The Surprising Weakness of Invincible Institutions

Richard Fernandez (of "Belmont Club" fame) is always an interesting thinker and he makes a case below for expecting all tyrannies to collapse under their own weight eventually -- including the tyranny of America's Leftist-led bureaucratic state.  He gives various examples of it happening rather suddenly and unexpectedly but omits the very best example of that -- perhaps because he thinks we know all that already.  I am referring to the quite sudden implosion of the Soviet state.  What always seemed to be a powerful and solid entity suddenly just melted down.  

The unanswered question, however, is how long it will take for a tyranny to crumble. The Soviet beast blighted people's lives for 70 years and the personal dictatorships of Tito in Yugoslavia, Franco in Spain and Salazar in Portugal lasted for the lifetimes of the tyrants concerned.

Just an excerpt below as the article is rather long


Winston Churchill memorably predicted the end of the German East Asia Squadron when it slipped out of Tsing-tao harbor under Admiral Maximilian von Spee. "He was a cut flower in a vase, fair to see yet bound to die."  Winston knew that the Spee's s squadron however imposing and bravely led had no means of support.  Sooner or later it would come to grief, which it duly did.

The same calculation must apply to the giant bureaucracies that pretend to rule the world.  At first glance there is nothing seemingly more formidable than the interlocking shield wall of public institutions and public sector unions. One writer argued that JFK was "the real killer of Laquan McDonald" because he first authorized public employee unions and "police unions make it impossible to get rid of bad-apple cops".  Camelot had created a Frankenstein monster able to run roughshod over everything.

Yet it's a monster which just can't seem to do much.  For example the Washington Metro, the pride of the nation's capital, is collapsing.  Once "it was a rail system of the future. Then, reality set in."  Perhaps the most telling indicator of fundamental weakness is the public pension crisis.  A study by the Hoover Institution covering 97% of all state and local governments found that politicians have little or no ability to meet their pension promises.

Most state and local governments in the United States offer retirement benefits to their employees in the form of guaranteed pensions. To fund these promises, the governments contribute taxpayer money to public systems. Even under states’ own disclosures and optimistic assumptions about future investment returns, assets in the pension systems will be insufficient to pay for the pensions of current public employees and retirees. Taxpayer resources will eventually have to make up the difference. ... In aggregate, the 564 state and local systems in the United States covered in this study reported $1.191 trillion in unfunded pension liabilities (net pension liabilities) under GASB 67 in FY 2014. ...

What is in fact going on is that the governments are borrowing from workers and promising to repay that debt when they retire.

How do bureaucracies get so big they can't pay themselves? Assertions that it "can't possible happen" are refuted by history in instances ranging from Henry VIII's dissolution of the monasteries in 1536, which turned thousands of clergy starving into the streets to recent examples like the collapse of Soviet pensions or the debasement of the Greek pension system.

In each of these cases the impossible happened, just as it's happening in Venezuela, where Joel Hirst describes the collapse of a whole system. "I never expected to witness the slow suicide of a country, a civilization. I suppose nobody does."

More HERE

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Venezuela is the socialist object lesson of our generation

Venezuela’s largest bill, the 100-bolivar note, today barely pays for a loose cigarette at a street kiosk.

Even a year ago when we were there, when the worst of the inflation hadn’t yet kicked in, we had to take wads of cash in duffle bags just to buy lunch. Preparing for a day’s shopping felt like doing a drug deal as you counted out dozens or even hundreds of notes just to buy a jacket or shirt.

It breaks my heart to know that this is an entirely man-made tragedy, with desperate people turning to crime, prostitution, violence, and dying of preventable disease and if something doesn’t change soon, malnutrition.

I spoke on the lessons of what I saw in Venezuela at last years Australian Libertarian Society conference, and said then that it was only a matter of time before there would be blood in the streets. The locals we spoke to told us they expected open warfare and blood running the gutters before the next presidential elections. On the current trajectory, they’re not far wrong.

The military are bought-and-paid-for Chavistas, now loyal to President Maduro, and they’ve shown already their willingness to use deadly force against anyone guilty of protesting against the government. The people are disarmed, apart from the drug traffickers and the like, and so when the pay cheques to the military stop, and that will have to happen soon given that the government can’t even afford to keep printing money… then those guns will be used by the military to take food, money, and whatever else they want from the disarmed public.

Watch and learn. Socialism doesn’t lead to equality, peace, prosperity, or unicorns frolicking in the garden with rainbows coming out their asses. Socialism impoverishes an entire nation, hitting the poorest people the hardest. It leads first to where Greece is, then if you continue it leads to Venezuela, then if you persist with the madness you’ll soon arrive at North Korea.

Socialism leads to totalitarianism as the government continuously clamps down on anything and everything in a desperate attempt to keep a doomed-to-fail system working. There is no other trajectory for socialism to take.

SOURCE

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Black Power, A Done Deal

A couple of people recently have drawn my attention to the 2014 article below by Fred Reed. It does make a striking  point

It is curious that blacks, the least educated thirteen percent of the population, the least productive, most criminal, and most dependent on governmental charity, should dominate national politics. Yet they do. Virtually everything revolves around what blacks want, demand, do, or can’t do. Their power seems without limit.

Courses of instruction in the schools, academic rigor, codes of dress, rules regarding unceasing obscenity, all must be set to suit them, as must be examinations for promotion in fire departments, the military, and police forces. Blacks must be admitted to universities for which they are not remotely qualified, where departments of Black Studies must be established to please them. Corporate work forces, federal departments, and elite high-schools must be judged not on whether they perform their functions but on whether they have the right number of blacks.

Do laws requiring identification to vote threaten to end multiple voting? The laws must go. Do blacks not like Confederate flags? Adieu, flags. Does Huckleberry Finn go down the Mississippi with the Nigger Jim, or Conrad write The Nigger of the Narcissus? These must be banned or expurgated to please blacks who haven’t read them or, usually, heard of them. Do we want to prevent people coming from regions infested with Ebola from entering the United States? We cannot. It would offend blacks.

We must never, ever say or do anything that might upset them, as virtually everything does. It is positively astonishing. One expects the rich and smart to have disproportionate power. But America is dominated from the slums.

One might think that a single set of laws should apply to all citizens, and that things should be done without regard to race, creed, color, sex, or national origin, and that all should have the same rights and responsibilities. It is not so.

The dominance of the media by blacks is impressive. If a white shoots a black to defend himself, it becomes national news for weeks, or months, and riots follow, but when blacks engage in their unending racial attacks on whites, the media demurely look the other way. The attackers are never black. They are “teens.” Reporters who say otherwise are likely to be fired. In effect, the thirteen percent censor the national press.

Much of their mastery has become so deeply engrained as no longer to be noticed. There is the DC Bob. In the bars and restaurants of Washington, a man weary of an incompetent affirmative-action hire in his office will, before commenting to a friend, lean forward, lower his voice, and look furtively over both shoulders to see whether anyone might overhear: The DC Bob. People don’t even know that they are doing this.

Defensive behavior by whites has become nearly universal. A sort of Masonic recognition-ritual occurs among white people recently introduced in social gatherings. Is the other person, for want of better terms, a liberal or a realist? Dare one speak?  One of them will say something mildly skeptical about, say, Jesse Jackson. The other rolls his eyes in shared disgust. The secret handshake.  Or, if the listener is politically correct, the bait is not taken. In either case, blacks dominate political conversation.

So extreme is the power to control speech and even thought that politicians have to avoid mentioning watermelons, that neighborhoods of high crime must delicately be called “sketchy” instead of “black,” though all understand what is meant.

The avoidance of racial reference is not an even-handed if despotic attempt to oppose racism since, as we all know, blacks freely apply any derogatory wording they choose to whites. In short, they rule. Which is amazing.

The dominance extends to children. When in junior high one of my daughters brought home a science handout with common chemical terms badly misspelled. “Is your teacher black?” I said without thinking. “Daaaaaaady!” she said in anguish, having made the connection but knowing that she shouldn’t have. Blacks control what you can say to your own children in your own home. And of course if I had gone to the school and demanded that the teacher be fired, it would have been evidence of my depravity and probable KKK membership.

The word “unbelievable” has lost all force.  Things that ought to be unbelievable, and once were, have become routine.  Still, there it was: Don’t expect a junior-high teacher to have the level of literacy I had in the fourth grade. Instead, make it dangerous to notice her stupidity.

