Bible history vindicated once again

Once you translate the ancient Hebrew  correctly

The Old Testament Book of Joshua may contain the oldest known reference to a solar eclipse recorded by humanity. And it occurred 3224 years ago

The text in question is in the 12th and 13th verses of the 10th chapter of the Book of Joshua. According to the King James version of the Bible, these verses read,

"Then spake Joshua to the Lord in the day when the Lord delivered up the Amorites before the children of Israel, and he said in the sight of Israel, Sun, stand thou still upon Gibeon, and thou, Moon, in the valley of Ajalon. And the sun stood still, and the moon stayed, until the people had avenged themselves upon their enemies. … So, the sun stood still in the midst of heaven, and hasted not to go down about a whole day."

The passage is part of the story of Joshua leading the Israelites into Canaan (today's Israel and Palestine) and beating back their enemies (the Amorites) after the Amorite armies laid siege to the Israelite camp. Astronomically speaking, the text may refer to a solar eclipse (when the moon blocks the sun's light from reaching portions of the Earth), said Sir Colin Humphreys, a materials science professor at the University of Cambridge in England.

The King James translation of the Bible refers to the sun and moon standing still, Humphreys said, but the original Hebrew uses a root word that, in Babylonian, a related tongue, can also describe eclipses. What Joshua may have prayed, in other words, was not that the moon and sun would freeze in the sky, but that they would stop their usual shining.

Previous researchers have attempted to validate this eclipse hypothesis by linking the Book of Joshua to an independent indicator of when the Israelites were in Canaan: a stele from the reign of the Egyptian pharaoh Merneptah, son of Ramesses the Great. The Merneptah stele, carved in the fifth year of Merneptah's reign, mentions that the pharaoh ordered a (successful) campaign against the people of Israel in Canaan. Dating the stele puts the Israelites in Canaan between 1500 B.C. and 1050 B.C.

But until now, scientists haven't had much luck cross-referencing the two dates. Astronomical calculations turned up no total solar eclipses that matched. Humphreys and his colleagues expanded the search to include not only total eclipses, but also annular eclipses. In these celestial events, the moon slips between the Earth and the sun but not at a distance at which it appears to cover the sun's face entirely. The result is an impressive display that looks like a ring of fire in the sky, but without the sudden twilight darkness of a total solar eclipse.

Humphreys and his colleagues use astronomical calculations to determine that the only annular eclipse visible from Canaan between 1500 B.C. and 1050 B.C. was on the afternoon of Oct. 30, 1207 B.C.

SOURCE

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Optimism Must Be Balanced With Reality

Rich Kozlovich below has a rather dire view of the future but it is a future to be wary of

“I begin with the young. We older ones are used up. We are rotten to the marrow. But my magnificent youngsters! Are there any finer ones in the world? Look at these young men and boys! What material.  With them I can make a new world. My teaching will be hard. Weakness will be knocked out of them. A violently active, dominating, brutal youth – that is what I am after. Youth must be indifferent to pain. There must be no weakness and tenderness in it. I want to see once more in its eyes the gleam of pride and independence of the beast of prey.  I will have no intellectual training. Knowledge is ruin to my young men. I would have them learn only what takes their fancy. But one thing they must learn – self-command. They shall learn to overcome their fear of death under the severest tests. This is the heroic stage of youth. Out of it will come the creative man, the god-man.”
“The state must declare the child to be the most precious treasure of the people. As long as the government is perceived as working for the benefit of the children, the people will happily endure almost any curtailment of liberty and almost any deprivation."

 “When an opponent declares, "I will not come over to your side," I calmly say, "Your child belongs to us already... What are you? You will pass on. Your descendants, however, now stand in the new camp. In a short time they will know nothing else but this new community.” 

Various quotes by Adolf Hitler above

The Main Stream Media is now under attack and being exposed for the corrupt propaganda tool of the left that it's been for decades.  Politicians, environmental and social activists, left leaning businessmen, entertainment people, academics, bureaucrats and unions - all bulwarks of the left - are being exposed for who and what they really are. 

But in spite of all of that - I've not been entirely optimistic about the future.  Although I see glimmers of hope with the change in the White House.  RINO's are abandoning their leftist ship before they're humiliated in the primaries, and I especially enjoy watching the media squirm and practically burst into tears over a President of the United States that doesn't just take it - he dishes it out - hard, fast and regularly, and clearly doesn't care what his opponents or his supporters think.  Worse yet for them - especially after all the arrogant snickering and eye rolling - he keeps ending up being right most of the time. And America is loving it. But for America to take this small start and turn it into a great age of optimism would take rolling back liberal initiatives that have been evolving in America for over 125 years. 

We may be living in an information age explosion showing how these leftist schemes have brought us to where we are today but that's not the real issue.  The real issue is  - will America accept that information and act on it?

These efforts by the left started in the late 19th century with public education. And the goal wasn't reading, writing and arithmetic. The goal of public education was to make sure "the apple fell as far away from the tree as possible." What was that apple and what was that tree? The children of America were the apple, and the parents and churches that molded their values and morality was the tree!  America's institutions were also part of that apple.   The goal of progressivism (American socialism) was to make sure government was to be the great and last arbitrator of morality. Not the church and not the family - at least until they were infiltrated, subverted and converted. As Mussolini stated: "All within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state."

In America, that didn't come about by accident.  Both Teddy Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson believed the Constitution was an impediment to human progress, and both imposed policies to promote progressive ideas, and they both were believers in the axiom uttered by Louis XIV of France: L'état, C'est Moi - I am the state! 

In all the 20th century there were only three conservative Presidents.  Warren Harding, Calvin Coolidge and Ronald Reagan, and in total they were only in control for 16 years.  For the other 84 years the nation was controlled by the liberals or leftists of both parties.  We've also had 16 years of liberal control from both parties in this century.  Bush wasn't a conservative and neither were John McCain or Mitt Romney.  That's 100 out of the last 117 years of liberal corruption in power in America. 

Without support of the nation's leaders none of this could have come about.  Both Republicans and Democrats have been stunningly dishonest and gotten away with it because the nation's public education system was designed to subvert our children - not educate them.

As a result:

Too many Americans graduate from school semi-illiterate, unable to do basic math, read, write or spell properly.

Too many Americans graduate from college filled with false information on how the world works, or should work, and are arrogant in their ignorance

Too many Americans are remarkably ignorant of American history.

Too many Americans fail to realize how unique American style republican democracy is in all of world history.

Entirely too many "Americans" don't think they're Americans.
Too many Americans hate America.

Too many Americans think sports and entertainment are more important than politics or religion.

Too many people believe celebrities' views are valid and more important than the views of those who actually know what they're talking about.
 
Too many Americans no longer are people of faith, and as a result have no moral foundation other than the latest philosophical flavor of the day.

Too many Americans are stunningly uninformed, ill informed and confidently stupid, and that's the result of our public education system.

Too many Americans think socialism is a plan for successful government.

Is it any wonder foolish young people in our universities wear T-shirts with the faces of mass murderers Fidel Castro and Che Guevara on them, and go around telling the world to "Feel the Bern", supporting a Marxist lunatic?   Is it any wonder society is being washed back and forth like waves crashing against the rocks to its destruction?

I don’t believe Social Security will there for my children and it may not be there for me for much longer since the now for the first time the outlay is going to be over 1 trillion dollars, and by 2020 Social Security will be paying out more than it's taking in. 

I don't believe my children and grandchild will have a better life than I did.

 I don’t believe Medicare and Medicaid can survive much past this decade.

I don’t believe crony capitalism will be less but more – especially since this pattern goes back to the Whiskey Act of 1791.

I don’t believe those who left California because they made a mess of it won’t attempt to make a mess of the states they moved to.

I don't believe you can convince liberals their leftist philosophy has been the most misanthropic belief system in all of world history.

I don’t believe the national debt can be paid unless the government sells its assets - which amounts to 150 trillion dollars.

I don’t believe academia can be purged of its Frankfurt School aficionados unless we stop funding them and make them all "for profit" institutions.

I don’t believe anything can be fixed until the 16th and 17th amendments are repealed.

So, what do I believe?

