The West’s huge cost disadvantages, particularly because of   regulations

By economic historian MARTIN HUTCHINSON

Modern telecommunications shrank the cost differential between rich and poor country product sources, making global supply chains easily feasible. Ever since the middle 1990s, therefore, the rich world has been getting poorer, as living standards across the planet began to converge. In the last decade, however, government actions have hugely increased costs in rich countries, making them less and less competitive – and lowering their citizens’ living standards far below the level dictated by the market. It’s time for Western citizens to rise up against this oppression.

Many commentators are currently bemoaning the parlous state of emerging markets’ economies. Yet their diagnosis is precisely the reverse of reality. Emerging markets now have a massive cost advantage compared to their developed brethren, they have further to grow without outrunning their living standards, they have by and large avoided the mistakes of the developed world and their growth rates remain safely in the black, even after population growth is factored in. It is the developed economies, not the emerging ones, which are in serious danger of falling backwards in absolute terms.

Before the 1980s, it was difficult for emerging markets to compete. Communications were expensive and difficult and most emerging markets were not fully aware of the needs of a modern economy, with poorly trained workers and whimsical regulations. Hence most production for the rich world was done in the West, with only a few industries, notably textiles/garments, fully open to competition from poor countries (and high protectionist barriers against poor country textile production until the 1990s.)

Since 1994, emerging markets have become fully competitive with Western countries. Under the influence of the fall of Communism and the emergence of new producers in Eastern Europe, they made a bonfire of many of the silly regulations that had hindered them. The surge in foreign investment which followed, which was partly motivated by the new ease of communication, rapidly improved the skill levels of emerging market workforces. Today, emerging markets are competitive against the West in almost any manufacturing sector and most services, so the West needs to up its game in order to ensure the preservation of its living standards – not the differential against emerging markets living standards, which is bound to erode over time, but the living standards themselves in absolute terms.

Instead of upping their game to meet the new tougher competition, Western countries have done the opposite, especially since 2008. They have added costs to the economy in a number of different areas, weakening their economic performance and their ability to compete with emerging markets. As a result the living standards of Western workers, especially those of only modest attainments, have gone into steady decline and many have withdrawn themselves from the workforce.

The most important area where additional costs have been imposed is through regulation, especially in the energy area. The global warming hysteria from about 2007 has caused government after government to pass heavy regulations forcing the closure of electricity plants while subsidizing hopelessly uneconomic energy sources. This has not only affected living standards directly, by increasing energy costs, it has also driven out many high-paid jobs in heavy industry, which depend on cheap energy to remain competitive with emerging market producers. The German saga, where energy costs almost double those in other countries have reduced the German steel industry to a fraction of its former size, is just one case where ideological fanaticism on the part of the elite has wrecked the livelihoods of ordinary people.

As important as the restriction of existing efficient power capacity has been the subsidization of new inefficient power capacity. Scams such as Solyndra in the United States, and the massive cost-inefficient wind farms in Britain, have all been instituted at enormous cost to the public, either directly through state subsidy or indirectly through regulations forcing utilities to take the uneconomic power at rates that make no sense in the context of their overall business.  Each wind farm may represent only a relatively modest waste of taxpayer or utility-user money, but collectively they place a colossal drag on the Western economies concerned.

The “green” cost to Western economies is not limited to the global warming campaign. The regulation outlawed by the U.S. Supreme Court in June, which imposed $10 billion of costs on electric utilities for a benefit of only around $5 million, thereby achieving a cost/benefit ratio of 2,000 to 1 in the wrong direction, is just one of a myriad of additional costs that enthusiastic Obama-era zealots have imposed on the U.S. economy. Similarly in Europe, there is little or no democratic control over the regulatory enthusiasms of the EU bureaucracy. Globally also, the various international bureaucracies impose massive costs primarily on the “rich” West without any form of democratic control. As the $10 billion example above shows, the individual regulations may be obscure and fairly modest in their economic effects, but they quickly add up.

Infrastructure costs have soared through the roof due mostly to the regulatory bureaucracy but also to the excessively favorable climate for obstructive lawsuits. When a new tunnel under the Hudson River costs in real terms fifteen times what a functionally identical tunnel cost in the 1920s, the burden on the economy has become grotesque. Big-government politicians observe crumbling bridges and call for more infrastructure spending, but society has rationally taken the decision to spend less on infrastructure while its cost is so great. It is not greater Chinese efficiency that enables them to build new facilities at one tenth or less of the cost in the U.S., it is sclerotic U.S. bureaucracy and regulation and uncontrolled parasitic U.S. lawyers.

Government’s additional cost burdens on Western economies go far beyond regulation itself. The orgy of fines and related costs imposed on the banking system since 2008 now totals over $260 billion, according to Morgan Stanley research quoted in the Financial Times, and there is no sign of any slowdown soon. Extraordinarily, most of the fines have not been related to the outrageous bad behavior of the banks in the run-up to the crisis, such as Goldman Sachs’ deliberate design of securities destined to fail in the “Fabulous Fab” case, but have instead related to tiny manipulations of LIBOR and other systems that were never designed to take the stresses of multi-trillion volumes through the derivatives markets. Either way, that $260 billion alone represents about 0.6% of rich country GDP, and it is sheer dead weight on economic output, especially damaging because it has mostly been imposed for faults that nobody could have spotted at the time, with penalties imposed in entirely arbitrary and excessive amounts.

The West’s costs are also increasing for a reason entirely independent of government: a higher dependency ratio as the baby boomers age past retirement and the workforce shrinks. Governments have however persistently attempted to worsen this problem by mass immigration, adding immeasurably to the welfare burdens of society by letting in poor immigrants with few skills who languish at the bottom of the economic totem pole. While the higher dependency ratio should reduce the income of society as a whole, by reducing the number of workers, it should increase the earnings of the workers themselves (by all means, while making them look after an increasing number of dependents.) It is a bitter condemnation of the West’s immigration policies over the last couple of decades that this is not happening; instead, wages are declining even as dependency ratios increase, as the flood of immigrants pressures the lower end of the earnings scale.

The additional costs imposed by the higher dependency ratio are being exacerbated by the soaring costs of healthcare, which has been subsidized by government for far too long. Pharmaceutical prices are bloated by excessive intellectual property rights, while hospital care prices are bloated by sheer maddening bureaucracy and the trial bar. Patients are now flying to Third World clinics to get their non-urgent healthcare carried out at reasonable cost. The additional burden of a healthcare sector that absorbs 18% of GDP is a major burden on U.S. living standards and to a large extent those in the rest of the rich West where the market in healthcare services has been distorted.

The greatest recent additions to the West’s burdens however have come from the grossly misguided economic policies pursued since 2008. Economies have been loaded up with extra debt to pay for wasteful government boondoggles, and it has all been financed by a monetary policy far more extreme than any since the 1920s, making government debt cheaper but forcing up asset prices, especially those of real estate. I wrote two weeks ago about how big cities were now hopelessly uncompetitive as business locations; that is true only in the West and not by and large in emerging markets where real interest rates have been kept safely positive and real estate bubbles have been avoided. There is a certain “feel-good factor” to rising house prices which prevents their full cost from being felt until after prices stop rising, but in reality the economic damage they do is both immediate and long-lasting. The money wasted in superfluous real estate and on projects that are economic at normal interest rates is an additional burden on the Western economies, invisible now but crippling in the next downturn.

Western politicians are right to worry about declining living standards, and their countries’ strange inability to compete with emerging market production. However this failure is very largely the result of their own hugely damaging policies.

SOURCE

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

Beefing Up Obama's Pro-Amnesty Agenda

The Obama administration’s intention to force-feed a pro-amnesty agenda to a recalcitrant American public has reached a new low. The Department of Justice (DOJ) recently announced it had reached an immigration-related settlement with Nebraska Beef Ltd., a meat packing company headquartered in Omaha, Nebraska. The DOJ had accused the company of discrimination — because the meat packing company demanded that workers show proof of immigration status to demonstrate they were eligible to work legally in the United States.

The DOJ insisted Nebraska Beef violated the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA) because it required “non-U.S. citizens, but not similarly-situated U.S. citizens, to present specific documentary proof of their immigration status to verify their employment eligibility.” Yet the act itself states that “employers may hire only persons who may legally work in the United States (i.e., citizens and nationals of the U.S.) and aliens authorized to work in the U.S. The employer must verify the identity and employment eligibility of anyone to be hired, which includes completing the Employment Eligibility Verification Form (I-9).” Adding insult to injury, the act warns employers that they can be penalized if they fail to complete and/or retain those I-9 forms.

Judicial Watch put this outrage in the proper perspective: “You know the nation is in trouble when a U.S. business gets investigated by its own government for following the law.”

Regardless, Principal Deputy Assistant Attorney General Vanita Gupta, head of the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division, was adamant. “The department is committed to ensuring that individuals who are authorized to work in the United States can support their families and contribute to our country’s economic growth without facing unnecessary and discriminatory barriers to employment,” she stated. “We will vigorously enforce the law to remove such barriers where we find them, and ensure that affected individuals have a means of seeking relief.”

“Relief” in this case amounts to Nebraska Beef paying $200,000 in a civil penalty settlement, establishing an uncapped back-pay fund for people who lost wages because they could not prove they are in the country legally, and two years of compliance monitoring. The company is also required to train employees on the anti-discrimination provision within the Immigration and Nationality Act and to revise policies within its office.

