The poor have more heart attacks

That the poverty is a strong correlate of worse health tends to be ignored in the medical literature so a strong study pointing it out is worth noting. It is more support for the idea that there is a general syndrome of biological fitness

Geographic Variation in Trends and Disparities in Acute Myocardial Infarction Hospitalization and Mortality by Income Levels, 1999-2013

Erica S. Spatz et al.

ABSTRACT

Importance:  During the past decade, the incidence and mortality associated with acute myocardial infarction (AMI) in the United States have decreased substantially. However, it is unknown whether these improvements were consistent across communities of different economic status and geographic regions since efforts to improve cardiovascular disease prevention and management may have had variable impact.

Objective:  To determine whether trends in US county-level, risk-standardized AMI hospitalization and mortality rates varied by county-based median income level.

Design, Setting, and Participants:  In this observational study, county-level risk-standardized (age, sex, and race) hospitalization and 1-year mortality rates for AMI from January 1, 1999, to December 31, 2013, were measured for Medicare beneficiaries 65 years or older. Data analysis was performed from June 2 through December 1, 2015. Counties were stratified by median income percentile using 1999 US Census Bureau data adjusted for inflation: low- (<25th average-="" high-="" or="" th-75th="">75th) income groups.

Main Outcomes and Measures:  The effect of income on the slope of AMI hospitalizations and mortality, measured as differences in the rate of change in AMI hospitalizations and mortality by county income and by the 4 US geographic regions, and a possible lag effect among low-income counties.

Results:  In the 15-year study period, AMI risk-standardized hospitalization and mortality rates decreased significantly for all 3 county income groups. Mean hospitalization rates were significantly higher among low-income counties compared with high-income counties in 1999 (1353 vs 1123 per 100 000 person-years, respectively) and in 2013 (853 vs 648 per 100 000 person-years, respectively). One-year mortality rates after hospitalization for AMI were similar across county income groups, decreasing from 1999 (31.5%, 31.4%, and 31.1%, for high-, average-, and low-income counties, respectively) to 2013 (26.2%, 26.1%, and 25.4%, respectively). Income was associated with county-level, risk-standardized AMI hospitalization rates but not mortality rates. Increasing 1 interquartile range of median county consumer price index–adjusted income ($12 000) was associated with a decline in 46 and 37 hospitalizations per 100 000 person-years for 1999 and 2013, respectively; interaction between income and time was 0.56. The rate of decline in AMI hospitalizations was similar for all county income groups; however, low-income counties lagged behind high-income counties by 4.3 (95% CI, 3.1-5.9) years. There were no significant differences in trends across geographic regions.

Conclusions and Relevance:  Hospitalization and mortality rates of AMI declined among counties of all income levels, although hospitalization rates among low-income counties lag behind those of the higher income groups. These findings lend support for a more targeted, community-based approach to AMI prevention.

JAMA Cardiol. Published online May 11, 2016. doi:10.1001/jamacardio.2016.0382

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Vermont college to close due to ‘crushing’ debt incurred by Bernie Sanders’s wife

If you want a sneak peak into what the U.S. economy would look like under a Bernie Sanders presidency, look no further than Vermont’s Burlington College. Sanders’s wife, Jane O’Meara Sanders, was president of the private liberal arts school from 2004 to 2011. She must’ve not been very good at her job, though, because the college announced Monday that it will close May 27 due to “the crushing weight of the debt” incurred under Ms. Sanders’s presidency:

At the end of 2010, Ms. Sanders took out $10 million in loans on behalf of Burlington College to purchase a 32-acre swathe of land from the Roman Catholic diocese, which put the land up for sale to help cover the costs of a $17 million sexual-abuse settlement.

As Heat Street reported last month, the college almost immediately fell short on its financial obligations as fundraising pledges and commitments Ms. Sanders cited in the loan agreements never materialized.

Less than a year after leading Burlington College into massive debt, Ms. Sanders resigned, taking with her a $200,000 severance package. By 2014, because of its shaky finances and running deficits, Burlington College found itself placed on probation for two years by the regional accreditation agency.

A Burlington College news release issued this morning called these financial hurdles “insurmountable at this time.”

And if displacing hundreds of college students (the very demographic for which Bernie has claimed to be a champion) and shuttering an institution of higher education isn’t enough, Catholics in Vermont want to investigate Ms. Sanders for fraud:

Catholic parishioners in Vermont have called for an investigation into whether Ms. Sanders committed federal bank fraud by deliberately misrepresenting the amount that the college had secured in fundraising pledges as she sought financing for the land purchase.

As Ms. Sanders pursued financing for the land acquisition, she repeatedly said that Burlington College had received more than $2 million in fundraising commitments and pledges, according to numerous records.

But in fiscal year 2011, Burlington College raised only $279,000—though the college had earlier claimed to have secured $1.2 million in confirmed pledges.

Apparently Bernie isn’t the only Sanders who thinks other people’s money grows on trees.

SOURCE

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Clueless Republicans Don't Realize It's the Democrats Who Have the Problem

 BY ROGER L SIMON

I'm a bit perplexed with the continued resistance of so many of my right-wing brothers and sisters to Donald Trump. If it's just his brash style and vulgar taste, his preference for glittery gold over brushed nickel or flat black for his bathroom fixtures, I could understand it. I'm a flat black guy myself. But it's so much more than that.

The latest "betrayal" is that Trump admitted his tax plan was negotiable  Imagine that—a tax plan being negotiated between the administration and Congress! Never heard of that before.... oh, wait.

Never mind that the Trump plan, even negotiated, would be considerably lower than just about any on offer and well within the parameters of conventional GOP proposals.  (Now be honest—who would you rather have negotiating for you, Donald Trump or Paul Ryan? Who do you think would get a better result?) Nevertheless The Donald, in the opinion of the cognoscenti, once more has shown himself to be a feckless character not worthy of support—and the Republican gulf widens.

Or so we're supposed to believe, even though he has the nomination completely nailed down, signed, sealed and delivered, everything but set in bronze.

Meanwhile,  to almost everyone's surprise, the Democrats are still fighting, their internal enmity growing as Comrade Bernie wins primary after primary, sometimes by large majorities, and Lady Hillary clings to her super delegates like a three-year-old to a blanket. What happens if she loses California? According to West Virginia exit polls, a full third of Democratic primary voters are ready to defect to Trump. In the latest poll of swing states, Donald is already ahead of Clinton in Ohio and neck-and-neck in Florida and Pennsylvania. And the big show is just getting started.

It is the Democrats, not the Republicans, that have the problem, but you wouldn't know it if you watched, say, The Kelly File or had your Internet perpetually wired to National Review or The Weekly Standard, where the writing is as elegant as the thinking, these days, is often fuzzy. The Democrats are fighting a real war of ideas, disreputable though those ideas may be, while the Republicans fight a status war among themselves, a battle over control, not, except in the margins, over ideology.

Am I wrong? Remind me again where Trump, at least currently, is not a conservative? Taxes, check. Deficit, check. Immigration, check. Sanctuary cities, check. Strong defense, check.  Supreme Court, check. Veterans, check. Common core, check. Iran deal, check. Israel, check. Healthcare, check. Pro-life, check.... Oh, yes, Planned Parenthood.  He thinks the part of that operation that treats cervical cancer is okay. What a sin.

But...but...but... he has those whacky ideas on NATO and nuclear weapons and trade.

Are they so whacky? Other nations maybe should pay the part of NATO they contracted to. And the Japanese and South Koreans themselves have been talking about building nukes.  Wouldn't you after eight years of Obama? And then trade, who would doubt it could have been negotiated better, considering how our foreign policy deals have been negotiated?

And of course there's the matter of Muslim immigration. He wants that restricted for now. So do most Americans, according to polls. Again, this is the opening point of a negotiation. Who knows where it will end? But no one, other than the extreme left, would like to see the Syrian refugees pouring in. Trump will have the public on his side in preventing it.

As I said, the real problem is with the Democrats.  They are the ones in true disarray and are likely to remain so through their convention. This is a huge gift to the Republicans if they can only suck it up, shelve their egos, get together and take advantage of it. It doesn't matter whether you are a neocon, a social con, a libertarian, a financial con or just a plain con. Ideology is so last year. (Well not completely, but it doesn't have to be on the front burner all the time, does it?) Just do it.

SOURCE

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More Leftist authoritarianism

Smokers in California from 18 to 20 years old have only three and a half weeks until the state’s new tobacco restrictions kick in. Come June 9—two days after the California primary election—tobacco consumption for the under 21 crowd will be verboten.

Young adults will still be able to make many life-or-death decisions, but they won’t be able to light up legally unless they are in the military. But that doesn’t necessarily mean all will abstain from indulging in tobacco: Many will have access to smokes and chew via the underground market that is sure to emerge. For evidence, observe how black markets arose in New York in response to the Empire State’s tax on cigarettes.

