Rush to Subvert Electoral College Hits Roadblock

Democrats in Maine and Nevada decline to join the National Popular Vote initiative.   

Ever since the 2017 inauguration, we’ve known leftists would do whatever they could to bring down Donald Trump’s presidency. Indeed, while most of the nation waited breathlessly for Robert Mueller to announce the results of his two-year, $30-million investigation into the now-debunked Trump/Russia collusion conspiracy, Democrats were working on a backup plan to keep future Republican nominees from ever setting foot into the White House.

Their plan is known as the National Popular Vote, an interstate compact that would essentially make the Electoral College null and void. In its early stages, the campaign didn’t garner much attention. But now that we’re facing the real possibility of ending the Electoral College, people seem to be waking up to this sleight-of-hand attempt to undermine the Constitution and ensure one-party rule in perpetuity.

The campaign had been picking up steam. Had. Recently, both Maine and Nevada dealt setbacks to the initiative, with Maine’s state House rejecting it in bipartisan fashion and Nevada Democrat Gov. Steve Sisolak vetoing his state’s measure. He even explained what many Americans already know to be true: The NPV compact would “diminish the role of smaller states like Nevada in national electoral contests and force Nevada’s electors to side with whoever wins the nationwide popular vote, rather than the candidate Nevadans choose.”

Still, as the editors at The Wall Street Journal write, “Fourteen states so far, along with the District of Columbia, have joined a compact to bypass the Electoral College by pledging their presidential electors to whichever candidate wins more ballots nationally.”

In other words, if the candidate your state chooses on Election Day falls short by one vote in the national tally, all of his electoral votes go to his opponent.

Even worse, the system would open up the floodgates to increased voter fraud and would do violence to both the wisdom of the Founders and the “one person, one vote” goal that Democrats talk about ad nauseam.

The initiative is misleading and subversive.

Tara Ross writes at The Daily Signal, “National Popular Vote’s compact would radically change the presidential election system, even as it pretends to leave America’s current state-based Electoral College untouched. National Popular Vote must be laughing all the way to the bank. It relies on the state-based aspects of the system when convenient, but then switches to reliance on a national tally when that’s convenient.”

Ross asks us to “consider what is happening on another front: California legislators are working to prevent President Donald Trump from appearing on their state ballot in 2020. Assuming Trump is the Republican nominee, how could he possibly win the national popular vote when he will be unable to win even a single vote from the largest state in the Union?”

Democrats who pride themselves on defending voting rights are essentially seeking to steal the votes from millions of Americans in order to support the popular-vote winner. And while no system is perfect, the Electoral College ensures that presidents represent the interests of a broad section of the American population, not merely the views of people living in big cities or on the coasts.

Under NPV, future candidates for president would never again set foot in Nevada, Iowa, New Mexico, or any other state between New York and California. After all, why go on the stump in 30 small states when all one needs is California, New York, and a few other big states to siphon the votes away from the rest of the citizenry?

Think about it: Under NPV, a candidate could theoretically lose 39 states and still win the presidency. That’s what founding father James Madison called “the tyranny of the majority.”

Undeterred, Oregon moved one step closer to becoming the 15th state to pass the national popular vote bill by sending it to the Democrat governor for a rubber stamp. This would bring the tally to 196 of the 270 votes needed to put the NPV into effect.

But there’s still a glimmer of hope that we can save the Electoral College. Nathaniel Rakich writes at FiveThirtyEight, “The compact could encounter other obstacles. Republicans could recapture full control of one (or more) of the states in the compact and repeal the National Popular Vote law. And if the compact began to look like it was really going to take effect, opponents would likely sue and claim that it is unconstitutional. So despite its successes in 2019, the National Popular Vote interstate compact remains a highly uncertain proposition in the long term.”

For now, it looks like the Electoral College will remain in place for the 2020 presidential election. After that, all bets are off. Progressives have chipped away at the Constitution for more than a century, but now they’re taking a sledgehammer to its foundation.

If thoughtful legislators don’t rise up to stop NPV from taking effect now, we may never have the means to stop it in the future.

SOURCE 

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Barr Asking Questions the Media Don't Want Asked
   
“I’m amused,” Attorney General William Barr told CBS News’ Jan Crawford, “by these people who make a living by disclosing classified information, including the names of intelligence operatives, wringing their hands about whether I’m going to be responsible in protecting intelligence sources and methods.”

He went on after further questions: “Well, the media reaction is strange. Normally the media would be interested in letting the sunshine in and finding out what the truth is. And usually the media doesn’t care that much about protecting intelligence sources and methods. But I do, and I will.”

You don’t have to have been “in the business” for Barr’s nearly 50 years to understand what he means. Just flash back 13 years to June 2006 and read The New York Times’ revelations about the Swift bank procedures.

The Belgian-based Swift manages foreign currency transfers, and after 9/11, the CIA and Treasury conducted data searches to spot — and, ultimately, stop — terrorist financing. The Times’ story conceded that this program was successful in obstructing terrorist activity, and it identified no abuses.

Top administration officials pleaded with The Times not to publish the story, and then-President George W. Bush said the publication was “disgraceful.” Times editor Bill Keller’s justification was that “the administration’s” — not the government’s but the administration’s — “extraordinary access to this vast repository of international financial data … is a matter of public interest.”

In other words, The Times didn’t care much about weakening America’s fight against terrorism by disclosing classified information and revealing intelligence sources and methods. It was more interested in letting the sunshine in on a program that, to the best of its knowledge, had infringed no one’s rights.

Some called for prosecution of The Times for violating the Espionage Act of 1917, which criminalizes the publication of classified information, signed by then-President Woodrow Wilson two months after the U.S. entered World War I. But as then-Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan pointed out in his 1998 book “Secrecy: The American Experience,” the Espionage Act is overbroad, and government tends to overclassify information, including even newspaper articles.

Accordingly, successive administrations up to and including George W. Bush’s have declined to prosecute news media for publishing stories, including leaks of classified information, that seem clearly forbidden by the words of Wilson’s Espionage Act.

Abandoning that precedent, perhaps surprisingly, was the administration of Barack Obama. He described himself as “a strong believer in the First Amendment” and dismissed “stories about us cracking down on whistleblowers or whatnot” as “a really small sample.”

Actually, they were an unprecedentedly large number. As James Risen, co-byliner on The Times’ original Swift story, wrote in December 2016, the Obama administration “has prosecuted nine cases involving whistleblowers and leakers, compared with only three by all previous administrations combined.”

Obama’s Justice Department subpoenaed Associated Press phone records — of AP trunk lines and 30 separate phones. It identified Fox News reporter James Rosen as a “co-conspirator” in an Espionage leak case. The supposedly liberal and pro-First Amendment Obama administration was actively pursuing what the Columbia Journalism Review called “a massive intrusion into newsgathering operations.”

It’s true that Obama did not emit as many tart words for the press in his eight years as president as Donald Trump has in his two and a half. But it’s also true that Trump has come nowhere near to challenging Obama’s record as the president most inclined to sic law enforcement on the press since Woodrow Wilson himself. Liberal Democrats aren’t necessarily the best friends of press freedom.

Nor are they, it seems, friends of a citizen’s right to privacy or a candidate’s right to seek public office without government surveillance. In his testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee, when Barr made the point that the government “spying” had occurred on the Trump campaign, Democrats and the press expressed horror. You’re not supposed to say “spying,” apparently, even though Democrats and media like The Times have routinely used it as a conveniently short and understandable synonym for surveillance.

As Barr told Crawford, spying is appropriate if it’s “adequately predicated” — and it’s unclear whether the spying on the Trump campaign was. Certainly, the use of the partisan and unverified Steele dossier is not adequate.

Barr is old enough to remember when liberals did not take government legal or intelligence agencies’ word that spying on an administration’s opponents was justified and did not attack those who questioned it as unpatriotic.

He may be amused that such doings are self-righteously justified today, but it’s good that he’s willing to ask questions most of the media don’t want asked, to determine how the Obama law enforcement and intelligence agencies set about spying on the opposite party’s presidential campaign.

SOURCE 

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Backflip Biden
   
After two days of intense criticism, Joseph R. Biden Jr. reversed himself Thursday night on one of the issues most important to Democratic voters, saying he no longer supports a measure that bans federal funding for most abortions.

As recently as Wednesday, Mr. Biden’s campaign had said he supported the measure, known as the Hyde Amendment. His decision to change positions illustrates the intense pressure he faces as the presumed front-runner for the Democratic nomination for president.

[What is the Hyde Amendment? Here’s a look at what it does, and why the politics have shifted.]

His turnaround was abrupt, particularly because Mr. Biden has grappled for decades with his views on abortion rights. While he has said he supports Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court ruling that made abortion legal nationwide, he has opposed members of his own party on a number of abortion measures, ascribing his reluctance to his Roman Catholic faith.

In a speech at a gala hosted by the Democratic National Committee in Atlanta on Thursday night, Mr. Biden credited the change, in part, to recent efforts by Republicans to roll back abortion access in states including Georgia and across the country — especially in the South — calling them “extreme laws.”

SOURCE 

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Lies are normal for the Left

Joe Biden has claimed for DECADES that he marched during the civil rights movement.

