Racial quotas for elections?

Leftist racism marches on

Voters in Port Chester, 25 miles northeast of New York City, are electing village trustees for the first time since the federal government alleged in 2006 that the existing election system was unfair. The election ends Tuesday and results are expected late Tuesday.

Although the village of about 30,000 residents is nearly half Hispanic, no Latino had ever been elected to any of the six trustee seats, which until now were chosen in a conventional at-large election. Most voters were white, and white candidates always won.

Federal Judge Stephen Robinson said that violated the Voting Rights Act, and he approved a remedy suggested by village officials: a system called cumulative voting, in which residents get six votes each to apportion as they wish among the candidates. He rejected a government proposal to break the village into six districts, including one that took in heavily Hispanic areas.

SOURCE

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L.A. Times blogger does a great job on President Emptyhead

Some scathing words by Andrew Malcolm below

For all his reputation as the nation's Top Talker, Barack Obama took his sweet time giving a maiden Oval Office address to the country. And waiting another nearly 60 days to speak nationally about the oil spill that’s become the worst environmental disaster in the nation’s history.

Obama, the first modern president to pass his first full year in office without addressing the country from his historic desk, had the setting right. Just back from a day-and-a-half on the gulf coast listening, reassuring, talking tourism, eating seafood. He wore the proper suit, had the requisite flags and family photos in the background.

For 18 minutes he delivered the words crisply and forthrightly, though too often distracting anxious viewers with his fidgeting hands like the lecturing professor he once was. Or wait! Was Mr. Cool nervous? (See video below.)

Obama had the firmness down OK: Make no mistake etc. We will hold BP accountable etc. He....

...had the God references. The talk of real live shrimpers devastated. An American way of life threatened. And though he likened the spill more to an epidemic, he also brought in the requisite battle metaphors. And, in case anyone hasn't heard by now, Obama noted has another Nobel Prize winner in his cabinet, Stephen Chu, who hasn't been able to stop the oil leak either.
But there was something wrong. The first two-thirds of the president's remarks read just fine (Full text over here on The Ticket as usual). By golly, we’ll get the money, we’ll clean it up, no matter how long it takes.
Democrat president Barack walks to the Oval Office shortly before his national speech 6-15-10

But watching the president and hearing him was a little creepy; that early portion of the address was robotic, lacked real energy, enthusiasm. And worst of all specifics. He was virtually detail-less.

After almost two months of waiting through continuously contradictory reports, an anxious American public wanted to know, HOW are you going to accomplish all this?

Even Obama's cheerleaders over at MSNBC were complaining. "Where was the How in this speech?" demanded Keith Olbermann. Seriously.

Everyone's assumed that fixing the leak was a given since Day Four, which was still five days before the Democrat got his big plane and presidential entourage down there.

Local gulf coast officials are tearing out their hair trying to comprehend and comply with seventeen (as in seven more than 10) federal agencies falling all over themselves to do The Boss’ bidding and help and impose and superimpose their visions and regulations on what is a war zone with hundreds of ships and some 30,000 people involved, many of them frightened. And all of them inexperienced on a disaster of this scale.

Trust me, the president said, tomorrow I'm going to give those BP execs what-for. As CBS' Mark Knoller noted on his Twitter account, the president has allotted exactly 20 whole minutes this morning -- 1,200 fleeting seconds -- to his first-ever conversation with the corporation responsible for the disaster.

Then, he's got an important lunch with Joe "I Witnessed the World Cup's First Tie" Biden.

Well, just-believe-in-my-change-to-believe-in may have been good enough to win Obama's party primaries and the general election in 2008 and drag along into office enormous congressional majorities of fellow party travelers.
Democrat president Barack Obama gives his first Oval Office Speech 6-15-10

But after yelling "JOBS!" for a year and getting a protracted Democratic intra-party fight over Obama's beloved healthcare instead, Americans wanted some Oval Office specifics Tuesday evening on stopping the uncontrolled undersea oil escape.

Instead, Obama was like a Harvard-trained nurse talking vacation to a new patient bleeding all over the ER floor. Hello, could we please stop the blood flow here before we discuss the long-term recovery?

Obama’s delivery did not really come alive until the end when the ex-community organizer got into his favorite Big Picture stuff. Memo to American Homeowners: Do not call Obama over to fix your leaking roof – or pipe. Have him design a new house, no, better yet an entire neighborhood or city from scratch.

Following the advice of his chief of staff, Rahm "I Got a Rent-Free Apartment from a BP Adviser" Emanuel, Obama is determined to leave no crisis unused. When he got into the decades-long fossil fuel addiction rehab stuff, his eyes shone. His delivery punched up.

Now, that is an issue that requires greatness. Another galactic reform out of Hyde Park. It sounds swell unless mega-trillion-dollar federal deficits are on your mind, which voter polls now show ranks with terrorism as Americans' top fears.
Obama’s historic presidential campaign was not only big in terms of an unprecedented three-quarters of a billion dollars to win. It was about Big Promises. He was going to change America, radically reform the entire education system, healthcare, comb the entire federal budget line-by-line, oh, and change the 200-year-old partisan ways of the capitol. About the only big change the White Sox fan didn't promise was getting the Cubs a World Series ring.

It was all impractical, of course. But the country wanted to believe.... ....in his change to believe in. And it did, handing complete control of the federal government over to Obama and his Democratic party. And today, after 17 months of lop-sided Democratic majorities now nervously confronting midterm elections Nov. 2, about 60% of Americans would like the new healthcare bill repealed. And they're hinting they'd probably like some more Republicans in Congress too.

President Obama has said he doesn’t sense an appetite to address something as large as the illegal immigrant issue this year. But suddenly – watch the left hand over here because he wants you to not focus on how long it’s taken him to take charge of the spill – he thinks there’s a compelling need to spend a motorcade full of moola that the federal government doesn’t have in order to change the country’s energy habits.

And we've gotta start that right now because of an underwater leaking pipe 40 miles off Louisiana that we haven't plugged and don't really understand how it broke in the first place. So let's do the electric car thing and build more windmills now.

And if, by chance, the nation’s politicians end up fighting over an energy plan during the next five months until the voting, maybe the politically damaging healthcare regrets and hidden costs will drown in all the words like so many thousands of seabirds in all the gulf’s still-surging oil.

SOURCE

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Economic Myths, Fallacies and Stupidity

George Orwell admonished, "Sometimes the first duty of intelligent men is the restatement of the obvious." That's what I want to do -- talk about the obvious. Suppose that a person is faced with the choice of spending $50,000 on a brand-new car or paying two years worth of college tuition for his 18-year-old. What is the solution?

That's a stupid question. In the world of economic decision making, there are no solutions -- only tradeoffs, where having more of one thing means having less of another. Having one desire fulfilled means having another unfulfilled. For example, there's no solution to our health care issues. Congress' health care law simply substitutes its judgment on the delivery of medical services in the name of helping the uninsured. The tradeoff is that Americans have less of something else such as fewer personal choices, less after-tax income and very likely a lower quality of medical services.

How about the criticism that businesses are just in it for money and profits? That's supposed to be an anti-business slam but upon simple examination, it reflects gross stupidity or misunderstanding. Wal-Mart owns 8,300 stores, of which 4,000 are in 44 different countries. Its 2010 revenues are expected to top $500 billion. Putting Wal-Mart's revenues in perspective, they exceed the 2009 GDP of all but 18 of the world's 181 countries. Why is Wal-Mart so successful? Millions of people voluntarily enter their stores and part with their money in exchange for Wal-Mart's products and services. In order for that to happen, Wal-Mart and millions of other profit-motivated businesses must please people.

Compare our level of satisfaction with the services of those "in it just for the money and profits" to those in it to serve the public as opposed to earning profits. A major non-profit service provider is the public education establishment that delivers primary and secondary education at nearly a trillion-dollar annual cost. Public education is a major source of complaints about poor services that in many cases constitute nothing less than gross fraud.

If Wal-Mart, or any of the millions of producers who are in it for money and profits, were to deliver the same low-quality services, they would be out of business, but not public schools. Why? People who produce public education get their pay, pay raises and perks whether customers are satisfied or not. They are not motivated by profits and therefore under considerably less pressure to please customers. They use government to take customer money, in the form of taxes.

The U. S. Postal Service, state motor vehicle departments and other government agencies also have the taxing power of government to get money and therefore are less diligent about pleasing customers. You can bet the rent money that if Wal-Mart and other businesses had the power to take our money by force, they would be less interested and willing to please us.