“New York’s experience is instructive,” write Independent Institute Senior Fellow William F. Shughart II and Strata Policy Analyst Josh T. Smith. “Largely because of the titanic tax that it places on cigarettes, almost 60 percent of the cigarettes sold in New York are smuggled into the state, according to the Tax Foundation.”

While experience with other prohibitions (and exorbitant tax hikes) offers strong reasons to oppose California’s new tobacco law, the moral case against it is even stronger. “It is absurd to claim that 18-year-olds are too young to buy a pack of cigarettes, but are mature enough to consent to sex, marry, or vote,” Shughart and Smith write. “It is a double standard that threatens the protection of all personal choices, even the ones still considered sacrosanct.... Lawmakers should let adults be adults and allow them to make their own decisions because they are worthy of our respect as equal, autonomous human beings.”

SOURCE

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America's slide downhill?



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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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China and the East China Sea

There has been much heartburn lately over China's island building in the East China Sea.  Just about everyone disapproves.  I do not.  I realize that in saying so I am rather like the editor of the Skibbereen Eagle, when he warned the Tsar, but what I think will happen generally does happen so what I have to say on the matter may be a harbinger of things to come nonetheless.

For a start, I think island building is a good thing in general.  The climate of the area is a pleasant one and recovering land from the sea expands the human habitat.  The Dutch would of course agree with that, though Greenies would automatically talk of endangered marine creatures. And China has an enormous population so needs all the living space it can find.  So I hope that in due course there the facilities there will be greater  than the merely military.  Could there even be a tourist industry there one day?  Stranger things have happened

Living space is of course not the motive of the island building concerned.  The motive is a combination of military considerations and resource hunger.  China has a huge need for resources, energy sources in particular, so the prospect of oil reserves in the general area is hugely motivating. And it could  be argued that China deserves those resources in the light of its huge poplulation and that less populous nations have a lesser claim on them.  That is of course a socialist argument but China is officially a socialist country and we live in a socialist world.

And the military argument is orthodox. Many nations have sought and supported buffer states and the worldwide network of military bases maintained by the USA puts it in no position  to claim that China should not maintain bases at a distance from the homeland.

But in the end, the argument is over. China has clearly lost patience with the dithering and debate about ownership of the places concerned and has decided to settle the argument in its own favour in the traditional way, by conquest. And it has stated that it will defend its new bases so the message is basically "Up yours".  The world would do well to accept the new status quo.  It's not going to change. You don't argue with China

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How Trump Could Destroy Hillary Clinton In The Debates

Every once in a while, someone out there says something that a fellow writer has been mulling on for months, but couldn’t find a way to express. This is both frustrating (it was my idea!) and reassuring (it confirms what you’ve been thinking).

This happened to me recently when I was listening to The Tom Woods Show, and Michael Malice described what might happen when Donald Trump debates Hillary Clinton.

Despite demographic trends, I have sensed that Trump had a shot to defeat her. But I have struggled to find a way to explain how “magic” can beat “math.” Well, one way this could happen would be for there to be a big moment. This could come in the form of some sort of disaster (like a terrorist attack, God forbid), or it could simply come in the form of a knockout punch. (Trump is unlikely to win if the fight goes the distance and relies on the judges’ scorecard, but I could imagine Hillary choking, and Trump triumphing.)

Michael Malice provides us with one hypothetical example of how this might occur during one of the presidential debates.

This is a partial transcript of his conversation with Tom Woods:

"[Hillary’s] going to come in with her little smarmy smirk and have some kind of joke about Trump, and he’s going to improv some devastating one-liner… As soon as Trump hits her back, she’s not going to have a comeback on her feet. And she’s going to look weak and pathetic.

He’s going to dare her to say ‘I dare you to say Islamic Fundamentalist Terrorism,’ and she’ll either obey him and look weak, or refuse and look cowardly.

And — this is the one — I’m predicting this one right now: If she has one of her coughing fits on stage, he is going to attack her rapid fire. And she’s literally going to be unable to speak. And he’s going to say things like, ‘Look, she’s dying in front of us.’ ‘Look, I like grammas, but they should be in a home, not the president.’ ‘She’s weak. She’s pathetic.’ … And he’s like: ‘Let’s take a break, cause she needs a breather. This woman is not well.’

That will be the moment that destroys her campaign. He’s going to eat her alive in those debates. And, as you know, most people in the middle don’t care about ideology. They just respond like dogs to a visceral way towards strength…and in those debates, he is going to have her in the palm of his hand. There’s nothing she will be able to do"

Sadly, I buy Malice’s theory that most voters are lemmings who will follow the Alpha dog. Hell, some of Trump’s supporters have taken to calling him “daddy.” What is more, Trump is a dangerous fighter, partly because he’s willing to say and do things that most of us would never think of.

Few of us would pounce on a woman while she’s coughing, and there are really two reasons for this. First, it’s unkind and unchivalrous. But second, we also think it would be bad politics — that it would backfire and make us look “mean.”

Trump is unencumbered by the former concerns — and, in terms of the latter — seems to have proven that chivalry went out with the knights.

Based on observation (the way he dispatched of opponents ranging from Jeb Bush to Marco Rubio to Ted Cruz  — not to mention the way he has attacked women ranging from Megyn Kelly to Carly Fiorina), Trump is ready, willing, and able to do this.

Let’s see if he gets his shot at a knockout punch.

SOURCE

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Obama’s Gift of Immunity to Trump

 BY VICTOR DAVIS HANSON

It is now old wisdom that Barack Obama created Trump—as in the idea of a national pushback to Obama’s out-of-the-mainstream agendas and the unconstitutional way in which he pursued them. Forgotten is the insulation that Obama has also provided for the excesses of Trump as a candidate and, especially, if he were to be president.

Last week, in sober and judicious tones Obama all but warned Americans that they cannot seriously support Trump, who, he implied, is little more than a reality-TV conman. But such admonitions come from a president whose chief foreign policy advisor, a failed fiction writer and D.C. insider, just bragged how he deceived the media and Washington’s insider world by feeding amateurish journalists misleading talking points. Is it serious or in the spirit of reality TV for a president to invite to the White House a rapper whose court-ordered ankle monitor goes off in a presidential ceremony, or to give an exclusive interview with YouTube personality GloZell, noted for her selfies of eating breakfast cereal floating about her in a bathtub? Obama has lectured the media that they have to vent Trump, this from a candidate who never released his medical or college records, whose speech in praise of Rashid Khalidi was suppressed by the media, and whose entire memoir was only belatedly found out to be impressionistic fiction. Obama lowered the bar and Trump skipped over it.

Can Trump mislead much more than did Obama, who assured Americans that they would never lose their doctor or health plan but rather save money and have better care, and that pulling peacekeepers from Iraq would ensure a stable and self-reliant country? Obama, remember, also bragged abroad that he had all but closed Guantanamo within a year and would stop the Bush habit of piling up more debt? After Ben Rhodes and Jonathan Gruber, what exactly are the presidential standards on veracity that we must hold Trump to?

Can Trump act any less constitutionally than has Obama? Will he scan existing law, and order his attorney general to enforce some statutes but ignore others? Will he boast that “I won” and thus has a pen and a phone to sign treaties with foreign countries without Senate ratification?  Will Trump, in Obama fashion, threaten to cut off federal funds to cities that believe in biologically identified male/female restrooms, while encouraging other cities to defy federal immigration law? Sanctuary cities in California, but not in North Carolina? Are we back to 1860 and state nullification of federal law if and when the president wishes it?

How can the media fault Trump as uniquely dense for lacking even basic familiarity with geography or foreign affairs, when they shrugged after the current president of the United States variously believed there are 57 states, there is an Austrian-speaking Austria, and the Maldives islands are the Falklands? When a president declares that Hawaii is in Asia, certainly the media cannot be surprised that Trump is not embarrassed about being clueless about the nuclear triad.

Trump is certainly vicious, but after 2009 viciousness is no longer a mortal sin in presidential politics. If it were, Obama would have been through for his thuggish language, after advising supporters to “get in their faces,” take “a gun to a knife fight” and “punish our enemies.” Trump often ridicules the helpless. But he if stoops to make fun of the Special Olympics or jokes about vaporizing people with Predator drones, what will the New York Times or NPR do? Obama ridiculed the wealthy, who did not build their own businesses, or did not know when to stop profiting, or were clueless about the point at which they had made enough money or needed their money spread around. But then again, Obama made fun of the lower middle classes as well, who clung to their religion and guns and were stereotyped as xenophobes and nativists.

