Do firearm-control laws make you safer?

A medical journal gives the answer "yes" to that.

One of the besetting problems with science is that academics often don't keep up with previous research on their subject. Example here.  They seem to think that no-one before them could have had such brilliant ideas as theirs.  So they do not check that.  A case in point has just emerged.  It is an article in a prestigious American medical journal under the title: "Interstate Association of State Firearm Laws With Suicide and Homicide", authored by a Robert Steinbrook, MD.

Dr Steinbrook probably knows a lot about colds and flu but he appears to know very little about scientific research.  In particular he seems to know nothing about bibliographical  research.  His article mirrors closely  a 2016 article under the heading: "Firearm legislation and firearm mortality in the USA: a cross-sectional, state-level study" -- by Kalesan et al -- also published in a prestigious medical jourtnal. 

Because of his failure to do comprehensive background research, he has fallen into the trap that background research is designed to prevent:  He has learnt nothing from the mistakes in the previous study.  He has repeated its mistakes.  And the mistakes are grievous -- as I pointed out in 2016. A failure of basic scientific precautions has rendered both studies a nullity.  They prove nothing. They are at best propaganda.

It rather bemuses me that a humble retired psychologist such as I has to point out basic howlers in prestigious medical journals.

***************************

Two Judges in Virginia rebuke Special Counsel Mueller

As bad weeks go, last week was a pretty bad week for Special Counsel Robert Mueller. Two different judges dealt blows to the Special Counsel while breathing life into the Constitution. From the beginning it was obvious the Special Counsel was not interested in Russian collusion but was more interested in getting President Trump. Thanks to a pair of federal judges the American people are finally seeing what the Special Counsel is really up to.

In a blistering exchange with Mueller cronies, U.S. District Judge T.S. Ellis, overseeing Mueller’s case against one-time Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort, questioned why the Special Counsel was handling a case that was years old and had nothing to do with President Donald Trump or the election. The judge stated, “You don’t really care about Mr. Manafort’s bank fraud. … What you really care about is what information Mr. Manafort could give you that would reflect on Mr. Trump or lead to his prosecution or impeachment.”

The judge is correct. From the beginning, it has become increasingly clear, the investigation has absolutely nothing to do with finding a link between Russia and President Trump, but everything to do with ending the Trump presidency. The Special Counsel handed over the case involving Mr. Cohen to federal authorities in New York but did not do so in this case, even though Manafort is being charged with crimes that are alleged to have happened years before becoming part of the Trump campaign.

Americans for Limited Government President Rick Manning agreed with the judge stating, “Everyone outside the Department of Justice seems to be able to see that Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s only objective is to create grounds for the Democrats to impeach the president. That isn’t his job; his job is to investigate Russian collusion if there was Russian collusion in the election. The Manafort case clearly demonstrates the special counsel is well beyond his legal mandate, and Judge Ellis should throw the charges out immediately on this basis.”

Perhaps the most critical issue to come out of the hearing, was the judge ordering the Special counsel to turn over the scope memo to the court. The scope memo was written by Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein and laid out the parameters of the Special Counsel’s investigative powers. The DOJ has been guarding this document closely, refusing Congressional subpoenas to turn it over. If the Special Counsel and DOJ have nothing to hide and are doing everything legally, why are they refusing to hand over the document?

While Judge Ellis was slamming the Mueller investigation for targeting the President, another judge dealt a potential lethal legal blow to the case against 13 Russians and three companies indicted earlier this year. Federal District Court Judge Dabney Friedrich rejected Mueller’s motion to delay the first hearing after lawyers showed up to defend two of the companies last month when it was expected no one would show up. The lawyers made multiple requests for information, seemingly catching the Special Counsel off guard.

It is believed the requests were a plan “to force Mueller’s team to turn over relevant evidence to the Russian firm and perhaps even to bait prosecutors into an embarrassing dismissal in order to avoid disclosing sensitive information,” according to Politico’s Josh Gerstein, citing legal experts.  Mueller’s team must now show up on Wednesday. If the team does not turn over all exculpatory Brady material the defendants are entitled to, it risks a dismissal and an extremely embarrassing episode for Mueller and Deputy AG Rosenstein.

Something else we also learned late last week, is that Mueller may have lied to the court. For almost a year, there have been multiple reports on the contacts between Manafort and Russian agents or people connected to Russian agents. On March 28, it was further reported by Newsweek, Mueller told the court Gates knew he and Manafort were dealing with ex-Russian intelligence agents in sentencing documents for Alex van der Zwaan. Manafort’s lawyers challenged the allegation that their client knew anything and asked the Special Counsel to produce the evidence Manafort had contact with Russian intelligence officials.

The government is allowed to deny the request for the Brady material on national security grounds, but the government is not allowed to deny the evidence exists. This is exactly what the Mueller team did. Manafort’s legal team filed papers stating, “Despite multiple discovery and Brady requests in this regard, the Special Counsel has not produced any materials to the defense – no tapes, notes, transcripts or any other material evidencing surveillance or intercepts of communications between Mr. Manafort and Russian intelligence officials, Russian government officials (or any other foreign officials). The Office of Special Counsel has advised that there are no materials responsive to Mr. Manafort’s requests.”

Two questions immediately come to mind, did Mueller lie to the court, and how can there be collusion if there is no evidence of contact? If Robert Mueller can go after Trump officials on specious charges of lying to the FBI, then Mueller’s lies to the federal court should be treated harshly. Apparently, Mr. Mueller lives in a glass house and should have known better than to throw the first three stones.

We are finally seeing the true nature of the Special Counsel. His sole objective is to be the most expensive and extensive opposition research project in history. He was created to give Congress an excuse to impeach the President, and if he couldn’t find it, make it up. Thanks to the Judicial Branch, the people can finally see who is pulling the coup strings.

SOURCE 

******************************

President Trump’s historic jobs achievement

While the media obsess over the latest palace intrigue, President Trump is quietly shaping up to be one of the best economic presidents in modern U.S. history.

Under his watch, the unemployment rate hit 3.9 percent in April, the lowest level this century. At this rate, essentially every American who wants a job could find one. Keep in mind, the unemployment rate was more than double this level as recently as President Obama's second term in office.

Unemployment has dipped below 4 percent only a few times in U.S. history. Yet the underlying figures may be even more remarkable. Unemployment among blacks and Latinos fell to 6.6 percent and 4.8 percent, respectively, their lowest levels in recorded history — and half the rates of five years ago.

This historically low unemployment isn’t part of a natural pattern — like the weather — as some left-wing pundits imply. It’s a result of the pro-business public policies created and implemented by President Trump and Republicans in Congress.

Exhibit A is the historic tax cuts passed late last year. The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act delivered the biggest tax relief for small businesses in American history, reduced the tax burden on the middle class, and brought the corporate rate in line with international standards.

Taken together, the tax cuts are putting more money in Americans’ paychecks and on companies’ balance sheets. This leads to more spending, more investment and more jobs. It also means employers will pay higher wages, which are growing at their fastest pace in a decade.

No wonder small business optimism is at an all-time high. According to a national poll of small businesses by the organization that I lead, the Job Creators Network, respondents support the Republican tax cuts by a margin of 10-to-1.

As a result of this tax cut stimulus, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office recently raised its economic growth estimate to 3.3 percent for this year. This is more than double the growth rate of the last year of the Obama administration; it’s the type of growth that ordinary Americans can actually notice in their day-to-day lives.

Prominent left-wing economists scoffed when President Trump predicted this level of growth a couple of years ago. You’d have to believe in “tooth fairies  and ludicrous supply-side economics” to believe in his 3 percent growth prediction, is how Obama's former chief economic adviser, Larry Summers, put it.

While Americans should expect this labor market and economic vibrancy as their birthright, bad public policies such as over-taxation and over-regulation threaten it. Still, leading Democrats have promised to raise taxes and increase regulations if they retake control of Congress this fall.

This is the wedge issue that Republicans must take to voters during this election season. Pocketbook issues beat identity politics and divisive social issues every time. To paraphrase the James Carville cliche: Campaign on the economy and tax cuts, stupid.

Of course, labor market challenges remain. Despite recent improvements, the labor force participation rate remains stubbornly low at 62.8 percent. Meanwhile, there are 6.3 million unfilled jobs in the country — the largest in history. Roughly half of these pay $50,000 or more, according to pay data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Closing this gap calls for a “Fight for 50,” as in a fight for $50,000 jobs. With Republican-led skills training and occupational licensing deregulation, this too can be achieved. 

President Ronald Reagan famously said, “The best possible social program is a job.” Based on this criteria, President Trump is shaping up to be more than just one of the greatest economic presidents in modern history. Just don’t expect these historic achievements to interrupt programming of the Stormy Daniels soap opera that dominates today’s mainstream media.

SOURCE 

********************************

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)

***************************

Tim Allen: 'The Left Wants to Tell Everybody' What to Do

Actor Tim Allen told PJM “the left” should “stop telling” people what to do, adding, “no one is stopping you from paying more taxes.”

Allen stars on the ABC show Last Man Standing, in which he plays a conservative father who owns a sporting goods store and often pokes fun at the Democratic Party. Allen was asked if he writes some of the material himself.

