Playing the Trump card

Comment from Israel

No US presidential candidate in recent history – not even George W. Bush, the favorite target of liberals everywhere – has received as much condemnation and criticism as Donald Trump. And that includes numerous articles in this newspaper. But while I agree that the Donald has an aggressive, abrasive style that is woefully short on substance, I can well understand his growing popularity.

Trump is bold, brash and breaks the mold; he is a kind of anti-Obama enfant terrible, and that plays well in a country that is sick and tired of the “Yes, I can, but no, I don’t” president, whose every ill-conceived endeavor into foreign policy has reduced America to an also-ran, if not a laughing stock.

For while Barack Obama continues to mislead the people about the clear and present danger of Islam, or praises the virtues of reducing America’s influence in the world, Trump dares to tell it like it is and say what everyone is thinking, but misplaced political correctness won’t allow them to say. While Obama basks in “reaching out” to violently anti-West (and certainly anti-Israel) countries like Iran and Cuba; while world leaders pontificate in Pollyanna fashion about the moral imperatives of unchecked immigration by Middle East “asylum-seekers,” Trump clearly warns about strengthening enemies and carelessly opening the front doors of our countries to anyone and everyone who wants in, including terrorist sleeper cells.

Trump is striking a chord with millions of people who just want to be told the truth, straight up, with no sugar- coating or political obfuscation.

The Donald may not end up in the White House, but his numbers clearly add up to a warning – from one of the world’s most successful businessmen – to whoever does end up winning the election: It’s time to stop business as usual.

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Cronyism and Corruption in Brazil revealed -- bringing popular uproar

If the late Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises were alive today, he would have used one of South America’s largest countries, Brazil, as an example of his teachings. Not only because the effects of heavy-handed interventionism have finally propelled the anti Workers Party movement that is now taking over the country, but also because of what happened prior to the current turmoil.

As Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff (Workers Party or “PT”) struggles to conquer hearts and minds amidst the legal difficulties her administration has been facing due to the crony capitalist nature of Brazilian politics, millions of Brazilians wearing traditional green and yellow soccer jerseys flood the streets—and social media—with signs reading “Dilma out!”

The anger is understandable. In a country where Brazilians from all income brackets are forced to pay about 36 percent in sales taxes on most goods and services—a regressive tax that ends up hurting the poor—and give up about 28 percent of their income yearly, things haven’t been easy for quite some time.

Trouble began to brew for Dilma’s administration in 2009, when authorities launched an investigation into a network of currency exchanging businesses connected to Alberto Youssef. He was accused of forging contracts and moving billions of Brazilian Reais domestically and abroad using front companies and foreign bank accounts.

As the investigation broadened, authorities learned that Youssef had business relationships with Paulo Roberto Costa, the former director of the state-controlled oil giant Petrobras, major contractors and their lobbyists, and other Petrobras servicers. On March 2014, both Costa and Youssef were arrested.

As Costa agreed to cooperate with the authorities in August of 2014, Brazilians learned that he and several other directors of Petrobras received bribes and passed them along to politicians for their campaigns. In a matter of weeks, authorities got Youssef to join Costa, and revelations about one of the largest embezzlement schemes in the history of the country started flooding the news.

As both men started feeding authorities with the names of contractors involved in the scheme, Odebrecht and Andrade Gutierrez, the country’s two largest construction companies, were dragged into the investigation. Banker André Estevez, owner of Latin America's largest investment bank, BTG, was also involved.

In March 2015, a series of politicians were also accused of participating in the scheme.

By August, José Dirceu, the former prime minister under president Luiz Inácio “Lula” da Silva, was accused of receiving payments from Odebrecht and Andrade Gutierrez. Brazil Senator Delcídio Amaral (PT) and Lula’s close friend, the farmer José Carlos Bumlai, were arrested. The President of the Chamber of Deputies Eduardo Cunha (PMDB) and several PMDB party leaders were also targeted.

In no time, state prosecutors learned that the embezzlement scheme benefitted political parties in charge of Petrobras’s leadership appointments. At least 53 politicians are under investigation. As federal judge Sérgio Moro showed signs he believed former president Lula had profited from the scheme, prosecutors from the state of São Paulo added insult to injury by accusing Lula of “hiding his ownership of a beach-front condominium.

According to documents obtained by the Brazilian magazine “Época,” Jornal Opção reports, former president Lula was heavily involved in the embezzlement/crony capitalist scheme.

In what local media outlets call an “explosive” piece, Época writers claim Lula was the “lobbyist in chief” of Brazil during his administration and the period he has spent as a private citizen thereafter.

The magazine alleges that most of the former president’s time was spent traveling on behalf of Odebrecht contractors. Writers Thiago Bronzatto and Filipe Coutinho accuse Lula of aiding “Odebrecht billionaires” in deals with other countries using Brazilian taxpayer money.

As the country cries for impeachment, a smaller faction of the population stands with Rousseff and Lula, despite her lack of support among the general population. But as her approval ratings hover in the single digits, it is the country’s working class, not the country’s “wealthy factions” leading the way. As demonstrated by nanny Maria Angélica Lima, the woman turned famous for appearing in a photograph of a family taking part in one of the anti-Rousseff protests.

She told the newspaper: “Lula wasn’t the president everybody expected. Neither was Dilma. We need to take our chances with something new. I was tired of hearing the same lies, seeing the same corruption.”

As Brazilians struggle with increasing unemployment rates and rampant inflation, they also learn Lula—whose past popularity got the world jealous—was the leader of one of the largest crony capitalist schemes in the country’s history, working on behalf of major corporations, securing them deals with the state-owned firm, and doing all of that while on the taxpayer dime. It’s no wonder everyone is so angry.

As Mises once wrote in Human Action, “corruption is a regular effect of interventionism.” What Brazil—and America—now needs is a culture of liberty. More now than never.

SOURCE

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Leftist ignorance on display in Britain

Jeremy Corbyn’s defence spokesman sparked a row last night over claims that she did not know the meaning of ‘Defcon One’ – the term for imminent nuclear war.

Gaffe-prone Emily Thornberry shocked aides by asking: ‘Can someone explain Defcon One and Two to me? I’ve only ever seen it in films.’

She made the remark at a meeting of a group set up to review the Labour leader’s pledge to scrap the UK’s Trident nuclear submarines.

A nuclear weapons expert present pointed out that Defcon stands for ‘defence readiness condition’.

The term was coined by US defence chiefs to signal degrees of military threat, ranging from Defcon Five to Defcon One, which means nuclear attack is imminent. The highest alert the US has used was Defcon Two, which it reached in the 1962 Cuban missile crisis.

The levels date back to 1959, the height of the Cold War, and were little-known outside military circles until the 1983 movie WarGames, about a computer hacker who almost sparked World War Three by accessing US military computers.

A witness who heard Ms Thornberry’s comment said: ‘The room went quiet. Everyone was silently asking themselves, “Has our candidate to be the next Labour Defence Secretary just said she doesn’t know the code for a nuclear war?” ’

Ms Thornberry provoked more controversy later that day when she was accused of snubbing former Admiral of the Fleet Lord Boyce.

After Labour foreign affairs spokesman Hilary Benn suggested asking Lord Boyce for advice on nuclear policy, witnesses say Ms Thornberry replied: ‘He has been out of it for too long. We need someone who can talk about the future. How about getting a physicist?’

It led to a clash with Blairite MP John Woodcock, head of Labour’s defence committee, who was at the meeting of Labour’s international policy commission.

Mr Woodcock, who supports keeping nuclear weapons, told Ms Thornberry: ‘If you won’t listen to someone who was a submarine commander, head of the Royal Navy and Chief of the Defence Staff, our defence policy will have no credibility.’

Lord Boyce, 73, was First Sea Lord from 1998 to 2001 under Tony Blair’s government and Chief of the Defence Staff from 2001 to 2003.

Ms Thornberry, a leading supporter of Mr Corbyn, had previously suggested Britain’s nuclear submarines could become as outdated as Spitfires. She was also branded a snob for tweeting a photograph of a home draped with England flags and a white van on the driveway during the Rochester by-election in 2014. Such was the outcry that she was forced to resign from her front-bench post. This latest dispute is part of a wider Labour Party battle over Mr Corbyn’s attempts to adopt more Left-wing policies.