I believe the world is headed for a massive economic downturn, with the fake economies of China and Russia collapsing into a chaotic swirl of revolution and national devolution creating new and smaller, desperately broke starving nations based on geography, ethnicity or religion.

I believe the only modern advanced country in the world that will still survive - albeit with a few dents but safe and intact - is the United States.  The U.S. can feed itself, fuel itself, arm itself and defend itself without the help or need of anyone else in the world.

I believe there will be European countries that will cease to exist as intact independent nations by 2030. Europe will soon cease to exist as we know it and whatever survives will be third rate, broke, desperate and devolving into more and smaller countries, as is already developing is parts of Europe with a lot civil violence.

As a result of all of this I believe the world's leftists will make one last big push to impose world governance under the auspices of the United Nations.

Finally, While I believe the U.S. will be the only nation to successfully survive the upcoming worldwide economic downturn, I also believe that once again the sheeple will return leftist politicians to power and they will fund this effort by allowing the U.N. to tax Americans and create their own military force, and then turning the most effective military force in the world - the United States Navy - over to U.N. control.

In spite of my last post - A New Renaissance Awakening! - I'm not optimistic because the left is constantly changing itself into an angel of light in order to fool the sheeple with promises and visions of utopia in order to gain the one thing they desire beyond rational comprehension - power! 

Why?  Because the left is still in complete control of the nation's young minds, and they hear the promises, and believe them.  And it's been a long time since anyone publically stood up to them.   But the left has no answers and the result is always dystopia because they live in a world that's an intellectual bubble of hate, envy, corruption, greed and self-interest. 

That's history, and that history is incontestable.

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 THE PSYCHOLOGIST.

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

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Is it racist to own a gun?

The academic article below says it is.  To understand what is going on, you need to know what is meant by "symbolic racism".  Basically it means reasoned racism.  Below are the items of the most popular such scale.  Some items are pro-black and some are anti-black:

The Symbolic Racism 2000 Scale

1.   It’s really a matter of some people not trying hard enough; if blacks would only try harder they could be just as well off as whites.     

2.  Irish, Italian, Jewish and many other minorities overcame prejudice and worked their way up.  Blacks should do the same.

3.  Some say that black leaders have been trying to push too fast.  Others feel that they haven’t pushed fast enough.  What do you think? 

4.  How much of the racial tension that exists in the United States today do you think blacks are responsible for creating?                     

5.  How much discrimination against blacks do you feel there is in the United States today, limiting their chances to get ahead?

6.  Generations of slavery and discrimination have created conditions that make it difficult for blacks to work their way out of the lower class.

7.  Over the past few years, blacks have gotten less than they deserve.

8.  Over the past few years, blacks have gotten more economically than they deserve.

SOURCE

So a symbolic racist disapproves of perceived black characteristics.  But a  very prominent characteristic of blacks is their high rate of violent crime -- muggings, home invasions etc.  So a symbolic racist will also be sure to disapprove of black crime.  And if black crime is salient to you, it follows rather easily that you will be more likely to want to defend yourself from it.  And that is the whole of what the article below shows:  People who accept the reality of black crime are more likely to want to defend themselves from it.

But what are we to make of people who are critical of blacks?  Are they being unreasonable?  Leftists would say that they are.  But conservatives would say that Leftists are deliberately blind to black reality.

The way in which many newspapers refuse to mention the race of a black perpetrator in a crime report certainly does display a policy of deliberate blindness. So a broader interpretation of the finding would be that realists own guns.


Racism, Gun Ownership and Gun Control: Biased Attitudes in US Whites May Influence Policy Decisions

Kerry O’Brien et al.

Abstract

Objective

Racism is related to policies preferences and behaviors that adversely affect blacks and appear related to a fear of blacks (e.g., increased policing, death penalty). This study examined whether racism is also related to gun ownership and opposition to gun controls in US whites.

Method

The most recent data from the American National Election Study, a large representative US sample, was used to test relationships between racism, gun ownership, and opposition to gun control in US whites. Explanatory variables known to be related to gun ownership and gun control opposition (i.e., age, gender, education, income, conservatism, anti-government sentiment, southern vs. other states, political identification) were entered in logistic regression models, along with measures of racism, and the stereotype of blacks as violent. Outcome variables included; having a gun in the home, opposition to bans on handguns in the home, support for permits to carry concealed handguns.

Results

After accounting for all explanatory variables, logistic regressions found that for each 1 point increase in symbolic racism there was a 50% increase in the odds of having a gun at home. After also accounting for having a gun in the home, there was still a 28% increase in support for permits to carry concealed handguns, for each one point increase in symbolic racism. The relationship between symbolic racism and opposition to banning handguns in the home (OR1.27 CI 1.03,1.58) was reduced to non-significant after accounting for having a gun in the home (OR1.17 CI.94,1.46), which likely represents self-interest in retaining property (guns).

Conclusions

Symbolic racism was related to having a gun in the home and opposition to gun control policies in US whites. The findings help explain US whites’ paradoxical attitudes towards gun ownership and gun control. Such attitudes may adversely influence US gun control policy debates and decisions.

SOURCE

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Illegal immigrant who paved way for Massachusetts’ ‘sanctuary’ policy arrested in stunning robbery

The illegal immigrant whose case turned Massachusetts into a “sanctuary” state is behind bars yet again.

Police say he committed a stunning daylight robbery by taking a wheelchair-bound woman, slapping her and stealing the $2,000 she had just carried out of the bank.

Sreynuon Lunn had been free on the streets of Boston because his home country won’t take him back, leaving immigration officers no choice but to release him under a 2001 U.S. Supreme Court ruling.

His case gained headlines over the summer when the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court ruled that state and local authorities could no longer legally hold immigrants for pickup by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

Now ICE is trying to decide whether to try again to pick up and deport Lunn, even as he faces local charges from the latest robbery.

“The first, obvious problem is that Lunn is here at all. He should be removed to either Cambodia or Thailand, but apparently neither country will take him,” said Jessica Vaughan, policy studies director at the Center for Immigration Studies, which wants stricter immigration controls.

A 65-year-old wheelchair-bound woman told police that Lunn and a female companion wheeled her away from a bank where she had just withdrawn $2,000, then robbed her. After the woman told Lunn to stop, he responded with an expletive, slapped her in the face and fled, according to the police report. The woman’s son and others witnessed the assault.

Lunn told police that he robbed the woman because he was detoxing and needed money for drugs. He blamed his companion, identified as Tiffany Bovio, for the idea of the robbery.

Immigrant rights advocates said Lunn’s latest arrest amounts to a local crime report that doesn’t merit much attention.

“I’m not going to comment on the charges against Mr. Lunn except to say that under U.S. law, everyone is innocent until proven guilty. If he did actually commit a robbery, the criminal justice system will put him in prison after giving him his due process,” said Eva A. Millona, executive director of the Massachusetts Immigrant and Refugee Advocacy Coalition. “However, one thing that is crystal-clear is that the arrest of Mr. Lunn has nothing to do with the Supreme Judicial Court case about his unlawful detention.”

The court ruled in July that Massachusetts law enforcement officers could not hold illegal immigrants just to give ICE agents a chance to pick them up for deportation.

“Massachusetts law provides no authority for Massachusetts court officers to arrest and hold an individual solely on the basis of a federal civil immigration detainer, beyond the time that the individual would otherwise be entitled to be released from state custody,” the state high court ruled.

The justices said deportation is a civil proceeding, not a criminal matter, and while there are some cases in which police can detain someone without a criminal charge — drunks, deadbeat parents and “sexually dangerous persons” — that doesn’t apply to illegal immigrants or others eligible for deportation.

Lunn has been under a final order of deportation since 2008, but ICE has been unable to oust him. He was born to Cambodian parents in a refugee camp in Thailand, and Cambodia refuses to recognize him as a citizen.

ICE agents tried to deport Lunn again this year, taking custody after a previous robbery charge, but were again rebuffed by Cambodia and had to release him after more than three months.

Under the 2001 Zadvydas v. Davis ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court, the government cannot detain migrants for immigration violations beyond six months, except in cases involving national security or severe mental health problems.

