Blacks Can Murder Whites, and It Won’t Make National News
Doug Giles
If you’re a 20-year-old black male, you can beat an 85-year-old white woman to death and pummel her 90-year-old white husband straight into ICU, and it won’t make the national news.
Yep. Tyrone Woodfork, a black male who -- much like Trayvon Martin -- looks like Obama’s son, allegedly killed Nancy Strait and broke her husband Bob’s jaw, several ribs and shot him in the face with a BB gun last month in Tulsa. 20-year-old Tyrone also raped the nearly blind 97-pound Mrs. Strait, a great-great-grandmother, before he murdered her.
Did the above monstrous crime make the national news? Are you kidding me? Why, hell no. Of course not, silly!
Why wasn’t it fit for primetime, you ask? Well, it starred the wrong races in the wrong roles, and it thus did not fit into the fairytale the Left’s trying to foist on us goobers of Obamaland.
For those of you who have not heard diddly squat about a black twentysomething’s senseless, atrocious burglary, rape, battery and murder of an elderly white couple, here are the details regarding the couple, the crime and the culprit(s):
-Bob and Nancy Strait, the victims, grew up in rural Oklahoma during the Great Depression.
-Bob and Nancy met on a blind date in 1946 and married a month later. They had 6 kids, 18 grandkids and about 50 great- and great-great grandchildren.
-The Straits just celebrated their 65th wedding anniversary.
-Bob served in the 101st Airborne Division in WWII.
-Bob loved woodworking, and Nancy loved quilting.
-The couple used to sit on their porch and play the guitar and sing together during the warm summer evenings.
-On either Tuesday evening (3/13) or Wednesday morning (3/14) Tyrone invaded their home and stole $200 in cash as well as the Strait’s TV and Dodge Neon after raping Mrs. Strait and severely beating Mr. Strait.
- As noted, Nancy died from her injuries. Bob is in serious condition and is being treated at a nearby hospital.
-Mrs. Strait’s funeral was on Friday, March 23, 2012.
-The family has set up a fund—The Nancy Strait and Bob Strait Support Trust—to help pay for Nancy’s funeral service and Bob’s medical care.
-The Tulsa cops are looking for five more murderous morons suspected in this sick and twisted tale.
I wonder if President Obama is going to lecture the nation on this despicable act and tell us something similar to what he said regarding Trayvon’s shooting, namely:
“It is absolutely imperative that we investigate every aspect of this and that everybody pulls together—federal, state and local—to figure out exactly how this tragedy happened. I think all of us have to do some soul searching to ask ourselves how does something like this happen? And that means that we examine the laws, the context for what happened, as well as the specifics of the incident.”
Will Spike Lee and the New Black Panther Party tweet Tyrone’s address and put out a bounty on the remaining pieces of crap who have yet to be arrested for killing Nancy and brutally beating Bob? Spike and his ilk are all about “justice,” correct? Or is it more about “just us”?
For two more (out of many) recent black-on-white crimes that have ranged from unreported to insanely underreported, click here and here.
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Not Another Dime
I’ve sat by and watched progressives attack our liberties, our Constitution and our way of life for long enough. No more.
For too long, conservatives have been content to sit on what we call the high ground while the Left racks up small victory after small victory until all we have left is the high ground under our butts. Enough.
They go after Rush Limbaugh, and conservatives say, “This is an outrage,” but do nothing. The most extreme, racist left-wing groups contact advertisers and sponsors and pressure them to abandon shows and networks that made them. And too often – and far too quickly in a lot of cases – the advertisers cave. If not for their spots on Rush’s show, I never would have heard of Angie’s List, Carbonite or many others who’ve bought into the faux anger the astroturf pros drummed up.
I’ve used ProFlowers in the past but never again. There are plenty of other options for sending flowers, just as there are options for every sponsor who sides with the Left.
Normally conservatives say, “I don’t support boycotts, but I’m never going to use company X again,” and have done with it. No more.
I am asking you to join me in never, EVER using any product or service from ANY company that sides with or caves under pressure from those who seek to silence us. And avoid any company that supports their hate-machine monetarily.
