 elections if it were not for his name recognition and entertainment factor. According to Real Clear Politics, Trump is polling higher than Rick Perry, Carly Fiorina, Rick Santorum, Lindsey Graham and Bobby Jindal.

But even if he’s fired in the end — and we hope he is — he will provide some much-needed humor. After Tuesday’s announcement, Politico pulled Trump’s 10 best lines. Notably, however, Politico missed the best one: “When did we beat Japan at anything?”

Well, there was that whole WWII thing in the Pacific…

But to put things in perspective, as absurd as the Trump vanity campaign is, he is far more qualified than Barack Obama was in 2009 — or today! For example, Obama put Joe Biden on his ticket. When Trump was asked who he wanted as a running mate, he replied, “I think Oprah would be great. I’d love to have Oprah.”

Frankly, presidential elections could use a little levity. It’s been a long time since the last billionaire vanity campaign kept us amused, compliments of Ross Perot!

SOURCE

I don't entirely agree with the above.  I think it is defensive.  Trump seems to be more consistently conservative than anyone I can think of in the GOP

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President Obama: Stay out of Entrepreneurship

As Ronald Reagan famously said, “the nine most terrifying words in the English language are ‘I'm from the government, and I'm here to help.’” While champions of limited government are in favor of entrepreneurship, do we really want the federal government to decide on which companies to invest in? After President Obama’s announcement that the White House plans to invest in entrepreneurs in the United States and abroad, what should we expect? The Spark Global Entrepreneurship coalition plans to raise $1 billion in private funding for entrepreneurs in the United States and abroad by 2017. At face value, this may seem like a fine idea – but this is actually very bad news.

Our government should not be in the position of picking winners and losers. Politicization inevitably plagues everything touched by government and political elites. The White House press release on the initiative states, “The United States is making empowering women and youth a central objective of its global entrepreneurship programs,” and at the White House event in which these initiatives were announced, President Obama stated, “At a time that we’re facing challenges that no country can meet by itself — lifting people out of poverty, combating climate change, preventing the spread of disease — helping social entrepreneurs mobilize and organize brings more people together to find solutions.” By these two statements alone, we can glimpse the political agendas this $1 billion in investments will be funding. Companies that promise to combat climate change will receive priority despite being the least promising in the marketplace (think: Solyndra), and preferential treatment will be given to women entrepreneurs even if their ideas and execution are significantly less valuable than those of their male competitors.

This kind of government interference in venture capital distorts the efficiency of the marketplace. Money that could be invested to fund another entrepreneurial project will now go where the government wants it – something we’ve seen wreak havoc in the past, like during the housing bubble or the current student loan crisis. Venture capital should go towards funding things that there is, or could be, a market demand for, not towards what politicians think will further their agenda. The government taking money that could otherwise be used as individuals and firms see fit and giving it to those who they decide deserve it is the kind of central planning that leads to economic bubbles and crashes, not innovation and progress.

The White House’s interest in entrepreneurship is troubling on a greater ideological and cultural level as well. The President’s impulse to become involved in entrepreneurship is evidence of a pervasive “you didn’t build that” mentality. Entrepreneurs have long been the most individualist of the American population, taking risks on their own visions in order to change the landscape of American life, and the government wants to stake a claim on those successes. The current administration would like to look at entrepreneurs, brave enough to forge their own path, and say, “where would they be without us?”

This attitude was recently exemplified by White House Chief Technology Officer Megan Smith, who said that more entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley need to work for the federal government, which, translated into reality, means she wants to turn innovators into bureaucrats. What Smith doesn’t understand is that entrepreneurs in private markets create positive change in the world – but put them in government, or involve the government in their work, and the best they can do is change nothing. The government becoming involved in entrepreneurship will not help bring about more entrepreneurship, but rather, manipulate entrepreneurs into doing what the government wants them to do.

SOURCE

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Life without libraries would be unimaginably poorer

I understand the paen by Jeff Jacoby below.  My early life experience was similar.  But I think he is pissing into the wind.  Unforgiveable though it is, even university libraries these days are in fact throwing out books to make more room for computer terminals

I WAS A four-year-old in kindergarten the first time I remember reading in a library. The book was Are You My Mother? by P.D. Eastman, and I'm not sure which I found more captivating — the adventure of the hatchling that sets off to find its mother, or my own adventure of picking out a book from what seemed an endless array of enticing titles.

I was hooked early, on books and libraries both. To this day I can visualize precisely the shelves in the fiction section of my school's library, where I first discovered many of my favorite children's novels: The Twenty-One Balloons, Harriet the Spy, A Wrinkle in Time.

But the small library in my Cleveland-area day school was merely a gateway drug to the local public library a mile from my home. I spent innumerable hours there as a boy, addicted as much to the serendipitous pleasures of searching for a good book as to the satisfying relish of losing myself in its pages once I found one. My parents, raising five kids on a meager income, had little money to spare for buying books. But my library card was free, and I made heavy use of it.

The University Heights Library was my home away from home. Nothing was off-limits to a curious reader. From the Edward Eager magic books that fascinated me when I was little to Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex, But Were Afraid to Ask, which held a different fascination as I grew older, it was all available. All I had to do was choose.

I can't imagine life without libraries. And by "libraries" I mean actual books — ink on paper — to be borrowed and shared and read. I don't mean bookless digital-content centers like San Antonio's $2.3 million BiblioTech, an all-electronic reading venue that looks, in Time magazine's description "like an orange-hued Apple store" outfitted with 500 e-readers, 48 computers, and 20 iPads and laptops. I would never discourage reading in any format, but rows of iMacs do not a library make. The ability to browse goes to the essence of the library experience, along with the egalitarian access that puts books in plain sight of all comers.

Happily, that experience is alive and well. As British journalist Alex Johnson documents in a wonderful new volume, Improbable Libraries, even in the digital age readers yearn for printed books, and librarians go to amazing and creative lengths to supply them.

Johnson highlights libraries that have opened in airports, train stations, and hotels, the better to serve readers on the move in this hypermobile era. In Santiago, Chile, there are lending libraries in the subways: The Bibliometro system lends 440,000 books a year from 20 underground stations, and has effectively become the largest public library in the country. A global "tiny library" movement has blossomed in the form of honor-system book nooks on street corners, at bus stops, and even in front yards of private homes. In Great Britain, hundreds of iconic red telephone boxes, no longer needed, have been repurposed into mini-lending libraries.

Smartphones and tablets have grown ubiquitous, but reading on screens is not the same — and for many people, not nearly as satisfying — as reading in print. Clicking links on an electronic device is efficient, but it can't replace the tactile engagement of wandering the stacks, pulling a book from the shelf, reading the dust jacket, flipping through its pages.

