Why do you hate Israel? The question that hangs over the left, and which no one can answer

Brendan O'Neill below is principally talking about the British Left but to a lesser degree the same applies to the USA.  There's certainly plenty of Leftist hate of Israel on U.S. campuses

Why do you hate Israel more than any other nation? Why does Israel anger you more than any other nation does? Why do Israel’s military activities aggravate you and disturb your conscience and provoke you to outbursts of street protesting or Twitter-fury in a way that no other state’s military activities do? These are the questions that hang darkly over today’s so-called progressives. Which eat away at their self-professed moral authority, at their claims to be practitioners of fairness and equality. They are the questions to which no satisfactory answer has ever been given. So they niggle and fester, expertly avoided, or unconvincingly batted away, a black question mark over much of the modern left: why Israel?

The question has returned in recent days, following violent clashes on the border between the Gaza Strip and Israel. Like clockwork, with a predictability that now feels just mostly depressing, these clashes that resulted in the deaths of many protesting Palestinians magically awoke an anti-imperialist, anti-war instinct among Western observers that was notably, stubbornly, mysteriously dormant when Turkey recently laid waste to the Kurdish town of Afrin or during any of the recent Western-backed Saudi barbarism visited upon the benighted people of Yemen.

A member of the IDF raises his gun and suddenly the right-minded of the West switch off Spotify, take to Twitter, engage their emotional fury, and say: ‘NO.’ Their political lethargy lifts, their placards are dusted down, and they remember that war and violence are bad. They even go on to the streets, as people did in London and across Europe in recent days. This is evil, they declaim, and that question rises up again, silently, awkwardly, usually ignored: why is this evil but Turkey’s sponsored slaughter of hundreds of Kurdish civilians and fighters in Afrin was not? Why Israel?

Israeli activity doesn’t only elicit a response from these campaigners where Turkish or Saudi or Syrian activity does not – it always elicits a visceral response. The condemnation of Israel is furious and intense, the language used about it is dark, strikingly different to the language used about any other state that engages in military activity. Israel is never just wrong or heavy-handed or a country that ‘foolishly rushes to war’, as protesters would say about Tony Blair and Iraq, and very occasionally about Obama and Libya, and, if they were pressed for an opinion, would probably say about the Turks and the Saudis, too.

No, Israel is genocidal. It is a terrorist state, a rogue state, an apartheid state. It is mad, racist, ideological. It doesn’t do simple militarism – it does ‘bloodletting’; it derives some kind of pleasure from killing civilians, including children. As one observer said during the clashes at the Gaza border, Israel kills those whose only crime is to have been ‘born to non-Jewish mothers’. Israel hates. This Jewish State is the worst state, the most bloodthirsty state.

Following the deaths of 18 Palestinians on the Gaza border, Glenn Greenwald denounced Israel as an ‘apartheid, rogue, terrorist state’, like a man reaching for as many ways as possible to say ‘evil’. One left-wing group says Israel’s behaviour at the Gaza border confirms it is enforcing a ‘slow genocide’ on the Palestinians. The ‘scale of the bloodletting’ is horrifying, says one radical writer. Israel loves to draw blood. A writer for Al-Jazeera says the clashes are a reminder that Israel has turned Gaza into ‘the biggest concentration camp on the surface of the Earth’.

And that question, that unanswerable, or certainly unanswered, question, rises up once more: why is Gaza a concentration camp but Yemen, which has been subject to a barbaric sea, land and air blockade since 2015 that has resulted in devastating shortages of food and medicine, causing famine and the rampant spread of diseases like cholera, is not? By any measurement, the blockade on Yemen is worse than any restrictions that have been placed on Gaza. People in Gaza are not starving to death or contracting cholera in their tens of thousands, as Yemenis are. Yet Gaza is a concentration camp while Yemen, when they can be bothered to comment on it, is a war zone. Israel is agitated against, Saudi Arabia is not. Saudi Arabia makes war; Israel commits ‘genocide’, it builds ‘concentration camps’, it carries out ‘terrorism’. And they should know better, these Jews. That is the subtext, always: the victims of genocide turned genocidal maniacs.

Across the mainstream, Israeli activity is always treated differently. The Gaza clashes were frontpage news in a way that the worse horrors of Afrin just days and weeks earlier rarely were. Left-leaning politicians, including leaders of the UK Labour Party, tweet stern condemnations of Israel’s shootings on the Gaza border where they were silent, or at least more restrained, in relation to Turkey and the Kurds.

Academic and cultural institutions boycott Israel where they do not boycott Turkey, or China, or Russia, or America and Britain for that matter, which have done their fair share of bad things – ‘bloodletting’? – in the Middle East in recent years. That only Israel is boycotted by the self-styled guardians of the West’s moral conscience, by our cultural and academic elites, constantly communicates the idea that Israel is different. It is worse. It stands above every other state in terms of wickedness and hatred and war. BDS institutionalises the idea that Israel is alien among the nations, a pock among countries, the lowest, foulest state. It is a bleak irony that BDS activists holler ‘apartheid!’ or ‘racist!’ at Israel while subjecting Israel to a kind of cultural apartheid and contributing to the ugly view of this state, this Jewish state, as the maddest state, the state most deserving of your anger and even your hatred.

There have been attempts to answer that question, that looming question of ‘Why Israel?’, especially following recent controversies over the expression of anti-Semitic ideas in left-wing circles, including in Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party. But the answers have been spectacularly unconvincing. Israel deserves Western campaigners’ special fury because it is backed by Western leaders, our leaders, they say. So is Turkey. And the Saudis. Israel’s repression of the Palestinians has been going on for a very long time and so it feels like a grave injustice we must address, they argue. And Turkey’s war against the Kurds hasn’t been going on for a long time? Israel punishes Palestinians culturally and politically and that makes it a special case, they claim, as they throw around terms like ‘apartheid’ to describe life in and between Israel and the Palestinian Territories and in the process distort the reality of what happens there.

But again there is Turkey, disrupting their thin, self-serving narrative. Turkey genuinely seeks to strip away the cultural heritage and language and aspiration to independence of the Kurds, and on that they say nothing, or certainly little. They don’t gather outside theatres in London when Turkish actors perform there. They don’t shout down Turkish violinists at the Proms. They don’t demand that Turkish academics and their books be expelled from American and British universities. No, only Israelis. Only them. Only those people.

There is no getting away from it: the thing that is really unique about Israel is how much they hate it. Israel stands out not because of what it does, but because of how they talk about what it does: as strange, bloody, vindictive, disruptive, genocidal, this ‘gang of thugs indoctrinated by an ideology that dehumanises children’, as the Al-Jazeera writer described Israel this week. Say it, why don’t you. They are fascists. The victims of fascism now practise fascism. This is the sentiment behind much of the myopic focus on Israel: that the Jews now do to others what people once did to them.

Even though actually they don’t. Even though they do nothing that bears even the remotest resemblance to the Nazis’ effort to exterminate the Jews. And yet on anti-Israel demos, placards compare Gaza to the Warsaw Ghetto, people implore the Jews to remember their own suffering, Israeli flags with swastikas on them are held up. This is not anti-imperialist, it is anti-Jewish; it is the gravest insult to say that Jews or the Jewish State are the new Nazis, and they know it is a grave insult.

The treatment of Israel as uniquely colonialist, as an exemplar of racism, as the commissioner of the kind of crimes against humanity we thought we had left in the darkest moments of the 20th century, really captures what motors today’s intense fury with Israel above all other nations: it has been turned into a whipping boy for the sins of Western history, a punch-bag for those who feel shame or discomfort with the political and military excesses of their own nations’ pasts and who now register that shame and discomfort by raging against what they view, hyperbolically, as a lingering expression of that past: Israel and its treatment of the Palestinians.

They heap every horror of the past on to Israel, hence their denunciation of it as ideological, racist, imperialistic, even genocidal – in their eyes, and courtesy of their campaigning, Israel comes to symbolise the crimes of yesteryear. So when 18 Palestinians are killed, it is not simply a tragedy, it is not simply excessive, it is certainly not something that requires serious, nuanced discussion, including about the role of Hamas in organising such protests in order to shore up international sympathy for Palestinian victimhood. No, it is an act that reminds us of the entire history of colonialism and racial chauvinism and of concentration camps and genocide, because this is what Israel now reminds people of; they project their post-colonial guilt and scepticism about the Western project on to this tiny state in the Middle East.

The rage against Israel is actually more therapeutic than political. It is not about seriously addressing the reality of life and conflict in the Middle East, but rather is driven by the narrow needs of Western observers and activists for an entity they can fume against in order to give release to their own sense of historical and political disorientation. But the impact of this therapeutic rage, this almost primal-scream therapy against Israel, is dire. It contributes to the growing conspiratorial view that certain people, you know who they are, have a uniquely disruptive influence on international affairs, political life, and everyday safety and security.

‘It isn’t anti-Semitic to criticise Israel’, observers say, and they are absolutely right. Every nation state must be open to criticism and protest. But if you only criticise Israel, or you criticise Israel disproportionately to every other state, and if your criticism of Israel is loaded with Holocaust imagery and talk of bloodletting, and if you boycott Israel and no other nation, and if you flatter the dark imaginings of the far right and Islamists and conspiracy theorists by fretting over a super powerful Israel Lobby, and if the sight of an Israeli violinist is too much for you to stomach, then, I’m sorry, that has the hallmarks of anti-Semitism.

SOURCE 

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Trump Overhauls Medicaid, Food Stamps and Public Housing in Landmark Executive Order

This is change conservatives can really believe in. While much of the mainstream media was occupied with analyzing Monday’s FBI raid on President Donald Trump’s personal lawyer, the president himself was making a different kind of history earlier this week by overhauling the country’s welfare programs to make able-bodied recipients work or risk losing their benefits.

