A joyous occasion in Israel as the U.S. embassy opens in Jerusalem

Only one song seems right to celebrate the occasion



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The appalling seductiveness of Karl Marx

Martin Hutchinson

The 200th birthday of Karl Marx on May 5 passed with several indications, in both Europe and China that his appeal is not dead, and indeed showing considerable signs of revival. China has significantly reversed its move away from Marxism, whereas elements in the EU High Command seem to be recognizing that a centralized Marxist dictatorship is what they are aiming for. “Big Data” possibilities bring the frightening possibility that Marxism may work – better than it did, at any rate. How can a freedom-lover fight this apparently inexorable trend?

Probably the worst prophesy ever made was Francis Fukuyama’s 1992 “The End of History.” Far from becoming universal, the liberal democracy that appeared to have triumphed with the fall of communism rapidly became “liberal” in the American sense, acquiring a thick gooey patina of political correctness, wasteful social spending, non-market interest rates and endless yawning budget deficits.  Whatever was supposed to have won in 1991, it wasn’t this. As a result, old falsehoods, which were never really killed, only scotched, made a rapid comeback in the West’s education institutions and now appear to be making a significant comeback in the West as a whole.

In this respect European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker’s speech in Trier, Marx’s birthplace, was typical. Saying that Marx had been misunderstood, Juncker claimed that people learned “freedom, emancipation and independence” from his works. That’s not just rehabilitation, it’s hagiography, and goes along with the 18-foot statue of Marx, donated by China, that now disfigures the pretty former capital, whose Archbishop was for over 500 years one of seven electors of the Holy Roman Empire. 

The European Union, with its dirigiste assumptions that the big decisions must always be taken by a centralized government, is moving increasingly towards Marxism, while on the other side of the world China never really left it. President Xi Jinping is now promoting Marx as a rallying symbol for the nation while economically, the move towards private enterprise seen since Deng Xiaoping took over in 1978 has reversed in recent years, with state owned enterprises taking the great majority of loans and investments, funded by a banking system that remains almost entirely state-controlled.

There are three main reasons why Marxism remains attractive: the desire of governments to exert control, the insidious philosophical influence of leftist professors in universities and the advent of Big Data, which has for the first time awakened the horrid dream that its practitioners might actually be able to achieve the universal control they seek.

It is no coincidence that the two economists most favored by the big governments of today’s world are Karl Marx and John Maynard Keynes. Both thought in terms, not of an economy of small producers and consumers competing for resources, but of governments allocating them. In Marx’s case, the individual consumer or producer was subsumed in a “class,” with private ownership eliminated and resources allocated by the state after negotiations between the classes.

In Keynes’ case, while the price mechanism had some relevance in ordinary commerce, interest rates had no place in allocating capital, and the overall level of the economy, as well as much capital investment, would be determined by benign government bureaucrats. Both systems, therefore, are instinctively appealing to those who choose to work for government and fear the uncertainties of commerce.    Keynes was himself highly sympathetic to Marxism/Communism, especially during the 1930s when he was locked out of influence in Britain by the capable free-market Chancellor of the Exchequer Neville Chamberlain.

There is no avoiding the natural proclivities of those working in government, except setting clear constitutional rules preventing them from messing up the economic system. In that context, it is a great pity that Thomas Jefferson, when drafting the Declaration of Independence, allowed his fascination with dodgy French philosophers to replace John Locke’s “life, liberty and property” with “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” Without Locke’s firm property right, there is no protection against government allocating private resources to itself (a fact reinforced by the infamous 2005 “Kelo vs New London” Supreme Court decision) and therefore no protection against the horrors of Marxist economics. “The pursuit of happiness” as an aspiration tends to negate property rights and provides no real protection against anything.

The cultural drift towards Marxism needs little explanation. Professors, being unconcerned with the market system and, once established, secure in their jobs feel free to advocate economically destructive nostrums. Most college systems are set up with no effective control on this, because college alumni, many of whom are committed to market mechanisms, are deliberately given very little voice. The institution’s funding is either by government or through a charitable trust that benefits from unfair tax breaks and is thereby insulated from market forces. In such circumstances, there is no check on leftist fantasy, and the idiocies which the older members of the professoriat picked up during the “Summer of Love” are perpetuated among their juniors.

The pull towards Marxism exerted by modern technology is a more interesting question. I speak now not of the likes of “Facebook” which with its PC content-censors is merely another arm of the leftist academic-charitable complex. However, the abilities of Big Data are more sinister. Suddenly the problem that wrecked Gosplan, the lack of knowledge of the myriad factors affecting production, demand and value, may in principle be soluble. To the likes of Juncker and Xi, a dream beckons: If data can only be made BIG enough, it may finally be able to reflect the efficiencies of the market mechanism, while being controlled entirely by Big Brother standing at the Off switch.

If you combine Big Data with the censorship possibilities of social media, an even more enticing vision opens to authoritarians in government. Using Big Data, they can control the economy more efficiently than Gosplan (they think) and ensure that all the little regulations they can think of for enforcing economic conformity are in fact being followed. Then using social media they can suppress any data points that suggest something might be going wrong, and ensure that any economic actors whose lives are wrecked by their Big Data economic control are never heard from. 

There are fortunately flaws in the Marxists’ dream of a super-Gosplan. Sure, you can imagine Big Data recording the production side of the economy so accurately that Big Brother has an idea of widget output to the last widget. You can even imagine Big Data recording via point-of-sale terminals every time a widget is sold, so that Big Brother knows the exact sales of widgets, second by second, together with data on where they are sold and who bought them. But there is very little he can do with this data. He can match production to sales, increasing production of fast-selling items – but any filthy capitalist can do this, and with Big Data will have as much information as Big Brother has to do it.

What Big Brother cannot do, even with Big Data, is get an accurate estimate of what consumer demand for any new product variant might be (because opinion polling is unamenable to Big Data accuracy). Further, Big Brother cannot in any way change the products the consumer wants to buy, or alter the products sold in any way that optimizes the economy beyond what is done by the market. Any attempt to produce excessive amounts of steel, because you have just decided to call yourself Stalin, will result in miserable failure, as consumers will not buy any more steel products than they would in a free market, so the excess steel will be wasted.

The instrument of control that Marx never thought of is interest rates. By pushing economies onto fiat money, and then setting interest rates at bureaucrat-determined ultra-low levels, Big Brother has over the last decade produced a gigantic mass of misguided investment, and urban housing markets that completely fail to serve ordinary people. This will doubtless eventually produce another enormous housing crash, which Big Brother will address by inventing more controls (such as abolishing cash) and distorting the economy further. Still, to be fair it is Keynes, not Marx, whom we must blame for this particular gigantic economic disaster.

Social media may offer Big Brother better opportunities for Marxist control than Big Data. If as several countries of the EU have recently done, you have through legislation acquired control of social media’s output, so that you control the political and social messages seen by the vast majority of the electorate, who do not take the trouble to make themselves properly informed, then you have gone a long way to ensuring that the electorate will vote as you want it to vote.

The EU is happy to sneer at Vladimir Putin’s version of “democracy” which draws heavily on techniques developed in the previous Marxist-Leninist state, but one can easily imagine the EU itself and its puppet European Parliament becoming a very similar one-party bureaucracy, with opposition limited to a few gadflies from unimportant countries, who can easily be quelled and overruled. As Putin has discovered, you don’t need to control 99% of the votes in an assembly to do exactly what you want; 70% will do just fine. 

Fortunately, it appears Big Data won’t bail out Big Brother, although social media may well make his task of domination easier. If a free market can be kept going, the lives of ordinary people will improve even in a non-free state, as Russians have proved over the significantly populace-enriching period of Vladimir Putin’s rule. The trick, therefore will be to preserve as much of capitalism as possible against the bureaucrats – and do something about the universities, so Marx’s pernicious doctrines are gradually relegated to the dustbin of history, where they belong.

SOURCE 

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Top Four Obama Policies Trump Has Reversed

Fulfilling a campaign promise, earlier this week Donald Trump officially withdrew the United States from the Obama-era nuclear deal with Iran, calling it “one of the worst and most one-sided transactions the United States has ever entered into.” For critics of the deal who recognized its flaws and did not turn a blind eye to evidence Iran was violating the terms of the agreement, this was welcome news a long time coming. Trump fulfilled his promise, and the days of kowtowing to terror-sponsoring regimes are behind us.

Naturally, Obama administration alums are throwing hissy fits. Obama himself released a statement calling the decision “a serious mistake.” Apparently, the man who gave billions of dollars and a pathway to creating nuclear weapons to the world’s number one state sponsor of terrorism thinks he has any credibility on the issue. Of course, Obama, the self-proclaimed former constitutional law professor, should have known that Senate ratification is required for his deal to be legally binding. For all intents and purposes, Obama’s Iran deal was written in pencil, and Trump took his eraser to it.

Just like that, Obama’s "major" foreign policy achievement became yet another example of just how foolish Obama’s “I have a pen and a phone” approach to governing was for someone who wanted to establish a long-term legacy.

Below are the top four unilaterally implemented Obama policies Trump has successfully reversed:

1. The Trans-Pacific Partnership

It may have been Obama’s signature trade deal, but Trump was not “down with TPP” and he often referred to it as a bad deal while on the campaign trail. Trump made good on his promise to end it just days after taking office. The move was no surprise, and the fact that Obama didn’t go to Congress to approve the deal made it an obvious choice for President Trump’s chopping block.

