Teens aren't too old to boost their IQ, study finds
I haven't looked at this study closely but it seems to represent confirmation of the most favoured explanation for the Flynn effect. The Flynn effect is that average IQ scores rose during most of the 20th century in most places. The effect is probably the result of a number of influences but the influence generally thought most important is increasing test sophistication. The longer kids stay in school the more they become "test wise" and thus increase their IQ score even though there is no increase in underlying ability. That would certainly explain the findings below but, sadly for the hopeful, no real advantage will have been gained
If your teenager could use a few more IQ points, Norwegian scientists have some good news: It may not be too late for junior to get them.
Many researchers now agree that mental stimulation in one's early years helps IQ to develop, but there is no such consensus that education - or anything else - can boost IQ on older kids. Studies have seen correlations between a person's total years of schooling and his or her IQ, but there's no good way to tease out the cause and effect. It could be that extra school raises IQ, but it's just as likely that those with higher IQs to start with are inclined to stay in school longer. It's also possible that some other trait, such as family income, influences both IQ and length of education at the same time.
In an ideal world, researchers would divide students into groups, give some of those groups a few extra years in the classroom and then measure everyone's IQ. If additional education was indeed an intelligence booster, then the students who spent more time in school would have higher IQs, on average, than the students who spent less time in school.
It turns out that the government of Norway conducted just such an experiment - albeit unwittingly. From 1955 to 1972, the Norwegian government required schools to increase the number of years of mandatory schooling from seven to nine. This meant that students who used to be done at age 14 now remained in the classroom until age 16. School districts didn't implement the change all at once but rolled it out over many years. This resulted in a data set that allowed researchers to slice and dice the figures in many ways - to check their work, in other words.
The other helpful thing about Norway is that the military there measured the IQ of all 19-year-old men as part of the universal draft.
Researchers from the University of Oslo and Statistics Norway (the government's bureau of statistics) matched up IQ and years of schooling and IQ for men born in 1950 through 1958. They found that each of the additional years of education raised the men's IQ by an average of 3.7 points - an increase that was deemed statistically significant. For these men, the school reform meant that they got about two additional months of education, resulting in an additional 0.6 IQ points.
The results were reported in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
"These results do not directly challenge the recent emphasis placed on early childhood environment for the development of cognitive skills," the researchers wrote. However, they added, "these results suggest that we should not yet entirely disregard the potential of interventions even as late as in adolescence."
SOURCE
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The Left Isn't Just Wrong: It Really Is Evil!
By Rich Kozlovich
Why are people so easily fooled by the lefties and the greenies? The answer is basic; because people mostly want to be nice to others. It is called a sense of decency. It is a genetic paradigm. Did you ever notice how everyone loves to say Happy Holidays, Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukah, Happy Easter, etc? Why? Because people really like connecting with their fellow man, and at these times of the year they can extend themselves warmly and no one will think they are weird. Is it any wonder people love holidays? Religion may be the basis for it, but in reality it is about the personal connections with their fellow human beings. It is a sense of decency that is part and parcel of the human genetic paradigm.
Lefties use that sense of decency to promote what they call equality or a sense of fairness. What they promote isn’t an equal right to compete to the best of our abilities. To be given a fair shot to play the game with the best of our abilities. In reality it is the equality of outcomes is what they want. And they will decide what that outcome will be. That is the very foundation of leftism. Everyone should have less as long as there is one who has nothing and they will manage that process. That is insane and we need to start saying so. And that is the problem. The very same media that crossed every ‘t” and dotted every “i” on these candidates turns a blind eye to every wart, mole, flaw, scar and destructive misdirection of the left.
In a society such as ours the more wealthy people there are the more those at the bottom of the economic spectrum will also have. Poor in America is luxury in most places in the world because we have so many with so much, and that abundance at the top creates ‘trickle down’ economics. The poor in America have toilets, televisions, radios, watches, regular meals, descent clothes and medical care….even when they can’t afford any of this. Even if they refuse to work! How terrible a system can that be?
However, do we really have equality of competition? They used to publish the names of the top 25 richest people in the nation every year in the newspaper; and every year the same families were among the bottom 12 or 13 and many were old money. There was one family that held three of those slots and then eventually dropped off entirely. Why? Because inherited money isn’t the same as made money! Inherited money dissipates among a growing number of generational heirs. But the top 12 or 13 were always self made people such as Oprah Winfrey, Bill Gates and others. In no other country in the world is that possible. I haven’t seen that list for a number of years, but I have no doubt that the pattern remains the same.
As for the greenies; it is easy to surmise that everyone wants clean air, land and water. The trick is to scare them into believing that everything humanity is doing is contaminating those planetary components to the detriment of all human and animal life beyond repair.
We need to get this! Their goal isn’t a sound environment. Their goal is for all of humanity to willingly turn power over to them to control the lives of everyone on the planet; truth notwithstanding. What bothers me are those in the leadership positions in education, religion, politics and science who know better, or at least should know better because they are at the center of information in their fields, who go along with this insanity. They have misled us for their own gain and a corrupt media is the handmaiden to all of this.
Everything we see on the news and everything we read in the newspaper is a lie. Mostly lies of omission, but they are clearly guilty of lies of commission also. The most disturbing part of all of this is the fact that most people don’t mind. People don’t want to have turmoil in their lives, and if they face the truth as to what is going on they then become uncomfortable, then they become responsible and worse yet; they may have to do something. They would rather just be in ignorant bliss, and the left knows that.
That is why when you look around the country at the professional business associations there is always a small fraction of the membership doing all the work, especially if that work is pro bono. That small fraction is then divided into those who are willing to serve and those who are capable of serving, which is a really small number. And those who serve pay a financial penalty for their dedication. None of that will ever change because it is all part and parcel of what it means to be human….it is a genetic paradigm….and we need to accept it. Once we can do that we now have a firm grasp on reality. Once we have a firm hold on reality we can plan and organize to do those things that are necessary to ward of the evil being done. And I do not agree with Dennis Prager when he says the “people on the left aren’t evil, they’re just wrong!” Wrong Dennis!
If a person dies, even accidently, during the commission of a crime everyone that was part of the crime is guilty of murder, even if the person who dies was one of the perpetrators; and they are all charged accordingly. That is a basic ‘common law’ principle! Leftism, in all of its manifestations, has murdered, impoverished and abused more people than any other movement in the history of mankind
SOURCE
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South Carolina and Voter ID: When Politics Drives Law Enforcement
Hans von Spakovsky
Attorney General Eric Holder put a lump of coal in South Carolina’s Christmas stocking on Dec. 23 when he objected to the state’s new voter ID law. By ignoring inconvenient facts and clear legal precedent, Holder showed once again that politics and ideology—not the rule of law—drive his law enforcement decisions. Given the power of the Justice Department and its potential for abuse, this should worry all Americans, particularly when that abuse has the potential to affect the outcome of next year’s election.
This new ID requirement is a common-sense reform that can easily be met by voters regardless of their race, ethnicity, or economic status. However, South Carolina is one of the few states still covered under Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act, a civil rights-era law that requires the state to get “preclearance” of any voting change from the Voting Section of the Civil Rights Division at the U.S. Justice Department or a federal court in the District of Columbia. Section 5 was originally passed in 1965 as a five-year emergency provision to remedy widespread, systematic discrimination in the South. Yet it has been frequently renewed—most recently in 2006—even though the official discrimination it was intended to stop has long since disappeared except for isolated incidents.
South Carolina made the grievous error of submitting the state’s new voter ID law to the Justice Department for review, rather than going straight to federal court where it would get an impartial hearing. The history of this Justice Department over the past three years, from the New Black Panther Party voter intimidation case to the refusal to defend the Defense of Marriage Act, has been one in which raw politics and ideology are driving law enforcement decisions.
Holder’s flawed outlook on voter ID laws, as he outlined it recently in a speech at the LBJ Library in Texas, matches the racial paranoia of the Democratic National Committee and the NAACP, each of which claims erroneously that voter ID laws are an attempt to suppress minority votes comparable to Jim Crow. This is a historically preposterous idea. But there was no way that South Carolina was going to get a fair, objective, and nonpartisan review of its voter ID law from this Justice Department, particularly given the parallel views of the radicals hired into career civil service positions within the Civil Rights Division.
In its objection letter to South Carolina, the Justice Department wrongly claims that voter ID would have a discriminatory impact on “non-white” voters. To get to that conclusion, however, DOJ manipulated the statistics to claim that “minority registered voters were nearly 20% more likely to lack DMV-issued ID than white registered voters, and thus to be effectively disenfranchised by” the law’s requirements. This is not a legitimate claim, given the actual data and the provisions of the law.
South Carolina compared its voter registration list to its DMV records. That data showed that out of 2.7 million registered voters, only 240,000 (active and inactive voters) did not have a DMV-issued photo ID (there was no telling how many of those hold military IDs or passports). When broken down by race, DOJ claimed that of the registered voters, 8.4 percent of whites do not have a photo ID compared to 10 percent of blacks. DOJ’s entire claim of discrimination is based on the statistically insignificant difference between these two numbers, i.e., because there is supposedly a 1.6 percentage point difference, then blacks are being discriminated against. Of course, this also ignores the fact that since blacks are only 28 percent of South Carolina’s population, even if these percentages are correct, then a much larger total number of white voters are without a photo ID.
However, these numbers are flawed. Before DOJ issued its objection letter, the Associated Press reported that according to the South Carolina DMV, at least 207,000 of the 240,000 registered voters without an ID “live in other states, allowed their ID cards to expire, probably have licenses with names that didn’t match voter records, or were dead.”
In fact, at least 60,000 of the registered voters on whom DOJ is basing its invalid objection are deceased (!) and shouldn’t be on the voter list at all.
This revised report eliminates 86 percent of the 240,000 registered voters who supposedly don’t have an ID. So only 1.2 percent of registered voters in South Carolina don’t have a DMV-issued photo ID—and that minimal number is supposed to be grounds for DOJ to object to the voter ID law?!
DOJ also placed a burden on South Carolina that doesn’t exist under the applicable Section 5 legal standard. The objection letter claims that the state did not submit “any evidence or instance of either in-person voter impersonation or any other type of fraud.” However, Section 5 does not require a covered state to justify or outline the public policy reasons for the law. It only requires that a state show that the effect or intent of the law is not discriminatory. Despite Holder’s inflammatory and untrue claims in his speech in Texas about voter ID laws, DOJ made no claim of discriminatory intent against South Carolina, and the facts show no discriminatory effect. DOJ is not entitled to question the public policy rationale of the state legislature; it does not have a veto over the state’s decisions.
South Carolina should challenge the relevance of DOJ’s demands. This unlawful hurdle is a naked effort by Holder to undermine election integrity.
The letter also very carefully does not mention DOJ’S Section 5 approval of Georgia’s voter ID law in 2005 (as well as Arizona’s ID law). DOJ found the Georgia law to be nondiscriminatory, and court decisions and actual election results in Georgia bear that out. The lawsuit filed against Georgia’s voter ID law was eventually dismissed because the court also found that law to be nondiscriminatory. The court specifically noted that after claiming that hundreds of thousands of African-Americans would be unable to vote because of the Georgia law, the American Civil Liberties Union and the NAACP could not produce a single individual who would be unable to vote. Turnout of black voters in elections in Georgia and Indiana has increased significantly since their laws went into effect—the exact opposite of critics’ predictions.
But DOJ mentions none of this, because its objection in South Carolina violates both its own precedent as well as the findings of federal courts that voter ID requirements are nondiscriminatory and not a burden on voters.
More HERE
But you need photo ID for lots of other things. For instance:
New Law Requires Photo ID To Buy Drain Cleaner in Chicago
A new state law requires those who buy drain cleaners and other caustic substances to provide photo identification and sign a log.
It’s getting a rough reception from customers and merchants alike although perhaps none more than a cashier at Schroeder’s True Value Hardware in Lombard. “They’re not very happy about it at all,” said Don Schroeder, one of the store’s owners. “One of the customers actually threatened the (cashier) and threatened to throw the acid on her.”
Although the customer did not make good on the threat, and no one called police, other employees of Schroeder’s said they would call police immediately if any similar threat is made.
The law, which took effect Sunday, requires those who seek to buy caustic or noxious substances, except for batteries, to provide government-issued photo identification that shows their name and date of birth. The cashier then must log the name and address, the date and time of the purchase, the type of product, the brand and even the net weight.
State Rep. Jack Franks (D-Woodstock) obtained passage of the new law following attacks in which drain cleaner was poured on two Chicago women, badly scarring them.
More HERE
I guess that tracking drain cleaner buyers is a lot more important than honest elections
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My Twitter.com identity: jonjayray. I have deleted my Facebook page as I rarely access it. For more blog postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, 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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Saturday, January 07, 2012
Comedians for Obama
President Obama may not know it, but he has a nice advantage in the world of late-night TV. A new study by The Center for Media and Public Affairs at George Mason University says that in 2011, late-night comedians mocked Republicans three times more than they did Democrats. The biggest ideological difference was between David Letterman and Jay Leno. Letterman told 77 jokes at the expense of Obama, while Leno told 156 -- about 100 percent more.
The Republican presidential candidates got whacked across the board in late-night precincts. Herman Cain was mocked 191 times, Rick Perry 186, Michele Bachmann 128, and Newt Gingrich 110.
Interestingly, Mitt Romney was only singled out for teasing 79 times, perhaps signifying a certain blandness on the part of the governor.
The George Mason survey doesn't count the GOP mocking by Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert, possibly because researchers would have collapsed trying to chronicle that. The fact is that every late-night comedian is liberal, and so are most of their writers. Leno is the most neutral; Letterman, Stewart, Colbert and Jimmy Fallon are the furthest left.
The question is: How much will this matter in the 2012 election? Tough to answer, but one thing is certain: The late-night shows are not as well watched as they used to be.
However, popular culture does have an effect on the distracted voter: those people who do not pay much attention to the news. They often pick up the political narrative from entertainment programs and stuff they read on the Internet. There is no question that Obama's rock-star status in 2008 was largely defined by Oprah and other entertainers. And that stodgy old John McCain did not exactly dominate the rundown on "Entertainment Tonight."
If Romney is the Republican nominee, boring jokes will rule the day. If a committed conservative like Rick Santorum were to run, the writers would go wild. I can see a Santorum impersonator on "Saturday Night Live" wearing a sleeveless sweater and a "Re-elect John Adams" button. Huey Lewis once sang, "It's hip to be square." Not on late-night TV, it isn't.
Americans should expect the media to back Obama again, although the enthusiasm couldn't possibly match that of 2008. We live in sobering times, and even though many believe it's all George W. Bush's fault, that punch line is not working anymore. There will be a new narrative, and it most likely will involve highlighting the dumbness of the GOP guy, not the accomplishments of the president.