“I’m more of an anarchist because I’m a stand-up comic. I don’t like anybody telling me what to do and, lately, the left wants to tell everybody – it’s the ‘we all know this, you should, you should.’ Stop telling me what to do, you go do it. You want to support stuff that the government should stay out of? You go do it. No one is stopping you from paying more taxes. Then, that’s the attitude I get,” he told PJM after he left the Creative Coalition’s Inaugural Gala.

“You see my act on the road or in concert – I don’t do political stuff. I do anarchist stuff. I like making everybody laugh. Jokes should be – President Trump should laugh at it, so should Hillary – that’s the balance I like; the personal stuff is different,” he added.

Allen was likely referring to Pay.gov, which allows every American to make a donation to the Treasury Department at any time to reduce the nation’s debt.

Actors Robert De Niro and Alec Baldwin addressed an anti-Trump protest in New York City on the eve of the inauguration, encouraging the crowd to resist Trump’s policies.

“Donald Trump and Steve Bannon and Mike Pence, and all these people that are part of the Trump administration, they think that you are going to lay down. Are you going to lie down? The one thing they don’t realize is New Yorkers never lay down,” Baldwin said. “Are you going to fight? Are we going to have 100 days of resistance?”

SOURCE

*******************************

Karl Marx Gets Celebrity Status at New York Times

As the philosopher's 200th birthday approaches, too many people are still celebrating.

Among the many things the 19th century will forever be remembered for is the early proliferation of communism. The chief developer of this repressive framework was Karl Marx — a stalwart anti-capitalist combatant. He entered this world on May 5, 1818, and spent his life cultivating the collectivist philosophy ultimately bearing the name Marxism, which forms the foundation of communism.

Last year, marking the centennial of Soviet communism, our own Mark Alexander noted this staggering statistic: “Between 1917 and 1991, there were almost 150 million civilian casualties of communist dictatorships, the three largest dictatorial offenders being China (73,237,000), the USSR (58,627,000) and Germany (11,000,000). Where those dictatorships exist today, the slaughter continues.”

That’s not exactly a sterling legacy, nor is it deserving of celebration. Yet some academics continue to treat as a hero the man who laid the foundation for one of the world’s most monstrous political systems. This week, Karl Marx turns 200 years old. Enter Jason Barker, an associate professor of philosophy, who declares in a New York Times op-ed, “Happy Birthday, Karl Marx. You Were Right!” Professor Barker ponders: “As we reach the bicentennial of Marx’s birth, what lessons might we draw from his dangerous and delirious philosophical legacy? What precisely is Marx’s lasting contribution?”

Barker’s takeaway isn’t just incredibly deleterious, it’s vehemently anti-capitalist — just like Marx was. Barker insists, “Countless books have appeared, from scholarly works to popular biographies, broadly endorsing Marx’s reading of capitalism and its enduring relevance to our neoliberal age.” He also endorses the view that “Marx’s basic thesis — that capitalism is driven by a deeply divisive class struggle in which the ruling-class minority appropriates the surplus labor of the working-class majority as profit — is correct.”

While admitting that “Marx arrives at no magic formula for exiting the enormous social and economic contradictions that global capitalism entails,” the professor asserts, “What Marx did achieve, however, through his self-styled materialist thought, were the critical weapons for undermining capitalism’s ideological claim to be the only game in town.” Amazingly, he goes on to posit: “Social justice movements like Black Lives Matter and #MeToo, owe something of an unspoken debt to Marx through their unapologetic targeting of the ‘eternal truths’ of our age. Such movements recognize, as did Marx, that the ideas that rule every society are those of its ruling class and that overturning those ideas is fundamental to true revolutionary progress.”

He concludes by noting: “Marx, as I have said, does not offer a one-size-fits-all formula for enacting social change. But he does offer a powerful intellectual acid test for that change. On that basis, we are destined to keep citing him and testing his ideas until the kind of society that he struggled to bring about, and that increasing numbers of us now desire, is finally realized.”

The biggest irony of all? Parker is employed by Kyung Hee University, which is located in … South Korea. His anti-capitalist tirade completely ignores the nuclear threat posed by communist North Korea. Parker’s tribute to Marx is a tip of the cap to revolutionary social and economic change. Yet it’s worth repeating: Whatever qualms people have with capitalism, last we checked, it didn’t result in 150 million deaths. And as Mark Alexander also observed, “Democratic Socialism, like Nationalist Socialism, is nothing more than Marxist Socialism repackaged.”

As we noted last December, a Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation study found that “58% of Millennials would prefer living in a socialist, communist or fascist nation instead of a capitalist one.” With professors like Parker, it’s no wonder. You can put lipstick on a pig, but it’s still a pig. Communism and its sister system, socialism, are no different.

SOURCE

*****************************

A journalist laments

Matt Bai

Trump’s victory in 2016 brought forth an outpouring of self-flagellation and banal reflection from people in my industry. We’d lost touch with the country, is what dozens of Washington journalists said and wrote. We didn’t know how angry all those white voters were. We didn’t know how anxious they felt about the future, how desperate they were to overturn the order.

Never have so many keyboards been worn out in the service of such nonsense. Of course we knew. No one travels the country as widely or talks to as many voters as a campaign reporter. Some of us had been writing for years, even decades, about the growing alienation of less affluent white voters. Literally thousands of stories had been devoted to the subject.

But that facile explanation — this idea that we just didn’t know the depth of the rage out there — enabled us to sidestep the harder reality, which is that a lot of that rage was directed squarely at us.

For 20-plus years now, a lot of Americans have been taking in the smugness on cable TV and watching journalists chase their own brand of celebrity, and they’ve decided that the political press corps is a pretty good stand-in for everything that’s wrong in a country where a small, educated stratum of the society reaps all the economic benefit and shapes all the public opinion.

Then, as now, the polling on Trump tells a fascinating story. A lot of people who say they support the president don’t especially like him, or admire his behavior, or agree with him on issues. But as long as every dumb thing he says makes us (and urban Democrats) jump up and down and rend our clothes and scream about the death of fact and the end of civilized society, they’re willing to overlook all that for a while.

I hear from readers all the time who say some version of this: Trump may not be great at governing, but if he’s making you feel less relevant and less powerful, then at least something’s going right.  A sizable bloc of voters reviles the political establishment, and no embodiment of that establishment looms larger on their screens than we do.

So the main problem with the White House Correspondents’ Dinner isn’t the glut of almost recognizable movie stars, or the ugly brand of partisan humor, or the ill-fitting tuxedos and carbon-fiber filet mignon. The problem is the showy display of vanity, pretension and tribalism that reinforces the worst idea of what political journalism is all about.

For 364 days a year, a lot of my colleagues do work that defies Trump’s phony outrage and disproves his cliché of a lazy, elitist, attention-craved media. And then, for one stupid night, we go out of our way to prove him right.

How about this? Next year, if you want to honor the scholarship winners who are supposedly at the center of this event, then hold smaller events in each of their communities instead. Set out to change perceptions, instead of mindlessly reinforcing them.

SOURCE

*******************************

North Korea Just Caved To ANOTHER One Of Trump’s Demands In Historic Concession

North Korea has freed three U.S. citizens that have been detained in the communist nation for several years, bowing to another demand of President Donald Trump ahead of the U.S.-North Korea meeting in the coming weeks.

According to the Washington Times, Trump has said that the U.S. detainees needed to be released from North Korea before the historic meeting with Kim Jong Un, and the regime has honored Trump’s request.

The three Americans — Kim Dong Chul, Kim Hak-song and Kim Sang Duk, also known as Tony Kim — were released and sent to a medical treatment facility in Pyongyang.

They will reportedly be sent back home on the day of the U.S.-North Korea summit, and will reportedly be staying in a hotel outside Pyongyang until summit.

“We believe that Mr. Trump can take them back on the day of the U.S.-North Korea summit, or he can send an envoy to take them back to the U.S. before the summit,” said Choi Sung-ryong, an activist pursuing release of North Korea’s political prisoners.

SOURCE

******************************

Australia tipped to soon produce more than half of the world's lithium

Giving security of supply to the Western world

Western Australia is tipped to produce more than half of the world’s lithium supply by the end of this year, as new mines come online and the world’s appetite for the materials used to make batteries for electric vehicles grows. [Batteries in small appliances such as phones also use lithium]

That forecast, made by Citi analyst Clarke Wilkins last week, came on the same day that the managing director of lithium miner Pilbara Minerals, Ken Brinsden, said Australia was in "pole position in lithium raw materials", and described one part of WA as "lithium valley".

But with Australia’s emerging lithium industry growing so fast, investors have also been reminded that there will be “bumps and curves” and twists along the way.

Most of the world’s lithium now comes from hard rock mining of spodumene deposits, or via the extraction of lithium from brine deposits in Argentina and Chile.

But given the handful of hard rock mines now operating in Western Australia or soon to start, Australia is well placed to capitalise on the rapid growth in the use of electric vehicles over coming years in major car markets such as Europe and China.

“If you look at all the hard rock (lithium) mines, WA is going to dominate. West Australia will be over half of the (world’s) lithium supply, effectively, by the end of this year. Because all of the world’s hard rock mines are basically in WA,” Mr Wilkins said.

“There are projects outside of Australia, but it’s unlikely that any of those will be really of material scale production until a number of years away. Because you’ve got infrastructure, you’ve got a mining culture, the biggest projects tend to be in Australia, so Australia does lead the world in terms of development of these hard rock mines."

