Wednesday, August 01, 2018
Association of Statin Exposure With Histologically Confirmed Idiopathic Inflammatory Myositis in an Australian Population
How do you like that heading? I have been reading medical journals for a long time but even I had to blink to make out that one. What it says, however, is hugely important. It has to do with the dangerous side-effects of statins. For years, clinicians have been reporting complaints from their patients to the effect that statins have weakened their muscles. And since the heart is a muscle, that is no joke.
And now we are finally seeing research reports on the topic. And what the report below shows is that people with severe muscle problems are highly likely to have been taking statins. There was a statistically significant 79% increased likelihood of statin exposure in patients with severe muscle problems.
Apparently, there has to be some susceptibility in the person to suffer that side-effect as only a minority of statin-users get that problem. But it is no joke if you are one of the susceptible ones. The cases discussed below were ones where just giving up statins did not fix the problem. Statins left you with permanently rotted muscles. Not much fun!
Gillian E. Caughey et al.
Abstract
Importance: Statin medications are widely prescribed for cardiovascular risk reduction. Myalgia and rhabdomyolysis are well-recognized adverse effects of statins, and they resolve with the cessation of statin therapy. Idiopathic inflammatory myositis (IIM) is a heterogeneous group of autoimmune myopathies that may also be associated with statin use. Recently, statin-associated autoimmune myopathy has been recognized as a distinct entity with the presence of specific autoantibodies against hydroxymethylglutaryl–coenzyme A reductase, which results in a necrotizing myositis that does not resolve with cessation of statin therapy and requires treatment with immunosuppressive agents.
Objective: To examine the association between histologically confirmed IIM and current exposure to statin medications.
Design, Setting, and Participants: Population-based case-control study using the South Australian Myositis Database of all histologically confirmed cases of IIM diagnosed between 1990 and 2014 in patients 40 years or older (n = 221) and population-based controls from the North West Adelaide Health Study (n = 662), matched by age and sex in a 3:1 ratio of controls to cases. Data analysis using conditional logistic regression was performed from June 1, 2016, to July 14, 2017.
Exposures: Current statin medication use.
Main Outcomes and Measures: Unadjusted and adjusted (for diabetes and cardiovascular disease) odds ratios and 95% CIs for likelihood of inflammatory myositis.
Results: A total of 221 IIM cases met the inclusion criteria with a mean (SD) age of 62.2 (10.8) years, and 132 (59.7%) were female. Statin exposure at the time of IIM diagnosis was 68 of 221 patients (30.8%) and 142 of 662 matched controls (21.5%) (P = .005). There was an almost 2-fold increased likelihood of statin exposure in patients with IIM compared with controls (adjusted odds ratio, 1.79; 95% CI, 1.23-2.60; P = .001). Similar results were observed when patients with necrotizing myositis were excluded from the analysis (adjusted odds ratio, 1.92; 95% CI, 1.29-2.86; P = .001).
Conclusions and Relevance: In this large population-based study, statin exposure was significantly associated with histologically confirmed IIM. Given the increased use of statins worldwide and the severity of IIM, increased awareness and recognition of this potentially rare adverse effect of statin exposure is needed.
JAMA Intern Med. Published online July 30, 2018. doi:10.1001/jamainternmed.2018.2859
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Sorry If You’re Offended, but Socialism Leads to Misery and Destitution
On the same day that Venezuela’s “democratically” elected socialist president, Nicolas Maduro, whose once-wealthy nation now has citizens foraging for food, announced he was lopping five zeros off the country’s currency to create a “stable financial and monetary system,” Meghan McCain of “The View” was the target of internet-wide condemnation for having stated some obvious truths about collectivism.
During the same week we learned that the democratic socialist president of Nicaragua, Daniel Ortega, is accused of massacring hundreds of protesters whose economic futures have been decimated by his economic policies, Soledad O’Brien and writers at outlets ranging from GQ, to BuzzFeed, to the Daily Beast were telling McCain to cool her jets.
In truth, McCain was being far too calm. After all, socialism is the leading man-made cause of death and misery in human existence. Whether implemented by a mob or a single strongman, collectivism is a poverty generator, an attack on human dignity, and a destroyer of individual rights.
It’s true that not all socialism ends in the tyranny of Leninism or Stalinism or Maoism or Castroism or Ba’athism or Chavezism or the Khmer Rouge—only most of it does. And no, New York primary winner Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez doesn’t intend to set up gulags in Alaska. Most so-called democratic socialists—the qualifier affixed to denote that they live in a democratic system and have no choice but to ask for votes—aren’t consciously or explicitly endorsing violence or tyranny.
But when they adopt the term “socialism” and the ideas associated with it, they deserve to be treated with the kind of contempt and derision that all those adopting authoritarian philosophies deserve.
But look: Norway!
Socialism is perhaps the only ideology that Americans are asked to judge solely based on its piddling “successes.” Don’t you dare mention Albania or Algeria or Angola or Burma or Congo or Cuba or Ethiopia or Laos or Somalia or Vietnam or Yemen or, well, any other of the dozens of other inconvenient places socialism has been tried. Not when there are a handful of Scandinavian countries operating generous welfare state programs propped up by underlying vibrant capitalism and natural resources.
Of course, socialism exists on a spectrum, and even if we accept that the Nordic social program experiments are the most benign iteration of collectivism, they are certainly not the only version. Pretending otherwise would be like saying, “The police state of Singapore is more successful than Denmark. Let’s give it a spin.”
It turns out, though, that the “Denmark is awesome!” talking point is only the second-most preposterous one used by socialists. It goes something like this: If you’re a fan of “roads, schools, libraries, and such,” although you may not even be aware of it, you are also a supporter of socialism.
This might come as a surprise to some, but every penny of the $21,206 spent in Ocasio-Cortez’s district each year on each student, rich or poor, is provided with the profits derived from capitalism. There is no welfare system, no library that subsists on your good intentions. Having the state take over the entire health care system could rightly be called a socialistic endeavor, but pooling local tax dollars to put books in a building is called local government.
It should also be noted that today’s socialists get their yucks by pretending collectivist policies only lead to innocuous outcomes like local libraries. But for many years they were also praising the dictators of Cuba, Nicaragua, and Venezuela. Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., the nation’s most successful socialist, isn’t merely impressed with the goings-on in Denmark. Not very long ago, he lauded Hugo Chavez’s Venezuela as an embodiment of the “American dream,” even more so than the United States.
Socialists like to blame every inequity, the actions of every greedy criminal, every downturn, and every social ill on the injustice of capitalism. But none of them admit that capitalism has been the most effective way to eliminate poverty in history.
Today, in former socialist states like India, there have been big reductions in poverty thanks to increased capitalism. In China, where communism sadly still deprives more than a billion people of their basic rights, hundreds of millions benefit from a system that is slowly shedding socialism. Since the fall of the Soviet Union, the extreme poverty rate in the world has been cut in half. And it didn’t happen because Southeast Asians were raising the minimum wage.
In the United States, only 5 percent of people are even aware that poverty has fallen in the world, according to the Gapminder Foundation, which is almost certainly in part due to the left’s obsession with “inequality” and normalization of “socialism.”
Nearly half of American millennials would rather live in a socialist society than in a capitalist one, according to a YouGov poll. That said, only 71 percent of those asked were able to properly identify either. We can now see the manifestation of this ignorance in our elections and “The View” co-host Joy Behar.
But if all you really champion are some higher taxes and more generous social welfare, stop associating yourself with a philosophy that usually brings destitution and death. Call it something else. If not, McCain has every right to associate you with the ideology you embrace.
SOURCE
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The Clinton State Department’s Major Security Breach That Everyone Is Ignoring
Peter Strzok’s testimony about the email server scandal involving former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton raised headlines because of his defiant, disrespectful, and unapologetic attitude about the bias revealed in his text messages that permeated his work at the FBI.