In an executive order signed Tuesday, Trump imposed a 90-day deadline for all federal agencies that administer aid programs to review their work requirements and come up with ways to make them stronger.

As Investor’s Business Daily noted, the federal government has plenty of examples of states that have cut their welfare rolls and put recipients back to work by imposing work requirements.

Alabama, Arkansas and Kentucky are among the states that have decided that making work a requirement for public aid is good for the public coffers as well as the recipient.

Trump’s executive order is titled “Reducing Poverty in America by Promoting Opportunity and Economic Mobility” and that pretty sell sums up the rationale. It states in part (emphasis added):

“The federal government should do everything within its authority to empower individuals by providing opportunities for work, including by investing in federal programs that are effective at moving people into the workforce and out of poverty.  It must examine federal policies and programs to ensure that they are consistent with principles that are central to the American spirit — work, free enterprise, and safeguarding human and economic resources.  For those policies or programs that are not succeeding in those respects, it is our duty to either improve or eliminate them.”

Basically, welfare that simply prolongs dependency by families across generations is bad for the families involved, it’s bad for the American spirit, and it’s bad for a system of government that depends on the informed choices of the governed.

In a nutshell, individuals who work for their own living are individuals who can be functioning parts of a democracy. Of course, poor people on welfare have the right to vote. But they might be a little more careful how public dollars are spent if they were actually contributing to them.

While the executive order went largely unreported by the mainstream media — FBI raids on the president’s lawyer are so much sexier than substantive policy changes — the measure is a sign of just how adept the still-young Trump administration is becoming at handling the twin responsibilities of foreign policy challenges and domestic policy reforms.

While facing a crisis in Syria that ultimately culminated (for the moment) in Friday’s missile strikes in conjunction with Britain and France, Trump still had time to issue an executive order overhauling key elements of the welfare state.

On social media, many liberals — as they always do — cried about the unfairness of making public assistance recipients work for their benefits. But for many conservatives, the action was yet another step in the direction of dumping the Barack Obama legacy of swelling the country’s food-stamp rolls.

Of course, liberals are screaming, because the power of liberal government in a democracy grows with every citizen who is dependent on the government.

That’s why liberals love public employees — they’re dependent on the government, too — and welfare recipients.

Since Trump took office, he has made it clear he doesn’t feel obligated to grow the federal bureaucracy, and with this latest executive order, he’s taking a concrete step to reduce the number of Americans who depend on the government for their daily bread.

Cutting federal payrolls. Cutting the welfare rolls.

After eight years of Obama swelling both, that’s definitely change a conservative can believe in.

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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Trump and the White Helmets

Churchill once described the Soviet Union as "a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma". The same could be said of Syria at the moment.  Ascertaining what is actually going on there is very difficult and dogged with disinformation from several sources.  A major reason for that is the sheer danger of being there at all. So the Western media seem to have no-one on the ground there at all.  They are not going to risk the precious Leftist skins of their journalists just for the sake of the truth. They rely on feeds from Syria which are all likely to be compromised.

And that is where the White Helmets come in.  They masquerade as peace and humanitarian workers and have been adopted by the West.  It appears however that they are all old El Qaeda supporters.  Since nobody else was claiming to be peace workers, the Western authorities have done a Nelson and turned a blind eye to the dubious origins of the White Helmets. With Osama bin Laden dead and ISIS stealing their thunder, El Qaeda is a shadow of its former self but it has not gone away. And it is the White Helmets who are the sources principally relied on by the Western media for their news feeds out of Syria.

So it is entirely likely that Russia is right in claiming that the chemical weapon attacks in Syria were in fact a put-up job by the White Helmets. Who was in a position to question what the White Helmets said?  There seems little doubt that two chemical attacks did happen.  Nobody is questioning that.  The big issue is "Who dun it?".  Who was responsible for it?

You can work out the answer to that by looking at what nearly happened if Mr Trump had fallen for it.  The White Helmets very nearly started a war between the USA and Russia!   What rejoicing throughout Syria that would have generated!  So I think all logic is on the side of the Russian account.

And Trump was initially taken in.  But wise counsel obviously got to him and pointed out the difficulty of pinning responsibility for the deaths on anyone.  Trump then did a big backtrack and said that an American strike would happen "maybe never".  That was his response to the difficulty of assigning blame.  He was prepared to do nothing in the circumstances.

Then President Macron of France waded into the issue and strongly suggested that France would strike at Syria.  Macron claimed to have complete proof that Assad was responsible.  On what grounds?  Much flimsier grounds than he claimed.  I have read Macron's dossier and it is all "highly probable" claims -- guesswork in other words.

But Trump liked the idea of a joint French/British/American strike on Syria.  American relations with Britain and France have been under strain ever since Trump got into office and this was a great opportunity to restore co-operation and friendship. It was too good to miss

But what about the target?  Targeting any of the Russian/Syrian facilities in Syria would be just what El Qaeda wanted -- so the targets had to be non-military. So alleged centers of chemical weapon production and design were the perfect target. They would be good targets even if no gas attacks had occurred. Chemical weapons are just always BAD! No excuses needed for attacking them.

That Russia was not directly involved with those targets was shown by the fact that all of the cruise missiles appear to have gotten  through and no planes were lost.  Cruise missiles are SLOW -- about the same speed as a Boeing airliner -- and the feared Russian S-400 anti-aircraft battery could have slaughtered them. Obvious conclusion:  The S-400 was not deployed to protect those targets.  The S-400 appears to have been deployed to protect only the joint Russian/Syrian airbase near Latakia.

So the Syrian and Russian armed forces are intact and able to operate as before despite all the huffing and puffing about how evil they are.  Neither Mr Assad nor Mr Putin are likely to be too put out.

Conclusion:  The raid got big kudos for Trump from almost everybody -- at minimal cost and at only symbolic damage to Russia.  Mr Trump is a statesman for the ages. He navigated a brilliant path though a very dangerous challenge.

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Lavrov: Swiss lab says ‘BZ toxin’ used in Salisbury, not produced in Russia, was in US & UK service

The Skripal affair has always smelled.  The British government rushed to blame Russia (sorry for the pun) long before it had any evidence of Russian involvement in the poisoning.  And initially the British chemical weapons establishment at Porton Down said it could not tell where the chemical agent came from.  The alleged Novichok agent is an old one and there are quite a few derivatives of it that are used in a number of countries -- so certainty about blame was always going to be difficult.  Eventually, presumably under political pressure, Porton Down changed its mind and said the stuff definitely came from Russia.

I was relating all this to a friend who had been out of contact with the news for a couple of months.  I noted that the alleged Novichok had not in fact killed anyone and all those affected were making a good recovery.  He guffawed at that, saying:  "If Russia had done it they would be dead".  That is my conclusion too.

And how is it that Britain refuses to hand over to Russia any samples of the not-so-deadly agent?  What are they afraid  Russia might find?  Only the Americans and the Swiss have been given samples.  But the Swiss are people of considerable integrity and it seems that they have denied that any Novichok was present in the samples. So the whole coverup of Mrs May's rush to a mistaken judgment seems to be coming apart.  The poisoning seems to be some sort of amateur effort by parties unknown


The substance used on Sergei Skripal was an agent called BZ, according to Swiss state Spiez lab, the Russian foreign minister said. The toxin was never produced in Russia, but was in service in the US, UK, and other NATO states.

Sergei Skripal, a former Russian double agent, and his daughter Yulia were poisoned with an incapacitating toxin known as 3-Quinuclidinyl benzilate or BZ, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said, citing the results of the examination conducted by a Swiss chemical lab that worked with the samples that London handed over to the Organisation for the Prohibition of the Chemical Weapons (OPCW).

The Swiss center sent the results to the OPCW. However, the UN chemical watchdog limited itself only to confirming the formula of the substance used to poison the Skripals in its final report without mentioning anything about the other facts presented in the Swiss document, the Russian foreign minister added. He went on to say that Moscow would ask the OPCW about its decision to not include any other information provided by the Swiss in its report.

Lavrov said that the Swiss center that assessed the samples is actually the Spiez Laboratory. This facility is a Swiss state research center controlled by the Swiss Federal Office for Civil Protection and, ultimately, by the country’s defense minister. The lab is also an internationally recognized center of excellence in the field of the nuclear, biological, and chemical protection and is one of the five centers permanently authorized by the OPCW.

The Russian foreign minister said that London refused to answer dozens of “very specific” questions asked by Moscow about the Salisbury case, as well as to provide any substantial evidence that could shed light on the incident. Instead, the UK accused Russia of failing to answer its own questions, he said, adding that, in fact, London did not ask any questions but wanted Moscow to admit that it was responsible for the delivery of the chemical agent to the UK.

The scandal erupted in early March, when former double agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia were found in critical condition in the town of Salisbury. Top UK officials almost immediately pinned the blame on Russia.

Moscow believes that the entire Skripal case lacks transparency and that the UK is in fact not interested in an independent inquiry. "We get the impression that the British government is deliberately pursuing the policy of destroying all possible evidence, classifying all remaining materials and making a transparent investigation impossible," the Russian ambassador to the UK, Alexander Yakovenko, said during a press conference on Friday.

SOURCE

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How Ignorant We Are

By Walter E. Williams

Here's a question for you: In 1950, would it have been possible for anyone to know all of the goods and services that we would have at our disposal 50 years later? For example, who would have thought that we'd have cellphones, Bluetooth technology, small powerful computers, LASIK and airplanes with 525-passenger seating capacity?

