How the Years Between the World Wars Created the Modern World

From a historical standpoint, the period between the two world wars resonates powerfully in many directions. “See you in 20 years,” the diplomats said to each other as they left the Paris Peace Conference, and war did indeed break out 20 years and a few weeks after the Versailles Treaty was signed in 1919. The interwar period would be highly interesting if for no other reason.

But other significant historical trends — many of them only indirectly related to the war itself — were in process as well. European imperialism, admittedly influenced by the strains of global war, was developing its first real fissures. The intellectual movement associated with Modernism accelerated. The electronic media emerged rapidly — the BBC started radio broadcasts in 1921! Einstein got the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1921. The great Max Weber died in 1920. Freudian terminology — think “Oedipus Complex” or “displacement activity” — were becoming household terms, at least in educated circles. Dress hemlines shot upward. Jazz altered popular music radically. Movies got sound and color!

After a short burst of showcase “democracy” in postwar Europe, totalitarian regimes and functional dictatorships seemed to be the wave of the future.

All of these trends make the Entre-deux-guerres, as French historians call the period, an unusually eventful and even fateful 20 years in the history of the world.

But for students of the idea and practice of liberty, the period is absolutely crucial in understanding and interpreting the twentieth century and hence our own world.

For one thing, the Entre-deux-guerres practically created totalitarianism. The Bolsheviks captured the Russian government in 1917/18. Shortly thereafter, Mussolini’s Fascism took control in Italy, and later Hitler’s Nazism in Germany. All three cases featured movements that gave life to the words “terrible simplifiers,” a phrase coined by historian Jacob Burckhardt during the late nineteenth century. Burckhardt meant the kind of mass movements guided by violent demagogues to which European civilization had become susceptible. The interwar years gave us such demagogues in spades.

And lesser simplifiers too. The first socialist governments ruled for various lengths of time in Western and Central Europe. And East-Central Europe was likewise guided by socialist policies, for most of the time after the mid-twenties by nationalist dictators. And where nominal socialists were not in power, the welfare/warfare state came to be the norm. The forces of collectivism found fulfillment in many, many ways throughout the world.

It was also during the interwar period that the heroes of the modern philosophy of liberty and the Austrian School in particular framed their profound critique of collectivism. This critique stands as the basis of modern Austrian economics and indeed for a great deal of modern thought about liberty.

From a number of perspectives, the First World War was the death knell of the century of bourgeois liberalism. It certainly paved the way for totalitarianism, statism, and the mass violence that distorts modern life. Some few understood all this early on. Still fewer — Mises and others — recognized the wave of the future for what it was, and fought back. But to understand this crucial period both on the general level and as a piece of the history of individualism, we must investigate ideas, culture, politics, economics, and more.

Some periods of history seem to produce a more intense human experience, to impact the future more than other epochs. I would nominate the 20 years between the wars as one of those intensive periods, both for good and ill. The period certainly produced a design for the world to come.

More HERE

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The Left have always been with us

They want power; conservatives want liberty

In Machiavellism: The Doctrine of Raison d’État and Its Place in Modern History (English translation, 1957), Friedrich Meinecke wrote:

"The striving for power is an aboriginal human impulse, perhaps even an animal impulse, which blindly snatches at everything around until it comes up against some external barriers. And, in the case of men at least, the impulse is not restricted solely to what is directly necessary for life and health. Man takes a wholehearted pleasure in power itself and, through it, in himself and his heightened personality. Next to hunger and love, pleonexia is the most powerful elemental and influential impulse in man."

The lust for power has been an important and recurring theme in western historiography. Tacitus (c. 55 - c.117) mentioned it repeatedly in his Annals of Imperial Rome, as when he suggested that “the motive of Octavian, the future Augustus, was lust for power”; that Lucius Marcus Sejanus (a hatchet man for the emperor Tiberius) “concealed behind a carefully modest exterior an unbounded lust for power”; and that “Drusus Caesar’s degraded character was animated by power-lust.”

Tacitus was greatly admired by eighteenth-century historians, so it is not surprising that many of them emphasized the desire for power as a significant factor throughout history. This passage from Edward Gibbon’s The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire is typical: “Of all our passions and appetites, the love of power is of the most imperious and unsociable nature, since the pride of one man requires the submission of the multitude.”

The works of Tacitus were known to many eighteenth-century Americans through the translation (1731) of Thomas Gordon, a radical whig who earlier had co-authored (with John Trenchard) the libertarian classic, Cato’s Letters. (Thomas Jefferson owned three sets of Gordon’s translation, two of which he donated to the Library of Congress in 1815.)

What made Gordon’s edition of Tacitus especially appealing was his own “Political Discourse Upon that Author,” a lengthy commentary that repeatedly warned against the temptations and dangers of power. Tacitus, according to Gordon, was “zealous for public liberty,” a “declared enemy to Tyrants,” and a historian “of extraordinary wisdom.” It is by reading Tacitus that we learn the invaluable lesson that only “treachery” will cause a free people to submit to tyranny. According to Jefferson, Tacitus was “the first writer in the world without a single exception.”

Thomas Gordon also translated The Works of Sallust (1743), in which we find the phrase “the ardent lust of domination.” This phrase caught the attention of Edward Wortley Montague, who presented an interesting analysis of the lust for power in Reflections on the Rise and Fall of the Ancient Republics Adapted to the Present State of Great Britain (1759). The “lust of domination, here mentioned by Sallust, though generally confounded with ambition, is in reality a different passion.” Ambition, which is a passion that “attends us from the cradle to the grave,” stems from “the desire of pre-eminence, the fondness for being distinguished above the rest of our fellow creatures”; and the nature of a specific ambition will vary according to “the different objects it pursues.”

The lust of domination is more general than mere ambition. It is a mode of “selfishness” whereby we attempt “to draw every thing to center in ourselves, which we think will enable us to gratify every other passion.” Montague goes on to argue that “selfishness” differs fundamentally from “self-love.”

"[I]f we rightly define these two principles, we shall find an essential difference between our ideas of self-love and selfishness. Self-love, within its due bounds, is the practice of the great duty of self-preservation, regulated by that law which the great Author of our being has given for that very end. Self-love, therefore, is not only compatible with the most rigid practice of the social duties, but is in fact a great motive and incentive to the practice of all moral virtue. Whereas selfishness, by reducing every thing to the single point of private interest, a point which it never loses sight of, banishes all the social virtues, and is the first spring of action, which impels to all those disorders, which are so fatal to mixed Governments in particular, and to society in general.

It is the selfish lust of domination, not the rational motive of self-love, that will transform the most mild government into the “most insupportable tyranny.” A man motivated by that “destructive passion” will need the assistance of like-minded people” to serve as “subordinate instruments” in his pursuit of power, and this will require that he “put on as many shapes as Proteus.”

[H]e must ever wear the mask of dissimulation, and live a perpetual lie. He will court the friendship of every man, who is capable of promoting, and endeavor to crush every man, who is capable of defeating his ambitious views. Thus his friendship and his enmity will be alike unreal, and easily convertible, if the change will serve his interest."

Montague’s analysis—which was quoted at length by James Burgh in his influential three-volume work, Political Disquisitions (1774)—was an effort to explain how the lust for power, if not held in check, will invariably corrupt rulers. “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” When Lord Acton penned this celebrated aphorism in the late nineteenth century, he was summarizing a theme that had been widely discussed and carefully analyzed by earlier classical liberals, radical whigs, and libertarians generally. As Bernard Bailyn noted in The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (an indispensable book for libertarians), the “systematic” problem of the lust for power and its corrupting tendencies was regarded by eighteenth-century Americans as applicable to “mankind in general.”

And the point they hammered home time and again, and agreed on—freethinking Anglican literati no less than neo-Calvinist theologians—was the incapacity of the species, of mankind in general, to withstand the temptations of power. Such is “the depravity of mankind,” Samuel Adams, speaking for the Boston Town Meeting, declared, “that ambition and lust of power above the law are…predominant passions in the breasts of most men.”

Quoting from various contemporary American sources, Bailyn continued:

"These are instincts that have “in all nations combined the worst passions of the human heart and the worst projects of the human mind in league against the liberties of mankind.” Power always and everywhere had had a pernicious, corrupting effect upon men. It “converts a good man in private life to a tyrant in office.” It acts upon men like drink: it “is known to be intoxicating in its nature:—too intoxicating and liable to abuse.” And nothing within man is sufficiently strong to guard against these effects of power—certainly not “the united considerations of reason and religion,” for they have never “been sufficiently powerful to restrain these lusts of men.”

As indicated by Bailyn’s reference to “neo-Calvinist theologians,” the ubiquitous problem of power-lust was discussed in ancient Christian as well as in pagan sources. In The City of God, for example, Augustine argued that “lust for power in arrogant hearts” was responsible for much of the moral corruption in Rome and played a significant role in its decline. Indeed, before Christianity became the state religion of Rome in the fourth century, Christian theologians took pride in contrasting the voluntary institutions of the Christian community with the coercive institutions of the Roman state. Tertullian argued that “all secular power and dignities are not merely alien from, but hostile to, God.” Secular governments “owe their existences to the sword.” All institutions of the Roman government, even its charities, were based on brute force. This is contrary to the way of Christians, among whom “everything is voluntary.” Rather than rely on coercive taxation, Christians contributed voluntarily “to support the destitute, and to pay for their burial expenses; to supply the needs of boys and girls lacking money and power, and of old people confined to the home.” Christians “do not hesitate to share our earthly goods with one another.”

