Clinton Economist Favors Force over Freedom

As Leftists generally do -- JR

Tyler Cowen

Few candidates spell out their policy proposals in as much detail as Hillary Clinton, but there’s still room to wonder about how a President Clinton would set her agenda for 2017 and beyond.

One clue comes in the naming of Heather Boushey to be chief economist of her transition team, giving Boushey an inside track for a major political appointment. She is currently the executive director and chief economist of the Washington Center for Equitable Growth, and recently published “Finding Time: The Economics of Work-Life Conflict.” That book is one good source for which ideas might rise in a Clinton administration.

The central insight is that American institutions do not support a proper balance between work and family life, and that the burdens fall disproportionately upon women. The proposed remedies are an extensive set of government interventions, including paid sick leave, paid parental leave, subsidized child care and better care for the elderly to relieve care burdens on grown children.

Do we trust the legal machinery of government to be making that decision anew over decades of social and economic change?

This is a thoughtful and intelligent book, but for my taste Boushey holds too much faith in mandated and centralized solutions.

It is striking, for instance, that private insurance companies offered prescription drug coverage long before Medicare did, and many business employers offered benefits for same-sex partners before the federal government did. When it comes to innovation, including benefits innovation, the federal government is often a laggard, due to the nature of bureaucracy, political checks and balances and the one-size-fits-all feature of most legislation. I am therefore reluctant to give government a much larger role in managing American family lifestyles.

Boushey portrays her policies as boosting rather than restricting freedom of choice, but usually trade-offs are involved. She does argue that recent state-level experiments show that mandatory paid sick leave doesn’t destroy jobs, but there is not yet a lot of hard evidence on the question. And what works in California may not be well-suited to Mississippi.

The Long-term Effects of Government Intervention

Most likely, there is a big difference between short-run and long-run effects. For instance, employers value the workers they have, and are reluctant to fire them when labor costs go up. A lot of “pro-worker” policies thus seem to be a kind of magical free lunch. Over time, however, as a generation of workers turns over and is replaced, mandatory benefits represent a real added cost, evaluated anew, and employers will respond accordingly. They will cut the paid dollar wage, cut other job benefits, require more hard work, automate more, or cut back on plans for growing the business. The downward-sloping demand curve is the best established empirical regularity in all of economics, and in this context that means some laborers -- maybe most laborers -- will pay a price for their new benefits, one way or another.

So let’s say America’s future means better sick leave and pregnancy leave for employed women, but a narrower choice of jobs, including lower pay, for those same women. Is that better? And do we trust the legal machinery of government to be making that decision anew over decades of social and economic change? Keep in mind that there is an alternative mechanism, which for all its imperfections is far more flexible: Let companies and workers make such decisions through employment bargains.

Unrealistic Optimism

Boushey doesn’t estimate or indicate the expense of her proposed mandatory benefits, although she does suggest on page 1 that the cost would be “very small.” She is developing a new kind of supply-side economics, this time on the left, but like her right-wing counterparts she is running the risk of excess optimism about how much her suggested improvements will boost productivity in the system.

I usually suggest comparing any proposed program for amelioration to the simple alternative of sending people cash or leaving more cash in their hands, whether through tax cuts, tax credits or outright payments. With that cash in hand, individuals could try to create better arrangements for child care, elder care, and other problems of work-life balance. Some might work fewer hours or take lesser-paying but more flexible jobs, relying on their cash transfers to make up the difference. Others would spend the money on better neighborhoods, better health care or better schools, or in some cases the expenditures will be wasted.

Freedom vs Government-Mandated Benefits

Might that freedom be better than receiving a big package of government-mandated benefits? There is already a big distortion in the employment relationship that comes from taxing money wages at higher rates than workplace benefits. Workers, at the margin, actually receive higher workplace benefits than they ideally would desire, relative to being paid more cash. The way to remedy that misallocation is a lower net tax on the cash, not more benefits.

A more left-wing version of the cash transfer query would ask this: If workers can claim more resources from their bosses for free, through the exercise of legal bargaining power, why not focus policy changes on boosting minimum and mandated wages?

“Finding Time” doesn’t find time to address, much less resolve, such questions. The most plausible response to these criticisms is that individual Americans cannot be trusted to make good decisions for themselves, and I am afraid that is the view being swept under the carpet here.

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Obamacare's Economic Assumptions Collapse

Economic reality is making it increasingly obvious that we are in the midst of Obamacare’s long anticipated death spiral. Most recently, Aetna joined UnitedHealthcare and Humana as the third of the "big five" insurance firms to announce major cuts to its Obamacare exchange business.

For insurers, it's simple math: Premiums collected must exceed claims paid. If too few healthy, low risk individuals enroll to offset the costs of insuring unhealthy, high risk individuals, the math doesn’t work. This imbalance forces insurers to raise premiums on the low risk individuals who do enroll to cover the costs of insuring high risk individuals. The rising premiums cause even more healthy individuals to drop coverage – resulting in what has been called a death spiral.

Aetna’s CEO Mark Bertolini explained that his company was dropping out of the exchanges because "[p]roviding affordable, high-quality healthcare options to consumers is not possible without a balanced risk pool," and that “individuals in need of high-cost care represent” a percentage of the risk pool so large that it “results in substantial upward pressure on premiums and creates significant sustainability concerns.”

The result: Aetna suffered a second-quarter pretax 2016 loss of $200 million and total pretax losses of more than $430 million since January 2014 when the exchanges opened for business. Aetna wasn’t alone.

In April, the nation’s largest health insurer UnitedHealthcare, announced that it was pulling out of nearly all ObamaCare exchanges. In 2017, it will participate in only three exchanges instead of the 34 this year. CEO Stephen Hemsley similarly explained that “[t]he smaller overall market size and shorter-term higher risk profile within this market segment continue to suggest we cannot broadly serve it on an effective and sustained basis.”

UnitedHealth lost $475 million in the exchanges in 2015 and expects to lose $650 million in 2016.

The problem extends beyond big insurers. ObamaCare established 23 non-profit health insurance companies called Consumer Operated and Oriented Plans (co-ops). According to the Center for Medicaid and Medicare Services, they received $2.4 billion in taxpayer dollars because they demonstrated “a high probability of financial viability”. To date, 16 of the 23 co-ops (or 70 percent) have failed due to weak balance sheets. Six of the remaining seven are on the brink of collapse.

As a result, the competition between insurers that ObamaCare counted on to keep the quality of coverage up and the costs down is vanishing.

According to a recent analysis by the consulting company Avalere Health, in 2017 nearly 36% of markets may have only one insurer participating in the exchanges, up from 4% in 2016. Nearly 55% may have two or fewer choices, up from 33%. The reasons: “Lower-than-expected enrollment, a high cost population, and troubled risk mitigation programs have led to decreased plan participation for 2017.”

The all too predictable consequence is daunting rate hikes. In an ongoing analysis, independent analyst Charles Gaba recently crunched the numbers for insurers participating in the exchanges. He concluded that for 2017, the national average increase requested is a whopping 24.3%. For the eight states that have approved rate hikes to date (representing about 10% of the total population) the average approved increase was 25.6%. And that’s with current overall inflation at about 1 percent. So much for President Obama’s promise that the average family would see its premiums decline by $2,500.

Even President Obama knows something must be done. As recently as August 2nd, he proposed a “public option” government run insurance company that would compete against private insurers on the exchanges. This "public-option" insurer could operate at a loss indefinitely with taxpayers footing the bill, driving private insurance companies that actually have to turn a profit, out of the market. The result: A massive taxpayer-funded government bureaucracy supporting a single-payer healthcare system that eliminates consumer choice as well as the competition necessary to keep benefits up and costs down.

Hillary Clinton, who sees more government as the solution to every problem, has endorsed the idea. Perhaps those sceptics who saw ObamaCare as an intentionally flawed plan paving the way for a single payer system had a point after all.

But making ObamaCare more bureaucratic, economically indefensible and politically untouchable is not the answer. Americans deserve quality affordable care, not more bureaucracy. It’s past time to do something that makes sense.

Any meaningful effort to repeal and replace Obamacare will require cooperation between the President and Congress on a plan that incorporates economically rational free market principles while preserving ObamaCare’s most popular provisions. The good news is that both GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump and Speaker of the House Paul Ryan have outlined such plans.

Among other complimentary proposals, they both would encourage much needed competition by allowing insurance sales across state lines while using health savings accounts and tax credits or deductions to reduce insurance costs. They would also increase the role of states to more effectively manage and administer Medicaid (the state-federal program for low income Americans that accounts for the lion’s share of those added to the rolls of the insured under ObamaCare).