The anti-discrimination provisions of the act can be seen here. The germane clause states that employers “may not treat individuals differently based on citizenship or immigration status. U.S. citizens, recent permanent residents, temporary residents, asylees and refugees are protected from citizenship status discrimination.” All well and good, save for one seemingly inherent contradiction:

How is a company supposed to determine a potential employee’s status and eligibility to work in the United States without documentary proof?

A 2014 federal audit conducted by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) inspector general revealed the bigger stakes in play here, noting the Obama administration has not only been “inconsistent” in enforcing the provisions of the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 (IRCA), but it reduced the average fine for businesses caught hiring illegals by a whopping 40% between 2009 and 2012. Now the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division is getting in on the act, helping to facilitate the administration’s pro-amnesty agenda.

All Americans should be outraged, but none more so than black Americans. Another disappointing jobs report Friday revealed that only 173,000 jobs were created in August, despite predictions of 220,000. And though the unemployment rate dropped to 4.4% for whites, a drop of 0.2% from July, black unemployment is 9.5%, up 0.4% from July.

Unfortunately, both of those figures hardly tell the real story. The daunting reality is that a record-setting 94,031,000 Americans were not in the labor force last month, and the labor participation rate is 62.6% — the lowest level since 1977. When those people are counted, the overall unemployment rate, trumpeted to be 5.1%, more than doubles to 10.3%. Even worse, wages for all American workers have declined from the time the so-called recovery began in 2009, right through 2014 — with lowest paid workers taking the biggest hit.

All while Obama champions amnesty for million of illegals who would drive those wages even lower — for as long as a decade.

In short, the fundamental transformation, or more accurately, the balkanization of America, continues. Assimilation has been tossed on the ash heap of history, in favor of the multiculturalist “celebrating our differences” nonsense that is tearing this nation apart. The transnationalists who would abet our descent into Third World-ism for cheaper labor and reliable big-government votes must be thoroughly rejected by an electorate that still treasures national sovereignty. And it’s about time presidential candidates other than Donald Trump heartily embrace the one irrefutable statement he has made (echoing Ronald Reagan, by the way): A nation without borders is no nation at all.

SOURCE

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

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

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

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

IQ differences between populations are genetic

Knowledge of the genes associated with IQ has now advanced considerably.  As everyone in the field expected, IQ is governed not by one gene but many.  It is polygenetic.  This is in accordance with the view that IQ is just one aspect of general  biological good functioning.  The brain is just another organ of the body and if the body as a whole is functioning well, the brain should usually be pretty good too.

The researcher below selected 9 alleles that seemed particularly influential on IQ and combined them to get a score which could be called the genetic IQ score.  He calls it a metagene.  He found that the score varied widely between populations but that it correlated extremely strongly with IQ as measured by IQ tests.  Nations that averaged out high on IQ as measured by conventional IQ tests also had a lot of people with high genetic IQ scores.

So much for the common Leftist claim that IQ is only what IQ tests measure.  What IQ tests measure is in fact closely related to brain genes.  You could in theory examine an individual  person's brain and get an accurate IQ score that way  -- without using a conventional IQ test.  It has not got to that point yet.  Only whole populations have been examined so far -- but the future is now in plain sight.  IQ tests may some time in the not distant future be replaceable by genetic examinations.

Leftists have always argued that genetic determination of IQ within a population does not mean that between-population differences are also genetically determined.  That is of course logically true but highly improbable.  That claim would now appear  to have been examined and found wanting.

The implication, of course is that the black IQ deficit is also a function of black genes but anybody who tried to test that directly would probably be lucky to escape with his life.  So we just have to remind Leftists that blacks are people too and that what is true of people worldwide must also therefore be taken as true of blacks.  Blacks just don't normally have the genes needed for high IQ.

That is what the science shows.  When Warmists talk about "The Science", they never actually mention any. Good reason: What they call "science" is in fact prophecy.  See below for some real science:

A review of intelligence GWAS hits: Their relationship to country IQ and the issue of spatial autocorrelation

By Davide Piffer, Ulster Institute for Social Research, London, UK

Abstract

Published Genome Wide Association Studies (GWAS), reporting the presence of alleles exhibiting significant and replicable associations with IQ, are reviewed. The average between-population frequency (polygenic score) of nine alleles positively and significantly associated with intelligence is strongly correlated to country-level IQ (r = .91). Factor analysis of allele frequencies furthermore identified a metagene with a similar correlation to country IQ (r = .86). The majority of the alleles (seven out of nine) loaded positively on this metagene. Allele frequencies varied by continent in a way that corresponds with observed population differences in average phenotypic intelligence. Average allele frequencies for intelligence GWAS hits exhibited higher inter-population variability than random SNPs matched to the GWAS hits or GWAS hits for height. This indicates stronger directional polygenic selection for intelligence relative to height. Random sets of SNPs and Fst distances were employed to deal with the issue of autocorrelation due to population structure. GWAS hits were much stronger predictors of IQ than random SNPs. Regressing IQ on Fst distances did not significantly alter the results nonetheless it demonstrated that, whilst population structure due to genetic drift and migrations is indeed related to IQ differences between populations, the GWAS hit frequencies are independent predictors of aggregate IQ differences.

SOURCE

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

Multicultural football

A white referee was deliberately knocked down from behind by a black player.  More racial hostility? Or just deficient impulse control?  Probably both. It's certainly not clever, as the attackers will have ended their careers in football

SAN ANTONIO - Two student athletes who tackled a referee during a high school football game on Friday night have been suspended from the team and the school, according to the Northside Independent School District.

The students - who are football players for the John Jay High School football team - were playing against a team from Marble Falls.

Video of the play, which was uploaded to YouTube and at least one other high school football highlights website, shows a Jay defensive back running into the back of the unaware referee, knocking him down to the ground. Immediately afterward, a second player jumps onto the ref who is laying on the ground.

"This incident is extremely disturbing," said NISD spokesman Pascual Gonzalez. "Not the sportsman-like behavior that we teach our students. We are cooperating in this investigation with the UIL (University Interscholastic League)."

Gonzalez added an official investigation into the situation would begin on Tuesday with the scheduling of a due process hearing. Later on Sunday, Gonzalez said the two students were suspended.

SOURCE

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

Refugee crisis in Europe: ‘Something fishy’ among migrant flood as discarded ID papers appear

A PAKISTANI identity card in the bushes, a Bangladeshi one in a cornfield. A torn Iraqi driver’s license bearing the photo of a man with a Saddam-style moustache, another one with a scarfed woman displaying a shy smile.

Documents scattered only metres from Serbia’s border with Hungary provide evidence that many of the migrants flooding Europe to escape war or poverty are scrapping their true nationalities and likely assuming new ones, just as they enter the European Union.

Many of those travellers believe that using a fake document — or having none at all — gives them a better of chance of receiving asylum in Germany and other western European states. That’s because the surest route to asylum is to be a refugee from war and not an economic migrant fleeing poverty. That fact has led to a huge influx of people claiming to be Syrian.

Serbian border police say that 90 per cent of those arriving from Macedonia, some 3,000 a day, claim they are Syrian, although they have no documents to prove it. The so-called Balkan corridor for the migrant flight starts in Turkey, then goes through Macedonia and Serbia before entering the European Union in Hungary.

“You can see that something is fishy when most of those who cross into Serbia enter January first as the date of their birth,” said border police officer Miroslav Jovic. “Guess that’s the first date that comes to their mind.”

The chief of the European Union border agency Frontex said that trafficking in fake Syrian passports has increased.

“A lot of people enter Turkey with fake Syrian papers, because they know that they’ll get asylum in the EU more easily,” Fabrice Leggeri said.

In Germany, customs authorities have intercepted packages mailed to Germany containing Syrian passports, both genuine and counterfeit, the finance ministry said.

Syrians transiting through Serbia are concerned about the trend.

“Everyone says they are Syrian, even those who are obviously not,” said Kamal Saleh, pointing toward a group of people camping in a Belgrade park. “That is not good for us Syrians because of limited number of people who will get the asylum.”

SOURCE

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

Hillary wasn't thinking:  How surprising

HILLARY Clinton says her use of a private email system at the State Department wasn't the "best choice" and she's acknowledged she didn't "stop and think" about her email set-up when she became President Barack Obama's secretary of state in 2009.

THE Democratic presidential front-runner on Friday said in an interview with NBC News that she was immediately confronted by a number of global hotspots after joining the new Obama administration as its top diplomat and didn't think much about her email after arriving at her new job.
Her use of private email has now become a distraction for her presidential campaign.

"You know, I was not thinking a lot when I got in," Clinton said in the rare extended interview.

"There was so much work to be done. We had so many problems around the world. "I didn't really stop and think what kind of email system will there be?"

But Clinton did not apologise for her decision when asked directly: "Are you sorry?"  Instead, she again said she wishes she had "made a different choice" and that she takes responsibility for the decision to use a private email account and server based at her home in suburban New York.

She added it was a choice that should not raise questions about her judgment.  "I am very confident that by the time this campaign has run its course, people will know that what I've been saying is accurate," Clinton said, adding: "They may disagree, as I now disagree, with the choice that I made. But the facts that I have put forth have remained the same."

Republicans have criticised Clinton's unwillingness to apologise saying it underscores polls which have shown large numbers of people question her trustworthiness.

