Plain truth can be hate-speech on Quora

I responded to the following question on Quora.com:

"Why has the free movement of people between Canada, Australia, New Zealand & the UK not been implemented? There are similar population sizes, common language, & social, political, economic, & educational systems are all based on the British model"

I replied:

"Australia and NZ don’t want the blacks — too crime-prone"

Quora deleted my reply on the grounds that it violated their Be  Nice, Be Respectful policy

I wrote in response to them:

"Since when is the truth simply expressed disrespectful? The alternative is BS"

On behalf of Quora, Amelia then replied:

"Thanks for your email. We'll be more than happy to clarify our moderation decision here.

Your content was in violation of our Be Nice, Be Respectful policy. This core Quora principle requires that people treat other people on the site with civility, respect, and consideration.

More specifically, your content contained what we consider to be hate speech:

Users are not allowed to post content or adopt a tone that would be interpreted by a reasonable observer as a form of hate speech, particularly toward a race, gender, religion, nationality, ethnicity, political group, sexual orientation or another similar characteristic. Questions and question details about generalizations in these topics should be phrased as neutrally and respectfully as possible.

Our decision is final, and your content will not be reinstated"

My closing comment:  "I imagine Amelia is just an apparatchik at Quora so shares the current politically correct hysteria about any mention of blacks that fails to praise them -- but her action deprives their questioner of the answer to his question.

Is that what Quora is about?  Is it a cover-up service or an information service?  No American is in any doubt about the black crime-rate so why can it not be mentioned in an objective information context?  I have had many articles published in the academic journals of the social sciences on questions about race and racism but such discussions must be kept from the general public, apparently. So I suppose that this episode is just another example of Leftists having big problems with the truth -- JR. 

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‘I hate everything.’ says Jerry Brown

The Left gives itself away now and then

Nine days into his European trip, Jerry Brown might have been enjoying himself.

The Democratic governor had just wrapped interviews with Japanese and German reporters late Saturday, after holding a climate coalition signing ceremony with Terry McAuliffe, or His Excellency, the honorific used for the governor of Virginia. Oregon Gov. Kate Brown and billionaire environmental activist Tom Steyer were also at the photo op.

That’s when Brown was asked whether he enjoyed it at the UN climate conference.

“No, I hate everything,” he said, allowing the slightest smile. “Why do you ask that silly question?”

I mean it earnestly, the reporter responded.

Brown asked whether, at age 79, he would be running around Europe if he didn’t enjoy it?

Maybe, his interrogator replied.

“Why, because I’m a masochist?” Brown asked.

Brown said he doesn’t think of it as “joy,” but did for some reason say he was glad the conversation had meandered to the subject. An accurate reflection of his existential position is one that is constantly changing, Brown eventually confessed.

“There are certain things you have to do that aren’t as pleasant as other things you have to do, but if it’s something you want to get accomplished, you will do it, and there will be different levels of joy, from zero to 100 percent,” he said

SOURCE

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Covered California Still Spreading Misery

During the heyday of the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare, Emily Bazar of the Center for Health Reporting kept track of how Covered California, the ACA’s wholly owned subsidiary, actually performed. As she noted, Covered California wasted millions on promotion, handed out lucrative deals to cronies, and its $454 million computer system was dysfunctional. Last year Bazar showed how, despite skyrocketing premiums, Covered California dropped 2,000 pregnant women from coverage, causing them to lose their doctors and miss key prenatal appointments.

Earlier this year, Bazar reported that the state’s vaunted health exchange sent incorrect tax information to the health plans, which led to “higher premiums than consumers initially anticipated,” and people also “owed more out of pocket than they originally thought.” Bazar had already charted how Obamacare hiked premiums 13.2 percent, and canceled policies when people reported changes in income. As a result, many Californians did not get the tax credits they they sought. Covered California may have helped “multitudes” apply for health insurance, Bazar wrote, but “it also is responsible for countless glitches and widespread consumer misery.” So how is it performing now?

Emily Bazar, now with Kaiser Health News, warns that Anthem Blue Cross is pulling out of a large swath of California’s individual market, “forcing hundreds of thousands of consumers to find new plans.” Rate hikes average 12.3 percent and “silver-level” plans “will bear an additional 12.4 percent average surcharge.” Doctor’s networks are smaller and smaller all the time, and “if you are in the middle of treatment for a complex medical condition and lose your insurer, you may have options.” But then, you might not have options. So for all its lofty promises, Covered California still works best as a misery index.

The ACA was essentially a statist coup camouflaged in a white coat. In this plan, you get only the health care the government wants you to have. The same is true for the so-called “single player” scheme, better known as government monopoly health care.

SOURCE

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Hollowed-out blue chips are the next subprime

Subprime mortgages caused much of the 2008 financial crisis by defaulting in much greater concentrations than the experts expected. The next financial crisis is likely to be caused by a similar disaster that surprises the experts. I have an excellent candidate: Fortune 500 companies that have been repurchasing their shares like maniacs for a decade, and in many cases have left themselves with negative net worth. In a major recession, when their business drops off and their cash flow turns negative, they will only need a breath of adverse wind to default. Like the subprime mortgages, once a few major companies default, the rest, with fragile credit structures, will fall like dominoes.

There are two mechanisms by which the balance sheets of major companies have been hollowed out: overpriced acquisitions and share repurchases. Both are products of a decade of interest rates held far below their natural level, which have abominably skewed the economy’s allocation of resources.

In the case of overpriced acquisitions, even companies that make a low return appear attractive purchases if you can borrow at a negative real cost to finance their acquisition. Share repurchases meanwhile are more attractive than dividends because they goose the value of management’s stock options. If long term money can be borrowed at 3% on a tax-deductible basis, then it makes sense to go on buying the company’s shares up to 33 times earnings, even if there is no earnings growth to be had.

The effect on balance sheets of the two bad practices is significantly different. In the case of acquisitions, the accountants make the acquirer record a “goodwill” item reflecting the difference between the price paid for the company acquired and the value of its- assets. In the 1970s and 1980s, that goodwill item could be taken as reflecting real value. Much of the assets’ value in the books reflected construction and acquisition costs from decades earlier, so in a time of high inflation, when stock prices were not extended, acquirers generally did not pay much more than the true value of assets.

Now the “goodwill” item reflects genuine water, in the nineteenth century sense of that term. Nineteenth century investors, mostly in railroads, were very concerned at promoters “watering” the stock – issuing shares at a price far above net asset value – because they knew that railways could be replicated at the same cost, or even somewhat less (since some survey and other costs might be common). If your competitor had issued less stock than you to construct the same route, he would have lower costs, because he would have to pay fewer dividends and/or less debt interest.

In industrial companies, the “watering” principle does not apply so rigidly; industrial companies often have patented technologies, marketing networks or business relationships that cannot easily be replicated. Nevertheless, if you buy $1 of assets for $2, and finance the $2 by debt, you are still in trouble in a recession. Gold miners have seen this problem recently; a few of them have been bankrupted not by operating losses but by goodwill write-offs that destroyed their balance sheets.

Goodwill at least arguably has some value. However, what remains when you have borrowed money to repurchase stock has no value at all. In that situation, your stockholders’ equity has been eaten away and you have literally nothing to show for it. In good years, earnings per share are increased, because there are fewer shares outstanding. In bad years, if you lack capital you will find it very difficult to finance yourself. If cash flow and earnings falter, potential creditors will take a suddenly skeptical look at the infinitely leveraged balance sheet and shy away.

The Fortune 500’s problem is that the period of funny money and slow growth has lasted so long. For a year or two, if profits look good, you can buy back stock worth 150% of earnings and make some overpriced acquisitions, and the hit to the balance sheet will only be moderate. But if you keep on doing it for close to a decade, you will run out of equity.

The Fortune 500 companies that are in this difficulty (and not all of them are) can be divided into two groups. The acquirers have eaten away their stockholders’ equity through overpriced acquisitions; they still have a positive book net worth, but a negative tangible net worth. Their fate during a deep downturn will be determined by how much of that goodwill must be written off through “impairment of value” and whether net worth remains positive after doing so.

The second group, who have destroyed their shareholders’ equity by repurchasing shares, often worth several times their earnings, will have only moderate amounts of goodwill, and negative net worth even including intangible assets. If their business turns down substantially, they are in trouble from Day 1.

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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Blame a dithering Congress, not Trump, for Democratic wins

After a hotly contested — and highly expensive — 2017 election cycle, the Democrats have taken the governor’s mansions in both Virginia and New Jersey. In both cases, it was a sweeping victory, with Ralph Northam winning nearly 54 percent of the Virginia vote and Ryan Murphy winning 56 percent of the New Jersey vote.