Then, there was the verbal combat between him and Republican members of the two committees holding the joint hearing, and between the Republicans and Democratic members who were running interference for Strzok and acting as his defense counsel.
The news media jumped on an exchange in which Rep. Louie Gohmert, R-Texas, asked Strzok if he lied to his wife about his affair with former FBI lawyer Lisa Page in the same way as he was in testifying to Congress. That was too much for the Democrats and the media, who leaped to Strzok’s defense.
The media, however, virtually ignored another exchange between Gohmert and Strzok that revealed a potential bombshell. Gohmert asked Strzok about his meeting in 2016 with Frank Rucker and Janette McMillan, an investigator and lawyer, respectively, for then-Intelligence Community Inspector General Chuck McCullough (an Obama appointee).
McCullough sent them to see Strzok, who was the FBI’s deputy assistant director for the Counterintelligence Division, to brief him and three other FBI personnel about an “anomaly” that their forensic analysis had found in Clinton’s server.
According to Gohmert, the inspector general discovered that, with four exceptions, “every single one” of Clinton’s emails—more than 30,000—“were going to an address that was not on the distribution list.”
In other words, according to the information Gohmert received from the intelligence inspector general, something was causing Clinton’s server to send copies of all of her email communications outside of the country “to an unauthorized source that was a foreign entity unrelated to Russia.”
If true, this means that Clinton’s email communication with her top aides, department leadership, ambassadors, and other officials, including President Barack Obama, may have been read by an alien entity, perhaps a foreign power hostile to the United States. That could include confidential, sensitive, and even classified information about our foreign policy or our allies.
Gohmert’s exchange with Strzok doesn’t reveal who the foreign entity is, but if not the Russians, the likely culprit is the Chinese government, which has a special unit of hackers within its military that has long targeted the U.S.
Our intelligence agencies have identified the Chinese as responsible for the biggest data breach to ever hit the federal government, the 2015 hack of the Office of Personnel Management that stole the files, including security clearance applications, of 21 million current and former federal employees.
Here is how Strzok should have responded to Gohmert’s question about the briefing that Strzok received from the intelligence inspector general’s staff:
As the FBI’s lead counterintelligence agent, I understood that this was a major security breach, with widespread implications over the disclosure of sensitive and classified communications.
I immediately implemented protocols to investigate the extent of the problem; to notify all agencies and government officials whose communications had been compromised; to assess the damage that may have been done to specific operations, assets, programs, and personnel; and to prepare recommendations on how to remedy the problems caused by this disclosure.
Unfortunately, Strzok actually said that while he did “remember meeting Mr. Rucker on either one or two occasions,” he did not “recall the specific content or discussions.”
In other words, the FBI’s main counterintelligence director doesn’t remember being told that the secretary of state (his preferred candidate for president) had a breach in her computer system that forwarded all of her internal communications—including emails containing classified information—to a foreign entity.
Since he claimed not to remember being told about something that serious, he obviously did nothing about it.
The question is which of two scenarios is more likely true. Either 1) Strzok was completely incompetent, or 2) his pro-Clinton bias displayed in the thousands of text messages between him and Page caused him to downplay this security issue and ignore it, because it could hurt his favored presidential candidate if it came to light.
Strzok’s anti-Trump, pro-Clinton bias was overwhelming. The texts between him and Page are direct and damning evidence in and of themselves. But there is more. His body language and attitude during the hearing also showed bias against Donald Trump and for Clinton.
His lack of prudent action as an agent when he was briefed about this massive security breach suggests that he may have abandoned his role as a law enforcement officer, and skewed the results of a politically sensitive investigation to serve his own political leanings.
One of the other disturbing bits of information that came out of this exchange was that, according to Gohmert, the Office of the Intelligence Community Inspector General called Michael Horowitz, the inspector general of the Department of Justice, “four times” because it wanted to brief Horowitz about this forensic analysis and this security breach. But, according to Gohmert, Horowitz “never returned the call.”
According to Horowitz’s recent report on the Clinton email server investigation, the FBI “did not find evidence confirming that Clinton’s email server systems were compromised by cyber means,” but they could not definitively determine that her servers had not been compromised.
Obviously, if the intelligence inspector general has information to the contrary, that would be significant.
If this is true, the Justice Department, the FBI, and the intelligence inspector general have an obligation to disclose to the public and to lawmakers the foreign entity that hacked into Clinton’s server and received all of those communications.
That disclosure would be similar to the way they revealed that it was the Russians who hacked into the Democratic National Committee and Clinton’s campaign.
They also need to disclose what steps have been taken to investigate the extent and depth of the problems caused by this potential security breach.
And those in the political arena who have been painting Strzok as some kind of hero who deserves a Purple Heart need to stop insulting our intelligence and our veterans.
If this is an example of how Strzok did his job, he should have been fired long ago, and he is certainly no hero.
SOURCE
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Do as I say, not as I do
That seems to be the typical Leftist message from Elena Kagan. If she wants more civility in political discourse she should be talking to those fountains of hate, the American Left. When has any Leftist said anything civil about Donald Trump or his judicial nominees?
Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan criticized the current state of the judicial confirmation process this week, telling a student group that politicizing nominations harms the public’s perception of the courts.
Her remarks come just weeks after President Donald Trump nominated Judge Brett Kavanaugh to succeed Justice Anthony Kennedy on the high court, setting off a generational fight over the future of the nation’s highest judicial tribunal.
“It’s an unfortunate thing, because it makes the world think we are sort of junior varsity politicians,” Kagan said of recent confirmations. “I think that’s not the way we think of ourselves, even given the fact that we disagree.”
“There is so much tit-for-tat for tit-for-tat that goes on in these processes,” she said elsewhere in her remarks. “Everybody has their list of times that they’ve been wronged. The Republicans have their list and the Democrats have their list.”
The justice was referring to the bare-knuckle partisanship that characterizes judicial confirmations in the modern period, a history littered with the failed nominations of legal luminaries in both parties.
The justice made the remarks to a student group from the University of Chicago, who posted a recording of the 30 minute question and answer session on YouTube.
Kagan did not reference Kavanaugh’s nomination at any point in her remarks. As dean of Harvard Law School, Kagan recruited Kavanaugh to teach courses over the winter term.
SOURCE
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Some history
I have just written some historical notes about Theodore Roosevelt, An American President of just over 100 years ago who is generally highly thought of to this day. I point out that he was mad (bipolar), a Leftist and a forerunner of Fascism. See here
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For more blog postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated), a Coral reef compendium and an IQ compendium. (Both updated as news items come in). GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten. I also put up occasional updates on my Personal blog and each day I gather together my most substantial current writings on THE PSYCHOLOGIST.
Email me here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or here (Pictorial) or here (Personal)
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Tuesday, July 31, 2018
The insidious metaphor of trade as 'war'
Jeff Jacoby below is correct in what he says but he fails to take account of Trump's objective in restricting imports. Trump has repeatedly made clear that he does not want his restrictions to be permanent. Permanent restrictions would be very damaging, as Jeff says.
What Trump is doing is dealing himself some very powerful bargaining chips, with the aim of getting other countries to reduce their trade-distorting arrangements which penalize American firms. And he has had considerable success with that. The EU has now come to the party.
And note that it was in negotiating with the EU that Trump offered a complete free trade deal. The bureaucrats of the EU reacted to that with horror but that was not Trump's fault. Trump is the free trader.
OUR CIVIC AND political discourse is replete with metaphors.
We avoid having to swallow a bitter pill by instead kicking the can down the road. Desperate candidates throw a Hail Mary pass. Sensitive souls learn that if they can't take the heat, they should get out of the kitchen. A good prosecutor can get a grand jury to indict a ham sandwich.