Ryan’s more detailed plan would, among other things, implement much needed medical malpractice reforms and allow small businesses and individuals to pool their collective purchasing power. It would also preserve ObamaCare’s more popular provisions such as protecting those with pre-existing conditions and prohibiting sudden cancellations if continuous coverage is maintained.

At this point, it is evident that ObamaCare’s economic assumptions are collapsing. It’s time to elect lawmakers who will offer effective legislation, vet it through congressional committees and learn what’s in it before they pass it. Trump and Ryan are on the right path.

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It Pays to Be a Liberal

Wall Street is accused of many things — some legit, some not — but flying under the radar is its alleged watchdog, the federal government, which is actively utilizing an egregious form of blackmail that makes banks' impropriety look like child’s play. Writing in The Wall Street Journal, Freedom Partners Chamber of Commerce adviser Andy Koenig makes a startling revelation of the federal government’s forcing large banks to fund leftist fads in the name of “social justice.” Here’s how Koenig describes it:

“The administration’s multiyear campaign against the banking industry has quietly steered money to organizations and politicians who are working to ensure liberal policy and political victories at every level of government. The conduit for this funding is the Residential Mortgage-Backed Securities Working Group, a coalition of federal and state regulators and prosecutors created in 2012 to ‘identify, investigate, and prosecute instances of wrongdoing’ in the residential mortgage-backed securities market. In conjunction with the Justice Department, the RMBS Working Group has reached multibillion-dollar settlements with essentially every major bank in America.”

Koenig adds, “Combined, the banks must divert well over $11 billion into ‘consumer relief,’ which is supposed to benefit homeowners harmed during the Great Recession. Yet it is unknown how much, if any, of the banks' settlement money will find its way to individual homeowners. Instead, a substantial portion is allocated to private, nonprofit organizations drawn from a federally approved list.” Some of the groups include La Raza, the National Urban League and the National Community Reinvestment Coalition — entities with an obviously leftist bent. The total windfall is unclear, but these and other leftist groups have benefited handsomely off the $11 billion the government has managed to purloin from the nation’s largest banks.

This sounds appalling — and indeed it is — but it’s not without precedent. Consider that something similar happened with Obama’s infamous “stimulus” package. The near-trillion dollar injection of taxpayer funds went almost exclusively toward funding Obama’s leftist cronies. As much flack as banks receive, their indiscretions are nothing compared to what the feds are doing behind the scenes.

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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.

Email me  here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or  here (Pictorial) or  here  (Personal)

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When murder is punished with death, fewer criminals will murder

When the death penalty is on the books and consistently enforced, a significant number of homicides will be prevented

By Jeff Jacoby

Writing in support of Proposition 62, a California ballot initiative to repeal the death penalty, former El Dorado county supervisor Ron Briggs makes the tiresomely familiar claim that “the death penalty does not make our communities any safer” and “is not a deterrent to crime.”

For death penalty opponents, it is a venerable article of faith that executing murderers doesn’t deter other murders and that abolishing the death penalty doesn’t make killings more likely. Never mind that a thick sheaf of peer-reviewed academic studies refutes the abolitionists’ belief, as, of course, does common sense: All penalties have some deterrent effect, and the more severe the penalty, the more it deters. Let a parking meter expire, and you risk a $20 ticket; park in a handicapped spot, and risk a $200 ticket. Which violation are you less likely to commit?

It doesn’t take a social-science degree to grasp the real-world difference between facing vs. not facing a potential death sentence. Criminals grasp it too.

Dmitry Smirnov did. A resident of British Columbia, Smirnov was smitten with Jitka Vesel, a pretty Chicago woman he’d met online playing “World of Warcraft” in 2008 and then dated for several weeks. When Vesel ended the brief relationship, Smirnov took it badly. He returned to Canada, but kept pursuing Vesel by phone and online. When she broke off communication with him, he began plotting to kill her.

Smirnov returned to the United States in 2011, bought a gun and ammunition, and drove back to Chicago. He attached a GPS device to Vesel’s car so he could track her movements. On the evening of April 13, he tailed her to the Czechoslovak Heritage Museum in Oak Park, Ill., where she was a curator and board member. When she came out after a meeting, Smirnov ambushed her. He shot her repeatedly, firing multiple rounds into the back of her head even after she had crumpled to the ground.

A deranged suitor? Maybe — but Smirnov wasn’t too deranged to first check out whether Illinois was a death penalty state. He headed back to Chicago to murder Vesel only after learning that Illinois had recently abolished capital punishment. When he was questioned afterward by police, according to prosecutors, he told them he had confirmed Illinois’ no-death penalty status “as recently as the morning of the murder.” In an e-mail sent to a friend after the fact, Smirnov — who voluntarily surrendered to the police — made clear that he knew what to expect. “Illinois doesn’t have the death penalty, so I’ll spend the rest of my life in prison,” he wrote.

At trial Smirnov pleaded guilty, and was given a life sentence.

Would Jitka Vesel be alive today if Smirnov had faced the death penalty? Obviously there is no way to know for sure. But we do know for sure that when the cost of a crime goes up, the frequency of that crime goes down. Raise the price of any behavior, and fewer people will do it. The deterrent power of punishment is axiomatic; criminal law would be meaningless without it.

Still, a penalty cannot deter if it is never imposed. California hasn’t executed a murderer in 10 years. Only 13 killers have been put to death since 1972, when the state legalized capital punishment. Hundreds of savage murderers have been sentenced to death — there are currently 746 inmates on California’s death row — but endless legal appeals and procedures have made executions, for all intents and purposes, impossible.

Most Californians understand that their state’s death penalty needs to be fixed, not abolished. Voters defeated a repeal initiative, Proposition 34, in 2012 and appear likely to do the same to Proposition 62, the new repeal measure, this November. According to a statewide poll released last week by the Institute of Governmental Studies at the University of California at Berkeley, voters oppose the new death penalty repeal measure by a 10-point margin, 55 percent to 45 percent.

On the other hand, California voters strongly support a second death penalty measure that will also be on the November ballot. Proposition 66, as summarized by the San Francisco Chronicle, would “speed up executions by setting tight deadlines for court rulings, placing some limits on appeals, and requiring many more defense lawyers to take capital cases.” The UC Berkeley poll shows voters backing Proposition 66, with its mend-it-don’t-end-it approach, by an overwhelming 76-to-24 ratio.

The politics of capital punishment are complicated and emotional, but human nature doesn’t change. Granted, incentives and disincentives are never foolproof. Granted, there will always be cases in which deterrents don’t deter. On the whole, however, when the death penalty is on the books and consistently enforced, a significant number of homicides will be prevented.

Pretty much by definition, murders that don’t happen because criminals are deterred by the prospect of being executed can’t be systematically tallied. But felons often disclose their motives when asked. In a striking 1961 opinion, California Supreme Court Justice Marshall McComb plumbed the files of the Los Angeles Police Department to demonstrate the deterrent effect of the death penalty on the thinking of violent criminals.

McComb listed numerous examples of homicides not committed because a would-be killer didn’t want to risk capital punishment. Among them:

 *  Margaret Elizabeth Daly, arrested for attacking Pete Gibbons with a knife, who told the investigating officers: “Yeah, I cut him and I should have done a better job. I would have killed him but I didn’t want to go to the gas chamber.”

 *  Orelius Mathew Steward, imprisoned for bank robbery, who acknowledged that he had considered shooting the unaccompanied cop who arrested him: “I could have blasted him. I thought about it at the time, but I changed my mind when I thought of the gas chamber.”

 *  Paul Brusseau, convicted for a string of candy store holdups, which he committed while pretending to carry a gun. “Asked what his reason was for simulating a gun rather than using a real one, he replied that he did not want to get the gas chamber.”

Criminals may be evil and pitiless, but criminality isn’t a synonym for stupidity. When murder is punished with death, fewer criminals will murder. When murder is punished with nothing worse than prison, more criminals will be emboldened to kill. In the never-ending debate over capital punishment, that is always what the choice comes down to.

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If Dems Don't Win Senate, Thank ObamaCare

If Hillary Clinton wins the presidency on Nov. 8, her running mate Tim Kaine will provide the tie-breaking vote in the Senate if Democrats win just four seats. Democrats will hold the White House and the Upper Chamber of Congress. But there's a glimmer of hope for the Senate, and, ironically, we can thank Democrats for it.

While Donald Trump beat the entire field of polished résumés, Republicans have a strong field of incumbents and a deep bench of candidates and potential candidates due to the shift of political majorities in the states. The New York Times agrees as it frets, "Democrats find themselves hobbled by less-than-stellar candidates in races that could make the difference in winning a majority."