We learned this week that Color of Change, the race-based progressives group funded by George Soros and founded by communist/truther Van Jones, pressured Coca-Cola into abandoning the Left’s latest boogeyman – the American Legislative Exchange Council. ALEC helps draft voter ID laws throughout the country. That’s what it does – create model legislation, on request, to help state lawmakers.
But requiring a photo ID to vote is akin to Jim Crow laws, according to politicians and pundits dependent upon race-motivated voting. So it must be stopped. Voting is so fundamental, so important a right, we simply can’t try to protect the integrity of the vote by asking those who would participate for something they need for almost all of life’s important transactions.
If Color of Change and Democrats truly were concerned about people being “disenfranchised,” they would be worried about all the other ways people can be disenfranchised in society if they don’t have a photo ID. And they’d help those people get a photo ID so they could travel, deal with a bank, enter the Justice Department building, etc. But they don’t give a damn about people beyond using them as props or milking them for votes.
When I found out this week Arby’s and Walgreens joined the boycott of Rush, I vowed never to patronize them again. Although me not patronizing them means nothing, us not patronizing them might.
Our individuality has been weaponized against us because the Left and the companies who pull their ads from Rush know we don’t engage in boycotts. It’s time we change that, or we will keep losing ground and eventually lose our voices.
Traditionally, Arby’s had nothing to fear by giving conservatives the finger. Why else would a company known for roast beef make the mistake of siding with the party of PETA and vegans? It’s time to give them something to fear. There are plenty of other sandwich joints around, roast beef isn’t rare, just as there are other pharmacies. If they want to side with those who view our thoughts as something to avoid, something to silence, why should we give them a dime?
If we make an example of companies that side with fascists against liberty, others will take notice and fewer will cave to fascism.
Thankfully, in their bravado and desire to fundraise by showing how effective they are, these fascists compiled a list of companies who’ve chosen their side over the consumers who’ve made them viable companies. Note this list and avoid.
I’m not angry with the progressives. They’re fascists, and this is what fascists do. I’m angry with the companies who are more than happy to take our money, then side with those who seek to silence us. Well, no more.
Maybe you’re thinking, “Fascism is such a nasty word!” Well, it is. But it’s also accurate. They prefer to call themselves “progressives” now, but that’s like calling someone a kid at 14 and an adult at 21 – they’re still the same person.
Progressives are the embarrassed children of fascism who changed their name solely because Hitler used it. But a name change is all it is. They still share the same philosophy, concepts of the role of government and, all too often, hatred of Jews.
We can no longer sit back and simply take comfort in the virtue of our ideals. We risk losing too much. It’s time to stop feeding the beasts who side against us and with those who seek to silence or intimidate us. Only when siding with fascists starts to hurt their bottom line will they stop doing it.
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Plunder! How Public Employee Unions Are Raiding Treasuries, Controlling Our Lives, and Bankrupting the Nation
Data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics show that there are more union members in the public sector than in the private sector in the United States. Thirty-nine percent of state and local government workers are members of unions, compared to just 7 percent of private sector workers. What problems are caused by the high level of public sector unionism?
Steven Greenhut argues that public sector unions are “bankrupting the nation.” Greenhut’s book comes at a time of rising concern about the growing political power of public sector unions. With large budget deficits and huge funding gaps in pension plans, policymakers in many states are trying to constrain spending and improve government efficiency. But many governors, such as Chris Christie of New Jersey, are finding that unions stand in the way of needed fiscal reforms.
Greenhut is a California-based journalist and a former member of the editorial board of the Orange County Register. He is thus familiar with both public sector unions and state budget crises.
California’s public sector workers have the highest average compensation of public sector workers in any state, and they also have one of the highest rates of unionization. It’s not a coincidence that the state is having severe budget problems and that it finds spending restraint very difficult to achieve.