And while this claim has been disputed ever since he first made it in 1987…he’s still making it. Even though he was told not to by his own people.

“When I marched in the civil rights movement, I did not march with a 12-point program,” Biden told a New Hampshire audience in 1987. “I marched with tens of thousands of others to change attitudes. And we changed attitudes.”

Nope, he didn’t.

Jake Tapper reminded his panel of what the New York Times had previously reported: “More than once, advisers had gently reminded Mr. Biden of the problem with this formulation: He had not actually marched during the civil rights movement. And more than once, Mr. Biden assured them he understood — and kept telling the story anyway.”

“That is really, really weird,” Tapper followed up with an awkward chuckle.

CNN Senior White House correspondent Jeff Zeleny replied: “When he gets very comfortable out on the stump speaking and other things, he has tended to embellish. He has tended to, you know, make things sound slightly rosier than they are.”

Yeeeeah. They’re taking it SO easy on him. He’s not embellishing. Biden is peddling a repeatedly disproven lie.

SOURCE 

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Who You Callin' Fascist?

R. Emmett Tyrrell
   
For over two years now, a peculiar combination of the media and the Democrats has been goading Donald Trump, always to painful effect — painful for both sides in this vituperative battle but particularly painful to the media and the Democrats. Not much good has come of it.

The media and the Democrats vilify Trump as a Hitler, a fascist, a racist, a misogynist, a homophobe and so forth. What is more, they do not approve of his hair. Interestingly, they do not disparage him as a Stalin, a Castro or a communist. Why do they not dip into their arsenal of dread phraseology to call him a Stalinist, a Castro or a communist? Is it because they still see these comrades as the good guys? Do they perceive communists as liberals without the red tape? What Henry Wallace once called liberals in a hurry.

Do the media and the Democrats harbor some lingering respect for these historic friends of the working class? Are they somewhat smitten by the bilge of the left? Do they even understand the term “fascist”? What would Sen. Chuck Schumer or Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi describe as Trump’s fascist traits? His songs? His martial music? What is his daily uniform? All I see is Donald’s sober business suit, always worn with a tie, a white shirt and wingtip shoes. How does this uniform differ from that of Schumer?

What is all this talk of fascism? Fascism generally features politicians who favor one-party dictatorship above democracy. Fascism favors a glorified sense of nationalism, often of race over the individual. In governance it favors centralized government and is heavily militaristic. Actually, when you compare fascism with communism, it is pretty much the same thing, though the German and Italian fascists always were smarter dressers, and their guns usually worked better. The communists even caught up with German racism eventually. Both the Germans and the Russians were anti-Semites.

What is more, now that the latest edition of Democrat is coming out as a socialist I guess they have all the more reason to stay clear of calling Trump a communist or a Stalin or a Castro. These Democrats are at least Stalinists in the economic sense, and they can always adopt the one-partyism and militarism later.

Yet to return to my original point about the effect these coarse terms are having on the public discourse, particularly for the media and the Democrats: All the media and the Democrats achieve, it seems to me, is enraging Trump, who resorts to his Twitter account and fires off a volley that leaves the media and the Democrats the worse for wear. The fact is that Trump is better at it than they are, and he usually amuses. The media and the Democrats never do. Hitler was not funny. Nor was communism. Donald’s “fake news” has caught on, and everyone knows who authored the term, along with “Crooked Hillary” and “Pocahontas” and “Crazy Bernie” and all the rest.

When the race really gets under way, what will Trump make of poor old Joe Biden, the gaffable one (I shall take credit for that one)? Biden was caught red-handed, as they say, filching from a speech by Neil Kinnock of Britain’s Labour Party. Kinnock is not even an American. Already Trump has dispatched Beto O'Rourke with his notice of the former congressman’s “hand movement.” “Is he crazy?” Trump said. He had only a few hours to come up with that one. Well done, Donald! Beto has yet to recover. There will be two dozen more Democratic candidates who bite the dust before Trump finishes off the final Democratic candidate. Will the candidate be the one from South Bend, or is there another would-be John F. Kennedy out there? It is going to be vastly amusing.

As I say, it is destructive language from both sides, but from one side it is at least amusing. I noticed this when I first met Trump in 2013. He is very entertaining. I can well imagine him, long after he is out of office, relaxing with friends and watching old tapes of himself up against the Republican gang in 2016, and then against Hillary, agelastic Hillary. She thought she could beat him, and after she lost she plotted with her friends in the intelligence community to run him out of office. She, a life-long liberal, threw in with certain chieftains of the FBI and the CIA (and presumably others) to turn these institutions against the American people in an election. They were the kind of liberals who were always haranguing us against the police power of the state. But they were the first in American history to turn the intelligence community against us. Clinton has been a malign force in American politics since her early days. I am glad she turned her back on Goldwaterism.

These next months will be interesting.

SOURCE 

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

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

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Trump Suspends Tariffs On Mexico Following Deal On Migrants

President Donald Trump has announced an immigration reform deal with the Mexican government which likely will allow border officials to end the catch-and-release of Central American migrants.

Ending catch-and-release is a huge win for Americans and Trump because it means border officials now have a legal alternative to the catch-and-release rules which allow migrants to legally enter the United States if they bring children and claim asylum.

Those catch-and-release rules set by Congress and the courts also allow the migrants to get work permits before their asylum court hearings, which are now backlogged for two or more years.

Instead of catch-and-release, the migrants can be returned to Mexico until their asylum claims can be heard by a judge.

The “joint declaration” was outlined in a State Department message:

… those [migrants] crossing the U.S. Southern Border to seek asylum will be rapidly returned to Mexico where they may await the adjudication of their [US.] asylum claims.

In response, Mexico will authorize the entrance of all of those individuals for humanitarian reasons, in compliance with its international obligations, while they await the adjudication of their asylum claims. Mexico will also offer jobs, healthcare, and education according to its principles.

The United States commits to work to accelerate the adjudication of asylum claims and to conclude removal proceeding as expeditiously as possible.....

Both parties also agree that, in the event the measure adopted do not have the expected results, they will take further actions.

Mexico’s agreement to offer jobs and healthcare to the migrants will weaken lawsuits by pro-migration U.S. groups that oppose the deal.

In exchange, the U.S will also work with Mexico to spur regional economic development.

Mexico also promised to step up police enforcement against the cartels’ labor trafficking from Central America into the United States:

Mexico will take unprecedented steps to increase enforcement to curb irregular migration, to include the deployment of its National Guard throughout Mexico, giving priority to its southern border.

The promise of extra enforcement is vague, and far less important to U.S. border security than the return of migrants to Mexico.

However, border officials face the practical problem of processing migrants for return to Mexico at a faster rate than the cartels can bus them up to the border. If the border agencies cannot keep pace with the cartels’ transport networks, they may be forced to release some migrants into the United States.

The compromise deal allows Mexico to dodge the escalating tariffs that Donald Trump promised, and it also means that Mexico does not have to formally declare itself a “safe third country.”

Trump and his deputies wanted Mexico to declare itself a safe third country because that would give U.S. border officials the permanent legal authority to reject migrants who cross through Mexico. But the Mexican government’s agreement to host the migrants before their U.S. court hearings provide similar legal authority to U.S. border agencies,

The deal means that border agencies will not have to release migrants into the United States prior to their asylum hearings.

The end of catch-and-release will likely wreck the cartels’ labor-trafficking business, which depends on migrants getting U.S. jobs to repay their smuggling debts. Few poor people in Honduras, El Salvador, or Guatemala will go into debt with the cartels, or mortgage their farms and homes to the cartels, once they know they will be forced to remain in Mexico prior to their asylum hearings.

The reduction of migration will also help stabilize the Central Americans countries, which is needed before foreign investors build farms or factories in those nations.

Under current rules, roughly one million Central Americans will walk through the border loopholes created and preserved by courts and Congress, and into Americans’ workplaces, neighborhoods, and schools during the 12 months prior to October.

Politically, a good deal for Trump is a bad deal for Democrats, who have campaigned during the last few days to prevent a deal that would slow the inflow of migrants.

Democrats oppose a deal, in part, because it reduces their bargaining power in the domestic fight against Trump to win amnesty for millions of illegals.

SOURCE 

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Socialism is Not Democratic

Nor is it compatible with the Constitution

By Charles C. W. Cooke

BACK in 2011, while covering Occupy Wall Street, I was accosted by a man wearing a large cardboard box. On this box, which he wore around his torso as might a child pretending to be a robot, he had scribbled down a theory that, at first glance, seemed more sophisticated than most that were on display. “Hey, man,” he said to me, “it’s up to us.” To explain, he turned around to reveal the other side of the box, which bore a single word: DEMOCRACY. Then, having paused for effect, he turned around again and pointed to the front, on which he had written down almost every single economic system that had been tried in human history: CAPITALISM, SOCIALISM, MERCANTILISM, AUTARKY, DISTRIBUTISM, FASCISM, FEUDALISM, POTLATCH, MUTUALISM, and so forth. “It’s up to us,” he said again. “It’s our democracy, and we can choose the economy we want.”

Further conversation revealed that he believed this quite literally. In his view, democracy was the sole nonnegotiable element of our political system, while everything else was up for grabs. If a majority wanted to nationalize the banks or abolish private property or bar all international trade or invade Brazil and harvest its resources, that was its prerogative.