Thousands of people — many with serious convictions on their records — are released from ICE custody each year thanks to the Zadvydas ruling. In one notorious case, a man who served time for attempted murder was released onto the streets after Haiti refused to take him back, and months later he killed a young woman in Connecticut after a drug dispute with her boyfriend.

President Trump this month called for Congress to amend the law to change the Zadvydas ruling and said he wants to crack down on sanctuary cities.

Ms. Vaughan said both are needed.

“This case illustrates exactly why Congress needs to pass legislation that clarifies that state and local law enforcement agencies may and should honor ICE detainers and warrants,” she said. “We’ve seen enough examples of released criminal aliens who go on to harm more people. Enough already.”

SOURCE

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Democrats Have Done a 180 on Corporate Taxes. Here’s What They Said Last Year

The president proposed cutting the corporate tax rate in his budget. He wrote that cutting the rate to 28 percent was necessary for “putting the United States in line with major competitor countries and encouraging greater investment here at home.”

Which president am I referring to? You’re probably assuming Donald Trump. Nope. Barack Obama.

As a lame duck sending his final budget to Congress for fiscal year 2016, Obama finally told the truth about how our economy suffers because the U.S. has the highest corporate tax rate in the industrialized world.

But now that Trump and the Republican Congress are about to actually act to cut the top federal corporate tax rate from 35 to 20 percent, Democrats are suddenly railing against it.

The highest-ranking Democrat, Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., said on the floor Tuesday that “[the] cut in the corporate rate would hardly help the everyday American worker. This is trickle-down. Our Republican colleagues don’t really talk about trickle-down, because they know most of America doesn’t believe in it.”

That was a whopper of a flip-flop. Just last year, Schumer said in a committee hearing on cutting corporate taxes: “I’m game to do it because I think it’s really important for American competitiveness.”

He also told CNBC that “it would be a permanent lower rate, not a holiday rate,” meaning not a one-time cut for the so-called repatriation of trillions in U.S. companies’ profits, which are sitting offshore to avoid getting whacked by U.S. taxes.

Rep. Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., the House minority leader, said at a press conference earlier this month that Republicans are “deceptively, misleadingly say[ing] to the American people” that “cutting the taxes of corporate America is going to produce such growth that it will eliminate that increase in the debt.”

Hold on a second. Pelosi put out a press release in 2016 that called for congressional action, saying, “It is long past time for tax reform that would lower the corporate rate.”

Nothing has changed in the last year, except that Pelosi realized this good policy would now be credited to Trump instead of Hillary Clinton.

The U.S. has a top federal tax rate of 35 percent, plus state and local taxes, which brings the total to about 39 percent. To put that in context, the global average among developed nations is just 22.5 percent.

Trump, a businessman, understands that when you tell businesses that they will get taxed a minimum 35 percent in America, those companies will just move overseas or keep their profits offshore, out of Uncle Sam’s reach.

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 THE PSYCHOLOGIST.

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

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With all the evidence of rationing and cruelty, why is socialized medicine still being pushed by Democrats?

The newest reports coming out of the National Health Service (NHS) in the U.K. are genuinely frightening. The latest plans from the NHS in Hertfordshire are considered to be the some of the more extreme measures introduced yet. The new rules will ration care to smokers and the obese. The NHS will mandate smokers quit smoking and take a breathalyzer test before getting treatment, and those considered obese will have to lose weight.

Many pushers of socialized medicine have said rationing doesn’t happen in civilized countries. Many love to say everyone gets great healthcare in countries with socialized medicine unless you’re overweight or happen to smoke.

But the fun doesn’t stop in the U.K. There are examples of failed socialized medicine across the globe the politicians would only open their eyes.

A recent survey of Canadian wait times was shocking. The survey found an average wait time of 20 weeks for medically necessary treatment. 20 weeks may seem like a lot, but if you live in New Brunswick province, you’re waiting for 38.8 weeks. 20 weeks is double the wait time it was in 1993.

Sweden was once a health care model for the world. But that is hardly the case anymore. The 2016 Euro Health Consumer Index painted a grim picture of the Bernie loving Swedish healthcare stating, “the notoriously poor Swedish accessibility situation seems very difficult to rectify, in spite of state government efforts to stimulate the decentralized county-operated healthcare system to shorten waiting lists by throwing money at the problem (“Queue-billions”). Sweden now has the highest healthcare spend per capita, (after the three super-wealthy countries, see Section 4.1) together with The Netherlands and Austria. “Throwing money at a problem” is obviously not an effective way of problem-solving…. Particularly cancer care waits, not least in the capital Stockholm, seem inhumane!”

Bernie Sanders is constantly praising Sweden’s model as a goal for the U.S. Perhaps the Democrat Senator from Vermont should take a trip there and do a little research.

Socialism has not only collapsed the healthcare system in Venezuela, it has also collapsed the economy and is well on its way to collapsing the country. The system is working so poorly in Venezuela that the leadership fires people that give bad news.

Health Minister Antonieta Caporale was fired after releasing data that showed a 76 percent increase in malaria, a 66 percent increase in pregnancy-related deaths, and a 30 percent increase in infant mortality. Those don’t sound like the numbers of a successful healthcare system.

Cuba is another socialized nation that has earned praise from the left. If only they took a closer look. Cuban doctors are exported like products to foreign countries to serve as revenue raisers for the central government. Many Cuban doctors are now suing the Cuban government and host governments on the grounds of slavery. The doctors are treated like indentured servants and must do what the government tells them to do. What do you think will happen to medical school enrollment in the U.S. if this was how doctors were treated?

While patients are being denied care in national healthcare systems around the world, Sanders is driving the bus to lead the U.S. into oblivion. Sanders has introduced S. 1804, Medicare for All Act of 2017, a bill that would absolutely put the government in charge of your healthcare. It is further disturbing 16 Members of the Senate have cosponsored the bill. It is scary to think 35 percent of Democrats in the Senate are pushing for a failed system.

Why do socialized healthcare advocates continue to want systems that have clearly failed? This is not theory. Multiple month wait times in Europe, slavery in Cuba, and a total collapse in Venezuela are petri dishes to study. When you study them, socialized medicine doesn’t work.

With all the access Members of Congress have to news sources, healthcare data, and foreign government information you figure they would be able to see a pattern. Will you please quit trying to force the U.S. into a failed system and allow us to have a healthcare system based on the free market? You know, the same principles that lowered the prices and raised the quality of TVs, cars, and computers.

President Trump campaigned to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare. Speaker Paul Ryan promised to repeal and replace Obamacare. Majority Leader Mitch McConnell vowed to repeal and replace Obamacare. Now news reports out of the U.K. are giving Congress a real reason to worry about the rationing and cruelty of socialized medicine. Will somebody please repeal and replace Obamacare before it’s too late?

SOURCE

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Most would call it extortion, but the Obama DOJ called them “donations”

By Printus LeBlanc

Another day, another Obama era scandal is revealed. Following the subprime mortgage crisis in 2007-2010, the calamity that almost brought down the economy, lawsuits were abound, including suits brought by the Department of Justice (DOJ). The Obama administration lived by the motto “never let a crisis go to waste,” and used the mortgage crisis to benefit political allies at the expense of fraud victims.

Under the authority granted in the Financial Institutions Reform, Recovery, and Enforcement Act of 1989 (FIRREA), the DOJ launched into dozens of lawsuits against banks and mortgage companies. The act was passed in response to the Savings and Loan scandal, and among other powers, granted the federal government the authority to bring civil claims with less rigorous requirements to establish liability in fraud claims.

It seems like a good idea at the time. If banks and mortgage companies misled their investors and customers, they should pay the price. That is until the Obama administration chose to corrupt the process.

The Obama administration began suing over 30 banks involved in the mortgage-backed security crisis. Many of the banks scrambled to reach settlements with the DOJ. One of the first to settle was JP Morgan in late 2013. JP Morgan settled for a then-record amount of $13 billion. Citigroup followed less than a year later, reaching a settlement totaling $7 billion. However, Bank of America gets the grand prize. Bank of America settled for a whopping $16.65 billion. In total, there would be over $110 billion paid out by banks.

If the money went to the victims, there would be no problem, but the money would find its way to political activist organizations that aligned themselves with the Democrat party.

