My Alternative Wikipedia

Over the years I have on various occasions attempted to make contributions to Wikipedia.  Whatever I put up there, however, gets wiped.  Wikipedia editors are clearly Left-leaning so I can understand that they wipe anything written from my libertarian/conservative viewpoint.  But even stuff with no obvious political slant disappears.

From what I can see, Wikipedia editors in fact spend most of their  day deleting what others have put up.  So there is clearly an informally-specified  Wikipedia culture that you have to conform to if you wish your writings to appear there.  It also seems likely that, once you have been identified as a bad egg, you are just totally black-banned, no matter how good what you want to post may be.

That is something of a pity as some of the information I try to put up is not found anywhere else in English. My major recreational interest these days is Austro/Hungarian operetta.  I spend a couple of hours nightly watching it.  Rather frivolous, I guess, but I have the privilege of reading and writing serious stuff all day so light relief has its place.

So I have come to know rather a lot about it.  Being the academic type, I also research the shows as well as watching them.  I look at who is singing, who the artistic director is and other details.  I try to accumulate biographical information about the singers, about the historical background, and information about particular notable performances.

Operetta does have a worldwide audience but it is almost all sung and written in German and the information about it, including libretti, is also mostly in German.  So if English Wikipedia does have any information at all about (say) a particular singer, it will mostly be pretty bare-bones.  Wikipedia in German, and sometimes in Italian, will have much more information.  And German Wikipedia is only a start. There are many music-oriented German-language sites that include operetta information.

Since I can read German and Italian (the latter with difficulty) I can however usually find out quite a lot more about a singer than most people in the English-speaking world would be able to. And I am inclined to pass on that information in English.  But Wikipedia won't let me.

So I have set up My Alternative Wikipedia to draw together my posts on matters that I think have reference interest.  It's not all operetta but mostly so.  And that may be a useful approach.  Most of the performers in operetta are from Europe and have European names -- such as Ingeborg Hallstein or Dagmar Schellenberger -- that would rarely be encountered in English-language sources.  So a Google search on those names should lead quickly to my site.

And having an operetta database can lead you to the unexpected. If, for instance, you Google the very popular "Ivan Rebroff", you will find a multitude of well-deserved references to him as a jolly Russian bass singer of both popular and operatic works. But without a comprehensive reference to operetta, you may not realize that he was also a brilliant comic actor.  His performance of red-faced rage at the rejection of his "daughter" in a 1970s performance of  Zigeunerbaron is far and away the best I have seen.  His whole life was an act, in fact.  He was a German, not a Russian.  And he died a Greek. As all conservatives know, reality is complicated.

First, however, we have to get Google to index my site.  They  do not so far appear to have done so.  So I would be much obliged if anybody reading this would put up a link to my new site on any site that they may run. The more links there are to it, the more likely it will appear in Google searches.

And I should perhaps note that Austro/Hungarian operetta is very politically incorrect these days.  It was written around 100 years ago so reflects a more natural set of values.  Membership of the military is, for instance, treated with great respect, and even is to some extent glorified.  No modern Leftist would applaud that.  But, as a former Sergeant in the Australian army, I do myself have every respect for the military.

And we also see monarchist sentiments at times -- but only inhabitants of a monarchy -- and I am one -- will understand that.

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Minnesota Considers Scrapping Health Insurance Exchange

In King v. Burwell, the Court did not just ignore plain meaning of the words “established by the State,” but opened up a whole new can of worms as well.

After the King decision, states can now get rid of their health exchanges and move their citizens to the federal exchange without forcing them to give up their subsidies. Since insurance exchanges are costly and often more trouble for politicians than they are worth, states may now decide it is better just to shut down their own exchange. Minnesota is considering just this move.

Minnesota’s state exchange, MNsure, has faced billing problems and low enrollment numbers. After the King decision, Representative Matt Dean (R), calls MNsure an “unnecessary problem.”

It was recently announced that a software problem with MNsure forced 180,000 Minnesotans to have their MinnesotaCare and Medical Assistance renewals delayed. This created a dilemma for politicians: deny coverage to people in need, or contribute to the insurance of some ineligible people, typically 5 to 10 percent of enrollees. Not surprisingly, the politicians choose the second route.

Another problem with MNsure is that 24,000 Minnesotans did not even receive a bill for a full half-year. This has created two problems. First, there is uncertainty over how much each individual should be required to pay. Second, many individuals that had to budget for each month’s premium will now be required to come up with a half-year’s worth of premiums.

MNsure is scheduled to cost $229.6 million through June 2017. However, most of this will be covered by the federal government, Minnesota will only pay $16.5 million. For this price, the state has received software that cannot update basic life changes such as marriage or birth of a child.

Minnesota has created a new 33-person task force, the MNsure Advisory Task Force, that will begin meeting this month to discuss the future on MNsure and MinnesotaCare. The task force is to make recommendations to make the health insurance exchange more efficient and sustainable, which are due January 15.

Republicans have been actively calling for the end of MNsure and a switch to the federal exchange. “We’ve had three years of failures, of failures with MNsure and sometimes in life you just have to admit it failed. It didn’t work,” stated Representative Greg Davids (R). He continued, “[w]e should get over to the federal exchange and stop wasting Minnesotans’ money.”

Members of the DFL have also acknowledged problems with the state exchange but are in less of a hurry to switch to the federal exchange. “To just say outright, ‘ok we’re going to the federal exchange’ is kind of premature. But [we] certainly wouldn’t take it off the table,” said Representative Tina Liebling (DFL). “Obviously it’s not working for the people it’s supposed to be working for and that’s really frustrating for everybody.”

It is not just Minnesota that is considering getting rid of their state health insurance exchange. Arkansas has already scrapped their partnership exchange in favor of dumping its citizens on the federal exchange. In addition, Vermont and Rhode Island are considering dropping their state exchanges in a post-King world.

The King decision was not only poor legal reasoning, it opened up the door for states to scrap their exchanges and move their citizens to the federal exchange. This is just another step towards a single-payer health care system.

SOURCE

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Juvenile justice reforms would save money and spare nonviolent youths

In the 2013 documentary Kids for Cash, director Robert May told the stories of several young offenders from Pennsylvania whose lives were up-ended by the dysfunctional juvenile-justice system.

Presented in the young offenders’ own words, their stories are compelling.  They will also make your blood boil.

Judges, seemingly without much thought of the lifelong consequences, unnecessarily exposed these children to the system as adolescents, putting them at risk of being trapped in an endless cycle of crime.

Among the young offenders profiled in the documentary is Justin Bodnar. In December 2001, when he was 12-years-old, Bodnar got into trouble when he hurled obscenities at the mother of another student.

Despite his colorful language, which his mother tried hard to curb before this particular incident, Bodnar is an intelligent and talented young man. His mother consented to having him arrested in hopes that it would put a stop to his frequent profane speech and prevent any future embarrassing incidents.

To her surprise, Justin was charged with making “terroristic threats” and sentenced to a juvenile-detention facility. Over the next seven years, Bodnar would spend time inside the juvenile system, where he tried marijuana and heroin for the first time.

These are experiences he might have avoided had he not been exposed to the system at such an early age.

“[What] you see first is fences — 20-foot tall fences with rows of razor wire, like I’m a convicted criminal, like I’m a murderer. And that’s what it feels like. You feel like I’m now one of those people you see in the movies,” Bodnar said, recalling his first trip to a juvenile-detention facility.

“I woke up in a nice bed with my family, and I went to sleep with cockroaches and criminals. Every time you went into a room, you had to do a roach look, like to make sure there are no roaches anywhere. It’s dirty, and there are stains on the walls.”

Bodnar, who is struggling to put his life on the right track, and many of the other young people in the documentary were “status offenders” — adolescents charged with a crime that would not otherwise be a crime if they were adults.

Too often, judges, in closed-door hearings deemed necessary to protect the young offender, take tough stances in a purported attempt to scare them straight.

The good news is that the number of crimes committed by juveniles is at record lows. In 2012, about 1.3 million young people were arrested, down 40 percent from 2006.

For those who do make mistakes, however, any exposure to the justice system, including arrest, can actually increase the likelihood of a young person becoming a repeat offender. Residential placement is ineffective, and out-of-home placement is expensive and fails to produce better outcomes than alternatives.