"A library is not a luxury, but one of the necessities of life," wrote Henry Ward Beecher. The hunger for books knows no boundary. In Laos, the Big Brother Mouse project uses elephants to carry books to remote villages for children to borrow and exchange. The Mongolian Children's Mobile Library, using camels, does the same thing in the Gobi desert. So does Luis Soriano's Biblioburro library in rural Colombia —with donkeys.

Life without books and libraries in which to discover them would be unimaginably poorer. Improbable Libraries makes that point beautifully. Then again, if you're anything like me, you've known it since you were four.

SOURCE

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

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For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated) and Coral reef compendium. (Updated as news items come in).  GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten. I also put up occasional updates on my Personal blog and each day I gather together my most substantial current writings on A WESTERN HEART.

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

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A white kills blacks!  BIG News!

Blacks killing whites is mostly only local news, if that.  No national attention to this event for instance



The attack is of course deplorable. The kid seems to have attacked some pretty decent people. But his words reveal that the kid was disturbed by the difficulties blacks pose for white society.  Apparently he somehow escaped the brainwashing which says that blacks must be treated like children who cannot be blamed for what they do -- "the soft bigotry of low expectations" -- as George Bush called it. In a country that claims equality before the law it is in fact amazing that so many accept one law for whites and another for blacks (e.g. so-called "affirmative action").  One wonders how long the brainwashing will retain its power.  If it loses its power we will see many like Dylann Roof.  Some basic details below

Dylann Roof, the man arrested after a shooting dead nine people in an historically black South Carolina church on Wednesday, wanted to start a civil war and bring back segregation, friends claim.

The 21-year-old is pictured on his Facebook profile wearing a jacket bearing flags from apartheid-era South Africa and what was once white-rule Rhodesia.

He also has a criminal record and in April received a gun for his 21st birthday.

'He flat out told us he was going to do this stuff,' his friend Christon Scriven told the New York Daily News. But, he said, 'He’s weird. You don’t know when to take him seriously and when not to.'

His roommate Dalton Tyler told ABC News: 'He was big into segregation and other stuff. He said he wanted to start a civil war. He said he was going to do something like that and then kill himself.'

According to classmates, Roof is a frequent abuser of prescription drugs.

Court records from Lexington, North Carolina - where he has been living in a trailer park - reveal he was arrested twice this year on charges of trespassing and drug possession.

Roof attended ninth grade at White Knoll High during the 2008-09 school year and went there for the first half of the following academic year, district spokeswoman Mary Beth Hill said. The school system gave no reason for Roof's departure and said it had no record of him attending any other schools in the district.

According to CBS News, school records show that between fourth and ninth grade, Roof attended six different schools, and repeated the ninth grade.

A witness to Wednesday's massacre said Roof said before the shooting: 'I have to do it...You rape our women and you're taking over the country.'

SOURCE

He's precisely right about rape. In the latest available U.S. government figures (for 2008) there were over 16,000 rapes of white women by blacks and zero rapes of black women by whites.  See Table 42 here. Is he the only one to see a problem there?

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Like clockwork, Democrats push for more gun control

What happened in Charleston, South Carolina is a tragedy in every sense of the word. The loss of life is always tragic.

But what is also tragic is how predictable Democrats have become. We’re barely even 48-hours removed and Democrats are already making a new push for gun control. It's just shameful.

Yesterday, President Obama gave a brief speech responding to the attack. “We don’t have all the facts, but we do know that once again innocent people were killed in part because somebody who wanted to inflict harm had no trouble getting their hands on a gun.”

Oh yes, blame the gun.  Well, let’s look at the facts, shall we?

We’re hearing today that the shooter may have actually purchased the gun himself at a gun store, which means that he passed a background check. The Left’s argument keeps unraveling. No amount of background checks would have stopped this.

This man didn’t use an assault weapon. He used a .45 caliber pistol. Not even close to one of Obama’s dreaded “assault weapons.”

The man didn’t use high capacity magazines. He killed 9 people by reloading five times. The Left’s narrative is that magazine bans save lives because they force a shooter to reload. A typical .45 pistol has a 7-8 round magazine.

He wasn’t allowed to bring the gun into the church. The church was, legally, a “gun-free zone.” Merely bringing the gun into the building was a crime.

All of these laws were broken. Yet today, Barack Obama, Harry Reid, and all their cronies were out in force pushing for more gun control.

So what exactly is the President advocating when he says the shooter had “no trouble” getting a gun? If every gun control law on the books wasn’t enough to stop this, what does Obama think we should do?

Well, for one, the Democrats are moving forward with the Handgun Purchaser Licensing Act of 2015.

This bill would force every single American to first get permission from local law enforcement before being allowed to purchase a handgun. Just a friendly reminder: the Supreme Court ruled in 2008 that handgun ownership was an individual right protected by the 2nd Amendment to the United States Constitution.

They have a system like this in New Jersey and a woman was just murdered on her own driveway after waiting 43 days for the state to give her permission to buy a gun.

Not ONE of Obama’s proposed gun control policies would have prevented this tragedy. But that hasn’t stopped the President from calling on Congress to ‘do something.’ And that something is to punish the rest of us.

SOURCE

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Why the Liberals Can’t Get It

I am a big fan of John Hinderaker over at Powerline, and you can see why if you read one of his latest, this one about the Democrats' lack of any sort of coherent national security policy. Here is the essence of it:

    "Democrats are incapable of devising a coherent strategy for dealing with (our problems), and seemingly don't even try to do so. The charitable explanation is that they are incompetent. But perhaps it is because they aren't sure what their desired ends are. Do they want the U.S. to win? Do they want us to be powerful, prosperous, influential and successful? That is not a hard question for most Americans, but it is for leading Democrats like Obama and Clinton. If you don't know the answer to that question, then coming up with a strategy is tough. That, I suspect, is what we have seen for the last six or seven years".

It's the basic question about the Obama administration (Hinderaker however is focused on Hillary Clinton and her failed Libyan actions): Is the long list of foreign policy failures due to stupidity and incompetence, or to some sort of purposeful malevolence?

I think this question is invariably framed too narrowly. I think that we are dealing with the result of the collapse of an entire world view, and that collapse has left the Democrats without any guiding principles.  Their old templates, from class struggle to capitalist imperialism, no longer apply to the real world.  The most potent forces in play are those the left has never understood.  Religion above all.