As might be expected, he had a prediction and a predilection: Socialism, he explained, was both the most likely system to be adopted, because it catered to the “majority, not the 1 percent,” and the best, because it would fix all of America’s problems without any downsides. “It’s up to us.”

I have thought about this conversation frequently since then, because it highlights some of the core misconceptions held by socialism’s champions, which are, in no particular order, that the retention of a democratic system of government makes massive state intervention more acceptable, that “capitalism” is a “system” in the same way as is “socialism,” and that liberal democracy—and, in particular, America’s brilliant constitutional order—can survive the establishment of a socialist economy.

 Because I was there to write about the protests rather than to get into prolonged arguments, I listened and probed rather than disputed his contention. Had I been debating him, however, my rejoinder would have been a simple one: No, it’s not “up to us.” Or, at least, it’s not up to “us” in the way that my friend in the cardboard box was using the word “us.” As I write, ascendant elements within the American Left are engaged in a sustained attempt to reintroduce and rehabilitate the word “socialism,” in part by prepending to it a word that has a much better reputation and an infinitely better historical record: “democratic.” Voters should not be fooled by the rebranding, for there is no sense in which socialism can be made compatible with democracy as it is understood in the West.

At worst, socialism eats democracy and is swiftly transmuted into tyranny and deprivation. At best—and I use that word loosely—socialism stamps out individual agency, places civil society into a straitjacket of uniform size, and turns representative government into a chimera.

The U.S. Constitution may as a technical matter be silent on most economic questions, but it is crystal clear on the appropriate role of government. And the government that it permits is incompatible with, and insufficient to sustain, socialism. This is deliberate. In the United States, and beyond, we do not think about our democracy in purely procedural terms. While majority rule on certain political questions is indeed deemed imperative, we nevertheless reject the notion that majorities may do whatever they wish, we demand that our institutions leave room for civil society and for individuals, and we insist upon a broad presumption of liberty that extends across all areas of human activity.

It is reasonably well understood in this country that to place the word “democratic” in front of, say, “speech restrictions” or “warrantless searches” or “juryless criminal prosecutions” would be in no way to legitimize those things or to make them more compatible with the preservation of a free society. It is less well understood that to place the word “democratic” in front of “socialism” is an equally fruitless endeavor—and for the same reasons.

To those whose conception of “democracy” is limited entirely to the question of “Who won the most votes?” this may seem paradoxical. To those familiar with the precepts beneath the Anglo-American tradition, however, it should be quite obvious. Just as the individual right to free speech is widely comprehended as part of what we mean by “democracy” rather than as an unacceptable abridgment of majority rule, so the individual rights protected in property and by markets are necessary to the maintenance of a democratic order—in this, deeper, sense of the word.

In the West, choosing to trade with a person in another country is, itself, a democratic act. Electing to start a company in your garage, with no need for another’s imprimatur, is, itself, a democratic act. Banding together to establish a cooperative is, itself, a democratic act. Selecting the vendor from which you source your goods and services—and choosing what to buy from it—is, itself, a democratic act. Keeping the lion’s share of the fruits of your labor is, itself, a democratic act.

When governments step in with their bayonets and say “No!” they are, in effect, keeping your choices off the ballot. Properly understood, the attempt to draw a hard line between “democracy” and “economics” is not only a fool’s game but a game that socialists do not in fact play themselves. Ugo Okere, a self-described “democratic socialist” who ran for the Chicago City Council earlier this year, was recently praised in Jacobin magazine for explaining that “democratic socialism, to me, is about democratic control of every single facet of our life.”

That’s one way of putting it, certainly. Another is “tyranny.” Or, if you prefer, democratic tyranny. Alexis de Tocqueville observed that “the health of a democratic society may be measured by the quality of functions performed by private citizens.” Lose those functions in America, and you lose democracy in America, too.

And then there is the question of socialism’s substantive record, which is so extraordinarily disastrous that it renders my friend-in-the-box’s theoretical argument useless even on its own terms. It is, in a strictly technical sense, “up to us” whether we choose to, say, smash ourselves repeatedly in the face with a hammer, but that is neither here nor there given that nobody in his right mind would elect to smash himself in the face with a hammer. We should avoid socialism with a similar diligence—and for similar reasons.

History has shown us that socialism exhibits three core defects from which it cannot escape and which its champions cannot avoid. The first is what Hayek termed “the knowledge problem.” This holds that all economic actors make errors based on imperfect knowledge but that a decentralized economy will suffer less from this, partly because the decision-makers are closer to the information they need, and partly because each actor does not wield total control over everything but is only one part of a larger puzzle. The second problem is that, because socialism eliminates both private property and supply and demand, it eliminates rational incentives and, thereby, rational calculation.

The third problem is that socialism, following Marx’s dialectical theory of history, lends itself to a theory of inevitability or preordination that leaves no room for dissent, and that leads in consequence to the elevation of a political class that responds to failure by searching for wreckers and dissenters to punish.

Worse still, because socialists view all questions, including moral questions, through a class lens, these searches tend to be deemed morally positive—bound, one day, to be regarded by History as Necessary. Together, these defects lead to misery, poverty, corruption, ignorance, authoritarianism, desperation, exodus, and death.

Ironically enough, they also lead to socialism’s exhibiting a record of failure in precisely the areas where it is supposed to excel. Despite the promises in the brochure, socialism has been terrible at helping the poor; it has been terrible at helping women advance; it has been terrible for civil liberties; it been terrible at helping the environment; it has been terrible at attracting immigrants; it has been terrible at tolerating and protecting minorities; it has been terrible at fostering technology, architecture, and art; it has been terrible at producing agriculture; and, worst of all, it has been terrible at sharing power and resources—indeed, it has done precisely the opposite, creating new “ruling classes” that are far less adept, far less responsive, and far less responsible than the ones they replaced.

It has become something of a running joke that, whenever socialism’s history is highlighted, its diehard advocates insist that “that wasn’t real socialism.” This defense is frustrating. But it is also instructive, in that it is an admission that, like perpetual motion, socialism has never been realized in the world. The U.S. Constitution has survived for so long because it was built upon the understanding that man is imperfect and always will be, because it accepts that selfishness is ineradicable and so must be harnessed, because it acknowledges that power corrupts as much in our era as it ever did, and because it makes provisions for the fact that disunity is inevitable in any free society.

Capitalism, too, has survived because it is built on truth rather than myths. Socialism, by contrast, has failed each and every time it has been tried because it is predicated upon precisely the opposite—that is, precisely the wrong—assumptions.

One would have imagined that, at some point, “That wasn’t real socialism. . .” would have been followed by “. . . and real socialism can’t exist because man isn’t perfectible, selfishness is ineradicable, power has needed restraining since the dawn of time, and political unity is a dangerous and undesirable myth.”

 Alas, no such recognition has yet been forthcoming. In the 20th century, Communism killed at least 100 million people—by democide, by famine, by central planning, by war—and yet it is still acceptable to say in public that it was a “nice idea.” In the post-war period, “democratic” socialism ravaged the economies of the West like a virus and required a counterrevolution to remove, and yet it remains sufficiently seductive to a slice of the public as to present a threat to the American order.

Today, the states that have actively rejected socialism are growing fast (India, Poland, the former East Germany) while those that fell prey to the temptation are either moribund (Greece), tyrannies (China), or international pariahs (Cuba and North Korea)—and yet there is still a solipsistic cottage industry dedicated to blaming their successes and failures on decisions made by the United States.

The damn thing is ineradicable. And so we get Venezuela. That Hugo Chávez’s centrally planned “Bolivarian Revolution” has descended into dictatorship, repression, starvation, and crisis was apparently genuinely shocking to a good number of the people who write about politics for a living. Six years ago, upon Chávez’s death, the Guardian’s Simon Reid-Henry reflected the consensus view on the left by arguing that Chávez had shown “that the West’s ways aren’t always best” by “[refashioning] Venezuelan democracy in ways that he thought better addressed the country’s long-standing development issues.” His paper’s editorial board went one further, describing Chávez’s work as an “unfinished revolution.”

Predictably enough, this was in fact a correct characterization of Venezuela’s fate—just not in the way that the Guardian had anticipated. Five years after that edition went to print, Ricardo Hausmann, the former chief economist of the Inter-American Development Bank, was explaining that “Venezuela’s economic catastrophe dwarfs any in the history of the U.S., Western Europe or the rest of Latin America.”

Surprise! “The West’s ways aren’t always best”? The Venezuelan president is now a ruthless dictator who has cracked down on free speech, prohibited mass political protests, and confiscated firearms from anyone who has been even remotely critical of him. Thirteen percent of the country’s population has now fled, and those who have remained have been left so degraded by the government’s price controls that they have gone years without toilet paper, meat, and other basic necessities and have in consequence taken to eating zoo animals for sustenance and to scouring garbage bags for supplies.

According to the Pharmaceutical Federation of Venezuela, the country is suffering through an 85 percent medicine shortage and a 90 percent shortage of basic medical supplies. The child-mortality rate has increased 140 percent. Ninety percent of Venezuelans now live in poverty. This year, the IMF predicts, inflation will hit 10 million percent. All this in a country with the world’s largest oil reserves— reserves greater than those of the United States by a factor of ten.