The question policymakers should be asking is this: How can they effectively treat and rehabilitate young offenders and put them on a path to productive lives while cutting costs?

The answer can be found in different states.

Functional Family Therapy, an evidence-based, family-centered intervention program, has proven to be an effective alternative to placement in juvenile-detention facilities. At a cost of up to $4,000 per youth, this approach can reduce the chance of a young person from becoming a repeat offender by one-third.

States that have used evidence-based approaches have seen their juvenile-detention populations fall. Texas and Ohio, for instance, experienced declines of 80 percent and 70 percent, respectively, since 2006. Both states saw repeat-offender rates fall even while commitments to state facilities dwindled.

The savings from this innovative approach to juvenile justice allow states to focus on rehabilitation for higher-risk young people who remain in detention facilities.

Congress can also step up to protect young people who are unnecessarily caught up in the juvenile-justice system. Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) and Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) have already introduced legislation to reauthorize the Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention Act of 1974 with a series of long-overdue reforms, including phasing out remaining situations in which a status offender can be detained.

Other efforts, such the Redeem Act, which would allow a young person to have their record expunged if they stay out of trouble, is an idea that lawmakers should explore as they seek to give offenders the opportunity to prosper in their adult lives.

The “scared straight” approach may’ve been attractive at one time, but it has proven to be a costly failure and one that deprives young people of opportunity, because it exposes them to the justice system before they’ve fully mentally developed.

With the approach to corrections changing for nonviolent offenders, there is a tremendous opportunity to put young lives on the right path, ending the cycle of crime before it starts.

SOURCE

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Burt Prelutsky on "Cecil"

Finally, there’s no way that a Minnesota dentist is going to kill an African lion without my commenting on it. I’m not as outraged as most people seem to be. After all, it was a lion, even if someone decided to name it Cecil. It wasn’t someone’s pet. It wasn’t our dog Angel. It was a lion, for heaven’s sake, and five minutes before the dentist hired a couple of schmucks to lure it off a reserve so he could hit it with a spotlight and shoot it with an arrow, it was probably gnawing on Bambi.

Still, there is something comforting in the fact that a guy can blow $50,000 killing an animal in the most pathetic way imaginable and wind up, not with a lion’s head on his wall, but with his own dumb mug on the front page.

There is an old saying that doctors should cure themselves. In the case of this dentist, it seems that before packing for this safari, Walter Palmer should have paused to fill the cavity between his ears.

I understand that a lot of you are hunters, and regard yourselves as sportsmen and would never do the chickenshit stuff the dentist did, but, assuming you’re not hunting in order to feed your families, I confess I don’t grasp the appeal of getting the best of dumb animals. I admit that I don’t shy away from matching wits with liberals, but at least I don’t leave their bloody carcasses lying around to frighten their wives and children.

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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Hitler's Leftism and Jewish Leftism

Hitler called his political party, "The National Socialist German Worker's Party", Nazi for short. And all Socialist Worker's Parties that I know of are to at least some degree Trotskyist, meaning far Leftist. Even the Soviet Union was not socialist enough for Trotsky. He called it "Bonapartist", which is an enormous insult in Marxist circles. Bonapartism was an early form of Fascism. So Hitler placed himself very firmly in the socialist camp.

But those who know something about it sometimes say that Hitler was more of a nationalist than a socialist and there is truth in that. Nazism was actually a fairly coherent doctrine and in it socialism actually sprang from its nationalism. And Hitler was quite explicit about that. He saw Germans as a family and family members look after one-another.

Have a look at the 1939 Nazi propaganda placard below (a "Wochenspruch" for the Gau Weser/Ems). The placard promotes one of Hitler's sayings. The saying is, "Es gibt keinen Sozialismus, der nicht aufgeht im eigenen Volk" -- which I translate as "There is no socialism except what arises within its own people".

Like Bismarck before him, Hitler was a pan-German nationalist. He saw all Germans as one family ("Volk") that was sadly disunited and wanted to re-unite them as one big happy family. He was not as wise as Bismarck, however. He didn't quit while he was ahead. Bismarck waged a short sharp and very successful war (the Franco-Prussian war of 1870) and then spent the rest of his days avoiding war -- ushering in what came to be known as the "Belle Epoque", a time of general European peace which produced a great flowering of the arts, a period that lasted until 1914.

So by the time Hitler came along, Germany was largely united into a single legal entity. Bismarck had accomplished that. But it was a very fragile unity. The Laender (states) that were formed out of the old German kingdoms and principalities still retained the prime loyalty of most Germans. They thought of themselves (for instance) as Bavarians first and citizens of the Deutsches Reich second. And, even worse, there were still some German speaking lands that were outside the Deutsches Reich, Austria in particular. And Hitler was an Austrian.

But far worse than those elements of disunity were the class enmities and struggles of his day. Even before WWI, there was a lot of unrest in Vienna.  And that intensified in the wake of the WWI defeat, when Germany was in turmoil. The Marxists exploited that turmoil. There were even minor revolutions on some occasions. And the central element of Marxist thinking is of course social class and class war was their explicit aim.

That filled Hitler with horror. To have Germans making war on one another was the very antithesis of what he wanted. The Marxists wanted bloody revolution while Hitler wanted one big happy family.

Fascism is now dead but the Marxist-inspired Leftism of Hitler's day is still with us. It is what we recognize as Leftism today. Nobody preaches "one big happy family" Leftism today but a diluted form of class-war is still very much with us. Modern-day Leftists too want to rip down the customs and arrangements of our society and replace that with some incoherently conceived utopia. Democracy restrains them but they introduce as many destructive policies as they can get away with.

So if you don't like the sound of modern Leftism, you might have some understanding of how the version of that in Hitler's day sounded to Hitler. It sounded demonic. But it was clearly threatening to all he stood for so he studied it.

And before he came from his home in Linz to "the big smoke" (Vienna) he says he had no particular thoughts about Jews, regarding them as just another religion.

But let Hitler speak for himself about his years in prewar Vienna (From Chap. 2 of Mein Kampf). First we read of his horror at the nihilism of the Austrian Social Democrats, at that time a heavily Marxist party but with some rather startling parallels to modern-day mainstream Leftism. Then we read what he found about the leading lights in that party. Key excerpts :

My first encounter with the Social Democrats occurred during my employment as a building worker. These men rejected everything: the nation as an invention of the 'capitalistic' (how often was I forced to hear this single word!) classes; the fatherland as an instrument of the bourgeoisie for the exploitation of the working class; the authority of law as a means for oppressing the proletariat; the school as an institution for breeding slaves and slaveholders; religion as a means for stultifying the people and making them easier to exploit; morality as a symptom of stupid, sheeplike patience, etc. There was absolutely nothing which was not drawn through the mud of a terrifying depths

More than any theoretical literature, my daily reading of the Social Democratic press enabled me to study the inner nature of these thought-processes.

The greater insight I gathered into the external character of Social Democracy, the greater became my longing to comprehend the inner core of this doctrine.

The official party literature was not much use for this purpose. In so far as it deals with economic questions, its assertions and proofs are false; in so far as it treats of political aims, it lies. Moreover, I was inwardly repelled by the newfangled pettifogging phraseology and the style in which it was written. With an enormous expenditure of words, unclear in content or incomprehensible as to meaning, they stammer an endless hodgepodge of phrases purportedly as witty as in reality they are meaningless. Only our decadent metropolitan bohemians can feel at home in this maze of reasoning and cull an 'inner experience' from this dung-heap of literary dadaism.

However, by balancing the theoretical untruth and nonsense of this doctrine with the reality of the phenomenon, I gradually obtained a clear picture of its intrinsic will.

At such times I was overcome by gloomy foreboding and malignant fear. Then I saw before me a doctrine, comprised of egotism and hate, which can lead to victory pursuant to mathematical laws, but in so doing must put an end to humanity.

I gradually became aware that the Social Democratic press was directed predominantly by Jews; yet I did not attribute any special significance to this circumstance, since conditions were exactly the same in the other papers. Yet one fact seemed conspicuous: there was not one paper with Jews working on it which could have been regarded as truly national according to my education and way of thinking.

I swallowed my disgust and tried to read this type of Marxist press production, but my revulsion became so unlimited in so doing that I endeavoured to become more closely acquainted with the men who manufactured these compendiums of knavery. From the publisher down, they were all Jews.