Greenhut’s book focuses on California, and his background as a journalist results in a narrative-driven examination of the public sector union problem. He examines how public sector workers can
often retire at age 50 or 55 and draw very large pensions. In California, for example, there are more than 9,000 retired public sector workers with annual pensions of more than $100,000 a year. Oftentimes these high pensions result from government workers abusing the system; for example, the last year of an employee’s salary may be artificially inflated to garner a larger annual pension, a technique known as “pension spiking.”
Journalists often do not ask tough questions of groups such as firefighters and police because of the valuable contributions of those groups to local governments. But Greenhut analyzes these groups asspecial interests like any other, pushing for private gain and advantage. Yes, fire and police jobs can be dangerous, he says, but numerous private sector jobs are even more dangerous, and they don’t get the sweetheart deals on pensions and other benefits that public sector workers do.
The author takes on the education unions as well. The American Federation of Teachers and the National Education Association are powerful players in every aspect of education policy, and they rake in about $2 billion of union dues and fees a year. Greenhut describes how these unions “shamelessly” oppose reforms such as school choice, how they protect failing teachers from termination, and how they impose layers of costly bureaucracy on local governments.
While Greenhut has a strong narrative and tackles a very important issue, I would like to have seen more analysis of the union problem from a national perspective. Which states are the most unionized? Which states have the biggest pension problems? How will taxpayers be affected if governments don’t start reforming worker compensation packages? Greenhut does not provide sufficient analysis to answer those questions.
As I have documented, the level of public sector unionization varies dramatically from state to state. While New York’s public sector workforce is 73 percent unionized, North Carolina’s is only 8 percent. These large differences are due to varying state-level rules on collective bargaining and “union shop” provisions. Presumably, the public sector problems that Greenhut describes, such as pension abuses, are worse in the high-union states, but this is something that needs to be explored. Similarly, research is needed to compare the problems created by teachers’ groups in heavily unionized states such as California, and teachers’ groups in states such as Virginia, which have no monopoly unionism.
Greenhut concludes his entertaining but depressing book noting that “the public’s servants have become the public’s masters.” It does seem that the nation’s 20 million state and local government workers have tightened the screws on citizens and governments in many states. As the baby boomers in government workforces retire and draw their generous pension and retiree health benefits, there will be pressure to raise property, income, and sales taxes in the states.
Looking at possible reforms, Greenhut says that “public sector unions should be outlawed.” I would describe the needed reform somewhat differently. State governments should pass legislation to ban collective bargaining in the public sector, which is the successful path followed by Virginia and North Carolina. Government workers should be able to join voluntary organizations and have a voice in public policy debates, as people in any other voluntary organization can do. But collective bargaining infringes the rights of workers to freedom of association, and it creates monopoly unions with a privileged position in our democratic process.
A huge fiscal battle between taxpayers and public sector unions is getting under way in many states across the nation. Steven Greenhut’s book provides a timely guide to the challenges ahead in reforming governments and restraining the self-serving appetites of government unions.
SOURCE
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Gas Prices Skunk Jobs Again
High gas prices may be hitting the economy right in the gut. For the month of March, the pace of new job creation was cut by more than half compared to the last several encouraging monthly reports.
According to the Labor Department just 120,000 new jobs were created in March. Over the previous three months an average of 246,000 new jobs were added. Analysts generally believe at least 200,000 new monthly jobs are necessary for the economy to expand.
Stuart Varney, business analyst at Fox News and Fox Business Network, says these disappointing numbers "suggest the recovery has stalled."
A little deeper look at the numbers reveals further troubling news – a great many Americans walked away from the workforce.
The number of America's employed or looking for a job (157.7 million) declined by 164,000 in March even though the total age eligible workforce population (242.6 million) increased by 169,000 people– a net shift in the wrong direction of 333,000 people. The effect of the shrinking size of the workforce was decline in the Labor Force Participation Rate to 63.8%, and a slight drop of the unemployment rate to 8.2%.
The skunk at the modest economic recovery party that seemed to have begun can be found at your nearest gas station. The national average price of gas has increased 18% (59 cents per gallon) in just the last 90 days. That kind of shock to the family budget and to the cost of producing and transporting goods is like putting a noose around the neck of an already chocking economy.