"What's clear is Hillary Clinton regrets that she got caught and is paying a political price, not the fact her secret email server put our national security at risk," said Michael Short, a spokesman for the Republican National Committee.

SOURCE

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

Congressional Democrats PAID BY IRANIAN LOBBY to support Obama’s nuke deal

That D for Democrat also means D for dollars

Every senator who accepted money from the Iranian American Political Action Committee (IPAC) should be impeached and removed from office — or at very least, soundly defeated the next time he or she comes up for reelection. But the enemedia, true to form, will cover for them and do everything it can to keep them on the government payroll.

    One of the many unanswered questions about P5+1 agreement with Iran is why so many Congressional Democrats are rallying behind the President on this issue when recent polls show the majority of Americans want Congress to reject the deal.

    Part of the reason is obvious: they are supporting a president from their own party, but a not-so-obvious reason may be that there is a “nefarious” lobby trying to control American foreign policy, and for a change the anti-Semites can’t blame the Jews. Iranian lobbyists are making big campaign donations to Democrats and are funding pro-deal propaganda.

    Writing in Front Page Magazine, Daniel Greenfield pointed out that many of the Democratic legislators who announced their support for the deal are getting money from the Iran lobby, specifically the Iranian American Political Action Committee, IPAC, which maxed out its contributions to Senator Ed Markey (D-MA) and Al Franken (D-Minn) — each received $5,000 in the 2014 election cycle.

    “Senator Jeanne Shaheen (D-NH), the Iran lobby’s third Dem senator, didn’t bother playing coy like her colleagues. She came out for the deal a while back even though she only got half the IAPAC cash that Franken and Markey received.”

    Senator Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY), who represents the state with the largest Jewish population in America, surprised many with her support of the deal. In addition to IAPAC cash, “Gillibrand had also picked up money from the Iran lobby’s Hassan Nemazee,” Greenfield reports. “Nemazee was Hillary’s national campaign finance director who had raised a fortune for both her and Kerry before pleading guilty to a fraud scheme encompassing hundreds of millions of dollars. Nemazee had been an IAPAC trustee and had helped set up the organization.”

    Barbara Boxer, who also came out for the deal, also Iran lobby funds.

    Getting IPAC cash on the House side were Mike Honda (D-CA), Andre Carson (D-IN), Gerry Connolly (D-VA), Donna Edwards (D-MD) and Jackie Speier (D-CA). Each of them supports Obama’s P5+1 turkey.

    But the Iran lobby’s biggest wins weren’t Markey or Shaheen. The real victory had come long before when two of their biggest politicians, Joe Biden and John Kerry, had moved into prime positions in the administration. Not only IAPAC, but key Iran lobby figures had been major donors to both men.

    “That list includes Housang Amirahmadi, the founder of the American Iranian Council, who had spoken of a campaign to ‘conquer Obama’s heart and mind’ and had described himself as ‘the Iranian lobby in the United States.’ It includes the Iranian Muslim Association of North America (IMAN) board members who had fundraised for Biden. And it includes the aforementioned Hassan Nemazee.

More HERE

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

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)

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

America’s Class Divide: Scribes v. Producers

by John O. McGinnis

The most comprehensive study of the ideology in the legal profession ever has just been published. It confirms what most people have already intuited: lawyers as a whole lean strongly to the left. Within the profession, a few characteristics predict that a lawyer will be even farther left than the median. Females and government attorneys are even more liberal, and no category is farther to the left than law professors. So much for diversity in legal education.

But what is most interesting about the study was its comparison of the ideology of lawyers with that of other key professions. Academics as a whole are substantially more left-wing than lawyers, and journalists in the print media are even slightly more left-wing than academics. Thus, we now know that there is a shared ideology of what we might call the scribal class – those who seek to alter the world by their use of information and rhetoric.

This scribal class wields enormous political power. Academics in the humanities and social sciences set a long-term agenda for the country by educating the young and by shaping the categories of thought. The news media shapes the shorter-term political agenda by deciding what to emphasize in its coverage and how to spin it. Lawyers, whom Tocqueville almost two centuries ago understood as the aristocrats of the United States, are experts at using the courts and the burgeoning administrative state to shift social policy. And the study leaves out the entertainment industry and government bureaucrats, groups that are also on the left.  Entertainers help set social agendas, and bureaucrats often help advance the programs of liberal politicians and obstruct those of conservatives.

Thus, the left owns the commanding heights of our democracy. Given this power, it is a surprise that the right wins as many elections as it does. To be sure, modern information technology has created a more dispersed media world and permitted conservatives a somewhat greater voice. But the imbalances remain dramatic.

The study thus helps us understand that one of the greatest class divides is not between those above the median income and those below it, or between the religious and secular, or between the North and South. None of these divisions represents as stark an ideological chasm as that between the scribal classes and those that produce material goods and non-information services for a living.  And the scribal class shares an interest in growing complex government. Lawyers get more clients from a more complicated and expensive government. Some academics gain more power from advising politicians and most gain more status as the market becomes less vibrant. The news media has a more interesting beat and readers need to more information, if big government is always shifting in its social engineering.

It is not surprising that what now unites the scribal class is campaign finance “reform.” Elections are the best opportunity for citizens outside the scribal class to disrupt agenda control, because elections provide both the motivation for some citizens to speak and others to listen. And of course campaign finance reform makes disruption more difficult, because it restricts campaign spending while not affecting the most important levers that the scribal class enjoys in shaping politics. Campaign finance reform is how today’s scribes wage class warfare.

SOURCE

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

DOJ Accuses U.S. Biz of Discrimination for Requiring Proof of Work Eligibility

In its crusade to protect and assist illegal immigrants, the Obama administration has accused an American company of discrimination for requiring employees to furnish proof that they are eligible to work legally in the United States.

You know the nation is in trouble when a U.S. business gets investigated by its own government for following the law. The case involves a Nebraska meat packing company that demanded workers to furnish proof of immigration status for the federal employment eligibility verification process. The Obama Department of Justice (DOJ) went after the company, accusing it of engaging in employment discrimination.

In particular the DOJ's Office of Special Counsel for Immigration-Related Unfair Employment Practices objected to non-U.S. citizens being "targeted" because of their citizenship status. "The department's investigation found that the company required non-U.S. citizens, but not similarly-situated U.S. citizens, to present specific documentary proof of their immigration status to verify their employment eligibility," the DOJ claims. This could constitute a violation of the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA), the feds assert, because its anti-discrimination provision prohibits employers from making documentary demands based on citizenship or national origin when verifying an employee's authorization to work.

With the feds breathing down its neck the business, Nebraska Beef Ltd, agreed to pay Uncle Sam a $200,000 civil penalty and establish an uncapped back pay fund to compensate individuals who lost wages because they couldn't prove they are in the county legally. Additionally, the business will undergo "compliance monitoring," which means big brother will be watching very closely. The head of the DOJ's civil rights division explains that the agency is on a mission to eliminate "unnecessary and discriminatory barriers to employment" so workers can support their families and contribute to the U.S. economy.

This case is part of a broader effort by the Obama administration to helps illegal aliens in the U.S. Besides shielding tens of millions from deportation via an executive amnesty order, the president has also expanded the DOJ to help carry out part of this mission. It's why the agency's civil rights division has grown immensely under Obama. A few years ago Judicial Watch reported that the DOJ's civil rights division launched a secret group to monitor laws passed by states and local municipalities to control illegal immigration. Because the measures are viewed as discriminatory and anti-immigrant by the administration, the DOJ has spent huge sums of taxpayer dollars to track them and legally challenge them as it did in Arizona.

The federal tentacles have reached deeply into the workplace. A few years ago the DOJ civil rights division, under the leadership of renowned illegal alien advocate Thomas Perez, launched a plan to eliminate tests that supposedly discriminate against minorities in the workplace. The administration defines them as having a "disparate impact," a racial discrimination created by the various written exams. The tests disproportionately screen out people of a particular race, even though they "present the appearance of objective, merit-based selection," according to the Obama DOJ.

Last year a federal audit disclosed that the Obama administration was letting businesses that hire undocumented workers off the hook by drastically reducing fines and enforcement. During a three-year period the administration slashed by 40% the amount of fines collected from employers caught with illegal immigrants on their payroll, according to the probe which was conducted by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Inspector General. This inconsistent implementation hinders the government's mission to prevent or deter employers from violating immigration laws, the DHS watchdog wrote in its report. Now the DOJ is taking it a step further by going after employers that try to ensure their workers are in the U.S. legally.

SOURCE

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

VA’s record of waste, fraud and abuse keeps piling up

The federal agency entrusted to stretch tax dollars as far as they can go to get veterans the best medical care, in fact, has a hard time spending tax dollars wisely.

Over the last year, the Department of Veterans Affairs has been repeatedly cited for waste, fraud, abuse and theft that took valuable tax dollars away from veterans, many who are still waiting in long backlogs to get benefits decisions.

The examples are jaw-dropping, starting with the a memo that surfaced in March by the VA’s chief procurement officer, Jan. R. Frye, who went public with a stunning admission that the VA likely wastes $6 billion a year on unnecessary contracts, purchases and services.

“Doors are swung wide open for fraud, waste and abuse,” Mr. Frye, the deputy assistant secretary for acquisition and logistics, wrote in a whistleblower letter that made national headlines.

The examples backing up Mr. Frye’s claims just keep piling up:

 *  The VA’s inspector general reported that the agency's human resources department wasted $6.1 million on two conferences in Orlando, Florida, that treated employees more to vacation than to training.