Contrary to what the mainstream media would have you believe, this was not a referendum on President Trump. This was a warning shot to congressional Republicans. Congressional Republicans have shown themselves unable to deliver. After running for years on promises of a wholesale repeal of ObamaCare and a replacement of it with a patient-centered, free market alternative, they couldn’t even get enough consensus to pass the “skinny repeal.”

It shouldn’t surprise anyone that Republicans failed to win the day. Why would voters turn out for a party that can’t keep its promises? Why would conservatives support leaders who are utterly indifferent to skyrocketing premiums and crippling taxes? Why back a group as disorganized and duplicitous as today’s Republican party?

And why on earth would Virginia conservatives back Ed Gillespie? When conservatives chose Donald Trump in 2016, they were rejecting the seamy, swampy insider politics that have dominated D.C. for far too long and opting instead for an outsider and an innovator who would shake things up.

But Ed Gillespie is just the kind of politician voters rejected in 2016. He’s been a lobbyist; he’s been a chairman of the Republican National Convention; and he’s been a counselor for the Bush White House. All voters had to do was look at his resume to know exactly what they were getting: more carve outs for insider interests, more personal politics and favoritism, and more elitist interference. Conservative voters deserved better options than what they got this November — and they know it.

This election should be a wake-up call for Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wisc.) and Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.). Americans won’t tolerate delay and dithering any longer. They want a party that has a vision for America and the drive to see it through. Unless Republican leadership can convince citizens that they are this party, they’re looking at a bloodbath in 2018. Conservative voters will stay home, and liberals and moderates will flock to the polls to vote Ryan, McConnell and all other Republicans out of office.

If Republicans want to keep their seats, they need to act. They need to deliver a tax plan that gets rid of special favors for special interests, that cuts rates for businesses, families and individuals, and that brings American companies back home. They need to repeal and replace ObamaCare, once and for all. They need to bring federal spending under control and start hacking away at our $20 trillion-dollar debt. And they need to ensure three percent growth or higher.

This — and only this — will secure their seats in 2018. When Americans start finding more and more money in their wallets, when tax day arrives and they can finish their returns in a matter of minutes, when they aren’t steamrolled by health care costs, and when they can quickly find well-paying jobs, they’ll vote Republican.

Until then, my bet is on the Democrats — although I certainly hope I’m proven wrong. If I’m proven right, however, and Republicans lose the House and the Senate in 2018, you can bet they’ll try to blame Trump. But the fact of the matter is that, ultimately, they’ll have no one to blame but themselves.

SOURCE

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An ICE Agent's Quest for Justice

By Michelle Malkin
   
“Betrayed.”

Victor Avila is a survivor. Soft-spoken but iron-willed, he dedicated his life to law enforcement and to his country. Yet, the feds are now fighting tooth and nail to bury the full truth about the 2011 ambush by Los Zetas drug cartel thugs in Mexico that left him gravely wounded and his partner, special agent Jaime Zapata, dead.

This week, two of the Mexican gangsters convicted in the horror on Highway 57 between Mexico City and Monterrey were sentenced to double life terms in prison.

“HSI Special Agents Jaime Zapata and Victor Avila were in Mexico to protect and serve our country when they were ambushed by these ruthless criminals, who will now spend the rest of their lives in a prison cell,” Acting Assistant Attorney General Blanco announced on Monday.

“This case serves as a reminder that if you harm a U.S. agent, the U.S. government will pursue you to the ends of the earth to ensure that you are brought to justice.”

Five others received lesser sentences of 35, 34, 30, 28 and 12 years for murder and attempted murder, which Avila on Tuesday called a “complete and utter disappointment.” As he described in his victim impact statement, “I was shot in three places and had shrapnel and glass imbedded in my body in too many places to count. Not only did I have to undergo multiple surgeries to remove the bullets and shrapnel and stitch together my shredded muscles and skin, but I also had to learn to walk again.”

Avila’s wife, who also worked for the government, lost her job. The ICE agent’s health care costs and other bills related to the attack’s aftermath piled up, leaving the family nearly $200,000 in debt and his wife and two children traumatized. “To this day, the government has not reimbursed my out-of-pocket expenses related to my work injuries,” he told U.S. District Court Judge Royce Lamberth.

Another disgraceful indignity: This week, the feds refused to cover the Avilas’ $3,000 in travel and lodging costs from Texas to DC for the sentencing hearing, but did provide humanitarian parole for several of the Zetas’ family members from Mexico to attend the trial.

Even more disappointing, however, is the callousness of Beltway bureaucrats obstructing the Avilas’ and Zapatas’ search for answers. The families want to know who ordered the agents to travel through Zetas-infested territory unprotected to pick up equipment from another agent; why their superiors ignored a State Department security warning banning travel by U.S. personnel on Highway 57; and what the Obama administration hid as evidence mounted that the semi-automatic weapons ad handguns used in the ambush came from one of its botched gun-walking operations that echoed the infamous and deadly Operation Fast and Furious scheme.

“The significant importance here,” Avila explained on an upcoming episode of my CRTV.com show, “Michelle Malkin Investigates,” is that the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives “had identified the arms traffickers, had them under surveillance, and had the opportunity to arrest them months before, and did nothing. They still allowed these individuals … the Osorio brothers, to continue trafficking in arms, and allowing the weapons to be walked south into Mexico. Once the weapons went south into Mexico, there is no trace of them. They were long gone. They were lost.”

While the feds have paid lip service to Zapata’s sacrifice and Avila’s courage, their actions have administered a collective slap in the face. The families’ public records requests have been stymied every step of the way. Not a single Justice Department official has been punished for President Obama’s deadly gun-walking failures. Instead, Avila was ostracized, transferred against his will and issued a “3R” letter to “resign, retire or relocate.”

As Avila’s wife, Claudia, told my program: “He had to give up his passion … he loved his job. And the government ended that. I think more than anything we feel betrayed. We feel like complete outcasts … Very unfair. If you didn’t know any better, you would think that Victor was this criminal person that did something very wrong in his line of duty and is being punished for it. I mean, we’re outraged. We’re very disheartened. The government has most definitely turned their back on us. And not only us but the Zapata family. I mean, they lost their son. They’re still trying to find answers; they are overwhelmed.”

Where is Congress? Where is President Trump? True justice for the Avila and Zapata families requires full accountability and real consequences — not just for the triggermen but for the crapweasels who enabled them.

SOURCE

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Bernie Sanders goes to Canada and turns a blind eye to their failing health system

Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., traveled to Canada in late October. His goal? To highlight the supposed benefits of that nation's single-payer healthcare system. "How is it that here in Canada, they provide quality health care to all people ... and they do it for half the cost?" he asked rhetorically.

If Sanders took off his rose-colored glasses, he'd see that Canada doesn't provide "quality" care to all people. And it only keeps costs low by rationing who can see doctors and obtain treatment.

That's hardly a model Americans should envy.

The Vermont socialist is willfully oblivious to the Canadian system's shortcomings. He went so far as to deny "there is any debate that the quality of care is as good or better than the United States."

If Canada's healthcare system was really as top-notch as Sanders claims, why do so many Canadians flee the country to obtain treatment? A Fraser Institute report from this summer finds that more than 63,000 Canadians sought medical treatment elsewhere in the world in 2016.

Could it have something to do with Canada's atrociously long wait times? When Canadian patients receive referrals from general practitioners, the median wait time is 20 weeks until specialists treat them. Here in the United States, waiting five months for treatment is unheard-of.

The problem isn't limited to specialist care. One-in-five Canadians must wait longer than a week to see a family doctor. About three-in-ten wait more than four hours at emergency departments. The crisis is so widespread that #CanadaWAITS is trending on Twitter.

Canada's rationed care is the predictable result of a healthcare system funded and administered by government bureaucrats. Americans mustn't let Sanders fool them into adopting a system that guarantees free, universal access to a waitlist.

SOURCE

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PERVERSE



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Compare and contrast



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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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The best hope for world peace

Mr Trump obviously gets on well with Mr Putin and enjoys talking to him.  With its stupid sanctions, Congress has done what it can to foster cold war with Russia so the world is fortunate to have a real statesman in  charge of the U.S. administration.  The entente between Trump and Putin at the very least ensures good communication between them and that ensures that no mistakes will be made between them



Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin shook hands Saturday in Da Nang, Vietnam for the second time in two days during the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation leaders' summit.

Trump entered the summit meeting room and walked straight to his Russian counterpart, who was already seated at the room's giant round table.

Putin stood and the two shook hands and spoke briefly, with Trump smiling and doing most of the talking.

Later, the two heads of state chatted before posing for a 'family photo' with all the other presidents and prime ministers.

The two presidents stood next to each other Friday night for a less formal group photo, shaking hands before waving at onlookers as shutters snapped.