Minucius Felix maintained that the Roman Empire began as a pact between criminals and murderers. The Romans acquired their power by “capturing, raping, and enslaving their victims.” John Chrysostom contrasted the use of force with the Christian community, in which “the wrongdoer must be corrected not by force, but by persuasion.”

Of all the sources that influenced how eighteenth-century Americans viewed power and its dangers, none was more influential than Cato’s Letters, a series of newspaper articles written during the 1720’s by the Englishman John Trenchard and the Scot Thomas Gordon. These articles, which were largely a popular presentation of the radical whig ideology found in John Locke and Algernon Sidney, are commonly viewed by historians as the greatest single influence on American political thought prior to the Revolutionary War. A complete collection of these articles was published in four volumes, and individual pieces were reprinted time and again in American newspapers. Then as now, the average person was not inclined to read weighty philosophical tomes, but the colonials did love their newspapers, and it was through this popular medium that Americans found many spirited passages about the lust for power. Here, from Letter #33, is one example among many.

"Power is naturally active, vigilant, and distrustful; which qualities in it push it upon all means and expedients to fortify itself, and upon destroying all opposition, and even all seeds of opposition, and make it restless as long as any thing stands in its way. It would do what it pleases, and have no check. Now, because liberty chastises and shortens power, therefore power would extinguish liberty; and consequently liberty has too much cause to be exceeding jealous, and always upon her defence. Power has many advantages over her; it has generally numerous guards, many creatures, and much treasure; besides, it has more craft and experience, less honesty and innocence: And whereas power can, and for the most part does, subsist where liberty is not, liberty cannot subsist without power; so that she has, as it were, the enemy always at her gates."

The unending struggle between liberty and power became the conceptual framework for many histories written by classical liberals and libertarians. As Lord Acton, the dean of liberal historians, put it, the “struggle for the concentration of power and for the limitation and division of power is the mainspring of history.”

SOURCE

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Thanks, Obamacare: 1,000 Jobs Lost in West Michigan

Concerns over the security and functionality of the exchanges aside, the president’s health care law is directly and solely responsible for the loss of 1,000 jobs in West Michigan, according to a new study:

    A new report out Thursday by Grand Valley State University found that there are at least 1,000 fewer jobs in West Michigan as a result of the Affordable Care Act, more commonly referred to as Obamacare.

    The report was conducted by GVSU economics professors Leslie Muller and Paul Isely in collaboration with Priority Heath. A survey was sent to local businesses with more than 50 employers in Allegan, Kent, Muskegon and Ottawa counties.

    "Firms are actually holding off on hiring or their reducing their hiring that they were thinking they were going to be doing because of the ACA," said Muller.

    The 1,000 jobs lost does not include the number of workers in West Michigan that have lost hours to ensure that they are kept as part-time employees. Nearly one-third of companies said they have cut employees' hours.

A thousand fewer jobs in the area; plus, one-third of employees now have had their hours cut. Devastating. That means if the Affordable Care didn’t pass, a thousand more Americans would be employed and countless others would be working full-time. This is only a small section of the United States, too. I’ll leave you with this exit quotation from the piece:

    "What is happening in Western Michigan is quite similar percentage-wise to what is happening in the rest of the country," Muller said. Comforting, isn’t it?

SOURCE

There is a  new  lot of postings by Chris Brand just up -- on his usual vastly "incorrect" themes of race, genes, IQ etc

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For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC,  AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated) and Coral reef compendium. (Updated as news items come in).  GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten.

List of backup or "mirror" sites here or  here -- for when blogspot is "down" or failing to  update.  Email me  here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or  here (Pictorial) or  here  (Personal)

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English-Language Media Ignores Breivik’s Coming-Out As A Nazi

Robert Spencer

Last Friday, I published a translation of a Swedish report about a letter mass murderer Anders Breivik had sent to the media, in which he revealed that he was a Nazi, and that he had published his “counter-jihad manifesto” intending to destroy the counter-jihad movement. The Swedish news source Expo Idag (Expo Today) reported:

Anders Behring Breivik has sent out a letter to the international media that Expo Today has reviewed. He describes the letter as a sort of first step in a “peace negotiation” with his political opponents. In the letter, Anders Behring Breivik to some extent changes the rhetoric from that which he used in his so-called manifesto. He says that he used “counter-jihadist” rhetoric in the manifesto to protect “ethno-nationalists” and instead provoke a media campaign against the anti-nationalist counter-jihad supporters. He calls this a strategy of “dual psychology.”

Now Daniel Greenfield has picked up the story, but he is the only one: the English-language media has completely ignored this story, not even bothering to publish stories designed to shore up their earlier demonization of the counter-jihad movement, and claiming that Breivik is cravenly trying to obscure his counter-jihadist tracks, or simply delusional and crazy, as Greenfield does. Instead, no one mentioned it at all. Nothing. The Wall Street Journal published a piece about his claims that he was tortured, but that was as close as any mainstream media outlet came to covering this story at all.

Contrast that to the huge media barrage when Breivik’s “manifesto” was first discovered: I was on NBC for the first time in ten years, I was on the front page of the New York Times, I was on the BBC, and in a hundred other places — everywhere being blamed for the murders. But now, when Breivik says he was a Nazi and was not only not influenced by the counter-jihad movement, but was trying to destroy it?

This isn’t the first time the media has distorted Breivik’s story, although this is the first time it has done it by omission. Although Leftists and Islamic supremacists, as well as hard-Left governing and media elites, will continue to insist that there is something wrong with opposing jihad terror and Islamic supremacism because of this mass murderer, and will continue to claim that I and others somehow “inspired” him, it has been clear for quite some time that Breivik was not a counter-jihadist at all, and could not have been and was not incited to violence by the counter-jihad movement.

In all his quotations of me, Breivik never quotes me calling for or justifying violence – because I never do. In fact, Breivik even criticized me for not doing so, saying of me, historian Bat Ye’or and other critics of jihad terror: “If these authors are to [sic] scared to propagate a conservative revolution and armed resistance then other authors will have to” (Breivik, 2083: A European Declaration of Independence, p. 743). Breivik explains in his manifesto that he was “radicalized” by his experiences with Muslim immigrants in the early 1990s, before I had published anything about Islam (See Breivik, p. 1348).

Breivik also hesitantly but unmistakably recommended making common cause with jihadists, which neither I nor any other opponent of jihad would ever do: “An alliance with the Jihadists might prove beneficial to both parties but will simply be too dangerous (and might prove to be ideologically counter-productive). We both share one common goal” (Breivik, p. 948). He even called for making common cause with Hamas in plotting jihad terror: “Approach a representative from a Jihadi Salafi group. Get in contact with a Jihadi strawman. Present your terms and have him forward them to his superiors….Present your offer. They are asked to provide a biological compound manufactured by Muslim scientists in the Middle East. Hamas and several Jihadi groups have labs and they have the potential to provide such substances. Their problem is finding suitable martyrs who can pass ‘screenings’ in Western Europe. This is where we come in. We will smuggle it in to the EU and distribute it at a target of our choosing. We must give them assurances that we are not to harm any Muslims etc.” (Breivik, p. 949).

But from the media, there was absolute silence on all of this at the time of the murders and ever after, just as there is silence now about Breivik’s Nazi claims. And that, in a nutshell, manifests the sinister agenda of the mainstream media: the objective was never to uncover the facts surrounding Breivik’s heinous murders. It was just to discredit the counter-jihad movement. And for that, Anders Behring Breivik has already served his purpose. At this point, he is no longer useful.

 SOURCE

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If the Republicans Take the Senate..

If the Republicans Take the Senate what can or should they do about Obamacare? The current unpopularity of the program is the reason it looks at least possible that they will not only hold the House but get a majority in the Senate. If so, what are their options?

The obvious one is to replace Obamacare with something that moves medical insurance in the opposite direction, towards something more like a free market. One  elements of such a bill would be legalizing interstate sales of medical insurance, another equalizing the tax status of individual plans and employer provided plans, which probably means making expenditure on individual plans deductible. Sponsors could plausibly argue that the savings from abolishing the ACA will more than make up for the lost revenue.

Obama can and presumably will veto any attempt to repeal his pet program. The Republicans will not have enough votes to override a veto, so their only hope would be to get enough Democratic senators and representatives to go along. That is going to be hard, but not necessarily impossible, depending on just how badly Obamacare is doing. One critical actor will be Hilary Clinton. On ideological grounds she should be even more adamantly in favor of preserving the program than Obama—but on political grounds she may be looking for a way of avoiding the political fallout from its failure. Organizing Democratic support for something she can plausibly represent as a compromise might be one way of doing so.

There is another alternative. Suppose the House and Senate pass a spending bill with nothing allocated to continued implementation of the ACA. Obama can veto it and force another government shut down. But it is going to be much harder for him to blame a shut down on the Republicans if both houses have passed a budget and his refusal to sign it is the only remaining obstacle.

