Social co-operation

I put up a post recently in which I looked at the now generally accepted sociological finding that social homogeneity promotes interpersonal involvement and trust.  Most notably in multicultural communities, social harmony and co-operation is damaged.

I thought therefore that I might add to my remarks on the subject by way of an anecdote.  The report is from a wise young mother who left the big smoke to live in a small country town in New Zealand.  There is one well-liked Chinese family there but everyone else is of British or Northern European ancestry. Many families have lived there for generations. It could reasonably be described as a Kiwi monoculture.  Nobody has to press "1" for English there. The young mother and her husband are well settled there now and both are  greatly pleased by the move.  She writes:

Last Thursday I returned home from swimming with H** [young daughter] when only 20 minutes after my return there was a knock at our door. It was one of the mum/swimming instructors at my door returning my phone that I had accidently left behind at the pool.

She told me one of the girls picked it up, gave it to her and she recognised the photo of H** on the phone and popped over to drop it off. Of course I was grateful and thanked her, I also told her I hadn't yet noticed that I had even lost the phone.

She saved me the stress and panic of realising I had lost it and it left me thinking about how wonderful living in a small town is. It is a lovely thought that H** will be under the watchful eyes of the people around us as we all know and look out for each other's kids.


Would that it were like that everywhere!  Anyone for New Zealand?  I have another favorite New Zealand story here.

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What the Left’s Moments of Condescension Reveal

Sometimes the left unwittingly throws gems our way. These come in rare moments of exasperation, rather than the usual poise the left displays. The transformation of America, after all, requires quiet, subtle movements, coordinated with high-minded propaganda. That’s why moments of condescending contempt, accompanied by the left’s sharpest weapon — mockery—are so revealing.

For example, during a recent White House press briefing, President Obama’s press secretary, Josh Earnest, was asked whether Congress should have a say on the agreement with China that commits the United States to reducing its carbon output over the next 10 years. Rather than taking it to Capitol Hill, however, Secretary of State John Kerry submitted our “commitment” to the U.N.

In response to the questioner, Earnest said many members of Congress “deny the fact that climate change even exists. So I’m not sure they would be in the best position to decide whether or not a climate change agreement is one that is worth entering into.”

Earnest’s remarks show a contemptuous ignorance of the reasons behind our Constitution. The Senate’s involvement in international agreements that obligate the United States to sacrifices and the fulfillment of promises to foreign nations is not a mindless tradition, as Earnest implies.

In international affairs, Senate ratification of treaties indicates to the world that our commitments are not tied to the fancies or vanities of a single man, who will leave office after four or eight years. A concern for our nation’s reputation abroad—among the central issues Barack Obama campaigned on—requires that agreements be lasting, since respect from other nations comes in part from reliability and steadiness. Senate ratification provides this.

The Senate, as originally designed, was meant (insofar as possible) to preserve prudence in democratic politics by removing that body to a great extent from the influence of public opinion. This meant longer tenure in office and indirect election. This was done in order to create a deliberative body capable of seriously reflecting on the unknown continent of the future. As John Jay writes in Federalist No. 64, the Senate will possess “discretion and discernment,” as opposed to the “energy” of the executive.

The Senate should therefore be a kind of aristocratic class within a democracy. The advantage of this, as Tocqueville comments, is that “An aristocratic body is a firm and enlightened man who does not die.” Unlike the populace, sometimes taken in by manias, and unlike a particular president, who can be good or bad depending on the judgment of the electorate, the Senate should be more or less unchanging—a bastion of continuity in an unsteady sea of fears, hopes, and ambitions. For Madison in Federalist No. 63, the Senate possesses “sufficient permanency to provide for such objects as require a continued attention,” like foreign affairs.

When Earnest was asked to clarify his statement, he merely reiterated: “Well, again, I think it’s hard to take seriously from some members of Congress who deny the fact that climate change exists, that they should have some opportunity to render judgment about a climate change agreement.” That is, constitutional powers are revoked upon disagreement, making consent of the governed irrelevant.

Yet our political liberty is based on the consent of the governed, a notion often ignored by the left. For liberals, freedom is self-actualization, whereby what is actualized is some kind of consciousness hitherto oppressed by stigma. As such, consent is not only unimportant, but can indeed be an impediment to freedom.

Among the reasons for the left’s appeal is its seeming confidence. Unlike conservatives, the left need not argue about principles and interpret their complexities. Monolithic, moralistic declamations are designed to convince the wavering and silence the unsure. Airs of superiority appear to be knowledge itself.

This is a favorite tactic of the left, as demonstrated by the attempt by Rep. Raul Grijalva, D.-Ariz., to browbeat universities into investigating professors who disagree with his opinion on climate change, or by the president’s blaming his daughter’s asthma on climate change. This is the theater of high-minded condescension that seeks to convince through a mixture of mockery and threats.

The consequences are not small. Such demagogic arguments do not present a standard of judgment but rather deride serious deliberation. Mockery and condescension are easy moralistic indulgences not worthy of a free people.

SOURCE

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Gary Trudeau and other hypocritical Leftists ignore  the oppressed, despite their posturing

Tim Blair

The New York Times reports: "Italian police on Thursday charged 15 Muslim men with homicide aggravated by religious hatred after survivors of a migrant boat rescued in the Mediterranean told investigators that the men had menaced Christians on board and thrown a dozen Christians overboard to their deaths … The victims came from Ghana and Nigeria, the police said, while the accused are from Ivory Coast, Mali and Senegal."

The crucial issue here – particularly if you’re Doonesbury cartoonist Garry Trudeau – is whether throwing Christians to their deaths is an example of punching down or punching up. I suspect he’d go with up, on account of Muslims being “non-privileged” and “a powerless, disenfranchised minority”, as Trudeau whined in his recent, pathetic attack on slaughtered Charlie Hebdo staffers:

"Traditionally, satire has comforted the afflicted while afflicting the comfortable. Satire punches up, against authority of all kinds, the little guy against the powerful. Great French satirists like Molière and Daumier always punched up, holding up the self-satisfied and hypocritical to ridicule. Ridiculing the non-privileged is almost never funny – it’s just mean."

By punching downward, by attacking a powerless, disenfranchised minority with crude, vulgar drawings closer to graffiti than cartoons, Charlie wandered into the realm of hate speech …
Charlie Hebdo attacked with drawings. Their killers attacked with AK-47s. Trudeau is more upset about the former, as is New York artist Melanie West, a co-resident in Trudeau’s obscene moral abyss:

"Christianity is a religion that features a lot of people with a lot of global dominance, while on the other side, Islam is a faith that has been bludgeoned in order to justify the pillaging and imperial slaughter of the East. Within that context, a Western body blatantly disrespecting Islam (like when drawing the Prophet Muhammad) is dropping arrows from the top. They are driving salt into the wound. They’re punching down, and they shouldn’t be surprised when people get desperate and punch back."

Or, presumably, when Muslims throw Christians into the Mediterranean, possibly due to the massive global dominance of Nigerians and Ghanaians. Mark Steyn has far more to say on the topic of Trudeau and his disgusting kind, expressed far more eloquently than I ever could, but for now let me add this:

The likes of Trudeau and West are too fantastically, rigidly stupid to understand that “comfortable” and “afflicted” are not permanent conditions. For example, if “comfortable” millionaire crap cartoonist Trudeau were to have been visiting friends in the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, he may have found himself rapidly converted to “afflicted”, what with all the burning jet fuel pouring over him.

Likewise, the “afflicted” Islamic terrorists aboard those 9/11 jets, who were already “comfortable” enough in terms of upbringing, education and careers, became more “comfortable” still as they carried out their martyrdom missions. One supposes, too, that the “afflicted” Muslims floating off the Italian coast were more than “comfortable” tossing Christians to their deaths.

Among many others, Trudeau, West and Australian Guardian illo-pullet Andrew Marlton probably dreamed for their entire lives of the moment when they would bravely stand up to confront a democracy-opposing, women-hating, homophobic, theocratic fascist power. But when that moment came, through extremist Islam, they licked power’s boots. They caved. They ran.

They not only punched down, they fell down, pleading, on their knees.

SOURCE

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Wisconsin's dirty prosecutors pull a Putin

Abusing law enforcement powers to punish political opponents is a crime

When Vladimir Putin sends government thugs to raid opposition offices, the world clucks its tongue. But, after all, Putin's a corrupt dictator, so what do you expect?

But in Wisconsin, Democratic prosecutors were raiding political opponents' homes and, in a worse-than-Putin twist, they were making sure the world didn't even find out, by requiring their targets to keep quiet.