Lithium is a key ingredient in the manufacture of lithium ion batteries used in electric vehicles, large battery storage units, and electronic devices like mobile phones and laptop computers.

In an address to the Melbourne Mining Club on Friday, Mr Brinsden said Pilbara Minerals’ Pilgangoora mine would be “one of the world’s largest lithium mines”, and that the company was only a week or two away from turning on its processing plant. The plant will crush and process rocks from the mine to produce spodumene concentrate containing lithium.

“We expect to make our first shipment of spodumene concentrate sometime in late June,” Mr Brinsden said.

Mr Brinsden said Australia was the world’s largest producer of spodumene concentrate with mines already in production, and with several more to come.

“Australia commands pole position in lithium raw materials, and will likely hold that mantel for many years to come as a result of the incredible mineral endowment we have in hard-rock lithia sources,” he said.

SOURCE

********************************

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)

***************************

Stop Talking About Race and IQ

Does WILLIAM SALETAN deny the humanity of blacks?

My heading above is copied from a recent, very long-winded article by Saletan, who is a sort of token conservative among prominent journalists. Saletan accepts that there are large differences between black and white IQ averages but thinks we should not talk about it.  To help us think about the matter, let us look at some hypothetical statements about dogs:

Long tails in dogs are hereditary
Great Danes have long tails
Therefore long tails in Great Danes are hereditary

That conclusion seems pretty reasonable, does it not?   From my memory of my studies in formal logic of over 50 years ago, I think it is in fact a valid syllogism.

Here is another very similar syllogism that refers to the centrepiece of the   Saletan article.

Low IQs are hereditary
Blacks have low IQs
Therefore low IQs in blacks are hereditary. 

Is that syllogism not as valid as the first?

Saletan wants to say that that conclusion is NOT logical or is at least unproven.  The only way he can do that, however, is to attack one or both of the premises.  He attacks the statement that low IQs are hereditary.  He says that statement is overly broad.  It may be that among blacks IQ is not hereditary or is hereditary in some different way.

But there have now been many studies of brain function (GWAS studies) which show that IQ involves a large number of brain components and the most recent studies have in fact shown that neuron size is heavily involved in IQ. Smart people have bigger neurons.  And note that the brain is almost entirely composed of neurons.

So Saletan is saying that all those GWAS features are different in blacks.  He is denying the humanity of blacks. He is in effect saying that blacks are a different species, almost something extra-terrestrial.  I am betting that he does NOT want to say that but his argument leads to it.  He would not want to say that because he places great stress on kindness to blacks as being a big issue in the debate. Telling blacks that they are on average dumber and can't change that is unkind. 

I don't think it is unkind.  It is lies that are unkind.  As Eysenck often said, the policies you derive from low average black IQs could as well be kind as anything else. By having lower expectations of blacks, you could be relieving stresses on them to keep up in various ways, for instance.

And we do in any case ordinarily make it very clear to all blacks that they are on average dumber.  That is the famous educational "gap". In their school studies, blacks lag behind white pupils by about the degree you would expect from their much lower average IQ.  And the best brains among American educators have for years striven mightily to find ways of closing that gap.  Many things have been tried but nothing works.  The gap remains no matter what is tried.  It remains just as it has to be if it is genetically-based on IQ.

And all that educational failure is vividly brought home to blacks time and time again.  They are repeatedly shown that they are on average dumber than whites and that nothing will fix that.  Many blacks drop out of education as as result.  They just can't do the work but know that whites can.

So we already make plain to blacks exactly the message that Saletan want to avoid.  So the lies about black IQ come to naught anyway.

Saletan also bows down to convention in saying: “Race science, the old idea that race is a biologically causal trait, may live on as an ideology of hate. But as an academic matter, it’s been discredited"

It is Saletan who has been discredited.  In recent years, there have been  a number of factor-analytic and other studies which have shown that the traditional racial categories do emerge in international data. Saletan might want to start here if he wants to catch up with the research concerned.  Does he really believe that there is no biological cause for the many obvious differences between blacks and whites?  Do you get born black or white at random?  Insane.

Note that I am not the lone psychometrician in pointing to genetics as the cause of black/white IQ differences.  In 2013, a survey of 228 intelligence researchers found that the typical scientist in this field agrees:



 ******************************

A Good Economy Is Bad for Democrats

Fresh off the socialist May Day protests, Hillary Clinton's hilariously bad socialist/capitalist blame game and a day ahead of Karl Marx's 200th birthday, there's some positive news for our lower-taxed, less-regulated, free-market economy.

April saw another 164,000 jobs created, which isn't fantastic but it's progress, and the headline unemployment rate dropped to just 3.9%, an 18-year low. The fuller measure of unemployment fell to 7.8%, a 17-year low. Black unemployment hit a new record low of 6.6% — doubly interesting in the midst of the Kanye West controversy. March's jobs numbers were revised up from 103,000 to 135,000. Government payrolls declined by 4,000. People applying for unemployment benefits for the first time is now at the lowest level since 1973. Wages grew at an unimpressive 2.6% annualized rate, which bewilders experts, but according to the Employment Cost Index, first-quarter wages grew at the fastest pace in 11 years. That would be prior to the Democrat-caused financial collapse of 2008 for those keeping score.

The lone dark cloud was that unemployment dropped in part because more people aren't even looking for work. As Reuters reports, "236,000 people dropped out of the labor force. The labor force participation rate, or the proportion of working-age Americans who have a job or are looking for one, fell to 62.8 percent from 62.9 percent in March." That said, job growth can't help but slow when the labor market is at essentially full employment.

Meanwhile, the Commerce Department recently announced its estimate for first-quarter GDP growth of 2.3%, which is better than expected. Of course, Americans who rely on nightly newscasts didn't hear about that good news. Other news organizations spun it in a negative light for President Donald Trump.

And that right there is the key. A lot of the Leftmedia churn undermines consumer confidence, and the economy is all about confidence. To the extent Democrats — with the help of their Leftmedia allies — can erode confidence in the administration, the more they undermine the economy. The trick is for Republicans to hammer home the message of tax cuts, deregulation and a growing economy.

SOURCE 

*******************************

Trump refugee policy favors Christians over Muslims, 3-1

President Trump’s move to change U.S. refugee policy has led to a radical change in the religious makeup of the population, with Christians now outnumbering Muslims by some three to one, according to the State Department.

In data analyzed by the Pew Research Center, some 10,500 refugees entered the U.S. in the current fiscal year, of which 6,700 were Christians. Another 1,800 were Muslim.

The shift breaks a pattern of allowing equal numbers of Muslims and Christians into the U.S. from dangerous and war-torn nations.

Under Trump, the number of refugees allowed has been slashed. Under former President Obama it reached 100,000, but under Trump it is set for a fraction of that.

Also, the president has targeted some mostly Muslim nations with a travel ban, though there are millions of Muslims in other nations not hit by the ban who are seeking to flee.

In past years, some Christian groups said that Muslims were favored by refugee officials, especially during the Obama years.

Pew did the math and said, “As a result of these changes, Christians account for a far larger share of refugees admitted than Muslims the first half of fiscal 2018 (63 percent vs. 17 percent). By comparison, in full fiscal 2017 Christians (47 percent) and Muslims (43 percent) were more evenly split, and in fiscal 2016 the Muslim share (46 percent) slightly exceeded the Christian share (44 percent).”

SOURCE 

****************************

The swamp still has the power to destroy you

On May 2, the Daily Caller reported, “House Democrat Warns Trump Team: You’ll End Up ‘Sullied’ Like Ronny Jackson,” writing, “Democratic Tennessee Rep. Steve Cohen warned on Wednesday that members of President Donald Trump’s inner circle will end up ‘sullied’ like former White House physician Adm. Ronny Jackson — if they stick with the president for long.”

On May 2, the Washington Examiner reported, “Ex-Trump aide Michael Caputo warns: Investigations espousing ‘punishment strategy’ to deter future Trump-like candidates, stating, “Michael Caputo, a former Trump campaign aide, said that he doesn’t think anybody should work on a Republican campaign ever again, unless they are compensated for any legal fees that may come out of it. Speaking out Wednesday evening, Caputo also said he believes there is a ‘punishment strategy’ to ‘destroy’ Trump and deter any other billionaires in the future from thinking about running for president. Just out of an interview with special counsel Robert Mueller, Caputo told Fox News’ Tucker Carlson he’s certain that federal investigators are fixated on collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia. Caputo said he firmly believes there was never any collusion. Caputo also griped about the crushing legal costs of being a witness in the Russia investigations. He excoriated the Senate Intelligence Committee on Tuesday in his closing remarks, blaming the investigation for forcing his family out of their home due to mounting legal costs and death threats. He concluded the statement saying, ‘God damn you to hell.’”

On May 3, NBC News reported, “Feds tapped phones of Trump lawyer Michael Cohen, and caught one call with White House: NBC News,” stating, “Federal authorities wiretapped the phone lines of President Donald Trump’s long-time personal lawyer Michael Cohen, NBC News reported Thursday. At least one call between Cohen’s phone and the White House was captured by the wiretap, according to the story.”

The NBC story was later retracted, with Fox News reporting, “Sources with knowledge of the proceedings told Fox News that investigators used a pen register, or dialed number recorder (DNR), on at least one of Cohen’s phones. A pen register records all numbers dialed from a given phone number, as well as the length of each call.”