 SOURCE

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7 Lies Liberals Tell Young Americans

Saying that life is hard is kind of like saying the sun is hot, water is wet, or noting that politicians lie a lot. It's so obvious that anyone who's paying attention already knows that it's true. That being said, life's even harder when you're working under false assumptions that have been drilled into you by your teachers, college professors, Hollywood, and politicians in D.C. Much of what liberalism drums into the young skulls full of mush simply isn't true and millions of lives have been ruined by people finding it out the hard way. The good news is that the truth is out there if you're willing to look for it and not accept the easy answers that make you feel good.

1) You are a special little flower: We live in an "everybody's a winner," don't use red ink, don't offend anyone, participation trophies for everyone era where we build up self-esteem as much as possible. Then the college student who just went $100,000 a year in the hole to get a women's studies degree from a prestigious university finds that she's not even a stand-out at the $10 an hour job she only got because her father knew someone. This leaves her angry and baffled as to why she doesn't even merit a raise, much less a promotion. When you have that experience, it's easy to retreat into bitterness or video games where "greatness awaits" in a simulation where you get to restart over and over until you win. Contrary to what young Americans are taught in school, "experience trumps brilliance," hard work beats talent, and most people value you for what you bring to the table right now, not how wonderful your teacher said you were for "trying hard."

2) Social Security and Medicare will be there for you: Young Americans are expected to pay into Medicare and Social Security, but the programs aren't going to be there in their present forms when they get old enough to use them. In other words, we're defrauding young Americans. We're telling them to pay today so they'll be taken care of when they get old, but we have no intention of ever allowing them to collect. Unless there are massive changes made to our entitlement programs, most young Americans should expect to work until they die. Let me repeat that: if you're 25 years old, you will not get to retire at 65 like your parents because you will have to work until you drop dead. When there's a 100 trillion dollar difference between what we already owe and the money we're collecting to pay it, that's not even a legitimately arguable proposition. If young Americans would like to receive more than sack cloth and an occasional bowl of gruel from the government once they get long in the tooth, they should be demanding entitlement reform.

3) Faith isn't relevant anymore: Hollywood almost universally makes Christians look bad in TV shows and movies, liberalism has become reflexively hostile to Christianity, and militant atheists work overtime to attack people of faith. Yet and still, this nation has been a success in large part because of Christianity. If not for this nation's Protestant work ethic, fundamental Christian decency and biblically inspired dedication to human rights, we would have never been so successful. That doesn't mean all Christians are good and all atheists are bad because that's certainly not true, but Christianity offers up a moral order to the universe that atheism is incapable of doing, by its very nature. Although I have known some wonderful people in my life who didn't believe in God, on the whole I've found that Christians (and observant Jews for that matter) are happier, more stable and are generally just better human beings than the people who don't believe. Contrary to what Hollywood would tell you, Christianity doesn't keep people from "doing all the fun stuff" in life, it just steers them away from sins that are "fun for a season," but that will do a lot of damage over the long-term. Few things will turn out to be more integral to your happiness and success as a human being over the long haul than your faith.

4) The government is your friend: As a general rule the more contact you have with a government, the more miserable you will be long term. Some politicians, government workers and well-connected corporations that land big contracts are exceptions to that rule, but you're probably not in any of those groups. For you, the more the government gets involved in your life, the worse off you'll be. Those college loans? The government expects them to be paid. That welfare and food stamps? It's not much money, it comes with a lot of strings attached and you'll have to degrade yourself by leeching off of your fellow citizens to get it. Ronald Reagan once said, "The nine most terrifying words in the English language are, ‘I’m from the government and I’m here to help.’" He wasn't wrong about that.

5) Morality doesn't matter: It's ironic that Christianity is regularly attacked, it's considered bad form to talk about morals, and we worry more about offending people than doing the right thing; yet we're shocked at how degenerate our society has become. You want a society with no moral code, where no one is ever made to feel bad about doing disgusting things? Well, then you should expect school shootings, welfare fraud, a deterioration of marriage, women having five children out of wedlock with four different men, perverted politicians, etc., etc., etc. When you say morality isn't welcome, you don't get to pick and choose which dearly held precepts are trampled into the dirt in the public square. If you want your kids growing up in a modern day Sodom and Gomorrah, buy into the idea that morals don't matter and you'll be doing your part to make it a reality.

6) Politicians are investing in your future: There really was a time in American history when the people and the government were living with one foot in the present and one foot in the future. As a practical matter, that just doesn't happen anymore. Our political differences are so stark, our government is so big, our debt is so out of control and the quality of men the American people have sent to D.C. is so low that everything is about "the now." It's about what gets them through the next news cycle, the next scandal or the next election. There's not a single Democrat in D.C. who cares about what happens to you if you're not his relative or campaign contributor and sadly, most of the Republicans aren't any better. The only people in politics that are genuinely fighting tooth and nail to protect future generations of Americans are the decidedly unhip Tea Party and its allies in Congress. They've been relentlessly smeared for that because people who are frittering away the future loathe nothing more than people who expose how small and selfish they've become.

7) The world owes you a living: There was a time in America when, "The world doesn't owe you a living," was probably the mother's favorite phrase to repeat to her child after, "If all your friends jumped off a bridge, would you do it, too?" However, we've moved past that and now everyone seems to believe that if he gets a college degree, he’s owed a cushy, fulfilling job and all the cool stuff his parents had after a lifetime of work. Unfortunately, that's the wrong answer, kiddo. For most people, all a college degree entitles you to is THE CHANCE to find a job where you’ll be allowed to start proving yourself for low pay. If you're expecting more than that and daddy isn't going to give you a VP slot at his company, then don't be surprised if the world adjusts your expectations the hard way.

SOURCE

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Dolly Birds of the Hindu Kush



A few weeks back, I wrote:

"At this point, Americans sigh wearily and shrug, "Afghanistan, the graveyard of empire," or sneer, "If they want to live in a seventh-century s***hole, f*** 'em." But neither assertion is true. Do five minutes' googling, and you'll find images from the Sixties and early Seventies of women in skirts above the knee listening to the latest Beatles releases in Kabul record stores."

Dangerous Minds has now assembled a collection of these photographs - not just Kabul coeds and teenyboppers but scientific researchers, too - from the Seventies, Sixties and Fifties, and they're well worth taking a look at, if only to understand the totality of our failure there. There's also a portrait of King Amanullah's consort, Queen Soraya, in the Twenties wearing a sleeveless gown that would get her stoned in 21st century Afghanistan. Amanullah was the emir who regained control of his country's foreign policy from the British, but he and his wife were more westernized than any of the would-be heirs to his throne today. Queen Soraya, a practising Muslim, nevertheless went around riding on horseback - which no unaccompanied woman can do in her country after 12 years as an American protectorate. As I said:

If it's too much to undo the barbarism of centuries, why could the supposed superpower not even return the country to the fitful civilization of the disco era? The American imperium has lasted over twice as long as the Taliban's rule — and yet, unlike them, we left no trace.

America and its allies have the best tanks, planes, and guns ...but no will and no strategy. And so the tanks, planes and guns count for naught. Our enemies have nothing but will. The consequences of this distinction extend well beyond Afghanistan

 SOURCE

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For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC,  AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated) and Coral reef compendium. (Updated as news items come in).  GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten.

List of backup or "mirror" sites here or  here -- for when blogspot is "down" or failing to  update.  Email me  here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or  here (Pictorial) or  here  (Personal)

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Shaking down business

Attorney General Eric Holder has long made an issue of race, obviously carrying a chip on his shoulder that dictates how he does his job. The latest affront to Rule of Law is that he and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (another bureaucracy created by the Dodd-Frank financial “reform” bill) have announced a $100 million settlement with Ally Bank for “discrimination” in making auto loans. It's the largest-ever such settlement against the auto industry, and the third largest overall. So far, Holder's Justice Department has extorted $810 million from the financial industry over so-called discriminatory lending practices.

But let's look at the facts – crazy talk, we know. The Justice Department accused Ally of “charg[ing] African-American borrowers more than white borrowers in interest-rate markups not based on creditworthiness or other objective criteria related to borrower risk.” However, Justice didn't have the pertinent data to make such a claim. Unlike the mortgage industry, the auto industry doesn't track a buyer's race, so Holder and Co. had to guess based on Census data for the racial composition of a buyer's neighborhood. Justice didn't bother looking at creditworthiness of the buyers, either – regardless of the supposed race – so how would they know Ally didn't assess it before making the loans?

The bottom line is that the Justice Department had nothing to go on and pushed forward with these trumped-up charges anyway. Ally caved rather than fight the inevitable Leftmedia PR battle. The Obama administration is far more concerned with its beloved but discredited “disparate impact” theory than upholding fair business practices, and the media will always dutifully fall in line.

Holder once accused the American people of being “essentially a nation of cowards” when it comes to race, while demanding a “national conversation” on the topic. It's time he participated in the conversation already happening instead of making up lies to persecute political opponents and the free market.

SOURCE

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Why Economic Growth Is Exponentially More Important Than Income Inequality

In 1900, we had no airplanes, no computers, no cellphones, no internet. We had only rudimentary versions of cars, trucks, telephones, even cameras.