As David French notes in National Review, "As if the home invasion, the appropriation of private property, and the verbal abuse weren't enough, next came ominous warnings. Don't call your lawyer. Don't tell anyone about this raid. Not even your mother, your father, or your closest friends. ...

This was the on-the-ground reality of the so-called John Doe investigations, expansive and secret criminal proceedings that directly targeted Wisconsin residents because of their relationship to Scott Walker, their support for Act 10, and their advocacy of conservative reform."

Is this un-American? Yes, yes it is. And the prosecutors involved — who were attacking supporters of legislation that was intended to rein in unions' power in the state — deserve to be punished. Abusing law enforcement powers to punish political opponents, and to discourage contributions to political enemies, is a crime, and it should also be grounds for disbarment.

SOURCE

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The Clinton Pay-to-Play Foundation Unmasked

“Clinton Cash: The Untold Story of How and Why Foreign Governments and Businesses Helped Make Bill and Hillary Rich,”  by Peter Schweizer, is due to hit the bookshelves soon, but Republican presidential candidates are already taking advantage. That’s because the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, including Rand Paul and Marco Rubio, was briefed on the book.

The New York Times obtained a copy, too, and reports that the “186-page investigation of donations made to the Clinton Foundation by foreign entities … asserts that foreign entities who made payments to the Clinton Foundation and to Mr. Clinton through high speaking fees received favors from Mrs. Clinton’s State Department in return.”

The Times quotes a passage in which Schweizer writes, “We will see a pattern of financial transactions involving the Clintons that occurred contemporaneous with favorable U.S. policy decisions benefiting those providing the funds.”

We know it’s shocking to consider that Hillary Clinton’s massive income and her record of “smart power” at the State Department might be tainted by these pay-to-play shenanigans, but Schweizer appears to have done his homework and provides numerous examples. Hillary’s use of private email servers was problematic in large part because she was able to cover up the Clinton Foundation’s dealings. No wonder she deleted tens of thousands of “personal” emails. And her response to the book is typical Hillary: It’s just part of the vast right-wing conspiracy.

SOURCE





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

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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How the FDA Could Save Thousands of Lives

About 30,000 Americans suffer from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS)—a.k.a. Lou Gehrig’s disease—a horrible ailment that causes patients to gradually lose control of their muscles. Currently, there is no known cure for ALS, and the only drug approved for helping the afflicted adds at most just a few months to their lives. That’s why it’s vital that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) accelerate the approval of a new drug that offers hope for ALS patients—GM6, developed by Pasadena-based Genervon Biopharmaceuticals.

More than 500,000 people have signed an online petition urging the FDA to approve the drug—thanks in part to the Ice Bucket Challenge, the campaign that went viral on YouTube last summer—so it’s conceivable that agency officials will soon override their overly cautious tendencies and issue an approval. But life and health shouldn’t have to come down to a publicity campaign. “In a free society, of course, dying patients shouldn’t have to petition bureaucrats for permission to take promising new drugs, so long as they understand there are risks involved,” Independent Institute Senior Fellow Benjamin W. Powell writes in National Review.

Under the current FDA approval process, too many regulations stand between life-enhancing pharmaceuticals and the patients who need them. Although these regulations, which include clinical trials that can take 12 years and cost $1 billion to complete, sometimes keep unsafe drugs off the market, they also prevent the terminally ill from getting drugs they need to extend their lives. Most of all, they usurp the ability of patients to decide, in consultation with their doctors, how much risk-taking is acceptable to them. “In the long term,” Powell writes, “the FDA should get out of the approval process, for the benefit of the rest of us.”

SOURCE

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There Is No Real Increase in Insured under Obamacare

Gallup has released the full results of its first-quarter survey of health insurance. It concludes that the proportion of uninsured Americans has collapsed to the lowest level ever: 11.9 percent.

Only the people who have employer-based benefits can be said to be paying for their own health insurance. They decreased 0.9 percentage points in the quarter.

People on Medicaid (which went up 2.1 percentage points) are simply on welfare. Lumping them in with people who have employer-based benefits is like lumping people getting welfare checks and people getting paychecks into the same group of “income recipients.” The respondents whom Gallup classifies as having “a plan paid for by self or family member” (which went up by 3.5 percentage points) are in Obamacare exchanges. Most of their premiums are paid by taxpayers, so they are mostly dependent, not independent with respect to having health insurance.

If we go back and compare the types of coverage in Q3 2013 to Q1 2015, we see that the proportion of those with employer-based benefits dropped from 44.4 percent to 43.3 percent; those on Medicaid jumped from 6.8 percent to 9.0 percent; and those with “self-paid” (actually, heavily subsidized Obamacare) plans spiked from 16.7 percent to 21.1 percent.

Here’s what I do not understand: The proportion of people aged 18 through 64 on Medicare increased from 6.4 percent to 7.3 percent. There are three ways to get Medicare if you are under 65: Receive Social Security Disability Benefits, suffer from End-Stage Renal Disease, or suffer from Lou Gehrig’s Disease (ALS). I cannot see how Obamacare increased any of these three situations.

SOURCE

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Israel deserves our support for its morality alone

"Only a virtuous people are capable of freedom. As nations become corrupt and vicious, they have more need of masters." --  Benjamin Franklin

The left with few exceptions typically supports Palestinians, and usually at the expense of Jews. The right, with few exceptions, remains a staunch supporter of Israel; especially conservative Christians and the GOP.

But it is the middle, the independent voice that remains to be engaged, and to them I ask for their consideration as the world gets more dangerous, politics more divided, and the fate of the West increasingly hangs in the balance, when deciding if a choice must be made - whether to align with Israel or her adversaries - that they consider Israel as the righteous cause.

Let me engage the help of my fellow Philadelphian, Dr. Franklin, who once again demonstrates his prescience and ageless wisdom in that simple phrase. Any question about the veracity of his thoughts simply requires looking at neighboring enterprises - Palestinians and Israelis. Any objective observer would come to the same conclusion Dr. Franklin would if assessing the two peoples. Corruption, viciousness, violence and hatred rule the hearts and minds, policies and passions of many Palestinians. Were it not so, their masters, in the form of Hamas, PIJ, or similar, would not exist and prevail.

Compare this with people across the fence - Jews - most of whom are dedicated to education, farming, art, literature, inventing medical interventions, developing water treatment and technology advances that can benefit all mankind, and in so doing, enjoy democratic freedoms, a significantly higher standard of living, and, except when their aggressor neighbors are lobbing rockets into Jewish neighborhoods, or are bombing, knifing, running over or randomly beating to death people in Jewish cities, Israelis enjoy a significantly higher standard of living than their neighbors....  "a virtuous people capable of freedom!"

As readers of FSM have noted, over the years I've denounced the moral equivalence that the left, secular progressives, and the media are all too willing to extend to Palestinians in the media, the White House, and on college campuses, almost always at the expense of Israel.

For reasons that continue to escape rationale thought, Palestinians remain the cause célèbre among the salon set, the pseudo-intelligentsia, many democrats, including former President Jimmy Carter and academia.  Perhaps as Annette Benning's character in the film The Siege opines "they (Palestinians) seduce you with their suffering." Or perhaps it is the natural antipathy of the unsuccessful who are all too willing to become class warriors rebelling against successful enterprises like Israel, even if Jews' very success was obtained while defending against attacks by the so called underdogs, who behave more like wild, rabid dogs.  Perhaps it is part of the liberal mindset that wishful thinking makes all matters thus; the left are the peace makers, and any oppressed people must deserved to be rescued, regardless of the facts.

Well the facts in the Palestinian saga are pretty clear. Much of the suffering Palestinians face is mostly of their own doing, and at the hands of their own leaders, fueled by the politics of jealousy, defined by narrative that the plight of the average person in Gaza or the West Bank is because of Jews, allowing their leaders to exploit a mass of people easily manipulated through one unifying mindset - a hatred for one entity - Israel.  And in order to remain in power - Saul Alinsky style - you have to create an enemy class to engage, enrage, distract and mobilize the masses. Obama, the Alinsky-crats who now run the DNC, and folks like ISIS, Al Qaeda, Fatah, Hezbollah, Hamas, Moslem Brotherhood (starting to catch a theme here?) all exploit this strategy to most effective ends.

But do we stop and ask, especially as pertains to a failed social enterprise, such as perennially impoverished collections of people who have the resources to live better lives, how can a group of people emerge into a thriving society? There are lots of moving parts to a successful community - a democracy or any national enterprise. But paramount is the notion we all row the boat together, for a common purpose, a higher purpose. We need skilled people. We need to build things, not destroy them. We need to educate our people.  We need to have infrastructure and we need to be self sustaining - which means having things to sell in order to pay for things you need.

