Did Jesus really speak in the mystical manner portrayed in John 14?

I must say initially that I am not challenging Christian faith here.  Christians believe that God used men to express divine truths in their own way so the narratives from Apostle John can be seen as just another way of conveying important truths.

But most of John 14 is rather a gabble.  Christ constantly speaks of being IN the Father and the Father also being IN him.  He is quite repetitious about it.  He also however speaks of the disciples being in him and he being in them so an allusion to the Trinity doctrine cannot be read into it.  If there were any doubt about that, verse 28 puts it as rest.

As far as we can tell Jesus was a popular preacher so it seems unlikely to me that he spoke in a gabble that would do a French philosopher proud.  So it seems unlikely that John was trying to present the actual words of Jesus.  My view is that he was trying to present very emphatically something that Jesus taught.  And what that is is fairly clear.  He was trying to emphasize a unity of belief and purpose between himself and the Father.  He felt that he was so close to the Father that to see him was to see the Father.

So the passage is sensible enough if you allow for John's Gnostic way of writing. And from the opening verses of John's Gospel we have it made clear that John likes to present truths in that way.

Jesus also emphasises in the passage the importance of keeping his commandments -- so he was emphasizing the importance of his  commandments by saying that they were also the commandments of the Father.

The major puzzle in chapter 14, it seems to me, is what we are to make of the Paraclete (helper) that Jesus will send when he is gone. Again I think we have to look for a figurative meaning rather than accept some sort of "Holy Ghost" story.  And I think that the Paraclete must be the whole body of his teaching which will live on in the disciples.  That Christian teachings can indeed be very sustaining, we now know.  The way the Bible Students (Ernste Bibel Forscher) went to their deaths for refusing to bow the knee to Hitler is just one example of that strength.

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Trumping The Establishment

The Washington Establishment hates Trump, because he promises to put them out of business

By Scot Faulkner

Why does The Washington Establishment hate Donald Trump? It is not because of his positions on immigration or trade. Pat Buchanan and Ross Perot advocated similar stands in 1992, and they did not generate the obsessive hatred being displayed in 2016.

Trump has declared war on The Establishment itself. In his June 16, 2015 Presidential announcement he asserted:

“So I’ve watched the politicians. I’ve dealt with them all my life…. They will never make America great again. They don’t even have a chance. They’re controlled fully by the lobbyists, by the donors, and by the special interests…. It’s destroying our country. We have to stop them, and it has to stop now.”

So in a nutshell, The Washington Establishment has a visceral hatred for Donald Trump, because he promises to put their system out of business.

The Washington Establishment sees Trump as serious about them being the primary impediment to making America “great again.” He sees The Establishment as lining their pockets, and their friends’ pockets – as beneficiaries of the status quo. As long as nothing changes, The Establishment will have their mansions, limousines, VIP tables and ego trips.

There is much at stake.

Think of Washington, DC as a mass of “cookie jars,” each containing delicious treats. There are those who control the cookie jars, those who want the cookie jars, and those who can get the cookie jars.  Officially, these treats are distributed based on legislative mandates, open competition, and documented needs.

In fact, the treats are almost always handed out to friends, and friends of friends. Friends can be purchased. Friends help friends get reelected, and gain power, and get treats. It is Washington, DC’s “golden rule” – those with the gold rule.

Welcome to “crony capitalism”.  Someone knowing someone who can hand out favors has been around since the first tribes shared the first harvest. The term “lobbyist” came from favor seekers hanging out in the lobby of Washington, DC’s Willard Hotel during the Grant Administration in the 1870s.

In 1905, George Washington Plunkett, a ward boss in the Tammany Hall political machine, coined what could be the motto of Washington, DC: “What is the Constitution among friends?”

Today, things have gotten way out of hand. Spending for Washington lobbyists has tripled since 1998 to over $3.22 billion a year. Favor seekers spend $24 million on lobbyists each day Congress is in session.

Campaign fundraising is another dimension of how The Establishment stays in power. Over $750 million has been raised for House races and $520 million for Senate races this election cycle. Leaders of Political Action Committees (PACs), and individual bundlers who raise funds, dominate this ultimate game of “pay for play.”

