When and Why Nationalism Beats Globalism: And how moral psychology can help explain and reduce tensions between the two

JONATHAN HAIDT is, as usual, the soul of moderation below and I agree with much of his analysis. He makes a point few Leftists make:  That "racists" are not usually objecting to the race or skin color of another group but rather to things that go with that race or skin color.  So he sees most ascriptions of "racism" to non-Leftists as missing the point.  It is an avoidance of the real issues.

Where I think Haidt goes wrong is in his trust of the work of Karen Stenner and her odd concept of "authoritarianism".  The scale she uses to measure that concept may not measure anything at all.  For a start, its internal reliability is disastrously low.  Where a coefficient alpha of .70 is normally required in a research instrument, the Stenner scale has shown alphas of less than .30.  In normal psychometric practice, that indicates that a scale does not measure ANYTHING.

But that is not the only fault of the Stenner intrument. The questions they used to assess authoritarianism were "forced-choice" questions.  A typical question was:

"Please tell me which one you think is more important for a child to have: to be considerate or to be well-behaved?".

The option you chose was supposed to indicate whether you are authoritarian or not.  But what if you thought that BOTH attributes are important?  What if you wanted a kid who was BOTH considerate AND well-behaved?  The form of the question prevents you from saying that.  So the answers given might not well represent what the person actually thinks.

So is that naive form of question construction actually misleading?  It is. If the people don't like the choices they are offered, what is likely to happen is that a "Donkey vote" effect will result: If the choices in a forced-choice scale are labelled "a" and "b", the Donkey voter will, at the extreme, simply tick all the "a"s.  And I showed in my own survey research years ago that forced choice questions can push the results in a direction more or less opposite to what occurs with more straightforward questions

So Stenner's "findings" do not show what she thinks they do.  If her findings show anything at all, it may arise from the fact that she in fact asks about child-rearing attitudes in her scale of "authoritarianism". But scales measuring child-rearing attitudes correlate very highly with fundamentalist Christian beliefs. By Stenner's measures, most Republicans look like “authoritarians” because so many are conservative Christians who advocate strict child-rearing practices. This is also why Bernie Sanders’s supporters are so much less "authoritarian" than Hillary Clinton’s — “Berners” are much less religious than other Democrats.

So I respectfully suggest to Prof. Haidt that the "authoritarians" he talks about may in fact just be Christians. That surely requires a re-think.  Although Leftists customarily assume the opposite, I list here 16 studies -- with references -- that show that child rearing attitudes and experiences do NOT predict authoritarianism.

So I think  Haidt is right in saying that conservatives have good and rational reasons for objecting to mass immigration of incompatible people.

Curiously, however, he looks at the psychology of conservatives only.  When it comes to the internationalists he eschews any psychological enquiry at all. He gives sociological reasons only to explain why internationalists think what they do.  Although he is a psychologist, he makes no attempt to look into their minds.

But their behaviour reveals clearly what is in their minds.  They are very hostile and angry people, as Yancey documents in his book. And the thing they hate most is their own society.  They want to "fundamentally transform" it, in Mr Obama's words.  And what better way to attack the existing society than to bring into it large numbers of people who will disrupt it in various ways?  The very lax attitude to immigration during the Blair regime in Britain was eventually admitted to be a conscious attack on British "complacency".  The big immigration problems both the UK and the USA have at the moment are entirely traceable to the haters of the Left.

Finally, let me suggest that it is fitting that the first decisive break with the internationalists, Brexit, should have come from Britain.  Britain has much to be proud of and no other country  retains and displays her national traditions so opulently and to such popular acclaim.  See below for one sketch of it:




What on earth is going on in the Western democracies? From the rise of Donald Trump in the United States and an assortment of right-wing parties across Europe through the June 23 Brexit vote, many on the Left have the sense that something dangerous and ugly is spreading: right-wing populism, seen as the Zika virus of politics. Something has gotten into “those people” that makes them vote in ways that seem—to their critics—likely to harm their own material interests, at least if their leaders follow through in implementing isolationist policies that slow economic growth.

Most analyses published since the Brexit vote focus on economic factors and some version of the “left behind” thesis—globalization has raised prosperity all over the world, with the striking exception of the working classes in Western societies. These less educated members of the richest countries lost access to well-paid but relatively low-skilled jobs, which were shipped overseas or given to immigrants willing to work for less. In communities where wages have stagnated or declined, the ever-rising opulence, rents, and confidence of London and other super-cities has bred resentment.

A smaller set of analyses, particularly in the United States, has focused on the psychological trait of authoritarianism to explain why these populist movements are often so hostile to immigration, and why they usually have an outright racist fringe.

Globalization and authoritarianism are both essential parts of the story, but in this essay I will put them together in a new way. I’ll tell a story with four chapters that begins by endorsing the distinction made by the intellectual historian Michael Lind, and other commentators, between globalists and nationalists—these are good descriptions of the two teams of combatants emerging in so many Western nations. Marine Le Pen, the leader of the French National Front, pointed to the same dividing line last December when she portrayed the battle in France as one between “globalists” and “patriots.”

But rather than focusing on the nationalists as the people who need to be explained by experts, I’ll begin the story with the globalists. I’ll show how globalization and rising prosperity have changed the values and behavior of the urban elite, leading them to talk and act in ways that unwittingly activate authoritarian tendencies in a subset of the nationalists. I’ll show why immigration has been so central in nearly all right-wing populist movements. It’s not just the spark, it’s the explosive material, and those who dismiss anti-immigrant sentiment as mere racism have missed several important aspects of moral psychology related to the general human need to live in a stable and coherent moral order. Once moral psychology is brought into the story and added on to the economic and authoritarianism explanations, it becomes possible to offer some advice for reducing the intensity of the recent wave of conflicts.

Chapter One: The Rise of the Globalists

As nations grow prosperous, their values change in predictable ways. The most detailed longitudinal research on these changes comes from the World Values Survey, which asks representative samples of people in dozens of countries about their values and beliefs. The WVS has now collected and published data in six “waves” since the early 1980s; the most recent survey included sixty countries. Nearly all of the countries are now far wealthier than they were in the 1980s, and many made a transition from communism to capitalism and from dictatorship to democracy in the interim. How did these momentous changes affect their values?

Each country has followed a unique trajectory, but if we zoom out far enough some general trends emerge from the WVS data. Countries seem to move in two directions, along two axes: first, as they industrialize, they move away from “traditional values” in which religion, ritual, and deference to authorities are important, and toward “secular rational” values that are more open to change, progress, and social engineering based on rational considerations. Second, as they grow wealthier and more citizens move into the service sector, nations move away from “survival values” emphasizing the economic and physical security found in one’s family, tribe, and other parochial groups, toward “self-expression” or “emancipative values” that emphasize individual rights and protections—not just for oneself, but as a matter of principle, for everyone. Here is a summary of those changes from the introduction to Christian Welzel’s enlightening book Freedom Rising:

…fading existential pressures [i.e., threats and challenges to survival] open people’s minds, making them prioritize freedom over security, autonomy over authority, diversity over uniformity, and creativity over discipline. By the same token, persistent existential pressures keep people’s minds closed, in which case they emphasize the opposite priorities…the existentially relieved state of mind is the source of tolerance and solidarity beyond one’s in-group; the existentially stressed state of mind is the source of discrimination and hostility against out-groups.

Democratic capitalism—in societies with good rule of law and non-corrupt institutions—has generated steady increases in living standards and existential security for many decades now. As societies become more prosperous and safe, they generally become more open and tolerant. Combined with vastly greater access to the food, movies, and consumer products of other cultures brought to us by globalization and the internet, this openness leads almost inevitably to the rise of a cosmopolitan attitude, usually most visible in the young urban elite. Local ties weaken, parochialism becomes a dirty word, and people begin to think of their fellow human beings as fellow “citizens of the world” (to quote candidate Barack Obama in Berlin in 2008). The word “cosmopolitan” comes from Greek roots meaning, literally, “citizen of the world.” Cosmopolitans embrace diversity and welcome immigration, often turning those topics into litmus tests for moral respectability.

For example, in 2012, UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown gave a speech that included the phrase, “British jobs for British workers.” The phrase provoked anger and scorn from many of Brown’s colleagues in the Labour party. In an essay in Prospect, David Goodhart described the scene at a British center-left social event a few days after Brown’s remark:

The people around me entered a bidding war to express their outrage at Brown’s slogan which was finally triumphantly closed by one who declared, to general approval, that it was “racism, pure and simple.” I remember thinking afterwards how odd the conversation would have sounded to most other people in this country. Gordon Brown’s phrase may have been clumsy and cynical but he didn’t actually say British jobs for white British workers. In most other places in the world today, and indeed probably in Britain itself until about 25 years ago, such a statement about a job preference for national citizens would have seemed so banal as to be hardly worth uttering. Now the language of liberal universalism has ruled it beyond the pale.

The shift that Goodhart notes among the Left-leaning British elite is related to the shift toward “emancipative” values described by Welzel. Parochialism is bad and universalism is good. Goodhart quotes George Monbiot, a leading figure of the British Left:

Internationalism…tells us that someone living in Kinshasa is of no less worth than someone living in Kensington…. Patriotism, if it means anything, tells us we should favour the interests of British people [before the Congolese]. How do you reconcile this choice with liberalism? How…do you distinguish it from racism?

Monbiot’s claim that patriotism is indistinguishable from racism illustrates the universalism that has characterized elements of the globalist Left in many Western nations for several decades. John Lennon wrote the globalist anthem in 1971. After asking us to imagine that there’s no heaven, and before asking us to imagine no possessions, Lennon asks us to:

"Imagine there’s no countries; it isn’t hard to do
Nothing to kill or die for, and no religion too
Imagine all the people living life in peace.
You may say I’m a dreamer, but I’m not the only one.
I hope some day you’ll join us, and the world will be one"

This is a vision of heaven for multicultural globalists. But it’s naiveté, sacrilege, and treason for nationalists.

Chapter Two: Globalists and Nationalists Grow Further Apart on Immigration

Nationalists see patriotism as a virtue; they think their country and its culture are unique and worth preserving. This is a real moral commitment, not a pose to cover up racist bigotry. Some nationalists do believe that their country is better than all others, and some nationalisms are plainly illiberal and overtly racist. But as many defenders of patriotism have pointed out, you love your spouse because she or he is yours, not because you think your spouse is superior to all others. Nationalists feel a bond with their country, and they believe that this bond imposes moral obligations both ways: Citizens have a duty to love and serve their country, and governments are duty bound to protect their own people. Governments should place their citizens interests above the interests of people in other countries.