 *  The inspector general also divulged in that report that department officials wasted $97,906 on trinkets like bags, pens and water that were unnecessary. VA employees also improperly accepted gifts including room upgrades, meals, limousine services, golf, spa services, helicopter rides and tickets to see the Rockettes.

 *  In July, an employee at the Rhode Island Veterans Memorial Cemetery in Exeter pled guilty to stealing 150 marble headstones from a veterans cemetery in a scheme that went unnoticed for a long time.

 *  In June, a former head engineer at the VA hospital in East Orange, New Jersey, was accused of taking $1.2 million in kickbacks for contracts, which fleeced taxpayers.

 *  The VA’s inspector general found last month that the Veterans Benefits Administration mismanaged millions of dollars in benefits for veterans who were unable to manage their own income and estates due to age, injury or disability. Among the woes cited in the report was a failure to remove two custodians who had misspent benefit funds.

 *  In testimony before Congress in May, Mr. Frye cited reports that VA employees in the Bronx in New York City had swiped charge cards 2,000 times, saying they were buying prosthetic legs and arms for veterans. Each charge was for $24,999, one dollar below the VA’s charging limit for purchase cards. When lawmakers demanded details about the charges, they were told there was no documentation.

More HERE

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

Only conservatives have to obey the law

A Kentucky county clerk who has become a symbol of religious opposition to same-sex marriage was jailed Thursday after defying a federal court order to issue licenses to gay couples.

The clerk, Kim Davis of Rowan County, Ky., was ordered detained for contempt of court and later rejected a proposal to allow her deputies to process same-sex marriage licenses that could have prompted her release.

So, naturally, this became a national brouhaha – A NYT article was front page, for Pete’s sake– and, where there is national attention to be had, the White House has to weigh in. And they did so with this jaw-dropper:

The White House said today that the Kentucky county clerk taken into custody over her refusal to issue same-sex marriage licenses should obey the law just as President Obama does.

Press secretary Josh Earnest, asked at today’s briefing about the jailing of Rowan County Clerk Kim Davis for contempt, said “ultimately I think that this is something that the courts will weigh in on.”

But, he said, “the question of the rule of law” is at stake.

“And every public official in our democracy is subject to the rule of law. No one is above the law. That applies to the president of the United States and that applies to the County Clerk and Rowan County, Kentucky, as well,” Earnest said. “And that’s a fundamental principal of our democracy. In terms of how that applies to this particular case? That’s obviously something that a judge will have to decide. And I would not second guess it from here.”

I’m amazed that he didn’t choke to death from trying to keep from laughing here. I actually agree with Josh Earnest that the rule of law is at issue here. It’s a shame his boss doesn’t know the meaning of the words. Let’s consider just a few examples:

Obamacare waivers

Multiple far-reaching regulations (EPA, NLRB, FCC) issued with no statutory authority

Racially biased enforcement of our civil rights laws on voting

The Libya war, in violation of the War Powers Act

Operation Fast & Furious

Failure to produce budgets by the statutory deadline — or at all

Non-enforcement of our immigration laws

Ignoring the treaty clause of the Constitution

Ignoring congressional demands for information in violation of Congress’ oversight powers

All of this just screams “respect for the rule of law,” and I’m sure you can come up with others.

How Earnest avoided a lightning bolt from above for this one, I don’t know. I guess even God was gobsmacked.

SOURCE

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

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

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

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

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

Dreadlocked black refuses to Serve Cop at Arby's

Another example of how Leftist agitation has set blacks against the police.  The female cop was white and had personally done nothing wrong or antagonistic

An Arby’s spokesman told The Daily Caller News Foundation Thursday night that the employee who refused to serve a Florida police officer out of resentment for police has been indefinitely suspended and that the manager of the location has been fired.

“We take this isolated matter very seriously as we respect and support police officers in our local communities,” Arby’s spokesman Jason Rollins told TheDCNF in a statement. “As soon as the issue was brought to our attention, our CEO spoke with the Police Chief who expressed his gratitude for our quick action and indicated the case is closed.”

Rollins told TheDCNF the employee was indefinitely suspended “pending further investigation.” The manager is Angel Mirabal, 22, and the employee was identified as Kenneth Davenport, 19.

SOURCE

Another incident:

A [black] Maryland man was thrown in jail Wednesday night after he threatened to kill all the white people in his small town of La Plata.

Police say Carlos Anthony Hollins, 20, posted a threat on Twitter that said, “IM NOT GONNA STAND FOR THIS NO. MORE. TONIGHT WE PURGE! KILL ALL THE WHITE PPL IN THE TOWN OF LAPLATA. #BLACKLIVESMATTER [sic].”

The Twitter account has since been suspended.

Police were able to identify Hollins and took him into custody without incident. He was charged with threats of mass violence

SOURCE

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

Is Government the Major Cause of Unemployment?

BOOK REVIEW of "Unemployment and Government in Twentieth-Century America" by By Lowell E. Gallaway and Richard K. Vedder

On Labor Day Americans enjoy the day off to celebrate with their friends and family. But Labor Day is a holiday largely grounded in the narrative of benevolent governments protecting workers through New Deal-type “make work” projects, minimum-wage laws, national-industrial policies, high military expenditures, unemployment insurance, welfare payments, and a myriad other programs.

However, could such government interventions in labor markets actually play the most significant role in creating joblessness? According to data released today by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, more than 93 million Americans 16 years and older are now not in the labor force, producing a participation rate of only 62.6%, matching a 37-year low.

In the award-winning book, Out of Work: Unemployment and Government in Twentieth-Century America, economists Richard K. Vedder and Lowell E. Gallaway separate myth from reality, showing how good intentions have had disastrous consequences for American workers.

Lucidly recounting the history of American unemployment, Out of Work for example showing that the policies of both Presidents Herbert Hoover President Franklin Roosevelt prolonged and exacerbated unemployment during the Great Depression. Here is a powerful rebuttal to the prevailing myths about unemployment and the government’s role in combating it. As a result, the book points the way toward market-based reforms that would have a meaningful, lasting impact on creating extensive and well-paying employment opportunity in the United States.

Email from Independent Institute

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

The theory that could land Trump in the White House

If you’re having trouble understanding the phenomenal rise of Donald Trump, buck up — you’re not alone. Even political pros are dumbfounded.

They were shocked when the reality-TV star and businessman first grabbed the lead in national GOP polls. Now they’re double shocked as he soars in primary states, grabbing a 24-point lead in New Hampshire and a 15-point lead in South Carolina.

In one survey, Trump more than doubled his favourability ratings among Republicans in a single month, from 20 per cent to 52 per cent. The Hill newspaper called the turnaround “political magic” and the poll’s director, Patrick Murray of Monmouth University, called it ­“astounding.”

“That defies any rule in presidential politics that I’ve ever seen,” Murray told The Hill.

Other pollsters made similar comments, but a closer look shows an explanation. I call it the Pendulum Factor.

It reflects the fact that the legacy of each president includes the political climate he leaves behind. In plain English, Barack Obama’s most ­important failures as a leader begat Donald Trump’s success.

A favourable legacy among voters generally means the public wants more of the same in the next president. The clearest example is that Vice President George H.W. Bush succeeded Ronald Reagan in 1988, an election widely regarded as Reagan’s third term.

On the other hand, George W. Bush narrowly defeated Vice President Al Gore in 2000, a disputed election that was nonetheless seen as a repudiation of the scandal-scarred Bill Clinton era.

The pendulum swung back again when Obama followed Bush, who left office with wars in Iraq and ­Afghanistan unsettled and the economy cratering and jobs vanishing.

With Obama’s poll numbers ­underwater, the country wants change again. And Trump is the ultimate Un-Obama candidate, especially in style and attitude.

A telling example of the chasm between them involves the speech Obama gave in Berlin in July 2008. Still a senator, he called himself “a fellow citizen of the world.”

The crowd of 200,000 gathered near the Brandenburg Gate correctly sensed a turning point in America’s relationship with the world, and roared its approval.

Seven years later, the citizen of the world has made a mess of things. From the rise of Islamic State to the horrific slaughters in Syria and the immigration chaos at home, along with the unchecked aggression of China, Russia and now Iran, Obama’s appeasement and blame-America approach are having disastrous consequences.

All the Western democracies are rattled, and their politics are scrambled by nervous and unhappy publics. The United States is not immune, but the unique culture of American exceptionalism, which Obama never embraced, is alive and well in many hearts. If there is anything most Americans hate more than war, it is seeing the country ­behaving like a weakling and being pushed around.

Trump is scoring as the perceived antidote. You cannot imagine him going to Germany and proclaiming himself a “citizen of the world.” The slogan on his hat says, “Make America Great Again,” and he summarised his message as, “We’re not gonna take it anymore!” Subtle he’s not.

Pat Buchanan, a former GOP presidential candidate, says Trump represents a “new nationalism.”

In truth, Trump’s ideas are as old as the country. He vows that America will not be cowed with him in the White House — and many people obviously believe him.

He talks of building a wall on the southern border and forcing Mexico to pay for it. He talks about deporting illegal immigrants and stopping the waves of “anchor babies.”

He promises to get tough with China, to push back against Putin’s aggression, and to squeeze Iran — and everywhere to negotiate better deals than Obama. Trump would put America first and his bombastic personality helps persuade people he means it.

