Trump has saved us -- temporarily? -- from a mental Gulag

A useful technique for anaesthetizing the individual citizen and rendering him compliant is the erasure of authentic historical knowledge. We’ve remarked the success of this approach in the U.S. with the “history from below” or “people’s history” movement, associated with Howard Zinn, and the foregrounding of a bowdlerized version of Islamic history in American schools.

Canada is no different. Eric McGeer, author of Words of Valediction and Remembrance: Canadian Epitaphs of the Second World War, writes: “In my last years of high school teaching I was increasingly infuriated and disgusted at the portrayal of Canada in the history textbooks assigned for use in our courses. There was no sense of gratitude in the textbooks, no empathy with the people of the past or an attempt to see them in their own terms, no sense of the effort people made to create one of the few truly liveable societies on earth.

You would have thought that this country was nothing more than a racist, bigoted, this or that-phobic hotbed. My first lesson involved taking the book and dropping it into the waste paper basket and advising the students to do the same.”  The study of history, McGeer concludes, is nothing now but a progressive morality tale and a mechanism of social engineering. Sounds a lot like Title IX. Pride in one’s nation, its accomplishments and sacrifices, is contra-indicated. There is more than one way of burning the flag.

The center-right consensus that has characterized Western nations has been under attack for some considerable time as nation after nation in the once liberal West gravitates progressively leftward. Robert Conquest’s Second of his Three Laws of Politics states that “any organization not explicitly right-wing sooner or later becomes left-wing.” The consequence of Conquest’s Law is, inevitably, what Robert Michels in Political Parties called “The Iron Law of Oligarchy,” which formulates how democratic institutions tend to succumb to the rule of an elite—in our day, a progressivist camarilla that controls government policy and media outlets, and harnesses the energies of dissenting associations and cabals. In many countries, the democratic process has become or is on the road to becoming a mere formality.

The oligarchic agenda can be detected in the disastrous nationalization of the health care system; the decadence of an academy which indoctrinates rather than educates; the rise of destructive feminism and the feminization of the culture; the transgendering of everyday life—in Canada, for example, Bill C-16 has been tabled, making “gender expression” a prohibited ground of discrimination and potentially mandating non-binary pronouns such as zhi or hir, as is already the case in New York City where astronomical fines are levied for contravention; the special status ascribed to the incursions of anti-democratic Islam; the “abolition of the family,” as Marx and Engels urged in The Communist Manifesto; and the regulatory strangling of the free market economy and the conjoint attrition of the middle class.

Additionally, the leftist project is materially facilitated by the growing prevalence of kangaroo courts run by committed activists of every conceivable stripe and in which no provision whatsoever is made to assist those too often falsely accused of discrimination or being in violation of some obscure code or policy of sanctioned conduct. The judgments handed down against those who have offended the sensibilities of favored identity groups will often involve harshly punitive forms of retribution that may cost a defendant his employment and his livelihood.

A Romanian friend who suffered through Nicolae Ceaușescu’s dictatorship in his home country tells me that in many ways the situation in the “freedom loving” West is actually worse. In Romania, as in the Soviet Union and the rest of the Eastern Bloc, most people knew that the regime was founded on lies and that the media were corrupt, time-serving institutions. Here, on the contrary, people tend to believe that the government is relatively, if not entirely, trustworthy, that the judiciary is impartial, and that the media actually report the news.

Citizens are therefore susceptible to mission creep and are piecemeal deceived into a condition of indenture to socialist governance, an activist judiciary, a disinformative, hireling press corps, and left-wing institutions. People will vote massively for the Liberal Party in Canada and the Democrats in the U.S., not realizing they are voting themselves into bondage, penury and stagnation.

The process operates insensibly and takes longer to embed itself into the cultural mainstream, but the result is alarmingly effective and durable. My friend has never read F.A. Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom or George Orwell’s 1984, but his layman’s insights and practical experience bear out Hayek’s scholarly analysis and Orwell’s dire warnings.

A totalitarian regime will control its citizens through propaganda, censorship, and outright violence, modes of oppression that are at least publicly demonstrable, evident to most. But knowing that the enchainment of the spirit is ultimately more reliable than the enchainment of the flesh, a democratic polity veering towards oligarchy will focus on propaganda and censorship as well, but in a far more subtle form. It will function mainly through public shaming rituals, social ostracism, rigid speech codes, Orwellian disinformation, and legal or quasi-legal assault. It does not need to depend on physical violence.

Fear of social rejection, the lure of groupthink, the pestilence of political correctness controlling what one may say and think, public apathy, historical ignorance, and especially the Damoclean sword of selective hiring, job dismissal, and financial reprisal go a long way to subdue a people to the will of its masters and consign them to a Gulag that may be less observable a such, but one that is nonetheless socially and economically crippling to individuals, families and businesses.

In the last analysis, this system of subjugation looks to be even more effective than the cruder techniques of its tyrannical counterparts. In the absence of public awareness and concerted pushback, we will have sold our birthright for a mess of political pottage.

SOURCE

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The Left have no shame and no humane values

Even a brutal Communist butcher and dictator is OK if he is of the Left.  Power is their only value and they will say anything to get it

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is under fire for hailing Fidel Castro as 'larger than life' and a 'legendary revolutionary and orator' after he died on Friday.

Trudeau praised the former Cuban president in a tribute that focused on his family's close ties to Castro and made no mention of his history of ruthless suppression.

'It is with deep sorrow that I learned today of the death of Cuba's longest serving President,' Trudeau said in his statement, which was released on Saturday.

'While a controversial figure, both Mr Castro’s supporters and detractors recognized his tremendous dedication and love for the Cuban people who had a deep and lasting affection for "el Comandante'".

Trudeau celebrated Castro's 'significant improvements' to Cuba's education and healthcare systems and said his own father was 'very proud to call him a friend'.

'On behalf of all Canadians, Sophie and I offer our deepest condolences to the family, friends and many, many supporters of Mr Castro,' he concluded.

'We join the people of Cuba today in mourning the loss of this remarkable leader.'

Trudeau's father met Castro in 1976, during a controversial trip that took place at the height of the Cold War.

SOURCE

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Some fun



Wonderful to see the Leftist knowalls prove that they know nothing.

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Trumping the Media: Donald Continually Confounds the MSM

"The Master Persuader"

Looking back on it now, who do you think provided the best commentary on the run-up to the election?

And a related question: who has provided the most insightful commentary on the aftermath, i.e. "Why Trump Happened," "What His Victory Means," "What the Protesters and Crybullies Want"?

It's amusing now to replay the scenes of those Important People who assured us that Trump, the clown, could never win. My favorite headline was from The Nation: "Relax, Donald Trump Can't Win."

But if the MSM was almost exclusively a source of schadenfreude, who was out there telling the truth?

There were several percipient commentators. But I want to mention one who may be overlooked because the public regards him as an entertainer, not a sage. I mean Scott Adams, the creator of the Dilbert comic strip. Adams, at his blog, has been providing some of the most original and most penetrating commentary on the whole Trump phenomenon.

I was, I admit, a little taken aback when I first encountered his description of Trump as a "Master Persuader" (see here, for example, or here), but the more I think about it, the more right I think he is. Trump on the stump was not articulate in any traditional sense. He was repetitious, digressive, given to stumbling about in sentence fragments. But he honed a message that resonated deeply with the voters.

Adams noted the following in a column posted yesterday:

"If you believe Trump’s skill for persuasion wasn’t the key variable in his win, you have to imagine some other candidate beating Clinton with the same set of policies as Trump. Personally, I can’t imagine it"

I commend Adams' blog to you: among other things, he shows that the people who are protesting against Trump are not really protesting against Trump. They're protesting against a hallucination they call "Trump" that has almost nothing to do with the man who is now the president-elect.

"How," Adams asks, "do you explain away Trump’s election if you think you are smart and you think you are well-informed and you think Trump is OBVIOUSLY a monster?"

You solve for that incongruity by hallucinating -- literally -- that Trump supporters KNOW Trump is a monster and they PREFER the monster. In this hallucination, the KKK is not a nutty fringe group but rather a symbol of how all Trump supporters must feel. (They don’t. Not even close.)

In a rational world it would be obvious that Trump supporters include lots of brilliant and well-informed people. That fact -- as obvious as it would seem -- is invisible to the folks who can’t even imagine a world in which their powers of perception could be so wrong. To reconcile their world, they have to imagine all Trump supporters as defective in some moral or cognitive way, or both."