Sometimes metaphors are used to express a political idea with verve, as when our nation of assimilating immigrants is dubbed a melting pot, or when John Roberts said his job on the Supreme Court would be to call balls and strikes. But metaphors are also invoked for more than style. A deft metaphor advances an argument — sometimes a highly dubious argument. To say the poor should get a larger slice of the pie is to imply that wealth is limited and someone should redistribute it. If American officials speak of pressing the Russia reset button, their message is that better relations with Moscow are primarily a matter of American will. Insist that illegal immigrants must go to the back of the line and you are contending that they had a legal option but chose to ignore it.
Of all the arguments we advance by metaphor, perhaps none is as potent as war. When Lyndon Johnson, unveiling an array of programs to assist the poor, declared a War on Poverty, he was telling the nation that it had no higher priority. When Jimmy Carter told the nation that curtailing energy use was the moral equivalent of war, his implicit argument was that American independence was at stake.
Consider another war metaphor — one employed so matter-of-factly that it has indelibly shaped public thinking: trade war.
Talk of trade wars is hardly new, but under Donald Trump, trade-war rhetoric has become ubiquitous. In speeches and on social media, he repeatedly approaches trade in terms suited to a grim international conflict — a struggle for dominance among nations in which there must be winners and losers.
"When a country (USA) is losing many billions of dollars on trade with virtually every country it does business with, trade wars are good, and easy to win," Trump tweeted in March. Last month he put it even more sharply: "When you're almost 800 Billion Dollars a year down on Trade, you can't lose a Trade War! The U.S. has been ripped off by other countries for years on Trade."
For centuries, economists have pointed out the destructive folly of tariffs and other trade barriers. Tirelessly they explain that a trade deficit is not a defeat, just as a shopper's "deficit" with a department store is not a defeat. They implore policymakers to see that trade restrictions always impose more costs on a country's economy than any benefits they generate. They highlight the ways in which protectionist tariffs make many consumers poorer in order to make a handful of producers richer — and how even the intended beneficiaries often end up worse off.
But data and common sense are no match for the seductive metaphor of trade as warfare.
Many Americans will say they favor free trade, but then add the caveat that it must be "fair trade" as well. They feel the tug of national resentment when the president demands: "Are we just going to continue and let our farmers and country get ripped off? Lost $817 Billion on Trade last year. No weakness!" They may not share Trump's confidence that trade wars are "easy to win," but they agree that other countries' protectionist measures are a form of belligerence that cannot just be ignored.
The evidence is piling up that the impact of Trump's retaliatory trade penalties has been falling hardest not on foreigners, but on Americans. Yet when the president indignantly declares that America is being victimized by its trading partners, much of the nation nonetheless nods approvingly. In a new survey, the Pew Research Center found that while 49 percent of respondents thought higher tariffs would be damaging, fully 40 percent said they would do more good than harm.
All of this comes from thinking of trade as metaphorical warfare — as an economic struggle pitting nation against nation.
That's a great fallacy. Nations don't trade with each other. We speak as if they do out of habit and convenience, but it's not true. The United States and Canada are not competing firms. America doesn't buy steel from China, and China doesn't buy soybeans from America. Rather, hundreds of individual American companies choose to buy steel from Chinese mills and fabricators, and hundreds of Chinese-owned firms make deals to buy soybeans from far-flung American growers. Unlike wars, which really are fought by nation against nation, international trade occurs among countless sellers and buyers, all acting independently in their own best interest.
Tariffs don't punish countries. They punish innumerable consumers, wholesalers, importers, exporters, farmers, manufacturers — the myriad discrete actors whose choices and preferences are the true substance of international trade. To those individuals, national trade deficits and surpluses are irrelevant. They aren't competing — they're cooperating. Buyers and sellers aren't in conflict with each other, let alone with each other's countries.
On the contrary: By doing business together, traders create wealth and connections, knitting the world together in mutual interest, making the planet more harmonious.
Trade war is an insidious term. The metaphor notwithstanding, trade isn't war. It's peace.
SOURCE
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Trump threatens to shut down government over border security
There are more retiring Democrat than GOP senators at the next election so this could be a ploy to keep the senators in Washington and thus prevent them from campaigning in their home states
Trump has threatened he will be willing to shut down the government if Democrats refuse to vote for changes he seeks to make to the US immigration system, including building a wall along the US-Mexico border.
“I would be willing to ‘shut down’ government if the Democrats do not give us the votes for Border Security, which includes the Wall!” the president tweeted.
“Must get rid of Lottery, Catch & Release etc. and finally go to system of Immigration based on MERIT! “We need great people coming into our Country!”
Mr Trump returned to the idea of shutting down the government over the border wall just days after meeting at the White House with House Speaker Paul Ryan and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell to discuss the fall legislative agenda.
Mr McConnell, asked about a shutdown last week during a Kentucky radio interview, said it was not going to happen. He did acknowledge, however, that the border funding issue was unlikely to be resolved before the November midterm elections.
Mr Trump campaigned on the promise of building a border wall to deter illegal immigration and making Mexico pay for it. Mexico has refused. Congress has given the president some wall funding but not as much as he has requested.
Mr Trump also wants changes to legal immigration, including scrapping a visa lottery program. In addition, he wants to end the practice of releasing immigrants caught entering the country illegally on the condition that they show up for court hearings.
The president has also demanded that the US shift to an immigration system that’s based more on merit and less on family ties.
Democrats and some Republicans have objected to some of the changes Mr Trump seeks. The federal budget year ends on September 30, and politicians will spend much of August in their states campaigning for re-election in November.
The House is now in a five-week recess, returning after Labour Day. The Senate remains in session and is set to take a one-week break the week of August 6, then returning for the rest of the month.
Both chambers will have a short window of working days to approve a spending bill before government funding expires.
Mr Trump would be taking a political risk if he does, in fact, allow most government functions to lapse on October 1 — the first day of the new budget year — roughly a month before the November 6 elections, when Republican control of both the House and Senate is at stake.
House Republicans released a spending bill this month that provides $US5 billion next year to build Mr Trump’s wall, a major boost.
Democrats have long opposed financing Mr Trump’s wall but lack the votes by themselves to block House approval of that amount. However, they do have the strength to derail legislation in the closely divided Senate.
Without naming a figure, Mr Trump said in April that he would “have no choice” but to force a government shutdown this fall if he doesn’t get the border security money he wants.
The $US5 billion is well above the $US1.6 billion in the Senate version of the bill, which would finance the Homeland Security Department.
SOURCE
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Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Cory Booker Host Bible Event Against Trump Supreme Court Pick
On Tuesday, three prominent senators — all likely 2020 presidential candidates — joined the Rev. Dr. William Barber in opposing President Donald Trump's Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh. At the event, Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and Cory Booker (D-N.J.) quoted the Bible in their attacks against Kavanaugh. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) did not quote the Bible, but joined with Barber, who did.
"Corporations have won 62 percent of the cases they've been in whenever they are up against workers, shareholders, people who represent the public interest," Warren declared at the press conference Tuesday afternoon. She argued that allowing Kavanaugh to join the Supreme Court would violate Matthew 25, Jesus' parable of the sheep and the goats.
"It is not enough to have a good heart ... we are called to act," Warren declared. She argued that Kavanaugh's opponents are "on the moral side of history."
Sanders immediately seized on his favorite topic, the Supreme Court case Citizens United v. FEC (2010), which ruled that for legal purposes "corporations" — people coming together in groups — are also "people" and have First Amendment rights. The case ruled that individuals can pay to promote a film expressing political speech, a basic principle that liberals claim allows billionaires to "buy elections."
"People are outraged that billionaires are buying elections," Sanders declared. "Do you know that that is a direct result of the Citizens Untied decision?" He suggested that Kavanaugh's confirmation would be a moral stain on America.
Booker agreed, declaring that conservatives are "trying to roll back civil rights, the protections against discrimination. This has nothing to do with politics, this has to do with who we are as moral beings. There is no neutral. ... You are either complicit in evil or you are fighting against it."
The Rev. Dr. William Barber, a longtime liberal activist, warned that if Kavanaugh is confirmed, "We could be facing the most regressive Supreme Court since Jim Crow. There must be a moral fight to keep Kavanaugh off the Supreme Court."