More HERE

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Prince Charles suggested the 'influx of foreign Jews' was partly to blame for unrest in the Middle East and asked who will stand up and take on 'Jewish lobby' in America in controversial letter

He is just a fool.  Coming on top of his love for the global warming fraud, this confirms it. I have always defended him as being well meaning but I can no longer justify that.  And I am (and will remain) a keen monarchist.  His eldest son will re-establish the sterling reputation so outstanding in the Queen. For the sake of the monarchy, Charles should not take up the crown when the times comes but pass that duty over to Prince William

Prince Charles was fiercely criticised last night after it emerged he once urged the US to ‘take on the Jewish lobby’ – and blamed ‘the influx of foreign Jews’ for causing unrest in the Middle East.

Writing to his close friend Laurens van der Post in 1986, the Prince makes a startling assessment of the Arab-Israeli conflict.

He argues it was the exodus of European Jews in the middle of the last century that ‘helped to cause the great problems’.

He goes on to say terrorism in the region will only end when its causes are eliminated.

He then expresses the hope a US President will find the courage to stand up to the American ‘Jewish lobby’.

The term ‘Jewish lobby’ is considered by many to be anti-Semitic – suggesting wealthy Jews in the US operate behind the scenes to exercise undue influence over government policy.

Other high-profile figures have been heavily criticised for using the term.

Last night, Stephen Pollard, influential editor of The Jewish Chronicle, said: ‘To me this is the most astonishing element of the Prince’s letter. The “Jewish lobby” is one of the anti-Semitic themes that have endured for centuries. It is this myth there are these very powerful Jews who control foreign policy or the media or banks or whatever.’

Mr Pollard described the letter as ‘jaw-droppingly shocking’, adding: ‘That they [the Prince’s comments] come from the heir to the throne is unsettling, to put it mildly.’

While the letter is inflammatory, there is no suggestion Charles holds anti-Semitic views.

He has many prominent Jewish friends and in 2013 became the first Royal to attend a chief rabbi’s inauguration ceremony. In a speech that year, he expressed concern at the apparent rise of anti-Semitism in Britain.

In the past it has been reported that the Prince is privately critical of US policy in the Middle East, with one diplomatic source accusing him of having ‘fairly dodgy views on Israel’.

At the same time, he is seen as a defender of Islam, with one historian noting that no other major Western figure has as high a standing in the Muslim world.

It has also been suggested he has pro-Palestinian leanings, a perception the letter appears to support.

The Prince’s candid letter surfaced in a public archive. It was written on November 24, 1986, immediately after an official visit the then 38-year-old Prince made to Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and Qatar with Princess Diana.

The Prince’s reference in the letter to the influx of European Jews also caused dismay.

It is not clear if he is referring to immigration before or after the Second World War, or both. Mr Pollard said: ‘It is the absolute classic Arab explanation of the problems in the Middle East.

'And it is what everyone has always said the British aristocracy actually thinks – the idea that Jews were some kind of foreigners who had no real place in Israel until we decided to make it their homeland. Historically it is nonsense and it’s quite stunning when it comes from the heir to the throne.’

A senior Israeli diplomatic source said last night: ‘He [Charles] was travelling around the Gulf states [just before he wrote the controversial letter], which in those years were very anti-Israel. It seems he was presented with a narrative in a very convincing way.’

Earlier this month, Britain marked the centenary of the Balfour Declaration, the document that paved the way for the state of Israel, with a gala dinner in London attended by Theresa May and Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

In 1993, Charles delivered what was then considered to be the most pro-Islamic speech ever made by a member of the Royal Family. He said: ‘Islam can teach us today a way of understanding and living in the world which Christianity is poorer for having lost.’

In 2003, it was reported the Prince had not been to the US for the previous six years on Foreign Office advice, largely because of his criticism of US policy in the Middle East.

A diplomatic source said at the time the Prince had ‘in American terms and international terms, fairly dodgy views on Israel. He thinks American policy in the Middle East is complete madness.’

In 2007, leaked emails between senior Clarence House staff put Charles at the centre of a row about the Royals’ attitude towards the Jewish state.

Exchanges between Sir Michael Peat, the Prince’s then principal secretary, and Clive Alderton, Sir Michael’s deputy, contained apparently disparaging remarks about Israel.

Over the years, the Prince has forged a close relationship with the Saudi royal family. But no Royal has ever visited Israel in an official capacity. Officials say it is because there is no permanent peace deal in the region.

More HERE

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Outsiders vs. Insiders: 2017’s lessons – To ‘win’ more, Republicans need to man-up and change

I see the results discussed below as a reproof to the small band of Senate RINOs who blocked Trump's agenda.  The results show that their actions did nothing for the GOP but were a boon to the Democrats.  Trump needs to show that he can deliver on behalf of the GOP and they have blocked that -- JR

What happened?  It’s a legitimate question coming two days after Democrats dominated the 2017 elections. Granted gubernatorial contests were held only in two Mid-Atlantic states (New Jersey and Virginia) this year – both either solid blue or trending blue – but the results pretty much equaled a whitewash for Republicans in their first state-level test of the Donald Trump era.

Not only did Democrat candidates for governor win convincingly in both cases, by all appearances the minority party picked up enough seats in the Virginia House of Delegates to at least pull even in the chamber. When coupled with the GOP’s narrow two-seat majority in the state senate, Virginia could now be the most evenly partisan divided state in the country (with Democrats holding all the executive offices, of course).

The media narrative of the drubbing was about what you’d expect from the chattering class – voters rejected Trump; they were fed up with the Republicans’ “negative” tone; people revolted against racism… you know, standard stuff for the liberal journalism profession.

Tunneling a little deeper below the surface there is some evidence that the Democrats, at least in Virginia, pulled out all the stops to win when they had to. They went low and it doesn’t look like they’re ashamed of it either.

Charles Hurt wrote in the Washington Times, “Over the past 40 years, only once has Virginia elected a governor from the same party that won the White House the previous year. With Republican Donald Trump in the White House, Mr. Northam, nee [Jim] Crow, was all but guaranteed to win this off-year election in a walk.

“This trend has only intensified in the favor of Democrats in recent elections as the state turns bluer and bluer because of population in the swampy northern part of the state. Add to that the unique distaste for the government-bashing Mr. Trump, an outsider who is loathed by all the swamp creatures who commute into the District from Northern Virginia.

As the federal government grows, so do the Virginia/Washington D.C. suburbs. Even in my home of Prince William County the voters kicked out long-serving principled conservative Delegate Bob Marshall in favor of what is probably the first transgender elected official in the country (at least at the state-level). Daniel “Danica” Roem won with 54 percent of the district 13 vote.

But judging by the number of seats Democrats pulled-in statewide, it wasn’t just a transgender thing on Tuesday. This election was a sure sign that something isn’t quite right with the state Republican Party. Democrats not only portrayed poor nice guy Ed Gillespie as a child-threatening racist, they also firmly pinned the establishment label to the former lobbyist’s lapel. “Enron Ed” they called him in several TV ads.

Ralph Northam will take over for outgoing Clinton buddy Governor Terry McAuliffe in January. The former head of the Democrat National Committee is widely rumored to be considering a run for president in 2020. Carpetbagger McAuliffe likely won’t get far – he’s too closely tied to the Clintons -- but with the clueless Democrats, you never can tell.

Beyond the local matters at stake in this year’s elections it’s clear blame for the GOP’s losses also lies with the national Republican Party, and to some extent, with President Trump himself. Congress’s multiple well-reported failures to pass a promised Obamacare repeal and replace bill gave average voters little reason to choose Republicans two days ago. And Trump’s tweeting habit remains a sore spot for some who might otherwise be inclined to support his agenda.

After what happened this week it’s only natural to lean towards panicking, but it’s probably too early for candidates to completely jump off the Trump bandwagon and start taking up the Gillespie-esque strategy of distancing themselves from the president in order to appeal to those in the so-called “middle” (if there is such a category any more).

While I agree it’s in the Republican Party’s own best interests to pound the healthy economic numbers it shouldn’t be forgotten many of the items on Trump’s agenda have been summarily pushed to the side by party elites who believe they can get away with waffling on immigration, tax cuts and conservative cultural issues and still win elections.

Let’s not leap off the bridge just yet – after all, this was blue-trending Virginia and bluer than blue New Jersey we’re talking about. The GOP is growing stronger in regions such as the Midwest where Trump’s agenda hits home with the citizens. Democrats and the media have turned Virginia into the modern-day battleground over confederate statues and politically correct race issues. I highly doubt the country has wholesale changed in less than a year’s time and likewise taken up the cause of those who want to erase history to appease some political constituency.

If anything, the GOP needs more Trump, not less; or should I clarify, it needs more of Trump’s agenda, not less.