“It’s up to us.” One of the great advantages to living at the tail end of 6,000 years or so of human civilization is the chance we have been afforded to look back and learn from the lessons accrued by others without having to go through the pain of learning them for ourselves. History is a complicated thing, and should be treated as such, but there are nevertheless a few core rules by which we can live:

Do not inflict laws on others to which you would not subject yourself; ensure that you distribute power among several rival institutions, and, if possible, several geographical locations; never relinquish the right to free speech, the right to free conscience, the right to freedom of religion, the right to bear arms, or the right to a jury trial; insist on being represented by a parliament, and make sure that you prohibit that parliament from loaning its powers to a king, temporarily or permanently; do not ask people to give up more of their income than they are permitted to keep; and don’t, whatever you do, be seduced by socialists bearing promises. And if you are seduced, get out before it’s too late. You have nothing to lose but your chains.

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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Prosperity prolongs life

No wonder lifespans are so short in Russia after so many years of socialism.  Capitalism gives life.  Socialism gives death

The Intimate Link Between Income Levels and Life Expectancy: Global Evidence from 213 Years

Michael Jetter et al.

Abstract

Objectives
What is the main driver of life expectancy across societies and over time? This study aims to document a systematic and quantitatively sizeable relationship between income levels and life expectancy.

Method
A panel data set of 197 countries over 213 years is analyzed with different regression methods. Robustness tests are provided.

Results
By itself, GDP per capita explains more than 64 percent of the variation in life expectancy. The Preston curve prevails even when accounting for country‐ and time‐fixed effects, country‐specific time trends, and alternative explanatory variables such as health‐care expenditure, malaria prevalence, or political institutions. If anything, this link has become stronger over recent decades when data quality has improved. Results from instrumental variable estimations suggest this finding to be largely unaffected by reverse causality. Quantile regression results suggest the relationship between income and life expectancy to be persistent across different levels of life expectancy.

Conclusion
Income matters for life expectancy. If policymakers want to prolong people's lives, economic growth appears to be the pr

SOURCE 

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How to make the USPS lose even MORE money

The United States Postal Service is a chronic money loser and politicians have failed to trim its most wasteful services, such as Saturday delivery. For his part, Vermont socialist and presidential candidate Bernie Sanders wants to expand the USPS into banking.

As Sanders writes in a May 9 Medium commentary, “Today’s loan sharks wear expensive suits and work on Wall Street, where they make hundreds of millions of dollars in total compensation by charging sky-high fees and usurious interest rates, and head financial institutions like JP Morgan Chase, Citigroup, Bank of America, and American Express.” For Sanders, “an important way to provide decent banking opportunities for low-income communities is to allow the U.S. Postal Service to engage in basic banking services.”

“What could possibly go wrong with that?” wonders Justin Haskins at Fox News. Haskins finds “no reason to believe the federal government is capable of effectively providing anyone with banking services, nor is there a dire need for such a costly new system.” For Haskins, this is “nothing more than a scheme to dramatically increase the size, power, and influence of the federal government,” and akin to “socialist banking.”

Sanders chose to spend his honeymoon in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Fellow “democratic socialist” Alexandria Ocasio Cortez is on record as saying that “capitalism will not always exist in the world.” The pair’s USPS banking plan, the “Loan Shark Prevention Act,” does expand the power of government, and under socialism, the government controls the commanding heights of the economy. To understand what that means in practice, see conditions in Cuba.

“The Cuban government announced Friday it is launching widespread rationing of chicken, eggs, rice, beans, soap, and other basic products in the face of a grave economic crisis,” explains a recent CBS News report. So it’s all about shortages, rationing, and perpetual poverty.

SOURCE 

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The vote-by-phone tech trend is scaring the life out of security experts

With their playbook for pushing government boundaries as a guide, some Silicon Valley investors are nudging election officials toward an innovation that prominent coders and cryptographers warn is downright dangerous for democracy.

Voting by phone could be coming soon to an election near you.

As seasoned disruptors of the status quo, tech pioneers have proven persuasive in selling the idea, even as the National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine specifically warn against any such experiment.

The fight over mobile voting pits technologists who warn about the risks of entrusting voting to apps and cellphones against others who see internet voting as the only hope for getting most Americans to consistently participate on Election Day.

“There are so many things that could go wrong,” said Marian Schneider, president of Verified Voting, a coalition of computer scientists and government transparency advocates pushing for more-secure elections. “It is an odd time for this to be gaining momentum.”

Behind the vote-by-phone push is a political operative who grew rich helping Uber elbow its way onto city streets and Bird populate the sidewalks with electric scooters, and who sees mobile voting as a potential cure for an ailing democracy.

Bradley Tusk is using the same tactics in this personal crusade that he used to advance tech startups. He has bet a significant share of the fortune he built off his equity stake in Uber that the gospel of mobile voting will spread so fast that most Americans will have the option of casting their ballots for president by phone as soon as 2028.

He has already persuaded the state of West Virginia and the City of Denver to start tinkering with voting by phone, and hopes to move quickly from there.

“What we learned at Uber is once the genie is out of the bottle, it can’t be put it back in,” said Tusk, a venture capitalist who managed former New York Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg’s reelection campaign before bouncing to Silicon Valley. In the tech world, he invests in startups that face political and regulatory hurdles, then helps knock those hurdles down by galvanizing the public’s appetite for game-changing innovations.

Tusk is certain participation in elections would surge if the technology were widely permitted, even though studies in some of the few places around the world that have tried the method revealed no big turnout boost. Although turnout for the 2018 midterm election was the highest in more than a century, it still brought out only about half of eligible Americans. And while turnout has gone up for presidential contests, it has dropped sharply for many state and local elections around the country.

The entrepreneur frames the fight as one pitting reformers against special interests invested in a low turnout that makes lawmakers unaccountable and easy to corrupt. He talks of the security concerns as if they are a sideshow. Sure, the scholars raising them are earnest, he said, but their approach to the challenge bewilders him. He likens them to people whose only solution to making a swimming pool safer is to fill it with concrete.

He and the executives at Boston-based Voatz, the company he is working with, say the way to make the technology more secure is to improve it through more pilot programs.

“Magic beans,” responds Josh Benaloh, a senior cryptographer at Microsoft, accusing backers who make claims for secure voting technology of peddling something that doesn’t exist. Benaloh sits on the National Academies committee that has warned against the technology.

This is a personal crusade for Tusk. He has refrained, he said, from investing in any of the start-up firms he recruits. His motivation comes from the dismay he developed over what he saw in politics, most notably when he was deputy governor in Illinois under Rod R. Blagojevich, who is serving 14 years in federal prison for corruption. Tusk detailed his disgust in a book he wrote in 2018 titled “The Fixer: My Adventures Saving Startups from Death by Politics.”

“I don’t see a world where the country can survive long term without something that fixes the dysfunction,” Tusk said. “Maybe this is that something.”

He’s meeting with election officials all over the country, offering to pay for pilot mobile voting programs out of his own pocket, as he did in West Virginia and Denver. Tusk is aiming to get 25 such pilots launched over the next few years, spending as much as $50 million. He is optimistic that a couple of states will work with him to allow voting by phone in the 2020 presidential primaries.

So far the pilot programs have been small. West Virginia used the Voatz app to offer mobile voting as an option to military personnel serving abroad in both the primary and general election in 2018. There were 144 votes cast in the state using it. Denver officials offered it as an option to several dozen voters in municipal elections in May. Tusk is confident that states that start dabbling in it will scale up quickly, and make the tech universally available in just a few election cycles.

“The technology can be perfected, but people have to look at this,” said Mike Queen, deputy chief of staff to West Virginia’s secretary of state. At a national gathering of secretaries of state this month in Santa Fe, West Virginia will be urging other states to launch their own pilot programs.

That prospect alarms some of the nation’s most prominent election-security thinkers, who see in Tusk a formidable adversary with an intimidating public relations tool kit. They say he and other promoters for the projects are misleading election officials about how secure the systems are.

“There is wide agreement among computer security experts that this is problematic,” said David Dill, a professor emeritus in computer science at Stanford. “It disturbs me that officials are getting enthusiastic about this voting technology without talking to the people who have the expertise to evaluate its security.”

The National Academies report warns that the risks of this and other forms of internet voting are “more significant than the benefits.”

“Secure Internet voting will likely not be feasible in the near future,” the report said.

The report specifically disputes claims by firms like Voatz that say their system is secure because it sends votes over a blockchain. The technology leverages a network of potentially thousands of independent computers with their own security systems, aiming to diffuse risk. Promoters of such voting say hackers could not alter an election without penetrating thousands of independent security systems.

That argument is in dispute.

“Anybody who is promoting blockchain voting either doesn’t understand blockchains, doesn’t understand voting, or is being dishonest,” said Benaloh, the Microsoft cryptographer. He was speaking at a panel earlier last month at Columbia University that also included West Virginia Secretary of State Mac Warner.

Cryptographers tick off a list of reasons blockchain technology used for such things as trading Bitcoin won’t work for protecting American election systems, which foreign agents already see as ripe for attack. The cryptographers warn that the app could be breached and stealthily redesigned to rig votes, that malware spread onto voters’ phones could make the system go haywire, that blockchains themselves introduce new security vulnerabilities.