Trump can be polarizing on matters of race, but here again by what standard—when the president and his team have established new lows of racial discourse? Does Trump comment on ongoing criminal cases by suggesting one of the involved might look like one of his possible white offspring? Did Trump smear illegal aliens further by suggesting that they were “typical Mexican persons”? Would he appoint an attorney general who might refer to whites as “my people” and accuse the country of being a “nation of cowards”? Would Trump stoop to wink and nod about shared white racial solidarity with a redneck comedian who shouted out to a President Trump, “Yo, Donny, you did it, my cracker, you did it”? After Obama, there are no rules about racial discourse—and no media sensitivity to racially coarse and offensive language.

Trump, as the media has shown, is certainly a crude narcissist. But will he learn to boast as a smooth egoist that he can lower the seas and cool the planet? Does he insist that he is a better political handler and speechwriter than his handlers and speechwriters? Does he claim that he will be the fourth best president in U.S. history—albeit in an outer-borough accent rather than in an Ivy League mellifluous patois?  “I,”“me” “mine” and “my” are now the normal baggage of a presidential speech.

As for the supposed fanatical Trumpsters, have they gone berserk with wild praise of Trump in near divine terms? Has a Laura Ingraham or Charles Hurt, or any other columnist, historian, talk show host, or journalist said that Trump’s neat pant crease presages that he will be a great president or that Trump makes his leg tingle, or confessed that Trump is a god, or assured that Trump would be the smartest president in the history of the office? So far, I have not read any such embarrassment in the Washington Times or American Conservative. After Obama, biased deification of a presidential candidate is old hat.

Trump certainly has wacky ideas. But will he promise to ensure that the coal industry goes out of business, or electric rates will skyrocket, or will his energy czar hope that our gas prices reach European levels? Does he plan to double the national debt in eight years or dismantle the existing health care system? Will Trump praise and subsidize a failing coal company as iconic of the country’s future in the manner that Obama coronated the soon-to-be-bankrupt Solyndra? Will he brag that setting and then ignoring red lines for Syria were among his greatest foreign policy moments?

The point is not to whitewash Trump’s crudity and outlandishness, but to explain why it so far has not eliminated him as a candidate.  Obama’s outright destruction of presidential protocols created candidate Trump. The media, which in Faustian fashion mortgaged its soul to empower Obama, has now lost all credibility as a legitimate critic and arbiter of the dangers of narcissism, half-educated pop knowledge, polarizing politics, and demonization of one’s critics.

Sadly, nearly every gross thing Trump says or does has had an antecedent in the Obama administration. "Hope and Change" begat "Make America Great," in a tit-for-tat way that Trump’s likely garish convention props will mimic Obama’s Styrofoam Greek columns. After Obama dismissed ISIS as jayvees by invoking Kobe Bryant and the Lakers, we should not be too outraged that Trump cited an endorsement from Mike Tyson.

Yikes: Trump Plans to Run America Like He Ran His Casinos
There may be reasons to vote against Trump, but at least spare us the outrage that he is somehow uniquely demagogic, crude, or ill-informed in a manner that we have not seen over the last eight years from Trump’s greatest enabler.

SOURCE  

There is a  new  lot of postings by Chris Brand just up -- mainly about immigration

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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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Statin side-effects at last being taken seriously

The methodology seems very weak but at least an awareness of the issue is evident

Researchers have launched a new £1million trial to assess whether controversial heart drug statins cause severe muscle pain.

The Government is set to fund the trial which comes after doctors have been overestimating the risk of heart attacks and strokes for some patients.

Research uncovered by the Sunday Express also found doctors had been prescribing the drugs to patients who do not need them.

Those eligible to take the drugs - which are the most commonly prescribed treatment in the UK - has increased to around one in four adults, which equates to 12 million people.

The groundbreaking study, which received a grant from the National Institute of Health Research, will assess the risk of muscle pain and has been backed by health experts.

Professor Jane Armitage, an expert in public health medicine at the University of Oxford, is a key researcher for the trial.  Professor Armitage told the Sunday Express: 'The evidence suggests statins are safe and undoubtedly reduce the risk of heart attacks and stroke.'  The British Heart Foundation also believes statins are safe.

But cardiologist Dr Aseem Malhotra said: 'I have no doubt millions of people taking statins in the UK will not benefit but are being put at risk of unnecessary harm.'

The new trial will involve 200 patients who have stopped or want to stop using statins due to muscle pain or fatigue.

It will investigate whether muscle issues are more common in those using the statins than those taking a dummy drug.

Concerns about statins were raised earlier this year by the Queen's former doctor, Sir Richard Thompson, who called for an independent inquiry.

SOURCE

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Out of the spotlight, some say there is a softer side of Trump

Andrea Lake, who appeared on Season Five of “The Apprentice,” had every reason not to like Donald Trump. He was a bully, she thought. Too brash. His bankruptcies bothered her, and the way he lied about them bothered her more.

But then she met him. Over the course of a lunch in Manhattan, with other contestants on the show, she came to a shuddering realization: She liked the guy. “He was super charming,” she said. “He was legitimately funny and quick-witted.”

The man who would scream “You’re fired!” in front of the TV cameras would later call some of those same losing contestants on their cellphones to follow up. After firing one contestant on his reality show in Season Six, he even offered her a job in real life.

Interviews with former business colleagues, campaign rivals, and others who have known Trump up close say there is a jarring juxtaposition between the Trump they know and the Trump they see these days on TV.

Trump the presidential candidate is omnipresent, constantly invading TV screens or appearing on stage at big rallies, and it’s hard to see how that arena-sized personality can possibly fit into a meeting room or make small talk with regular folks. It raises the question about who the real Trump is — and how much of his stage persona is a schtick. Also to wonder at is how he manages to condense that outsized personality into someone that many people who’ve met with him describe almost universally as charming — though not the slightest self-effacing. Even in private, he remains his own greatest fan.

While Trump is now the star of a political reality show that has Americans transfixed — or, in some cases, horrified — behind the curtain, he can seem quite a different man. At times, surely, and especially in the company of women, his behavior and remarks can discomfit or offend. He is well known for his blunt comments about women’s bodies, their beauty or the want of it, and was, during his playboy years in the 1990s, no stranger to allegations of unwanted advances.

Still, as Trump begins trying to unite a fractious Republican Party, he is performing some head-spinning shifts, employing the powerful charm many describe to win over today those he insulted yesterday.

Trump — who has called Senator Lindsey Graham a “nut job,” “disgrace,” and “one of the dumbest human beings I’ve ever seen” — was suddenly on the other end of the line last week, in a private conversation with the South Carolina Republican.

“He told a few jokes,” said Graham, who has tossed some choice verbal bombs of his own Trump’s way. “Of all the people running, he’s the guy you’d want to go to dinner with.”

Representative Chris Collins of New York, the first member of Congress to endorse Trump, predicted some of his skeptical colleagues would rally to the real estate mogul once they had the opportunity to meet him one on one. “People will see the Donald Trump I know, not necessarily the one you see in the rallies,” Collins said.  “One on one, Mr. Trump is a listener, not a talker. When he’s got a group of people, he wants to know what’s going on in other people’s districts. . . . He’s a very thoughtful listener, one on one.”

Trump is a man whose public persona can seem like a caricature of himself, and at times it seems like the entire country is privy to his internal monologue — a stream of half thoughts, boasts, unabashed contradiction, and smartly targeted promises. His life has been lived in the tabloids, and he has played up aspects of his life that most people try to downplay, from his antics in the bedroom to the mountain of money in his bank account.

But in private gatherings, he usually doesn’t come on in all caps; he massages the conversation. “He’s methodical. Not extraordinarily aggressive,” said Republican National Committee chairman Reince Priebus, who has gotten to know Trump over the years. “He’s good at understanding that getting close to people personally is always good first before you go in for the chess move.”

Trump, as he is for those who approach him after rallies, can be intimidating to people meeting him for the first time. He’s the guy that most know as a celebrity. He’s the one who, if TV ratings are to be believed, we can’t seem to stop looking at.

Trump seems aware of his oversized public persona and works to make sure people aren’t intimidated by the version of him they see on television. Conversations with him don’t feel rushed. When he is approached for photos, he’ll pose for several, asking, “Do you have what you need?”

“He has a commanding presence. When he enters the room, you know Donald has entered the room. He’s magnetic,” said Chelsea Cooley, who won the Miss USA pageant in 2005 and later went to Trump for advice for her business.  “He can walk into the room and not say anything, but it’s palpable,” she added. “That is true confidence. His sheer presence is absolutely powerful.”

But quickly, she and others said, he attempts to put those around him at ease. He’s not one for small talk, but he’ll ask about family members. He repeatedly uses the names of the people he’s speaking with and makes his guests feel as if they are close friends, even when meeting him for the first time. It is, surprisingly to some Trump watchers, typically an insult-free space.