2. Planned Parenthood Protections

In January, the Department of Health and Human Services rescinded Obama-era “legal guidance” that would have punished states for defunding Planned Parenthood, the nation’s number one abortion provider and big money donor to Democrats. The regulations “warned states that ending Medicaid funding for Planned Parenthood or other health-care providers that offer abortions could be against federal law.” Of course, for many pro-life conservatives, while this was a welcome reversion of an Obama regulation, the subsequent omnibus bill that fully funded Planned Parenthood was not so welcome.

3. DACA

Perhaps one of Trump’s more brilliant moves in undoing Obama’s legacy was how he handled Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA). Aside from being pseudo-amnesty, one of the primary objections to DACA was that Congress, not the president unilaterally, is supposed to make decisions regarding issues of immigration. In place for five years at the time Trump ended it, nearly 800,000 people were protected from being deported under DACA, and reversing it was no simple issue. So Trump put the onus on Congress to work out a permanent solution. Trump said of his decision: "We will resolve the DACA issue with heart and compassion -- but through the lawful Democratic process -- while at the same time ensuring that any immigration reform we adopt provides enduring benefits for the American citizens we were elected to serve.”

Obama may not have understood how our constitutional republic works, but Trump clearly does. Currently, Republicans are trying to force a vote on DACA in Congress.

4. The Paris Climate Accord

Once again, this was another multinational treaty that Obama knew he couldn’t sell to Congress, so he didn’t even try. It has been just under a year since President Trump withdrew the United States from the 2015 Paris climate accord. So far, no climate apocalypse has occurred. Sea levels haven’t eaten up our coastlines and the air is still breathable. We’ve survived.

It is true that Trump has signaled that rejoining the treaty is still a possibility, but if he punts that to the Senate (where it should be), it will never happen.

Keep in mind, this list is by no means complete. Trump has reversed or weakened many Obama-era policies that were enacted without the consent of Congress. Earlier this year, Obama’s Vice President Joe Biden lamented: “All he seems to be trying to do is undo everything that President Obama has done.”

Yeah, that is why he won. But Obama was the one who chose to take an unconstitutional unilateral approach to governing. Obama took office with comfortable majorities in the House and Senate. Bipartisan compromise was unnecessary, and was never sought. When Democrats lost their majorities, Obama never felt the need to meet Republicans in the middle to achieve consensus the way his predecessors had. Obama was counting on Hillary Clinton to win the presidency and keep his unconstitutionally enacted agenda in place.

SOURCE 

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Bolton: Iran's Economy 'Quite Shaky,' So Effect of Sanctions 'Could Be Dramatic'

Regime change in Iran is "not the policy of the administration," National Security Adviser John Bolton told ABC's "This Week" on Sunday. "The policy of the administration is to make sure that Iran never gets close to deliverable nuclear weapons," he said.

But on CNN's "State of the Union," Bolton noted that getting out of the Iran nuclear deal will result in the reimposition of American sanctions on Iran: "And I think what we've seen is that Iran's economic condition is really quite shaky, so that the effect here could be dramatic," Bolton told CNN's Jake Tapper.

Tapper noted that Bolton repeatedly pushed for regime change in Iran before he became national security adviser. "I know that is not the current position of the United States government. But are you behind the scenes pushing for it to become the position of the United States government, regime change?" Tapper asked Bolton.

Bolton replied that he has "written and said a lot of things over the years when I was a complete free agent. I certainly stand by what I said at the time. But -- but those were my opinions then.

"The circumstance I'm in now is that I'm the national security adviser to the president. I'm not the national security decision-maker. He makes the decisions, and the advice I give him is between us."

Meanwhile, CBS's "Face the Nation" started on Sunday with a report from foreign correspondent Elizabeth Palmer in Tehran. Host Margaret Brennan asked Palmer how Iranian citizens are reacting to the U.S. pulling out of the nuclear deal:

"Well, the hard-liners hit the streets after President Trump's decision, with the old cries of 'Death to America,'" Palmer responded. "But they and everybody else are actually much more angry with their own government. They're fed up, because they haven't had salary increases. There are no jobs. There's corruption. And, most of all, they say the Iranian government can offer nothing but a bleak future.

"I have never heard people so angry here. At the moment, the government is keeping a lid on little protests that have been springing up everywhere, but it's anyone's guess how long they can maintain stability," Palmer concluded.

SOURCE 

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

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

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Donald Trump’s Mommy Issues

The report below is very light on evidence. It is by an amateur psychologist, PETER LOVENHEIM, who has devoted himself to "Attachment Theory" -- the claim that you need to have a lot of nurturance from your mother in the first 4 years of you life to grow up psychologically healthy

It is a theory from John Bowlby, an early British psychoanalyst who was disowned by other psychoanaysts, who think the father is the key.  Bowlby himself lost his mother when he was about 4 so that seems to be the genesis of the theory.  Psychologists today -- such as Rutter -- generally think there is something in the Bowlby theory but see it as only one of several influences

But when you have got a hammer everything looks like a nail and Lovenheim sees attachment theory as an explanation of Trump's behaviour.  As Trump always talks warmly of his mother, that would seem to disprove the Lovenheim theory but Lovenheim thinks he knows better what Trump feels.  It's all just speculation.

For what it's worth, I just think Trump was rather spoilt in his upbringing but it has not hurt his ability to empathize with normal people


Donald Trump is easily the most psychoanalyzed president of modern times. His decision-making style and behavior have been hotly debated by journalists, voters, politicians, world leaders and pundits who have bestowed upon him any number of fanciful, grave-sounding mental conditions, calling him, among other things, a narcissist, a sociopath, a psychopath and a paranoiac. Trump has said he distrusts mental health professionals, so we don’t have access to a formal assessment of his psychology. But colloquially speaking, perhaps the best explanation for the president’s behavior dates back to his earliest interactions with his mother.

Although I’m not a psychologist, I have spent years researching a major field of psychology known as attachment theory for a book. According to the science of attachment—developed in the second half of the 20th century by British psychotherapist John Bowlby—we’re hardwired at birth to attach to a competent and reliable caregiver for protection because we are born helpless. The success or failure of this attachment affects all our relationships throughout life—in the workplace, on the athletic field, with loved ones—and yes, even in politics. Children who bond successfully with a primary caregiver—usually this is the mom but it could also be the dad, grandparent, nanny or other adult—grow up with what is termed a “secure” attachment. As adults, they tend to be confident, trusting of others, resilient in the face of setbacks, and able to enjoy long, stable relationships. Children who fail to achieve a successful attachment, on the other hand, may as adults have a lack of comfort with intimacy, difficulty trusting others, a constant need for reassurance from relationship partners, and a lack of resilience when faced with illness, injury or loss.

The biographical record is fairly strong on Trump’s failure to develop a healthy emotional attachment to either of his parents. It may have contributed to his tumultuous personal life, but it also endowed him with some traits that made him well-suited to his late-career entry in politics.

Donald Trump is the fourth of five children of Fred and Mary Trump. Because his father was busy building a real estate business, and it was the mid-20th century when dads didn’t typically do a lot of early child care, his mother cared for the children (with the help of a live-in maid) and was their primary “attachment figure.” What factors may have affected the quality of young Donald’s early care—his own temperament as an infant; the role, if any, of the family’s maid in child care; the demands on his mother’s time and energy of three older children and a subsequent pregnancy—we don’t know. The president’s own writings are largely silent about his early childhood; journalists and biographers fill in only some of the blanks.

But we do know that Mary Trump became seriously ill from complications during labor with her last child. An emergency hysterectomy and subsequent infections and surgeries followed—four in two weeks, one of her oldest daughters once said. As a result, at just two years and two months of age, Trump endured the trauma of the prolonged absence and life-threatening illness of his mother. It’s not clear how long she was incapacitated. Indeed, we don’t know that she ever really re-engaged with her son. According to a Politico Magazine story on Mary Trump, there’s evidence that Mary and her son didn’t interact much during his childhood (more on this later).

Infants who fail to receive that kind of care usually fall into one of two categories as adults. Either they have what’s called attachment anxiety—leading them as adults to crave intimacy but have difficulty trusting others and constantly seeking reassurance—or they have attachment avoidance, where as adults they generally distrust others and convince themselves they don’t need close relationships. The relationships they do have are often unstable. They also tend to be excessively self-reliant and desire a high level of independence. These last two traits—self-reliance and independence—are not necessarily disadvantageous, of course. They might be just the right recipe, for example, for an entrepreneur.

The only way to be certain of President Trump’s attachment style would be for him to take the Adult Attachment Interview, an hour-long, structured interview that is considered the gold standard for assessing attachment in adults. Since that isn’t likely to happen, we’ll have to make an educated guess. While mental health professionals are constrained by ethical standards to avoid diagnosing public figures they haven’t personally examined, I am not bound by those rules. Based on my seven years of research, reading countless academic studies and interviewing leading attachment researchers worldwide, I’m willing to say what they can’t. I would peg President Trump’s attachment style as avoidant. Here are my three reasons:

First, Mary Trump’s major health crisis appears to have compromised her efforts—no matter how well-intentioned—to care reliably for young Donald.

Second, as previously reported in Politico Magazine, Trump has over the years said many flattering things about his mother, calling her “fantastic” and “tremendous.” He’s also described her as “very warm” and “very loving.” And yet, I find no stories or other anecdotes of early childhood that support these sentiments. In fact, friends of the Trump family who knew the Trump kids when they were young have reported they “rarely saw Mrs. Trump” and that Donald, while “in awe” of his father, was “very detached from his mother.” A characteristic of adults with avoidant attachment is the tendency to idolize one’s parents without supporting evidence.