In the end, the election will not be decided on late-night TV. Republicans already have lost there. Luckily for them, the Electoral College is a daytime operation.
SOURCE
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Obama Unemployment Magic Trick: Indefinitely Detain 4 Million People from Workforce
Lying with statistics
Although there’s little doubt that job creation is speeding up in the private sector, unemployment is not going down as widely touted by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). In fact, it’s likely unchanged since the beginning of the recession because the government is deliberately undercounting the workforce to make unemployment appear to go down.
Missing in the latest labor report are at least 1.2 million job seekers who have been added to the civilian population over the last year but not to the work force, thereby artificially deflating the unemployment rate.
BLS is undercounting the workforce by lowering the Labor Force Participation rates
They are missing in part because the BLS no longer counts people who have been unemployed for so long that they have stopped looking for work. Since 1994 the BLS has discontinued the practice of counting the “long-term discouraged workers” from the workforce. If a worker stops looking for work after a period of time, they are no longer counted in the workforce. That means that government has created a system whereby the longer a jobs recession continues, the less reliable the unemployment numbers become- to the advantage of the government.
In December of 2010 there were just shy of 239 million workers in the civilian pool available to the work force. In the last year, that number has risen by 1.6 million to 240.5 million people. At the same time, the officially-counted workforce as used by the BLS has risen by only 274,000 workers. At a participation rate of 64 percent, that number should be closer to 1.1 million workers. Indeed, over the last year, the participation rate has also dropped from 64.3 percent to 64 percent. In other words, fewer people from the available population are counted as available to the workforce, thereby decreasing unemployment numbers.
In making an apples-to-apples comparison with a year ago, the country should have about 1.2 million more workers in the workforce than the BLS currently calculates. If one accounts for those extra workers, top line unemployment is at 9 percent. But that’s not the end of the deception.
Since the beginning of the recession labor participation rates have gone down from an average of 65.8 percent since 1980 as calculated by Zero Hedge to 64 percent, a rate not seen since the early 1980s. Indeed the persistency of this jobs recession is shown in the precipitous decline in the labor participation rates regardless of where the official unemployment rate has stood.
Just using the average participation rate of 65.8 percent since 1980 supplied by Zero Hedge, there are 4.4 million workers missing from the work force. Zero Hedge predicts that if the BLS keeps dropping the workforce number at the current rate, unemployment will hit zero just prior to the general election no matter how many jobs Obama “saves”.
It won't surprise anyone that as of December, the real implied unemployment rate was 11.4% - basically where it has been ever since 2009 - and at 2.9% delta to reported, represents the widest divergence to reported data since the early 1980s. And because we know this will be the next question, extending this lunacy, America will officially have no unemployed, when the Labor Force Participation rate hits 58.5%, which should be just before the presidential election.
If you can give Obama a Nobel Peace Prize for a non-existent peace, you should also consider an Oscar award for a movie yet to made.
If there were a remake of Dr. Strangelove today, there’d be no better subject than the Obama administration’s deconstructionist assault on truth. The sad thing is that so many people are willing accomplices in that assault.
For this administration, lying is a state of mind; supplying guns to drug traffickers is a noble act; killing healthcare is “saving” healthcare; ignoring entitlement reform is “preserving” entitlements; ignoring laws on immigration, recess appointments, detention of Americans, wiretaps, declarations of war, are all the constitutional prerogatives of the great constitutional law-giver and professor-in-chief, Dr. Strangelove or; How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Obama.
It would be hilarious, except it’s not a Hollywood movie. Obama’s made it the truth. Or whatever truth means now.
SOURCE
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Why the Doctor Won’t See You
Are you having difficulty finding a doctor who will see you? If you are, brace yourself. Things are about to get a whole lot worse.
Right now, the biggest problems are in Massachusetts. If you live in Boston and are trying to see a new family doctor, get prepared to wait more than two months before you ever get a foot in the door. For the state as a whole, the average wait to see a new family doctor is one month. More than half of all family doctors and more than half of all internists are not accepting new patients at all.
What if you live in another state? Just wait two more years. In Massachusetts people are lined up waiting to see doctors because of the health reform championed by the former governor (RomneyCare). And as Barack Obama has said on more than one occasion, RomneyCare is the model for ObamaCare.
Why? In both the Massachusetts health plan and the new health care law the mistake is the same: insuring the uninsured, but doing nothing to enable the medical community to deliver more care. Massachusetts succeeded in cutting the number of uninsured in half — a worthy accomplishment. But the state did nothing to expand the number of doctors, nurses or paramedical personnel. The result: a major increase in the demand for care, but no change in supply.
I learned what this means in human terms a while back from a Boston cab driver. She was on MassHealth (Medicaid) and her biggest problem, she told me, was getting care. "I went down a list of 20 doctors before I found one who would see me," she said. "Twenty doctors?" I responded incredulously. "Were you going through the Yellow Pages?" "No," she said, "I was going down the list MassHealth gave me."
In Massachusetts, this is what the advocates of health reform call "universal coverage."
Bad as all this is, it is actually rather mild compared to what is about to happen in other states. In Massachusetts, less than 10 percent of the population was uninsured before the reform set in. In Texas, by contrast, one in every four people is currently uninsured. Insure half of those and the demand for Texas doctors is going to soar.
Estimates are that ObamaCare will succeed in insuring 32 million otherwise uninsured people. If economic studies are correct, once these folks are insured, they will try to double their consumption of health care. On top of that, ObamaCare does something that Massachusetts did not do. It will force the vast majority of people who already have insurance to switch to more generous coverage. For example, everyone will have to be covered for a long list of preventive care and diagnostic screenings, with no copay and no deductible. Once people have this extra coverage, they will be inclined to take advantage of it.
Get prepared, then, for a huge increase in the demand for care. The result will be growing waiting lines — at the doctors’ offices, at hospital emergency rooms, at the health clinics, etc.
In the early stages of Massachusetts' health reform, Governor Romney told me what he expected to happen. Instead of uninsured patients going to hospital emergency rooms to get expensive care in inappropriate settings (all paid for by the rest of us), he said, insured patients will be getting less expensive care in the offices of primary care doctors.
Ah, but the best laid plans …. Turns out that more people are currently seeking care in hospital emergency rooms and at publicly funded community health centers than there were before the reform! As one academic study concluded, in Massachusetts you have the same people seeking the same care at the same places you had before. Health reform has mainly meant shuffling money around from one bureaucracy to another.
When health care is rationed by waiting, who gets care and who doesn’t? Here is the real surprise. Just as ObamaCare intends to do, Massachusetts set up health insurance exchanges where the uninsured could obtain insurance, in most cases with generous government subsidies. Yet the newly insured are the patients having the greatest difficulty obtaining access to care. According to one report:
* Only 56 percent of family doctors accept patients enrolled in Commonwealth Care (subsidized insurance sold in the "exchange").
* Only 44 percent accept patients in Commonwealth Choice (unsubsidized insurance sold in the "exchange").
* The fraction of internists who accept Commonwealth Care and Commonwealth Choice is 43 percent and 35 percent, respectively.
In Massachusetts this is called "access to care."
SOURCE
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Crony Capitalism is Failing; Let's Try the Real Thing
The past four years have seen governments throughout the West turn to a ghoulish corporatism, in which selected private companies are bailed out with public money. Understandably, people from across the political spectrum have reacted angrily. The Tea Partiers and the Occupiers are both protesting against the same thing, viz the rescue of large banks by taxpayers.
But whereas the Occupiers, in a slightly inchoate way, believe they are complaining about capitalism, free marketeers point out that, in a capitalist system, bad banks would have been allowed to collapse, their assets sold to more efficient competitors. Bondholders, shareholders and some depositors would have lost money, but taxpayers wouldn't have contributed a penny.
When we make that argument in full – as I did in a direct exchange with some Occupy LSX types recently (see here) – the typical response is 'Yeah, well that might be your theoretical capitalism, but we're dealing with the one that actually exists'.
This is a reasonable objection. We capitalists mustn't become like those student Trotskyists who were forever insisting that the USSR wasn't really communist, and that proper socialism had never been tried.
What, then, is genuine capitalism? Where can you find it? What changes do we need to make to the present system to get there? I was planning to write a lengthy blog about it, but then I discovered that Jesse Norman, the cerebral MP for Hereford, had got there first. His paper, The Case for Real Capitalism, is worth reading in full. Having worked in the City before becoming a philosophy don, he understands in practice as well as in theory where the system has gone wrong. And he proposes concrete steps to put it right, to make shareholders think of themselves as owners rather than investors, to incentivise saving and boost competition.
Above all, Jesse grasps that freedom is more than just an absence of rules: that it also implies responsibility and (in the absence of external restraints) self-control. Herein lies the difference between what Milton called 'liberty' and what he called 'licence'. Jesse's paper is consciously conservative, yet underlines once more that, in practical terms, the differences between conservatives and libertarians can be deferred until the grave.
SOURCE
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ELSEWHERE
IA: Couple wins lawsuit over names on birth certificate: "An Iowa judge has ordered the Department of Public Health to issue a new birth certificate listing both members of a same-sex marriage as legal parents of a 2-year-old girl, The Des Moines Register reports. ... The couple sued the state when the department refused to list both names on the birth certificate of their daughter, Mackenzie, who was conceived through use of an anonymous sperm donor."
Santorum's big-government conservatism: "There is no doubt that Santorum is deeply conservative on social issues. ... At the same time, on economic and size-of-government issues, Santorum's record is much weaker. In fact, Eric Erickson of Red State refers to Santorum as a 'pro-life statist.'"
US Navy rescues Iranian fishing boat from pirates: "The political tensions between the U.S. and Iran over transit in and around the Persian Gulf gave way Friday to photos of rescued Iranian fisherman happily wearing American Navy ball caps. The fishermen were rescued by a U.S. Navy destroyer Thursday, more than 40 days after their boat was commandeered by suspected Somali pirates in the northern Arabian Sea. The rescue came just days after Tehran warned the U.S. to keep its warships out of the Persian Gulf _ an irony not lost on U.S. officials who trumpeted the news on Friday. "We think it's very doubtful that the Iranians or the pirates were aware of recent events of the last couple days," Rear Adm. Craig S. Faller, commander of the U.S. Navy Carrier Strike Group involved in the rescue, told reporters by phone Friday. "Once we released them (the fishermen) today they went on their way very happily, I might add, waving to us wearing USS Kidd Navy ball caps."
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My Twitter.com identity: jonjayray. I have deleted my Facebook page as I rarely access it. For more blog postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, 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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President Obama may not know it, but he has a nice advantage in the world of late-night TV. A new study by The Center for Media and Public Affairs at George Mason University says that in 2011, late-night comedians mocked Republicans three times more than they did Democrats. The biggest ideological difference was between David Letterman and Jay Leno. Letterman told 77 jokes at the expense of Obama, while Leno told 156 -- about 100 percent more.
The Republican presidential candidates got whacked across the board in late-night precincts. Herman Cain was mocked 191 times, Rick Perry 186, Michele Bachmann 128, and Newt Gingrich 110.
Interestingly, Mitt Romney was only singled out for teasing 79 times, perhaps signifying a certain blandness on the part of the governor.
The George Mason survey doesn't count the GOP mocking by Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert, possibly because researchers would have collapsed trying to chronicle that. The fact is that every late-night comedian is liberal, and so are most of their writers. Leno is the most neutral; Letterman, Stewart, Colbert and Jimmy Fallon are the furthest left.
The question is: How much will this matter in the 2012 election? Tough to answer, but one thing is certain: The late-night shows are not as well watched as they used to be.
However, popular culture does have an effect on the distracted voter: those people who do not pay much attention to the news. They often pick up the political narrative from entertainment programs and stuff they read on the Internet. There is no question that Obama's rock-star status in 2008 was largely defined by Oprah and other entertainers. And that stodgy old John McCain did not exactly dominate the rundown on "Entertainment Tonight."
If Romney is the Republican nominee, boring jokes will rule the day. If a committed conservative like Rick Santorum were to run, the writers would go wild. I can see a Santorum impersonator on "Saturday Night Live" wearing a sleeveless sweater and a "Re-elect John Adams" button. Huey Lewis once sang, "It's hip to be square." Not on late-night TV, it isn't.
Americans should expect the media to back Obama again, although the enthusiasm couldn't possibly match that of 2008. We live in sobering times, and even though many believe it's all George W. Bush's fault, that punch line is not working anymore. There will be a new narrative, and it most likely will involve highlighting the dumbness of the GOP guy, not the accomplishments of the president.
In the end, the election will not be decided on late-night TV. Republicans already have lost there. Luckily for them, the Electoral College is a daytime operation.
SOURCE
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Obama Unemployment Magic Trick: Indefinitely Detain 4 Million People from Workforce
Lying with statistics
Although there’s little doubt that job creation is speeding up in the private sector, unemployment is not going down as widely touted by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). In fact, it’s likely unchanged since the beginning of the recession because the government is deliberately undercounting the workforce to make unemployment appear to go down.
Missing in the latest labor report are at least 1.2 million job seekers who have been added to the civilian population over the last year but not to the work force, thereby artificially deflating the unemployment rate.
BLS is undercounting the workforce by lowering the Labor Force Participation rates
They are missing in part because the BLS no longer counts people who have been unemployed for so long that they have stopped looking for work. Since 1994 the BLS has discontinued the practice of counting the “long-term discouraged workers” from the workforce. If a worker stops looking for work after a period of time, they are no longer counted in the workforce. That means that government has created a system whereby the longer a jobs recession continues, the less reliable the unemployment numbers become- to the advantage of the government.
In December of 2010 there were just shy of 239 million workers in the civilian pool available to the work force. In the last year, that number has risen by 1.6 million to 240.5 million people. At the same time, the officially-counted workforce as used by the BLS has risen by only 274,000 workers. At a participation rate of 64 percent, that number should be closer to 1.1 million workers. Indeed, over the last year, the participation rate has also dropped from 64.3 percent to 64 percent. In other words, fewer people from the available population are counted as available to the workforce, thereby decreasing unemployment numbers.
In making an apples-to-apples comparison with a year ago, the country should have about 1.2 million more workers in the workforce than the BLS currently calculates. If one accounts for those extra workers, top line unemployment is at 9 percent. But that’s not the end of the deception.
Since the beginning of the recession labor participation rates have gone down from an average of 65.8 percent since 1980 as calculated by Zero Hedge to 64 percent, a rate not seen since the early 1980s. Indeed the persistency of this jobs recession is shown in the precipitous decline in the labor participation rates regardless of where the official unemployment rate has stood.
Just using the average participation rate of 65.8 percent since 1980 supplied by Zero Hedge, there are 4.4 million workers missing from the work force. Zero Hedge predicts that if the BLS keeps dropping the workforce number at the current rate, unemployment will hit zero just prior to the general election no matter how many jobs Obama “saves”.