Defcon stands for ‘defence readiness condition’. The term was coined by US defence chiefs in 1959 to signal degrees of military threat, ranging from Defcon Five to Defcon One
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Defcon stands for ‘defence readiness condition’. The term was coined by US defence chiefs in 1959 to signal degrees of military threat, ranging from Defcon Five to Defcon One

A source close to Ms Thornberry confirmed she had referred to Defcon and films, but denied that she did not know what it meant. The source said that, in relation to Lord Boyce, Ms Thornberry had been stressing the need to look forward to nuclear capability in 20 or 30 years’ time – not back to the point when Lord Boyce was in command.

However, in an apparent U-turn, he said that the ex-defence chief would be invited to give evidence to Labour’s review.

SOURCE

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Southern resolve

A brief review of Dafoe, A. & Caughey, D., “Honor and War: Southern US Presidents and the Effects of Concern for Reputation,” World Politics (April 2016).

DON’T PICK A fight with a Southerner. That’s the lesson — internationally — of recent research by political scientists at MIT and Yale. They found that American presidents from the South — where there is more of a culture of honor and resolve — were less likely to back down in international disputes. Specifically, disputes “that have occurred under Southern presidents have been twice as likely to involve the use of force, have lasted on average twice as long, and have been three times as likely to be won by the United States.” This pattern was not explained by other characteristics of the president or the domestic or international situation at the time.

SOURCE

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

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

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I have just discovered that I am a member of something

Below is the first part of a big backgrounder on the various streams of the "Alt-Right".  It seems that I fit most of the description concerned -- at least insofar as the publications that I read are concerned.  I am also a member of the Alt-Right in that I am seen as very marginal politically.  My occasional mentions of race and IQ are perfectly factual but are unforgiveable to most political participants and can easily be misrepresented

A specter is haunting the dinner parties, fundraisers and think-tanks of the Establishment: the specter of the “alternative right.” Young, creative and eager to commit secular heresies, they have become public enemy number one to beltway conservatives — more hated, even, than Democrats or loopy progressives.

The alternative right, more commonly known as the alt-right, is an amorphous movement. Some — mostly Establishment types — insist it’s little more than a vehicle for the worst dregs of human society: anti-Semites, white supremacists, and other members of the Stormfront set. They’re wrong.

Previously an obscure subculture, the alt-right burst onto the national political scene in 2015. Although initially small in number, the alt-right has a youthful energy and jarring, taboo-defying rhetoric that have boosted its membership and made it impossible to ignore.

It has already triggered a string of fearful op-eds and hit pieces from both Left and Right: Lefties dismiss it as racist, while the conservative press, always desperate to avoid charges of bigotry from the Left, has thrown these young readers and voters to the wolves as well.

National Review attacked them as bitter members of the white working-class who worship “father-Führer” Donald Trump. Betsy Woodruff of The Daily Beast attacked Rush Limbaugh for sympathising with the “white supremacist alt-right.” BuzzFeed begrudgingly acknowledged that the movement has a “great feel for how the internet works,” while simultaneously accusing them of targeting “blacks, Jews, women, Latinos and Muslims.”

The amount of column inches generated by the alt-right is a testament to their cultural punch. But so far, no one has really been able to explain the movement’s appeal and reach without desperate caveats and virtue-signalling to readers.

Part of this is down to the alt-right’s addiction to provocation. The alt-right is a movement born out of the youthful, subversive, underground edges of the internet. 4chan and 8chan are hubs of alt-right activity. For years, members of these forums – political and non-political – have delighted in attention-grabbing, juvenile pranks. Long before the alt-right, 4channers turned trolling the national media into an in-house sport.

Having once defended gamers, another group accused of harbouring the worst dregs of human society, we feel compelled to take a closer look at the force that’s alarming so many. Are they really just the second coming of 1980s skinheads, or something more subtle?

We’ve spent the past month tracking down the elusive, often anonymous members of the alt-right, and working out exactly what they stand for.

THE INTELLECTUALS

There are many things that separate the alternative right from old-school racist skinheads (to whom they are often idiotically compared), but one thing stands out above all else: intelligence. Skinheads, by and large, are low-information, low-IQ thugs driven by the thrill of violence and tribal hatred. The alternative right are a much smarter group of people — which perhaps suggests why the Left hates them so much. They’re dangerously bright.

The origins of the alternative right can be found in thinkers as diverse as Oswald Spengler, H.L Mencken, Julius Evola, Sam Francis, and the paleoconservative movement that rallied around the presidential campaigns of Pat Buchanan. The French New Right also serve as a source of inspiration for many leaders of the alt-right.

The media empire of the modern-day alternative right coalesced around Richard Spencer during his editorship of Taki’s Magazine. In 2010, Spencer founded AlternativeRight.com, which would become a center of alt-right thought.

Alongside other nodes like Steve Sailer’s blog, VDARE and American Renaissance, AlternativeRight.com became a gathering point for an eclectic mix of renegades who objected to the established political consensus in some form or another. All of these websites have been accused of racism.

The so-called online “manosphere,” the nemeses of left-wing feminism, quickly became one of the alt-right’s most distinctive constituencies. Gay masculinist author Jack Donovan, who edited AlternativeRight’s gender articles, was an early advocate for incorporating masculinist principles in the alt-right. His book, The Way Of Men, contains many a wistful quote about the loss of manliness that accompanies modern, globalized societies.

It’s tragic to think that heroic man’s great destiny is to become economic man, that men will be reduced to craven creatures who crawl across the globe competing for money, who spend their nights dreaming up new ways to swindle each other. That’s the path we’re on now.

Steve Sailer, meanwhile, helped spark the “human biodiversity” movement, a group of bloggers and researchers who strode eagerly into the minefield of scientific race differences — in a much less measured tone than former New York Times science editor Nicholas Wade.

Isolationists, pro-Russians and ex-Ron Paul supporters frustrated with continued neoconservative domination of the Republican party were also drawn to the alt-right, who are almost as likely as the anti-war left to object to overseas entanglements.

SOURCE

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The Davoisie: Our “Slave Power”

The Davoisie are those who gather at Davos in Switzerland for the annual international conference of bigwigs -- and those like them.  The idea is that a very small elite holds a decisive sway over us

Harry Jaffa liked to tell the story of how, while reading Plato’s Republic with Leo Strauss at the New School in 1946, he encountered a copy of the Lincoln-Douglas debates in a used book store near his father’s Greenwich Village restaurant.  Unable to afford the book, he read it piecemeal on several furtive visits and realized that the issue between Lincoln and Douglas—no slavery in the territories v. “popular sovereignty”—was identical to that between Socrates and Thrasymachus: natural right v. might makes right.

We see a similar similarity between Lincoln’s times and ours.

In the decade or so before the Civil War, a phrase in common use was “the Slave Power,” which described a trans-partisan (and even to a small extent trans-regional) alignment of interests to protect, promote and extend slavery in the United States and even in the Western Hemisphere.  The Slave Power was led by the big slave-owners themselves, of course, but was hardly limited to them.  Through various proxies and fellow-travelers, they absolutely controlled Southern state governments.  They could also count on some federal officials, including—importantly—judges.  They even had support in the North: the notorious “doughfaces.”  The growing influence of the Slave Power contributed mightily to the Civil War.  The passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act alone destroyed the Whig Party and created the Republican.

But this is not meant to be a history lesson.  The point is that a numerically and proportionally small but economically and politically powerful oligarchy managed—for a time, anyway—to steer the nation in the direction of its own interests at the expense of everyone else’s and of the popular will.  Sound familiar?

Nor do the similarities end there.  Is not the similarity between slavery and mass immigration obvious?  (Note to the hysterical that I said “similarity” and not “identicality.”)  They both serve the same fundamental purpose: sources of cheap labor to squeeze out the working class and enrich a few.

The fact that slaves are not free and immigrants are is, to be sure, a non-trivial difference—for immigrant and slave.  But what about the third man, William Graham Sumner’s “forgotten man”?  In their effects on him, the two don’t seem so very different after all.  Nor are they supposed to.

A major source of opposition to the Slave Power arose from the Free Soil Movement: free men—American citizens—who wanted to earn decent livings without having to compete against slave labor that would undercut them at every turn.  Does that sound familiar? Nor is at any accident that the Old South was staunchly free trade while the free North was protectionist.  Is the theme becoming clearer?

Now it is probably too harsh to refer to our modern oligarchs as a new “slave power.”  Peter Brimelow’s “treason lobby” is not bad.  We’re partial to Walter Russell Mead’s contribution: Davoisie.