It's a simple fact that since 2010, from the courthouse to the state houses and to the governors' mansions, voters have placed their trust in Republicans. According to Ballotpedia in 2016, there are 23 states with a "Republican trifecta" comprised of state representatives, state senators and governors. Only seven states have a "Democrat trifecta."

The statement's been made before: Barack Obama has been the greatest thing for the GOP in a long time. Why? Obama's failed policies and lawless approach have originated from a hard-Left view of the role of government — it's the answer to everything! But when the solution doesn't look much better than the problem, that hurts Democrats.

According to The New York Times, "Democrats are mired in their own struggle, as they try to identify future stars who can appeal to a base increasingly insistent on a progressive agenda." Going further, The Cook Political Report's senior editor Jennifer Duffy predicted, "Democrats are going to have their own Tea Party movement in 2018." Why? The rigged primary for Hillary, shutting down Bernie Sanders' passionate crowd.

In the U.S. Senate races, the Democrat field is weak when assessing its recruits and institutional structure to support them.

But the personnel isn't the Democrats' only weakness. Their record of failure during the Obama administration is hard to dismiss.

Obama will soon become the only president to never have a single year of GDP growth of at least 3%. Data will show that the rich got richer and the poor had to get more government hand-outs during the "fundamental transformation" of America. On the foreign policy front, the Middle East is a roiling cauldron of stew featuring beheadings, the rape of children and married women and, oh yeah, the arming of Iran with nuclear weapons.

But one issue alone should serve to solidify voters' movement away from Democrats in these Senate and House races. The predicted and absolute failure of the laughably misnamed "Affordable Care Act," Obama's "signature legislation," has proven, again, that there's never enough money for a government program and there's always a negative consequence to a competing private sector entity.

On March 23, 2010, the flock of Democrats surrounding Obama at his bill-signing ceremony that enacted ObamaCare into law stood with plumage in full show. Today, the birds of that feather are being stuffed into the nests of insurance companies and hospitals that spent millions to lobby for the government takeover of America's health care. Insurers are now reporting hundreds of millions in losses and crying for a taxpayer-funded bailout as they flee the exchanges. Hospitals are wailing for states to expand their Medicaid rolls to prop up their financial losses. Oh, and those oft-forgotten folks called the taxpaying public are seeing their insurance premiums rise annually up to 60%.

Not only have enrollees in the IRS-enforced ObamaCare seen their doctors and their plans change, but their out-of-pocket expenses are skyrocketing. On Saturday, Sen. Lamar Alexander, the Chairman of the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions, gave the GOP Weekly Address citing the "very near collapse" of the ObamaCare Insurance Exchanges with an "intolerable increase" in premium costs to be administered in 2017.

Will Senate Republicans effectively remind middle class voters that their budgets are busted by health care expenses thanks to the Democrats? Will they win hearts and minds by engaging in policy discussions of portable health savings accounts and price transparency that would drive consumerism in health care? Will the GOP articulate that the working class will be restored through work and personal savings, not government taxes and redistribution?

The quadrennial voting pool has every reason to support Republicans due to their own financial losses during the Obama "recovery," and the prospect of better days ahead with effective policy

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.

Email me  here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or  here (Pictorial) or  here  (Personal)

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Liberal whining

If you want to be a victim, become a liberal. It doesn’t matter whether you want to go online to whine about your lot in life or whether you want to harm others with everything from shutting down free speech to fiddling with the climate. Both work.

It comes down to our different world views. When liberals talk about triggering, they mean someone said something their precious little ears couldn’t handle. (Note: That video spawned the “trigglypuff” meme. Watch it and you will understand.) When conservatives talk about triggering, they are discussing the correct placement of their finger for optimum accuracy.

All of that calls to mind Chris Ray Gun who makes song parodies that mock everything “ridiculous happening right now in the real world including Social Justice Warriors, The Regressive Left, and whatever else slightly annoys me.” Chris wrote the excellent “Ain't No Rest for the Triggered” which includes the lyrics:

"Oh, there ain't no rest for the tiggered

“We're easily displeased

“We've got hair to dye

“We've got tears to cry

“Please gimme your sympathy

“No I won't let loose, I get my news

“From places like Salon

“No there ain't no rest for the triggered

“Donate to my Patreon"
It turns out you can donate to his Patreon to help fund his efforts. And as for Salon, it wouldn’t be a week on the crazy, left-wing internet without them. And as for Salon, they came out criticizing the University of Chicago’s commitment to academic freedom.

Now, let’s talk about the biggest victim of them all -- Mother Nature.

Deadly Volcanoes Are A Blast: The Year Without Summer (Happy 200th anniversary!) was set in motion by the massively deadly eruption of Indonesia’s Mt. Tambora. The volcano spewed ash around the globe and killed about 100,000 people nearby. Who knows how many more starved to death. Those sure were the days -- at least to liberals who want to geo-engineer our weather. According to the nutballs from Slate: “Though the aerosol haze produced by the Tambora eruption reflected less than 1 percent of sunlight, that was enough to drop global temperatures by 2 to 3 degrees Fahrenheit by the summer of 1816, causing a catastrophic weather chain reaction.” Crop yields dropped 75 percent and people starved, but Slate found a bright side. The site wants to know: “Could we use the same mechanism that cooled the planet then to cool the planet now?” Actual quote: “Strangely enough, massive volcanoes might be part of the answer.” If massive volcanoes are part of your “answer,” maybe you ought to rethink whatever stupid question you were asking.

Pity The Poor, Female Olympian: American news outlets have been peddling the pity party for our female soccer Olympians since before the Olympics. They aren’t paid as much as the men, and that’s a national crisis apparently. Journalists, who are lucky to be able to count the five Olympic rings bemoan that pay gap without understanding it. Our friends, the whack jobs at Fusion, are especially unhappy. “The sad reality is that male athletes still get paid way more than female competitors.” The article forgot to point out that top male athletes are typically much better than female athletes. Find me a female Lebron, a Tom Brady, a Cal Ripken, Jr., then maybe I’ll care. Fusion looked at sports such as soccer, cycling and golf and complained women earn less than men in those sports. Poor Taryn Hillin, “Fusion's love and sex writer,” thinks that all sports and athletes are equal. Actual quote: “So as we all continue to root for Lydia Ko, Mara Abbott, and the U.S. Women’s National Soccer Team outside of Rio, just know they could make a gabillion times more money if they only had penises.” In this day of liberal-mandated gender equality, they don’t need penises. They just need to play better than men. The Rams drafted Michael Sam just because he’s gay. Think they wouldn’t draft a woman to play if there was one who could?

A Cut Below Other Protesters: More than 200 million women have been victim of the horrific practice of female genital mutilation. But here in the West, we’ve got idiots protesting … male circumcision. The head (Sorry!) of the anti-circumcision group (Intactivists) Anthony Losquadro claims, “You can’t force a medical procedure on someone, no matter how beneficial it is.” Fusion, the same outlet that just bought Gawker and its component lunatic parts, forgets that parents make medical decisions for their kids all the time. But liberals love victims, and so the wrong kind of genital victim gets attention. Actual quote: “One thing that hardly tempers intactivists’ reputation as a group of isolated crazies is their fondness for blood imagery. On that day in D.C., fake blood is everywhere.” A guy wearing all white with his crotch spray-painted red is always the rational source I go to for medical information.

Social Justice Ceramics! “The politics of clay” sounds a lot more boring than “The Politics of Dancing.” That’s because it is. Fusion (with the column hat trick) did a Q&A with ceramic artist Robert Lugo, who fires up his politics in the kiln -- putting people like Che, Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown on his artwork. Fusion went to Lugo because of his “use of pottery as a medium for political progress.” Actual artist quote: “I put Mike Brown and Trayvon Martin on a pot. Their faces will be on a pot for thousands of years, even when people have forgotten. My role in the new civil rights movement is keeping the conversation going long after it’s left the news.” At least when conservatives say the culture is going to pot now, it won’t just be a lame 420 joke.

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Leftist lies about poverty in America

Today is the 20th anniversary of welfare reform. Two decades ago, President Bill Clinton signed the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act, known as welfare reform, into law.

The highly popular reform cut welfare caseloads by over 50 percent, sharply boosted the employment of the least-skilled single mothers, and pushed the poverty rates of black children and single-parent families to historic lows.

But the left always hated welfare reform. It now claims that reform has thrown 3.5 million children into “extreme poverty,” the kind seen in the developing world, living in destitution on less than $2 per day.