To believe that the FBI went and got a court to violate the President’s attorney-client privilege via wiretap and did not record the contents of the wiretap, it seems like bull. It’s clearly an attempt to obscure the fallout of this egregious abuse of power, to cover up the fact that the President’s attorney was under surveillance. Either way, it’s surveillance of the President’s attorney.

Are you picking up a theme?

Support Donald Trump and you will be destroyed.  It doesn’t matter if the public has ever heard your name, you will be targeted and driven into bankruptcy or worse.  The crime?  Supporting the President of the United States.

And it is all happening right before our eyes in plain sight.

It is no secret that Special Counsel Mueller is a heat seeking missile with only one goal – to take down the Trump presidency.

It is no secret that senior officials within the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Obama Department of Justice similarly sought to undermine the Trump candidacy and subsequently the legitimacy of his presidency.

It is no secret that the Democrats with the aid of some key Senate Republicans have engaged in full blown obstruction of the President’s ability to staff his own Administration.

And now, anyone can read with their own eyes that the seek and destroy campaign goes beyond just the President and those closest to him, and aims at anyone who had the audacity to work in the Trump campaign, to large donors who support conservative causes, and even to those who dare to fight for traditional constitutional governance.

The message is clear. If you dare step outside the accepted socialist orthodoxy that pervades dominant thought in the United States, you will be silenced.

But they cannot silence the people, and ultimately that is the strength of America. Unfortunately, those who seek to destroy the President and anyone who dares to support him know this and that is what the campaign of intimidation is about.

On the Cohen wiretap, it is an obscene abuse of power for the Department of Justice to use wiretaps or pen registers or whatever on the phone of the President’s personal attorney in an apparent attempt to listen to an attorney/client privileged conversation(s).  Whether at least one conversation between someone at the White House and the President’s attorney was recorded or even simply its metadata registered, this brazen judicial abuse should have civil libertarians apoplectic.

Of course, the reality is that the left can justify any action, no matter how egregious, in their effort to take down President Trump.

In the mid-terms, the people will decide if they want to reward those who are engaged in a silent coup, not just against Trump, but also against the very premises of our constitutional republic of innocence until proven guilty and the right to free speech and political activity. President Trump was elected in spite of the D.C. swamp, and threats from the swamp will do nothing but show the people who the real swamp creatures are. If the people want to maintain their freedoms, they better be taking names also.

It is clear to anyone who is paying attention that those who vowed before the election to impeach Trump if he won will stop at nothing to end or disable his presidency.  We can no longer be shocked by this ongoing abuse of prosecutorial power, the only question is how long the American people will tolerate it.

SOURCE 

********************************

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)

***************************

Secret to intelligence? New link between brain cell size and IQ may help scientists find a way to enhance human intellect

For the first time, scientists have discovered that smart people have bigger brain cells than their peers. 

As well as being bulkier, the cells are better connected to their neighbours, allowing them to process more information at a faster rate.

If results of the study are confirmed, it could help researchers find a way to enhance our intelligence.

A study, led by Natalia Goriounova at the Free University Amsterdam, gave an IQ test to 35 people who were due to undergo brain surgery, according to report in New Scientist.

During surgery, doctors took a small sample of healthy brain tissue from the temporal lobe of the volunteers. This piece of human brain was then kept alive for testing in a lab.

Dr Goriounova compared the size and shape of the brain cells with volunteers' IQ scores. They found that the brain cells are significantly bigger in people with higher IQs.

Brain cells from smarter people also have more dendrites, which are short extensions of the main neuron that connect to other cells. These tiny projections are important in transferring information from one cell to another.

The study is the first to ever show that the  physical size and structure of brain cells is related to a person's intelligence levels. 

Christof Koch at the Allen Institute for Brain Science in Seattle told New Scientist:  'We've known there is some link between brain size and intelligence. The team confirm this and take it down to individual neurons.

The concept of intelligence being derived from brain structure could ruffle feathers among some in the academic field.

Dr Koch said: 'Some people will say intelligence is so elusive and complex that the idea it can be tied to individual neurons is implausible.' 

The research team also tested people's ability to transmit electrical signals, mimicking the processing of information.

What they found was that people with a low IQ coped at a low frequency, but rapidly became fatigued. The smarter people did not slow down and continued to transmit even at a high rate of stimulation.   

'What they did here is extraordinary neuroscience,' says Richard Haier at the University of California, Irvine. 'It's the beginning of being able to study intelligence neuron by neuron, and circuit by circuit.

'This research could lead to neuroscience-based ways to enhance human intelligence – perhaps dramatically. 'We might be able to treat intellectual disabilities or prevent them from occurring.'

'Theoretically, we can say that with both pluripotent and embryonic stem cells that we can create larger brain cells which, when combined with this recent research, would indicate that we could increase intelligence,' Michele Giugliano, co-author and professor at the University of Antwerp told MailOnline.

'This was shown in rodents as we grafted these cells into the brain of mice.

'The problem is that we do not know if the size of the cell is from genetic cause or neurophsycical cues.

It does seem that it would be theoretically possible to restore human brain matter in the next 50 years to restore cognitive deficit. Ethically, I am not sure if that would be allowed.'

SOURCE 

******************************

Wisconsin and Welfare: Work Works
   
“It’s so evident that work is the only way to get people out of poverty.”

Chris Kapenga, a Wisconsin state senator, said the sentence above in regard to welfare reform legislation recently passed in the Badger State. “We’re going to help people get 30 hours of work and move them closer to being self-sustained.”

Of course, the state senator is only half right; the other steady road out of poverty is a healthy marriage. But the basic facts about the gains of work and marriage still seem to elude some people.

Promoting work and marriage are the goals of welfare reform. Contrary to the caricature painted by liberals, conservatives don’t lack compassion for the poor. Quite the opposite. We know a failure to institute work requirements robs those in poverty of their dignity — that if they’re able to work, we do them no favors by engaging in a simple handout. And the collapse of marriage in low-income communities has had devastating effects on men, women and children.

That’s why Gov. Scott Walker and his state deserve credit for taking the lead on reform issues. Among other things, the latest reforms establish work requirements for housing programs and strengthen already existing work requirements in food stamp programs.

It may surprise some people that such requirements are even necessary. Don’t we, they may ask, already have them at the federal level?

We do, but it’s not as widespread as they may think. There are more than 80 means-tested federal welfare programs, yet only two have substantial work requirements: The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program and Temporary Assistance for Needy Families.

And of the 3,000 federal housing authorities, only 39 require any sort of work as a condition for housing assistance.

That’s where the Wisconsin reforms come in. They expand work requirements to all work-capable state residents who receive federal housing assistance.

“The generosity of federal housing subsidies and the expense of the program make it a good target for reform,” writes welfare expert Marissa Teixeira. “This measure will help those who utilize housing vouchers to reduce their dependency on government.”

Another new Wisconsin measure that would encourage self-sufficiency: Increasing the number of work hours required of able-bodied adults without dependents from 20 a week to 30. The state is also expanding work requirements for parents with children above the age of six who apply for food stamps.

Some critics paint this an unreasonable. But if we’re interested in actually lifting individuals and their dependents out of poverty — to break the crippling cycle that often ensnares multiple generations — this is what we need to do.

Consider the success of the 1996 reform, which the Wisconsin one is built on. “That law, among other things, introduced work requirements to the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program,” Ms. Teixeira writes. “The result was a 50 percent increase in employment among never-married mothers and a one-third decrease in poverty among that group.”

Wisconsin’s latest reforms offer a model for other states. Its efforts, in fact, remind me of a key recommendation in “Solutions 2018,” The Heritage Foundation’s latest policy briefing book: that when it comes to welfare reform, we should return fiscal responsibility to state governments.

Those governments administer many federally funded welfare programs, but inefficiency abounds — which is hardly surprising, considering that it’s not their money on the line. But if we began to shift things so that states not only administer but pay for the programs with state resources, we can expect that to change.

The final crucial element of reform, courtesy of “Solutions 2018”: We need to do much more to promote marriage, which is a proven weapon against child poverty.

Marriage reduces the probability of child poverty by a whopping 80 percent. Children in single-parent homes, by contrast, are more than five times more likely to be poor, compared to their peers in homes with both parents.

As President Lyndon Johnson said of the War on Poverty, “Our aim is not only to relieve the symptom of poverty, but to cure it.” Wisconsin is pointing the way. Will other states follow?

SOURCE 

*****************************

Leading Economist Now Says Trump Policies Are Restoring America’s Economy

Sean Snaith is not a household name but he is one of the nation’s top economists and highly regarded in economic circles for the depth and accuracy of his projections.

So much so that he is on multiple national economic forecasting panels, including The Wall Street Journal’s Economic Forecasting Survey, the Associated Press’ Economy Survey, CNNMoney.com’s Survey of Leading Economists, USA Today’s Survey of Top Economists, the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia’s Survey of Professional Forecasters, Bloomberg and Reuters.

All this is stated upfront because what he says rightly carries weight in a lot of influential circles, and probably should outside those circles. And he is now supremely optimistic about the American economy going forward.