The fundamental similarity is however undeniable.  A trans-partisan and trans-regional, numerically small but economically and politically powerful elite—in our case, financial, technological and corporate—essentially control political debate and get their way on everything important, in defiance of popular will, in order to enrich themselves at the expense of everyone else.

We know how it ended the last time.  How will it end this time?

What makes our current overlords slightly more insidious (if only in one way) than their slave-master predecessors is their risible moral preening.  19th century slaveholders really did have a difficult time affirming the justice of their “peculiar institution.” In addition to the obvious injustice of owning other human beings like animals, they knew from experience what Xenophon teaches in the Anabasis and Shakespeare in the Tempest: “when difficult things are commanded, harshness, and not sweetness, is needed in order to bring about obedience.”  Concerned to shield its reputation from intrusive, revealing sunlight, the Slave Power was not eager to advertise this necessity and the harsh treatment it necessitated.

By contrast, our overlords never tire of lecturing us about how virtuous they are.  I know of no record of a plantation owner claiming that his recent purchases at a slave auction show his goodness.  But every new immigrant—legal or otherwise—who takes an American job at a fraction of the recent wage, our masters trumpet as a sign of their superior morality.  Every American laid off and every job outsourced gets the same self-congratulation.  Recall the words of that hedge-fund high priest: “if the transformation of the world economy lifts four people in China and India out of poverty and into the middle class, and meanwhile means one American drops out of the middle class, that’s not such a bad trade.”

That sickly sanctimonious phrase — “lifts people out of poverty” — heard in every hotel conference room and lecture hall where the Davoisie meet to rub holy oil on each other’s backs, is the modern rhetorical equivalent of John C. Calhoun’s “positive good” and serves the same purpose.  Only it’s been much more effective.  The real aim of the Davoisie’s showy, skin-deep leftism is to confer upon itself the veneer of legitimacy necessary to preserving its status.  Well, that and divide-and-conquer.

Has there ever been a plutocratic class more adept at claiming the moral high ground for wealth and privilege achieved in large measure by the impoverishment of its fellow citizens and decimation of domestic industries?  If so, we can’t think of it.

The eternal struggle between these two principles—right and wrong—throughout the world. They are the two principles that have stood face to face from the beginning of time, and will ever continue to struggle. The one is the common right of humanity and the other the divine right of kings. It is the same principle in whatever shape it develops itself. It is the same spirit that says, “You work and toil and earn bread, and I'll eat it.” No matter in what shape it comes, whether from the mouth of a king who seeks to bestride the people of his own nation and live by the fruit of their labor, or from one race of men as an apology for enslaving another race, it is the same tyrannical principle.

Thrasymachus to Stephen Douglas to George Soros and Paul Singer.  Plus ҫa change.

Since the Davoisie seized the commanding heights of the West (about 30 years ago), Trump is the only presidential candidate to oppose our equivalent of the slave power.  Granted, he’s not exactly a Lincoln in stature, temperament, virtue, intellect or ability.  We’d certainly prefer another Abe!  If you know where to find one, please send him our way.  In the meantime, we have no choice but to make do with Trump.

SOURCE

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

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

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Border Patrol Agents Endorse Trump; Defy Obama’s Bureaucrats

No matter how the race for the GOP presidential nomination concludes after the remaining primaries and caucuses and the Cleveland convention, there is no denying that immigration will be a priority issue in the general election. There also is no denying that Donald Trump has made immigration a key issue in the Republican primary season since he announced his candidacy last June.

Now the men and women who protect the nation’s borders on a daily basis have stepped forward to endorse Trump. The endorsement came from the National Border Patrol Council (NBPC), the union that represents 16,500 Border Patrol agents.

Breaking with its tradition of withholding endorsements in presidential primaries, the NBPC said Trump will stand up for Border Patrol agents and resist pressure from special interests and government bureaucrats.

“Mr. Trump will take on special interests and embrace the ideas of rank-and-file Border Patrol agents rather than listening to the management yes-men who say whatever they are programmed to say. This is a refreshing change that we have not seen before – and may never see again.”

The NBPS endorsement came in a statement signed by Brandon Judd, President of the Council. Judd praised Trump for speaking for those without political power.

“You can judge a man by his opponents: all the people responsible for the problems plaguing America today are opposing Mr. Trump. It is those without political power – the workers, the law enforcement officers, the everyday families and community members – who are supporting Mr. Trump.”

SOURCE

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When it comes to Trump-hating, it is worse than conspiracy, it is consensus

No candidate in modern times has been on the receiving end of more demonizing than Donald J. Trump.  It spews from leftist publications and blogs, publications and blogs on the right and from the so-called main stream media.  Second only to the hate directed at Mr. Trump is the demonizing directed to his supporters.

The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, National Review, Weekly Standard, The New Republic, The Nation, The Dailey Kos, The Huffington Post, and Red State all have joined in a huge spitting squad and the spit is all directed at Mr. Trump.  As some of us used to say about during the Cold War about the U.S. Government aiding the Soviet Union, “it is worse than conspiracy, it is consensus.”

If you think this is an exaggeration just Google “Trump Stalin.”  You will get 772,000 hits comparing Mr. Trump to one of worlds all time mass murders and leader of The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.  Then try, “Trump Hitler.”  That will get you 2,710,000 hits comparing Mr. Trump unfavorably with the leader of the National Socialist Workers Party.

What has Mr. Trump done to engender this raw hatred from all points of the establishment’s political spectrum?  Makes one wonder is there any real difference between alleged conservative Bill Kristol and Democratic Socialist Bernie Sanders.  It is like listening to a chorus of the ruling class.  The sopranos sound different than the baritones but in reality they are all singing the same song.

Demonization is the name of the game.  When Mr. Trump suggests enforcing existing law at the border we are told he hates Mexicans.  When he suggests we have a moratorium on Muslim immigration we are told he hates a billion people.  Conclusion: He is a hater just like Hitler, Mussolini and Stalin.

When he calls for a restoration of libel laws destroyed by the New York Times v. Sullivan Supreme Court decision he is calling for the repeal of the First Amendment.  When he criticizes Obama he is a racist.  If he takes issue with Mrs. Clinton he is a sexist.  If he does not agree with Bernie Sanders he is an anti-Semite.

When provocateurs invade his venues with the goal of causing violence and they are successful it is his fault and he is roundly condemned.  When these same provocateurs illegally block a public highway to attempt to prevent Mr. Trump from speaking they are exercising their First Amendment rights and he is trying to rob them of such rights.

In the world of the Trump haters black is white, wrong is right and up is down.  George Orwell, call your office.

As Scott Adams of Dilbert fame and the Breitbart web site have observed, what the media, right, legacy and left is doing consciously or unconsciously is setting Mr. Trump up for assassination, there has already been one attempted assault on Mr. Trump in Chicago.  It will be his fault.  “He brought it on himself!”  This will be loudly and incessantly repeated.  The assassination will be a ratings bonanza for the media which will give them the opportunity to make a lot of money while pushing this message and excusing themselves.

What the threats towards Mr. Trump’s children and his sister show is that this scenario not as far-fetched as it may appear at first glance.  Can it be stopped?  One can only hope.

SOURCE

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Some interesting apples-to-apples comparisons

Nordics, Chinese, education and guns

While there are many things I admire about Scandinavian nations, I’ve never understood why leftists such as Bernie Sanders think they are great role models.

Not only are income levels and living standards higher in the United States, but the data show that Americans of Swedish origin in America have much higher incomes than the Swedes who still live in Sweden. And the same is true for other Nordic nations.

The Nordics-to-Nordics comparisons seem especially persuasive because they’re based on apples-to-apples data. What other explanation can there be, after all, if the same people earn more and produce more when government is smaller?

The same point seems appropriate when examining how people of Chinese origin earn very high incomes in Hong Kong, Singapore, Taiwan, and the United States (all places with reasonably high levels of economic liberty), but are relatively poor in China (where there is still far too much government control over economic affairs).

Again, what possible explanation is there other than the degree of economic freedom?

Let’s now look at two other examples of how leftist arguments fall apart when using apples-to-apples comparisons.

A few years ago, there was a major political fight in Wisconsin over the power of unionized government bureaucracies. State policy makers eventually succeeded in curtailing union privileges.

Some commentators groused that this would make Wisconsin more like non-union Texas. And the Lone Star States was not a good role model for educating children, according to Paul Krugman.

This led David Burge (a.k.a., Iowahawk) to take a close look at the numbers to see which state actually did a better job of educating students. And when you compare apples to apples, it turns out that Longhorns rule and Badgers drool.