CBS News asserts that, because of welfare reform, “ … America is joining the likes of Third World countries.” The New York Times proclaims “welfare reform has resulted in a layer of destitution that echoes poverty in countries like Bangladesh.”

Bloomberg News gasps that millions of Americans now “live on less than the average GDP [gross domestic product] per capita of a low-income country such as Afghanistan, Mozambique, or Haiti.” It insists millions in America are poorer than the “disabled beggars of Addis Ababa in Ethiopia.”

The origin of these sensational claims is a recent book, “$2.00 a Day: Living on Almost Nothing in America,” by Kathryn Edin and Luke Shaefer.

The authors argue that welfare reform has led 3.55 million children (and 1 in 25 of all families with children) in America to subsist on less than $2 per person per day, which they identify as “one of the World Bank’s measures of global poverty.” According to Edin and Shaefer, these families live in “extreme destitution,” regularly engaging in prostitution, selling their blood, and collecting scrap metal to survive. Edin claims that “extreme poverty” is actually “much worse” in the U.S. than in developing nations because there is no “barter economy” here.

Edin and Shaefer’s bizarre charges are based on the government’s Survey of Income and Program Participation. However, examination of the survey data reveals that the families Edin and Shaefer claim are living in “extreme poverty” don’t actually appear to be particularly poor, let alone living in “extreme destitution.”

According to the data, some 67 percent of families with children allegedly living in “extreme poverty” have a computer, 86.5 percent have air conditioning in their homes or apartments, 89 percent have cellphones, and 88 percent have a DVD player, digital video recorder, VCR, or similar device.

What about hunger? Surely, hunger must be widespread among families in “extreme destitution.” But, according to the survey data, only 1 percent of families allegedly living in “extreme poverty” report that they “often” did not have “enough food to eat” over the previous four months; another 8 percent said they “sometimes” did not have “enough to eat.” The remaining 91 percent report that they “always” had enough food to eat.

Despite having alleged incomes of less than $2 per day, only 1 percent of these families were evicted during the prior year, while 4 percent had their oil, gas, or electricity cut off.

Edin and Shaefer concoct their remarkable claim that 3.5 million children routinely live in “extreme destitution,” on $2 per day or less, through a combination of statistical sleight of hand and lousy data. In 2014, federal and state government spent $221 billion on cash, food, and housing for low-income families with children. That’s two and a half times the amount needed to eliminate all poverty among families with children.

But when Edin and Shaefer calculate “extreme poverty,” they exclude nearly all of that welfare spending from their count of family income. With welfare out of the picture, it’s not hard to find families with very low incomes.

The authors admit that if food stamps and the earned income tax credit are counted, the number of kids in “extreme poverty” drops to 1.2 million. But that number is still misleading because the survey used by Edin and Shaefer undercounts receipt by more than 20 million welfare benefits distributed to recipients each month.

In a nutshell, Edin and Shaefer have used a survey that omits more than 20 million welfare benefits each month to conclude that 1.2 million children live in families that go without welfare in that month. They are simply measuring large data gaps in a flawed survey, not actual holes in the safety net.

Poverty experts understand that government income surveys, such as the Survey of Income and Program Participation, always underreport the incomes of the poor, especially welfare and off-books earnings. No surprise then that the U.S. Department of Labor’s Consumer Expenditure Survey has shown for decades that the poor households routinely report spending roughly $2.40 for every dollar of apparent income. For families in Edin and Shaefer’s “extreme poverty,” the expenditure-to-income ratio in the Consumer Expenditure Survey rises to around $25 to $1.

Based on self-reports of consumer spending, “extreme poverty” has been practically nonexistent for three decades.

From 1984 through 2015, the Consumer Expenditure Survey shows only 61 instances in which a family reported spending less than $2 per person per day out of a total of 272,597 quarterly family records. (Two-thirds of the 61 underspending families lived in public housing.) According to spending data reported by the families themselves, the number of families with children living on $2 per person per day is not 1 in 25, as Edin and Shaefer contend, but 1 in 4,469.

Edin and Shaefer argue that welfare reform increased poverty, but expenditure data show that, after reform, both official poverty rates ($17.44 per person per day for a three-person family) and deep poverty rates ($8.72 per person per day) fell sharply for the main group affected by reform: single parents with children.

In fact, poverty fell much more for single parents than for other groups in society. In other words, the group directly affected by welfare reform had the greatest drop in poverty.

Exaggerating poverty has been a mainstay of progressive politics since the beginning of the war on poverty. No matter how much the taxpayers spend on welfare, the sky is always falling. Bogus claims of widespread “extreme destitution” promote social polarization and political paralysis, distracting attention from the real problems crippling low-income communities.

SOURCE

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

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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.

Email me  here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or  here (Pictorial) or  here  (Personal)

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New scare about hormone replacement therapy and breast cancer

HRT is very beneficial to many women as they cease menstruation.  It relieves the many physical problems they experience at that time. So, as with anything popular,  the elites had to find something wrong with it.  And there was a big scare around the beginning of this century saying that it caused breast cancer. Subsequent research, however, largely cleared the HRT pill of that danger and official guidance these days is that there is little to worry about.

A new study just out (summary and journal abstract below), however, has renewed the scare. And the new study is methodologically strong.  It takes careful account of things not well considered in previous studies.  There are a couple of reasons not to be too bothered by the findings, however.  The first is that, as with most medical research, only the relative risk is reported, not the absolute risk.  I had to scratch fairly deeply to find the absolute risk behind the current results.  It was about 40 in 1,000.  Out of 1,000 old ladies, 40 will get cancer from taking the HRT pill. That is not negligible but it is not a great risk either.  Most of us do more risky things with some regularity -- like driving a car.

The second thing to note is that not all HRT pills are the same.  What is most lacking in old ladies is the female hormone estrogen.  Those old ladies who get around in masculine haircuts have lost most of their female hormones so are in a sense post-female.  So replacing the estrogen is all that should be required to restore the old  balance in the woman's life.  And that is what most HRT pills do.

For women whom the estrogen doesn't help much, however, there is another sort of pill: estrogen plus progestogen. And that is inherently risky.  Progestogens produce progesterone, which is a major pregnancy hormone.  Worldly-wise men know why their women  get irritable once a month (PMT).  It is when her ovaries are producing progesterone to prepare the womb for conception.  So progesterone is vital for conception but it is also the bad-mood hormone. I once saw a rather spectacular example of progesterone-induced rage myself. The woman concerned was deeply embarrassed afterwards. That increased progesterone levels  might have other problems is therefore easily understood.

And it appears that it does.  The research below found absolutely no problem with the estrogen-only pill but did find problems with the combined pill. The progestogen-containing pill does slightly elevate the risk of breast cancer.  Giving old ladies a pregnancy hormone is pretty wild to start with so it is no surprise that it might have some ill effects.

But there is a BIG problem with the causal arrow here.  As is deplorably common in the medical literature, the authors assume that correlation is causation, which is a gross statistical fallacy.

What they have not done is ask WHY the women concerned were put on the combined pill in the first place?  Were they less healthy in various ways from the beginning?  Would they have got more cancer anyway, with or without the pill?   So being put on the combined pill may be an  indicator that the old ladies were from the beginning more likely to get cancer rather than the pill causing the cancer.

So this research is not conclusive at all.  Only a before-and-after experimental design could answer questions about cause.  Even the combined pill could be completely harmless.

Nonetheless, I agree with the most common medical advice, that women should by and large stick to the estrogen-only pill.  We KNOW that it is harmless


HRT raises the risk more than threefold for women who had taken it for 15 years, the Institute of Cancer research found Credit: Press Association

Hormone replacement therapy can triple the risk of breast cancer, the biggest ever study has found, following more than a decade of controversy.

Last year the National Institute of Health and Care Excellence (Nice) changed guidance to encourage more doctors to prescribe HRT claiming too many menopausal women had been left suffering in silence.

HRT is used to treat uncomfortable symptoms of the menopause - such as hot flushes, migraines, disrupted sleep, mood changes and depression - by topping up the decreased levels of hormones produced by the body.

But doctors were reluctant to prescribe it after a study in 2002 suggested it could raise the risk of cancer, a claim later widely disputed.

Now new findings by the Institute of Cancer Research and Breast Cancer Now suggest the original risk had actually been underestimated.

A study of 100,000 women over 40 years found those who took the combined oestrogen and progestogen pill for around five years were 2.7 times more likely to develop cancer compared to women who took nothing, or only the oestrogen pill.

The risk rose to 3.3 times for women who took the drugs for 15 years or more.

Around 14 in 1,000 women in their 50s are expected to develop breast cancer, but that rises to 34 in 1000 for women taking the combined pill, the study suggests.