It won't surprise anyone that as of December, the real implied unemployment rate was 11.4% - basically where it has been ever since 2009 - and at 2.9% delta to reported, represents the widest divergence to reported data since the early 1980s. And because we know this will be the next question, extending this lunacy, America will officially have no unemployed, when the Labor Force Participation rate hits 58.5%, which should be just before the presidential election.
If you can give Obama a Nobel Peace Prize for a non-existent peace, you should also consider an Oscar award for a movie yet to made.
If there were a remake of Dr. Strangelove today, there’d be no better subject than the Obama administration’s deconstructionist assault on truth. The sad thing is that so many people are willing accomplices in that assault.
For this administration, lying is a state of mind; supplying guns to drug traffickers is a noble act; killing healthcare is “saving” healthcare; ignoring entitlement reform is “preserving” entitlements; ignoring laws on immigration, recess appointments, detention of Americans, wiretaps, declarations of war, are all the constitutional prerogatives of the great constitutional law-giver and professor-in-chief, Dr. Strangelove or; How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Obama.
It would be hilarious, except it’s not a Hollywood movie. Obama’s made it the truth. Or whatever truth means now.
SOURCE
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Why the Doctor Won’t See You
Are you having difficulty finding a doctor who will see you? If you are, brace yourself. Things are about to get a whole lot worse.
Right now, the biggest problems are in Massachusetts. If you live in Boston and are trying to see a new family doctor, get prepared to wait more than two months before you ever get a foot in the door. For the state as a whole, the average wait to see a new family doctor is one month. More than half of all family doctors and more than half of all internists are not accepting new patients at all.
What if you live in another state? Just wait two more years. In Massachusetts people are lined up waiting to see doctors because of the health reform championed by the former governor (RomneyCare). And as Barack Obama has said on more than one occasion, RomneyCare is the model for ObamaCare.
Why? In both the Massachusetts health plan and the new health care law the mistake is the same: insuring the uninsured, but doing nothing to enable the medical community to deliver more care. Massachusetts succeeded in cutting the number of uninsured in half — a worthy accomplishment. But the state did nothing to expand the number of doctors, nurses or paramedical personnel. The result: a major increase in the demand for care, but no change in supply.
I learned what this means in human terms a while back from a Boston cab driver. She was on MassHealth (Medicaid) and her biggest problem, she told me, was getting care. "I went down a list of 20 doctors before I found one who would see me," she said. "Twenty doctors?" I responded incredulously. "Were you going through the Yellow Pages?" "No," she said, "I was going down the list MassHealth gave me."
In Massachusetts, this is what the advocates of health reform call "universal coverage."
Bad as all this is, it is actually rather mild compared to what is about to happen in other states. In Massachusetts, less than 10 percent of the population was uninsured before the reform set in. In Texas, by contrast, one in every four people is currently uninsured. Insure half of those and the demand for Texas doctors is going to soar.
Estimates are that ObamaCare will succeed in insuring 32 million otherwise uninsured people. If economic studies are correct, once these folks are insured, they will try to double their consumption of health care. On top of that, ObamaCare does something that Massachusetts did not do. It will force the vast majority of people who already have insurance to switch to more generous coverage. For example, everyone will have to be covered for a long list of preventive care and diagnostic screenings, with no copay and no deductible. Once people have this extra coverage, they will be inclined to take advantage of it.
Get prepared, then, for a huge increase in the demand for care. The result will be growing waiting lines — at the doctors’ offices, at hospital emergency rooms, at the health clinics, etc.
In the early stages of Massachusetts' health reform, Governor Romney told me what he expected to happen. Instead of uninsured patients going to hospital emergency rooms to get expensive care in inappropriate settings (all paid for by the rest of us), he said, insured patients will be getting less expensive care in the offices of primary care doctors.
Ah, but the best laid plans …. Turns out that more people are currently seeking care in hospital emergency rooms and at publicly funded community health centers than there were before the reform! As one academic study concluded, in Massachusetts you have the same people seeking the same care at the same places you had before. Health reform has mainly meant shuffling money around from one bureaucracy to another.
When health care is rationed by waiting, who gets care and who doesn’t? Here is the real surprise. Just as ObamaCare intends to do, Massachusetts set up health insurance exchanges where the uninsured could obtain insurance, in most cases with generous government subsidies. Yet the newly insured are the patients having the greatest difficulty obtaining access to care. According to one report:
* Only 56 percent of family doctors accept patients enrolled in Commonwealth Care (subsidized insurance sold in the "exchange").
* Only 44 percent accept patients in Commonwealth Choice (unsubsidized insurance sold in the "exchange").
* The fraction of internists who accept Commonwealth Care and Commonwealth Choice is 43 percent and 35 percent, respectively.
In Massachusetts this is called "access to care."
SOURCE
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Crony Capitalism is Failing; Let's Try the Real Thing
The past four years have seen governments throughout the West turn to a ghoulish corporatism, in which selected private companies are bailed out with public money. Understandably, people from across the political spectrum have reacted angrily. The Tea Partiers and the Occupiers are both protesting against the same thing, viz the rescue of large banks by taxpayers.
But whereas the Occupiers, in a slightly inchoate way, believe they are complaining about capitalism, free marketeers point out that, in a capitalist system, bad banks would have been allowed to collapse, their assets sold to more efficient competitors. Bondholders, shareholders and some depositors would have lost money, but taxpayers wouldn't have contributed a penny.
When we make that argument in full – as I did in a direct exchange with some Occupy LSX types recently (see here) – the typical response is 'Yeah, well that might be your theoretical capitalism, but we're dealing with the one that actually exists'.
This is a reasonable objection. We capitalists mustn't become like those student Trotskyists who were forever insisting that the USSR wasn't really communist, and that proper socialism had never been tried.
What, then, is genuine capitalism? Where can you find it? What changes do we need to make to the present system to get there? I was planning to write a lengthy blog about it, but then I discovered that Jesse Norman, the cerebral MP for Hereford, had got there first. His paper, The Case for Real Capitalism, is worth reading in full. Having worked in the City before becoming a philosophy don, he understands in practice as well as in theory where the system has gone wrong. And he proposes concrete steps to put it right, to make shareholders think of themselves as owners rather than investors, to incentivise saving and boost competition.
Above all, Jesse grasps that freedom is more than just an absence of rules: that it also implies responsibility and (in the absence of external restraints) self-control. Herein lies the difference between what Milton called 'liberty' and what he called 'licence'. Jesse's paper is consciously conservative, yet underlines once more that, in practical terms, the differences between conservatives and libertarians can be deferred until the grave.
SOURCE
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ELSEWHERE
IA: Couple wins lawsuit over names on birth certificate: "An Iowa judge has ordered the Department of Public Health to issue a new birth certificate listing both members of a same-sex marriage as legal parents of a 2-year-old girl, The Des Moines Register reports. ... The couple sued the state when the department refused to list both names on the birth certificate of their daughter, Mackenzie, who was conceived through use of an anonymous sperm donor."
Santorum's big-government conservatism: "There is no doubt that Santorum is deeply conservative on social issues. ... At the same time, on economic and size-of-government issues, Santorum's record is much weaker. In fact, Eric Erickson of Red State refers to Santorum as a 'pro-life statist.'"
US Navy rescues Iranian fishing boat from pirates: "The political tensions between the U.S. and Iran over transit in and around the Persian Gulf gave way Friday to photos of rescued Iranian fisherman happily wearing American Navy ball caps. The fishermen were rescued by a U.S. Navy destroyer Thursday, more than 40 days after their boat was commandeered by suspected Somali pirates in the northern Arabian Sea. The rescue came just days after Tehran warned the U.S. to keep its warships out of the Persian Gulf _ an irony not lost on U.S. officials who trumpeted the news on Friday. "We think it's very doubtful that the Iranians or the pirates were aware of recent events of the last couple days," Rear Adm. Craig S. Faller, commander of the U.S. Navy Carrier Strike Group involved in the rescue, told reporters by phone Friday. "Once we released them (the fishermen) today they went on their way very happily, I might add, waving to us wearing USS Kidd Navy ball caps."
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My Twitter.com identity: jonjayray. I have deleted my Facebook page as I rarely access it. For more blog postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, 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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Friday, January 06, 2012
Norman Lear's Left-wing paranoia about 'The Right'
The usual Leftist projection. It tells us more about the Left than it does about the Right. They imagine that conservatives are like them
(Norman Milton Lear (born July 27, 1922) is an American television writer and producer who produced such 1970s sitcoms as All in the Family, Sanford and Son, One Day at a Time, The Jeffersons, Good Times and Maude. As a political activist, he founded the civil liberties advocacy organization People For the American Way in 1981 -- Wikipedia.
The quote below is an excerpt from what Lear said a few weeks ago at the 30th anniversary of PFAW)
They're coming for your children! They're coming for the womenfolk! Then they're coming after you! Norman Lear, the famous television show producer, offered this hysterically paranoid assessment of the allegedly growing and presumably insidious power of "the right":
How accurate is Lear's assessment of the supposed power and influence of the right? Is the right steadily forming a formidable alliance of academics, media outlets, websites, etc., that serve as a fourth column for the "right wing"? Even if this were true, what about the power of the left?
Let's look at the mainscream media. In "Left Turn: How Liberal Media Bias Distorts the American Mind," UCLA economist and political science professor Dr. Tim Groseclose uses three different methods to determine the SQ -- or slant quotient -- of the major media outlets. Of the 20 most prominent news outlets, including The Wall Street Journal, "Good Morning America" and Time magazine, he found only two that leaned to the right: The Washington Times and Fox News.
True, the network evening news shows no longer hold the market share of years past, but nearly 25 million Americans still turn to Diane Sawyer, Brian Williams and Scott Pelley each night. That means eight times as many viewers watch ABC/NBC/CBS as watch "The O'Reilly Factor," the top-rated cable news/talk program.
When people like Lear speak of the growing power of the right-wing cabal, they believe Fox leads the charge. And Bill O'Reilly is clearly the face of the Fox News network. But as hated as O'Reilly is by the left, how legitimate is their description of O'Reilly as a right-wing ideologue?
O'Reilly is not even a Republican. He is registered as an independent and opposes the death penalty. He supported -- at least initially -- the Senate's so-called "amnesty bill." His opposition to ObamaCare is based on cost rather than the Constitution. He believes that in "a system where everybody is guaranteed the same health care ... whether you have a lot of money or no money, you're gonna get the same health care. Now, in theory, that sounds good ... but in practice, we got a $14 trillion debt that we can't pay off, and this is gonna add to it, big-time." He wondered how a man can raise a family of four on minimum wage. In a recent interview with former President Bill Clinton, O'Reilly said, "I think I am paying my fair share (of taxes). Now, I didn't mind paying what you had me at. I didn't mind paying you that." Somewhere, anti-tax crusader Grover Norquist is having heartburn.
Now let's look at academia. Given the dominance of left-wingers in academia, that Lear can even say this with a straight face is astonishing. Let's look at who is teaching our college-level students. The American Enterprise Institute's magazine examined the political registrations of professors at 20 colleges and universities, representing a cross section of higher education -- public and private, big and small, in the North, South, East and West. The study divided the registrations into those belonging to a "party of the left" -- Democrats, Greens or some other liberal political party -- or a "party of the right" -- either Republican or Libertarian. Overwhelmingly, by a more than 13-1 margin, the profs were registered with a party of the left. Many departments had no professors from a right-wing party.
Let's look at Hollywood. Ben Shapiro, a recent Harvard Law School grad, wrote a book called "Primetime Propaganda: The True Hollywood Story of How the Left Took Over Your TV." He interviewed, on the record, over 100 industry bigwigs, including David Shore ("House"), Fred Silverman (former CBS programming vice president, ABC Entertainment president, and NBC president and CEO), Marta Kauffman ("Friends"), Larry Gelbart ("M-A-S-H") and Mark Burnett ("Survivor"). When asked whether there is a prevailing pro-left ideology, if not a left-wing agenda, several major players admitted that of course Hollywood leans left. Others bluntly bragged about their bias against conservatives and the extent of the left-wing messages inserted into their comedies and dramas.
Given the left's dominance in the major media, academia and Hollywood, it is beyond insulting to hear influential Hollywood lefties like Mr. Lear whine about the supposed power of the right. Makes them sound like a, well, "Meathead."
SOURCE
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Democrats Are Terrified of Voter ID
The most consequential election in our lifetime is still 11 months away, but it's clear from the Obama administration's order halting South Carolina's new photo ID law that the Democrats have already brought a gun to the knife fight.
How else to describe this naked assault on the right of a state to create minimal requirements to curb voter fraud?
On Dec. 23, Assistant Attorney General Thomas E. Perez sent a letter ordering South Carolina to stop enforcing its photo ID law. Perez, who heads the Civil Rights division that booted charges against the New Black Panther Party for intimidating voters in Philadelphia in 2008, alleged that South Carolina's law would disenfranchise thousands of minority voters.
South Carolina Attorney General Alan Wilson rejected Perez's math and explained on Fox News why the law is necessary. The state Department of Motor Vehicles audited a state Election Commission report that said 239,333 people were registered to vote but had no photo ID. The DMV found that 37,000 were deceased, more than 90,000 had moved to other states, and others had names not matched to IDs. That left only 27,000 people registered without a photo ID but who could vote by signing an affidavit as to their identity.
Wilson told me by phone on Thursday that he would file a challenge to the order in federal district court in January. Asked whether he felt South Carolina was being singled out, he declined to speculate on motives. However, citing the National Labor Relations Board's orders to invalidate the voter-approved union card check amendment and to stop a new Boeing plant, and the Justice Department's suit to halt the immigration law, he said, "there certainly is a pattern of the federal government overreaching into South Carolina."
Leading Democrats loudly equate recently enacted photo ID legislation as updated versions of Jim Crow laws that once robbed people of their constitutional right to vote simply because of their race. But photo ID laws and other voter integrity measures cover everyone. Like other states, South Carolina provides photo IDs if a person cannot afford one....
In 2008, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld Indiana's 2005 photo ID law, which the Democratic Party and several interest groups had challenged as a "severe burden." But, as American Civil Rights Union attorney Peter Ferrara noted in the ACRU's friend of the court brief:
"No one has been denied the right to vote by the Indiana Voter ID Law. The record clearly establishes without challenge that 99% of the Voting Age Population in Indiana already has the required ID, in the form of driver's licenses, passports, or other identification. Of the remaining 1%, senior citizens and the disabled are automatically eligible to vote by absentee ballot, and such absentee voting is exempt from the Voter ID Law."
Does that sound "severe" to you? As Ferrara notes, "the slight burden of additional paperwork for a fraction of 1%, to show who they are and thereby prove their eligibility to vote, cannot come close to outweighing the interests of all legitimate legal voters in maintaining their effective vote."