I think this correct. And I am delighted to see Trump circumventing that hallucination so skillfully.

Forget about the Soros-funded protests: those are already dissipating. Perhaps there will be a brief recrudescence at the inauguration, but the street action is already looking sillier and sillier as Trump is acting more and more presidential.

The really important action is with respect to the MSM. Just yesterday, Trump convened an off-the-record meeting with anchors and executives from the top five networks to complain about the unfair coverage he had been receiving.

CNN reported that this meant Trump was off to a "rocky start" with the media. That's hilarious. Why? Because no one cares what CNN thinks about its relationship with Donald Trump.

To prove the point, Trump circumvented the media altogether yesterday when he released via YouTube a clip of him outlining some of the things he hoped to accomplished in his first 100 days. It all revolved around a "simple core principle," i.e., "putting America first."

What a novel idea, but not one that Wolf Blitzer or Chris Matthews can get his head around.

SOURCE

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The latest from two fun ladies



CHRIS BRAND has had a relapse and we may well lose him this time.  I am upset at the thought of losing such an independent mind

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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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Trump brings in the billionaires

The Democrats are going to pick at this and claim that Trump does not stand for the little guy after all.  But the point is that Trump is bringing in high achievers, not inexperienced political hacks.  He is bringing in people of known high competence who will get results.

And since they are already rich they are not doing it for the salary. And being already rich, they will be very hard to corrupt.  This may be the least corrupt administration for a long time -- just what Trump promised.

And no-one can say that they did not know Trump had rich friends.  He has long been one of the best known people in America -- and known to be a rich man who hobnobs with other rich people.


Donald Trump is used to being surrounded by rich people, but the squad of billionaires he is lining up to serve in his first cabinet is extraordinary even by his standards.

Hedge funders, heiresses, bankruptcy bankers and baseball barons are being tipped for top positions in the new administration, leading to deep concerns about conflicts of interest and the expectation of a bumpy ride when they face confirmation hearings in the Senate.

“Donald Trump said during the campaign that he doesn’t like hanging out with rich people,” said Larry Sabato, professor of politics at the University of Virginia. “We’re discovering that’s not really true. We’ve had wealthy people in almost every cabinet, but I don’t believe we’ve ever had so many.”

SOURCE

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Trump inspires second thoughts from a British libertarian

by Sean Gabb

The election of Donald Trump took nearly everyone by surprise. For some of us, it was a moment of joy, for others a terrible shock. I was in the first category. The British Government was in the second. From Theresa May downward, the Ministers had spent a year heaping scorn on Mr Trump. The scale and nature of their insults will not be quickly forgotten. Their earliest punishment appears to be that they have been told to approach Mr Trump only through Nigel Farage. I have no doubt there will be other humiliations.

Part of me is delighted. I like Donald Trump. I like Nigel Farage. Even if she is better than David Cameron, I remain suspicious of and hostile to Mrs May. Let her and her ministers eat dirt for a few weeks, and then come to a more reasonable view of British interests. All this does, however, leave part of me uncomfortable. This article, I must warn you, will be more than usually solipsistic. On the other hand, I have always tried to be intellectually honest, and I feel obliged at least to describe my present difficulty.

During the twenty years or so till last Tuesday, I held a set of opinions that – I always grant – may have been wrong, but that were internally consistent. They went something like this:

The fundamental interests of every country are the same. These are to give as much freedom and security to their citizens as local circumstances will allow, while living at peace with all other countries. What disturbs this view of the world is that interest and ability do not always coincide. The United States has been able to dominate the world, and it has. Britain is no longer able to do this, but has been able to act above its inherent power through becoming a satellite of the United States. I found both these facts irritating before 1989. After then, America became the home of political correctness and neoconservatism. For me, therefore, America became The Great Satan. Any British Government committed to our fundamental interests should begin by breaking off relations with the United States. In the meantime, I was even willing to see membership of the European Union as a useful counterweight to American power.

I do not know what a Trump Presidency will be really like. But it is possible that the opinions I have just summarised are suddenly obsolete. It is possible that, within a few weeks, America will cease being The Great Satan, and become the seat of the God-Emperor-Daddy. I already find myself in the same position as leftists did towards France in 1789, or towards Russia in 1917. It may, then, be that you can strip out all the Powellite rhetoric, and I shall be revealed as nothing more than a dissident Anglospherist. My only difference with the people I have been denouncing for a generation is nothing more than that I want a different American Empire.

There is some truth in this. The government of my own country is now at the head of the neoconservative interest. I shall certainly be relieved if stiff orders come out of Washington, and Theresa May and Boris Johnson go scuttling off to Moscow to patch up their differences with Mr Putin. But, if the facts are changed, my principles are not.

No hard reset button was pressed last week in America. The country will not revert to what it was supposed to become in the 1780s. America will remain the most powerful country in the world, with interests on every continent. It may conceive and pursue these in a more rational manner. But its interests are unlikely to become perfectly aligned with those of my own country. For this reason, our interests depend, in the long term, on close relations with France and Germany, and an adequate relationship with Russia. If we can add to this friendly relations with America, that will be a bonus.

I turn to the matter of what Mr Trump is already doing to Mrs May. For a long time, the British Establishment has been a wholly-owned franchise of the military-industrial complex in America, taken in its widest sense. British Governments are neoconservative because that is what Washington wanted. They are politically correct for the same reason. If American pressure is not to be removed, but merely changed in a better direction, I shall be grateful for that. I shall be grateful in the short term. In the longer term, I still want full independence. I will put up with a more sensible master when his bailiffs are told to go easy on the whip. The final ambition remains no master at all.

I turn now to how I view the “Anglosphere.” There is no doubt that England and America are rather in the position of Siamese twins. We share a language. We share a culture. Speaking for myself, I have as many American friends as English. When I go abroad, and am among Americans, we always find ourselves part of a single group, almost forgetting differences of passport, and sharing jokes about the foreigners we are among. Always taking account of our different weight, what was done to the world after 1989 was a joint British-American enterprise. The intellectual resistance to this has been no less a joint British-American enterprise – again taking account of our different weights. Libertarians and conservatives in our two countries have not merely worked together over the past few decades – we have belonged to the same movement, and we have worked against the same enemy, though in two different locations. My American friends rejoiced when the British Establishment got a bloody nose last June. We now rejoice that Mr Trump is to be the next President. Our struggle has been, and is, the same. Our victories are their victories. Their victories are ours.

I am not sure if I have made myself as clear as I want to be. Perhaps I need to think more about the events of this year before I can become as self-assured again as I have been for the past third of a century. It remains, however, that I am delighted that the uncertainty I describe has become necessary. All those American leftists last week, their faces like burst balloons, were an early Christmas present. The strained faces of Theresa May and her ministers are of exactly the same kind.

I look forward to Mrs May’s first trip to Washington next year, and I shall have a good laugh when she prostrates herself in the appropriate manner before the God-Emperor-Daddy. It will be a victory for me and everyone else in the world who wants the best for England and America in particular, and for a suffering humanity in general.

https://thelibertarianalliance.com/2016/11/14/donald-trump-and-english-patriotism/


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Winning Coalition: Married, Mature, Church-Going, Self-Sufficient

Assume, for the next few minutes, that you are a Machiavellian political strategist.  You do not care about the liberty and prosperity of our nation or of future generations. The only thing you want to ensure is that all American presidents elected after Donald Trump are liberals in the mold of Hillary Clinton.

So, what sort of cultural and demographic changes would you like to see in the United States?

An examination of the network exit poll taken last Tuesday might give you a general idea about whom your most likely future supporters will be - and it might not match the model of the liberal coalition the liberal media promotes.

Is marriage an issue? Yes.  Among unmarried voters, according to the exit poll published by CNN, Clinton beat Trump 55 percent to 38 percent. But among married voters, Trump beat Clinton 53 percent to 43 percent. When Americans marry and stay married it hurts the liberal cause.

Is generational change an issue? Yes.  Among voters 44 and younger, Clinton beat Trump 52 percent to 40 percent. But among voters 45 and older, Trump beat Clinton 53 percent to 44 percent.

When Americans live to middle age and longer, it hurts the liberal cause.

Is upward mobility an issue? Yes. Among voters with incomes of $49,999 or less, Clinton beat Trump, 52 percent to 41 percent. But among voters with incomes of $50,000 or more, Trump beat Clinton 49 percent to 47 percent.