This list could be extended to include thousands of goods and services that could not have been thought of in 1950. In the face of this gross human ignorance, who should be in control of precursor goods and services? Seeing as it's impossible for anyone to predict the future, any kind of governmental regulation should be extremely light-handed, so as not to sabotage technological advancement.

Compounding our ignorance is the fact that much of what we think we know is not true. Scientometrics is the study of measuring and analyzing science, technology and innovation. It holds that many of the "facts" you know have a half-life of about 50 years. Let's look at a few examples.

You probably learned that Pluto is a planet. But since August 2006, Pluto has been considered a dwarf planet. It's just another object in the Kuiper belt.

Because dinosaurs were seen as members of the class Reptilia, they were thought to be coldblooded. But recent research suggests that dinosaurs were fast-metabolizing endotherms whose activities were unconstrained by temperature.

Years ago, experts argued that increased K-12 spending and lower pupil-teacher ratios would boost students' academic performance. It turned out that some of the worst academic performance has been at schools spending the most money and having the smallest class sizes. Washington, D.C., spends more than $29,000 per student every year, and the teacher-student ratio is 1-to-13; however, its students are among the nation's poorest-performing pupils.

At one time, astronomers considered the size limit for a star to be 150 times the mass of our sun. But recently, a star (R136a1) was discovered that is 265 times the mass of our sun and had a birth weight that was 320 times that of our sun.

If you graduated from medical school in 1950, about half of what you learned is either wrong or outdated. For an interesting story on all this, check out Reason magazine. Ignorance can be devastating. Say that you recently purchased a house. Was it the best deal you could have gotten? Was there some other house within your budget that would have needed fewer extensive repairs 10 years later and had more likable neighbors and a better and safer environment for your children? What about the person you married? Was there another person available to you who would have made for a more pleasing and compatible spouse?

Though these are important questions, the most intelligent answer you can give to all of them is: "I don't know." If you don't know, who should be in charge of making those decisions? Would you delegate the responsibility to Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, Donald Trump, Ben Carson or some other national or state official?

You might say, "Stop it, Williams! Congressmen and other public officials are not making such monumental decisions affecting my life." Try this. Suppose you are a 22-year-old healthy person. Rather than be forced to spend $3,000 a year for health insurance and have $7,000 deducted from your salary for Social Security, you'd prefer investing that money to buy equipment to start a landscaping business. Which would be the best use of the $10,000 you earned — purchasing health insurance and paying into Social Security or starting up a landscaping business? More importantly, who would be better able to make that decision — you or members of the United States Congress?

The bottom line is that ignorance is omnipresent. The worst kind of ignorance is not knowing just how ignorant we are. That leads to the devastating pretense of knowledge that's part and parcel of the vision of intellectual elites and politicians.

SOURCE

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Federal Government Has Cut 21,000 Jobs Under Trump

The federal government cut an additional 1,000 jobs in March, bringing the total number of federal government jobs eliminated since President Donald Trump took office to 21,000, according to data released today by the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

In December 2016, the month before Trump was inaugurated, the federal government employed 2,810,000. In March 2018, that was down to 2,789,000.

While the federal workforce has been downsizing since December 2016, the overall government workforce in the United States has been increasing—thanks to an increase in employment by local governments.

Total government employment in the country (including federal, state and local government employment) has climb by 20,000 since December 2016—rising from 22,306,000 that month to 22,326,000 this March.

Like the federal government, state governments have cut employment. In December 2016, state governments employed 5,145,000. In March 2018, they employed 5,113,000—a decline of 32,000. In March alone, state governments cut 1,000 jobs—dropping from 5,114,000 in February to 5,113,000 in March.

But state local governments increased their employees from 14,351,000 in December 2016 to 14,424,000 in March 2018—a climb of 73,000. From February to March, local government employment increased by 3,000, rising from 14,421,000 to 14,424,000.

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 View’ Pushes Panic That ‘Trump Could Turn America Into a Fascist Country’
 
These brainless old hens show vividly that they are just scratching around in the dust and have no clue about their subject.  Both Mussolini and Hitler were energetic socialists.  Where are Trump's socialist tendencies?  

It was Obama who tried to do an end-run around Congress with "a pen and a phone".  That pen and phone created a whole host of regulations -- which Trump is now busily abolishing.  So who is the Fascist again?

Once again we have that good ol' Leftist projection: Blaming on  others what is true of themselves. Freud would understand.

Note: To protect myself from the speech police, I should note that I don't claim the ladies ARE old hens.  Their behaviour just reminds me of old hens scratching for minutiae in the dirt


The women of The View, Tuesday, eagerly promoted the idea that a fascist Donald Trump might bring a dictatorial reign to America. Promoting ex-Secretary of State Madeleine Albright’s new book, the ABC show’s announcer panicked: “Why is former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright warning that President Trump could turn America into a fascist country?”

Previewing Albright’s appearance on the show, the announcer hyped: “Still ahead, former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright on why she says Donald Trump is the most anti-democratic president in American history.”

Co-host Sara Haines uncritically promoted the threat of fascism under Trump:

We want to talk about your book. So Fascism: A Warning. You write, “Some may view this book and its title as alarmist, good.” That's your quote. Coming from you, that should scare a lot of people. Are you actually afraid that America could become a fascist nation?

Trump has been president for over a year and the 2018 midterms are still scheduled for November 6, 2018. If you believe the media, the Republicans are headed for an electoral wipe out. So, it’s a little hard to see where the fascism comes in.

Albright vaguely explained how her book, which mentions Hitler and Mussolini, compares to current politics: “I'm worried about some of the steps that take place and the reason I wrote the book is really historical in terms of what happens in other countries.”

Joy Behar helpfully announced “attack on the press” and “lying” as examples of Trump’s connection to fascism. However, on January 5, 2016, Behar admitted that Ted Kennedy abandoning a woman to drown and Bill Clinton lying about sexual abuse don’t matter to her:

People have to understand, it's policy. Teddy Kennedy. Remember Chappaquiddick?.... A girl drowns and he abandons her and she drowned and women still voted for Teddy Kennedy. Why? Because he voted for women's rights. That's why. That's the bottom line of it in my opinion. I mean, I don't like either one of them, to tell you the truth, Teddy or Bill. They're both dogs as far as I'm concerned. But I still will vote for Bill Clinton because he votes in my favor.

So maybe her concerns about “fascism” ring a little hollow

More HERE

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Trump Derangement Syndrome is getting bad

Bill Kristol, in an attempt to stay relevant, has shown just how crazy he has become. Kristol is the founding director of Republicans for the Rule of Law, a group dedicated to protecting Special Council Robert Mueller. Kristol intends to run the ads during Fox and Friends in the hope of reaching the President. Kristol, like most establishment Republicans, want an endless investigation into President Trump in the hopes he will be impeached, and they can regain control of the party they believe belongs to them. Kristol and his ilk have proven they will stop at nothing to end the presidency of Trump, even if they have to spit on everything they’ve ever done in the past.

Mr. Kristol himself was once considered a standard bearer of conservativism but has caught a full-blown case of Trump Derangement Syndrome (TDS). Symptoms include ignoring potential crimes and constitutional violations committed by those going after President Trump.

One of the more obvious examples of Kristol’s TDS was his mocking of the memo produced by the House Intelligence Committee, known as the Nunes memo. In a Twitter post, Kristol bashed the Nunes memo calling the information in the memo “embarrassing.” What most people found embarrassing was the idea the FBI and DOJ misled the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) and used a political opposition research document to spy on political opponents. Apparently, Kristol is okay with police state tactics as long as he is the beneficiary.

If Kristol and cohorts knew how to use google, they could easily find several instances in Mueller’s career where he acted less than honorable.

During the 1980s Robert Mueller was an assistant U.S. attorney then acting U.S. attorney in Boston. During this time, under his supervision, the FBI was running an informant one James “Whitey” Bulger. While under the protection of the FBI and DOJ, Bulger would expand his criminal empire. Also, during this time, Bulger divulged that four men convicted of murder in 1965 were innocent.

Did the FBI and DOJ look into the case to clear the innocent men? No, in fact, Muller wrote letters to parole and pardon boards to keep the men in prison after the FBI and DOJ knew of their innocence. The actions of the DOJ and FBI were so egregious, in 2007 a jury awarded more than $101 million in damages to the surviving men and their families, two of the men died in prison innocent of the crimes they were in prison for. Does this sound honorable?

What about the anthrax case? Hardly what one would call honorable service. According to Carl Cannon from Real Clear Politics, Robert Mueller zeroed in on one suspect, Steven Hatfill, while ignoring tips and evidence leading to the actual anthrax killer, Bruce Edwards Ivins. Carl Cannon stated, “the bureau was bullied into focusing on the government scientist by Democratic Sen. Patrick Leahy (whose office, along with that of Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle, was targeted by an anthrax-laced letter) and was duped into focusing on Hatfill by two sources – a conspiracy-minded college professor with a political agenda who’d never met Hatfill and by Nicholas Kristof, who put his conspiracy theories in the paper while mocking the FBI for not arresting Hatfill.”

Hatfill had his life turned upside down for years with the full weight of the federal government bearing down on him. After years of legal torture, the DOJ would drop the case, exonerate Hatfill, and pay him a seven-figure legal settlement. But perhaps the most insulting aspect of the case is the Director of the FBI, Robert Mueller couldn’t be troubled to apologize to Hatfill for years of harassment.

Is this what Bill Kristol considers honorable? Leaving innocent men in jail and harassing innocent suspects for years and not even apologizing when you are proven wrong does not seem to fit on the honorable scale I know.