Finally, much of the president’s behavior, both before and since he took office, is clearly consistent with attachment avoidance: His powerful sense of self-reliance and near-inability to acknowledge self-doubt; his bragging about his sexual relations; his almost complete lack of close friends; his multiple marriages; and his unstable relationships with White House staff, Cabinet members and congressional leaders of both parties.

Trump’s almost compulsive need to be in the spotlight might be evidence of attachment anxiety if it were aimed primarily at needing approval. But in the president’s case, it appears to be more about needing admiration. Overt narcissism or grandiose self-regard, the leading attachment researchers Mario Mikulincer and Philip R. Shaver report, is associated with attachment avoidance.

By any number of measures, President Trump may be seen as an anomaly among politicians—after all, how many people have run for precisely one political office and landed directly in the White House?—but if my hunch is correct, in this one trait—attachment avoidance—Trump may, in fact, be rather typical.

Attachment avoidance accounts for about 25 percent of the general population, with about 55 percent of people being secure, 15 percent anxious and 5 percent disorganized (often those who were neglected or maltreated in childhood). But in the course of my research, I asked questions from the Adult Attachment Interview to diverse officials: a former presidential nominee, current and former members of Congress and a mayor. With only one exception, their results indicated attachment avoidance.

Some of this may be because avoidance—though generally not the ideal for anyone—does confer some advantages for the political lifestyle. Avoidant athletes, for example, do well when they compete individually—as politicians do in elections. Avoidant people travel well—think never-ending campaign trail—feeling little need to be near loved ones. And the avoidant person’s general reluctance to trust others can act like protective radar in a field like politics that is rife with betrayal and double-dealing.

Avoidant politicians have one more quality that under the right circumstances can lead to success in office: They are quick to respond to threats and to take action. In a clever study in 2011 where test subjects were exposed to what appeared to be a threatening situation (a room gradually filling with smoke because of a supposedly malfunctioning computer), people high in attachment avoidance—who prize independence and self-reliance—were the first to find a way out to safety for themselves and others.

So is having a president with an avoidant attachment style good or bad? According to attachment theory, human relationships would generally be healthier and more stable if more people had a sensitive and consistent caregiver during infancy—and grew up to have a secure attachment style. So it is likely that leaders with secure attachment—as, for example, Franklin Roosevelt had, according to researchers—can become truly transformational by encouraging and uplifting the population in times of crisis. And while it’s true that people with attachment avoidance can often be personally successful—in business and other individually focused activities—there are requirements for public office, such as the ability to connect emotionally with constituents or at times to act selflessly—that may be difficult for those with attachment avoidance to muster. While it is too early for history to judge this presidency, understanding President Trump’s likely attachment style—and the attachment styles of all our political leaders—can give us important insights into their behavior and actions in office.

We should keep in mind that as voters, we have attachment styles, too. According to research, these may affect our political leanings and the relationships we have with elected leaders.

Secure voters, for example, tend to be tolerant of ambiguity, flexible in their political views, and thus disinclined to embrace any rigid dogmatism, As such, secure voters are most often found in the political center. Insecure voters, on the other hand, may be attracted to the perceived safety of dogmatism and are more likely to be found on the far-left or far-right. For example, anxious voters—seeking security in a world that feels threatening—may find comfort in a liberal orthodoxy that advocates redistribution of wealth and political power, and aggressively demands “inclusion” and protection in the form of a care-giving government. Avoidant voters, on the other hand, often distrusting others and prizing self-reliance, may embrace a strident conservatism, both economic (the world is a “competitive jungle”) and military (“we can only depend on our own strength”).

So as we think about President Trump, we might consider that his presidency—and our personal reactions to it—may be influenced not only be his attachment style, but also our own.

SOURCE

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Exhaustive Study: Murder Rates Rise Every Place that Bans Guns

So, think banning guns is going to solve America’s murder problem? The data should tell you to think again.

Yes, in spite of the fact that we’ve been told that Mr. and Mrs. America turning all their guns in is the best way to fix violence, that’s actually a complete lie. And the Crime Prevention Resource Center has the numbers to prove it.

The 2013 study looked at murder rates from places that had banned guns around the world, from Washington, D.C. and Chicago to England, Wales, Jamaica and even the Solomon Islands, an archipelago in the South Pacific which only had mass shootings after they decided to ban guns.

The most striking example might be that of England and Wales, both of which banned firearms back in 1997. Homicides rose from 676 to 734 the first year of the ban. And things only got worse from there.

“After the ban, clearly homicide rates bounce around over time, but there is only one year (2010) where the homicide rate is lower than it was in 1996,” the CPRC noted. “The immediate effect was about a 50 percent increase in homicide rates.  Firearm homicide rate had almost doubled between 1996 and 2002 …  The homicide and firearm homicide rates only began falling when there was a large increase in the number of police officers during 2003 and 2004. Despite the huge increase in the number of police, the murder rate still remained slightly higher than the immediate pre-ban rate.”

The highest recorded murder rate was in 2002/03, which saw 1,041 murders. That number included 172 murders by Dr. Harold Shipman, a notorious physician and serial killer who murdered his patients via lethal doses of morphine. That said, the general trend was still toward more killings after the gun ban was put into place.

Meanwhile, Jamaica’s murder rate was at roughly 10 killings per 100,000 people in 1974, when guns were banned. By 1980, that number spiked to over 40 per 100,000, and 58 per 100,000 in 2005. While the numbers have again bounced around, Jamaica didn’t see under 20 murders per 100,000 people between 1990 and 2007. According to the Jamaica Gleaner, 38 people were murdered in the first six days of this year alone.

Ireland also saw a spike when it banned guns, the CPRC reports, from under 0.4 murders per 100,000 in 1972 to over 1.6 per 100,000 in just a few years, an increase of well over 400 percent. While that was the peak of the murder rate, it never fell below what it was the year before the gun ban.

Chicago also banned guns in 1982. How did that work? Well, the Windy City has always had a high homicide rate, but as you can see, it rose dramatically in the years following the ban. While there was a reduction in the 2000s, it rebounded again in the 2010s to become the gunshot capital of America.

SOURCE

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Escape from Obamacare: Coming soon to a health insurance plan near you

Millions of Americans could soon enjoy lower health insurance premiums, thanks to a new Trump administration rule.

The rule, which was proposed in January and will likely be finalized by early summer, would make it easier for self-employed individuals and small businesses to band together and purchase coverage through association health plans.

AHPs offer small businesses and sole proprietors an alternative to overpriced plans sold through the Obamacare exchanges. In 2018, average individual premiums on the healthcare.gov exchanges were nearly twice as high ($444 per month) as average individual-market premiums in 2013, the year before most of Obamacare took effect.

Premiums for small-group plans have also skyrocketed. This year, the price of plans in Connecticut jumped an average of 25 percent compared to 2017. Small businesses in Minnesota experienced increases of up to 23 percent.

These hikes explain why many small businesses don't extend health benefits to employees. Less than one in three employers with 50 or fewer workers currently offers coverage.

President Trump's AHP proposal could make it less expensive for small-business owners and self-employed Americans to obtain health insurance. In effect, the rule gives these people access to the coverage enjoyed by large businesses.

Historically, premiums for large employer plans have increased at a far slower rate than individual and small-group market premiums. Among companies with at least 1,000 workers, average premiums for an individual plan rose by less than 6 percent between 2014 and 2016.

The reason? Larger companies have more bargaining power to negotiate lower rates with insurers and providers. These companies also aren't subject to some of Obamacare's most expensive 10 essential health benefit mandates.

AHPs would level the playing field. Right now, a 20-person construction company has little to no leverage to negotiate favorable rates. But if a dozen small construction firms formed an AHP, they could negotiate better deals and keep costs low.

AHPs give small-businesses and self-employed Americans an affordable alternative to Obamacare-compliant coverage. The reform can't come soon enough.

SOURCE

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

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

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Would-be Hitler says Trump Must Be Impeached before He Becomes another Hitler

Leftist projection again.  Steyer and his Greenie companions want to control just about everything that people do.  They are the real heirs of the Nazis

Billionaire liberal Tom Steyer told the crowd at an Iowa town hall Thursday that President Trump communicates effectively like Hitler and must be impeached before he leads the country down a similarly dark path.

A lady from the crowd remarked to Steyer that Trump reminds her of Hitler, saying the president separates immigrant families just as the leader of Nazi Germany separated Jewish families and others.

“[Trump] really is an incredibly skillful and talented communicator. He really is, which Hitler was, too,” Steyer agreed.  He added, though, that there is still a “very big difference” between the two men:

    I think the reason people push back against the Hitler comparison, regardless of any similarities, is Hitler ended up killing millions and millions of people, and Mr. Trump has shown a disregard for our law, he breaks the law…and in many ways he has done things that we find, or I find abhorrent. But he hasn’t killed millions of people.

The crowd rumbled with raised voices, causing Steyer to entertain the comparison some more.

“I agree! Look, that’s why we want to impeach him!” Steyer said. “We’d like to end it here while it’s still OK….We haven’t gotten to that point. God bless us, let’s hope we never get anywhere near that point.”

Steyer, the heavyweight anti-Trump activist, has invested tens of millions of dollars trying to convince Democrats to impeach the president, to the chagrin of many party luminaries including House minority leader Nancy Pelosi, who has argued that the best way to oppose Trump is to gain control of Congress.

As part of his campaign against Trump and the GOP, Steyer’s political action committee, NextGen America, released an ad this week comparing Republicans to white nationalists.