The big difference between entities that serve us well and those who do not lies in what motivates them. Wal-Mart and millions of other businesses are profit-motivated whereas government schools, USPS and state motor vehicle departments are not.

In the market, when a firm fails to please its customers and fails to earn a profit, it goes bankrupt, making those resources available to another that might do better. That's unless government steps in to bail it out. Bailouts send the message to continue doing a poor job of pleasing customers and husbanding resources. Government-owned nonprofit entities are immune to the ruthless market discipline of being forced to please customers. The same can be said of businesses that receive government subsidies.

The ruthlessness of the market discipline, which forces firms to please customers and thereby earn profits, goes a long way toward explaining hostility toward free market capitalism.

SOURCE

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ELSEWHERE

Presbyterians lurching Left: "The compounding problem with the Accra Confession is that it takes the wrong side, the side that embraces an essentially neo-Marxist narrative of Third World alienation and victimization, and seeks ‘justice’ in the form of retribution against First World villains. Far from promoting the kind of unity that is at the core of ecumenical efforts, this kind of rhetorical and ideological confessionalism drives apart those who ought to be joining together. It pits the rich against the poor, north against south, east against west, inserting the divisive language of economic class into the definition of the Christian church. Wholesale rejection of globalization should not be made into an article of the Christian faith.”

The criminalization of business: "Under the radar, the Obama administration has exhibited a disturbing tendency to criminalize business. Recently the administration announced that it was opening a criminal investigation into the activities of Goldman Sachs in selling securities backed by subprime mortgage loans. Now comes word that the Food and Drug Administration is considering imposing criminal penalties against Johnson & Johnson’s McNeil Consumer Healthcare unit for a ‘pattern of non-compliance’ with rules governing the manufacture of pharmaceutical products. This criminalization of business represents a dramatic expansion of government power that is unwarranted.”

End the drug war: "I understand that people on drugs can do terrible harm — wreck lives and hurt people. But that’s true for alcohol, too. But alcohol prohibition didn’t work. It created Al Capone and organized crime. Now drug prohibition funds nasty Mexican gangs and the Taliban. Is it worth it? I don’t think so. Everything can be abused, but that doesn’t mean government can stop it, or should try to stop it. Government goes astray when it tries to protect us from ourselves.”

My Twitter.com identity: jonjayray. My Facebook page is also accessible as jonjayray (In full: http://www.facebook.com/jonjayray). For more blog postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, EYE ON BRITAIN and Paralipomena

List of backup or "mirror" sites here or here -- for readers in China or for everyone 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 Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist" (Nationalsozialist) and the full name of Hitler's political party (translated) was "The National Socialist German Workers' Party" (In German: Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei)

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Amusing crap about IQ

A murder in your area lowers your IQ -- even if you don't know about the murder concerned? It's totally implausible but Leftists never give up in their hatred of around 100 years of IQ research that show IQ to be mostly genetic.

The author below found that people living in areas where a crime had occurred recently have lower IQs. But what sort of area is likely to have experienced a crime recently? A area that has high rates of crime generally and an area where anybody with brains would NOT live. Note that criminals have long been known to have generally low IQs and very low levels of educational attainment.

So all that the author below in fact found was that people living in high crime areas tend to be dumb, which is no surprise to anyone. The journal article is The acute effect of local homicides on children's cognitive performance.

The statement below to the effect that "The effects wear off after a week to nine days" is simply not supportable from the data available. It is just another perverse guess. You would need before-and-after data on the same person to substantiate that claim and the author simply did not have such data.

A murder in the neighborhood can significantly knock down a child's score on an IQ test, even if the child did not directly witness the killing or know the victim, U.S. researchers reported on Monday....

Sharkey compared data on crimes broken down to within a few blocks in a neighborhood with school test scores.

He collected details of more than 6,000 murders in the Chicago area and the results of two surveys of children and families in Chicago neighborhoods. The surveys included scores from tests that are used to determine a child's IQ.

If a murder occurred in a child's neighborhood -- an area of roughly six to 10 square blocks as denoted by the U.S. Census -- the children's test scores fell by an average of half a standard deviation, Sharkey reported.

On an IQ test using 100 as the average or norm, one standard deviation is 15 points. So if a child took the test within a week of a local murder, his or her score was 7-8 points lower on average than the score of a similar child in a similar neighborhood where there was no murder.

This fits in with what is known about the effects of post traumatic stress, Sharkey said. "The results suggest that children may carry the burden of violence with them as they take part in daily life within the neighborhood or school settings," he said.

The effects wear off after a week to nine days, Sharkey found. But in areas with a lot of crime, this does not provide much relief.

More HERE

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Obamafraud

Deepwater-Gate: Administration Modifies Peer-Reviewed Report After it was Reviewed by Scientists

In the days following the Gulf oil spill, President Obama requested that the Secretary of the Interior conduct a 30-day review of the offshore drilling program in the United States and issue a report with recommendations. This report was to be “peer reviewed” by a team of seven engineers recommended by the National Academy of Engineering.

The team of engineers reviewed, approved and signed off on a version of the 30-day review that was presented to them by the Administration. However, after they signed their names to this document, a significant change was made – a change that led to the 6-month suspension of deepwater exploratory drilling.

The eight panel members said they disagree with the moratorium on all exploratory drilling.” In justifying its broad moratorium on deepwater drilling, the Obama administration emphasized that the measure was recommended by an Interior Department report prepared in consultation with scientists and industry experts.

The May 27 report to President Barack Obama said the experts “peer reviewed” its recommendations, including the six-month moratorium and 22 safety measures. But eight of the 15 members of the review panel are charging that the administration misrepresented their position by suggesting they supported a blanket moratorium that they actually oppose. Their criticism, and the administration’s response, are evidence that the six-month stoppage is based on politics rather than on science.

More HERE

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Obama Blocked Clean-Up of BP Oil Spill by Friendly Countries

Is this another crisis Obama doesn't want to waste?

Crucial offers to help clean up BP’s oil spill “have come from Belgian, Dutch, and Norwegian firms that . . . possess some of the world’s most advanced oil skimming ships.” But the Obama Administration wouldn’t accept the help, because doing so would require it to do something past presidents have routinely done: waive rules imposed by the Jones Act, a law backed by unions.

“The BP clean-up effort in the Gulf of Mexico is hampered by the Jones Act. This is a piece of 1920s protectionist legislation, that requires all vessels working in U.S. waters to be American-built, and American-crewed. So the U.S. Coast Guard" cannot "accept, and therefore don’t ask for, the assistance of high-tech European vessels specifically designed for the task in hand.”

The law itself permits the President to waive these requirements, and such waivers were “granted, promptly, by the Bush administration,” in the aftermath of hurricanes and other emergencies. But Obama has refused to do so, notes David Warren in the Ottawa Citizen.

“After the Obama administration refused help from the Netherlands, Geert Visser, the consul general for the Netherlands in Houston, told Loren Steffy: ‘Let’s forget about politics; let’s get it done.’” But for Obama, politics always comes first: “The explanation of Obama’s reluctance to seek this remedy is his cozy relationship with labor unions. . . ‘The unions see it [not waiving the act] as … protecting jobs. They hate when the Jones Act gets waived.’”

Ironically, even the staunchest supporters of the Jones Act are now distancing themselves from refusals to accept foreign help, saying they have “not and will not stand in the way of the use of these well-established waiver procedures to address this crisis.” Obama is being more intransigently pro-union than the unions themselves. Never mind that "each day our European allies are prevented from helping us speed up the clean up is another day that Gulf fishing and tourism jobs die.”

In April 2009, the Obama administration granted BP, a big supporter of Obama, a waiver of environmental regulations. But after the oil spill, it blocked Louisiana from protecting its coastline against the oil spill by delaying rather than expediting regulatory approval of essential protective measures. It has also chosen not to use what has been described as “the most effective method” of fighting the spill, a method successfully used in other oil spills. Democratic strategist James Carville called Obama’s handling of the oil spill “lackadaisical” and “unbelievable” in its “stupidity.”

Obama is now using BP’s oil spill to push the global-warming legislation that BP had lobbied for. Obama’s global warming legislation expands ethanol subsidies, which cause famine, starvation, and food riots in poor countries by shrinking the food supply. Ethanol makes gasoline costlier and dirtier, increases ozone pollution, and increases the death toll from smog and air pollution. Ethanol production also results in deforestation, soil erosion, and water pollution. Subsidies for biofuels like ethanol are a big source of corporate welfare: “BP has lobbied for and profited from subsidies for biofuels . . . that cannot break even without government support.”