Well that pretty much defines how Israel grew up from a post WWII territory to a nation. Blood, sweat and tears were shared, but it happened. And while it is true Israel obtains military funding for her defense, she also is a pretty self sufficient nation with prodigious intellectual property being developed and commercialized, technology well sought after from China to Russia as well as the West.  She is the only nation in the region with perennial next century industries and companies.

Once when flying over the North-East part of Israel - a colleague looking out the window looking down at the ground which represented Israel and her ‘neighbors,' recognizing I had been here before, asked me how could I tell what was Israel compared to what wasn't. "That's simple" I replied...."if it is green and looks alive like something is growing, it's Israel, if it is lifeless, dark and barren, it isn't Israel!"

Hanging out at a café perched between Palestinian and Jewish neighborhoods the difference in appearance between school children was stunning. The Jewish kids were well kempt, in uniforms, carrying school books, or sitting down together reading from them on their front steps. The Palestinian kids of similar age looked unkempt, were not sporting books, instead sitting next to older men who were drinking, playing card or tile games, and languishing unproductive.

The difference in educational materials is breathtaking. Many of the teaching materials supplied by Hamas to Palestinian kids include such useful math problems like this example -"if you kill two Jews today and two tomorrow, how many have you killed in all?" The books are often laced with imagery that foster vilification of Jews from an early age. It is often more subtle than the math problem, but no less pervasive or destructive. Jewish kids on the other hand learn languages, science, literature, math, computers, and, well you get the idea.

It is painful to watch a generation of Palestinian kids where their God given talents and future are curtailed, and that these children will never reach their potential, instead being prostituted towards dark purposes. They will never enjoy the satisfaction of knowing what it is like to become a teacher, a physician, a lawyer, an inventor.  Suicide bombing is by definition a temp job, not a career.

And yet it doesn't have to be this way. Many years ago my colleagues and I flew to Israel from all over the world to support our Israeli friends who put together an amazing adolescent medicine conference. As part of the congress, young people from both sides of the divide revealed shared projects, and enjoyed early successes. Palestinian and Jordanian and Israeli teens working together; though nascent, their programs were making a difference. A short time later the 2nd intifada started. One has to wonder what might have evolved had the Palestinian leaders' hatred of Jews, fears of democracy and desire to keep power overruled their desire to create a nation for their people. But such is the hallmark of dictators, and tyrants.

In spite of the barrage of rockets sent from Gaza into civilian regions such as Sderot, Israel continues to supply much of the basic needs of that deadly region, even after abandoning it to the Palestinians in the hope self rule might foster pride in the region, pride in self, and evolution into a functional society. Hope clearly isn't a strategy, and Gaza has devolved into a region of despair, largely due to bad leadership,  citizens unwilling or lacking the courage to demand change from within, and decaying infrastructure.  The sickest of Gazans who cannot get adequate care in their region, are allowed to come to Israel for medicine and advanced intervention. Water, electricity are also supplied in part by Israel.

And yet the Jews continue to be denounced as occupiers, captors, tormentors. One must ask the Leftist apologists for Gaza - when is it the Palestinians' responsibility to grow up, stop expecting  handouts from the world, stand on their own two feet, stop blaming the Jews when they sit on a piece of Mediterranean front real estate that could become a resort? One has to ask would Gaza treat Jews as compassionately as Israel treats sick Palestinians.  We can't even get the fine friendly folks from Gaza to stop rocket attacks on Israeli citizens - unprovoked and unnecessary.

Israel would be the first to volunteer and help Gaze grow up, if Palestinians would only agree to live and let live. Israel and the US are almost always the first to show up in a global crisis - from Haiti to Japan to Turkey to, well you get the idea.

Does anyone worry about a generation of PTSD afflicted Jewish kids who, in addition to learning reading, writing, math and languages, learn such other useful skills - if a rocket alarm goes off, where are the closest hardened shelters you can reach in fifteen seconds? And yet in spite of decades of attacks, most Jews I talk with do not hate Palestinians, they pity them with compassion. They recognize a generation of Palestinian kids have had their youth stolen in an atmosphere of hatred.

The Israeli kids have had part of their youth stolen, too, under assault, and yet their lives are remarkably normalized because of the wisdom of a compassionate "virtuous" society folks from the North ‘adopt' i.e. bringing kids up from the South, out of harms way in the summer and other times where fun time is an essential component of youth.

And, every young person, except the Orthodox, joins the military. But no rational person could ever equate the army of Allah (Hamas) with the Israeli Defense Force. There are simple, noble truths why.  First and foremost the IDF is not charged with attacking or eliminating neighbor nations. If that were the case, Israel might have more territory! Hamas is chartered to eliminate Jews.

But there is one reason above all others that is the most telling argument going back to Ben Franklin why Israel ought to be supported by the democracies of the world, that the Left ought to shut up, get with the program, abandon supporting blood thirsty enterprises like Iran, Hamas, or Palestine until they learn to act like civilized people; the left ought to join with the grownups and support one of the most hunted and persecuted people on the planet - Jews.   Jews believe in the concept of righteousness - the notion of the moral being.  That could NEVER be ascribed to Hamas!

Imperfect as any other ethnicity, Jews none the less seem to have adopted their own mission statement - upholding the dignity of humanity.  This is why Jewish physicians offer the same medical care to a suicide bomber who was clinging to life, as the victims of that Palestinian bomber.

Several years ago I was at a small Israeli military base near ‘the front' - and had the opportunity to speak with the commanding officer who was in his early twenties.  Consider the responsibilities of this young adult. A man (adolescent) who was the same age as any recent college graduate in the US, this young Israeli officer was in charge of 100 troops. A colleague and I spoke with him about spending part of his adolescence in the IDF, and asked how it felt to be responsible for the lives of 100 people. The young man replied "I'm responsible for more than the lives of 100 soldiers. I'm responsible for the lives of my adversaries, too. They have mothers that love them like my troops do. I'm responsible to their parents as well as Israeli parents. That's why we must be moral and careful how we fight. I have to care about my troops and theirs."

"I have to care about my troops and theirs." Wow that is powerful stuff! And to me, this makes the IDF more formidable. Let's not lose sight of his resolve to defend the State of Israel; but within his marching orders is a moral imperative.

That sentence alone commends Israel to most favored nation status. It is an insight that captures a morality in a ‘virtuous people' as Franklin would likely describe were he joining me during my visits to Israel.

SOURCE



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

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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The Death of the Left

The thought below is not cheering.  The Left hurt a lot of people as their systems implode

The left is winning, but for the left winning is indistinguishable from dying. The West didn’t defeat Communism; it held it at bay long enough for it to defeat itself. The Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China crushed Communism more decisively than Goldwater could have ever dreamed of.

The embargo didn’t turn Cuba into a hellhole whose main tourism industry is inviting progressive Canadian pedophiles to rape its children. Castro did that with help from the dead guy on the red t-shirts.

“One of the greatest benefits of the revolution is that even our prostitutes are college graduates,” Castro told Oliver Stone. In real life, his prostitutes are lucky if they graduated from elementary school.

American admirers eager to get to Havana claim to be worried that Starbucks will ruin their Socialist paradise. What really worries them is that American businesses might give Cuban teens an economic alternative to sexually servicing decrepit leftists from Berkeley for $10 a night in the revolutionary version of Thailand where everyone is free, especially the political prisoners and raped children.

There’s no embargo to blame in Venezuela. Hugo Chavez destroyed his own Bolivarian revolution by implementing it. The Venezuelan economic collapse really took off while Obama was in the White House leafing through the tract Chavez had gifted him blaming America for all of Latin America’s troubles.

Now Chavez, the tract’s author and the Venezuelan economy are all dead.

Chavez’s successor has desperately tried to blame America for his crisis, but Uncle Sam had nothing to do with the lack of toilet paper in the stores, the milk rationing and the soldiers stationed outside electronics retailers. It’s just what happens when the left wins.

When the man in the White House wanted a Latin American revolution to succeed, it still failed.

The left is at its best when it’s trying to take power. It unleashes its egocentric creative impulses, it writes poems, plays and songs as its heroes die in doomed battles or pump their fists at protests. And then they win, get rich and fat, the people grow poor and the country becomes a miserable dictatorship. Try putting a 300 pound Che on a t-shirt. Or get inspired by Obama lazily playing golf.

A successful leftist revolution quickly becomes indistinguishable from an ordinary oligarchy. Millions may die, but decades later all that’s left is a vast pointless bureaucracy that runs on family connections, an ideology no one understands anymore and an impoverished population ripe for outside exploitation.