They used to favor the poor countries, ergo they advocated foreign aid galore and all power to the UN.  Neither is working out.  They will never forgive us for winning the Cold War, thereby ending their utopian dream that the Soviet Union would truly become the successful incarnation of "real socialism."  And instead of class interest, most people pursue narrower goals, motivated by passions, like religion, which leftists believe archaic.  You know, redneck stuff like guns and bourbon.  Except that now, religion is the most dynamic force in the world, for good and for ill.  This frustrates and angers them, since, unable to make sense of the world, they can't craft policies that make sense.

The collapse of the old world view is not surprising.  Any decent cultural historian will tell you that world views collapse with striking frequency.  But our current leftists don't know this, because they are products of an educational system that doesn't teach history.  Obama is a great example of the ignorance that abounds, even in our "best" schools.   From his amazing claim that "Islam" brought printing to the Western world (it was the Chinese, who sold it to the Europeans, and Portuguese Jews brought it to the Middle East) to claims of Muslim "toleration," his ignorance of history has been demonstrated over and over again.

Instead of acquiring some real knowledge, he and his cohorts have been taught to blame us-the West, the capitalists, the Jews, above all, the United States-for the palpably alarming state of affairs in the world.  And blaming us, they embrace a seemingly simple solution to the world's problems:  rein us in, deprive us of the capacity to reshape the world, turn us into an unexceptional country, and work with nasty foreign leaders who, the leftists believe, have been wrongly branded as evil.  Hence Cuba.  Hence Iran.

If you can't tell your friends from your enemies, you end by adopting your enemies' view of the world.

Which brings me back to Hinderaker.  I think they have answers to his questions. Do they want us to win?  Certainly not.  Those who want us to win and to flourish are, in the oft-repeated words of the president and his acolytes, "on the wrong side of history."  As Ali Khamenei and Fidel Castro might put it.

SOURCE

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The Lie Obama Keeps Repeating About the Poor in America

President Obama recently acknowledged what every sane person knows to be true: The best anti-poverty program is a job. Obama said this at a recent conference on poverty.

But he continues to repeat a falsehood over and over. This is the claim that the poor work just as hard as the rich do. Well, yes, many people in poor households heroically work very hard at low wages to take care of their families. No doubt about that. Yet the average poor family doesn’t work nearly as much as the rich families do. And that’s a key reason why these households are poor.

The most recent Census Bureau data on household incomes document the importance of work. Census sorts the households by income quintile, and we will label those in the highest quintile as “rich,” and those in the lowest quintile as “poor.” The average household in the top 20 percent of income have an average of almost exactly two full-time workers. The average poor family (bottom 20 percent) has just 0.4 workers. This means on average, roughly for every hour worked by those in a poor household, those in a rich household work five hours. The idea that the rich are idle bondholders who play golf or go to the spa every day while the poor toil isn’t accurate.

The finding that six out of 10 poor households have no one working at all is disturbing. Since they have no income from work, is it a surprise they are poor?

As for rich households, 75 percent have two or more workers. For the poor households, that percent is less than 5 percent.

Of course, hours worked doesn’t account for all or even most of the gap between rich and poor. But it does account for some of it. One of the more pernicious concepts is the notion of “dead-end jobs.” No, the surefire economic dead end is no job at all. There’s no climbing the economic ladder if you’re not even on the first rung.

Marriage is also a very good anti-poverty program. Married couples are almost five times more likely to be in the highest income quintile (33 percent) than in the lowest quintile (7 percent).

Without a father in the home, there is usually at most one full-time worker. Married couples are more economically successful for many reasons, not least of which is that they can and often do have two people working and bringing in a paycheck. So divorce and out-of-wedlock births have a lot to do with the income inequality. Budget expert Isabel Sawhill of the Brookings Institute found that if marriage rates were as high today as they were in 1970, about 20 percent of child poverty would be gone. What is worrisome is that a record 47 percent of Americans aged 25 to 34 have never married.

What is to be learned from all of this income data? First, one of the best ways to reduce poverty is to get people in low-income households working—and hopefully 40 hours a week. By the way, one reason raising the minimum wage won’t help lower poverty much is that it will help far fewer than half of the poor who have no job at all. And if it destroys jobs at the bottom of the skills ladder, it may lead to fewer people working and exacerbate poverty.

This data also reinforces the case for strict work requirements for all welfare benefit programs. When welfare takes the place of work it actually contributes to long-term poverty. It isn’t cold-hearted to be in favor of work programs. It is providing a GPS system to help the poor find a way out of poverty.

Finally, getting married before having kids is a great way to avoid falling into the poverty trap.

Yes, there are way too many working poor in America, and that problem needs to be addressed by programs like the earned income tax credit that supplement low-income wages. But there are way too many non-working poor in America. That’s a problem liberals seem to want to do nothing about.

SOURCE

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Texas to Take Back $1 Billion in Gold From the Fed

Texas no longer trusts our nation’s central bank to safely store its gold in New York City. For years, the Lone Star State has kept its $1 billion in gold in the hands of the Federal Reserve Bank, which has safeguarded the bullion of the U.S. government, foreign governments and other major organizations. But now, the state is setting up its own bullion depository and will soon withdraw its gold from Fed control.

“Today I signed HB 483 to provide a secure facility for the State of Texas, state agencies and Texas citizens to store gold bullion and other precious metals,” Texas Gov. Greg Abbott said in a statement June 12. “With the passage of this bill, the Texas Bullion Depository will become the first state-level facility of its kind in the nation, increasing the security and stability of our gold reserves and keeping taxpayer funds from leaving Texas to pay for fees to store gold in facilities outside our state.”

The move could be as simple as Texas stepping up and taking responsibility for its own assets, as well as providing a place for Texas citizens to store gold. Or, as CBS notes, it could be a step toward establishing a currency if Texas were to secede from the union. Regardless, it’s a Texas two-step toward greater autonomy.

SOURCE

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For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated) and Coral reef compendium. (Updated as news items come in).  GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten. I also put up occasional updates on my Personal blog and each day I gather together my most substantial current writings on A WESTERN HEART.

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

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Culture and Social Pathology

By Walter E. Williams

A civilized society's first line of defense is not the law, police and courts but customs, traditions, rules of etiquette and moral values. These behavioral norms — mostly transmitted by example, word of mouth and religious teachings — represent a body of wisdom distilled over the ages through experience and trial and error. They include important thou-shalt-nots, such as thou shalt not murder, thou shalt not steal and thou shalt not cheat. They also include all those courtesies that have traditionally been associated with ladylike and gentlemanly conduct.

The failure to fully transmit these values and traditions to subsequent generations represents one of the failings of what journalist Tom Brokaw called "The Greatest Generation." People in this so-called great generation, who lived during the trauma of the Great Depression and fought World War II, not only failed to transmit the moral values of their parents but also are responsible for government programs that will deliver economic chaos.