I took all the Social Democratic pamphlets I could lay hands on and sought the names of their authors: Jews. I noted the names of the leaders; by far the greatest part were likewise members of the 'chosen people,' whether they were representatives in the Reichsrat or trade-union secretaries, the heads of organizations or street agitators. It was always the same gruesome picture. The names of the Austerlitzes, Davids, Adlers, Ellenbogens, etc., will remain forever graven in my memory. One thing had grown clear to me: the party with whose petty representatives I had been carrying on the most violent struggle for months was, as to leadership, almost exclusively in the hands of a foreign people

And once the Marxist Jews of prewar Vienna had fired him up, Hitler began to see a malign influence of Jews everywhere, as later chapters of Mein Kampf reveal and as at least some historians document and as was common in Germany anyway.

Apologies for the long quote but I wanted to let Hitler speak for himself before putting his thinking into my words. And much of what he said does have resonance today. It is surely fascinating that much of what he says about the Social Democrats (the mainstream Leftists of his day) could equally be said of modern-day Leftists.  When he described Leftist theoretical writing as gibberish, he could well be talking about much of what is taught in American universities today.

And that similarity should give Leftist Jews pause for thought. By embracing hostility to existing German society in the inter-war years, they eventually brought down on their heads a terrible vengeance from a charismatic patriot. They found that hate sometimes hurts the hater most of all. Is it not possible to learn from that? American Jews are still overwhelmingly Leftist and hence hostile to the society that has given them a safe place. Would it not be more appropriate and decent to support rather than contest the arrangements that have been so beneficial to them?

Hitler arose in one of the most civilized and enlightened countries on earth. And no-one foresaw his advent. So how can we be sure that another charismatic patriot will not arise in America? Donald Trump is no Hitler but he does show that a charismatic and angry patriot can come out of nowhere and win a totally unexpected level of support.

And note that the frontrunner for leadership of Britain's major Leftist party at the moment is a neo-Marxist antisemite and open supporter of jihadists.  His popularity has surprised everyone.  Reassuring?

If the steady pace of destruction that Obama has been inflicting on America continues long enough, there could be an anti-Left rebellion that sheds much blood. Conservatives have the guns, after all.  And the military is deeply conservative.  And America has had two civil wars already.  And I think that the Left are more dangerous to American welfare and prosperity than either the British or the Southerners ever were. And any rebellion that had Leftists in its sights would ipso facto have many Jews in its sights. Jews always lose in any upheaval. It is in their interests to prevent an upheaval, rather than encouraging it.

I just hope that what I have said is not prophetic. Just over 70 years ago, the many haters among them set Jewry up for the most ghastly retaliatory blow.  Has nothing been learned? Will the hate ever stop?  I regret to say that I am not optimistic.

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More evidence of IQ as just one aspect of physical good functioning

IQ has a large range of physical correlates.  Odd for something that Leftists say does not exist

New research reveals a distinct association between male intelligence in early adulthood and their subsequent midlife physical performance. The higher intelligence score, the better physical performance, a study reveals.

Researchers at the Center for Healthy Aging and the Department of Public Health at the University of Copenhagen have studied the association between male intelligence in early adulthood and their subsequent physical performance, aged 48-56. The study comprised 2,848 Danish males born in 1953 and in 1959-61, and the results have just been published in the scientific Journal of Aging and Health.

"Our study clearly shows that the higher intelligence score in early adulthood, the stronger the participants' back, legs and hands are in midlife. Their balance is also better. Former studies have taught us that the better the results of these midlife tests, the greater the chance of avoiding a decrease in physical performance in old age", says PhD student Rikke Hodal Meincke from the Center for Healthy Aging

With a 10-point increase in intelligence score, the results revealed a 0,5 kg increase in lower back force, 1 cm increase in jumping height - an expression of leg muscle power, 0.7 kg increase in hand-grip strength, 3.7% improved balance, and 1.1 more chair-rises in 30 seconds.

SOURCE

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States should copy winning policies for economic growth

Instead of doubling down on outdated policy ideas such as raising taxes and increasing government spending, state governments facing budget crises should look to successful states for ideas on how to jumpstart their own economies and reverse population declines. Fortunately, there are resources they can use to make the case for innovation in government.

This year’s edition of the American Legislative Exchange Council’s (ALEC) Rich States, Poor States report shows the economic outlooks of states such as Illinois and Kentucky improved significantly since the release of ALEC’s 2014 report, as their respective leaders learned from the examples of other states.

The report measures and ranks states’ relative economic performance using three criteria: the state’s gross domestic product output, the net number of people domestically relocating to or from the state, and the state’s nonfarm payroll employment numbers. State policies strongly affect these three factors, the report explains.

The report also details 15 “policy variables” that impact how and why capital—not only money, but people—moves from one state to another. These variables include marginal corporate and personal income tax rates, the progressivity of personal income tax structures, and the ratio of government employees to total population.

“Generally speaking, states that spend less—especially on income transfer programs, and states that tax less—particularly on productive activities such as working or investing—experience higher growth rates than states that tax and spend more,” the report says.

Those observations really shouldn’t surprise anyone, but too few states embody them in their taxing and spending policies. In addition, the numbers do have some instructive details.

For example, Kentucky’s economic output was lower than that of 29 states, reflecting past fiscal sins, but the state’s migration numbers, which react directly to current conditions, were better than almost two-thirds of the states.

Also on a positive note, Kentucky’s property tax burdens are among the lowest in the nation, as Kentucky homeowners were charged an average of $20.29 in property taxes per $1,000 of personal income. The state’s relatively low sales taxes and personal income tax structures helped boost the state’s economic ranking.

On the other end of the scale, Illinois, led by incoming Republican Gov. Bruce Rauner, is an example of how states can learn from other states’ examples to bring success home.

In 2014, Illinois was near the bottom of the pack, ranking 48th out of 50. In 2015, Illinois climbed eight spots thanks to recently legislated tax reforms. One of those changes was a decision to allow income tax hikes enacted in 2011 to expire.

Speaking of Illinois’ jump in the rankings, ALEC’s Tax and Fiscal Policy Task Force Director Jonathan Williams told Watchdog.org, “Sometimes you have to celebrate those small victories,” referring to how the state got it “less wrong” than in past years.

As Rich States, Poor States proves, attracting new residents and new businesses—and in turn new tax revenue—is not rocket science.

By keeping tax burdens low and government small, states can encourage businesses and residents of other states to relocate, bringing their capital with them. Kentucky is on the road to prosperity, Illinois is improving, and states following in their footsteps will prosper as well.

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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Your genes WON'T make you wealthy: Becoming rich is more about nurture than nature, study finds (?)

I add some skeptical comments at the foot of the report below.  The usual finding is that high IQ people tend disproportionately to be high income earners.  And IQ is of course highly hereditary

If your parents are rich, then you’re more likely to be wealthy too.

Scientists have long debated whether this is down to genetics or the culture in which children are raised.  Now, a new study claims to have finally settled the debate; nurture, it says, is far more important that nature when it comes to amassing wealth.

‘Innate biology is only a small factor in wealth’, Kaveh Majlesi, a professor of economics at Lund University in Sweden and co-author of the study told fivethirtyeight.com

Previous studies have attempting to find a ‘rich gene’ which might explain how genetic characteristics that cause people to be wealthy are passed down.

The latest research, however, found that the wealth of an adopted child – before receiving an inheritance – is similar to that of their adoptive parents, rather than their biological ones.

The study included data from 2,519 Swedish children who were adopted between 1950 and 1970.

The researchers then compared this to data on adults’ overall wealth in Sweden between 1999 and 2007. This allowed scientists to compare the wealth of the adult adoptees to the wealth of potential biological and adoptive parents.

The biological parents were tended to be younger, poorer and less-educated than the adoptive parents.

Researchers found the adoptive parents had 1.7 to 2.4 times more of an effect than the biological parents did on the adopted child’s adult wealth.

SOURCE


I hate to rubbish a very carefully and laboriously done study but it is important to note that this is a study of WEALTH, not income. It is derived from data collected by the Swedish government for the purposes of its wealth tax.

I have read the whole original study ("Poor Little Rich Kids? The Determinants of the Intergenerational Transmission of Wealth") and note that it showed great statistical care.