Historic trends usually lead away from the incumbent president in off-year elections. 2017 was no different. There’s plenty of time to “recover” for the GOP, but not if the Congress doesn’t get to work and keep some of its promises. This should be a wake-up call, indeed.

Byron York wrote in the Washington Examiner, “Unlike during the campaign, Trump today has a record as president for voters to evaluate. If the economy were to stumble, he would certainly pay a political price. But what if current trends continue for a while, and the economy stays strong or keeps getting better?

“Should that happen, there's no doubt Trump's adversaries, in Congress and in the press, will focus even more relentlessly on his tone, on the hair-on-fire controversy of the day, in an effort to make voters overlook their general level of satisfaction and oppose Trump, even as their lives improve.”

This already seems to be happening as economic growth is stronger now than it’s been for most of this century and the unemployment numbers are similarly trending positively downward for the GOP. Consumer confidence is sky-high and the stock market keeps setting new records. Americans are feeling good about a lot of things, but still don’t like Trump because of his Twitter “tone.”

More HERE

Another suggestion:  We should make the District of Columbia include any adjacent county in Maryland and Va and it becomes a state. absurd to let  adjacent VA and MD counties loaded with DC interests control both those states.

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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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Armistice day -- lessons from "Kanzler" Bismarck and General Monash

The 11th day of the 11th month (also known as Remembrance Day and Veterans Day) was originally made memorable because it marked the end of WWI.  And well might it be commemorated.  The war it ended was unbelievably grisly.  It has often been compared to a meat grinder.  And it was pretty much that.  Strong and healthy young men were marched forward ("over the top") into withering machine gun fire.  Most died instantly. It was if their lives did not matter.  They were deliberately kil;led by their own generals.  Both sides did it but Britain's general Haig was most known for it.  He became known as the "Butcher of the Somme"

This strange behaviour was because they could think of no other way of waging war.  An outright charge on the enemy was how wars had been conducted since time immemorial.  That was what you did in a war.  But it was madness in the era of the machine gun and rapid firing field artillery.

One would have thought that manpower would be seen as the ultimate resource in a war and that it should therefore be conserved and carefully used.  It should not be squandered as in the disastrous Somme Offensive.

There was one General who did work to conserve his men:  Australia's General Monash, a son of emigrant German Jews.  As a  Jew he might well have been horrified by the mass deaths Jews had experienced and wanted no more of that.  A small excerpt about him:

"In July 1916 he took charge of the newly raised 3rd Division in northwestern France and in May 1918 became commander of the Australian Corps, at the time the largest corps on the Western Front. The successful Allied attack at the Battle of Amiens on 8 August 1918, which expedited the end of the war, was planned by Monash and spearheaded by British forces including the Australian and Canadian Corps under Monash and Arthur Currie. Monash is considered one of the best Allied generals of the First World War and the most famous commander in Australian history"

It's an irony that he spoke, read, and wrote German fluently.

And there is another very eminent German who might well have been horrified by mass deaths.  Prussia's "Iron Chancellor" and founder of united Germany, Otto von Bismarck.

One of Bismarck's better known remarks (misquoted by Churchill) was: "Der ganze Balkan ist nicht die gesunden Knochen eines einzigen pommerschen Grenadiers wert"  (The whole of the Balkans is not worth the bones of a single Pomeranian grenadier).  You can't get more conserving of manpower than that.

Bismarck died in 1898.  Had he lived and ruled a few years longer,  World War I might have been fought very differently, if it was fought at all.  Monash showed what could be done in the field. 

I can't resist a few more quotes from Bismarck:


A little caution outflanks a large cavalry.

What we learn from history is that no one learns from history.

The most significant event of the 20th century will be that the fact that the North Americans speak English.

The secret of politics? Make a good treaty with Russia.

The Americans are truly a lucky people. They are bordered to the north and south by weak neighbors and to the east and west by fish.

Whoever speaks of Europe is wrong: it is a geographical expression.

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The Navy Swamp Needs Draining Too

From Obama-style social engineering to rampant corruption, the Navy is in trouble.

A scathing Navy report released Nov. 2 reveals that two major collisions — one between the USS Fitzgerald and merchant ship ACX Crystal off the Japanese coast on June 17 that killed 17 sailors and another between the USS John McCain and oil tanker Alnic MC near Singapore on Aug. 20 that killed another 10 — were caused by “fundamental failures to responsibly plan, prepare and execute ship activities to avoid undue operational risk.”

The USS Fitzgerald’s collision was precipitated by a “compilation of failures by leadership and watchstanders,” including lookout crews who “were inattentive, disengaged in developments on the Bridge, and unaware of several nearby vessels.” As a result they “failed to visually differentiate between two vessels in close proximity” while “attempting to cross a highly congested sea lane at night.”

Moreover the Officer of the Deck, the person responsible for safe navigation of the ship, “exhibited poor seamanship by failing to maneuver as required, failing to sound the danger signal and failing to attempt to contact CRYSTAL on Bridge to Bridge radio,” the report states. The officer also failed to “call the Commanding Officer as appropriate and prescribed by Navy procedures to allow him to exercise more senior oversight and judgment of the situation.”

The USS McCain’s collision was an equally damning sequence of errors. Because the person at the helm was having difficulty maintaining course while also adjusting the throttles for speed control, the Commanding Officer “ordered the watch team to divide the duties of steering and throttles.” This unplanned shift “caused confusion in the watch team,” that ultimately led the helmsman to believe the steering mechanism had failed. According to the report, crews attempted to fix the mistake by transferring steering “among various controlling stations four times within the two minutes leading up to the collision.”

Crew members also accidentally decoupled the ship’s two engines, and the two shafts “working opposite to one another in this fashion caused an un-commanded turn to the left.” This error, coupled with “lost situational awareness” on the ship’s bridge, effectively accelerated the McCain’s turn into the Alnic MC.

“The thing that stood out to me was in both situations they had minimal situational awareness,” stated Capt. Rick Hoffman, a retired cruiser captain who reviewed the report for Defense News. “In the case of Fitzgerald, nearly criminal negligence on the part of the bridge watch team. And in neither case did the ship sound five short blasts or raise the general alarm to let anyone know they were in danger.”

Incredibly, there were two additional incidents involving 7th Fleet vessels last year. In January, the USS Antietam guided missile cruiser ran aground near Yokosuka base. In May, the USS Lake Champlain collided with a South Korean fishing boat.

The report minced no words regarding why these incidents occurred: “In each of the four mishaps there were decisions at headquarters that stemmed from a culturally engrained ‘can do’ attitude, and an unrecognized accumulation of risk that resulted in ships not ready to safely operate at sea.”

Since the collisions, eight senior leaders have been relieved of duty, and members of both ships’ bridge and Combat Information Center watch teams have also received administrative actions. And while the Navy does not make these actions public, they may include career-killing letters of reprimand. Moreover, if the continuing investigation demands additional punishment, it will be forthcoming.

“We are dangerously underinvesting in our military,” insisted Sen. Ben Sasse (R-NE) after reading the report. “Training, readiness and maintenance are hit the earliest — and tragic errors like this are the canary-in-the-mine warning bells.”

While true in some respects, Sasse’s assertion — essentially that basic competence requires increased funding levels — rings exceedingly hollow, especially when one remembers that Barack Obama’s Navy Secretary, Ray Mabus, made political correctness one of his primary objectives.

Marines in Congress from both parties criticized Mabus, also the former Democrat governor of Mississippi, for force-feeding co-ed training on the Marine Corps. They viewed the move as retaliation following the Corps request for an exemption from allowing women in combat. That request was based on studies showing sex integration would raise the risks of casualties. Mabus also attempted — and ultimately failed — to make all service job titles “gender neutral.”

And funding has nothing to do with a massive corruption scandal encompassing as many as 440 Navy personnel, current and retired — including at least 60 admirals — under investigation for their involvement with Malaysian contractor Leonard “Fat Leonard” Glenn Francis. Francis allegedly provided Navy personnel with cash kickbacks and “wild times” in return for receiving classified information and contracts.

Contracts with whom? The Navy’s 7th Fleet.

In 2015, Francis pleaded guilty to bribery and fraud that included scamming the Navy out of approximately $35 million. He remains in jail in San Diego awaiting sentencing on Dec. 1. In the meantime, he is cooperating with the DOJ, which has already filed criminal charges against 28 individuals, including two admirals.

The Navy is enacting some after-the-fact reforms following the acknowledgment in September that budget constraints, 100-hour workweeks, extended deployments, and training and maintenance delays have severely taxed the nation’s fleet and personnel. But top leaders speaking to the Senate Armed Services Committee refused to directly tie the quartet of accidents to those problems.

“These collisions, along with other similar incidents over the past year, indicated a need for the Navy to undertake a review of wider scope to better determine systemic causes,” the report states.