“We’re just telling the truth to the American people, and it’s an important truth,” he said of impeaching the president. “And if you don’t think it’s politically convenient for you, that’s too bad.”

SOURCE 

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The Republican Advantage That’s Easy to See but Nobody Notices

In close elections, any slight advantage might be responsible for determining the outcome, and it might be that the red party has a slight advantage over the blue party... because it’s the red party.

An article reporting on studies by two psychologists suggests that color influences behavior and that red is a winning color. In one study from the 2004 Olympics, where competitors in combat sports like boxing and taekwondo were randomly assigned either red or blue kits, they found that those assigned the red kits were more likely to win than those assigned the blue.

One of the researchers said, “Simply wearing red doesn’t turn you into an excellent competitor, but it helps tip the balance between winning and losing when people are fairly evenly matched.” Might referring to one party as the red party and the other as the blue have the same effect in politics?

The article gives many other examples of the color red being associated with dominance. People feel more dominant when they wear red. Gamblers feel more confident and gamble more when they use red poker chips. Waitresses get higher tips when they wear red. Men and women are both rated as being more attractive when they are wearing red rather than other colors.

This suggests that the party associated with red will have an advantage over the party associated with blue.

Today, we are accustomed to thinking of the Republican Party as the red party and the Democratic Party as blue, but this color assignment was solidified only in the past few decades. This article explains that color-coding the parties as red and blue became popular with the advent of political reporting on color television, but initially, the colors were not consistently assigned. The election of 2000 was the point at which the current color identification was solidified, and the Republican Party became the red party.

If there really is an advantage to being the red party, how did the Republicans manage to get it? One conjecture is that the mainstream news media (which may slant toward the left) rightly associated red with communism, and didn’t want the Democrats being the red party. During the Cold War, being a red meant being a communist. So, the media assigned red to the Republican Party to avoid associating the Democratic Party with socialism.

If so, this may have been a lucky break for the Republicans. They managed to grab the color that dominates all others by default, giving them a slight advantage in elections. Surely, in politics more than in many aspects of life, symbolism exerts powerful effects.

This is a red party advantage that everyone can see, but nobody notices.

SOURCE 

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Free Traders Should Be More Careful When Defending Trade Deficits

 In a recent Wall Street Journal op-ed, Harvard economist Robert Barro understandably took aim at President Trump’s faulty mercantilist criticism of free international trade. In contrast to Trump’s view, Barro argued that imports are “things we want” whereas exports are “the price we have to pay” to obtain them. Although Barro’s statements are a useful way to get novices to think about trade, they can be misleading, and in this case actually did lead a WSJ editor to write something incorrect. All too often, in their zeal to defuse hysteria over America’s trade deficit, free-trade economists prove too much, using arguments that suggest countries with trade surpluses are somehow getting ripped off. In this post, I’ll spell out the WSJ mistake, and offer a clearer way to think about international trade.

To set the scene and to be fair to Barro, here is his argument in context:

The Trump theory of international trade seems straightforward: Selling stuff to foreigners is good, and buying stuff from foreigners is bad. It’s a form of mercantilism. Exports are attractive because they represent domestic production and American jobs. Imports are undesirable because that production and employment otherwise could have happened at home.

Simple economic reasoning, however, suggests that this logic is backward. Imports are things we want, whether consumer goods, raw materials or intermediate goods. Exports are the price we have to pay to get the imports. It would be great, in fact, if we could get more imports without having to pay for them through added exports. [Barro, bold added.]

To reiterate, there’s nothing explicitly false in the above excerpt; this is a standard approach to getting students to think about international trade. However, there’s actually a problem with this typical line of free-trade reasoning that I’ve noticed for some time now. And to prove I’m not just handwringing, look at the title and subtitle that a WSJ editor (presumably) gave to Barro’s piece:

Trump and China Share a Bad Idea on Trade

Imports are things we want, and we pay for them with exports. Isn’t getting more for less a good thing?

Contrary to this claim, the U.S. trade deficit does not mean that Americans are “getting more for less.” If it did mean that, then the flip side would hold as well: Countries running a trade surplus must be getting less for more, and so presumably a populist candidate could run for office in those countries and offer trade barriers as a way to stop the bleeding. Yet, of course, that’s not right either: so long as people around the world are engaging in voluntary transactions, the trades are all win-win and a “trade deficit” or “trade surplus” is a bit of statistical trivia.

The problem with the WSJ subtitle stems from the equivocation in the claim that “we pay for them [imports] with exports.” Although this statement is a useful first step in getting novices to think about trade, strictly speaking, it is not literally correct in any finite time frame. After all, if a country literally paid for its imports with its exports in any particular time period—say, during each calendar year—then every country’s measured trade deficit/surplus would always be $0.

It’s easy to unpack the confusion by considering an analogy with an individual. We can imagine an economics professor telling her students: “Contrary to popular belief, ‘consumption’ is the things you want, while ‘work’ is the price you have to pay to get them. Indeed, if you could get more consumption without having to work more, that would be great.”

There’s a certain sense in which this statement is correct, and it might help some students get their thinking straight when sorting out benefits vs. costs in the context of employment. However, suppose a particular student replied, “Ah, then I’m doing great! Last year I spent $52,400 on consumption, while I worked only enough to earn $18,700 in wages. I plan on keeping my consumption the same this year, while maybe working even less. I love getting more goods for fewer labor hours!”

It would be clear that such a student utterly misunderstood the professor’s statement. The student isn’t bartering labor-hours directly for consumption goods. Rather, the student is spending a full $52,400 on the “$52,400 worth” of consumption goods; that’s what it means to measure consumption in dollars. The difference between the consumption ($52,400) and wages ($18,700) is made up by the fact that the student is selling assets worth $33,700 in order to finance his “trade deficit,” by selling off pieces of property (such as an old car) and/or by issuing claims against his future income by (say) borrowing money from credit card companies.

There is similar confusion in the WSJ’s treatment of U.S. trade with China. According to Barro, “In 2017, the Chinese sold the U.S. $524 billion of goods and services and bought only $187 billion, for a bilateral trade deficit of $337 billion.” Even though it’s true that imports are things we want and exports are the price we pay to get them, it is not the case that Americans are somehow snookering the Chinese. No, we paid a full $524 billion for our $524 billion of imports; that’s what it means to measure imports in dollars. The fact that we only sold them $187 billion of goods and services means that we made up the difference by issuing a net $337 billion in asset sales, such as U.S. real estate, corporate stock, and Treasury debt.

There’s a sense in which a worker must pay for consumption by selling labor hours, but that is only a long-run condition; the timing of consumption and wage payments can be different, with the gaps accommodated through asset sales (including the credit markets). Furthermore, if we observe a worker who consumes more than his wages in a certain year, this isn’t evidence of shrewdness; it simply means the worker is selling assets and/or taking on future claims against himself. Maybe that’s a sign of wise investment (in the case of a student taking out loans to attend medical school) or maybe it’s a sign of profligacy (in the case of someone running up credit cards for gambling vacations), but either way we shouldn’t congratulate such a worker for “getting more for less.”

What is crystal clear in the case of an individual is, unfortunately, obscured in the case of a country, as even a WSJ editor got tripped up. The editor took Robert Barro’s correct claim that a nation pays for its imports with its exports, and then erroneously misconstrued trade deficits as evidence of a bargain. But it’s more accurate to say the United States in any given time period “pays for” its imports with exports and by selling claims on future U.S. dollars. Maybe that’s a sign of wise investment (in the case of foreigners investing in U.S. factories) or maybe it’s a sign of profligacy (in the case of foreigners lending money to Uncle Sam to fuel boondoggle programs), but either way we shouldn’t view our trade deficit as “getting more for less.”

SOURCE 

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Curing Diseases Is Sustainable, Government in Healthcare Is Not

 Goldman Sachs analysts recently asked the question, “Is curing patients a sustainable business model?”, in a report entitled The Genome Revolution. The report outlined profit strategies for biotechnology companies engaged in gene therapy, which attempts to replace defective genes to correct genetic disorders. CNBC has since obtained the report and released the answer:

The potential to deliver ‘one shot cures’ is one of the most attractive aspects of gene therapy, genetically-engineered cell therapy and gene editing. However, such treatments offer a very different outlook with regard to recurring revenue versus chronic therapies... While this proposition carries tremendous value for patients and society, it could represent a challenge for genome medicine developers looking for sustained cash flow.

Some have taken the report to be an “outright acknowledgment from the financial services industry that curing diseases with a single treatment is not profitable.” Others allege the report demonstrates “curing patients is bad for business” more broadly.

While Americans have every reason to be concerned about their healthcare, the belief that private medical companies will not develop and produce products that cure various conditions is unwarranted.

Recent medical history provides ample evidence that the medical industry has tremendous incentives to cure patients. For example, chicken pox, smallpox, rabies, SARS, measles, polio, and shingles, among many other diseases, were all cured and eradicated in our lifetime. Insulin, although not a cure for diabetes, has saved countless diabetics from certain death. Similarly, HIV and AIDS are now manageable when they were once fatal.

Further, most medical discoveries do not earn profits. This is especially true of pharmaceuticals where, according to a white paper published by the Biotechnology Innovation Organization, only 20 percent of the drugs that make it to market obtain enough revenue to cover their R&D and FDA drug approval costs. Although not all these drugs provide a cure, profits are clearly not the only motives for these companies.