Trump's largest margin, among the six income brackets listed in the exit poll published by CNN, was among those who earn between $50,000 and $99,999. Among these voters, Trump beat Clinton 50 percent to 46 percent. But he also beat her 48 percent to 46 percent among voters earning $250,000 or more.  When voters make more money - attaining a middle-class income or higher - it hurts the liberal cause.

Is where you live an issue? Yes. Among voters in urban areas, Clinton beat Trump 59 percent to 35 percent. But among voters in the suburbs, Trump beat Clinton 50 percent to 45 percent; and among voters in rural areas, he beat her 62 percent to 34 percent. When voters move to the suburbs and the country, it hurts the liberal cause.

Does faith play a role in our national destiny? Yes. Among voters who attend religious services only a few times a year, Clinton squeaked by Trump 48 percent to 47 percent. And among voters who never attend religious services, she stomped him 62 percent to 31 percent.

But among voters who attend religious services monthly, Trump beat Clinton 49 percent to 46 percent. And among those who attend religious services once a week or more, he stomped her 56 percent to 40 percent. When voters practice their faith, it hurts the liberal cause.

Now, imagine an unmarried 22-year-old, who lives in a city, works part-time making $20,000 per year, and has not gone to a religious service in four years. How would that person be likely to vote?  Suppose, then, this same person gets married, starts working full-time and overtime, earns more than $50,000 per year, buys a home in the suburbs, and regularly attends religious services with the spouse and children.

How would this person be likely to vote then?

But what if this person followed another path? They married and then divorced, decided it was not worth it working full-time, went on food stamps and never went to church.

The ultimate question is not how a person will vote, but what will give them a fulfilling life. It is not what persons will hold political office in United States of America, but what values will keep us free and prosperous.

The same values that made this nation great can unite this nation again. They are family, faith, hard work and the desire to live a long and good life without government standing in your way.

SOURCE

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From my twitter feed:

Ann Coulter: Today, the media take a brief time-out from worrying about Trump being a dictator to praise Fidel Castro.

Donald J. Trump: The Democrats, when they incorrectly thought they were going to win, asked that the election night tabulation be accepted. Not so anymore!

Paul Joseph Watson ‏on the death of Castro: What we leaned today: Killing political dissidents, interning gays, & being a dictator for 50 years is fine, so long as you're left wing.

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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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Trump's "backdowns"

Trump was so vague and contradictory during his campaigns -- first for the GOP nomination and then for Prez -- that one can argue that his recent "backdowns" are just his general vagueness and nothing new.  His decision not to prosecute Hillary, however, is clearly a change. So why?

He has actually told us why.  He wants to bring the nation together and for that reason he has been extremely conciliatory.  He has been as nice as he can to everybody.  And given the big guns in the media, the bureaucracy and the legal system he might see it as simply safer to lay off Hillary. Push the Donks to the wall and you never know what they will come up with.  Bribes and threats to members of the electoral college?  A cinch.  And that is just the start.

And there are two general reasons for him to go easy:

1).  He is a most experienced businessman and if you want the best result in business you have to do all that you reasonably can to keep people sweet.  To be corny, you catch more flies with honey than with vinegar.

2). Nobody seems to be mentioning this  but Trump is himself one of the establishment.  He may not previously have stood for elective office but he knows most of the main players of old and has donated to some of their electoral campaigns. He is one of the best known people in America.  He has long been a celebrity. His marriages and divorces have for decades been front-page news.  There is a reason why he is known as "The Donald".

And that is gold.  People WANT to know and be seen with a celebrity and Trump is a celebrity.  He can hobnob with anybody he wants.  He just has to buy them a flash dinner at one of his establishments and the flashbulbs will flash.  And lots of people crave those flashes.  And guess what?  His beloved and devoted daughter Ivanka is close friends with whom?  Chelsea Clinton.  Would you want to put the mother of your beloved daughter's close friend in jail?

So I think it is clear why Hillary is off the hook. She was always going to be off the hook.

But what of his other backdowns?  Obamacare and the Paris climate agreement?  Again, as a good businessman he knows the value of compromise and he wants to be seen as fair.  "winner takes all" just generates resentment.  The way Obama and his minions pushed Obamacare through with out ANY GOP support is an example of where that approach leads.  All the effort they put in to get it though now looks like being a complete waste -- a cancelled legacy.  So Trump is looking for at least the appearance of compromise.

So what about Obamacare?  He has a clear mandate to abolish it and a majority in both houses who are mad keen to do so.  Any compromise he offers will therefore be greeted with relief.  He can look like the generous man in the middle who reconciles two deeply opposed parties -- And he has already said that he likes some provisions of Obamacare.

So my prediction is that he will negotiate with both sides of Congress to gut Obamacare but leave enough remnants for both sides to feel that they have been heard and been given something.  That should achieve what Obamacare could not:  A health insurance system that has at least a degree of bipartisan support -- making it resistant to much in the way of future changes. Something as hard-fought as health insurance reform is going to leave people with little appetite for further battles over it.  The new system is likely to win general acceptance as the best that can be done.  Australia has arrived at that point after similar long battles.

So what could he do with the Paris agreement?  There are two things

1). He could present it to the Senate for ratification, which is the legally correct thing to do.  The U.S. Congress as a whole has the great distinction of being the only legislature in the world to have skeptics in the majority and the Senate would certainly not endorse the Paris agreement.  It would thus lapse and Trump would not be to blame.  That blame would fall on the shoulders of the Senate, and they have broad shoulders.

2). He could do nothing.  He could accept the Paris agreement but just fail to enforce it.  Any time some action is demanded of him he could just say things like: "America comes first in my administration and I am not going to hit the coal miners of West Virginia again.  They have already suffered enough".  He could, in other words, always find some higher priority than to worry about global warming.  I think it is highly likely that he will do one of those two things, most likely the former.

So Trump's "backdowns" actually show his wisdom and experience.  People took him for an aggressive and ignorant fool but behind his facade was a cool thinker.  They made the same mistake with Ronald Reagan.

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Some recent tweets:

From John Schindler:  "America lost its mind, electing a fraud and conman without any actual skills. All he had was media cover.  8 years later, we elected Trump'

Jason C. on the death of Castro: Many of the same Lefties that hyperventilate about Trump as a 'fascist' will tonight romanticize a dictator that used to send gays to camps.

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People are hardwired to fall in love with partners who have a similar level of educational aptitude

The effect sizes noted in the journal abstract below are very small but that may reflect our still rudimentary ability to isolate the genes responsible for IQ.  The very weak tendency so far is for the evolution of a genetic elite

A study co-led by the University of East Anglia (UEA) has found that people with genes for high educational achievement tend to marry, and have children with, people with similar DNA.

Humans generally do not choose their partners randomly, but rather mate 'assortatively', choosing people with similar traits. Among the highest ranking qualities people look for in a potential partner are intelligence and educational attainment.

While it is well known that humans mate assortatively in relation to education - people with similar education levels marry each other - this is one of the first studies to show that this has significance at a DNA level.

The researchers argue that this could increase genetic and social inequality in future generations, since children of couples who mate assortatively are more unequal genetically than those of people who mate more randomly.

The study, published in the journal Intelligence, was co-led by Dr David Hugh-Jones, from UEA's School of Economics, and Dr Abdel Abdellaoui, of the Department of Biological Psychology at VU University in The Netherlands.

They examined whether assortative mating for educational achievement could be detected in the DNA of approximately 1600 married or cohabiting couples in the UK. The sample was drawn from the UK Household Longitudinal Study, a survey that aims to be representative of the population.

Dr Hugh-Jones, a senior lecturer in economics, said: "Our findings show strong evidence for the presence of genetic assortative mating for education in the UK. The consequences of assortative mating on education and cognitive abilities are relevant for society, and for the genetic make-up and therefore the evolutionary development of subsequent generations.

"Assortative mating on inheritable traits that are indicative of socio-economic status, such as educational achievement, increases the genetic variance of characteristics in the population. This may increase social inequality, for example with respect to education or income.

"When growing social inequality is, partly, driven by a growing biological inequality, inequalities in society may be harder to overcome and the effects of assortative mating may accumulate with each generation."

The researchers used polygenic scores that predict educational attainment to see whether they predicted the partner's own educational attainment and polygenic score. They found that the scores correlated between partners and significantly predicted partners' educational outcome, for both sexes, in that individuals with a stronger genetic predisposition for higher educational achievement have partners who are more educated.