There is nothing necessarily racist or base about this arrangement or social contract. Having a shared sense of identity, norms, and history generally promotes trust. Having no such shared sense leads to the condition that the sociologist Émile Durkheim described as “anomie” or normlessness. Societies with high trust, or high social capital, produce many beneficial outcomes for their citizens: lower crime rates, lower transaction costs for businesses, higher levels of prosperity, and a propensity toward generosity, among others. A liberal nationalist can reasonably argue that the debate over immigration policy in Europe is not a case of what is moral versus what is base, but a case of two clashing moral visions, incommensurate (à la Isaiah Berlin). The trick, from this point of view, is figuring out how to balance reasonable concerns about the integrity of one’s own community with the obligation to welcome strangers, particularly strangers in dire need.

So how have nationalists and globalists responded to the European immigration crisis? For the past year or two we’ve all seen shocking images of refugees washing up alive and dead on European beaches, marching in long lines across south eastern Europe, scaling fences, filling train stations, and hiding and dying in trucks and train tunnels. If you’re a European globalist, you were probably thrilled in August 2015 when Angela Merkel announced Germany’s open-door policy to refugees and asylum seekers. There are millions of people in need, and (according to some globalists) national borders are arbitrary and immoral.

But the globalists are concentrated in the capital cities, commercial hubs, and university towns—the places that are furthest along on the values shift found in the World Values Survey data. Figure 1 shows this geographic disjunction in the UK, using data collected in 2014. Positive sentiment toward immigrants is plotted on the Y axis, and desire for Britain to leave the EU on the X axis. Residents of Inner London are extreme outliers on both dimensions when compared to other cities and regions of the UK, and even when compared to residents of outer London.

But if you are a European nationalist, watching the nightly news may have felt like watching the spread of the Zika virus, moving steadily northward from the chaos zones of southwest Asia and north Africa. Only a few right-wing nationalist leaders tried to stop it, such as Victor Orban in Hungary. The globalist elite seemed to be cheering the human tidal wave onward, welcoming it into the heart of Europe, and then demanding that every country accept and resettle a large number of refugees.

And these demands, epicentered in Brussels, came after decades of debate in which nationalists had been arguing that Europe has already been too open and had already taken in so many Muslim immigrants that the cultures and traditions of European societies were threatened. Long before the flow of Syrian asylum seekers arrived in Europe there were initiatives to ban minarets in Switzerland and burkas in France. There were riots in Arab neighborhoods of Paris and Marseilles, and attacks on Jews and synagogues throughout Europe. There were hidden terrorist cells that planned and executed the attacks of September 11 in the United States, attacks on trains and buses in Madrid and London, and the slaughter of the Charlie Hebdo staff in Paris.

By the summer of 2015 the nationalist side was already at the boiling point, shouting “enough is enough, close the tap,” when the globalists proclaimed, “let us open the floodgates, it’s the compassionate thing to do, and if you oppose us you are a racist.” Might that not provoke even fairly reasonable people to rage? Might that not make many of them more receptive to arguments, ideas, and political parties that lean toward the illiberal side of nationalism and that were considered taboo just a few years earlier?

Chapter Three: Muslim Immigration Triggers the Authoritarian Alarm

Nationalists in Europe have been objecting to mass immigration for decades, so the gigantic surge of asylum seekers in 2015 was bound to increase their anger and their support for right-wing nationalist parties. Globalists tend to explain these reactions as “racism, pure and simple,” or as the small-minded small-town selfishness of people who don’t want to lose either jobs or benefits to foreigners.

Racism is clearly evident in some of the things that some nationalists say in interviews, chant at soccer matches, or write on the Internet with the protection of anonymity. But “racism” is a shallow term when used as an explanation. It asserts that there are some people who just don’t like anyone different from themselves—particularly if they have darker skin. They have no valid reason for this dislike; they just dislike difference, and that’s all we need to know to understand their rage.

But that is not all we need to know. On closer inspection, racism usually turns out to be deeply bound up with moral concerns. (I use the term “moral” here in a purely descriptive sense to mean concerns that seem—for the people we are discussing—to be matters of good and evil; I am not saying that racism is in fact morally good or morally correct.) People don’t hate others just because they have darker skin or differently shaped noses; they hate people whom they perceive as having values that are incompatible with their own, or who (they believe) engage in behaviors they find abhorrent, or whom they perceive to be a threat to something they hold dear. These moral concerns may be out of touch with reality, and they are routinely amplified by demagogues. But if we want to understand the recent rise of right-wing populist movements, then “racism” can’t be the stopping point; it must be the beginning of the inquiry.

Among the most important guides in this inquiry is the political scientist Karen Stenner. In 2005 Stenner published a book called The Authoritarian Dynamic, an academic work full of graphs, descriptions of regression analyses, and discussions of scholarly disputes over the nature of authoritarianism. (It therefore has not had a wide readership.) Her core finding is that authoritarianism is not a stable personality trait. It is rather a psychological predisposition to become intolerant when the person perceives a certain kind of threat. It’s as though some people have a button on their foreheads, and when the button is pushed, they suddenly become intensely focused on defending their in-group, kicking out foreigners and non-conformists, and stamping out dissent within the group. At those times they are more attracted to strongmen and the use of force. At other times, when they perceive no such threat, they are not unusually intolerant. So the key is to understand what pushes that button.
The answer, Stenner suggests, is what she calls “normative threat,” which basically means a threat to the integrity of the moral order (as they perceive it). It is the perception that “we” are coming apart:

"The experience or perception of disobedience to group authorities or authorities unworthy of respect, nonconformity to group norms or norms proving questionable, lack of consensus in group values and beliefs and, in general, diversity and freedom ‘run amok’ should activate the predisposition and increase the manifestation of these characteristic attitudes and behaviors"

So authoritarians are not being selfish. They are not trying to protect their wallets or even their families. They are trying to protect their group or society. Some authoritarians see their race or bloodline as the thing to be protected, and these people make up the deeply racist subset of right-wing populist movements, including the fringe that is sometimes attracted to neo-Nazism. They would not even accept immigrants who fully assimilated to the culture. But more typically, in modern Europe and America, it is the nation and its culture that nationalists want to preserve.

Stenner identifies authoritarians in her many studies by the degree to which they endorse a few items about the most important values children should learn at home, for example, “obedience” (vs. “independence” and “tolerance and respect for other people”). She then describes a series of studies she did using a variety of methods and cross-national datasets. In one set of experiments she asked Americans to read fabricated news stories about how their nation is changing. When they read that Americans are changing in ways that make them more similar to each other, authoritarians were no more racist and intolerant than others.

But when Stenner gave them a news story suggesting that Americans are becoming more morally diverse, the button got pushed, the “authoritarian dynamic” kicked in, and they became more racist and intolerant. For example, “maintaining order in the nation” became a higher national priority while “protecting freedom of speech” became a lower priority. They became more critical of homosexuality, abortion, and divorce.

One of Stenner’s most helpful contributions is her finding that authoritarians are psychologically distinct from “status quo conservatives” who are the more prototypical conservatives—cautious about radical change. Status quo conservatives compose the long and distinguished lineage from Edmund Burke’s prescient reflections and fears about the early years of the French revolution through William F. Buckley’s statement that his conservative magazine National Review would “stand athwart history yelling ‘Stop!’”

Status quo conservatives are not natural allies of authoritarians, who often favor radical change and are willing to take big risks to implement untested policies. This is why so many Republicans—and nearly all conservative intellectuals—oppose Donald Trump; he is simply not a conservative by the test of temperament or values. But status quo conservatives can be drawn into alliance with authoritarians when they perceive that progressives have subverted the country’s traditions and identity so badly that dramatic political actions (such as Brexit, or banning Muslim immigration to the United States) are seen as the only remaining way of yelling “Stop!” Brexit can seem less radical than the prospect of absorption into the “ever closer union” of the EU.

So now we can see why immigration—particularly the recent surge in Muslim immigration from Syria—has caused such powerfully polarized reactions in so many European countries, and even in the United States where the number of Muslim immigrants is low. Muslim Middle Eastern immigrants are seen by nationalists as posing a far greater threat of terrorism than are immigrants from any other region or religion. But Stenner invites us to look past the security threat and examine the normative threat. Islam asks adherents to live in ways that can make assimilation into secular egalitarian Western societies more difficult compared to other groups. (The same can be said for Orthodox Jews, and Stenner’s authoritarian dynamic can help explain why we are seeing a resurgence of right-wing anti-Semitism in the United States.)

Muslims don’t just observe different customs in their private lives; they often request and receive accommodations in law and policy from their host countries, particularly in matters related to gender. Some of the most pitched battles of recent decades in France and other European countries have been fought over the veiling and covering of women, and the related need for privacy and gender segregation. For example, some public swimming pools in Sweden now offer times of day when only women are allowed to swim. This runs contrary to strong Swedish values regarding gender equality and non-differentiation.

So whether you are a status quo conservative concerned about rapid change or an authoritarian who is hypersensitive to normative threat, high levels of Muslim immigration into your Western nation are likely to threaten your core moral concerns.

But as soon as you speak up to voice those concerns, globalists will scorn you as a racist and a rube. When the globalists—even those who run the center-right parties in your country—come down on you like that, where can you turn? The answer, increasingly, is to the far right-wing nationalist parties in Europe, and to Donald Trump, who just engineered a hostile takeover of the Republican Party in America.

The Authoritarian Dynamic was published in 2005 and the word “Muslim” occurs just six times (in contrast to 100 appearances of the word “black”). But Stenner’s book offers a kind of Rosetta stone for interpreting the rise of right-wing populism and its focus on Muslims in 2016. Stenner notes that her theory “explains the kind of intolerance that seems to ‘come out of nowhere,’ that can spring up in tolerant and intolerant cultures alike, producing sudden changes in behavior that cannot be accounted for by slowly changing cultural traditions.”

She contrasts her theory with those who see an unstoppable tide of history moving away from traditions and “toward greater respect for individual freedom and difference,” and who expect people to continue evolving “into more perfect liberal democratic citizens.“ She does not say which theorists she has in mind, but Welzel and his World Values Survey collaborators, as well as Francis Fukuyama’s “end of history” thesis, seem to be likely candidates. Stenner does not share the optimism of those theorists about the future of Western liberal democracies. She acknowledges the general trends toward tolerance, but she predicts that these very trends create conditions that hyper-activate authoritarians and produce a powerful backlash. She offered this prophecy:

"[T]he increasing license allowed by those evolving cultures generates the very conditions guaranteed to goad latent authoritarians to sudden and intense, perhaps violent, and almost certainly unexpected, expressions of intolerance. Likewise, then, if intolerance is more a product of individual psychology than of cultural norms…we get a different vision of the future, and a different understanding of whose problem this is and will be, than if intolerance is an almost accidental by-product of simple attachment to tradition. The kind of intolerance that springs from aberrant individual psychology, rather than the disinterested absorption of pervasive cultural norms, is bound to be more passionate and irrational, less predictable, less amenable to persuasion, and more aggravated than educated by the cultural promotion of tolerance"

Writing in 2004, Stenner predicted that “intolerance is not a thing of the past, it is very much a thing of the future.”