It does not show much knowledge of people however.  It covers gifts in the form of bequests but otherwise omits the issue of gifts altogether.  The authors seem quite unaware that well-off people tend to give their kids money on various occasions and for various reasons.  My son, for instance, does well every birthday.

And since the adoptive parents in the study above were richer than the natural parents, it is almost certain that the adopted kids got more gifts -- thus accounting entirely for the finding that those kids had more wealth.  The study therefore tells us nothing about any biological effect -- including the influence of genes.

I might add the general point that wealth taxes of any kind are quite like other taxes in that they provoke avoidance (legal)  and evasion (illegal).  And the standard way of avoiding wealth taxes is to transfer funds to later generations in the form of gifts.  Gift taxes hinder but do not prevent that. So the fact that the data originate from official Swedish wealth tax statistics is rather unfortunate for this study.  It guarantees that a LOT of intergenerational giving did go on.  So the findings in this study would seem to be largely an artifact of Swedish law.

The data of the study is therefore not capable of supporting the conclusions of the study.  I can't say I am surprised by social scientists who know nothing about people.  I had a lot of fun pointing out the follies of my fellow social scientists during my own 20-year research career.  But I guess I shouldn't laugh!

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The Extreme Party

During last Thursday night's inaugural 2016 Republican presidential debate, Fox News' Megyn Kelly got into a spat with Donald Trump over his history of vulgar comments about women. Trump followed up that tiff by dropping a thinly veiled reference to Kelly's menstruation in the media. Those comments prompted Democratic frontrunner Hillary Clinton to praise Kelly — a woman with whom she would never deign to do an interview — bash Trump, and then lash out at Senator Marco Rubio, R-Fla., whom she perceives as the most serious threat to her presidential aspirations.

"Yes, I know [Trump] makes great TV," said Clinton. "I think the guy went way overboard - offensive, outrageous, pick your adjective. But what Marco Rubio said has as much of an impact in terms of where the Republican Party is today as anybody else on that stage."

What, pray tell, was Rubio's great sin? He said that he believed the Constitution protects the unborn: "What I have advocated is that we pass law in this country that says all human life at every stage of development is worthy of protection. In fact, I think that law already exists. It is called the Constitution of the United States."

According to Clinton and her allies in the media, this makes Rubio — and any Republican who agrees with him — too extreme for the general public. And it's not just abortion. Polls show that 52 percent of Americans say that the Republican Party is more "extreme" in its positions than the Democratic Party; just 35 percent say the reverse.

But is that true?

On abortion, for example, the Republican Party platform states that the Constitution warrants protections for the unborn; the Democratic Party position states that taxpayers should foot the bill for the killing of unborn children at every stage of pregnancy, including partial-birth abortion, a gruesome procedure in which children are pulled feet-first out of their mother's wombs, their skulls pried open and brains sucked out. Then the Democrats want to fund Planned Parenthood to carve up those babies for organ sale.

Which position is more extreme?

On same-sex marriage, the Republican Party wants to pass a Constitutional amendment to enshrine traditional marriage as the only governmentally rewarded form of marriage; until such time, Republicans acknowledge that same-sex marriage is legally a state's rights issue. The Democratic Party wants to force religious Americans to participate in homosexual weddings without recourse to the Constitution. Which is more extreme?

On health care, Republicans want Americans to be able to choose the healthcare they receive and pay for; Democrats want to force Americans to pay into a system from which they receive less than they would if they expended their dollars privately. Extremism, anyone?

The list goes on and on. Democrats want no major changes to the educational system, except for spending more money on corrupt teachers' unions; they also want to use taxpayer dollars to subsidize students majoring in useless subjects at second-tier colleges. Republicans want to allow Americans to keep more of their own money, and they want American parents to be able to spend that money as they see fit on the education of their children. Democrats want to dramatically increase taxes; Republicans want to decrease them. Democrats want no meaningful enforcement of America's immigration system; supposedly, Republicans want to enforce immigration laws.

Yet the media portray Republicans as the extremists. That rhetorical trick has its desired effect: Republicans are seen as nasty and unpleasant, even while Democrats move so far to the left that an open socialist is now their second leading contender for the presidency. Republicans counter by insisting that they are kind and generous, wonderfully moderate. This strategy is destined to fail. But Republicans have no idea how to fight extremists, even as the left portrays them consistently as America's most extreme political party.

SOURCE

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The F35 debacle

The F35 is a political compromise.  Different services wanted different things in a new jet.  To keep them all happy, the F35 was designed to do everything -- resulting in it doing nothing well.

The reliance on stealth is truly tragic. Stealth has basically had its day.  Both China and Russia have demonstrated stealth nullification via radar improvements and other means.  They've had a long time to work on it and they have succeeded.

The only consolation is that Russia won't have many T-50s.  But they may not need many against the F35. And what if Russia sells the T-50 to China and China devotes its huge industrial base to building them?

I predict that if ever the F35 flies into a real combat situation, the airforce will soon realize the uselessness of its stealth attempts and will abandon them.  That will free the planes armorers to equip it with a full external weapons load  -- which would certainly make the plane more survivable and may even enable it to do some damage to the enemy

CAN the F35 beat this? Possibly not. Video footage of Russia’s new T-50 stealth fighter shows the extreme manoeuvrability the F-35 is up against.  Earlier this year a damning report from an F-35 test pilot revealed the troubled $400 billion dollar single-seat stealth fighter was easily outmanoeuvred by a two-seat 1980s vintage F-16D combat jet.

As recently as last week, the success of modern Russian designs appear to have won some vindication when Indian Russian-made Su-30 combat jets went toe-to-toe with British Typhoon fighters in a competitive training exercise: It was a 12-0 clean-sweep victory, in favour of the Indians.

The T-50 is the latest incarnation of Russian combat jet doctrine.  It purports to blend stealth with extreme manoeuvrability, and an extensive suite of sensors and weapons. Russian President Vladimir Putin hopes to have the jets operational by 2020, though an initial order for 50 of the aircraft has since been cut back to just 12.

The Tu-50 is just one of several new fighter types the F-35 Lightning may eventually face.

Despite its advanced sensors and avionics, the fighter’s single engine simply isn’t powerful enough to push the bulky and overweight airframe through the air all that fast — or accelerate it away from danger.

The F-35’s supporters argued that dogfighting was not what the next-generation stealth fighter was built for:  “The F-35’s technology is designed to engage, shoot and kill its enemy from long distances, not necessarily in visual ‘dogfighting’ situations,” a Lockheed Martin statement reads.

“The challenge, chivalry and thrill of ‘guns-only’ dogfighting is clearly of a bygone era,” a 2007 US Air Force article reads.
Detractors, however, point out we’ve heard that argument before — with near disastrous results.

US Navy jets went into Vietnam without cannons, such was the confidence they had in their ultra-advanced new missiles. Every jet designed and built since then has had them included due to the lessons learnt at the hands of the Russian-built jets the US came up against.

Detractors also argue F-35s long-range, stealth fighting style is also suspect.

To survive against a T-50, the F-35 must be stealthy. To be stealthy, the F-35 cannot carry any weapons or fuel under its wings. This reduces its capabilities and flexibility considerably.

Even if the F-35 is able to evade new visual and heat-seeking sensors developed specifically in the past decade to find it, it is totally reliant upon the success of its two air-to-air missiles. These must find — and then hit — targets which are capable of both hiding through stealth and countermeasures while using extreme manoeuvrability to dodge.

Once those two missiles are fired, the comparatively slow and sluggish F-35 is entirely dependent on its stealth capability to slink away from the battlefield to refuel and rearm.

And it’s not all that stealthy from behind. If it’s spotted, the questions remain: Can it run? Can it turn? Can it fight?

SOURCE

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Court Strikes Down the FDA's Speech Regulations

The FDA is preventing you from learning about medical treatments that could save your life

They say that knowledge is power, that knowing is half the battle; and the explosion of knowledge that has emerged in the information age has undoubtedly made the world and its citizens far, far richer. Knowledge saves lives and elevates people from rags to riches. You would think that government would then be interested in promoting the spread of knowledge to as many people as possible, to maximize well-being among its citizens. You would think wrong.

The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) exercises strict controls over what information drug companies are allowed to publicize, and in many cases, these limitations result in needless deaths.