The Obama Administration is playing the same race card that Democrats have played for decades. But this is not about race; it's about whether legitimately cast votes will be wiped out by illegally cast votes.
Since the GOP took a majority of governorships and legislatures in 2010 and continued enacting voting safeguards, you can feel the panic in Democratic strongholds. The stakes are enormous, and the Obama Administration is quite aware of the danger posed by an aroused electorate on a level playing field.
With the economy in a ditch, their only hope of stemming the conservative tide might be to rig the returns, especially where political machines still prevail.
More here
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The Regulatory Pendulum Has Swung Too Far
The political dispute is not whether to regulate, but how much.
We need some regulation. Even the most bombastic conservatives recognize this. So everyone also should recognize that when President Obama says the GOP favors "dirtier air [and] dirtier water," he is committing the fallacy of the false alternative. The political dispute is not whether to regulate, but how much.
Everyone also can agree that if an environmental rule can prevent 1 million birth defects at a cost of only one dollar, then the regulation merits adoption - and if a regulation would prevent only one birth defect at a cost of $100 trillion, then it does not. In the real world regulations fall within narrower parameters. And nobody knows for certain precisely how much misery a proposed regulation might prevent, or how much it might cost. Hence the bickering.
Take the EPA's new rules on power-plant emissions. Emission controls are desirable as a general rule, since emissions are what economists call negative externalities: costs of production that are shifted to non-producers, usually without their consent. (Not all externalities are created equal. The aroma of a neighbor's grill is not nearly as annoying as the whine from his leafblower.)
The EPA says its new rules will cost about $10.6 billion by 2016 - but will save anywhere from $59 billion to $140 billion in health costs, forestall up to 17,000 premature deaths, and prevent up to 130,000 cases of childhood asthma per year. A big net win.
But Susan Dudley, who runs the Regulatory Studies Center at George Washington University, says the new rules will cost almost $11 billion per year. Industry sources estimate the real cost could be more than 10 times that much. And the Manhattan Institute's Diana Furchtgott-Roth notes that the EPA's estimates about asthma benefits seem, well, rather optimistic. In recent decades asthma has become more common even while air quality has improved. The Centers for Disease Control says "the causes of asthma remain unclear." If the CDC is right, then the EPA is just guessing.
Naturally, liberals glom onto the EPA's rosy figures while conservatives seize on the gloomier numbers from skeptics. People tend to reach conclusions first, then seek out supporting evidence and dismiss evidence to the contrary.
Whatever the merits of the new power-plant rules, though, it's clear that the Current Occupant, as they used to call George W., has commenced an era of great new regulatory zeal:
* The Obama administration is finalizing an average of 84 "economically significant" rules (those costing $100 million or more) per year, compared to 62 for Bush and 56 for Bill Clinton.
* In May the EPA tailored new rules for greenhouse-gas emissions that, absent the tailoring, would have affected 6 million factories, landfills, and other sources - and required the EPA, by its own estimates, to increase its workforce from 17,000 employees to 230,000. The New York Times calls such tailoring "contentious."
* The Department of Labor is considering whether to require disabled individuals to make up at least 7 percent of the workforce of every federal contractor - not only in the aggregate, but within "each job group." According to one summary, contractors would be required to collect and report data on "referrals from applicable employment service delivery systems . . . the `applicant ratio' of known applicants with disabilities to total applicants . . . the `hiring ratio,' . . . the `job fill ratio' . . . . training programs and promotional opportunities for which applicants and employees with a disability were considered . . . a statement of the reason as well as a description of any accommodation considered when it rejects an individual with disability for employment, promotion, or training. . . . a record describing any accommodation that makes possible the selection of an individual with a disability for hire, promotion, or training," etc.
Compliance cost for all of this? God only knows. Yet rules such as those pale in comparison to the gargantuan compliance burdens imposed by Sarbanes-Oxley and (soon) Obamacare.
* Last summer the FDA carried out an armed raid on Amish farmers in Pennsylvania who were selling raw milk to eager customers.
* The Consumer Product Safety Commission may soon require expensive new flesh-sensing technology on all table saws. (This is being pushed by SawStop, the maker of the technology, which stands to benefit handsomely.)
* Last year the CPSC recalled a half-million drop-side cribs because of "31 . . . incidents. In six of those incidents children were entrapped between the drop side and crib mattress. Three children suffered from bruises as a result of the entrapment."
You could argue that when regulators recall a half-million cribs because of three bruises - instead of, say, sending crib owners a letter about potential bruising hazards - the pendulum has swung too far. If you do, however, be prepared: You may be accused of wanting more dead babies by those who delight in the fallacy of the false alternative.
SOURCE
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ELSEWHERE
Kodak dead? "Eastman Kodak is preparing a Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection filing in case it is unable to sell its digital patents to raise capital, The Wall Street Journal reported on Wednesday. The once-iconic photographic film pioneer is in talks with potential lenders to secure about $1 billion in debtor-in possession financing to sustain Kodak through bankruptcy proceedings, the Journal reported, citing unidentified sources. The Chapter 11 filing could come as soon as this month or early February, the newspaper said. Kodak shares fell about 28% to 47 cents on the New York Stock Exchange following the online report, which dampened investors' hopes that the company could arrange a quick sale of its patents or a financing lifeline to keep it afloat."
EU agrees to Iranian oil embargo: "European governments have agreed in principle to ban imports of Iranian oil, EU diplomats said yesterday, dealing a blow to Tehran months before an Iranian election. The prospective embargo by the European Union, along with tough U.S. financial measures signed into law by President Barack Obama on New Year's Eve, form a concerted Western campaign to hold back Iran's nuclear program."
Israel, US to stage major military drill: "The Israeli military is gearing up together with U.S. forces for a major missile defense exercise, the Israeli military announced Thursday, as tension between Iran and the international community escalates. The drill is called 'Austere Challenge 12' and is designed to improve defense systems and cooperation between the U.S. and Israeli forces. It follows a 10-day Iranian naval exercise near the strategic Strait of Hormuz."
Obama's tyrannical abuse of power: "Standing behind a podium on a stage just outside Cleveland, President Barack Obama delivered a speech yesterday that will reverberate throughout history. ... [I]t was at that moment on a Wednesday afternoon in Ohio that the President announced his plans to act in total and utter disregard of the U.S. Constitution with his illegal appointment of Richard Cordray to serve as director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB). It's an astonishingly reckless exercise of executive authority."
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My Twitter.com identity: jonjayray. I have deleted my Facebook page as I rarely access it. For more blog postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, 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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The usual Leftist projection. It tells us more about the Left than it does about the Right. They imagine that conservatives are like them
(Norman Milton Lear (born July 27, 1922) is an American television writer and producer who produced such 1970s sitcoms as All in the Family, Sanford and Son, One Day at a Time, The Jeffersons, Good Times and Maude. As a political activist, he founded the civil liberties advocacy organization People For the American Way in 1981 -- Wikipedia.
The quote below is an excerpt from what Lear said a few weeks ago at the 30th anniversary of PFAW)
They're coming for your children! They're coming for the womenfolk! Then they're coming after you! Norman Lear, the famous television show producer, offered this hysterically paranoid assessment of the allegedly growing and presumably insidious power of "the right":
"I want to suggest that we lefties start laying claim to what we see as 'sacred' and serve it up proudly to the religious right -- to the James Dobson, Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, Karl Rove ... hatemongers, sheathed in sanctity, and to the Koch brothers, the types that fund them and use them so effectively for their own political power-grabbing purposes. Over the past several decades, the power-grabbing right has built a powerful infrastructure -- radio and TV stations and networks. They've built think tanks, colleges and law schools."
How accurate is Lear's assessment of the supposed power and influence of the right? Is the right steadily forming a formidable alliance of academics, media outlets, websites, etc., that serve as a fourth column for the "right wing"? Even if this were true, what about the power of the left?
Let's look at the mainscream media. In "Left Turn: How Liberal Media Bias Distorts the American Mind," UCLA economist and political science professor Dr. Tim Groseclose uses three different methods to determine the SQ -- or slant quotient -- of the major media outlets. Of the 20 most prominent news outlets, including The Wall Street Journal, "Good Morning America" and Time magazine, he found only two that leaned to the right: The Washington Times and Fox News.
True, the network evening news shows no longer hold the market share of years past, but nearly 25 million Americans still turn to Diane Sawyer, Brian Williams and Scott Pelley each night. That means eight times as many viewers watch ABC/NBC/CBS as watch "The O'Reilly Factor," the top-rated cable news/talk program.
When people like Lear speak of the growing power of the right-wing cabal, they believe Fox leads the charge. And Bill O'Reilly is clearly the face of the Fox News network. But as hated as O'Reilly is by the left, how legitimate is their description of O'Reilly as a right-wing ideologue?
O'Reilly is not even a Republican. He is registered as an independent and opposes the death penalty. He supported -- at least initially -- the Senate's so-called "amnesty bill." His opposition to ObamaCare is based on cost rather than the Constitution. He believes that in "a system where everybody is guaranteed the same health care ... whether you have a lot of money or no money, you're gonna get the same health care. Now, in theory, that sounds good ... but in practice, we got a $14 trillion debt that we can't pay off, and this is gonna add to it, big-time." He wondered how a man can raise a family of four on minimum wage. In a recent interview with former President Bill Clinton, O'Reilly said, "I think I am paying my fair share (of taxes). Now, I didn't mind paying what you had me at. I didn't mind paying you that." Somewhere, anti-tax crusader Grover Norquist is having heartburn.
Now let's look at academia. Given the dominance of left-wingers in academia, that Lear can even say this with a straight face is astonishing. Let's look at who is teaching our college-level students. The American Enterprise Institute's magazine examined the political registrations of professors at 20 colleges and universities, representing a cross section of higher education -- public and private, big and small, in the North, South, East and West. The study divided the registrations into those belonging to a "party of the left" -- Democrats, Greens or some other liberal political party -- or a "party of the right" -- either Republican or Libertarian. Overwhelmingly, by a more than 13-1 margin, the profs were registered with a party of the left. Many departments had no professors from a right-wing party.
Let's look at Hollywood. Ben Shapiro, a recent Harvard Law School grad, wrote a book called "Primetime Propaganda: The True Hollywood Story of How the Left Took Over Your TV." He interviewed, on the record, over 100 industry bigwigs, including David Shore ("House"), Fred Silverman (former CBS programming vice president, ABC Entertainment president, and NBC president and CEO), Marta Kauffman ("Friends"), Larry Gelbart ("M-A-S-H") and Mark Burnett ("Survivor"). When asked whether there is a prevailing pro-left ideology, if not a left-wing agenda, several major players admitted that of course Hollywood leans left. Others bluntly bragged about their bias against conservatives and the extent of the left-wing messages inserted into their comedies and dramas.
Given the left's dominance in the major media, academia and Hollywood, it is beyond insulting to hear influential Hollywood lefties like Mr. Lear whine about the supposed power of the right. Makes them sound like a, well, "Meathead."
SOURCE
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Democrats Are Terrified of Voter ID
The most consequential election in our lifetime is still 11 months away, but it's clear from the Obama administration's order halting South Carolina's new photo ID law that the Democrats have already brought a gun to the knife fight.
How else to describe this naked assault on the right of a state to create minimal requirements to curb voter fraud?
On Dec. 23, Assistant Attorney General Thomas E. Perez sent a letter ordering South Carolina to stop enforcing its photo ID law. Perez, who heads the Civil Rights division that booted charges against the New Black Panther Party for intimidating voters in Philadelphia in 2008, alleged that South Carolina's law would disenfranchise thousands of minority voters.
South Carolina Attorney General Alan Wilson rejected Perez's math and explained on Fox News why the law is necessary. The state Department of Motor Vehicles audited a state Election Commission report that said 239,333 people were registered to vote but had no photo ID. The DMV found that 37,000 were deceased, more than 90,000 had moved to other states, and others had names not matched to IDs. That left only 27,000 people registered without a photo ID but who could vote by signing an affidavit as to their identity.
Wilson told me by phone on Thursday that he would file a challenge to the order in federal district court in January. Asked whether he felt South Carolina was being singled out, he declined to speculate on motives. However, citing the National Labor Relations Board's orders to invalidate the voter-approved union card check amendment and to stop a new Boeing plant, and the Justice Department's suit to halt the immigration law, he said, "there certainly is a pattern of the federal government overreaching into South Carolina."
Leading Democrats loudly equate recently enacted photo ID legislation as updated versions of Jim Crow laws that once robbed people of their constitutional right to vote simply because of their race. But photo ID laws and other voter integrity measures cover everyone. Like other states, South Carolina provides photo IDs if a person cannot afford one....
In 2008, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld Indiana's 2005 photo ID law, which the Democratic Party and several interest groups had challenged as a "severe burden." But, as American Civil Rights Union attorney Peter Ferrara noted in the ACRU's friend of the court brief:
"No one has been denied the right to vote by the Indiana Voter ID Law. The record clearly establishes without challenge that 99% of the Voting Age Population in Indiana already has the required ID, in the form of driver's licenses, passports, or other identification. Of the remaining 1%, senior citizens and the disabled are automatically eligible to vote by absentee ballot, and such absentee voting is exempt from the Voter ID Law."
Does that sound "severe" to you? As Ferrara notes, "the slight burden of additional paperwork for a fraction of 1%, to show who they are and thereby prove their eligibility to vote, cannot come close to outweighing the interests of all legitimate legal voters in maintaining their effective vote."
The Obama Administration is playing the same race card that Democrats have played for decades. But this is not about race; it's about whether legitimately cast votes will be wiped out by illegally cast votes.
Since the GOP took a majority of governorships and legislatures in 2010 and continued enacting voting safeguards, you can feel the panic in Democratic strongholds. The stakes are enormous, and the Obama Administration is quite aware of the danger posed by an aroused electorate on a level playing field.
With the economy in a ditch, their only hope of stemming the conservative tide might be to rig the returns, especially where political machines still prevail.
More here
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The Regulatory Pendulum Has Swung Too Far
The political dispute is not whether to regulate, but how much.
We need some regulation. Even the most bombastic conservatives recognize this. So everyone also should recognize that when President Obama says the GOP favors "dirtier air [and] dirtier water," he is committing the fallacy of the false alternative. The political dispute is not whether to regulate, but how much.
Everyone also can agree that if an environmental rule can prevent 1 million birth defects at a cost of only one dollar, then the regulation merits adoption - and if a regulation would prevent only one birth defect at a cost of $100 trillion, then it does not. In the real world regulations fall within narrower parameters. And nobody knows for certain precisely how much misery a proposed regulation might prevent, or how much it might cost. Hence the bickering.
Take the EPA's new rules on power-plant emissions. Emission controls are desirable as a general rule, since emissions are what economists call negative externalities: costs of production that are shifted to non-producers, usually without their consent. (Not all externalities are created equal. The aroma of a neighbor's grill is not nearly as annoying as the whine from his leafblower.)