But in the last century, 1900 to 2000, as Stephen Moore and Julian L. Simon report in their underappreciated work, It’s Getting Better All the Time: 100 Greatest Trends of the Last 100 Years, real per capita GDP in the U.S. grew by nearly 7 times, meaning the American standard of living grew by that much as well. The authors explain:

It is hard for us to imagine, for example, that in 1900 less than one in five homes had running water, flush toilets, a vacuum cleaner, or gas or electric heat. As of 1950 fewer than 20 percent of homes had air conditioning, a dishwasher, or a microwave oven. Today between 80 and 100 percent of American homes have all of these modern conveniences.

Indeed, in 1900 only 2% of homes enjoyed electricity.

Michael W. Cox and Richard Alm add in their insightful Myths of Rich and Poor that as a result of all that economic growth today:

"Homes aren’t just larger. They’re also much more likely to be equipped with central air conditioning, decks and patios, swimming pools, hot tubs, ceiling fans, and built in kitchen appliances. Fewer than half of the homes built in 1970 had two or more bathrooms; by 1997, 9 out of 10 did."

Such economic growth has produced dramatic improvements in personal health as well. Throughout most of human history, a typical lifespan was 25 to 30 years, as Moore and Simon report. But “from the mid-18th century to today, life spans in the advanced countries jumped from less than 30 years to about 75 years.” Average life expectancy in the U.S. has grown by more than 50% since 1900. Infant mortality declined from 1 in 10 back then to 1 in 150 today. Children under 15 are at least 10 times less likely to die, as one in four did during the 19th century, with their death rate reduced by 95%. The maternal death rate from pregnancy and childbirth was also 100 times greater back then than today.

Moore and Simon further recount, “Just three infectious diseases – tuberculosis, pneumonia, and diarrhea – accounted for almost half of all deaths in 1900.” Today, we have virtually eliminated or drastically reduced these and other scourges of infectious disease that have killed or crippled billions throughout human history, such as typhoid fever, cholera, typhus, plague, smallpox, diphtheria, polio, influenza, bronchitis, whooping cough, malaria, and others. Besides the advances in the development and application of modern health sciences, this has resulted from the drastic reduction in filthy and unsanitary living conditions that economic growth has made possible as well. More recently, great progress is being made against heart disease and cancer.

Also greatly contributing to the well-being of working people, the middle class, and the poor in America has been the dramatically declining cost of food resulting from economic growth and soaring productivity in agriculture. As Moore and Simon report, “Americans devoted almost 50 percent of their incomes to putting food on the table in the early 1900s compared with 10 percent in the late 1900s.”

While most of human history has involved a struggle against starvation, today in America the battle is against obesity, even more so among the poor. Moore and Simon quote Robert Rector of the Heritage Foundation, “The average consumption of protein, minerals, and vitamins is virtually the same for poor and middle income children, and in most cases is well above recommended norms for all children. Most poor children today are in fact overnourished.” That cited data comes from the U.S. Census Bureau. As a result, poor children in America today “grow up to be about 1 inch taller and 10 pounds heavier than the GIs who stormed the beaches of Normandy in World War II.”

That has resulted from a U.S. agricultural sector that required 75% of all American workers in 1800, 40% in 1900, and just 2.5% today, to “grow more than enough food for the entire nation and then enough to make the United States the world’s breadbasket.” Indeed, today, “The United States feeds three times as many people with one-third as many total farmers on one-third less farmland than in 1900,” in the process producing “almost 25 percent of the world’s food.”

Moreover, it is economic growth that has provided the resources enabling us to dramatically reduce pollution and improve the environment, without trashing our standard of living. Moore and Simon write that at the beginning of the last century,

“Industrial cities typically were enveloped in clouds of black soot and smoke. At this stage of the industrial revolution, factories belched poisons into the air—and this was proudly regarded as a sign of prosperity and progress. Streets were smelly and garbage-filled before the era of modern sewage systems and plumbing.”

Not any of these truly dramatic advances for the poor, working people and the middle class could have been achieved by redistribution from “the rich.” Only economic growth could achieve these results.

Nor would it have been worth sacrificing any of these world shattering gains for greater economic “equality.” And Barack Obama’s leftist protestations to the contrary notwithstanding, economists have long recognized the conflict between economic equality and maximizing economic growth. Put most simply, penalizing investors, successful entrepreneurs, and job creators with higher taxes, to reward the less productive with government handouts, to make everyone more equal, is a sure fire way to get less productivity, fewer jobs, lower wages, and reduced economic growth.

The above history, and the future prospects below, are why to most benefit the poor, working people, and the middle class, our nation’s overriding goal must be to maximize economic growth. Consider, if total real compensation, wages and benefits, grow at just 1% a year, after 20 years the real incomes of working people would be only 22% greater. After 40 years, a generation, real incomes would be 50% more. But with sustained real compensation growth of 2%, after just 20 years the real incomes and living standards of working people would be nearly 50% greater, and after 40 years they would be 120% greater, more than doubled. At sustained 3% growth in wages and benefits, after 20 years the living standards of working people will have almost doubled, and after 40 years they will have more than tripled.

The U.S. economy sustained a real rate of economic growth of 3.3% from 1945 to 1973, and achieved the same 3.3% sustained real growth from 1982 to 2007. (Note that this 3.3% growth rate for the entire economy includes population growth. Real wages and benefits discussed above is a per worker concept). It was only during the stagflation decade of 1973 to 1982, reflecting the same Keynesian economics that President Obama is pursuing today, that real growth fell to only half long term trends. If we could revive and sustain that same 3.3% real growth for 20 years, our total economic production (GDP) would double in that time. After 30 years, our economic output would grow by 2 and two-thirds. After 40 years, our prosperity bounty would grow by 3 and two-thirds.

If we are truly following growth maximizing policies, we could conceivably do even better than we have in the past. At sustained real growth of 4% per year, our economic production would more than double after 20 years. After 30 years, GDP would more than triple. After 40 years, a generation, total U.S. economic output would nearly quadruple. America would by then have leapfrogged another generation ahead of the rest of the world.

Achieving and sustaining such economic growth should be the central focus of national economic policy, for it would solve every problem that plagues and threatens us today. Such booming economic growth would produce surging revenues that would make balancing the budget so much more feasible. Surging GDP would reduce the national debt as a percent of GDP relatively quickly, particularly with balanced budgets not adding any further to the debt. Sustained, rapid economic growth is also the ultimate solution to poverty, as after a couple of decades or so of such growth, the poor would climb to the same living standards as the middle class of today.

With sustained, robust, economic growth, maintaining the most powerful military in the world, and thereby ensuring our nation’s security and national defense, will require a smaller and smaller percentage of GDP over time. That security itself will promote capital investment and economic growth in America. The booming economy will produce new technological marvels that will make our defenses all the more advanced. With the economy rapidly advancing, there will be more than enough funds for education. There will also be more than enough to clean up and maintain a healthy environment.

With such booming growth, imagine where our exploding, rapidly advancing science will take us from 2000 to 2100. In a March, 2012 interview in the Wall Street Journal, pathbreaking, pioneering, futurist physicist Michio Kaku explained, “Every 18 months, computer power doubles, so in eight years, a microchip will cost only a penny. Instead of one chip inside a desk top, we’ll have millions of chips in all of our possessions: furniture, cars, appliances, clothes. Chips will be so ubiquitious that we won’t say the word ‘computer.’” Kaku further projected, “In this ‘augmented reality,’…the Internet will be in your contact lens. You will blink, and you will go online. That will change everything.”

Kaku continued:

"To comprehend the world we’re entering, consider another word that will disappear soon: ‘tumor.’ We will have DNA chips inside our toilet, which will sample some of our blood and urine and tell us if we have cancer maybe 10 years before a tumor forms. . . . When you need to see a doctor, you’ll talk to a wall in your home, and an animated artificially intelligent doctor will appear. You’ll scan your body with a hand-held MRI machine, the ‘Robodoc’ will analyze the results, and you’ll receive a diagnosis that is 99% accurate."

On the distant horizon beckons the personalized medicine made possible by the mapping of the human genome, so contrary to the central planning of Obamacare. Modern genetics is rapidly advancing to a redesign of plants and agriculture, the leftist European cant over “frankenfood” to the contrary notwithstanding. While Star Trek style teleporting eludes our science, high definition and 3D video conferencing will provide a similar feel. While Barack Obama thinks modern technology causes unemployment, 3D printing offers new vistas in manufacturing. Robotics has already produced driverless, automated cars, “lights out” factories, and robotic surgery. And that is mostly without advances in artificial intelligence that can expand the effectiveness of the human race to vast new realms.

George Gilder’s transformative book, Power and Knowledge, unrecognized in the current generation’s temporary Dark Age of the West, explains how breakthroughs in information theory are opening new vistas for previously sidetracked frontiers of physics, chemistry, and biology. That is opening the way for currently frustrated visionaries to achieve their dreams: “Peter Thiel wants supersonic flight and real genetic medicine, robotic vehicles, and new libertarian city-states at sea. Ray Kurzweil pushes for a prosthetic life, an upgraded bionic body with veins vamped with nanobots, chasing down viruses and cancers, repairing outworn tissue and extended by virtual worlds of glass and light.”

Kaku concludes, “If you could meet your grandkids as elderly citizens in the year 2100, you would view them as being, basically, Greek gods.”