Those brokering power become gatekeepers for funding and favors throughout the Federal Government. This power comes from a truism overlooked by everyone in the media: all discretionary federal money is earmarked. The popular myth is that earmarks vanished once the Republicans banned them when they returned to power in 2011.

In fact, they only banned legislative earmarks, and there are still ways to work around that system. The President, and his appointees, earmark funds as standard operating procedure.  Even career bureaucrats play favorites.

Favorites can be based on institutional, Administration and ideological biases. Favoritism can also go to the highest bidder. This is federal money flowing out the door as grants, programs, contracts, buildings, leases and employment.

Other “treats” to be dispensed include regulatory relief, tax waivers and subsidies. Favoritism is rarely purchased with money directly changing hands; that kind of corruption occurs more in state and local government. Washington level corruption is true “quid pro quo.”

The Washington Establishment swaps favors more insidiously. How many times does a military officer get a major position with a defense contractor years after he favored them with a multi-million dollar contract? A Reagan aide granted a building height waiver near the White House and quadrupled his salary when hired by the developer.

Grant and contract officers obtain slots at prestigious colleges and prep schools for their children for making the “right” choices or being a little lax on oversight.

Bush era National Park officials refused to prosecute the destruction of park land in exchange for Redskins tickets. Obama era Fish & Wildlife Service officials give wind turbine companies 5- and 30- year exemptions from endangered species and eagle protection, so they can slaughter eagles, hawks, falcons, other birds and bats by the hundreds of thousands year after year – while “commoners” get fined or jailed merely for “possessing” a bald eagle feather.

Hillary Clinton gets exonerated from a host of transgressions, in exchange for who knows what.

Everyone has their price, save for “true public servants.”

Trump promises to smash the cookie jars and end the reign of The Establishment.

Normal Americans are rallying around Trump. They are enraged at the lies and duplicity of those in power. Many see a reason to vote for the first time since Reagan. They want November 8, 2016 to be America’s “Bastille Day,” marking the end of Washington, DC’s arrogant and unaccountable ruling class.

Billions of dollars are at stake. Perks, prestige and power are at stake. The future of representative government is at stake. Is it any wonder that The Establishment is doing everything and anything to stop Trump?

SOURCE

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Trump boosts minority outreach with Philadelphia visit

Donald Trump was met with tears and gratitude as he sat with African-American supporters Friday, including the mother of a slain young woman who was killed by a man living in the United States illegally.

The back-to-back meetings, held in a ballroom in Northwest Philadelphia, underscored the balancing act the Republican nominee is playing as he tries to expand his support in the race against Democrat Hillary Clinton.

While Trump works to broaden his appeal among more moderate and minority voters, he is also working to maintain his popularity with his core GOP base by pressing his hard-line views on immigration.

At the invite-only roundtable discussion, Trump met with a dozen local business, civic, and religious leaders who praised him for coming to the city as part of his outreach efforts.

Trump was warmly received by the group, including Daphne Goggins, a local Republican official, who wiped away tears as she introduced herself to Trump, saying she has been a Republican for years but, ‘‘for the first time in my life, I feel like my vote is going to count.’’

Renee Amoore, a local business leader, assured Trump that he has support in the black community, despite his low standing in public opinion surveys.

‘‘We appreciate you and what you’ve done, coming to the hood, as people call it. That’s a big deal,’’ she said.

In a separate development Friday, the Commission on Pr esidential Debates announced that NBC News chief anchor Lester Holt will moderate the first of three scheduled debates between Clinton and Trump scheduled for Sept. 26.

The first and third debates will be question-and-answer sessions, with a journalist choosing the topics. The third session will be moderated by Chris Wallace of Fox News on Oct. 19.

ABC’s Martha Raddatz and CNN’s Anderson Cooper will team up for the second session on Oct. 9, a town hall-style meeting with half of the questions to be posed by audience members.

Each of the debates is scheduled for 90 minutes, with a 9 p.m. EDT start time.

The commission also said Elaine Quijano of CBS News will lead the vice presidential debate between Republican Mike Pence and Democrat Tim Kaine on Oct 4.

Trump’s meeting in Philadelphia also showed the challenges he faces making inroads with African-Americans and Latinos.