And then before you know it, Moscow is full of fast food joints, China uses slave labor to make iPhones and aging hippies can buy children in Cuba for the price of a Happy Meal.

The left rams through its ideology by force and when the ideology is gone, all that’s left is the force.

Now that the left has gotten its way in America, crushing its enemies, the excitement is gone. Even pro-criminal policies, the straw that once broke the left’s electoral back, have been accepted by Republicans.

What’s left except trying to sell Hillary Clinton as the exciting face of the future, a task that even the left seems to lack the stomach for?

The excitement died once Obama took over. Suddenly those inspiring speeches no longer inspired. The speeches were the same teleprompter pabulum mixing bad poetry with worse diction, but there was no longer anything to push against except a frustrated Republican opposition in Congress.

The left had won and victory was boring. Obama took to golfing. He only seemed to come alive by campaigning so he campaigned all the time in an endless non-stop cultural revolution.

Imagine a future in which the left wins permanently. Just picture Hillary Clinton and then Elizabeth Warren and finally Bernie Sanders kept alive in the Oval Office by electricity and fetal stem cells from babies. Imagine the country run like the DMV. Imagine it divided between the politically connected and the poor. Imagine everyone else giving up and surviving on the black market. Imagine Social Justice becoming a slogan that everyone is forced to repeat, but that no one understands.

And then the Chinese will come along to take advantage of the cheap labor.

The left is like a suicide bomber or a honey bee. It can’t win. It can only kill and die. A successful leftist regime is a contradiction in terms. The hard revolutions blow up fast and then decay into prolonged misery. The soft electoral revolutions skip the explosions and cut right to the prolonged misery.

Europe went Full Socialist and gave up. Carter’s malaise has been a reality in Europe for generations.  What was four years in America was forty years in Europe. The American left’s great ambitions; bureaucratic rule, international impotence, national health care, endless education, environmental correctness and childbirth replaced by immigration were realized in Europe. And they killed Europe.

Now they’re killing America.

What can the left achieve when it no longer has to worry about a conservative opposition, budgets, democracy or any other obstacle to its great dreams? Cities filled with old men and women who never had children. Cities filled with young men and women who will never marry, who are still working on their fourth degree without ever having held a job. Cities filled with multi-generational welfare recipients who are also the only ones having children. Cities owned by foreign nations from their historic buildings to their imported booming populations. That was the great accomplishment of a united Europe.

No children, no jobs and no future. No great works, no civilizational progress and no golden age.

What stakes are to a vampire, victory is to the left. The left gains its creative energies from fighting against authority. Its entire reason for existing is to resist. In triumph, its writers become prostitutes for authority, its heroes become tyrants and its myths die on propaganda posters dissolving in the gutter.

The left gains its ideological legitimacy from reform. But what happens when it becomes the entity in need of reform? Then reform dies and the word comes to be used as a euphemism for oppression. All the ideas die while the slogans march on like zombies. Radicals kill and then are killed. The men and women who used to fill the gulags, die in them instead. Lenin becomes Stalin becomes Khrushchev.

Before you know it, no one remembers why there was a revolution or how to get rid of it.

The American left survived its last round of victories by losing elections. It won while maintaining the appearance of defeat. Now it has both the appearance and the substance of victory. Maddened social justice warriors lynch-tweet their own over trifles as the revolution’s children devour its elders in search of someone to fight.

The left has won and victory is killing it. It’s a slow miserable death for it, and for us. If we win, then a defeated and revitalized left will go back to fulminating and ranting, plotting and scheming its way to a victory that will kill it. If its victory becomes permanent, a generation from now Cuban sex tourists with pesos will be visiting the Socialist enclaves of Berkeley or Boston for their child prostitution needs.

SOURCE

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The Negotiator Strikes Again

Once again, Barack Obama has demonstrated his brand of “diplomacy,” which can only be described as “on my knees” statesmanship. He makes Neville Chamberlain look like Muhammad Ali.

After meeting with Raul Castro and other Latin American leaders over the weekend, our fearless leader announced he would be removing Cuba from the list of states supporting terrorists — his first move toward normalizing relations with Cuba. This comes on the heels of 18 months' worth of secret meetings between Obama’s and Castro’s negotiators. Considering what came of the negotiations, we can’t understand why it took 18 month, or even 18 days.

Obama reassured Congress that Cuba “has not provided any support for international terrorism” for at least the last six months, and, furthermore, “has provided assurances it will not support acts of international terrorism in the future.” And if you believe that we have some beautiful property in the Whitewater development at rock bottom prices.

As Washington Post columnist Marc Thiessen observes, “There will be no mention from the White House of terrorists being protected and supported by the Castro regime, such as Joanne Chesimard — who murdered a New Jersey state trooper and was named in 2013 by Obama’s own FBI as one of its Most Wanted Terrorists. There will be no mention of the 70 other U.S. fugitives that Obama’s own State Department reports ‘The Cuban government continued to harbor’ while providing ‘support such as housing, food ration books, and medical care’ — or of the Spanish and Colombian terrorists receiving similar support from the Castro brothers.”

Obama’s move puts him at odds with the previous 10 presidents — both Democrat and Republican — who have all recognized that Cuba’s anti-American, despotic communist government terrorizes its formerly prosperous, hard-working people, keeps them in poverty, and locks up political dissenters who often languish for years in Cuban prison holes.

The ignorance of the American public is Obama’s best hope. Leftmedia newsreaders cheer Obama’s “courageous” move to finally recognize our island neighbor, which they say has suffered under the U.S. embargo and its other unjust policies. At first, a majority of low-information Americans agree that Obama is doing the right thing. But when told that Cuba is harboring Russian ships in its ports, opposition for normalization rises to 58%. And, Thiessen notes, when told that Cuba “attempts to smuggle 240 tons of weaponry to North Korea, opposition jumps to 63 percent and support plummets to 26 percent. When … told that Cuba is harboring a cop-killer and terrorists, opposition jumps to 63 percent and support plummets to 23 percent … and when asked whether Cuba’s designation as a supporter of terrorism should be maintained because it harbors terrorists, respondents agreed 68 percent to 16 percent.”

Americans aren’t quite as dumb as you think, Señior Obama.

Being the consummate negotiator he is, as demonstrated with the Iranians, Obama displays his brilliant “give all, take nothing” diplomacy as he moves toward the goal of normalization. Castro refuses to complete the deal until the U.S. pulls out of Guantanamo Bay Naval Base, and, of course, our president would gladly oblige if that pesky Congress weren’t in the way. The military also sees Gitmo as essential to our national defense.

There also remains the small issue of congressional approval on the way to his lifting the trade embargo and later recognizing Cuba. But Obama doesn’t often concern himself with the niceties of constitutionality, so he could very well decide to recognize Cuba without Congress. Sadly, Congress will probably blather about it but do nothing else.

Obama has angered many Americans, including politicians on both sides of the aisle, with his apologizing to dictators for America’s offenses and now with his kissing up to the Castro regime.

Sen. Robert Menendez (D-NJ), whose parents came to America from Cuba just before his birth, said, “President Obama’s actions have vindicated the brutal behavior of the Cuban government.”

Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL), also born of Cuban immigrants, likewise slammed Obama’s actions. In a Wall Street Journal op-ed, Rubio wrote that Obama’s giving Castro’s regime diplomatic legitimacy “isn’t just bad for the oppressed Cuban people or for the millions who live in exile and lost everything at the hands of the dictatorship. Mr. Obama’s new Cuba policy is a victory for oppressive governments the world over and will have real, negative consequences for the American people.”

We have to say that all this comes as no surprise. Obama did promise to fundamentally transform the country, and his communist mentoring means he must lean in that direction. Actually, many people have suggested that’s where he stands. As Red State’s Erick Erickson writes, Obama’s “mentor, communist Frank Marshall Davis, would be proud of him.”

SOURCE

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Terrorists Planning Attack Along Our Southern Border

For months, we have been receiving reports that ISIS fighters have begun collaborating with Mexican cartels and training along the US-Mexico border.  Earlier reports have suggested that an attack was imminent.

Every time something like this is leaked, the Federal government categorically denies the findings. The same is true for the most recent allegations that ISIS is operating a camp just a few miles away from the border.

But while government officials discredit these reports, the FBI has gathered all of its area border assets to figure out who is leaking this information to the press. Fact.

This is where Obama’s open border policy can really bite us! So let’s review:

-       We have government officials who are warning news outlets that an attack is imminent.

-       We have leaked documents proving that terrorist chatter is up, especially concerning the US Border and Fort Bliss.

-       We have allegations that ISIS – with the help of the Cartels – is operating a training base just miles away from the border.  