He made projections last year he said were based on the assumption of a Hillary Clinton victory and her policies being instituted — because that is what all of the political pundits told him. When Trump won, he says, he had to re-think things. He went back to the drawing board and began a new set of calculations which he is constantly updating. The differences are dramatically better for the American economy and the American worker.

In fact, to hear Snaith speak recently to a large Florida economic development group, its almost jarring how much of a MAGA Trumper he sounds like — well, on economic policies anyway. And the projections he announced were almost goose-bumpy good.

Snaith said the tax cuts and deregulatory efforts will generate a 3.5 percent national GDP this year — much higher than at any point since before the Great Recession — and will remain very strong at least through 2020. He said this is more where the American economy should be and will be (barring any major, unforeseen disruptions.)

That has positive implications for American workers. The jobless rate is hovering at about 4 percent right now, but he predicted that as policies really start generating economic activity, the unemployment rate will fall to 3.4 percent by late 2020 — and that is even as the labor participation rate increases. So even as more Americans re-enter the job market after giving up for the past six years or more, they will all be absorbed into new jobs, plus some.

This tight labor market means there will be competitive market pressures driving wages and salaries specifically at the lower ends to begin with. In fact, that is already beginning to happen.

“Markets are magical and will solve the labor problem” by increasing wages to attract workers, he said. “The lowest end jobs are seeing the fastest income growth rate right now.”

Snaith, director of the University of Central Florida’s Institute for Economic Competitiveness, said there are two driving policies at work here. The Tax Cut and Jobs Act and the ongoing regulatory relief.

The key elements of the tax reform package boosting the economy include: lower income tax rates; higher standard deductions; expansion of the child tax credit; reducing the highest corporate tax rate in the developed world from 35 percent to 21 percent; tax breaks for small businesses; and a one-time tax break to 15.5 percent to repatriate American companies’ offshore profits — which Apple already announced they will take advantage of to the tune of $252 billion.

The tax package will increase take-home pay for American workers — something that has not happened since President Bush was in office — and will generate more consumer spending, stimulating the economy and GDP growth. American companies will be more apt to keep their profits at home and reinvest a portion of them — several have already announced their intentions with plant expansions and sharp increases in employee pay.

But Snaith sees deregulation as every bit as important because of the tremendous drag that excess regulation places on companies and the economy. “Deregulation is the special sauce that will juice the economy,” Snaith said.

The Code of Federal Regulations exploded from 140,000 pages in 2005 to 185,000 today, he said. Those endless rules strangled the economy by trillions of dollars as companies spend so many resources on compliance rather than innovation, expansion and employee pay. Last year, the Trump administration took 22 deregulatory actions for every one new regulation, saving about $8 billion in regulatory compliance costs alone.

Interestingly, Snaith is not worried about a trade war undercutting his economic projections because he does not think there will be one.

“Are we going to have a trade war? My answer is no. Everybody knows that no one wins in a trade war,” he said. However, he thinks that some of the nation’s trade deals do need renegotiating because they were unbalanced, and China was cheating on them.

“If you are a manufacturer, you are not on an even playing field with China,” he said.

Snaith is about as mainstream as you can get in the economics field. And his projections record is stellar. His optimism is worth paying attention to.

SOURCE 

********************************

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)

***************************

Israel Exposes Iran’s Nuclear Lies

Huge intelligence find proves Trump’s suspicions correct

Israel now has proof of what many suspected all along about the disastrous nuclear deal that former President Barack Obama reached with the Iranian regime. “Iran did not come clean on its nuclear program,” Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu charged, claiming that more than 100,000 Iranian documents Israel’s intelligence agents obtained from a secret “atomic archive” in Tehran prove the nuclear deal is "based on lies.” This latest development should make President Trump's decision to withdraw from the nuclear deal a no-brainer.

Prime Minister Netanyahu announced in a press conference that the trove of secret nuclear weapons files came from a hidden Iranian site where they were moved in 2017. He said the files contain materials, which Israel has shared with the United States, that include “incriminating documents, incriminating charts, incriminating presentations, incriminating blueprints, incriminating photos, incriminating videos and more.” The prime minister added that the United States has confirmed its authenticity, a claim supported by Trump administration officials who have reviewed the secret documents.

"Prime Minister Netanyahu gave a powerful presentation today of compelling new evidence documenting Iran's determined pursuit of a nuclear weapon," a senior Trump administration official said, as quoted by the Free Beacon. "It certainly would have been helpful to have this information when the JCPOA [Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action] was negotiated but the Iranians decided to lock it away in a secret vault for future reference. Only the regime knows what else they're hiding, but the revelations today don't give us much confidence in their protestations that they have never had interest in militarizing their nuclear program."

The “atomic archive” documents reportedly reveal details about a hush-hush nuclear weapons plan known as Project Amad that began back in the early 1990’s. It was supposedly shut down in 2003, but, in actuality, the project work was carried on under different guises with the same Iranian scientists involved. The work has focused on what the prime minister said were five elements. As described by the Times of Israel, these elements consisted of “designing nuclear weapons, developing nuclear cores, building nuclear implosion systems, preparing nuclear tests and integrating nuclear warheads on missiles.” Since the flawed nuclear deal itself did not directly address Iran’s ballistic missile research and development program as it should have, Iran has felt free to work on perfecting the technology for nuclear warhead missile integration.

“Even after the deal, Iran continued to preserve and expand its nuclear know how for future use," Prime Minister Netanyahu pointed out, no doubt having the deal’s sunset clauses in mind. As Debkafile commented, “The material presented by the prime minister demonstrated that Iran’s nuclear program had been secretly stored intact for use at a time of its choice and posed an ever-present peril.”

Iran has played the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the UN watchdog which has repeatedly given Iran a clean bill of health for supposedly complying with its commitments under the nuclear deal, known formally as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action or JCPOA for short. Iran misled the IAEA into believing that Iran had discontinued the use of any technology for developing nuclear weapons.

Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif mocked Prime Minister Netanyahu, tweeting, “The boy who can’t stop crying wolf is at it again… You can only fool some of the people so many times.” Zarif is right about only being able to fool some of the people so many times, but his comment applies to the Iranian regime itself. The regime fooled Obama and Kerry, who in turn sold a bill of goods to Congress and the American people. President Trump is not so easily fooled.

Indeed, President Trump now has the proof he needs to announce withdrawal from the JCPOA on May 12th, reimpose harsh sanctions for Iran’s lies to the IAEA and other deceptions, and at the same time send a message to the North Korean regime that he will not tolerate a meaningless paper agreement in his negotiations with Kim Jong-un. As the president noted in response to the evidence of Iran’s lies, it “really showed that I've been 100 per cent right. That is just not an acceptable situation.”

Meanwhile, missile attacks in Syria Sunday evening struck two pro-Iranian Shiite command centers, including a depot with 200 Iranian missiles said to have been slated for transport to Hezbollah. Reportedly, eighteen Iranians were killed, including a senior officer. Israel has not claimed responsibility. However, Israel may be girding for a Hezbollah attack from the north, or possibly for a direct attack by Iran itself. According to Debkafile, there has been unusually heavy Israeli military traffic spotted going north. Israel has also announced that its northern airspace will be closed to civilian flights until the end of May.

As reported by the Washington Times, “Israeli defense officials have told their American and Russian counterparts that if Iranian-backed forces attack Israel from inside Syria, Jerusalem will not hold back from retaliating with direct strikes against Tehran or other targets in Iran.” Iran’s nuclear facilities may well top the target list.

SOURCE 

****************************

May Day: Dems Seek to Replicate Failed Socialist States

Proponents of socialism see all migration as good, while ignoring what causes the problem 

Across the world yesterday, crowds of leftists demonstrated, protested and rioted all in celebration of that failed egalitarian pipe dream known as socialism. Meanwhile, as the infamous caravan of illegal aliens demands asylum, many of these May Day protests focused on advocating any and all kinds of immigration. Democrats and their Leftmedia cohorts continue to insist that President Donald Trump’s efforts to secure the border and enforce our nation’s immigration laws are dangerous expressions of bigotry and racism. When pressed on why the U.S. should essentially ignore its own immigration laws and allow for the unlawful entry of illegal aliens, they offer a ridiculous non sequitur: Because we are “a nation of immigrants.” The fundamental question is this: Why do these people want to leave failed socialist states to come to America?

The Left’s vacuous logic was on full display recently when Fox News’ Tucker Carlson interviewed Univision senior anchor Jorge Ramos. Carlson asked Ramos why the U.S. should let into the country these illegal alien asylum seekers. Ramos responded by saying that the U.S. is the richest and most powerful nation in the world and therefore has a moral obligation to take in these illegals. Tellingingly, Ramos, who has dual citizenship with Mexico and the U.S., was absolutely unwilling to grant that Mexico has any role to play in helping to deal with the illegal immigration problem. And again, a question: Why is the U.S. the richest nation in the world? Liberty and free-market capitalism.

What this interview displayed was the corrupting influence of a socialist worldview. Never was the question of who is ultimately responsible for the “plight” of these illegal alien asylum seekers legitimately addressed. Rather, as is often the case, Ramos blamed the U.S. for the situation in which these foreign individuals find themselves. And this is the fundamental problem with socialism: It lays the blame for failure at the feet of the successful. Since the U.S. is so wealthy and powerful, and since it enjoys this status due to its free-market economy, leftists blame America for the failure of socialist nations across the globe. Never can the failure of those socialist nations be attributed to the corrupting agent of socialism itself. This was exposed in the controversy over Trump’s alleged reference to “s-thole countries.”