This is the future that today’s so-called “progressives,” fixated on their literally dumb, static analysis concepts of economic “equality” and “redistribution,” would be denying tomorrow’s otherwise poor, working people, and middle class. Today’s so-called “progressivism” is just the late 19th century reactionary response to the rise of the industrial revolution. It is the surviving nostalgic project to stop history at Karl Marx, and return to the imagined, more bucolic world of the 18th century. This is all best reflected in the environmentalist extremist fraud of global warming/climate change, with Barack Obama’s EPA serving as the spear carriers even now still openly trying to reverse the industrial revolution (even if that is not what they themselves imagine they are doing).

But the future will overwhelm the present, and reject the past. Just as the technological breakthrough of fracking, and the resulting oil and gas boom, is overwhelming today’s EPA. The American people, pursuing the same vision of freedom and prosperity that inspired the first, original, American Revolution, will not be denied the bounty of the future. And ultimately leading that fight for the infinitely prosperous future will ironically be the very same young immigrants that today’s “progressives” think will put them over the top in their reactionary war to restore pre-capitalism.

SOURCE

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For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC,  AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated) and Coral reef compendium. (Updated as news items come in).  GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten.

List of backup or "mirror" sites here or  here -- for when blogspot is "down" or failing to  update.  Email me  here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or  here (Pictorial) or  here  (Personal)

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Prevalence of psychopathy in politics

As I have pointed out at length elsewhere, there are many reasons why people can have hate in their hearts for the society around them.  But those who have that hate are the Left.  And it is that hate which makes them want to change us all.


The anger and hate is sometimes so strong that it is visible -- Mrs Clinton  with TWO clenched fists.  Even the Communist salute requires only one.  The fist is the emblem of the Left.  It tells you what they want to do.

But a major reason for the hate is ego.  The hater thinks highly of himself and resents that the world does not give him the praise and rewards that he thinks are his due.

It is hard to know for certain how much Leftism is driven in that way.  It is very evident in Leftist leaders but is it  widespread among the voters?  When people are questioned immediately after voting in Presidential elections, the reasons that Democrat-voters give for their vote seem to be founded mainly on profound ignorance of the facts and issues.  Democrat candidates are blamed for what Republicans do and vice versa.

For all that, however, many ordinary people who favour the Left   often do express the same resentment of the world that we see in Leftist leaders.  I can warrant that from the many social attitude surveys I did in my social science research career.

As I also set out at length elsewhere, however, many Leftist leaders are not only egotists but are in fact the ultimate egotists -- psychopaths, people who have no real concern for other people at all  -- people to whom only their own self-interest is visible.  Though their psychopathy is "sub-clinical", i.e. it is subdued enough to keep them out of trouble with law enforcement and the mental health system.

So when both the leadership of the Left and a substantial part of their supporters are psychopathic, we clearly have one half of the political spectrum that is  substantially insane.  Beneath their  superficial charm lies a serious mental defect.

That such a pathology has engulfed half of politics is of course extremely disturbing.  My comment  (during my research career) that psychopathy is often successful in various ways appears to have been confirmed in spades.  It even appears in fact to have been reproductively successful, which is very alarming.  We now have a substantially psychopathic population around us.

That psychopathy has been reproductively successful for many years now is not hard to fathom.  As I have pointed out psychopaths seem to have a magic way with women.  The women eventually get disillusioned but pregnancies often occur in the interim.  And these days the children of such pregnancies will normally survive to adulthood.  So there has been a gradual but steady drip of psychopathy into the population.  And the "soft" penal practices of the current era have greatly facilitated that.  Criminals are now rarely executed but are released back into the population to continue their mayhem.  And a substantial number of those criminals are psychopaths.

No wonder our Leftist political opponents often seem to be off the planet -- JR

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Conservatives and libertarians can learn from one-another

In January 1990, Lew Rockwell wrote in the magazine ‘Liberty’ on ‘The Case for Paleolibertarianism’[1]. In this manifesto, he argued that while libertarians are often correct in their criticisms of conservatives, conservatives are often right in their criticisms of libertarians. He cites people like Russell Kirk and Robert Nisbet, with the latter claiming that libertarians were drifting so far from conservatism that they were coming to view the “coercions of the family, church, local community and school” as almost as corrosive of liberty as that of the state.

In this paleolibertarian manifesto, Rockwell states that if libertarianism is to make any real progress, then it must do away with its “defective cultural framework”, stating that Western civilisation is worthy of praise and that social or ‘natural’ authority – like the authority of the family, the church, the local community and the school – is essential to a free society. Libertarianism’s cultural framework had become a blend of moral relativism, egalitarianism, modernism and libertinism with the modal libertarian often conflating legality with morality. In addition to the error of assuming that because X must be legal, X must also be moral, the modal libertarian had conflated freedom from aggression with freedom from social authority, tradition, and bourgeois morality.

With the rise in popularity of the Republican politician Patrick Buchannan, Rockwell sought to both put the neolibertarians right and to forge an alliance with the paleoconservative movement. The paleoconservatives were those conservatives in America who questioned the welfare-warfare state (with the Cold War over, many no longer saw the need for such a bloated state department) and saw their intellectual roots in the Old Right, a broad church of intellectuals, journalists, politicians and others who opposed Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal. The Old Right included libertarians such as HL Mencken, Albert Jay Nock, and Frank Chodorov and so unsurprisingly, Murray Rothbard, Lew Rockwell and the ‘paleolibertarians’ saw their chance to reach out to a brand new group.

While the paleoconservatives distinguished themselves from the big-government conservatives, the paleolibertarians distinguished themselves from what Rothbard called ‘big-government libertarians’.[2] For instance, Rothbard warned libertarians against the North American Free Trade Agreement, which the neoconservatives and neolibertarians enthusiastically supported. Why would Rothbard, Mr Libertarian, not support a free trade agreement? He “opposed Nafta because it was a phony free-trade measure, and because it piled numerous new government restrictions upon trade, including socialistic labor and environmental controls.” In addition to this, he criticised Republicans who self-labelled themselves ‘libertarians’ only to further increase the size of the state. One such example was that of Governor William Weld, who was seen as a potential ‘libertarian’ presidential candidate for his “fiscal conservatism” and commitment to “gay rights”. On Weld’s “fiscal conservatism”, Rothbard commented “William Weld’s gesture in cutting his first year’s budget by less than 2 percent has been more than made up by his raising the budget in the last two years by 17 percent.” The typical neolibertarian was more than happy to support people like this, who claim to be ‘libertarians’ and then give evidence to the contrary. The neolibertarian was also content with the Nafta, presumably out of ignorance or stupidity.

Yet another unifying feature of both paleoconservatives with paleolibertarians and neoconservatives with neolibertarians lies within the cultural sphere. As Lew Rockwell pointed out in his Case for Paleolibertarianism, the modal libertarian or ‘neolibertarian’ was clueless on culture. This might suggest that there is a ‘libertarian position’ on culture, which there isn’t. Even so, while Rothbard made it clear that “libertarianism is logically consistent with almost any attitude toward culture, society, religion, or moral principle”, he argued that “psychologically, sociologically, and in practice, it simply doesn’t work that way.” Even though libertarian political philosophy does not prohibit the promotion of moral relativism, the paleolibertarians recognised the need for “bourgeois morality”. The anarcho-capitalist philosopher and economist Hans-Hermann Hoppe expressed this eloquently:

“This Establishment Libertarianism was not only theoretically in error, with its commitment to the impossible goal of limited government (and centralized government at that): it was also sociologically flawed, with its anti-bourgeois—indeed, adolescent—so-called ‘cosmopolitan’ cultural message: of multiculturalism and egalitarianism, of ‘respect no authority’, of ‘live-and-let-live’, of hedonism and libertinism.”[3]

As the paleolibertarian John Kersey has said, the neoconservatives too “have created a yawning chasm where their cultural values should be” and yet there is no vacuum as “the chasm has been very ably filled by the Left”.[4] And so there we have it; the two main unifying features of neoconservatism and neolibertarianism are a lazy attitude to opposing state aggression in the political sphere and an even lazier ‘anything goes’ attitude in the cultural sphere. Conversely, this must mean that both paleoconservatism and paleolibertarianism are united behind an opposition to statism and an at best sceptical treatment of the modern cancers of feminism, moral relativism, and egalitarianism.

Now, then, from the above one would assume that the neo versus paleo distinction is only applicable to the United States. I think not. This distinction – between big government libertarians/conservatives and radical libertarians/conservatives and between egalitarian libertarians/conservatives and anti-egalitarian realist libertarians/conservatives – definitely, definitely, definitely does apply in this country [Britain]. In the neo corner, you have the Conservative Party and its various affiliate think-tanks and research groups, both unapologetic apologists for varying degrees of statism and egalitarianism, and in the paleo corner you have the Libertarian Alliance and the Traditional Britain Group, both committed to a defence of truth, life and property, and civilisation itself.

‘How can a libertarian be a reactionary, a conservative, or a traditionalist?’ This is the question which the modal libertarian cannot bring himself to answer. The simplest answer is that England has a very long history of libertarianism and to defend that tradition is to defend libertarianism itself. In defence of the term ‘reactionary’ for libertarians, I would like to say that there is a sense in which no true libertarian is a radical. What we want established in Britain is not something fundamentally radical, but instead something which is natural. We want to return, rather, to a pre-state society, a society where all relations were voluntary and not exploitative, all authority was natural and not artificial, and where all power was economic and not political. This natural order has existed in our past and it only could exist in those times when the “coercions” of the family, church, community, etc. were at their strongest.