And what is the administration doing? Instead of bolstering border security, Border Patrol agents are now allowed to skip patrols at certain border crossings deemed to be “too dangerous.” No, that’s not a joke. They are afraid of creating an “international incident” and some border agents are allowed to avoid entire areas of the border.

Think about that… There are wide stretches of land that border patrol agents actively avoid because they are officially deemed to be too dangerous to patrol…

Ranch owners have set up hundreds of cameras along the border and the results are shocking. Streams of illegal aliens are entering this country non-stop, and very few are being apprehended. What is even worse is that many of these illegals are carrying firearms right across the border.

Now, these men are suspected to be working for the cartels and helping smuggle weapons and drugs into the country. That's right, these guns were brought into the US from Mexico, not the other way around. But stop for a minute and imagine if these were terrorists…

We know the terrorists are working and training alongside the cartels. It is only a matter of time before we see terrorists crossing the border. That is, unless it has already happened.

The government can deny these reports all it wants. That hasn’t stopped these federal employees from blowing the whistle and warning the American people about this.

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, 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. I also put up occasional updates on my Personal blog and each day I gather together my most substantial current writings on A WESTERN HEART.

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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A summary of a psychopath

Hillary's numerous and foolish lies are typical of a psychopath

Hillary Clinton campaigns for the immigrant vote in Iowa:

”All my grandparents, you know, came over here [to America],” Hillary Clinton claimed, reinforcing her immigration reform bona fides.

Except, of course, it’s another Hillary lie - one so astonishingly obvious that you can only conclude that she lies reflexively and habitually.

Only one of her grandparents was born overseas, although another was the child of immigrants, forcing Clinton’s staff to offer this cringing explanation:

“Her grandparents always spoke about the immigrant experience and, as a result she has always thought of them as immigrants,” a Clinton spokesman told BuzzFeed News.

Remember this lie?:

The Clinton campaign says Senator Hillary Clinton may have “misspoke” recently when she said she had to evade sniper fire when she was visiting Bosnia in 1996 as first lady…

She has been using the episode as an example of her foreign policy bona fides.

“I certainly do remember that trip to Bosnia,” she said last week. “...I remember landing under sniper fire. There was supposed to be some kind of a greeting ceremony at the airport, but instead we just ran with our heads down to get into the vehicles to get to our base.”

But her account has been challenged, first by Sinbad, the comedian, who traveled with her, and then by news organizations, most notably the Washington Post, which awarded her four “Pinnochios” which it gives for major “whoppers.”

A number of videos have been posted to YouTube juxtaposing a CBS news report with Mrs. Clinton’s statements last week:

Roger Stone recounts more Hillary lies:

As Hillary’s now infamous email scandal demonstrates, in which Madam Secretary purposely used private email to conduct government business and escape disclosure requirements, telling the truth is outside her DNA. For instance, during the sole time Hillary publicly addressed this issue at the UN press conference, she claimed that some of the deleted emails were between Bill and her. Yet the Wall Street Journal reported only hours before the press conference that the impeached former president has “sent a grand total of two emails during his entire life.”

She also got busted lying about having one computer device when proof existed that she used two…

Whitewater was a failed real estate venture which lost money for all equity partners but siphoned $800,000 in campaign funds to Bill Clinton’s campaign and paid Hillary’s law firm handsomely. As First Lady, Hillary was caught criminally defying 1994 congressional and federal subpoenas. During the Whitewater investigation, a grand jury subpoena was issued for all of Rose Law Firm billing records. Rose Law Firm claimed that the documents were destroyed and the Clintons claimed that they did not have them. Yet two years later, the Rose billing records were discovered in the personal residence of the White House by a staffer. Hillary, of course, claimed no wrongdoing.

In January 2001, a scandal broke when Hillary was caught taking artwork and furniture from the White House. She claimed that these items were given to Bill and her as gifts during their years in the White House. However, less than a month later on February 8th, Hillary agreed to return $28,000 worth of gifts to the White House and pay in restitution $86,000 for china, flatware, rugs, televisions, sofas and other items which was only 50 percent of the value.

This brings up another issue. If Hillary was able to make an $86,000 vanity purchase in February 2008, then why did she describe herself as “dead broke” upon leaving the White House?…

Of course Hillary has often lied about her biography for convenience as well. Since at least 1995, Hillary claimed that her mother named her after Sir Edmund Hillary, the first climber to reach the summit of Mount Everest. Bill even mentioned this anecdote in his autobiography. The only problem, Hillary was born in 1947 and Sir Edmund did complete his historic feat until 1953.

Mona Charen on perhaps the most disgusting Hillary lie:

...let’s not forget what it took for Mrs. Clinton to lie to the grieving father of an American hero…

A convoy of well-armed terrorists rolled into the complex housing the American consulate in Benghazi on September 11, 2012. The attackers sealed off streets leading to the consulate with trucks and then commenced the attack on the building using rocket-propelled grenades, AK-47s, mortars, and artillery mounted on trucks.... The terrorists killed Ambassador Stevens and another American and set the building ablaze.  (Two more Americans would die later attempting to protect the annex.)… [N]o help arrived…

As soon as the next morning, Congressman Mike Rogers, chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, described the attack as a “commando-style event” with “coordinated fire, direct fire, [and] indirect fire.” A few days later the Libyan president said that it was a planned terrorist attack…

Yet a well-orchestrated disinformation campaign by the Obama administration managed to put the press off the story and mislead the American people… At 10:32 on the night of the attack, Secretary Clinton issued a statement deploring violence in response to “inflammatory material posted on the Internet.” In the days that followed, the president and his spokesman repeatedly invoked the supposedly offensive video as the cause of the attack. The president and secretary of state even filmed commercials to play in Muslim countries denouncing the video ...

But as the State Department finally disclosed a month after the attack..., there was no protest outside the American consulate in Benghazi. Nothing. Not a peep. As the Rhodes memo makes clear, the president sent his U.N. ambassador to the Sunday shows to lie. Susan Rice was “to underscore that these protests are rooted in an Internet video, and not a broader failure of policy."…

When the Libyan ambassador to the U.S. apologized to [Clinton] on September 13 for the “terror attack,” she ignored this and burbled on about “The Innocence of Muslims.” The president, the vice president, and Mrs. Clinton welcomed the bodies of Chris Stevens, Tyrone Woods, Sean Smith, and Glen Doherty to Andrews Air Force base on September 14.

According to Woods’s father,… Mrs. Clinton stayed on message. She greeted the man whose son who had bravely attempted to fight off far more numerous and better-armed terrorists on the roof of the CIA annex and who gave his life… Did she express regret that [his son] had been left nearly alone to fight off the Islamist terrorists? No… She told Mr. Woods that they would catch the guy who made the Internet film and make sure he was punished.

SOURCE

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Reality is Optional for the Left

By Walter E. Williams

One of the wonders of modern times is that reality is often seen as a social construct and therefore optional. Thus, if one finds a particular reality offensive or inconvenient, he just "changes" it.

Say that one is born a male or a female but believes that nature made an error. Some believe that nature's "error" can be corrected by calling oneself another sex. Possibly a medical procedure on one's genitalia can correct nature's error. However, Mother Nature is ruthless. Sex determination is strictly chromosomal. Females are XX, and males are XY. There is no medical procedure that can change that. Once a male or female, always a male or female.

What about the chant "Hands up; don't shoot," echoed during street demonstrations and rioting and even in the halls of Congress? The lie was that Michael Brown had held his hands up to surrender to a white racist Ferguson, Missouri, police officer, Darren Wilson, who then shot him in cold blood. Even after it was proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that the reality was entirely different, it didn't matter. "Hands up; don't shoot" became the chant across the land.

"More women are victims of domestic violence on Super Bowl Sunday than on any other day of the year." That's the lie produced by feminists in 1993. It received a boost at this year's Super Bowl game in a 30-second, multimillion-dollar ad co-sponsored by the NFL, currying favor with women's groups as a result of a few players' misbehavior. Regarding the grossly bogus study, feminist writer Christina Hoff Sommers concluded, "How a belief in that misandrist canard can make the world a better place for women is not explained."

When President Barack Obama swapped five Taliban terrorists for U.S. Army Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl, now charged with desertion, he gave us some historical insights. Obama said, "This (exchange of prisoners) is what happens at the end of wars." He added: "That was true for George Washington. That was true for Abraham Lincoln. That was true for FDR. That's been true of every combat situation, that at some point, you make sure that you try to get your folks back. And that's the right thing to do."

There was a bit of a history problem with Obama's claim. George Washington did not become president until 1789, six years after the Revolutionary War's end in 1783. There were no prisoners for him to exchange.