Spreading voting out over the internet, computer experts at America’s most prominent research universities caution, also makes it impossible to create a reliable backup paper trail that election officials can use to audit results.

Blockchains “don’t solve any of the problems,” Benaloh said. “They actually introduce new ones, and make things worse.”

Voatz is refusing to open up its code to unaffiliated programmers and cryptographers like Benaloh and Dill for stress testing of vulnerabilities, citing trade secrets. But its chief executive, Nimit Sawhney, bristles at their critiques, saying they reflect “a misunderstanding of how we use the blockchain.”

The stakes are high. The lead investor behind Voatz is the venture arm of Overstock.com, which states its mission is to “change the world by advancing blockchain technology.”

West Virginia officials say they are taking it slowly. They have no plans right now to expand beyond overseas military personnel, saying those are voters who could otherwise be disenfranchised, and that the state’s audit showed the Voatz technology was effective in enabling them to vote securely.

But Tusk believes the technology will spread quickly.

“Once we prove this is a thing that works and people can do it, I think there will be real demand for it,” he said.

And he has learned well how to inject the pitch into popular discussion.

Recently, the idea of voting by phone emerged as a subplot on the popular Showtime drama “Billions.” The plot twist came after Tusk had dinner with one of the show’s creators. In the show, security concerns scarcely register as a legitimate barrier. The foil is a corrupt Washington politician motivated by anything but the public good.

What did Tusk think of the way the show framed his battle?

“It was great,” he said.

SOURCE 

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Desperate Dems Trying to revive Watergate
   
Destroying Trump is the only policy they care about

At this point, the vast majority of Americans are sick and tired of rehashing the news from 2016. Well, Democrats — the “progressives” always yammering about being on “the right side of history” — are about to ensure that we rehash the news of 1972.

In hearings set for Monday, June 10, House Democrats plan to make quite the spectacle of beginning to review Robert Mueller’s report by calling as their first witness John Dean, the former White House counsel … to President Richard Nixon. As National Review notes, “Dean served as the star witness in the Watergate impeachment trial and ultimately pled guilty to obstruction of justice in 1973.”

Why are Democrats pulling what appears to be a totally irrelevant stunt? Because they clearly want to draw parallels between the drive to impeach President Donald Trump and the scandal that eventually forced Nixon’s resignation. “This is Trump’s Watergate,” they tell us. Dean himself called the Mueller report “more damning” than anything produced by the Senate in the ‘70s on Nixon, and he insisted regarding Trump’s actions that “this is clear obstruction.”

House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerry Nadler declared, “While the White House continues to cover up and stonewall, and to prevent the American people from knowing the truth, we will continue to move forward with our investigation.”

The truth is, what Democrats in concert with Barack Obama’s “Justice” Department did with the fake dossier is much more significant and a much greater assault on freedom and free elections than anything Nixon ever did.

Even The Washington Post’s Watergate-era liberal, Bob Woodward, has called for an investigation into the FBI and CIA’s reliance on the Christopher Steele dossier. “I think it was the CIA pushing this,” he said. “Real intelligence experts looked at this and said, 'No, this is not intelligence; this is garbage,’ and they took it out. … The idea that they would include something like that in one of the great stellar intelligence assessments, as Mueller also found out, is highly questionable.”

Nevertheless, Mueller may be done, but the Democrats’ MAGA obstruction continues and will continue through at least November 2020.

SOURCE 

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Did Votes By Noncitizens Cost Trump The 2016 Popular Vote? Sure Looks That Way

This article from 2017 deserves a re-run.  Very little has been done about the problems it raises

Election 2016: Late in 2016, we created a stir by suggesting that Donald Trump was likely right when he claimed that millions of noncitizens had illegally voted in the U.S. election. Now, a study by a New Jersey think tank provides new evidence that that's what happened.

Last November, just weeks after his Electoral College win that gave him the presidency, then President-elect Donald Trump tweeted, "In addition to winning the Electoral College in a landslide, I won the popular vote if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally."

The reaction was angry and swift, with the left accusing him of being an "internet troll" and of hatching a "Twitter-born conspiracy theory."

At the time, we noted that a group called True The Vote, an online anti-voter-fraud website, had claimed that illegals had cast three million votes last year. The media and left-wing groups immediately portrayed True The Vote as a fringe group with little credibility.

The only problem is, a study in 2014 in the online Electoral Studies Journal made a quite similar claim: In the 2008 and 2010 elections, they said, as many as 2.8 million illegal noncitizen votes were cast, "enough to change meaningful election outcomes including Electoral College votes and congressional elections," said the study, authored by Jesse T. Richman and Gushan A. Chattha, both of Old Dominion University, and David C. Earnest of George Mason University.

The bombshell was this: "Noncitizen votes likely gave Senate Democrats the pivotal 60th vote needed to overcome filibusters in order to pass health care reform and other Obama administration priorities in the 111th Congress."

It got little coverage in the mainstream media, and what coverage it did get was almost entirely dismissive.

Now comes a new study by Just Facts, a libertarian/conservative think tank, that used data from a large Harvard/You.Gov study that every two years samples tens of thousands of voters, including some who admit they are noncitizens and thus can't vote legally.

The findings are eye-opening. In 2008, as many as 5.7 million noncitizens voted in the election. In 2012, as many as 3.6 million voted, the study said.

In 2016, the U.S. Census Bureau estimates that there were 21.0 million adult noncitizens in the U.S., up from 19.4 million in 2008. It is therefore highly likely that millions of noncitizens cast votes in 2016.

And it was no accident. Democrats had extensive get-out-the-vote campaigns in areas heavily populated by illegal aliens. As far back as 2008, Obama made sure that those who wanted to vote knew it was safe, announcing that election records would not be cross-checked with immigration databases.

And last year, the Obama White House supported a court injunction that kept Kansas, Alabama and Georgia from requiring proof of citizenship to register to vote. The message was sent, loud and clear: If you're a noncitizen or here illegally, don't be afraid. You're free to vote. No one will stop you.

We don't know the exact number of illegal votes. No one does. But the data that are available suggest that the number of illegal votes was substantial — probably in the millions, as Trump said — and likely had a significant impact on the election's outcome.

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)

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

President towers over London, and Queen comes up trumps

Comment from Australia

Scott Morrison [Australian PM] was overshadowed in Britain by Donald Trump. That is no criticism of our Prime Minister. Who in the world wouldn’t be overshadowed by Trump? Maybe the Queen, certainly no one else. For all that, Morrison was hot property in London. Everybody wanted to see him. Everybody loves a winner.

But Trump was the London superstar. The US President was on his best behaviour. Theresa May, beaten, battered and barely functioning, was a figure to excite pity even from Trump and he was as kind to her as a parent with a sick child.

Despite the oddities of his state visit, serious business was done. Trump is only the third US president to receive the honours of a full state visit. Trump responds well to flattery and he certainly did this time. He was charmed and impressed by the Queen.

It is worth pausing to note the incredible global triumph of the Queen. She is surely the most popular woman in the world. She is a magnificent silent rebuke to the age. She does not hector. She does not abuse. She makes no real gesture to the zeitgeist. She doesn’t do psychodrama and self-disclosure. Yet she is the most powerful element of Britain’s vast, accumulated soft power.

It is right for Britain to give Trump a state visit. It is not an honour for an individual but for the office of the presidency, an especially powerful symbol of continuity in a troubled time. The anti-Trump demonstrators covered themselves in ignominy. They are happy to welcome the President of the People’s Republic of China, Xi Jinping, but determined to mock and insult the US President.

Much that Trump has tweeted and said in the past has been vulgar and offensive. But I don’t see how you credibly criticise him for this by being more vulgar, offensive and extreme yourself.

The two most foolish Londoners this week were mayor Sadiq Khan and Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn.

Khan styles himself a moderate, sensible, social democratic politician and once had ambitions to lead the Labour Party. Yet a day before Trump arrived Khan wrote a newspaper opinion piece that denounced him as the moral equivalent of the fascist dictators of the 20th century.

This is, frankly, grotesque on Khan’s part. Those fascist dictators include Adolf Hitler, who murdered six million Jews, invaded and laid waste to his neighbours and waged a world war in which tens of millions were killed.

It is perfectly legitimate to criticise Trump for all manner of things, stylistic and substantial. It is not only functionally insane to equate him to fascist dictators, it is deeply corrosive of the fundamental decencies of political debate. Forget all these pious denunciations of populism from progressive politicians. When figures like Khan use such grotesquely exaggerated moral categories to denounce Trump, they are promoting extremism more effectively than anyone else.

Khan of course does not espouse violence against anyone. But far from being a voice of moderation, he cynically manipulates the emotional extremism of our demented moment in history. He got the reaction he wanted. Trump tweeted critically of Khan, calling him, among other things, a “stone cold loser”. This encouraged much of the British media to embark on a full-scale jihad denunciation of Trump. Mind you, the outrage seemed tired and stale this time. Corbyn railed against Trump for criticising Khan.

There is an element almost of class snobbery here. Trump speaks in colloquial terms, which innately sound rough, whereas Khan speaks in the mellifluous Davos man dialect which, though oleaginous, sounds superficially reasonable. But Khan’s remarks were significantly more extreme than Trump’s.