And so, the reactionary libertarians and radical conservatives, the paleos of both kinds, have broadly the same aims. Furthermore, the paleolibertarians need the paleoconservatives and the paleoconservatives need the paleolibertarians. A conservative society cannot exist under an oppressive state just as much as a libertarian society cannot exist in a cultural and moral vacuum.

SOURCE

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The Fair Tax

John Linder

It was disclosed in the last year that the IRS harassed conservative groups and disclosed the confidential information of individuals. It strikes me that this is the perfect opportunity to change the entire way we fund the government. It is time to say goodbye to the IRS.

We should take this opportunity to abolish the IRS and begin to collect the necessary funds to run the government by taxing consumption instead of income.

There are two approaches to taxing income. The value added tax is used by many nations. It taxes each addition of value to a product in its manufacturing. Milton Friedman once said that it was the most efficient way to raise taxes and the easiest way to increase the size of government.

The second consumption tax is the retail sales tax that is used by 45 states to fund their governments. I am a supporter of the sales tax. I was the original sponsor of the FairTax in 1999 as a Member of Congress from Georgia. Today it is the most extensively researched and broadly supported tax reform measure before the Congress. It is an entire paradigm shift from how we have been funding our government for the last 100 years.

The FairTax repeals all taxes on income: no more income taxes, payroll taxes, capital gains or death taxes. If you make $52,000 a year your weekly check will be $1,000. Since the average income tax today is 15% and the employee’s portion of the payroll tax is 7.65%, the average take-home pay will increase by 29%.

The tax on income will be replaced by a tax on the purchase of new goods and services. The rate will be 23% of what you pay for at the check out counter. That is not 23% on top of the marked price, but 23% included in the price. If the item you buy is priced at $100, the merchant will keep $77 and send $23 to the government.

There has been some confusion about this method of calculation since states calculate their sales tax as a tax on top of what you buy. However, since we are replacing a tax that is calculated “inclusive” of what you earn rather than on top of what you earn we concluded that to use an “inclusive” rate would be more honest. Both the state and the retailer would be paid for collecting the tax.

To lessen the burden on those who spend all of their income on necessities, we untax necessities by providing a cash distribution to every family, based on the size of the family.

More HERE

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ELSEWHERE

Obama regime charges Wal-Mart with labor violations:  "Federal officials filed a formal complaint Wednesday charging that Wal-Mart violated the rights of workers who took part in protests and strikes against the company. The National Labor Relations Board says Wal-Mart illegally fired, disciplined or threatened more than 60 employees in 14 states for participating in legally protected activities to complain about wages and working conditions at the nation's largest retailer. The labor board's general counsel first laid out similar charges in November, but held off on filing a complaint while trying to work out a settlement with Wal-Mart. Those discussions were not successful, government officials said in a statement. The company has insisted its actions were legal and justified."

Airlines applaud as spending bill drops travel tax:  "Air travelers will avoid new taxes this year after Congress dropped the plans in its final budget bill, a move the industry cheered Tuesday as a victory for passengers. Congressional negotiators earned the ire of US airlines last month when they unveiled a deal that would end billions of dollars in crippling [sic] automatic spending cuts, but chose to raise air travel fees to help pay for it. That deal would have jacked up the '9/11 Aviation Security Fee' from $2.50 per flight segment to $5.60, and doubled the fee for a return trip to $10.00, generating some $13 billion over the next decade."

OK: Federal judge thwarts the will of the people:  "A Federal judge in Tulsa struck down Oklahoma's ban on same-sex marriage Tuesday but suspended his decision while it's appealed to higher courts. The ruling is the latest in a series of legal victories for same-sex marriage proponents around the country. U.S. District Judge Terence Kern's ruling stemmed from a lawsuit filed in 2004, the same year Oklahoma passed its constitutional amendment with 76% of voters in favor of banning same-sex marriage."

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For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC,  AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated) and Coral reef compendium. (Updated as news items come in).  GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten.

List of backup or "mirror" sites here or  here -- for when blogspot is "down" or failing to  update.  Email me  here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or  here (Pictorial) or  here  (Personal)

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America’s freedom continues to slip

Our nation continues to lose its economic freedom.  That is the result of the just-released Heritage Foundation 2014 Index of Economic Freedom.   Since President Obama took office, the United States of America has slipped six spots in the Index with this year’s drop out of the world’s top ten freest economies serving as a cold slap in the face to those who equate Uncle Sam with freedom.

The Heritage report attributes the drop, “primarily due to deteriorations in property rights, fiscal freedom, and business freedom.”

The report continues to describe the decline of economic freedom in the United States since 2006 saying there have been “particularly large losses in property rights, freedom from corruption, and control of government spending.”

The United States has earned the dubious distinction of being the only country in the world, “to have recorded a loss of economic freedom each of the past seven years.”

It should be no surprise to those who have followed the politics and government over the past seven years that the United States has experienced a dramatic expansion in the size and scope of government, even with recent attempts to rein in spending.

In 2006, the total outlays of the federal government were $2.65 trillion compared with outlays in the past fiscal year of $3.45 trillion.  The good news is that over the past three years, spending has dropped by approximately $200 billion, the bad news is that the cost of government has still increased by more than 30 percent in just seven years.

However, even more chilling is that the scope of government has expanded much more rapidly than even the dramatic increase in the budget shows.

The Environmental Protection Agency and other environmental regulators have been the primary culprits in this attack on economic freedom.  These agencies under Obama have engaged in a regulatory war against domestically produced energy with a primary focus on destroying markets for coal, both at home and abroad.

However, the Obama Administration’s efforts have not just been limited to attacks on coal.  The Department of the Interior has made domestic energy development on public lands extremely difficult through impossible to meet licensing requirements, and taking large swaths of natural resources rich land out of development.

Interior has also continued its attack on timber and other renewable resource industries under the false guise of species protection.  This is exemplified by the federal government’s attempts to dramatically increase the habitats of the northern spotted owl, in spite of the fact that the species thrives on timbered land, and its main biological problem is the Horned Owl, not any activity by man.  This effort to expand habitats across the nation is a primary example of the overall loss of private property rights that has contributed to the precipitous decline in America’s standing as one of the freest nation’s in the world.

The report also measures whether a government is free from corruption, and has an honest electoral system.  In this area, it notes that in the U.S., “The growth of government has been accompanied by increasing cronyism that has undermined the rule of law and perceptions of fairness.”

While the 2014 Economic Freedom Index is a stark warning about the erosion of freedom in our nation, it is not all bad news as America ranks top in the world in labor freedom and the progress made in lowering the deficit from more than $1.4 trillion to just under $700 billion in a few short years.

America is still the greatest country in the world.  It is the responsibility of its citizens to keep it that way, and reports like the Heritage 2014 Economic Freedom Index are a useful warning light to areas where the freedoms that make our nation great are most in jeopardy.

As Benjamin Franklin famously is quoted as saying, ““Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.”

The only question is what the people are going to do to stop this erosion of freedom?

SOURCE

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Australia's economic freedom outranks US

One of America’s best known conservative think tanks has named Australia as the world’s third most free economy, outranking the US after the debut of Obamacare.

The Heritage Foundation’s 2014 Index of Economic Freedom  praised Australia’s low debt and “flexible” labour force. It found Australia’s freedom from corruption had slipped marginally, citing the Independent Commission of Corruption investigations in New South Wales Australia, but said that the rule of law remained strong.

“Australia’s judicial system operates independently and impartially. Property rights are secure, and enforcement of contracts is reliable. Expropriation is highly unusual,” said the report.

The report placed Australia after Singapore and Hong Kong. Australia was ranked third with a score of 82, just ahead New Zealand with a score of 81.2. The index, also published by the Wall Street Journal, found that America had slid from 10th place to 12th.

“Can you imagine if our Secretary of Defence announced that we were mostly strong, or kind of strong as a nation?” Heritage Foundation president Jim DeMint, a former Republican senator, said at the launch. “I don’t think we would sit still for that as a nation.”

In his keynote address in launching the index in Washington, DC, the Republican libertarian senator Rand Paul lamented the Affordable Healthcare Act in America as a “significant loss to freedom.”

The report evaluates countries on four broad areas of economic freedom: rule of law; regulatory efficiency; limited government; and open markets, and grants an aggregate score.

“Over the 20-year history of the Index, Australia has advanced its economic freedom score by 7.9 points, one of the 10 biggest improvements among developed economies,” says the report.

“Substantial score increases in six of the 10 economic freedoms, including business freedom, investment freedom, and freedom from corruption, have enabled Australia to achieve and sustain its economically 'free' status in the Index.”

.A Heritage Foundation analyst, Brian Riley, told Fairfax that while in the organisation’s view Labor’s stimulus package had been a negative, Australia’s bipartisan commitment to free trade and support for foreign investment as well as its relatively low tax rates, was enough to keep the nation’s score so high.

He said America had slipped in part because of increased regulation associated with the Affordable Healthcare Act.