Lincoln was assassinated April 14, 1865. The Civil War ended June 2, 1865. Lincoln was dead and didn't have the opportunity to exchange prisoners at the war's end.

Franklin D. Roosevelt died of a stroke April 12, 1945. The war in Europe ended May 8, 1945. The Japanese empire surrendered Aug. 15, 1945.

The historical fact of business is that none of the presidents Obama mentioned was in office at the time that his war ended, so how in the world could they make prisoner swaps as Obama asserted?

Gun control advocates argue that stricter gun control laws would reduce murders. They ignore the fact that Brazil, Mexico and Russia have some of the strictest gun control laws but murder rates higher than ours. On the other hand, Switzerland and Israel have higher gun ownership rates than we but much lower murder rates. These are realities that gun controllers ignore.

Another reality completely ignored in the gun control debate is the reason the Founding Fathers gave Second Amendment protections. Alexander Hamilton wrote, "If the representatives of the people betray their constituents, there is then no recourse left but in the exertion of that original right of self-defense which is paramount to all positive forms of government."

Thomas Jefferson wrote, "What country can preserve (its) liberties if (its) rulers are not warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of resistance? Let them take arms." I leave it up to you to decide what representatives and rulers the founders were talking about.

SOURCE

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The great deceiver again

It's no surprise that Barack Obama likes to misrepresent his policies and his record. The latest example is the whopper he told a town-hall audience in Charlotte about his record on taxes and spending. "If you listen to some of my political critics, they always want to paint me or the Democratic Party as this tax-and-spend, you know, irresponsible," he complained. "Since I came into office, the federal deficit's come down by two-thirds."

He loves this line because his adoring audiences don't know the difference between "debt" and "deficit," and because it allows him to leave out two particularly inconvenient truths: First, he and his party nearly quadrupled the deficit before the Tea Party gave Republicans control of the House in 2010; and second, the national debt has gone from $10.6 trillion to more than $18 trillion since Obama took office.

But, hey, he cut the deficit! Furthermore, Obama's never met a tax he didn't like, and he's always looking for new "investments" to make in education, infrastructure, job training, or any number of other leftist programs. Raise taxes, spend more money, repeat. That's the Democrat way.

SOURCE

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Hillary's Income Inequality Platform Problem

While Hillary Clinton established her campaign on reducing income inequality, she has not practiced what she preached. “Americans have fought their way back from tough economic times, but the deck is still stacked in favor of those at the top,” Clinton said in the video announcing her presidential campaign “Everyday Americans need a champion, and I want to be that champion.”

Sure, Clinton can talk all she wants, but her platform places her between the idealistic Left and her salary. Progressives are beginning to say a $15-an-hour wage is the only wage they will support, probably to the chagrin of Seattle small businesses that have to close because of the city’s $15-an-hour wage experiment.

And Hillary has acted precisely like the CEOs and one-percenters she lambasts. Her $200,000-an-hour speaking gigs place her firmly in the filthy rich category. Furthermore, she directs all her salary through her foundation, so she avoids paying taxes. The income deck is, indeed, stacked in her favor

SOURCE

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No Tip for You!

Hillary Clinton is “hitting the road to earn your vote,” but she managed to visit an Ohio Chipotle restaurant without actually interacting with or being recognized by anybody. Even the employees didn’t know she was there until after she left. But maybe that was a good thing, since she didn’t leave a tip. The store manager said, “Her bill was $20 and some change, and they paid with $21 and left” without putting anything in the counter tip jar.

Normally, it’s not a huge deal to skip the tip at a fast food restaurant when no particular person is serving you at a table. Indeed, even the manager played it off as no big deal.

But Hillary is worth north of $100 million and hauls in $300,000 just for making a speech. Surely she could spare a few bucks for the hard-working people at Chipotle when she had the opportunity to make a difference — if for nothing else than a photo-op of her caring generosity. After all, she tells us “everyday Americans need a champion.” Evidently, that champion isn’t her.

SOURCE

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

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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Quick thinkers are born not made: The speed at which we process new information is written in our genes

The journal article for that is: "GWAS for executive function and processing speed suggests involvement of the CADM2 gene".  Processing speed is one aspect of IQ so this is another genetic contribution to IQ identified.

It has long been agreed that IQ is affected by many genes but an earlier article in the same series ("Genetic contributions to variation in general cognitive function: a meta-analysis of genome-wide association studies in the CHARGE consortium (N=53949)" shows that 28% to 29% of the genes affecting IQ have now been identified:  "The proportion of phenotypic variation accounted for by all genotyped common SNPs [single-nucleotide polymorphism] was 29% and 28%"

The first article in the series was "Genome-wide Studies of Verbal Declarative Memory in Nondemented Older People: The Cohorts for Heart and Aging Research in Genomic Epidemiology Consortium".  It isolated genes for memory performance, also important to IQ

"General cognitive function" is basically just a euphemism for IQ  -- less likely to frighten the horses. It is encouraging to see the long list of academics involved in the studies above.  Interest in studying "general cognitive function" is obviously widespread, despite its political incorrectness. Layman's account of the first study mentioned above given below


Quick thinkers are born not made, claim scientists.  They have discovered a link between our genes and the ability to remain mentally on the ball in later life.  It is the first time a genetic link has been shown to explain why some people have quick thinking skills.

Researchers identified a common genetic variant – changes in a person’s genetic code – related to how quickly a person is able to process new information.  The researchers say the finding could help understand how the brain works, and why some people develop mental decline, while others do not.

Professor Ian Deary, director of the centre for cognitive ageing and cognitive epidemiology at the University of Edinburgh and a co-author on the study, said: ‘Processing speed is thought to be a core capability for preserving other mental skills in older age.

‘This inkling into why some people's processing speed is more efficient than others is a small but encouraging advance in understanding the biological foundations of more efficient thinking.’

Professor Deary said the study found one variant with a relation to processing speed.  He said: ‘The genetic difference that was significantly related to slight slowing of processing speed was one that about one third of the population have.’

The Cohorts for Heart and Aging Research in Genomic Epidemiology (CHARGE) Consortium, which includes experts at the University of Edinburgh, brought together data from 12 different countries on 30,000 people, aged more than 45 years old.

The participants – none of whom had dementia – took cognitive function tests that included tests of simple, repeated coding under pressure of time.

Researchers then processed the results alongside details of each person’s genome to identify genetic variants or changes associated with speed of thinking skills.

People with slower processing speed overall were found to have variants near a gene called CADM2.

The CADM2 gene is linked to the communication process between brain cells - the gene is particularly active in the frontal and cingulate cortex in the brain, which are areas of the brain involved in thinking speed.

Professor Deary said the study examined the genetic contribution to processing speed differences among middle-aged and older people.

‘This is important because, as people age, when processing speed slows down there tends to be reduced efficiency of other thinking skills too, like reasoning executive functions, and some aspects of memory,' he said.

‘So it is important to understand the mechanisms by which people differ in their processing speed.'

Lead researcher Dr Carla Ibrahim-Verbaas, resident in Neurology at Erasmus University Medical Center in Rotterdam, said: ‘We have identified a genetic variant which partly explains the differences in information processing speed between people.

‘Our study confirms the likely role of CADM2 in between-cell communication, and therefore cognitive performance. It is of interest that the gene has also been linked to autism and personality traits.’

The study complements two other recent discoveries by the CHARGE team, which identified genetic variants associated with memory performance and general cognitive functioning in older adults.

The study, published in Molecular Psychiatry journal, involved researchers in Australia, Austria, Croatia, Finland, France, Germany, Holland, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, the UK and the US.

SOURCE

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An interesting answer to Mrs Obama

Why is the woman below so healthy?  According to Mrs Obama and the food dictators she should be dead.  There are many examples of extreme diets doing no harm.  It's doubtful if anybody knows what an unhealthy diet is. Eskimos living on a traditional diet eat little else but meat and blubber.  It's difficult to grow vegetables at the North pole.  It's a definite that neither broccoli nor Brussels sprouts are needful for a healthy diet



A young woman says she lives on almost nothing but Rice Krispies – and insists she is still healthier than most people.

Natalie Swindells, 26, eats four bowls of the cereal every day. She can’t face eating much else and has not tasted a vegetable for nearly two decades.

The bank worker, who says she has never taken a day off sick, stopped eating most other foods from the age of two. She now believes overeating causes more health problems than having a very restricted diet like her own.

‘I think doctors overestimate the amount of vitamins that we need to be healthy,’ she said.  ‘I think it is about how much you eat, not what you’re eating.’

In a typical day, Miss Swindells will have two bowls of Rice Krispies with milk for breakfast, followed by a slice of bread and butter for lunch, and two bowls of Rice Krispies again for dinner.