The EPA says its new rules will cost about $10.6 billion by 2016 - but will save anywhere from $59 billion to $140 billion in health costs, forestall up to 17,000 premature deaths, and prevent up to 130,000 cases of childhood asthma per year. A big net win.
But Susan Dudley, who runs the Regulatory Studies Center at George Washington University, says the new rules will cost almost $11 billion per year. Industry sources estimate the real cost could be more than 10 times that much. And the Manhattan Institute's Diana Furchtgott-Roth notes that the EPA's estimates about asthma benefits seem, well, rather optimistic. In recent decades asthma has become more common even while air quality has improved. The Centers for Disease Control says "the causes of asthma remain unclear." If the CDC is right, then the EPA is just guessing.
Naturally, liberals glom onto the EPA's rosy figures while conservatives seize on the gloomier numbers from skeptics. People tend to reach conclusions first, then seek out supporting evidence and dismiss evidence to the contrary.
Whatever the merits of the new power-plant rules, though, it's clear that the Current Occupant, as they used to call George W., has commenced an era of great new regulatory zeal:
* The Obama administration is finalizing an average of 84 "economically significant" rules (those costing $100 million or more) per year, compared to 62 for Bush and 56 for Bill Clinton.
* In May the EPA tailored new rules for greenhouse-gas emissions that, absent the tailoring, would have affected 6 million factories, landfills, and other sources - and required the EPA, by its own estimates, to increase its workforce from 17,000 employees to 230,000. The New York Times calls such tailoring "contentious."
* The Department of Labor is considering whether to require disabled individuals to make up at least 7 percent of the workforce of every federal contractor - not only in the aggregate, but within "each job group." According to one summary, contractors would be required to collect and report data on "referrals from applicable employment service delivery systems . . . the `applicant ratio' of known applicants with disabilities to total applicants . . . the `hiring ratio,' . . . the `job fill ratio' . . . . training programs and promotional opportunities for which applicants and employees with a disability were considered . . . a statement of the reason as well as a description of any accommodation considered when it rejects an individual with disability for employment, promotion, or training. . . . a record describing any accommodation that makes possible the selection of an individual with a disability for hire, promotion, or training," etc.
Compliance cost for all of this? God only knows. Yet rules such as those pale in comparison to the gargantuan compliance burdens imposed by Sarbanes-Oxley and (soon) Obamacare.
* Last summer the FDA carried out an armed raid on Amish farmers in Pennsylvania who were selling raw milk to eager customers.
* The Consumer Product Safety Commission may soon require expensive new flesh-sensing technology on all table saws. (This is being pushed by SawStop, the maker of the technology, which stands to benefit handsomely.)
* Last year the CPSC recalled a half-million drop-side cribs because of "31 . . . incidents. In six of those incidents children were entrapped between the drop side and crib mattress. Three children suffered from bruises as a result of the entrapment."
You could argue that when regulators recall a half-million cribs because of three bruises - instead of, say, sending crib owners a letter about potential bruising hazards - the pendulum has swung too far. If you do, however, be prepared: You may be accused of wanting more dead babies by those who delight in the fallacy of the false alternative.
SOURCE
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ELSEWHERE
Kodak dead? "Eastman Kodak is preparing a Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection filing in case it is unable to sell its digital patents to raise capital, The Wall Street Journal reported on Wednesday. The once-iconic photographic film pioneer is in talks with potential lenders to secure about $1 billion in debtor-in possession financing to sustain Kodak through bankruptcy proceedings, the Journal reported, citing unidentified sources. The Chapter 11 filing could come as soon as this month or early February, the newspaper said. Kodak shares fell about 28% to 47 cents on the New York Stock Exchange following the online report, which dampened investors' hopes that the company could arrange a quick sale of its patents or a financing lifeline to keep it afloat."
EU agrees to Iranian oil embargo: "European governments have agreed in principle to ban imports of Iranian oil, EU diplomats said yesterday, dealing a blow to Tehran months before an Iranian election. The prospective embargo by the European Union, along with tough U.S. financial measures signed into law by President Barack Obama on New Year's Eve, form a concerted Western campaign to hold back Iran's nuclear program."
Israel, US to stage major military drill: "The Israeli military is gearing up together with U.S. forces for a major missile defense exercise, the Israeli military announced Thursday, as tension between Iran and the international community escalates. The drill is called 'Austere Challenge 12' and is designed to improve defense systems and cooperation between the U.S. and Israeli forces. It follows a 10-day Iranian naval exercise near the strategic Strait of Hormuz."
Obama's tyrannical abuse of power: "Standing behind a podium on a stage just outside Cleveland, President Barack Obama delivered a speech yesterday that will reverberate throughout history. ... [I]t was at that moment on a Wednesday afternoon in Ohio that the President announced his plans to act in total and utter disregard of the U.S. Constitution with his illegal appointment of Richard Cordray to serve as director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB). It's an astonishingly reckless exercise of executive authority."
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My Twitter.com identity: jonjayray. I have deleted my Facebook page as I rarely access it. For more blog postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, 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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Thursday, January 05, 2012
The West should hand Iran's leadership a chalice of poison
It would be a mistake to relieve the economic and military pressure on Tehran
Tensions in the Strait of Hormuz are at a more than 20-year high after Iranian authorities threatened to close the 34-mile-wide channel through which more than one-third of the world's oil tanker traffic passes. The threats come against the backdrop of renewed international discussion of sanctions in the wake of an International Atomic Energy Agency report cataloguing Iranian efforts to develop nuclear weapon technology.
Many academics and retired diplomats call for renewed diplomacy and less coercion. A letter sent last month to the White House by the former British, French and Italian ambassadors to Iran declared that while sanctions have a place, winning Iranian concessions ''requires the renewal of effective negotiations''.
Amin Saikal, a professor at the Australian National University, suggested this week that Western concerns about Iran's nuclear intentions were misplaced, and argued that, regardless, the West had no choice but to negotiate. ''Neither sanctions nor military operations can really work,'' he declared. He is wrong.
Advertisement: Story continues below
To relieve economic and military pressure on Iran would be counterproductive. So long as Iran does not attain nuclear weapons, its threats to close the Strait of Hormuz remain simple bluster. If Iran is allowed to develop nuclear weapons, all bets are off. Tehran's ability to amplify its leverage over the international economy would increase exponentially.
Make no mistake: Iran cannot close the Strait of Hormuz for more than a day. When its navy mined the Persian Gulf in 1988, damaging a US vessel, president Ronald Reagan responded with Operation Praying Mantis, decimating the Iranian navy, a bloody nose that led Tehran to respect international waters for more than two decades.
Nor can Iran itself afford a closure of the strait. Not only does it need to export oil itself through the waterway, but, because of decades of financial mismanagement, it also depends on the strait for the import of refined gasolineeum products.
Without imported gasoline to fuel its car and factories, Iran's economy would grind to a halt. To close the strait even for a day would do far more economic damage to Iran than it would to Australia, east Asia or the West.
The leadership in Tehran knows better than anyone that every time Iran has experienced a fuel shortage, protesters have poured into the streets.
Despite bluster that sanctions have had no effect, Iranian behaviour suggests the opposite. Both the March 2007 Iranian attack on British sailors in the waters between Iraq and Iran, and the November 2011 attack on the British embassy in Tehran, came two days after the British government lent its support to new sanctions. Both attacks were overreactions that belied Tehran's insistence that sanctions are meaningless.
Even Iranian parliamentarians do not buy their government's rhetoric. Last month, 30 representatives called for a closed session of the parliament in order to dispense with polemic and to discuss sanctions truthfully. Abolghasem Mozaffari, the head of the Revolutionary Guards' economic wing, confessed that ''the sanctions have not been without impact''.
Iran's current provocations may have more to do with its own desperation than any real grievance. After the US Congress imposed unilateral sanctions on Iran last month, Iran's currency lost nearly half its value. Unemployment and inflation are both in double digits.
To keep afloat, Iran needs high oil prices. Simply threatening tanker traffic drives up the price of oil, adding hundreds of millions of dollars to Iran's coffers. The irony of such a psychological strategy, however, is that the spike in oil prices mitigates any increase that would result from military strikes.
Nor are military strikes as difficult as some believe. While Saikal argues that ''most Iranian nuclear installations are buried deep underground'', itself an admission that they have no civilian purpose, pilots point out that they need only destroy entrances to such facilities rather than blast the underground centrifuges, reactors and potential assembly plants and storage depots.
While no Australian, American, or European wants to pay more at the gasoline pump, the status quo is unsustainable. Should the Islamic Republic develop nuclear weapons, Tehran will have a free hand to lash out indiscriminately, feeling secure behind its own nuclear deterrent. A limited conflict in the Persian Gulf might add $20 to the price of oil for a month, but a nuclear Iran could permanently add $100 a barrel.
History can be a guide. Twice, in the Islamic Republic's history, revolutionary authorities have sworn no surrender. In 1979, they said they would not release their American hostages until Washington met revolutionary leader Ayatollah Khomeini's demands. Then, they said they would accept no end to the Iran-Iraq war until Saddam Hussein was in Iranian hands. In both cases, however, isolation and sanctions took their toll.
When Khomeini announced a ceasefire with Iraq, he likened it to drinking a chalice of poison but said the cost of continuing to fight gave him no choice.
When it comes to Tehran's nuclear program and its Hormuz threats, it is time to hand Iranian leaders such a chalice, not to relieve the pressure.
SOURCE
*************************
Norway killer Breivik is 'not psychotic', say experts
That has also been my view throughout -- JR
Experts monitoring the Norwegian killer, Anders Behring Breivik, say they believe he is not psychotic, contradicting court-appointed psychiatrists. A team of experts reached the conclusion after monitoring Breivik in prison, said the public prosecutor who submitted their report to the court.
Breivik admits to twin attacks on 22 July 2011, which killed 77 people.
The original psychiatric analysis said he was insane. The two court-appointed psychiatrists reached this conclusion after interviewing him on 13 occasions. Their report said 32 year-old Breivik lived in his "own delusional universe where all his thoughts and acts are guided by his delusions".
The expert team of four psychiatrists assessing Breivik in prison disagreed with several of the original conclusions. According to the report submitted by the Public Prosecutor, Svein Holden, they do not believe Breivik is psychotic or schizophrenic and do not think he needs drugs. In addition they do not regard him as being at high risk of committing suicide.
Breivik is due to go on trial on terrorism charges on 16 April, regardless of whether or not he is regarded as sane. As things stand, a guilty verdict would see him placed in psychiatric care rather than in prison. The court is expected to decide within the next few weeks whether or not to order a new psychiatric evaluation. Mr Holden said he would not be calling for a new assessment, despite the conclusions in the latest report.
SOURCE
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One Percent or 33: America's Real Inequality Problem
33% is the percent of children living with one parent rather than two and it is they who have least chance of "making it". Although carefully ignored below, a large number of them are black and blacks tend to have inborn limitations (low IQ etc.) that are beyond remedy. And many poor whites will be in the same boat
The American economy remains sluggish and, from all over the political spectrum, particularly the left, people have turned their attention to inequality. But if the Occupiers were right about one thing, it was that there is a growing inequality in American life. Scott Winship, relying on the findings of the Pew Charitable Trust's Economic Mobility Project as evaluated by his colleagues at the centerleft Brookings Institution, shows that though the gains have not been as startling in the last few decades as they were for Americans 40 years back, what has been evident is indeed "pervasive economic mobility." Pervasive indeed, from downward mobility from the top and middle to upward mobility from the middle. The exception, he notes, is "upward mobility from the bottom."
Mitch Pearlstein, who worked in the Department of Education under Reagan and Bush I, and then founded the Center of the American Experiment in Minneapolis, also sees this as a growing problem. His new book, From Family Fragmentation to America's Decline, laments this inability of many to climb their way up from the bottom rungs of society. But rather than fixating on the one percent, he focuses on the 33 percent. This is the percent of children living with one parent rather than two. These children, victims of what many call "family fragmentation," start out with tremendous social and educational deficits that are hard to narrow, nevermind close. These are most often the children for whom upward mobility has stalled. Their economic well-being has led to decline in American competitiveness and also the deeper cleavages of inequality that have been so widely noted.
This territory is not new. In his first chapter, "From Moynihan to 'My Goodness," Pearlstein traces the findings of social scientists on the effects of divorce, single-parenthood, and particularly the absence of fathers from the period of Daniel Patrick Moynihan's famous (or infamous, from contemporary leftist viewpoints) 1965 report on the status of black families. While Moynihan was careful to ascribe the then-current break down of the black family to factors like slavery, racism, and other economic factors, he was nonetheless demonized for racism in raising the topic. While other social scientists working from the 1960s to the 1980s vindicated everything Moynihan had said, it was not politically correct to say any of it, considering the opposition from multiculturalists and, of course, feminists themselves who seemed to believe not only that women, but also children, needed men like fish needed bicycles. Charles Murray's 1984 Losing Ground had the temerity to suggest that much of the welfare state apparatus assembled since the 1960s had not only not helped family life, but incentivized divorce and single parenthood, creating the same problems among whites that Moynihan had identified among blacks. The ice was finally broken when established liberal figures like Bill Moyers and then William Galston began to publicize the realities of family breakdown.
Discouraging Trends
Now it is virtually certain from a social science perspective that married fathers and mothers living together have a much greater impact on children's future economic well-being than simply being additional "income inputs." Pearlstein's chapters on the effects of family fragmentation on "every conceivable measure" and on education are sobering in their completeness. Divorce and single-parenthood are seen as risk factors for poverty as well as the health, safety, and educational well-being of children across the board. He verifies this not only from studies in the U.S. but across cultures. What is particularly depressing about American family life is that American children born to two married parents are more likely to experience family breakdown (or "fragmentation" as the current euphemism has it) than Swedish children born to cohabiting parents. (Pearlstein is careful to note that this is a comparative measure— other data show that the effects of having married parents are far greater than simply legal for children. Being married is still better for kids than cohabiting.)
Like Moynihan before him, Pearlstein is careful to say not all poverty, health, and educational failure are caused by family fragmentation, but "a great deal of it is." Given the data I cited above about the pervasive upward mobility at least from the middle classes, Pearlstein's findings do not paint a pretty picture of America's future. All the data, particularly from the National Marriage Project's comprehensive 2010 study of Americans and marriage, show that the "unMarriage Culture," as Kay Hymowitz styles it, has become endemic among the broad middle classes as well. Pearlstein's data shows that the effects of family fragmentation are not limited to those in poverty, but affect kids of all classes who experience them. Pearlstein is at pains to make clear that he is not pointing fingers at anyone, nor is he denying that many children in single-parent or divorced homes are doing well. But all the best available data show that children in these situations are at much greater risk of educational failure and corresponding economic weakness as adults.