While Democrats are quick to criticize Trump and Republicans for wanting to enforce our nation’s immigration laws, they are amazingly reticent to offer any criticisms of those nations and their socialist systems of government that are directly responsible for creating the dismal economies these illegal aliens are fleeing. Worse, Democrats want to turn our country into exactly the kind of failed socialist states these migrants are fleeing. Democrats preach the glories of socialism as a more “just” and “equitable” system when all we see are examples of its failures.

SOURCE 

******************************

State of the Resistance

A digest of remarks by CONRAD BLACK

The house of cards of the Trump Resistance is collapsing with accelerating speed, as anything propelled by the force of gravity does. The “comedy” act at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner on Saturday and the groans from the audience must have caused even some of the more militant Democrats to wonder what the whole White House press beat had become.

It was a vicious, unfunny replication of the late-night television laughing hyenas, while the president whipped up his supporters at a large rally in Washington, Mich. (televised nationally).

 Nothing to do with the White House, and especially not the correspondents, amounts to anything without the president. This was always a good-natured back and forth between the president and the reporters who follow him every day and was a pleasant, if fairly predictable, Washington event, like Alfalfa and Gridiron.

It is now just mudslinging in absentia, revealing the White House media as essentially the partisan pack of defamers and myth-makers that they have made of themselves, and that their employers have tolerated. The country doesn’t trust them and doesn’t much listen anymore. It is potentially dangerous when a free press had made itself so dispensable.

The evidence continues to accumulate that not just former FBI deputy director Andrew McCabe, but his boss James Comey, and the partisan intelligence directors James Clapper and John Brennan will all be facing perjury charges, and that those responsible for the phony surveillance warrant on Carter Page (including the former attorney general, Loretta Lynch, and her chief collaborators) and ultimately a considerable swath of the Clinton campaign and the Obama administration will all be responding to serious allegations.

It is at that point that the Resistance will have to show whether it has any backbone, and not just an ability to orchestrate the bigotry of the media and the stunned, dethroned solidarity of the OBushinton joint-incumbency under which the political confidence of the country largely eroded.

Like officers on a sinking vessel directing passengers toward an insufficient number of lifeboats, Rahm Emanuel and Nancy Pelosi are now urging Democrats to be more subtle and restrained in calling for the impeachment of the president. As some of the leaders of the Resistance are arraigned for serious misdeeds, the impeachment of a president whose only misdemeanors are in areas of style and etiquette (though those are sometimes jarring) will increasingly seem esoteric.

It is a reasonable inference, though not one that can be made with much confidence, that Rudolph W. Giuliani, former mayor and U.S. attorney of New York, has joined the president’s legal team to negotiate with Robert Mueller a series of written questions for the president to be answered in writing, and a conclusion, at least of the Russian aspect of this inquiry, which will then have to show cause why its mandate should be extended to other fields.

Failing some such agreement, the president could well ask a Supreme Court review of the validity of Mueller’s proceedings, given that they were launched by Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein at the instance of Comey’s leaked and partially classified documents (that were probably wrongly removed government property), because he wanted a special investigation into the Russian issue, despite the fact that Rosenstein had recommended the firing of Comey, who himself confirmed that Trump was not a target of the Russian investigation and had made no effort to interfere with the Russian investigation.

There has never been any excuse for any of it, and it has accomplished nothing except to drag Trump’s accusers into a quagmire of their own making. At some point in James Comey’s tortuous book tour, as he twists and turns to square irreconcilably conflicting assertions and actions of his recent past, there will be a moment that will recall Joseph Welch’s counter-attack on Senator Joseph R. McCarthy: “Have you no decency, sir?”

As we wait hopefully for such a moment, I declare the opening front-runners for next year’s Pulitzer Prizes: Tucker Carlson, Mollie Hemingway, and Mark Penn. The first three have declared cogently and forcefully that Comey’s briefing of the president-elect on the Steele dossier was a “set-up,” so that Clapper, the director of the National Intelligence Agency, could leak it to CNN (his future employer), lie to Congress about it as he had about other things, and smear the incoming president with all the spurious defamations that Comey had himself told Trump were “salacious and unverifiable.”

Alan Dershowitz also deserves much credit because, with the great weight of his legal eminence, he has joined Victor Davis Hanson and me in seeking an investigation of Mueller’s role in the horrible Deegan-Bulger scandal of the FBI in Boston in the Sixties to Eighties, when innocent men were knowingly prosecuted and condemned for murder, while the real killers were sheltered because of their assistance in attacking the Patriarca crime family in New England.

Comey conveniently tied a bow on his own misfeasances by condemning the pardon of former vice president Dick Cheney’s completely unoffending chief of staff, Scooter Libby, and by engaging as his counsel in the legal hellfire that is about to burst on him, the special prosecutor in that case, his fascistic doppelganger Patrick Fitzgerald, and his designated leaker, Daniel Richman.

There is now little to do but watch the collapse of the proud façade of the corrupt prosecutocracy that Mueller, Comey, and Fitzgerald personify, corroded and bloated by a 99 percent conviction rate, 97 percent without a trial, because of the hideous mutation of the plea-bargain system. They are all very self-righteous: “Great will be the fall of it.”

Robert Mueller, after nearly 20 indictments (most of them empty gestures at absentee Russians), is on course to discover the extent of collusion with Russia and the identity of the colluders. Even now (issue of April 21), Republicans should “know that Mr. Trump is bad for America and the world.” The Republicans must rally to the bill “to protect Mr. Mueller’s investigation from sabotage.” It was implied that Mike Pompeo would be defeated as nominee for secretary of state, and that Sean Hannity might be the succeeding candidate.

SOURCE 

********************************

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)

***************************

Fear of the Left: The Most Powerful Force in America Today

By DENNIS PRAGER

The dominant force in America and many other Western countries today is fear of the Left.

This is a result of the fact that the most dynamic religion of the past 100 years has been neither Christianity nor Islam. It has been leftism. Whoever does not recognize this does not understand the contemporary world.

Leftism — in its incarnations, such as Marxism, Communism, and socialism; expressed through egalitarianism, environmentalism, and feminism; in its denigration of capitalism and Western civilization, especially in America and Israel; in its supplanting of Christianity and Judaism; through its influence on Christianity and Judaism; in its celebration of race; and in its replacing of reason with romanticism — has almost completely taken over the news and entertainment media and institutions of education.

There is a largely (though not entirely) nonviolent reign of ideological terror in America. In almost every area of life, people fear antagonizing the Left.

Last week, before my speech at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, a man employed by the university (I will not say in what department) walked over to me, looked around to see whether anyone was watching, and whispered in my ear, “I’m a conservative.”

This happens just about everywhere I speak. People whisper — yes, whisper — that they are conservative or they support Trump. The last time I experienced people looking around to check whether they were seen speaking to me was with dissidents in the Soviet Union.

People call my radio show from all over the country to say that their fellow musicians, nurses, teachers, or employees do not know that they are conservative, let alone that they support the president.

I have called contemporary conservatives in America Marranos, the name given during the 15th-century Spanish Inquisition to Jews who hid their Judaism while appearing to be Catholics, lest they be persecuted. I do not compare the consequences: Losing one’s friends or employment is not the same as losing one’s home or one’s life. But otherwise, the label is apt.

Because of my widely covered conducting of the Santa Monica Symphony Orchestra at the Walt Disney Concert Hall last summer, members of some of the most prestigious orchestras in America have opened up to me, telling me they are conservative but would never reveal this fact to their fellow musicians. They fear either losing their position or, more likely, being socially ostracized.

Why are so many Democrats shocked when a Republican is elected president? Because, as they themselves say, they “don’t know anyone” who voted for the Republican. The primary reason for this is that the people in their lives who voted for Donald Trump — professional colleagues, and even friends and relatives — are afraid to tell them.

There are two reasons the Left labels most conservatives and all Trump supporters “white supremacists,” “neo-Nazis,” and “racists.” One is to defeat conservatives without having to defeat conservative ideas. The other is to instill fear: Speak out and you will suffer the consequences.

Parents call my radio show and ask what they should tell their children at college when they ask whether they should risk receiving a lower grade for divulging their conservative politics in a paper or on an exam.

It is becoming more and more common for leftist mobs to gather in front of a conservative’s home, scream epithets at the conservative’s family members, and vandalize the home. Just last week, the Associated Press reported:

Protesters are targeting the northern Virginia home of the National Rifle Association’s top lobbyist . . . Chris Cox . . . as well as his wife’s nearby decorating business. . . . Libby Locke, a lawyer for the Cox family, said the vandalism included spraying fake blood and defacing the home with stickers.

Left-wing student mobs routinely take over the offices of university deans, professors, and even presidents. The few non-left-wing professors on any campus understand their lives will be made miserable if they speak out. The widely reported case of liberal biology professor Bret Weinstein at Evergreen State College in Washington is directly on point.

In May 2017, Professor Weinstein was surrounded by about 50 left-wing students, who screamed curses at him outside of his classroom for refusing to participate in an event during which white people were asked to leave the campus for a day.

On May 24, 2017, Weinstein tweeted: “The police told me I am not safe on campus. They can not protect me.”