".…white students in Texas perform better than white students in Wisconsin, black students in Texas perform better than black students in Wisconsin, Hispanic students in Texas perform better than Hispanic students in Wisconsin. In 18 separate ethnicity-controlled comparisons, the only one where Wisconsin students performed better than their peers in Texas was 4th grade science for Hispanic students (statistically insignificant), and this was reversed by 8th grade. Further, Texas students exceeded the national average for their ethnic cohort in all 18 comparisons; Wisconsinites were below the national average in 8… Not only did white Texas students outperform white Wisconsin students, the gap between white students and minority students in Texas was much less than the gap between white and minority students in Wisconsin"

In other words, students are better off in Texas schools than in Wisconsin schools – especially minority students.  This is what I call a devastating debunking.

Our second example showing the value of apples-to-apples comparisons deals with gun control.

Writing for PJ Media, Clayton Cramer compares murder rates in adjoining American states and Canadian provinces. He starts by acknowledging that a generic US-v.-Canada comparison might lead people to think gun rights are somehow a factor in more deaths.

"…for Canada as a whole, murder rates are still considerably lower than for the United States as a whole. For 2011, Canada had 1.73 homicides per 100,000 people; the United States had 4.8 murders and non-negligent homicides per 100,000 people.

But he then makes comparisons that suggest guns are not a relevant factor.

"…look at murder rates for Canadian provinces and compare them to their immediate American state neighbors. When you do that, you discover some very curious differences that show gun availability must be either a very minor factor in determining murder rates, or if it is a major factor, it is overwhelmed by factors that are vastly more important.

Gun ownership is easy and widespread in Idaho, for instance, but murder rates are lower than in many otherwise similar Canadian provinces.

I live in Idaho.  In 2011, our murder rate was 2.3 per 100,000 people.  We have almost no gun-control laws here. You need a permit to carry concealed in cities, but nearly anyone who may legally own a firearm and is over 21 can get that permit.  We are subject to the federal background check on firearms, but otherwise there are no restrictions. Do you want a machine gun? And yes, I mean a real machine gun, not a semiautomatic AR-15. There is the federal paperwork required, but the state imposes no licensing of its own.  I have friends with completely legal full-automatic Thompson submachine guns.

Surely with such lax gun-control laws, our murder rate must be much higher than our Canadian counterparts’ rate. But this is not the case: I was surprised to find that not only Nunavut (21.01) and the Northwest Territories (6.87) in Canada had much higher murder rates than Idaho, but even Nova Scotia (2.33), Manitoba (4.24), Saskatchewan (3.59), and Alberta (2.88) had higher murder rates.

The same is true for other states (all with laws that favor gun ownership) that border Canada.

What about Minnesota? It had 1.4 murders per 100,000 in 2011, lower than not only all those prairie provinces, but even lower than Canada as a whole.  Montana had 2.8 murders per 100,000, still better than four Canadian provinces and one Canadian territory.  When you get to North Dakota, another one of these American states with far less gun control than Canada, the murder rate is 3.5 per 100,000, still lower than Manitoba, Saskatchewan, the Northwest Territories, and Nunavut.  And let me emphasize that Minnesota, Montana, and North Dakota, like Idaho, are all shall-issue concealed-weapon permit states: nearly any adult without a felony conviction or a domestic violence misdemeanor conviction can obtain a concealed weapon permit with little or no effort.

The takeaway from this evidence (as well as other evidence I have shared) is that availability of guns doesn’t cause murders. Other factors dominate.

P.S. Regarding the gun control data shared above, some leftists might be tempted to somehow argue that American states with cold weather somehow are less prone to violence. That doesn’t make sense since the Canadian provinces presumably are even colder. Moreover, that argument conflicts with comparing murder rates in chilly Chicago and steamy Houston.

SOURCE

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Donors choose

A brief review of Barber, M., “Representing the Preferences of Donors, Partisans, and Voters in the US Senate,” Public Opinion Quarterly (forthcoming).

SOME HAVE ATTRIBUTED the surprising popularity of Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump to a divergence between ordinary voters and the “donor class,” who typically bankroll candidates. But are politicians actually aligned with their donors? A survey of donors from the 2012 election revealed that senators and their donors are in “nearly perfect” ideological alignment, whereas senators are less aligned with average voters of the same party or those who actually voted for the senator, not to mention voters overall. Some of this may simply be explained by donors contributing only to candidates already in close alignment, but given that donors tend to be ideologically motivated, it’s not like candidates can just as easily raise money by moderating themselves ideologically.

SOURCE

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

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

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Why a Stanford grad joined the Trump revolt

Trump's reversal of GOP's anti-American free trade and immigration policies is drawing voters

Charlotte Allen

I went to Stanford, and I voted for Donald Trump. So did my husband. He went to Yale.

And so we spent more than three hours standing in line in Washington, D.C., to vote in the Republican presidential caucus on March 12. We suspected that this would be time spent quixotically, as Washington is the bull's-eye of the anti-Trump GOP political and intellectual establishment. Sure enough, establishment favorite Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida won the majority of the delegates, and Trump finished a poor third. Even so, we wanted to be part of the nationwide rebellion against the establishment that has resulted in Trump’s becoming the clear GOP front-runner practically everywhere else in America. And we weren’t alone. Trump is actually enjoying surprisingly strong support among highly educated people like us — and for good reason.

The common wisdom is that the majority of Trump’s supporters are barely literate knuckle-draggers. They’re “low-information,” in the words of Trump’s leading GOP rival nationwide, Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas. And it’s true that the largest education-level cohort among the Republicans who have consistently given Trump a double-digit lead in the primaries consists of people with high-school educations or less.

But in Massachusetts, home of Harvard and MIT and ranked as the No. 1 statefor residents possessing at least a bachelor’s degree, a CNN exit poll for the March 1 GOP primary showed Trump winning over 46% of voters with college degrees and even edging out Ohio “moderate” Gov. John Kasich (29% to 28%) among voters with postgraduate sheepskins. Exit polls in other states show similar results

For nearly 25 years — since President George H.W. Bush lost his bid for a second term in 1992 — the Republican Party has been unable to field a presidential candidate who could excite enough of its own party members to the ballot box so as to win a majority of the popular vote. (In the lone exception, George W. Bush squeaked by with 50.7% in 2004 in a patriotic surge after 9/11.) The main reason: the GOP establishment’s suicidally inexplicable but intractable commitment to “comprehensive immigration reform” (amnesty for 11 million illegal immigrants and continued mass migration) and so-called free trade.

Voters of both political parties cite the U.S. economy, faltering since 2008, as one of their top concerns. And Republican voters can see perfectly well that it makes no sense to import around 400,000 illegal immigrants annually, the vast majority of them unskilled, into a labor market where, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the real unemployment rate is close to 10% if you count people who have given up looking for work because they can’t find it, or who are working part-time because they need the money but would prefer to work full-time. Furthermore, only the most Pollyanna-ish of economists would argue that unlimited immigration in a weak economy doesn’t depress wages.

Free trade is an elegant concept in the 18th century pages of Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations. The Portuguese export wine to Britain, and the British export woolen goods to Portugal — a win-win situation, your Econ 101 professor would say. In the real world of the 21st century, “free trade” means 25 years’ worth of treaties and arrangements in which the U.S. hews to the Smith playbook while China, for example, puts its thumb onto the scales via rock-bottom wages, allegedly ignored labor violations, poison-level air and water pollution and a manipulated currency. And free trade hasn’t exactly delivered Smith’s promised export benefits to the U.S. We currently run an almost $366 billion trade deficit with China alone and a $484.1 billion trade deficit worldwide.

SOURCE

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Supreme Hypocrisy

Thomas Sowell

If there is one thing that is bipartisan in Washington, it is brazen hypocrisy.

Currently there is much indignation being expressed by Democrats because the Republican-controlled Senate refuses to hold confirmation hearings on President Obama’s nominee to the Supreme Court, to fill the vacancy caused by the death of Justice Antonin Scalia.

The Democrats complain, and the media echo their complaint, that it is the Senate’s duty to provide “advice and consent” on the President’s appointment of various federal officials. Therefore, according to this claim, the Senate is neglecting its Constitutional duty by refusing even to hold hearings to determine whether the nominee is qualified, and then vote accordingly.