"Our research shows that some previous studies are likely to have underestimated the risk of breast cancer with combined oestrogen-progestogen HRT," said study leader Professor Anthony Swerdlow, of The Institute of Cancer Research.

"We found that current use of combined HRT increases the risk of breast cancer by up to threefold, depending on how long HRT has been used.

"Our findings provide further information to allow women to make informed decisions about the potential risks and benefits of HRT use."

Women taking the oestrogen-only pill have no greater risk

HRT was first developed in the 1940s and was first made available to women in Britain in 1965.

However in 2002 the British Millennium Women Study published findings claiming that HRT raised the risk of cancer. Many doctors immediately withdrew prescriptions while the Medical Healthcare and Regulatory Agency (MHRA) issued new guidance recommending all women be given the "lowest effective dose should be used for the shortest time."

Since then the number of women taking HRT has more than halved with around one in 10 eligible patients now using the drugs, approximately 150,000 women.

More recently a review by Imperial College and a 10-year study by New York University found no evidence of a link, adding further to the confusion and last year the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (Nice) changed its guidance to encourage doctors to offer HRT claiming one million women were suffering in silence.

At the time Nice said that the cancer risk was 27 in 1,000 so the new research, which followed 100,000 women for 40 years, increases that risk by 54 per cent.

The health watchdog said that the new study should not change how doctors prescribed HRT.

We found that current use of combined HRT increases the risk of breast cancer by up to three fold, depending on how long HRT has been usedProfessor Anthony Swerdlow, Institute of Cancer Research

Professor Mark Baker, director of the Centre for Guidelines at NICE, said: "As with Nice guidance this study recognises there is no increased risk of breast cancer with oestrogen-only HRT but the combined HRT can be associated with an increased risk of breast cancer.

"The guideline makes clear that menopausal women should be informed that the impact of HRT on the risk of breast cancer varies with the type of HRT used.

"The message from our guidance to women is clear - talk about the menopause with your clinician if you need advice on your symptoms - it's very important to discuss the options to find what might help you."

The new study also found that the risk declined when women stopped taking HRT and there was no danger at all for women only taking oestrogen, which accounts for half of all prescriptions.

Baroness Delyth Morgan, chief executive at Breast Cancer Now, said: "Whether to use HRT is an entirely personal choice, which is why it's so important that women fully understand the risks and benefits and discuss them with their GP. We hope these findings will help anyone considering the treatment to make an even more informed decision.

"On balance, some women will feel HRT to be a necessity. But in order to minimise the risk of breast cancer during treatment, it is recommended that the lowest effective dose is used for the shortest possible time.

"The good news is that the increased risk of breast cancer begins to fall once you stop using HRT."

SOURCE

Menopausal hormone therapy and breast cancer: what is the true size of the increased risk?

Michael E Jones et al.

Abstract

Background:  Menopausal hormone therapy (MHT) increases breast cancer risk; however, most cohort studies omit MHT use after enrolment and many infer menopausal age.

Methods: We used information from serial questionnaires from the UK Generations Study cohort to estimate hazard ratios (HRs) for breast cancer among post-menopausal women with known menopausal age, and examined biases induced when not updating data on MHT use and including women with inferred menopausal age.

Results:  Among women recruited in 2003-2009, at 6 years of follow-up, 58?148 had reached menopause and 96% had completed a follow-up questionnaire. Among 39,183 women with known menopausal age, 775 developed breast cancer, and the HR in relation to current oestrogen plus progestogen MHT use (based on 52 current oestrogen plus progestogen MHT users in breast cancer cases) relative to those with no previous MHT use was 2.74 (95% confidence interval (CI): 2.05-3.65) for a median duration of 5.4 years of current use, reaching 3.27 (95% CI: 1.53-6.99) at 15+ years of use. The excess HR was underestimated by 53% if oestrogen plus progestogen MHT use was not updated after recruitment, 13% if women with uncertain menopausal age were included, and 59% if both applied. The HR for oestrogen-only MHT was not increased (HR=1.00; 95% CI: 0.66-1.54).

Conclusions:  Lack of updating MHT status through follow-up and inclusion of women with inferred menopausal age is likely to result in substantial underestimation of the excess relative risks for oestrogen plus progestogen MHT use in studies with long follow-up, limited updating of exposures, and changing or short durations of use.

British Journal of Cancer (2016) 115, 607-615. doi:10.1038/bjc.2016.231

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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.

Email me  here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or  here (Pictorial) or  here  (Personal)

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Hillary Clinton Denounces the ‘Alt-Right,’ and the Alt-Right Is Pleased

Below is the NYT take on the Alt-Right.  Since I am often seen as Alt-Right, I think I am in a position to give a more accurate perspective.

For a start, in its best misleading style, the NYT lumps together all sorts of quite different interest groups.  If there is a discernible common theme in Alt-Right writings, it is probably a belief that racial differences are real and that some of those differences matter.  And I think you just have to walk around with your eyes open to see that.  But where you go from there is quite various.  Stormfront, for instance, is clearly neo-Nazi and I never go there.  Vdare, on the other hand, I do read occasionally and I have donated to them.  But I see Vdare as just old-fashioned conservatives.  They would be Republicans if Republicans could bring themselves to mention racial differences.  But Republicans have been thoroughly cowed by the Left so that is not going to happen.

I myself think that most racial differences are trivial or temporary but some are not.  And I don't think America will have good public policy until the real differences between blacks and whites are acknowledged and integrated into public policy.  For instance, there should be special schools using high-discipline policies for those blacks who are unable to adapt to traditional white classrooms.  White education would thus no longer be held back and the blacks concerned might actually learn something for a change.

And let there be no doubt that the real racists are the Left.  They never stop agitating about black "inequality" and they have in place a whole raft of laws and regulations that are as racially discriminatory as Jim Crow.  And they are consistent in that Jim Crow laws were the work of Democrats too.  Race, race, race dominates their thinking.  It has got to the ridiculous stage in some schools where blacks cannot be punished for misbehavior unless whites and Asians are being punished at a similar rate.  And since black kids are much more unruly, that leads to a very serious breakdown of order and means that all the students learn very little in the course of their education.

So, as usual, Leftists have turned reality on its head.  They are themselves the most zealous racists but, with their unending torrents of abuse, they have managed to pin the racist label on other people.  Leftists DO see differences between blacks and whites but no-one else is allowed to.  Crazy.

So, one thing that would unite all those described as Alt-Right is the view that the "forgiveness" of disruptive and violent black behavior should end.  There should be one law for all, impartially enforced.

The only other commonality that I see in the alleged "Alt-Right" is a respect for traditional European values.  Britain, Western Europe and their derivative societies have created modern civilization and the modern world generally.  Western European culture (including U.S. culture) has been enormously creative and its influence extends worldwide.  A trivial but instructive example of that is that young Japanese females these days sometimes blond their hair!  The European example is a powerful influence in just about everything these days



But where you go from acknowledging that is another matter.  Most Alt-Righters would simply be pleased to have their membership of a dominant civilization generally acknowledged. They don't seek "white supremacy" at all.  Why?  Because they already have it!  Their culture and laws already rule the roost.  The Left devote demonic energies trying to tear down the dominant culture and its systems but they can only  nibble at the edges.  Alt-Righters would mostly be happy if the Left simply became constructive rather than destructive -- but that is an impossible dream, of course.

The Alt-Right does however explore a variety of possibilies for protecting European-descended people from hostile minorities.  The phenomenon of "white flight" suggests that most Americans have some wishes in that direction.

And even Abraham Lincoln wanted to send all the blacks back to Africa.  So was the Great Emancipator a racist?  In the addled thinking of the modern Left, he was. What the Left will not see is something well-accepted in law -- that motives matter.  Wanting to protect yourself and those like you from harm is radically different from wanting to do harm to others.  And such different motives will produce quite different behaviour sets.

But because the thinking categorizes people by race, it is racist, according to the Left.  You can categorize people in all  sorts of ways but the one way in which you must not categorize people is by race, according to the Left.

In all political movements there is a considerable diversity of viewpoints.  Among the far-Left they can be  quite vicious to one-another over what to us would seem like very tiny differences of doctrine.  And insofar as there is such a thing as the Alt-Right there is even less unity.  Mrs Clinton was attacking a paper tiger.  She has form on that. In 1998 she was attacking a "vast Right-wing conspiracy" to account for opposition to the Clinton with the overactive penis.

There is also a libertarian take here on the Alt-Right.  Again it is over-inclusive.  Very little of what it says would apply to all Alt-Right thinkers.