“You can’t become a multibillionaire by giving heads of other corporations unfavorable monikers,” said Hogan Gidley, a longtime Republican consultant. “You’ve got to have some savvy, some charm, some ability to be that successful.”

Gidley has met Trump several times. In their first encounter, Trump complimented him profusely, saying “Hogan! That’s a good name, a strong name. I like that very much.”  “He didn’t look past me, he didn’t look around the room,” he said. “He looked directly at me.”

A key element of Trump’s charm appears to be his ability to adapt to his audience.

When he ran into former presidential contender Mike Huckabee at a hotel in Iowa, he blew him an air kiss and said, “I love you, Mike!” When talking with beauty queens, he would speak in softer tones spliced with “sweetie” (an old-fashioned sort of endearment that is sometimes seen as sexist). When talking with contractors and officials in Atlantic City, he was far more coarse, dropping expletives with natural gusto.

“We called him our Teamster Friend,” said Edward Kline, a former state legislator who represented Atlantic City and is now backing Trump’s campaign. “Because he’d talk like a Teamster. He’s a little tough, and the language he would use, it was like you were talking with a Teamster. But you were dealing with Donald Trump.”

Throughout the Republican presidential campaign, he has tapped into an angry, fed-up slice of the electorate. Violent outbursts have occurred at some of his rallies. He is best known for proposing a wall along the border with Mexico, and insulting essentially all Latinos and Muslims, which makes it hard to imagine him building any bridges.

But when he wants to, it seems he can. The Trump who yells at protesters, requesting that police officers remove them from the room, is not the same Trump that those who have been in more intimate settings with him know. There is a diplomatic side to him that rarely comes across at the podium.

“I cringe sometimes,” says Tyana Alvarado, a former contestant from “The Apprentice” who, as a Hispanic and a woman, fits two of the groups that Trump has often insulted.

“I just feel like I know a different side of him and I need to protect him,” she said. “Sometimes the things he says it’s like, ‘God, you’re making it hard for me to protect you.’ But that’s not the Trump that I know.”

Trump makes a remarkable shift as soon as he gets in front of a camera, say those who’ve seen him both on and off screen.

“It’s almost like multiple personalities,” said Liza Wisner, a former contestant on “The Apprentice.” “I think he actually is genuine. But then he gets before the camera, and he puts on this act.”

Shortly after she was fired, coming in third place on Season 10, Trump invited Wisner to an 18-hole outing at one of his golf courses. He drove the golf cart around for several hours, munching on a sandwich and grabbing drinks from an ice chest.

“I think he knows what he’s doing. I truly believe this is part of his whole scheme to getting elected,” Wisner, who is turned off by his campaign but isn’t yet sure if she’ll vote for him. “There are moments I don’t believe we are where we are right now, considering a USA with Donald Trump as president. But anybody who ever meets him in person cannot say they didn’t enjoy meeting him.”

During the Republican primary campaign, most voters saw Trump only from a distance.  Juliana Bergeron, a Republican national committeewoman from New Hampshire, met Trump with a small group a few months back, in Keene, N.H.

In front of a group of more than a dozen locals, he came across as warm. He was likable. And funny. Nothing like how he would present himself later that day at a rally with 4,000 supporters. And some people left with a feeling they didn’t imagine they’d have: They planned to vote for him.

“He was very pleasant. Not as loud. He took time with each person individually,” Bergeron said. “I just would suspect if you and I were privy to his business meetings, they are not at all like what we see of him on CNN.”

Lake, “The Apprentice” contestant who was prepared to dislike Trump when she first met him, says she despises his politics and thinks he would be a terrible president.  She cannot imagine why anyone would vote for him. But she would be happy, thrilled even, to have him over to her house.

“If you met him, even if you think you don’t like him, you would invite him into your home for dinner,” she said. “He’s charming, one on one. He would win you over. He just would.”

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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How different are Jehovah's Witness beliefs?

To start at the end:  Not very different at all.

Charles Taze Russell, the founder of Jehovah's Witnesses, was originally a Presbyterian and quite a lot of JW doctrines are held in common with traditional Presbyterians.  Like a lot of strict Presbyterians, particularly in Scotland, the JWs don't like drinking or smoking and are dubious about dancing.  Both denominations believe that the Bible is the word of God and that salvation is needed to get God's reward in the afterlife.  And the hymns that JWs sing are just slightly re-worded versions of generally popular hymns.

Perhaps the best known doctrine of the JWs is that we live in the "end times":  That Armageddon, the end of the secular world, is around the corner.  And that is actually a common belief among a variety of Protestant groups, though usually a belief by a particular congregation rather than by the whole of a denomination.  Matthew 24 makes it pretty clear that Jesus too believed that the end was nigh, and the apostle Paul clearly did (1 Corinthians 15:51), so it is hardly surprising that some Christians still do.

And their pacifism is also shared by a variety of other Christians -- such as the Quakers.  After reading Matthew 5:39 I was once a pacifist myself.

Their rejection of blood transfusions is a little peculiar but it should be noted that both Jews and Muslims are superstitious about blood and take great care not to eat any.  JWs think likewise but add that it is inconsistent to avoid taking blood into your body via your mouth and then take it in by other means.  So their sensitivity there is just a refinement of a prohibition followed by over a billion people.

And here's the kicker about that:  There was a study of survival after heart surgery that took a particular interest in survival by JWs.  Apparently transfusions are common during  heart surgery so they expected a greater mortality among JWs after they had refused transfusions.  The study found that about a third of non-JWs died but NO JWs did.  Tranfusions cause stresses of their own.  Use of transfusions has declined markedly since then.  So JWs did have the last laugh.  God's wisdom?  They think so.

JWs also reject the messy doctrine of the Holy Trinity but they are not entirely alone in that.  As the name implies, Unitarians do too -- if there are any of those left.  Christadelphians also reject the Trinity doctrine.  But it is a major break from Chistianity generally.  Even Seventh day Adventists accept the Trinity.  It should be noted that the doctrine of the Trinity was introduced by Athanasius in the fourth century as a theological compromise. Even the word "Trinity" is not mentioned in the Bible.

JWs also reject Christmas and Easter as being pagan celebrations but that is widely acknowledged among more scholarly Christians.

But the biggest break from other denominations is the JW belief that the soul is not immortal.  Since there are quite a lot of places in the Bible where the soul is said to die, it is not a surprising belief but the doctrine of the immortal soul is apparently too ego-pleasing for anyone else to give up.  Since  the favorite scripture of most Protestants -- John 3:16 -- says you don't automatically get immortality -- you can perish -- it is a real wonder that the belief in an immortal soul is so widespread.  Ego trumps scripture.

It should be noted, however, that the original Jewish teaching was that eternal life for the righteous was attained by resurrection at the second coming of the Messiah. Popping off to heaven when you die was ignored as a pagan teaching.  Jews believe all sorts of things these days but most would, I think, be comfortable enough with JW teaching on the prospect of an afterlife. As the Jewish Encyclopedia says:

"The belief that the soul continues its existence after the dissolution of the body is a matter of philosophical or theological speculation rather than of simple faith, and is accordingly nowhere expressly taught in Holy Scripture"

So JW's have at least some Jews on their side in the matter.  Their view of the afterlife could be said to be Jewish.

On church government JWs departed early on from Presbyterian practice.  Pastor Russell was originally elected but that seems to have just faded out. JWs are governed by a central government, a theocracy, unlike the democratic Presbyterian practice.  JWs are governed much as Roman Catholics are -- but their "pope" (Don Alden Adams) keeps a low profile these days.

The best-known difference of JWs is their practice of doorstep preaching but the Mormons do that too.

The overall zeal of JWs  is striking.  Hitler gassed a lot of them for refusing to bow the knee to him. But such zeal has much precedent among other Christians.  Can you believe that at one stage even the Church of England had bishops being burnt at the stake for their faith?

So there is no major point of JW doctrine that is not held in common with some other Christians or Jews.  Like all other denominations, JW beliefs are a particular pick-and-mix of common beliefs.  It is probably true, however, that the particular pick-and-mix chosen by JWs is closer to first century Christianity than is the doctrine-set of any other denomination.

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Mega Mogul Backs Trump

Big time GOP donor Sheldon Adelson has announced that he will be backing Donald Trump in the general election, in what will be a huge fundraising boom for the New York billionaire:

"Like the Derby, the race for the Republican nomination started from a wide gate — some entries with better post positions, others with more backing. We had candidates with such perceived advantages as wide name identification, large campaign war chests, supposed geographic benefits and other assets they hoped would tip the race in their direction.