This is not new, and it hasn’t changed. In 1981, in a piece for Harper’s, I wrote:

“The bald, statistically verifiable truth is that the teachers' colleges, probably on ideological grounds, have produced an incredible proportion of incompetent black teachers. Evidence of this appears periodically, as, for example, in the results of a competency test given to applicants for teaching positions in Pinellas County, Florida (which includes St. Petersburg and Clearwater), cited in Time, June 16, 1980. To pass this grueling examination, an applicant had to be able to read at the tenth-grade level and do arithmetic at the eighth-grade level. Though they all held B.A.'s, 25 percent of the whites and 79 percent of the blacks failed. Similar statistics exist for other places.”s

 Nothing has changed.

Blacks now control the presidency and thus, most importantly, the Attorney Generalship. In this the staggering political power of blacks is most evident. Obama was elected because he was black: an equally unqualified and negligible white pol would have had no chance. He is now fiercely pushing the most profound transformation of America ever attempted, by opening the floodgates to immigration from the south. To effect this end he apparently will simply ignore Congress. The people will not be consulted.

It is hard to imagine why he does it except from racism, from a desire to get even with whites by enrolling their country in the Third World. A short-sighted policy, yes, since Hispanics do not like blacks and will soon be more powerful—but that will come a bit later.

Note that self-inflicted problems of blacks consume inordinate amounts of public and governmental attention, even though only blacks can solve them. I might say, “should solve them,” since they never have and we all know they won’t. Yet we hear about them endlessly.

Are blacks in Chicago killing each other in large numbers? The solution might be to stop doing it, might it not? While I do not wish these young dead, I can do nothing to stop them, and it is not my problem. Are black children growing up illiterate? This gives me no pleasure, and I have various reasons both selfish and moral to wish it were not so. But perhaps the solution is for their parents, or parent, to see that they do their homework, or even to teach them. I cannot do this for them, and it isn’t my problem.

Why do I have to hear, endlessly, about the “achievement gap”? Whether of genetic or cultural origin, it seems as immutable as Avogadro’s number, and I can do nothing about it.  I raise my children. They need to raise theirs.

 They rule. It is astonishing.

SOURCE

There is a  new  lot of postings by Chris Brand just up -- about antisemitism in the British Labour party. Apparently the British Left have rediscovered the Haavara Agreement -- with much chortling.

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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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Vladimir Putin likes The Donald

The wise-heads are afraid of THIS?  Is this why they call Trump dangerous?  This is surely a triumph for peace.  If Trump had been a Democrat, the Left would be celebrating this

U.S. presidential hopeful Donald Trump has found himself an unlikely supporter in the form of Russian president Vladimir Putin.

A foreign policy speech made by Mr Trump on 27 April, in which the Republican candidate spoke about his hopes for an improvement in U.S.-Russian relations, was well received in Russia, CNN reported, with people in Moscow praising his attitude.

“I believe an easing of tensions and improved relations with Russia, from a position of strength only, is possible,” Trump said during his speech.

The Russian president said at his annual press conference back in December: “He is saying that he wants to move to a different level of relations with Russia, to a closer, deeper one. How can we not welcome that? Of course, we welcome that.”

He described also described Mr Trump as a ‘flamboyant’ and ‘outstanding’ man, and appeared keen to work with the Republican frontrunner in future.

For his part, Mr Trump has previously returned the compliment, stating: “I will get along - I think - with Putin, and I will get along with others, and we will have a much more stable world. I would talk to him.

Mr Putin and Mr Trump’s latest bout of mutual appreciation comes amid increasingly tense relations between the US and Russia, in a week that saw a Russian jet barrel roll over a U.S. plane above the Baltic Sea in what the US described as an ‘aggressive’ move.

SOURCE

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The reason people like Trump

Two Australian academics give their analysis.  There's something in what they say

People just seem to get Donald Trump.  And while he’s obviously intelligent enough to build an empire, people understand him because he’s actually kind of basic and just uncomplicated.

A Melbourne academic has been looking into why people are serious about electing Trump as the next president and he has found it’s because society speaks his language, we get his dumbed-down policies and got to know him from the comfort of our couches as he fired people off The Apprentice reality show.

Trump is involving more people in politics, because he cuts through the jargon.

In an article for Pursuit, Melbourne University School of Social and Political Sciences academic Dr Raymond Orr, said we lived in a simplified and dramatised society that was fuelled by technology and he blames reality television for giving Trump a serious shot at the presidency.

Dr Orr said people have seen Trump’s reality show, The Apprentice, as a serious application for America’s top job.

Trump can get down on the same level as society, and Dr Orr said his campaign was tailored to people using technologies like social media, where his message could be dumbed-down.

The academic said screen time could blur our sense of reality and Trump’s television show made people feel like they knew him personally.

The academic believes as things on our screens creep into our loungerooms, people begin to treat them as part of their lives and harbour a certain connection to them. Therefore he believes a society that has so much screen time is more susceptible to Trump’s “brash and concept-free message”.

Melbourne University Department of Management and Marketing academic Dr Marcus Phipps wrote on Pursuit that Trump was an unlikely frontrunner and one who broke every rule of a conservative presidential candidate.

“He has been critical of religious leaders, most notably having an argument with the Pope,” Dr Phipps said. “He has even questioned the military record of war hero and former Republican nominee John McCain stating that ‘I like people who weren’t captured’.”

Trump has made many controversial comments, he accused Mexican immigrants of being rapists who were bringing drugs and crime into America and has shocked some with his pro-gun stance.

Dr Phipps said Trump’s campaign should have fallen over ages ago, but instead it kept on strengthening.  He believes it’s because Trump is an “authentic” politician.

“Trump is not scripted," Dr Phipps said.  “It is hard to believe that anyone who openly criticises the Pope and John McCain’s military record has a team of script writers behind him.

“Trump is not stylised. The candidate’s hair alone proves that he is not image obsessed.”

Dr Phipps said Trump was an unfiltered politician and one who appealed to lazy voters.  Watching Trump’s campaign could be similar to watching a reality show.

Dr Orr said the substance of campaigns had become superficial with politicians attacking other politicians sometimes more often than sharing policies.

Dr Orr said Trump’s simple and hurried messages fitted in perfectly with society’s addiction to new media.

SOURCE

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Regulations Are the Ties That Bind

It might not have its own government, citizens or flag, but the world’s fourth largest economy has become a force — and a threat — to be reckoned with. What constitutes this mysterious economic might? None other than the $4 trillion in federal regulations imposed by the U.S. government. You read that correctly. If the cost of government regulations were its own country, it would boast the fourth-largest GDP in the world — bigger than the economies of Germany, France, Brazil, Russia, Italy, and the United Kingdom. And it’s just a couple of hundred billion away from matching the entire federal budget.

This bombshell comes courtesy of a new study by the Mercatus Center, which analyzed data from 1977 through 2012 to discover the cumulative costs of regulations (or, more accurately, taxes by a different name). While most studies of the economic impact of regulations have focused on select industries and/or specific regulations, the Mercatus study looked at data across 22 industries.

The picture ain’t pretty.

The study found that regulations, “by distorting the investment choices that lead to innovation, [have] created a considerable drag on the economy, amounting to an average reduction in the annual growth rate of the US gross domestic product (GDP) of 0.8 percent.”

In plain English, if regulations had remained steady at 1980 levels, our economy would have been 25% — or $4 trillion — larger in 2012 than it was. This represents a whopping $13,000 loss per person in just one year. All to ensure every aspect of our lives is compliant with Uncle Sam’s Big Government Guidebook.

Unfortunately, President Ronald Reagan wasn’t joking when he quipped, “Government’s view of the economy could be summed up in a few short phrases: If it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving, regulate it. And if it stops moving, subsidize it.”

Just how many regulations are we talking about? As of December 2015, more than 81,000 pages-worth of federal rules, proposed rules and notices. According to the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI), these pages included 3,378 final rules and regulations, of which 545 affect small businesses. And this didn’t count 2,334 proposed rules.

Regulations have become such a behemoth that CEI created tenthousandcommandments.com, which looks at “the other national debt — the cost of regulation.” (In case you’re wondering, as of last week, 2016 already has 1,001 new federal rules.)

Not surprisingly, the regulatory landscape only grew worse under Obama. As Investor’s Business Daily notes, Obama’s administration foisted 172 “economically significant” regulations on Americans in his first term, and 200 more since, thus far outpacing both George W. Bush and Bill Clinton. And Obama’s rules include things like, oh, the government takeover of the health care industry and the EPA’s coal-killing carbon emissions rules.

It’s little wonder our annual GDP growth has been sluggish at best. So sluggish that in 2013, the Bureau of Labor Statistics called slower GDP growth “the new normal.” GDP growth in the first quarter of 2016 was a woeful 0.5%, the weakest in two years. (It was an anemic 1.4% in the previous quarter.) And Obama is on track to be the only president in U.S. history without a single year of 3% growth on his watch — he’ll be doing well to average 1.55%.