Mr. Kristol may have more credibility if he could answer one question, what crime is Mueller investigating? Mr. Kristol cannot answer that question, because he does not care. In his hatred of President Trump, the former Republican has adopted tactics that would make Joseph Stalin proud. Mr. Kristol is apparently adopting the motto of the Soviet Secret Police, “Show me the man and I’ll find you the crime.” Kristol and his latest group seem to take more after Stalin than Washington.

This is a challenge issued to all Bill Kristol and all former federal prosecutors serving in Congress that keep covering up for Mueller, explain why Robert Mueller leaving innocent men in jail is honorable. Explain why Mueller ruining an innocent man’s life in a politically motivated investigation is honorable. They can’t, and they won’t. All their latest stunt is doing is proving what many grassroots limited government conservatives knew all along, there is no difference between them and the Democrats.

SOURCE

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All is well in Trumpland

A Leftist reports

While progressives focus on the Robert Mueller Russia investigation, the constant churn in White House staff, tariffs that seem to be backfiring, and the president’s unwillingness to read his notes prior to a phone call with Vladmir Putin, all is well — mostly — in Trumpland.

In my ongoing research with 450 voters from across the political spectrum, 225 voted for Donald Trump in the 2016 election. Despite the drama and chaos surrounding our president, over 90 percent of those who voted for him tell me that they have no regrets about their choice. To them, hope and change is finally here: a president whose outrage matches theirs, who is committed daily to focusing on their key issues, and who is moving at record speed. Says Theresa from Virginia, “The establishment is turning out to be the Titanic — and the rogue captain is off on a speedboat.”

The predominant theme for Trump voters is the economy. Jeff, a Wall Street executive, sends me statistics weekly about improvements in the Dow Jones, unemployment rates, and consumer confidence. For most, however, it’s more about how those metrics are affecting both their psyches and their pocketbooks. Just as Hillary Clinton’s remark about “deplorables” was the nail in the coffin for her candidacy, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s remark about tax cuts producing “crumbs” for workers made over 80 percent of my voters recoil. “I would like Pelosi to take a look at my paycheck,” says Hope from Ohio. “Maybe an extra $252 every month isn’t much to her or to the liberal elites, but to me, it has been life-changing.” Hope says her neighbors feel the same way, and that one neighbor was moved to tears when she saw the difference in her take-home pay. Ron, a conservative from Mississippi, agrees. “Down here, there is a feeling of momentum. In our churches and even in our bars, people are talking about more business, more pay and less taxes. I know that there are other issues in the country, but when you are in debt and trying to feed your family, not much else matters.”

People often ask me how Trump supporters can ignore the chaos in the White House, the character flaws, and the lying. It’s mostly because over half of Americans can’t make ends meet; people report how they pay more than half of their income in rent, avoid going to the doctor because they can’t afford the copayment, and lie awake at night worrying about whether they can pay utility bills. Says Stan, of West Virginia, who took on an extra evening job temporarily so that his family could travel to his niece’s wedding: “I am so tired that I barely know what those kids in Parkland are marching for.”

Trump supporters are troubled by the president’s behavior, but it doesn’t surprise them. Says Kenny from Louisiana, “I think Trump lies daily, and by that I mean, he’s a classic salesman. Everything is millions and billions, smooth and the best. He won’t be negative about anything. Do I think he has stuff in the closet that he doesn’t want out and may lie about? Yes. I couldn’t care less. He never preached he was a saint and then all of the sudden we found out he had horns. We all knew this and accepted it.”

“Trump was not my first, second, or third choice in the GOP pool,” says Lucinda from Kentucky. “I think he needs to quit tweeting and quit responding to personal attacks from the media and celebrities. He just needs to tweet about what he is doing for the country. To me, he is very immature, but performance-wise, he’s doing a great job.” Lucinda and others have a list of what they see as the president’s accomplishments: more than 2 million jobs created, the elimination of unnecessary regulations, reduced illegal immigration, the decline in the threat of ISIS, and the renegotiation of unfair trade agreements.

Adds Britta from Michigan, “Whenever we are appalled about Trump’s sexual misconduct, let’s remember that he is not the first sexual predator to occupy the Oval Office.”

Interestingly, two-thirds of Trump supporters tell me they believe that Mueller should be allowed to continue his investigation. Most believe that the special counsel’s effort is a very expensive “witch hunt,” but they believe that the optics of firing Mueller would mean that Trump has something to hide.

Translation: We like the economy, we like the progress, we don’t like the man very much.

When I ask Trump supporters about the Democrats, most no longer know what the party stands for. Some see a party that doesn’t represent them: They believe that the Democrats cater to the very rich (“celebrities, football players, and Ivy Leaguers”) or the very poor — but not to them. Or, they observe a party obsessed with racial and gender issues above all else. Phil, from Florida, responded by sending me a comic strip, showing a TV announcer: “Tonight we skip the tremendous growing economy and go straight to a bad word Trump said.”

Here’s the irony. Trump supporters tell me they are open to voting for people from either party whose priorities are close to theirs. They are especially interested in candidates “with good values” who care about helping them prosper. Says Jonas from New Mexico, “I just cannot see myself voting for a liberal Democrat who hates guns and loves abortion, like some of the leaders in Congress — but I can certainly get excited about some new, more reasonable leader who wants to help my children realize the American Dream.” This is partially why moderate Democratic candidates, like Doug Jones of Alabama and Conor Lamb of Pennsylvania, are succeeding. They are getting support both from progressives and from moderate Republicans, including those who voted for the President.

As the Democrats search for the soul of their party, these nuances make all the difference. Although the president lies, Trump supporters believe almost all politicians lie; although they don’t like the president’s style, they overlook it in support of priorities that matter to them; although they cringe at the president’s words, they support him because of what they feel he has accomplished. And, although they would never vote for someone on the far left, they are open to someone – Republican or Democrat – whom they believe has their back.

Until then, that brash, nasty guy remains their champion.

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 swamp is a huge drag on us all

Matt Ridley

While the world economy continues to grow at more than 3 per cent a year, mature economies, from Europe to Japan, are coagulating, unable to push economic growth above sluggish. The reason is that we have more and more vested interests against innovation in the private as well as the public sector.

Continuing prosperity depends on enough people putting money and effort into what the economist Joseph Schumpeter called creative destruction. The normal state of human affairs is what The jurist Sir Henry Maine called a “status” society, in which income is assigned to individuals by authority. The shift to a “contract” society, in which people negotiate their own rewards, was an aberration and it’s fading. I am writing this from Amsterdam and am reminded we caught the idea off the Dutch, whose impudent prosperity so annoyed the ultimate status king, Louis XIV.

In most western economies, it is once again more rewarding to invest your time and effort in extracting nuggets of status wealth, rather than creating new contract wealth, and it has got worse since the great recession, as zombie firms kept alive by low interest rates prevent the recycling of capital into new ideas. A new book by two economists, Brink Lindsey and Steven Teles, called The Captured Economy: How the Powerful Enrich Themselves, Slow Down Growth, and Increase Inequality, argues that “rent-seeking” behaviour — the technical term for extracting nuggets — explains the slow growth and rising inequality in the US.

They make the case that, in four areas, there is ever more opportunity to live off “rents” from artificial scarcity created by government regulation: financial services, intellectual property, occupational licensing and land use planning: “The rents enjoyed through government favouritism not only misallocate resources in the short term but they also discourage dynamism and growth over the long term.”

Here, too, hidden subsidies ensure that financial services are a lucrative closed shop; patents and copyrights reward the entertainment and pharmaceutical industries with monopolies known as blockbusters; occupational licensing gives those with requisite letters after their name ever more monopoly earning power; and planning laws drive up the prices of properties. Such rent seeking redistributes wealth regressively — that is to say, upwards — by creating barriers to entry and rewarding the haves at the expense of the have-nots. True, the tax and benefit system then redistributes income back downwards just enough to prevent post-tax income inequality from rising. But government is taking back from the rich in tax that which it has given to them in monopoly.

As an author, my future grandchildren will earn (modest) royalties from my books thanks to lobbying by American corporations to extend copyright to an absurd 70 years after I am dead. Yet there is no evidence that patents and copyrights incentivise innovation, except in a very few cases. Indeed, say Lindsey and Teles, the evidence suggests that “rents that now accrue to movie studios, record companies, software producers, pharmaceutical firms, and other [intellectual property] holders amount to a significant drag on innovation and growth, the very opposite of IP law’s stated purpose.”

[Thomas Babington Macaulay MP summarised an early attempt to extend copyright in a debate thus: "The principle of copyright is this. It is a tax on readers for the purpose of giving a bounty to writers. The tax is an exceedingly bad one; it is a tax on one of the most innocent and most salutary of human pleasures; and never let us forget, that a tax on innocent pleasures is a premium on vicious pleasures." A correspondent sends me the following details of this appalling saga: "Someone noted that there is a divergence in copyright term in the European Union.

All the then member states protect works for the life of the author plus fifty years while West Germany alone protects works for the life of the author plus seventy years. Immediately the copyright publishers suggested this as something in need of harmonisation. But instead of harmonising down to the norm, all the member states were lobbied to harmonise up to the unique German standard. As a result, Adolf Hitler's "Mein Kampf" which was going out of copyright in 1995 was suddenly revived and protected as a copyrighted work throughout the European Union.

Gilbert and Sullivan operettas whose copyright had been controlled by the stultifying hand of the D'Oyly Carte Opera Company found themselves in a position to once again stop anyone else performing Gilbert and Sullivan works or creating anything based upon them. It is not surprising that, following a brief flowering of new creativity when the Gilbert and Sullivan copyrights initially expired (e.g. Joseph Papp's production of Pirates on Broadway and the West End stage), since their revival by the European Union harmonisation legislation their use have become effectively moribund. A generation of young people are growing up without knowing anything about Gilbert and Sullivan - an art form which, it can be argued, gave birth to the modern American and British musical theatre."]