Warren, Booker, and Barber misused or twisted four Bible passages to fight Kavanaugh's confirmation.
1. Matthew 25.
Warren quoted Matthew 25, when Jesus tells the parable of the sheep and the goats. Jesus said the Son of Man will separate the good (sheep) from the evil (goats).
"Then the King will say to those on his right, 'Come, you are blessed by my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world. For I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, I was naked and you clothed me, I was sick and you visited me, I was in prison and you came to me,'" Jesus said (Matthew 25:34-36).
He suggested that the righteous will ask when they did all these things, and He will answer "Truly, I say to you, as you did it to one of the least of these my brothers, you did it to me" (Matthew 25:40).
This command to love and serve "the least of these" is extremely important in Christianity, but Warren warped it. She suggested that Matthew 25 isn't just a command to love and serve the poor directly, but to oppose a Supreme Court that would rule in favor of corporations rather than people.
Warren is dead wrong in her application of this verse. The Supreme Court's job isn't just to protect "people" against "corporations" — it's to apply the law justly and equitably. Sometimes an organized group of people — a "corporation" in legal terms — will be in the right, while someone Warren thinks of as an underdog will be in the wrong. In those cases, the Supreme Court should rule against the underdog.
Warren's complaint that the Court has favored corporations 62 percent of the time reveals a fundamental misunderstanding about justice that the Bible does not sanction. The Bible rightly condemns when the powerful abuse their power to oppress the poor, but it does not condemn the just ruler who punishes a lawbreaker (Romans 13) or sides with the powerful when the powerful are in the right.
The Court's job is not to twist the law to always favor the underdog. If it did so, that would be unjust.
2. Isaiah 10.
Rev. Barber turned to Isaiah 10 to condemn Kavanaugh.
"The scriptures are clear that when it comes to public policy, 'Woe unto those who legislate evil and rob the poor and women and children of their rights,'" Barber declared, paraphrasing Isaiah 10:1-2. "The scripture is clear that a nation must make sure that its laws lift the hungry, the hopeless, the poor, the sick, the naked, and the least of these, and the stranger."
Notice the sleight of hand. Barber quoted Isaiah 10 and then melded it with Matthew 25 to suggest the law needs to favor "the least of these," to "lift" them.
This is nonsense. The Bible is clear that Christians must care for the poor and the least of these, but it nowhere says that the law must "lift" the poor out of poverty.
In Isaiah 10, God is condemning lawmakers who rob the poor — He is not commanding laws to make the poor richer. It is injustice to steal wages from a poor man who has just earned them, but that does not make it justice to give money to a man just because he is poor. Indeed, that would violate the principle that "if anyone is not willing to work, let him not eat" (2 Thessalonians 3:10).
3. Psalm 23.
In his remarks, Sen. Booker quoted one line of Psalm 23, the famous psalm that begins, "The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want." Booker quoted verse 4: "Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for you are with me; your rod and your staff, they comfort me."
Or rather, Booker quoted the first phrase. Here's his tortured reasoning on this passage:
There’s a saying from one of the Abrahamic faiths in a psalm saying, "Yea though we walk through the valley of the shadow of death." We are walking through the valley of the shadow of death but that doesn’t say, "though I sit in the valley of the shadow of death." It doesn’t say that I’m watching on the sidelines of the valley of the shadow of death, it says I am walking through the valley of the shadow of death. I am taking agency, that I am going to make it through this crisis.
Booker twisted a psalm about God's providence in the midst of despair — "your rod and your staff, they comfort me" — and turned it into an exhortation to "walk" rather than "sit" or "watch on the sidelines" in a moral battle. God's providence in the psalm does suggest that "I am going to make it through this crisis," but the psalm is not meant as a call to action. Indeed, the psalm says God "makes me lie down in green pastures" and sets a "table before me"...
Booker has taken one of the deepest and most comforting psalms and twisted it into a banal call to action. This was so dumb and ridiculous, I couldn't help but laugh.
4. Numbers 13-14.
Booker did draw something of the right conclusion from another passage, however. He summarized Numbers 13-14, saying, "Moses sent people into the promised land — 12 folks to view what was going on, and ten of them came back saying, 'We can't meet this challenge.'"
"Joshua and Caleb saw something different," Booker declared. "Joshua and Caleb refused to surrender to fear, they refused to surrender to cynicism. We need the Joshua spirit right now. We need the Caleb spirit right now."
Joshua and Caleb did indeed trust in God to do what He promised and bring the Jews into the promised land, and their courage is to be emulated today. However, Booker suggested that opposing Kavanaugh is akin to making America a promised land — an extremely tenuous application.
In the end, these liberals are fighting tooth and nail against a judge who will remain faithful to the text and original intent of the Constitution, rather than twisting it to support a liberal agenda — as these very Democrats twisted the Bible. Here's hoping American see through the rhetoric.
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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Monday, July 30, 2018
Stupid logic about genes in the BMJ
All British medical journals have a distinct Leftist bias so the conclusion below was predictable. Leftists hate any evidence that genes cause anything so the claim below that genes do not influence social class was to be expected.
Their basic leap of logic is that individual genes have only a narrow mode of action so they cannot cause anything as complex as social class. That's logic? Its like saying that tires can't by themselves make a car move so tires are irrelevant to cars.
The universal conclusion of those who study the relationships between genes and traits is that any one trait is polygenetic. Just as a car needs a lot of bits to make it go, so any trait needs a particular underlying SET of genes for it to manifest itself.
And as Charles Murray showed decades ago, social class is strongly determined by IQ. High IQ people tend to get rich and low IQ people usually stay poor. And IQ IS heavily genetically determined, so the paper below is just counter-factual rubbish aimed at drawing a particular do-gooder conclusion
Genetics and social class
N A Holtzman
Abstract
Objective: To assess claims that genes are a major determinant of social class.
Design: Using genetic epidemiological principles, five claims on the role of genes in determining social class are examined: (1) traits that run in families are usually inherited; (2) complex traits can be explained by alleles at a single gene locus; (3) complex traits are transmitted intact from one generation to the next; (4) natural selection explains social advantage. (5) Heritability estimates provide a valid estimate of the importance of genes in explaining complex human traits or behaviour.
Results: (1) Traits that run in families can result from environmental exposures that differ by social class. (2) The protein encoded by any single gene has too narrow a range of biological activity to explain traits as complex as social status. (3) Because alleles at different gene loci are transmitted independently, genetic inheritance cannot explain why offspring display the same complex traits as their parents. (4) The propagation of mutations that might result in a selective advantage takes much longer than the time for which any social class has achieved or maintained dominance. (5) Heritability measures are accurate only when environment is maintained constant. This is impossible in evaluating human traits.
Conclusions: The roots of social class differences do not lie in our genes. Consequently, genetics cannot be used as a justification for maintaining a ruling class, limiting procreation among the poor, or minimising social support programmes.
SOURCE
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Donald Trump could be ready to order a strike against Iran, Australian Government figures say
Senior figures in the Turnbull Government have told the ABC they believe the United States is prepared to bomb Iran's nuclear capability, perhaps as early as next month, and that Australia is poised to help identify possible targets.
But another senior source, in security, emphasises there is a difference between providing intelligence and "active targeting"
It comes amid intense sabre-rattling by US President Donald Trump and his Iranian counterpart Hassan Rouhani.
The ABC has been told secretive Australian defence facilities would likely play a role in identifying targets in Iran, as would British intelligence agencies.
But a senior security source emphasised there was a big difference between providing accurate intelligence and analysis on Iran's facilities and being part of a "kinetic" mission.
"Developing a picture is very different to actually participating in a strike," the source said.
"Providing intelligence and understanding as to what is happening on the ground so that the Government and allied governments are fully informed to make decisions is different to active targeting."