Remember those wondrous numbers while Obama’s sycophants at The New York Times' feature their puff piece in which he “weighs his economic legacy.”

“I actually compare our economic performance to how, historically, countries that have wrenching financial crises perform,” Obama mused. “By that measure, we probably managed this better than any large economy on Earth in modern history.” Go back and read the aforementioned numbers and see if you agree that he “managed this better.”

What’s the solution? For one thing, eliminating thousands of pages of federal regulations. It’s straightforward but hardly palatable to the government elites who believe they’re most qualified to run your life.

Frighteningly, the alternative is the continued growth of the regulatory nation that keeps our economy in chains.

SOURCE

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English has a big lack of words for "State"

Is it perhaps an Anglo-Saxon dislike of government that makes it difficult for us to make immediately clear statements about government? The old Sapir-Whorf codability hypothesis would certainly suggest that.

For instance, we don't have a separate word for an intermediate level of government, a State government. In the English-speaking world -- The USA, Canada, Australia -- such forms of government are common and important: Governments running Texas, California, Alberta, Ontario, Queensland and Victoria, for instance.
So a self-governing nation can be called a state but so can one part of that nation.

Germans are much better off. They can use Staat, Reich, Land and Nation. A State government, for instance is a "Land" government in Germany, while the nation is a "Reich".

And "Reich" is both an extremely useful German word and one that CANNOT adequately be translated into English. That deficit gets a bit embarrassing when we try to translate what the people of China call their nation. The best we can do is to translate it as: "Middle Kingdom". But that is absurd. China is NOT a kingdom. In German, by contrast, "Mittelreich" is a perfectly adequate translation.

I use German words quite a bit. It would probably help if more German words became better known. We use heaps of French words, so why not?

Germans of course don't have it all their way. They don't, for instance, have a good word for "pink". They usually translate it as "rosa" or "nelke". But both those words are names for flowers and both flowers can of course have a variety of colors. Who can forget the yellow rose of Texas, for instance? So Germans should probably adopt our word. Maybe some do.

But A BIG gap in German is that they have no word for "happy". Does that tell us something? Maybe. The nearest word to happy that they have is "gluecklich", but that just means "lucky. Many years ago I was talking to an old German Jewish refugee who had narrowly escaped Hitler. I asked him if he was happy. He knew I understood a bit of German so he said: "Gluecklich I am but happy I am not". He knew he was lucky to escape but missed the high culture of Germany. And he needed two languages to say that concisely

So let us have more linguistic borrowing! -- JR

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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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Canada’s Great Leap Forward

Feel the ecstasy of the Leftist writer below as Canada prepares to emulate Chairman Mao. And they even refer to the policy set as a "Leap". Yet another demonstration that the Left don't remotely understand economics.  That the policies described would be very impoverishing is not considered.  It's just dreams, divorced from reality.  But the policies concerned would be very disruptive and Leftists like that.  It is probably the real reason behind the "Leap".  Mao's version was certainly very disruptive.  The consolation is that, if implemented, the associated disasters will get Pretty Boy thrown out on his ear at the next Federal election


In early 2015, 60 representatives from Canada’s Indigenous rights, environmental, social and food justice, labour and faith-based movements met to draft a progressive vision for Canada’s future. The idea came from a belief that “now is the moment for a transformative agenda to come from outside electoral politics, to build a wave of popular support that will put real pressure on the Federal Liberal government.”

The result is the Leap Manifesto.

The manifesto, described as “a call for a Canada based on caring for the Earth and one another”, makes 15 demands. It starts with respect for “the inherent rights and title of the original caretakers of this land” and full implementation of the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. It urges the shift to 100 per cent renewable electricity by 2030, a 100 per cent clean economy by 2050, and commits to no new long-term fossil fuel extraction projects.

Other demands include community control of clean energy systems, investment in public infrastructure, high speed rail and affordable public transport, resources for workers in carbon-intensive jobs, and a localised ecological agriculture system.

It also advocates an end to damaging free trade deals, welcoming refugees and migrants, expanding low-carbon professions like caregiving, teaching, social work, the arts and public interest media, a universal basic income and removing corporate money from political campaigns.

These proposals would be fully funded by an end to fossil fuel subsidies, financial transaction taxes, increased resource royalties, increased corporate and high income taxes, a progressive carbon tax and cuts to military spending.

To me, this sounds like a common sense list of good public policy. It would rein in the cowboy extractivism of fossil fuel companies, end the toxic relationship between polluters and politicians, offer masses of good clean energy jobs, deliver justice to the most vulnerable parts of our population and secure a sustainable future for human beings on a liveable planet.

To the establishment complex of banks, government, industry, think tanks and the corporate media, a common sense plan to avoid climate catastrophe is actually an INSANE RADICAL MARXIST AGENDA TO RUIN THE ECONOMY.

The Leap Manifesto has made quite a splash since its release during the Canadian federal election campaign in September 2015, pretty much dividing opinion along these lines.

Thus far 200 organisations, 40,000 Canadians and numerous celebrities (celebrities!!!) have backed the manifesto while the media has hysterically dismissed the document as “economic madness”, a “prescription for economic ruin” and my personal favourite, “another step towards re-enacting the Bolshevik revolution”.

The great strength of the manifesto is its grassroots origins and political independence.

As a “People’s Platform”, it’s not limited by the constant compromises of electoral politics but can still make waves in Parliament. The Green Party of Canada have highlighted similarities between their own platform and the Leap Manifesto. The National Democratic Party (NDP), who were the favourites for the 2015 election until they were outflanked by Justin Trudeau’s disgusting handsomeness, passed a resolution at their convention earlier this month to support the Leap Manifesto and debate its principles at the grassroots level over the next two years. They lost their leader, Tom Mulcair, partly due to his unconvincing and shifting positions on key aspects of the manifesto.

A majority of voters from the Greens, NDP and governing Liberal Party support the Leap.

SOURCE

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The White Working-Class Meltdown in the U.S.

They are the ones least able to protect themselves from perverse government politcies -- e.g. when a less qualified black gets a job they should have got -- or an illegal offers to work for less than the legal minimum wage

During an era of headline-grabbing advances in medicine, the United States is experiencing a health cataclysm.

The latest straw in the wind is last week’s report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention showing that life expectancy for white women declined slightly from 2013 to 2014.

Other studies indicate rising death rates for a white working class that is in a slow-motion economic and social meltdown. Self-destructive behaviors are outpacing medical advances against killers like heart disease and cancer. Hopelessness may not be a condition studied by epidemiologists, but it is cutting a swath through a segment of white America.

A paper in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences late last year highlighted the bleak American exceptionalism of this crisis. It focused on middle-aged whites. In the 20 years prior to 1998, their mortality rate fell about 2 percent a year, in keeping with the trend toward lower mortality in other advanced countries. Then the rates diverged. Rates kept declining in countries like France and Britain. They begin increasing for middle-aged whites in the United States.

The slide in the wrong direction was driven by drug and alcohol poisoning, chronic liver diseases and suicide. In 1999, middle-aged blacks had higher rates of poisoning than whites; by 2013, rates were higher for whites. Overall, mortality rates for middle-aged blacks and Hispanics have declined since 1999, as they have increased for whites.

The trend among whites breaks down neatly by levels of education. The mortality rate for middle-aged whites with a high-school degree or less has jumped since 1999; the rate for middle-aged whites with some college but not a degree stayed roughly flat; the rate for middle-aged whites with a college degree or more dropped. If there is such a thing as white privilege, no one has told less-educated whites.

The most direct indicator of rising distress is that the suicide rate in the United States is at a roughly 30-year high, according to new figures from the National Center for Health Statistics. The rate increased for white middle-aged women by 80 percent from 1999-2014. Although the data wasn’t analyzed by education level, researchers believe it tracks with other findings about increased working-class mortality.

It is not just the middle-aged. The New York Times analyzed death certificates earlier this year. The good news is that the gap in death rates between young-adult blacks and whites is closing fast; the bad news is that soaring death rates for whites account for much of the change.

The Times found that the cohort of whites aged 25-34 is the first to have higher death rates than the generation before it since the Vietnam War, and the trend is particularly pronounced among the less-educated. The rate of drug overdoses among young whites quintupled from 1999-2014.

The white working class is dying from the effects of a long-running alienation from the mainstream of American life. As one researcher told the Times, “they are not in stable relationships, they don’t have jobs, they have children they can’t feed and clothe, and they have no support network.” It is a formula for loneliness, stress and despair.