Ultimately, each candidate had to convince the party’s primary voters across the country that he or she deserved to be the nominee.

One candidate has won that race, and now Republicans must join together to make sure he wins the next one.

While the primary cycle still has some important elections ahead, it is clear that Donald Trump will be the Republican nominee for president.

I am endorsing Trump’s bid for president and strongly encourage my fellow Republicans — especially our Republican elected officials, party loyalists and operatives, and those who provide important financial backing — to do the same.

The alternative to Trump being sworn in as the nation’s 45th president is frightening"

This is a major boost for Trump, who, despite being a billionaire, likely faces a major fundraising deficit against Hillary Clinton.

SOURCE

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Jeffrey D. Sachs  is disturbed by how much the elite get away with:

He's right.  He is one of the saner Greenies and has been a leading economic reformer -- advising backward nations on how to transition to capitalism

THE PANAMA PAPERS opened yet another window on the global system of financial corruption, showing how political leaders and businesses use shell companies in secrecy havens like the British Virgin Islands and many US states to evade taxes and hide corruption and other crimes. Yet the system of corruption depends on another factor beyond secrecy, one that is perhaps even more important: impunity. Impunity means that the rich and powerful escape from punishment even when their malfeasance is in full view.

Impunity is epidemic in America. The rich and powerful get away with their heists in broad daylight. When a politician like Bernie Sanders calls out the corruption, the New York Times and Wall Street Journal double down with their mockery over such a foolish “dreamer.” The Journal recently opposed the corruption sentence of former Virginia governor Bob McDonnell for taking large gifts and bestowing official favors — because everybody does it. And one of its columnists praised Panama for facilitating the ability of wealthy individuals to hide their income from “predatory governments” trying to collect taxes. No kidding.

Our major institutions, the ones that should know better, are often gross enablers of impunity. Consider my alma mater, Harvard University, and its recent nuptial with hedge-fund manager John Paulson. Paulson was the coconspirator with Goldman Sachs of one of the most notorious scams of the recent financial bubble.

Paulson and Goldman constructed and marketed a portfolio of toxic assets to sell to unwitting investors so that Paulson could bet against the portfolio. Goldman and Paulson thereby turned the sucker investors’ quick $1 billion loss into an equivalent $1 billion gain for Paulson, with Goldman collecting on fees. The SEC fined Goldman but left Paulson untouched. As one disillusioned SEC investigator put it: The SEC is “an agency that polices the broken windows on the street level and rarely goes to the penthouse floors.” Yet Harvard was delighted last year to take $400 million of Paulson’s ill-gotten gains, leave Paulson with the rest, name its engineering school after Paulson, and declare Paulson to be “the epitome of a visionary leader.”

Impunity. Paulson remains a much-celebrated figure on Wall Street. He has many kindred spirits, such as his partner in crime, Goldman CEO Lloyd Blankfein, who has described himself as just a banker “doing God’s work.” Or consider JP Morgan CEO Jamie Dimon, whose bank has paid well over $30 billion in fines while Dimon remains CEO with a $27 million salary for 2015. The hedge-fund industry itself is a case study of impunity. With few exceptions, it is domiciled in tax and secrecy havens, enjoys crass tax breaks brokered by cronies in Congress (such as Wall Street Senator Chuck Schumer), and pays itself billion-dollar-plus paychecks even while leaving investors with below-market returns or outright losses over the years.

The recourse to cheating within the financial industry now seems to be deeply ingrained, part of the corporate culture, and enabled by the prevailing impunity. An ingenious scientific study published in December 2014 showed the rot. Employees of a major international bank were divided into a control group and a treatment group. All subjects were asked to flip a coin 10 times and report truthfully on the number of heads, with more heads resulting in a bigger monetary prize. The treatment group was subtlety reminded they were bankers, while the control group was not. Simply reminding them that they were professional bankers was enough to induce the employees to cheat by exaggerating the number of heads they flipped.

Impunity is of course not limited to banking. Consider the poster-child of impunity in Big Pharma, Gilead Sciences. Gilead brazenly bought the patents on a life-saving cure for Hepatitis C and then gouged patients and taxpayers by charging $1,000 per pill — for a drug that costs $1 per pill to manufacture. Hundreds of thousands of Americans are unable to afford treatment, and many are dying, while Gilead earns far more in profits each year than it paid for the patents. Gilead adds to this deadly effrontery by booking its profits in an offshore tax haven.

Or consider another tech company in the health sector, Theranos, led by Elizabeth Holmes, until recently much lionized on Wall Street. Holmes, it now seems, may have been lying about Theranos’s supposed high-tech blood-testing technology and reporting faulty blood test results to boot. Yet when confronted with these serious concerns, Theranos board member and famed lawyer David Boies expressed his view that the board has “complete confidence in Elizabeth Holmes as a founder of the company, as a scientist, and as an administrator.” It seems not to have dawned on Boies and the board to call for an urgent, impartial, and complete investigation of the serious allegations swirling around the company.

Impunity is not an accidental or incidental defect of American society. It is a system foisted on us by the rich and powerful, and it continues to work its magic. It has enabled Hillary Clinton to come within reach of the presidential nomination without releasing the transcripts of her highly paid speeches to Wall Street banks. The Clintons long ago perfected the art of impunity, becoming rich and powerful by blurring the lines between their campaign fund-raising, public policies in office, Clinton Foundation work, big-money speeches, and off-the-record favors for foreign governments.

This week British Prime Minister David Cameron hosted an Anti-Corruption Summit in London in the wake of the Panama Papers. He was speaking accurately when he was caught on an open microphone telling the Queen that leaders of two “fantastically corrupt countries,” Nigeria and Afghanistan, would be at the summit. Nigeria’s new president, Muhammadu Buhari, himself a corruption-fighter, concurred with Cameron’s assessment, but called on the UK to return the money stolen by Nigeria’s former leaders and deposited in British and other Western banks. He might well have added the historic role, for more than a half century, of Royal Dutch Shell in Nigeria’s oil-sector corruption.

Buhari is, in fact, making a much larger point. While there is enough top-level political corruption to go around — from Afghanistan and Nigeria to Malaysia, Brazil, South African, FIFA, and many more places — the channels of corruption and secrecy havens are largely owned and operated by the big boys — the United States and the UK — and depend absolutely on the gross impunity that prevails at the highest reaches of power and finance in the United States.

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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Bernie's secret weapon



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Trump placates Ryan

The Republican Party lurched back toward unity Thursday after Donald Trump, the GOP’s presumptive presidential nominee, and House Speaker Paul Ryan, the party’s top leader on Capitol Hill, concluded a closely watched summit with soothing statements that the GOP can, after all, get along.

Well, eventually.

“I was very encouraged with what I heard from Donald Trump today,” Ryan said after the meeting. “We are now planting the seeds to get ourselves united. . . . This is a process. It takes a little time. You don’t pull it together in 45 minutes.”

The Trump-Ryan confab was convened after Ryan took the extraordinary step last week of announcing that he wasn’t yet ready to support Trump as his party’s nominee. The pair met early Thursday along with Republican National Committee chairman Reince Priebus, followed immediately afterward by a larger meeting with Ryan and other members of House GOP leadership. Trump then met with Senate Republican leaders.

In the wake of these meetings — covered breathlessly all day, with cameras focused on Trump’s car, or his idling airplane — the sounds of harmony rippled across Capitol Hill.

“He was terrific. I was really quite impressed,” said Senator Orrin Hatch of Utah. “I totally endorse him.”

“He’s actually a pretty affable guy in a small group setting. Obviously much different than the public demeanor,” said Senate majority whip John Cornyn.

“The meeting was great,” Priebus tweeted. “It was a very positive step toward party unity.”

But the sunny sentiments belie a continued tension at the heart of the GOP. Even the feel-good statements that emerged from Trump’s series of meetings couldn’t ignore the real differences on policy and tone that persist after a bruising primary fight that produced a very unconventional candidate at the top of the GOP ticket.

“While I may disagree with the rhetoric Mr. Trump uses and some policy positions, he is the better option than Hillary Clinton in the White House,” Representative Greg Walden, the Oregon Republican who is chairman of the National Republican Congressional Committee, said in a statement. “That’s why all along I’ve said I intend to support the GOP nominee.”

Representative Charlie Dent, a moderate from Pennsylvania, said many members of his caucus — including those supporting Trump — still harbor concerns about their presumptive nominee. Trump “has to convince many Americans, including myself, that he’s ready to lead this great nation,” said Dent, who does not yet support Trump.

SOURCE

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America is transitioning to an amoral State where Might is Right

America is witnessing the transition from a Judeo-Christian based culture and government where rights are conferred by God and just government is instituted to secure those rights, to a government and society which rejects this notion, preferring to merely have privileges allowed by government — which can be transferred or rescinded on a whim.