This was the issue in a recent court case in which a New York district judge ruled that some of these limitations violate the right to freedom of speech. The restrictions in question limit what is known as “off label marketing.” What this means is that a drug company can only market its products for uses approved by the FDA, even if it turns out that the drugs have other benefits as well.

For example, suppose a company had gone through the rigorous approval process to get the FDA to sign off on a new drug for, let’s say, insomnia. The FDA agrees that the pill helps people sleep, and allows the company to market it for that purpose. Suppose then that further research emerges showing that the sleeping pill can shrink cancerous tumors as well. Current law forbids drug companies from publicizing this information to consumers, to doctors, or to anyone else who might find it useful. Cancer treatment is an “off label” use for the drug, and therefore forbidden.

The problem with these laws is obvious. There may exist many effective treatments for life threatening diseases, but we would have no way of knowing it, since that fact is not allowed to be advertised. It’s impossible to estimate the number of needless deaths resulting from such suppression of knowledge, but it is sure to be significant.

The court’s decision is an important victory, not only for our constitutional rights, but also as a first step in removing some of the regulatory barriers that are making health care less available and more expensive. The FDA’s regulations have consistently held back innovation and kept prices higher than they need to be. If we really care about improving health care in America, permitting more freedom in the market would be a good place to start.

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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An extreme Leftist nut in Britain

Jeremy Corbyn is the leading contender as new leader of the British Labour Party, Britain's main party of the Left.  The Conservatives are hoping that he gets the job. Corbyn likes pigeons a lot better than people

Runaway Labour leadership frontrunner Jeremy Corbyn once backed a House of Commons motion welcoming the 'inevitable' end of human life on earth in an asteroid strike, it emerged today.

The veteran socialist signed the controversial motion, attacking people as 'obscene, perverted, cruel, uncivilised and lethal', after it emerged MI5 were planning to use pigeons as flying bombs in combat.

Mr Corbyn is a long-term campaigner against 'pigeon prejudice' – and has insisted the birds are 'intelligent and gentle creatures' which are cleaner than cats and dogs.

In 1996, his love of the birds moved him to attack plans to try to remove them from city centres.  The Islington MP criticised plans to force them out of Trafalgar Square and urged people to see the birds as 'friends rather than enemies'.

The rebellious backbencher, whose has never been a minister or held a shadow ministerial role, has backed a host of left-field causes including a ban on 'war toys' for boys, homeopathy in the NHS and a ban on working in hot weather.

In 2003 Mr Corbyn signed a motion attacking the 'lack of gratitude' for carrier pigeons during the Second World War.

In 1991 he campaigned for British Rail staff to be allowed to keep 'calming' beards after new rules proposed banning facial hair. Mr Corbyn joined with 14 MPs to call for the rules to be scrapped. He said: 'This House further believes that beards are healthy and create the sympathetic image necessary for staff dealing with deeply distressed passengers.'

In 1995 he called for a ban on adverts for 'war toys' for boys - like Action Man figures - where there is 'a connection between such toys and male violence'.

He has also called for the legalisation of the possession of cannabis and dismissed the Serbian massacres in Kosovo as a 'genocide that never existed'.

Mr Corbyn also backed a motion welcoming England's success in the 1996 European Championships but criticised the 'jingoism and nationalism in the pages of sections of the tabloid press'.  It added it was 'reminiscent of Hitler's use of sport to enhance his evil regime in the 1930s'.

This year Mr Corbyn launched a bid to ban work in temperatures above 30C – or just 27C for physical jobs like on building sites.

Mr Corbyn has previously attracted criticism for describing the leaders of militant groups Hamas and Hezbollah as his 'friends'.

And he was embroiled in a new controversy earlier this week, as it emerged he had defended controversial Anglican vicar Stephen Sizer, who was disciplined by the church for posting a Facebook link to an article suggesting Israel was responsible for the 9/11 attacks.

It emerged that Mr Corbyn wrote a letter during the furore earlier this year, defending Reverend Sizer and claiming he was 'under attack' because he had 'dared to speak out against Zionism'.

A shock poll suggested Mr Corbyn had doubled his lead in the Labour leadership race and was on course for a 'knockout victory'.   The YouGov poll of those eligible to vote in the contest gives Mr Corbyn 53 per cent of the first preference votes – enough to win a majority in round one.

SOURCE

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Conservatives Vs. 'The Real World'

As she runs to hold on to her base against an openly declared socialist in the Democratic primaries, Hillary Clinton is declaring she intends to go even further than President Obama and his radical executive amnesty efforts. She continues to defend Planned Parenthood even after those horrific videos documented the ghastly sale of baby body parts for profit. She is wrapping herself in a gay agenda, viciously attacking religious freedom.

But it's the Republicans that are the extremists.

Check out The Washington Post. On the front of the August 8 Post came the headline "For GOP candidates, a rush to the right." Reporter Sean Sullivan harped on abortion and immigration as issues where it could "cause the eventual nominee problems with a more moderate electorate."

Sullivan claimed on social issues like abortion and gay marriage, "much of the Republican field has now taken positions that are at odds with mainstream American opinion. For example, three out of four Americans say a woman should be able to obtain a legal abortion if she becomes pregnant as a result of rape."

The problem for the Post? The Republican candidates and the Republican platform haven't really changed on abortion since the last campaign. What's changed on the Abortion Extremism Meter is liberals demanding Democrats like Clinton defend Planned Parenthood removing "intact fetal cadavers" for sale to the highest bidder. Avoiding this ugliness is where the Post's yellow-dog Democrat bias comes through.

In Sunday's paper, here was another headline: "A platform for conservative views: RedState Gathering gives nine GOP presidential candidates - without Trump — room to expand on hard-right positions from Thursday's debate." Reporter David Weigel also used that "hard right" lingo in the news story.

As an example, Weigel cited Mike Huckabee deriding "paid transgender surgery for members of the military." It is somehow extremist for Huckabee to warn of the next step of left-wing extremism. Obama's Pentagon is surging toward the radicals intent on shredding the "gender binary," the military rank and file are furious — but to even discuss it is "hard right."

Doom for the GOP is all over the Post's pages. Above Weigel's story in the Post was a story headlined "A look at Donald Trump's history of flippant misogyny." On the next page was the headline "Trump's behavior may imperil GOP chance at White House."

In the world of the liberal media, everything is always "imperiling GOP chances."

Saturday's top editorial in the Post really underlined the media tendency to exile conservatives in their own minds. The headline on the Web was "Only a handful of GOP candidates are living in the real world." After the first debate, the party was divided by the "electable ones" — Jeb Bush, John Kasich, Chris Christie and Lindsey Graham — and everyone else on the "GOP fringe," those who are "frighteningly out-of-touch."

So the tendentious Post classifies every conservative as incapable of "living in the real world." But in the real world, Ronald Reagan in 1980 was certainly considered "hard right" and outside the left-tilting political spectrum of the 1970s, and yet he won in a landslide ... twice.

How the Posties must recoil at the NBC poll over the weekend. The top five: Trump, Ted Cruz, Ben Carson, Carla Fiorina and Marco Rubio. Who, exactly, is "frighteningly out of touch" here?

SOURCE

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Jindal puts the emphasis on assimilation

by Jeff Jacoby

BOBBY JINDAL'S presidential quest may not take him all the way to the White House. But if his time on the campaign trail helps put assimilation back at the heart of the nation's immigration debate, he will have rendered his country a valuable service.

The 44-year-old governor of Louisiana was born and raised in Baton Rouge. His parents had immigrated to the United States from Punjab in northern India, and Jindal's election in 2007 made him the first Indian American chief executive of any state in US history.

But Jindal didn't run for governor as an Indian American, and he isn't running for president as an Indian American, either. Throughout his career he has championed the value and virtue of what used to be called "Americanization" — the patriotic integration of immigrants and their descendants into the American nation, so that they become Americans not just legally, but culturally and socially as well.

"We must insist on assimilation," Jindal said in the closing moments of the Republican "undercard" debate in Cleveland last week. "Immigration without assimilation is an invasion." A TV commercial aired in Iowa by Believe Again, a super PAC promoting Jindal for president, highlights the governor's emphasis on making immigrants into Americans.