Chapter Four: What Now?

The upshot of all this is that the answer to the question we began with—What on Earth is going on?—cannot be found just by looking at the nationalists and pointing to their economic conditions and the racism that some of them do indeed display.

One must first look at the globalists, and at how their changing values may drive many of their fellow citizens to support right-wing political leaders. In particular, globalists often support high levels of immigration and reductions in national sovereignty; they tend to see transnational entities such as the European Union as being morally superior to nation-states; and they vilify the nationalists and their patriotism as “racism pure and simple.” These actions press the “normative threat” button in the minds of those who are predisposed to authoritarianism, and these actions can drive status quo conservatives to join authoritarians in fighting back against the globalists and their universalistic projects.

If this argument is correct, then it leads to a clear set of policy prescriptions for globalists. First and foremost: Think carefully about the way your country handles immigration and try to manage it in a way that is less likely to provoke an authoritarian reaction. Pay attention to three key variables: the percentage of foreign-born residents at any given time, the degree of moral difference of each incoming group, and the degree of assimilation being achieved by each group’s children.

Legal immigration from morally different cultures is not problematic even with low levels of assimilation if the numbers are kept low; small ethnic enclaves are not a normative threat to any sizable body politic. Moderate levels of immigration by morally different ethnic groups are fine, too, as long as the immigrants are seen as successfully assimilating to the host culture. When immigrants seem eager to embrace the language, values, and customs of their new land, it affirms nationalists’ sense of pride that their nation is good, valuable, and attractive to foreigners. But whenever a country has historically high levels of immigration, from countries with very different moralities, and without a strong and successful assimilationist program, it is virtually certain that there will be an authoritarian counter-reaction, and you can expect many status quo conservatives to support it.

Stenner ends The Authoritarian Dynamic with some specific and constructive advice:

"[A]ll the available evidence indicates that exposure to difference, talking about difference, and applauding difference—the hallmarks of liberal democracy—are the surest ways to aggravate those who are innately intolerant, and to guarantee the increased expression of their predispositions in manifestly intolerant attitudes and behaviors. Paradoxically, then, it would seem that we can best limit intolerance of difference by parading, talking about, and applauding our sameness….

Ultimately, nothing inspires greater tolerance from the intolerant than an abundance of common and unifying beliefs, practices, rituals, institutions, and processes. And regrettably, nothing is more certain to provoke increased expression of their latent predispositions than the likes of “multicultural education,” bilingual policies, and nonassimilation"

If Stenner is correct, then her work has profound implications, not just for America, which was the focus of her book, but perhaps even more so for Europe. Donald Tusk, the current president of the European Council, recently gave a speech to a conclave of center-right Christian Democratic leaders (who, as members of the educated elite, are still generally globalists). Painfully aware of the new authoritarian supremacy in his native Poland, he chastised himself and his colleagues for pushing a “utopia of Europe without nation-states.” This, he said, has caused the recent Euroskeptic backlash: “Obsessed with the idea of instant and total integration, we failed to notice that ordinary people, the citizens of Europe, do not share our Euro-enthusiasm.”

Democracy requires letting ordinary citizens speak. The majority spoke in Britain on June 23, and majorities of similar mien may soon make themselves heard in other European countries, and possibly in the United States in November. The year 2016 will likely be remembered as a major turning point in the trajectory of Western democracies. Those who truly want to understand what is happening should carefully consider the complex interplay of globalization, immigration, and changing values.

If the story I have told here is correct, then the globalists could easily speak, act, and legislate in ways that drain passions and votes away from nationalist parties, but this would require some deep rethinking about the value of national identities and cohesive moral communities. It would require abandoning the multicultural approach to immigration and embracing assimilation.

The great question for Western nations after 2016 may be this: How do we reap the gains of global cooperation in trade, culture, education, human rights, and environmental protection while respecting—rather than diluting or crushing—the world’s many local, national, and other “parochial” identities, each with its own traditions and moral order? In what kind of world can globalists and nationalists live together in peace?

SOURCE

There is a  new  lot of postings by Chris Brand just up -- about immigration and such things

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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.

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 The conclusions from the study below are borderline insane

Orthodoxy  must be defended by hook or crook, I guess.  The study below not only showed tiny effects but achieved those effects only by throwing out four fifths of the data.  Using extreme quintiles for your analyis is a confession that there are no actual effects in the data as a whole.  The only statistically defensible conclusion from the results below is  to eat as much fatty food as you like, because it will have no effect on your health either way

Association of Specific Dietary Fats With Total and Cause-Specific Mortality

Dong D. Wang et al.

ABSTRACT

Importance

Previous studies have shown distinct associations between specific dietary fat and cardiovascular disease. However, evidence on specific dietary fat and mortality remains limited and inconsistent.

Objective

To examine the associations of specific dietary fats with total and cause-specific mortality in 2 large ongoing cohort studies.

Design, Setting, and Participants

This cohort study investigated 83?349 women from the Nurses' Health Study (July 1, 1980, to June 30, 2012) and 42?884 men from the Health Professionals Follow-up Study (February 1, 1986, to January 31, 2012) who were free of cardiovascular disease, cancer, and types 1 and 2 diabetes at baseline. Dietary fat intake was assessed at baseline and updated every 2 to 4 years. Information on mortality was obtained from systematic searches of the vital records of states and the National Death Index, supplemented by reports from family members or postal authorities. Data were analyzed from September 18, 2014, to March 27, 2016.

Main Outcomes and Measures

Total and cause-specific mortality.

Results

During 3?439?954 person-years of follow-up, 33?304 deaths were documented. After adjustment for known and suspected risk factors, dietary total fat compared with total carbohydrates was inversely associated with total mortality (hazard ratio [HR] comparing extreme quintiles, 0.84; 95% CI, 0.81-0.88; P?
Conclusions and Relevance

Different types of dietary fats have divergent associations with total and cause-specific mortality. These findings support current dietary recommendations to replace saturated fat and trans-fat with unsaturated fats.

JAMA Intern Med. Published online July 05, 2016. doi:10.1001/jamainternmed.2016.2417

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Recent shootings: Donald Trump blames Barack Obama for race divide

Obama has repeatedly taken the side of black criminals and blamed the police.  No wonder blacks are angry.  They have no reason to doubt him. Obama and his ilk PROVOKE black anger.



Donald Trump attacked President Obama yesterday, saying that America's first black president had only worsened racial tensions.  "Our nation has become too divided," the presumptive Republican presidential nominee said after five white police officers were shot dead by a black gunman in Dallas.

Mr Trump, who has repeatedly been accused of "dog-whistle" politics, added: "Crime is harming too many citizens. Racial tensions have gotten worse, not better. This isn't the American Dream we all want for our children."

As the presidential campaign was interrupted by a mass shooting for the second time in less than a month, Mr Obama called for calm after a three-day spasm of racial violence.

The president had reprimanded police on Thursday after video footage emerged of the deaths of Philando Castile, who was shot by an officer in Minnesota on Wednesday, and Alton Sterling, a black man who was shot dead by police in Louisiana on Tuesday.

Mr Obama said: "There's a big chunk of our citizenry that feels as if, because of the colour of their skin, they are not being treated the same, and that hurts."

Even as the president was speaking, Micah Xavier Johnson, a 25-year-old black man, was preparing to unleash hell on the streets of Dallas.

Johnson shot a dozen police on Thursday night, five fatally, at what had been a peaceful protest march against the deaths of Mr Castile and Mr Sterling. Hours later Mr Obama found himself making yet another set of remarks after a mass shooting. At a Nato summit in Warsaw, he said that all Americans "stand united with Dallas".

Both Mr Trump and Hillary Clinton called off campaign events yesterday. Mr Trump had planned to address Hispanics in Florida but instead issued a statement calling the Dallas shootings "a co-ordinated, premeditated assault on the men and women who keep us safe".

He said that the deaths of Mr Castile and Mr Sterling were a reminder of "how much more needs to be done" to restore public confidence in the police.

After a mass shooting claimed 49 lives at an Orlando nightclub last month Mrs Clinton put calls for controls on assault rifles at the heart of her campaign. Mr Trump retaliated by alleging that she would scrap the Second Amendment and the right to bear arms.

The likelihood of progress on gun control is small. A tweet sent by Joe Walsh, a former Republican congressman, signalled how charged the atmosphere has become.

"This is now war. Watch out Obama. Watch out black lives matter punks. Real America is coming after you," he wrote after the Dallas attack.

Mr Walsh deleted the post but stood by the sentiment. "There's a war against our cops in this country, and I think Obama has fed that war and Black Lives Matter has fed that war," he said.

SOURCE

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The post-Brexit ugliness of the left:  Report from Britain

Money-obsessed and anti-working class – the liberal left has revealed its ugly side

Those on the liberal left have always prided themselves on being more caring and compassionate than conservatives. People on the right, they insist, are narrow-minded and selfish, beholden to vested interests. They only care about money and themselves. They are bad people.

This is one of the most persistent myths of modern times. I’ve never believed it. Selfishness transcends politics. Those on the left are just as given as conservatives to self-interest, bigotry and dislike of people different to themselves. And, my word, over the past couple of weeks, following Britain’s vote to leave the UK, haven’t we seen just how. The illusion of the liberal-left’s inherent and exclusive capacity for compassion has truly been exploded.

Consider the recent March for Europe in London, to demand that the will of the people be revoked and that corporate-backed oligarchy be restored. Rich, metropolitan types have shamelessly complained about the result because their holidays in Europe will henceforth become more expensive. They fear for their second homes in Tuscany and the south of France. People have been saying this openly. The burghers of north London fear they might no longer get dirt-cheap nannies and au pairs from Eastern Europe. They fret about the staff on the sainted NHS, staff trained at the expense of poorer countries who we in the UK have since hired on the cheap. Corporate types fear for the future of immigrant workers, those magnificently exploited souls who live six to a room on three-month contracts being paid a minimum wage or less. Such outrageous displays of greed haven’t been witnessed since the heady days of Thatcherism.

Consider, too, the ceaseless insults hurled at the stupid, poor white people who voted to leave the EU. These are folk who struggle to maintain a first home, let alone a second – people who can barely afford to go on holiday at all. These are the fishermen, from Aberdeen to Hull to Ramsgate to Hastings to Cornwall, whose livelihoods have been devastated by the EU – the same fishermen taunted by Bob Geldof and his champagne-swilling chums. These are the people living in Peterborough and Boston who can’t get doctor’s appointments or find school places for their children because hospitals and schools are overwhelmed.