In a high-tech information age, the path to upward mobility is dependent on a high level of education both social and intellectual. Those who are left behind in these areas will have an increasingly difficult time not only with upward mobility but making it in general. In the groundbreaking 2008 Marriage and Caste in America, the aforementioned Kay Hymowitz described the "self-perpetuating single-mother proletariat" that had come into existence and paralleled the self-perpetuating cycle of university educated mothers who raise children who go to college, get married, and then have children. Pearlstein only adds to the case by noting that while many believe that the offshoring of jobs has been only to evade higher labor and regulatory costs, many high tech jobs are now being moved abroad because there aren't enough Americans with enough education to handle them. This labor deficit means weakening American competitiveness is likely to worsen down the road.
What are the solutions to all this? Or, more realistically, what can even help? Pearlstein's final two chapters on ways to strengthen education and marriage are very tentative. While he has no doubt that public education can be improved, there is a certain skepticism about the broad-based reforms which have been made over the last hundred years in education. Pearlstein thinks private religious schools are so successful because they are able to teach the unity of intellectual and moral virtue. Public schools that have succeeded are similarly "paternalistic" in that they teach reading, writing, and arithmetic, but also middle-class values like diligence, thrift, politeness, and a strong work ethic. Due to constraints imposed by teachers unions and bureaucratic red-tape, such public schools are rare and difficult to duplicate when found.
Concerning marriage, we have even less data since government encouragement of a marriage culture only began about 15 years ago. The results have not been encouraging. Pearlstein doesn't think there is no place for government in encouraging married parenthood, but his book points again and again to the root problem: our culture. Despite the widespread impression that American Christianity is largely judgmental, Pearlstein contends that "religious institutions need to be more assertive in this realm, while being no less supportive of those in need." Parents won't get married or stay married to "save the economy" or "lessen inequality," but they will for deeper reasons that will have the same result.
SOURCE
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ELSEWHERE
Romney tough on illegals: "In the one-page flyer that is expected to be mailed out statewide, Romney details his plans to stop illegal immigration, according to Ryan Williams, a spokesperson for the Romney campaign. "The mailer talks about putting an end to magnets or benefits that illegal immigrants have, ensuring a tamper-proof system that allows employers to check the status of their employees and creating a strong border fence," Williams said. Time and time again, Williams said that voters have brought attention to the very serious problem of illegal immigration in the United State. "The Obama administration is opposed to common sense immigration laws," Williams said. "With Romney's plan there would be no magnets, no jobs, no holes in the borders."
AZ: Candidate asked to prove English language skills: "This year, Alejandrina Cabrera put city officials of San Luis, Arizona in the hot seat. Twice, Cabrera and the group she heads, For a San Luis with a Future, launched unsuccessful recall drives against the mayor. Now, Cabrera, who is vying for a seat on the City Council, finds herself in the hot seat. Last week, the council approved a motion asking for verification that Cabrera meets a state law requiring any person holding office in the state, county or city to speak, write and read English."
Obamacare already sending costs through the roof: "There may never have been a law more misnamed than the Affordable Care Act. President Obama's health overhaul law already is driving up health insurance costs for businesses and consumers and will inflict even higher costs on American taxpayers in the years ahead. Obama repeatedly promised the American people he would cut a typical family's premium $2,500 a year before the end of his first term. But costs are rising now even faster than before the law was enacted in March 2010."
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My Twitter.com identity: jonjayray. I have deleted my Facebook page as I rarely access it. For more blog postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, 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)
****************************
It would be a mistake to relieve the economic and military pressure on Tehran
Tensions in the Strait of Hormuz are at a more than 20-year high after Iranian authorities threatened to close the 34-mile-wide channel through which more than one-third of the world's oil tanker traffic passes. The threats come against the backdrop of renewed international discussion of sanctions in the wake of an International Atomic Energy Agency report cataloguing Iranian efforts to develop nuclear weapon technology.
Many academics and retired diplomats call for renewed diplomacy and less coercion. A letter sent last month to the White House by the former British, French and Italian ambassadors to Iran declared that while sanctions have a place, winning Iranian concessions ''requires the renewal of effective negotiations''.
Amin Saikal, a professor at the Australian National University, suggested this week that Western concerns about Iran's nuclear intentions were misplaced, and argued that, regardless, the West had no choice but to negotiate. ''Neither sanctions nor military operations can really work,'' he declared. He is wrong.
Advertisement: Story continues below
To relieve economic and military pressure on Iran would be counterproductive. So long as Iran does not attain nuclear weapons, its threats to close the Strait of Hormuz remain simple bluster. If Iran is allowed to develop nuclear weapons, all bets are off. Tehran's ability to amplify its leverage over the international economy would increase exponentially.
Make no mistake: Iran cannot close the Strait of Hormuz for more than a day. When its navy mined the Persian Gulf in 1988, damaging a US vessel, president Ronald Reagan responded with Operation Praying Mantis, decimating the Iranian navy, a bloody nose that led Tehran to respect international waters for more than two decades.
Nor can Iran itself afford a closure of the strait. Not only does it need to export oil itself through the waterway, but, because of decades of financial mismanagement, it also depends on the strait for the import of refined gasolineeum products.
Without imported gasoline to fuel its car and factories, Iran's economy would grind to a halt. To close the strait even for a day would do far more economic damage to Iran than it would to Australia, east Asia or the West.
The leadership in Tehran knows better than anyone that every time Iran has experienced a fuel shortage, protesters have poured into the streets.
Despite bluster that sanctions have had no effect, Iranian behaviour suggests the opposite. Both the March 2007 Iranian attack on British sailors in the waters between Iraq and Iran, and the November 2011 attack on the British embassy in Tehran, came two days after the British government lent its support to new sanctions. Both attacks were overreactions that belied Tehran's insistence that sanctions are meaningless.
Even Iranian parliamentarians do not buy their government's rhetoric. Last month, 30 representatives called for a closed session of the parliament in order to dispense with polemic and to discuss sanctions truthfully. Abolghasem Mozaffari, the head of the Revolutionary Guards' economic wing, confessed that ''the sanctions have not been without impact''.
Iran's current provocations may have more to do with its own desperation than any real grievance. After the US Congress imposed unilateral sanctions on Iran last month, Iran's currency lost nearly half its value. Unemployment and inflation are both in double digits.
To keep afloat, Iran needs high oil prices. Simply threatening tanker traffic drives up the price of oil, adding hundreds of millions of dollars to Iran's coffers. The irony of such a psychological strategy, however, is that the spike in oil prices mitigates any increase that would result from military strikes.
Nor are military strikes as difficult as some believe. While Saikal argues that ''most Iranian nuclear installations are buried deep underground'', itself an admission that they have no civilian purpose, pilots point out that they need only destroy entrances to such facilities rather than blast the underground centrifuges, reactors and potential assembly plants and storage depots.
While no Australian, American, or European wants to pay more at the gasoline pump, the status quo is unsustainable. Should the Islamic Republic develop nuclear weapons, Tehran will have a free hand to lash out indiscriminately, feeling secure behind its own nuclear deterrent. A limited conflict in the Persian Gulf might add $20 to the price of oil for a month, but a nuclear Iran could permanently add $100 a barrel.
History can be a guide. Twice, in the Islamic Republic's history, revolutionary authorities have sworn no surrender. In 1979, they said they would not release their American hostages until Washington met revolutionary leader Ayatollah Khomeini's demands. Then, they said they would accept no end to the Iran-Iraq war until Saddam Hussein was in Iranian hands. In both cases, however, isolation and sanctions took their toll.
When Khomeini announced a ceasefire with Iraq, he likened it to drinking a chalice of poison but said the cost of continuing to fight gave him no choice.
When it comes to Tehran's nuclear program and its Hormuz threats, it is time to hand Iranian leaders such a chalice, not to relieve the pressure.
SOURCE
*************************
Norway killer Breivik is 'not psychotic', say experts
That has also been my view throughout -- JR
Experts monitoring the Norwegian killer, Anders Behring Breivik, say they believe he is not psychotic, contradicting court-appointed psychiatrists. A team of experts reached the conclusion after monitoring Breivik in prison, said the public prosecutor who submitted their report to the court.
Breivik admits to twin attacks on 22 July 2011, which killed 77 people.
The original psychiatric analysis said he was insane. The two court-appointed psychiatrists reached this conclusion after interviewing him on 13 occasions. Their report said 32 year-old Breivik lived in his "own delusional universe where all his thoughts and acts are guided by his delusions".
The expert team of four psychiatrists assessing Breivik in prison disagreed with several of the original conclusions. According to the report submitted by the Public Prosecutor, Svein Holden, they do not believe Breivik is psychotic or schizophrenic and do not think he needs drugs. In addition they do not regard him as being at high risk of committing suicide.
Breivik is due to go on trial on terrorism charges on 16 April, regardless of whether or not he is regarded as sane. As things stand, a guilty verdict would see him placed in psychiatric care rather than in prison. The court is expected to decide within the next few weeks whether or not to order a new psychiatric evaluation. Mr Holden said he would not be calling for a new assessment, despite the conclusions in the latest report.
SOURCE
************************
One Percent or 33: America's Real Inequality Problem
33% is the percent of children living with one parent rather than two and it is they who have least chance of "making it". Although carefully ignored below, a large number of them are black and blacks tend to have inborn limitations (low IQ etc.) that are beyond remedy. And many poor whites will be in the same boat
The American economy remains sluggish and, from all over the political spectrum, particularly the left, people have turned their attention to inequality. But if the Occupiers were right about one thing, it was that there is a growing inequality in American life. Scott Winship, relying on the findings of the Pew Charitable Trust's Economic Mobility Project as evaluated by his colleagues at the centerleft Brookings Institution, shows that though the gains have not been as startling in the last few decades as they were for Americans 40 years back, what has been evident is indeed "pervasive economic mobility." Pervasive indeed, from downward mobility from the top and middle to upward mobility from the middle. The exception, he notes, is "upward mobility from the bottom."
Mitch Pearlstein, who worked in the Department of Education under Reagan and Bush I, and then founded the Center of the American Experiment in Minneapolis, also sees this as a growing problem. His new book, From Family Fragmentation to America's Decline, laments this inability of many to climb their way up from the bottom rungs of society. But rather than fixating on the one percent, he focuses on the 33 percent. This is the percent of children living with one parent rather than two. These children, victims of what many call "family fragmentation," start out with tremendous social and educational deficits that are hard to narrow, nevermind close. These are most often the children for whom upward mobility has stalled. Their economic well-being has led to decline in American competitiveness and also the deeper cleavages of inequality that have been so widely noted.
This territory is not new. In his first chapter, "From Moynihan to 'My Goodness," Pearlstein traces the findings of social scientists on the effects of divorce, single-parenthood, and particularly the absence of fathers from the period of Daniel Patrick Moynihan's famous (or infamous, from contemporary leftist viewpoints) 1965 report on the status of black families. While Moynihan was careful to ascribe the then-current break down of the black family to factors like slavery, racism, and other economic factors, he was nonetheless demonized for racism in raising the topic. While other social scientists working from the 1960s to the 1980s vindicated everything Moynihan had said, it was not politically correct to say any of it, considering the opposition from multiculturalists and, of course, feminists themselves who seemed to believe not only that women, but also children, needed men like fish needed bicycles. Charles Murray's 1984 Losing Ground had the temerity to suggest that much of the welfare state apparatus assembled since the 1960s had not only not helped family life, but incentivized divorce and single parenthood, creating the same problems among whites that Moynihan had identified among blacks. The ice was finally broken when established liberal figures like Bill Moyers and then William Galston began to publicize the realities of family breakdown.
Discouraging Trends
Now it is virtually certain from a social science perspective that married fathers and mothers living together have a much greater impact on children's future economic well-being than simply being additional "income inputs." Pearlstein's chapters on the effects of family fragmentation on "every conceivable measure" and on education are sobering in their completeness. Divorce and single-parenthood are seen as risk factors for poverty as well as the health, safety, and educational well-being of children across the board. He verifies this not only from studies in the U.S. but across cultures. What is particularly depressing about American family life is that American children born to two married parents are more likely to experience family breakdown (or "fragmentation" as the current euphemism has it) than Swedish children born to cohabiting parents. (Pearlstein is careful to note that this is a comparative measure— other data show that the effects of having married parents are far greater than simply legal for children. Being married is still better for kids than cohabiting.)
Like Moynihan before him, Pearlstein is careful to say not all poverty, health, and educational failure are caused by family fragmentation, but "a great deal of it is." Given the data I cited above about the pervasive upward mobility at least from the middle classes, Pearlstein's findings do not paint a pretty picture of America's future. All the data, particularly from the National Marriage Project's comprehensive 2010 study of Americans and marriage, show that the "unMarriage Culture," as Kay Hymowitz styles it, has become endemic among the broad middle classes as well. Pearlstein's data shows that the effects of family fragmentation are not limited to those in poverty, but affect kids of all classes who experience them. Pearlstein is at pains to make clear that he is not pointing fingers at anyone, nor is he denying that many children in single-parent or divorced homes are doing well. But all the best available data show that children in these situations are at much greater risk of educational failure and corresponding economic weakness as adults.
In a high-tech information age, the path to upward mobility is dependent on a high level of education both social and intellectual. Those who are left behind in these areas will have an increasingly difficult time not only with upward mobility but making it in general. In the groundbreaking 2008 Marriage and Caste in America, the aforementioned Kay Hymowitz described the "self-perpetuating single-mother proletariat" that had come into existence and paralleled the self-perpetuating cycle of university educated mothers who raise children who go to college, get married, and then have children. Pearlstein only adds to the case by noting that while many believe that the offshoring of jobs has been only to evade higher labor and regulatory costs, many high tech jobs are now being moved abroad because there aren't enough Americans with enough education to handle them. This labor deficit means weakening American competitiveness is likely to worsen down the road.
What are the solutions to all this? Or, more realistically, what can even help? Pearlstein's final two chapters on ways to strengthen education and marriage are very tentative. While he has no doubt that public education can be improved, there is a certain skepticism about the broad-based reforms which have been made over the last hundred years in education. Pearlstein thinks private religious schools are so successful because they are able to teach the unity of intellectual and moral virtue. Public schools that have succeeded are similarly "paternalistic" in that they teach reading, writing, and arithmetic, but also middle-class values like diligence, thrift, politeness, and a strong work ethic. Due to constraints imposed by teachers unions and bureaucratic red-tape, such public schools are rare and difficult to duplicate when found.
Concerning marriage, we have even less data since government encouragement of a marriage culture only began about 15 years ago. The results have not been encouraging. Pearlstein doesn't think there is no place for government in encouraging married parenthood, but his book points again and again to the root problem: our culture. Despite the widespread impression that American Christianity is largely judgmental, Pearlstein contends that "religious institutions need to be more assertive in this realm, while being no less supportive of those in need." Parents won't get married or stay married to "save the economy" or "lessen inequality," but they will for deeper reasons that will have the same result.