However, there is a more fundamental misunderstanding about these claims. Are profits derived from curing diseases sustainable? No. However, in a market economy, no profits are sustainable! Entrepreneurs work tirelessly to improve their products and lower their prices to please their customers and to compete for the profits earned by others. When profits dwindle, entrepreneurs search for other opportunities to serve customers. In some cases, this means finding innovative ways to cut costs. In others, it can mean improving the product. Offering a cure for a condition, although difficult, is a clear way to beat out other treatment methods.

Consider the case of the biopharmaceutical company Gilead Sciences, whose entrepreneurial insight to purchase and develop an unproven compound became Sovaldi, the only cure for hepatitis C. In 2014, Solvaldi earned over $10 billion in sales. However, two years after making the cure, Solvadi sales fell over 50 percent. Far from suffering from its “unsustainable business model,” the company recently released data on a drug it is developing to help HIV infection.

While the evidence companies do not find curing diseases profitable is weak, concerns that the healthcare sector might act in ways against the patient’s interest are very real. But these concerns stem from the relationship between the state and the market, not from the market itself.

For example, the burdensome costs and time-intensive FDA drug approval process, which is supported by large pharmaceutical companies, prevents many smaller companies with less financial capital from getting their products approved. When the medical industry spends lobbying for government favors, and it spent $57 million last year, it uses resources to thwart competition to the detriment of consumers. Efforts like these are how the firms in the healthcare sector can earn sustainable profits without benefiting consumers.

Fundamentally, the alarm created by Goldman Sach’s report stems from a fear that the companies in the healthcare sector will not act in the patient’s interest and little can be done about it. I can think of no better way for these fears to become a reality than to have government involved in healthcare. Once we understand this diagnosis, we can work toward a cure.

SOURCE 

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

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

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The ultimate feat of projection:  Leftist academics describe conservatives as being like Leftist academics

That's a bit hard to get your head around, isn't it?  After years of reading and researching in political psychology, I have only just realized it fully myself.  Projection consists of seeing your own faults in others and Leftists do it all the time.  So it is interesting that the major academic Leftist account of what a bad lot conservatives are should list characteristics that are actually very prominent in Leftists themselves. And as Leftists the academics partake of those characteristics too.

It all started with a 1950 book under the lead-authorship of noted Marxist theoretician Theodor Adorno (born Theodor Wiesengrund), a Jewish refugee from Hitler's Germany.  The book was called "The authoritarian personality" and had a theme only a Marxist could love:  The claim that it was conservatives, not Leftists who were authoritarian.

And that claim was made just after the socialist Hitler had been defeated and the vast Soviet tyranny was straddling the Northern half of Eurasia -- a Communist  empire that stretched from Leningrad on the Baltic to Vladivostok on the Pacific.  That was a big blob of authoritarianism to overlook.

But in typical Leftist style, Adorno and his merry men (and one woman) were not concerned with actual on the ground reality.  They were concerned with POTENTIAL or theoretical authoritarianism.  And where would one look for that?  To conservatives of course.  To people who are skeptical of authority and who believe in democracy and the rule of law.  Apparently that makes sense in some weird Freudian sort of way.  And Adorno loved Freud nearly as much as he loved that great hater, Karl Marx.

When Adorno arrived in the USA he saw much that he thought was reminiscent of Hitler's Germany.  There were a lot of rather tough-minded social attitudes about.  He was right about that.  America at the time was at the tail end of a long dominance by "Progressives", with eugenics being widely accepted and practiced and Jews being kept at arm's length and away from much that was desirable in America -- such as enrollment at Harvard.  The Progressives and Hitler differed not so much in attitudes but in the fact that Hitler applied those attitudes with German thoroughness.

The idea of war as a purification of the human spirit and territorial conquest being a source of national glory had rather gone off the boil in America by that time but Hitler learnt those ideas off an American President who had been world-famous in Hitler's youth:  Theodore Roosevelt, the man who was instrumental in the American conquest of Cuba, the Philippines and Puerto Rico.  TR himself rather went off those ideas when one of his sons died in WWI but those ideas were still widely respected in America.  TR was a great Progressive.  He even founded a short-lived Progressive party and he personally remained widely respected and admired in America.

So you could see why Adorno feared a Nazi uprising in America.  The ideology was there.  But Adorno was a European.  He didn't understand the Anglo-Saxon temperament, traditions or ideas about government.  Franklin Delano Roosevelt had already gone as far as he could in enacting Progressivism in America and there was no chance that Americans would accept a Hitler-like regime.  Shortly after the Adorno book was published, Americans elected the conservative "Ike" (Eisenhower) to the Presidency, with Richard Milhous Nixon as Vice president.  Ike of course had made his name by playing a major role in the destruction of Nazism.

So how did Adorno & Co. put flesh on their naive fears about Americans?  They resorted to their old friend Sigmund Freud. Freud had told a merry tale about how a stern father could psychologically ruin a son for life (In Freud's era a stern father was thought to be rather a good thing) and Adorno had the brilliant idea that a son's relationship with his father was a relationship with an authority figure.  Therefore Freud's ideas told us all about our attitude to authoritarian governments. Despite much contrary evidence, that idea lives on to this day in the world of a-historical Leftist psychologists such as George Lakoff and Karen Stenner. See here for some of the research evidence that contradicts that neo-Freudian theorizing.

Anyway, from their Freudian ideas Adorno & Co deduced a whole series of personal characteristics that would be found in a pro-authority person.  He would show conventionalism, authoritarian submission, authoritarian aggression, anti-intellectualism, anti-intraception, superstition and stereotypy, an admiration of power and "toughness", destructiveness and cynicism, projectivity, and exaggerated concerns over sex. Later authors would amplify that to say that the authoritarian would be rigid, closed minded and dogmatic in his beliefs, intolerant of ambiguity, not open to experience or novelty.

So there you have the typical conservative, a thoroughly bad egg!  But is that true?  No.  Every one of those characterizations has been found unsupported in subsequent research.  The first half of Altemeyer's 1981 book "Right-Wing Authoritarianism" gives a pretty thorough coverage of the contrary research. I see that a copy of that book is going for $499 on Amazon.  I should sell my copy.  Altemeyer's publisher, the University of Manitoba Press, sent me my copy for free.

Many of my academic publications also test and find wanting the Adorno theories.

So are there any real persons who fit the Adorno picture of villainy?  Was Adorno's picture of the authoritarian based on any real group of people?  I think it was.  It was actually a picture of what leftist academics are like.  Adorno and his merry men (and one woman) were making the classic mistake of judging other people by themselves.  They thought others thought like they thought.  Let me illustrate that by some contemporary examples.

Rigidity:  Academics are amazingly rigid in their adherence to Leftist ideas.  Particularly in the social sciences, a conservative is as rare as hen's teeth.  You just don't get anywhere in academe unless you are a Leftist.  And that lockstep Leftist ideology in academe also shows a conventionalism and a lack of openness to novelty and diversity.

Authoritarian submission: And how about  subservience to authority?  When those dreadful climate "deniers" (heretics) put forward facts that indicate that there is nothing out of the ordinary going on in the global climate, how do devotees of the climate cult respond?  Do they question the facts or point to alternative facts?  Almost never.  They appeal to authority. They simply say that 97% of scientists accept global warming and that is good enough for them.  They have an absurd respect for the current outpourings of scientists, quite oblivious of the 180 degree turns that scientific "wisdom" periodically undergoes.  Whether or not dietary fat is good for you is a current example of that. They appeal to an authority with feet of clay

And they certainly overlook that the paper by Cook et al. from which the 97% claim originates in fact quite plainly said that only ONE THIRD of the scientific papers surveyed took any position on global warming.  Two thirds of the papers did NOT give support to the global warming theory.

Cook et al. were rather peeved by that lack of support so sent out a questionnaire to the non-confirming scientists to see what they thought.  Only 14% of the scientists surveyed even bothered to answer the questionnaire, however, so that tells its own story. It's all plainly there in the paper's abstract.  Read it for yourself here.

Closed-mindedness: So there is much faith invested in the claim that "The science" supports global warming. The adherence by Leftist academics to the global warming theory is therefore a good instance of conventionalism, anti-intellectualism, closed-mindedness and dogmatism.

Power and toughness: And when it comes to an admiration of power and toughness, what could be a clearer example of that than their unwavering support of international Communism?  They shilled for the Soviets until Ronald Reagan caused the regime to implode and to this day they have never ceased to find Fidel Castro admirable, a man who lived like an old-fashioned Spanish grandee while his people scraped by on minimal rations.

Exaggerated concern about sex: And what about an exaggerated concern about sexual matters?  Is not that a pretty good description of modern-day feminism?  Feminists deny basic biology and ascribe all the world's ailments to "patriarchy".  They judge everything and everybody by what you have between your legs.  They are completely obsessed with the importance of sex (or "gender" in their coy terminology).

Destructiveness:  And what could be more destructive than the chaos unleashed on American health insurance by Obamacare?  Under the pretext of making health insurance more affordable, Obamacare has in fact made it unaffordable for many.  Many employers have dropped health insurance for their workers as no longer affordable by them and skyrocketing deductibles have made many Americans effectively uninsured even if they are nominally covered.  When your deductible is $10,000 you have for most instances no useful insurance cover whatsoever.

Cynicism: And there is certainly vast cynicism in the Leftist response to Mr Trump.  Mr Trump is certainly a flawed character in some ways but we all are. Does the Left give any credence to the thought that Mr Trump might be on to something valuable and important?  Roughly half of Americans think he is but the Left greet his ideas with uniform hostility.  That he has brought American unemployment down to a near-record low (3.9%) and has proven to be a Prince of Peace in the Korean confrontation they can only greet with denial. There is no openness to new ideas in the Leftist response to President Trump, just unwavering cynicism and complete intolerance of ambiguity.