SOURCE

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BrookesNews Update

Is the US economy heading for the rocks? : If the public had — or at least the country's economic pundits — had a far better understanding of how the economy functioned Obama's destructive economic policies would never have got of the ground
Is the US economy facing deflation?: A sharp fall in commodity prices has raised the spectre of deflation in the US. But so long as the rate of monetary expansion remains positive there can be no deflation. And monetary pumping by the Fed has kept monetary growth in positive territory. Moreover, there is the distinct possibility that stagflation will emerge
Rudd's disastrous resource rent tax: how the right let the country down again : What is truly bizarre about the present situation is not a single member of our rightwing has come out against the theoretical basis of Rudd's tax. Equally bizarre is their refusal to acknowledge that the theory of economic rent has been effectively debunked, even though they are stridently attacking the tax
The Gaza flotilla's organisors' terrorist links : The 'charity' that organised the Gaza flotilla is in fact a terrorist front with strong links to the Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Evidence is emerging that suggests Erdogan collaborated with these terrorists in an effort to score a propaganda victory against Israel, a victory that the willing collaboration of the Western media guaranteed, making Erdogan a sponsor of international terrorism
CNBC is collaborating with Castro's KGB-trained secret police : CNBC has decided to partner itself with Castro's secret police. In a hit job on the rescue of more than 14,000 children from Castro's vicious regime it brought in Maria Torres, neglecting to mention that she is an agent of influence for the Castro regime and is a also a member of the Antonio Maceo Brigade, an organization that is run by Castro's KGB-trained DGI. CNBC has once again revealed itself as a deeply corrupt, even treasonous, phony news outlet
Friends of Israel take a stand : The goal is to fight the web war against Israel by blogging and using social networks like Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube, and posting talkbacks on a range of media sites
A shrink asks: what's wrong with Obama? : Obama will not learn from his mistakes. He will not grow and mature from on-the-job experience. Over time he will become a more ferocious version of who he is today. Why? Because this is a damaged person. Obama's fate was sealed years ago growing up in his strange and poisonous family

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ELSEWHERE

On Henry Ford and his $5 a day: "It's a fairly common trope in US lefty land that Henry Ford and his $5 a day wages back in 1913 marked a huge change in labour relations. He was moved to raise wages so high (approximately double the prevailing wage) so as to help create a market for his own products. This is an interesting thought, certainly, but not one that stands much examination. That year his establishment of workers was some 14,000 head: his sales some 170,000 and that's just the year that he started ramping up production through the moving assembly line (reaching 500,000 in a couple of years and near a million within a decade). The spending power of his workforce was entirely marginal."

How can America’s “War on Drugs” succeed if alcohol Prohibition failed?: "America’s Prohibition laws were meant to cut crime and boost morality — they failed on both fronts. So how can the ‘War on Drugs’ ever succeed? It can’t.”

Views from abroad: "Having spent almost six years living in various parts of Asia and traveling to over 50 cities, I always made a deliberate effort to absorb as much of the local sentiment as possible. Sometimes this is very difficult given time constraints, language barriers, etc.; however, certain aspects of my travels were very clearly spelled out and remain very vivid to this day. When I found myself engaged in meaningful discussions with people who understood their society and seemed genuinely connected to their society, I would always ask ‘what do you think is the biggest problem in society?’ From my time spent in places like Philippines, India, Vietnam and China, the overwhelming majority of times, I received a similar response — ‘Government.’”

Bailing out politicians now?: "Obama calls it an ‘emergency’ measure to prevent ‘massive layoffs of teachers, police and firefighters.’ Yet, none of the 20 million state, county or municipal workers can lose their job unless an elected legislature and a chief executive agree that they should go. Obama is calling for a taxpayer rescue of the political class to which he belongs, to spare it the painful duty tens of thousands of business executives have had to perform. Private employees — 25 million of whom are out of work, underemployed or have given up looking for jobs — may be expendable, but government workers are not.”

My Twitter.com identity: jonjayray. My Facebook page is also accessible as jonjayray (In full: http://www.facebook.com/jonjayray). For more blog postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, EYE ON BRITAIN and Paralipomena

List of backup or "mirror" sites here or here -- for readers in China or for everyone 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 Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist" (Nationalsozialist) and the full name of Hitler's political party (translated) was "The National Socialist German Workers' Party" (In German: Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei)

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Crisis puts nails back in Keynesian coffin

Comment from Australia

LAST year's global financial crisis heralded the stunning return of Keynesian fiscal policy as governments pumped up their budgets to stave off a feared global depression. This year's European sovereign-debt crisis signals its spectacular fall as governments are suddenly forced to cut their budgets even when their economies are weak.

The discrediting of activist fiscal policy also dashes Kevin Rudd's wild talk that the GFC marked the end of unregulated extreme capitalism and its overthrow by a new epoch of "social democracy". As the PM's essay in The Monthly approvingly quoted French President Nicolas Sarkozy: "Le laissez-faire, c'est fini."

Of course, the neo-liberal minimalist state doesn't exist, particularly in Europe. Yet the Europeans continued to blame unregulated financial markets as their sovereign-debt crisis spread from Greece across the world in April and May. The Swedish Finance Minister likened the markets to "a pack of wolves".

Only after the EU's emergency $US1 trillion ($1.17 trillion) financial stabilisation fund failed to stabilise the situation did the euro finally drop. The recession and the huge budget stimulus and bank bailout packages had pushed Europe's budgets over the brink. Investors demanded much higher risk premiums before they would be prepared to buy bonds issued by the most profligate governments, such as Greece, Portugal and Spain. This threatened to club their economies even harder, make their budget positions worse and risk feeding back through sovereign defaults into a new European banking crisis.

After championing last year's huge budget stimulus packages, the International Monetary Fund now says the euro area crisis primarily results from "fiscally unsustainable policies". Advanced economies will have to contract their budgets nearly nine percentage points of gross domestic product to reduce their gross government debt from post-war highs of over 100 per cent to 60 per cent of GDP by 2030. The World Bank says a severe loss of confidence in the budget positions of high-income economies is now the biggest risk to the global economy. "Demand stimulus in high-income countries is increasingly part of the problem instead of the solution," it says.

One of the world's leading macro-economists, Columbia University's Jeffrey Sachs, argues that Europe's enforced switch from budget stimulus to fiscal austerity reveals the folly of last year's Keynesian revival.

"Keynesian stimulus was premised on four dubious propositions," Sachs wrote last week in the Financial Times. "That it was needed to prevent a global depression; that a short-run fiscal boost would jump-start the economy; that 'shovel-ready projects' could combine short-term cyclical and long-term structural agendas; and, last, that the rapid rise of public debt occasioned by stimulus need not be a concern. That these ideas were so widely accepted was a testament to the perennial political attractiveness of tax cuts and spending increases."

Sachs dismisses last year's ubiquitous references to another Depression as glib. Politicians panicked when they should have left the financial crisis to central bankers. Many of the budget stimulus programs were "dispiriting wastes of scarce time and money". And they ignored a key rationalist insight of modern macro-economics: that the effectiveness of such stimulus packages depends not only on current taxes and spending but also on their likely future trajectories.

The irony is striking. Rudd claimed that the GFC revealed the neo-liberal fallacy that financial markets naturally self-corrected. But it has taken the markets to finally discipline the political tendency for the modern welfare state to repeatedly ratchet up spending and taxes as a share of national income. EU president Herman Van Rompuy now even blames financial markets for being too "soft" on European fiscal irresponsibility for too long after the euro was born in 1999.

And the battle to save the euro will not be waged through Rudd's seismic social-democratic overthrow of neo-liberalism. Along with austerity, it will require more pro-market reforms - particular to Europe's over-regulated labour markets - to provide the internal economic flexibility required by a single-currency area.

More here

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Time to Stop Funding Luxuries, Like Public Broadcasting

As a taxpayer, it is a good idea to take a step back and evaluate the government-run programs you are financially supporting.

Most likely you will be appalled. As American families have to adjust their spending budgets due to the depressed economy, the federal government continues to plunge the nation into unprecedented debt levels. The only way out of this mess is for the government to start cutting non-essential programs.

One such program, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB), is a good place to start.

Networks such as Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) and National Public Radio (NPR) feed off federal funding from CPB. This year alone, American taxpayers are spending $420 million to fund CPB. That’s $420 million too much.

Congressman Doug Lamborn (R-CO) is proposing legislation this week that will put an end to taxpayer subsidies of public broadcasting. CPB is a non-profit that receives about 13 percent of its funding from the federal government — meaning taxpayers.