For instance, it says: "What is the alt-right theory of history? The movement inherits a long and dreary tradition of thought from Friedrich Hegel to Thomas Carlyle to Oswald Spengler to Madison Grant to Othmar Spann to Giovanni Gentile to Trump’s speeches"

That is an amazing lumping together of disparates, mostly Communists and Fascists. Hegel, for instance, was the inspiration of Karl Marx, not the Alt-right. And the article goes downhill from there.

So let people do a bit of Googling and read for themselves what the various Alt-Right sites say.  You won't agree with them all but you may agree with some -- JR


As Hillary Clinton assailed Donald J. Trump on Thursday for fanning the flames of racism embraced by the “alt-right,” the community of activists that tends to lurk anonymously in the internet’s dark corners could hardly contain its glee.

Mrs. Clinton’s speech was intended to link Mr. Trump to a fringe ideology of conspiracies and hate, but for the leaders of the alt-right, the attention from the Democratic presidential nominee was a moment in the political spotlight that offered a new level of credibility. It also provided a valuable opportunity for fund-raising and recruiting.

Jared Taylor, editor of the white nationalist publication American Renaissance, live-tweeted Mrs. Clinton’s remarks, questioning her praise of establishment Republicans and eagerly anticipating her discussion of his community.  “Come on, Hillary,” he wrote. “Talk about Alt Right.”

In an ode to Mr. Trump’s characterization of Jeb Bush, Mr. Taylor described her speech as “low energy.”

Other white nationalists mocked Mrs. Clinton, saying she sounded like a neoconservative and a “grandma,” while welcoming the publicity.

Mr. Trump has publicly kept his distance from the alt-right, but his critics have accused him of offering subtle cues to invite its support. His appointment of Stephen K. Bannon, the head of Breitbart News, to be chief executive of his campaign was cheered by alt-right members who are avid readers of the Breitbart website.

The alt-right claims to support the preservation of white culture in the United States, and many of its members want to see an overhaul of the entire political system. However, its views are widely seen as white supremacist and anti-Semitic.

Many who align themselves with alt-right philosophies say that they do not subscribe to all of Mr. Trump’s policies, but that electing him would be a step in the right direction because of his “America First” worldview and his hard line on immigration. This week, some expressed disappointment that Mr. Trump appeared to be softening his tone on deporting people who are in the country illegally.

Richard B. Spencer, the president of the white-nationalist National Policy Institute, who is credited with coming up with the name “alt-right,” pushed back against claims that the group promotes violence and said in a statement that there was a double standard at play.

“While Hillary & Co. condemn the alt-right — nonviolent activists seeking social change, largely through a vibrant internet presence — she allows noted supporters of terror to attend her rallies and has never once disavowed the actions of domestic terrorists associated with Black Lives Matter,” Mr. Spencer said.

Mrs. Clinton’s public criticism of the alt-right could turn out to be a boon for the movement, and its members did their best to capitalize on the moment.

Some, in an effort to show a lighthearted side, circulated footage of Mr. Taylor playing the saxophone at the group’s most recent conference. The white nationalist website VDare published a “What Is the Alt-Right?” video and blasted out a fund-raising pitch warning, “Hillary wants to ignite a witch hunt against the alt-right because she knows we are finally starting to make an impact on the public’s thinking about immigration.” And the Stormfront forum set up an online thread for potential new members.

After Mrs. Clinton’s speech, one group of white nationalists convened a 90-minute videoconference that was broadcast on YouTube. The consensus was that Mrs. Clinton was “toothless” and “lackluster,” and they expressed disappointment that she had not mentioned alt-right leaders by name. She made reference only to David Duke, the former Klansman whose support Mr. Trump was slow to disavow.

Although the alt-right tried to put its best foot forward, there was plenty of venom directed at Mrs. Clinton, and the conspiracy theories ran wild. A popular attack was the continuing effort to raise questions about her health.

By addressing the alt-right in such a prominent setting, Mrs. Clinton ran the risk of helping its cause. But Richard Cohen, the president of the Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks hate groups, dismissed the idea that Mrs. Clinton was doing the public a disservice by drawing attention to the alt-right.

“I think every public official ought to denounce racism, and that is what Secretary Clinton did,” Mr. Cohen said, noting that the alt-right ideology opposes the notion that all people are equal.

Referring to the term “alt-right,” which was trending on Twitter, he added, “It is a fancy, almost antiseptic term for white supremacy in the digital world.”

SOURCE

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VA Whistleblower Gets the Boot

When it comes to the Department of Veterans Affairs, miracles do happen. Just ask Anthony Salazar. The Los Angeles-based VA employee was fired last year for ostensibly violating the agency’s code of conduct. Great news, right? Well, not exactly. Even when miracles like this do happen at the VA, they’re shrouded in malicious ulterior motives. According to the Office of Special Counsel, a few years ago “Mr. Salazar described how 30 of the 88 agency vehicles were unaccounted for, explained how ten fleet cards were suspected of fraudulent purchases, and pressed the urgent need for the VA to get the situation under control.”

That’s pretty alarming stuff, and an ensuing investigation found Robert Benkeser, who oversees the VA Greater Los Angeles Healthcare System, culpable. According to The Daily Caller, “The department convened an ‘administrative investigation board’ (AIB) that resulted in ‘a letter of counseling’ to Benkeser for mismanaging the motor pool.” But instead of rectifying the situation and moving on, a vengeful Benkeser terminated Salazar … for exposing his own misdeeds. As the Caller goes on to note, “The ease with which Salazar was fired … stands in contrast to the many employees who unambiguously committed egregious misconduct and are still on the job.” No joke.

Meanwhile, The New York Times reports, “A 76-year-old veteran committed suicide on Sunday in the parking lot of the Northport Veterans Affairs Medical Center on Long Island, where he had been a patient, according to the Suffolk County Police Department.” An anonymous source said the man, Peter A. Kaisen, “went to the ER and was denied service. And then he went to his car and shot himself.” If the VA put as much effort into helping folks like Mr. Kaisen as it does looking to retaliate against whistleblowers — a problem that’s systemic — perhaps fewer vets would be killing themselves.

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.

Email me  here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or  here (Pictorial) or  here  (Personal)

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I don't normally put anything up on Saturday but I am doing so now because I missed a few days during the week due to another encounter with a surgical scalpel.  It all went well in the end.  Details here

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Diversity: History's Pathway to Chaos

Victor Davis Hanson

Emphasizing diversity has been the pitfall, not the strength, of nations throughout history.

The Roman Empire worked as long as Iberians, Greeks, Jews, Gauls and myriad other African, Asian and European communities spoke Latin, cherished habeas corpus and saw being Roman as preferable to identifying with their own particular tribe. By the fifth century, diversity had won out but would soon prove a fatal liability.

Rome disintegrated when it became unable to assimilate new influxes of northern European tribes. Newcomers had no intention of giving up their Gothic, Hunnish or Vandal identities.

The propaganda of history’s multicultural empires — the Ottoman, the Russian, the Austro-Hungarian, the British and the Soviet — was never the strength of their diversity. To avoid chaos, their governments bragged about the religious, ideological or royal advantages of unity, not diversity.

Nor did more modern quagmires like Iraq, Lebanon, Syria, Rwanda or Yugoslavia boast that they were “diverse.” Instead, their strongman leaders naturally claimed that they shared an all-encompassing commonality.

When such coerced harmony failed, these nations suffered the even worse consequences of diversity, as tribes and sects turned murderously upon each other.

For some reason, contemporary America believes that it can reject its uniquely successful melting pot to embrace a historically dangerous and discredited salad-bowl separatism.

Is there any evidence from the past that institutionalizing sects and ethnic grievances would ensure a nation’s security, prosperity and freedom?

America’s melting pot is history’s sole exception of E pluribus unum inclusivity: a successful multiracial society bound by a common culture, language and values. But this is a historic aberration with a future that is now in doubt.

Some students attending California’s Claremont College openly demand roommates of the same race. Racially segregated “safe spaces” are fixtures on college campuses.

We speak casually of bloc voting on the basis of skin color — as if a lockstep Asian, Latino, black or white vote is a good thing.

We are reverting to the nihilism of the old Confederacy. The South’s “one-drop rule” has often been copied to assure employers or universities that one qualifies as a minority.

Some public figures have sought to play up or invent diversity advantages. Sometimes, as in the cases of Elizabeth Warren, Rachel Dolezal and Ward Churchill, the result is farce.

Given our racial fixations, we may soon have to undergo computer scans of our skin colors to rank competing claims of grievance.