These are people whose small businesses have been ruined by Operation Stack in Kent, whereby lorries clog up the roads for miles, the result of Schengen Area free movement that has led to the mayhem in Calais. Consider those people in Wales who faced the daily, humiliating reminder that their economy was dependent on hand-outs from the EU. Consider, too, all these English people in Dover and Folkestone who know Poles and Latvians, not as cheap domestic staff but as neighbours, parents of their children’s schoolfriends, as equals. All these people slandered as vermin and racists.

The metropolitan left sneered at them from their secluded London villages or their homes in rural Derbyshire. Cloistered writers and academics seem oblivious to the negative effects of the EU, not least because none has experienced first-hand the adverse effects of EU policy. No newspaper editor has opted for a cut-price, cutting-edge columnist from Romania. As for people working in the building trade, in decorating, in plumbing, I can introduce you to many who have been undercut or seen their businesses go under. There are countless here in Kent who have left costly and crowded London for that reason. If you have a house, a mortgage and children to look after, you simply can’t live as a footloose twentysomething singleton with no responsibilities.

I’m not sure how much the liberal-left realise just how repellent their brattish behaviour has been. But this has been coming for some time. Ever since the libertine cultural revolution of the 1960s, Labour and the orthodox left in the Western world have been in a long process of abandoning the working class, withdrawing into identity politics, rights for the self, for affirmation of the self. Hence, so-called progressives now care above all for their image as ‘good people’. Virtue signalling is the epitome of the new faux-compassionate, egocentric left.

Hence the needy rhetoric about ‘the world hating us’ for leaving the EU, the exhortations to ‘hug an immigrant’ or wear safety pins to boast of one’s non-racist credentials. Everything’s about ‘me’. The liberal-left couldn’t understand why people would vote in the name of abstract principles such as ‘democracy’ or ‘freedom’ or ‘self-determination’, because they view everything in terms of their own money and their own public image.

There was a time when it was Tories who sneered at the poor, who deplored them as stupid and feckless. This was in the loadsamoney era of the 1980s, during which the market ruled and we were beholden to the whims of capitalists and the sainted market. There was even a time, many years ago, when the left spoke of principles, of democracy and liberty. How the roles have been reversed. How strange that it’s mostly conservatives who now talk in abstractions, and it’s the left that obsesses about the markets and worry about the FTSE 100, about their own money. They oppose democracy. They hate the poor and the old. They are despicable.

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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Those pesky genetics again

Genetics affects choice of academic subjects as well as achievement

Kaili Rimfeld et al.

Abstract

We have previously shown that individual differences in educational achievement are highly heritable throughout compulsory education. After completing compulsory education at age 16, students in England can choose to continue to study for two years (A-levels) in preparation for applying to university and they can freely choose which subjects to study. Here, for the first time, we show that choosing to do A-levels and the choice of subjects show substantial genetic influence, as does performance after two years studying the chosen subjects. Using a UK-representative sample of 6584 twin pairs, heritability estimates were 44% for choosing to do A-levels and 52–80% for choice of subject. Achievement after two years was also highly heritable (35–76%). The findings that DNA differences substantially affect differences in appetites as well as aptitudes suggest a genetic way of thinking about education in which individuals actively create their own educational experiences in part based on their genetic propensities.

Scientific Reports 6, Article number: 26373 (2016) doi:10.1038/srep26373

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Hillary was "Not Put Under Oath" and the Interview by the FBI was "Not Recorded"

By Capt Joseph R. John

Federal Prosecutor, Law Enforcement Officer, and most clear thinking law abiding citizens throughout the nation are concerned with the FBI Director’s decision to decision to summarily acquit Hillary Clinton.   FBI Director James Comey stated that Hillary Clinton sent and received Secret, Top Secret, and Compartmented messages on her unclassified private E-mail server, and went on to say “we believe that hostile actors gained access to the private commercial E-mail accounts of people with whom Secretary Clinton was in regular contact from her personal account.”  The FBI Director also stated that Hillary Clinton was “extremely careless” (another way of saying “grossly negligent”) in handling and transmitting very sensitive classified information.

Hillary violated US Federal Laws, violated National Security Statues, and put the National Security of the United States at risk; some of her staff handling the server and the messages didn’t have proper security clearances  Many of the 24 million Americans who served in the US Armed Forces and handled classified messages, would have been prosecuted if they illegally destroyed 30,000 messages, and transmitted & received 110 messages containing clearly marked classified information, from an unclassified server.

Hillary’s actions demonstrated “gross negligence”; “gross negligence” is a “felony.” Over a 4 year period, Hillary Clinton repeatedly violated federal statues governing the handling of over 100 Secret, Top Secret, and compartmented messages. The FBI could have easily met the standard to prosecute Hillary for her “negligence” in handling Secret, Top Secret, and Compartmented messages

The central flaw in the acquittal of Hillary was “Intent”. Intent “does not” matter in US Federal Laws governing the handling of classified material.  Thousands of Americans have been prosecuted for “mishandling” classified material—never having had “Intent.”

The FBI Director’s findings revealed the Hillary Clinton misled the American people over and over again.  Director Comey contradicted Hillary repeated statements on national TV when she said, she never transmitted or received classified messages on the unclassified server in the basement of her home.

This final decision in the Case of Hillary Clinton, brings into question the manner in which this case was resolved, brings into questions the judgment of the FBI Director; and demonstrated to the American people that in the Obama administration there is “Not Equal Justice Under Law” because thousands of Americans have been convicted and sent to prison for doing much less than Hillary Clinton did.

A cautious FBI Director should have impaneled a Grand Jury, then he should have referred the findings of the investigation to the Grand Jury.   Violation of the Federal Statues should have been considered by the Grand Jury, and the FBI Director should have announced the Grand Jury’s decision to the American people.    

The decision by Director Comey to summarily acquit Hillary for her actions over a 4 year period in illegally destroying 30,000 messages, while transmitting and receiving over 110 messages containing clearly marked classified information, on an unclassified server in her home, was a miscarriage of justice that “Violated the Rule of Law.”  Director Comey’s summarily acquittal of Hillary Clinton damaged the fine reputation of the FBI.

SOURCE

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Conservative critics Need To Suck It Up And Vote For Trump

Kurt Schlichter

I know why he’s terrible. I’ve written about it at length.

But the Hillary Clinton charade of July 5th – a date that shall live in infamy – and the subsequent rubbing of normal Americans’ noses in the heap of droppings progressives have piled upon the rule of law make plain that there is something much more important at stake here than fussy distaste over Trump’s aesthetic failings and his myriad misjudgments.

The short-sighted liberal elite, aided and abetted by its media catamites, are using our Constitution as toilet paper. One thing matters. One thing only. That is restoring the rule of law, because without it the coastal femboys and hectoring harridans of the left will keep pushing and prodding and provoking until they, to their shock, find normal Americans pushing back. They are worse than stupid – they are unwise, thinking they are simply playing fun games oppressing and abusing those they see as lessers when, in reality, they are playing with fire.

One thing matters. One thing only. That is restoring the rule of law, and only a Trump presidency can do that.

Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and their cabal have demonstrated that there is no one they cannot corrupt, or at least whose integrity they can’t twist and deform. John Roberts, James Comey – all we heard about was their lofty integrity right up until the moment they shoved their shivs in our collective kidney. We can’t rely on the honor of individuals. We need to return to a paradigm where the interests of factions work to check and balance each other.

If elected, how will Hillary Clinton ever be held accountable? Can you conceive of a scenario where the Democrats, or their media, judicial and bureaucratic allies ever stand up in opposition to anything she does, no matter how venal, how corrupt, how fascist? Name the Democrat who stood up in the wake of Comey’s honor flush and said, “This is wrong!”

There will be no check or balance on Hillary Clinton. Not the Congress (D or R), not the courts, not the media, not the bureaucrats. None. This Alinksyite corruptocrat, her second-rate mind twisted with hatred toward normal Americans, will reign unchallenged. She has already sought the power to jail those who criticize her; reversing Citizens United would only be the first step in an unopposed quest to eliminate all legitimate means of dissent, to bar all legitimate means of opposition. Which, of course, would leave only illegitimate means – something she is too dense and ignorant of normal Americans to imagine is possible.

Which leaves Donald Trump as the only alternative, not merely because he is less awful than Hillary Clinton – leprosy is less awful than Hillary Clinton – but because the election of a tacky jerk like Donald Trump is the only thing that could ever motivate the elite to rediscover checks and balances upon executive power.

Think of it. A Congress that finally finds a spine in the face of the president. And that’s not just Democrats – even the posing goofs on the Republican side of the aisle would be falling over themselves to take a whack at the orange executive. What court would shrug and defer to El Presidente Little Digits? Even the mainstream media would rediscover the curiosity about West Wing wrongdoing that disappeared back in January 2009. Imagine their delight to once again be able to preen and strut while babbling about how they speak truth to power instead of groveling and bussing the rear of their White House master.

America will have never seen checking and balancing like President Trump would experience. And that is exactly, precisely what America must have right now.

Hillary Clinton will roll into office unhindered and unaccountable. We know what Clintons do when there is oversight; any sane person should shudder at the thought of them not merely unaccountable, but actively abetted by the entire elite. If you want to tear this country apart – not figuratively, not metaphorically, but with the real violence and bloodshed she will blunder into provoking – then hand that aspiring pants-suited Chavez wannabe the keys to the Oval Office.

That’s the choice. There’s no white knight riding in to snag the nomination away from the guy who won it fair and square. It’s Trump or Hillary. Sorry, that’s your choice, and making no choice is a choice for her.

I get that you detest Trump. So do I. But you can stop sending me tweets about the latest faux outrage. “Trump loves Saddam Hussein and has insulted all our vets and blah blah blah!” Get some damn perspective.

I know you’ve invested a lot of your personal credibility in refusing to support him, and you will absolutely have to endure a lot of graceless gloating by his jerkier acolytes if you walk it back. I endure plenty from Trump haters. Apparently I’m a fake conservative and hate America and blah blah blah. But walk it back you must.

This isn’t about how awful Trump is; it’s about how awful Hillary will be without any constraints whatsoever.

Only one thing matters. One thing only. That is restoring the rule of law. And only a Trump presidency has any hope of doing that.

SOURCE

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There are no "correct" foods

Is popcorn good for you? What about pizza, orange juice or sushi? Or frozen yogurt, pork chops or quinoa?

Which foods are healthy? In principle, it’s a simple question, and a person who wishes to eat more healthily should reasonably expect to know which foods to choose at the supermarket and which to avoid. Unfortunately, the answer is anything but simple.

The Food and Drug Administration recently agreed to review its standards for what foods can be called “healthy,” a move that highlights how much of our nutritional knowledge has changed in recent years — and how much remains unknown.

With the Morning Consult, a media and polling firm, the New York Times surveyed hundreds of nutritionists — members of the American Society for Nutrition — asking them whether they thought certain food items (about 50) were healthy. The Morning Consult also surveyed a representative sample of the American electorate, asking the same thing.