The researchers also tested whether their data could be explained by other factors, for example by people simply meeting their partners because they lived in the same county. They re-matched individuals with random partners within the same educational levels and geographical locations. However, they found that the scores of the original couples showed greater similarities than the randomly generated pairs, indicating significant genetic assortative mating for educational attainment regardless of educational level and geographic location.

SOURCE

Assortative mating on educational attainment leads to genetic spousal resemblance for polygenic scores

David Hugh-Jones et al.

Abstract

We examined whether assortative mating for educational attainment (“like marries like”) can be detected in the genomes of ~ 1600 UK spouse pairs of European descent. Assortative mating on heritable traits like educational attainment increases the genetic variance and heritability of the trait in the population, which may increase social inequalities. We test for genetic assortative mating in the UK on educational attainment, a phenotype that is indicative of socio-economic status and has shown substantial levels of assortative mating. We use genome-wide allelic effect sizes from a large genome-wide association study on educational attainment (N ~ 300 k) to create polygenic scores that are predictive of educational attainment in our independent sample (r = 0.23, p < 2 × 10− 16). The polygenic scores significantly predict partners' educational outcome (r = 0.14, p = 4 × 10− 8 and r = 0.19, p = 2 × 10− 14, for prediction from males to females and vice versa, respectively), and are themselves significantly correlated between spouses (r = 0.11, p = 7 × 10− 6). Our findings provide molecular genetic evidence for genetic assortative mating on education in the UK.

Intelligence, Volume 59, November–December 2016. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.intell.2016.08.005

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Stop vote-shaming Trump’s female supporters

The fact that 53% of white women voted for Trump really grinds feminists' mental gears

Since Donald Trump’s election last Tuesday, many have taken to the streets, not just in protest, but in mourning. The great and good were so convinced that Hillary Clinton was going to win that, even after the fact, they simply couldn’t believe the result. Then the exit polls came, and with them the news that 53 per cent of white women had voted for Trump.

Clinton supporters on both sides of the pond lost their minds. ‘Most white women don’t want to be part of an intersectional feminist sisterhood. Most white women just want to be one of the guys. And we will all suffer for it’, wrote one American journalist, the morning after the vote. ‘Dear fellow white women: you had the personification of safe white liberal feminism to vote for. You STILL picked racist patriarchy’, tweeted one upset British columnist as the news rolled in. White women chose a misogynist, wrote an Irish Times columnist, ‘like slaves fluffing the pillows of their master’s rocking chair on his porch as he shouts abuse at them’.

White women are filled with self-hatred, an activist wrote: ‘White women understand hate. We have been hating ourselves for so long that self-hatred feels normal. We may well hate people of different skin colours or religious beliefs as well, but we hate ourselves more.’ Another American observer argued that it’s now clear that ‘far too many white women still see white men as their saviours’.

I could go on – there have been endless articles, tweets and public outpourings about how shameful it is that many female voters chose Trump over Clinton. Every woman quoted above claims to be a feminist, and yet they’ve denounced female Trump voters as selfish, traitors, blind idiots, slaves, self-haters. Supposedly progressive feminists argue that women have ‘internalised misogyny’ – that hatred towards women is so ingrained in their daily experience that they can’t help being brainwashed by it and then expressing it in the ballot box. Apparently Clinton voters were able to rise above this subconscious force.

Yes, Trump has said he wants to roll back women’s access to abortion; he’s been a pig in many of his comments about women; and he’s probably not the best candidate to argue for better childcare resources or maternity leave. But the idea that he will send every woman howling back to the dark ages is absurd; that smacks more of fearmongering than a serious feminism designed to criticise and challenge the new president.

White women didn’t vote for Trump because they hate themselves. The fact is, not every woman in the US is a card-carrying feminist. Not all college-educated women go to Harvard and scream at their professors for using the wrong pronoun. In fact, as Elizabeth Nolan Brown points out in Reason, Trump’s female fanbase was made up of mostly older white women, without a college degree, living in rural areas, ‘unlikely candidates to be reading progressive, feminist-focused, millennial publications. Who, exactly, are these impassioned public screeds aimed at white “female misogynists” supposed to sway?’

This election proved that asking women to vote on the basis of their gender, rather than their political ideas, doesn’t work. Clinton’s campaign was a vacuous insult to free-thinking women. Trump is certainly no champion of women’s liberation, but the rejection of Clinton’s vagina-voting sisterhood, which encouraged women to fall in line rather than think for themselves, nonetheless felt pretty good.

Forget the ‘betrayal’ by female Trump voters; the way middle-class media feminists like Caroline Criado-Perez, Polly Toynbee and Jessica Valenti have insulted ordinary women for their political beliefs is far more shameful. By claiming that female Trump voters are merely adhering to ‘the patriarchy’, or have internalised self-hatred, or are mentally enslaved by their men, these feminists strip women of agency. Rather than deal with the fact that some women don’t agree with them, and argue for what they believe in, they smear opposing views as stupid and blind. And rather than accept that politics doesn’t go your way unless you make a good case, they bury their heads in the sand and weep. As one celebrity feminist wrote: ‘Wednesday was a day of mourning. Thursday, too. Hell, I’m giving us till Sunday.’

The more feminism presents itself as a superior girls’ club, a ‘sisterhood’ which only welcomes women who toe the line, the faster it will descend into the dustbin of history. Maybe it’s about time.

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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A conservative talks to a liberal relative

Possibly useful model for certain Thanksgiving conversations

"I know good people who had good reasons for voting for either Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton. As for the general electorate, I'm going to make some sweeping generalizations, but they're important for perspective.

Liberals (and I think I'm being fair to include you) see government as the best and biggest possible force for good. You see injustice in the way women, minorities, gays, the poor, etc. are treated. You want equality. You see people killed left and right with guns, and you want to protect your family and your school kids. And you want to rectify all of that where it'll make the most difference for everyone — from Washington, DC.

It's really important for you to realize that conservatives see the same things. We want to solve those problems, not create or defend them. Obviously, however, our solutions are different, and there are some disagreements over what the problem actually is.

We want to protect our right to defend our own families. We want a rising tide to lift all boats — JFK said that about tax cuts — and we want good schools, good jobs, fair pay, equal justice and opportunity (which doesn't mean equal outcome) for everyone. We just don't think DC is the place to accomplish that. Our families, churches, local communities and states are better suited because we're nearer to the problem than some distant bureaucrat or corrupt national politician.

So to the election.

This election was a reaction to the last eight years. During that time in particular, anyone who didn't support massive growth of government through ObamaCare, financial overhaul, the stimulus, increased minimum wage, same-sex marriage, etc. has been told they're not just wrong but horrible people.

To be sure, there are some haters who claim to be on the Right — people who troll the internet to say awful things to and about liberals. Heck, they say awful things about other conservatives if they're not "pure" enough. I've been called plenty of ugly things by Trump's truest believers whenever I've written the slightest criticism. And I can only imagine that you, along with many liberals, minorities, women, and others, felt that Trump grossly offended your humanity with some of the horrible things he's said.

But to Trump voters, it's the liberals in power — whether in media or elected office — who are smearing regular Americans who just want to be left alone.

For example, this sentiment from Slate columnist Jamelle Bouie: "There's no such thing as a good Trump voter: People voted for a racist who promised racist outcomes. They don't deserve your empathy." That column has well over 100,000 shares on Facebook, so it's not just one dude's opinion. He evidently struck a chord for liberals.

But 700 counties voted for Obama twice. 209 of them voted for Trump this time. Are they now racist?

Liberal philosopher Noam Chomsky, in apparent seriousness, calls the GOP "the most dangerous organization in world history."

And of course Hillary labeled Trump supporters a "basket of deplorables" who are "irredeemable."

When was the last time you reacted kindly to someone who completely besmirched your character? Who assumed the absolute worst about you? And not only that, but someone in power who wanted to force you to do things their way?

Reactions can be bad, too, though. "That jerk just cut me off in traffic!" Well yes, but maybe he was just distracted as he rushed to the hospital because his wife is dying. Was it right to cut you off? No, but maybe he needs a little grace. The same can be said of politics.

Trump voters look around and see corruption in government, factories moving to China, illegal immigrants taking their jobs, riots in major cities — and a media complex that blames them for it. You certainly don't have to agree with those voters to realize that if they see things that way, they'd latch on to the vehicle they think will best rectify those wrongs.