“The Corporation for Public Broadcasting puts out some programs that I enjoy and a lot of people enjoy, but they can stand on their own two feet,” Lamborn says in an exclusive interview with Americans for Limited Government (ALG). “In fact, 87 percent of their money comes from sources other than the U.S. taxpayer. So why should we, in days of $1 trillion annual deficits, give money to a corporation or any company that can fund itself.”

More here

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African-American Ethics Judge Accused of being bribed by a trip Overseas

In an ironic revelations concerning a California judge, details of a suit accusing the judge of accepting a trip oversees as a form bribery were publicized recently by a faith-based watchdog group. The suit accuses Patrice Elizabeth McElroy (aka Pat McElroy), a judge with the State Bar Court of California, of accepting bribery as part of a scheme and as a valuable consideration in exchange for favorable rulings from a private attorney who appeared before her in a case in which he was involved.

The suit also alleges that McElroy never made any disclosures to the other litigants appearing before her concerning her participation in the trip which she had had secretly accepted from the private attorney.

Patrice McElroy is the supervising judge of the State Bar Court Hearing Department, which is part of the State Bar of California. The work of Patrice McElroy involves judging others in matters relating to ethics.

Press release here. Details here.

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Big Labor Is Humbled by Blanche Lincoln's Win

How bad a defeat did labor unions suffer when Sen. Blanche Lincoln defeated their candidate and won the Arkansas Democratic runoff last week? That's like asking how Custer fared at Little Big Horn.

Like Custer, the unions bet heavily, putting something like $10 million into Arkansas to support Lincoln's challenger, Lt. Gov. Bill Halter, since he started his campaign in early March. And they did so for good reason.

Union leaders desperately need Congress to pass their card check bill, which would effectively abolish the secret ballot in unionization elections. Card check would allow union thugs -- er, organizers -- to collect signatures on cards of a majority of employees and then, presto, the union would be recognized as a bargaining agent, and dues money would come pouring in.

It isn't now, at least at the rate union leaders would like. Last January, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that union membership in 2009 was at an all-time low since the 1930s. Only 12 percent of wage and salary workers were union members, and the number of union members dropped 771,000 between 2008 and 2009.

And, for the first time in history, more union members (7.9 million) work in the public sector than the private sector (7.4 million). Only 7.2 percent of private-sector workers are union members, a huge drop from the peak figure of 28 percent in the mid-1950s.

Moreover, unions aren't picking up many young workers. The BLS reports that 16.6 percent of workers 55 to 64 years old are union members. That's compared to only 4.7 percent of workers 16 to 24.

Union leaders spent some $400 million in the 2008 campaign cycle to elect Barack Obama and Democratic candidates for Senate and House. They got their wish: Obama won, House Democrats gained a solid majority and, once Al Franken was seated last July, there was a 60-vote Democratic supermajority in the Senate. There was speculation in sympathetic blogs about how many Senate Republicans would join the Democrats in passing card check and sending it to the president for his signature.

But politicians don't always stay bought. Every Democratic senator but one (who was out sick) voted for cloture to consider the card check bill in 2007, including Blanche Lincoln. But that was when it was sure to be vetoed by George W. Bush.

After the 2008 elections, Lincoln undoubtedly started to hear constituents in Arkansas -- including, undoubtedly, top management at Wal-Mart and Tysons Food, who don't want unions to do to their firms what the United Auto Workers did to General Motors and Chrysler. Polls showed large majorities of the national electorate opposed to eliminating the secret ballot. By January 2009, Lincoln was saying she didn't think "there is a need for this legislation right now."

She wasn't the only Senate Democrat to take that view. Her Arkansas colleague Mark Pryor, re-elected without opposition in 2008, said he wouldn't co-sponsor card check again. Card check slowly died.

Union leaders are under no illusion that there will be more Democrats in the next Congress than in this one. But they think far ahead, and they decided to oppose Lincoln to teach every Democrat a lesson: If you oppose big labor, we will end your career. Whether they persuaded Halter to run or just hitched a ride on his last-minute candidacy, they went all-in for him.

More here

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ELSEWHERE

I don't know that it proves anything much -- other than the usual Leftist hypocrisy -- but there is an article here about Hitler's homosexuality. It is a review of Lothar Machtan's book, "The Hidden Hitler". Homosexual aggression is nothing new. The Pink Swastika by Scott Lively is the best-known book on homosexuality in the Nazi party.

Democrat thug caught out: "In a video released early this morning, a North Carolina congressman gets rowdy with a "college student" who accosted him with questions. Rep. Bob Etheridge has apologized for the incident, captured on YouTube, where he grabs the inquisitive young man a repeatedly asks, "Who are you?" Etheridge, was apparently peeved by the question of whether he fully supports the Obama agenda. The congressman released the following statement regarding the altercation: "I deeply and profoundly regret my reaction and I apologize to all involved," Etheridge said. "Throughout my many years of service to the people of North Carolina, I have always tried to treat people from all viewpoints with respect. No matter how intrusive and partisan our politics can become, this does not justify a poor response." (Video here)

The ambiguity of "equal rights": "Ted Olsen's view, widely shared by supporters of gay marriage, is that current California law fails to provide homosexuals the same right it provides to heterosexuals - the right to be married to the partner of their choice. An opponent could respond, with equal logic, that it is consistent with equal rights. Both homosexuals and heterosexuals have the right to marry a partner of the opposite sex, neither has the right to marry a partner of the same sex. Seen from this standpoint, the difference is not in what rights different people have but in what rights matter to different people."

What’s your plan, Senator Reid?: "It is no secret that Harry Reid sees the road to his Senate re-election as running through Social Security. His opponent, former Assemblywoman Sharron Angle, supports proposals to allow younger workers to privately invest a portion of their Social Security taxes through personal accounts. Reid has been practically salivating at the prospect of portraying her as sentencing seniors to a life of eating cat food. … Social Security is certainly a fair-game issue. It is the largest government program in the world, accounting for 23 percent of the federal budget. … Millions of seniors depend on Social Security for their retirement income. Angle’s position should be scrutinized and debated. But one must also ask Sen. Reid what, exactly, he would do about Social Security’s looming fiscal meltdown.”

Jobs programs: “Job creation, government style, is a splashy, photo-op filled, nice-sounding program that makes politicians sound clever and seem proactive. The Boise Valley Economic Partnership is a taxpayer and private money example of the process. They are now four years into this five-year, $5,000,000 government program. The planned $650,000,000 private/taxpayer investment has fallen short of the goal, but only by $530,000,000. The planned 5,000 new jobs has fallen short by 3,194 jobs. But the Boise area did get 1,806 new jobs (… while losing 10,000 — oops). Those new jobs only cost $66,445 each!”

My Twitter.com identity: jonjayray. My Facebook page is also accessible as jonjayray (In full: http://www.facebook.com/jonjayray). For more blog postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, EYE ON BRITAIN and Paralipomena

List of backup or "mirror" sites here or here -- for readers in China or for everyone 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 Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist" (Nationalsozialist) and the full name of Hitler's political party (translated) was "The National Socialist German Workers' Party" (In German: Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei)

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Gmail difficulties

In their never-ending attempts to "improve" their services (i.e. stuff their users around), Google seem to be trying to integrate more closely their Blogger.com and Gmail services. Because I divide my use of blogger.com services into two separate accounts (for security purposes) with different passwords, that leads to a lot of difficulties -- and accessing my gmail a/c has become particularly tricky

Fortunately, I have been phasing out mention of my gmail address on my blogs and just giving my hotmail address. So most people using my gmail address will be ones who have it stored from somewhere in the past. As Google get more and more East German, however, it seems likely that I will lose all access to my gmail address, so if anybody reading this uses my gmail address, I would suggest that they change it forthwith to my hotmail address: jonjayray@hotmail.com. I also have a backup address that I check only about once a day: jonjayra@bigpond.net.au. I check my hotmail address many times throughout the day.

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Most Israelis are indigenous to the region

WHEN HELEN THOMAS sniped that Israel's Jews should "get the hell out of Palestine" and "go home" to Poland and Germany, she displayed more than just hostility for the Jewish state. She also revealed her ignorance of basic Israeli demography.

Contrary to the anti-Zionist stereotype, Israel is not primarily a nation of Europeans and their descendants: The largest share of Israel's population is ethnically Middle Eastern and North African. Some Jewish survivors from "Poland and Germany" did find haven in Israel after the Holocaust, but a far greater number of Israeli Jews were refugees from the Arab world.