As for occupational licensing, Professor Len Shackleton of the University of Buckingham argues that it is mostly a racket to exploit consumers. After centuries of farriers shoeing horses, uniquely in Europe in 1975 a private members bill gave the Farriers Registration Council the right to prosecute those who shod horses without its qualification.

Then there are energy prices. Lobbying by renewable energy interests has resulted in a system in which hefty additions are made to people’s energy bills to reward investors in wind, solar and even carbon dioxide-belching biomass plants. The rewards go mostly to the rich; the costs fall disproportionately on the poor, for whom energy bills are a big part of their budgets.

An example of how crony capitalism stifles innovation: Dyson found that the EU energy levels standards for vacuum cleaners were rigged in favour of German manufacturers. The European courts rebuffed Dyson’s attempts to challenge the rules, but Dyson won on appeal and then used freedom of information requests to uncover examples of correspondence between a group of German manufacturers and the EU, while representations by European consumer groups were ignored.

So deeply have most businesses become embedded in government cronyism that it is hard to draw the line between private, public and charitable entities these days. Is BAE Systems or Carillion really a private enterprise any more than Oxford University, Oxfam, Oxfordshire county council or the NHS? All are heavily dependent on government contracts, favours or subsidies; all are closely regulated; all have well-paid senior managers extracting rent with little risk, and thickets of middle-ranking bureaucrats incentivised to resist change. Disruptive start-ups are rare as pandas; the vast majority work for corporate brontosaurs.

Capitalism and the free market are opposites, not synonyms. Some in the Tory party grasp this. Launching Freer, a new initiative to remind the party of the importance of freedom, two new MPs, Luke Graham and Lee Rowley, not only lambast fossilised socialism and anachronistic unions, but also boardrooms “peppered with oligarchical and monopolist cartels”.

One of the most insightful books of recent years was The Innovation Illusion by Fredrik Erixon and Björn Weigel, which argues that big companies increasingly spend their profits not on innovation but on share buybacks and other “rents”. Far from swashbuckling enterprise, much big business is “increasingly hesitant to invest and innovate”. Like Kodak and Nokia they resist having to reinvent themselves even unto death. Microsoft “was too afraid of destroying the value of Windows” to go where software was heading.

As a result, globalisation, far from being a spur to change, is an increasingly conservative force. “In several sectors, the growing influence of large and global firms has increasingly had the effect of slowing down market dynamism and reducing the spirit of corporate experimentation”.

The real cause of Trump-Brexit disaffection is not too much change, but too little. We need to “radically reduce the restrictive effect of precautionary regulation” and promote a new regulatory culture based on permissionless innovation, Erixon and Weigel say. “Western economies have developed a near obsession with precautions that simply cannot be married to a culture of experimentation”. Amen.

SOURCE

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Trump Signs Executive Order Pushing Work for Welfare

President Donald Trump signed an executive order Tuesday that aims to add and strengthen work requirements for public assistance and other welfare programs.

The order, signed in private, promotes "common-sense reforms" that policy adviser Andrew Bremberg said would reduce dependence on government programs.

"Part of President Trump's effort to create a booming American economy includes moving Americans from welfare to work and supporting and encouraging others to support common-sense reforms that restore American prosperity and help them reclaim their independence," he said.

The order focuses on looking for ways to strengthen existing work requirements and exploring new requirements for benefits such as food stamps, cash and housing assistance programs.

Trump has long accused beneficiaries of abusing government assistance programs and has claimed many who have no intention of working make more in benefits than those with jobs.

"I know people that work three jobs and they live next to somebody who doesn't work at all. And the person who is not working at all and has no intention of working at all is making more money and doing better than the person that's working his and her ass off," Trump said in November. During the campaign, he pledged that, under a Trump administration, families "trapped in welfare" would be "provided with jobs and opportunity."

Most people who use the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, who are able to hold jobs do work, but they don't earn enough to pay for food and cover other expenses. According to 2015 data from the Department of Agriculture, 44 percent of the total households using the SNAP program had someone in the family earning money.

The administration has made several moves pushing work for Medicaid recipients and those who use the SNAP program.

In January, officials announced that states would be able to impose work requirements for Medicaid. And they've proposed tightening the existing requirement that able-bodied adults who want to receive SNAP benefits for more than three months at a time must work in some capacity.

The proposal would raise the age limit for recipients who are exempt from the requirement and restrict the ability of states to offer waivers. The Department of Agriculture has been soliciting public comment on the issue.

The administration has also been exploring more stringent work requirements for those who receive assistance under the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program, as well as minimum weekly work hours for those who receive housing assistance.

The order gives various Cabinet secretaries 90 days to review the programs their agencies offer, and recommend possible changes.

Advocates argue that, while encouraging people to work is fundamentally a good thing, imposing strict requirements on already vulnerable populations, particularly when coupled with an aggressive effort to slash funding and shrink public assistance programs, could be disastrous for those in need.

Such requirements could have dire consequences for those already experiencing barriers to finding, and keeping, a job, including single mothers who can't afford child care, people who lack access to transportation and those who suffer from mental illness.

Rebecca Vallas, vice president of the Poverty to Prosperity Program at the Center for American Progress, said Trump's executive order served to reinforce myths about poverty in the U.S.

"By using dog-whistle terms like 'welfare,' Trump's trying to paint people who turn to Medicaid, SNAP, and other public programs as Reagan's mythical 'welfare queen' -- so we don't notice that he's coming after the entire working and middle class," Vallas tweeted.

The White House had once identified overhauling the welfare system as one of its top two legislative priorities for 2018, along with a major investment in infrastructure. But GOP leaders, including Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, told the president there was little chance of passing anything that needs Democrats' votes.

Trump appeared to agree as he huddled with GOP leaders at the Camp David presidential retreat in January.

"It's a subject that's very dear to our heart," Trump said then. "We'll try and do something in a bipartisan way. Otherwise, we'll be holding it for a little bit later."

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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More vindication for Trump

Chinese president Xi Jinping promised to open up economy and lower tariffs.  Xi vowed to slash car import tariffs and strengthen intellectual property rights, two key Trump gripes

The FTSE 100 hit a six-week high after relieved markets rallied on Chinese President Xi Jinping's keynote speech at the "Asian Davos" cooling trade tensions with Washington.

Markets rattled by the prospect of a severe disruption in trade between the world’s two largest economies were soothed by Xi’s olive branch to the White House.

Xi reinforced the Asian powerhouse’s commitment to open up its economy, setting out China’s stall to attract foreign investment in the shipbuilding, aviation and financial sectors.

Xi’s conciliatory tone pandered to Donald Trump’s criticisms on car tariffs and intellectual property rights but also warned against regressing to a “Cold War mentality” that could drive a growth-derailing wedge in international trade.

The Dow Jones — the US blue-chip index — surged as much as 2.2pc on opening in New York while London’s mining heavyweights, which are so reliant on the free flow of trade and consumption in China, climbed higher along with metal prices.

SOURCE 

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Whatever the Left Touches It Ruins (and it means to)

Dennis Prager
   
The only way to save Western civilization is to convince more people that leftism — not liberalism — is a nihilistic force. Quite literally, whatever the Left touches it ruins.

So, here is a partial listing of the damage done by the Left and the Democratic Party:

The most obvious — and, therefore, the one more and Americans can resonate with — is the near destruction of most American universities as places of learning. In the words of Harvard professor Steven Pinker — an atheist and a liberal — outside of the natural sciences and a few other disciplines (such as mathematics and business), “universities are becoming laughing stocks of intolerance.”

If you send your children to a university, you are endangering both their mind and their character. There is a real chance they will be more intolerant and more foolish after college than they were when they entered college.

When you attend an American university, you are taught to have contempt for America and its founders, to prefer socialism to capitalism, to divide human beings by race and ethnicity. You are taught to shut down those who differ with you, to not debate them. And you are taught to place feelings over reason — which is a guaranteed route to eventual evil.

The Left has ruined most of the arts. The following three examples are chosen because they are scatological, a favorite form of left-wing artistic expression. Before the Left poisoned the arts, art was intended to elevate the viewer (or listener). But to the Left, “elevate” is a meaningless term; it is far more at home depicting urine, fecal matter and menstrual blood.

In 2011, a lifelike German sculpture depicting a policewoman squatting and urinating — even the puddle is sculpted — received an award from a prestigious German foundation, the Leinemann Foundation for Fine Art.

In 2013, the Orange County Museum of Art in California placed a huge 28-foot sculpture of a dog outside the museum, where it periodically urinates a yellow fluid onto a museum wall.

In 2016, one of the most prestigious art museums in the world, the Guggenheim in New York, featured a pure-gold working toilet bowl, which visitors were invited to use. The name of the exhibit was “America” — so one could literally relieve oneself on America.

Thanks to the Left, The Philadelphia Orchestra, one of the greatest orchestras in the world, allowed itself to become of a voice of leftist hate last week. It featured the premiere of Philadelphia Voices, “a political rant put to musical garbage,” as some musically knowledgeable Philadelphians described it to me. In the fifth movement, titled “My House Is Full of Black People,” the black teen narrator chants the following lines: “The county is full of black people/ All wanting to be heard/ While old white men draw lines on maps/ To shut all of them up.” Later in the movement, he yells, “If you would all just f—ing listen!”

Uplifting, no?

On the Left, that’s considered art.

And, of course, such politicization of the arts is accepted as the norm. Indeed, that’s part of the Left’s poisoning of everything — its politicization of everything.