Protesters gathered in front of the building where he appeared, and a coalition of labor leaders met nearby to denounce Trump’s outreach to black voters as disingenuous and insulting.

Ryan Boyer of the Labor District Council said Trump ‘‘has no prescription’’ to help inner-city people. ‘‘He did nothing for African-Americans in 30 years of public life,’’ he said. “We reject his notion that we have nothing to lose by supporting him.’’

The next stop for Trump is Detroit on Saturday, where blacks make up some 83 percent of the population.

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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Goldman Sach & HSBC Recently Bought 7.1 Tons Of Physical Gold Bullion!

This is a straw in the wind.  The banks clearly expect a collapse in the value of the Greenback and want a better store of value.  They are probably right.  With all the new money Obama has printed, there has got to be a big drop in the purchasing power of the dollar soon. I do have a small amount of gold but I am mainly into blue chip shares and real estate.  They should be pretty protective in an economic crisis too

Mind you, being in Australia has extra advantages.  Our government has spent beyond its means too but has financed that through borrowing (denominated in U.S. dollars), not running the printing presses hard at the mint.  And if the U.S. dollar collapses, Australia will be able to get a heap of U.S. dollars very cheaply and thus retire a big lot of its debts very easily.

A wise American would put a lot of his funds into the banks of any major country with a well managed economy.  Canada would be a bad bet there now it is the hands of Pretty Boy.  There is no doubt he will manage the Canadian economy badly


On August 6, 2015, Goldman Sachs (NYSE:GS) and HSBC (NYSE:HSBC) took delivery of a sum total of 7.1 tons of physical gold. No, I have not made any typographical errors. And no, I am not talking about electronic paper claims. I am talking about shiny yellow metal stuff that you can touch and feel.

The gold bars were not purchased for bank clients. They were purchased for the banks themselves. How do I know this? They are designated by the exchange as being for delivery to the bank's "house" accounts at COMEX, not to client accounts.

Goldman Sachs, alone, took 3.2 tons worth of physical gold bars. Yet, even as the firm builds its stockpile, Goldman tells clients not to do it. According to Goldman's Jeffrey Currie, the long-term outlook for gold is bleak.

They bought 3.9 metric tons at COMEX, no doubt at rock bottom prices, and it was just delivered into the bank's house account. Note that we are NOT talking about paper-gold. Both bought physical gold bars! Apparently, top Goldman and HSBC executives are "gold bugs." They do not, apparently, believe in the promises made by the gold trust (NYSEARCA:GLD), or at least they are not willing to use the trust's shares as a substitute for hard metal bars.

Physical gold is a long-term investment, everywhere and always. They are not particularly hard to sell, especially now, but short-term trading would be much easier with paper-gold products like GLD or gold futures. Remember, vaults cost money, as do big men with big guns and the knowledge of how to use them. The banks are choosing to accumulate and hoard physical gold bars for a reason.

SOURCE

Note.  Most new money is created via the banks.  Printing it is mainly a metaphor.

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Trump Delivers A Speech For The Ages

The media all called the speech a disaster but that was to be expected

One speech does not a campaign victory make – that is until last night when Donald Trump delivered his much-anticipated speech on immigration. The speech was, in its passion, in its emotional connection with Trump’s audience, and most importantly in its substance, a speech for the ages.

And, we might add, in Trump’s adoption of the very language we here at CHQ have used since his first major speech on economic growth, a renewal of his promise to “forgotten Americans” of all races, creeds and colors Trump Angel Momsthat hope and help are on the way.

While much of the establishment media commentary focused immediately on Trump’s 10-point plan for reestablishing America’s borders and immigration system in a way that serves and protects Americans first, we think one of the most important parts of the speech was Trump’s vision for his Administration beyond immigration enforcement.

It is “We will accomplish all of the steps outlined above, and when we do, peace and law and justice and prosperity will prevail.”

What has Hillary Clinton got to offer to counter that?

The chaos and terror of open borders, the free-falling quality of life of economic stagnation and the cultural disaster of Muslim immigration that has destroyed Sweden and that is despoiling Germany and France even as you read this column.

As important as that theme was to the speech, the most important rhetorical element of the speech was how Donald Trump established the need for his 10-point plan:

"When politicians talk about immigration reform, they usually mean the following: amnesty, open borders, and lower wages.