Behavior accepted as the norm today would have been seen as despicable yesteryear. There are television debt relief commercials that promise to help debtors pay back only half of what they owe. Foul language is spoken by children in front of and sometimes to teachers and other adults. When I was a youngster, it was unthinkable to use foul language to any adult. It would have meant risking a smack across the face. But years ago, parents and teachers didn't have "experts" on child rearing to tell them that corporal punishment was wrong and ineffective and "timeouts" would be a superior form of discipline. One result of our tolerance for aberrant behavior was that, according to the National Center for Education Statistics, during the 2011-12 academic year, 209,000 primary- and secondary-school teachers were physically assaulted and 353,000 were threatened with injury. As a result of this and other forms of school violence, many school districts employ hundreds of police officers.

Nowadays baby showers are often held for unwed mothers. Yesteryear such an acceptance of illegitimacy would have been unthinkable. Today there is little or no social sanction or shame for illegitimate births. There are no "shotgun" weddings to make the man live up to his responsibilities. But not to worry.

Taxpayers bear the financial burden of illegitimacy. Any economist worth his salt will tell you that if something is taxed, expect less of it. If something is subsidized, expect more of it. Taxpayers have been forced to subsidize slovenly behavior. The statistical evidence proves it. According to the 1938 Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences, that year 11 percent of black children and 3 percent of white children were born to unwed mothers. Today 72 percent of black children and 30 percent of white children are born to unwed mothers.

For nearly three-quarters of a century, the nation's liberals have waged war on traditional values, customs and morality. Our youths have been counseled that there are no moral absolutes. Instead, what's moral or immoral is a matter of personal opinion. During the 1960s, the education establishment began to challenge and undermine lessons children learned from their parents and Sunday school with fads such as "values clarification." So-called sex education classes are simply indoctrination that undermines family and church strictures against premarital sex. Lessons of abstinence were considered passe and replaced with lessons about condoms, birth control pills and abortions. Further undermining of parental authority came with legal and extralegal measures to assist teenage abortions with neither parental knowledge nor parental consent.

You say, "OK, Williams, the Greatest Generation is responsible for our moral decline, but what about our economic decline?" Ask yourself: What are the massive government spending programs that threaten to bankrupt our nation in the future? The answer would have to be Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. Over 50 percent of today's federal budget is spent on these programs. Around the time when many in the so-called Greatest Generation were born (1920), there were no such programs, and federal spending was $53 billion. In 2014, federal spending was $3.5 trillion.

If it were only the economic decline threatening our future, there might be hope. It's the moral decline that spells our doom.

SOURCE

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No, Conservatives Don’t Suddenly Hate Free Trade

The debate over the Trade Promotion Authority (TPA) bill backed by President Obama, House Speaker John Boehner and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has turned into a debate over just about anything except free trade.

The easy interpretation is that if you’re pro-TPA you are pro-trade, and if you’re anti-TPA you are anti-trade. The truth is more complicated.

It’s true that negotiating objectives included in the TPA bill passed by Congress include plenty for free-traders to like, including “the reduction or elimination of barriers and distortions that are directly related to trade and investment.”

But the bill also has components that should concern free trade advocates. It directs trade negotiators to preserve destructive U.S. antidumping laws instead of working to reduce other countries’ antidumping laws, and calls for countries to adhere to international environmental and labor agreements of dubious value. It expresses concern about currency manipulation, a protectionist standby.

The best summary of the relationship between TPA and free trade is “it’s complicated.”

There are also non-trade-related parts of the bill that should alarm conservatives. It urges respect for “internationally recognized human rights,” which for the United Nations and most countries includes international covenants like the Convention on the Rights of the Child and the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women, neither of which has been ratified by the United States.

Even more concerning, passage of TPA has been linked to a Trade Adjustment Assistance (TAA) program that promotes the myth that trade destroys jobs. As Rep. Louise Slaughter, D-N.Y., put it “TAA has always been an absolute admission to me that there is going to be lots of lost jobs.”

Contrary to some critics, support for TPA does not have anything to do with support for Obama’s position on amnesty or Obamacare.

Although TPA allows Congress to spell out negotiating objectives, the amount of leeway it gives the president means that who the president is matters.  And a president who has pledged to negotiate “the most progressive trade deal the world has ever seen” is clearly interested in ensuring that new deals advance major parts of his progressive agenda, including new multinational labor and environmental regulations and the injection of minimum wage guidelines into trade agreements for the first time in U.S. history.

Some of TPA’s most outspoken opponents, particularly from the left, rely on protectionist rhetoric, but it is possible to question the TPA process without questioning the benefits of trade.

Free trade is unquestionably important—and something conservatives should support. As Ronald Reagan once said:

"The winds and waters of commerce carry opportunities that help nations grow and bring citizens of the world closer together. Put simply, increased trade spells more jobs, higher earnings, better products, less inflation, and cooperation over confrontation. The freer the flow of world trade, the stronger the tides for economic progress and peace among nations."

Whether or not they support TPA, that’s an agenda on which all conservatives could agree.

SOURCE

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Feds accused of pushing ‘utopias’ in wealthy neighborhoods with diversity regs

Congressional Republicans are trying to thwart a new federal housing rule they claim would allow Washington to play a heavy-handed role in trying to remake upscale neighborhoods as racially and economically diverse "utopias."

The forthcoming regulations, expected to be formally proposed later this month, would leverage grant money to try and bring more affordable options into these neighborhoods. It would require local jurisdictions to report on their progress; they'd risk federal housing money if they don't.

But while the Department of Housing and Urban Development program essentially aims for more integration and equality, critics see a meddling federal government.

"[The rule] tells us how we can live, where we go to school, how we will vote, what this utopian type of neighborhood should look like," charged Rep. Paul Gosar, R-Ariz., who sponsored an amendment to the House HUD spending bill Wednesday, blocking any future funding for the new rule. The spending bill was passed in the House with the amendment.

"These rules want to manipulate the way American neighborhoods look," he told FoxNews.com in an interview.

HUD officials and proponents of the new rule say it would do nothing but clarify -- even simplify -- current obligations under The Fair Housing Act of 1968.

Right now, local and state housing authorities must have plans showing they are "affirmatively furthering fair housing." In other words, making sure their communities offer affordable housing opportunities in all neighborhoods, not just the poor ones, and do not discriminate based on color, religion, sex, or national origin. Affordable housing is generally defined as housing that costs no more than a third of a family's monthly income.

The new rule would require jurisdictions to file a full assessment every five years that not only addresses the affordable housing landscape, but patterns in poverty and minority concentrations, as well as "community access" to transportation, good schools and jobs.