The top-secret Pine Gap joint defence facility in the Northern Territory is considered crucial among the so-called "Five Eyes" intelligence partners — the US, UK, Australia, Canada and New Zealand — for its role in directing American spy satellites.
Analysts from the little-known spy agency Australian Geospatial-Intelligence Organisation would also be expected to play a part.
Canada would be unlikely to play a role in any military action in Iran, nor would the smallest Five Eyes security partner New Zealand, sources said.
Any US-led strike on Iranian targets would be fraught for a region bristling with tensions. Israel would have reason to be anxious about retaliation, given Iran rejects Israel's right to exist.
That said, Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in April invoked the so-called "Begin Doctrine" that calls on the Jewish state to ensure nations hostile to Israel be prevented from developing a nuclear weapons capability.
"Israel will not allow regimes that seek our annihilation to acquire nuclear weapons," Mr Netanyahu said.
SOURCE
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We should denounce folly
Modern society suffers when tolerance is given to fools. We too often give them the power and prestige they demand
James E. Smith, Ph.D.
An old adage says we should “gladly suffer fools.” The opposing view is that we should “stop doing stupid.” Either way, the key concern is the direct impact that not confronting stupid or shortsighted actions has on morale and the long-term effectiveness of any decision-making/leadership process.
Whether it is managing people, business processes, visionary leadership or important innovation efforts, the need to mitigate stupid, wasteful directives, interjections and interruptions has become an essential requirement if we are to grow socially and economically.
A primary reason we as a species have been so successful is our ability to take advantage of acquired knowledge in making decisions and solving problems. These abilities also allow us to aggressively protect ourselves from the varied and changing environments we choose to live in, amidst the diverse personalities that we are expected to live and work with.
In other words, we have the ability to successfully teach, mentor, lead and manage as required to precipitate the next great something. This becomes a clear necessity in staying ahead of the problems that prior generations created in solving even earlier problems. It also seems to be a primary characteristic for any advancing technological society, where the notion of simply stepping off the progress merry-go-round in favor of “an earlier, simpler time” will lead only to frustration and a train to Emerald City.
And yet many seem to have an apparently endless willingness to allow, or at least tolerate, acts of stupidity. This is certainly not a new problem. Each generation has had to deal with the few, but noisy and persistent, actors who make life and progress just a little harder to navigate. But unlike in the past, when we may have had the luxury to argue trivial points ad nauseam with little consequence, the accelerating rate of our social and technological development means we can no longer tolerate these delays.
Consider how our society often indulges foolishness by individuals or groups acting out of ignorance or petulance. These people expect to continue getting away with their interference, obstruction, stupidity and obnoxious behavior because they think they are entitled, above reproach or simply smarter than the rest of society, or they have ensconced themselves high up in the hierarchical or governmental pecking order.
Many people who fit this description actually begin as foolish, but appeal to the mercy of their associates or subordinates, learn what is needed, and use the group’s combined skill set to move the process forward. This preferred path eventually removes the party from the “stupid group.” (Your own past experiences can judge what percentage of the population chooses this option.)
Others, however, ignore reality and micro-manage whatever capabilities, skill sets and authorities they have been given or assigned – and often request more time and resources to advance their beliefs, agendas and ignorance. Ultimately, if they fail to accomplish their goals, they find ways to blame everything and everyone around them for their failure. If they plead their case well enough, they may even be rewarded with a promotion and even greater responsibilities that they can’t or won’t handle in the future.
This latter situation is clearly too prevalent in our society at all levels of corporate America, and, of course, within the government: local, state and federal. It is also prevalent in our social programs and the very activities we subject ourselves and our children to. In many of these cases, people get fed up and walk out, while others feel compelled by societal, employment and governance rules and expectations to put up with it all.
It is clear to a growing number of us that we as a society have sat too long letting people who have perfected the art of stupid continue to add ever increasing levels of nonsense to our already busy lives, through accident, oversight, ignorance, laziness, personal gain, or just plain self-entitlement.
Letting “stupid” continue, with no relief or recourse, is affecting our home, social and work environment, our creative and innovative talents, and the governance we expect and subject ourselves to.
We shouldn’t have a problem with ignorant people who are willing to learn and to do the best they can. The problem is with those who are unwilling to learn, or to develop new skill sets but still expect to be allowed by silent assent to do as they please. Even worse are the growing numbers of people who expect to succeed by virtue of their imperious demands and loud, obnoxious, even threatening behavior.
Non-reaction on our part has perpetuated growing levels of such behavior on their part, and an increasing degree of hopelessness and complacency on the part of decent, reasonable people. That has an additional downside.
Failure to respond and act in response to stupid or bad behavior breeds greater incompetence, as equally or more incompetent people are recruited at all management and leadership levels, to ensure that “stupid” isn’t exposed or jeopardized. More importantly, we also get a lowered performance bar, reducing or even removing challenges and the need for excellence. This result makes us all stupid.
Clearly, stupid has been around since little Jimmy decided to poke the sleeping bear with a stick.
I do believe, though, that we as a population have increasingly (and incorrectly) decided that it is just plain easier to let things continue as they are. We have become a nation of people who are too busy to get involved; too indoctrinated into believing the current state of affairs was mandated on high; or too intimidated by loud, menacing street mobs to question their wisdom or asserted “will of the people.”
These will eventually become more opportunities for well-deserved Darwin Awards to weed out the worst practitioners of stupid (or worse) behavior.
I don’t believe today’s “middle America” had any real input into the present situation, though it may be complicit through its silence. But I get an uneasy feeling that what is being pontificated, decided and decreed is being listened to and accepted by too many people who are either clueless, apathetic or feeling obligated by self-imposed, job-related or socially pressured expectations to just sit there and take it.
I also believe a growing percentage of those same folks simply don’t notice or acknowledge what they read or hear about, or even witness with their own eyes. So why do we continue down this path?
I don’t have an answer. Maybe we just need a few people with the courage and presence of mind to speak out, step forward and refuse to take it anymore. It may require a groundswell from the general population to get noticed. But that is unlikely to happen without a few brave people taking a stand.
All I know is, a lot of individuals in this world are still plugged-in and aware enough to know things are not right, or not right enough.
We all see and call things wrong at times, or frequently. However, if we haven’t made a few mistakes, we probably haven’t done anything good either, or we are still in bed with the covers pulled over our heads.
Making well-reasoned decisions – and standing up to bullies, oppression and intolerance – are hallmarks of our nation’s success story. Our continued success, and even survival, depends on this continuing. It seems to me it’s time for each one of us to identify and challenge a small piece of the human foolishness around us, and work to improve the situation, by demanding that the perpetrators “Stop Doing Stupid!”
Via email
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We're racist towards robots, too, study finds
All this shows is that Africans have made the colour brown a danger sign
Have you ever wondered why you rarely see a brown or black robot?
A couple of researchers at Monash University in Melbourne and Canterbury University in New Zealand were having trouble finding any — why were all the robots white?
It led them to investigate whether people ascribe race to robots, and if this changed their behaviour towards them. What they discovered was that humans carry their racial biases over to robots.
"If you ask anybody, 'Are you racist?' of course they will say no," said Dr Christoph Bartneck, one of the study's authors and a professor at the Human Interface Technology Lab at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand.
Instead, the researchers adapted a research tool called the "shooter bias" paradigm.
This is where the participants are asked to play the role of a police officer.
They are then shown images of people and they have to decide whether to shoot at the person or not.
In the original study, participants were shown images of people who were either white or black, armed or unarmed.
In this study, participants were also shown robots with two "skin" colours.
"What we observed is that the exact same bias observed with humans can also be observed with robots," Professor Bartneck told RN Drive. "People changed their behaviour towards brown robots in comparison to white robots."
Professor Bartneck said the race of the participant did not play a role.
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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Sunday, July 29, 2018
Study concludes Conservatives are more likely to live meaningful lives
No surprise. Leftists spend all their time whining about how unfair the world is
According to a recent University of California study, conservatives tend to find more purpose and meaning in their lives.