Immigration reform should mean something else entirely: it should mean improvements to our laws and policies to make life better for American citizens.

But if we are going to make our immigration system work, then we have to be prepared to talk honestly and without fear about these important and sensitive issues.

For instance, we have to listen to the concerns that working people have over the record pace of immigration and its impact on their jobs, wages, housing, schools, tax bills, and living conditions. These are valid concerns, expressed by decent and patriotic citizens from all backgrounds.

We also have to be honest about the fact that not everyone who seeks to join our country will be able to successfully assimilate. It is our right as a sovereign nation to choose immigrants that we think are the likeliest to thrive and flourish here."

In those five short paragraphs Donald Trump threw down the folly and conceit of Paul Ryan, Marco Rubio, John McCain, the Gang of Eight, Facebook Billionaire Mark Zuckerberg, the US Chamber of Commerce and the rest of the open borders econometric school of immigration policy.

And finally, Donald Trump framed the core debate going into the post-Labor Day campaign as immigration and claimed the mantle of change agent by challenging the Washington establishment and media:

"Instead, the media and my opponent discuss one thing, and only this one thing: the needs of people living here illegally.

The truth is, the central issue is not the needs of the 11 million illegal immigrants – or however many there may be.

That has never been the central issue. It will never be the central issue.

Anyone who tells you that the core issue is the needs of those living here illegally has simply spent too much time in Washington.

Only out of touch media elites think the biggest problem facing American society today is that there are 11 million illegal immigrants who don’t have legal status.

To all the politicians, donors and special interests, hear these words from me today: there is only one core issue in the immigration debate and it is this: the well-being of the American people. Nothing even comes a close second."

If Hillary Clinton has been looking weak and haggard on the campaign trail she must be positively terrified now, because last night Donald Trump rallied an army fiercely determined to take its country back and reclaim the promise that she and Barack Obama have stolen from them.

SOURCE

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Ann Coulter: Trump's Immigration Policy Address Was "The Greatest"

In an interview with Breitbart News Daily host Raheem Kassam, Ann Coulter described Donald Trump's immigration policy speech yesterday as "the greatest speech ever given."

"I think we can start working on the Trump transition team," she added.

"I’m just going to watch it whenever I’m not on radio or sleeping," she said. "That was the most perfect speech, and Trump – I describe this in In Trump We Trust, he is so brilliant. Every time you think Trump has made a mistake – and I describe these incidents in my book, as with John McCain, and we’ve seen it recently with the claims about Khizr Khan, this snarling Muslim at the Democratic convention, lecturing Trump on how he’s not allowed to venture opinions because his son didn’t die in Iraq. Look, maybe I don’t know America, and maybe Khizr Khan knows it better, but I don’t think that’s going over well."

"In any event, all throughout this campaign, he’d do things that at first I thought, ‘Ah, I wish he hadn’t said that,’ and then I learned to start telling my friends – who’d call me as if they could yell at me for everything Trump does – and I’d say, ‘Just wait a few days. Let’s see how it plays out.’ And look at what he did, with the stuff he said on Hannity last week, on the alleged softening," she continued. "He got every network to cover that speech live, the most magnificent speech in human history."

SOURCE

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Economic Conspiracies

By Walter E. Williams

A general economic principle is that any law or regulation that restricts market entry tends to impose the greatest burden on those who can be described as poor, latecomers, discriminated-against and politically weak.

The president of the NAACP's St. Louis chapter, Adolphus Pruitt, has petitioned a circuit court judge to reject the St. Louis Metropolitan Taxicab Commission's conspiratorial call to issue a temporary restraining order that would force Uber to shut down. He says the order would negatively impact nearly 2,000 African-Americans who work as Uber partners in black neighborhoods that have long been ignored by taxis and other transportation providers. In a statement, Pruitt said, "The immediate harm of a (temporary restraining order) would strand thousands of African American riders who depend on Uber to travel around a city that has measurable gaps in its transportation system and has failed to serve our neighborhoods for decades."