In addition to the assessments, the new requirements include an action plan obligating the jurisdiction to "identify the primary determinants influencing fair housing conditions, prioritize addressing these conditions, and set one or more goals for mitigating or addressing their determinants." For its part, HUD would be sharing demographic data that local officials need to pull this together, while offering guidance and technical assistance.

But here's the rub. If cities and counties don't comply, it could put millions of dollars in annual federal block grants at risk, which critics say is how Washington can bully governments to do their bidding.

"This is nothing new," countered Debby Goldberg, vice president at the National Fair Housing Alliance, who supports the rule. "It's a planning tool. They leave it up to the jurisdictions to make their own decisions. HUD is not dictating what the answers must be, that's up to the locality."

HUD Secretary Julian Castro argued this in a hearing of the House Financial Services Committee June 11, when Rep. Mia Love, R-Utah, asked him directly if HUD would be actively telling localities how to remake their maps. "I know as a [former] mayor you wouldn't want the federal government to come in and tell you what to do with your zoning and your rules," she charged.

Castro said: "This is not about changing zoning laws, planning laws or anything like that." He called the new requirements a "tool" for local communities to do what they already are obligated to do better.

"I wish I had this tool when I was mayor," said Castro, who was mayor of San Antonio, Texas before he was appointed secretary of HUD in 2014. "We want to ensure that local communities have the tools to assess the landscape of housing in their area, where the investments are, where the affordable housing opportunities are," he said.

But Gosar is concerned that the feds would force local officials to plot out significant changes to their communities, as a requirement for grant money.

In order to get the money, he said, "you have to give them the plan and ask for a sign-off. These rules are put into place to manipulate the way America looks."

Critics point to the case of Westchester County, N.Y., which has been locked in a battle with HUD since it settled in a lawsuit brought by the nonprofit Anti-Discrimination Center over the county's lack of affordable housing units. The 2009 settlement, which HUD helped broker with the Justice Department, mandated the affluent county spend $50 million of its own money to build units, most of which would be in predominantly white neighborhoods. The county and HUD have been arguing ever since over compliance, with Westchester claiming HUD has been changing the rules along the way. As a result, HUD has repeatedly withheld annual funding from the county.

But Goldberg said this is the way it works -- jurisdictions aren't forced to comply with the law, but they won't get federal grants if they don't. "The law says if you are getting funds you have to show that you are affirmatively furthering fair housing," she said, noting it was designed that way to better the quality of life for all Americans, not just the ones who can afford to live in affluent neighborhoods. Segregation by race and poverty traps families in dead-end, often unhealthy circumstances, Goldberg added.

"We know that the more inclusive the neighborhoods are, the more robust your economy, the better the schools are, the jobs."

This should be directed at the local level, not from Washington, Gosar said. He has introduced a stand-alone bill that would block the rule from reaching fruition. For now, it is up to the Senate if it wants to carve it out of their own HUD spending bill.

"Once again," he said, "it's an overreach on our liberties to live and work and move to wherever we want."

SOURCE

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For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated) and Coral reef compendium. (Updated as news items come in).  GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten. I also put up occasional updates on my Personal blog and each day I gather together my most substantial current writings on A WESTERN HEART.

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

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The Greek situation

Greece has huge debts that it cannot repay and is essentially "broke".  And its creditors are barking at it. They want their money. Its only way forward would seem to be to retire from the Eurozone (a common-currency area) and reintroduce its own currency, the Drachma.  It can then print as much money as it likes and pay Greeks everything that they think they deserve.  The result of that will be hyperinflation, yet more economic collapse and sky-high prices for anything that Greece imports from overseas.  Greek living standards could end up at less than half of what they once were.  And it would leave the Greek government unable to borrow from overseas for a long time.

To understand the Greek situation, people need to know something that is just about unmentionable these days -- because it could be seen as "racist":  Greeks are undoubtedly the most work-shy people in Europe.  Where a lot of Northern Europeans like to keep themselves busy by building and making things or otherwise doing something constructive, the ideal life for the average Greek male is to sit around with his friends drinking coffee and arguing about politics.  Finding a way of getting money without working for it is his Holy Grail.  Which is in part why one in two Greek households rely on social security payments to make ends meet.

And the Greek government too wants a free ride.  It has had such a ride courtesy of Europe's banks but now that it cannot pay the interest due on its borrowings, it still wants to cruise along propped up by the rest of Europe.  Faced with colossal bad debts, the rest of Europe is inclined to continue that propping up -- but not at any price.  They want the Greek government to curb its wasteful ways and get on top of its debt.

But the present government is a far-Left one so will not.  They say that Greece has already cut all its fat.  But it has not.  A major demand of Germany and other creditors is that Greece reform its pension (social security) system.  But government payments to the elderly are already low so that cannot be done, says the Greek government.  They are actually right in saying that the payments are low but that is not what the rest of Europe has its beady eyes on.  What they are looking at is ELIGIBILTY for pensions in Greece.  An article from five years ago tells us rather vividly what it is all about:

In Greece, trombone players and pastry chefs get to retire as early as 50 on grounds their work causes them late career breathing problems. Hairdressers enjoy the same perk thanks to the dyes and other chemicals they rub into people's scalps.

Then there are masseurs at steam baths: they get an early out because prolonged exposure to all that heat and steam is deemed unhealthy.

Until the Greek debt crisis, northern Europeans looked at Greek early retirement with an amused roll of the eyes. But more and more such loopholes are angering them: they bristle at being asked to pay for their laggard southern neighbours' early retirement.

When Germany's top-selling newspaper Bild asked readers in that fiscally prudent nation how they felt about coughing up hard-earned money for this kind of luxury, the daily's website lit up with comment.

In a bloc with a shared currency but no power to enforce budgetary restraint and keep members from spending themselves into messes like Greece's, the retirement quirk illustrates another fault line that crept to the surface with the debt crisis that began in Athens and is threatening to spread across the euro zone.

Germany, making available as much as 22.4 billion euros for the joint EU and IMF bailout of Greece, and which not long ago raised its retirement age from 65 to 67 to offset a shrinking, aging population, is being made "the laughing stock of Europe," one reader wrote to Bild.

Like many EU countries, the general retirement age in Greece is 65, although the actual average is about 61. However, the deeply fragmented system also provides for early retirement - as early as 55 for men and 50 for women - in many professions classified as "arduous and unhealthy."

The vast majority seem reasonable, like coal mining, but others, like the bakers and wind-instrument musicians, might strike some as a tad silly.

Greek pensions are low but the system is widely abused, and as part of a drive to reduce Greece's huge debt the government is trying to simplify the labyrinth of rules governing pensions and abolish early retirement rights for some categories of workers. In the end, Greeks will have to work more years, pay a bit more into the system and receive smaller pensions.