The past year? On Jan. 12, 2016, two Navy riverine command boats were captured by Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC). A Navy report on that incident also cited “failed leadership at multiple levels from the tactical to the operational” as the reasons for the debacle.

What kind of leadership? The unidentified commander in charge of the boats “opted to surrender rather than fight back, citing later fears that a confrontation could endanger the Obama administration’s efforts to lock in a deal with Tehran on its nuclear program,” The Washington Times reported.

“Clearly, under President Obama’s plan to fundamentally change America, the degradation of our military forces was a key element,” asserts U.S. Navy Admiral and former commander in chief of the U.S. Pacific Fleet James A. Lyons. “The capitulation of our military leadership to accept these mandates was more than shocking, as it was a manifestation of the corrupt ‘political correctness’ mentality run amok.”

Thus the ongoing effort to embrace progressive dogma proceeds, even if military readiness and people lives are sacrificed as a result.

A sailor aboard the USS Shiloh, one of the Navy’s missile cruisers monitoring North Korea, told an anonymous Navy survey everything Americans need to know. “I just pray we never have to shoot down a missile from North Korea, because then our ineffectiveness will really show,” the sailor wrote.

As the aforementioned incidents indicate, it’s already showing. Thus it behooves the Trump administration to drain this particular swamp ASAP. National security cannot be held hostage to social engineering and political correctness.

And commanders in every branch of the military who disagree should be sent packing.

SOURCE

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Chicago, land of gun control, hits homicide highs — and blames Trump

Five-hundred-and-ninety-three — that’s the number of homicides Chicago has seen this year so far. Oh, apologies. That’s the number of homicides the gun controlling city of Chicago has seen this year so far.

You’d think it time to admit the anti-Second Amendment atmosphere isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, at least in terms of curbing gun-related violence — yes? Nope. The city just came off a near-800 homicide count for last year. The mantra seems to be: Let’s focus on the positive.

Nevertheless, Trump’s at least partly to blame for Chicago’s high homicide rates — at least in the eyes of the left-leaning media.  More, from the Tribune: “Trump doesn’t care about the daily carnage on our city’s streets. Remember during the campaign, when he pledged he would solve everything, when he hinted of some magical police officer here who told him he knew just what to do to solve Chicago’s decades-long violence problems? There’s no magical police officer. Trump has done nothing. Trump will do nothing.”

The question is, Chicago: What will you do? Apparently — criticize.

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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Russian meddling in American politics is long-standing

But is is the Left who are their tools

Paul Kengor

Newly declassified documents confirm Moscow always knew to play the American left like a fiddle.

President Trump recently authorized a mass declassification of documents relating to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in November 1963. Among the material subsequently released, one document that instantly grabbed headlines was a December 1966 FBI memo reporting the reaction of Soviet and Communist Party USA officials to the Kennedy shooting. The document was headlined in (among other publications) the New York Post, which, in turn, was flagged at the top of the Drudge Report, which attracted a lot of readers. Old JFK conspiracy theorists picked up the torch and were off and running.

“The Soviet Union theorized that President Lyndon B. Johnson could have been behind JFK’s assassination,” began the New York Post, “and also learned Moscow could be blamed and attacked, according to documents in a major release of files related to Kennedy’s slaying.”

This sounds very intriguing, and very new. It isn’t new. And it also requires crucial historical context, especially as certain conspiracy theorists thump their chest in quasi-vindication. Here I’d like to offer that context before delving into the contents of the newly declassified FBI memo.

I provide the context in a book that was published in May. That book, A Pope and a President, focused on Pope John Paul II and Ronald Reagan, and deals at length with the Soviet role in the shooting of John Paul II, but also deals with the Soviet disinformation campaign launched in response to the Kennedy assassination.

The Soviets were extremely cynical and extremely shrewd. In late November 1963, they immediately saw how the American left reacted to the Kennedy shooting. American liberals, hysterical then as they still are today, didn’t waste a minute blaming everything and everyone but Lee Harvey Oswald and his love of communism, the USSR, and Castro’s Cuba. Of course, those were the obvious motivations behind the bullet fired into the brain of America’s young president.

And yet, true to everlasting form, liberals back then, in November 1963, attempted to blame the shooting on “right-wing hysteria,” on “conservatism,” on right-wing “hate.” They smeared the entire city of Dallas as a “City of Hate.” They fingered right-wing “extremism,” “paranoia,” “kooks,” gun violence, and an assorted list of bogeymen on the right. They even oddly hurled stones at the rightist, intensely anti-communist John Birch Society. This was an especially brazen charge given that Oswald in April 1963 had tried to assassinate Edwin Walker, a retired U.S. Army general who headed the Dallas chapter of the Birch Society; in fact, Oswald used the same rifle to shoot Kennedy.

Nonetheless, American liberals had their narrative, and it did not take long for them to run with it to besmirch their domestic political opponents.

No sooner than the very afternoon of the assassination, Chief Justice Earl Warren blamed Kennedy’s shooting on “the hatred and bitterness that has been injected into the life of our nation by bigots.” In his eulogy at Kennedy’s funeral, Democratic Senator Mike Mansfield attributed the shooting to “bigotry, hatred, and prejudice.” Popular columnist Drew Pearson blamed the shooting on a “hate drive.” In his first column after the assassination, James “Scotty” Reston, longtime liberal columnist for the New York Times, lamented the “violent streak” and “strain of madness” plaguing America, which he placed at the feet of “extremists on the right.” Since the beginning of his administration, Kennedy had been “trying to damp down the violence of the extremists on the Right.” “America wept,” said Reston, not only for its dead young president, “but for itself.”

Nowhere in Reston’s article ascribing blame at America and her alleged deadly conservatives were these three words: Lee Harvey Oswald. And certainly nowhere were the words communism, Cuba, or the Soviet Union as driving inspirations of Oswald.

James Burnham, the conservative intellectual and convert from atheistic communism, once famously stated that “for the Left, the preferred enemy is always to the Right.” Reston’s reaction was spot-on confirmation of the Burnham maxim. The New York Times rewarded it with a prominent page-one display.

And thus, no doubt sensing how easy this could be, with a more-than-receptive audience on the American left, the Soviets wasted no time doing what they did best: concocting malicious disinformation. If the American left was looking for phony demons as culprits for the Kennedy killing, Kremlin sorcerers were more than willing to conjure them up.

Detailing all of that here is too much, but two later sources were especially revealing in regard to these Soviet efforts: 1) the 1994 book, The First Directorate, by Oleg Kalugin, who spent 32 years in the Soviet KGB, rising to the rank of major general and chief of foreign counterintelligence, and 2) Ion Mihai Pacepa, in his 2013 book (co-authored with Ron Rychlak) Disinformation and his 2007 book on the Soviets and the Kennedy assassination.

As for Kalugin, he was the highest-ranking KGB officer to record his story. In November 1963, Kalugin was deputy station chief in Washington for the KGB. Kalugin notes that immediately after the disclosure that Oswald had Soviet connections (more on that in a moment), he and his fellow agents in Washington began receiving “frantic cables from KGB headquarters in Moscow, ordering us to do everything possible to dispel the notion that the Soviet Union was somehow behind the assassination” (which, to Kalugin’s knowledge, it was not). The Kremlin, he noted, was “clearly rattled by Oswald’s Soviet connection.” So, how to dispel that notion? Kalugin explained their orders: “We were told to put forward the line that Oswald could have been involved in a conspiracy with American reactionaries displeased with the president’s recent efforts to improve relations with Russia.” And so, said Kalugin, “I spoke with all my intelligence assets, including Russian correspondents and various U.N. employees, and told them to spread the official Soviet line. In the end, our campaign succeeded.”

It sure did. American liberals swallowed the Soviet line. They not only reflexively accepted Soviet innocence, but they heartily and happily pointed the finger at American conservatives — their preferred enemy.

As for Ion Mihai Pacepa, he argues two primary points: 1) The KGB had a thorough, ongoing, and very successful disinformation campaign to blame the Kennedy assassination on domestic elements in the United States, from “right-wingers” and anti-communists to the CIA (as Kalugin affirmed); and 2) Picking up from his 2007 book, Programmed to Kill: Lee Harvey Oswald, the Soviet KGB, and the Kennedy Assassination, Pacepa believes (and I cannot confirm) that the Soviets were involved in the actual assassination, or at least in earlier steps leading toward or helping to precipitate the event.