Just as you can’t imagine Trump echoing Obama’s soft internationalism, you can’t imagine Obama echoing Trump’s muscular nationalism.

That’s not to deny their similarities. Both have thin skins and zero patience for dissent. Obama tries to govern through executive orders and it’s easy to envision a President Trump doing the same. A supporter calls Trump the “Obama for the right.”

If so, the cover of a German magazine that greeted Obama in 2008 also fits Trump. Stern magazine featured Obama’s picture with the words: “Saviour — or demagogue?”

The pendulum doesn’t stop in the middle.

SOURCE

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

The Truth About Wages in Right-to-Work States

Private sector wages are not reduced in right-to-work states as union advocates have argued, according to a new report released Tuesday by The Heritage Foundation.

James Sherk, a research fellow in labor economics at The Heritage Foundation and the author of the study, cited an Economic Policy Institute paper that claimed right-to-work laws reduce wages by 3 percent.

Sherk found the conclusions “fundamentally flawed” because the study only partially accounted for the cost of living differences across states. He said this is a problem because companies in states with higher costs of living pay their employees higher wages to account for steeper expenses.

Every state with compelled union membership and Virginia, a right-to-work state, has living costs above the national average, which is how EPI arrived to its finding that right-to-work states have lower wages.

Once cost of living was accounted for in the Heritage study, Sherk said EPI’s results “disappeared” and right-to-work laws had no effect on private sector wages.

Sherk’s study did find government employees make about 5 percent less in right-to-work states, but he attributed this to government unions’ ability to affect wages by electing “political allies” who will give them “favorable contracts.”

“All of these arguments of right-to-work wages really evaporate when you look under the hood of all these studies,” Sherk said.

Though more than three-quarters of Americans believe union membership should be voluntary, 25 states still have compulsory unionization.

Vincent Vernuccio, the director of labor policy at the Mackinac Center, said at a panel hosted at The Heritage Foundation Tuesday that after Michigan passed a right-to-work law in December 2012 its unemployment rate dropped largely because company site selectors were no longer eliminating the state for its compelled union laws.

He said in May 2013, Michigan added 6,000 manufacturing jobs while Illinois, a compelled union state, lost 2,000 that same month.

“The right-to-work states are gaining these jobs the forced unionism states are losing,” Vernuccio argued.

Republican state Rep. Chris Kapenga of Wisconsin said he immediately saw positive impacts after his state passed a right-to-work law this past year.

He said Wisconsin had the highest growth of manufacturing jobs out of any metro area in the U.S. over the past year and was ranked third in the nation by “Manpower” magazine for its “bright job outlook,” which he attributes in part to the state’s move toward a workers’ choice environment.

“Right-to-work is good for the state and I think it’s good for the nation as a whole because it gets back to the individual liberty and freedom of a person to choose if they want to associate or not,” Kapenga said.

SOURCE

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

Chick-fil-A Is Coming to Denver Airport After All

Chick-fil-A, the fast-food chain that soars in customer satisfaction surveys, recently bid to open a restaurant in the Denver International Airport, but it was initially denied due to “concerns” that a local franchise could generate “corporate profits used to fund and fuel discrimination.” The unforgivable sin, of course, was Chick-fil-A founder Dan Cathy’s 2012 defense of biblical marriage.

The Denver City Council’s opposition was completely absurd, but, fortunately, sanity prevailed. Well, perhaps we should rephrase: Fear of losing a lawsuit prevailed. National Review’s John Fund writes, “[C]ity-council members sat through a closed-door briefing from Denver’s city attorneys, where they were warned that barring a business on the basis of political prejudice would be a one-way ticket to a successful First Amendment lawsuit.

Minority groups spoke up against the council, noting that Chick-fil-A’s local partner was a minority-owned business named Delarosa Restaurant Concepts.” And eventually they caved, though none walked back their original reasons for opposing the lease. In other words, it’s good news of a sort, but leftists will simply wait for a more opportune time to browbeat anyone who doesn’t fall in line with “tolerance.”

SOURCE

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

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

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

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

Do conservatives have better self-control?

The research below says that they do and it may be true -- but the study claiming that has rightly been criticized as overgeneralized. See here.

What the study did was rather typical of laboratory psychology. An effect was examined in an extremely limited context and the resulting finding made the basis of vast generalizations.  This study used the Stroop test -- which asks people to name color words that are printed on coloured blocks.  The word "green" might be printed on a red block, for instance.  When people are asked to name the word, the clash of color and meaning does of course slow people down. And conservatives were less slowed down than liberals.

So what does it mean?  It's most incautious to guess.  Saying that it measures something as general as self-control is a pretty wild speculation that could only be supported by much further research.  It IS related to brain function but our understanding of brain function is still in its infancy so that tells us little.  It is however ipso facto a measure of mental speed and measures of mental speed have repeatedly been shown to correlate well with IQ.  So, unsurprisingly, some studies have found that Stroop performance correlates highly with both IQ and academic performance.  And various types of mental illness lead to very poor Stroop performance.

So does this have any implications for conservatives?  I think it has a most interesting implication in fact.  It shows that conservatives have greater academic potential than liberals.  Conservatives are not generally keen on academe as a career, seeing it as poorly paid, among other things, but they do actually have more potential for it.

And that surprises me least of all. I had a double career. Like a good conservative, I made good money in business while also doing a heap of published academic research. And throughout my social science research career, I was rather dumbfounded by the poor quality of the psychological research by others that I encountered.  A very common fault was exactly the one mentioned above:  Overgeneralization.  Some effect would be demonstrated in the laboratory and vast claims made about what it meant.  The whole research field of mental rigidity is an example of that.  My papers  in that area can be read here.

The amusing outcome of that was that I had a lot of critiques published in the journals -- critiques in which I tore somebody else's research to shreds.  Journal editors HATE publishing critiques because it shows that their reviewing processes have fallen down.  But the points I made were so obviously right that I did in fact get about 50% of my critiques published! See here.

And almost all psychological researchers are Leftist so what I was critiquing was Leftist psychology.  So my experiences is certainly that Leftists make very poor academics.  And the recent revelations about the poor replicability of psychological research results is also a straw in the wind.  The Stroop test is right. Journal abstract below:

The self-control consequences of political ideology

Joshua J. Clarkson et al.

Abstract

Evidence from three studies reveals a critical difference in self-control as a function of political ideology. Specifically, greater endorsement of political conservatism (versus liberalism) was associated with greater attention regulation and task persistence. Moreover, this relationship is shown to stem from varying beliefs in freewill; specifically, the association between political ideology and self-control is mediated by differences in the extent to which belief in freewill is endorsed, is independent of task performance or motivation, and is reversed when freewill is perceived to impede (rather than enhance) self-control. Collectively, these findings offer insight into the self-control consequences of political ideology by detailing conditions under which conservatives and liberals are better suited to engage in self-control and outlining the role of freewill beliefs in determining these conditions.

PNAS vol. 112 no. 27, 8250–8253

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

Trump's Trump

By G. Murphy Donovan

Donald Trump is a piece of work even by New York standards: tall, white, loud, brash, entrepreneurial, successful, rich, ruthlessly candid, well-dressed, and fond of heterosexual women. He has married at least three delicious ladies in fact. Trump has five children and seven grandchildren. Indeed, his progeny are well above average too, smartly groomed, photogenic, and successful to boot.

As far as we know, Donald does not have any tattoos, piercings, unpaid taxes, or under-aged bimbo interns. He is not a drunk or a junkie either. Trump projects and enterprises probably employ more folks than the NYC school system -- or the United Nations.

You could say that Trump is living the life, not the life of Riley, but more like Daddy Warbucks with a comb over. “The Donald,” as one ex-wife calls him, is not just living the American dream. Trump is the dream -- and proud of it.

You could do worse than think of Trump as upwardly mobile blue collar. He is the grandson of immigrants and the product of Long island, a Queens household, and a Bronx education. The Donald survived the Jesuits of Fordham University for two years before migrating to finish his baccalaureate at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania.

When readers of the New York Times, The New Yorker, and the New York Review of Books speak of “the city”, they are not talking about the Queens or the Bronx.  Growing and schooling in the blue-collar boroughs gives Trump a curb level perspective, something seldom found in Manhattan. Or as any “D” Train alumnus might put it, Trump has “a pretty good Bravo Sierra detector.”

So what’s not to like about Donald Trump? He doesn’t just stay in four-star hotels; he builds them. He doesn’t just own luxury condominiums; he makes them. He doesn’t just own historic buildings; he restores them. He doesn’t just eat at the best restaurants; ke creates them. He just doesn’t belong to the best country clubs; he builds those, too.

And Donald Trump, unlike the Manhattan/Washington fantasy Press and every Beltway political pimp, doesn’t just pay lip service to a bigger and better economy, he creates micro-economies every day.

The only thing we don’t know about Donald Trump is why he would like to immigrate to the District of Columbia.

In any case, the merits of entrepreneurs like Trump might best be defined by the character or motives of his critics. Trump detractors are for the most part “B” list politicians, ambulance chasers, and a left-leaning Press corps that lionizes the likes of Nina Totenberg, Dan Rather, Chris Matthews, Andrea Mitchell, and Brian Williams.

If the truth were told, most of Trump’s critics are jealous, envious of his wealth -e- and they loath his candor.  Donald might also be hated for what he is not. Trump is not a lawyer, nor is he a career politician who lives on the taxpayer dime. Trump is paying for his own campaign. Bernie, Barack, McCain, and Kerry could take enterprise lessons from a chap like Trump.