St. Louis taxicab restrictions are not nearly so onerous as those in some other cities. In New York, the license, called a medallion, to own one taxi costs $704,000. In Chicago, the medallion price in 2015 was $270,000, down from $357,000 in 2013. Boston medallions currently sell for about $200,000, and that's down from $700,000 several years ago. The effect of these licensing restrictions is to close the market to those who do not have hundreds of thousands of dollars or are unable to acquire a loan to purchase a medallion. I'd ask my liberal friends: Who are the people least likely to have those resources?

Entry restrictions are not necessarily a racial issue. Those who are in a monopoly arrangement find it in their interest to keep outsiders out. If they can do so, it means they can charge higher prices and earn higher income. That means blacks who are part of a taxicab monopoly share the same interests as whites in that industry.

There are hundreds of conspiratorial entry restrictions that work against blacks. George Leef has a story in Forbes about a case before the courts, Pritchard v. Board of Cosmetology. The plaintiff is Tammy Pritchard, a policewoman who would like to supplement her income by working in a hair salon owned by a friend. The salon specializes in African hair braiding, and Pritchard wants to shampoo customers' hair. After she had been working a few months, Tennessee Board of Cosmetology officials barred her from washing hair because she lacks a governmental license to do so. Under the board's regulations, an individual must complete "not less than 300 hours" of instruction "in the practice and theory of shampooing" at an approved school. Pritchard cannot afford the time and money costs, so she has lost a source of income.

My colleagues at the Institute for Justice have waged war against economic restrictions since 1991 and have had a number of important successes. Among hair braiders the Institute for Justice has liberated from onerous regulations are those in Arkansas, California, Iowa, Washington and Missouri. The institute has successfully waged war against taxi licensing and other transportation restrictions in Bowling Green, Milwaukee, Chicago, Florida, Cincinnati, Denver, Indianapolis, Las Vegas, Minneapolis and elsewhere. Its successes in other areas of liberty can be found on its website.

The most devastating and difficult-to-change economic conspiracy is the minimum wage law. The conspiratorial aspect of the law is that it prices all people out of the job market whose skills do not provide the value of the minimum wage. Put yourself in the place of an employer and ask yourself whether you would hire a person whom the minimum wage law mandates you pay $7.25 an hour if that person were so unfortunate that he could add only $5 worth of value an hour. Most employers would view hiring such a low-skilled person as a losing economic proposition, but they might hire him if he could be paid $5 an hour. Unfortunately, the minimum wage law is seen as sacrosanct, and that conspiracy will continue in perpetuity — robbing youngsters, particularly black youngsters, of a chance to get their feet on the bottom rungs of the economic ladder.

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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Bush=Nazi?  Not so much

Despite the extreme abuse he received from the Left, I  have always described GWB as a sentimental Christian gentleman -- and the report below by Taylor Griffin reinforces that

As a young White House staffer in the early years of President George W. Bush’s administration, I was always struck by President Bush’s kindness, warmth and genuine humility. I saw it when he choked back tears as he comforted grieving families after 9/11. Or in the camaraderie he shared with wounded warriors. But, I saw it in small moments too. Here's one of those that meant a great deal to me personally.

As I prepared to leave the White House for a new job opportunity, Ashley Kavanaugh, the President’s secretary at the time, called to tell me that the President wanted to invite my family to come visit in the Oval Office on my last day of work. It was 2003, a few days after the start of the Iraq war, when my brother, sister and father arrived at the White House Northwest gate. This was a busy time for the President. I anticipated a quick photo op. So, as we walked down the drive toward the West Wing, I instructed my family not to linger too long with the President. I knew that he had a great deal weighing on him, more than usual, and had an especially tight schedule that day.

We were ushered into the Oval, introductions were made, and White House photographer Eric Draper snapped a photo for posterity. After a few minutes of pleasantries, I thanked the President and began to usher everyone out.

As we turned for the door, he boomed, “hang on,” and motioned us back, insisting that we stay a little longer. He asked my brother about his career plans, my sister about her studies in college. He took the time to get to know each of them. As we left, everyone was beaming.

Later, I thanked the President for how generously he had welcomed our family. As much as I appreciated it, I asked why he had taken so much time for a junior staffer and his family from a small town in North Carolina? “Well,” he said, “this may be the one time in their lives your family will ever visit with a President in the Oval Office. I wanted to make sure that it was something they could remember.”