As to the first point, Pacepa recalls the date November 26, 1963, four days after Kennedy’s death. On that day, Soviet General Aleksandr Sakharovsky landed unannounced in Bucharest, where he met with Pacepa and other high-level members of Romanian intelligence and leadership. This was to be his first stop in a “blitz” tour of top KGB “sister” services in the Communist Bloc. “From him,” recalls Pacepa, “we in the DIE [Romanian intelligence] learned that the KGB had already launched a worldwide disinformation operation aimed at diverting public attention away from Moscow in respect to the Kennedy assassination, and at framing the CIA as the culprit.” Nikita Khrushchev himself, said Sakharovsky, wanted it made clear to the sister services that “this was by far our first and most important task.” It was crucial “to spread our version about the assassination before Washington could spread its own, so that our disinformation machinery could plant the idea on virgin soil that the CIA was responsible for the crime.” They also circulated rumors that Lyndon Johnson specifically and the “military-industrial complex” generally had been involved.

To repeat: The Kremlin peddled deliberate disinformation about the alleged role of LBJ in killing Kennedy.

The effort would be called Operation Dragon. It became, said Pacepa, one of the most successful disinformation operations in contemporary history. Pacepa points to Hollywood film director Oliver Stone’s 1991 movie, JFK, which blamed the Kennedy assassination on a cabal that included the CIA, Lyndon Johnson, and the military-industrial complex. It was nominated for eight Academy Awards, and won two.

The material from Pacepa is just one source for this information. There are other excellent sources, but I need not lay them out here. Generally, they show how Moscow did its damnedest to direct eyes of suspicion elsewhere, especially toward “ultra-right” elements in the United States. Pravda would claim that American “reactionaries” were exploiting Kennedy’s death to try to “fan anti-Soviet and anti-Cuban hysteria.”

That’s the context we already knew — or should have known — prior to the new Trump declassification of a December 1, 1966 FBI memo titled, “Reaction of Soviet and Communist Party Officials to the Assassination of President John F. Kennedy.”

That document (click here) begins by noting that “officials of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union believed there was some well-organized conspiracy on the part of the ‘ultraright’ in the United States to effect a ‘coup.’ They seemed convinced that that assassination was not the deed of one man, but that it arose out of a carefully planned campaign in which several people played a part. They felt that those elements interested in utilizing the assassination and playing on anticommunist sentiments in the United States would then utilize this act to stop negotiations with the Soviet Union, attack Cuba and thereafter spread the war.”

As I’ve shown in the historical context above, this was precisely the Soviet Party line. Thus, this longtime secret FBI memo — only now released — merely reflected the Communist Party’s propaganda line at the time.

Speaking of which, in the next paragraph in the memo, the FBI repeated the Soviet line that sought to deflect any blame for the shooting on the far left, which is where it belonged: “It was the further opinion of the Soviet officials that only maniacs would think that the ‘left’ forces in the United States, as represented by the Communist Party, USA, would assassinate President Kennedy.”

Yeah, right. Only maniacs. This was classic communist mendacity.

The memo also added that “Soviet officials claimed that Lee Harvey Oswald had no connection whatsoever with the Soviet Union. They described him as a neurotic maniac who was disloyal to his own country and everything else.”

That was half-true. Yes, Oswald was disloyal to the United States of America, but he was fully loyal to the deadly ideology of communism.

The memo also reported — here going by a second unnamed source — that all the diplomatic personnel at the Soviet Mission in the United States were just broken up by the news of Kennedy’s death. It was a “considerable shock,” which they “very much regretted” to hear.

Sure, comrade. I bet the boys in the Kremlin were all torn up. Crocodile tears in Moscow for their beloved JFK.

Never stopping with just one lie, or a series of prevarications, the KGB whoppers smothered the FBI memo. Yet another unnamed Communist Party source alleged that “now” the KGB was suddenly “in possession of data purporting to indicate President Johnson was responsible for the assassination of the late President John F. Kennedy.”

Yes, LBJ. And on this blockbuster… well, that data was never supplied in the memo.

The remainder of the memo repeated the Kremlin’s pleas of innocence that it had no connection between Oswald and the Kennedy shooting, even as both the memo and Kremlin itself unavoidably acknowledged that Oswald had indeed visited the USSR in 1959, had expressed his desire to defect to the Soviet Union, had shared his willingness to offer his services to the communist cause, and had even met his wife back in the USSR. The noble apparatchiks (allegedly) rejected Oswald as “mentally unstable” and sent him home.

As usual, you see, the Kremlin’s hands were squeaky clean — no dirt, no blood. This ghastly regime that murdered tens of millions graciously “had no interest” in a U.S. Marine looking to enlist his sniper rifle in their righteous cause.

As if all of that hogwash isn’t enough to make one sick to the stomach at the steaming, putrid pile of bilious lies, the memo then claimed that “President Kennedy was held in high esteem by the Soviet government.”

That, my friends, is pure bilge. No one, not even the most naïve Camelot liberal usually easily duped by the Kremlin, buys that bunch of bunkum.

And still worse, the final two pages of the six-page memo concluded with (at last) a named source. Who was this source? It was one Gus Hall, longtime head of Communist Party, USA, and a contemptible Party hack that even Moscow didn’t trust. Good old comrade Gus chimed in on December 4, 1963, not even two full weeks after the Kennedy shooting, assuring an unnamed FBI source that the assassination “could have been done by no one other than the ‘ultraright.’”

Thanks, Gus.

After that, Gus literally headed back to his regular duty of pilfering Kremlin cash sent to subsidize his Party’s activities and cronies at CPUSA.

And finally, the FBI memo did, at last, mercifully, note that this angle on the Kennedy shooting by Communist Party USA had been set forth clearly in the Daily Worker. Yep, it sure had. The memo observed this common Party line in Moscow as well — namely, in Pravda, Izvestia, and other “news” organs.

So, in short, what we have here with this widely publicized declassified document from December 1966, released two weeks ago to great and growing fanfare in some circles — including conservative ones — is merely a rehash of once-moribund Soviet and Communist Party USA malicious misinformation.

The stirred up stench of old Kremlin lies still stinks so bad — with the denials and propaganda and disinformation so shameless — that it makes one wonder what Moscow was really seeking to cover up in November 1963.

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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The Politics of Hatred

Sen. Rand Paul is recovering from a blindside attack by his neighbor. Was it politically motivated? 

Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) was attacked from behind by his neighbor as he was mowing his own lawn (think about that for a minute) in Bowling Green, Kentucky, last Friday. “Senator Paul was blindsided and the victim of an assault. The assailant was arrested and it is now a matter for the police,” said Kelsey Cooper, Sen. Paul’s communications director. Paul suffered five broken ribs, including three displaced fractures. Clearly, that wasn’t very neighborly. And as details slowly emerge, it was worse than that.

The lawyer for Rene Boucher, the neighbor who attacked Paul, claims the dispute that precipitated the attack had nothing to do with politics but was over some “trivial” matter. He insisted, “Senator Paul and Dr. Boucher have been next-door neighbors for 17 years. They are also prominent members of the local medical community and worked together when they were both practicing physicians. The unfortunate occurrence of November 3rd has absolutely nothing to do with either’s politics or political agendas.” Perhaps, but it’s no secret that Paul and his neighbor are on opposite sides of the political spectrum and evidently have not spoken to each other in years.

There is an obvious reason why Boucher’s lawyer would seek to distance his client’s motivation from anything political. If it was political, then Boucher is looking at a federal rather than a state offense, and attacking a U.S. senator “on account of the performance of official duties” carries an 8 to 20 year prison term. At the very least, Boucher faces felony rather than misdemeanor charges due to the severity of the attack.

Irrespective of how this particular incident plays out, the fact that we are questioning if politics was a motive says much about the current state of our national political climate — a political climate in which congressional Republicans are targeted for assassination by a socialist. When Democrats, the mainstream media and popular culture feel entirely justified to regularly and falsely paint Republicans and conservatives as the party of racists and bigots, when Hillary Clinton labels Donald Trump’s supporters a “basket of deplorables,” and when the Left sees no problem resisting and calling for the impeachment of a justly elected president simply because they don’t like him, we have a real problem. This is type of hatred is the result of one side choosing to exploit identity politics. It remains to be seen if Paul’s neighbor was indeed driven by politically fueled hatred, but there is little question that on a national level America has a dangerously growing problem with “progressive” hate.

SOURCE

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Network News Ignores Clinton-DNC Bombshell

The broadcast evening newscasts on three major networks on Thursday didn’t mention bombshell revelations by former Democratic National Committee interim Chairwoman Donna Brazile.

Brazile has written in a new book that she discovered evidence that she said showed Hillary Clinton’s campaign “rigged” the Democratic presidential primary.

“ABC’s World News Tonight,” “NBC Nightly News” and “CBS Evening News” all didn’t report the allegations by Brazile on Thursday evening despite it receiving considerable coverage on cable news and in print and online media. Brazile was also trending as one of Twitter’s top topics on Thursday.

In excerpts released to Politico Thursday, Brazile writes in her new book, “Hacks: The Inside Story of the Break-ins and Breakdowns that Put Donald Trump in the White House,” that it “broke [her] heart” upon discovering evidence that she said showed the Clinton campaign “rigged” the Democratic nomination system.