"I am tired of hyphenated Americans," Jindal says in the ad, which features clips of a recent speech. "We're not Indian-Americans or African-Americans or Asian-Americans. We're all Americans." Instead of obsessing, as so many Republican candidates do, on the legal status of those who cross the border, Jindal emphasizes the importance of embracing the norms and mores of their new homeland. Immigrants, he declares, "should adopt our values, they should learn English, and they should roll up their sleeves and get to work."

For most of American history, the belief that immigration should go hand-in-hand with assimilation was all but universally shared. There were debates aplenty about the most effective means of Americanizing the foreign-born, and there have always been restrictionists who argued that immigrants from certain countries were incapable of blending into the mainstream. When the Supreme Court upheld the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1889, it accepted the government's claim that immigrants from China had "remained strangers in the land, residing apart by themselves," and that they were unlikely "to assimilate with our own people or to make any change in their habits."

Whatever one's views on the ideal number or nationality of immigrants, however, it was taken for granted until very recently that those who came to America should want to be American. What the conservative Jindal says on the subject in the 21st century is hardly different from what the liberal Louis Brandeis was saying a century ago. In a speech at Faneuil Hall in Boston in 1915, Brandeis argued that "the immigrant is not Americanized unless his interests and affections have become deeply rooted here" — until he comes to "possess the national consciousness of an American."

In its 1912 platform, Teddy Roosevelt's Progressive Party explicitly included immigrants in promising workers "a larger share of American opportunity," even as it pledged "to promote their assimilation, education, and advancement." Americanization activities were taken up by public schools and private corporations, by nonprofit organizations and chambers of commerce. Not all assimilation programs were successful. Some relied too much on conformist pressure rather than on affectionate encouragement. But on the whole, Americans thought it only natural that immigrants should strive to become American, and immigrants of all backgrounds could feel that they were part of a single national family.

The rise of militant multiculturalism undermined this consensus. Today's "progressives" tend to regard the old ideal of patriotic assimilation as a form of cultural suppression. Instead of celebrating a common American culture, they pursue "diversity," and elevate racial, sexual, and ethnic identities over national identity. E pluribus unum has been turned on its head.

Because Jindal rejects the tribal politics that the left expects minorities to uphold, he has been attacked as an Indian Uncle Tom and mocked in a Twitter campaign linked by the hashtag #BobbyJindalIsSoWhite. "There's not much Indian left in Bobby Jindal," a University of Louisiana professor sneered to The Washington Post.

That might be a grievous shortcoming, were Jindal running for office in India. But he is running in his own country, which he makes no apology for loving. "My dad and mom told my brother and me that we came to America to be Americans," Jindal says. "If we wanted to be Indians, we would have stayed in India."

SOURCE

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Tide Turns in Favor of Greece’s Shipping Industry

An article in WSJ highlighted the Greek shipping industry, which it says has "emerged largely unscathed" from the nation's recent financial troubles.

The reports say that shipping companies in Greece are buying vessels from cash-strapped competitors and German banks, and are poised to grab even more market share - but bailout-related tax hikes could lead shipowners to seek cheaper waters.

Greek owners, who operate almost a fifth of the global fleet of merchant ships, are paying rock-bottom prices for competitors' vessels. Shipping employs more than 200,000 people in Greece and contributes around 7.5% of Greece's gross domestic product. The industry is dominated by a small circle of family-run companies that control almost a fifth of the world's shipping fleet-long a source of national pride.

According to Basil Karatzas, a New York-based maritime adviser, as the global financial crisis took hold and the freight market gradually collapsed, the Greeks stayed above water as they were not overly leveraged and stood on cash generated during the boom years before 2008.

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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Another meltdown of official wisdom

People who eat lots of butter or cream are no more likely to have an early death than anyone else, a study suggests.

Researchers trawled through the health records of hundreds of thousands of patients and found no statistical link between eating saturated fat and falling ill with heart disease, strokes or type 2 diabetes.

The findings, published in the British Medical Journal, raise further doubts about 32-year-old guidelines that warn people to avoid butter, full-fat milk and other meat and dairy products with high levels of saturated fats.

Britons were advised in 1983 to cut their fat intake to 30 per cent of their total energy, and saturated fat intake to 10 per cent, while increasing the amount of carbohydrates they ate.

But the latest evidence suggests that saturated fats may not be bad for you after all.

SOURCE

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What Does It Mean to Be a Democrat?

On ABC’s This Week with George Stephanopoulos, Matthew Dowd identified four factions that make up the Republican Party: the Tea Party, libertarians, social conservatives and establishment Republicans. Note that three of these groups are identified almost exclusively by how they think. Arguably the fourth is as well. The Republican Party definitely attracts people who take ideas seriously.

What about the Democratic Party? It’s tempting to say that Democrats are liberal. But did you know that the base of the party — those that are the most reliable supporters of Democratic candidates — are not particularly liberal at all?

According to Pew research, among self-identified Democrats the most liberal are the ones with high incomes and post graduate degrees — a tiny minority. But among blacks, among people who have no more than a high school education and among those who make less than $30,000 a year, a majority consider themselves neither “liberal” nor “mostly liberal.” Among Hispanics it’s about fifty-fifty. And remember: this was a poll of people who call themselves Democrats.

Matt Vespa, writing at Townhall, quotes New York Times analyst Nate Cohn as saying:

"The majority of Democrats and Democratic primary voters are self-described moderates or even conservatives, according to an Upshot analysis of Pew survey data from 2014 and exit polls from the 2008 Democratic primary.

Some of these self-described moderates hold fairly liberal views. But the “mostly liberal” Democrats barely outnumber Democrats with “mixed” or conservative policy views, according to the Pew data, which classified respondents based on how consistently they agreed with Democratic policy positions. Only about a quarter of Democratic-leaners hold the consistently liberal views that would potentially put them to the left of Mrs. Clinton."

Well if liberalism isn’t what unites Democrats, could it be something else, like concern for the least fortunate? You might think so if you are a regular reader of the columns of New York Times columnist Paul Krugman. But the facts don’t bear that out either. A study by American Enterprise Institute president Arthur Brooks finds that conservatives are consistently more charitable than liberals. As one reviewer put it:

"Brooks finds that households with a conservative at the helm gave an average of 30 percent more money to charity in 2000 than liberal households (a difference of $1,600 to $1,227). The difference isn’t explained by income differential — in fact, liberal households make about 6 percent more per year. Poor, rich, and middle class conservatives all gave more than their liberal counterparts.

And it wasn’t just money. The conservatives gave more time, more blood, etc.

These findings are consistent with my own anecdotal experience. For many years I was an attentive viewer of C-Span’s morning show — where callers could call in on a “Democratic” or “Republican” line. Sometimes lines were labeled “liberal” or “conservative.” What I found striking was how rarely anyone on the Democratic or liberal line advocated a position I regarded as unambiguously liberal. I don’t recall a single caller saying we should all (including the caller) pay higher taxes so that we could have universal pre-school or universal long term care or so we could pay for some other government spending project.

Instead, I heard teachers arguing for more pay for teachers, seniors wanting more out of Social Security and Medicare, union members wanting trade protection, blacks wanting more for blacks, etc. In other words, what I heard a lot of was selfishness. The Democratic line attracted a lot of people who want government to intervene for their benefit at everyone else’s expense.

Is it possible that raw economic self-interest is what attracts voters to the Democratic Party? Certainly that is one way to view the Franklin Roosevelt political coalition. At Roosevelt’s behest, Congress passed the National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA), which attempted to regulate the entire economy, based on the Italian fascist model. In each industry, management and labor were allowed to collude to set prices, wages, output, etc. Every industry or trade was ordered to conspire to pursue its own interests at the expense of the public. The Supreme Court put an end to the NIRA, but it didn’t put an end to the ideas behind it.

If economic selfishness is what unites Democrats, could that model be in danger of falling apart? Trade unions, occupational licensing, and other attempts to monopolize trades and professions are very much in the Roosevelt tradition. But none of this attracts high income, highly educated liberals who back charter schools in their fight against the teachers' unions and who back Uber in its fight against the taxi cab monopoly.

Even more stunning is the recent Obama administration broadside against occupational licensing. It points out that one of every four jobs in the country requires a government license and reflects the concern of economists that these laws protect the producers, not consumers, and that their effects are eerily similar to medieval guilds.