Rep. Bob Goodlatte (R-Va.) began investigating the disbarments of the payments by sending a letter in November of 2014 after noticing something strange in the settlement agreements of the banks.

Many of the settlements have a section that describes a minimum donation to HUD-approved housing counseling agencies. Other segments included minimum donations to housing-related organizations. The minimum payments were often over $10 million per section. In total, many settlements required over $40 million in “donations” to various groups. It gets worse.

The settlements also gave double credit for each dollar “donated,” while money to victims was a one for one exchange. That means after a bank paid the minimum, a $50 million donation would be treated as a $100 million towards the settlement amount. If you’re a bank which would you rather pay?

Earlier this week Rep. Goodlatte released documents from his investigation into the DOJ settlements. The documents are internal DOJ emails that show personnel within the DOJ discussing where to direct the “donations.” One email states, “Concerns include: a) not allowing Citi to pick a statewide intermediary like Pacific Legal Foundation (does conservative property-rights free legal services)”

How many legitimate victims were not helped because the Obama administration gave double credit for donations to third-party political activist organizations?

Attorney General Jeff Sessions ended the practice of compensating third party groups in future DOJ settlements this past June. He wrote a memo stating, “Unfortunately, in recent years the Department of Justice has sometimes required or encouraged defendants to make these payments to third parties as a condition of settlement.” Sessions is to be celebrated for taking this step.

However, Congress must go further, and Rep. Goodlatte continues to lead the fight.

Goodlatte introduced H.R.732, the Stop Settlement Slush Funds Act of 2017, earlier this year. It passed the House with bipartisan support earlier this week on Tuesday, 24 October. It now waits where good legislation goes to die, the Senate.

Sessions and Goodlatte are to be commended for fighting this dubious practice. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell must now pass the legislation. Bring the bill up for a vote and force Senators to vote for political activist organizations over victims of fraud. If it is blocked, put it into must-pass legislation such as the budget or debt ceiling. The Senate needs a win, and this piece of legislation is an excellent place to start.

SOURCE

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Spain clamors for a 'two-state solution' — in Israel but not in Catalonia

by Jeff Jacoby

IN AN Oct. 1 referendum, the people of Catalonia voted overwhelmingly in favor of independence from Spain, the nation that has occupied their homeland for generations. Madrid did everything it could to prevent Catalonia from legitimizing its quest for independence by ballot, including sending thousands of troops to block polling places. In the ensuing violence, voters were beaten with clubs, dragged by their hair, and shot with rubber bullets. Nearly 900 civilians were treated for injuries.

Since the election-day assault, the Spanish government has doubled down on its opposition to Catalan self-determination. Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy, invoking Article 155 of the Spanish Constitution, is claiming the right to remove Catalonia's elected officials from office and assume direct control from Madrid. A senior cabinet minister warned Monday that Spain will use force, if necessary, to compel Catalonia to submit.

Why such hostility to the Catalan yearning for self-determination? The people of Catalonia are a distinctive population, with their own culture, language, and customs. Shouldn't their sovereignty be peacefully conferred, rather than brutally resisted?

In other words, shouldn't Spain accept a two-state solution?

After all, the Spanish government unhesitatingly proclaims support for Palestinian sovereignty. Spain's leaders, such as former foreign minister Trinidad Jimenez, insist that the key to Middle East peace "depends on the coexistence of two states." In 2014 Spanish lawmakers adopted a resolution recognizing Palestine as a state and urging the European Union to do the same.

How can Spain, so ready to endorse a two-state solution for Israel and the Palestinians, aggressively oppose one for its conflict with Catalonia?

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 THE PSYCHOLOGIST.

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

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US growth storms ahead as hurricanes blow over

Boost for Trump after GDP beats expectations to hit 3%

President Trump’s ambition to expand the American economy at a rate not seen since the 1990s was boosted yesterday when third-quarter growth came in higher than expected.

Gross domestic product rose at an annual rate of 3 per cent between July and September, the commerce department said, suggesting that hurricanes Harvey and Irma had had little impact on the economy. Analysts had expected growth of 2.5 per cent.

The strong showing by the world’s largest economy makes a December rise in interest rates even more likely. It could also help the Republicans to push through ambitious tax plans, with the White House claiming that strong growth will pay for $1.5 trillion of planned cuts to corporate and personal taxes.

SOURCE

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Why the Left and Right Clash Over National Identity

In 2011, after 899 issues and 73 years of publication, Superman, the most famous American comic book character, announced that he was renouncing his American citizenship.

“I intend to speak before the United Nations tomorrow and inform them that I am renouncing my U.S. citizenship,” Superman announces. He then adds, in reference to his famous motto: “Truth, justice, and the American way—it’s not enough anymore.”

After a national uproar, the comic publisher announced that this theme would not be revisited in any future edition of the comic. But an important point was made. To the liberal publishers of Superman, the hero’s American identity just didn’t feel right.

Maybe that was what people wanted from 1938 to the late 20th century. But this national identity stuff has got to go. We should all be world citizens.

This example illustrates a primary difference between left and right: their respective views of nationalism and national identity.

The rejection of national identities began with the founder of leftism, Karl Marx. He ends his major work, “Das Kapital,” with the famous left-wing motto, “Proletariat of the world, unite; you have nothing to lose but your chains.”

Marx regarded national identities as backward and useless. In his view, the only identities that mattered were class identities—the working class and the ruling class. If a worker thought of himself first as a German or Englishman, rather than as a worker, communism would never be achieved.

The rejection of nationalism in Europe became mainstream after World War I. Many Europeans, especially among the intellectuals, concluded that the unprecedented loss of life caused by the Great War was a result, first and foremost, of nationalism.

They concluded that Europeans slaughtered each other for nothing more than a flag and a national identity. Therefore, the argument went, by abolishing nationalism, war could be abolished.

That is the belief that led to the creation of the European Union: The more Europeans identified with Europe rather than with a particular country, the less likely were the chances of war between European countries.

In the United States, however, a national American identity has always been a major part of what it means to be an American.

The three pillars of Americanism, constituting what I have called the “American Trinity,” are found on every American coin and banknote: “Liberty,” “In God We Trust,” and “e pluribus unum.” The latter is Latin for “out of many, one.”

Because America has always been a nation of immigrants, it has no ethnic identity. Therefore, unlike almost all other nations, America could not depend on an ethnic identity to keep its people together.

In fact, if all Americans retained their ethnic identities, America would simply splinter. So a nonethnic American national identity had to be forged and preserved.

To this day, foreigners in the United States are struck by how patriotic Americans are in comparison to whatever country they come from.

They marvel, for example, at the fact that before almost every sporting event—from professional down to high school—the American national anthem is played and/or sung.

Conservatives wish to conserve all these manifestations of American patriotism and nationalism because they believe a sense of national unity is essential to the political and social health of the country.

On the other hand, the American left, like the left in Europe, is opposed to nationalism, and it generally finds patriotic expressions corny at best and dangerous at worst.

This is easily seen. Just visit conservative and liberal areas on July Fourth, America’s Independence Day. You will see American flags displayed throughout conservative areas and virtually none displayed in liberal areas such as Manhattan, or Santa Monica or Berkeley, California.

Left-wing opposition to American nationalism is exemplified by the left’s embrace of “multiculturalism”—the cultivation of all ethnic and racial identities except American. It has even reached the point wherein some American colleges no longer display the American flag.

In lieu of an American national identity, the left prefers an international identity. Thus, ideally, United Nations authority would supersede American authority, and the World Court would supersede American courts.

To conservatives, such ideas are anathema because, in addition to subverting American sovereignty, the United Nations has not done nearly the amount of good in the world that the United States has.

That’s why the liberals at DC Comics had Superman renounce his American citizenship (at the United Nations, no less). In their view, Superman is now even more super. In conservatives’ view, the renunciation is kryptonite.

SOURCE

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Obama's DOJ Discriminated Against Conservative Groups

Obama directed billions of financial settlement funds to leftist organizations while blocking conservatives.