Published in the Social Psychological and Personality Science journal last month and led by lead researcher David Newman, a doctoral candidate at USC Dornsife’s Mind and Society Center, the study was in itself an examination of five other studies.
Newman’s team specifically examined the feelings of purpose and meaning that 50,000 participants across 16 countries had reported over a 40-year span.
What his team found was that being conservative more often than not correlated with being driven by a purpose in life and experiencing a sense of meaning. Newman warned though that the results of his study should not be misused to issue automatic judgments of others.
“It doesn’t mean that every conservative finds a lot of meaning in their life and that every liberal is depressed,” he said.
He also noted that other factors play a role as well: “These factors range from various personal characteristics such as how religious someone is to situational influences such as one’s current mood.”
True, but the results do suggest that conservatives are more likely to find meaning in their lives. Why, though, might this be? Listen to the following segment of Fox News’ “The Greg Gutfeld Show” to hear some possible reasons:
George Murdoch, also known as the wrestler Tyrus, said something interesting toward the end of the clip.
“If you watch or skim through … any liberal TV show or news program, it’s Armageddon. It’s horrible. It’s like misery’s in your house and there’s a little guy breaking your ankles. They’re all sad,” he said.
“They’re just miserable, and we’re like, ‘We won, we’re making money, I’m pop-locking it home.’ It’s a good time if you’re working hard and paying your bills and stuff. And if you’re not, you’re miserable. I’m not saying all Democrats don’t work, but I’m just saying there’s a certain group of them who prefer things done for them, and they’re pretty upset right now.”
He had a valid point, but not in regard to the left’s reaction to President Donald Trump’s election. Trump just stepped into office a year ago, and since the study covers a 40-year span, he’s ultimately irrelevant to the study’s results.
But what Tyrus said later about Democrats preferring “things done for them” hit the nail on the head. Conservatives find joy and meaning in working hard, fulfilling their obligations, taking care of their families and, in some cases, adhering to a religious faith. And while not every liberal is a welfare-consuming secularists, many leftists do readily subscribe to attitudes of victimhood and entitlement.
Recall that it’s the left that tries to drum up support among women, minorities and the youth by encouraging them to adopt a victim mentality and offering them freebies like free tuition, free healthcare, free housing, free meals.
The problem is that it’s by earning the fruits of one’s labor that people find meaning. When people instead get everything handed to them, there’s no sense of accomplishment, no pride from a job well done. There’s just an empty pit devoid of purpose and meaning.
We know first-hand that censorship against conservative news is real. Please share stories and encourage your friends to sign up for our daily email blast so they are not getting shut out of seeing conservative news.
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Some Trump ideas worth stealing
A tribute to Trump's cleverness from Boston liberal Alex Beam
What is Trump doing that the next president will want to emulate? If you answer, “Nothing!” you are wrong. There is plenty to learn, even from this train wreck of a presidency.
* The tweets. These work, undeniably. No future president will be expected to tweet day and night about his favorite sycophantic TV show, or routinely misspell words of over three syllables. But these mini-press releases pack a lot of power, and Trump has successfully weaponized them.
I followed the Obama White House Twitter feed and it was mainly anodyne junk, e.g., “Watch @POTUS and @FLOTUS welcome Singapore PM @leehsienlong and Mrs. Lee for tonight’s State Dinner.” I can see the next president hiring some with-it 28-year-old to keep the Twitter feed spicy, unboring, and engaged.
* The rolling pardons. Yes, this is cheap sensationalism, but it’s cheap sensationalism that works. The tawdry spectacle of rich crumbums lining up at the White House door to suborn the outgoing president (See Bill Clinton’s pardoning of Marc Rich via Eric Holder) in the final days of an administration is disgusting.
Trump has changed the rules. There is a lot of room for creativity here, and Trump’s posthumous pardon of boxer Jack Johnson opened an interesting door. We know history is rich with miscarriages of justice directed against Native Americans for defending their lands and against African-Americans for all manners of imagined crimes.
You could combine long-overdue restorative justice with a headline-grabbing pardon for (convicted felon) Martha Stewart. Now we’re raising a big tent!
* In-office campaign rallies. Trump isn’t the first president to hold campaign-style events early in his tenure — Obama and George W. Bush held similar pep rallies — but “he’s just more upfront about it,” as The Washington Post observed last year. Unlike his predecessors, Trump filed papers to create his reelection campaign committee on the day of his inauguration.
Why pretend? Trump is better at campaigning than governing, and his canned events outside of Washington get plenty of coverage. That lesson won’t be lost on his successors.
What else? Trump has annoyed the Obama fan base by undoing some of his predecessor’s most ambitious executive orders, e.g. Trump’s radical rollback, by almost 2 million acres, of two national monuments created by his Democratic predecessors.
The lesson? Live by extra-legislative fiat, die by extra-legislative fiat. To paraphrase Matthew 19:6, what one president hath put together, another president can easily rend asunder.
Trump has plenty of tricks up his sleeve, and some of them are worth copying.
SOURCE
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Americans have constitutional right to carry guns in public for self-defense, appeals court rules
Americans must have a constitutional right to carry a firearm in public for self-defense, a federal appeals court ruled Tuesday, delivering a major legal victory to gun-rights supporters.
A three-judge panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said Hawaii’s law severely restricting carrying of firearms to homes and businesses “eviscerates a core Second Amendment right.”
In an opinion that covers the breadth of thought from Geoffrey Chaucer to the country’s founders, Judge Diarmuid F. O’Scannlain, who wrote the majority opinion in the 2-1 ruling, said that while the government can limit concealed carry, it cannot ban weapons outside the home altogether — so public open-carry must be allowed.
Judge O’Scannlain said there’s little doubt the framers of the Second Amendment were comfortable with Americans openly carrying weapons for self defense, and until the Constitution is changed, that remains the standard.
“For better or for worse, the Second Amendment does protect a right to carry a firearm in public for self-defense,” the judge wrote.
The case could be appealed to the full 9th Circuit, frequently cited as the most liberal appeals court in the country,
SOURCE
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Show your support for ICE
Some have defined a fanatic as “One who can’t change his opinion and won’t change the subject.” (It is often attributed to Winston Churchill, though the truth appears to be more complicated.) By that definition, I am a fanatic when it comes to the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency—aka: “ICE.”
As most readers likely know, across the Left there is a greater and greater clamouring to abolish ICE entirely. Just last month Socialist darling Bernie Sanders would not go on the record as saying ICE should go the way of the Works Progress Administration, but with an eye on the 2020 Presidential race, he has since caved. [Bernie Abolishes His Opposition to "Abolish Ice", by Ethan Epstein, The Weekly Standard, July 17, 2018.] Remember that in 2015 (as in three years ago) he called Open-Borders “a right-wing proposal, which says essentially there is no United States… It would make everybody in America poorer—you're doing away with the concept of a nation state, and I don't think there's any country in the world that believes in that…” .
Meanwhile, Kamala Harris, California’s freshman senator and another strong contender for 2020, has been flip-flopping and equivocating like crazy. In March she said:
Should ICE exist? Well, certainly. When we’re talking about people who’ve committed serious and violent crimes–you know... I’m a prosecutor. I believe there need to be serious, severe and swift consequences when people commit serious and violent crimes…and certainly if they are undocumented, they should be deported if they commit those serious and violent offenses. So, yes, ICE has a purpose. ICE has a role. ICE should exist. But let’s not abuse the power.
[Dem Senator Kamala Harris Slammed for Defending the Existence of ICE (VIDEO), by Colin Kalmbacher, Law and Crime, March 10, 2018.]
But that did not go over well with the new Socialist wing of the Democratic Party, and boy did they let her know. Come June, she was more prepared to say the right thing:
I think there’s no question that we’ve got to critically re-examine ICE, and its role, and the way that it is being administered, and the work it is doing. And we need to probably think about starting from scratch.