The Washington Post recently wrote a compelling portrait of a woman in rural Oklahoma who died at age 54 of cirrhosis of the liver. It was a tale of joblessness, of martial breakdown, of alcohol abuse, of repeated heartbreak, until she was “sick and tired of being sick and tired.” She drank herself to death. At her funeral, the Post reporter noted the plots of friends and relatives who had died at ages 46, 52 and 37.

The authors of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences paper say middle-aged whites may be a “lost generation.” That is depressing enough, but there is no guarantee only one generation will be lost.

SOURCE

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A Superior Vision

Walter E. Williams

Last month, I celebrated the beginning of my 81st year of life. For nearly half that time, I have been writing a nationally syndicated column on many topics generating reader responses that go from supportive to quite ugly. So I thought a column making my vision, values and views explicit might settle some of the controversy.

My initial premise, when looking at all human issues, is that each of us owns himself. I am my private property, and you are your private property. If you agree with that premise, then certain human actions are moral and others immoral. The reason murder is immoral is that it violates private property. Similarly, rape and theft are immoral, for they, too, violate private property. Most Americans will agree that murder and rape violate people’s property rights and are hence immoral. But there may not be so much agreement about theft. Let’s look at it.

Theft is when a person’s property is taken from him — through stealth, force, intimidation, threats or coercion — and given to another to whom it does not belong. If a person took your property — even to help another person who is in need — it would be called theft. Suppose three people agreed to that taking. Would it be deemed theft? What if 100,000 or several hundred million people agreed to do so? Would that be deemed theft? Another way to ask these questions is: Does a consensus establish morality?

Self-ownership can offer solutions to many seemingly moral/ethical dilemmas. One is the sale of human organs. There is a severe shortage of organs for transplantation. Most people in need of an organ die or become very ill while they await an organ donation. Many more organs would become available if there were a market for them. Through the National Organ Transplant Act of 1984, Congress has made organ sales illegal. Congress clearly has the power to prevent organ sales, but does it have a right? The answer to that question comes by asking: Who owns your organs? One test of ownership is whether you have the right to sell something. In the case of organs, if it is Congress that owns our organs, then we have no right to sell them. That would be stealing from Congress.

People have the right to take chances with their own lives. People do not have a right to take chances with the lives of others. That is why laws that mandate that cars have brakes are consistent with liberty and seat belt laws are not. You might say, “Aha, Williams, we’ve got you there because if you don’t wear a seat belt and you have an accident and turn into a vegetable, society is burdened with taking care of you!” That’s not a problem of liberty. It’s a problem of socialism. Nobody should be forced to take care of me for any reason. If government assumes the job of taking care of us, then Congress can control just about every aspect of our lives. When I was a rebellious teenager, my mother frequently told me, “As long as you’re living in my house and I’m paying the bills, you’re going to do as I say.” That kind of thinking is OK for children, but not for emancipated adults.

I have only touched the surface of ideas of self-ownership. The immorality associated with violation of the principle of self-ownership lies at the root of problems that could lead to our doom as a great nation. In fiscal 2015, total government spending — federal, state and local — was about $6.41 trillion. That’s about 36 percent of our gross domestic product. The federal government spent $3.69 trillion. At least two-thirds of that spending can be described as government’s taking the property of one American and giving it to another. That’s our moral tragedy: We’ve become a nation of people endeavoring to live at the expense of others — in a word, a nation of thieves.

SOURCE

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In 2015, 19,000 Criminal Illegal Immigrants Were Released From Custody

More than 19,000 criminal illegal immigrants were released from custody in 2015, according to new figures disclosed by the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency.

The 19,723 criminal releases—as the government refers to them—represent a 35 percent decrease from fiscal year 2014.

The phrase “criminal releases” can apply to a wide range of crimes, including traffic violations—such as driving without a license—to more serious offenses like sexual assault, rape, and murder. Their crimes include misdemeanors and felonies.

According to the Center for Immigration Studies, which advocates for less immigration, the 19,723 criminal releases had a total of 64,197 convictions among them. More than 200 of those were homicide convictions. Most are traffic offenders.

More HERE

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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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When it comes to the women’s card, Donald holds all the Trumps. He knows What Women Want, and it isn’t Hillary

By PIERS MORGAN

‘They say every powerful man is good in bed,’ I once asked Donald Trump. ‘That true?’

He smirked. ‘I think there is a certain truth to that, yes. Put it this way, I’ve never had any complaints. A lot of it is down to The Look. It doesn’t mean you have to look like Cary Grant, it means you have to have a certain way about you, a stature. I see successful guys who just don’t have The Look and they are never going to go out with great women.

‘The Look is very important. I don’t really like to talk about it because it sounds very conceited… but it matters.’

I thought of this exchange when Trump launched into Hillary Clinton today about her lack of appeal to women.

‘I think the only card she has is the women’s card,’ he scoffed. ‘She has got nothing else going. Frankly, if Hillary Clinton were a man, I don’t think she’d get 5% of the vote. And the beautiful thing is, women don’t like her…’

He was instantly and roundly ridiculed for being a revolting pig, of course.  Such is the habitual reaction from the sneering swathes of America’s political and media elite to everything Trump says or does.

They’re the same experts who predicted Trump ‘won’t last three weeks’ when he entered the race last summer, and who more recently predicted with equal confidence that he’d ‘never win the nomination.’  Now they assure us just as vehemently that Trump can’t beat Hillary because women hate him.

That’s what I keep reading and hearing as the cocky billionaire tycoon continues to steamroller his way to what now looks like an inevitable confirmation as Republican nominee.

(Seriously, Senator Cruz and Governor Kasich, it was over from the second you two clowns decided last week to tag-team against The Donald, thus making yourselves look utterly incapable of beating him on your own. I’d quit the race now before you both lose the last remaining vestige of dignity..)

The Women-Hate-Trump theory dictates that if he IS the nominee and comes up against Hillary Clinton, then he’ll be crushed not just because women loathe him but also because they all love Hillary.

Really? As Goldfinger used to say to 007: ‘Not so fast, Mr Bond….’

I suspect Trump’s a lot more popular with women than people think, and Hillary a lot less so.

I spent well over 100 hours observing Trump in his former Celebrity Apprentice boardroom lair. First as a (winning) contestant in 2008, then as one of his advisors in every subsequent season.

He was whip-smart, very funny and brilliantly provocative at creating compelling television drama.  He was also extremely charming when he wanted to be, especially with the female contestants. Many of them, including sports stars, actresses, supermodels and rock stars, ended up melting like fawning putty in Mr Trump’s famously delicate hands.

Even the legendarily ferocious comedienne Joan Rivers used to blush from his effusive compliments. I know, because I was there and saw it happen.

Part of this was because they wanted to win, obviously, so sought his approval. But part of it was undeniably also because Trump is genuinely at ease with women and seems to love their company – unless it’s Rosie O’Donnell - as much as they enjoy his.

I always think you can judge a man pretty well by his relationship with his former partners. Trump’s remained good friends with both his ex wives, Ivana and Marla. He even let Ivana get re-married at his Florida home.

His current wife Melania has proven to be a very effective electoral asset, combining brains with beauty and a feisty side which shows she’s no pushover.

And his daughter Ivanka is by common consent, a beautiful, vote-winning working mother superstar whose respect for her Donald is touchingly unequivocal.

Even fearsome Fox News star Megyn Kelly has made up with the man who attacked her mercilessly in public after they locked horns in a poisonously personal way after a heated presidential debate.

If Trump can get Ms Kelly back onside, after mocking her menstrual cycle, then surely he’s got a good chance of persuading millions of other women in America that he’s not such a bad guy after all?

I watch how the women behave at his gigantic rallies in all parts of America and I don’t see much hatred in those ecstatic eyes; I see fevered adoration.

Recent primary results, especially in his thumping 5-state clean sweep last night, suggest that adoration is beginning to translate into votes with more and more woman coming out for Trump.

Why?  He’s charismatic, that’s why.  They like his swaggering self-confidence, his non-PC and non-politician style, his fierce ‘I’ll make America great again’ patriotism, and his often outrageous, off-the-cuff sense of humour.

I spent some time in Texas and Florida recently and most of the women I met there were positively cooing over the prospect of a President Trump, and snarlingly scathing about the very notion of President Clinton.

Hillary likes to boast that she’s the only possible candidate for women, but I know a lot of women who can’t stand her.  They think she’s hard, elitist, they don’t really trust her after Benghazi and the email scandal, and they find it hard to forgive her own repeated forgiveness of her husband’s brazen infidelity.