Following the 2008 financial crisis, several of the nation’s largest financial institutions made legal settlements with the Obama administration. Public records show that these settlement payouts totaled over $3 billion. The House Judiciary Committee, along with the House Financial Services Committee, as part of an investigation has obtained internal documents from the Justice Department showing that not only did the Obama administration steer settlement payments toward leftist groups, Obama hacks also sought to prevent any conservative groups from receiving any of the settlement funds.

This is eerily reminiscent of the IRS’s targeting of Tea Party groups that came to light in 2013. In an email from July 2014, a senior Justice Department official explained how to draft a mandatory donation provision to prevent Citigroup Inc. from picking “a statewide intermediary like the Pacific Legal Foundation (PLF),” noting that the PLF “does conservative property-rights free legal services.” In the same email the Justice official then noted that the National Association of IOLTA Programs would be eligible for the funds because it provided “funds to legal aid organizations, to be used for foreclosure prevention assistance and community redevelopment assistance.”

Chairman of the House Judiciary Committee Bob Goodlatte (R-VA) called the documents a “smoking gun.” Goodlatte noted an email specifically identifying former Assistant Attorney General Tony West as the person responsible for directing the money to leftist organizations. “Can you explain to Tony the best way to allocate some money to an organization of our choosing?” asked a deputy of West’s in an email from 2013. Smoking gun indeed.

Rick Manning, president of Americans for Limited Government, stated, “The Justice Department emails released by Goodlatte show that only approved left-wing groups were eligible for the banks to make payouts to as part of their settlements, overtly excluding those deemed to be too conservative. What’s worse, is that the settlements often gave the banks double credit if they gave money to the left-wing groups rather than paying the government. Meaning, every $10 million to left-wing groups was counted the same as $20 million to the government.”

On Tuesday, the House voted on and passed the Stop Settlement Slush Funds Act of 2017.

SOURCE

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The Jobs and Wage Effects of a Corporate Rate Cut

Congressional tax writers will soon reveal their plans to reform the federal tax code. The most important thing that Congress and the Trump administration can do to boost economic growth, lift workers’ wages, create jobs, and make the U.S. economy more competitive globally, is reform the business-half of our tax system. And one of the most critical elements of that reform is cutting the corporate tax rate.

There has been a great deal of debate recently over how much a corporate rate cut can create jobs and boost wages and living standards. The Tax Foundation’s extensive economic research and tax modeling experience suggests that cutting the corporate tax rate to a globally competitive 20 percent would substantially lower the cost of capital which, in turn, would boost capital investment, leading to higher wages and more jobs.

Our research also shows that these economic benefits would be enhanced if lawmakers coupled a corporate rate cut with an allowance for full expensing of capital investments.

The GDP, Investment, and Jobs Effect of the Rate Cut

We used our Taxes and Growth (TAG) Macroeconomic Tax Model[1] to simulate the long-term economic effects of these policies separately and combined to give tax writers an idea of how the policies work together. The table below summarizes the long-term results of this exercise.

Here we can see that cutting the corporate tax rate to 20 percent would boost the long-term level of GDP by 3 percent and increase the capital stock by more than 8 percent. This has the effect of lifting wages by more than 2.5 percent and creating more than 587,000 full-time equivalent jobs.

The results are very similar for allowing corporations full expensing for their capital investments. In this example, long term is generally about ten years, once the policies have worked their way through the economy.[2]

Combining the two policies does not double the results because of their interactive effects. However, we can see that the two policies together would increase the level of GDP by 4.5 percent and the capital stock by nearly 13 percent. These economic forces act to lift wages by an average of 3.8 percent and create 861,000 full-time equivalent jobs.

Some might question how a corporate rate cut could create that many jobs while the economy is inching toward full employment. The TAG model is actually estimating the increase in the total amount of hours worked in the economy as a result of the policy change. Thus, some of those full-time equivalent hours could be filled by new workers, while others would be filled by part-time workers moving to full-time, or some idle people coming back into the workforce.

It should also be noted that in performing these estimates, we have not factored in any increase in profit-shifting into the United States, either by U.S. firms repatriating foreign earnings or foreign-based firms increasing their investments into the U.S. We believe that a lower corporate tax rate would encourage such activity, but estimating those effects were outside the scope of this exercise.

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 THE PSYCHOLOGIST.

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

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Another nail in the coffin of statins: They raise the risk of Type 2 diabetes by nearly a third

This dangerous junk was idolized by many medical commentators.  Some wanted to put it in the water supply to dose up everyone on it.  Statins do seem to help people who ALREADY have heart disease but evidence for their use as a preventive is dubious.  A study of nearly 3,000 older adults found that giving them statins did not extend their lifespans nor did they get fewer  heart attacks.  Since old people are the high risk group, we have to ask if they do not benefit from statins, who would?

Taking statins increases the risk of type 2 diabetes by nearly a third, researchers found. A decade-long study of more than 3,200 patients found those who took statins were 30 per cent more likely to develop the condition.

Some six million Britons take statins every day to reduce their cholesterol and ward off heart disease.

The pills are proven lifesavers, slashing the chance of a repeat attack, yet a scientific row over benefits and side effects has dragged on for years.

Experts have long known there was a link between statins and diabetes – but doctors have always stressed that the advantages of the pills far outweigh the small chance of getting diabetes.

Previous research had put the chance of developing type 2 diabetes at no more than 10 to 12 per cent greater than if someone did not take statins. The latest study, however, suggests the medication increases the risk by 30 per cent.

The researchers, from Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York, think this may be because statins impair insulin production. In the journal BMJ Open Diabetes Research & Care, they called for regular blood sugar tests of people taking statins.

‘Glucose status should be monitored and healthy lifestyle behaviours reinforced in high-risk patients who are prescribed statins for cardiovascular disease [prevention],’ they wrote.

The scientists tracked overweight people already considered at risk of diabetes for ten years. At the start, 4 per cent took statins, but by the end roughly a third were taking the pills.

No link was found between the potency of the statins used and diabetes risk.

The researchers stressed that the additional risk of developing diabetes should be balanced against ‘the consistent and highly significant’ reduction in risk of heart attacks, strokes and death. Last night experts said that although the relative risk of diabetes may seem high, in reality the absolute numbers of people it would affect would be small.

SOURCE

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Trump congratulates China's President Xi on new powers, saying he could be called the 'king of China' - as he labels the reelected leader a 'good person'

This is excellent diplomacy on behalf of America.  It will  certainly go down well in China.  And good relationships with  China are of huge importance



President Trump touted his relationship with China's Xi Jinping and complemented the Chinese leader for his reelection and the fact that his name and dogma were now written into his party's constitution.

'It's really virtually never happened in China,' Trump told Fox Business Network's Lou Dobbs in an interview that aired Wednesday night. 'Now some people might call him the king of China. But he’s called president,' the president added.

Dobbs, in a friendly interview, had asked the president about his relationship with Xi, noting how the 'so-called intelligentsia of this country’s foreign policy establishment' had indicated to Trump that he was wasting his time trying to court the Chinese leader.

Trump brought up the fact that the two leaders had spoken on the phone just minutes before, something the president had tweeted about earlier.  'Spoke to President Xi of China to congratulate him on his extraordinary elevation. Also discussed NoKo & trade, two very important subjects!' Trump tweeted after the call.

Speaking to Dobbs he continued heaping on praise. 

'He's a powerful man. I happen to think he's a very good person,' Trump said. 'Now with that being said, he represents China, I represent the USA, so, you know, there's going to always be conflict.'

'But we have a very good relationship,' Trump continued. 'People say we have the best relationship of any president-president, because he's called president also.'

Trump's phone conversation with Xi came as the leader was formally handed a second term in power and both his name and his dogma were written into the party constitution – putting him on par with the nation's founder, communist revolutionary Mao Zedong.

SOURCE

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Market-oriented policies have reduced poverty worldwide

Although hundreds of millions of people remain trapped in poverty around the globe, at no time in human history have as many people escaped extreme poverty as they have in recent years.

Forty-five years ago, the United Nations declared World Development Information Day to draw attention to development problems and the need for international cooperation to solve them. While problems and impediments to development remain, decentralized international cooperation and exchange have been eradicating poverty at unprecedented levels.