SOURCE
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ELSEWHERE
Romney tough on illegals: "In the one-page flyer that is expected to be mailed out statewide, Romney details his plans to stop illegal immigration, according to Ryan Williams, a spokesperson for the Romney campaign. "The mailer talks about putting an end to magnets or benefits that illegal immigrants have, ensuring a tamper-proof system that allows employers to check the status of their employees and creating a strong border fence," Williams said. Time and time again, Williams said that voters have brought attention to the very serious problem of illegal immigration in the United State. "The Obama administration is opposed to common sense immigration laws," Williams said. "With Romney's plan there would be no magnets, no jobs, no holes in the borders."
AZ: Candidate asked to prove English language skills: "This year, Alejandrina Cabrera put city officials of San Luis, Arizona in the hot seat. Twice, Cabrera and the group she heads, For a San Luis with a Future, launched unsuccessful recall drives against the mayor. Now, Cabrera, who is vying for a seat on the City Council, finds herself in the hot seat. Last week, the council approved a motion asking for verification that Cabrera meets a state law requiring any person holding office in the state, county or city to speak, write and read English."
Obamacare already sending costs through the roof: "There may never have been a law more misnamed than the Affordable Care Act. President Obama's health overhaul law already is driving up health insurance costs for businesses and consumers and will inflict even higher costs on American taxpayers in the years ahead. Obama repeatedly promised the American people he would cut a typical family's premium $2,500 a year before the end of his first term. But costs are rising now even faster than before the law was enacted in March 2010."
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My Twitter.com identity: jonjayray. I have deleted my Facebook page as I rarely access it. For more blog postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, 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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Wednesday, January 04, 2012
Will the economic world end in 2012?
I agree with Martin Hutchinson (below) that the present financial situation in Europe, the UK and the USA is headed for disaster but I have a somewhat different view of what governments will do about it. All three are already hurtling down the path of Weimar Germany, with big money-printing operations happening sporadically. There will be a lot more of that -- as it is the only way all the debts can be paid. The debts will be paid with freshly-created money.
Because the supply of goods and services will remain fairly constant while the amount of money representing those goods and services expands greatly, each dollar will soon buy a lot less and could easily drop to the point where it needs a hundred dollars to buy what one dollar now buys. All savings will buy so little that they become virtually worthless. So our "betters" will rob everybody's savings to pay for their extravagance
So if savers get a knockout blow, what will happen to others? Holders of blue-chip company shares will be OK; Real Estate owners will probably gain; debtors will be laughing; Gold bugs will finally have their day and China will be right royally stiffed. They hold trillions of U.S. dollars which are set to lose most of their value. They might even drop a big one on San Francisco "accidentally" to show their displeasure.
I'm glad I live in Australia, which has very little Federal debt and a good relationship with China -- JR
According to the Mayan calendar, the Great Cycle will end on December 21, 2012, at which point the current Fourth World founded on August 11, 3114 BC will come to an end, leading us into a Fifth World of greater enlightenment. Economically, this is beginning to seem like a remarkably accurate prediction. There are a number of signs in today’s market that a world-changing crisis is approaching, after which our economic environment will never be the same.
The approach of a market apocalypse can be gauged by considering the relative valuations the market is currently putting on assets. Considered rationally, the most attractive asset today should be equity participations in the world’s fastest growing economy, China – yet Chinese equities are at 33-month lows, and many small Chinese companies are trading on earnings multiples not seen since the Great Depression. Considered rationally, among the least attractive assets today should be the long-term debt of two countries with unsustainable budget deficits and governments that have made very little effort to close them – yet British and U.S. government bonds are trading at yields close to all-time historic lows and far below the rates of inflation in their respective countries.
Extreme market irrationality of this kind is a pretty good warning signal of coming market collapse. Just as the Emperor’s Palace grounds being worth more than the state of California signaled the end of Japan’s real estate bubble in 1989, so current valuations of British and U.S. government debt signal that we are very close to a massive reversal, in which probably for several decades it becomes impossible for those governments to sell new debt except at very high cost. Bank balance sheets worldwide, which have loaded up on government debt because of the foolish Basel banking regulations and the attractiveness of “gapping” income between short-term and long-term rates, will collapse into insolvency. The early part of this collapse will be marked by a rapid reversal of “mark-to-market” regulations, so that banks are not forced to mark down their debt holdings to deflated market prices, but even if this accounting chicanery works in the short run, it will prove no solution in the long run, as short term rates rise above the meager long term yields on their government bond portfolios.
The First Pennsylvania Bank failed in 1980 through precisely this problem, at a time when there was thought to be no risk whatever of a U.S. government default or delay in payment. Adding the default possibility into the equation will simply make the problem all the more insoluble. Banks will attempt to hedge themselves through interest rate swaps and credit default swaps, but that will only cause a collapse in swap markets as well; the depth of those markets will prove completely inadequate to solve their problems. Naturally as in 2008 there will be a few sharp operators, like John Paulson and Goldman Sachs in that year, who make money out of the collapse, but their ability to do so will merely worsen the burden on the rest of the system and the costs of any attempted rescues.
There is thus considerable danger, probably in the latter half of 2012 as the Mayans predicted, of a banking system collapse dwarfing that of 2008. Value distortions such as those prevalent currently are necessarily of short duration. The eurozone problem seems certain either to find a solution or to cause a major upheaval in 2012, with the balance of probability being on the latter outcome. In the United States also, 2012 seems the period of maximum near-term danger for the budgetary problem; solutions are impossible in an election year and exacerbation of the problem by foolish handouts only too likely. Maybe the U.S. budget mess can avoid collapsing before 2013, but any market shock, for example from Europe, is likely to push it over the edge. Japan, too, is nearing the point at which its government debt to GDP ratio moves above the level at which it is unsustainable; again a market shock in 2012 could push it over the edge. To use a chemical analogy, the market solution is super-saturated, and any tiny crystal dropped into it will cause precipitation. A trivial event, such as a repetition of May 2010’s stock market “flash crash,” could be the trigger for a market collapse.
Given the extent to which banks have loaded up on “risk-free” government debt, a collapse of the government debt market will cause a collapse of the banking system. I have written before how the world economy would work rather better if government debt were not considered the universal risk-free investment, and were instead considered the doubtfully solid security it actually is. However there is no question that the transition, with the collapse of global government debt markets and banking systems, will be extremely painful. Since government debt market collapse will cause banking system collapse, there will be no rescue available.
Central banks worldwide will of course attempt to alleviate (or rather, postpone) the problem, by an endless array of gimcrack money-printing schemes. Since their credibility, already dented, will be at an all-time low as evidence of world systemic collapse emerges, they will doubtless attempt to devise money-printing schemes with a populist appeal. Thus Ben Bernanke, whose 2002 “thought experiment” of dropping $100 bills from helicopters was intended as a snobbish academic joke against the bourgeoisie, will end up doing just this. TV cameras will be lined up, the world’s financial bloggers will be prepared, and a Bernanke-bearing helicopter will appear hovering over some carefully chosen demographically balanced slum, dropping roll after roll of greenbacks to a Secret Service-prescreened crowd of adoring populace. Of course the real money will still zip by wire transfer to the vaults of the nation’s largest banks and embezzling government securities dealers, but the production values of a benign Bernanke rewarding a faithful underclass will be thought well worth creating.
It won’t work. Far from obeying Walter Bagehot’s famous advice for a financial crisis, of lending freely against top quality security at very high rates, Bernanke and his chums will as in 2008 throw money around like confetti, taking little account of the quality of the security nominally tendered, and lending it at rates that allow the banks to make yet more illicit billions by on-lending their subsidized finance. The European Central Bank’s handout last week, where it lent $600 billion of 3-year money to the banks at 1%, in the hope that they would re-lend it to tottering Eurozone governments at a spread of some 500-600 basis points, is typical of current central bank thinking.
Lend money to the banking system by all means, if you think there is a liquidity problem, and lend it for 3 years if you want to stabilize their financial position. However the money should be lent at a stiff interest rate of around 7%. At that rate, only those banks that really needed the money would have borrowed it, so the bailout would have been limited to $100 billion or so. The remainder of the rescue of banks’ balance sheets would have been achieved by them rushing to sell all their assets that yielded less than 7%. This would notably not include consumer loans and productive small-business loans, which generally yield considerably more than 7%, but it would include all the miscellaneous government junk with which the banks had been playing “gapping” games, hoping to borrow at short term rates and lend at long-term rates, capturing the spread between short-term and long-term interest rates. With their marginal funding cost 7% for 3 years, this would no longer be profitable.
Of course, many Eurozone banks, a simple lot, have not incorporated marginal pricing into their Treasury operations, so will happily borrow at 7% and lend through a different department at 3%, puzzling why their profits are less than they were. But frankly, a little Darwinian selection against stupidity in the European banking system would do no harm at all!
The chance of a system-destroying financial breakdown in 2012 is thus substantial, and December 21 is as good a day as any other on which it might occur. With government credit and banks both collapsing, the old financial world as we have known it since the Bank of England’s foundation in 1694 would indeed have ended. The good news is that this would not shove us back to 1694’s living standards. As for my Great-Aunt Nan, who put her savings in British government War Loan when she retired in 1947 and found inflation and interest rate rises eroded more than 90% of their value before she died in 1974, the disappearance of government bonds, bank stocks and many bank deposits from our assets would cause great hardship. However the central function of banks as a payment mechanism would not disappear and commercial, manufacturing and service-providing activity would continue.
The disruption would be huge, but human civilization would carry on, even the affluent Western civilization many of us have grown used to. It would not be necessary to invest our assets in gold, canned goods and a shotgun; those of us with our savings in non-financial sector stocks would find their long-term value would recover, after what would doubtless be the mother of all stock market crashes.
There would be a Fifth World for us as the Mayans predicted. In it we will finally have achieved enlightenment – about the folly of fiat money, over-powerful central banks and “risk-free” government paper. Achieving this enlightenment will be painful, but it will be worth it!
SOURCE
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The Federal Reserve's Covert Bailout of Europe
America's central bank, the Federal Reserve, is engaged in a bailout of European banks. Surprisingly, its operation is largely unnoticed here.
The Fed is using what is termed a "temporary U.S. dollar liquidity swap arrangement" with the European Central Bank (ECB). There are similar arrangements with the central banks of Canada, England, Switzerland and Japan. Simply put, the Fed trades or "swaps" dollars for euros. The Fed is compensated by payment of an interest rate (currently 50 basis points, or one-half of 1%) above the overnight index swap rate. The ECB, which guarantees to return the dollars at an exchange rate fixed at the time the original swap is made, then lends the dollars to European banks of its choosing.
Why are the Fed and the ECB doing this? The Fed could, after all, lend directly to U.S. branches of foreign banks. It did a great deal of lending to foreign banks under various special credit facilities in the aftermath of Lehman's collapse in the fall of 2008. Or, the ECB could lend euros to banks and they could purchase dollars in foreign-exchange markets. The world is, after all, awash in dollars.
The two central banks are engaging in this roundabout procedure because each needs a fig leaf. The Fed was embarrassed by the revelations of its prior largess with foreign banks. It does not want the debt of foreign banks on its books. A currency swap with the ECB is not technically a loan.
The ECB is entangled in an even bigger legal and political mess. What the heads of many European governments want is for the ECB to bail them out. The central bank and some European governments say that it cannot constitutionally do that. The ECB would also prefer not to create boatloads of new euros, since it wants to keep its reputation as an inflation-fighter intact. To mitigate its euro lending, it borrows dollars to lend them to its banks. That keeps the supply of new euros down. This lending replaces dollar funding from U.S. banks and money-market institutions that are curtailing their lending to European banks — which need the dollars to finance trade, among other activities. Meanwhile, European governments pressure the banks to purchase still more sovereign debt.
The Fed's support is in addition to the ECB's €489 billion ($638 billion) low-interest loans to 523 euro-zone banks last week. And if 2008 is any guide, the dollar swaps will again balloon to supplement the ECB's euro lending.
This Byzantine financial arrangement could hardly be better designed to confuse observers, and it has largely succeeded on this side of the Atlantic, where press coverage has been light. Reporting in Europe is on the mark. On Dec. 21 the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung noted on its website that European banks took three-month credits worth $33 billion, which was financed by a swap between the ECB and the Fed. When it first came out in 2009 that the Greek government was much more heavily indebted than previously known, currency swaps reportedly arranged by Goldman Sachs were one subterfuge employed to hide its debts.
The Fed had more than $600 billion of currency swaps on its books in the fall of 2008. Those draws were largely paid down by January 2010. As recently as a few weeks ago, the amount under the swap renewal agreement announced last summer was $2.4 billion. For the week ending Dec. 14, however, the amount jumped to $54 billion. For the week ending Dec. 21, the total went up by a little more than $8 billion. The aforementioned $33 billion three-month loan was not picked up because it was only booked by the ECB on Dec. 22, falling outside the Fed's reporting week. Notably, the Bank of Japan drew almost $5 billion in the most recent week. Could a bailout of Japanese banks be afoot? (All data come from the Federal Reserve Board H.4.1. release, the New York Fed's Swap Operations report, and the ECB website.)
No matter the legalistic interpretation, the Fed is, working through the ECB, bailing out European banks and, indirectly, spendthrift European governments. It is difficult to count the number of things wrong with this arrangement.
First, the Fed has no authority for a bailout of Europe. My source for that judgment? Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke met with Republican senators on Dec. 14 to brief them on the European situation. After the meeting, Sen. Lindsey Graham told reporters that Mr. Bernanke himself said the Fed did not have "the intention or the authority" to bail out Europe. The week Mr. Bernanke promised no bailout, however, the size of the swap lines to the ECB ballooned by around $52 billion.
Second, these Federal Reserve swap arrangements foster the moral hazards and distortions that government credit allocation entails. Allowing the ECB to do the initial credit allocation — to favored banks and then, some hope, through further lending to spendthrift EU governments — does not make the problem better.
Third, the nontransparency of the swap arrangements is troublesome in a democracy. To his credit, Mr. Bernanke has promised more openness and better communication of the Fed's monetary policy goals. The swap arrangements are at odds with his promise. It is time for the Fed chairman to provide an honest accounting to Congress of what is going on.
SOURCE
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ELSEWHERE
Pentagon: US Navy will remain in Persian Gulf: "The Pentagon on Tuesday answered an Iranian warning to keep U.S. aircraft carriers out of the Persian Gulf by declaring that American warships will continue regularly scheduled deployments to the strategic waterway. George Little, the Pentagon press secretary, said the Navy operates in the Gulf in accordance with international law and to maintain 'a constant state of high vigilance' to ensure the flow of sea commerce"
We are all evil un-American terrorists now: "According to government officials, you may be a terrorist if you: are a Tea Party activist, an Occupy activist, store seven days of food, have missing fingers, buy flashlights, pay cash at hotels, are a Ron Paul supporter, are a libertarian, believe in conspiracies, own precious metals, guns and ammo. It's getting very difficult to keep up with."