They also feel she has a sense of entitlement to become the first female president, and has sold her soul to Wall Street through chums like Goldman Sachs.

This explains some of the catastrophically bad results she had early on in this campaign. In the Iowa Caucus, for example, she got just 14% of the under-30 female vote, while 74-year-old Bernie Sanders romped away with 84%.

The irony of Hillary’s position is that there’s only one man in America who can possibly compete with Trump for populist appeal right now, and indeed his ability to seduce women, and that’s her husband Bill. Unfortunately, he’s not running, she is.

If it comes down to Trump vs Clinton in November, as now seems likely, I think a lot more women are going to vote for him than she assumes.

And that could be enough for the man with The Look to win the White House.

SOURCE

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Why the Left Loathes Western Civilization

Dennis Prager

This month, Stanford University students voted on a campus resolution that would have their college require a course on Western civilization, as it did until the 1980s.

Stanford students rejected the proposal 1,992 to 347. A columnist at the Stanford Daily explained why: Teaching Western civilization means “upholding white supremacy, capitalism and colonialism, and all other oppressive systems that flow from Western civilizations.”

The vote — and the column — encapsulated the left’s view: In Europe, Latin America and America, it loathes Western civilization.

Wherever there is conflict between the West — identified as white, capitalist or of European roots — and the non-West, the left portrays the West as the villain.

I am referring to the left, not to liberals. The latter generally venerates Western civilization. President Franklin D. Roosevelt, for example, frequently spoke of defending “Christian civilization.” Today, the left would likely revile any Westerner who used such language as xenophobic, racist, and fascist.

The left similarly describes any suggestion that anything Western is superior to anything non-Western. Likewise, it dismisses virtually all Western achievements, but regards criticism of anything non-Western as racist, chauvinistic, imperialist, colonialist, xenophobic, etc.

That is why the left is so protective of Islam. America’s left-wing president, Barack Obama, will not use, and does not seem to allow the government to use, the words “Islamic terrorism.” And, criticism of Islam is labeled “Islamophobic,” thereby morally equating any such criticism with racism. It is not that the left is sympathetic to Islam, for it has contempt for all religions. It is that many Muslims loathe the West, and the enemies of my enemy (the West) must be protected.

That is why the left loathes Israel. If the left actually cared about human rights, women’s rights, gay rights, or freedom of speech, religion and press, it would be wildly pro-Israel. But Israel, in the left’s view, is white, European and colonialist, or in other words, Western. And the Palestinians are non-Western.

So, the Big Question is, why? Why is the left hostile toward Western civilization?

After decades of considering this question, I have concluded the answer is this: standards.

The left hates standards — moral standards, artistic standards, cultural standards. The West is built on all three, and it has excelled in all three.

Why does the left hate standards? It hates standards because when there are standards, there is judgment. And leftists don’t want to be judged.

Thus, Michelangelo is no better than any contemporary artist, and Rembrandt is no greater than any non-Western artist. So, too, street graffiti — which is essentially the defacing of public and private property, and thus serves to undermine civilization — is “art.”

Melody-free, harmony-free, atonal sounds are just as good as Beethoven’s music. And Western classical music is no better than the music of any non-Western civilization. Guatemalan poets are every bit as worthy of study as Shakespeare.

When the Nobel Prize-winning American novelist Saul Bellow asked an interviewer, “Who is the Tolstoy of the Zulus? The Proust of the Papuans?” all hell broke loose on the cultural left. Bellow had implied that the greatest writers of fiction were Western.

Why such antagonism? Because if some art is really better than other art, your art may be judged inferior. The narcissism of left-wing thought does not allow for anyone to be better than you artistically or in any other way. Therefore, all art and artists must be equal.

In the moral realm, the same rejection of standards exists. Thus, the left loathed President Ronald Reagan for labeling the Soviet Union an “evil empire,” because that would mean America was morally superior to the Soviet Union. And such a judgment was unacceptable. The whole left-wing moral vocabulary is a rejection of Western moral standards: “tolerance,” “inclusion,” “anti-discrimination” (by definition, standards discriminate), “non-judgmental,” and even “income inequality,” which deems some peoples' work more valuable than others.

Every civilization had slavery. But only thanks to Judeo-Christian civilization was slavery abolished there, and eventually elsewhere. Nevertheless, to speak about any moral superiority of Western or Judeo-Christian civilization is completely unacceptable, thanks to the left’s stranglehold on education and most media.

In this regard, the protection of Islam by the left is so thorough that one cannot even say such obvious truths such as that the status of women has been far superior in the Judeo-Christian West than in the Islamic world. The veil women wear, for example, is dehumanizing. Yet, in a speech at the annual convention of the Islamic Society of North America, a rabbi who, at the time, was the president of the Union for Reform Judaism, said that a woman’s voluntary choice to wear a head scarf “deserves our respect.”

And finally, we come to the left’s loathing of the religions of Western civilization — the Judeo-Christian religions, which have clear standards of right and wrong.

Bible-based religions affirm a morally judging God. For the left, that is anathema. For the left, the only judging allowed is leftists' judging of others. No one judges the left — neither man nor God.

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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Trump’s crushing wins put him in a commanding role

Donald Trump swept all five Northeastern primaries Tuesday, cementing his position as the most likely Republican presidential nominee and giving him a big surge of delegates and energy heading into what could be a final showdown next week with Ted Cruz in Indiana.

Trump won by comfortable margins in each of the five East Coast states — Rhode Island, Connecticut, Pennsylvania, Delaware, and Maryland — and is now in a commanding role with just 10 states left to vote.

“I consider myself the presumptive nominee, absolutely,” Trump said from Trump Tower in Manhattan. “When the boxer knocks out the other boxer, you don’t have to wait around for a decision. That’s what’s happening.”

Trump has won 12 out of the last 15 primary contests, capped by his recent six-state run that started last week with New York. His sweep Tuesday was so dominant that all the races were called within 40 minutes after polls had closed. His margins were on track to be higher than they have been in previous contests, with about 60 percent of the vote in early results.

Trump — who earlier in the evening attended a gala in New York sponsored by Time magazine that honored the world’s most influential people (Trump made the list) — essentially declared himself as the winner of the race.

“As far as I’m concerned, it’s over,” he said, calling for the Republican Party to unify around him. “Senator Cruz and Governor Kasich should really get out of the race. They have no pathway.”

More HERE

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Kansas Required Work for Food Stamps. Here’s What Happened

Abraham Lincoln once said, “No country can sustain, in idleness, more than a small percentage of its numbers. The great majority must labor at something productive.”

Over the past several years, the number of Americans on food stamps has soared. In particular, since 2009, the number of “able-bodied-adults” without dependents receiving food stamps more than doubled nationally. Part of this increase is due to a federal rule that allowed states to waive food stamps’ modest work requirement. However, states such as Kansas and Maine chose to reinstate work requirements. Comparing and contrasting the two approaches provides powerful new evidence about the effectiveness of work.

According to a report from the Foundation for Government Accountability, before Kansas instituted a work requirement, 93 percent of food stamp recipients were in poverty, with 84 percent in severe poverty. Few of the food stamp recipients claimed any income. Only 21 percent were working at all, and two-fifths of those working were working fewer than 20 hours per week.

Once work requirements were established, thousands of food stamp recipients moved into the workforce, promoting income gains and a decrease in poverty. Forty percent of the individuals who left the food stamp ranks found employment within three months, and about 60 percent found employment within a year. They saw an average income increase of 127 percent. Half of those who left the rolls and are working have earnings above the poverty level. Even many of those who stayed on food stamps saw their income increase significantly.

Work programs provide opportunities such as job training and employment search services. For example, in Kansas, workfare helped one man, who was unemployed for four years and on food stamps, find employment in the publishing industry where he now earns $45,000 annually. Another Kansan who was also previously unemployed and dependent on food stamps for over three years, now has an annual income of $34,000.

Furthermore, with the implementation of the work requirement in Kansas, the caseload dropped by 75 percent. Previously, Kansas was spending $5.5 million per month on food stamp benefits for able-bodied adults; it now spends $1.2 million.

Maine is another powerful example in favor of work over dependency. Similarly to Kansas, Maine saw a major decline in its caseload after instituting a work requirement. Within the first three months after Maine’s work policy went into effect, its caseload of able-bodied adults receiving food stamps plunged by 80 percent, falling from 13,332 recipients in December 2014 to 2,678 in March 2015.