"Jews In Grave Danger In All Moslem Lands," reported the New York Times in May 1948, "Nine Hundred Thousand in Africa and Asia Face Wrath of Their Foes." In the years that followed Israel's creation, ancient Jewish communities in Egypt, Yemen, Libya, and elsewhere were decimated as their inhabitants fled from anti-Semitic violence and terror. Israel absorbed most of those refugees, and they and their descendants -- the Jews indigenous to the region -- became the core of the country's population.

SOURCE

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Deafening silence from Left as Iranians protest

Proof that the Left stand for nothing but their own self-interest

IT is surely one of the great paradoxes of this age that while many of our cleverest minds have fallen headlong in love with peoples whose causes are more or less entirely alien to us, we can find no stirring in our hearts for peoples whose greatest hope is to become . . . well, more like us.

Thus we artlessly dispatched our hearts on a sentimental journey to Gaza designed for our benefit by the canny Islamists in Ankara and their bloodstained allies in Gaza; people who, in any other context, would treat our Western soft-heartedness and woolly-mindedness with undisguised contempt.

And yet our hearts have no space whatever for the thousands of young Iranian students who, on Saturday, defied the threats of their government, the beatings of the extra-legal militias, and the pusillanimity of their erstwhile leaders, merely to ask for the right to have their votes treated with dignity, rather than being fabricated out of some dodgy Russian software in Iran's Ministry of the Interior.

To the best of my knowledge, not one single person has died at the hands of Iran's green opposition, even as thousands of their number have been arrested, hundreds sexually and physically tortured in prison, and dozens murdered in loneliness, often in the most squalid and humiliating of circumstances. Their cause has been Gandhian, almost to a fault. ("The students will die, but they will not accept humiliation", they chanted at Tehran University.)

And yet their plight leaves us entirely cold. Who knows: if they strapped bombs to themselves, or professed a secret admiration for the racial policies of the Third Reich, would they then become sufficiently exotic to pique our jaded imaginations, and would we then love them a little more?

Fearless Western journalists, we are told, boarded the Gaza flotilla at hazard to their lives, the better to pen florid descriptions of the predations of the Israeli "hyenas"; sentences that could presumably have been written with equal vigour and no less accuracy from the comfort of their computer terminals.

Yet presently there is not one solitary Western journalist, willing to risk the wrath of the Iranian security forces to file a report from Tehran in the open air. And so the job is left to the Iranians themselves: to the anxious young students whose wavering phone cameras record those fleeting snippets of history, floating like sea-wrack across the YouTube ocean in 15 or 20-second fragments. And to the exiles and expatriates, like the courteous, serious-minded and courageous London Guardian stringer Saeed Kamali Dehghan, who have spirited their way back into the country, at genuine hazard to themselves, before the people whose stories they need to tell have disappeared.

Dehghan' s new documentary For Neda - recorded secretly in Iran, using interviews from the family of the young murdered bystander Neda Soltan - will air on US and British television on the anniversary of Neda's death this Wednesday, no doubt to murmurs of polite interest. Perhaps the most touching aspect of this heartfelt documentary is its portrait of a young woman (not in the least political, at least in the Western intellectual sense of the word) who wanted merely to live her life, true to herself as best she could be, and at peace with the world, much in the same manner as any thoughtful Western teenager.

And yet, even before she was gunned down at random by a twitchy sniper, her efforts to follow her own star had been thwarted by laws which view Western popular music as corrupting, Western casual dress as lascivious, and an uncovered head or arms as the grossest of moral provocations. In the Iranian moral-spiritual imagination Neda has already been adopted as a martyr. And yet our Western hearts seem curiously closed to her. Could this be because she reminds us too much of ourselves?

As well as the Iranian elections, and the death of Neda Soltani, we should perhaps recall a third ill-starred anniversary. It was, after all, just one week before the Iranian elections that US President Barack Obama rose in Cairo to deliver an oration on the relations between the US and the Muslim world: a speech, full of generous sentiments and carefully balanced praise and blame for all parties, which for some weeks made him the darling of the political class all over the world. Who knows: perhaps Obama was being merely naive when he spoke encouragingly of a new and optimistic climate of negotiation with the regime in Tehran, even though we must suspect that this signal aided the regime in its decision to overturn the following week's election result, rather than simply to flee to Syria, as they feared they might have to do....

In one of those stolen phone-camera fragments from Saturday's rally, at Tehran University, one of the demonstrators runs towards the camera. Her bright green hijab has been twisted around to cover her nose and mouth, providing protection from tear gas, and a necessary cloak of anonymity. It's an image whose irony, sad to say, would be lost on President Obama, as well as on some of our otherwise clever souls. In that respect, as in others, those brave young Iranians put us all to shame.

More here

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The remote man

Far from having a multicultural awareness, Obama doesn't even know or understand America. All he knows is his little Far-Leftist bubble

So a man swept into office on an unprecedented tide of delirious fawning is now watching his presidency sink in an unstoppable gush. That’s almost too apt.

It is hard to imagine Obama wandering along to watch a Memorial Day or Fourth of July parade until the job required him to. That’s not to say he’s un-American or anti-American, but merely that he’s beyond all that. Way beyond. He’s the first president to give off the pronounced whiff that he’s condescending to the job — that it’s really too small for him and he’s just killing time until something more commensurate with his stature comes along.

And so the Gulf spill was an irritation, but he dutifully went through the motions of flying in to be photographed looking presidentially concerned. As he wearily explained to Matt Lauer, “I was meeting with fishermen down there, standing in the rain, talking . . . ” Good grief, what more do you people want? Alas, he’s not a good enough actor to fake it. So the more desperately he butches up the rhetoric — “Plug the damn hole!”; “I know whose ass to kick” — the more pathetically unconvincing it all sounds.

No doubt my observations about Obama’s remoteness from the rhythms of American life will be seen by his dwindling band of beleaguered cheerleaders as just another racist, right-wing attempt to whip up the backwoods knuckle-dragging swamp-dwellers of America by playing on their fears of “the other” — the sophisticated, worldly cosmopolitan for whom France is more than a reliable punchline.

But in fact my complaint is exactly the opposite: Obama’s postmodern detachment is feeble and parochial. It’s true that he hadn’t seen much of America until he ran for president, but he hadn’t seen much of anywhere else, either. Like most multiculturalists, he’s passed his entire adulthood in a very narrow unicultural environment where your ideological worldview doesn’t depend on anything so tedious as actually viewing the world.

The U.N., Greenpeace, Amnesty International, Bono: these are the colors a progressive, worldly Westerner nails to his mast. You don’t need to go anywhere, or do anything: You just need to pick up the general groove, which you can do very easily at almost any college campus.

This Barack Obama did brilliantly. A man who speaks fewer languages than the famously moronic George W. Bush, he has nevertheless grasped the essential lingo of the European transnationalist: Continental leaders strike attitudes rather than effect action — which is frankly beneath them. One thinks of the insistence a few years ago by Louis Michel, then Belgian foreign minister, that the so-called European Rapid Reaction Force “must declare itself operational without such a declaration being based on any true capability.” As even the Washington Post drily remarked, “Apparently in Europe this works.”

Apparently. Thus, Barack Obama: He declared himself operational without such a declaration being based on any true capability. But, if it works for the EU, why not America? Like many of his background here and there, Obama is engaged mostly by abstractions and generalities. Indeed, he is the very model of a modern major generalist. He has grand plans for “the environment” — all of it, wherever it may be. Why should the great eco-Gulliver be ensnared by some Lilliputian oil spill lapping round his boots?

He flew in to Cairo to give one of the most historically historic speeches in history to the Muslim world. Why should such a colossus lower his visionary gaze to contemplate some no-account nickel-’n’-dime racket like the Iranian nuclear program? With one stroke of his pen, he has transformed the health care of 300 million people. But I suppose if there’s some killer flu epidemic or a cholera outbreak in New Mexico, you losers will be whining at Obama to do something about that, too.

In recent months, a lot of Americans have said to me that they had no idea the new president would feel so “weird.” But, in fact, he’s not weird. True, he’s not, even in Democratic terms, a political figure — as, say, Clinton or Biden are. Instead, he’s the product of the broader culture: There are millions of people like Barack Obama, the eternal students of a vast lethargic transnational campus for whom global compassion and the multicultural pose are merely the modish gloss on a cult of radical grandiose narcissism. As someone once said, “We are the ones we’ve been waiting for.” When you’ve spent that long waiting in line for yourself, it’s bound to be a disappointment.