How does one mete out the relative reparations for various atrocities of the past, such as slavery, the Holocaust, the American Indian wars, the Asian or Catholic exclusion laws, indentured servitude, or the mid-18th-century belief that the Irish were not quite human?

Sanctuary cities, in the manner of 1850s Richmond or Charleston invoking nullification, now openly declare themselves immune from federal law. Does that defiance ensure every city the right to ignore whatever federal laws it finds inconvenient, from the filing of 1040s to voting laws?

The diversity industry hinges on U.S. citizens still envisioning a shrinking white population as the “majority.” Yet “white” is now not always easily definable, given intermarriage and constructed identities.

In California, those who check “white” on Orwellian racial boxes are now a minority. Will white Californians soon nightmarishly declare themselves aggrieved minorities and thus demand affirmative action, encourage Viking-like names such as Ragnar or Odin, insert umlauts and diereses into their names to hype their European bona fides, seek segregated European-American dorms and set up “Caucasian Studies” programs at universities?

Women now graduate from college at a higher rate than men. Will there be a male effort to ensure affirmative action for college admissions and graduation rates?

If the white vote reaches 70 percent for a particular candidate, is that really such a good thing, as it was considered to be when President Obama was praised for capturing 95 percent of the black vote?

It is time to step back from the apartheid brink.

Even onetime diversity advocate Oprah Winfrey has had second thoughts about the lack of commonality in America. She recently vowed to quit using the word “diversity” and now prefers “inclusion.”

A Latino-American undergraduate who is a student of Shakespeare is not “culturally appropriating” anyone’s white-European legacy, but instead seeking transcendence of ideas and a common humanity.

Asian-Americans are not “overrepresented” at premier campuses. Their high-profile presence should be praised as a model, not punished as aberrant by number-crunching bureaucrats.

African-Americans who excel in physics and engineering are not “acting white” but finding the proper pathways for their natural talents.

Being one-half Southeast Asian or three-quarters white is not the touchstone to one’s essence and is irrelevant to one’s character and conduct.

No one is impinging on anyone’s culture when blacks dye their hair blond, or when blondes prefer to wear cornrow braids.

Campuses desperately need unity czars, not diversity czars.

Otherwise, we will end up as 50 separate and rival nations — just like other failed states in history whose diverse tribes and races destroyed themselves in a Hobbesian dog-eat-dog war with one another.

SOURCE

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Trump racist?

Things got uncomfortable on “CNN Tonight with Don Lemon," when New York Times columnist Charles Blow flipped out on Donald Trump’s National Diversity Coalition chairman Bruce Lavell.

Blow and Lavell, who are both African-American, were guests on Lemon’s show. Their exchange almost immediately turned hostile once Blow began speaking in rebuttal to Lavell.

“Donald Trump is a bigot,” said Blow. “Anyone who accepts that, supports it… and that makes you part of the bigotry itself.”
Laval attempted to take the debate back to Donald Trump’s actual statements.

“Name one [negative] statement that you’ve heard Donald Trump say about African-Americans,” countered Lavell.
Blow did not have an answer, and attempted several times to avoid answering.

“If he doesn’t want to answer your question, he doesn’t have to,” interjected Lemon, as the sparring escalated.
Lavell responded with: “Because he can’t, that’s why.”

“I don’t know you and I don’t want to talk to you,” said Blow finally, towards the end of the segment, on his final attempt to avoid the question. “And I don’t want to answer your question.”

As Blow continued to call Donald Trump a “bigot"—and tried to link Lavell to bigotry because of his support for the Republican nominee—Lavell attempted to take the debate back to the issues.

After listing several of the biggest issues facing our nation—issues that have been cornerstones of Trump’s campaign thus far—Lavell skewered Blow on playing the race card: “Our nation is crumbling and the only thing we can keep bringing us is this stuff about race all the time…”

Blow angrily responded, "That’s called a deflection, because you don’t want to understand you’re supporting that bigotry.”
"I would like to debate substantive policies, not fantasy,” replied Lavell, as the segment ended.

The mainstream media has long been accused of being in the tank for Hillary Clinton, and biased against conservatives—but, in 2016, it’s clear they’ve dropped even the pretense of impartiality.


SOURCE

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Here's More Bad News for Obamacare

Obamacare was supposed to save the American economy.

Back in 2009, when President Obama decided to push for healthcare reform in the midst of a financial crisis, he justified the decision by arguing that healthcare reform was economic reform, stating that the Affordable Care Act would “build a new foundation for lasting and sustained growth.”

One of the ways that healthcare reform was supposed to boost the economy was ending the phenomenon of “job lock,” whereby workers are scared of leaving a job for a potentially better opportunity out of fear of losing their health insurance. But according to a new study by the National Bureau of Economic Research, Obamacare isn’t actually solving that problem.

Economists Pauline Leung of Cornell University and Alexandre Mas of Princeton studied states that recently expanded Medicaid under the law and found no evidence that there was a reduction in employment lock in response to these expansions. Admittedly, researchers only studied the effects of the Obamacare-related Medicaid expansion, which is offered to Americans with incomes below 138% of the poverty line. It’s possible that these folks are working in jobs that don’t offer health care in the first place, and so obtaining medicaid benefits has no affect on their decisions to leave their current job for a new one.

At the same time, these results should lead us to question the lasting economic benefits of the law, given the fact that new Medicaid enrollees have exceeded expectations while fewer middle-class Americans are enrolling through subsidized exchanges than was previously expected. And though this trend doesn’t represent an existential threat to the law itself (see this recent post for some of those), it does underscore the need for continued health care reform if the U.S. economy is to remain competitive with other wealthy nations.

And this is actually one area where the right and the left agree. President Obama himself took to citing research from the Heritage Foundation—which praised Senator John McCain’s 2008 health reform plan for its ability to tackle the job lock problem by offering tax credits to workers so that they could afford to buy insurance on the private market—as evidence for the need to address the problem.

So why are health care wonks so worried about job lock? If workers are scared to leave their job to look for new prospects or even start their own businesses out of fear of losing insurance, they are not going to be in the position to produce as much as they can. And a lack of productivity growth, which ending job lock would help to reverse, is one of the fundamental problems affecting the U.S. economy today. The latest reading shows productivity falling in the second quarter year-over-year, while the Conference Board predicts that this measure will fall for the full year for the first time since 1982.

Finding a way to solve this crisis of slow productivity will be a priority for lawmakers of both parties, given that productivity growth is widely assumed to be necessary if average workers are to see their wages rise. The problem is that Obamacare—with its mix of public subsidies and regulations with the private provision of health insurance—is the only conceivable model that could get both Democratic and Republican support. Of course, the Republican Party, after supporting forms of the law in places like Massachusetts, abandoned this model after President Obama took office in 2009 and began pushing it nationally.

Now, the Republican Party will accept nothing short of the law’s repeal, mixed with new free-market reforms. Meanwhile, the Democratic Party is increasingly hostile to the idea of reform that doesn’t include greater government involvement, as evidenced by Bernie Sanders support for a single-payer, “Medicare for all” plan and Obama’s renewed push for a public option. It’s conceivable that either of these approaches could work to help make the U.S. labor market more flexible, but there is little chance that either plan will actually be tested given the growing and intractable polarization of American politics.

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.

Email me  here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or  here (Pictorial) or  here  (Personal)

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Direct measurement of IQ advancing

Tuning inside the brain is the difference between normal and super smart people, researchers have found.  They say general cognitive ability may be the result of a 'well-tuned brain network' - and may even be able to develop to tune up the mind of those less intelligent.

They found the brains of those with higher intelligence were extremely similar at rest and while carrying out  tasks.

'Specifically, we found that brain network configuration at rest was already closer to a wide variety of task configurations in intelligent individuals,' the Rutgers University team wrote in The Journal of Neuroscience.

'This suggests that the ability to modify network connectivity efficiently when task demands change is a hallmark of high intelligence.

The study suggests greater similarity between brain connectivity at rest and on task may be associated with better mental performance.

It shows that general cognitive ability may be the result of well-tuned brain network updates, said study author Michael Cole of Rutgers University.

'The results also suggest that if we can figure out how to better tune these networks, we can possibly influence cognitive ability generally.'

Different types of cognitive tasks spur activity in various regions of the brain, as indicated by studies using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI).

The regions activated depend on the specific task, and scientists believe regions active at the same time work together as a network.

Even when our brains are at rest, collections of regions remain active in 'resting-state networks.'

To test the theory, Schultz and Cole analyzed brain imaging data obtained by researchers at Washington University in St. Louis and the University of Minnesota as part of the Human Connectome Project.

One hundred healthy adults had their brains scanned with fMRI while they rested quietly and while they performed various cognitive tests.