Obama has learned nothing from mortgage meltdown mess: "Just days before Christmas, the Obama administration gave Bank of America a big lump of coal, levying a hefty $335 million dollar fine on the company for discriminating against minorities in its lending practices. Supposedly Countrywide, a mortgage company bought by Bank of America in 2008, had not given out enough low interest rate loans to minorities from 2004 to 2008. What the large fine reveals is that President Obama hasn’t learned anything from the recent financial crisis."
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My Twitter.com identity: jonjayray. I have deleted my Facebook page as I rarely access it. For more blog postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, 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)
****************************
I agree with Martin Hutchinson (below) that the present financial situation in Europe, the UK and the USA is headed for disaster but I have a somewhat different view of what governments will do about it. All three are already hurtling down the path of Weimar Germany, with big money-printing operations happening sporadically. There will be a lot more of that -- as it is the only way all the debts can be paid. The debts will be paid with freshly-created money.
Because the supply of goods and services will remain fairly constant while the amount of money representing those goods and services expands greatly, each dollar will soon buy a lot less and could easily drop to the point where it needs a hundred dollars to buy what one dollar now buys. All savings will buy so little that they become virtually worthless. So our "betters" will rob everybody's savings to pay for their extravagance
So if savers get a knockout blow, what will happen to others? Holders of blue-chip company shares will be OK; Real Estate owners will probably gain; debtors will be laughing; Gold bugs will finally have their day and China will be right royally stiffed. They hold trillions of U.S. dollars which are set to lose most of their value. They might even drop a big one on San Francisco "accidentally" to show their displeasure.
I'm glad I live in Australia, which has very little Federal debt and a good relationship with China -- JR
According to the Mayan calendar, the Great Cycle will end on December 21, 2012, at which point the current Fourth World founded on August 11, 3114 BC will come to an end, leading us into a Fifth World of greater enlightenment. Economically, this is beginning to seem like a remarkably accurate prediction. There are a number of signs in today’s market that a world-changing crisis is approaching, after which our economic environment will never be the same.
The approach of a market apocalypse can be gauged by considering the relative valuations the market is currently putting on assets. Considered rationally, the most attractive asset today should be equity participations in the world’s fastest growing economy, China – yet Chinese equities are at 33-month lows, and many small Chinese companies are trading on earnings multiples not seen since the Great Depression. Considered rationally, among the least attractive assets today should be the long-term debt of two countries with unsustainable budget deficits and governments that have made very little effort to close them – yet British and U.S. government bonds are trading at yields close to all-time historic lows and far below the rates of inflation in their respective countries.
Extreme market irrationality of this kind is a pretty good warning signal of coming market collapse. Just as the Emperor’s Palace grounds being worth more than the state of California signaled the end of Japan’s real estate bubble in 1989, so current valuations of British and U.S. government debt signal that we are very close to a massive reversal, in which probably for several decades it becomes impossible for those governments to sell new debt except at very high cost. Bank balance sheets worldwide, which have loaded up on government debt because of the foolish Basel banking regulations and the attractiveness of “gapping” income between short-term and long-term rates, will collapse into insolvency. The early part of this collapse will be marked by a rapid reversal of “mark-to-market” regulations, so that banks are not forced to mark down their debt holdings to deflated market prices, but even if this accounting chicanery works in the short run, it will prove no solution in the long run, as short term rates rise above the meager long term yields on their government bond portfolios.
The First Pennsylvania Bank failed in 1980 through precisely this problem, at a time when there was thought to be no risk whatever of a U.S. government default or delay in payment. Adding the default possibility into the equation will simply make the problem all the more insoluble. Banks will attempt to hedge themselves through interest rate swaps and credit default swaps, but that will only cause a collapse in swap markets as well; the depth of those markets will prove completely inadequate to solve their problems. Naturally as in 2008 there will be a few sharp operators, like John Paulson and Goldman Sachs in that year, who make money out of the collapse, but their ability to do so will merely worsen the burden on the rest of the system and the costs of any attempted rescues.
There is thus considerable danger, probably in the latter half of 2012 as the Mayans predicted, of a banking system collapse dwarfing that of 2008. Value distortions such as those prevalent currently are necessarily of short duration. The eurozone problem seems certain either to find a solution or to cause a major upheaval in 2012, with the balance of probability being on the latter outcome. In the United States also, 2012 seems the period of maximum near-term danger for the budgetary problem; solutions are impossible in an election year and exacerbation of the problem by foolish handouts only too likely. Maybe the U.S. budget mess can avoid collapsing before 2013, but any market shock, for example from Europe, is likely to push it over the edge. Japan, too, is nearing the point at which its government debt to GDP ratio moves above the level at which it is unsustainable; again a market shock in 2012 could push it over the edge. To use a chemical analogy, the market solution is super-saturated, and any tiny crystal dropped into it will cause precipitation. A trivial event, such as a repetition of May 2010’s stock market “flash crash,” could be the trigger for a market collapse.
Given the extent to which banks have loaded up on “risk-free” government debt, a collapse of the government debt market will cause a collapse of the banking system. I have written before how the world economy would work rather better if government debt were not considered the universal risk-free investment, and were instead considered the doubtfully solid security it actually is. However there is no question that the transition, with the collapse of global government debt markets and banking systems, will be extremely painful. Since government debt market collapse will cause banking system collapse, there will be no rescue available.
Central banks worldwide will of course attempt to alleviate (or rather, postpone) the problem, by an endless array of gimcrack money-printing schemes. Since their credibility, already dented, will be at an all-time low as evidence of world systemic collapse emerges, they will doubtless attempt to devise money-printing schemes with a populist appeal. Thus Ben Bernanke, whose 2002 “thought experiment” of dropping $100 bills from helicopters was intended as a snobbish academic joke against the bourgeoisie, will end up doing just this. TV cameras will be lined up, the world’s financial bloggers will be prepared, and a Bernanke-bearing helicopter will appear hovering over some carefully chosen demographically balanced slum, dropping roll after roll of greenbacks to a Secret Service-prescreened crowd of adoring populace. Of course the real money will still zip by wire transfer to the vaults of the nation’s largest banks and embezzling government securities dealers, but the production values of a benign Bernanke rewarding a faithful underclass will be thought well worth creating.
It won’t work. Far from obeying Walter Bagehot’s famous advice for a financial crisis, of lending freely against top quality security at very high rates, Bernanke and his chums will as in 2008 throw money around like confetti, taking little account of the quality of the security nominally tendered, and lending it at rates that allow the banks to make yet more illicit billions by on-lending their subsidized finance. The European Central Bank’s handout last week, where it lent $600 billion of 3-year money to the banks at 1%, in the hope that they would re-lend it to tottering Eurozone governments at a spread of some 500-600 basis points, is typical of current central bank thinking.
Lend money to the banking system by all means, if you think there is a liquidity problem, and lend it for 3 years if you want to stabilize their financial position. However the money should be lent at a stiff interest rate of around 7%. At that rate, only those banks that really needed the money would have borrowed it, so the bailout would have been limited to $100 billion or so. The remainder of the rescue of banks’ balance sheets would have been achieved by them rushing to sell all their assets that yielded less than 7%. This would notably not include consumer loans and productive small-business loans, which generally yield considerably more than 7%, but it would include all the miscellaneous government junk with which the banks had been playing “gapping” games, hoping to borrow at short term rates and lend at long-term rates, capturing the spread between short-term and long-term interest rates. With their marginal funding cost 7% for 3 years, this would no longer be profitable.
Of course, many Eurozone banks, a simple lot, have not incorporated marginal pricing into their Treasury operations, so will happily borrow at 7% and lend through a different department at 3%, puzzling why their profits are less than they were. But frankly, a little Darwinian selection against stupidity in the European banking system would do no harm at all!
The chance of a system-destroying financial breakdown in 2012 is thus substantial, and December 21 is as good a day as any other on which it might occur. With government credit and banks both collapsing, the old financial world as we have known it since the Bank of England’s foundation in 1694 would indeed have ended. The good news is that this would not shove us back to 1694’s living standards. As for my Great-Aunt Nan, who put her savings in British government War Loan when she retired in 1947 and found inflation and interest rate rises eroded more than 90% of their value before she died in 1974, the disappearance of government bonds, bank stocks and many bank deposits from our assets would cause great hardship. However the central function of banks as a payment mechanism would not disappear and commercial, manufacturing and service-providing activity would continue.
The disruption would be huge, but human civilization would carry on, even the affluent Western civilization many of us have grown used to. It would not be necessary to invest our assets in gold, canned goods and a shotgun; those of us with our savings in non-financial sector stocks would find their long-term value would recover, after what would doubtless be the mother of all stock market crashes.
There would be a Fifth World for us as the Mayans predicted. In it we will finally have achieved enlightenment – about the folly of fiat money, over-powerful central banks and “risk-free” government paper. Achieving this enlightenment will be painful, but it will be worth it!
SOURCE
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The Federal Reserve's Covert Bailout of Europe
America's central bank, the Federal Reserve, is engaged in a bailout of European banks. Surprisingly, its operation is largely unnoticed here.
The Fed is using what is termed a "temporary U.S. dollar liquidity swap arrangement" with the European Central Bank (ECB). There are similar arrangements with the central banks of Canada, England, Switzerland and Japan. Simply put, the Fed trades or "swaps" dollars for euros. The Fed is compensated by payment of an interest rate (currently 50 basis points, or one-half of 1%) above the overnight index swap rate. The ECB, which guarantees to return the dollars at an exchange rate fixed at the time the original swap is made, then lends the dollars to European banks of its choosing.
Why are the Fed and the ECB doing this? The Fed could, after all, lend directly to U.S. branches of foreign banks. It did a great deal of lending to foreign banks under various special credit facilities in the aftermath of Lehman's collapse in the fall of 2008. Or, the ECB could lend euros to banks and they could purchase dollars in foreign-exchange markets. The world is, after all, awash in dollars.
The two central banks are engaging in this roundabout procedure because each needs a fig leaf. The Fed was embarrassed by the revelations of its prior largess with foreign banks. It does not want the debt of foreign banks on its books. A currency swap with the ECB is not technically a loan.
The ECB is entangled in an even bigger legal and political mess. What the heads of many European governments want is for the ECB to bail them out. The central bank and some European governments say that it cannot constitutionally do that. The ECB would also prefer not to create boatloads of new euros, since it wants to keep its reputation as an inflation-fighter intact. To mitigate its euro lending, it borrows dollars to lend them to its banks. That keeps the supply of new euros down. This lending replaces dollar funding from U.S. banks and money-market institutions that are curtailing their lending to European banks — which need the dollars to finance trade, among other activities. Meanwhile, European governments pressure the banks to purchase still more sovereign debt.
The Fed's support is in addition to the ECB's €489 billion ($638 billion) low-interest loans to 523 euro-zone banks last week. And if 2008 is any guide, the dollar swaps will again balloon to supplement the ECB's euro lending.
This Byzantine financial arrangement could hardly be better designed to confuse observers, and it has largely succeeded on this side of the Atlantic, where press coverage has been light. Reporting in Europe is on the mark. On Dec. 21 the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung noted on its website that European banks took three-month credits worth $33 billion, which was financed by a swap between the ECB and the Fed. When it first came out in 2009 that the Greek government was much more heavily indebted than previously known, currency swaps reportedly arranged by Goldman Sachs were one subterfuge employed to hide its debts.
The Fed had more than $600 billion of currency swaps on its books in the fall of 2008. Those draws were largely paid down by January 2010. As recently as a few weeks ago, the amount under the swap renewal agreement announced last summer was $2.4 billion. For the week ending Dec. 14, however, the amount jumped to $54 billion. For the week ending Dec. 21, the total went up by a little more than $8 billion. The aforementioned $33 billion three-month loan was not picked up because it was only booked by the ECB on Dec. 22, falling outside the Fed's reporting week. Notably, the Bank of Japan drew almost $5 billion in the most recent week. Could a bailout of Japanese banks be afoot? (All data come from the Federal Reserve Board H.4.1. release, the New York Fed's Swap Operations report, and the ECB website.)
No matter the legalistic interpretation, the Fed is, working through the ECB, bailing out European banks and, indirectly, spendthrift European governments. It is difficult to count the number of things wrong with this arrangement.
First, the Fed has no authority for a bailout of Europe. My source for that judgment? Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke met with Republican senators on Dec. 14 to brief them on the European situation. After the meeting, Sen. Lindsey Graham told reporters that Mr. Bernanke himself said the Fed did not have "the intention or the authority" to bail out Europe. The week Mr. Bernanke promised no bailout, however, the size of the swap lines to the ECB ballooned by around $52 billion.
Second, these Federal Reserve swap arrangements foster the moral hazards and distortions that government credit allocation entails. Allowing the ECB to do the initial credit allocation — to favored banks and then, some hope, through further lending to spendthrift EU governments — does not make the problem better.
Third, the nontransparency of the swap arrangements is troublesome in a democracy. To his credit, Mr. Bernanke has promised more openness and better communication of the Fed's monetary policy goals. The swap arrangements are at odds with his promise. It is time for the Fed chairman to provide an honest accounting to Congress of what is going on.
SOURCE
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ELSEWHERE
Pentagon: US Navy will remain in Persian Gulf: "The Pentagon on Tuesday answered an Iranian warning to keep U.S. aircraft carriers out of the Persian Gulf by declaring that American warships will continue regularly scheduled deployments to the strategic waterway. George Little, the Pentagon press secretary, said the Navy operates in the Gulf in accordance with international law and to maintain 'a constant state of high vigilance' to ensure the flow of sea commerce"
We are all evil un-American terrorists now: "According to government officials, you may be a terrorist if you: are a Tea Party activist, an Occupy activist, store seven days of food, have missing fingers, buy flashlights, pay cash at hotels, are a Ron Paul supporter, are a libertarian, believe in conspiracies, own precious metals, guns and ammo. It's getting very difficult to keep up with."
Obama has learned nothing from mortgage meltdown mess: "Just days before Christmas, the Obama administration gave Bank of America a big lump of coal, levying a hefty $335 million dollar fine on the company for discriminating against minorities in its lending practices. Supposedly Countrywide, a mortgage company bought by Bank of America in 2008, had not given out enough low interest rate loans to minorities from 2004 to 2008. What the large fine reveals is that President Obama hasn’t learned anything from the recent financial crisis."
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My Twitter.com identity: jonjayray. I have deleted my Facebook page as I rarely access it. For more blog postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, 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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