Corbyn’s performance was even worse than Khan’s. Corbyn decided he would address the street protest against Trump. He also boycotted the state banquet the Queen hosted.

Trump’s own later comments on Corbyn were, by Trump’s standards, mild, calling Corbyn ”somewhat negative”. Corbyn’s irresponsibility is profound. If Corbyn should become prime minister, he will be responsible for Britain’s national security. As Theresa May observed, and as anyone with an IQ above room temperature knows, no relationship is more important to British security than the US relationship. Whether a Trump administration would trust a Corbyn government enough to continue the intelligence-sharing relationship at the heart of the entire Five Eyes Western alliance would be a critical question for British security.

Corbyn did not lead a street protest against Xi, whose government has put a million Muslim Uighurs in centres human rights activists describe as concentration camps. And he has a long history of supporting dictators such as Fidel Castro and Hugo Chavez.

The only moment I felt a speck of sympathy for Corbyn was when Trump revealed that Corbyn had asked for a private meeting and Trump turned him down.

The biggest issue of substance was the US asking Britain not to allow Chinese telco Huawei to participate in its 5G network. Numerous Conservative leadership contenders have come out in favour of excluding Huawei. May’s preference, according to leaks, was to allow Huawei into the periphery of the network but not its core.

In his press conference with May, Trump said he was sure the Huawei issue would not be a problem. He didn’t force the Brits to capitulate in public but it looks as though they are moving towards the US and Australian position.

Former foreign secretary William Hague, who was in government when Britain was co-operating with Huawei to make sure its equipment was secure for British use, argued in a powerful newspaper column that the Chinese government, the technical issues and the strategic environ­ment had all changed and Britain should now keep Huawei out of its 5G network altogether.

If Trump’s visit achieved that policy change, it was a singular success.

The visit was originally conceived as coming after Britain had left the EU and would be on the lookout for new trade deals. Trump, enticingly, offers Britain a “phenomenal” trade deal if it ever does clear itself of the EU.

But that is all speculative. May formally resigns the prime ministership tomorrow. Everything then depends on the next Conservative prime minister, most likely Trump’s friend, Boris Johnson, who talked with Trump over the phone but otherwise sensibly kept a low profile.

This week, Johnson was the most level-headed British leader of the lot. Apart from the Queen, of course.

SOURCE 
https://www.theaustralian.com.au/commentary/president-towers-over-london-and-queen-comes-up-trumps/news-story/aa88fad2f4f64c39a14853efd0da2237

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Life in the San Francisco Soviet

No free speech.  As in the old Soviet Union, police can come after you for what you say -- even using the good Soviet practice of breaking down your door

San Francisco public defender-filmmaker Jeff Adachi passed away at age 59 on February 22, reportedly from cocaine and alcohol plus a heart condition. Local reporter Bryan Carmody thought the circumstances were unusual and began to investigate. Carmody told Matthew Keys of the California Globe that as he gathered information, an unnamed individual provided him with a 16-page police dossier with photographs and investigator’s reports. San Francisco police began pestering Carmody for the source of his report, which he declined to reveal. The reporter was not charged with a crime, but San Francisco police chief William Scott said the reporter “crossed the line,” motivated by profit or animosity toward Adachi.

Two judges issued search warrants, and on May 10 the police broke down Carmody’s door with a sledgehammer and held the reporter in handcuffs for six hours. Police confiscated Carmody’s notebooks, cellphone, computer, hard drives, and cameras, taking away video equipment worth more than $30,000. Carmody still declined to reveal his source.


In classic style, San Francisco mayor London Breed flip-flopped on support for the raid, and local officials were divided. It remains unclear who launched the raid, but there is no doubt that the action violated Carmody’s First Amendment rights. No word yet whether any officers declined to participate in the raid, or expressed any regrets afterward. The officers’ unquestioned obedience recalls another case in 2012.

In November of that year, voters were to decide four ballot measures on taxes and spending. The Senate Governance and Finance Committee held hearings on these measures, and the California Channel gave voters statewide a chance to watch and gain insights. Senate boss Darrell Steinberg told state employees to pull the plug on the broadcast, and they did so, keeping voters statewide in the dark. Afterward, Steinberg proclaimed “I pride myself on being open and transparent.”

In similar style, San Francisco officials all claim to support the First Amendment. With police and public officials alike, California taxpayers should watch what they do, not what they say.

SOURCE 

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Biden Swipes Trump Over Brunei LGBT Abuses, But Obama Administration Embraced the Sultanate

Former Vice President Joe Biden on Saturday sought to link the Trump administration’s LGBT policies at home to attacks on LGBT individuals abroad, saying the U.S. should refuse to cooperate with governments responsible for violations, “as we did in our administration.”

But the example he cited – Brunei’s recent phasing in of a penal code providing for death by stoning for sodomy and adultery – was not one on which the Obama administration took a strong public stand when it was first announced more than five years ago.

Addressing the Human Rights Campaign’s annual Ohio gala, the 2020 Democratic presidential hopeful assailed the Trump administration’s LGBT policies, and suggested that it was sending a poor example to other countries.

“We have to make it clear – as we did in our administration – the United States of America will not stand for it in any countries and we will not cooperate with those countries who engage in this fratricide that they’re moving on,” he said. “Using religion or culture to discriminate against or demonize LGBTQ individuals is never justified, not anywhere in the world.”

Pointing to difficulties faced by LGBT people in a number of countries, Biden continued, “We’re losing ground to some of the divisive politics we’re battling here at home in the Trump administration.”

“That’s why it’s so important for the rest of us to speak out, make clear how repugnant we find these actions. For example in Brunei, a new law recently put into effect authorizes the execution by stoning of gay sex and adultery.”

“It was only thanks to the international outcry – not withstanding this president – and the global pressure that the sultan pulled back from that position, maintaining a de facto moratorium on the death penalty. Wasn’t that so nice of him? He has very little social redeeming value.”

Brunei’s controversial statute took effect last March, but on the eve of Ramadan Sultan Hassanal Bolkiah said a de facto moratorium on executions would remain in force. (He did not rescind the Islamic code itself, saying it was “crucial in protecting the morality and decency of the public.”)

‘Our ambassador has relayed our concerns privately’

Despite Biden’s “as we did in our administration” remark, the Obama administration did not take a firm public stance when the Islamic sultanate first announced the shari’a punishments back in 2013.

Brunei was one of 11 countries in the Asia-Pacific participating in the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), a free trade agreement which the Obama administration viewed as a top priority. As such the small, oil-rich sultanate was considered important enough to merit a number of visits by senior administration officials, as well as meetings between President Obama and Bolkiah in Washington and New York.

Obama intended to visit Brunei for an Oct. 2013 Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) summit but canceled due to a government shutdown. Then-Secretary of State John Kerry did visit, and just days later the sultan first unveiled his shari’a penal code plans.

“Phase one” of the code took effect the following May, shortly after Kerry in a statement hailed the “excellent cooperation” between the U.S. and Brunei and described the sultanate as “wonderful.”

The development sparked a boycott – promoted by the Human Rights Campaign and others – of iconic Beverly Hills hotels owned by a Brunei investment fund controlled by the sultan.

But the Obama administration’s response was low-key.

That same month (May 2014), State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki confirmed Kerry had not spoken to the sultan since the law was announced seven months earlier, but said, “our ambassador has relayed our concerns privately to the government of Brunei.”

In September 2014, Bolkiah and his wife were invited to a reception hosted by Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel in New York. Kerry met with Bolkiah in Jakarta a month later.

In June 2015, White House press secretary Josh Earnest was asked about some LGBT activists’ criticism of the TPP, because of Brunei’s death-by-stoning plans.

He replied that while some argue such countries should be shunned or isolated because they “discriminate against people because of who they love,” Obama believed that engagement was the best way to advocate for the kinds of values he “has championed while sitting in the Oval Office.”

Three months later, the Obamas again hosted Brunei’s first couple at a reception on the sidelines of the U.N. General Assembly, this time at the New York Palace Hotel.

When the TPP text was released in Nov. 2015, Earnest was asked why it did not include language “addressing laws criminalizing homosexuality in Malaysia and Brunei.”

He replied that there were provisions relating to “raising human rights standards,” adding that whenever Obama travels around the world “he makes clear to the leaders of other countries when he’s visiting with them how seriously we take the issue of human rights.”

Days later Obama met with Bolkiah again, at an Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit in the Philippines. In 2016 Bolkiah was back in the U.S. for an ASEAN summit hosted by Obama in California.

President Trump pulled out of the TPP shortly after his inauguration.

When Brunei earlier this year moved ahead with “phases two and three” of the shari’a code, the State Department said in a statement the decision “runs counter to its international human rights obligations, including with respect to torture or other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.”

“All governments have an obligation to ensure that all people can freely enjoy the universal human rights and fundamental freedoms to which they are entitled,” it said. “The United States strongly opposes violence, criminalization and discrimination targeting vulnerable groups, including women at risk of violence, religious and ethnic minorities, and lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersex (LGBTI) persons.”

Other elements of Brunei’s code range from limb amputation for thieves, lashes, terms of imprisonment, or fines for offenses such as “propagating” a religion other than Islam to a Muslim, drinking alcohol, attempting suicide or “failure to perform Friday prayer.”