At the state and local level, Republicans appear to have been as bad as Democrats in yielding to these special interest pressures. For Republicans, this is inconsistent with their free market rhetoric. However, for Democrats, it’s consistent with the Roosevelt model.

There is a potential rupture within the Democratic Party that has been largely ignored by the pundits.

SOURCE

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Christian Refugees Get the Cold Shoulder

One of the great traditions of American foreign policy has been to protect the oppressed against those who would do them harm. Yet throughout Barack Obama’s presidency, we have seen time and again how that policy has been abandoned for the sake of politics and The One’s own personal aggrandizement.

The most recent example is the revelation that 28 Chaldean Christians have been sitting in a San Diego immigration detention facility while bureaucrats decide whether to let them seek asylum in America or be returned to Iraq, where Christians are facing widespread persecution under the Islamic State and an indifferent and corrupt Iraqi regime.

The Chaldean Christians hail from one of the oldest Christian communities in the world, and the more than two dozen people who now sit in a barbed wire compound in San Diego faced a perilous trek to avoid being jailed and murdered at the hand of barbarians who seek nothing less than their conversion to Islam or their death. Twelve have already been given deportation orders, though their final destination and fate remains unknown.

While illegal immigrants with horrendous criminal records run rampant on American streets committing heinous crimes that the administration and the Leftmedia try to downplay, Christians who want nothing more than the freedom to practice their faith are being detained.

“In Iraq, they only had three choices: convert to Islam, death by the sword or leave the country,” Mark Arabo, head of the Minority Humanitarian Foundation, told Fox News. “They’ve refused to convert, escaped slavery and death — only to be imprisoned by our broken immigration system.”

Arabo, whose parents came from Iraq to the U.S. in 1979, went on to note a sad truth under the Obama administration: “The disheartening thing is it seems that our border is open to anyone unless you’re a Christian fleeing genocide.”

Since Obama abandoned Iraq in 2009, leaving that country to the wolves and spitting on the graves of the 4,000 American soldiers who gave their lives to secure that country, more than a million Iraqi Christians have been exiled. Some 300,000 still remain, and they live in constant fear of displacement, rape, murder and a number of other brutalities at the hands of the Islamic State, which has made significant military gains in the absence of an American military presence.

John Sununu, former New Hampshire governor and chief of staff to George H.W. Bush, recently noted, “There seems to be an indifference in Washington to what is happening here.”

Sununu is being too kind.  Former Rep. Frank Wolf of Virginia was more accurate, saying, “This administration is fundamentally anti-Christian.”

Obama is not just indifferent to the plight of Iraqi Christians or the Christians in Syria and Egypt and many other nations around the world who are being persecuted and murdered in record numbers by jihadis. We think his sustained record of inaction and turning a blind eye to the massacres taking place across the globe belies an underlying disdain for the Christian faith.

Consider Obama’s words since taking office. From his inaugural “apology” tour in 2009 to mandating Christians pay for abortive drugs through health insurance to his open browbeating of Christians over the Crusades during the National Prayer Breakfast in February to his support for the Rainbow Mafia’s persecution of Christians over marriage, he has demonstrated not only ignorance of history but contempt for the Christian religion and its place in the world.

At every turn, Obama has chosen to play down the horrific actions of the Islamic State as it burns people alive, decapitates nonbelievers en masse, and drives people of other faiths from the homes their families have lived in for generations. Instead, he callously dishes out revisionist history of atrocities committed by Christians hundreds of years ago in an attempt to lay out some twisted morally equivalent worldview that is logically and morally bankrupt.

As Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal said in February, “It was nice of the President to give us a history lesson… Today, however, the issue right in front of his nose, in the here and now, is the terrorism of Radical Islam, the assassination of journalists, the beheading and burning alive of captives… The Medieval Christian threat is under control, Mr. President. Please deal with the Radical Islamic threat today.”

But that is not Obama’s M.O. He is acting on a lifelong contempt for Western values that was instilled in him by his mentors of hate. He sees the threats that face America as some sort of punishment for a perceived injustice that our nation has perpetrated on the world.

It cannot be denied that some Christians acted poorly in the past (and sometimes the present), nor can it be denied that America has awful scars in its history. But our country learns from its mistakes, and it remains as always the single brightest beacon of freedom and hope for people around the world who want to practice their faith in peace and with dignity. Obama’s twisted worldview has done America no favors, and it has rolled back the march toward universal freedom. Who can say how long it will take to undo the damage he has wrought?

SOURCE

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Minimum wage Restaurants Suffer Worse Job Loss Since The Great Recession

According to a report released Sunday by the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), the $15 minimum wage has caused Seattle restaurants to lose 1,000 jobs — the worst decline since the 2009 Great Recession.

“The loss of 1,000 restaurant jobs in May following the minimum wage increase in April was the largest one month job decline since a 1,300 drop in January 2009, again during the Great Recession,” AEI Scholar Mark J. Perry noted in the report.

The citywide minimum wage increase was passed in June of last year. The measure is designed to increase the city minimum wage gradually to $15 an hour by 2017. The first increase under the plan was to $11 an hour in April. According to the report, Seattle restaurants have already faced severe consequences as a result. In contrast, in the six years since the 2009 financial crisis, the industry has been recovering in areas without the $15 minimum wage.

“Restaurant employment nationally increased by 130,700 jobs (and by 1.2%) during that same period,” the report also noted. “Restaurant employment in Washington increased 3.2% and by 2,800 jobs.”

Supporters of the $15 minimum wage often argue it will help the poor and stimulate economic activity. Opponents, however, argue such policies will actually hurt the poor by limiting job opportunities. How little or how much of either outcome usually depends on the study. Nevertheless, even the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) agrees at least some job loss is expected.

Studies also show that industries with low profit margins, like restaurants, are more likely to be hit the hardest. A June report from the investor rating service Moody’s claims the minimum wage doesn’t even have to go up to $15 an hour for negative effects to occur.

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 recent large pivot Leftward of the Democratic party

But why did they move that way?  Because they can.  The American electorate was once economically conservative, so the Democrats matched that to stay in office.  In recent years, however, the rusted-on vote of the minorities gives them a freer hand.   Mitt Romney was a lackluster candidate yet won an amazing 59 percent of the white vote.  It was monolithic minority votes that handed the Presidency to Obama.  So they can now do much more of what they basically want: Control.

“We Democrats believe that our economy can and must grow at an average rate of 5% annually, almost twice as fast as our average annual rate since 1953....We shall bring in added Federal tax revenues by expanding the economy itself.” -- 1960 Democratic Party Platform

“We will continue to use tax policy to maintain steady economic growth by helping through tax reduction to stimulate the economy when it is sluggish.” – 1968 Democratic Party Platform

“We reject ..the big government theory that says we can..tax and spend our way to prosperity..We honor business as a noble endeavor.” -- 1992 Democratic Party Platform

“Today's Democratic Party knows that the era of big government is over. Big bureaucracies and Washington solutions are not the real answers to today's challenges. We need a smaller government.” – 1996 Democratic Party Platform

“We have ended the era of big government; it’s time to end the era of old government…Democrats believe in supporting the startups, the small businesses, and the entrepreneurs that are making the New Economy go.” -- 2000 Democratic Party Platform

“We promise to cut taxes for 98% of Americans…We believe the private sector, not government, is the engine of economic growth and job creation.”  -- 2004 Democratic Party Platform

Up until 2000, Democrats routinely used buzzwords like “tax cuts,” “smaller government,” and “growth” in their platforms,” beginning in the John F. Kennedy era, even through Al Gore’s “reinventing, downsize the government” campaign. Though Democrats kept the caveat that it would resort to higher taxes, as it did in 1960, if the “unfolding demands of the new decade” necessitated them, President John F. Kennedy still cut taxes and famously declared that “a rising tide lifts all boats.”

But since 2008, the Democrats have lost their ideological bearings. The Obama Administration and now Democrat presidential contender Hillary Clinton are pursuing a course the polar opposite of the modus operandi of prior Democratic Administrations, when tax cuts were about igniting growth first, redistribution later. But both Hillary Clinton and President Barack Obama continue to put redistribution and big government first at the expense of growth, and end up getting neither.

Both are about raising taxes when the government routinely fails to deliver a budget. For the first time in six years, both houses of Congress last May adopted concurrent budget resolutions, notes FOX News Channel’s information specialist Stephen Scarola, as the federal government continues to mistake emergency stabilization plans to handle the housing crash as growth plans.