You asked specifically about the margin of white evangelicals voting for Trump. First, I'd say that the term "evangelical" is so broad as to be mostly meaningless. There are seemingly countless denominations that don't even agree on what it means to be a Christian, much less about political agendas. That said, certainly some evangelicals were really for Trump, which may be perplexing given his glaring character flaws. But I suspect most are like the believers I fellowship with every Sunday morning: They were against a woman who supports abortion without restriction, funded by taxpayers; who is no friend of religious liberty; and who would nominate Supreme Court justices who agree with these positions. This election perhaps more than any I've ever read about was a "lesser of two evils" election, and Christians chose according to their perceptions of that "evil."

Next, you asked about Trump's incoming chief strategist, Steve Bannon. Here, I'm going to quote The Wall Street Journal: "We've never met Mr. Bannon, and we don't presume to know his character, but maybe one lesson of 2016 is that deciding that Americans who disagree with you are bigots is a losing strategy. Politics would be healthier if accusations of racism in the country that twice elected the first black President were reserved for more serious use."

Really, that sums up my answer to your overarching question: What happened? I believe Trump voters simply tired of being told how awful they are, and many of them didn't bother to share that with pollsters in advance. They just voted."

SOURCE

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How President-Elect Donald Trump Can Fast-Track Deregulation And Wealth Creation

On this, the day after the election of Donald J. Trump as the 45th president (yes, he has already updated his Twitter profile), President Barack Obama’s 2016 Federal Register page count stands at a record-level 78,898.

The Federal Register, so emblematic of Washington excess, is where the hundreds of Washington bureaucracies post their proposed and final rules and regulations each day.

Obama will break his own all-time record of 81,405 pages even before December gets here. Of the ten highest-ever Federal Register page counts, the incumbent president will own seven of them.

Within those pages, several thousand rules get issued annually, no matter which party holds the Oval Office. Big government is bipartisan.

This all matters because, in reaction to expanding regulation, president-elect Trump called for a moratorium and for a 70 percent reduction in regulations during the campaign.

He’ll need to work with Congress to do anything close to the latter ambition (toned down some by an aide), especially since many crony types like regulations just the way they are, let alone progressives who like to rule above all else. But there are a number of things he can do on his own in the meantime.

That is to say, the “pen and phone” made famous by Obama can be used to advance liberty rather than curtail it (and, within the rule of law, no less)

A quick lesson can be learned from Ronald Reagan. Via executive order (E.O. 12291), he set up the still-existing procedure whereby regulations are reviewed by the White House, and in some cases (alas, too few then and now) receive cost-benefit analysis.

The process has been weakened in the decades since. But a fast reduction in Federal Register page counts and in number of rules is possible simply by having a president concerned about regulatory excess, who expects sanity.

In Reagan’s case, his 1981 version of the administrative pen and phone to restrain the regulatory state arguably made a big difference in regulatory volume, at least for a few years.

Federal rules dropped from the all-time high of 7,745 to as low as 4,589, while Federal Register pages that stood at 73,258 in 1980 hit a low of 44,812. (For details and charts, see ” Channeling Reagan by Executive Order: How the Next President Can Begin Rolling Back the Obama Regulation Rampage.”)

Now, executive actions cannot suffice and more permanent, legislatively instituted reforms are needed. President-elect Trump can easily collaborate with the new 115th Congress on these. Abusive and alarmist agencies themselves need to be legislatively targeted, and we need an advanced program of eliminating agencies and rolling back their powers, if legitimate in the first place, securing authority with the states and the people. That’s the forgotten principle of federalism.

The entire process and institution of the modern out-of-control “administrative state” has got to be reined in. There should be no costly or controversial rule allowed to be issued without Congress’ affirmation (examples go on but include recent bureaucratic forays such as the overtime rule, net neutrality and Environmental Protection Agency excesses like the Waters of the United States rule and the Clean Power Plan).

Unelected bureaucrats making sweeping rules governing (and wrecking) entire sectors of the economy needs to be a thing of the past. Conservatives seeking to rationalize delegation or who’ve made peace with it are not helpful to the cause of substantial reestablishment of constitutional bounds on the state. They are playing in a sandbox on the progressives’ administrative-state beach.

We can revive the separation of powers, and enshrine checks and balances that restrain. We need an executive, legislature, and judiciary, not today’s rock, paper, scissors. Special, new emphasis and care must be brought to bear on agencies’ back door rulemaking, whereby agencies use guidance, memoranda, bulletins, circulars and other regulatory dark matter to implement policy, as highlighted by Sen. Heidi Heitkamp (D-North Dakota) and James Lankford (R-Oklahoma). Note the bipartisan concern.

President-elect Trump may also appreciate that some in Congress appear very eager to implement a regulatory budget. Rep. Tom Price (R-Georgia), Budget Committee Chairman, has held hearings on the idea (which has bipartisan roots) and released a working paper. A statement of principles on regulatory budgeting was incorporated into the fiscal 2017 Budget Resolution; Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) introduced legislation to implement a regulatory budget, while also incorporating regulatory dark matter, in the 114th Congress, and will likely reintroduce it; and Rep. Paul Ryan, the Speaker of the House, included it in his widely touted BetterWay task force recommendations.

Part of the interest in a regulatory budget likely stems from the parallel, related campaign for dynamic scoring, since regulations have macroeconomic effect. To work properly and to be manageable, agencies need to be downsized ahead of time.

As the 115th Congress contemplates broad economic liberalization, Trump can jumpstart things with executive orders and oversight. Reagan showed that the president, within the rule of law, can do a lot. Trump promised action, and there are significant things he can do while permanent legislative reforms are pending.

SOURCE

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Federal Judge Blocks Implementation of Controversial Overtime Rule

A federal judge blocked implementation of a controversial rule addressing overtime pay from taking effect next week, a rule that had businesses, nonprofits, and higher education institutions bracing for the impacts of the measure.

The Department of Labor’s rule was supposed to take effect Dec. 1, and under the new measure, any employee making up to $47,476 each year would’ve been eligible for overtime pay.

The Obama administration finalized the rule in May, and the federal government’s announcement sent many companies and nonprofits scrambling to figure out how to comply with the law while also protecting both their businesses and employees.

“The more I learned, the more shocked I became that a rule like this would pass with so little input from those who were going to be impacted by it,” Albert Macre, a small business owner in Steubenville, Ohio, told The Daily Signal. “It’s the law of unintended consequences.”

In anticipation of Dec. 1, some businesses decided to reclassify workers who were previously salaried to hourly, while others gave raises to employees who were close to the $47,476 threshold, exempting them from the new rule.

More HERE  

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

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

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Day One of Trump Presidency: Withdraw From the TPP

It does appear that the main beneficiaries of this deal were going to be crony-infested big businesses. It was conceived as a free trade pact but rapidly got corrupted into favours for insiders. The potential benefits for average Americans were slight

President-elect Donald Trump said Monday that on his first day in office next January he will begin the process of withdrawing from the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), a prospective trade deal which has been a centerpiece of the Obama administration’s “rebalance” to Asia, but which Trump while campaigning called “horrible.”

Trump said in an online video message on priorities for his first 100 days that he has asked his transition team “to develop a list of executive actions we can take on day one, to restore our laws and bring back our jobs. It’s about time.”

“On trade, I am going to issue our notification of intent to withdraw from the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a potential disaster for our country,” he said. “Instead, we will negotiate fair, bilateral trade deals that bring jobs and industry back onto American shores.”

Trump characterized the move a part of a plan to advance the simple core principle of “putting American first.”

“Whether it’s producing steel, building cars, or curing disease, I want the next generation of production and innovation to happen right here, on our great homeland, America – creating wealth and jobs for American workers,” he said.

The TPP partners the U.S. with 11 countries on either side of the Pacific – Australia, Brunei, Canada, Chile, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore and Vietnam.

U.S. Trade Representative Michael Froman has said the agreement would usher in more than $130 billion a year in estimated GDP growth and more than $350 billion in additional exports.

But Trump during the campaign described the TPP as “horrible” and “one of the worst trade deals,” adding that “I’d rather make individual deals with individual countries. We will do much better.”

Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton, who was secretary of state at the time negotiations for the deal were launched, also opposed it during her presidential campaign – despite having praised it in earlier years, saying in 2012 that it set “the gold standard in trade agreements.”