SOURCE 

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FDA Approves $2 Million Drug. Blame the Price on Excessive Regulation

Last year, drug producer Brainstorm Cell Therapeutics received significant criticism for attempting to offer patients access to an experimental treatment procedure for amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (often called ALS or Lou Gherig’s disease) for $300,000. A drug recently approved by the Food and Drug Administration dwarfs this price.

A new gene therapy drug named Zoglensma became the most expensive drug in the world, costing patients over $2.1 million for one-time use. Zoglensma joins a small (and outlandishly expensive) group of treatments called gene therapy drugs. Gene therapy uses actual genes to treat or prevent diseases.

Before Zoglensma’s approval, its predecessor treatment, named Spinraza, cost patients $750,000 for the first year’s treatment and an additional $375,000 for each additional year. Other FDA approved gene therapy treatments cost between $375,000 and $875,000.

Zoglensma treats spinal muscular atrophy (SMA), a rare genetic disease that restricts the nervous system’s ability to coordinate voluntary muscle movement. Nearly one in eight-thousand people carry the SMA gene. Tragically, the disease typically affects infants. In severe case, infants with SMA are unable to sit upright, suffer from severe joint pain, and ultimately die from respiratory failure. SMA is considered the most common genetic cause of death in infants.

Despite providing rare and promising results, many gene therapy drug prices place them beyond financial reach for many families in tragic situations. But why are these treatments so expensive?

A significant reason is government regulation.

Unlike other drugs regulated by the Food and Drug Administration, gene therapies are subject not only to the regulatory structure of the FDA, but also to the Office of Biotechnology Activities, and the Recombinant DNA Advisory Committee. Excessive regulatory oversight creates an elongated and expensive route to approval. By one estimate, an approved gene therapy drug costs nearly $5 billion (five times as high as the average cost of FDA approval). Covering these costs is difficult because many of the diseases gene therapy drugs treat are extremely rare.

Gene therapies are also often tailored to specific individuals, making completing clinical trials for FDA approval very challenging and costly. One estimate holds it costs drug providers nearly $1 million per clinical trial participant. For reference, the first phase of the FDA approval process typically requires twenty to eighty participants. The third and largest phase usually requires at least 3,000 participants.

Gene therapies provide those with rare, serious, and possibly terminal conditions with the ability to significantly improve their quality of life. When pioneering medical breakthroughs provide such an opportunity, it is imperative to provide treatment where possible. Existing regulations serve to hinder access to treatment by making it prohibitively expensive. Drugs costing over $2 million are the latest symptom of the overregulation disease.

SOURCE 

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My scripture blog

I have just finished updating my Scripture blog.  Anybody who finds helpful my commentaries on important issues of scriptural interpretation way find it worth a look.

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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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Far More Than a Culture War Rages in America
   
America’s two greatest presidents, Washington and Lincoln, both believed that the ultimate threat to the United States wouldn’t come from abroad in the form of a foreign enemy but rather from within. In his Farewell Address, Washington warned of the dangers of “party passion,” and the “disposition to retaliate… [giving] ambitious, corrupted or deluded citizens… facility to betray, or sacrifice the interests of their own country…sometimes even with popularity…” Lincoln said, “America will never be destroyed from the outside. If we falter and lose our freedoms, it will be because we destroyed ourselves.” On another occasion he said, “…if destruction be our lot we must ourselves be its author and finisher.”

Of all the cultural changes that endanger the well-being and happiness of Americans and impair the governability of the nation, severing the present from the past and the rise of division and intolerance are probably the two greatest threats. In the last 25 years, division and intolerance have increasingly become defining characteristics of American politics and culture — attributes at odds with the vision of the founders and most successive presidents who understood that shared values and unity were the bedrock of American strength.

So all-encompassing has division and intolerance become now, that older generations hardly recognize in contemporary American culture, the place and spiritual home of their childhood. And today, one can rarely take in the arts on stage or in museums, comedy, contemporary Hollywood productions or major league sports without having one’s sensibilities offended or being confronted with politically correct inferences that reflect intolerance and condescension.

Beyond our borders it’s always been a crazy and depraved world. Anti-Semitic prejudice and intolerance has a long history in the Middle East and has been on the rise in Europe and the U.S., taking a turn for the worse on U.S. college campuses in recent years and punctuated this last year with mass murder and attempted mass murder at synagogues in Pittsburgh and Poway, California. In the last 25 years Christian persecution has been increasing in the Middle East, South Asia, and Africa from the upsurge of militant Islam. And just when ISIS appears defeated, the shocking news of mass killings of Christians carried out by Islamist terrorists, who directed their bombings at churches and hotels in Sri Lanka Easter morning reminds us of the harsh reality and magnitude of anti-Christian persecution and intolerance.

In January, Newsweek magazine, which is no friend of Christianity, reported that “Christian persecution and genocide is worse now than in any time in history.” The Pew Research Center recently noted that “in 144 [out of 195] countries in the world, Christians are the most targeted religion.”

To the extent Americans are aware of these facts and that more Christians have died for their faith in the 20th century than at any time in history, some might find consolation that such persecution is primarily taking place outside of the United States. But is that really so and what is to come?

Historians whose research is based on primary sources know that the United States was founded by self-professing Christians. The Founders came from different denominations, but they agreed on fundamental beliefs. And when those fundamentals were applied to the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, the trajectory of human history was radically changed, for it was Christian Biblical principles that were the basis for man having inalienable rights from God that no government can deny or take away. In the words of President John F. Kennedy many years later: “The rights of man come not from the generosity of the state but from the hand of God.” Similarly it was Christian principles in the Declaration and Constitution that asserted that the legitimacy of government came only from the consent of the people and that human dignity and equality for everyone was the calling of this new revolutionary United States of America.

The supposition that America was founded by Christians based on Christian principles does not mean that every American was or would be Christian. From the beginning, America’s doors were open to people of all faiths — or of no faith — to live in peace and tolerance, knowing they could practice their religion or lack thereof without harassment or discrimination. Christianity not only presupposes respect for people’s free will, but also tolerance, which is the essential guarantor of the rights of others to differ in their personal beliefs and expression.

The earliest groups of settlers coming to America were Protestants — Pilgrims, Puritans, Baptists, Dutch Reformed, Anglicans, and others — and they had various and strong disagreements amongst themselves. By experience, they knew secular government was the only workable option because a theocratic-type alternative would be oppressive and cause perpetual turmoil and civil conflict. Since the founders were Protestants, they were basically optimists and believed that things work together for good because of the dual assumption that the hand of God’s providence is at work in human affairs and that spiritual truth would prevail through man, by love not force, by the example of service and sacrifice for others, and by the exercise of free will in the marketplace of ideas.

The Constitution was drafted in 1787, but its acceptance was stalled for several years because the larger and most influential states feared that the document gave the federal government too much power and they wanted to amend the Constitution to provide for and guarantee specific protections regarding the rights of the people and the states. Finally, with ten amendments, the Constitution was ratified by the last state, Rhode Island, in 1790. Those protections were of course known as the Bill of Rights, with the First Amendment providing the explicit guarantee of religious liberty, which included related rights of freedom of the press, speech, and assembly.

That the United States was a Christian nation was affirmed in 1892 in the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling in the case of Holy Trinity Church v. The United States, wherein the Court’s findings included a lengthy and detailed accounting of the Christian foundation of both the individual states’ constitutions and the federal U.S. Constitution. The Court summarized its findings, stating: “Our laws and our institutions must necessarily be based upon and embody the teachings of the Redeemer of mankind. [It is] impossible that it should be otherwise and in the sense and to this extent our civilization and our institutions are emphatically Christian.”

Once considered the most towering figure in the Democratic Party, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt said in 1935 that, “We cannot read the history of our rise and development as a nation, without reckoning with the place the Bible has occupied in shaping the advances of the Republic.…[W]here we have been the truest and most consistent in obeying its precepts, we have attained the greatest measure of contentment and prosperity.”

Fast forward a generation from Roosevelt and things began happening that rapidly changed the path of American values and culture. Two Supreme Court case rulings on the interpretation of the First Amendment’s Establishment Clause in the early 1960s removed reference and respect for the Almighty from public schools. Together, Engle v. Vitale (1962) and Murray v. Curlett (1963) ruled it was unconstitutional to have prayer, and readings or recitations from the Bible in the classroom or on the grounds of public schools.

Nine years later in 1971 the Supreme Court took up Roe v. Wade, ruling on January 22, 1973, that under the 14th Amendment, a woman’s right to abortion trumped any other competing rights and could not be abridged by state laws banning abortions. This ruling effectively stripped unalienable rights and equality from both the unborn and the father. In yet another 14th Amendment ruling in Obergefell v. Hodges, handed down on June 26, 2015, in a narrow 5-4 decision, the Supreme Court, legalized same sex marriage nationwide, a decision that transformed the definition of the family, which had been for millennia the foundational institution for pro-creation and child-rearing. In the dissenting words of Chief Justice Roberts, that narrow majority ruling was likely to unleash a new level of intolerance and division because it “not only overlooks our country’s entire history and tradition, but actively repudiates it, preferring to live only in the heady days of the here and now.”