In Stockholm, 22-year-old security guard Jenny Lindstrom, called the Greek system unfair to other Europeans and said the bloc should have a single set of rules. "I also would like to retire earlier. I don't want to work for a long time to pay for others' to retire early in other countries."

Greece has to reform its system.  It is just not sustainable to allow women to retire at, say, 58, and pay them a pension well into their 80s. Along with early retirement, Greece has one of Europe's highest longevity rates - with an average life expectancy of 77.1 years for men and 81.9 for women.

As far away as Finland, where the government has tried to push up the retirement age to make up for a lack of skilled workers, there is resentment over paying for early retirement in the EU's sun-baked south.  "No way. It would be really unfair on a Finnish taxpayer who is still at work at the same age as someone in the same profession in another country retires," said 60-year-old Pirkko Toivonen.

SOURCE

Some changes to the above situation have apparently been made since then but not many and not by very much.  See here

So at a time when many countries are phasing in 70 as the normal retirement age, Greece could cut its pensions bill by a huge amount simply by falling in line with that retirement age.  But a far-Leftist government just will not do it of course.  They will   send the whole country into a downward spiral rather than earn the ire of one of their major support groups.

And the rest of Europe also has its beady eyes on the Greek tax system.  Greeks are so crooked that the tax system collects only about half of what it should.  Tax evasion is a way of life in Greece.  Again, a little has been done to tighten that up but not much.  Much more could be done.  And it's not the Leftist government that's principally at fault in that matter.  The situation is the fault of Greeks generally.  They almost all think that someone else owes them a living and that they have already paid plenty.  That attitude has already significantly impoverished them and they are now on the brink of even greater impoverishment

There is one potential solution to Greece's problems that would rid Greece of its debts in an entirely honourable way -- but nobody much is talking about it so far -- so I will mention it only in passing:  Greece has a LOT of islands, many of which are in very attractive locations and thinly populated.  Greece could  sell off entire islands to foreign governments, which would use them to build for their citizens retirement homes in the sun.  That could prove quite attractive to some Northern European countries.

There's a current report of the negotiations between Greece and the rest of Europe here -- JR

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Obama, the mass murderer

We all know that President Obama has been releasing illegal alien convicted criminals from prison at a record pace. These are people in the country illegally who were convicted and sentenced for committing violent crimes and Barack Obama just released them from prison anyway.

But there’s another side to this story. There are the illegal aliens who are caught committing lesser crimes and released from prison only to commit even worse crimes later.

Right now, there are 121 illegal aliens in this exact scenario. They were caught committing crimes yet, instead of being deported, the Obama administration released them back into society. And do you know what all 121 of them did after that?

They all murdered someone. That’s right, Obama gave amnesty to 121 illegal aliens who then went on to commit murder.

Legislation has already been introduced to stop this once and for all. It is called S.291, the Keep Our Communities Safe Act. It was introduced in January by Senators James Inhofe, Chuck Grassley, Ted Cruz, and Jeff Sessions.

The bill is simple: if an illegal alien is convicted of a crime, the Obama administration cannot simply release him or her from prison.

When this legislation was introduced, we knew that the President was releasing illegal alien criminals but we had no idea how dangerous the program was.

121 people are dead now because the President thinks illegal aliens should be allowed to stay in the country, regardless of how dangerous they are.

This is the cost of Obama’s amnesty. This is the human cost of having a President who completely disregards the Constitution and this country’s immigration laws.

It has to stop. It simply can’t go on like this. This latest statistic is just the murders. This doesn’t even include the cases of manslaughter, rape, child molestation, or any number of other violent crimes.

Like always, the GOP is talking a good talk. Republican Senators have come out demanding “answers.” We already know all we need to know. These illegal aliens should have been deported but instead, the Obama administration allowed them to murder 121 innocent people.

SOURCE

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Hannity: Objective Truth Takes a ‘Backseat’ to Liberal Narrative on Race

Nationally syndicated radio host Sean Hannity said that Rachel Dolezal’s “transracialism” shows how objective truth is being forced to take a "backseat" to liberal racial identity politics.

Dolezal is a white woman who resigned from her position as president of the Spokane, Washington chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) Monday after being criticized for portraying herself as black.

Dolezal exposed “an utterly twisted, confused and dishonest world that represents the left today, caught red-handed,” Hannity said on his Friday show, “It’s a lie that bothers her not one bit because she’s committed to a cause. And everything including the truth needs to take the backseat to the narrative in the cause.”
Here is a transcript of what Hannity said:

"This is so bizarre. It’s utterly bizarre. You know, in one weird way, a perfect one, and I say that because it tells you about modern-day liberalism. Think about this: You see in this story the obsession with identity politics to the point that a professor and leader of the NAACP local chapter would flat out lie about her race -- deny her parents -- in order to make her something into something she’s not.

"Then there’s the post-modernism aspect to this story, and that’s the belief that real-world facts just don’t matter. Only narrative matters. Objective truth doesn’t exist in this liberal, post-modernism world. You know, facts don’t exist independently, they’re merely pawns to be used on a racial and ethnic chessboard, if you will.

"So after being caught in a lie, she doesn’t feel any responsibility, she doesn’t feel any remorse, no shame, apparently. Her response is that she doesn’t feel any obligation to explain her deception to a community that quite frankly doesn’t understand the definition of race and ethnicity.

"In other words, if you’re white like she is, you’re part of a community that just doesn’t really understand the definition of race and ethnicity. I mean, this is just liberal gobbledygook. When translated into English, it means that she feels that she can lie about her racial identity because it’s serving a larger racial purpose.

"See where I’m going here? Whether or not she’s white -- what you say, it doesn’t matter. Because the truth doesn’t matter. Because identity politics matters. Because the narrative matters. And I’m guessing the hate mail she has received, if and when it’s revealed to be a hoax, isn’t gonna matter either because she’ll argue a more important cause was served. That’s why liberals -- the ends justify the means for them.

"She’s pushing a narrative, that America’s a racist country by making up, you know, racist mailings. It’s an utterly twisted, confused and dishonest world that represents the left today, caught red-handed. It’s a lie that bothers her not one bit because she’s committed to a cause. And everything including the truth needs to take the backseat to the narrative in the cause."

SOURCE

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‘Law Enforcement Is Under Attack All Across Our County,’ Former DEA Official Says

Michael Braun, former chief of operations at the Drug Enforcement Agency, said on Thursday that police in the United States are “disengaging” because of the media’s focus on isolated cases of alleged overuse of force at a time when local and state law enforcement are the first responders to domestic terror threats and attacks.