Providing assistance to help those in need does not have to be a one-way handout. According to a Heritage Foundation survey, Americans overwhelmingly agree that able-bodied adults receiving welfare should work. However, very few of the federal government’s 80 means-tested welfare programs require recipients to work for benefits.

One of the best ways to ensure that welfare does not become a trap is to initiate reform based on the principles of work and personal responsibility. As the examples of Kansas and Maine show, good public policy can help encourage individuals towards self-sufficiency and better lives.

SOURCE

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International Chutzpah: Russia, US to trade away Israel’s Golan Heights

As part of a possible settlement of the Syrian civil war, the United States and Russia are planning to offer a return of the Golan Heights to Syria.

Wow — talk about chutzpah!  Of course neither Russia nor the US “owns” the Golan Heights. Israel does.

And that land, captured from Syria in the 1967 war, is indeed an imposing “heights” from which Israel’s enemies have attacked Israel’s people with artillery. See the map below.* In Carol’s book, you can read the history of the Golan Heights and how Israel’s enemies have used it militarily.

Small wonder Israel intends to maintain its hard-won sovereignty over this strategic piece of land.

Yet Barack Obama and Vladimir Putin have instructed John Kerry and Sergei Lavrov to offer it up, as if it were theirs to give, as part of some hoped-for settlement.

Why doesn’t Obama throw in the Brooklyn Bridge while he’s at it?

SOURCE

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No 9/11 for China

TWO men who allegedly tried to hijack a plane in China were beaten to death by passengers and crew. The Global Times newspaper reported that two of the suspects died in hospital from injuries they suffered during the ensuing fight with passengers and crew on board.

The men were part of a six-strong gang involved in the foiled hijack of a Tianjin Airlines flight bound for the regional capital of Urumqi last Friday.

Just minutes after the flight took off from Hetian, southwest Xinjiang, the men, all aged between 20 and 36, stood up and announced their plans to terrified passengers. The gang reportedly broke a pair of aluminium crutches and used them to attack passengers while attempting to break into the cockpit, Hou Hanmin, a regional government spokeswoman said.

They were tackled by police and passengers who tied them up with belts before the plane, carrying 101 people, returned to the airport safely just 22 minutes later.

Hanmin added that police were still testing materials they had been carrying, thought to be explosives.

The men were reported to be Uighurs, the local Muslim ethnic minority. There have been clashes between authorities and Uighurs resentful of government controls over their religion and culture.

SOURCE

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Nearly half of Britons pay no income tax as burden on rich increases

Proportion now similar to the USA.  "Fair"?

Almost half of Britons pay no income tax while the richest are now shouldering the biggest burden on record, a new analysis has found.

The Institute for Fiscal Studies said that the proportion of working-age adults who do not pay income tax has risen from 34.3 per cent to 43.8 per cent, equivalent to 30million people.

Over the same period the amount of income tax paid by the richest 1 per cent has risen from 24.4 per cent to 27.5 per cent, meaning that 300,000 people pay more than a quarter of the nation's income tax.

The Institute for Fiscal Studies said that the change has been driven by George Osborne's policies of tax cuts for low earners and hikes for those who earn the most.

Mr Osborne has repeatedly highlighted the fact that the richest pay more while those on lower incomes pay less as part of his bid to rebrand the Conservatives as the "worker's party".

Under Mr Osborne the personal allowance has risen from £6,475 to £10,600, lifting millions of people out of the basic rate of income tax entirely.

Over the same period 1.6million people have been dragged into paying the higher rate of income tax after the Chancellor repeatedly froze the threshold for the 40p rate.

Labour introduced the 50p rate of income tax for higher earners, which Mr Osborne cut to 45p, while pensions tax relief has also been cut significantly.

The IFS said: "The recent increase in the share of tax coming from the top 1% of taxpayers was driven by a series of policy changes.

"Some, notably the large increase in the personal tax allowance, took many low earners out of tax while also reducing payments for lower to middle taxpayers.

"While the personal allowance was increased, the higher-rate threshold was cut.

"Meanwhile, those on the highest incomes did not gain at all from the increase in the personal allowance, since a new policy introduced in 2010 means that it is gradually withdrawn once incomes rise above £100,000.

"In addition, big cuts in pension tax relief and the increase in the tax rate for those earning over £150,000 will have raised more revenue from the highest earners."

The IFS said that the increased burden on the rich is unlikely to "unwind" in future as the Conservatives have pledged to increase the personal allowance to £12,500.

It said that Mr Osborne's pledge to raise the threshold for the higher rate of tax to £50,000 will only "hold constant" the number of people paying the 40p rate.

SOURCE

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Judge Okays North Carolina Voter ID

If Democrats can gain an advantage at the ballot box by supporting a certain voting policy, they will, whether it be illegal, unconstitutional or ethically shady. On Monday, a federal judge on Monday dealt a blow to proponents of voter fraud by declaring the changes to the voting law that North Carolina enacted in 2013 did not violate the civil rights of minority citizens in the state.

The Left had argued that minority voters would be disproportionately disadvantaged by a law requiring voters to show one of eight acceptable kinds of ID before filling out a ballot, eliminating same-day voter registration and reducing early voting periods. But these are simply common-sense verifications that preserve the integrity of elections. North Carolina is a contested state, with the state leaning Democrat by the thinnest of margins, so they need all the help from illegitimate voters they can get. But Judge Thomas Schroeder wrote that North Carolina’s law was not unusual compared to other states' voting laws and “North Carolina has provided legitimate state interests for its voter ID requirement and electoral system.”

Because it’s a presidential election year and because of North Carolina’s contested nature, this case is almost certain to head to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, which is based in Richmond, Virginia. Speaking of Virginia, the commonwealth’s Democrat governor unilaterally granted voting rights to 200,000 former felons through an executive order. Again, whatever it takes for votes, Democrats will do it.

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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A thought

A lot of conservatives did not like Romney because he was too much of a compromiser.  Now some do not like Trump because he doesn't compromise enough!

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Are conservatives healthier?

I am indebted to Deniz Selcuk, my indefatigable Turkish correspondent, for drawing my attention to the 2007 article below.  The article argues that emotions of disgust have evolved to drive us towards being more hygienic and hence healthier.

As is, I think, well-known by now, Jonathan Haidt has found that conservatives are much more easily disgusted than Leftists.  Since even mass-murder does not seem to disgust Leftists, that stands to reason.  So are conservatives healthier and therefore more long-lived?  It is the obvious inference to be drawn from combining Haidt's work and the paper below.

I consulted Professor Google on the matter and the most useful article seemed to be This one.  It basically pointed out that most indicators did seem to confirm better health among conservatives but also pointed to a much-quoted study by Pabayo which found liberals to be more long-lived.

The Pabayo study, however, seems to have been withdrawn so there were obviously problems with it.  None of the studies, however suggest a big difference in lifespans according to your politics.  There are of course many factors influencing lifespan so that is not inherently surprising.  But, in any event, conservative are probably more hygienic.


A natural history of hygiene

Valerie A Curtis, PhD

Abstract

In unpacking the Pandora's box of hygiene, the author looks into its ancient evolutionary history and its more recent human history. Within the box, she finds animal behaviour, dirt, disgust and many diseases, as well as illumination concerning how hygiene can be improved. It is suggested that hygiene is the set of behaviours that animals, including humans, use to avoid harmful agents. The author argues that hygiene has an ancient evolutionary history, and that most animals exhibit such behaviours because they are adaptive. In humans, responses to most infectious threats are accompanied by sensations of disgust. In historical times, religions, social codes and the sciences have all provided rationales for hygiene behaviour. However, the author argues that disgust and hygiene behaviour came first, and that the rationales came later. The implications for the modern-day practice of hygiene are profound. The natural history of hygiene needs to be better understood if we are to promote safe hygiene and, hence, win our evolutionary war against the agents of infectious disease.

SOURCE

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What if the Left Doesn't Really Want to Achieve Its Policy Goals?

John C. Goodman

Here is something I bet you haven’t thought about. We naturally assume that that public policy advocates actually want to achieve the things they advocate. But there are a lot of people both on the right and the left — but especially on the left — for whom that probably isn’t true.

Suppose you could wave a magic wand and eliminate global warming forever. You might think that all the environmental organizations and all the environmental scientists would get out the champagne and cerebrate. More likely their offices would look like a wake.

Causes are vehicles to money and power. They generate millions of dollars in donations. They create high paying jobs. They motivate millions in research grants and millions in campaign contributions. If the cause goes away, money and power go away with it.

Without global warming, the donations would dry up. The jobs would go away. The research grants would vanish. The end of global warming would be an economic disaster for tens of thousands of people. Especially for someone like Al Gore — who has made a fortune on the issue.