That these Supreme Court rulings incrementally and collectively weakened the authority and influence of Christianity in American society and culture, there can be little doubt. In legislating from the bench and creating whole new rights, these Supreme Court rulings are fundamentally problematic, as they run contrary to the Constitution’s requirements of separation of powers. In both Roe and Obergefell, the Supreme Court usurped and nullified the legislature, whose constitutionally defined role was to originate, debate, and vote on new laws — particularly important when those new laws would fundamentally change family life and society. But also — insofar as law is uncompromising — the Obergefell ruling would escalate the culture war because newly created rights of a minority were certain to clash with and encroach on the rights, sensibilities, and long-standing moral values and institutions held by the majority.

The imprimatur of five Supreme Court justices effectively opened the door to some 2% of Americans being able to dictate to the population at large what they can say, how they can conduct their business, and even influence what churches and synagogues are allowed to practice and preach. From there it’s been a short step in the LGBT agenda to demand ever more equal rights — such as equal access to public bathrooms and locker rooms of either sex, and the right to participate in sports under the transgender’s new sex rather than the biological birth gender like everyone else. And the way it has been going, those who dare question these trends are likely to be charged with being homo- or transphobic and engaging in hate speech.

Thus, the mooring of a Christian anchor hat helped provide protection and continuity around common sense and shared values — established over millennia — and for some three centuries dating back to colonial times, was cast aside in the course of a few decades. Effectively, a few Supreme Court decisions were instrumental in bending the trajectory of American society’s values and priorities that had been shaped by 2000+ year-old transcendent virtues, aspirations and unalienable God-given rights to a new direction preoccupied with unrestrained self-interest and man-made worldly rights of self-gratification.

To be fair, gradual steps leading to marginalization and discrimination against Christians in America were underway considerably before the aforementioned Supreme Court decisions. The influence of John Dewey, lauded as the greatest educational thinker of the 20th century, can be traced back to the 1920s. Dewey was an atheist, who believed and said, “There is no room for fixed and natural law or permanent moral absolutes.” In the decades that followed, various quarters of the public school educational establishment sought to downplay and erase the facts about the role of Christianity in America’s founding and shaping of the nation.

In 1986, Dr. Paul Vitz, a professor of psychology at New York University, published the findings of a commission’s study in which he participated to examine the degree and nature of bias in 60 social studies and history textbooks used by 87% of public schools across the United States. Not only was there no God being thanked by the Pilgrims in the first Thanksgiving, but the study found that almost every other reference to the Christian influence of early America was systematically removed.

In this regard George Orwell’s dystopian future depicted in 1984 has already arrived. Orwell wrote: “Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, and every date has been altered. And the process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.”

As Orwell also noted, “the whole aim of Newspeak and Doublethink is to narrow the range of thought.” Political correctness has the same goal and that’s why its adherents are so intolerant — seeking to shut down and silence people with whom they disagree on college campuses across the country, clamoring for removal of historic statues and monuments, and demanding that people with differing views on such subjects as climate change and LGBT rights be silenced, fined or arrested.

Shocking as it might seem, a pattern has been emerging in the U.S. with similarities to the longstanding standard practices in Communist and Fascist totalitarian states — that is: to rewrite history and indoctrinate the youth so as to be able to manipulate and control the future cultural and political landscape.

In that sense the U.S. is closer to a future that is reminiscent of developments that led to persecution in 1930s Germany than anyone would like to contemplate or admit. The Nazi propaganda machine censored non-conforming views and sought to isolate and discriminate against Jews — a strategy intended to engender hatred and prejudice against them within the greater German population, thus setting the stage for the genocidal “final solution” of the Holocaust.

This is not to say that Christians are on the threshold of massive physical persecution in the U.S. But make no mistake, Christianity in America is being marginalized and put on the defensive by growing prejudice and outright hostility. And this trend of intolerance and disenfranchisement of Christians is happening at a time when the digital megaphone of social media is getting increasingly dominant.

Propaganda may actually be more effective in America than in totalitarian societies because of the power of repetitive messaging from ostensibly separate and diverse private media sources within the United States. Citizens in totalitarian societies aren’t as easily fooled because they know that the government controls the media and all its messaging.

In America propaganda narratives originate less from government than from progressive-minded groups of people who tend to think and act “collectively.” Many with this collective mindset are naturally predisposed to joining forces with what Boston University Professor Angelo Codevilla described as America’s Ruling Class, by pursuing careers in the knowledge and information industry — where others of a similar progressive mindset tend to work. Institutions that are largely dominated by the Ruling Class include the mainstream media; social media and information search multinational corporations — notably but not limited to the near monopolies of Facebook, Twitter, Yahoo, Microsoft and Google; the educational establishment and universities; government bureaucracies; large segments of the law practice and the Democratic Party; and many non-profit foundations.

It is noteworthy that the rise of militant secularism and a decline in tolerance and civil discourse has taken place concurrent with the rise and proliferation of social media in America. And for many, visceral hate and name calling have all but replaced civil discourse and debate. America is more divided now than at any time in its history, except perhaps during the period leading up to the Civil war. But because it is hatred and intolerance that fuel this so-called culture war, we have actually opened the floodgates of spiritual warfare, with the forces of darkness and deceit seeking the destruction of the forces of light and truth.

Just so we can’t miss what’s at stake, this epic spiritual battle — that threatens the very foundation of society and the nation — is driven by extreme hate and intolerance, and Christianity, the religion of love and the Savior, is now in the crosshairs.

Who can deny that America’s blessings are unparalleled in human history? The colonists, through their representatives, drafted a revolutionary Constitution that created a system of limited government with checks and balances and separation of power, which also prioritized the protection of the people’s rights and property. It was the first government in human history whose legitimacy came from the people and whose purpose was to serve the people.

As a result the United States rose from colonial poverty to the world’s most creative, prosperous and generous nation in just 200 years. A miraculous accomplishment. And that success happened not by chance, but because the nation’s Christian foundation and Constitution put limits on government and empowered the people to be creative and productive. In the words of the 30th president, Calvin Coolidge, “Who can doubt that it has been guided by a Divine Providence?”

Unfortunately, with affluence comes spiritual laziness. Comfortable and disengaged Americans have forgotten the admonitions by Washington, Lincoln, and a number of modern presidents, that it’s necessary to understand and overcome the forces and determined enemies within who seek power by emasculating the values of individual liberty and the institutions that have made America great. Some 20 years before he was elected the 40th U.S. president, Ronald Reagan reminds us that, “Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction.”

What’s needed now is an awakening and spiritual revival within Christianity that acts as a positive force throughout America. That revival would not only inspire believers and reach non-believers, but it would also help the silent majority and less engaged people whose yearnings may be simple, such as the return of civility, satisfaction, and joy that comes from being more authentically connected with people and with the nation’s profound heritage. If Christianity is the source of both love and the principles that are at the heart of the Constitution, it is certainly worth defending. For as Christianity in America goes, so goes everything else.

SOURCE 

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Sen. Rand Paul: Violence Is 'Inherent to Socialism'

All their policies are coercive. Coercion is their only idea for how to get desired things to happen

Speaking to The Blaze’s Andrew Wilkow, Kentucky Senator Rand Paul (R) said that violence is “inherent to socialism.” The senator explained that he and his wife discuss this topic within their forthcoming book “The Case Against Socialism”:

“And in it, we talk about, is it an accident that you get violence and genocide under socialism? Or is it an inevitability, is it inherent to socialism?” Senator Paul answers the question in the affirmative: “Really, is violence inherent to socialism? And I think the answer is absolutely yes.”

He said that in the upcoming book they note varying levels of socialism. In a small quantity, “it’s just sort of I threaten you with a fine but there’s no real followup,” Sen. Paul explained—but he said when the government seeks to take away private property by force, that is when violence ensues:

“And so the ultimate conclusion of socialism where you really take people’s property, people do resist and it becomes violent and that’s when you have the Gulag,” Paul said, pointing to history: “Whether it was Stalin, or Hitler, or Mao, Pol Pot, Maduro or Chavez, Castro—doesn’t seem to be that there is a benign socialism out there.”

While people highlight Scandinavia, Sen. Paul disagreed with applying the label of socialism to the region, stating that “they point to Scandinavia, which in reality really isn’t socialism, it’s a high tax welfare state, but you still have private property. They didn’t go confiscate the property in Sweden.”

Sen. Paul highlighted the pomposity of an ideology that claims the government can make better decisions for people than they can make for themselves:

“Socialism, or big government, or government control of things, ultimately is the most arrogant and elitist concept you can imagine. Because it is a very arrogant concept for me to think, I know what church would be best for you, I know what school would be best for you, and I think you’re eating too many hamburgers and that you need more vegetables—all of those things are arrogant for me to presume that I know best for you.”

He described the dichotomy between ideologies:

“And this is what is the real difference between those who believe in liberty and those who believe in coercion, is, they think they know what’s best, and they’re willing to send a guy with a truncheon and beat you over the head if you don’t listen.”

“And they say, ‘Oh, we’re not willing to do that we’re just going to fine you.’” But upon failure to pay the fine, “They’ll put you in jail,” he said, noting, “Ultimately it’s the threat of state violence, but because they presume they’re right.”

SOURCE 

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

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

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