“Law enforcement is under attack all across our country,” Braun said during a discussion at the Potomac Institute for Policy Studies in Washington, D.C., about the connection between police and counterterrorism efforts in the homeland.

“Law enforcement is disengaging these days, and it’s not the right time to be doing that,” he said, citing as an example local police officers were the first to confront domestic terrorists in Texas in May when a local cop killed two heavily armed men who attacked a gathering at a cultural center.

When CNSNews.com asked him to expound on his comments about law enforcement being under attack, Braun said watching a few episodes of the television program “Cops” gives a realistic view of the challenges law enforcement personnel face.

“That’s what law enforcement deals with at the local and state level day in and day out, and they’ve got a very tough job,” Braun said.

He cited another incident in Texas where a cop resigned after arresting a teenage girl at a pool party where the crowd became unruly. The cop, who resigned and issued a public apology, had responded to a suicide and a suicide attempt before he got the call for the party.

“I’m simply not seeing the media paint the most accurate picture … of law enforcement that should be painted,” Braun said. “They’re focused on some isolated events.”

Statistics prove that is the case, Braun said.

“When you stop to think that we’ve got 17,000 law enforcement jurisdictions in the United States and on any given day of the week I believe we’ve got 500, 555,000 law enforcement officers, and every day of the year those cops are making about 35,000 arrests, and we isolate one bad event, and we dwell on it for not days or a day but often times days and weeks, what kind of an impact does that have on the American psyche?” Braun said. “That’s what worries me.”

SOURCE

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For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated) and Coral reef compendium. (Updated as news items come in).  GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten. I also put up occasional updates on my Personal blog and each day I gather together my most substantial current writings on A WESTERN HEART.

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

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Government Charges Hastert with “Crime” of Withdrawing His Own Money

More misuse of the law to target conservatives.  The next Republican administration should return the compliment

Dennis Hastert, former Speaker of the US House of Representatives, has been charged with lying to the FBI about the reason he was withdrawing money from bank accounts. Should what Hastert did be illegal, or any of the government’s business? Let’s look at the facts.

From the charges, it appears that Hastert (1) withdrew $3.5 million of his own money from banks to (2) pay an individual “to cover up past misconduct” and (3) lied to the FBI about the reason he was making the withdrawals. It appears that the past misconduct was (4) molesting a student when Hastert was a high school teacher and wrestling coach. Let’s look at each of these four things to see whether the charges are warranted.

I’m going to wait to discuss (4), but will state the obvious up front. It’s not acceptable for teachers to molest their students, and it is also against the law. I’ll discuss this at the end of the post, because Hastert is not being charged for this.

1. The $3.5 million was Hastert’s money, which should give him the right to spend it as he sees fit. Withdrawing a person’s own money from a bank should never be a crime, although it can constitute the crime of structuring, if it appears that the withdrawals might be to finance some illegal activity. But note that under structuring laws, there need be no evidence of any actual illegal activity; just a suspicious pattern of withdrawals. If someone is doing something illegal, charge them with that. While someone’s suspicious behavior might lead law enforcement officials to follow up and detect illegal activity, suspicious behavior by itself should never be illegal. Doing so puts every law-abiding citizen at risk, and the abuses of civil asset forfeiture show this. Hastert did nothing wrong when he withdrew his own money from his own bank accounts.

2. Paying money to a former student also should not be illegal. Note that Hastert is not being charged with this. I just bring it up because it is part of what Hastert did. If Hastert wanted to give money to someone, that’s between the giver and the recipient, and it is none of the government’s business. It is not, and should not be, illegal to give money to people. (I will note that it is likely that the recipient in this case should have paid income taxes on the money, but I have no indication that the IRS has shown any interest in pursuing this.)

3. Apparently, when questioned by the FBI about the withdrawals, Hastert claimed he felt the money would be safer if it was not in the bank, which the FBI says was a lie. I could twist this around to make it true: Hastert might have thought the money would be safer in the hands of the person he paid rather than languishing in the bank. But, I would argue that it is none of the government’s business anyway, because it is Hastert’s money to use as he sees fit.

My conclusion is that regardless of the actual law, none of (1), (2), or (3) should be illegal, even though (1) and (3) actually are illegal, and Hastert is being charged with violating (1) and (3). Those laws are examples of government overreach that threaten every American, innocent or not, that violate our privacy, and allow people to be penalized based on activities that look suspicious to some government employee even when no wrongdoing has occurred.

Now let’s look at (4), which should be a crime, because if the accusation is true, Hastert was violating the rights of his students. If that is the crime we believe has occurred, he should be accused and tried for that crime, not for withdrawing his money from a bank or lying to the FBI.

Assuming the accusation is true, what would be the appropriate punishment? Jail time, coupled with being labeled as a sexual predator once released? Such a punishment would be typical for the crime.

However, libertarian scholars such as my colleague Bruce Benson argue that such punishments do nothing to compensate the victims of crime, and that a libertarian legal system would require those who violate the rights of others to pay restitution to the injured parties. Then justice would be served. A prison sentence for the rights violator falls short because it does nothing to compensate the person whose rights were violated.

In this particular case, Hastert did just that. He paid the victim $3.5 million, which the victim apparently thought was fair compensation because we have heard nothing from the victim. I’m not arguing that because of those payments, justice has already been served, and it appears there may be other victims who were not compensated. I’m just saying that libertarians often argue that restitution is the appropriate way to justly settle rights violations, and Hastert paid what, apparently, his victim viewed as fair compensation.

My big issue with this case is that while almost everyone would agree that a teacher molesting a student is a repulsive criminal act, Hastert is not being charged for that crime. He’s being charged with withdrawing his own money from his own bank accounts. Our legal system allows people suspected of one crime to be charged with something else that only amounts to suspicious behavior. Everyone should be against that perversion of the law.

SOURCE

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Public Pension Crisis Robs Future Generations

Politicians across the nation have promised public employees larger pensions while low-balling the contributions needed to fulfill those promises. Consequently, city and state governments have wracked up piles of debt that may take three decades to pay off, rather than the 15 to 20 years recommended by the Society of Actuaries. Young people will bear a huge share of the burden, even though they have had no say in the matter.

“The injustice and immorality of using Millennials as piggy banks should be apparent to all but the willfully blind,” Independent Institute Senior Fellow Lawrence J. McQuillan writes in an op-ed at Forbes. “Public pension funds should not be balanced on the backs of students or younger Americans.”