Poverty reduction in China alone is unprecedented in human history. According to the World Bank, in 1990, a mere generation ago, more than 90 percent of China’s people lived on less than $3.20 per day. Two-thirds of its people lived on less than $1.90 per day. The most recent figures are about 12 percent and two percent respectively. The total number of people living in extreme poverty declined by more than one billion, while the population grew by more than 200 million.

While China leads the world in poverty reduction, the story is similar elsewhere. In 1993 more than 80 percent of India’s population lived on less than $3.20 per day and 45 percent lived on less than $1.90. Those numbers have fallen to 60 percent and 21 percent in recent years.

Even countries in sub-Saharan Africa, where poverty rates increased from the early 1990s through the early 2000s, have experienced improvements. The percentage of people living on less than $3.20 per day fell from 75 percent in 2002 to 62 percent recently. More extreme poverty has seen greater declines as the percentage living on less than $1.90 a day has declined from 53 percent to 20 percent.

For decades the United Nations, World Bank, and other governmental and international agencies have tried — with little success — to engineer development from the top down through aid programs. Some economists have criticized these efforts, maintaining that these programs often impede development by creating dependency, distorting market incentives, and entrenching corrupt dictators.

In contrast, decentralized market cooperation has promoted development. This is shown by the most recent update of the Economic Freedom of the World Annual Report (EFW), released last month. The index measures openness to decentralized market cooperation around the globe by looking at the size of government, protection of private property, soundness of money, freedom to trade internationally, and regulatory restrictions. Scores of academic studies have found that economic freedom is associated with economic development.

China, although far from a free-market ideal, has made some of the world’s greatest strides toward economic freedom. While China’s economic liberalization began under Deng Xiaoping in 1978, by 1990 it rated only 4.09 on the EFW’s 10-point scale. Since then, the score has improved 56.5 percent, the largest improvement in all of Asia.

Similarly, India began its economic reforms in 1991. Its economic freedom score has improved 38 percent since then. Even sub-Saharan Africa, with disasters like Zimbabwe, has improved its economic freedom by almost eight percent since 2000.

Liberalization alone is not the only factor contributing to poverty reduction. China’s measured liberalization understates its degree of market reform because it doesn’t account for the additional economic freedom in special enterprise zones. As the recent book China’s Great Migration has argued, the freedom of Chinese citizens to migrate to these enterprise zones has been a major contributor to the reduction in poverty in that country.

If citizens trapped in poverty around the globe had the freedom to migrate to more economically free and productive countries, much the way Chinese citizens can migrate from less-free to more-free areas within their country, even greater poverty reductions could be achieved.

SOURCE

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Government No-Fire Zone Abuses Taxpayers

“Tesla fired hundreds of workers this week, including engineers, managers and factory workers,” reported Louis Hansen of the San Jose Mercury News. “Little or no warning preceded the dismissals,” which came after performance reviews, as the company struggles to produce its Model 3 sedan, for which 450,000 customers are waiting. Overall, Tesla showed the door to as many as 700 employees. Taxpayers would be hard pressed to find similar action in government at any level, despite disastrous performance.

In 2015 the federal Environmental Protection Agency spilled three million gallons of toxic wastewater in southern Colorado’s Animas River. EPA boss Gina McCarthy did not lose her job, and few if any EPA managers were fired over the massive spill. As we noted, for years the EPA kept on staff “policy advisor” John Beale, who performed no work for the agency and claimed to be working for the CIA. The EPA even paid Beale retention bonuses, but no EPA bosses lost their jobs over his fakery.

The federal Social Security Administration paid out more than $1.5 million to ex-Nazis, including death-camp guards and SS soldiers. At least 38 of 66 Nazi guards removed from the United States were allowed to keep their Social Security benefits and only 10 were prosecuted for war crimes in Europe. Reports have not emerged about Social Security bureaucrats losing their jobs for keeping the Nazis funded.

In 2013, the Internal Revenue Service handed out between $13.3 an $15.6 billion in improper payments. Even so, taxpayers will be hard pressed to find a report of any IRS employee or manager being fired for this massive waste and fraud. Indeed, the intrusive federal agency also gave $2.8 million in bonuses to employees with disciplinary and tax compliance problems of their own.

If motorists don’t like cars produced by Tesla, they can buy a Ford, Toyota or Kia. Taxpayers, on the other hand, have no choice but to deal with the IRS, EPA, and the whole federal bureaucratic establishment. If President Trump is serious about “draining the swamp,” he needs to take a cue from Tesla and fire those who fail to perform for the people.

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 THE PSYCHOLOGIST.

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

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Deconstructing the equality mania

The Left never cease their pursuit of "equality".  You see it most often in their racist devotion to quotas:  50% of all jobs should go to women; 13% of all jobs should go to blacks; 17% of all jobs should go to Hispanics etc.  They're not quite as rigid as that but "equal representation" or "proportionate representation" is a fiercely pursued aim.

And the current obsession with "white privilege" is another example of the same thing.  Whites are seen as being unequal in various ways and are supposed to be deeply ashamed of that.

Conservatives have of course always resisted such quotas, saying that jobs should be allocated on ability only, not on the colour of the applicant's skin.

But conservatives never seem to go back to basics and ask WHY equality should be pursued.  In most cases it never has existed and never will so why on earth should it be such a holy grail?  What is good about it?  No Leftist I have ever met has been able to answer that question. They just look dumb and say that it is OBVIOUSLY good.  But obvious to whom?  It is certainly not obvious to me. 

The best they can come up with is that pursuing the equality  goal causes people who might normally not have a chance at a particular job to get a chance at it.  It opens up opportunities. But conservatives have never been bothered by equal opportunity.  It's the only sort of equality that they will normally support.  But the opportunity concerned is only the opportunity for the person to show that he/she is capable of better things.  It does not imply that you should get some position REGARDLESS of whether or not you are capable of better things -- which is what quotas tend to do.

So as far as I can see, the breakneck pursuit of equality is simply envy.  If everybody is equal, no-one can be enviable. But that state will never arise so there must be more to it than that. 

And the deeper reason seems fairly clear to me.  The pursuit of equality is destructive. It puts incompetent people in responsible positions.  For instance, a black fireman who can't pass his fireman's exams but who is hired anyway because he is back may well be not very good at putting out fires and thus could allow a house to burn down that might otherwise have been saved.

Leftists always pretend to have noble motives but talk is cheap.  Look at what they do to see what they really intend.  And almost always there are adverse "unforeseen" consequences of any policy they get enacted.  The enormous mess made by Obamacare -- the "Affordable Care Act" -- is a good example.  Because of all the mandates and bureaucracy that form part of it, Obamacare has  caused both premiums and deductibles to soar -- thus making effective health insuranc UNaffordable to many.  Because of high deductibles alone many people who were previously insured are now effecively uninsured for most things.

And that Leftists are basically hostile people is being shown time and time again by the way in which those who depart from the politically correct line are hounded both in the colleges and in the workplace these days.  And when Leftists gain untrammelled power -- as we saw in Soviet Russia and Mao's China, we see how truly destructive they are.  So the pursuit of equality is just another tool in the Leftist's toolbox of destruction.

And it is easy to make an argument that INEQUALITY is a good thing. For a start, it is the natural state of affairs and is a symptom of a society in which superior abilities are called into use. Abilities are very unevenly distributed and putting the most able man into a particular job will often mean success at a particular enterprise when failure might otherwise have ensued. Not everyone can be a good manager, not everyone can be a good fitter and turner and not everyone can be a computer programmer. Finding the right man for the job is something of a holy grail to some enterprises.

And because it is rare, the demand for top talent will usually exceed supply. And that is when competition arises. To get rare talent for his enterprise, a boss will usually offer big money for the services of the talented one, an amount which will be very unequal compared to what less talented people get. So inequality emerges from different abilities and is a symptom of a society getting the best out of its people. Inequality is good.

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Liberate government workers from forced union fees

by Jeff Jacoby

MARK JANUS IS a government employee. He works for the state of Illinois as a child-welfare specialist in the Department of Healthcare and Family Services. His job is to represent children caught in situations of domestic turmoil — a field he chose because children's well-being is important to him.

Mark Janus, an Illinois state employee, is forced to pay fees to a labor union whether he supports it or not — an egregious violation of his First Amendment freedoms.