The results suggest a surprising diversity of opinion, even among experts. Yes, some foods, like kale, apples and oatmeal, are considered “healthy” by nearly everyone. And some, like soda, french fries and chocolate chip cookies, are not. But in between, some foods appear to benefit from a positive public perception, while others befuddle the public and experts alike. (We’re looking at you, butter.)

“Twenty years ago, I think we knew about 10 percent of what we need to know” about nutrition, said Dr. Dariush Mozaffarian, the dean of the Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy at Tufts University. “And now we know about 40 or 50 percent.”

Of the 52 common foods that the Times asked experts and the public to rate, none had a wider gap than granola bars. More than 70 percent of ordinary Americans we surveyed described them as healthy, but fewer than a third of nutritional experts did. A similar gap existed for granola, which less than half of nutritionists we surveyed described as healthy.

Several of the foods considered more healthful by everyday Americans than by experts — including frozen yogurt, SlimFast shakes and granola bars — have something in common: They can contain a lot of added sugar. In May, the Food and Drug Administration announced a new template for nutrition labels, and one priority was to clearly distinguish between sugars that naturally occur in food and sugars that are added later to heighten flavors.

On the other end of the spectrum, several foods received a seal of approval from our expert panel but left nonexperts uncertain. Most surprising was the reaction to quinoa, a “superfood” grain so often praised as healthful that it has become the subject of satire.

In addition, tofu, sushi, hummus, wine, and shrimp were all rated as significantly more healthful by nutritionists than by the public. Why? One reason may be that many of them are new foods in the mainstream American diet.

Others may reflect mixed messages in news coverage of the healthfulness of foods. Shrimp was long maligned for its high rate of dietary cholesterol, though recent guidelines have changed. And public messages about the healthfulness of alcohol are conflicting: While moderate drinking appears to have some health benefits, more consumption can obviously have real health costs.

Several of the most controversial foods — including steak, cheddar, whole milk and pork chops — tend to have a lot of fat. And fat is a topic few experts can agree on. Years ago, the nutritional consensus was that fat, and particularly the saturated fat found in dairy and red meat was bad for the heart. Newer studies are less clear, and many of the fights among nutritionists tend to be about the right amount of protein and fat in a healthy diet.

The uncertainty about these foods, as expressed both by experts and ordinary Americans, reflects the haziness of the nutritional evidence about them.

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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Life was BETTER under Saddam Hussein: Iraqis say

Of course it was. At least there was peace then. You could buy bread with ease and not have your house blown up.  It's the same story throughout the Middle East these days and it is surely evidence that democracy does not take root there.  For nearly all of human history, people have been ruled by tyrants -- usually called kings or emperors -- and people have evolved ways of thinking and feeling that suit that.  As all the studies show, politics is highly heritable genetically, so that should be no surprise.

It is only the people of Northern Europe (including Britain and its derivative societies) who appear to have democratic instincts and it is indeed a deep instinct.  ALL of North Western Europe has a long history of irrepressible democracy.  Episodes of tyranny such as Cromwell and Hitler have been very short-lived.

And, as far as I know, there has never been a pure democracy anywhere, though Switzerland and Iceland come close.  The normal Northern European arrangement has been a king plus a parliament of some kind.  And some kings -- such as Sweden's Gustavus Adolphus -- ruled with very little to check their power.  So it has been a long struggle, even for the Northern European nations, to assert fully their democratic instincts.  And it is a battle far from over, with powerful elites still determined to control the masses as far as they can.

Democracy did appear in Southern Europe for a time -- in the shape of Athens and Rome -- but they were very limited democracies with only a minority allowed to vote and they did not in any case last.

But what about Russia?  They are as Northern as can be and look just like other Northern Europeans.  Yet they are hardly known for democracy.  One needs to know a little about Russia's different  history to understand what happened there.  From the 13th to the 15th century Russia was under the control of the Mongol khanates, which permitted no democratic input from Russians.  They were as imperial as can be.  And that was a critical period in Russian development.

So by the time the Khans ebbed away, Russians were well inured to tyranny. And the kings of Muscovy used that to commence and continue territorial expansion -- an amazing expansion that took centuries but which ended up with Russia spreading right across the Eurasian continent, as it does to this day. Americans talk about how the West was won -- but the East that Russians won was at least four times bigger than the American West. And that program of unending expansion continued into the 20th century with the takeover of the Baltic countries etc. So Russia has long been a country at war and wartime politics everywhere tend to permit a greater degree of tyranny than would otherwise be permitted.

But hey!  Wait a minute!  What about Japan?  There was nothing democratic about the Tokugawa Shogunate and the Meji restoration was not democratic either.  Yet Japan today is impeccably democratic.  Does that not show that you don't have to have democratic genes?  It does not.  What it shows is that the key personality trait underlying democracy is consideration of others.  Japanese are VERY considerate of one-another.  Those Japanese wearing surgical masks on the street and in lecture halls are doing so in order not to give their cold or flu to others.

And the Northern Europeans who had to battle unforgiving winters needed to be respecting of others too.  The climate was such a deadly enemy that you could afford to have no other enemies. They did of course have enemies among outsiders but in their own societies, enmity had to be avoided -- by everyone considering one-another

So forcing democracy on the Middle Easterners, with their vast contempt for one another  -- think ISIS -- was a deadly mistake


Iraqis whose lives were destroyed by the 2003 invasion of their country today accused Tony Blair and George Bush of being the architects of their downfall - and called them 'the devil'.

The former Prime Minister's reputation lies in tatters after today's Chilcot's damning report into the Iraq debacle found he toppled tyrant Saddam Hussein with no firm evidence he had weapons of mass destruction.

And today people on the streets of Erbil in northern Iraq celebrated as the report finally tore apart the so-called flawed invasion that killed 179 British troops and their countrymen and women.

'They removed Saddam Hussein, but they didn't think about the consequences of doing so,' said shopkeeper Selman Hussein.

The businessman, who briefly fled to Europe and lived in Belgium, said Mr Blair had been irresponsible when he claimed he could not have known how difficult the post-invasion situation would be.

In the report emails from the ex-Labour PM to then US-president George Bush showed unwavering loyalty as he was determined to take military action to topple Saddam.

"Under Saddam we were happier, it was much better. Now, it is Sunni-Shiite and Kurds. Everybody is fighting, now there are bombs everyday. Before we had a strong president. His name was Saddam" -- Selman Hussein, shopkeeper

But the shopkeeper went on:  'They did not plan for the future. We are now living in a destroyed country, Tony Blair did not make anything good for Iraq,' he said.

'Under Saddam we were happier, it was much better. Now, it is Sunni-Shiite and Kurds. Everybody is fighting, now there are bombs everyday. Before we had a strong president. His name was Saddam,' he said.

Selman, also believes Mr Blair twisted intelligence about the threat posed by Saddam to justify the war that led to the deaths of 179 British soldiers and left hundreds of thousands of Iraqis dead.  'He said Saddam had weapons of mass destruction. What weapons? They lied,' he added.

Iraq's Christian community, who have be persecuted heavily in post Saddam, agree with Chilcott's findings that Blair should have more fully explored alternatives to military action that cost lives.

'They did not plan for the future. They just invaded and then destroyed this country,' Albert, 36, a Christian from Baghdad told MailOnline.  'Tony Blair and George Bush they destroyed this country, they are the devil,' he added.

Albert now works in Erbil because he is unable to go back to Baghdad, added: 'I have only one thing I want to ask those who invaded Iraq: If they can manage to repair this country back to they way it was before, I will forgive them, but until then I will not.'

Those Christians who held high positions under Saddam's ruling Ba'ath Party look back fondly on their country under his dictatorship. 'Before 2003 it was safe, in Saddam's time it was good, now there is no security,' Albert, who was too frightened to give his surname, explained.

'Before I could drive from Basra to Baghdad to Mosul. Now that is impossible,' he added.

But Iraq is not entirely hostile to the humbled PM, who today said he expressed more sorrow, regret, and apology than we may ever know or can believe in a grovelling apology to the report's findings.

For those in the Kurdish community said life without the tyrant Saddam, who is believed to have murdered up to 280,000 of their people during the repression of the 1991 rebellion, is better.

'At the beginning we were happy. The American and the British came to liberate us from Saddam, and we thought the new situation would be much better,' Doctor, Mathum Falluh stated.

But Mathum, 68, a university lecturer, from Sulaymaniyah, still said his country was better before the 2003 invasion.

'It has become a 100 per cent worse than before Saddam was gone, because of the killing, slaughtering [and] murdering now,' he said.

The father-of-four said the invasion has led to the political breakup of Iraq, which has created a violent vacuum in fighting for power.

'People like me thought Britain and the US came to save us. But, they supported a bad leader in Nouri Kamil Mohammed Hasan al-Maliki when they supported him a Prime Minister,' he said.

SOURCE

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How The Elites Have A Monopoly On Political Power

Writing at National Review, historian Victor Davis Hanson weighs in on the Clinton prosecution that wasn't. It's a great look at what our country has become- a place where there's one set of rules for the powerful, and one set of rules for the rest of us:

In Merced or Dayton, if an insurance agent, eager to help his wife facing indictment, barged into a restaurant where the local DA is known to lunch, he would almost certainly be told to get the hell out.

But among the Washington elite, the scenario is apparently quite different. The two parties, in supposedly serendipitous fashion, just happen to touch down at the same time on the Phoenix corporate tarmac, with their private planes pulling up nose to nose. Then the attorney general of the United States and her husband, in secrecy enforced by federal security details, welcome the ex-president onto her government plane. Afterward, and only when caught, the prosecutor and the husband of the person under investigation assure the world that they talked about everything except Hillary Clinton’s possible indictment, Loretta Lynch’s past appointment by Bill Clinton and likely judicial future, or the general quandary of 2016.

There has been a lot of talk since Brexit and the rise of Donald Trump of the corrosive power and influence of the “elite” and the “establishment.” But to quote Butch Cassidy to the Sundance Kid, “Who are those guys?”

In the case of the ancient Romans or of the traditional British ruling classes, land, birth, education, money, government service, and cultural notoriety were among the ingredients that made one an establishmentarian. But our modern American elite is a bit different.

Residence, either in the Boston–Washington, D.C., or the San Francisco–Los Angeles corridor, often is a requisite. Celebrity and public exposure count — e.g., access to traditional television outlets (as opposed to hoi polloi Internet blogging). So does education — again, most often a coastal-corridor thing: Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Berkeley, Stanford, etc.
Hanson's whole piece is great, and worth the read(here). The Founders built a nation of laws, not men, where a system of checks and balances would hold governemnt accountable to the people. They never envisioned today's post New Deal system, a system that exists to enrich and empower a class of corporate and political consultants and disconnected academics, all of whom operate with little or no accountability in service of a massively bloated regulatory administrative state.