Unlike most government barnacles, Trump can walk and chew gum at the same time. He knows how to close a deal and build something. He is a net creator, not consumer, of a kind of wealth that provides “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” for Americans -- real jobs not feather merchants.

Today, Trump has nothing left to prove. Yet, success has allowed him the rarest of public privileges, an electoral pulpit and the courage to speak his mind. Alas, truth is not necessarily a political asset in a socialized democracy.

Indeed, the erstwhile presidential candidate stepped on his crank recently by suggesting that Mexico, already exporting dangerous drugs, cheap tomatoes, and even cheaper labor, was also exporting violent felons to the US.

Truth hurts! Trump’s rude candor is underwritten by nearly half a million illegal felons in American jails. Coincidently, events have conspired to support Trump’s take on Mexican dystopia with the El Chapo Guzman jailbreak and the murder of Kathryn Steinle by Francisco Sanchez.

Senor Sanchez sported a lengthy criminal record and had been deported on four previous occasions. San Francisco, a “sanctuary” city, failed to honor existing warrants and released Sanchez from jail just before he blew Kathy Steinle away

As serendipity would have it, Trump then went to Phoenix on 12 July and gave a stem winder to a sell-out crowd on the subject of illegal immigration. Senator John McCain was not pleased to have The Donald on Arizona’s front lawn and intemperately called Trump supporters “crazies.” Trump returned fire saying that McCain was no hero.

Here again Trump cut to the quick, pointing out that no one qualifies as a hero because he was shot down or captured. Indeed, being a hostage in North Vietnam is not necessarily heroic either. McCain is thought by some to be a heroic because he refused to accept an early release.

In fact, the Hanoi parole offer was a ruse, a Hobson’s choice, designed to embarrass McCain and his father at CINCPAC.

If McCain took the parole and abandoned his fellow POWs, he would have shamed his father and been ostracized by shipmates. Indeed, had John McCain not been the son and grandson of famous nd victorious, Pacific Command flag officers, no one would have noticed him then or now.

Few of the demagogues who have come to John McCain’s defense could name any of the 600 Vietnam-era POWs other than McCain. McCain is famous today because he, like John Kerry, has parlayed a very average Vietnam military service into a three-decade political sinecure.

We know of 50,000 Vietnam veterans that might be more deserving than John McCain. Unfortunately, they died in a war that generals couldn’t win and politicians couldn’t abide. A body bag seldom gets to play the “hero.”

McCain is no political hero either.

He is famously ambiguous on domestic issues like immigration. He is also a Johnny-come-lately to Veterans Administration rot, which has metastasized as long as McCain has been in office. On foreign policy, McCain is a Victoria Nuland era crackpot, supporting East European coups, playing cold warrior, and posturing with neo-Nazis in Kiev. McCain pecks at Putin too because the Senate, like the Obama crew, hasn’t a clue about genuine threats like the ISIS jihad or the latest Islam bomb.

To date, Trump has run a clever campaign. He is chumming, throwing red meat and blood into campaign waters and all the usual suspects are in a feeding frenzy. McCain, the Press, the Left, and the Republican establishment all have something to say about “the Donald.” It is truly amazing how cleverly Trump manages to manipulate the establishment.

If you are trying to sell an idea or a candidacy, there’s no such thing as bad publicity.

Who knows where the Trump campaign goes? For the moment, he has scored direct hits on Mexico and McCain. With El Capo on the loose again, every time a toilet flushes in Sinaloa, Mexican garbage is likely spill out in Los Angeles, Hollywood, San Francisco, Portland, or Seattle. Indeed, it’s hard to believe that the Left Coast could survive without cheap labor, pistileros, meth, coke, heroin, or weed. Necrotic immigration and its byproducts are ready made targets for a gunslinger like Trump.

Trump is no bigot. He probably employs more Latinos and Blacks than Enrique Peña Nieto or Barack Obama. In his own way, Donald Trump is both immigrant and POW, a refugee from Queens and still a prisoner of Wharton. The Donald is The Dude, the guy with babes and a role of Benjamins that would choke a shark. He is the wildly successful capitalist that some of us love to hate.

Before democratic socialism, success and effectiveness were measures of merit. It doesn’t take much insight to compare Trump’s various enterprises with federal programs. Public education, banking oversight, public housing slums, poverty doles, veterans fiascos, Internal Revenue hijinks, and even some Defense Department procurement programs are consensus failures. The F-35 “Lightning” fighter is an illustration, arguably the most expensive single DOD boondoggle in history. Pentagon progressives seldom win a catfight these days, but they still spend like sailors.

If and when Trump fails, he is out of business.

In Trump’s world, failure has consequences.  In contrast, Washington rewards failure with better funding. Indeed, generational program failure is now a kind of perverse incentive for Beltway politicians and apparatchiks to throw good money after failed programs.

The difference between Trump and McCain should be obvious to any fair observer; Trump has done something with his talents. McCain, in contrast, is coasting on a military myth and resting on the laurels of Senatorial tenure.

Any way you look at it, Donald Trump is good for national politics, good for democracy, good for America, and especially good for candor. If nothing else, The Donald may help Republicans to pull their heads out of that place where the sun seldom shines.

SOURCE

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

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

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

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

The Left Sees Only White Evil

By Dennis Prager

In the past week, two television reporters in Roanoke, Va. — Alison Parker and Adam Ward — were murdered by a black man who hated whites, and a white police officer in Houston — Darren Goforth — was murdered by a black man. Neither crime has been labeled a hate crime. And no mainstream media reporting of the murders attributes either to race-based hate.

For the mainstream media, the Roanoke murders were committed by “a disgruntled former employee,” and regarding the Houston policeman, the media report that, in the words of The New York Times, “a motive for the shooting remained unclear.”

The disregard of anti-white hatred as the motive for blacks who murder whites even when the murder is obviously racially motivated comes from the same people who denied that the Islamist Nidal Hasan’s murder of 13 fellow soldiers at Fort Hood was religiously motivated. These people — all on the left — have an agenda: to deny black racism and Islamist-based violence whenever possible. Only white police and other white violence against non-whites is clearly racist — even when not.

Thus, President Barack Obama convened a “White House Summit on Countering Violent Extremism” rather than a “White House Summit on Countering Islamist Violence.” Though the summit was convened the month following the Islamist massacre of the Charlie Hebdo staff in Paris, the words “Islam,” “Muslim” and “Islamist” did not once appear in the White House’s 1,668-word fact sheet on the summit. The Obama administration went so far as to label Hasan’s murders of his fellow soldiers “workplace violence.”

So, too, the mainstream media depicted the black murderer of eight white people at a Connecticut beer warehouse in 2010 as a man who had been angered by white racism, not as the white-hater he was. Under the headline “Troubles Preceded Connecticut Workplace Killing,” a New York Times article reported: “He might also have had cause to be angry: He had complained to his girlfriend of being racially harassed at work, the woman’s mother said, and lamented that his grievances had gone unaddressed.”

And a Washington Post headline read: “Beer warehouse shooter long complained of racism.”

The fact was that the man was fired for stealing beer from his workplace, and there was a video of him doing so.

The left denies black racism in another way. When a white racist murdered nine blacks in a Charleston, S.C., church this past June, the left and the media correctly stressed the murderer’s racism. Indeed, whenever blacks are killed by whites — which, it is worth noting, is many times less likely than a white being murdered by a black — and especially by white police officers, the left attributes the killings to racism. But when blacks kill whites, the left attributes the killings to guns. This is all reinforced by the left’s position that only whites can be racist, because only the powerful can be racist, and whites have all the power.

Parker’s grieving and enraged parents provide an example of this thinking. They have entirely ignored the racism of their daughter’s murderer and concentrated exclusively on the issue of gun control.

How tragic that the Parkers would not channel their grief and rage into a different campaign, one that actually addresses the reason for their daughter’s murder and might prevent future murders: a campaign against the fomenting of anti-white hatred among black Americans.

After a lifetime of studying and writing about evil, I have come up with an equation that explains most of it. Coincidentally, the equation actually spells the word. The equation is Evil = Victimhood + Lies. Or E=V+L.

Either victimhood or lies is enough to produce great evil. Together, they constitute the components of ultimate evil.

The left has been supplying both victimhood and lies to black America. The lies are that America is a racist society — as the president of the United States himself has said, racism is “still part of (America’s) DNA” — that the greatest problem facing young blacks is racism, and that white (and even black) police routinely kill blacks for no reason other than racism. One of the best examples of this lie is the left’s use of the word “Ferguson” as an example of white police killing innocent young black men. The extensive investigation into what actually happened in Ferguson (by both local authorities and the U.S. Department of Justice led by then-Attorney General Eric Holder) revealed no such thing. Yet even Obama continues to use the term “Ferguson” as an exemplar of police racism.

Those lies in turn produce the anger-inducing victimhood that pervades too much of black life. Just this past weekend at the Minneapolis State Fair, a “Black Lives Matter” group chanted, “Pigs in a blanket, fry ‘em like bacon.”

Some blacks — as in Houston this past weekend and in Louisiana two weeks earlier when a black man murdered another white policeman — are taking this message literally and randomly murdering police officers. And some other blacks just want to kill whites, whether or not they are police. Such is the power of victimhood and lies.