SOURCE

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ELSEWHERE

Afghanistan: Vast mineral deposits found: "The United States has discovered nearly $1 trillion in untapped mineral deposits in Afghanistan, far beyond any previously known reserves and enough to fundamentally alter the Afghan economy and perhaps the Afghan war itself, according to senior American government officials. The previously unknown deposits — including huge veins of iron, copper, cobalt, gold and critical industrial metals like lithium — are so big and include so many minerals that are essential to modern industry that Afghanistan could eventually be transformed into one of the most important mining centers in the world, the United States officials believe.”

The Prohibition folly repeated: "It is not my purpose in this essay to debate the merits or demerits of drug use, a question that should properly be left to the individual. … Given the number of turf wars, drive-by shootings, corrupted police and other officials, and invasions by police of the wrong address that are closely associated with the War on Drugs, it should be clear by now that drug laws and the attempt to enforce them cause vastly more destruction to individuals and society — and consume much more time, energy, and money — than the drugs in question ever did. We owe the existence and character of the police state which has sprung up all around us largely to government excesses in the name of the War on Drugs.”

Obama’s failures creating new libertarians: "Despite the damage to the nation, President Barack Obama’s failed presidency has accomplished one thing: more people are embracing libertarian values. While no one should confuse the tea party with libertarianism, the populist movement does embrace many libertarian values, such as smaller government, fewer taxes and respect for federalism, the very core values of this nation’s founding.”

A leak in the presidency: "Leave it to my wife to come up with a jewelry metaphor for Barack Obama. Obama is, according to my bride, the political equivalent of cubic zirconia. Usually sold to people who love the look of diamonds but can’t afford a real one or are fooled into buying an imposter, cubic zirconia is superficially pretty and appealing. But when subjected to the scrutiny of an expert or when placed under great pressure, the falseness and weakness compared to the real thing become apparent. The pressure analogy is particularly appropriate given that the source of Barack Obama’s troubles lie a mile under the ocean’s surface, where pressures are about one ton per square inch. The pressure of the situation is causing Obama’s vaunted reputation as ‘competent’ to crack like the false promise it always was.”

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

My Twitter.com identity: jonjayray. My Facebook page is also accessible as jonjayray (In full: http://www.facebook.com/jonjayray). For more blog postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, EYE ON BRITAIN and Paralipomena

List of backup or "mirror" sites here or here -- for readers in China or for everyone 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)

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

The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist" (Nationalsozialist) and the full name of Hitler's political party (translated) was "The National Socialist German Workers' Party" (In German: Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei)

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Strange psychopathy controversy

The matter reported below reminds me of the disgraceful behaviour by Frank Sulloway, in using legal means to prevent publication of a critique of his absurd theories about birth order. But, unlike Sulloway, Hare is no kook so I can only presume that he is in his dotage. He must be very elderly by now.

What eventually ensued is what should have happened in the first place. The paper was published and Hare was given a right of reply.

I have some personal interest in this as I too have had published a paper questioning a popular measure of psychopathy. My paper was however published promptly -- perhaps because the authors of the measure that I questioned are now dead!

I also have a personal interest in that I have had a heap of critiques published -- papers which simply tear apart some existing research without adding new data. It is actually quite difficult to get such papers published anyway as editors prefer papers with new data. The episode described below is going to make the acceptance of critiques all the more difficult, which is a great pity -- as criticism is an essential feature of scientific advance

And psychopathy is still a quite poorly understood phenomenon so debate about it is important. The fact that Leftism and psychopathy seem to have a lot in common makes it particularly important, in fact

Academic disputes usually flare out in the safety of obscure journals, raising no more than a few tempers, if not voices. But a paper published this week by the American Psychological Association has managed to raise questions of censorship, academic fraud, fair play and criminal sentencing — and all them well before the report ever became public.

The paper is a critique of a rating scale that is widely used in criminal courts to determine whether a person is a psychopath and likely to commit acts of violence. It was accepted for publication in a psychological journal in 2007, but the inventor of the rating scale saw a draft and threatened a lawsuit if it was published, setting in motion a stultifying series of reviews, revisions and legal correspondence.

“This has been a really, really troubling process from the beginning,” said Scott O. Lilienfeld, a psychologist at Emory University and a collaborator with one of the paper’s authors. “It has people wondering, ‘Do I have to worry every time I publish a paper that criticizes someone that I’ll get slapped with a lawsuit?’ ” The delay in publication, he said, “sets a very dangerous precedent” and censors scientific discourse.

The inventor of the clinical test, Robert D. Hare, an emeritus professor of psychology at the University of British Columbia, sees a different principle at stake. “The main issue here is that these authors misrepresented my views by distorting things I said,” he said in a telephone interview. “I have been doing this work for 40 years and never seen anything like it.”

For its part, the psychological association maintained in a statement that it had never refused to publish a paper because of a threatened lawsuit but that it had “a responsibility to all parties to evaluate a legal claim.” The paper’s authors — Jennifer L. Skeem of the University of California, Irvine, and David J. Cooke of Glasgow Caledonian University in Scotland — also had lawyers, and the Scottish university did an extensive review of its own, people familiar with the process said.

“All I can tell you is that delays in the editorial process come from multiple sources,” said Gary VandenBos, the psychological association’s publisher.

The paper — “Is Criminal Behavior a Central Component of Psychopathy?” — was circulated widely among forensic psychologists well before publication. Experts say the scientific issue it raises is an important one.

Dr. Hare’s clinical scale, called the Psychopathy Checklist, Revised, is one of the few, if not the only, psychological measures in forensic science with any scientific backing. Dr. Hare receives royalties when the checklist is used; he called the income it generated “modest” compared with providing paid expert testimony — which he said he does not do.

Dr. Skeem and Dr. Cooke warned in their paper that the checklist was increasingly being mistaken for a complete definition of psychopathy — a broader personality construct that includes deceitfulness, impulsivity and recklessness, though not always aggression or illegal acts. The authors contended that Dr. Hare’s checklist warps that concept by making criminal behavior a more central component than it really is.

Dr. Hare maintains that he has stressed “problematic, not antisocial or criminal, behavior” and that his comments were distorted.

Dr. Skeem said she was “just worn out” by the prolonged dispute. “When we first wrote the paper,” she said, “we saw it simply as a call to the field to recognize we were going down a path where we were equating an abstract concept with a checklist, and it was preventing us from looking at the concept more closely.”

The report appears in the June issue of the journal Psychological Assessment — that is, along with a rebuttal by Dr. Hare, and a return response from Dr. Skeem and Dr. Cooke.

SOURCE

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The Consistency of Hatred, from Grand Mufti to Helen Thomas

Ari Fleischer was press secretary to an American president, not to some commissar or caudillo, yet his reaction to Helen Thomas' latest anti-Israel outburst would have been more fit for a totalitarian than a free society. He demanded that Hearst fire its White House correspondent, who'd probably been there longer than most of the furniture.

The idea of punishing a columnist for her views, however vicious, might befit some tinpot dictatorship, but it has no place in this country, where extremists do a more than adequate job of exposing themselves, thank you. Which is what Miss Thomas has just done. Followed by her apology and resignation, voluntary or otherwise.

Rather than demand Helen Thomas' dismissal, Mr. Fleischer -- and all those others outraged by her hissy fit -- ought to send her a thank-you note. Consider this mine. For years her animus toward the Jewish state could be read quite clearly between the lines of her columns, or even smelled. Now she's admitted it by using the old Go Back Where You Came From ploy against Israel's Jews. She said they "should get the hell out of Palestine" and "go home."

And where would that be? Miss Thomas answered: "Poland. Germany." The problem for the Helen Thomases of the world is that Israel is where the Jews came from -- a minor detail Miss Thomas seems to have overlooked.

Now at least there could be no excuse for reading Miss Thomas' prose as if it were untainted by her pet hatred. Not that her virulent views have ever been a secret from those who've followed her tantrums over the years, whether in her columns or during presidential press conferences. After one of her little tirades, another White House press secretary -- Tony Snow, a man of pointed understatement who is still much missed -- said only, "Well, thank you for the Hezbollah view."

What may be most impressive about Miss Helen's latest outburst is how little this hateful line has changed since it was being enunciated by Haj Amin al-Husseini, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, aka Der Grossmufti von Jerusalem when he was enjoying Herr Hitler's hospitality in Berlin during the Second World War. After its outbreak, the official leader of Palestine's Arabs, having opposed any compromise with the hated Jews before the war, took refuge in Berlin, whence he attempted to raise an Arab army to fight alongside the Nazis.