First of all, the “advice and consent” provision of the Constitution is a restriction on the President’s power, not an imposition of a duty on the Senate. It says nothing about the Senate’s having a duty to hold hearings, or vote, on any Presidential nominee, whether for the Supreme Court or for any other federal institution. The power to consent is the power to refuse to consent, and for many years no hearings were held, whether the Senate consented or did not consent.

Nor have Democrats hesitated, when they controlled the Senate, to refuse to hold hearings or to vote when a lame-duck President nominated someone for some position requiring Senate confirmation during a Presidential election year.

When the shoe was on the other foot, the Republicans made the same arguments as the Democrats are making today, and the Democrats made the same arguments as the Republicans are now making.

The obvious reason, in both cases, is that the party controlling the Senate wants to save the appointment for their own candidate for the Presidency to make after winning the upcoming election. The rest is political hypocrisy on both sides.

None of this is new. It was already well-known 40 years ago, when President Gerald Ford nominated me to become one of the commissioners of the Federal Trade Commission during the 1976 Presidential election year.

After months passed without any hearings being held, I went to see the chief legislative aide of the committee that was responsible for confirming or denying. When the two of us were alone, he said to me, quite frankly, “We’ve gone over your record with a fine tooth comb and can find nothing to object to. So we are simply not going to hold hearings at all.”

“If this were not an election year,” he said, “your nomination would have sailed right through. But we think our man is going to win the Presidential election this year, and we want him to nominate someone in tune with our thinking.”

Various Democrats who are currently denouncing the Republican Senate, including Vice President Biden, have used very similar arguments against letting lame-duck Republican Presidents appoint Supreme Court justices.

Last week, the New York Times ran a front-page “news” story about something Chief Justice John Roberts had said, more than a month ago, prior to the death of Justice Scalia, under the headline “Stern Rebuke For Senators.”

Since Justice Scalia was still alive then, and there was no Supreme Court vacancy to fill at the time, Chief Justice Roberts' remarks had nothing to do with the current controversy. Nor were these remarks news after such a long lapse of time. But this was part of a pattern of the New York Times' disguising editorials as front-page news stories.

In short, the political hypocrisy was matched by journalistic hypocrisy. Indeed, there was more than a little judicial hypocrisy in Chief Justice Roberts' complaint that Senate confirmation hearings on Supreme Court nominees do not confine themselves to the nominees' judicial qualifications, rather than their conservative or liberal orientations.

If judges confined themselves to acting like judges, instead of legislating from the bench, creating new “rights” out of thin air that are nowhere to be found in the Constitution, maybe Senate confirmation hearings for Supreme Court nominees would not be such bitter and ugly ideological battles.

Chief Justice Roberts himself practically repealed the 10th Amendment’s limitation on federal power when he wrote the decision that the government could order us all to buy ObamaCare insurance policies. When judges act like whores, they can hardly expect to be treated like nuns.

Politicians, journalists and judges should all spare us pious hypocrisy.

SOURCE

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Confirmed: Brussels Terror Suspect Was "Migrant Activist"‏

It is truly amazing how tone deaf Barack Obama is. After going to a baseball game with communists and terrorists instead of tending to an international terror attack, now Barack Obama has announced that logic be damned, he is going to bring more Middle Eastern refugees into the country than ever before.

One of the alleged Brussels terrorists was literally a prominent migrant activist. By day, Faycal Cheffou advocated for open borders and bringing in more refugees. By night, he was apparently building bombs to kill the very people who welcomed them in.

The problem is obvious: the West is bringing in “refugees” and migrants who are literally hell-bent on killing people.

It is just like what is happening at our Southern border. Everyone who crosses our border isn’t a hardened criminal. But enough of them are that we must lock it down. The same applies to Barack Obama’s refugee plans.

Here’s the problem: the votes aren’t there to stop Obama from bringing refugees here. Congress tried pushing through the American SAFE Act late last year. This bill would have cut off refugee funding until the Obama administration ran full background checks on them.

Democrats shot it down. They aren’t even willing to pause the program to keep us safe, there is no way they would shut it down entirely. But we can force them to change it.

Earlier this month, both Congress and the Obama administration declared that ISIS is committing Genocide against Syrian Christians and religious minorities. We can use this to make sure that Barack Obama can’t bring any more terrorists here!

Don’t let Obama bring ISIS terrorists here as refugees! Force Congress to pass the Religious Persecution Relief Act before it’s too late!

Australia, for example, is now going to be minimizing the number of Sunni men that it accepts as refugees and prioritize Syrian Christians for admittance.

It really is common sense. If the goal was to keep Americans safe, then whatever refugee program we have should prioritize bringing in people who don’t want to kill us.

But that is not the goal. Barack Obama’s goal is to bring as many refugees here as possible regardless of the consequences. This is fatal political correctness.

Efforts to defund Obama’s refugee program have failed. The votes weren’t there. But is we can force Congress to pass the Religious Persecution Relief Act of 2016. This would force the Obama administration to prioritize Syrian Christians and minorities for admittance into the US as refugees.

We’re already hearing that the Brussels attack was simply a test-run for much larger attacks in Europe and even in the United States.

Right now, as you read this, there are terrorists posing as refugees trying to get into the United States. They are interviewing and hiding their true intentions from US immigration officials and Obama is more than happy to let them in.

The Religious Persecution Relief Act of 2016 won’t fix all of our problems, but it will ensure that Barack Obama only brings into the country people who are truly grateful to be here.

There were migrants involved in the Paris attacks. Migrants were involved in the Brussels attacks.

How much longer are we going to pretend that Obama isn’t bringing the same violence here?

SOURCE

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

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

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Islam needs a Reformation, unlikely though that is

What may be a surprise, especially to those who haven’t completely read the Old Testament, is that the Bible is every bit as violent as the Koran. There are thirty six (36!!) different offenses in the Bible which qualify for capital punishment. Here are a few of them; — cursing parents, working on the Sabbath, premarital Sex (girls only), disobedience (boys only), worshipping any god but Yahweh, witches, loose daughters of clergy, girls who are raped within the city limits, blasphemers, anyone who proselytizes Yahweh worshipers to a different religion, men who lie with men, adulterers, men who lie with beasts.

(References: Leviticus 20:9 — Exodus 31:15 — Deuteronomy 22:20 — Deuteronomy 21:18 — Deuteronomy 17:2-5 — Exodus 22: 18 — Leviticus 21:9 — Deuteronomy 22:23-25 — Leviticus 24:16 — Deuteronomy 12:6 — Leviticus 20:13 — Leviticus 20: 10-12 — Leviticus 20:15)

It’s in the Bible. God’s word! These are commandments, NOT suggestions. So, in the last two thousand years how many children who have cursed their parents has Christianity put to death? I believe the correct answer is …. zero. In America, Christianity has killed people for only one of the above offenses; about 20 people were executed for witchcraft in Salem, MA., and that was about 325 years ago.

The most logical question to ask is, “Why aren’t Christians faithfully obeying God’s commandments in the same manner and fervor as Muslims obey the Koran? Are we less faithful?” The answer to that can be found in The Reformation.

THE CHRISTIAN REFORMATION

My intent is not to turn this into a doctrinal essay so, I’ll keep this brief … a view from 50,000 feet. None of what follows is a criticism of Catholicism. Rather, it is an indictment of human nature when fallible and weak humans are given unlimited power.

In the 1,500 years prior to the Reformation there was but one church – the Roman Catholic Church (RCC). How, what, when, and where to worship and believe was determined entirely by a small group of elite leaders, culminating with the Pope. Popes eventually became as powerful, if not more powerful, than kings. Corruption became the norm. They lived in splendor, and the people in squalor.

And then one day, along came Martin Luther – and he changed everything. Albeit, not without much violence and bloodshed — for those in power never ever give up their place in the universe without first inflicting even more pain and horror than ever before on the poor souls under their thumb. Reformation and suffering work in tandem.

At the heart of the Reformation was the desire to answer four basic questions;

—- 1) How is a person saved?

—- 2) Where does religious authority lie?

—- 3) What is the church?

—- 4) What is the essence of Christian living?

The answers to those questions — which changed everything by uprooting the monolithic power of the RCC — is summed up in the 5 “Sola” declarations;

 —-1) “Sola Scriptura” (Scripture Alone) —- Affirms that the Bible alone is the sole authority for all matters of faith and practice.

—-2) “Sola Gratia” (Salvation by Grace Alone) —- Affirms that salvation from God’s wrath is by God’s grace alone. Grace is the sole efficient cause of salvation which raises us up from spiritual death to spiritual life.