She will also occasionally eat milk chocolate, ready salted crisps and chips. Although she consumes fewer than half of the recommended 2,000 calories for women Miss Swindells still has an active lifestyle. She lives in Macclesfield with her boyfriend Daniel Walsh, 26, who she says has grown accustomed to her strange eating habits.  ‘He’s pretty cool with it,’ she said.

In fact, the last time she tasted a vegetable was 18 years ago, when her mother tried to make her eat a roast dinner – and failed.

SOURCE

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Hillary’s Ungainly Glide

PEGGY NOONAN

Hillary Clinton’s announcement followed by her dark-windowed SUV journey into deepest darkest America was the most inept, phony, shallow, slickily-slick and meaningless launch of a presidential candidacy I have ever seen. We have come to quite a pass when the Clintons can’t even do the show business of politics well. The whole extravaganza has the look of profound incompetence and disorganization—no one could have been thinking this through—or profound cynicism, or both. It has yielded only one good thing, and that is a memorable line, as Mrs. Clinton glided by reporters: “We do have a plan. We have a plan for my plan.” That is how the Washington Post quoted her, on ideas on campaign finance reform.

Marco Rubio had a pretty great announcement in that it made the political class look at him in a new way, and a better way. I have heard him talk about his father the bartender I suppose half a dozen times, yet hearing it again in his announcement moved me. I don’t know how that happened. John Boehner is the son of a barkeep. It has occurred to me a lot recently that many if not most of the people I see in the highest reaches of American life now come from relatively modest circumstances. Rubio is right that this is our glory, but I’m thinking one of the greatest things about America is a larger point: There’s room for everybody. You can rise if you come from one of the most established, wealthiest families, and you can rise if you came from nothing.

I have promised myself I will stop talking about the musical “Hamilton” and so will not note that this is one of the points made in the musical “Hamilton”: America was special in this regard from the beginning, with landed gentry like Jefferson and Washington working side by side with those such as the modestly born Ben Franklin and the lowborn Alexander Hamilton. But now it is more so. Anyway, back to Rubio: “Yesterday’s over” was good, and strict, and was a two shot applying as much to the Clintons as the Bushes.

Two points on the general feel of the 2016 campaign so far.

One is that in the case of Mrs. Clinton we are going to see the press act either like the press of a great nation—hungry, raucous, alive, demanding—or like a hopelessly sickened organism, a big flailing octopus with no strength in its arms, lying like a greasy blob at the bottom of the sea, dying of ideology poisoning.

Republicans know—they see it every day—that Republican candidates get grilled, sometimes impertinently, and pressed, sometimes brusquely. And it isn’t true that they’re only questioned in this way once they announce, Scott Walker has been treated like this also, and he has yet to announce. Republicans see this, and then they see that Mrs. Clinton isn’t grilled, is never forced to submit to anyone’s morning-show impertinence, is never the object of the snotty question or the sharp demand for information. She gets the glide. She waves at the crowds and the press and glides by. No one pushes. No one shouts the rude question or rolls out the carefully scripted set of studio inquiries meant to make the candidate squirm. She is treated like the queen of England, who also isn’t subjected to impertinent questions as she glides into and out of venues. But she is the queen. We are not supposed to have queens.

Second point: We have simply never had a dynamic like the one that seems likely to prevail next year.

On the Republican side there is a good deep bench and there will be a hell of a fight among serious and estimable contenders. A handful of them—Ted Cruz, Rand Paul, Rubio, maybe Bobby Jindal—are first-rate debaters, sharp advancers of a thought and a direction. Their debates, their campaigning, their oppo geniuses, their negative ads—it’s all going to be bloody. Will the American people look at them in 2016 and see dynamism and excitement and youth and actual ideas and serious debate? Will it look like that’s where the lightning’s striking and the words have meaning? Will it fortify and revivify the Republican brand? Or will it all look like mayhem and chaos? Will the eventual winner emerge a year from now too bloodied, too damaged to go on and win in November? Will the party itself look bloody and damaged?

On the Democratic side we have Mrs. Clinton, gliding. If she has no serious competition, will the singularity of her situation make her look stable, worthy of reflexive respect, accomplished, serene, the obvious superior choice? Or will Hillary alone on the stage, or the couch, or in the tinted-window SUV, look entitled, presumptuous, old, boring, imperious, yesterday?

Will it all come down to bloody versus boring? And which would America prefer?

SOURCE

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How Much Do the Top 1 Percent Pay of All Taxes?,/b>

Ever since President Obama started running for president in 2007, there has been a debate about how much tax rich Americans pay and whether they should pay more.

In that ongoing debate, Paul Krugman and Matt Yglesias criticized the chart below because, according to them, it does not give a complete picture of the tax burden borne by Americans because it only includes the federal income tax.

Since the rich pay a higher share of federal income taxes than of total federal taxes, they argued we were misleading by making it look like the rich pay a higher share of taxes than they do.

We responded to them here and here. In those responses, we showed we weren’t being misleading because we make plain the chart includes only federal income tax. Furthermore, examining the federal income tax makes sense because President Obama has long wanted to raise it on the rich.

We also agreed that it made sense to look at the total federal tax burden, in addition to federal income taxes, to offer additional context to the debate.

In that spirit, here is a new chart that shows the burden of all federal taxes, including individual income, corporate income, payroll, excise and other miscellaneous taxes:

It still shows the same story: Top earners pay a disproportionately large share of the federal tax burden.

The top 10 percent pays 53.3 percent of all federal taxes. When looking at just federal income taxes, they pay 68 percent of the burden.

The top 1 percent pays 24 percent of all federal taxes compared to 35 percent of all federal income taxes.

The data for total federal taxes comes from the Congressional Budget Office. The data for federal income taxes comes from the IRS. Heritage has not altered the data from either in any way, except to combine income categories in the Congressional Budget Office data.

The top 10 percent and top 1 percent pay smaller shares of the tax burden when looking at total federal taxes than federal income taxes because the payroll tax, which accounts for more than a third of all federal tax receipts, is more evenly distributed than the income tax. But the corporate tax tempers that effect because it falls mostly (75 percent according to Congressional Budget Office) on shareholders, most of whom earn higher incomes, although not all of them.

Neither chart makes a judgment on whether those top earners pay too much or if they should pay more. The purpose of the original chart and this one is simply to give the American people facts.

More HERE. (See the original for links and graphics)

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

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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Ancient Chinese capitalism

An interesting post on Quora by an old China hand

If I could only share one thing from China I think it would be the Chinese philosophy of Daoism. A lot of people think that capitalism has no respectable political theory behind it but the philosophy of Daoism is over 2500 years old and articulates the theory of libertarian government and laissez faire economics a mere two millennia before Adam Smith.

The political philosophy of an Emperor governing by doing as little as possible, by dismantling all government programs like rice storage and irrigation works. The economic theory that if left alone, farmers will grow what is needed, by responding to climate and soil and market prices. Goods in excess in one place or period, will be transported or stored so as to fetch a higher price where they are more needed. Without the government lifting a hand, goods in excess in a place of plenty will be transferred by merchants to a place of drought or shortage. Without the government building stores and compulsorily seizing crops against a bad winter, merchants will buy the cheap grain and store it to be sold when supply runs out.

Hence the complete lack of need for the traditional strong central government prescribed by the Confucian system. It was tried in the Early Han and worked brilliantly, but the scholars hated the idea of a rich merchant class which could compete with them for privilege and status, so they had a big meeting and got the Emperor to abandons Daoist economics for government monopolies which they could control for their own benefit.

Just think, if the Emperor had seen through the scheming scholars, China might have become capitalist half a millennium before Europe!

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China, Not America, Rescues Its Own Citizens Stuck in Yemen

As the situation in Yemen continues to deteriorate, consider this striking contrast between the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and the United States.

One country dispatched naval forces to evacuate its citizens from the collapsing Middle East state. In the process, they evacuated citizens from 10 other countries, including Great Britain, Japan and Germany.

The other country closed its embassy nearly a month ago, but did not evacuate its own citizens who remained behind. Instead, it told them that they were on their own, providing information for contacting other nations’ embassies. That country’s foreign ministry spokesperson observed that the use of military assets would only raise the level of risk.

Which country did which?

It might surprise you that the country that actively evacuated citizens from multiple countries was the People’s Republic of China. Or that it was the American State Department whose spokesperson Marie Harf dismissed the idea of using American military assets to evacuate its citizens.

The Chinese Navy, of course, has been steadily expanding its capabilities, so we should not be surprised that it can conduct such operations.