The Foundation noted that the Asia Pacific region was home to the world’s four freest economies, as well as three of its most repressed, Timor-Leste, Turkmenistan and North Korea

SOURCE

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Take Heart, Conservatives, Take Heart!

Conservatism is a very young movement. It did not even exist as a so-named political project in the United States until 1948 and did not achieve anything like movement status until the late 1950's.   It reached a moment of youthful certitude during the Reagan years but it is still casting about for self-definition.  The debate goes on to the present day.  Conservatism does not yet speak with a unified voice because there is still no consensus on what immutable principles unite them.

But think of what conservatives have accomplished.

In 1950 no prominent elected official identified himself as "conservative".  The Eisenhower Administration's aggressive centrism never challenged the fundamental assumptions of New Deal liberalism.  Except for Senator Robert Taft, the most powerful congressional Republicans were from the Northeast and in the tradition of liberal, privileged Brahmin aristocracy.

While Barry Goldwater was starting a small conservative insurgency, he received the votes of only ten delegates at the Republican convention of 1960.  Richard Nixon, a California Republican in the tradition of its progressive Republican governors Hiram Johnson and Earl Warren, was the overwhelming choice of the party as its candidate for president.

Throughout the 1960's and well into the 1970's Democrats had 2/3 majorities in both houses of Congress.  They held the presidency until 1968 when Nixon finally won the White House.  But Nixon's victory was hardly one for conservatism as Nixon's domestic agenda involved geometrically higher spending, the Clean Water Act, the National Environmental Policy Act, the Quiet Title Act, affirmative action, the Endangered Species Act, OSHA, the Clean Air Act of 1970 and many others.  And while their numbers were growing, conservatives still did not constitute a majority of Republican federal elected officials.

In the states, Democrats generally held the majority of governorships from 1950 to the 1990's, often at a ratio of 60% to 40%.  They held one or both houses of most state legislatures.

Even Ronald Reagan's election in 1980 hardly changed the national dynamic.   He changed the course of world history with his foreign policy and the trajectory of the nation with his optimism and tax and regulatory reform.  But while Reagan gave conservatism electoral respectability and was marginally successful in stopping the advance of liberalism, he was not so successful in rolling back 60 years of liberal domestic policy initiatives.  His success gave the movement form, substance and political, intellectual and historical credibility and he energized conservatives and inspirited conservatism so it became the muscular movement it is today.

Now, for the first time in well over 70 years, Republicans hold the governorships in 29 states and in 23 of those states, both houses of the legislature.  That has not been true in nearly a century and that situation adheres for Democrats in only 13 states.  The Republican Party holds a strong majority in the House of Representatives and has largely held that majority for nearly 20 years; something that has not occurred since the early 20th Century. And well over half of its House members are committed conservatives. Republicans are a hair's breadth from retaking the United States Senate and 2/3 of sitting Republican senators are conservatives.

Outside the Northeast and the West Coast, conservatism is triumphant and it is the predominant political impulse in the states that are growing the fastest, thus providing a glimpse of the electoral future as those states slowly but surely supplant those losing population in electoral importance.

It is easy for conservatives to get frustrated observing, as they do, that even at times of conservative predominance little effort is made to roll back liberal initiatives. That is part of conservatism's structural weakness for its Burkean sentimentalism.  But that is changing as conservatives explore the roots of their ideology. It is already manifesting itself in the states among such as Governors Scott Walker, Bobby Jindal and Nikki Haley.

As conservatives begin to put Burkean conservatism in its proper perspective as a social impulse rather than as a dominating philosophy and start to accept a set of defined principles, they will develop a unified and principled platform of public policy initiatives based on individual liberty that they will take to the people and achieve the electoral success that appeals to freedom always will among Americans.

It will be then that conservative elected representatives will have the courage to roll back a century of liberal depredation and its attending diminution of individual freedom.  And it will be then that the beating heart of liberty will throb ever more greatly as America enters its greatest age.

SOURCE

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ELSEWHERE

Administration lags on attracting young people to ObamaCare, stats show:  "The administration is lagging behind its goals for attracting young people to the ObamaCare exchanges, according to newly released statistics. Of those who signed up for health insurance through the ObamaCare insurance exchanges, less than 25 percent are between 18 and 34 years old. Experts predicted that the program will need roughly 40 percent of enrollees to be in that prime demographic in order to be fiscally solvent."

SCOTUS to hear case on Obama recess appointments:  "The US Supreme Court on Monday takes up a potential landmark case examining whether President Obama overstepped his authority when he unilaterally declared that the Senate was in recess and appointed three new members to the National Labor Relations Board. The Constitution assigns to the president the power to appoint judges and officers of the United States, but it requires him to act with the 'advice and consent' of the Senate. There is an exception. ... It is this recess appointment power that lies at the center of the historic showdown on Monday at the high court."

Disaster relief without the state:  "Someone asserted to me that the state was necessary for disaster relief. At the time I didn’t give much of an answer because I was dumbfounded at the assertion, and it would have taken a while to explain. I am going to use Florida hurricanes as an example. Feel free to replace it with your preferred danger: earthquakes, tornadoes, sharks, tsunamis, whatever. Here is my response."

Verizon wins Net Neutrality court ruling against FCC:  "Verizon Communications Inc. won its challenge to U.S. open-Internet rules as an appeals court said the Federal Communications Commission overreached in barring broadband providers from slowing or blocking selected Web traffic. ... The rules required companies that provide high-speed Internet service over wires to treat all traffic equally. With the regulation voided, companies such as Netflix Inc. and Amazon.com Inc. could face new charges for the fastest connections"

Deductibles are important: "There’s an unstated assumption in the continuing health care debate that health insurance should cover most, if not all, of health spending. To many, even a modest co-pay of $20 or $30, or an annual deductible of $2,000, are considered hardships. Overlooked in this conversation is the fact that every dollar paid by an insurer has to come from premium-payers; that is, employers, individuals or government (meaning, taxpayers). In fact, owing to administrative and other costs, a dollar paid to a hospital or doctor costs the premium-payer more than a dollar. I submit that we have too much health insurance."

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For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC,  AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated) and Coral reef compendium. (Updated as news items come in).  GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten.

List of backup or "mirror" sites here or  here -- for when blogspot is "down" or failing to  update.  Email me  here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or  here (Pictorial) or  here  (Personal)

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Main genes for IQ now isolated

This is much sooner than anyone expected. The .90 correlation between a gene set and IQ mentioned below is historic.  Correlations don't get much better than that in psychology.  The IQ deniers have always looked pretty silly in the light of the evidence but I cannot see that they have any room to move now at all  -- JR

Factor Analysis of Population Allele Frequencies as a Simple, Novel Method of Detecting Signals of Recent Polygenic Selection: The Example of Educational Attainment and IQ

Davide Piffer, Interdisciplinary Bio Central, November 27, 2013

Synopsis

Weak widespread (polygenic) selection is a mechanism that acts on multiple SNPs simultaneously. The aim of this paper is to suggest a methodology to detect signals of polygenic selection using educational attainment as an example. Educational attainment is a polygenic phenotype, influenced by many genetic variants with small effects. Frequencies of 10 SNPs found to be associated with educational attainment in a recent genome-wide association study were obtained from HapMap, 1000 Genomes and ALFRED. Factor analysis showed that they are strongly statistically associated at the population level, and the resulting factor score was highly related to average population IQ (r=0.90). Moreover, allele frequencies were positively correlated with aggregate measures of educational attainment in the population, average IQ, and with two intelligence increasing alleles that had been identified in different studies. This paper provides a simple method for detecting signals of polygenic selection on genes with overlapping phenotypes but located on different chromosomes. The method is therefore different from traditional estimations of linkage disequilibrium. This method can also be used as a tool in gene discovery, potentially decreasing the number of SNPs that are included in a genome-wide association study, reducing the multiple-testing problem and required sample sizes and consequently, financial costs.

SOURCE

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Five Myths About Inequality

“Inequality is the defining challenge of our time,” according to President Obama. It’s certainly the topic of the day for Paul Krugman, Joe Stiglitz and a whole raft of liberal pundits.

But have you noticed that hardly anyone else is talking about it? When is the last time you heard a shoeshine person or a taxi cab driver complain about inequality? For most people, having a lot of rich people around is good for business. But if average folks are not complaining should they be?

Unfortunately, a lot of what passes as serious commentary is actually myth. What follows are five examples.

Myth No 1: Income for the average family has stagnated over the past 30 years.

Here is an oft-quoted statistic: From 1979 to 2007, taxpayers’ median real income, before taxes and before government transfers, rose by only 3.2 percent. Cornell University economist Richard Burkhauser, via Greg Mankiw, shows why that statistic is misleading:

If we combine the income of all the taxpayers within each household to get household median income, that meager 3.2 percent rises to a bit more respectable 12.5 percent.

If we add in government transfer payments, that 12.5 percent number becomes an even better 15.2 percent.

Factoring in middle class tax cuts over the period, the 15.2 percent figure rises to 20.2 percent.

But not all households are the same size, and the size of households has fallen over time. Adjusting for household size increases that 20.2 percent to 29.3 percent.

Finally, if we add the value of employer-provided health insurance, the 29.3 percent figure rises to 36.7 percent.

So there you have it: real income for the average household actually increased by more than a third over the past 30 years.