‘There is no free lunch’

During a series of meetings in New Jersey on Sunday, Trump on Sunday met with Wilbur Ross, a billionaire investor who is believed to be in the running to be commerce secretary in a Trump administration.

“They engaged in a conversation regarding negotiating the best foreign deals, American manufacturing and job creation,” the transition team said in a statement afterwards.

Ross is known to be critical of free trade deals.

“Free trade is like free lunch,” he said in a Fox Business interview last August. “There is no free lunch. Somebody wins and somebody loses and unfortunately we’ve been losing with these stupid agreements that we’ve made.”

Trump’s announcement Monday came three days after Obama met with the other TPP leaders in Peru and, in the words of a White House readout, “discussed the United States' continued strong support for trade, our commitment to strengthening ties to the Asia-Pacific, and the need to remain engaged in an increasingly interconnected world.”

“President Obama discussed his support of high-standard trade agreements like TPP, which level the playing field for American workers and advance our interests and values in the economically dynamic and strategically-significant Asia-Pacific region,” it said.

The readout said Obama had urged the other TPP partners’ leaders “to continue to work together to advance TPP.”

During a press conference in Lima on Sunday, Obama said his meeting with the TPP partners had been “a chance to reaffirm our commitment to the TPP, with its high standards, strong protections for workers, the environment, intellectual property and human rights.”

“Our partners made very clear during the meeting that they want to move forward with TPP; preferably, they’d like to move forward with the United States.”

Obama said that not moving ahead with the TPP “would undermine our position across the region and our ability to shape the rules of global trade in a way that reflects our interests and our values.”

In a speech last September, Secretary of State John Kerry urged Congress to pass the TPP during the lame duck session.

“We can’t just stand up and say to the world, ‘Hey, we’re a Pacific power.’ We have to show it in our actions and in our choices,” he said at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars.

“We can’t talk about the ‘rebalance’ to Asia one day and then sit on the sidelines the next, and expect to possibly send a credible message to partners and to potential partners around the world.”

Trump's other priorities

Other measures listed by Trump in Monday’s video included:

--canceling “job-killing restrictions on the production of American energy, including shale energy and clean coal”

--formulating a rule saying that for every new regulation introduced, two old regulations must be eliminated

--tasking the Pentagon and joint chiefs of staff to develop a comprehensive plan to protect the nation’s vital infrastructure from cyber or other types of attack

--directing the Department of Labor to investigate all visa program abuses “that undercut the American worker”

--introducing a five-year ban on executive officials working as lobbyists after leaving the administration, and a  lifetime ban on executive officials lobbying on behalf of foreign governments

“These are just a few of the steps we will take to reform Washington and rebuild our middle class,” he concluded.

SOURCE

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Backward-Looking 'Progressives'

Thomas Sowell
 
People who call themselves “progressives” claim to be forward-looking, but a remarkable amount of the things they say and do are based on looking backward.

One of the maddening aspects of the thinking, or non-thinking, on the political left is their failure to understand that there is nothing they can do about the past. Whether people on the left are talking about college admissions or criminal justice, or many other decisions, they go on and on about how some people were born with lesser chances in life than other people.

Whoever doubted it? But, once someone who has grown up is being judged by a college admissions committee or by a court of criminal justice, there is nothing that can be done about their childhood. Other institutions can deal with today’s children from disadvantaged backgrounds, and should, but the past is irrevocable. Even where there are no economic differences among various families in which children are raised, there are still major differences in the circumstances into which people are born, even within the same family, which affect their chances in later life as adults.

For example, among children of the same parents, raised under the same roof, the first born, as a group, have done better than their later siblings, whether measured by IQ tests or by becoming National Merit Scholarship finalists or by various other achievements.

The only child has also done better, on average, than children who have siblings. The advantage of the first born may well be due to the fact that he or she was an only child for some time, perhaps for several formative years.

By the time people have grown up and apply to college, all that is history. Nothing that a college admissions committee can do will change anything about their childhoods. The only things these committees' decisions can affect are the present and the future. This is not rocket science.

Nevertheless, there are people who urge college admissions committees to let disadvantaged students be admitted with lower test scores or other academic indicators.

Those who say such things seldom even attempt to see what the actual consequences of such policies have been. The prevailing preconceptions — sometimes called what “everybody knows” — are sufficient for them.

Factual studies show that admitting students to institutions whose standards they do not meet often leads to needless academic failures, even among students with above average ability, who could have succeeded at other institutions whose standards they do meet.

The most comprehensive of these studies of Americans is the book “Mismatch” by Sander and Taylor. Similar results in other countries are cited in my own book, “Affirmative Action Around the World.”

When it comes to criminal justice, there is much the same kind of preoccupation on the left with the past that cannot be changed. Murderers may in some cases have had unhappy childhoods, but there is absolutely nothing that anybody can do to change their childhoods after they are adults.

The most that can be done is to keep murderers from committing more murders, and to deter others from committing murder. People on the left who want to give murderers “another chance” are gambling with the lives of innocent people. That is one of many other examples of the cruel consequences of seemingly compassionate decisions and policies.

Ironically, people on the left who are preoccupied with the presumably unhappy childhoods of murderers, which they can do nothing about, seldom show similar concern about the present and future unhappy childhoods of the orphans of people who have been murdered.

Such inconsistencies are not peculiar to our time, though they seem to be more pervasive today. But the left has been trying, for more than 200 years, to mitigate or eliminate punishments in general, and capital punishment in particular. What is peculiar to our time is the degree to which the views of the left have become laws and policies.

A long overdue backlash against those views has begun in some Western nations, of which the recent election results in the United States are just one symptom. How all this will end is by no means clear. Just as the past cannot be changed, so the future cannot be predicted with certainty.

SOURCE

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Australia cuts Clinton Foundation funds

The federal government has not renewed any of its partnerships with the Clinton Foundation.

Labor and coalition governments over the past decade have paid more than $75 million to the anti-poverty foundation set up by the former first family of the United States, but questions have been raised about its accountability.

Foreign Minister Julie Bishop told the coalition joint party room on Tuesday agreements entered into by the Rudd-Gillard government had not been renewed.

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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The Politics of Hate

John C. Goodman



One family canceled Thanksgiving dinner so they wouldn’t have to be with pro-Trump relatives. Another family canceled a Christmas reunion for the same reason. One couple changed the date of their wedding so that a pro-Trump relative wouldn’t be able to attend. Another couple chose to get married in Italy — a place too distant for their relatives to travel to. These are just a few of the ruptures that have followed the election of Donald Trump, as reported by The New York Times.

Are we a deeply divided nation? Maybe. But if we are divided the cause of that division comes squarely from the left, not the right. In virtually every case, the people who are canceling reunions and refusing to talk to their friends and family members are Hillary supporters. The Times reported not a single instance of a Trump voter shun.

What’s the cause of all this? I think it is identity politics.

Remember, the two candidates ran completely different campaigns. Trump’s campaign was an issues campaign, mainly economic issues. In every speech he gave, he complained about abandoned factories, lost jobs and low wages. Even if he was completely wrong about the cause of those problems (bad trade deals), his was still campaigning on issues.

Hillary Clinton, by contrast, ran a largely issueless campaign. Do you know what her position was on international trade? Of course not. What she said in private was the opposite of what she said in public. On the Pacific trade deal, as a candidate she contradicted everything she said while she was Secretary of State. Her confidants quietly advised worried Wall Street backers that they could safely ignore what was being said publicly on the campaign trail.

But none of that matters because Hillary wasn’t asking people to vote for her because of differences with Donald Trump over trade policy anyway. Or on corporate tax reform. Or school choice. Or safe neighborhoods. Or environmental policy. Or any other policy.

Hillary' s entire campaign, and the Democratic Party’s approach to elections in general, is based on appeals to people as members of racial, ethnic and sociological groups. Since the days of Franklin Roosevelt, the Democratic Party has approached people as groups, pitted group against group, and promised each to protect them from outsiders. In the Roosevelt era, the appeal was almost exclusively to economic groups.

Today the Democratic party has largely abandoned economic appeals in favor of identity politics. For example, they ask blacks to vote for them because they are black, not because of any policy differences they have with their opponents. And their appeals carry with them an assault on the opposition, either express or implied: The Republican candidate is anti-black. The same approach is used with Hispanics, women, the LGBT community, etc.