The Left is increasingly poisoning sports. In most football stadiums this past season, one could not attend an NFL game without being subjected to left-wing contempt for America and its flag.

So, too, one cannot watch late-night television if one desires to simply be entertained before drifting off to sleep. Jimmy Kimmel, Stephen Colbert and other hosts have changed late-night TV into left-night TV. Why merely be funny when you can use your monologues to advance your left-wing views?

The Left has poisoned mainstream religion. Mainstream Protestantism, non-Orthodox Judaism and much of the Catholic Church — including and especially Pope Francis — are essentially left-wing advocacy groups with religious symbols.

The Left is destroying the unique American commitment to free speech. Almost half of incoming college freshmen do not believe in free speech for what they deem “hate speech” (merely taking issue with a left-wing position is, in the Left’s view, “hate speech”). They do not understand that the whole point of free speech is allowing the expression of opposing ideas, including what we consider “hate speech.”

The Left has poisoned race relations. America is the least racist multiracial society in the world. On a daily basis, Americans of every race and ethnicity get along superbly. But the black Left and the white Left constantly poison young minds with hate-filled diatribes against whites, “white privilege,” “systemic racism,” black dorms, black graduations, lies about the events in Ferguson, Missouri, and the like.

The Left has made innumerable women unhappy, even depressed, with its decades of lying about how female sexual nature and male sexual nature are identical — leading to a “hookup” culture that leaves vast numbers of young women depressed — and its indoctrinating of generations of young women into believing they will be happier through career success than marital success.

And, in some ways scariest of all, the Left is poisoning our children with its commitment to ending male and female as distinct categories. One of the great joys of life, celebrating one’s sex, is now deemed nothing more than a hateful idea in many of your children’s schools.

For these and other reasons, if you treasure American and Western civilization, fighting the Left — something all liberals and conservatives need to do — is the greatest good you can engage in at this time.

SOURCE 

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Commerce Secretary Ross Wants to See US Catch Up to Other Countries on Economic Freedom

The United States will be turning the tide on economic freedom, said Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, referencing the United States being ranked 18th on The Heritage Foundation’s Index of Economic Freedom.

“It’s imperative that we acknowledge and address the reasons for which our country lags behind the 17 nations that are ranked above us,” Ross said Monday, speaking at The Heritage Foundation. “The good news is that thanks to President [President] Trump, we believe our downward slide in the index over the past decade not only has come to a halt, but should be reversing itself.”

Though free trade was among the factors determining which governments offered the most free economic environment, Ross gave a staunch defense of the Trump administration’s tariffs.

“We believe that trade should be fair, free, reciprocal, and free, free, free. But free trade is almost like the unicorn in the garden. People talk about it, but it’s very, very hard to find it now days,” Ross said. “Our tariffs are among the lowest of any major country in the world and we have the least in the way of nontariff trade barriers. Yet American exporters are plagued by every type of tariff and nontariff barrier thrown against them even by our most trusted allies.”

During the question and answer portion, Heritage Foundation President Kay Coles James asked if the United States is in a trade war with China.

“You’ve probably heard the president recently say, a trade war has been going on for the last 50 years,” Ross said. “The only difference is that now American troops are coming to the ramparts.”

In the Index of Economic Freedom, Hong Kong maintains the No. 1 spot for the fourth consecutive year. Five other countries ranked as free: Singapore, New Zealand, Switzerland, Australia, and Ireland. Rounding out the top 10 countries are Estonia, the United Kingdom, Canada, and the United Arab Emirates. The U.S. is ranked in the second tier category of “mostly free.”

For its part, amid fears of a trade war between the world’s two largest economies, China ranks 110th on the index.

“In Davos recently, I was on a panel with the director of the World Trade Organization,” Ross said, referring to the World Economic Forum in January. “To start things off, I asked him the question: If the United States is not the least protectionist big country, please tell me who is. He had no answer. So, we are using all of our available tools to ensure a level playing field.”

Coming in as least economically free in the index is North Korea at 180th. Neighboring South Korea ranks 27th.

Categories for ranking are “rule of law,” “government size,” “regulation efficiency,” and “open markets.” Each has three subcategories. High rankings in these categories correspond with individual prosperity, health, higher education levels, and have better environment, according to the index.

For thousands of years, people were denied economic freedom and lived dehumanizing lives of poverty and sickness, James said during her remarks.

“A few people controlled most of the power and most of the wealth and everyone else suffered for it,” James said. “Thankfully, those days are over for more people today than at any previous time in human history. But we still see instances, such as in North Korea, that serve as a stark reminder of where we’ve come from and where we could return if we don’t remain dedicated to building a better future.”

Rolling back regulations has been “one of the most positive achievements of the Trump administration,” said Terry Miller, the director for the Center for International Trade and Economics at The Heritage Foundation, who presented the report’s findings. But it hasn’t had time to factor into the ranking.

“It is in fact too early for us to be able to take account of those changes in this year’s edition of the index,” Miller said. “We will be picking that up strongly next year in the index as well as changes from the tax reform. So there is some hope that the U.S. score will improve. I would caveat that only with the issue of trade policy, which seems to be going in the opposite direction at this time. It would be very hard to predict what would happen to the U.S. score in the year ahead.”

SOURCE 

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Real fake news

Leftists have no ethical standards

Christopher Blair was sitting quietly in the corner of Dunkin’ Donuts, not far from his home on an unpaved road in rural Maine, looking at his phone.

People around him, absorbed in their own phones, paid no attention to the large man sitting alone among them.

Fact-checking organizations like Snopes and Politifact have labeled Blair one of the Web’s most notorious creators of fake news. Hidden behind his Internet persona, “Busta Troll,” he has for several years pumped out geysers of newsy-looking posts for an audience eager to believe it.

He doesn’t deny that he intentionally fools people. But Blair says he does so for an unusual reason — because he’s a hard-core Democrat, a “liberal troll” with a mission of undercutting the far right.

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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Why Liberals Are More Likely to Be Unhappy People

Did you know that for all the projection you get from liberals about conservatives being angry, unhappy, bitter people, conservatives are actually happier than liberals? Don’t take it from me; take it from Arthur Brooks in the very liberal New York Times:

"Scholars on both the left and right have studied this question extensively, and have reached a consensus that it is conservatives who possess the happiness edge. Many data sets show this. For example, the Pew Research Center in 2006 reported that conservative Republicans were 68 percent more likely than liberal Democrats to say they were “very happy” about their lives. This pattern has persisted for decades. The question isn’t whether this is true, but why"

Now, there are a variety of theories that help explain why conservatives are happier. Could it be because percentage wise, more conservatives are married or religious? Arthur Brooks had something to say about that:

"Whether religion and marriage should make people happy is a question you have to answer for yourself. But consider this: Fifty-two percent of married, religious, politically conservative people (with kids) are very happy — versus only 14 percent of single, secular, liberal people without kids.
He also added this, which many liberals may agree with:

An explanation for the happiness gap more congenial to liberals is that conservatives are simply inattentive to the misery of others. If they recognized the injustice in the world, they wouldn’t be so cheerful."

Is it that conservatives simply don’t see all the injustice in the world or could it be that conservatives do see it, but the attitude they have about that misery is different? Conservatives generally believe in making a better world, but they have very little faith that the government can make things better; they don’t believe you can make utopia here on earth and they have a pull-yourself-up-by-your-own-bootstraps philosophy. Charity? It’s a good thing and something that we should all strive to do, but it’s not owed to you.

In other words, everybody has problems, but it’s your job to take care of YOUR problems. Are we all in this together? Sure, in a broad “We wish all fellow Americans well and will do what we can to create an atmosphere where they can succeed” sort of way, but if you fail or succeed at life, that’s on you as an individual, not society.

Liberals do not tend to look at things this way. In fact, they tend to politically approach life the way liberal comic book aficionado Seanbaby imagines that Superman must look at the world:

"Superman has got to be jaded as hell. Besides the crap he has to put up with from Aquaman every day, he can hear the death screams of orphans for thousands of miles in every direction. That kind of thing would get to get to you. When I hear about dynamite ninjas blowing up the president, I don't feel guilty. There's nothing I could have done; I don't know how to defuse a ninja or even where the president lives. Not Superman. He can take every single obituary personally. He can go through the paper and say, "Let's see, this was the bus that fell off the bridge when I was in the bathroom... and here, I was playing ping pong when this family suffocated under tons of rubble... Oh! And I could barely get to sleep while this former skydiver was screaming for help! Ha ha ha!"

I'm surprised he even cares when the Trouble Alert goes off. I'd expect him to say, "Sorry your government building got shrink-rayed, Congressman, but I can hear a baby being circled by vampire hippos right now. Do you want me to let it get torn apart becau-- oh, there. It's dead. Good job, Congressman Selfish @sshole. How about you don't call again until there's a real emergency like poison ivy or a leg cramp?"

 Liberals always seem to imagine that we’re a few steps away from Utopia and that only selfish conservatives are stopping us from getting there. Why, there’s always some poor doofus who desperately needs the help of a liberal to get ahead. If only we could make people realize they were keeping him down with their sexism, racism or ageism, that person could finally make it. If only we were all a little bit more obsessed with politics. If only we could get a few trillion dollars’ worth of new government programs in place and everybody were a little more sensitive, we’d be in Nirvana.

Conservatives would argue that given the typical state of human civilization, THIS IS NIRVANA and that we’ll be lucky to even preserve our current level of success long term; that’s not an argument liberals seem to accept.