SOURCE

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Russia:  More fake news from the Left

OMG! Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross held stake in a company that ships natural gas, and actually found natural gas producers who wanted to ship it. One of them was Russia.

Stop the presses!  Actually, in this case, they probably should have stopped the presses.

The breathless reporting by NBC News and the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists that Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross failed to disclose to Congress his financial stake in Navigator Holdings Ltd., a British company that ships natural gas and liquid petrochemicals, which did business with Russia — is utterly false and completely indefensible. Nothing was hidden from Congress.

So says Ross, in an exclusive interview with CNBC, saying, “That’s totally wrong. It was disclosed on the form 278 which is the financial disclosure form, in my case, three times,” Ross said.

The form with his interest in Navigator, listed openly on the Office of Government Ethics website, was filed by Ross on Dec. 19, 2016, before Ross was ever confirmed by the U.S. Senate in Feb. 2017.

That’s bad enough. But the allegation that a company that ships natural gas around the world, including from Russia — the number two producer of natural gas in the entire world second only to the U.S. — is somehow suspicious is laughable.

Just read the headlines.  “Offshore Trove Exposes Trump-Russia links and Piggy Banks of the Wealthiest 1 Percent.” “Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross benefits from business ties to Putin’s inner circle.”

This new red scare has reached a new low. This would make Sen. Joe McCarthy blush.

Navigator’s fleet includes 38 seafaring vessels that ship natural gas everywhere.

As for Russia, according to Navigator’s website, “Russia’s largest gas processing and petrochemicals company saw an opportunity to meet European demand for LPG from increased local production. A new terminal was constructed near St Petersburg, but Sibur still faced the challenge of sustaining exports during freezing winters. At the time, no adequately-sized ice class gas carriers existed. In partnership with Sibur, we explored the various vessel capabilities that would suit its intended trade routes. We then constructed four handysize vessels with ice class capability sufficient for operating in the harsh climate of the Baltic Sea.”

Does that sound incredibly suspicious? Like some espionage plot? No, it’s a business strategy to work with natural gas exporters by a company that specializes in shipping natural gas. Nothing more. It’s about as unusual as a paper boy delivering newspapers.

This company is five-by-five. A true innovator.

But the purveyors of this bit of fake news have no problems with simply playing on unfounded Russia hysteria and fears that have engulfed the U.S. press corps. This story is utterly irresponsible that fails in the most basic of fact checks or even of putting the facts it did have into any meaningful context.

To repeat, Ross did disclose his stake in Navigator prior to Senate consideration. And a natural gas shipping company doing business with a natural gas producer is not suspicious.

Are oil tankers suspicious, too? Russia exports a lot of oil, you know. Perhaps some Trump officials had ties to major oil companies.

Next thing you know, NBC News will publish secret documents that prove that Secretary of State Rex Tillerson once ran Exxon — a company that did business with Russia! Oh wait…

If this is what the state of the Russia debate in the U.S. has degenerated to, where now any business dealings are considered espionage, our discourse has become utterly poisoned by this Russia witch hunt.

What’s worse, to the extent that such innuendo apparently now leads to federal investigations and who knows what else, as in the case of former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort, we are in a truly dark place as nation.

To NBC and the Consortium, somehow, this rather benign business dealing proves the Trump-Russia nexus that everyone’s been looking for. It’s a despicable smear. Insanity, pure and utter bat guano. Just stop.

SOURCE

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How wrong they were
   
Time magazine’s cover story for the week of Nov. 6 is a classic. It blares: “The Wrecking Crew: How Trump’s Cabinet Is Dismantling Government As We Know It.” The New York Times ran a lead editorial complaining that team Trump is shrinking the regulatory state at an “unprecedented” pace.

Meanwhile, last week the stock market raced to new all-time highs; we had another blockbuster jobs report with another fall in the unemployment rate; and housing sales soared to their highest level in a decade.

Are the editors at Time and the Times so ideologically blinded that they are incapable of connecting the dots?

The U.S. economic revival of 3 percent growth has already defied the predictions of almost every Donald Trump critic. I vividly remember debating Hillary Clinton’s economic gurus during the campaign: They accused Trump and advisers such as myself of “lying” when we said that pro-growth policies would speed up economic growth to 3 to 4 percent.

Jason Furman, who chaired the Council of Economic Advisers under President Barack Obama, told reporters earlier this year that the chances of reaching 3 percent growth over a decade were about 1 in 25 — which is what many political experts said was Trump’s chance of winning the election. Another Obama economist, Alan Krueger, called the 3 percent growth forecast “extremely rosy.”

Larry Summers, a top economic adviser to Obama, questioned the “standards of integrity” of the Trump economic team’s forecast for 3 percent (or more) growth. “I do not see how any examination of U.S. history could possibly support the Trump forecast as a reasonable expectation,” he wrote in The Washington Post.

Congress weighed in, too. “This budget relies on absurd economic projections and pretend revenues that no credible economist would validate,” Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-WA) announced at a House budget hearing.

The sharp-penned Paul Krugman of The New York Times declared Trump’s growth forecast an act of “economic arrogance.” He said that the productivity improvement necessary for faster growth was as likely as “driverless flying cars” arriving “en masse.”

Admittedly, we shouldn’t read too much into six months of very good economic data (with 3 percent growth) or the booming stock market. These trends can always reverse course quickly. Trump’s more restrictive policies on trade and immigration could harm growth potential.

But so far the Trump haters have missed the call on the economy’s trajectory. Doubly ironic is that the same Obama-era economists who are trashing Trump’s increasingly realistic forecast of 3 percent growth are the ones who predicted 4 percent growth from the Obama budgets. Obama never came anywhere near 4 percent growth, and at the end of his second term, the economy grew at a pitiful 1.6 percent.

Under Obama, free enterprise and pro-business policies were thrown out the window. What was delivered was the weakest recovery from a recession since World War II, with a meager 2.2 percent average growth rate. Middle America felt it, which is why Trump won these forgotten Americans.

One reason that economist Larry Kudlow and I and others assured Donald Trump that 3 to 4 percent growth was achievable was that Trump could capitalize on the underperformance of the Obama years. Under Obama, business investment fell almost two-thirds below the long-term trend line — thanks to higher taxes on investment. Now, partly in anticipation of the tax cut, business spending keeps climbing.

Maybe the liberal economists and their shills in the media should show some humility. They should acknowledge they were dead wrong about how much Obamanomics was going to grow the economy and about how Trumponomics would crash the economy and the stock market. Or better yet, maybe the rest of us should all just stop listening to them.

SOURCE

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

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

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Communism’s Bloody Century

In the 100 years since Lenin’s coup in Russia, the ideology devoted to abolishing markets and private property has left a long, murderous trail of destruction

A century ago this week, communism took over the Russian empire, the world’s largest state at the time. Leftist movements of various sorts had been common in European politics long before the revolution of Oct. 25, 1917 (which became Nov. 7 in the reformed Russian calendar), but Vladimir Lenin and his Bolsheviks were different. They were not merely fanatical in their convictions but flexible in their tactics—and fortunate in their opponents.

Communism entered history as a ferocious yet idealistic condemnation of capitalism, promising a better world. Its adherents, like others on the left, blamed capitalism for the miserable conditions that afflicted peasants and workers alike and for the prevalence of indentured and child labor. Communists saw the slaughter of World War I as a direct result of the rapacious competition among the great powers for overseas markets.

But a century of communism in power—with holdouts even now in Cuba, North Korea and China—has made clear the human cost of a political program bent on overthrowing capitalism. Again and again, the effort to eliminate markets and private property has brought about the deaths of an astounding number of people. Since 1917—in the Soviet Union, China, Mongolia, Eastern Europe, Indochina, Africa, Afghanistan and parts of Latin America—communism has claimed at least 65 million lives, according to the painstaking research of demographers.

Communism’s tools of destruction have included mass deportations, forced labor camps and police-state terror—a model established by Lenin and especially by his successor Joseph Stalin. It has been widely imitated. Though communism has killed huge numbers of people intentionally, even more of its victims have died from starvation as a result of its cruel projects of social engineering.

For these epic crimes, Lenin and Stalin bear personal responsibility, as do Mao Zedong in China, Pol Pot in Cambodia, the Kim dynasty in North Korea and any number of lesser communist tyrants. But we must not lose sight of the ideas that prompted these vicious men to kill on such a vast scale, or of the nationalist context in which they embraced these ideas. Anticapitalism was attractive to them in its own right, but it also served as an instrument, in their minds, for backward countries to leapfrog into the ranks of great powers.

The communist revolution may now be spent, but its centenary, as the great anticapitalist cause, still demands a proper reckoning.