This conclusion is consistent with other studies. A CBO study of family income over the same period of time found an increase almost twice that size: the average family experienced a 62 percent increase in real income.

Economists have a way of measuring inequality that includes the entire population, not just the average family or the top 1 percent. It’s by means of a Gini coefficient, which varies between 0 (complete equality) and 1 (complete inequality). One study found that between 1993 and 2009, the Gini value actually fell from .395 to .388—meaning that inequality has actually declined in recent years.

Myth No. 2: People at the bottom of the income ladder are there through no fault of their own.

In a study for the National Center for Policy Analysis, David Henderson found that there is a big difference between families in the top 20 percent and bottom 20 percent of the income distribution: Families at the top tend to be married and both partners work. Families at the bottom often have only one adult in the household and that person either works part-time or not at all:

In 2006, a whopping 81.4 percent of families in the top income quintile had two or more people working, and only 2.2 percent had no one working.

By contrast, only 12.6 percent of families in the bottom quintile had two or more people working; 39.2 percent had no one working.

The average number of earners per family for the top group was 2.16, almost three times the 0.76 average for the bottom.

Henderson concludes:  "...average families in the top group have many more weeks of work than those in the bottom and, in the late 1970s, the 12-to-1 total income ratio shrunk to only 2-to-1 per week of work, according to one analysis."

Having children without a husband tends to make you poor. Not working makes you even poorer. And there is nothing new about that. These are age old truths. They were true 50 years ago, a hundred years ago and even 1,000 year ago. Lifestyle choices have always mattered.

Myth No. 3: Government transfer programs, like unemployment insurance, are an effective remedy.

Government transfers can ameliorate the discomfort of having a low income and few assets. But at the same time they tend to encourage people to remain dependent, rather than achieving self-sufficiency. And the loss of benefits as wage income rises acts as an additional “marginal tax” on labor.

University of Chicago economist Casey Mulligan is the leading authority on welfare programs and how they affect employment. At The New York Times economics blog, he wrote:

As a result of more than a dozen significant changes in subsidy program rules, the average middle-class non-elderly household head or spouse saw her or his marginal tax rate increase from about 40 percent in 2007 to 48 percent only two years later. Marginal tax rates came down in late 2010 and 2011 as provisions of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act expired, but still remain elevated—at least 44 percent...A few households even saw their marginal tax rates jump beyond 100 percent—meaning they would have more disposable income by working less...work incentives were eroded about 20 percent for unmarried household heads...in the middle of the skill distribution, while they were eroded about 12 percent among married heads and spouses...with the same level of skill.

Overall, Mulligan estimates that up to half of the excess unemployment we have been experiencing is because of the generosity of food stamps, unemployment compensation and other transfer benefits.

Myth No 4: Raising the minimum wage is an effective remedy.

One of the few policy ideas President Obama has for dealing with inequality is raising the minimum wage. He thinks this will lift people out of poverty. Paul Krugman says the same thing. The difference is that Krugman is an economist who must surely know that the economic literature shows that raising the minimum wage does almost nothing to lift people out of poverty.

Richard Burkhauser and San Diego State University economist Joseph J. Sabia examined 28 states that increased their minimum wages between 2003 and 2007. Their study, published in the Southern Economic Journal, found “no evidence that minimum wage increases...lowered state poverty rates.” Part of the reason is that very few people earning the minimum wage are actually poor. Most are young people who live in middle income households. For example, the economists estimate that if the federal minimum wage were increased to $9.50 per hour:

Only 11.3 percent of workers who would gain from the increase live in households officially defined as poor.

A whopping 63.2 percent of workers who would gain are second or even third earners living in households with incomes equal to twice the poverty line or more.

Some 42.3 percent of workers who would gain are second or even third earners who live in households that have incomes equal to three times the poverty line or more.

Myth No. 5: Income is the best measure of wellbeing.

Why are we talking about income? The implicit assumption is that income limits our ability to enjoy life. But that turns out not to be true. One study found that consumption by those in the lower fourth of the income distribution was almost twice their money income. Moreover, consumption inequality is much less than income inequality. A Bureau of Labor Statistics study found that

...in 2001, the Gini coefficient for consumption was only .280 (almost 30 percent lower than the Gini for comprehensive income, and about 40 percent lower than the Gini for money income), indicating that inequality with respect to this most meaningful measure of living standards is relatively modest. Moreover, according to the BLS, during the fifteen-year period between 1986 and 2001, consumption inequality went down slightly; from a Gini of .283 to a Gini of .280.

Bottom line: the next time you hear someone complain about inequality, make sure they are not repeating these five myths.

SOURCE

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Book Review: 'Average Is Over,' by Tyler Cowen

The better we become at working alongside machines, the more the new economy will reward us. Fail and we'll be outsourced

By Philip Delves Broughton

To sum up, Mr. Cowen believes that America is dividing itself in two. At the top will be 10% to 15% of high achievers, the "Tiger Mother" kids if you like, whose self-motivation and mastery of technology will allow them to roar away into the future. Then there will be everyone else, slouching into an underfunded future of lower economic expectations, shantytowns and an endless diet of beans. I'm not kidding about the beans.

Poor Americans, writes Mr. Cowen, will have to "reshape their tastes" and live more like Mexicans. "Don't scoff at the beans," he says. "With an income above the national average, I receive more pleasure from the beans, which I cook with freshly ground cumin and rehydrated, pureed chilies. Good tacos and quesadillas and tamales are cheap too, and that is one reason why they are eaten so frequently in low-income countries."

So what am I to do to save my sons from this bean-filled future? The first thing, it seems, is to have them play more chess. Mr. Cowen is an avid player, and the first half of his book is taken up with an argument for how freestyle chess, in which humans play alongside machines, rather than against them, is a model for the economy. His point, and it is a good one, is that the future belongs to those of us able to work best with machines. The author roves broadly and interestingly to make his case, outlining the radical economic transformations that lie in store for us, predicting the rise and fall of cities depending on their capacity to adapt to this machine-driven world and offering policy prescriptions for preserving American prosperity.

"A potentially valuable worker offers the promise of improving on the machine, taken alone," he writes. "In the language of economics, we can say that the productive worker and the smart machine are, in today's labor markets, stronger complements than before."

In other words, we may not be able to calculate in the way a computer can, but we are usually better readers of character and emotion. For all that behavioral science and big data can provide, we remain the best interpreters of one another. This applies to everything from consumer products to medicine to Mr. Cowen's own profession of economics.

The author points out that we often see the promise of technology long before it delivers. "The advances of genius machines come in an uneven and staggered fashion," he writes. "For the foreseeable future, you'll always have to be learning something, reprogramming something, downloading new software, and pushing some buttons, all to have the sometimes dubious privilege of working with these new technological wonders."

You see this every time a company like Apple updates its operating system. Those of us with iPhones teach ourselves through the bugs, prodding and rebooting, becoming our own tech support. We have been trained to educate ourselves, to become complements to our machines. The better we become at these kinds of behaviors, the more the economy will reward us. Fail and we'll be outsourced. We needn't all be programmers, but we do need to be facile in making the most of the technology around us.

That takes motivation. One of the most interesting sections of Mr. Cowen's book is his analysis of the future of education. For a select few, he argues, the traditional college experience will still be worth the time and money. They will benefit from close proximity to highly engaged teachers. But for most, a much cheaper model might work better, one in which most of the material is available online and young people are provided with motivators instead of professors—that is, with people who are part drill sergeant and part yoga instructor, able to inspire and put the fear of God into students. No more tweedy snoozers lecturing everyone into oblivion and charging $50,000 a year. Think of college as a gym membership, with trainers to help you make the most of the machines around you.

Education for the masses, writes Mr. Cowen, "will become more like the Marines, full of discipline and team spirit." This will help the young avoid becoming "threshold earners," those "content just to get by and who do not push ambitiously for a higher wage or stronger credentials at every step. Williamsburg, Brooklyn, is full of young threshold earners." I think Mr. Cowen is being unfair to Williamsburg, which seems to me a hive of economic activity—from new, online-only journalistic ventures to artisanal pickle shops. But his point about the need for a more efficient marriage of machines and motivation in education is a sound one.

One world that Mr. Cowen does not investigate, but might have done, is that of high finance. Here you find these two worlds of man and machine co-existing marvelously. There is room for both computer-driven trading operations and grizzled veterans like Warren Buffett and Carl Icahn, with their genius for picking stocks and fights.

In his final chapter, "A New Social Contract?," Mr. Cowen cruelly lays it all out. "We will move from a society based on the pretense that everyone is given an okay standard of living to a society in which people are expected to fend for themselves much more than they do now." The top 10% will have it better than ever. The majority will suffer stagnant or falling wages but have more opportunities for cheap education and cheap fun. The rest will fall by the wayside, with government less and less able to take care of them. It will be dazzling at the top, and "meh" to miserable for the rest.

If that doesn't propel you and your children out of bed, you deserve all the beans you get.

SOURCE

There is a  new  lot of postings by Chris Brand just up -- on his usual vastly "incorrect" themes of race, genes, IQ etc

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For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC,  AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated) and Coral reef compendium. (Updated as news items come in).  GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten.

List of backup or "mirror" sites here or  here -- for when blogspot is "down" or failing to  update.  Email me  here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or  here (Pictorial) or  here  (Personal)

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