Authoritarian aggression: And how about authoritarian aggression?  What do we call it when Leftists (students abetted and encouraged by their Leftist professors) use all means they can to chase conservative speakers off university campuses?  They do a job not dissimilar to Hitler's brownshirts.  As well as being thoroughly intolerant, rigid and doctrinaire it is thoroughly tyrannical and often explicitly violent.

Intolerance: And when it comes to tolerance and openness to different ideas, what do we make of the constant censorship of conservative speech on social media?  It's a bit more sophisticated than book-burning but not by much.

I could go on but I think it is clear that the proto-Nazi leaders in America today are Leftist academics, not conservatives.

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You probably have to have a Christian or Jewish background to understand how emotional this is

Vice President Mike Pence revealed on Thursday that one of the Americans who was released from North Korea handed him a note that was very inspirational.

On Thursday morning, President Donald Trump, Pence, and many members of the administration arrived at the airport to greet the three Americans— Kim Dong Chul, Kim Hak-song and Kim Sang Duk — who were held captive in North Korea.

Pence, a devout Christian himself, tweeted a picture of a handwritten note that one of the Americans handed him at the airport.

It’s unclear which of the three men wrote the note, but it features the 126th Psalm from the Bible.

"It was an amazing moment I’ll never forget… when 3 Americans stepped onto the tarmac at @JBA_NAFW & gave me a signed personal note with Psalm 126 on the back. “When the Lord brought back the captives to Zion…” To these men of faith & courage – God bless you & welcome home!"  — Vice President Mike Pence (@VP) May 10, 2018

Here’s the full verse:

"When the Lord restored the fortunes of Zion, we were like those who dreamed. Our mouths were filled with laughter, our tongues with songs of joy. Then it was said among the nations, the Lord has done great things for them. The Lord has done great things for us, and we are filled with joy.”

What an amazing story, which the media has refused to report on. This personifies the power of faith and God, which helped at least one of these brave Americans get through an incredibly difficult time.

SOURCE

Their Lord has done great work among the people of Korea. Of 2014, about 30% of the South Korean population is Christian -- and growing

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Democrats' War on Capitalism
 
Hillary Clinton recently offered yet another reason why she lost her second consecutive race for the presidency: capitalism.

At the Shared Value Leadership Summit in New York City, Clinton was asked whether her self-proclaimed “capitalist” stance hurt her during the 2016 presidential primary season. “It’s hard to know,” she said, “but I mean, if you’re in the Iowa caucuses and 41 percent of Democrats are socialists or self-described socialists, and I’m asked, ‘Are you a capitalist?’ and I say, ‘Yes, but with appropriate regulation and appropriate accountability,’ you know, that probably gets lost in the ‘Oh, my gosh, she’s a capitalist!’”

Clinton’s right. Being a Democrat and a “capitalist” is an increasingly untenable position for a politician. Polls show that today’s Democratic Party and capitalism appear to be on a collision course. A November 2015 New York Times/CBS News poll found that 56 percent of Democratic primary voters said they held a positive view of socialism. A Morning Consult/Politico survey in June 2017 asked if a hypothetical replacement for House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi should be a socialist or capitalist. More Democrats opted for socialism, with 35 percent saying it’s somewhat or very important that her replacement be a socialist, while only 31 percent said the same for a capitalist.

Indeed, one of the Democrats’ loudest voices, filmmaker Michael Moore, recently praised Karl Marx, the ideological godfather of communism. Moore tweeted: “Happy 200th Birthday Karl Marx! You believed that everyone should have a seat at the table & that the greed of the rich would eventually bring us all down. You believed that everyone deserves a slice of the pie. You knew that the super wealthy were out to grab whatever they could. … Though the rich have sought to distort him or even use him, time has shown that, in the end, Marx was actually mostly right & that the aristocrats, the slave owners, the bankers and Goldman Sachs were wrong… ‘Happy Birthday, Karl Marx. You Were Right!’” Tell that to the millions who died under communist repression in, among other places, China, the Soviet Union and Cambodia.

Perhaps no issue reflects this socialist view more than the Democrats’ push for “single-payer” health care. As a state senator, Barack Obama said: “I happen to be a proponent of a single-payer, universal health care program. I see no reason why the United States of America, the wealthiest country in the history of the world, spending 14 percent of its gross national product on health care, cannot provide basic health insurance to everybody. … A single-payer health care plan, a universal health care plan. That’s what I’d like to see. But as all of you know, we may not get there immediately.” A few years later, then-presidential candidate Obama reiterated his stance, that if “starting from scratch” he’d have a single-payer system.

Former Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean called the so-called “public option” the endgame: “I think while someday we may end up with a single-payer system, it’s clear that we’re not going to do it all at once, so I think both candidates’ [Hillary Clinton’s and Obama’s] health care plans are a big step forward.”

Former Senate Democratic Majority Leader Harry Reid also said that he, too, wants to get to “single-payer.” The Las Vegas Sun reported in 2013: “In just about seven weeks, people will be able to start buying Obamacare-approved insurance plans through the new health care exchanges. But already, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid is predicting those plans,” wrote the Sun, “and the whole system of distributing them, will eventually be moot. … ‘What we’ve done with Obamacare is have a step in the right direction, but we’re far from having something that’s going to work forever,’ Reid said. When then asked by panelist Steve Sebelius whether he meant ultimately the country would have to have a health care system that abandoned insurance as the means of accessing it, Reid said: ‘Yes, yes. Absolutely, yes.’”

The “you didn’t build that” Left does not recognize the relationship between prosperity and allowing people to keep what they produce to the fullest degree possible. By the end of eight years under President Obama, according to the conservative Heritage Foundation, we had less “economic freedom.” The United States’ score on “economic freedom” — which looks at taxes and regulations, among other criteria — dropped to its lowest level in the 23 years since Heritage began publishing its annual rankings of 180 countries. It is no coincidence that this loss of economic freedom under Obama helped produce the worst American economic recovery since 1949.

Last week brought more good news for Democrats. A Rasmussen poll found that nearly half of American likely voters support a guaranteed government job for all. This is likely to become a central presidential campaign issue for Democrats in 2020. Democrats believe that there is a free lunch and that capitalists are stopping them from eating it.

SOURCE

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

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

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Promise Kept — Trump Nukes Iran Deal

Keeping his promise, President Donald Trump announced Tuesday that the United States will withdraw from the "horrible" Iran nuclear deal (the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action) and reinstate sanctions that were suspended as part of the deal. "We will not allow American cities to be threatened with destruction. We will not allow a regime that chants 'Death to America' to gain access to the most deadly weapons on earth," Trump declared. "Today's action sends a critical message: The United States no longer makes empty threats. When I make promises I keep them."

Despite attempts by the Europeans to dissuade Trump, despite John Kerry's smoke-filled-backroom efforts to save the deal, and despite Iran warning that it would be "a historic mistake" to withdraw, the president reiterated what he has said all along: "We cannot prevent an Iranian nuclear bomb under the decaying and rotten structure of the current agreement." Trump reportedly remains open to improving the deal, and he will now have economic leverage to persuade Iran and the Europeans to do just that.

Barack Obama, who paid the Iranians $1.7 billion in ransom cash loaded on pallets as well as over a hundred billion more in sanctions relief, predictably criticized the decision to withdraw — which is tantamount to an endorsement in our book. "Walking away from the JCPOA turns our back on America's closest allies," Obama admonished, adding that it's "a serious mistake." But the biggest mistake was made by Obama and his feckless secretary of state, Kerry, caving in to one Iranian demand after another and agreeing to the deal. As we said at the time, "You want it bad, you'll get it bad."

Obama was so desperate for a foreign policy "victory" that getting a deal was more important than the content of the deal. Having agreed to a deal that he knew would never pass the Senate as a treaty, the minute the ink was dry Obama instead ran to the United Nations, which passed a Security Council Resolution establishing the deal's terms. But only laws passed by the U.S. Congress, or treaties approved by the Senate, are binding on the actions of the United States. And as "constitutional scholar" Obama and longtime Senator Kerry undoubtedly knew, any deal that really was in the United States' best interest would have been able to pass muster in the Senate and gain the two-thirds votes needed to ratify a treaty.

Obama and his various minions told us time after time that the deal would moderate Iran's behavior and help bring it back into the community of nations, but a quick survey of recent events shows the spectacular deception of that claim.

Iran is fighting a proxy war in Syria to keep Bashar al-Assad's murderous regime in power, and it probably has more troops on the ground than any group other than the Syrian Army. It continues flying military equipment into Syria via Iraq, attracting the occasional Israeli airstrike (including one just last night) and risking major escalation of the fighting there. Its proxies in Yemen have fired Iranian-made weapons at U.S. Navy ships in the Red Sea, as well as used one of Iran's signature weapons, the explosive boat, to hit and severely damage a Saudi warship. Its ballistic missile activity has continued unabated, despite UN Security Council Resolution 2231's prohibitions on such activity. In addition to missile testing, Iran has actually fired ballistic missiles at targets in Syria, and its Yemeni proxies have fired Iranian-made missiles into Saudi Arabia.

Needless to say, we don't see much moderating in Iran's behavior. Worse, Obama helped fund Iran's increased terror sponsorship.