There is a lot of blood on the left’s hands. And there will be more.

SOURCE

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

Jeb represents an America that has lost its bearings  -- and its spine

By Thomas Sowell

Even those of us who are not supporters of either Donald Trump or Jeb Bush can learn something by comparing how each of these men handled people who tried to disrupt their question-and-answer period after a speech.

After Bush’s speech, hecklers from a group called “Black Lives Matter” caused Bush to simply leave the scene. When Trump opened his question-and-answer period by pointing to someone in the audience who had a question, a Hispanic immigration activist who had not been called on simply stood up and started haranguing.

Trump told the activist to sit down because someone else had been called on. But the harangue continued, until a security guard escorted the disrupter out of the room. And Jeb Bush later criticized Trump for having the disrupter removed!

What kind of president would someone make who caves in to those who act as if what they want automatically overrides other people’s rights — that the rules don’t apply to them?

Trump later allowed the disrupter back in, and answered his questions. Whether Trump’s answers were good, bad or indifferent is irrelevant to the larger issue of rules that apply to everyone. That was not enough to make “The Donald” a good candidate to become President of the United States. He is not. But these revealing incidents raise painful questions about electing Jeb Bush to be leader of the free world. The Republican establishment needs to understand why someone with all Trump’s faults could attract so many people who are sick of the approach that Jeb Bush represents.

No small part of the internal degeneration of American society has been a result of supposedly responsible officials caving in to whatever group is currently in vogue, and allowing them to trample on everyone else’s rights.

Some officials allow “the homeless” to urinate and defecate in public, right on the streets, or let organized hooligans who claim to represent “the 99 percent against the one percent” block traffic and keep neighborhoods awake with their noise through the night. Politicians who exempt from the law certain groups who have been chosen as mascots undermine the basis for a decent society — which everybody, from every group, deserves.

Even those who happen to be in vogue for the moment can lose big time when the vogue changes, as vogues do.

Back in the 1920s, when there was international outrage on the political left over the trial of anarchists Sacco and Vanzetti, Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote to British leftist Harold Laski, pointing out that the trials of black defendants were far worse, but nobody seemed to care about that.

“I cannot but ask myself why this so much greater interest in red than black,” he said.

The vogue has changed since then — and it can change again, when some other group comes along that catches the fancy of the trend-setters, and sways politicians who go along to get along.

The goal of “the rule of law and not of men” has increasingly been abandoned in favor of government picking winners and losers. Too many in the media and in academia do the same.

Time and again, we have seen false charges of rape set off instant lynch mob reactions in the media and academia, regardless of how many previous false charges of rape have later been exposed as hoaxes.

The problem is not with the particular choices made as to whose interests are to override other people’s interests, but that picking winners and losers, in defiance of facts, is choosing a path that demoralizes a society, and leads to either a war of each against all or to a backlash of repression and revenge.

The recent televised murder of two media people by a black man who said that he wanted a “race war” was one sign of the madness of our times. Nobody who knows anything about the history of race wars, anywhere in the world, can expect anything good to come out of it. Unspeakable horrors have been the norm.

It is a long way from a couple of disruptive incidents on the political campaign trail to a race war. But these small incidents are just symptoms of larger and worse things that have already happened in America, when the rules have been routinely waived for some.

We do not need to risk still worse consequences if we get yet another President of the United States who acts as if it is just a question of whose ox is gored.

SOURCE

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

Race: Obama is part of the problem

Deputy Darren Goforth was gunned down at a Harris County, Texas, gas station Friday evening when he stopped to fill up his squad car. He was 47, and he leaves behind a wife and two young children. The execution-style murder appeared unprovoked, though there is an unmistakable angle of racism and anti-cop hatred.

Security footage shows the murderer, who is black, come up behind and shoot 15 rounds into Goforth, who is white. Law enforcement has a theory to why the killer did it. In a press conference, an obviously emotional Harris County Sheriff Ron Hickman pinned the blame for this murder on the angry rhetoric surrounding the Black Lives Matter protests. “This rhetoric has gotten out of control,” Hickman said. “We’ve heard ‘black lives matter,’ ‘all lives matter.’ Well, cops' lives matter, too. So why don’t we just drop the qualifier and just say ‘lives matter’?”

To be sure, blacks aren’t the only ones killing law enforcement personnel. A deranged white man in Louisiana brutally murdered a state patrol officer last weekend. Fourteen officers were killed in August by perpetrators of different races.

Barack Obama condemned the “completely unacceptable” targeting of police officers as “an affront to civilized society,” and he promised to “continue to highlight the uncommon bravery that police officers show in our communities every single day.” Yet he has also driven some of the anti-police sentiment with his irresponsible rhetoric.

Late last year, after the deaths of Michael Brown and Eric Garner, Obama and then-Attorney General Eric Holder launched the 21st Century Policing Task Force, which Mark Alexander labeled “a $265 million charade based on the underlying assumption that cops generally have racial biases.”

They claimed their goal is an “honest conversation” about disparate treatment of blacks by law enforcement. “When anybody in this country is not being treated equally under the law, that is a problem,” Obama said then. “And it’s my job as president to help solve it.”

After reading the Justice Department’s report on Ferguson, it’s hard to conclude there isn’t a real problem in at least that police department, and likely many others. Police are human, after all. But, as Alexander also noted, “This ‘problem’ of ‘not being treated equally’ is Obamaspeak for ‘cops are racists.’” It’s far too broad a brush.

To further illustrate those assumptions, Obama said, “A combination of bad training [and] departments that really are not trying to root out biases, or tolerate sloppy police work; a combination in some cases of folks just not knowing any better, and, in a lot of cases, subconscious fear of folks who look different — all of this contributes to a national problem that’s going to require a national solution.”

So while it’s appropriate and welcome for Obama to express outrage at Goforth’s murder, it’s a stark contrast to his previous rhetoric.

Indeed, Milwaukee County Sheriff David Clarke blasted Obama, saying, “I’m disgusted there’s been no sense of urgency by the president of the United States over these cop killings. Look, he breathed life into this anti-cop sentiment, this cop hatred, and he stands by as it goes on. He went out and visited a federal prison, for heaven’s sake — federal prisoners and he pardoned 46 of them.”

That said, it goes too far to lay the blame for these murders squarely on Obama’s shoulders. Each cop killer is responsible for his own actions. To argue differently falls into the same line of thinking that causes leftists to blame Sarah Palin’s Facebook page for the lunatic who killed six near Tucson and wounded Rep. Gabby Giffords, or the race-baiting hoards that blamed a flag for the Charleston murders.

But there’s an unmistakable thread of racial hate being fomented among blacks by the nation’s first black president — a man whose election was supposed to herald a new age of racial harmony. Instead, our cities are suffering race riots reminiscent of the 1960s and tension between blacks and law enforcement is at a boiling point. A deranged and angry black homosexual just murdered two white journalists on live TV last week because he followed through on hateful racist sentiment.

For some blacks in the “Black Lives Matter” movement, this is about revenge — revenge for real oppression like slavery and Jim Crow but also every perceived slight or different outcome.

Just two weeks before Goforth was murdered, armed Black Panthers shouted, “We will start creeping up on you in the darkness” — exactly what Goforth’s killer did. Another Black Lives Matter rally featured protesters chanting, “Pigs in a blanket, fry ‘em like bacon.” An LA “life coach” tweeted after Goforth’s murder “this is what justice looks like.” We can only hope such abhorrent ideas are held by a tiny minority.

SOURCE

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

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

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

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

Milwaukee Sheriff: Obama ‘Started This War on Police’

In response to the execution-style murder of  Harris County Deputy Sheriff Darren Goforth, who was shot multiple times at a gas station in Cypress, Texas, Milwaukee County Sheriff David A. Clarke Jr. strongly criticized what he called the “black lies matter” movement and stressed that President Barack Obama himself had “started this war on police.”

On Fox’s “Justice With Judge Jeanine” on Aug. 29, the host asked Sheriff Clarke,  “Is it open season on law enforcement in this country?”

Sheriff Clarke said,  “Judge, I am too pissed off tonight to be diplomatic about what’s going on and I’m not going to stick my head in the sand about it.”

“I said last December that war had been declared on the American police officer led by some high profile people, one of them coming out of the White House, and one coming out of the United States Department of Justice,” said Clarke.

“And it’s open season right now,” he said.  “There’s no doubt about it. Anytime a law enforcement officer is killed, a little bit of every police officer in America dies along with them.”

Later in the interview, Judge Jeanine asked, “Finally, sheriff, the national rhetoric that’s going on. You say that people need to push back and we need, when we see things on Facebook and social media. You know, the truth is, people can say and do what they want. This is America. But, without leadership, there isn’t going to be any different reaction. More people seem to be emboldened by this kind of thing.”

Sheriff Clarke said,  “Right, and that’s why I said that the president of the United States started this war on police.”

“Look, and I know what you mean, judge, by that, but it’s not absolute,” said the sheriff.  “You can’t say anything you want in the United States of America: you cannot threaten people’s lives, you can’t call for the killing of people like we’re seeing from some of these things.”

“That is not First Amendment protected,” said Clarke.  “That is filth, that is slime, and there are some law enforcement implications that can be dealt with at the Department of Justice and with state attorney’s offices across the United States.”

“I love the First Amendment,” he continued.  “I love freedom of speech. You are not free to threaten my life or anybody else’s.”