…….Which finally, nearly 800 words in, brings us to an article in Self magazine entitled “Yoga Should Address Social Justice, So I Want to Open My Own Studio.” Now, you may be thinking, “What does Yoga have to do with social justice?” Good question. That was what prompted me to read the article and find, what I think, is a great read-between-the-lines example of why so many liberals are not happy people. There are so many unintentionally revealing parts to it. For example:

"I recognize that yoga in the Western world can be culturally appropriative, and I’ve had many an existential crisis about whether I, as a black southern American woman, should even be doing yoga, let alone thinking about teaching it."

She likes yoga, but she’s having an EXISTENTIAL CRISIS about whether she should be doing it all. An EXISTENTIAL CRISIS. Over YOGA. I thought it would be fun to throw axes, so I bought some tomahawks and had a target built in my backyard. It never occurred to me as a conservative to wonder whether I should be having an EXISTENTIAL CRISIS because I might be filching German – or is it Viking — culture? Who knows? I ate Chinese food on Friday. I don’t feel bad about that either, but I guess if I were liberal, that might have been the start of an EXISTENTIAL CRISIS.

The entire modern world is based on appropriating other cultures and given how interconnected we all are these days, other than perhaps some very isolated tribal cultures, appropriation is so common as to be almost universal. In fact, if you’re living in the Western world, it goes without saying that you are wholesale appropriating large amounts of Greek and Roman culture. So, why worry about it? Of course, there’s more…

"But at first, finding a studio where I felt comfortable was no easy task. If you walk into a yoga class in the United States, you likely won’t see someone who looks like me. Over the years, I’ve dropped into many a yoga session to see a near unbroken sea of slender bodies, white skin, and expensive athletic wear.

I often wondered why there were not more black femmes participating in or leading the yoga classes that I attended. Then I began to see the barriers that prevented people who look and live like me from engaging in yoga. Yoga classes can be expensive, y’all! And childcare usually isn’t provided, which can make it doubly hard for parents to attend

I’ve also found that many teachers often use white, Western references that are inaccessible and isolating to those who aren’t privy to those cultural cues."

 Those sure do seem like First World problems. The white people weren’t mean to her; it’s just that there were too many of them and she would have felt comfortable if there were more black people in the class. Uh….okay. Apparently, ONLY black Americans struggle to pay for things or find child care because… who knows.

Then there are all those awful “white, Western references” which I assume are worse than Indian spiritual references that often go along with Yoga because… uhm, something. This all plays into the relatively new liberal idea that only black Americans can teach, understand and relate to black Americans. The very fact that there are too many white people in a YOGA CLASS of all places is a problem. This would be similar to going to an inner city Chicago basketball court and being upset that there aren’t a lot of white people shooting hoops, but let’s just go on.

"Finally, in my experience, yoga instructors rarely acknowledge social and political happenings in the outside world....In the past few years, I have found it almost impossible to concentrate on happiness, love, and joy when yet another black person is being shot by police, immigrants are being rounded up in their own neighborhoods and deported, and the president of the United States is tweeting bigotry against transgender service members.
Not talking often enough about these realities in a safer space like yoga is a disservice to the consciousness of the nation.

Wow, there’s so much to unpack here. First of all:

 (In 2016), according to the Washington Post’s tally, just 16 unarmed black men, out of a population of more than 20 million, were killed by the police. The year before, the number was 36. These figures are likely close to the number of black men struck by lightning in a given year… And they include cases where the shooting was justified, even if the person killed was unarmed.

There are actually more unarmed white men being shot by the police every year than black men being shot by the police. In any case, whether you’re talking about white or black men, it’s a very rare occurrence and most of the time the people being shot deserve it. In the rare cases where they don’t, the cops involved face a trial.

As to illegal aliens being deported, that has been the law as long as anybody reading this has been alive. When it comes to transsexuals in the military, Obama put that in place on the way out the door and a lot of people didn't agree with it.

Personally, as a conservative I think the police have gotten a bum rap, I don’t think we’ve done enough to get rid of illegal aliens, and I don’t believe transsexuals should be in the military, but it hasn’t stolen my happiness, love and joy. Life’s not perfect and it’s never going to be perfect, but it does go on.

Also, to a non-liberal, discussing these issues at yoga seems… STRANGE? People... well... I should say most people don’t come to yoga to talk about political issues. Trying to shoehorn political discussions into a yoga class seems like trying to shove politics into a cooking class, into the NFL or into the Oscars….oh wait.

Liberals LOVE to try to turn every public activity into a political war zone where no one can just have a good time. Instead, everything has to be a vehicle for their ideology. Do you think that could lead to a lot of unnecessary conflict and arguing? Does that sort of political obsessiveness seem mentally healthy to anyone who’s not liberal? Then, to conclude:

"That’s why my dream is to create a yoga studio of my own… This kind of opportunity can be especially important for black women like me. In her book Sister Citizen: Shame, Stereotypes, and Black Women in America, Melissa Harris-Perry recognizes that black women “need sheltered, private space not available to public view. Because of their history as chattel slaves, their labor market participation as domestic workers, and their role as dependents in a punitive modern welfare state, black women in America… lack opportunities for accurate, affirming recognition of the self.” When I first read these words, I felt like they were plucked from my own heart. I, too, have struggled to find a private space to inquire about my personal identity without fear of the white heteronormative gaze.

As the owner of one of those white heteronormative gazes, I think the good news is that people are inherently concerned with their own business and they’re not thinking of you at all (or for that matter me or anyone else). The extent to which heterosexual white people are thinking of you is, “Wow, that’s a weird, depressing article she wrote” or alternately, “I wish that lady would stop vacantly staring at the lettuce while she mumbles about yoga. I need to get by her and get some avocados.” Being upset that you can’t find public “private spaces” where you can do yoga without the imaginary “judgey” gaze of straight white people looking at you seems like a lot of unnecessary self-inflicted pressure. If you enjoy yoga, just stop inserting all these oddball political issues into it and enjoy the yoga class.

 If you want to teach yoga, just teach the yoga class. If you want to run your own liberal, no-white-heteronormative-gazes-allowed yoga classes, give it a shot. In a place like New York City, that might even work and then you can shout “Viva la capitalism,” put some cash in your pocket and enjoy your success. When you make something this simple into something so complicated and fraught with unnecessary existential crises, it seems unlikely that it would lead to anything but misery.

SOURCE

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Stop comparing Trump to Stalin

Alex Beam (below) has an unsually strong grip on relaity despite being a Boston liberal

People say crazy things about Donald Trump, some of them factual, some not. To start with the obvious, Josef Stalin murdered his political adversaries, murdered the Soviet officer corps during the lead-up to a world war, and is “credited” with the annihilation of millions of Soviet citizens — “bourgeois” farmers; fictional “oppositionists” of every stripe — more or less because he felt like it.

Donald Trump is many things: a liar, a bloviator, a golf cheater. But he is not a mass murderer.

It is true, as Iannucci, a British citizen, has said, that Trump “questions judges, defies democratic norms and attacks the press and any person or institution that challenges him.” But here’s where that piece of paper called the Constitution comes into play. It is possible to impeach a federal judge, but that is the job of the Senate, which confirms judges, not of the president, who is left to whine about their rulings.

Trump famously fulminated against Judge Gonzalo Curiel, he “of Mexican heritage,” but it turns out that “ticking off a man/child politician” is not an impeachable offense. Curiel remains active on the bench.

On another front, Trump loves to make wild claims about ballot irregularities, stating that “millions of people . . . voted illegally” in the 2016 presidential election. He briefly convened an Advisory Commission on Electoral Integrity, which disbanded after nine months.

Trump thinks he can sway elections, campaigning in vain for Alabama Senate candidate Roy Moore, and more recently against Democrat Conor Lamb, who was running in a pro-Trump congressional district in Pennsylvania. Trump failed to relegate Lamb to the dustbin of history, and Pennsylvania certified Lamb’s victory last week, without a peep about voter fraud.

Stalin would have had Lamb shot.

You want to know what tyranny looks like? Starting this fall, Chinese high school students will be required to study “Xi Jinping thought,” the nominal philosophizing of China’s Communist Party leader-for-life. In a similar manner, institutes of Marxism-Leninism have masticated the profound thoughts of such intellectual giants as Mao Zedong, the Albanian strongman Enver Hoxha, and Josef Stalin.

Luckily we don’t have a nationalized school curriculum, so it will be a moment or two before “The Art of the Deal,” Trump’s ghostwritten 1987 song of himself, becomes required reading in schools.

Let’s despise Trump for his despicable qualities, not for grandly imagined “parallels” with the brutes of the past and present.

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 Changing Landscape of Political Parties

There is overlap between the parties in ways that you might not expect. And there's still hope.

The surprising outcome of the 2016 election and talk about Democrat hopes of flipping the House and/or Senate in 2018 have a lot of people speculating about political party alignment. Will Donald Trump drive Republican voters away from the Grand Old Party? Are we looking at 2018 or 2020 to be a “wave” election for Democrats?

A recent study by Larry Bartels of Vanderbilt University’s Department of Political Science asked these questions and more about the current state of affairs. What he found suggests some points that confound the prevailing wisdom.

Bartels maintains that there have been no mass defections from either Republicans or Democrats. His research found that the splits within each party break out in contrasting ways. Democrats are, of course, more united in their belief in an active government, but somewhat surprisingly they find themselves less united when it comes to cultural issues. Republicans tend to have the opposite leanings, being more united in their view on cultural issues but more at odds with one another when it comes to the role government should play in peoples’ lives.

Hence the failure to repeal ObamaCare and budgets that keep the Democrat pace on deficits.

Surveys Bartels conducted in his research found that nearly 25% of Republicans were closer to the average Democrat on the role of government when compared to the average Republican, while only 11% of Democrats were closer to Republicans on that role when compared to the average Democrat. On the flip side, over 26% of Democrats were closer to the average Republican on cultural issues. This is likely due in part to the Democrat Party’s small tent, in which elected officials and voters are practically coerced to toe the party line on abortion, same-sex marriage and other topics.