[Kamala Harris Says Congress Needs To Change ICE, Perhaps ‘Start From Scratch’, by Paul Blumenthal, The Huffington Post, June 25, 2018.]
Nevertheless, much of the Left is now unimpressed with this, because Harris did not use the word “abolish.” They are still hammering at the Senator for not going far enough [Kamala Harris Wants You To Know She's Definitely Not Calling For Abolishing ICE, by Molly Hensley-Clancy and Lissandra Villa, BuzzFeed News, July 3, 2018.]
It will be interesting to see how this all-but-official-presidential candidate “evolves” on the issue between now and when the Democratic nomination process really gets going.
Like me, the anti-ICE radicals of the Left are fanatics—they will not change their minds, and they are not going to change the subject. That is a good thing. I hope they continue to talk about this as frequently as possible, as their position is completely insane.
As even Sen. Harris pointed out in her first response, ICE targets the worst of the worst, and does great work. Patriots, politicians and pundits alike, need to be highlighting this as regularly as ICE announces each great action they take.
Let’s take a look at some of the monsters ICE has recently played a role in apprehending, arresting, convicting, and/or deporting:
In the meantime, you can show your support for ICE, and help VDARE.com do the same, by making a donation today, and getting yourself an “ICE is Nice” or “Abolish Open Borders” sticker.
Via email
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Another Trump win over critics
The United States hit its highest economic growth rate in roughly four years on Friday — something many economists predicted would never happen.
Gross domestic product (GDP) grew to a 4.1-percent rate in the second quarter of 2018, compared to just 2.8 percent in the second quarter of 2017.
Meanwhile, CNN ran a headline in October of 2016 claiming, “Donald Trump promises 4-percent growth, but economists say no way,” and the Los Angeles Times ran a column with an even more dire prediction — that Trump was “dreaming” to think he could hit a 3-percent growth rate.
“An aging population and stagnant productivity could put Donald Trump’s goal of 3.5-percent economic growth out of reach,” the Wall Street Journal similarly wrote in December of 2016.
Businessman and Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban predicted that the markets would tank if Trump were elected president in 2016.
And, of course, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton warned that the economy would fare quite poorly under her 2016 opponent.
“Just like he shouldn’t have his finger on the button, he shouldn’t have his hands on our economy,” Clinton said during the election.
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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Friday, July 27, 2018
Trump is taking US down the path to tyranny (?)
I rather like reading the writings of Leftist intellectual Prof. Jeffrey Sachs. He always sounds so calm and rational. But he is director of the Center for Sustainable Development at Columbia University so you know that he is also gullible and good at self deception. But he always puts up a plausible case for whatever he is pushing. He would probably convince most people who don't know the facts he leaves out. In true Leftist style he only tells half the story and runs very close to outright lies by what he leaves out.
I could challenge almost every sentence of what he writes below but I have no desire to clean out the Augean stables so will offer just a few comments on the first few paragraphs of his latest essay below.
How does he know that "Trump holds the grandiose belief that only he should rule America"? Does Sachs have a mind-reading machine?Is Sachs talking about the man who vowed to use his "pen and phone" to circumvent Congress? No. That was King Obama. Trump by contrast has been punctilious in wiping out regulations that tended to circumvent Congress. Trump is in fact very respectful of Congress.
Next we hear that Trump is good at keeping confidential the substance of sensitive negotiations? That is bad?
The next big laugh is that "Trump abrogated the Iran nuclear deal despite its unanimous support by the UN Security Council". The Security Council? How relevant is that? What about Congress? Congress did not ratify the so-called treaty so once again Trump is siding with Congress.
The next bit of Sachs deception is an outright lie: "Trump used executive authority without Congressional mandate to impose a travel ban on several Muslim-majority states". Congress HAD given Presidents that power years ago, a power that Obama used among others.
OK. One last bit of nonsense and I am done. "Trump changed the status quo regarding Jerusalem against the will of the UN Security Council and UN General Assembly." Once again Sachs quotes the United Nations instead of Congress. Trump was in fact simply obeying a law passed by Congress. Once again Trump went along with Congress rather than defying it. Sachs is talking a quite amazing heap of manure. It just keeps pouring out. He has got the truth exactly backwards. There is no truth in him. (John 8:44)
The United States was born in a revolt against the tyranny of King George III. The Constitution was designed to prevent tyranny through a system of checks and balances, but in President Trump's America, those safeguards are failing.
Donald Trump holds the grandiose belief that only he should rule America. Unchecked by cowed or complicit Republicans in Congress, Trump invokes executive authority to alter policies and practices long established by law and treaty.
Days after his summit meeting with Vladimir Putin, no one knows what the two autocrats agreed to, or even talked about -- not the President's top aides, nor the Pentagon, nor security establishment or Congress, never mind the rest of us. And in the midst of the ensuing uproar, Trump has invited Putin to Washington, without telling his top intelligence official and no doubt most other key aides and officials.
The list of one-man actions grows rapidly. Trump is single-handedly imposing hundreds of billions of dollars of tariffs -- that is, taxes -- on imported goods from key US allies and China, without any explicit or implicit Congressional backing.
Trump abrogated the Iran nuclear deal despite its unanimous support by the UN Security Council. Trump is in the process of imposing new and severe sanctions against Iran, including the cutoff of all of Iran's oil exports, against the international agreement with Iran and with no vote of Congress, presumably to try to topple the Iranian regime.
Not surprisingly, and perhaps as intended, Trump's drumbeat of belligerency triggered an ominous warning from Iran, and now an escalation from Trump, casting the increasingly ominous confrontation with Iran as yet another one-man Trump show.
Trump used executive authority without Congressional mandate to impose a travel ban on several Muslim-majority states; to announce the US withdrawal from the Paris Climate Agreement despite treaty-bound US obligations under the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change; and to change the status quo regarding Jerusalem against the will of the UN Security Council and UN General Assembly. Trump extended the stay of US troops in Syria without oversight or approval by Congress.
SOURCE
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Another win! Trump trumps the EU
President Trump struck a trade deal Wednesday with the European Union, reaping significant concessions as top E.U. officials moved to avoid an escalating tariff war with the U.S., according to early reports.
The deal involved the E.U. importing more U.S. soybeans, lowering industrial tariffs and working on an agreement to import more liquified natural gas (LNG) from America, according to a Dow Jones report.
The deal followed a high-stakes meeting between Mr. Trump and E.U. Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker.
The two leaders faced off over escalating dispute over tariffs and trade barriers that block U.S. goods. The big dispute is over cars, with Mr. Trump threatening massive tariffs on if for the E.U. didn’t lower high tariffs on cars.
Expectations of the announced deal, with reporters summoned to the Rose Garden for an announcement, sent the stock market soaring. The Dow Jones Industrial Average climbed more than 170 points after being down about 50 points early in the afternoon.
SOURCE
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Ignore Media’s Trump Hysteria, Look at ‘Remarkable’ Things He’s Actually Done
With the intensity with which those on the left despise President Donald Trump and his policies, and the constant barrage of negative news coverage about the president since he took office, you would think the country is on the verge of chaos.
If that were the case, can somebody explain why the stock market has surged roughly 41 percent from the night Trump won the presidential election to today?
After all, anyone with even a casual knowledge of the markets knows they are extremely sensitive to signs of uncertainty and turmoil. If we hear all of this noise from the media and Democrats about how the country is divided, facing an uncertain future and every other doomsday prediction, why isn’t Wall Street paying attention?
Because Wall Street looks at things in a different light than most individuals. Money is not a Republican or Democratic asset. Who the president is doesn’t trigger unrealistic emotions — either for or against.
Kevin O’Leary, noted investor and one of the stars of ABC’s “Shark Tank,” says when you cut through all of the noise surrounding Trump’s presidency, he’s doing some “remarkable” things to help businesses, specifically the cutting of regulations.
“I would say on a policy basis, I’m going to have to give it an 8 1/2 out of 10 so far,” O’Leary told Hill.TV’s Buck Sexton of the Trump administration’s performance to date.