—-3) “Sola Fide” (Salvation by Faith Alone) —- Affirms justification is by grace alone through faith alone because of Christ alone. Nothing man can do on his own will save him.

—- 4) “Solus Christus” (In Christ Alone) —- Affirms that salvation is found in Christ alone. His sinless life and substitutionary atonement alone are sufficient for our reconciliation to God the Father.

—- 5) “Soli Deo Gloria” (For the Glory of God Alone) —- Affirms that salvation is of God and has been accomplished by God for His glory alone.

HOW THE REFORMATION SET US ALL FREE

Ok, great! So, what does this all mean? I’ll tell you. Hold tight and read carefully for comprehension because this is extremely important.

1)— The Reformation laid down once and for all the right and obligation of the individual conscience, and the right to follow the dictates of that individual conscience. Do you grasp what this means? In one word ….. Liberty! We in the West talk a good talk about “liberty”, but too few realize and understand that they owe their liberty to this event.

2)— Individual conscience allowed believers to reconsider how the Word of God was received, and its effectual operation in their lives. For the first time in hundreds of centuries people of faith could read for themselves how God chose to reveal himself in the written Word which, according to 2 Timothy 3:16 is as follows; — “All Scripture is INSPIRED by God ..”.   No longer did they have to believe that every single word of the Bible was dictated by God (as Islam believes about the Koran) which only an elite clergy could interpret.

3)— By understanding that Scripture was inspired, and not dictated, this allowed believers to “re-interpret” Bible verses and even entire passages without fear that they were altering God’s Word

 4)— The ability to “re-interpret” Scripture without fear of being banned as a heretic led to an avalanche of scholarly work. New ideas, previously suppressed by the brute authority of the RCC, now flourished in vast abundance. Human brains, previously dormant for 1,500 years, were once again put to use. (See “Special Note” below.)

 5)— One of the very most important of these (many) new ideas was that God works differently in different eras. God is not like a rigid stone but, rather, has a heart of flesh. So, while the death penalty for many sins may have been sufficient and necessary at one time during the Age of Law, that same death penalty was totally unnecessary in the Age of Grace.

 THAT, dear friends, is why Christians no longer kill adulterers. And, as  the lack of all of the above is why Islam still does.

SOURCE

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1,000 words



This picture may suggest the reason why Russia is not overrun and is rarely the victim of ISIS attacks. I'm sure that the ladies  are lovely but this is a War between Freedom and Slavery, Life and Death. I guess they missed that meeting?

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The neurotic generation

There is something worse than ignorance, and that is unwarranted fear.

A new study concludes that Millennials should be renamed the “anxious generation.” This is matched by my experience as a teacher of two decades. Even in this short time I’ve noticed students in the past few years have tended to be more neurotic, and emotionally delicate, than any I’ve ever encountered.

When people get heated about imaginary threats — when they constantly cry wolf — that not only gets trying, it generates stress and anxiety. When the tenth fire alarm drill blares in one day but everything is obviously fine, in fact better than ever, it becomes galling and one simply ignores the alarm.

Those who think each fire alarm might be real are in genuine emotional distress.

In 1978 Jim Jones convinced over 900 members of his socialist People’s Temple to commit mass suicide in the jungle of Guyana. Jones’s idealism was a large part of what made him so lethal. He really believed his propaganda. It was regular for Jones to play his emergency recording at the Temple compound, “White Night! White Night! Get to the pavilion! Run! Your lives are in danger!”

The People’s Temple teaches us something about the danger of being in a constant state of tension, afraid that the end of the world may come at any moment.

While many nations now enjoy prosperity unprecedented in history, for many people in those nations the early twenty-first century brings with it freezing despair and lack of confidence that this prosperity can continue much longer. Increasingly these days there have been louder cries that societal collapse is coming.

According to Gallup polls Americans are pessimistic about the future. A Pew survey of 47 nations found a general increase in the percentage of people citing pollution and environmental problems as a top global threat.

Given the overwhelming media prevalence of what Bjørn Lomborg calls ‘The Litany,’ maybe it should not be surprising that people are anxious.

“We are all familiar,” says Lomborg, “with the litany of our ever-deteriorating environment. It is the doomsday message endlessly repeated by the media, as when Time magazine tells us that ‘everyone knows the planet is in bad shape.’ We have heard the litany so often that yet another repetition is, well, almost reassuring.”

At the 2015 Paris Climate Conference President Obama offered his version of the Litany: “a glimpse of our children’s fate if the climate keeps changing faster than our efforts to address it. Submerged countries. Abandoned cities. Fields that no longer grow. Political disruptions that trigger new conflict, and even more floods of desperate peoples seeking the sanctuary of nations not their own.”

It is hard to think beyond the clanging and relentless deluge of fire alarms from important people.

As perception of danger increases people will worry more, leading to more enthusiasm for reporting the concern, and so to more fear. According to the Journal of the American Medical Association, over 13 percent of the population are on antidepressants and the number is climbing.

It is difficult enough to question, let alone resist, an idea taught to the exclusion of others from kindergarten through university, printed in newspapers and magazines, and seen and heard multiple times each day on television and radio.

Young people are particularly at risk from this epidemic of fear. They are the first generation raised from cradle to grave on a constant diet of global warming fears.

And they are afraid. Very afraid.

A recent study finds millennials are more anxious and depressed than any generation since measurements began in the 1930s. They are being force fed lies. And so we find in the first quarter of the twenty-first century we live in a world where many people find it difficult to disentangle reality from fantasy. Could constant cries of environmental disaster blasted into their ears play a role?

Bear in mind that net warming anomaly the alarmists claim causes these upheavals amounts to a minuscule 0.6–0.8 °C in 100 years. Never mind that the very best climate models simulate two to three times observed warming and that none predicted that for about 20 years there’s been no warming trend apparent in NASA’s satellite records, the most reliable because the least contaminated and least “adjusted.”

“How extraordinary!” said the political scientist Aaron Wildavsky, “The richest, longest lived, best-protected, most resourceful civilization, with the highest degree of insight into its own technology, is on the way to becoming the most frightened.”

We seem to have arrived.

SOURCE

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

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

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Why Hillary Clinton Is More Dangerous Than Donald Trump:  A Leftist view

I am putting up the excerpt below primarily as entertainment.  It is by John Pilger, the Dr. Goebbels of the extreme Left.  He routinely lies, fabricates and distorts until he has turned reality on its head.  But there is an element of truth in what he says at times so I thought his very "alternative" Leftist view was worth some airing.  He does have a point in that, as Pat Buchanan often reminds us, American conservatism is traditionally isolationist.  America's wars have mostly been initiated by Democrat presidents.   The original article is very long-winded in the usual Leftist way but I think my condensation conveys the essence of it

How many people are aware that a world war has begun? At present, it is a war of propaganda, of lies and distraction, but this can change instantaneously with the first mistaken order, the first missile.

In 2009, President Obama stood before an adoring crowd in the centre of Prague, in the heart of Europe. He pledged himself to make “the world free from nuclear weapons”. People cheered and some cried. A torrent of platitudes flowed from the media. Obama was subsequently awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

It was all fake. He was lying.

The Obama administration has built more nuclear weapons, more nuclear warheads, more nuclear delivery systems, more nuclear factories. Nuclear warhead spending alone rose higher under Obama than under any American president. The cost over thirty years is more than $1 trillion.

A mini nuclear bomb is planned. It is known as the B61 Model 12. There has never been anything like it. General James Cartwright, a former Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has said, “Going smaller [makes using this nuclear]weapon more thinkable.”

In the last eighteen months, the greatest build-up of military forces since World War Two – led by the United States – is taking place along Russia’s western frontier. Not since Hitler invaded the Soviet Union have foreign troops presented such a demonstrable threat to Russia....

In the circus known as the American presidential campaign, Donald Trump is being presented as a lunatic, a fascist. He is certainly odious; but he is also a media hate figure. That alone should arouse our scepticism.

Trump’s views on migration are grotesque, but no more grotesque than those of David Cameron. It is not Trump who is the Great Deporter from the United States, but the Nobel Peace Prize winner, Barack Obama.

According to one prodigious liberal commentator, Trump is “unleashing the dark forces of violence” in the United States. Unleashing them?

This is the country where toddlers shoot their mothers and the police wage a murderous war against black Americans. This is the country that has attacked and sought to overthrow more than 50 governments, many of them democracies, and bombed from Asia to the Middle East, causing the deaths and dispossession of millions of people.