We now have become a society that wishes to be kept safe from alternative points of view, which wants to remove religious symbols from non-believer’s eyesight, and where chalked letters T-R-U-M-P cause entire college campuses to go into therapy.

The post-modern governance is best summed up by two separate incidents involving Harvard Law School.

The first revolves around a Harvard Professor, Mark Tushnet, who is advocating that Christians, traditionalists and constitutionalists, the presumed losers in the culture war be treated like the Nazis in post-World War II Germany, writing, “The culture wars are over; they lost, we won… My own judgment is that taking a hard line (‘You lost, live with it’) is better than trying to accommodate the losers, who — remember — defended, and are defending, positions that liberals regard as having no normative pull at all… [T]aking a hard line seemed to work reasonably well in Germany and Japan after 1945.”

In short, might makes right. This astounding piece effectively eviscerates any notion of minority rights in our culture in this new post-modern America, even though it is this very constitutional protection that allowed the atheist, non-traditionalist movement to grow unshackled.

Of course the First Amendment freedom of religious expression is not even a relevant point when it comes to imposing the will of the Lesbian, Gay, Bi-sexual, Transgender community on the church and other Bible believers. It’s not enough to agree to disagree. In Tushnet’s view, those who follow Biblical teachings should actually be compelled to abandon God in order to be part of the public place, no longer free to express or even conduct themselves according to their religious beliefs — just as the Nazi party was banned in Germany after 1945.

It is this imposition of the left’s cultural values on the entire nation that threatens the very heart of constitutional protections of rights. We’re no longer allowed to disagree.

Anyone familiar with various cases around the nation where Christian businesses have been forced by state governments to either go out of business or cater to gay marriage mandates can see where this leads.  Might makes right in the brave new world that Thrasymachus argued for, and little things like the Bill of Rights are not even speed bumps in the way of the new governing class.

Either join their revolution willingly, or the state will ensure compliance as mandatory.  Even though the Bill of Rights was constructed to stop those who would impose their will via government upon others. So much for the Enlightenment.

The second involves the Harvard Law School crest which has come under attack because it is the crest of the family that founded the law school in 1817 – a family of wealthy Massachusetts slave holders.  After some Harvard law students protested the shield of the school they chose to attend, Harvard Law School has decided to wipe it away along with the history – good and bad – that it represents.

The irony is the former crest of Harvard Law School contains a single word – veritas – the Latin word for truth.  A tidy metaphor for the new age in America where truth must be erased at all costs to avoid hurting feelings.  But also truth is the exact word that Jesus used to describe himself in front of Pontius Pilate and that Pilate scoffed at saying, “Que es veritas” or what is truth?

Thrasymachus was right. That is, once the restraints on government are let loose, the powerful will seek to impose their will on the rest of us. And America’s Ivy League philosopher kings know it, which is why they are hell-bent on imposing their new morality that doesn’t have room for dissent or discussion.  And it is why we need a Constitution, Bill of Rights, and the primacy of the rule of law — to stop them.

SOURCE

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Obama to Successful Blacks: 'You Didn't Build That'

Out of the myriad lectures commencement speeches Barack Obama has given, perhaps none was as disheartening as the one he gave Saturday at Howard University. The message was twofold: Obama’s presidency failed to bring racial healing, and when it comes to blacks who are living successful lives, it’s not really because of hard work so much as it is luck (i.e., they didn’t build that).

We begin with racial discord, of which Obama is washing his hands. “No, my election did not create a post-racial society,” he said. “I don’t know who was propagating that notion. That was not mine.” Uh, yeah it was.

Radio talk-show host Rush Limbaugh responds, “There are … white people who voted for Obama hoping to end [racial discord]. They think it’s tearing the country apart. … Nobody thought that meant more welfare or more benefits or more dependence, but that actual, quality standard of living improvements would take place. And there haven’t been any, at large.”

Next, recall Obama’s assertion four years ago: “If you’ve got a business — you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen.” Now see if you if you can find a resemblance to Saturday’s second damning remark:

“[W]e have to not only question the world as it is, and stand up for those African-Americans who haven’t been so lucky — because, yes, you’ve worked hard, but you’ve also been lucky. That’s a pet peeve of mine: People who have been successful and don’t realize they’ve been lucky.”

Hot Air’s Larry O'Conner says, “No, it’s more than a pet peeve of his, it’s an ideology.” Furthermore, Limbaugh opines: “That’s a hell of an inspirational message. I’d be really motivated. Okay, so I’ve spent four years or however many years here in this university trying to equip myself for success, and now I’m told that’s not a factor. I gotta go out and learn luck. Where do I go to study luck? Where do I go to get my degree in luck? And the unspoken message is: If you’re black, you aren’t gonna have it, ‘cause the people in charge of luck aren’t gonna pass it out to you.”

Besides, what does all that talk about luck say about Obama’s ascendance to the White House?

There’s a meme traversing social media depicting George W. Bush with a caption, “Miss me yet?” When it comes to Barack Obama, many blacks will still be answering: No.

SOURCE

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ObamaCare's Retreat From Affordability

Insurance providers UnitedHealth and Humana are admitting what most conservatives have realized for over a half-decade: The ObamaCare system is too bloated and regulation-heavy. Eventually, it will fail. United announced it was leaving most of the ObamaCare exchanges, and Humana said it will consider leaving too, for the two companies have been losing money. But the fact that health insurance companies don’t want to play in a system where consumers are forced to buy their product is a good sign to the Washington Post editorial board. “United’s selective exit from ACA marketplaces appears to reflect two positive features of the law,” the board opined. “First, Obamacare was meant to spur competition among insurance companies, thus constraining premiums … Second, the law has curtailed many of the ways that insurers used to contain their costs, such as refusing to cover certain people or certain treatments, or jacking up premiums for older customers.”

This is hardly free market competition we’re talking about here. But as market forces demand: Insurers must contain their costs. The next grand exodus by the insurance companies from the ObamaCare exchanges might be the bronze-level plans. A Virginian subsidiary of CareFirst BlueCross BlueShield is considering upgrading all its bronze plans to silver plans next year. Apparently the entry-level plans that cost-concerned Americans who are young and healthy take are eating away at health companies' bottom line. What happens to the exchanges when those young ‘n’ healthy — the folks that were supposed to keep this whole health system afloat — decide to pay extra in taxes than buy into a rigged system with ever-increasing premiums? It’s just one more step toward the tipping point of failure.

SOURCE

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How This Gun Free City Celebrated Mother's Day

Chicago’s gang violence is usually quite bloody during summer weekends, but this year’s Mother’s Day weekend was particularly bloody with 43 wounded and nine killed between Friday afternoon and Sunday night.

In fact, the Mother’s Day holiday brought five fatalities, the last of which came at 12:30 a.m. Monday morning. Eleven others were wounded on Sunday.

Saturday was also a dangerous day to live in Chicago, as three were killed and 21 more wounded by the gunfire traded between the city’s constantly warring gangs.

Friday was no light day, either. While one died, eleven more were shot.

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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Liberal in name only

Leftists have become the authoritarians they used to condemn

Do you support free speech, individual liberties and protections for private property? You must be a liberal.

Did that last sentence cause you to do a double take? I’m not surprised.

I’ve been reading a new book, “The Closing of the Liberal Mind,” and it shows that much of what passes for liberalism today is, historically speaking, anything but. Moreover, many who call themselves conservative today would have been considered “liberal” if they lived in the time of the Founding Fathers.

This distinction isn’t mere semantics, however. The shift I’m describing goes right to the heart of the political and culture wars that rage around us today. Author Kim Holmes demonstrates why the authoritarian stance adopted by many liberals today — as exemplified by speech codes, trigger warnings, boycotts and shaming rituals — is in fact more accurately described as illiberalism.

You don’t have to go back to the days of the Enlightenment, John Locke and the French Revolution (as Mr. Holmes, a former U.S. assistant secretary of state, does in his commendably thorough book) to see this trend at work. Consider the following quote from a famous politician. See if you can guess who said it and when:

“I am sick and tired of people who say that if you debate and you disagree with this administration, somehow you’re not patriotic. We should stand up and say, ‘We are Americans, and we have a right to debate and disagree with any administration’.”

John McCain talking about President Obama? Nope. That’s Hillary Clinton. She said it in 2003, in reference to the George W. Bush administration.

But as they say, that was then, and this is now. Apparently it’s patriotic to express your opposition to President Bush, but if you utter a word against President Obama, you’re a lying, racist bigot. And if you deny it? Well, that’s just what we would expect a bigot like you to say.