"But just because I care about kids doesn't mean I also want to support a government union," Janus wrote last year in the Chicago Tribune. "Unfortunately, I have no choice."

The employees in Janus's workplace are represented by the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees (AFSCME), a labor union that, under state law in Illinois and elsewhere, has exclusive authority to engage in collective bargaining over wages, hours, and other terms of employment. Naturally, members of the union pay dues. But even non-members are compelled to pay union levies, known as "agency fees," to cover the benefits of being represented by the union.

Yet coercing workers to pay for representation they don't want isn't a benefit. It's extortion. And it's particularly galling when those extorted payments are used to fund political speech and public-policy activism that employees have no wish to underwrite.

Two years ago, Janus filed a lawsuit challenging the Illinois law that forces him to pay fees to the union. The Supreme Court recently announced that it will take up the case this term. Janus v. AFSCME poses a straightforward question: Can public employees be forced to subsidize union speech or risk losing their jobs? If the court rules in Janus's favor, it will restore to government workers a right most Americans take for granted: the right to decide for themselves which causes and organizations they support.

It should never have come to this. Thomas Jefferson rightly declared long ago that "to compel a man to furnish contributions of money for the propagation of opinions which he disbelieves is sinful and tyrannical." Under the First Amendment, it should have been out of the question for government to force public employees to turn over part of their wages to a labor union they don't belong to — or, for that matter, to any other political, ideological, or special-interest organization. But in a 1977 case, Abood v. Detroit Board of Education, the Supreme Court ruled that public-sector workers could be required to pay agency fees in the interest of "labor peace" — as long as their fees were used only for the actual costs of collective-bargaining and representing employees, and not for anything political.

That was a blunder. Unlike the private sector, where labor and management are both constrained by market forces, competition, and the need to remain profitable, unions in the public sector face no such limitations. The government agencies that AFSCME and other unions bargain with can't go out of business or relocate to another state. Their revenue depends not on customer loyalty and sales but on politicians' decisions about taxes, spending, and public policy.

Consequently, pretty much everything public-sector unions do is political. In Abood, the court tried to distinguish between core collective-bargaining functions, on which nonmembers' fees could be spent, and overt political advocacy, which could not be charged to unwilling workers. But that distinction is illusory, as Justice Lewis Powell — who rejected the majority's reasoning — pointed out at the time:

"The ultimate objective of a union in the public sector, like that of a political party, is to influence public decision-making," Powell wrote. "The union's objective is to obtain favorable decisions and to place persons in positions of power who will be receptive to the union's viewpoint. In these respects, the public-sector union is indistinguishable from the traditional political party."

If that wasn't clear in 1977, it soon became an inescapable fact of life.

For public-sector unions, politics became all-important. AFSCME, like the National Education Association, the Service Employees International Union, and others, poured vast resources into honing their political clout. On its website, AFSCME boasts that candidates "all across the country, at every level of government" have learned to "pay attention to AFSCME's political muscle." The union is not shy about relying on politics to achieve its goals. "We elect our bosses, so we've got to elect politicians who support us and hold those politicians accountable," AFSCME proclaims. "Our jobs, wages, and working conditions are directly linked to politics."

Former AFSCME president Jerry Wurf put it in a nutshell: "We're political as hell," he told Time magazine.

"To compel a man to furnish contributions of money for the propagation of opinions which he disbelieves," Thomas Jefferson rightly asserted, "is sinful and tyrannical."
And the agency fees forcibly extracted from Mark Janus — and from hundreds of thousands of other public-sector employees who have not joined the union — subsidize all that politics. That is an ongoing affront to the First Amendment.

It is long past time the Supreme Court repaired its 1977 mistake. Abood should be overturned, and the court should affirm that Powell was right: In the public sector, collective bargaining amounts to political advocacy. And under the Constitution, nobody can be compelled by government to subsidize political advocacy involuntarily.

If unions are to be tolerated in government workplaces, their support and funding must be wholly unforced. Government workers who choose to join and pay dues to AFSCME or some other union are free to exercise their First Amendment rights of speech and association. Equally free should be those who want nothing to do with the union. Free not to join, and free not to pay.

SOURCE

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Down with the Czars!

Rep. Tom Marino, Pennsylvania Republican, has withdrawn his name for consideration as President Trump’s drug czar. By some accounts, Marino backed legislation that restricted enforcement of opioid laws. Sen. Joe Manchin, West Virginia Democrat, who called for Marino’s withdrawal, said “we need a drug czar who has seen the devastating effects of the problem.” Actually, we don’t, and President Trump should consider whether we need a drug czar at all.

The federal government already deploys the Drug Enforcement Administration, with an annual budget of nearly $3 billion. So in effect, the DEA boss renders a drug czar redundant. Don’t forget the Food and Drug Administration, whose budget has ballooned to $5 billion. Plenty of drug czars in that massive bureaucracy, and in recent years czars have been surging all over the federal government.

President Obama appointed 45 czars, and as Judicial Watch noted, “Many of these ‘czars’ are unconfirmed by the Senate and are largely unaccountable to Congress. Further, their activities are often outside the reach of the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), creating a veil of secrecy about their precise role in the administration.” As we noted, a day after Washington state allowed the sale of medical marijuana in the style of Colorado and California, drug czar Michael Botticelli sought to spend $25 billion in the war on drugs.

President George W. Bush deployed some 33 czars, including one for bird flu. Franklin Roosevelt appointed at least 11 czars, including one to deal with rubber. These actions imply that unelected appointees with the title of Russian kings can solve all problems. They can’t, but they do waste taxpayers’ money. President Trump, who wants to drain the swamp, should not appoint any drug czar and would be wise to eliminate all czars in government.

Meanwhile, a historical note. A century ago the Bolshevik Revolution was going on, but the Bolsheviks did not overthrow Czar Nicholas. He abdicated the throne and the Bolsheviks toppled the provisional government of Alexander Kerensky, the closest Russia ever came to liberal democracy.

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 THE PSYCHOLOGIST.

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

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Herrnstein & Murray are still right  -- and very relevant to the healthcare debate

The poor die young.  That is the simplest summary of the latest study looking at the association between wealth and health.  Whenever it is examined, a correlation between social class and health seems to emerge.  The findings surveyed  by Hernstein and Murray are the best known evidence of that but Herrnstein & Murray wrote over two decades ago so it is interesting to see that nothing has changed. Herrnstein died about the time the book was released so was spared the torrent of abuse that was poured out on the scholarly head of Charles Murray when his findings became known.  He survived the onslsaught however and is still making waves.  The attack on him at Middlebury college got a lot of press recently.

There is however a certain vagueness about what you call social class and there are distinct differences between Britain and America in that regard.  And although its importance to social class is generally accepted, wealth is rarely examined in medical research. It is usually considered to be "too sensitive"  for questions about it to be included in surveys.  So the findings below are valuable in filling a gap. The article is titled: "Wealth-Associated Disparities in Death and Disability in the United States and England" and it appeared in JAMA, a leading medical journal.

It will be interesting to see what, if any, reaction the article gets.  It is unlikely that the authors will receive the abuse that was heaped on Charles Murray.  After the first decade or so of huffing and puffing, the Left seem to have bowed to reality.  Mention of class effects on health are these days normally addressed, if at all, as just another example of injustice.  What was once seen as a politically incorrect attack on the poor is now usually seen as an argument for helping the poor in various ways.  The Left ended up assimilating the effect into their "social justice" narrative.

And what cure do the Left advocate for this injustice?  Easy! Single payer health-insurance.  It was one of the arguments behind the agony of Obamacare.  And that makes the study below of exceptional interest -- because it compared American health results with results from a country that has had single-payer healthcare for a very long time: England.  So the poor should do much better in England?  Right?  Wrong!  The wealth effect was similar in both countries.  So this study is exceptionally relevant to one of the most important issues in American politics today.

Academic prose is normally too dense for non-academics to make much out of it but the place where you are most likely to find plain speaking is the set of "Conclusions" at the end of the article.  So let me reproduce in full the "Conclusions" of the present article:

"We found that lower wealth was associated with higher mortality and disability in older adults in both the United States and England. This relationship was apparent from age 54 years and continued into later life. This study found no evidence that providing state-sponsored health insurance from birth (England), or providing state-sponsored health insurance later in life (United States), eliminated wealth-associated health disparities. Our study suggests that policy makers interested in decreasing mortality and function disparities in older adults should take a broad view and consider interventions beyond providing access to health care."