No country can equal this systemic record of violence. Most of America’s wars (almost all of them against defenceless countries) have been launched not by Republican presidents but by liberal Democrats: Truman, Kennedy, Johnson, Carter, Clinton, Obama.

In 1947, a series of National Security Council directives described the paramount aim of American foreign policy as “a world substantially made over in [America’s] own image”. The ideology was messianic Americanism. We were all Americans. Or else. Heretics would be converted, subverted, bribed, smeared or crushed.

Donald Trump is a symptom of this, but he is also a maverick. He says the invasion of Iraq was a crime; he doesn’t want to go to war with Russia and China. The danger to the rest of us is not Trump, but Hillary Clinton. She is no maverick. She embodies the resilience and violence of a system whose vaunted “exceptionalism” is totalitarian with an occasional liberal face.

As presidential election day draws near, Clinton will be hailed as the first female president, regardless of her crimes and lies – just as Barack Obama was lauded as the first black president and liberals swallowed his nonsense about “hope”. And the drool goes on.

Described by the Guardian columnist Owen Jones as “funny, charming, with a coolness that eludes practically every other politician”, Obama the other day sent drones to slaughter 150 people in Somalia. He kills people usually on Tuesdays, according to the New York Times, when he is handed a list of candidates for death by drone. So cool.

In the 2008 presidential campaign, Hillary Clinton threatened to “totally obliterate” Iran with nuclear weapons. As Secretary of State under Obama, she participated in the overthrow of the democratic government of Honduras. Her contribution to the destruction of Libya in 2011 was almost gleeful. When the Libyan leader, Colonel Gaddafi, was publicly sodomised with a knife – a murder made possible by American logistics – Clinton gloated over his death: “We came, we saw, he died.”

One of Clinton’s closest allies is Madeleine Albright, the former Secretary of State, who has attacked young women for not supporting “Hillary”. This is the same Madeleine Albright who infamously celebrated on TV the death of half a million Iraqi children as “worth it”.

Among Clinton’s biggest backers are the Israel lobby and the arms companies that fuel the violence in the Middle East. She and her husband have received a fortune from Wall Street. And yet, she is about to be ordained the women’s candidate, to see off the evil Trump, the official demon. Her supporters include distinguished feminists: the likes of Gloria Steinem in the US and Anne Summers in Australia.

A generation ago, a post-modern cult now known as “identity politics” stopped many intelligent, liberal-minded people examining the causes and individuals they supported – such as the fakery of Obama and Clinton; such as bogus progressive movements like Syriza in Greece, which betrayed the people of that country and allied with their enemies.

In the US, Bernie Sanders has promised to support Clinton if or when she’s nominated. He, too, has voted for America’s use of violence against countries when he thinks it’s “right”. He says Obama has done “a great job”.

SOURCE

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Is Detente between Trump and the GOP Establishment on the Horizon?

BY ROGER L SIMON

That Donald Trump and the GOP establishment have not been getting along may be the understatement of the year. George Will -- a respected writer and intellectual leader of that establishment -- is one of the many suffering from Trump Derangement Syndrome who often misconstrue or seem to almost deliberately misrepresent what Trump is saying. In return, Trump has not always been very nice to them.

Regarding the current Supreme Court vacancy, Will said on this weekend's Fox News Sunday: "If Trump is president, we'll have to guess who will be the nominee."

He said substantially the same thing in a recent column ("Do Republicans really think Donald Trump will make a good Supreme Court choice?"). Will asked the question partly in support of his contention Republicans should abjure the "Biden rule" and hold hearings on the nomination of Merrick Garland and partly from his undisguised contempt for Donald Trump.

But in so doing Will has indeed "misrepresented" Trump, who not only has spoken of his ideal nominee on several occasions as the "reincarnation" of Antonin Scalia, but has even specified the names of real potential nominees, something candidates rarely do this far before nomination.

The two possible SCOTUS nominees mentioned by Trump (as someone as well-informed as Will must have known) are William H Pryor, Jr. and Diane S. Sykes, both U.S. Court of Appeals judges (different circuits), both George W. Bush appointments, and both conservatives. Pryor is known for his opposition to Roe v. Wade. Sykes -- who was already short-listed for the Supreme Court by Bush -- is a defender of the Second Amendment known for granting a preliminary injunction against Chicago's ban on firing ranges.

If Will has an objection to either of these people, I am not aware of it. To his credit, Trump mentioned their names as suggestions, cognizant, as he should have been, that actual nominations were premature at this point. He wanted to give the public an idea of his thinking, which in many cases apparently fell on deaf ears.

Will and others are suffering from such acute Trump Derangement Syndrome that they don't allow themselves to acknowledge the obvious -- most of Trump's views, his current ones anyway, fall well within the conservative mainstream. To admit this would be fatal to the #NeverTrump cause. It also would mean, let's be honest, a loss of power for them. A whole network from pundits to lobbyists, a whole Beltway lifestyle, is at risk even more with Trump than it is with Ted Cruz.

This is a very real problem, which in truth deserves some sympathy. These people have devoted their entire lives to the governing of this country in good conscience, some of them anyway. Many feel under assault -- and to a great degree they are. But we don't need a "revolution," peaceful or otherwise, as Bernie Sanders is suggesting.  We just need a thorough housecleaning and retrofitting. (Spring cleaning, not "Democracy Spring.") A lot of cobwebs and rust have set in. Far too much of our government runs by habit and, as everyone knows, it has grown way too big. Our military is in decline. But not everybody has to be thrown out. Trump is not and should not be Robespierre.Trump and George Will should be talking, not fighting. They both have much to learn from each other.

SOURCE

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Court Slaps Down IRS for Stonewalling Investigation

It's been nearly three years since the story of the IRS targeting and harassing conservative nonprofit organizations broke, but the investigation into what actually happened is ongoing and resulted in an important court ruling this week. One reason the task of finding out who knew what has taken so long is that the IRS has been resolutely uncooperative with the investigation, from the claims that documents had been lost or destroyed, to outright refusals to provide relevant evidence.

Tuesday, a federal court called shenanigans on the agency's tactics, ordering the IRS to turn over spreadsheets indicating which groups were targeted. Judge Raymond Kethledge gave agency administrators a tongue lashing, arguing that the accusation of targeting of specific groups for political purposes are "among the most serious allegations a federal court can address."

Executive Director of FreedomWorks Foundation Curt Levey, who heads the organization’s regulatory reform project, commented, "It's refreshing to see the courts confirm what we have long known to be true: that the IRS has been actively obstructing this investigation from the beginning. The IRS is just another example of what happens when federal agencies, run by unelected bureaucrats, are given too much power. The lack of accountability inevitably leads to abuses by bureaucrats who come to believe they are above the law. The solution is to restore the constitutional separation of powers, under which agencies would be limited to faithfully executing the law.”

The lack of transparency and corrective action at the IRS is one of the main drivers behind FreedomWorks' campaign to impeach Commissioner John Koskinen, who took over the agency shortly after the targeting scandal emerged and has failed to do anything to uncover the truth or correct the problems. According to the Government Accountability Office, Koskinen failed to implement needed reforms to prevent targeting, and indeed, may still be continuing the practice of targeting conservative groups to this day. The GAO report states: “The control deficiencies increase the risk of selecting organizations for audit in an unfair manner — for example, based on an organization’s religious, educational, political, or other views.” The congressional effort to impeach Koskinen is being led by House Freedom Caucus members Jim Jordan (R-OH) and Ron DeSantis (R-FL)

The federal ruling confirming the corruption of the IRS highlights the need to reduce the power of the agency through fundamental tax reform. The scope of the IRS's power has far exceeded its basic function of revenue collection, as evidenced by the agency’s ability to persecute Americans based on their political or religious beliefs. Recently, the agency was also given extended authority over Americans' health care choices, having been put in charge of implementing various ObamaCare taxes and penalties. Deleting the federal tax code and replacing it with a simple flat tax would automatically eliminate a great deal of bureaucracy, opportunity for abuse, and by extension, corruption.

Until then, we intend to continue holding the IRS's feet to the fire to demand transparency and accountability for its misdeeds.

SOURCE

There is a  new  lot of postings by Chris Brand just up -- with news about black crime, Trump and Christianity

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

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

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Will the Left try to sabotage Trump?

The one glimmer of hope for those who hope to stop the real estate mogul is that with Rubio out, the battle for the nomination becomes a much clearer fight with Cruz. One which the Texan has been hoping to set up since the SEC Super Tuesday primaries.