Within a few months, left-wing students and the left-wing Evergreen administration made life so miserable for the lifelong liberal professor that he left the university.

Since the Left began spreading the lie that a white police officer in Ferguson, Mo., shot a black youth because he, like most police officers, was a racist, police officers in many cities have feared taking proactive measures to prevent violent crime in black neighborhoods. They fear the left-wing mob known as the news media will ruin their reputation and end their career.

In the recent case of a Philadelphia Starbucks manager who asked two black men to purchase something before giving them the code to the restroom, Starbucks immediately appeased the left-wing mob. The company didn’t wait until any facts came out; it simply abandoned the manager and announced it would close every U.S. store one day in May to educate all Starbucks employees about “unconscious bias.”

These are only a few examples of the left-wing intimidation that dominates much of American life.

SOURCE

******************************

Yes, Obama's Iran Nuke Deal Really Was the Sum of All Lies

Benjamin Netanyahu's damning report of Iran's lies undermines the whole foundation of the deal

Just yesterday, we wrote about the upcoming negotiations and policy considerations surrounding Barack Obama’s 2015 Iran nuclear deal — how President Donald Trump was facing pressure from European allies to once again waive sanctions and continue pretending everything is all well and good. Soon after we published, along came Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to effectively nuke the idea that Iran has ever done anything but lie about its nuclear program.

Israeli intelligence collected a massive amount of intelligence — literally half a ton of materials — proving that Iran hid its nuclear weapons program for two decades. And the U.S. has verified it. “I am here to tell you one thing: Iran lied,” Netanyahu said. “After signing the nuclear deal in 2015, Iran intensified its efforts to hide its secret files.” He continued, “We’ve known for years that Iran had a secret nuclear weapons program called Project Amad. We can now prove that Project Amad was a comprehensive program to design, build and test nuclear weapons. We can also prove that Iran is secretly storing Project Amad material to use at a time of its choice to develop nuclear weapons.” Those weapons include a goal of five 10-kiloton nuclear warheads, all to go with its ballistic missile program that Obama allowed to continue.

As part of the ruse, Iran ensured that some of its program was dual-use — nuclear energy, not weapons. But it continued covert work on nuclear weapons, particularly at its Fordow facility, and lied to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) about that work and Project Amad. So much for what it insisted were “peaceful purposes.”

Obama’s nuclear deal was built on lies, just as we said from the beginning. The worst part is that Obama and his secretary of state, John Kerry, weren’t duped — they were part of the con, all in search of a legacy for Obama. And what a horrible legacy it was, too.

Bloomberg’s Eli Lake observes, “Advocating for a pact in 2015, John Kerry said American agencies had ‘absolute knowledge’ about the regime’s past nuclear efforts. Oops.” Except it wasn’t an “oops.” Team Obama deliberately looked the other way and deceived the world. Now, Lake says, “Beyond the fate of the nuclear deal, the Israeli intelligence also presents a crisis for the [1970] Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty, to which Iran is a member. If verified, it shows that Iran has systematically lied to weapons inspectors for nearly 20 years. If Iran doesn’t pay a price for its deception, then what is to stop future rogues from following the Iran model?”

Even if Trump now pulls out of the deal, however, Europe may stand by it. The Washington Examiner’s Tom Rogan argues, “Yet while Israel’s intelligence community, the Mossad in particular, deserves immense credit for successfully seizing and extricating this material from an Iranian stronghold, it is unlikely to persuade Europe’s big three (Britain, France and Germany) to join Trump in withdrawing from the deal. To persuade those leaders to do so, Netanyahu would have needed to show evidence of continuing, covert Iranian efforts either to construct a nuclear weapon or to secretly enrich uranium beyond the low-level cap the current agreement allows for medical research. That was not on display [Monday].”

Time will soon tell what Trump does, but in discussing Netanyahu’s report in a Monday press conference, he made another important strategic point: Pulling out of the Iran deal would send “the right message” to North Korea.

SOURCE

****************************

Prosecution for Immigration Crimes Rising Again

Fell under first year of Trump, but now returning to Obama levels

Prosecutions of criminal immigration offenses are projected to rise almost 20 percent in FY 2018, a new report from the Transaction Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC) shows.

TRAC bases its estimates on the 7,020 new criminal immigration prosecutions in March of 2018, an increase of 23.9 percent from the previous month. TRAC projects that, if the federal government continues to prosecute criminal immigration offenses in accord with this trend, there will be more than 70,000 prosecutions by fiscal year's end.

Criminal immigration offenses importantly do not include simple illegal immigration, which is a civil, rather than criminal offense. Rather, criminal offenses include acts such as reentry of a previously deported person, the smuggling of illegal immigrants, or visa or other document fraud.

Prosecutions for criminal immigration offenses are historically quite low, TRAC noted, with fewer than 20,000 per year under the last term of the Clinton administration and the first term of the Bush administration. They increased some under Bush's second term, but only really took off with the swearing in of President Barack Obama. The number of criminal immigration prosecutions almost reached 100,000 in 2013.

Immigration prosecutions began to decline thereafter, likely due to a more selective prosecution policy during Obama's second term. That trend continued in the first year of President Donald Trump's administration: Fiscal year 2017 saw the fewest prosecutions of any administration in a decade. This is likely due in part to the conspicuous decline in immigration in Trump's first year, a phenomenon often referred to as the "Trump effect."

However, as immigration rates rise again, so too are prosecutions. The most common charges faced by defendants are entry at improper time or place and reentry subsequent to deportation, combined making up well more than half of all charges. Charges unsurprisingly concentrate within the federal judicial districts along the southwestern border; a previous Free Beacon analysis found that those regions were responsible for the plurality of federal offenses, primarily due to the concentration of immigration offenses.

While immigration charges concentrate along the southwestern border, certain districts are seeing less activity than they used to, TRAC noted. Texas's northern district, Florida's southern district, and the eastern district of Michigan were all immigration crime hot spots twenty years ago, but have now fallen out of the top ten.

This renewed concentration of criminal immigration offenses along the southwestern border helps to explain why earlier this month, Attorney General Jeff Sessions implemented a "zero tolerance" policy for immigration offenses in that region. Under the Obama administration, the Department of Justice generally sought to prosecute only violent or criminal immigration offenders. Sessions has instructed U.S. attorneys to prosecute all offenders to the maximum extent allowable by law.

This zero tolerance has been shown historically to drive down illegal immigration levels, according to Sessions, a claim he based on analysis by the U.S. Customs and Border Protection agency which has in turn been questioned by the Department of Homeland Security.

SOURCE

********************************

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)

***************************

Cognitive flexibility rides again

The article below revives a very old tale.  It originated in a book called "The authoritarian personality" published in 1950 under the lead authorship of prominent Marxist theoretician Theodor Wiesengrund (AKA Adorno).  The story was that conservatives are rigid thinkers, prone to oversimplified categories and generally unable to think straight.  Since almost all psychologists are Leftist, the story was wildly popular and generated much research based on it.  I had a lot of articles published which pointed out holes in that research.

As early as 1954, however, it emerged that the supposed measures of rigid/flexible thinking correlated very poorly with one another. In one popular measure, the Budner scale, I found that the supposedly positive and negative items of the scale were totally uncorrelated with one-another.  The conclusion had to be that there was no such thing as cognitive flexibility -- as the various alleged measures of it disagreed with one another.

Whenever it was examined, however, they showed a correlation with IQ, suggesting that they were all just clumsy measures of IQ and should therefore be either abandoned or used only in conjunction with an IQ measure. So the various correlations found with flexibility/rigidity were in fact correlations with IQ.

And that very well explains the findings below.  The heavy Brexit vote came from generally depressed centres in Northern England which would have had few bright sparks left there.  Smart people in England gravitate to London.  And it was the London vote which  was most pro-EU.  So the most probable explanation of the findings below is simply that it confirms the well-known IQ gradient from the big city towards rural areas.  The interpretations the authors put on the findings simply reflect their own intentions and prejudices.  The correlates with "flexibility" were in fact correlates of IQ.

Interpreting that, however, would be a whole new story.  Why are Brexit opponents dumber?  Probably because of a third factor. Probably because the EU really is bad for areas where poor people live.  A comparison with Northern affluence before and after membership of the EU would probably be adverse to the EU.

The academic journal abstract is appended to the summary immediately below

The Cambridge Analytica scandals have made it obvious that some people’s votes can be predicted and manipulated by knowing their emotional triggers. But new research suggests that the way people think, in apparently unemotional ways, is also a reliable predictor of political attitudes, and in particular, of nationalism and enthusiasm for Brexit.

Leor Zmigrod, a Cambridge University psychologist, set out to investigate whether a preference for clear categories in thought mapped on to a preference for clear national boundaries and precise, exclusionary definitions of citizenship. Instead of relying on self-reported habits of thought, as previous surveys have done, she had participants (who were not students) take part in some standard psychological tests. One of them tested how easy it is for participants to adapt to changes in the rules of the game they are playing; the other is a test of the ability to associate words and ideas across different contexts, so that it works as a measurement of cognitive flexibility, or woolly-mindedness, as the more rigid would no doubt say.