SOURCE

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Time for U.S. to Exit Entangling Alliances

Will the American public take a lesson from British voters and reconsider their official commitments to European allies—namely, U.S. participation in NATO? Whatever the impulses behind Donald Trump’s call for pulling out of various military alliances, according to Independent Institute Senior Fellow Ivan Eland the time is ripe for rethinking Pax Americana.

Part of the justification for a U.S. withdrawal from NATO is financial. “The United States accounts for three-quarters of the defense spending of NATO countries, and it is very unlikely that those allies—all much closer to zones of conflict than is the United States—will be defending the superpower rather than vice versa,” Eland writes. The same is true with respect to America’s allies in East Asia: the U.S. foots most of the bill but gets little if anything in return—not even open markets for U.S. trade and investment.

An even greater justification for reducing military commitments involves the alleged purpose of the alliances: national security. The United States is surrounded by two oceans and two friendly nations, and enjoys the world’s largest defensive capability. Yet military entanglements in Europe, East Asia, and the Middle East risk drawing the United States into armed conflicts large and small. The U.S. government’s alliances threaten America’s financial soundness and national security. “Perhaps an Amerexit from them is in order,” Eland concludes.

SOURCE

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Wrong policies have consequences



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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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Agricultural subsidies are bad for your pocket but are they also bad for your health?

Agricultural subsidies are the despair of libertarians and economists worldwide.  When politics gets into farming, vast idiocies arise -- often ending in governments paying farmers not to farm at all. And the subsidies come out of the taxpayer's pocket so one would hope that some benefit comes to someone other than the farmer with his hand out.  It's hard to see it.  And now we see a possible indication that the produce that subsidies encourage is actually bad for your health.  The study is far from conclusive due to a lack of controls and the mechanism is unclear but it should create some doubts

The U.S. government spends billions of dollars each year on subsidies to farmers, but consuming too much food made from those subsidized farm products can boost people's risk for heart disease, researchers say.

The more people eat of foods made with subsidized commodities, the more likely they are to be obese, have abnormal cholesterol and high blood sugar, according to a report in JAMA Internal Medicine.

Current federal agricultural subsidies help finance the production of corn, soybeans, wheat, rice, sorghum, dairy and livestock, which are often converted into refined grains, high-fat and high-sodium processed foods, and high-calorie juices and soft drinks (sweetened with high-fructose corn syrup), the authors write.

“We know that eating too many of these foods can lead to obesity, cardiovascular disease and type 2 diabetes,” said lead author Karen R. Siegel of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta.

But the subsidies help keep the prices of those products down, making them more affordable.

“Among the justifications for the 1973 U.S. Farm Bill was to assure consumers a plentiful supply of food at reasonable prices,” Siegel told Reuters Health by email. “Subsidized food commodities are foods made from federally funded crops to ensure the American population has an adequate supply of food, thus they tend to be non-perishable, or storable, e.g., corn, wheat, rice, to reduce the risk of spoiling.”

The researchers used National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey responses obtained from more than 10,000 adults between 2001 and 2006. Each person reported everything they had eaten in one 24-hour period.

The researchers gave each individual a “subsidy score” based on the percentage of their total calories than had come from subsidized foods.

At the same time, participants had their body mass index, abdominal fat, C-reactive protein (a marker of inflammation), blood pressure, cholesterol and blood sugar levels measured.

On average, people were getting about 56 percent of their calories from subsidized food commodities. When the total group was divided into four smaller groups based on their subsidy score, those with the highest scores were more likely to be obese, have a larger waist circumference, more C-reactive protein, more “bad” cholesterol and higher blood sugar than those in the lowest subsidy score, as reported in JAMA Internal Medicine.

The study itself can't prove that a diet higher in subsidized foods causes poor health, Siegel said. But foods that are high in fat, sugar and sodium are known to increase the risk for chronic health problems, particularly when paired with other factors such as smoking and inactivity, she added.

U.S. dietary guidelines recommend emphasizing fruits, vegetables, whole grains, and fat-free or low-fat milk products, lean meats, poultry, fish, beans, eggs, and nuts, Siegel said.

The government subsidies were a strategy to support rural communities and to manage hunger in the 1970s, said Raj Patel of the University of Texas at Austin, who wrote a commentary on Siegel’s report.

But “we rarely buy these foods raw,” Patel told Reuters Health by email. “These commodities are grown to be processed.”

SOURCE

The journal article is Association of Higher Consumption of Foods Derived From Subsidized Commodities With Adverse Cardiometabolic Risk Among US Adults

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Are polls understating Donald Trump’s support?

In days leading up to the UK’s historic June 23 vote to leave the European Union, almost every single opinion poll had the Remain side winning.

Populus gave Remain a 55 to 45 percent lead. YouGov gave Remain a 51 to 49 percent edge. Ipsos Mori had it at 49 to 46 percent with 1 percent undecided.

Yet when referendum day came, it was Leave which had the distinct advantage, winning 52 to 48 percent — stunning prediction markets and pollsters alike, who were left to wonder what had just gone wrong.

The usual variety of explanations, like greater than expected turnout in Leave areas or less than expected turnout in Remain areas, or sampling error have been offered.

But perhaps a significant percent of people polled lied to the pollsters about their true intentions, or simply those who were intent on voting Leave were more likely to opt out of the poll.

Which after a year of a media and political establishment barrage against the Leave campaign as racist, xenophobic, and the like, and they would crash the economy and send the UK into a depression. Significantly, supporters of Leave were even blamed for the assassination of an MP in the closing days of the campaign.

None of it happened to be true. But who wants to be called a racist for not wanting open borders or unbridled trade policies that ship jobs overseas? Or crashing the economy? Or worse, blamed for the murder of members of Parliament?

A similar situation could be emerging across the pond in the U.S., where Donald Trump trails Hillary Clinton in national and statewide polls.

Here, the media and political establishment here consistently characterize Donald Trump as racist and xenophobic, and portray his supporters as violent — even as Trump supporters are being assaulted by protesters on television. They are told Trump’s trade and immigration policies will kill the U.S. economy and those who support them are economically illiterate.

Sound familiar?

Maybe Trump supporters are less likely to want to be identified. Not necessarily out of shame, but out of fear of being physically bloodied or damaged professionally. Perhaps that is being reflected in the polls.

UK Independence Party leader Nigel Farage told CNBC on June 28 that is exactly what happened in the UK with the Brexit polls failing to predict the final outcome, and may be what is happening in the U.S., too. “There’s kind of this consensus that has made people feel slightly embarrassed, ashamed to be patriotic, to believe we should control immigration, and so when pollsters ring them they tend to shy away a little bit,” Farage suggested.

He may be on to something. Consider just how wrong the polls were in Republican presidential primary when it was still competitive a few months ago. The Real Clear Politics average of polls in Indiana had Trump at 43 percent to 32 percent. Instead, Trump got 54 percent of the vote.

In Pennsylvania polls said Donald Trump up 48 percent to 27 percent. Instead, he won 58 percent to 22 percent.

In Maryland, the average had Trump up 47 percent to 26 percent. Instead, he won 56 percent to 23 percent.

In Connecticut, the polls said Trump was at 54 percent, but then he over performed again at 59 percent.

In Rhode Island, the polls had Trump at 52 percent. Wrong again, he came in at 65 percent.

In Delaware, the polls said 55 percent. Voters said 63 percent.

In New York, the polls had said Trump would get 53 percent, but instead he hit 60 percent there.

Trump beat the poll estimates by up to 13 points in some states when election day finally came around. Simply incredible.

So perhaps Trump supporters are keeping quiet, and that is what is consistently turning up in the polls. You may not see their bumper stickers or lawn signs. Perhaps they don’t want their windows smashed. But they intend to vote for him all the same.

In Pittsburgh on June 28 Trump told voters, including disaffected labor Democrats, that “America became the world’s dominant economy by becoming the world’s dominant producer. The wealth this created was shared broadly, creating the biggest middle class the world had ever known. But then America changed its policy from promoting development in America, to promoting development in other nations. We allowed foreign countries to subsidize their goods, devalue their currencies, violate their agreements, and cheat in every way imaginable. Trillions of our dollars and millions of our jobs flowed overseas as a result.”

Trump added, “Ladies and Gentlemen, it’s time to declare our economic independence once again.”

We’ll know soon enough if a silent majority follows Trump’s call and puts him in the White House. Trump is running a Brexitonian style campaign of restoring U.S. sovereignty, stopping illegal immigration and securing better trade agreements. It is this pitch that Trump hopes will transcend traditional party loyalties, and throw off the conventional calculations that typically predict the final outcome of presidential elections.

But one cannot deny that 2016 is already shaping up to be a year that defies the expectations of the political and media establishment — all over the world.

The only people who have a clear idea of which way things are actually going are voters — and they might not be cooperating with pollsters.

Think Hillary Clinton has this in the bag? Ask outgoing British Prime Minister David Cameron if he still believes the polls.

SOURCE

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More Proof that the Fix is in for Crooked Hillary

If today's revelation that the FBI won't recommend the prosecution of Hillary Clinton despite the admission that she was "extremely careless," more information suggests that the fix was in from the getgo. The Obama State Department has done everything in its power to avoid turning over documents related to Hillary's tenure as Secretary of State. Per the AP:

Just five months before the presidential election, the State Department is under fire in courtrooms over its delays in turning over government files related to Hillary Clinton's tenure as secretary of state.

In one case, the agency warned it needed a 27-month delay, until October 2018, to turn over emails from Clinton's former aides, and the judge in another case, a lawsuit by The Associated Press, wondered aloud whether the State Department might be deliberately delaying until after the election.

"We're now reaching a point where there's mounting frustration that this is a project where the State Department may be running out the clock," said U.S. District Court Judge Richard J. Leon. The judge said he was considering imposing penalties on the agency if it failed to meet the next set of deadlines he orders. Leon wondered aloud at one point whether he might impose penalties for again failing to deliver records on time. He mused about "a fine on a daily basis" or "incarceration."

"I can't send the marshals, obviously, out to bring in the documents, at least they wouldn't know where to go, probably," Leon said.

Secretary of State John Kerry and other officials have said they are committed to public transparency, vowing that the State Department will improve its practices under the U.S. Freedom of Information Act. Last year, after an inspector general's audit harshly critical of the agency, Kerry appointed a "transparency coordinator," Janice Jacobs, and said the agency would "fundamentally improve our ability to respond to requests for our records."

But in three separate court hearings last week, officials acknowledged that their records searches were hobbled by errors and new delays and said they need far more time to produce Clinton records. In other cases where the agency has already reached legal agreements with news organizations and political groups, the final delivery of thousands of records will not come until months after the November election — far too late to give voters an opportunity to analyze the performance of Clinton and her aides.