Ditto for race relations. What would Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton do if there were no more racial discrimination? They couldn’t Mau Mau any more corporations. They couldn’t shake down any more rich white guys. They would have to …. well …. they would have to go find an honest job.

What brings this to mind is four recent items in the news.

First, labor unions in Los Angeles — the very unions that were in the forefront in pushing for California’s recently passed $15-an-hour minimum wage legislation — are petitioning to be exempted from the new law. After telling us for years how good high minimum wages are for everyone else, they are now claiming that the regulation is not good for their own members.

Second, as the New York Democratic primary election was well under way, the rhetoric became increasing shrill. Wall Street is responsible for inequality we were told by both Bernie and Hillary.

Yet as Dan Henninger reminds us in a Wall Street Journal editorial, it’s the rich Wall Street types who are putting up the money to fund charter schools and other alternatives to the public schools that are failing so miserably. No one who is poor is likely to climb the income ladder without a decent education. Yet New York City liberals, including the new liberal mayor, aren’t lifting a finger to help. In fact, New York’s liberals seem quite content to let the teachers unions run the schools as they wish and leave things pretty much as they are.

Third, an editorial in the Wall Street Journal by Holman Jenkins makes a damning case against environmental advocates in Congress, who have been unwilling “to propose policies costly enough that they would actually influence the rate of increase of atmospheric greenhouse gases.” Exhibit A was Al Gore’s about face right after the 2008 election. Jenkins writes:

    [T]he closest the U.S. Congress came to passing a serious (if still ineffectual) cap-and-trade program was during the George W. Bush administration in early 2007. Then, within days of Barack Obama’s election in 2008, Al Gore announced a revelation: the “climate crisis” no longer required such unpleasant, de facto energy taxes. The problem could be solved with painless handouts to green entrepreneurs.

Then there is the issue of gun control, which Hillary Clinton has been increasingly using to attack Bernie Sanders. If you think that anything about guns proposed by those on the left is a serious proposal (gun show loopholes? The right to sue gun manufacturers?) consider the following.

Although no one knows for sure, there are apparently 310 million guns in private hands in the United States — about one for every person in the country. Further, by one estimate, private gun ownership increased by about 100 million since Barack Obama became president.

Here is the irony. It appears that every time the president talks about the need for gun control, people go out and buy more guns. Of course, the kind of measures he and Hillary are talking about are trivial. But in the attempt to fire up the Democratic base and convince them they intend to do something serious about guns, the president’s rhetoric apparently succeeds in convincing the opposition instead.

The best thing Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton could do to stop the proliferation of guns is to shut up and quit talking about firearms.

What would a serious gun control measure look like? In 1996, the government of Australia imposed a virtual ban on automatic and semiautomatic assault rifles and instituted a temporary gun buyback program that took some 650,000 weapons out of public circulation. The effort seems to have had no effect on suicides or homicides, but at least one would have to agree that the effort was serious.

Is that the type of proposal we might see from those on the left in the near future? Don’t hold your breath.

SOURCE

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Let the patient pay the piper, and the price of health care will fall

By Jeff Jacoby

SHE WENT TO the doctor, the one at the downtown hospital she’s been going to for years, for her annual physical in January. She showed her insurance card when she checked in and confirmed that the details hadn’t changed. The doctor gave her a clean bill of health, renewed her prescriptions, and updated her medical record. It was a routine visit, and she gave it little further thought.

Until a bill arrived this week.

She was puzzled. The amount due wasn’t exorbitant, but she shouldn’t have been billed at all: Under her family’s health insurance policy, a yearly physical is deemed preventive care and not subject to a copay. She examined the statement more closely and saw that it was treating her January check-up as two events. One was identified as “Preventive Care” and carried a charge of $465, which was covered by the insurance payment of $319.31 and the hospital “adjustment” of $145.69. A second item, vaguely labeled “Office Visit,” was listed as a $397 charge. Of that amount, the insurer paid $113.55, and the hospital adjustment knocked off a further $248.45. That left a $35 balance for her to pay.

She called the doctor’s medical practice. “You probably discussed something with your physician that was outside the scope of an ordinary physical,” the billing clerk surmised. “So when your visit was entered into the system, it was coded for an office consultation as well as a checkup.”

She thought that was ridiculous — what was the point of an annual exam, if not to speak freely with the doctor about anything? At all events, she had no recollection of discussing an “outside-the-scope” topic and said so to the clerk. So her account has been sent back for a “coding review.” She’ll have to wait 45 days for an answer.

Against the backdrop of $3 trillion in annual health care spending in the United States, one woman’s frustration with a medical bill may seem insignificant. But who doesn’t encounter such frustrations? On any given day, millions of Americans are tearing their hair to make sense of billing snafus and insurance deductibles, prescription co-pays and out-of-network surcharges, baffling reimbursement rules and aggravating Medicare procedures, coding mysteries and paperwork blizzards. They face a myriad of complexities and convolutions that have nothing to do with buying health care . . . but everything to do with expecting someone else to pay for it.

Americans are forever being told that health care costs are out of control and that only sweeping government intervention can bring them back to earth. Obamacare was supposed to make medical plans more affordable, but premiums are higher than ever . Bernie Sanders campaigns on a platform of “Medicare for all” — single-payer socialized health care — yet any such system would inevitably lower the quality of care while raising prices still higher.

Any health care “reform” that intensifies government regulation or enlarges the role of insurance companies only makes a bad system worse. Like the woman described above, for most Americans, even their most routine and predictable medical costs must be routed through the maddening labyrinth of insurance procedures.

But nothing could be more counterproductive.

When Americans rely on a third party — private insurance, Medicare, or Medicaid — to pay most of their medical bills, they forfeit their power as consumers. Our ill-conceived system of subsidized health plans provided by employers and taxpayer-funded “free” treatment through the government ends up stripping patients of their economic clout. Doctors and hospitals have little incentive to compete by lowering prices, because patients rarely bother to ask about prices. By and large, health care providers in the United States do most of their negotiating with insurers or the government. After all, they’re the ones paying the piper.

It’s only when medical services aren’t reimbursed by a third party — think of Lasik eye surgery or veterinary care or the growing number of direct-pay “concierge” practices that don’t accept health insurance — that the consumer is king. When providers are paid directly by customers, transactions are transparent, prices fall, choices proliferate, and consumer convenience becomes a priority. Bills reflect actual prices, not inscrutable codes and deductibles and “adjustments” negotiated way over patients’ heads.

The purpose of insurance is to protect policyholders from unforeseen or catastrophic expenses. Nobody taps auto insurance to pay for tuneups or new tires; we use it when the car is rear-ended or stolen. We shouldn’t be using health insurance to pay for routine checkups, either. If it seems odd to say so, that’s only because we’ve convinced ourselves that normal medical expenses shouldn’t be treated normally. If we want health care to cost less, we should pay for it ourselves.

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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Mao’s vision of Utopia - torture the middle classes and bury them alive

BOOK REVIEW OF The cultural revolution: A people’s history 1962-1976  by Frank Dikotter

The problem with revolutions is that you have to keep them going, otherwise, as Chairman Mao’s ‘faithful dog’ Zhou Enlai pointed out, ‘every time the situation improves a little, the people move back towards capitalism’. How very dare they!

They go in for private property. They hold local markets. They enjoy raising their own chickens and pigs. They start acknowledging the profit motive.

As in France and Russia before, to put a stop to enterprise the Chinese authorities felt they had to unleash fresh waves of terror, cowing the populace with killing sprees, purges, arbitrary arrest and torture.

As Dikotter explains in this definitive and harrowing study: ‘The flames of revolution had to be constantly rekindled.’

Mao had already subjected his vast country to the Great Leap Forward, when tens of millions lost their lives in a mad agricultural experiment. Mass starvation and disease ensued when the peasants were compelled to hand over their harvests to the state.

Desperate men and women were executed for digging up a potato or stealing a handful of rice. Yet such exterminations, said Mao, were merely ‘an unavoidable phenomenon of our forward march’.

By the early Sixties, however, China was in danger of recovering its equilibrium, so Mao, desiring frenzy, decreed that ‘we must punish this party of ours’.

Villagers who had tilled their own patch of ground or woven baskets for sale were accused of ‘undermining the collective economy’. Gathering firewood was considered capitalist.

Soon, everyone was suspecting everyone else of ‘speculation’ and ‘moral decadence’. Officials who had run the communes were charged with being at the centre of ‘a nest of counter-revolutionaries’.

The police, the army, the teaching profession: suddenly ‘class enemies’ were all over the shop.