Everyone who has worked for President Bush has stories like this, my friend Dana Perino has a book filled with them (here's one and another). Many of these are far more awe-inspiring than mine (here here and here). But, sometimes it's the small things that best illustrate true kindness and real character.

SOURCE

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Another wonderful Reagan story -- perhaps the best yet

Reagan was giving a speech at a school for the blind in the early 80’s. When the speech and the question and answer period were over, Reagan ordered all the journalists and photographers, and even his own staff - including Bennett himself - out of the auditorium so he could spend a few minutes with the children.

Later that day, Bennett was on the phone with the school administrator and asked her about those last few minutes in the auditorium. The administrator recounted how Reagan came down off the stage, sat amongst the children, and allowed them to feel his face.

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In Denouncing Alt-Right, Hillary Treads Where GOP Will Not

Jonah is a bit flustered below.  That Hillary condemns the Alt-Right confuses him.  He does not seem to see that it is just an update of her "Vast right-wing conspiracy".  See sees demons where they are not.

Jonah is broadly right in identifying whom the Alt-Right are -- people who acknowledge racial differences -- but he has fallen for a simplistic explanation for their motives.  He cannot see that it is a concern for the safety of themselves and those like them that motivates Alt-Righters.

Black on white crime is a huge problem that is swept under the bed by mainstream  politicians because of their refusal to talk about racial realities.  Alt-Righters want to get that conversation under way without shrieks about Nazism, Apartheid, Jim Crow etc.  The world of the 21st century is different from the 20th century and we need to acknowledge that and not go back to fight old battles that were won long ago.

There is no general agreement among Alt-Righters about how to deal with black criminality, but that it must not be ignored is universally agreed among them.  Getting the problems of racial differences out in the open is what is aimed at

Last week delivered one of the most remarkable moments of this most remarkable political season. A major politician defended the conservative movement and the Republican Party from guilt-by-association with a fringe group of racists, anti-Semites and conspiracy theorists who have jumped enthusiastically on the Donald Trump train: the so-called alt-right.

“This is not conservatism as we have known it,” the politician said. “This is not Republicanism as we have known it.”

That politician was Hillary Clinton, and that’s astonishing. Clinton is normally comfortable unjustly condemning conservatism and the GOP for the sins of bigotry and prejudice, not exonerating it. After all, she coined the phrase “vast right-wing conspiracy.”

Her husband’s administration tried — unfairly — to pin the Oklahoma City bombing on conservative critics, specifically radio hosts such as Rush Limbaugh. Less than a decade later, she revived the charge in her book “Living History,” tying the bombing to “right-wing radio talk shows and websites [which] intensified the atmosphere of hostility with their rhetoric of intolerance, anger and anti-government paranoia.”

Just last year, Clinton was comparing the entire GOP presidential field to “terrorist groups” for their views on abortion.

This history suggests that Clinton’s attempt to distinguish the party of Paul Ryan from the alt-right was not the product of high-minded statesmanship, but political calculation. The goal was to demonize Trump so as to make moderate voters feel OK voting for a Democrat.

(Trump is not an alt-righter, but his political inexperience, his anti-establishment persona, and his ignorance of, and hostility to, many basic tenets of conservatism created a golden opportunity for the alt-righters to latch onto his candidacy.)

If I were a down-ballot Democrat, I’d be chagrined. By exonerating the GOP from the stain of the alt-right, Clinton has made it harder for Democratic candidates to tar their opponents with it. What’s truly extraordinary, though, is that Clinton is doing work many conservatives won’t.

There is a diversity of views among the self-described alt-right. But the one unifying sentiment is racism — or what they like to call “racialism” or “race realism.” In the words of one alt-right leader, Jared Taylor, “the races are not equal and equivalent.” On Monday, Taylor asserted on NPR’s “The Diane Rehm Show” that racialism — not religion, economics, etc. — is the one issue that unites alt-righters.

If you read the writings of leading alt-righters, it is impossible to come to any other conclusion. Some are avowed white supremacists. Some eschew talk of supremacy and instead focus on the need for racial separation to protect “white identity.” But one can’t talk about the alt-right knowledgeably without recognizing their racism.