The man was all heart. In the summer of 1943, the mufti found time to write Hungary's foreign minister protesting a plan to let some of its Jews escape the Final Solution then under way in Europe. His letter expressed alarm that the Jewish Agency had managed to obtain "immigration certificates for 900 Jewish children to be transported [to Palestine] from Hungary accompanied by 100 adults."

The mufti warned Budapest that such action would "by no means solve the Jewish problem" and, if any Jews were allowed to leave, they be sent instead to . . . Poland, where their fate would surely have been sealed. The suggestion that Jews be sent to Poland is scarcely new with Miss Thomas.

Historical note: Kielce, Poland, was the scene of the first post-war pogrom in July of 1946, when dozens of survivors of the Holocaust returned there only to be massacred by a mob abetted by local authorities.

Helen Thomas was kind enough not to specify just where in Germany or Poland the Jews should go "back" to -- Dachau? Auschwitz? Europe is full of such spas that once catered to Jewish clientele. Miss Thomas didn't even mention Russia and the killing fields of Babi Yar.

But her point was clear enough: Jews are just interlopers who should get the hell out of the Middle East. Maybe she's never noticed that Hebrew, like Arabic, is a Semitic language. It's a mystery how anyone on reading the Old Testament can deny that this people has it roots among the nomadic tribes of the Fertile Crescent, but mere fact has never been a barrier to bigotry.

For years, indeed decades, all such fulminations from Arab spokesmen were dismissed as just rhetoric, propaganda to stir up the Arab street and the mobs it produces on order. Surely the leaders of Arab Palestine could be negotiated with; their strident tirades were just for show. When face-to-face negotiations between Israel and her neighbors, including the Palestinians, finally began in the 1990s, peace was supposed to be just around the corner.

It wasn't. Instead, it was the protestations of peace and goodwill that have proven transitory, and the hateful propaganda that has proven lasting. Even in the mouths of Americans like Helen Thomas.

SOURCE

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Another rage-filled Leftist: The Prime Minister of Australia

Quite normal for Leftists. Rudd's predecessor as leader of the Labor Party -- Mark Latham -- was the same and all conservative bloggers know how rage-filled are the emails and comments that they get from Leftists. Rage and hate are of course closely allied emotions. Hate is just a bit quieter about it

Kevin Rudd is surrounded by c**** and everything is f*****. Let me explain. I don't mean the Prime Minister is making mistakes, or that his government is hopeless. I mean he has a potty mouth. He swears all the time, about everything, no matter whom he's addressing.

He likes the f-bomb almost as much as he loves the c-word. He's f****** sick of p***** saying he's just a nerdy f****** bureaucrat, all right? It's just bulls***! He's as tough as the next b******. Got it? Anyone who says otherwise can eat s***.

And he desperately wants us all to hear him loud and clear. In the past week, political geeks such as me have been chuckling over the revelation that the Prime Minister interrupted high-level climate-change negotiations at the Copenhagen summit last year to observe: "Those Chinese f****** are trying to rat-f*** us." Rudd spoke this sentence to a roomful of journalists, as part of a background briefing at the summit.

But none of them reported the line, because the understanding at such a briefing is that everything is off the record. When something is off the record, it means journalists are getting information that is useful for informing and enhancing their stories, in return for their tacit agreement that the source and exact wording of the supplied information will be kept secret.

A background arrangement such as this is useful for a leader such as Rudd, because it allows him to be frank in his assessments without having to deal with an outbreak of Rudd-effigy burnings across Beijing, or explain to the Australian dairy industry why China has decided to cancel 400 years' worth of advance import deals.

So the line stayed a secret until journalist David Marr published his fine new Quarterly Essay about the curious quirks of Captain Kevin. Marr also details how Rudd, during a long day of interviews, had an extraordinary explosion of temper when he realised Marr wasn't planning to write a particularly flattering piece.

Marr wrote that Rudd delivered "a dressing-down which registers about a 3.8 on his Richter scale". "He doesn't scream and bang the table as he does behind closed doors, (but) in his anger, Rudd becomes astonishingly eloquent. This is the most vivid version of himself I've encountered. "At last he is speaking from the heart, an angry heart."

Marr's thesis is that the real Kevin Rudd is this furious, self-righteous foot-stamper - a grown man who has tantrums just like those of a toddler. "He's a politician with rage at his core, impatient rage," Marr adds.

Oh, how I wish Marr had written exactly what the Prime Minister had said. I'm sure the air between them turned blue for a few moments, as Rudd questioned Marr's thesis, talent, intelligence, motivation and parentage. It would, if nothing else, be delightfully amusing to read.

But really, the words themselves are not as important as what they reveal: the Prime Minister's routine, casual and cynical use of the "off-the-record" convention as an opportunity to swear. He does it all the time, and he usually gets away with it....

Anyway, foul language is part of the Labor Party's genetic code. When modern lefties use a c-word to refer to one another, it's unlikely to be "comrade".

The phrase "rat-f***" has a long and proud Labor heritage. It's the sort of thing they say in Sussex St [Labor Party headquarters for the State of NSW] when the dim sims [NSW Labor Party identities often meet over Chinese food -- as Sussex St is adjacent to Chinatown] are running low. Now, Rudd has inadvertently brought it into the open. Bring it on, I say.

More HERE

My Twitter.com identity: jonjayray. My Facebook page is also accessible as jonjayray (In full: http://www.facebook.com/jonjayray). For more blog postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, EYE ON BRITAIN and Paralipomena

List of backup or "mirror" sites here or here -- for readers in China or for everyone 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 Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist" (Nationalsozialist) and the full name of Hitler's political party (translated) was "The National Socialist German Workers' Party" (In German: Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei)

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Flotilla sickness and the ‘progressive’ mind

The flotilla episode provided the trigger for a frenzied demonstration of the world’s collective loss of mind over Israel.

Israel did what it was entitled to do and what any other country at war would do: intercept boats that might be carrying weapons for an aggressor regime. Since six out of the seven intercepted boats then proceeded peacefully to Ashdod where their cargo was checked, this was demonstrably not an Israeli ‘attack’.

Conversely, as everyone could see from the video evidence, on the main boat the attack took place against the Israelis — who then killed nine of their jihadi assailants solely to protect themselves from being lynched, kidnapped and murdered.

Yet, for this, Israel has been hysterically denounced across the world for an act of aggression and even piracy — an onslaught, in effect, upon Israel’s right to defend itself, without which no country can exist.

The claim that Gaza is starving is the opposite of the truth: its markets are stacked with produce, and every week Israel allows in thousands of tons of aid across the border.

As its organiser admitted, the flotilla was not about humanitarian aid at all but was designed to break the sea blockade — and thus open up a weapons channel for Hamas. This manipulative and mendacious exercise was but the latest attempt to weaken Israel ready for the slaughter through an ever tightening noose of lies, demonisation and delegitimisation.

We have endured the fabricated claims of Israeli massacres in Jenin, the 2006 Lebanon war and Cast Lead; the charge that Israel is an ‘apartheid’ state, that it has committed genocide, ethnic cleansing and is starving the people of Gaza; that it is the aggressor in the Middle East.

How is it possible that so many believe all these lies? How can so many Jews believe them? As I have described in my new book, The World Turned Upside Down (please forgive the commercial) the witch-hunt against Israel is the pivotal example of the West’s repudiation of reason itself, leading to a widespread inversion of truth and lies, justice and injustice, right and wrong.

The ‘progressive’ left-wing intelligentsia now subscribes to a world-view that, over a wide range of issues, subordinates truth to ideology. This manifests itself in utopian creeds that hold that the world would attain a state of perfection if only it wasn’t for capitalism/America/ industrialisation/men/the nation state/those damned Jews.

Since these creeds are axiomatically the embodiment of virtue, all who dissent must be treated as moral outcasts and their views stifled.

From this Manichean mindset, which decrees that all who are not the left are a) the right, and b) intrinsically evil, it follows that anyone who challenges the lies generated by ideological dogma is by definition right-wing and evil. As a result of this knee-jerk name-calling, people dismiss such inconvenient truths even when they stare them in the face.

This terrifying mindset is the left’s default position. That is why this madness towards Israel is not confined to gentiles. Indeed, even Jews who consider themselves to have the interests of Israel at heart sometimes tragically end up believing the lies and supporting positions that would destroy it.

Which partly explains why some communal leaders busily suck up to the enemies of Israel in the faith or political worlds, even telling them on occasion that ‘in private I agree with you’.