In February 1917, Tsar Nicholas II abdicated under pressure from his generals, who worried that bread marches and strikes in the capital of St. Petersburg were undermining the war effort against Germany and its allies. The February Revolution, as these events became known, produced an unelected provisional government, which chose to rule without the elected parliament. Peasants began to seize the land, and soviets (or political councils) started to form among soldiers at the front, as had already happened among political groups in the cities.

That fall, as the war raged on, Lenin’s Bolsheviks undertook an armed insurrection involving probably no more than 10,000 people. They directed their coup not against the provisional government, which had long since become moribund, but against the main soviet in the capital, which was dominated by other, more moderate socialists. The October Revolution began as a putsch by the radical left against the rest of the left, whose members denounced the Bolsheviks for violating all norms and then walked out of the soviet.

The Bolsheviks, like many of their rivals, were devotees of Karl Marx, who saw class struggle as the great engine of history. What he called feudalism would give way to capitalism, which would be replaced in turn by socialism and, finally, the distant utopia of communism. Marx envisioned a new era of freedom and plenty, and its precondition was destroying the “wage slavery” and exploitation of capitalism. As he and his collaborator Friedrich Engels declared in the Communist Manifesto of 1848, our theory “may be summed up in the single sentence: Abolition of private property.”

Once in power in early 1918, the Bolsheviks renamed themselves the Communist Party as they sought to force-march Russia to socialism and, eventually, to history’s final stage. Millions set about trying to live in new ways. No one, however, knew precisely what the new society was supposed to look like. “We cannot give a characterization of socialism,” Lenin conceded in March 1918. “What socialism will be like when it reaches its completed form we do not know, we cannot say.”

But one thing was clear to them: Socialism could not resemble capitalism. The regime would replace private property with collective property, markets with planning, and “bourgeois” parliaments with “people’s power.” In practice, however, scientific planning was unattainable, as even some communists conceded at the time. As for collectivizing property, it empowered not the people but the state.

The process set in motion by the communists entailed the vast expansion of a secret-police apparatus to handle the arrest, internal deportation and execution of “class enemies.” The dispossession of capitalists also enriched a new class of state functionaries, who gained control over the country’s wealth. All parties and points of view outside the official doctrine were repressed, eliminating politics as a corrective mechanism.

The declared goals of the revolution of 1917 were abundance and social justice, but the commitment to destroy capitalism gave rise to structures that made it impossible to attain those goals.

In urban areas, the Soviet regime was able to draw upon armed factory workers, eager recruits to the party and secret police, and on young people impatient to build a new world. In the countryside, however, the peasantry—some 120 million souls—had carried out their own revolution, deposing the gentry and establishing de facto peasant land ownership.

With the devastated country on the verge of famine, Lenin forced reluctant party cadres to accept the separate peasant revolution for the time being. In the countryside, over the objections of communist purists, a quasi-market economy was allowed to operate.

With Lenin’s death in 1924, this concession became Stalin’s problem. No more than 1% of the country’s arable land had been collectivized voluntarily by 1928. By then, key factories were largely owned by the state, and the regime had committed to a five-year plan for industrialization. Revolutionaries fretted that the Soviet Union now had two incompatible systems—socialism in the city and capitalism in the village.

Stalin didn’t temporize. He imposed coercive collectivization from the Baltic Sea to the Pacific Ocean, even in the face of mass peasant rebellion. He threatened party officials, telling them that if they were not serious about eradicating capitalism, they should be prepared to cede power to the rising rural bourgeoisie. He incited class warfare against “kulaks” (better-off peasants) and anyone who defended them, imposing quotas for mass arrests and internal deportations.

Stalin was clear about his ideological rationale. “Could we develop agriculture in kulak fashion, as individual farms, along the path of large-scale farms” as in “America and so on?” he asked. “No, we could not. We’re a Soviet country. We want to implant a collective economy, not solely in industry, but in agriculture.”

And he never backtracked, even when, as a result of his policies, the country descended into yet another famine from 1931 to 1933. Forced collectivization during those few years would claim 5 to 7 million lives.

The Soviet Union’s awful precedent did nothing to deter other communist revolutionaries. Mao Zedong, a hard man like Stalin, had risen to the top of the Chinese movement and, in 1949, he and his comrades emerged as the victors in the Chinese civil war. Mao saw the colossal loss of life in the Soviet experiment as intrinsic to its success.

His Great Leap Forward, a violent campaign from 1958 to 1962, was an attempt to collectivize some 700 million Chinese peasants and to spread industry throughout the countryside. “Three years of hard work and suffering, and a thousand years of prosperity,” went one prominent slogan of the time.

Falsified reports of triumphal harvests and joyful peasants inundated the communist ruling elite’s well-provisioned compound in Beijing. In reality, Mao’s program resulted in one of history’s deadliest famines, claiming between 16 and 32 million victims. After the catastrophe, referred to by survivors as the “communist wind,” Mao blocked calls for a retreat from collectivization. As he declared, “the peasants want ‘freedom,’ but we want socialism.”

Nor did this exhaust the repertoire of communist brutality in the name of overthrowing capitalism. With their conquest of Cambodia in 1975, Pol Pot and his Khmer Rouge drove millions from the country’s cities into the countryside to work on collectives and forced-labor projects. They sought to remake Cambodia as a classless, solely agrarian society.

The Khmer Rouge abolished money, banned commercial fishing and persecuted Buddhists, Muslims and the country’s ethnic Vietnamese and Chinese minorities as “infiltrators.” Pol Pot’s regime also seized children to pre-empt ideological infection from “capitalist” parents.

All told, perhaps as many as 2 million Cambodians, a quarter of the population, perished as a result of starvation, disease and mass executions during the four nightmarish years of Pol Pot’s rule. In some regions, skulls could be found in every pond.

Marx’s class analysis denied legitimacy to any political opposition, not just from “bourgeois” elements but from within communist movements themselves—because dissenters “objectively” served the interests of the international capitalist order. The relentless logic of anticapitalist revolution pointed to a single leader atop a single-party system.

From Russia and China to Cambodia, North Korea and Cuba, communist dictators have shared key traits. All have conformed, more or less, to the Leninist type: a fusion of militant ideologue and unprincipled intriguer. And all have possessed an extreme willpower—the prerequisite for attaining what only unspeakable bloodshed could bring.

Communism was hardly alone over the past century in committing grand carnage. Nazism’s repression and wars of racial extermination killed at least 40 million people, and during the Cold War, anticommunism spurred paroxysms of grotesque violence in Indonesia, Latin America and elsewhere.

But as evidence of communism’s horrors emerged over the decades, it rightly shocked liberals and leftists in the West, who shared many of the egalitarian aims of the revolutionaries. Some repudiated the Soviet Union as a deformation of socialism, attributing the regime’s crimes to the backwardness of Russia or the peculiarities of Lenin and Stalin. After all, Marx had never advocated mass murder or Gulag labor camps. Nowhere did he argue that the secret police, deportation by cattle car and mass death from starvation should be used to establish collective farms.

But if we’ve learned one lesson from the communist century, it is this: That to implement Marxist ideals is to betray them. Marx’s demand to “abolish private property” was a clarion call to action—and an inexorable path to the creation of an oppressive, unchecked state.

A few socialists began to recognize that there could be no freedom without markets and private property. When they made their peace with the existence of capitalism, hoping to regulate rather than to abolish it, they initially elicited denunciations as apostates. Over time, more socialists embraced the welfare state, or the market economy with redistribution. But the siren call to transcend capitalism persists among some on the left.

It also remains alive, though hardly in orthodox Marxist fashion, in Russia and China, the great redoubts of the communist century. Both countries continue to distrust what is perhaps most important about free markets and private property: Their capacity to give independence of action and thought to ordinary people, pursuing their own interests as they see fit, in private life, civil society and the political sphere.

But anticapitalism also served as a program for an alternative world order, one in which long-suppressed nationalist aims might be realized. For Stalin and Mao, heirs to proud ancient civilizations, Europe and the U.S. represented the allure and threat of a superior West. The communists set themselves the task of matching and overtaking their capitalist rivals and winning a central place for their own countries on the international stage. This revolutionary struggle allowed Russia to satisfy its centuries-old sense of a special mission in the world, while it gave China a claim to be, once again, the Middle Kingdom.

Vladimir Putin’s resistance to the West, with his peculiar mix of Soviet nostalgia and Russian Orthodox revival, builds on Stalin’s precedent. For its part, of course, China remains the last communist giant, even as Beijing promotes and tries to control a mostly market economy. Under Xi Jinping, the country now embraces both communist ideology and traditional Chinese culture in a drive to raise its standing as an alternative to the West.

Communism’s bloody century has come to an end, and we can only celebrate its passing. But troubling aspects of its legacy endure.

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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