How should the crisis be handled? According to McQuillan, it could be solved by adopting just a few reforms: (1) Public pension plans should be made financially transparent and should be required to achieve full annual funding without issuing “pension obligation bonds”; (2) plans should be required to pay off unfunded liabilities in 15 to 20 years; (3) state and local governments should be given the flexibility to switch to a 401(k)-type defined contribution plan; and (4) voter approval should be required for any changes that would result in greater pension obligations. Together these reforms would, McQuillan writes, “save future generations from paying for promises they did not make.”

SOURCE

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Jeb Bush and Medicaid Reform

Despite his reputation as a “moderate,” 2016 presidential hopeful Jeb Bush pushed for bold reform in education and healthcare during his years as governor of Florida. Bush’s Medicaid reform pilot project merits particular attention as lawmakers consider a new round of healthcare reform. According to Independent Senior Fellow John C. Goodman, several indicators suggest that Bush’s program, which was expanded from two counties to five under Governor Rick Scott, was a success.

Goodman bases his conclusions on a study by two University of Arizona researchers, Michael Bond and Emily Patch, published in the peer-reviewed Journal of Applied Business and Economics. Bond and Patch found that the pilot program, which gave private health plans flexibility in setting the benefits available to low-income patients enrolled the program, was associated with lower cost growth, improved access to care, and better health outcomes. From 2006 to 2009, for example, Medicaid costs per capita rose much less in the counties that participated in the pilot program than in the Florida counties with regular Medicaid. In addition, patients enjoyed greater access to dermatological care, neurological care, and orthopedic care.

Most important of all, however, was that patient outcomes were better for those in the pilot program compared to those in regular Medicaid. A lesson to draw from all of this, according to Goodman, is that Medicaid plans administered by private companies have significant and underappreciated potential to offer low-income and disabled people better care, and with less burden to taxpayers. It’s a lesson that more politicians should take to heart.

SOURCE

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Carly Fiorina: No Citizenship 'If You Have Come Here Illegally and Stayed Here Illegally'M

When it comes to immigration, "Everyone talks about comprehensive solutions, but nobody starts with the basics," Republican presidential hopeful Carly Fiorina told MSNBC's "Morning Joe" on Monday.

"My own view is, if you have come here illegally and stayed here illegally, that you don't get a pass to citizenship."

Fiorina's view differs from that of Sens. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) and former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, all of whom advocate a more "comprehensive" approach, including eventual, earned legal status for illegal immigrants.

Fiorina did not rule out eventual legal status, but said it would be a long time coming:

"Well, I think legal status is a possibility for sure. I think their children maybe can become citizens. But my own view is, it isn't fair to say to people who have played by the rules -- and it takes a long time to play by the rules -- that, you know, it just doesn't matter."

She said the legal immigration system has been broken for 25 years and also needs fixing.

SOURCE

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HUD's 'Housing Equality' Thud

Barack Obama’s Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) is set to release a rule aimed at fostering “diversity” in wealthy neighborhoods around the country. “HUD is working with communities across the country to fulfill the promise of equal opportunity for all,” an agency spokeswoman said. “The proposed policy seeks to break down barriers to access to opportunity in communities supported by HUD funds.”

This diversity scheme has shades of the last time Democrats attempted to reconfigure banking to favor unqualified people. Promoters of the policy are suggesting it’s fair because, if states and communities don’t want to abide by Obama’s decree, they can forgo the federal money they receive. That’s a fair argument only if the people in those states can also choose to forgo paying taxes to the federal government.

Of course, most of Obama’s supporters pay no taxes. Political analyst Marc Thiessen said it best: “We as conservatives believe and diversifying communities too. The way you do that is through economic opportunity. It’s not by building more affordable housing in affluent communities, it’s by creating economic opportunities so that more Americans can afford housing in affluent communities.

Right now the problem is that people at the bottom of the Obama economy can’t get ahead.” HUD’s rule is nothing more than an Obama charade to ramp up class warfare and appease constituents who are enslaved on poverty plantations — the direct result of generations of failed Democrat economic policies.

SOURCE

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A war that America fought to win would be different

Burt Prelutsky

"Because Obama is so adamant about having what only he regards as a major foreign policy achievement on his resume, he is leaving Israel and the Gulf nations to swing in the breeze while he offers Iran the entire Middle East in exchange for a signature on a nuclear deal.

If he had a single ounce of red blood in his veins, Obama would have sent our military over there months ago to wipe out ISIS before they burned, beheaded or crucified any more people. Instead, Obama and his stooges defend his inaction by insisting that Americans are war-weary. I beg to differ.

What we’re sick of is engaging in wars we have no desire to win unconditionally. If an American president ever pledged himself to wipe out those in the Middle East and North Africa who target Christians for extermination, who kidnap young girls and turn them into sex slaves and who exhort their pea-brained followers in the U.S. and Britain to execute soldiers, cops and civilians, I feel reasonably confident that his approval rate would hover well above 80%."

SOURCE

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California dreaming

As we have repeatedly noted, the stylish new eastern span of the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge was 10 years in the making, a whopping $5 billion over budget, and yet riddled with safety issues. We have done our best to keep up with the problems, but they keep on coming.

As Jaxon Van Derbeken notes in the San Francisco Chronicle, about one-fourth of the steel rods that anchor the bridge’s town are in sleeves “flooded with corrosive salty water,” one of them up to five feet, and this was a critical threat” that compromises the very integrity of the new span. The 120 sleeves that encase the rods are designed to prevent damage from a major earthquake, which the Bay Area has had before and will doubtless experience again. As Van Derbeken observes, “salt is known to accelerate corrosion, which attacks metal over time and has been linked to numerous disasters,” such as the ruptured oil pipeline in Santa Barbara.

CalTrans boss Malcolm Dougherty told reporters the bridge’s foundation could never be fully watertight. But the bridge’s foundation structure has “sensitivity to water getting to some components,” therefore a solution was needed. This is the same Caltrans boss who in a 2014 Sacramento hearing said “the bridge is safe” so many times that then state senator Mark DeSaulnier asked him to stop. In the two hearings he chaired, DeSaulnier heard now Caltrans bosses, pushing to complete the project, compromised public safety by ignoring problems with welds, bolts, and rods. And they gagged and banished engineers, scientists and experts who had a problem with it. One whistleblower called for a criminal investigation, but that never took place. In effect, it was the bridge to no accountability, and that should come as no surprise.

During the hearings DeSaulnier let slip that his main problem with the safety issues was that they made people adverse to taxes, which in his view were needed for new infrastructure projects. DeSaulnier is now a member of Congress and he is sure to fit right in with the tax-and-spend squad.

SOURCE

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

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For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated) and Coral reef compendium. (Updated as news items come in).  GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten. I also put up occasional updates on my Personal blog and each day I gather together my most substantial current writings on A WESTERN HEART.

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

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