For example, here is Michelle Obama telling a black audience they had a duty to vote Democrat, no matter who is on the ticket. (And by implication, no matter what the candidate stands for or what he or she would do once in office.) Her husband was even worse. I have cited many examples in previous posts at Town Hall. (See “Which Is the Party of Hate?”) But you can check it out for yourself. Just Google the words “Obama” and “race baiting” and see how many links pop up.

Now if the election were covered fairly, it would be obvious that one side is talking about issues and the other is not. But as I pointed out last week, the mainstream media viewed the entire election the same way Hillary Clinton did. Even Fox News spent almost the entirety of election night talking about how many blacks were voting versus whites, or women versus men — as if demography were destiny at the polls.

An example of someone who has completely bought into the Democratic Party’s view of the world is Lee Drutman, who has a rather lengthy article explaining why the political fault line between the two parties are based on race and identity and why that is likely to continue for years to come. Much of what he says is correct. But it describes Democrats, not Republicans.

Identity politics works on some voters. I have heard stories of women who break down crying at the mere mention of the election results. Are they crying because NAFTA may be renegotiated? Or the pipeline may be built? Of course not. If elections are about identity, then elections are about you in a very personal way. If the other candidate wins, you have been personally rejected. I would probably cry too if I were naïve enough to believe all that.

As I pointed out last week, Donald Trump uttered not one word during the election that was anti-black, anti-Semitic or anti-gay. Although he may have been insensitive, he really never said anything that was anti-Hispanic. In fact, it’s just the opposite. See this post by Scott Alexander on what Trump really did say, along with the finding that Trump did much better among minorities than either Romney or McCain.

SOURCE

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President Trump’s Cabinet picks are likely to be easily confirmed. That’s because of Senate Democrats

Senate Democrats are not going to be able to block Alabama Sen. Jeff Sessions bid to become attorney general. And they can’t do much to stop Kansas Rep. Mike Pompeo from assuming the helm of the CIA.

And they have only themselves to thank for it. That’s because exactly three years ago, the Democratic Senate majority — led by Harry Reid (Nev.) — rammed through controversial rules fundamentally changing the way the Senate does business. They unleashed in November 2013 what’s called the “nuclear option” allowing senators to approve by a simple majority all presidential appointments to the executive branch and the judiciary, with a big exception for Supreme Court justices.

Democrats took the controversial step because they were so frustrated by what they saw as Republican foot-dragging on President Obama’s choices for his administration and federal judgeships. Under the new rules, it takes only a simple majority of senators to confirm such appointments instead of the 60 typically needed to force Senate action.

But now that Trump is in the White House and Republicans control the Senate, Democrats have lost their most powerful weapon to block his appointments. Democrats will have 48 seats in the new Senate.

The architect of the rules change, outgoing Senate Minority Leader Reid (D-Nev.), says he doesn’t regret his decision to go nuclear.

“Sen. Reid has no regrets on invoking the nuclear option because of Republicans’ unprecedented obstruction,” said Reid spokeswoman Kristen Orthman. “The nuclear option lets presidents show their true colors and guarantees a nominee a fair up-or-down vote. If Republicans want to go on record supporting radicals, that’s their decision and they will have to live with it.

Incoming Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) noted that he opposed the rules change in the first place.

“I wanted 60 for Supreme Court and Cabinet, but I didn’t prevail,” Schumer said in an interview Friday, in which he also expressed hope that Trump would nominate “mainstream” candidates.

“If it’s somebody who is out of the mainstream,” he added, “we’ll fight tooth and nail and use every tool we have.”

The problem is, those tools are now severely limited. It would fall to Republicans to join Democrats to stand in the way of any Trump appointment deemed objectionable.

“The most controversial nominees should attract Republican opposition as well as Democratic,” said Thomas Mann, a congressional expert with the Brookings Institution. “If they don’t, it’s speaking volumes about the Republican Party, and Democrats are relatively powerless to do anything about that.”

Republicans warned at the time that Democrats were making a mistake with what they called a “power grab,” warning they would be sorry about the change when they eventually found themselves in the minority.

Democrats defended the decision crucial to forcing action in a Washington gripped by partisan warfare.  “The important distinction is not between Republicans and Democrats, it is between those who are willing to help break the gridlock in Washington and those who defend the status quo,” Reid said in 2013.

SOURCE

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Creepy Billionaire Soros Trying to Buy Prosecutors Across America

Creepy Left wing billionaire George Soros is spending a massive amount of his ill-gotten fortune trying to amass an army of robot prosecutors all across the country he can activate to attack his political enemies at his bidding.

Soros is already well known for his underwriting of direct political “activism” like the Black Lives Matter riots and the recent anti-Trump violence he sponsored.

But a post election analysis shows how the shadowy billionaire is trying to put his globalist open border stamp on America by putting his political enemies in jail on trumped up charges.

Republican Matthew McCord was feeling pretty good about the $12,000 he had raised for his campaign for Henry County district attorney when he was blindsided by a September surprise.
New York billionaire George Soros dumped $147,000 into Georgia Safety & Justice, an independent-expenditure committee registered on Aug. 26, aimed at defeating Mr. McCord and electing his opponent, Democrat Darius Pattillo.

After recovering from the shock, Mr. McCord, a former prosecutor in Clayton and Newton counties, did what he thought was best for himself and the party: He dropped out of the race, allowing Mr. Pattillo to run unopposed.

“It was horrible,” said Mr. McCord, a lawyer in private practice in McDonough. “They rented space, they had a staff, they were using a Washington, D.C.-based PR firm. So what I knew was they could say whatever they wanted to say about me. It didn’t matter if it was true, and I would have no way to respond.”

He had already received a taste of things to come. “I’ve always been fairly centrist. I have a foundation that I started that has paid to send minority kids to school. And they [Soros campaigners] were already trying to paint me as a white racist,” he said. “It’s deplorable.”

Mr. McCord wasn’t alone. In 2015 and 2016 Mr. Soros, a leading Black Lives Matter funder, sunk more than $7 million into at least 11 local prosecutorial races in 10 states in an effort to implement criminal justice reform from the inside.

That’s a lot of money for a simple prosecutor position and for some phony “criminal justice reform” initiative from a billionaire known for ruthless investing and manipulation of the the political process to fatten his already considerable wallet.

Soros’s commitment to so-called reform was called into question when one of his bought and paid for robots was busted for his own brand of criminal justice reform:

Those concerns were heightened when one Soros-backed candidate, Hinds County District Attorney Robert Shuler Smith, was indicted in September on charges of attempting to hinder the prosecution of two criminal defendants. He has pleaded not guilty.

The Mississippi Safety & Justice PAC spent about $56,000 to help re-elect Mr. Smith in November 2015.

Soros’s minions have taken control in many key jurisdictions over the past few years.  Expect plenty of politicized prosecutions from the Soros-bots in the near future.

What happens next is anyone’s guess. “Only time will tell if there was a specific policy he [Mr. Soros] wanted them to implement,” said Mr. Thompson. “But we’re keeping our eyes wide open.”

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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Why the Radical Left Never Learns

Leftism is inherently violent.  They want to force people to behave in ways that they normally would not

Many everyday citizens are perplexed as to why the Radical Left is resorting to violence to protest the outcome of a democratically held election. And I’m perplexed as to why anyone would not understand why the Radical Left is resorting to violence to protest the outcome of a democratically held election.

It’s not really all that complicated. Plain and simple, violence is a trademark of the Radical Left. Its members resort to violence whenever they’re challenged — or, worse, when a majority legitimately rejects their ideas. This is a result of their being extraordinarily disciplined in staying focused on their two main objectives — implementation of their radical agenda and complete domination over all those who oppose it.

Before going any further, I should point out that not all those on the Radical Left are cut from the same cloth. There are three main groups that comprise this dangerous, anti-liberty segment of the human race.

* Elitists: These are the leaders of revolutions, men like Vladimir Lenin, Fidel Castro, Hugo Chavez, Mao Zedung, and Ho Chi Minh. It’s probably true that most Radical Left leaders sincerely believe, at least at the start of their climb to power, that they are acting nobly in an effort to improve the lives of the oppressed masses. But it’s equally true that all of them have one thing in common: While they claim to believe in equality, they simultaneously believe in the cognitive-dissonant proposition that some animals are more equal than others (credit George Orwell, Animal Farm). Translation: Unlike the unwashed masses, revolutionary leaders live like royalty while their duped followers live in misery and poverty.