Mao, who modelled himself on Stalin, delighted in the paranoia, and people proved their loyalty to the Chairman by joining in what quickly became a seemingly endless cycle of violence.

What may have begun — when Mao became the founding father of the People’s Republic of China in 1949 — as a Communist Utopia to redistribute wealth, degenerated, as these projects always do, into widespread suffering as the messianic dictatorship increased its savage grip.

By 1966, 60 million copies of Mao’s Little Red Book had been distributed, and because ‘the thoughts of Chairman Mao are always correct’, his totalitarian slogans were endorsements for the anarchy: ‘Carry the revolution through to the end’; ‘To rebel is justified’; ‘When bad people get beaten by good people, they deserve it.’

Mao could see the young were impressionable, easy to manipulate and eager to fight. The so-called Red Guards were formed, a ‘screaming, self-righteous band’ numbering many millions, who went on the rampage.

Higher education was a particular target. Professors were spat upon and made to wear placards around their necks identifying them as ‘imperial spies’. Lecturers were beaten with nail-spiked clubs, made to crawl over broken glass and had boiling water poured over them.

‘There were even cases of people being buried alive,’ writes Dikotter.

Pensioners and those on sick leave were flung out of the cities, along with China’s ‘most eminent scientists, physicians, engineers and philosophers, who were made to clean toilets.

‘What stinks is not so much the excrement as your own ideology,’ intellectuals were told. A ‘counter-revolutionary’ came to mean anyone who ‘likes freedom’ — freedom of speech, movement, expression. It was a death sentence to be found listening to a foreign radio station. Tough if you followed The Archers.

Military drills were held in the middle of the night. ‘Class enemies’ had their tongues ripped out or eyes gouged from their sockets. The offspring of former landlords or vaguely bourgeois sorts were electrocuted. Children were hung from their feet and whipped.

In the district of Wuxuan, 60 people had their heads bashed in with hammers.

Evidence of cannibalism emerged: ‘Students cooked the meat in casseroles.’ People must have felt fortunate if they were simply deported to labour camps in Manchuria.

The Red Guard, or ‘Mao’s little generals’, were ‘enjoined to smash the old world’ and did so with alacrity. Prehistoric bronzes were melted down in foundries, exquisite porcelain and jade stamped upon.

Private printing presses were closed down, religion abolished and literature and art had to be ‘geared towards definite political lines’. The Red Guard attacked 36 flower shops in Shanghai as bouquets were ‘wasteful and bourgeois’.

They flogged malefactors with the buckle-end of their belts, slashed jeans with knives and chopped off high heels. Restaurants served only plain meals. Soon there was no music, cinema, theatre or any museum open.

Florists, cobblers, greengrocers, coppersmiths and even embroiderers were suddenly out of a job.  Toys, make-up and the keeping of domestic pets were banned. (Cats were massacred.)

School teachers, scientists and writers — ‘intellectuals’ — were ‘battered into submission’, made to pay lip service to the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’.

By June 1967, China was in chaos, says Dikotter. Approximately two million people had been killed and many more lives were wrecked by false confessions and denunciations.

Five million party members were punished in public trials, and 77,000 such citizens were then hounded to their deaths. Everything had to become ‘thoroughly proletarian’, yet what Mao and his henchmen really hated and feared, like all tyrants, was that their subjects, despite the pressure, may here and there still have harboured private thoughts, shown initiative, been capable of ingenuity and individuality.

On the other hand, don’t think we have been spared the Red Guards.  Those egregious and intolerant Oxford and Cambridge students who want to tear down historical statues of Cecil Rhodes or Queen Victoria, and ban this and censure that, and silence this person and vilify another, are behaving in a way that Chairman Mao would at once recognise and condone.

SOURCE

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Liberty at Risk

The American Left’s desire to crush Liberty and dissent in order to “fundamentally transform the United States of America” has reached metastatic levels. In the last three weeks alone, the following stories have surfaced. All of which indicate we are well on our way toward relinquishing our birthright. Even worse, millions of Americans are apparently more than willing to do so.

First, this week the Supreme Court heard arguments in the United States v. Texas case that will determine whether a president can unilaterally rewrite immigration law. If SCOTUS rules in Barack Obama’s favor, the separation of powers outlined in the first three articles of the Constitution will be rendered moot and, as political analyst Charles Krauthammer wryly observed, “you can send Congress home.” And the Left is not content to stop there. A coalition of 118 cities and counties have filed a legal brief asserting they will lose up to $800 million in economic benefits if large numbers of illegal aliens remain subject to deportation.

Second, the IRS has admitted it abides the use of fraudulent Social Security numbers used by illegal aliens to process tax payments — and refunds.

Third, in New York and California, Democratic attorneys general Eric Schneiderman and Kamala Harris are pursuing fraud investigations against Exxon, based on the premise they can “prosecute persons and institutions with nonconforming views on global warming,” writes National Review’s Kevin Williams. “Prosecuting political institutions and businesses for political activism is brown-shirt business.”

Fourth, the Obama administration, already under fire for its determination to flood America with Syrian “refugees,” announced it will reduce its vetting process to three months, instead of 18-24 months. They claim the reduced time is necessary to handle a sped-up “surge operation” whose population is 99% Sunni Muslim. Even more insulting, Gina Kassem, the regional refugee coordinator at the U.S. Embassy in Amman, noted the administration’s target of 10,000 refugees “is a floor and not a ceiling, and it is possible to increase the number.”

Fifth, using the Fair Housing Act as a club, the Obama administration is forcing cities to embrace “diversity” that consists of building low-income housing in affluent neighborhoods nationwide. This forced integration scheme is political gerrymandering in disguise, and it is aimed at taking peoples' basic property rights and the constitutionally protected right of free association and tossing them on the ash heap of history.

Sixth, in North Carolina, the federal government threatens to withhold billions of dollars in federal aid for schools, highways and housing unless the state repeals a law restricting local authorities from over-riding state law that restricts the use of bathrooms transgender people can use. The Rainbow Mafia’s corporate hitmen are boycotting the state, aligning themselves with the idea that self-identification, and not genital makeup, is the only criterion that can be used to determine access. Not only to bathrooms, but locker rooms, and membership on sports teams as well. Tennessee will be the next state targeted by federal government’s wrath.

Seventh, when French President Francois Hollande referred to “Islamist terrorism” at a meeting with Obama in early April, the White House initially deleted the phrase from its audio translation, only to restore it when questioned about the deletion. “The Obama administration must be aware that in the 1930s, the Soviet Union wiped clean all photos, recordings and films of Leon Trotsky on orders from Josef Stalin,” writes historian Victor Davis Hanson. “Trotsky was deemed politically incorrect, and therefore his thoughts and photos simply vanished.”

Eighth, an astounding video taken at the University of Washington shows students struggling to disagree with a 5'-9" Caucasian male’s assertion that he is a 6'-5" Chinese female first-grader. “These are actual college students,” writes columnist Rod Dreher. “Adults who have the right to vote. And their reason is so compromised that they are unsure what the man in front of them is, so terrified are they of saying the wrong thing. … These people are ripe for dictatorship. They will not let themselves see reality if it offends against the party line.”

Ninth, in a vote at Stanford University, efforts by a group of students to restore a class requirement in Western Civilization was rejected by 85% the student body, and a student suspected of writing an article in support of the measure was suspended from a low-income advocacy group known as the Stanford First-Generation Low Income Partnership. A column in campus newspaper, The Stanford Daily, warned that passing such a proposal “would necessitate that our education be centered on upholding white supremacy, capitalism and colonialism, and all other oppressive systems that flow from Western civilizations.”

And tenth, in a speech at the Vatican, Democrat presidential candidate Bernie Sanders insisted that Americans “must reject the foundations of this contemporary [capitalist] economy as immoral and unsustainable,” further insisting that we must “redirect our efforts and vision to the common good.” Perhaps Sanders could explain why forcibly taking the fruits of one American’s labor and giving it to another is moral, and which group of leftist elites who believe they own the franchise on “enlightened thinking” gets to define “common good” — using coercive government as their vehicle for doing so.

Make no mistake: The same American Left that purportedly champions dissent, diversity, tolerance and inclusion utterly rejects anyone or anything that deviates from their definition of the terms. Moreover, they are at best intent on intimidating those opposing views — or, at worst, criminalizing those views at worst.

“Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty,” Thomas Jefferson reminds us. Ronald Reagan put it this way: “Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn’t pass it to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the same, or one day we will spend our sunset years telling our children and our children’s children what it was once like in the United States where men were free.”

Those sunset years are upon us. It’s time to fight back.

SOURCE

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Enough said



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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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