“The reduction of regulations has been remarkable in how it has accelerated small business,” he said. “These things are quietly being changed, and I really — I credit the administration for doing this. They’re making it easier to run a small business in pretty well every state I’m involved in. So that’s working.”
In an Op-Ed O’Leary penned for The Hill.com, he heaped more praise on the administration and said the markets are very confident in the president’s economic plans.
Part of that confidence, O’Leary said, is based on looking at the facts of what Trump is doing in terms of fundamental business policies, not the emotions social issues generate.
“Trump is like no president before him: not good, not bad, but different,” O’Leary wrote. “Want to manage through the turmoil? Here is a better strategy. Ignore the noise and watch the policy.”
O’Leary credits Trump with putting in place competent economic managers such as Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, Director Larry Kudlow and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin. O’Leary says deregulation and tax reforms are already a done deal, and trade is the next item on the agenda.
“Their message is clear: They are going to keep ratcheting up tariffs until the eurozone and China come to the table,” O’Leary said. “They care about the North American Free Trade Agreement and the Asian trade protocol, too, but these have been pushed to the back burner while they focus on the big dogs, China and Europe.”
The president is receiving steady criticism for his tough stances on trade, but if his policies were really that bad, the markets would reflect that, O’Leary said.
“So why has the market not corrected, and why have many stocks continued to hit all-time historic highs?” he asked. “Because the potential to equalize tariffs has such tremendous economic upside for the U.S. economy, investors are willing to put up with pain even if the chance of success is only 50 percent or less.”
And the markets are willing to put up with a lot of pain if the payoff is worth it, O’Leary said.
“The markets know this is not going to happen overnight, but the upside is so enticing that it is willing to wait,” he said.
O’Leary said that rather than judge a president or other politicians based on whether they have an “R” or “D” after their name, those in the business world know it’s best to look at the steak, and not the sizzle.
“My best advice in these extraordinary times? Tune out the circus and focus on the policy that actually gets implemented,” O’Leary said.
It’s hard for critics of the president to tune out the circus when it seems to have taken up permanent residence in their heads. But you can bet there are some hardcore liberals who are embarrassed to admit just how nice their 401k statements have looked since Trump took office.
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Liberal war on work
Once upon a time, work for welfare was a pretty accepted notion. In 1996, Bill Clinton signed a strict workfare bill that was so popular, it helped him get re-elected. A Brookings Institute study by welfare scholar Ron Haskins proved those reforms moved more than half of those on welfare (mostly young single moms) into the workforce, and millions eventually gained economic self-sufficiency.
If ever there were a public policy triumph, this was it.
During Barack Obama’s first term, those reforms were pretty much eviscerated. The recession was so deep the poverty lobby argued that there were no jobs for the welfare recipients to fill. Moreover, enrollment in the non-work requirement welfare programs, such as food stamps, Medicaid, disability and housing assistance, exploded.
Even as the unemployment rate fell, food stamps, Medicaid and disability enrollment remained at near-record highs. Is it a coincidence that during the Obama presidency, as welfare ballooned, workforce participation rates for those in the prime working ages fell dramatically?
The panoply of more than 20 welfare programs has become a substitute, not a supplement, for work. A Cato Institute studies showed that the full package of federal and state welfare benefits could deliver a family with more than $30,000 of benefits — tax and work-free. Why work?
Earlier this year, Republicans in Congress and the Trump administration tried to add a fairly modest work provision for able-bodied adults in the food stamps financing bill. Democrats en masse voted against the bill to stop workfare. This was more sad evidence that the “new Democrats” of the 1990s have vanished from the landscape.
Some Democrats have equated workfare to a form of “slavery.” By the way, the hard left made these same kind of over-the-top accusations in the mid-1990s about the Clinton work requirements, predicting “blood in the streets” if the bill passed. There was no blood in the streets.
The latest chapter in this story comes in the form of a new study by the White House Council of Economic Advisers (CEA) report which finds that only about one in five able-bodied recipients of food stamps and Medicaid work full time. This is scandalous given that today jobs are plentiful and in most states employers are begging for workers.
“These low employment rates of non-disabled working-age recipients” the CEA report concludes, “suggest that legislative changes requiring them to work and supporting their transition into the laborforce for Food Stamps and Medicaid would have positive effects on work participation and self-sufficiency.”
Liberals have denounced the CEA report by regurgitating the same discredited arguments used in 1996 that millions of Americans will lose their benefits and poverty rates will soar. Jared Bernstein, a former Obama economist, wrote that the proposal shows that Republicans care more about rich donors than poor people. The Daily Kos headline shouted that Republicans have replaced the War on Poverty with a “war on poor people.”
The left says that pretty much everyone on welfare who can be working is working. Raise your hand if you believe this. Incidentally, the work requirement for food stamps that Republicans are pushing would only apply to about one-in-five on welfare. My view is that just because someone has a disability doesn’t mean they can’t contribute. This is like saying a girl can’t throw a football. Nearly every town in America needs Uber drivers and I’ve often been picked up by “disabled” drivers.
What I don’t get is why the left is so knee-jerk opposed to work. The CEA report makes a very valid point that there are “pecuniary and non-pecuniary gains” when people get off welfare and into work. There is dignity and pride in a job well done and earning a paycheck.
Not so in the moral and financial dead end of a welfare check. The left’s latest idea to end poverty is to give every American a guaranteed family income. Mr. Trump wants to give everyone a job. The Democrats want to give the poor a fish. Mr. Trump wants to teach people to fish so they can eat for a lifetime. I suspect the American public is solidly behind Mr. Trump in this public policy fight and Republicans would be wise to double down on work requirements to convert welfare into a hand up, not a hand-out.
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CA: Rearmed Pillage People Ride Again
Back in 1990, Gilbert Hyatt invented the first single-chip microprocessor, which earned him a lot of money, so he moved to Nevada, which has no state income tax. California’s Franchise Tax Board (FTB) claimed Hyatt lied about his residency, and that he owed millions in state income taxes.
Despite a 2008 ruling in his favor by a Nevada court, FTB snoops kept after the inventor. By the time his case arrived at California’s Board of Equalization last August, the FTB was claiming that interest had run up Hyatt’s tab to $55 million. Trouble was, a 3-2 vote by California’s Board of Equalization determined that Gilbert Hyatt was indeed a Nevada resident when state tax collectors said he lied about his residency.
So the BOE waived $5.7 million in fraud penalties and $5.7 million in taxes from 1992, That left Gilbert Hyatt with a 1991 tax bill of $1.9 million, including interest, a far cry from $55 million. California’s pillage people didn’t like it and are now deploying in new uniforms.
Governor Jerry Brown and the legislature gutted the BOE and empowered the Office of Tax Appeals, a new state agency. As Dan Walters of CALmatters reports, “the FTB is now trying to persuade the new agency to reopen the residency case.” So Hyatt, who turns 81 this year, may be in store for more harassment on top of the many years he already endured. And he may not be the only target. As Walters also notes, in June the U.S. Supreme Court “granted the FTB’s petition to decide whether Hyatt’s successful harassment case in Nevada courts is valid.”
New federal tax law limits the deductibility of California’s state income tax, highest in the nation. Many will surely flee to low-tax states and Nevada’s ruling in favor of Hyatt shows they will be welcome. That displeases California’s rearmed pillage people, not exactly a gang of good losers. How this all shakes out for the tax refugees and Mr. Hyatt is uncertain, but for taxpayers some realities are clear.
Creating an innovative product people want to buy can earn an inventor lots of money. Those who want to keep most of the money they earn are not displaying greed. Greed is what motivates politicians to punish the productive with the nation’s highest taxes. Greed is what motivates state agencies to waste millions of dollars pursuing revenues to which they are not entitled. As California’s militant Franchise Tax Board and Office of Tax Appeals confirm, government greed is truly fathomless.
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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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