So we find ourselves in this nightmare situation. The Great Flotilla Derangement has created the impression that, as Iran moves towards completing its genocide bomb, the rest of the world senses an endgame and is moving in on Israel for the kill.

SOURCE

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ACORN employees tell FBI of deliberate election fraud

The radical activist group ACORN “works” for the Democratic Party and deliberately promotes election fraud, ACORN employees told FBI investigators, according to an FBI document dump Wednesday.

The documents obtained by Judicial Watch, a watchdog group, are FBI investigators’ reports related to the 2007 investigation and arrest of eight St. Louis, Mo., workers from ACORN’s Project Vote affiliate for violation of election laws. All eight employees involved in the scandal later pleaded guilty to voter registration fraud.

Project Vote is ACORN’s voter registration arm. Project Vote continues to operate despite the reported dissolution of the national structure of ACORN.

The handwritten reports by FBI agents show that ACORN employees reported numerous irregularities in the nonprofit group’s business practices.

One employee told the FBI that ACORN headquarters is “wkg [working] for the Democratic Party.”

According to one report, an ACORN employee said the purpose of “[f]raudulent cards” was “[t]o cause confusion on election day to keep polls open longer,” “[t]o allow people who can’t vote to vote,” and “[t]o allow to vote multiple times.”

Another report quotes an employee saying, “Project Vote will pay them whether cards fake or not – whatever they had to do to get the cards was attitude.” Project Vote pays based on the number of cards and “that’s why they were so reckless,” the report says.

A report quotes an employee saying, “I don’t like our system. I don’t think we should do voter registration.” The report also notes that employees were “[c]onstantly threatened” and that the staff were “instructed on what to say to FBI.”

Another report indicates an employee told the investigator, that ACORN “[t]old employees not to talk to the FBI.” The FBI is “‘trying to intimidate you.’”

“These documents show the need for a national criminal investigation by the Obama Justice Department into ACORN,” said Tom Fitton, president of Judicial Watch....

More HERE

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Keep Your Health Plan Under Obamacare? Probably Not, Gov't Analysis Concludes

Internal administration documents reveal that up to 51% of employers may have to relinquish their current health care coverage because of ObamaCare. Small firms will be even likelier to lose existing plans.

The "midrange estimate is that 66% of small employer plans and 45% of large employer plans will relinquish their grandfathered status by the end of 2013," according to the document. In the worst-case scenario, 69% of employers — 80% of smaller firms — would lose that status, exposing them to far more provisions under the new health law.

The 83-page document, a joint project of the departments of Health and Human Services, Labor and the IRS, examines the effects that ObamaCare's regulations would have on existing, or "grandfathered," employer-based health care plans....

In a statement, Posey said the document showed that the arguments in favor of ObamaCare were a "bait and switch." "The president promised repeatedly that people who like their current plans can keep them, but now the details of their plan actually confirm what many suspected all along, most Americans will lose their current health care plan," Posey said.

A White House official told IBD: "This is a draft document, and we will be releasing the final regulation when it is complete. The president made a promise to the American people that if they liked their health care plan, they can keep it. The regulation, when finalized, will uphold that promise."

However, the source conceded: "It is difficult to predict how plans and employers will behave in the coming years, but if plans make changes that negatively impact consumers, then they will lose their grandfather status."

More HERE

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Doctors who kill

This is America's version of Britain's notorious "Liverpool Pathway"

You’ve probably never heard of Don Holley. But you should know his name – and you should know how his family said he died: in a San Franciso hospital at the hands of medical staff using a procedure called, “Comfort Care”.

More and more people are finding that the hospitals they have gone to for help are becoming the places that permanently put them or their loved ones out of their misery. In Don Holley’s case, the hospital he went to for healing morphed into a medical version of the nightmarish Hotel California after it was too late for him to leave.

I recently wrote in this column about my family’s horrible experience in warding off the medical death squad when my dad was hospitalized for a heart attack. We won that battle and dad went on to live several more years. Many of you responded with nightmare stories of your own: Stories of loved ones who were killed by the modern medical culture that has developed the personal belief that many patients are often better off dead, and that is up to them to make sure they are.

Don Holley was a 90-year-old man who died in May from chocking on a pool of blood caused by medical professionals who were starving and dehydrating him to death. (You can learn more about his death at www.kgo-tv.com; and type “Don Holley” in the search box.), but here’s a summary of the report:

Mr. Holley entered the hospital after suffering a stroke. Although he was recovering, personnel convinced his neighbor, who had his power of attorney, that Don’s condition was so serous he should be put on what they call, “Comfort Care.” This insidiously evil, but lovely sounding procedure simply means you are heavily drugged while you are denied food and water. It is a barbaric way of killing helpless patients who someone has determined aren’t worth bothering with anymore. In Don’s case, oxygen was still administered while his body was shriveling up from dehydration, causing the blood vessels in his nose to burst and bleed into his throat. The hospital staff decided it was too much trouble to continue to suction the blood from his throat, so they let him drown in his own blood while family members stood by helplessly pleading for someone to save him.

I wish Don’s case were a horrible anomaly – the result of terrible confusion and mismanagement by a bumbling hospital or a crazed, rogue nurse that hates old people. But no so. He was passively but systematically murdered by a medical culture that is now more influenced by organizations like the infamous Hemlock Society – which has cleverly been renamed the pleasant sounding “Compassion and Choices” - than it is by the time-honored principle to, "First do no harm." You must know Don Holley’s story – because it just might become your own.

How to save your family members from the new Comfort Care? Fight for their lives. Fight tooth and nail if you have a hospitalized family member who is being denied basic care, or if you are being pressured to sign documents you don’t understand. Call for free legal help – you can contact the Liberty Counsel at 800-671-1776 or www.lc.org. The organization moves quickly to intervene in situations of emergency.

But don’t wait until an emergency to take action. Become an advocate right now for the most vulnerable among us – the sick, the aged, the disabled, and the very young. They have a right to live. And when they go to a hospital seeking medical care, they have a right to receive it.

We live in a culture where we can no longer assume that hospitals are places of healing and help. Not unlike your worst nightmare, a horror movie, or the popular 1970’s song, a hospital can quickly morph into the medical version of the Hotel California.There is an evil sweeping our nation that is using very clever, compassionate sounding language to hasten the deaths of people who are inconveniences or who, they believe, don’t contribute to society. The very best place to educate yourself quickly on both the history and recent activities of the death movement is at the website of the International Task Force here

SOURCE

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ELSEWHERE

Defending the speculator: "‘Kill the speculators!’ is a cry made during every famine that has ever existed. Uttered by demagogues, who think that the speculator causes death through starvation by raising food prices, this cry is fervently supported by the masses of economic illiterates. This kind of thinking, or rather nonthinking, has allowed dictators to impose even the death penalty for traders in food who charge high prices during famines. And this is done without the feeblest of protests from those usually concerned with civil rights and liberties. Yet the truth of the matter is that, far from causing starvation and famines, it is the speculator who prevents them. And far from safeguarding the lives of the people, it is the dictator who must bear the prime responsibility for causing the famine in the first place.”

Right to be feminist: "The latest Sarah Palin controversy has to do with feminism. In a recent article in the Washington Post, feminist author and blogger Jessica Valenti blasted the former vice presidential candidate for ‘adopting the feminist label.’ Valenti believes that any talk of a conservative version of feminism is a cynical right-wing ploy to fool women into supporting reactionary antiwoman policies. But while Palin may be far from the best spokeswoman for conservative feminism, the idea itself is essential to feminism’s health. If feminism is typecast as a left-wing movement, this automatically limits its appeal in a country with center-right politics.”

The Flotilla Wars: One stunt begets another: "A group of volunteers will shortly board some ships in order to deliver aid to suppressed minorities and send a political message to the world: It’s time for an end to occupation and oppression!No, it’s not another ‘Gaza freedom’ flotilla. This time it’s an Israeli ‘peace flotilla’ organised by the National Union of Israeli Students (NUIS). And it will be heading for Turkey – where the ship that was attacked by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) set sail from – with the aim of bringing attention to the plight of Turkey’s minorities and to challenge the global image of Israel as an evil, murderous state.”

My Twitter.com identity: jonjayray. My Facebook page is also accessible as jonjayray (In full: http://www.facebook.com/jonjayray). For more blog postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, EYE ON BRITAIN and Paralipomena

List of backup or "mirror" sites here or here -- for readers in China or for everyone 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)

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

The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist" (Nationalsozialist) and the full name of Hitler's political party (translated) was "The National Socialist German Workers' Party" (In German: Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei)

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