And so most of today’s liberals (or “postmodern leftists,” to use Mr. Holmes’ preferred term) are not championing the right to offer opposing views, as their intellectual forebears would have done. They’re suppressing them.

This campaign to stamp out dissent takes many forms. We see it in Internal Revenue Service witch hunts against conservative groups. On college campuses with administrators meekly bowing to angry demands that politically incorrect speakers be banned. In the push from state attorneys general to investigate groups that question climate change.

Ask Lennart Bengtsson. In 2014, this well-respected Swedish meteorologist working in the United Kingdom joined a group called the Global Warming Policy Foundation, which questions some of the climate change community’s findings. Mr. Bengtsson did so simply because he was concerned that some of the computer-model predictions didn’t match up with actual scientific observations over time.

Big mistake. “Within a matter of days, he found himself in deep trouble,” Mr. Holmes writes. “As happened to other scientists who question any aspect of the global-warming ‘consensus,’ Bengtsson was hounded by colleagues to the point that he felt forced to resign from the think tank.”

Mr. Bengtsson cited concerns for his “health and safety,” saying the pressure made “normal work” virtually impossible, and warned: “It is a situation that reminds me about the time of McCarthy.”

That’s how far today’s “liberals” have fallen. They’ve become the very thing they once denounced.

And so we wind up in a culture that punishes young children severely for first-time, minor infractions under “zero tolerance” policies. One with so many thousands of federal laws that we prosecute adults for committing crimes that they didn’t even know were crimes.

“I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.” Unless we all, liberal and conservative, find some way to recover this classically American outlook, the climate of intolerance will only grow more stifling. How far do we dare push it?

SOURCE

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What They Still Don't Realize About Trump Voters

As the smoke clears from the wreckage of Indiana, which brought down both Ted Cruz as well as John Kasich, we now know that the pundits and analysts who predicted Trump’s demise on so many occasions were wrong. We also know that Trump, who once remarked that some thought he could shoot someone in Times Square in broad daylight without losing supporters, appears to have been right about himself.

Some 40% of those voting in Republican caucuses and primaries this year have voted for Trump. In what he has constantly derided as the Republicans’ “rigged system,” that sufficed to garner enough delegates to clear out the competition.

Who are these Trump voters? Why was the accumulated conventional wisdom so wrong about Trump and his political chances at every turn?

Victor Davis Hanson, writing in National Review, posts a lyrical description of the Trump constituency in the attempt to explain why so many of us have been baffled:

"[Trump] is a postmodern creation, for whom traditional and time-tested rules do not apply. He is neither brilliant nor unhinged, neither ecumenical nor just a polarizer, not a wrecker and not a savior of the Republican party, but something else altogether. He does not defy conventional wisdom. There simply is no convention and no wisdom applicable to Donald J. Trump. For years postmodernists have lectured us that there is no truth, no absolutes, no timeless protocols worthy of reverence; Trump is their Nemesis, who reifies their theories that truth is simply a narrative whose veracity is established by the degree of power and persuasion behind it.

His supporters want a reckoning with a system that has not so much failed as infuriated them. What drives their loyalty to Trump -- if not the person, at least the idea of Trump -- is a sort of nihilism. As a close friend put it to me this week, “I don’t care whether Trump wins or not, I just want him to f*** things up as long as he can.”

This rage has been a long time building.

It first began to manifest with the rise of the Tea Party movement in the wake of the underhanded process used to pass Obamacare before Scott Brown, explicitly elected in Massachusetts to frustrate its passage, could take his Senate seat. Obamacare’s passage fueled the massive Republican legislative landslide of 2010, when the party regained control of the House of Representatives.

The frustration of Romney’s failure in 2012 added to it, fueling a second landslide of 2014 that strengthened the Republican hold on the House and gave them control of the Senate.

That campaign was characterized by a tremendous amount of over-promising by the candidates regarding what could happen once the Senate was taken back. This created expectations which anyone who had ever taken a high school civics course and paid attention could have known were unrealistic. Obama was still in the White House, and the GOP lacked a veto-proof majority in either chamber.

Those frustrated expectations poured gasoline on the rage already existing. National talk radio and prominent writers castigated the slightest disagreements over political tactics, calling the dissenters “RINOs” and “sell-outs,” casting them into the darkness.

Trump supporters looked for someone who would express their rage and frustration, which generated attitudes Hanson described as follows:

On race, Trump supporters are tired of hearing that black lives matter, while no one mentions that all lives matter. They are sick of seeing protestors wave the flag of the country they do not wish illegal aliens to be sent back to and trash the country they under no circumstances want them to leave. They don’t like getting a letter from an IRS that employs Lois Lerner -- a letter that would be ignored with impunity by those who are here illegally or who run the Clinton Foundation.

They are tired of wealthy minorities claiming they are perpetual victims of ill-treatment at the hands of people who are less well off than they. They don’t like hearing from elites that huge trade deficits have little to do with loss of jobs or that cheating by our trade partners is just a passing glitch in free trade. They cannot stand lectures from those who make more money in an hour than they do in a year about their own bad habits or slothfulness.

They don’t know what the on-screen savants mean by a leg-tingle or a perfectly pressed pant leg or a first-class temperament or a president as god -- and they don’t care to find out. They do not hate political correctness so much as one-sided political correctness, which gives a pass to some to say things that would get others fired or ruined. They don’t want to be lectured that their own plight is part of a larger, healthy creative destruction or a leaner, meaner competitiveness or an overdue restructuring -- by those who are never destroyed, rendered noncompetitive, or restructured.

And they don’t like to be talked down to by the experts who ran up $10 trillion in debt, ruined the health-care system, dismantled the military, and screwed up the Secret Service, the IRS, NASA, and the VA.

Trump is their megaphone, not their solution. The Trump supporters have seen plenty of politicians with important agendas, but few with the zeal to push them through; at this late date, they would apparently prefer zeal without agendas to agendas without zeal.

Hanson is correct in his analysis, but there is something missing, because the very same frustrations mentioned above are also shared by Rubio or Cruz supporters, who together represent at least as large a percentage of the Republican electorate this year as the Trump voters do. What, then, is the difference between Trump’s 40% and the “anyone but Trump” 40%?

The answer lies in two places.

The cumulative train wreck of eight years of Obama has left Republican voters in general in what may be called a “---structive” mood, but prefixes are decisive: While the typical supporter of the more qualified candidates were in a constructive mood -- seeking to build momentum and the legislative muscle to change things for the better (as had happened in Wisconsin following the “red tide” of 2010) -- the typical Trump supporter has a nihilistically destructive attitude, what Hanson’s friend described as the desire “to f**k things up as long as he can.” Tear everything down; burn, baby, burn.

The second attitude is something that most of the pundits have yet to come to terms with. Contrary to the views of Eric Cantor, we didn’t underestimate Trump. We overestimated many of our fellow voters, who never attended that civics class (or failed to pay attention), who don’t understand how the system works, and who increasingly inhabit a world of 30-second soundbites (at most) and 140-character Twitter slogans. Who can rattle off statistics for their sports teams, but can’t be bothered to know who represents them in Congress, let alone their state legislature or any of their voting records or positions.

We have as many “low information voters,” as Limbaugh famously calls them, as the Democrats do, and they have voted: To hell with the Constitution! Tear the whole thing down! Burn, baby, burn!

SOURCE

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Will Reagan's Top Advisor Push Trump Over the Top?

As Trump celebrated his win in Tuesday's Indiana primary, campaign manager Corey Lewandowski said their team is putting together a fundraising plan for a general election campaign against probable Democrat nominee Hillary Clinton, as well as downballot races for Congress. "Donald Trump is going to raise money for the Republican National Committee," Lewandowski said.

His allies also are gearing up to raise unlimited sums on his behalf.

For instance, Ed Rollins, a veteran Republican operative who oversaw Ronald Reagan’s 1984 reelection campaign, recently signed on as lead strategist for Great America PAC, a pro-Trump super PAC. Eric Beach, the super PAC’s co-chairman and a veteran of Rudy Giuliani and Newt Gingrich’s presidential campaigns, said the committee plans “to be the weapon of choice for the nominee in the general election” and soon will announce a “finance advisory team that will be second to none.”

Trump, who disavowed super PACs during the primary, appears to be softening his stance. “I know that people maybe like me and they form a super PAC, but I have nothing to do with it,” Trump said Wednesday night on NBC Nightly News. “As you know, I'm not allowed to have anything to do with it. So we'll see what happens.”

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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Does RACISM explain the rise of Donald Trump?

An amusing lack of thought below.   The study concerned is methodologically weak (many more females than males;  no representative sampling etc.) but I believe its conclusions are mostly right.  Support for Trump IS mediated by racism:  Leftist racism.