The delays loom even in the wake of FBI Director James Comey's announcement Tuesday that he has decided not to refer criminal charges to the Justice Department in Clinton's use of her personal computer server and private email accounts to conduct government business when she was secretary of state. Comey criticized Clinton's use of the private system and "careless" handling of classified materials, and also said the State Department was "generally lacking" in its handling of sensitive records.

It's not uncommon for government agencies to be extremely delayed when it comes to producing infromation, but this is ridiculous. It is clear that the Obama Administration has gone above and beyond to use the justice system to protect the presumptive nominee and prosecute her enemies. Expect more of the same if Crooked Hillary is victorious in November.

SOURCE

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

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

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Trump’s Muslim Ban Gains Support

When an ISIS-supporting Muslim named Omar Mateen massacred 49 people at a nightclub in Orlando on June 12, Donald Trump reminded Americans that he is still the only political candidate to support a pause in the massive flow of Muslims entering the United States.  Trump made his proposal last December after another ISIS-supporting Muslim massacred 14 people at an office Christmas party in San Bernardino, California.

Trump said his Muslim ban would be temporary.  “Until we are able to determine and understand this problem and the dangerous threat it poses,” he said, “our country cannot be the victims of horrendous attacks by people that believe only in Jihad.”

Trump’s reasonable, commonsense proposal was immediately condemned or disavowed by other presidential candidates in both parties.  Even Senator Ted Cruz said he disagreed with it, though he didn’t say why.

Now that Cruz has returned to his “day job” as U.S. Senator from Texas, he recently co-authored a new report with Senator Jeff Sessions that provides powerful support for Trump’s position.  The report issued June 22 shows that the overwhelming majority of convicted terrorists came into our country as immigrants or refugees from Muslim countries.

Cruz and Sessions were able to determine the birthplace of 451 of the 580 individuals who were convicted of terrorism since the 9/11 attacks on September 11, 2001.  Some 380 of the 451, or 84 percent of these terrorists, were foreign born – and most of them came from Muslim-majority countries such Pakistan, Egypt, Lebanon, Yemen, Somalia, Iraq and Afghanistan.

Of the 71 terrorists who were born here, most were children of immigrants or refugees from Muslim countries, although the Senators could not report the exact number because the Obama administration refused to provide that information.  Despite four official letters from the U.S. Senators on August 12, December 3, January 11, and June 14 to the appropriate agencies of the U.S. government, Obama’s appointees have refused to answer questions about the immigration status of the 580 persons convicted of terrorism in the United States since 9/11.

Coming six months after San Bernardino, the Orlando massacre entitled Donald Trump to say “I told you so” and he did so in a powerful speech on June 13.  “We admit more than 100,000 lifetime migrants from the Middle East each year,” Trump said.  “Since 9/11, hundreds of migrants and their children have been implicated in terrorism in the United States.”

Trump was right to include the children of immigrants as part of the immigration problem.  The Orlando shooter Mateen was born in the United States, but a witness said he referred to Afghanistan as “my country.”

Besides Orlando, other mass killings have been perpetrated by the U.S.-born children of Muslim immigrants or individuals who were brought here as children by their Muslim parents.  Examples include one of the San Bernardino killers; the Fort Hood shooter, Major Nidal Hasan; the Tsarnaev brothers, who bombed the Boston Marathon in 2013; and the man who killed four active-duty Marines and a sailor in Chattanooga in 2015.

Don’t overlook the Muslims who entered the United States on the pretext of marriage, such as the Pakistani woman named Malik who helped her husband commit the San Bernardino massacre.  The Orlando shooter’s first wife, his second wife, and his second wife’s first husband were all Muslims who never should have been allowed to come here.

In an interview, Trump said “there’s no real assimilation” by Muslim immigrants, even in the “second and third generation.”   A liberal website called Politifact tried to refute that statement by citing a telephone survey of Muslims who said they wanted to become American, but the interviews were conducted in “Arabic, Farsi and Urdu” – hardly evidence of assimilation.

Other countries have recently experienced terrorist massacres directed or inspired by the Islamic State, including 130 murdered in Paris; 32 in Brussels; 45 at the airport in Istanbul, Turkey; 28 at a restaurant in Dhaka, Bangladesh; and, most recently, 200 in Baghdad, Iraq.  Obviously we can’t prevent atrocities in other countries, but we can and should prevent potential terrorists from coming here.

Obama, however, is doing just the opposite.  He has admitted over 5,000 so-called refugees from Syria this fiscal year and scattered them to 167 communities in 39 states.  More than 99 percent of the Syrian refugees are Sunni Muslims, and only 8 individuals identified themselves as Christian.  The Obama “surge” of Syrian refugees is on track to reach 10,000 by September, even though FBI Director James Comey told Congress last year that there’s no way to vet them adequately.

Most Syrians lack the skills to support themselves without government assistance, and Robert Rector of the Heritage Foundation calculates that 10,000 refugees will cost federal, state and local taxpayers some $6.5 billion over their lifetime.  If that’s not bad enough, Hillary Clinton has vowed to increase the number of Syrian refugees to 65,000.

SOURCE

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You Owe Them Nothing - Not Respect, Not Loyalty, Not Obedience

Sometimes in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another. It is high time to declare our personal independence from any remnant of obligation to those who have spit upon the rule of law. We owe them nothing - not respect, not loyalty, not obedience.

Think about it. If you are out driving at 3 a.m., do you stop at a stop sign when there’s no one coming? Of course you do. You don’t need a cop to be there to make you stop. You do it voluntarily because this is America and America is a country where obeying the law is the right thing to do because the law was justly made and is justly applied. Or it used to be.

The law mattered. It applied equally to everyone. We demanded that it did, all of us – politicians, the media, and regular citizens. Oh, there were mistakes and miscarriages of justice but they weren’t common and they weren’t celebrated – they were universally reviled. And, more importantly, they weren’t part and parcel of the ideology of one particular party. There was once a time where you could imagine a Democrat scandal where the media actually called for the head of the Democrat instead of deploying to cover it up.

People assumed that the law mattered, that the same rules applied to everyone. That duly enacted laws would be enforced equally until repealed. That the Constitution set the foundation and that its guarantees would be honored even if we disliked the result in a particular case. But that’s not our country today.

The idea of the rule of law today is a lie. There is no law. There is no justice. There are only lies.

Hillary Clinton is manifestly guilty of multiple felonies. Her fans deny it half-heartedly, but mostly out of habit – in the end, it’s fine with them if she’s a felon. They don’t care. It’s just some law. What’s the big deal? It doesn’t matter that anyone else would be in jail right now for doing a fraction of what she did. But the law is not important. Justice is not important.

The attorney general secretly canoodles with the husband of the subject of criminal investigation by her own department and the president, the enforcer of our laws, shrugs. The media, the challenger of the powerful, smirks. They rub our noses in their contempt for the law. And by doing so, demonstrate their contempt for us.

Only power matters, and Hillary stands ready to accumulate more power on their behalf so their oaths, their alleged principles, their duty to the country – all of it goes out the window. But it’s much worse than just one scandal that seems not to scandalize anyone in the elite. Just read the Declaration of Independence – it’s almost like those dead white Christian male proto-NRA members foresaw and cataloged the myriad oppressions of liberalism’s current junior varsity tyranny.

There is one law for them, and another for us. Sanctuary cities? Obama’s immigration orders? If you conservatives can play by the rules and pass your laws, then we liberals will just not enforce them. You don’t get the benefit of the laws you like. We get the benefit of the ones we do, though. Not you. Too bad, rubes.

So if you are still obeying the law when you don’t absolutely have to, when there isn’t some government enforcer with a gun lurking right there to make you, aren’t you kind of a sucker?

Don’t you feel foolish, like you’re the only one who didn’t get the memo that it’s every man/woman/non-binary entity for his/her/its self?

Who is standing against this? Not the judges. The Constitution? Meh. Why should their personal agendas be constrained by some sort of foundational document? Judges find rights that don’t appear in the text and gut ones that do. Just ask a married gay guy in Los Angeles who can’t carry a concealed weapons to protect himself from [OMITTED] radicals.

The politicians won’t stand against this. The Democrats support allowing the government to jail people for criticizing politicians and clamor to take away citizens’ rights merely because some government flunky has put their name on a list. Their “minority report” on Benghazi is an attack on Trump, and to them the idea of congressional oversight of a Democrat official whose incompetence put four Americans in the ground is not merely illegitimate; it’s a joke.

Is the media standing against this, those sainted watchdogs protecting us from the powerful? Don’t make me laugh.

What do these moral abortions have in common? Short term political gain over principle. These people are so used to the good life that a society’s reflexive reliance on the principle of the rule of law brings that they think they can undermine it with impunity. Oh it’s no big deal if we do this, they reason. Everyone else will keep playing by the rules, right? Everything will be fine even as we score in the short term.

The Romans had principles for a while. Then they got tempted to abandon principle for – wait for it – short term political gain. Then they got Caesar. Then the emperors. Then the barbarians. And then the Dark Ages. But hey, we’re much smarter and more sophisticated than the Romans, who were so dumb they didn’t even know that gender is a matter of choice. Our civilization is permanent and indestructible – it’s not like we are threatened by barbarians who want to come massacre us.

Oh, wait. The last words of some of these people to their radical Muslim killers before they are beheaded will be, “Please remember me as not being Islamaphobic! And sorry about the Crusades!”

There used to be a social contract requiring that our government treat us all equally within the scope of the Constitution and defend us, and in return we would recognize the legitimacy of its laws and defend it when in need. But that contract has been breached. We are not all equal before the law. Our constitutional rights are not being upheld. We are not being defended – hell, we normals get blamed every time some Seventh Century savage goes on a kill spree. Yet we’re still supposed to keep going along as if everything is cool, obeying the law, subsidizing the elite with our taxes, taking their abuse. We’ve been evicted by the landlord but he still wants us to pay him rent.

Now it seems we actually have a new social contract – do what we say and don’t resist, and in return we’ll abuse you, lie about you, take your money, and look down upon you in contempt. What a bargain!

It’s not a social contract anymore – American society today is a suicide pact we never agreed to and yet we’re expected to go first.

I say “No.”  We owe them nothing - not respect, not loyalty, not obedience. Nothing.

We make it easy for them by going along. We make it simple by defaulting to the old rules. But there are no rules anymore, certainly none that morally bind us once we are outside the presence of some government worker with a gun to force our compliance. There is only will and power and we must rediscover our own. If there is no cop sitting right there, then there is nothing to make you stop at that stop sign tonight.

They don’t realize that by rejecting the rule of law, they have set us free. We are independent. We owe them nothing - not respect, not loyalty, not obedience. But with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence, we will still mutually pledge those who have earned our loyalty with their adherence to the rule of law, our lives, our fortunes and our sacred honor.