Even with a reasonably small sample of about 330, the differences that appeared were large and startling. In particular, her team found that less cognitive flexibility correlated strongly with “positive feelings toward Brexit and negative feelings toward immigration, the European Union, and free movement of labour”. This not to say that there is anything abnormal about people on either side of the question. There is a lot of normal variation in temperament and imagination among perfectly healthy and sane people, even those who disagree with us. But it is still extraordinary to think that some political differences can quite reliably be traced to cognitive ones which seem to have no connection with politics at all.

One of the strongest links was between cognitive flexibility, as measured by these two tests, and disagreement with Theresa May’s statement that “a citizen of the world is a citizen of nowhere”.

These cognitive styles do not work directly on attitudes to Brexit, says Zmigrod. They predispose people to wider ideological attitudes, and those in turn determine the attitudes people took to the referendum. And the test results she found work differently to each other: in particular, nationalism and authoritarianism were very strongly predicted by a preference for fixed rules and categories, whereas political conservatism (as self-reported) was influenced by an inability to take words out of familiar contexts and make fresh connections between them (which the second test measures).

Nonetheless, the correlation between the style in which people think and the way that they voted was very much stronger than any of the other factors in the sample: controlling for class, age and sex only changed the results by 4%, although there was a strong, and possibly related, correlation with the length of time in education.

“The way the brain constructs internal boundaries between conceptual representations and adapts to changes in environmental contingencies has been shown here to be linked to individuals’ desire for external boundaries to be imposed on national entities and for greater homogeneity in their cultural environment. Information-processing styles in relation to perceptual and linguistic stimuli may also be drawn upon when dealing with political and ideological information,” she writes.

What this suggests to me is that some kinds of political argument are going to be literally interminable. Obviously this isn’t true of any particular issue. Even the question of our relations with Europe will be settled some time before the heat death of the universe. But it may be replaced by something else which arouses the same passions and splits the population in the same way, because the cognitive traits she is analysing are all part of the normal variation of humanity.

Despite what you learn on the internet, the people who disagree with you about Brexit do not all have something terrible wrong with their brains. Progress is not necessarily on our side. Nor is it even on the other side. One of the underlying tendencies of political argument at the moment is that both left and right expect the other side to be proved conclusively wrong by history – either to be swept away by progress or to be destroyed by the return of traditional reality. But if ideologies arise in part from differences in cognitive style which are evenly distributed through the population, the war between progress and reaction will continue for as long as humanity does.

SOURCE

Cognitive underpinnings of nationalistic ideology in the context of Brexit

Leor Zmigrod, Peter J. Rentfrow and Trevor W. Robbins

Abstract

Nationalistic identities often play an influential role in citizens’ voting behavior and political engagement. Nationalistic ideologies tend to have firm categories and rules for what belongs to and represents the national culture. In a sample of 332 UK citizens, we tested whether strict categorization of stimuli and rules in objective cognitive tasks would be evident in strongly nationalistic individuals. Using voting behavior and attitudes from the United Kingdom’s 2016 EU referendum, we found that a flexible representation of national identity and culture was linked to cognitive flexibility in the ideologically neutral Wisconsin Card Sorting Test and Remote Associates Test, and to self-reported flexibility under uncertainty. Path analysis revealed that subjective and objective cognitive inflexibility predicted heightened authoritarianism, nationalism, conservatism, and system justification, and these in turn were predictive of support for Brexit and opposition to immigration, the European Union, and free movement of labor. This model accounted for 47.6% of the variance in support for Brexit. Path analysis models were also predictive of participants’ sense of personal attachment to the United Kingdom, signifying that individual differences in cognitive flexibility may contribute toward ideological thinking styles that shape both nationalistic attitudes and personal sense of nationalistic identity. These findings further suggest that emotionally neutral “cold” cognitive information processing—and not just “hot” emotional cognition—may play a key role in ideological behavior and identity.

SOURCE

UPDATE:  A reader has sent in a comment on why London people voted so strongly against BREXIT:

Now, I can think of a much more cogent reason: London is foreign. It is the one place in the sceptred isle where the indigenous population, the so-called "white British" are marginally in a minority. The others are not necessarily black or brown, but they hail from somewhere else - especially Europe.

Indeed, I might add an anecdote of my own. Last year, I spoke to a guard outside a major hotel in London, and discovered that he worked for a company which provided guards. I then said, "I could tell you weren't employed by the hotel, because you have a British accent. There seems to be some rule that nobody who works for a major hotel can be native born."

"You're not the first person to make that comment," he replied. (To be fair, the hotel staff were very helpful and efficient.)

The majority "Remain" vote came from Scotland and SE England. The heartland of England voted for Brexit just as the heartland of the US voted for Bush. In fact, the two best predictors for Brexit were:

Age, Older people (who remembered what it was like to be independent) were more likely to vote for Brexit.

Englishness. People were asked whether they considered themselves (say) more English than British, more British than English, British but not English etc. The more they self-identified as English, the more likely they were to vote for Brexit.

Incidentally, they were more likely to vote for Brexit if they self-identified as Anglican, even if they didn't attend church. The established church is part of their English identity, whereas many Roman Catholics and, of course, non-Christians, have affiliations outside the UK.

Also, it was pointed out that, in many market towns, the local church has a central social function irrespective of its spiritual function - something I've noted on British TV.

**********************************

Has Maine found a bipartisan solution to easing health care costs?

Might we ever see a bipartisan health care bill that addresses costs and receives unanimous legislative support? Although one emanating from Washington seems unlikely anytime soon, an innovative bipartisan health care bill — referred to as Right to Shop — unanimously passed the Maine Legislature in 2017 and merits a closer look.

The Maine Right to Shop law begins by giving patients direct access to price information, enabling them to make informed decisions about costs of their care. It simultaneously incentivizes them to shop for high-quality, lower-cost providers by offering them financial rewards when they do so.

Maine’s bill was developed by a local lawmaker who was fed up with the rising cost of coverage at his small, family-owned business. He borrowed from initiatives promoting transparency in at least three other states — Arizona, Massachusetts, and New Hampshire — and cleverly coupled these with cash (or other) incentives to encourage patients to shop. This combination has already shown promising results with state employees and at large companies, but until this legislation, it was largely nonexistent for those at small companies or buying insurance on their own.

But will this work to lower health spending? Some have questioned the effectiveness of price transparency, and others have reported mixed outcomes with transparency alone. But this shouldn’t be surprising, because price transparency has rarely been coupled to meaningful incentives — like paying cash to patients who use high-value providers.

Today, most of us make online purchasing decisions to obtain savings of a few dollars. But remarkably, we remain indifferent to choices between care options whose prices differ by tens of thousands of dollars, despite numerous studies showing that higher health care prices do not correlate with better quality. Choosing the wrong provider might cost patients and the overall system more, with no improvement or even with lower quality care.

Until providers are incentivized to compete for patients based on both the cost and quality of care, the massive waste of resources produced by this predictable market failure is unlikely to be remediated. The Maine law is one approach that just might open the door to such developments.

In addition to transparent pricing and rewards, a third key feature of the Maine law allows out-of-network providers to compete for patients on a level playing field. In other words, you can see any provider you want out of network, as long as they are lower-cost. Together, these ingredients could set off a race to provide high-quality care at lower prices. In addition, this policy would provide a counterweight to the growing trend toward hospital consolidation and narrower insurer networks, both of which reduce patient options. Consolidation drives prices and expenditures higher.

By combining transparent prices that enable a patient to shop with financial rewards for accessing the best-value providers — independent of insurer network — incentives may finally align to improve quality and reduce cost of care.

Like many legislatively driven health care solutions, Maine’s new law certainly won’t solve all the problems in health care. But broader application of Right to Shop could catalyze innovation to improve both cost and quality. Indications of bipartisan interest in the Maine law on the part of state lawmakers across the country suggest this approach could help break today’s partisan health care legislative gridlock. Why? At the risk of overgeneralizing: Republicans are drawn to the potential for more competition and Democrats to greater access to care, and both like the outcome of lower costs.

Some incumbent providers will probably resist this change, fearing price competition, and insurers may claim this would burden them with added administrative costs. Yet without innovations like Right to Shop, we’ll be stuck with high prices and inconsistent quality — the worst possible combination.

In 2018, federal lawmakers would be wise to consider similar efforts by rewarding patients who can shop on both private and public-subsidized insurance, like Healthcare.gov, Medicare, and Medicaid. Without such sensible innovations, many patients, whether insured or not, will struggle to afford care. With respect to both cost and quality of health care, Maine’s new law could be just what the doctor ordered.

SOURCE

*******************************

There are idiots and then there are real idiots

Why would Trump sign it?  A  pocket veto would kill it

According to The Hill, the Senate Judiciary Committee voted to APPROVE legislation that would protect special counsel Robert Mueller on Thursday.

The panel approved the bill in a 14-7 vote that go support from both Democrats and Republicans. Four GOP senators supported the legislation, including Sens. Tillis, Graham, Grassley, and Flake.

The Republicans who opposed the bill were Senators Hatch, Lee, Cornyn, Crapo, Sasse, Kennedy, and Cruz.

“The vote marks the first time Congress has advanced legislation to formally protect Mueller from being fired by President Trump, who has railed against him in public and reportedly talked in private of dismissing him,” reports the Hill.

The bill doesn’t have the 60 votes necessary to pass the Senate, and has even less of a chance to pass the more conservative House. It also would be unlikely to win the two-thirds support needed to override a presidential veto.

SOURCE

********************************

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)

***************************