The one area that Bartels doesn’t go into but should cause concern among Republicans is the loss of Millennial women. A Pew Research report found that in 2014, Democrats held a 21-point advantage over Republicans with women in this group. By 2018, the number of women who self-identified or leaned Democrat rose to 70%. Nearly three-fourths of women in the Millennial age group now identify as Democrats. Certainly, the election of Donald Trump played a big role in this, but we cannot discount the fact that Hillary Clinton was not nearly as popular among young women as Bernie Sanders. But with Clinton no longer a factor, Republicans will need to work much harder to reach this voting bloc with the message of Liberty.

In fact, Democrats aim to exploit women voters to take down Trump.

This issue aside, if we accept Bartels’ numbers and the idea that a larger percentage of Democrats are growing closer to Republicans on cultural issues, then why does the Left appear to be winning the culture war? This is where the power of the media comes into play. With much of the media and academia leaning heavily to the left, it becomes easier for progressives to steer the message. Consider the point that Republicans have been labeled increasingly more radical in recent years even while their fundamental policy stances have not changed all that much.

That’s because if any party has moved its fundamental policy stance, it’s been the Democrats. Former Clinton adviser and political prognosticator Dick Morris observes that Democrats tend to move further left based on negative outcomes during election cycles. This happened throughout the 1980s, and continued during the midterm drubbings Barack Obama received while in office. It seems counterintuitive to move further in a direction that voters reject, but leftists’ strategy is to drive everything their direction so the very terms of debate change over time.

So, if more Republicans are finding common cause with Democrats about the role of government, and young women are leaving the GOP in droves, is there any good news? Yes, and that is that progressives have not necessarily moved the electorate to the left, they have only succeeded in moving themselves further to the left. And in doing so, according to National Review’s David French, they are deceiving themselves about the impact they are having on voters. They are not changing many minds; they’re only browbeating people. And they are in fact illustrating to the rest of the country just how out of touch they truly are. The downside is that we can expect deeper polarization. The upside is wave elections are not born out of polarized electorates.

SOURCE 

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No, Hillary, it’s the red states that are ‘dynamic’

Hillary Clinton is being universally panned by Republicans and Democrats for her rant last week in India against Trump voters. She boasted, “I won the places that represent two-thirds of America’s gross domestic product. So I won the places that are optimistic, diverse, dynamic, moving forward.”

As evidence, she pointed to places like Illinois and Connecticut — where she won by sizable margins. Then she added that those who voted against her “didn’t like black people getting rights, and don’t like women getting jobs.”

Our guess is that Hillary Clinton’s words didn’t go over very well in Arkansas, the state that she once served as first lady. She lost Arkansas: Trump 60.6 percent, Clinton 33.7 percent. Her speech was offensive and filled with arrogance for sure (and a reprise of her 2016 description of Trump voters as “deplorables” and “irredeemables”), but what hasn’t been corrected for the record is that Mrs. Clinton had her facts wrong.

Hillary Clinton’s assessment of how the red Trump states are performing economically versus the blue Clinton states was backward. For at least the last two decades, most of the dynamism and growth — as measured by population movements, income growth and job creation — has been fleeing from the once-economically dominant blue states that Mrs. Clinton won, and relocating to the red states that Donald Trump won.

Here’s the evidence. Of the 12 blue states that Hillary Clinton won by the largest percentage margins — Hawaii, California, Vermont, Massachusetts, Maryland, New York, Illinois, Washington, Rhode Island, New Jersey, Connecticut, and Delaware — all but three of them lost residents through domestic migration (excluding immigration) over the last 10 years.

In fact combined, all 12 Hillary Clinton states lost an average of 6 percent of their populations to net out-migration over the past decade. California and New York alone lost 3 million people in the past 10 years.

Now let’s contrast the Hillary Clinton states with the 12 states that had the largest percentage margin vote for Donald Trump. Every one of them, save Wyoming, was a net population gainer — West Virginia, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Idaho, South Dakota, Kentucky, Alabama, Arkansas, Tennessee, Nebraska and Kansas.

The move from blue to red states — almost 1,000 people every day — has been one of the greatest demographic stories in American history. If you go to states like Arizona, Florida, Tennessee and Texas these days, all you see is out of blue state license plates.

Pretty much the same pattern holds true for jobs. The job gains in the red states carried by the widest margins by Mr. Trump had about twice the job creation rate as the bluest states carried by Mrs. Clinton.

Hillary Clinton mentioned GDP numbers. While it is true that the blue states of the two coasts and several of the Midwestern states are richer than the redder states of the South and mountain regions over recent decades, she failed to mention the giant transfer of wealth from Clinton to Trump states.

IRS tax return data confirm that from 2006-2016 Hillary Clinton’s states lost $113.6 billion in combined wealth, whereas Donald Trump’s states gained $116.0 billion.

The Hillary Clinton states are in a slow bleed. That is in no small part because the deep blue states that she carried have adopted the entire “progressive” playbook: High taxes rates. High welfare benefits. Heavy hand of regulation. Excessive minimum wages. War on fossil fuels. These states dutifully check all the progressive boxes.

And the U-Haul company can barely keep up with the demand for trucks and moving vans to get out of these worker paradises. A recent Gallup Poll asked Americans if they would want to move out of their current state of residency. Five states had more than 40 percent of its respondents answer yes: They were: Connecticut, New Jersey, Illinois, Rhode Island and Maryland. Hillary Clinton country.

Even more unbelievable to us was Mrs. Clinton citing Connecticut and Illinois as dynamic places. There probably isn’t another state in America that can match these two for financial despair and incompetence. Things are so bad in Illinois after decades of left-wing rule in Springfield that Illinois residents are now fleeing on net to West Virginia and Kentucky to find a better future.

Connecticut has raised income and other taxes three times in the last four years and still has one of the most debilitating budget deficits in the nation. The pension systems are so many billions of dollars in the red, they are technically bankrupt.

Even when it comes to income inequality, the left’s favorite measure of progressive success, blue states carried by Mrs. Clinton fare worse than red states. According to a 2016 report by the Economic Policy institute, three of the states with the largest gaps between rich and poor are those progressive icons New York, Connecticut and Massachusetts.

Sure, Boston, Manhattan and Silicon Valley are booming as the rich prosper. But outside these areas are deep pockets of poverty and wage stagnation.

The “progressive” tax and spend agenda has been put on trial. Not only do the policies lead to much slower growth, they also benefit the rich and politically well-connected at the expense of everyone else.

Getting these statistics right — about where the growth and dynamism is really happening in America — is important because if we want to be a prosperous nation, we need to learn what works and what doesn’t.

We need national economic policies that have been shown to work at the state level. Donald Trump wants to make America look like Florida and Tennessee. Hillary Clinton wanted to make America look more like Illinois and Connecticut. Maybe that’s the real reason why she lost.

SOURCE 

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Save lives with the 'right to try'

Giving terminally ill patients the right to try experimental treatments won’t transform the healthcare sector radically, but it will stop the government obstructing those who want to take a chance to live a little longer.

The House passed its version of a "right-to-try" bill on Wednesday, but it gained little notice because it was overshadowed by the omnibus spending bill that had just become public and which President Trump signed on Friday.

The right-to-try legislation, if signed into law, will allow terminally ill patients to seek drug treatments that have passed phase one of the FDA’s approval process, but have not yet received full approval.

Terminally ill patients are not a big or vocal political constituency, but their vulnerability makes them worth listening to. Giving them the right to try experimental treatments won’t transform the healthcare sector radically, but it will stop the government obstructing those who want to take a chance to live a little longer.

The reform is common sense, and is therefore popular nationwide: Thirty-eight states, from deep-blue California to deep-red Alabama, have already established a right to try. But the question of whether FDA regulations pre-empt state laws is unclear, which makes congressional action necessary.

Thankfully, a similar right-to-try bill already passed the Senate unanimously.

There are legitimate concerns about the right to try, but the bills in Congress improve on the status quo. The FDA already has expanded access programs for some terminal patients, and between 2010 and 2015 it authorized more than 99 percent of requests. But that amounts to only 1,200 patients a year, a tiny portion of the millions who are diagnosed with or die of terminal illnesses. Too many patients who would be helped by the right to try don’t qualify for the FDA process.

Critics worry that phase one FDA approval means a drug isn’t yet safe enough for terminal patients. But phase one approval means a treatment has already passed basic safety testing and is probably ready for clinical research trials. As the libertarian Goldwater Institute says: “Fewer than 3 percent of terminally ill patients gain access to investigational treatments through clinical trials. Right to try was designed to help the other 97 percent.”

There are also safeguards in the legislation. No patient will ever be forced to take an unapproved drug. And no doctors will be forced to provide a drug they wouldn't advise. No pharmaceutical company will be forced to give a drug if they don't think it will help the patient. What’s more, a drug manufacturer or prescriber couldn’t be sued for providing treatment through right to try.

Right to try won’t save everyone who takes advantage of it, but if a treatment has passed basic safety testing and terminally ill patients understand the risks, the government shouldn’t stop them trying to save their own lives.

President Trump endorsed the right to try in his first State of the Union address, saying, “We also believe that patients with terminal conditions should have access to experimental treatments that could potentially save their lives. People who are terminally ill should not have to go from country to country to seek a cure — I want to give them a chance right here at home. It is time for the Congress to give these wonderful Americans the ‘right to try.’”

The Senate and House should swiftly resolve the minor differences between their bills and send a right-to-try to Trump.

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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