In the coming days and weeks we expect the various actors that supported the deal — Democrats, the Leftmedia, the Europeans, the Iranians — will all make the most of the opportunity to paint President Trump as a bumptious and warmongering rube. The Europeans will follow Obama's cue and decry the undiplomatic behavior of withdrawing from a gentlemen's agreement. The Iranians will shout about the untrustworthy nature of the United States. We even expect Rep. Maxine Waters will ascribe racism to President Trump's decision, claiming it is an act of spite against his African-American predecessor.

But all the wailing and teeth-gnashing among various Europeans, Iranians, Democrats (and even some short-sighted Republicans) will merely serve to demonstrate the double injury Obama inflicted when he accepted the deal. The first injury was the deal itself. The second, as we said at the time, was that some future president would have to withdraw and harm our standing with friends and foes alike.

That day has now come, and our standing with our European allies may indeed suffer temporarily. Iran may try to create even more mischief around the Middle East. Oil markets and the U.S. and world economies may feel some pain as Iran's oil market is squeezed.

But the undeniable fact is that the existing nuclear agreement merely kicked the can down the road for a decade, ensuring that Iran would emerge with a full, UN-approved nuclear fuel cycle that would enable very rapid nuclear breakout in the future. Dealing with this problem now, even if painful, is vastly better than dealing with it later, when it may not only be painful but also deadly. Withdrawing from the nuclear deal is a first step in the right direction.

SOURCE

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Before and After Welfare Handouts

Walter E. Williams
   
Before the massive growth of our welfare state, private charity was the sole option for an individual or family facing insurmountable financial difficulties or other challenges. How do we know that? There is no history of Americans dying on the streets because they could not find food or basic medical assistance. Respecting the Biblical commandment to honor thy father and mother, children took care of their elderly or infirm parents. Family members and the local church also helped those who had fallen on hard times.

During the late 19th and early 20th centuries, charities started playing a major role. In 1887, religious leaders founded the Charity Organization Society, which became the first United Way organization. In 1904, Big Brothers Big Sisters of America started helping at-risk youths reach their full potential. In 1913, the American Cancer Society, dedicated to curing and eliminating cancer, was formed. With their millions of dollars, industrial giants such as Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller created our nation’s first philanthropic organizations.

Generosity has always been a part of the American genome. Alexis de Tocqueville, a French civil servant, made a nine-month visit to our country in 1831 and 1832, ostensibly to study our prisons. Instead, his visit resulted in his writing Democracy in America, one of the most influential books about our nation. Tocqueville didn’t use the term “philanthropy,” but he wrote extensively about how Americans love to form all kinds of nongovernmental associations to help one another. These associations include professional, social, civic and other volunteer organizations seeking to serve the public good and improve the quality of human lives. The bottom line is that we Americans are the most generous people in the world, according to the new Almanac of American Philanthropy — something we should be proud of.

Before the welfare state, charity embodied both a sense of gratitude on the behalf of the recipient and magnanimity on the behalves of donors. There was a sense of civility by the recipients. They did not feel that they were owed, were entitled to or had a right to the largesse of the donor. Recipients probably felt that if they weren’t civil and didn’t express their gratitude, more assistance wouldn’t be forthcoming. In other words, they were reluctant to bite the hand that helped them. With churches and other private agencies helping, people were much likelier to help themselves and less likely to engage in self-destructive behavior. Part of the message of charitable groups was: “We’ll help you if you help yourself.”

Enter the federal government. Civility and gratitude toward one’s benefactors are no longer required in the welfare state. In fact, one can be arrogant and hostile toward the “donors” (taxpayers), as well as the civil servants who dish out the benefits. The handouts that recipients get are no longer called charity; they’re called entitlements — as if what is received were earned.

There is virtually no material poverty in the U.S. Eighty percent of households the Census Bureau labels as poor have air conditioning; nearly three-quarters have a car or truck, and 31 percent have two or more. Two-thirds have cable or satellite TV. Half have at least one computer. Forty-two percent own their homes. What we have in our nation is not material poverty but dependency and poverty of the spirit, with people making unwise choices and leading pathological lives, aided and abetted by the welfare state. Part of this pathological lifestyle is reflected in family structure. According to the 1938 Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences, that year 11 percent of black children and 3 percent of white children were born to unwed mothers. Today it’s respectively 75 percent and 30 percent.

There are very little guts in the political arena to address the downside of the welfare state. To do so risks a politician’s being labeled as racist, sexist, uncaring and insensitive. That means today’s dependency is likely to become permanent.

SOURCE

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End food stamps

The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program is high on the Republican list of programs targeted for reform — and justifiably so.

The program has gone from 17 million enrollees in 2000 to about 43 million today, with outlays up from about $25 billion to more than $70 billion.

The Trump administration’s budget submitted last February includes major reforms to the program, designed to save $216 billion over the next decade.

Now the House Agriculture committee has put forth its own reforms as part of the bill reauthorizing the budget of the Department of Agriculture for the next five years.

The problem with the food stamp program is similar to the problem of the other anti-poverty welfare programs on which we spend almost 25 percent of the federal budget.

That is, what is directed in the spirit of compassion, to provide temporary assistance to those who have fallen on hard times, transforms into a way of life.

As we might expect, food stamp enrollees skyrocketed as the recession set in heavily in 2008. The number of recipients went from approximately 26 million in 2007 to a peak of 47.6 million in 2013. With the economic recovery, the number has dropped off to about 43 million.

The Labor Department now reports that unemployment has fallen to 3.9 percent — the lowest since December 2000. Unemployment peaked during the recession at almost 10 percent. Why, when unemployment has dropped by 61 percent, has the number of food stamp recipients dropped by only 10 percent? The number of recipients is about 17 million higher than before the recession.

The answer is that it’s a lot easier to get aid recipients onto a welfare program than get them off.

Although the unemployment rate has dropped dramatically, the employment rate — the percentage of the population over 16 working — is still far below where it was prior to the recession. The latest jobs report shows the employment rate at 60.3 percent. Just prior to the recession in 2007, it was at 63.4 percent. If today’s employment rate stood where it was before the recession, there would be eight million more Americans working.

These eight million Americans are not sitting on the sidelines just because of food stamps. Disability insurance and other welfare programs also leave the door open to not working.

How to solve this problem? Start with the Reagan rule: “Government is not the solution to our problem; government IS the problem.”

The more government we have, the more we make food stamps into the big business it is today. Why do we want corporate lobbyists for firms selling to food stamp EBT cardholders — Walmart, Target, Kroger, and even Amazon — lining the halls of Congress to lobby for these programs?

The Department of Agriculture is proposing that the government provide a food basket instead of cash. There is also the idea that government should manage the nutrition of food stamp recipients. The House bill incentivizes purchases of fruit, vegetables and milk. But do we really want a huge new government bureaucracy buying and packaging food baskets for 40 million enrollees?

I say no. We should not expand government interference in anybody’s life.

Instead, the best idea is to expand work requirements for getting benefits. The House bill requires 80 hours of work per month to receive ongoing benefits. This for those 18-49, with no dependents, and parents of school-age children, up to the age of 60. For any new or changed requirements, let’s have the states decide.

Government assistance should not be about changing anybody’s life. Changing lives should be left to family, friends and private charity.

SOURCE

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Pushing welfare blacks into middle class areas is now dead

Lawsuit can’t compel HUD Secretary Ben Carson to implement the Obama HUD racial and income zoning reg because Congress prohibited it!

On May 8, the National Fair Housing Alliance filed suit in the U.S. District Court of the District of Columbia against the Department of Housing and Urban Development for delaying the 2015 Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing regulation until 2020 or later.

This regulation allowed HUD to force more than 1,200 cities and counties that took $3 billion of annual community development block grants to rezone neighborhoods along income and racial criteria.

The lawsuit argues that HUD Secretary Ben Carson lacked authority to delay implementation of the rule when it was announced in Jan. 2018.

There’s only one problem. Even if that were true, since the announced delay, Congress has acted via the recent omnibus spending bill, which preempts everything HUD was doing on this regulation, especially in implementing it.

Under Division L, Title II of the Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2018, Section 234, it states, “None of the funds made available by this Act may be used by the Department of Housing and Urban Development to direct a grantee to undertake specific changes to existing zoning laws as part of carrying out the final rule entitled ‘Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing’ … or the notice entitled ‘Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing Assessment Tool’ …”

Yet the regulation still directs municipalities “to examine relevant factors, such as zoning and other land-use practices that are likely contributors to fair housing concerns, and take appropriate actions in response” [emphasis added] as a condition for receipt of the block grants.

Meaning, the regulation, as currently written, violates federal law. HUD could not implement it if it wanted to.

“The lawsuit is practically moot since it would be now be illegal for Carson to implement AFFH as currently written. In its present iteration, the HUD rule is illegal, since it still calls for changes to zoning,” Americans for Limited Government President Rick Manning noted in a statement in response to the suit.

Manning added, “HUD should move for immediate dismissal, as it is clear that Congress has preempted whatever vision of AFFH the Obama administration implemented.”

Even the National Fair Housing Alliance, acknowledges that the regulation has been used to address local zoning in its court filing, citing changes to zoning in Austin, Texas and Paramount, California.

The fact is, it will be very difficult for HUD to separate the regulation from its built-in mandate to address zoning issues.

Undoubtedly, the National Fair Housing Alliance will want to cite the 1968 Fair Housing Act as somehow providing a statutory obligation for making zoning changes, but they should beware. By explicitly taking action in the 2018 spending bill to prohibit the Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing regulation from being used to make zoning changes, Congress has effectively changed whatever effect the Fair Housing Act might have had in this area.