And yet that is exactly what some conservatives seem intent on doing. For example, my friend Hugh Hewitt, the influential talk radio host, has been arguing that there is a “narrow” alt-right made up of a “execrable anti-Semitic, white supremacist fringe” but also a “broad alt-right” made up of frustrated tea partiers and others who are simply hostile to the GOP establishment and any form of immigration reform that falls short of mass deportation.

This isn’t just wrong, it’s madness. The alt-righters are a politically insignificant band. Why claim that a group dedicated to overthrowing conservatism for a white nationalist fantasy is in fact a member of the conservative coalition? Why muddy a distinction the alt-righters are eager to keep clear?

In the 1960s, the fledgling conservative movement was faced with a similar dilemma. The John Birch Society was a paranoid outfit dedicated to the theory that the U.S. government was controlled by communists. It said even Dwight Eisenhower was a Red (to which the conservative political theorist Russell Kirk replied, “Ike’s not a Communist, he’s a golfer”).

William F. Buckley recognized that the Birchers were being used by the liberal media to “anathematize the entire American right wing.” At first, his magazine, National Review (where I often hang my hat), tried to argue that the problem was just a narrow “lunatic fringe” of Birchers, and not the rank and file. But very quickly, the editors recognized that the broader movement needed to be denounced and defenestrated.

Buckley grasped something Hewitt and countless lesser pro-Trump pundits do not: Some lines must not be blurred, but illuminated for all to see. Amazingly, Clinton is doing that when actual conservatives have not.

SOURCE

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We Have Nothing Left Holding Us Together

Ben Shapiro

On Friday, a South Carolina high school stopped students from bringing American flags to a football game against a heavily Hispanic rival school. Why? The principal was presumably worried that waving the flag might offend the Hispanic students. According to the principal, “This decision would be made anytime that the American flag, or any other symbol, sign, cheer, or action on the part of our fans would potentially compromise the safety of all in attendance at a school event.”

This isn’t the first such situation. The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled last year that a public school in California could ban students from wearing a shirt emblazoned with an American flag on Cinco de Mayo thanks to fears over racial conflict at the school. The lawyer for the children complained, “This opens the door for a school to suppress any viewpoints that are opposed by a band of vocal and violent bullies.”

Meanwhile, has-been San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick has been widely praised in the media for refusing to stand for the national anthem during football games. “I am not going to stand up to show pride in a flag for a country that oppresses black people and people of color,” explained the man earning an average of $19,000,000 per year for sitting on the bench. He continued: “To me, this is bigger than football and it would be selfish on my part to look the other way. There are bodies in the street and people getting paid leave and getting away with murder.”

We’re watching the end of America in real time.

That doesn’t mean that the country’s on the verge of actual implosion. But the idea of America required a common definition of being American: a love of country on the basis of its founding philosophy. That has now been undermined by the left.

Love of country doesn’t mean that you have to love everything about America, or that you can’t criticize America. But loving America means understanding that the country was founded on a unique basis — a uniquely good basis. That’s what the flag stands for. Not ethnic superiority or racial solidarity or police brutality but the notion of individual liberty and equal rights before God. But with the destruction of that central principle, the ties that bind us together are fraying. And the left loves that.

In fact, the two defining philosophical iterations of the modern left both make war with the ties that bind us together. In President Obama’s landmark second inaugural address, he openly said, “Being true to our founding documents … does not mean we all define liberty in exactly the same way.” This is the kind of definition worshipped by Justice Anthony Kennedy, who has singlehandedly redefined the Constitution. He said, “At the heart of liberty is the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life.”

But this means that liberty has no real definition outside of “stuff I want to do.” And we all want to do different stuff, sometimes at the expense of other people’s liberty. Subjective definitions of liberty, rather than a common definition, means a conflict of all against all, or at least a conflict of a government controlled by some who are targeting everyone else. It means that our flag is no longer a common symbol for our shared definition of liberty. It’s just a rag that means different things to different people based on their subjective experiences and definitions of reality.

And that means we have nothing holding us together.

The only way to restore the ties that bind us is to rededicate ourselves to the notion of liberty for which generations of Americans fought and died. But that won’t happen so long as the left insists that their feelings are more important than your rights.

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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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.

SOURCE

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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.

SOURCE

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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.

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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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.

SOURCE

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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.

SOURCE

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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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