So there was effectively no difference between America and England in health outcomes, including death.  The poor get sicker and die younger in both countries at roughly the same rate.  So the authors are in fact shooting down one of the important talking points of the Left. What they mean by "interventions beyond providing access to health care" is to make the poor richer.  They wisely don't go in to how you achieve that, though. So this is an article of unusual political importance.

It also has important implications for medical research generally. Probably because of political correctness, epidemiological research in particular simply ignores social class.  If it is mentioned at all, the only index of it used is education.  But my research showed long ago that education misses a lot. You can have highly educated poor people (e.g. the iconic Ph.Ds doing burger flipping in McDonalds) to dropouts making billions (e.g. Bill Gates).  You really do need to examine wealth directly.

But medical researchers just don't do that most of the time. And that very often makes the significance of their findings moot.  If, for instance, you find that big drinkers of pop die young, a medical researcher would normally conclude that pop kills you. They are that stupid. If you happen to know that the poor drink more pop, however, you can say (and I have often said it) that the conclusion is nonsense. If wealth had been included in the analysis, you will probably find that the "effect" of pop on health was in fact the effect of wealth discrepancies.

So I suppose it is a lot to ask for but one hopes that future medical researchers might use the article below to make some mention of what their research was not able to examine.

The authors below do not venture into much consideration of WHY the poor die young but do mention various environmental stressors.  I would add however that genetic influences are at work too. IQ is a much neglected index of social class.  The rich are smarter. The old challenge, "if you are smart, how come you are not rich?, has much justice to it. We can probably all think of exceptions but higher IQ does help you to figure out ways of making money.


Wealth-Associated Disparities in Death and Disability in the United States and England

Lena K. Makaroun et al.

Abstract

Importance:  Low income has been associated with poor health outcomes. Owing to retirement, wealth may be a better marker of financial resources among older adults.

Objective:  To determine the association of wealth with mortality and disability among older adults in the United States and England.

Design, Setting, and Participants:  The US Health and Retirement Study (HRS) and English Longitudinal Study of Aging (ELSA) are nationally representative cohorts of community-dwelling older adults. We examined 12 173 participants enrolled in HRS and 7599 enrolled in ELSA in 2002. Analyses were stratified by age (54-64 years vs 66-76 years) because many safety-net programs commence around age 65 years. Participants were followed until 2012 for mortality and disability.

Exposures:  Wealth quintile, based on total net worth in 2002.

Main Outcomes and Measures:  Mortality and disability, defined as difficulty performing an activity of daily living.

Results:  A total of 6233 US respondents and 4325 English respondents aged 54 to 64 years (younger cohort) and 5940 US respondents and 3274 English respondents aged 66 to 76 years (older cohort) were analyzed for the mortality outcome. Slightly over half of respondents were women (HRS: 6570, 54%; ELSA: 3974, 52%). A higher proportion of respondents from HRS were nonwhite compared with ELSA in both the younger (14% vs 3%) and the older (13% vs 3%) age cohorts. We found increased risk of death and disability as wealth decreased.

In the United States, participants aged 54 to 64 years in the lowest wealth quintile (Q1) (≤$39 000) had a 17% mortality risk and 48% disability risk over 10 years, whereas in the highest wealth quintile (Q5) (>$560 000) participants had a 5% mortality risk and 15% disability risk (mortality hazard ratio [HR], 3.3; 95% CI, 2.0-5.6; P < .001; disability subhazard ratio [sHR], 4.0; 95% CI, 2.9-5.6; P < .001).

In England, participants aged 54 to 64 years in Q1 (≤£34,000) had a 16% mortality risk and 42% disability risk over 10 years, whereas Q5 participants (>£310,550) had a 4% mortality risk and 17% disability risk (mortality HR, 4.4; 95% CI, 2.7-7.0; P < .001; disability sHR, 3.0; 95% CI, 2.1-4.2; P < .001). In 66- to 76-year-old participants, the absolute risks of mortality and disability were higher, but risk gradients across wealth quintiles were similar. When adjusted for sex, age, race, income, and education, HR for mortality and sHR for disability were attenuated but remained statistically significant.

Conclusions and Relevance:  Low wealth was associated with death and disability in both the United States and England. This relationship was apparent from age 54 years and continued into later life. Access to health care may not attenuate wealth-associated disparities in older adults.

SOURCE

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If FDA can't speed up drug testing, then give patients the right to try

Mikaela Knapp was in the prime of her life. After completing her studies at Stanford University and Berkeley College, Mikaela married her high school sweetheart, whom she had known since fifth grade. At age 25, she had her entire life before her. Then in an instant, it all changed. Mikaela was diagnosed with a rare form of kidney cancer and her world turned upside down. Unfortunately, this story doesn’t have a happy ending. After a long and hard fought battle, Mikaela passed away in 2014.

What makes her tragedy particularly difficult to accept is that it’s entirely possible to imagine a scenario in which Mikaela would still be alive today. Had Mikaela been able to take advantage of potentially lifesaving treatment, perhaps she would have beaten the odds. Unfortunately for Mikaela and so many others, we’ll never know because prohibitive rules and regulations block terminally ill patients from accessing treatment.

The numbers tell the story. In the last 20 years, the Food and Drug Administration has approved only three new treatments for childhood cancers. It takes this long because any medical treatment must undergo rigorous testing to demonstrate that they are safe and effective. The FDA has eased some restrictions in recent years, but less than 3 percent of all cancer patients can enroll in clinical trials. What’s more, eligibility is tricky and tough to navigate. As the Goldwater Institute, a think tank supportive of easing the FDA’s requirements for new treatments, describes it, “patients must be just sick enough, but not too sick.”

To terminally ill patients and their grieving families, these policies are callous and devoid of the urgency needed when a life is on the line. We should not have to ask the government for permission to try to save our own lives. Terminally ill patients should have the right to try. After they’ve exhausted all available treatments, they should be able to work with their doctors and take part in clinical trials, without interference from government bureaucrats.

For some, this could mean accessing promising treatment already being used elsewhere. For instance, there are 22 breast cancer treatments awaiting FDA approval, some of which are currently saving lives in Europe. Knowing that there is a potentially lifesaving treatment outside the United States is what compelled the family of 10 year old Diego Morris of Arizona to travel to England to access Mifamurtide, a drug being administered to treat bone cancer which is not available in the United States. The treatment worked. Today, Diego is back in Arizona doing the things he loves.

Unfortunately, stories like Diego’s are the exception, but perhaps someday, they’ll be more common. Momentum for right to try laws is growing. In all, 37 states have enacted right to try laws and 12 more states have introduced legislation. In most cases, right to try has been approved by huge margins with overwhelming bipartisan support.

This is encouraging, but more is needed at the federal level so that the FDA cannot interfere with the implementation of state right to try laws. Even with the consent of their state government, many doctors and medical practitioners won’t administer experimental medical treatment to terminally ill patients because they rightfully fear that the FDA will come after them.

Federal right to try legislation has support in Congress, most notably from U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.), whose bill to prevent this bureaucratic injustice recently passed the chamber unanimously. There are also encouraging signs that President Trump would sign right to try legislation if it got to his desk, but until then, terminally ill patients have little choice but to wait.

Right to try opponents worry that it would circumvent the FDA’s approval process and make it difficult for the government to keep track of the effectiveness of experimental medical treatment. But these worries are misplaced. Federal right to try legislation would not keep data and critical information from the FDA, but instead work with the government agency’s safety and testing approval process.

Also, the risk of inaction is far greater. As Matthew Bellina, a Navy Veteran suffering from Lou Gehrig’s disease, eloquently puts it, “What is the downside of creating new pathways for the terminally ill to access promising treatments? Maybe the law won’t help millions of people, or even many, but for those that it does help, it’s a game changer.”

It’s a question that Mikaela Knapp’s family must ask every day.

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 THE PSYCHOLOGIST.

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