And now, Hillary Clinton proposes a mind-boggling capital gains tax plan that involves a half-dozen rates, a plan which nearly doubles the rate for investments held less than six years.

A flip flop from when Mrs. Clinton said of the capital gains tax rate in the 2008 Democrat presidential debates: “I wouldn’t raise it above the 20% if I raised it at all. I would not raise it above what it was during the Clinton Administration.”

We’ve got a U.S. tax code undermining the economy that sits at 77,000 pages, with all the statutes and regulations factored in, at seven times the length of Tolstoy’s “War and Peace.” Americans spend 6.1 billion hours every year attempting to comply with the revenue code, at an all in monetary cost of about $168 billion, estimates the Tax Foundation, about the size of Vietnam's GDP.

It’s a tax code written in an incomprehensible tongue and neurotically fiddled with by politicians doing the paid bidding of rent seekers seeking privileges their competitors don’t get. Entire, multi-billion dollar, unproductive industries are built, and wasted, on either complying with the code, or chasing elected officials who dole out tax privileges.

“We will protect the rights of all taxpayers against oppressive procedures, harassment and invasions of privacy by the Internal Revenue Service,” reads the 1976 Democratic Party platform. “At present, many federal government tax and expenditure programs have a profound but unintended and undesirable impact on jobs and on where people and business locate. Tax policies and other indirect subsidies have promoted deterioration of cities and regions. These policies should be reversed.”

However, now both President Obama and Hillary Clinton are about bigger government, even though the economy grew at less than 2% since 2008 and just 1.5% in the first half of 2015, a virtual standstill.

That first half performance is less than half the average growth the U.S. economy experienced, at just over 3%, from World War II to 2007.

This isn’t just the worst growth rate since World War II. It’s the worst rate of growth since the modern concept of GDP was first developed in 1934. When about half the time from 1950 to 2000, 4% growth was the norm. Most every recession since World War II saw higher economic growth, including the cataclysmic 1981 recession that saw a severe banking collapse when big money center banks, including Citibank (C), faced insolvency due to Latin American debt crisis.

That 3% growth rate would toss off another $600 billion in annual economic growth, estimates show, which would mean more jobs and higher incomes.

Today we’ve got a federal government whose spending annually equates to about 24% of GDP, up from the 19% average from 1950 to 2000. That’s a lot of capital sucked out of the private markets away from job-creating entrepreneurs who could develop the next, hot technology or medical cures, capital for the politicians to use instead to pick and choose how it’s deployed.

Taxpayers continue to pay for federal waste, anywhere from $125 billion to $200 billion, due to duplicative spending, even after the Government Accountability Office, Congress‘ official watchdog, made 440 recommendations since 2009 for cut backs in 180 areas. Less than a third, 29%, of the GAO’s recommendations were fully addressed.

This, as the 2008 Democratic platform said the party would be all about “eliminating waste in existing government programs” and “pay as you go budgeting rules.”

SOURCE

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Support the re-election of Canada's PM HARPER

A group of Canadians living in Israel has launched a crowdfunding campaign to help Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper win re-election this October.

“As Canadians, we believe Harper is good for Canada, he is good for the Jewish community, he is good for Israel, and he is good for the world. We want to help him stay in office,” said the leader of the campaign, Dan Illouz, a strategic consultant and CEO of Di Consulting.

The crowdfunding campaign hopes to raise $20,000. The group plans to use the funds to send 10 people to Canada just prior to the election to get out the vote for Harper Canadian Jewish communities.

“One of the greatest Jewish values is to know how to say ‘thank you’ when someone does something good for you. This campaign is here to say thank you to Prime Minister Harper. People all around the world have the opportunity to participate and donate and to help us say thank you,” Illouz said.

Under Harper’s leadership, Canada has been an outspoken supporter of Israel in international bodies such as the United Nations. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said in June that Israelis believe the Jewish state has “no better friend than Canada.”

Harper, who leads the Conservative Party, faces a tough re-election campaign against Tom Muclair’s New Democratic Party and Justin Trudeau’s Liberal Party. The election comes Oct. 19.

SOURCE

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Why Socialist Bernie Sanders Is Wrong about Health Care Being a Human Right

People who make up human rights run a risk.  Someone else might follow on by making up a human right to (say) kill all socialists.  Socialists have repeatedly shown that they think they have a right to kill anyone they want to



"Democracy and socialism have nothing in common but one word, equality. But notice the difference: while democracy seeks equality in liberty, socialism seeks equality in restraint and servitude." ~Alexis de Tocqueville

Last week, National Nurses United (NNU) hosted a rally to celebrate the anniversary of Medicare. During the rally, NNU took the opportunity to host Independent-Socialist Senator Bernie Sanders, who is seeking the Democratic nomination for president. Sander's speech to the crowd shed further light on his socialist views on the future of healthcare in the United States.

In his speech, Sander's stated that “healthcare is a right, not a privilege of all Americans", which is far from the truth. The debate over whether or not the right to life correlates with the right to health care has been an issue since the late 1800's. The truth of the matter is that while you do have the right to your life (meaning no one has the right to murder you, force you into slavery, dictate the terms of your existence through coercion or forced aggression), this right is what is known to philosophers as a negative right; while the right to purchase and receive health care is a positive right. First, we must define what is a right, before we go any further.

According to the Markkula Institute for Applied Ethics:

" What is a right? A right is a justified claim on others. For example, if I have a right to freedom, then I have a justified claim to be left alone by others. Turned around, I can say that others have a duty or responsibility to leave me alone. If I have a right to an education, then I have a justified claim to be provided with an education by society."

Based on that definition, a negative right is a claim against being interfered with; while a positive right is a claim that requires positive action on the part of someone else. The American system is based on the idea that we have negative rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, but not positive claims on others. For example, you have the right to worship as you please without interference (a negative right) but you don't have the right to force someone else to use their labor or money to accommodate you in your worship (a positive right). Philosophy expert Leonard Piekoff, PH.D touched on this issue by showing a more exaggerated example of what people feel they have the right to:

"...the American viewpoint continues, are the rights to life, liberty, property, and the pursuit of happiness. That's all. According to the Founding Fathers, we are not born with a right to a trip to Disneyland, or a meal at Mcdonald's, or a kidney dialysis (nor with the 18th-century equivalent of these things). We have certain specific rights [mentioned in the Bill of Rights]—and only these."

Thus the pretense of Sanders' statement is entirely incorrect, since no one owes you luxury cars, food, clothes, or health care. For the sake of driving this point home even further, voters in the upcoming election must realize that it is fundamentally wrong to keep anything that you have not created that others need to survive. Socialized health care is not "compulsory charity" as Democrats and Socialists (if there is any difference between the two anymore) would guilt you into believing. Its taking the financial resources of individuals to give to someone else, and in turn giving many people a poor product they didn't want to have in the first place.

An important concept to consider is that, if Americans are so focused on patient access and protection through medical coverage, who will look out for the best interest of the doctors, nurses, and other health care professionals? After all, medicine is something that many students throughout the nation spend incredibly large amounts of money and many hours committing themselves to getting their degrees and becoming medical services professionals. So the greater question should be whether or not you have a right to dictate the uses of their skills and talents. Medical practices are like any other commodity or service, they come with a very real costs since doctors become doctors not simply because they just want to help people, but because they want to make a profit and a living in the process of doing so. If there isn't a way to make a living and earn a humble profit, doctors and other medical professionals would be going against their own rational self-interest by entering the profession. A looming issue with the expansion of ObamaCare is the drastic shortage in doctors the US is facing. According to a recent report covering this disturbing fact:

"... The analysis finds that exchange plan networks include 42 percent fewer oncology and cardiology specialists; 32 percent fewer mental health and primary care providers; and 24 percent fewer hospitals. Importantly, care provided by out-of-network providers does not count toward the out-of-pocket limits put in place by the ACA."

What this shows is that people are as obligated to give you health care as much as they are obligated to give you their efforts and labor as a form of economic indentured servitude. A free market approach to health care reform is the best way to allocate services and products to patients, but also looks out for health care providers so that they can work to satisfy customers while satisfying their bottom line.

In conclusion, if we all have the right to health care, then using that logic we should all have the right to drive and own a Mercedes.

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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