To study brain network reconfiguration, the Rutgers scientists compared participants' resting-state networks to the networks active during language, reasoning, and memory tasks and computed how similar each task-related network was to the resting-state network.

When they compared these similarity ratings to the participants' performance on each task, they found individuals who performed better had more similar resting and task networks.

The researchers also compared the networks active during each of the three cognitive tasks and created a composite generalized task network pattern.

They found that the more similar this generalized task network pattern was to the resting-state network pattern, the better the participant performed on each task, suggesting individuals who performed well had resting-state networks optimized to switch to any of a variety of new tasks.

In other words, high performers appeared to use their brains more efficiently, only needing to make small changes when switching tasks.

However, Cole and study author Douglas Schultz previously found the resting and on-task networks were highly similar.

This led the researchers to propose that the brain has an intrinsic network that reconfigures itself when we switch from resting to performing a task, and they hypothesized the reconfiguration of this intrinsic network relates to how well we perform a given task.

The results of the study suggest that 'people's performance on various cognitive tasks is better the fewer changes they have to their brain connectivity,' said John Dylan Haynes, a neuroscientist at the Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience in Berlin who studies cognition and was not involved in the study.

'The efficiency with which a brain engages in a task might be a predictor of intelligence.'

The researchers are planning additional studies to examine how training may improve cognitive abilities by influencing the brain's intrinsic network and its reconfiguration during different tasks. [Fat chance!]

SOURCE

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National Security Expert on Why He's Voting for Trump

Former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations John Bolton dropped by The Hugh Hewitt Show, where the diplomat said that between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, it’s an easy choice: Donald Trump all the way. He also discussed the lack of evidence to suggest that Clinton will be more hawkish on foreign policy than Obama, adding that she’s “comfortable” with the worldview that has given us a disaster in Syria, Libya, and Iran.

Concerning the possible ethics problems the former secretary of state faces from the Clinton Foundation, Bolton said that it just showed how Hillary just ignored every pledge/promise she made upon her confirmation hearing, where she said that no special treatment would be afforded to donors should she be confirmed. Bolton said that exiting and re-entering public life is sort of like a monastery-type mentality. You need to resign or cut connections to every private sector connection you have for the time being. The only acceptable connection to maintain from your former life is your church. Yet, the former ambassador did note that there was a grey area in this regard because regulations didn’t include spouses or children that are also part of the same non-profit, which has been called a slush fund by the non-partisan Sunlight Foundation watchdog.

Oh, and of course, Bolton feels like a Clinton presidency would constitute nothing but a third term for Obamaism, albeit a tad more to the left on some issues, like trade. Nevertheless, should Trump win in November, Bolton said he would consider it very seriously since it's a service to the country:
HH: So first question, are you going to vote for Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton?

JB: (laughing) That, to me, is an easy choice. I am going to vote for Donald Trump. And I think that’s something that a lot of our friends around the country still need to come to grips with. You know, the Republican field for the nomination had 17 candidates, which means there are supporters out there of 16 disappointed candidates. But compared to the prospect of four years of Hillary and Bill back in the White House, or even worse, eight years, really, I hope everybody just thinks about that a little bit more.

SOURCE

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American journalism is collapsing before our eyes

Hillary's impossible DNC task: reinvent herself — now
Donald Trump may or may not fix his campaign, and Hillary Clinton may or may not become the first female president. But something else happening before our eyes is almost as important: the complete collapse of American journalism as we know it.

The frenzy to bury Trump is not limited to the Clinton campaign and the Obama White House. They are working hand-in-hand with what was considered the cream of the nation’s news organizations.

The shameful display of naked partisanship by the elite media is unlike anything seen in modern America.

The largest broadcast networks — CBS, NBC and ABC — and major newspapers like The New York Times and Washington Post have jettisoned all pretense of fair play. Their fierce determination to keep Trump out of the Oval Office has no precedent.

Indeed, no foreign enemy, no terror group, no native criminal gang, suffers the daily beating that Trump does. The mad mullahs of Iran, who call America the Great Satan and vow to wipe Israel off the map, are treated gently by comparison.

By torching its remaining credibility in service of Clinton, the mainstream media’s reputations will likely never recover, nor will the standards. No future producer, editor, reporter or anchor can be expected to meet a test of fairness when that standard has been trashed in such willful and blatant fashion.

Liberal bias in journalism is often baked into the cake. The traditional ethos of comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable leads to demands that government solve every problem. Favoring big government, then, becomes routine among most journalists, especially young ones.

I know because I was one of them. I started at the Times while the Vietnam War and civil-rights movement raged, and was full of certainty about right and wrong.

My editors were, too, though in a different way. Our boss of bosses, the legendary Abe Rosenthal, knew his reporters leaned left, so he leaned right to “keep the paper straight.”

That meant the Times, except for the opinion pages, was scrubbed free of reporters’ political views, an edict that was enforced by giving the opinion and news operations separate editors. The church-and-state structure was one reason the Times was considered the flagship of journalism.

Those days are gone. The Times now is so out of the closet as a Clinton shill that it is giving itself permission to violate any semblance of evenhandedness in its news pages as well as its opinion pages.

A recent article by its media reporter, Jim Rutenberg, whom I know and like, began this way: “If you’re a working journalist and you believe that Donald J. Trump is a demagogue playing to the nation’s worst racist and nationalistic tendencies, that he cozies up to anti-American dictators and that he would be dangerous with control of the United States nuclear codes, how the heck are you supposed to cover him?”

Whoa, Nellie. The clear assumption is that many reporters see Trump that way, and it is note­worthy that no similar question is raised about Clinton, whose scandals are deserving only of “scrutiny.” Rutenberg approvingly cites a leftist journalist who calls one candidate “normal” and the other ­“abnormal.”

Clinton is hardly “normal” to the 68 percent of Americans who find her dishonest and untrustworthy, though apparently not a single one of those people writes for the Times. Statistically, that makes the Times “abnormal.”

Also, you don’t need to be a ­detective to hear echoes in that first paragraph of Clinton speeches and ads, including those featured prominently on the Times’ Web site. In effect, the paper has seamlessly ­adopted Clinton’s view as its own, then tries to justify its coverage.

It’s an impossible task, and Rutenberg fails because he must. Any reporter who agrees with Clinton about Trump has no business covering either candidate.

It’s pure bias, which the Times fancies itself an expert in detecting in others, but is blissfully tolerant of its own. And with the top political editor quoted in the story as ­approving the one-sided coverage as necessary and deserving, the prejudice is now official policy.

It’s a historic mistake and a complete break with the paper’s own traditions. Instead of dropping its standards, the Times should bend over backwards to enforce them, even while acknowledging that Trump is a rare breed. That’s the whole point of standards — they are designed to guide decisions not just in easy cases, but in all cases, to preserve trust.

The Times, of course, is not alone in becoming unhinged over Trump, but that’s also the point. It used to be unique because of its adherence to fairness.

Now its only standard is a double standard, one that it proudly ­confesses. Shame would be more appropriate.

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.

Email me  here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or  here (Pictorial) or  here  (Personal)

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Hallelujah!

My facial swelling has retreated somewhat overnight.  So I am now on the mend and out of pain and discomfort.  The clindamycin I buy is a Swiss formulation called Calindamin and I have had good results with it before.  Clindamycin is out of patent so most formulations of it come from India.  Most formulations of most out-of-patent drugs come from India these days so if you buy generic drugs, you may want to read this.

I used to use Indian formulations of clindamycin but got no discernible benefit from them. I am generally very pro-Indian so it grieves me to say that but "facts are chiels that winna ding", as the Scots say.

So I am going to be doing a lot of reading for the rest of the day with a view to re-starting blogging first thing tomorrow.  You can't keep a good blogger down!

Many thanks to the people who sent me "get well" messages -- and a particular thanks to those who told me that I will be remembered in their prayers.  I always feel particularly supported to hear that. And my recovery was after all swift.

UPDATE 2

I have a lot of facial swelling this morning

I have taken Clindamycin for it so that may help

But if it is no better tomorrow morning I will have to go into hospital and be put on a Vancomycin drip

I have been through all this before so I now expect to be up and running again early next week

UPDATE

I had my surgical procedure today and it was as bad as I thought it was going to be.  I went to a good public hospital so I was treated as well as they reasonably could in the circumstances.I ended up with a piece the size of a quarter chopped out of my right cheek near my  nose. Fortunately my plastic surgeon is brilliant and managed to put my face back together again.  I am now out of hospital but am experiencing some pain and discomfort.  So I would  not be clear enough in mind to attempt much in the way of blogging today