But it is Trump with the momentum, and the luxury to turn his sights to the general election while Cruz, will need to claw for every delegate. Still this is a two-man race between Trump and Cruz now.

However, there is one major wild card in the race and that is the Bernie Sanders supported efforts to disrupt the GOP nomination process by placing trained protesters into rallies and seeking to paint the Republican candidates in a negative light as the socialists attempt to provoke responses for the ready television cameras.

Trained on the streets for years, funded by George Soros amongst others, and encouraged by President Barack Obama and Sanders himself, these street activists will attempt to define the Republican candidates as intolerant while seeking to intimidate and shut down their opponent's free speech rights. The pernicious goal of this odd stew of 60s radicals, millennial hipsters, student dead enders, Black Lives Matter anti-police activists, La Raza open borders advocates and Muslims is to disrupt the political process.

Encouraged by the dangerous and false meme that anyone who opposes unfettered illegal immigration is a racist, and anyone who points out that letting tens of thousands of Muslims from Middle Eastern countries that don't like America is not wise in this time of terrorism gone wild is a religious bigot, this unstable motley crew has all the earmarks of being 21st century brown shirts. All the while justifying their intolerance with the same end justifies the means mental gymnastics that has fueled every fascist or communist regime in history.

Ultimately, no matter who is the GOP nominee, it is important that everyone from the disparate wings of the party join together around the eventual winner to push back the tide of hate coming from the professional left. In 2016, we are seeing the fruits of President Obama's seven years of using the government to attack his political opponents, and of a Justice Department that labels stopping voter fraud racism.

With the Supreme Court in the balance, and our nation's very future at stake, the gulf that separates some Republicans from their eventual nominee is like an unnamed stream when compared to the Mississippi River like divide between any of the Republicans and either Hillary Clinton or Bernie Sanders.

As the primary campaign becomes a mano y mano affair between Trump and Cruz, voters need to remember that stopping Hillary from getting the presidency is job one, and no matter the flaws, any of the Republican candidates would be immeasurably better stewards of our nation's course.

So even as the GOP struggles toward finalizing their nominee, remember that no matter the emotions now, it would be the height of petulance to fail to join together to beat Clinton.

SOURCE

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Even with their famous health insurance (Romneycare), Mass. residents often can’t afford care

Nearly all Massachusetts adults have health insurance, but being insured is no guarantee patients can afford health care or even find someone to provide it, according to a survey released Wednesday.

Despite the state’s landmark health care overhaul, the report found, cost and access remain problems for a significant share of residents.

The 2006 law, which became the model for the federal Affordable Care Act, quickly succeeded at its main goal: ensuring coverage for nearly all residents. But the survey by the Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts Foundation shows access remains a concern, especially for those with low incomes or health problems.

More than one-third of adults younger than 65 reported going without needed health care despite having insurance. Nearly half had trouble getting access to a health-care professional. One-fifth struggled to pay family medical bills or medical debts from previous years.

The foundation, which has conducted the survey almost every year since 2006, has repeatedly identified these problems. Their persistence echoes difficulties seen nationwide, as medical costs continue to rise and insurance policies require consumers to pay a greater share in deductibles and copays.

Those out-of-pocket costs represent "a new health care agenda," said Drew Altman, president and chief executive officer of the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation, a nonprofit focusing on national health issues. "It’s not just accessing care, but assuring that people can afford the care they now have access to.

"What we see in survey after survey we do — a significant percentage of people that have coverage also have medical bills that are a real burden for them," he said. "Those medical bills ripple through the family budget."

Audrey Shelto, Blue Cross foundation president, emphasized that people with insurance have better access to care than those who don’t.  "But," she said, "the affordability issues are clearly still haunting us both in terms of how it impacts individuals and in terms of the overall system."

The architects of the law deliberately focused on coverage rather than costs, in order to get it passed, she said. In 2012, the state adopted a sweeping law intended to control costs, but Shelto said the law hasn’t yet had much effect.

"It’s going to take more time," she said. "The issues around affordability are much more complex than access and coverage."

Amy Whitcomb Slemmer, executive director of the advocacy group Health Care for All, praised the foundation for shining a light on these shortcomings. "The report points to barriers to care that we need to pay attention to," she said.

The telephone survey, conducted Sept. 8 to Nov. 8 by the Urban Institute, questioned a random sample of 2,014 people ages 19 to 64. Nearly 96 percent said they had health insurance at that time, up from 86 percent in 2006 and better than the 2015 national rate of 87 percent.

Just over 37 percent of adults who were insured the full year reported going without needed health care — including doctor’s visits, tests, screenings, medications, and dental care. Among people with low incomes, more than 50 percent reported unmet health care needs. In a question asked for the first time, the survey found that a quarter of adults do not have dental insurance.

The proportion of people who had problems paying medical bills has declined slightly since 2006. Still, 43 percent said that in 2015, health care costs had caused problems for them and their families, including 19 percent who went without needed care as a result. The problem was more severe among low- and moderate-income adults and people with health problems.

"If you have low income, it’s harder to find providers who accept your type of coverage," Shelto said. "If you have a chronic condition, the array of services you need are much more complex and numerous." Additionally, low-income people are more likely to have difficulties finding child care and transportation.

Low-income people are often eligible for MassHealth, which in most cases does not have copays and deductibles. But many low-income people receive insurance through an employer, said Brian Rosman, research director at Health Care for All, and may not be aware they’re eligible for premium subsidies through MassHealth, the state Medicaid program. But help with premiums still doesn’t solve the problem of high deductibles and copays.

The survey also pointed to problems accessing care. Among adults who had insurance for the entire previous year, 47 percent said they’d had trouble getting in to see a health care professional, because they could not find a provider who accepted their insurance or was accepting new patients, or because they couldn’t get an appointment as soon as needed. This problem has worsened over time.

Nearly 86 percent said they had a place where they usually go for care. Even so, one-third of respondents reported visiting a hospital emergency department at least once in the previous year — half for a condition that was not an emergency.

Why are people having trouble getting medical appointments in a state teeming with physicians?

Dr. Dennis M. Dimitri, president of the Massachusetts Medical Society, said many doctors don’t work full time at patient care, instead pursuing research and teaching. Additionally, the problem varies by region, with doctor shortages in Western and Southeastern Massachusetts and on Cape Cod.

Another issue is the shortage, nationally and locally, of primary care doctors, who are the entry point to health care. Doctors with huge medical school debts often prefer higher-paying specialties, and general practice is sometimes regarded as "thankless and unglamorous," said Dimitri, who is a family practice doctor.

Massachusetts also loses out because the state’s five family practice residency programs have slots for only about 50 new doctors-in-training each year.

SOURCE

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“Trudeau has chosen sides. He sides with Islam”

Ezra Levant

Almost alone in the western world, Justin Trudeau and his Liberals are not only unconcerned about Islamic terrorism, they’re dismantling what protections Canada already has. It’s nuts.

In Europe, some people are waking up. As Daniel Pipes told us the other day, anti-Islam parties are on the rise. Meanwhile, the central issue in the U.S. Republican primaries is border control.

But Trudeau is starving our counter-terrorism agencies of funding, cutting our military and relaxing anti-terrorism laws.

(It's not just Trudeau. Liberal Defence Minister Harjit Sajjan wouldn’t even make a statement after the Brussels attack, saying he was too busy getting pizza for his kids...)

And then there’s the Muslim migrants: 50,000 a year for four years, coming from the most sexist, anti-Semitic, violent places in the world, and Trudeau doesn’t care, because he’s on their side. He told us that himself.

You can’t do this for long without a taste of Brussels coming to Canada.

SOURCE

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One photo can tell a lot



There’s a particular photo that went around the world. That of the little boy lying dead on the beach.

It is true that the photo is very sad and makes you reflect on the distress of these people fleeing their country at the risk of their lives.

Above, a photo showing some people walking to reach the final objective, to live in a European country.

Even if this photo is making it around the world, only 1% of the people will notice the truth.

On the photo,  there are 7 men and 1 woman. Up to this point – nothing special.

But in observing a bit closer, you will notice that the woman is in bare feet, accompanied by 3 children, and of the 3, she is carrying 2.

There is the problem, none of the men are helping her, because in their culture the woman represents nothing.  She is only good to be a slave to the men.

Do you really believe that these particular individuals could integrate  into our societies and countries and respect our customs, traditions and values????

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

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

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