Deputy Darren Goforth was killed on Friday, Aug. 28, while he was pumping gas into his car at a gas station.  The killer walked up from behind and shot Goforth multiple times in the back.

Shannon J. Miles, 30, was arrested on Aug. 29 and charged with capital murder in the death of Goforth.  Several Texas law enforcement officials have called the murder a “cold-blooded assassination.”

SOURCE

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

Obama Tries To Use Courts To Skew Votes Towards Democrats

 The recently concluded federal trial over North Carolina’s election rules proved one thing beyond a reasonable doubt: The Obama administration and its partisan, big-money, racial-interest-group allies will stop at nothing to win elections. And using the courts to change election rules is a key part of their strategy.

That was clearly evident in the federal courtroom in Winston-Salem. The plaintiffs, including the Justice Department, challenged a number of election reforms implemented in 2013 that were designed to reduce the cost and complexity of running elections and make it harder to commit voter fraud.

The administration pushed a novel legal argument. In its telling, if a change in election rules might statistically affect blacks more than whites, it constitutes illegal discrimination. For example, if 98 percent of whites have a voter ID but only 97.5 percent of blacks have one, then requiring voters to present ID violates federal law. Never mind the fact that getting an ID is free, easy, and open to everyone without regard to race. And never mind if a policy change is in line with the rules of many other states, or if it’s explicitly sanctioned by federal law. The mere act of changing the law in the wrong direction is discriminatory.

In other words, the Obama administration would turn the Voting Rights Act into a one-way ratchet to help Democrats. The court refused to go along.

SOURCE

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

The New U.S. Business Model: ObamaCorps

The National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) handed down a decision last week that could remake a vast swath of the economy. Where have we heard that before with this administration? The rule essentially took nine million American workers employed by just under 800,000 franchise businesses and moved their employment from the direct supervision of the franchisee to the big-brand parent company. To paraphrase Joe Biden’s comments when ObamaCare was signed, this is a big freaking deal.

The Democrat-controlled NRLB, Barack Obama’s instrument for decisions and rulings benefiting labor unions — involving issues such as collective bargaining and the minimum wage, just to name two — could potentially destroy the franchise business model. How? The NLRB blurred the lines of “direct and immediate” control over employees of franchises, meaning the corporation now has more control than the franchise.

The partisan vote, supported only by Democrats in the majority on the NRLB, undermines the current responsibility of the franchise owner as the business owner and employer that hires, fires, pays employees, determines promotions, raises and benefits offered. As always, the Obama administration aims to make everything part of a centrally controlled process dominated by the government.

In effect, the NLRB’s ruling has turned business entrepreneurs who have risked capital, hired staff and sacrificed for earnings as franchise owners into middle managers to oversee employees on the payroll of the big corporation.

In the era of economic failure caused by the too-big-to-fails, Obama’s union thugs, who are federally tasked with representing worker rights as an agency, have only turned the large corporate entities into larger corporate entities.

Franchises are contracts to what are functionally small business owners, through which corporations can leverage the scale of purchasing, advertising and brand development to local businesses that agree to maintain product and service standards regarding quality and pricing. Otherwise, the franchise owner controls the business. A prime example: 90% of McDonald’s restaurants are franchises, and those franchises employ 1.5 million of McDonald’s 1.9 million employees. Other large brands using the franchise model include food-industry giants such as Taco Bell, Chick-fil-A and Wendy’s, and service industry corporations like Hampton Inns, Hilton Hotel brands, Great Clips hair salons, Liberty Tax Service and Save-A-Lot Foods.

But as Beth Milito, senior legal counsel for the National Federation of Independent Business, explains, “If … corporations are suddenly responsible for the franchise employees, they’ll be forced to exert more control over the franchisees.” In fact, she adds, they might even “eliminate the franchise model entirely and take direct control over the locations.”

Ironically, the first black president has made it tougher for minorities, who, according to The Heritage Foundation’s James Sherk, are “almost 50% more likely” to own franchised businesses versus non-franchised businesses. So much for empowering minority-owned businesses in the Obama economy.

So why is the NRLB forcing employers to abdicate their business processes to the Giant Corporation model?

You already know. Large employers make easier targets for labor unions to win unionization. Soon, there could be the Ronald McDonald Teamsters, the Great Clips Scissorworkers, and the United Brotherhood of Hilton Garden Inn Employees. The “protections” offered by labor unions are documented and proven: The mediocre and worst employees are protected and any who work hard carry the load of the former. Many union members are good workers, but there are some very rotten apples in the bunch, too (like this New Jersey teacher who gets to keep his $90,000 job despite being tardy more than a hundred times). And above all, Big Labor is a critical Democrat constituency.

Union membership is at historical lows, especially outside the confines of government, with only 7.4 million workers in private-sector unions in 2014 according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. But those who fear competition and personal accountability in the workplace are using their favorite vehicle — tyrannical government — to create a situation inviting thuggery organized labor.

Obama has successfully socialized America’s health care — ObamaCare; provided cell phones as part of welfare — ObamaPhones; created new controls for the Internet — ObamaNet; is working to force neighborhoods to build low-income housing run by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development — ObamaHoods. Why would this tyrant not move to destroy the free market system and effective business models through organized labor’s oppression and government-controlled prices and wages with ObamaCorps? He’s got a country to fundamentally transform, after all.

SOURCE

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

Water water everywhere but not enough to drink -- in corrupt California

California borders the Pacific Ocean, the largest body of water in the world, so desalination is a no-brainer for the Golden State. But as Dan Walters of the Sacramento Bee shows, government is not exactly eager to slake the parched state’s thirst.

The San Diego County Water Authority is building a desalination plant near Carlsbad. The company in charge of the project, Poseidon Resources, is planning another at Huntington Beach in Orange County. As Walters notes, “Last week, a scientific panel gave a positive nod to the state Coastal Commission for Poseidon’s plan to draw in seawater, which has been a sticking point in its permit application. There was no particular reason why it should have been, other than that some folks in the environmental community reflexively oppose any project to increase California’s water supply, even in the midst of a historic drought.”

San Diego County has an elected government and so does the city of Carlsbad. But the desalination plant must bend the knee to the California Coastal Commission (CCC) an unelected body that overrides the elected governments of coastal counties and cities on land use and property rights issues. The CCC started as a temporary body during the first reign of Jerry Brown, and in typical style the state made it permanent. Headed and staffed by regulatory zealots, the CCC combines Stalinist-style regulation with Mafia-style corruption. In the 1990s, Commissioner Mark Nathanson served prison time for shaking down celebrities for bribes.

A scientific panel may have given the CCC the nod for seawater induction, but that is no guarantee the CCC will approve further plans. It does not need to face the voters, and it now has power to levy fines directly. Worse, the CCC serves the interest of those who, as Walters says, oppose “any” project to increase the state’s water supply.

Governor Jerry Brown wants to drill two massive tunnels under the Sacramento–San Joaquin River Delta at an estimated cost of $25 billion. If the governor supports the southern California desalination plants, Walters explains, “he would be undercutting the tunnel project, which he clearly sees as completing the State Water Project his father began and adding to his own political legacy.” San Diego County’s desalinated water, meanwhile, will cost $2,000 an acre-foot, but as Walters observes, that is scarcely a half-cent per gallon. Therefore, “It makes a lot of sense – perhaps more sense than spending billions of dollars on a couple of pipes that won’t increase supply.”

SOURCE

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

Study delivers bleak verdict on validity of psychology experiment results

Psychs are around 95% Leftist so a lack of care about the truth was to be expected

Of 100 studies published in top-ranking journals in 2008, 75% of social psychology experiments and half of cognitive studies failed the replication test

A major investigation into scores of claims made in psychology research journals has delivered a bleak verdict on the state of the science.

An international team of experts repeated 100 experiments published in top psychology journals and found that they could reproduce only 36% of original findings.

The study, which saw 270 scientists repeat experiments on five continents, was launched by psychologists in the US in response to rising concerns over the reliability of psychology research.

“There is no doubt that I would have loved for the effects to be more reproducible,” said Brian Nosek, a professor of psychology who led the study at the University of Virgina. “I am disappointed, in the sense that I think we can do better.”

“The key caution that an average reader should take away is any one study is not going to be the last word,” he added. “Science is a process of uncertainty reduction, and no one study is almost ever a definitive result on its own.”

All of the experiments the scientists repeated appeared in top ranking journals in 2008 and fell into two broad categories, namely cognitive and social psychology. Cognitive psychology is concerned with basic operations of the mind, and studies tend to look at areas such as perception, attention and memory. Social psychology looks at more social issues, such as self esteem, identity, prejudice and how people interact.

In the investigation, a whopping 75% of the social psychology experiments were not replicated, meaning that the originally reported findings vanished when other scientists repeated the experiments. Half of the cognitive psychology studies failed the same test. Details are published in the journal Science.

Even when scientists could replicate original findings, the sizes of the effects they found were on average half as big as reported first time around. That could be due to scientists leaving out data that undermined their hypotheses, and by journals accepting only the strongest claims for publication.

John Ioannidis, professor of health research and policy at Stanford University, said the study was impressive and that its results had been eagerly awaited by the scientific community. “Sadly, the picture it paints - a 64% failure rate even among papers published in the best journals in the field - is not very nice about the current status of psychological science in general, and for fields like social psychology it is just devastating,” he said.

SOURCE

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

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

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

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