If HUD were to continue implementing the regulation, particularly to make changes to local zoning, it would be doing so in violation of the law. If anything, the only case that should be brought to federal court is one overturning this regulation that still seeks to subvert local governments by usurping zoning authority in violation of federal law.

SOURCE 

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

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

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The Left’s Chilling Refusal to Stop Flirting With Marxist Ideas

The New York Times just can’t stop talking about communism.  Recently the Times ran an editorial headlined  “Happy Birthday, Karl Marx. You Were Right!”

The piece, written by Jason Barker, a professor in South Korea, is about what one would expect from a defense of communism. As one Federalist writer noted, it was “beyond parody.”

Hilariously, the article was behind a very capitalistic paywall.

The New York Times hasn’t shied away from publishing Marxist boosterism.

In 2017, the Times dedicated an entire section of its website to the 100-year anniversary of the communist revolution in Russia. It featured an assortment of absurd pieces running the gamut of declaring Lenin a hero environmentalist to claiming that women had better sex lives under socialism. This romanticized account of life under communism is a delusion.

Of course, while the most ridiculous claim in the most recent piece is that Marx has somehow proven to be correct, it’s notable it goes a step further to say that essentially nobody questions his fundamental critiques of capitalism. “While most are in agreement about Marx’s diagnosis of capitalism, opinion on how to treat its ‘disorder’ is thoroughly divided,” Barker wrote.

It seems fair to conclude that actually there is widespread doubt about Marx’s claims about capitalism—unless, of course, one lives in a neatly sealed left-wing bubble.

The fact is, Marx was wrong about everything. He was wrong about economics, wrong about the flow of history, wrong about religion, wrong about where his ideas would lead, and most importantly, wrong about human nature—which he believed could be reshaped under a communist regime.

If there was one thing that was illuminating about Barker’s piece, it was his description of modern social justice crusades as fundamentally Marxist.

“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,” Barker wrote. “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.”

This is an interesting admission that these movements are essentially “cultural Marxism,” a phrase that the left so often stridently claims is a figment of conservative imaginations.

Given the profound failures of and misery created by communism in the past, we probably shouldn’t be too hopeful about the success of its modern iterations. Unfortunately, many young people don’t know about the depths of these past failures, or have a skewed idea of what communism means in practice.

We should all worry about the consequences of historical ignorance. At least Marx could conceivably say that “real communism hasn’t been tried yet.” His modern proponents don’t have an excuse.

After nearly two centuries of experimentation with Marxist ideas, communism has failed to produce a brotherhood of man or a classless society in which everyone worked in blissful harmony.

Instead, it has produced societies notorious for their cruelty, dysfunction, and violence. It has led to the estimated death toll of just under 100 million people in the last century.

One only has to look at the Korean Peninsula to see the astounding difference of a society under communist tyranny and freedom.

As historian Sean McMeekin wrote in his book, “The Russian Revolution”: "Today’s Western socialists, dreaming of a world where private property and inequality are outlawed, where rational economic development is planned by far-seeing intellectuals, should be careful what they wish for … they may just get it.

Communism offers nothing to humanity but suffering and hopelessness.

This is not to say that life under communism was all about starvation and murderous purges.

Even at its least malignant, living under communism’s inevitable system of enforced conformity and equality where decisions are only the purview of government authorities and bureaucratic managers is hardly a system of human flourishing. This is more akin to living a lifetime stuck in the DMV.

Marx was wrong, hopelessly wrong. His ideas have been tried, tested, and spectacularly failed. It’s time to leave his legacy on the ash heap of history.

SOURCE 

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Donald Trump pulls the United States out of the nuclear deal with Iran, renews sanctions

President Trump said Tuesday the United States will withdraw from the Iran nuclear agreement and re-impose sanctions on Iran, a decision likely to anger allies who fear the prospect of a nuclear arms race in the heart of the Middle East.

"The Iran deal is defective at its core," Trump said during a speech at the White House.

Trump denounced the 2015 agreement as "disastrous," saying it gives Iran too much room to cheat on nuclear weapons development, though in the past he has delayed steps that would effectively render it moot.

Democratic lawmakers and other supporters of the agreement said the decision would alienate allies and encourage Iran to disregard the deal and pursue nuclear weapons.

In his speech, Trump bashed Iran for what he called support of terrorism and threats toward Israel.

SOURCE 

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The War on Wisdom
 
Dennis Prager
 
There is more knowledge available today than ever before in history. But few would argue people are wiser than ever before.

On the contrary, many of us would argue that we are living in a particularly foolish time — a period that is largely wisdom-free, especially among those with the most knowledge: the best educated.

The fact that one of our two major political parties is advocating lowering the voting age to 16 is a good example of the absence of wisdom among a large segment of the adult population. What adult deems 16-year-olds capable of making a wise voting decision? The answer is an adult with the wisdom of a 16-year-old — “Hey, I’m no wiser than most 16-year-olds. Why should I have the vote and they not?”

America has been influenced and is now being largely led by members of the baby-boom generation. This is the generation that came up with the motto “Never trust anyone over 30,” making it the first American generation to proclaim contempt for wisdom as a virtue.

The Left in America is founded on the rejection of wisdom. It is possible to be on the Left and be kind, honest in business, faithful to one’s spouse, etc. But it is not possible to be wise if one subscribes to leftist (as opposed to liberal) ideas.

Last year, Amy Wax, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania Law School, coauthored an opinion piece in the Philadelphia Inquirer with a professor from the University of San Diego School of Law in which they wrote that the “bourgeois culture” and “bourgeois norms” that governed America from the end of World War II until the mid-1960s were good for America, and that their rejection has caused much of the social dysfunction that has characterized this country since the 1960s.

Those values included, in their words: “Get married before you have children and strive to stay married for their sake. Get the education you need for gainful employment, work hard, and avoid idleness. Go the extra mile for your employer or client. Be a patriot, ready to serve the country. Be neighborly, civic-minded, and charitable. Avoid coarse language in public. Be respectful of authority. Eschew substance abuse and crime.”

Recognizing those norms as universally beneficial constitutes wisdom. Rejection of them constitutes a rejection of wisdom — i.e. foolishness.

Yet the Left almost universally rejected the Wax piece, deeming it, as the left-wing National Lawyers Guild wrote, “an explicit and implicit endorsement of white supremacy” and questioning whether professor Wax should be allowed to continue teaching a required first-year course at Penn Law.

To equate getting married before having children, working hard and eschewing substance abuse and crime with “white supremacy” is to betray an absence of wisdom that is as depressing as it breathtaking. It is obvious to anyone with a modicum of common sense that those values benefit anyone who adheres to them; they have nothing to do with race.

But almost every left-wing position (that differs from a liberal or conservative position) is bereft of wisdom.

Is the left-wing belief in the notion of “cultural appropriation” — such as the Left’s recent condemnation of a white girl for wearing a Chinese dress to her high school prom — wise? Or is it simply moronic?

Is the left-wing belief that there are more than two genders wise? Or is it objectively false, foolish and nihilistic?

Has the left-wing belief that children need (unearned) self-esteem turned out to be wise, or morally and psychologically destructive? To its credit, last year, The Guardian wrote a scathing exposé on the “lie” — its word — the self-esteem movement is based on and the narcissistic generation it created.

Is it wise to provide college students with “safe spaces” — with their hot chocolate, stuffed animals and puppy videos — in which to hide whenever a conservative speaker comes to their college? Or is it just ridiculous and infantilizing?

Is the Left’s rejection of many, if not most, great philosophical, literary and artistic works of wisdom on the grounds that they were written or created by white males wise? One example: The English department of the University of Pennsylvania, half of whose law school professors condemned Amy Wax and almost none of whose law professors defended her piece, removed a portrait of William Shakespeare (replacing it with that of a black lesbian poet).

Is multiculturalism, the idea that no culture is superior to another morally or in any other way, wise? Isn’t it the antithesis of wisdom, whose very premise is that certain ideas are morally superior to others, and certain literary or artistic works are superior to others?

And the veneration of feelings over truth, not to mention wisdom, is a cornerstone of leftism.

Here’s one way to test my thesis: Ask left-wing friends what they have done to pass on wisdom to their children. Most will answer with a question: “What do you mean?” Then ask religious Jewish or Christian friends the same question. They won’t answer with a question.

SOURCE 

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Sessions GETS TOUGH With Illegal Border Crossers

Monday, Attorney General Jeff Sessions made a massive announcement that DHS will now refer anyone caught entering the U.S. illegally through our southern border to the Federal Justice Department for prosecution.

“If you cross the border unlawfully, then we will prosecute you. It’s that simple. If you smuggle illegal aliens across our border, then we will prosecute you.”

“If you are smuggling a child, then we will prosecute you and that child may be separated from you as required by law.”

Sessions’ announced his new zero tolerance policy which includes the possibility that immigration authorities could separate parents and children whenever a family is apprehended attempting to cross the border. This will act as a deterrent to any illegal aliens attempting to gain access to the United States.

“We’re here to send a message to the world that we are not going to let the country be overwhelmed. People are not going to caravan or otherwise stampede our border. We need legality and integrity in our immigration system,” Sessions stated

He also warned that lying to an immigration officer, filing a fraudulent refuge claim or assisting others do any of the above would be treated as felonies and prosecuted as such.

“I have no doubt that many of those crossing our border illegally are leaving behind difficult situations,” Sessions added. “But we cannot take everyone on this planet who is in a difficult situation.”

Sessions claimed the Trump administration’s actions were necessary because of “massive increases in illegal crossings in recent months.”

SOURCE 

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

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

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