* Low-information losers: These are the college kids, welfare professionals, and those who, for any one of a number of reasons, are angry about life in general. Whether crying in a “safe space” at Princeton or stealing cigarillos from a convenience store, they are the losers of society who can be paid, if necessary, to vent their anger for any cause drummed up by the Radical Left elites.

* Rank-and-file true believers: These are everyday people who may or may not work for a living, but what they all have in common is a belief that a majority of the world’s population (or at least a majority of the Western world’s population) consists of ruthless and “greedy” people who must be restrained by morally superior folks like themselves. They can be counted on to go to the wall for their leaders whenever a call to action is put out to them.

Now, to understand the violence that the Radical Left is currently engaging in to protest Donald Trump’s victory over the Face of Evil, the first thing you should do is disregard the low-information losers. They are irrelevant because their lack of knowledge relegates them to nothing more than attack dogs who obediently obey the commands of the elites.

The rank-and-file true believers and elitists, however, have one very important thing in common: cunning. Whenever the Radical Left achieves power, its mouthpieces make it clear to all those who disagree with them that they have no interest in compromising and that they intend to implement their agenda one way or another — through legal or illegal means. And, if necessary, through the use of force.

However, when they are out of power, as they are about to be, they cunningly talk about the need for both sides to “come together,” unite, be nonpartisan, and compromise. Because they can be counted on to buy into this age-old, Radical Left tactic, people like the Bushes, John McCain, Mitt Romney, John Kasich, Paul Ryan, and the rest of their ilk are useful idiots every bit as much as are the low-information losers of the Radical Left.

To those on the Radical Left, it’s all about getting their foot in the door. Then, once in, they boldly put down a place marker and use that as the new starting point for future negotiations. It’s a very clever strategy that has paid huge dividends for the Radical Left over the past fifty years. Giving credit where credit is due, Barack Obama has been an absolute master at implementing this strategy during his two terms in office.

A lot of people also seem surprised that since the humiliating repudiation of both Hillary Clinton and, more specifically, Barack Obama’s policies by the voting public, the Radical Left has not let up on its smear and violence tactics. This should not come as a surprise to anyone, because the Radical Left has repeatedly demonstrated that it does not learn anything through experience. That’s because it has no interest in learning. Its interest is focused on achieving and maintaining power.

The Radical Left aligns with George Orwell’s character O’Brien in another of his classics, 1984, who said: “The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power. … We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means; it is an end. … The object of power is power.”

That being the case, you can count on the Radical Left to double and triple down on its past mistakes. Notwithstanding their feigned introspection on what went wrong on the way to Hillary’s second planned coronation, the same old radical leaders will use the same old tired identity politics to drum up the same old hatred and division among voters.

Their leading lights — villainous people like Elizabeth Warren, Chuck Schumer, and Barack Obama will continue to drive the party’s already far-left agenda further leftward. They not only don’t care what the “forgotten man” outside New York and California thinks, they loathe him and rather enjoying seeing him endure ever more pain.

Thus, it’s not surprising that the Dirty Dems are now talking about making Minnesota Congressman Keith Ellison leader of the Democratic National Committee. There’s nothing wrong with Ellison’s being both a black man and a Muslim. The problem is that he’s a Radical Left black man and a Radica Left Muslim. Just the fact that the Dirty Dems are considering him for the role of head of their party is a way of saying to the 60 million forgotten-man voters: “In your face.”

This while they act outraged that Trump has tabbed Steve Bannon as his chief strategist, insisting that he’s too “extreme.” Their hypocrisy takes chutzpah to a new level.

Keeping all this in mind, if you’re still celebrating Donald Trump’s big upset, I feel obliged to sober you up by reminding you yet again that 60+ million people — nearly half of all voters! — voted for a Radical Left career criminal in the most recent election. Do you really believe they are going to have a change of heart and be more civil to their opponents anytime soon?

The uncomfortable reality is that the Radical Left has no intention of backing down. America is irreversibly entrenched in a civil war that is guaranteed to become increasingly violent, and the most dangerous thing the Trump administration can do is bend over backwards to be “inclusive.” Always remember that the Dirty Dems use the inclusiveness trick to get their foot back inside the door with an eye toward regaining power.

As I said in my last article, be careful, Donald … be very, very careful. Just do a little reading on the Internet if you have any doubts about whether the Radical Left is prepared to undertake a violent civil war. Which is why I’ve said for years that the solution to the Radical Left problem is not to work with them, but to try to defeat them.

Sure, total defeat is an unrealistic expectation, but continuously working toward it is not. Harsh containment is a realistic goal, but it takes a steel resolve and an unbudgeable, no-compromise attitude to accomplish it.

SOURCE

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The Slacker Mandate and the Safety Pin Generation

News flash, kids: Things aren’t free. Things cost money. And “free” things provided to you by the government cost other people’s money.

Donald Trump gets it — somewhat. He vows to repeal Obamacare’s most burdensome federal mandates that are jacking up the price of private health insurance. But he also plans to preserve the most politically popular provisions of the Orwellian-titled Affordable Care Act, including the so-called “slacker mandate.” It’s the requirement that employer-based health plans cover employees' children until they turn 26 years old.

That’s right: Twenty-freaking-six.

Is it any wonder why we have a nation of dependent drool-stained crybabies on college campuses who are still bawling about the election results one week later?

Trump briefly mentioned during a “60 Minutes” interview on CBS this weekend that the slacker mandate “adds cost, but it’s very much something we’re going to try and keep.” That’s because most establishment Republicans in Washington, D.C., are resigned to keeping it. Once the feds hand out a sugary piece of cradle-to-grave entitlement candy, it’s almost impossible to snatch it back.

Who pays for this unfunded government mandate? As usual, it’s responsible working people who bear the burden.

Earlier this year, the National Bureau of Economic Research found that the No Slacker Left Behind provision resulted in wage reductions of about $1,200 a year for workers with employer-based insurance coverage — whether or not they had adult children on their plans. In effect, childless working people are subsidizing workers with adult children who would rather stay on their parents than get their own.

Moreover, according to company surveys and other economic analysis, the slacker mandate has resulted in overall increased health care costs of between 1 and 3 percent. The nonpartisan American Health Policy Institute reported one firm’s estimate of millennial coverage mandate costs at a whopping $69 million over 10 years.

At the time the federal slacker mandate was adopted in 2010, some 20 states had already adopted legislation requiring insurers to cover Big Kids — some up to age 31!

Yes, thirty-freaking-one.

In Wisconsin, the slacker mandate covered not only adult children, but also the children of those “children” if they lived in single-parent homes. In New Jersey, champions of the provision claimed it would help cover 100,000 uninsured young adults. But health policy researcher Nathan Benefield of the Commonwealth Foundation reported that “only 6 percent of that estimate has been realized” in its first two years. “The primary reason — health insurance is still too expensive.”

That has only gotten worse, of course, as Obamacare’s other expensive mandates — especially guaranteed issue for those with pre-existing conditions — sabotage the private individual market for health insurance, leaving young and healthy people with fewer choices, higher premiums and crappier plans. The solution is not more mandates, but fewer; more competition, not less.

The Obama White House will brag that the slacker mandate has resulted in increased coverage for an estimated 3 million people. As usual with Obamacare numbers, it’s Common Core, book-cooked math. Health care analyst Avik Roy took a closer look and found that the inflated figure came from counting “(1) young adults on Medicaid and other government programs, for whom the under-26 mandate doesn’t apply; and (2) people who gained coverage due to the quasi-recovery from the Great Recession.”

To add insult to injury, another NBER study found that roughly 5 percent of people younger than 26 dropped out of the workforce after the provision was implemented. They used their spare time to increase their socialization, sleeping, physical fitness and personal pursuit of “meaningfulness.”

Then there are the hidden costs of the millennial mandate: the cultural consequences. All this “free” stuff, detached from those actually paying the bills, reduces the incentives for 20-somethings to grow up and seek independent lives and livelihoods. Why bother? The societal sanctions have been eroded.

Now, the nation is suffering the consequences of decades of that collective coddling. Precious snowflakes can’t handle rejection at the ballot box or responsibilities in the marketplace. Appropriately enough, the new virtue signals of tantrum-throwing young leftists stirring up trouble are safety pins — to show “solidarity” with groups supposedly endangered by Donald Trump.

Safety pins are also handy — for holding up the government-manufactured diapers in which too many overgrown dependents are swaddled.

SOURCE

CHRIS BRAND has perked up and is probably now out of danger.

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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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