Mainstream  whites are discriminated against all the time by America's elites.  "Affirmative action" is nothing if not racist.  Leftist are the racists, not conservatives. And American whites don't like being discriminated against any more than blacks do.  It's only the brain-dead Left who think that the cure for discrimination is more discrimination.

And whites know that all sorts of minorities are privileged over them:  Blacks, Hispanics, Muslims, homosexuals, the sexually confused, Greenies, welfare parasites etc.  So when reminded about the discrimination that they suffer, they become more favourable to those who are against favoritism:  The Donald and the Tea Party.  And that is exactly what the researchers found.

Being Leftists, the researchers seem to think that they have discredited Tea Party and Trump supporters in some way. They fail to see that mainstream whites have real grievances and that the Left is to blame for those grievances. White males in particular are both badly treated by government and often mocked, condemned and even demonized. The researchers seem to think that they should not be aware of all that. Trumpism is protest -- protest by ordinary decent people, nothing more. It is the Left who are responsible for the rise of Trump


Many white Americans now believe that their hierarchical standing is being threatened by minority groups, leading them to support political forces that would help ‘restore the status of whiteness,’ a new study claims.

Through a series of online experiments, a Stanford University sociologist found that heightened levels of racial resentment were tied to greater support for the Tea Party in white participants.

The study suggests that the perceived ‘decline of whiteness’ prompts some to align with platforms that condemn minority groups – and they say this mindset may be at play in the rise of Donald Trump.

According to Stanford professor of sociology Robb Willer, this trend began with the election of President Obama in 2008 and grew through the Great Recession, along with the rising political influence of minorities in America.

The team, which also included Matthew Feinberg of the University of Toronto and Rachel Wetts of the University of California, Berkeley, conducted five survey-based online experiments involving 1,329 participants.

In the first, white participants were shown altered photos of President Obama.

Those who viewed an artificially darkened picture of Obama were more likely to express their support for the Tea Party, at 22 percent, compared with those who were shown a lightened photo, at just 12 percent.

In another set of studies, white participants were either told that white share of the total U.S. population was decreasing, or that whites’ average income was declining in comparison to other ethnic groups.

Both groups showed greater support for the Tea Party, which the researchers say is partly explained by increased racial resentment.

This was also seen when the researchers emphasized the declining portion of whites in America.

In the last experiment, the researchers found that the participants reported stronger support for the Tea Party when they emphasized aspects of the platform that could have racial implications, including opposition to immigration and welfare, over libertarian ones, like government spending.

The researchers say this is the first study to demonstrate the link between Tea Party support and racial resentment.

WHAT THE STUDY CLAIMS

Since the election of President Obama in 2008, followed by the Great Recession and the rising political influence of minorities in America, some white Americans feel their ‘racial standing’ is threatened, the researchers say.

‘Together these factors could be viewed as a collective threat to the status of whiteness in the U.S., which provided fertile ground for the rise of a social movement that promoted a return to the way things used to be in America, including a set of policies that could restore whites’ position on top in the racial status hierarchy,’ Willer said.

The study suggests that this perceived ‘decline of whiteness’ prompts some to align with platforms that condemn minority groups, including the Tea Party and likely even Donald Trump.

These groups advocate restrictions on immigration, opposition to Obama, militant positions toward Muslim nations, and other policies which the researchers say would help to 'restore the standing of whites in America.'

‘Past work finds that economic downturns can exacerbate racial resentment by giving whites the sense that they have a shrinking piece of a shrinking pie,’ Willer said.

This, combined with the election of a non-white president and other factors in recent years, are leading some white Americans to feel more ‘threatened,’ the researcher explains.

‘Together these factors could be viewed as a collective threat to the status of whiteness in the U.S., which provided fertile ground for the rise of a social movement that promoted a return to the way things used to be in America, including a set of policies that could restore whites’ position on top in the racial status hierarchy,’ Willer said.

And, the findings don’t just apply to the Tea Party; the researcher explains that the growing trend is likely playing a role in the growing support for Donald Trump as a presidential candidate.

‘Donald Trump’s candidacy pulls support from much of the same base that the Tea Party did and has,' Willer said.

'And there is good reason to think that many of the same psychological forces propelling Tea Party support also propel support for Trump’s candidacy. Indeed, Trump’s statements probably go further in criticizing minority groups than the Tea Party did.'

‘What was largely implicit in the case of the Tea Party has become more explicit in the case of Trump’s candidacy’ Willer said.

According to Willer, the findings suggest the ‘threats’ to racial status have caused some to turn to support for the Tea Party, and likely Trump, based on their advocacy of certain policies, including restrictions on immigration, opposition to Obama, militant positions toward Muslim nations.

The researcher says these policies would help to 'restore the standing of whites in America.'

SOURCE

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GOP Establishment wails that Trump isn’t a conservative. Have they looked in the mirror recently?



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Donald Trump is going to troll his way to victory

IN INTERNET parlance, a troll is a malevolent mischief-maker, a commenter who says something politically incorrect, then sits back and enjoys the resulting furore — sometimes even fanning the flames under multiple contradictory identities.

In politics, the master troll is Donald Trump.

During the recent GOP nominating process, he gave the media the vapours by criticising John McCain’s war record, and promising to ban all Muslims from the US and build a giant fence across the Mexican border. Each time, bien-pensant society (largely consisting of leftist politicians and fellow-travelling journalists) assured their increasingly nervous followers that this time the troll had gone too far, that Trump was finished.

Instead, he only got stronger. Why? The public was tired of politics as usual, sick of polite society. In the internet age, they loved the troll.

Last week, The Donald set off another tempest in a piñata when he posted a Cinco de Mayo tweet of himself sitting at his desk about to dine on a taco bowl from the Trump Grill. What really frosted his critics was his line: “I love Hispanics!”

It was classic Trump, being simultaneously innocuous (what was he going to say — “I hate Hispanics”?); funny (is he serious?); and sure to get plenty of attention. Once again, there was the master troll, on every news show and political web site in the country. “Dumb and condescending and racist,” groused Gawker.

Meanwhile, his fans just laugh and sit back to await the next outrage. Trump has disrupted the conventional wisdom of politics, where every speech is focus-grouped into blandness. Some think he says whatever pops into his head, but it’s more likely that he often makes statements just to be mischievous, in order to discomfit and disrupt his enemies.

Whatever he says doesn’t have to be particularly consistent, it just has to get the goats of the right people, to keep everyone focused on him, not on Hillary Clinton. Heck, even Hillary isn’t focused on Hillary.

What does this mean for his chances of being elected?

Well, the people who hate Trump aren’t going to stop if he no longer says outrageous things. The people who love Trump aren’t going to stop backing him. Those who haven’t made up their minds will, I suspect, not take everything Trump says seriously. But they may be amused, especially when compared to Hillary Clinton’s scandals. Setting up your email server to hide your correspondence from the public while the Romanians hack into it sounds a bit worse than tucking into a taco bowl.

The only worry Trump should have is if he fails to follow through on his promises. If his fans find out he’s trolling them, it really will end him.

Politics today, as Trump understands, is largely a narrative-driven reality show with good guys and bad guys.

His campaign is a gamble that the good guys — the scorned white working class, economically struggling inner-city blacks to whom Obama and the Democrats have consistently given the back of their hand, patriotic Americans in general — vastly outnumber the bad guys moving jobs overseas, racking up debt, allowing immigrants to flood in unchecked.

And if you don’t believe that, just ask Barack Obama, whose juvenile foreign-policy guru, Ben Rhodes, recently confessed that the White House shamelessly manipulated its own useful idiots of the press and others (“the Blob,” he called it) in order to foist its disgraceful Iran deal upon a trusting but duped public.

But I suspect the liberal politician attitude toward “shaping narratives” will be a typical one — it’s only right when we do it.

SOURCE

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More Welfare Going to Illegals Than U.S. Citizens



The average American household receives $4,431 a year in federal welfare, including food stamps and cash. That’s plenty of evidence for Barack Obama’s poor economic record, but it gets worse. Illegal immigrants take in an average $5,692 from the federal government a year. Who are the people paying taxes? The numbers were crunched by the Center for Immigration Studies, which last year also discovered that 51% of immigrant households take in some sort of federal aid compared to 30% of native households.

“It is difficult to imagine sitting down to craft an immigration policy that will benefit the American people and coming up with one in which immigrants consume more welfare than natives,” wrote Jason Richwine, the analyst who crunched the numbers. “It’s a strong indication that current policy is not working.” Immigrants — both legal and otherwise — take in more welfare because they often have more children and attained less education than people born here in the United States. America may be the land of opportunity, but it should present its opportunity through work and enterprise, not creating a whole class of people dependent on the government.

SOURCE

There is a  new  lot of postings by Chris Brand just up -- mainly about The Donald

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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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