What is surprising is that the U.S. Navy, whose recent messaging centered on the tagline “A force for good,” should be so absent from the evacuation effort. It’s certainly not because the U.S. is absent from the region.

Indeed, even as Chinese and Indian naval elements have been evacuating citizens from various countries, the American military has been providing assistance to the Saudis, who are conducting airstrikes into Yemen.

One can only wonder what the administration sees as its primary responsibility. As it pulls out the stops on the Iran deal, there are American citizens in Yemen who are undoubtedly wondering where they fit on government priorities.

SOURCE

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Income Inequality: Married Couples With Kids Make Average of $107,054

If American politicians wanted to drive down the income of the American people and make this a poorer nation — and they actually studied the government's own data about who does well financially in the United States — they would seek to advance policies that discourage traditional family life and child-rearing.

Married couples with children under 18 years of age, according to the Census Bureau's Current Population Survey (Table HINC-04), made an average household income of $107,054 in 2013 and a median household income of $85,087.

"A married couple, as defined for census purposes, is a husband and wife enumerated as members of the same household," says the Census Bureau in its list of definitions used in the Current Population Survey.

How do a husband and wife with kids compare to Americans living in other social arrangements?

Well, married couples with no children under 18 had an average household income of $91,870 in 2013 and a median household income of $70,995. That was about 86 percent of the average household income and 83 percent of median household income earned by their married counterparts who did have children under 18.

Unmarried couples with children under 18 had an average household income of $65,337 and a median of $50,031. That was only about 61 percent of the average income and 59 percent of median household income of their married counterparts.

Unmarried couples with no children did only a little bit better, with average household incomes of $76,609 and median household incomes of $62,126. That was only about 72 percent of the average household income and 73 percent of the median household income of married couples with kids.

Nonfamily male householders with no minor children had an average household income of $53,217 and a median of $36,600. That was only about 50 percent of the average household income and 43 percent of the median household income of married couples with kids.

Nonfamily female households with no minor children had an average household income of $39,781 and a median of $26,355. That was only 37 percent of the average household income and 31 percent of the median household income of married couples with children.

Of course, many young unmarried Americans who have no children today will get married and have children in the future.

The Census Bureau data shows that Americans who become part of a married couple follow a higher household income trajectory than those who live alone or in nonfamily households.

According to the bureau's Table HINC-02, married couple families with householders 24 years old or younger have an average household income of $48,275 and a median household income of $41,360.

By the time these married couple families are in the 35-to-39 age bracket, their average household income surpasses six figures at $104,696 and their median household income is $83,609.

The median income of married couple families peaks at $94,780 in the 45-to-49 age bracket and the average income peaks at $118,190 in the 50-to-54 age bracket.

According to the Census Bureau married couple families spend their retirement years (65 and over) with average ($74,978) and median ($53,856) household incomes higher than the overall average ($72,641) and median ($51,939) household incomes for all age brackets.

By contrast, the median household income of nonfamily households peaks at $48,269 when the householder is 30 to 34 years old and the average household income of nonfamily households peaks at $61,436 when the householder is in the 25-to-29 age bracket.

Male householders living alone hit a peak median household income of $41,187 when they are 40-to-44 years old and a peak average household income of $57,110 in that same age bracket. That is only about 43 percent of the peak median income ($94,780) of the married couple family and only about 48 percent of the peak average income ($118,190) of the married couple family.

Why do married couples with kids have higher household incomes?

Perhaps it is because they are not primarily driven by greed but something quite the opposite: a willingness to make sacrifices so their children may live better lives.

It is telling that married couples with children tend to end up with higher incomes than people who only need to maintain a household for themselves.

And it is a telling irony that some politicians would like to redistribute wealth from the former type of household to the latter while making fewer people dependent on themselves and their families and more dependent on government.

SOURCE

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Congress Scores Political Victory Over Obama in Iran Deal

The Senate Foreign Relations Committee forced Barack Obama to back away from his one-man approach to negotiations with Iran. Under Sen. Bob Corker’s leadership, the committee on Tuesday passed a bill that would require Congress review Obama’s deal with Iran before lifting sanctions against the country. The bill passed 19-0 and is expected to pass both chambers with veto-proof majorities.

Before the bill broke out of committee, Obama lobbied Congress to stay out of his dealings with Iran and its nuclear program. Now, Obama’s saying he may sign the legislation, cowing to the rightful demands of Congress.

But Corker’s bill is far from perfect. Conservative commentator Noah Pollack tweeted, “The way Corker & Graham wrote their bill, Obama will win Congressional approval of Iran deal with only 34 votes. Ponder that.”

In other words, a decision not to approve Obama’s bill faces the challenge of herding all the cats of Congress in the same direction. The Wall Street Journal argues the ideal role of Congress is to pass a treaty because nuclear deals should not be sealed with talk and a handshake. Corker’s bill is a victory, but merely a political one.

SOURCE

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The Armenian genocide was also a jihad

by Jeff Jacoby

UNLIKE SOME of Pope Francis's other headline-generating pronouncements, his description of Turkey's mass murder of 1.5 million Armenians during World War I as "genocide" was anything but inadvertent.

Speaking at the Vatican during a Sunday mass to mark the centenary of the slaughter, the pope said it is "widely considered the first genocide of the 20th century" — a quote from Pope John Paul II, who used nearly the same words in 2001. But Francis went further, equating the destruction of the Armenians to the Nazi Holocaust and the Soviet bloodbaths under Stalin. And he linked the genocidal Ottoman assault on Armenia, the world's oldest Christian nation, with the epidemic of violence against Christians today, especially by such radical Islamist terror groups as ISIS, Boko Haram, and al-Shabaab.

Turkey reacted angrily, recalling its ambassador to the Vatican and accusing Francis of distorting history and spreading prejudice. On Twitter, the Turkish foreign minister denounced the pope for fueling "hatred and animosity" with his "unfounded allegations." That was no surprise, given the government's vehement history of denialism on the subject. To this day, the use of the word "genocide" to describe the killing of the Armenians is a criminal offense in Turkey, and Turkish diplomats labor mightily to defeat genocide-recognition efforts worldwide.

The journalist Thomas de Waal wrote recently in Foreign Affairs that "no other historical issue causes such anguish in Washington." The political debate over "the G-Word" has consumed countless hours, even as the historical debate — as the pope suggested — has been largely resolved. As de Waal explains, Turkey is so adamant for reasons both material and psychological. Some Turkish politicians fear that acknowledging the Ottoman-perpetrated genocide could trigger claims for financial reparations or territorial concessions. But beyond that is "the emotive power of the word," which was coined in the wake of the Holocaust and is indelibly linked in the public mind with the absolute evil of the Final Solution. "No one willingly admits to committing genocide," writes de Waal, and many Turks seethe at "being invited to compare their grandparents to the Nazis."

Yet Turkish authorities weren't always so reluctant to accurately label the genocidal evil unleashed against the Armenians a century ago.

Talaat Pasha, the powerful Ottoman interior minister during World War I, certainly didn't disguise his objective. "The Government … has decided to destroy completely all the indicated [Armenians] persons living in Turkey," he brusquely reminded officials in Aleppo in a September 1915 dispatch. "An end must be put to their existence … and no regard must be paid to either age or sex, or to conscientious scruples."

US Ambassador Henry Morgenthau, flooded with accounts of the torture, death marches, and butchery being inflicted on the Armenians, remonstrated with Talaat to no avail. "It is no use for you to argue," Morgenthau was told. "We have already disposed of three quarters of the Armenians…. The hatred between the Turks and Armenians is now so intense that we have got to finish them. If we don't, they will plan their revenge…. We will not have the Armenians anywhere in Anatolia."

If some of them survived, it wasn't for lack of effort by the killers. Of the roughly 2 million Armenians living in the country in 1914, 90 percent were gone by 1918. The death toll was well over one million; innumerable others fled for their lives. To read eyewitness descriptions of the ghastly cruelties the Armenian Christians were made to suffer a century ago is to be reminded that the jihadist savagery of ISIS and al-Qaeda is not an innovation.

That key fact is one the pope, to his credit, refuses to downplay: Armenians were victims not only of genocide, but also of jihad. In imploring his listeners on Sunday to hear the "muffled and forgotten cry" of endangered Christians who today are "ruthlessly put to death — decapitated, crucified, burned alive — or forced to leave their homeland," Francis was reminding the world that the price of irresolution in the face of determined Islamist violence is as steep as ever.

The jihadists of 1915 murdered "bishops and priests, religious women and men, the elderly, and even defenseless children and the infirm." The world knew what was happening; the grisly details were extensively reported at the time. Just as they are now, and with as little effect.

SOURCE

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

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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