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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Australia has just had a version of the Trump revolt or the Brexit revolt

Australian politics is traditionally dominated by the two major parties, with few independents.  In last Saturday's election, however, neither of the two main parties had a clear win.  The big win was a big increase in the number of independents.  For either major party to govern, it will have to woo at least some of the independents

The leaders of both major parties had nothing fresh to offer and stood for business as usual.  Both offered only the same old tired elitist consensus about most things that has recently come under challenge in the U.S., Britain and Europe.

Trump in America, Brexit in Britain, the rise of Marine Le Pen in France and the crumbling of Frau Dr. Merkel in Germany all say the same thing:  People are sick of the same old politically correct consensus and  want no more of it. So Australia's independents too now represent a rejection of business as usual

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Brexit for America

Should we give Washington still more power over our lives – or “Take back control”

Paul Driessen

Independence Day weekend is a perfect time to reflect on personal freedoms and responsibilities.

The Magna Carta and Declaration of Independence were about overbearing, despotic kings. Brexit, Britain’s decision to leave the European Union, was much about overbearing bureaucrats in Brussels.

This year’s US elections likewise center on gaining a new measure of freedom from an authoritarian, unaccountable Executive Branch in Washington. Like Brexit, they are also about We the People actually having a role in a democracy, a voice in how much power government will have over our lives. The Brexit motto is fast becoming the driving force in 2016 politics: “Take back control!”

Today’s ruling elites do not govern from positions of land ownership or birth, but from assertions of greater education, expertise and wisdom than supposedly possessed by citizens at large. These ruling classes increasingly control our lands, the energy and minerals beneath them, and the lives, livelihoods and living standards of those beyond the DC Beltway. People are getting fed up.

A Financial Times headline just days after the Brexit vote read “Clinton wary of populist contagion.” She should be.

The very notion that people might vote to loosen the shackles of intrusive government is anathema to her. Like President Obama, Hillary Clinton shares the mindset that democracy is fine if angry liberals can be mobilized to elect an activist, wealth-redistributionist president to “fundamentally transform” America. It’s unsettling and intolerable if conservatives mobilize to unelect this agenda.

Mrs. Clinton and her increasingly far-left party rightly worry that voters have had a bellyful of liberal-progressive policies that have rolled back economic growth, job creation, and incomes for poor, working class and minority families; unleashed waves of illegal immigration; and imposed massive cultural changes on our communities and military. And yet, right after the Brexit vote, Mrs. Clinton said:

“Our first task has to be to make sure the economic uncertainty created by these events does not hurt working class families here in America.” Talk about being insulated from reality.

Possible impacts from Britain’s exit from the EU are hardly the issue. America’s concern is the certain harm to working classes inflicted by Mr. Obama’s policies – which Ms. Hillary promises to redouble if elected. Her comment to West Virginia’s coal country electorate underscores her insensitive disdain.

“I’m going to put a lot of coal miners out of jobs,” she informed them. And she won’t stop there.

Germany, Britain and Poland are finally awakening to the ways exorbitant prices for subsidized, unreliable wind and solar electricity are hammering their poor and middle class families, destroying their international competitiveness, and driving their steel, auto, ceramics and other industries out of business. But Mrs. Clinton has also vowed to regulate hydraulic fracturing into oblivion, and ban mining and drilling on federally controlled lands that represent 30-85% of all real estate in Alaska and America’s western states. Her rabid environmentalist base wants to rid these areas of ranching and grazing, as well.

The economic impacts will roll through states and communities like successive tsunamis. Mrs. Clinton, her media and intellectual supporters, and ruling elites will likely respond as they always do.

“What difference at this point does it make?” she ranted at lawmakers who dared to question her lies and incompetence in the deaths of Ambassador Chris Stevens and his heroic security team in Benghazi.

“Shoulda, coulda, woulda. We didn’t,” the then-First Lady contemptuously responded to suggestions that she and President Clinton mishandled financial reports on their Whitewater land deals. She gave the same dismissive answer to “impertinent” questions about her improper State Department email server.

“Every survivor of sexual assault deserves to be heard, believed, & supported,” she tweeted in 2015. But if they’re victims of her husband’s sexual predations, she labels them “trailer trash,” like Gennifer Flowers, or slimes and pressures them to shut up, like Juanita Broaddrick and other women.

Like Mr. Obama and other elites, she surrounds herself with armed security details – and then demands more gun control when unarmed or disarmed Americans are murdered in Orlando, San Bernardino or Fort Hood … while scrubbing press releases and cell phone transcripts of any mention of Islamist motives.

The Obama Justice Department prosecuted ex-Virginia Governor Bob McDonnell over a watch and meeting arrangements. (An 8-0 Supreme Court decision threw out the conviction.) But the DOJ was silent about Secretary of State Clinton appointing Rajiv Fernando to the International Security Advisory Board, giving him access to ultra-sensitive intelligence – when his only apparent “qualification” was raising millions of dollars for Mrs. Clinton’s 2008 presidential campaign, donating hundreds of thousands to the Clinton Foundation, and giving tens of thousands to Hillary PACs.

The extensive quid-pro-quo of $200,000 Bill and Hill speeches and special deals for Wall Street, Saudi and other supplicants – swelling Clinton Foundation coffers – has received similar DOJ inattention.

Obama, Clinton and other Democrat kids go to pricey, private prep schools – while they oppose funding for charter schools that give poor and minority kids a chance to escape inner city life. They demand full integration of middle-income neighborhoods, but live in segregated, gated communities.

Those who dare question government diktats gets targeted or audited by the IRS, or even find armed SWAT teams bursting through their doors.

Legal immigrants face slow, expensive processing – while illegals from Latin America receive healthcare and education, live in sanctuary cities, and rarely get deported for crimes. 99% of Syrian refugees arriving under the latest Obama decree are Muslims, even as Christians are being exterminated in Syria and Iraq.

More and more, it seems, our government does whatever it decides the times demand – even when it means stifling innovation, growth, jobs and incomes for everyone except bureaucrats and crony corporatist friends, whose decisions, arrangements, perks and pensions are sacrosanct.

“As president, I can do whatever I want,” President Obama has said. If it was meant as a joke, few are laughing. On June 30, total government debt hit a record $19.4 trillion, a jump of nearly $98 billion from the day before. Our kids and their future generations will pay the price.

Elites impose healthcare, climate change, red-ink and transgender agendas – and then go apoplectic over Donald Trump’s controversial remarks. There is a “clear consensus” among intellectual, political and media elites that Donald Trump is “ill-suited to be president,” we repeatedly hear.

By contrast, Mrs. Clinton offers the “calm, steady, experienced leadership” we need in these uncertain times. Such as what we’ve seen on Benghazi, emails, energy, economics and sexual assault?

Ronald Reagan once asked, “If no one among us is capable of governing himself, then who among us has the capacity to govern someone else?”

Indeed, who in government has the wisdom, knowledge or right to govern the rest of us, especially with the iron fist they increasingly employ – and with no transparency or accountability?

We gained independence from Britain over far less serious Abuses and Usurpations. Let’s hope we can at least have an angry populace election in 2016. And if Mr. Trump can formulate, articulate and implement sound, practical, job-creating, economy-stimulating policies – and enough voters can unite around him and those policies – America might get its own Brexit from tyrannical centralized, leftist government.

Via email

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How Government Cronies Redefined the Catfish

An industry clamored for more regulation—because it had a financial interest in doing so.

Cronyism is the ugly marriage between special interest groups and politicians, which results in an abuse of the government's power to grant special privileges to a few winners—for example, unfairly preventing competition or doling out subsidies and bailouts at the expense of taxpayers. Though cronyism is always outrageous, the way cronies go about achieving their goals is sometimes oddly funny. Case in point: the government's changing the definition of catfish to classify the fish as—wait for it—meat, not seafood.

As Patrick Mustain reports in Scientific American, Sen. Thad Cochran, R-Miss., included an amendment in the 2008 farm bill designating catfish as a "species amenable to" the Federal Meat Inspection Act, which "requires appointment of inspectors to examine and inspect all meat food products prepared for commerce." The 2014 farm bill made this silly amendment official.

As a result, from now on, catfish and a few other species of fish will be inspected by the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Food Safety and Inspection Service rather than by the Food and Drug Administration's seafood inspection program. All other seafood will continue to be inspected by the FDA.

Does it really matter who inspects what fish? Yes, because the cost to develop the new program will be $14 million and the ongoing annual cost during the transition phase will be $2.5 million. The USDA's inspections are also much more burdensome and frequent than the FDA's.

Is that extra scrutiny necessary because catfish carry a high risk of causing food poisoning? Nope. Advocates for the rules will point to recent USDA "discoveries" of chemical residue in catfish, but that finding doesn't hold water. In May 2012, the Government Accountability Office noted that the USDA catfish program "would cause duplication and inefficient use of resources" because "as many as three agencies—FDA, FSIS, and (the National Marine Fisheries Service)—could inspect facilities that process both catfish and other types of seafood." That's insane because in 2013, the GAO also found that catfish are a low-risk food and that safety wouldn't be enhanced by switching inspections from the FDA to the USDA.

A look at who is behind this rule tells you all you need to know about how misguided it is. During the public comment sessions, the domestic catfish farming industry was very vocal about the need for more regulations and oversight of their business. This seems odd because it's not often that one hears of an industry clamoring for more regulations—that is, of course, unless it has a financial interest in doing so.

For years, domestic catfish producers were getting hammered by competition coming from China and Vietnam. Those same catfish farmers understood that unlike the FDA inspection program, the USDA inspection program has a separate "equivalency" test for imports, which adds a layer of regulations only on imports and could take countries years to implement. In the meantime, they'd be completely barred from the U.S. market. Domestic catfish farmers love that. Also, 94 percent of U.S. farm-raised catfish is raised in Alabama, Arkansas, Louisiana and Mississippi, hence the interest of Sen. Cochran to push this misguided regulation on catfish.

Unfortunately, there are many losers in this scenario. First, the reduced competition faced by catfish farmers guarantees that the price for the fish (or should I say meat?) will go up. Second, catfish processors are on the losing side of the USDA inspection rule because most of them process other seafood—and now they'll have to comply with the USDA rules and the FDA rules. Third, taxpayers will have to foot an expensive bill for a duplicative rule that will achieve little except artificially boosting the profits of a few domestic catfish farmers. Finally, non-catfish industries will suffer as a result of the trade retaliation against this catfish protectionism.

There is, however, some light at the end of the tunnel. As Heritage Action for America's Dan Holler recently told me, "the choice between consumers and well-connected parochial special interests should not be difficult for Republican leaders. With a presidential signature likely and a clear majority of House Republicans in support of overturning the ... rule, now is the time to act." But will they?

SOURCE

There is a  new  lot of postings by Chris Brand just up --  covering news from Japan, Austria and Britain

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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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