Worse, the full impact of the rapid rise in the cost of gas is just beginning to be manifested in the economic numbers, and the peak driving season and historically associated price increases is still a month away.
SOURCE
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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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Sunday, April 08, 2012
Government Partying Shows the Real Sin City Is DC, Not Las Vegas
In February 2009, President Barack Obama gave this stern warning to bailed-out banks: "You are not going to be able to give out these big bonuses until you've paid taxpayers back," Obama said at a town hall meeting. "You can't get corporate jets, you can't go take a trip to Las Vegas or go down to the Super Bowl on the taxpayers' dime."
He should have added: "... unless you work for the federal government."
Twenty months later, as we all now know, a government agency called the General Services Administration rolled into Vegas on $822,000 worth of taxpayers' dimes so that 300 federal employees could enjoy a luxury spa, a clown show and a mind-reader, among other "over the top" entertainments at a regional training conference.
The revelation, unearthed by an internal inspector general, has resulted in two senior-level firings and the resignation of GSA chief Martha Johnson, while triggering the usual amount of political japery in Washington. But it's worth lingering on the contrast between this incident and Obama's original bank target.
The bailed-out bank that had been planning to send its most valuable employees to Vegas -- as it had been doing for years -- was Wells Fargo. One fact largely overlooked in the national shaming campaign that proved effective enough to derail the trip was that Wells Fargo didn't want the bailout. Or at least said it didn't when then-Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson summoned the nation's top nine private bankers to Washington on October 13, 2008.
Here's how Time magazine described the scene: "[T]he nine bank bosses, assembled in the Treasury's imposing boardroom, were each handed a piece of paper with the terms: $25 billion of preferred shares each from Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase, Wells Fargo and Bank of America. In return for the capital, the U.S. would collect a 5% dividend in the first five years. Although Wells Fargo chairman Richard Kovacevich resisted, Paulson gave the bankers no choice."
Newsweek's Michael Hirsh put it even more explicitly, and presciently: "Richard Kovacevich had a point. Why should his company, Wells Fargo, sign its freedom (and his compensation) away to the U.S. Treasury when, unlike many other banks, it hadn't overloaded itself with risky, mortgage-backed securities? The Wells Fargo chairman eventually agreed Monday to Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson's capital injection plan -- it was, frankly, an offer he couldn't refuse -- but Kovacevich's objections still resonate. Amid the continuing market turmoil, there is a sense that all of us are being asked to assume collective guilt for the large, but still identifiable, group of rogues and villains who got us into this mess. And then we're supposed to just forget about it."
A funny thing about collective shame -- we are happy to administer it on CEOs who get their arms twisted by the feds, yet we shy away from applying it to one of the only truly collective entities we have: taxpayer-funded government.
We love to bash Goldman Sachs for trading exotic mortgage-backed derivatives, but we are far less likely to even point out that the government-sponsored enterprises Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were trailblazers on the derivatives-trading fronts.
It shouldn't be surprising in this climate that federal employees would assume they get to play under different ethical rules and public scrutiny than fat-cat bankers. After all, Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin, D-Illinois, said last month that discretionary spending has been cut "to the limit," and Obama just this week thundered that the House GOP's recently proposed budget -- which, by the way, increases spending from $3.5 trillion to $4.9 trillion over the next decade -- amounts to "social Darwinism" that deliberately guts the middle class.
And let's not forget what the GSA does: As The New York Times puts it, the agency is "essentially the government's personal shopper for big-ticket items, like buying and leasing buildings and cars." These are precisely the people tasked with making sure taxpayer dollars are spent most wisely.
We have a federal government on autopilot, borrowing 40 cents on every dollar, after a decade-plus bipartisan spending binge that has doubled the budget in nominal terms. Washington is a boomtown, gentrifying rapidly as the rest of the country eagerly awaits the appearance of green shoots.
The surprise isn't that a federal agency went wild, or even that it got caught. What remains a genuine stumper is that the rest of the country hasn't quite figured out that the real Sin City has relocated 2,500 miles east.
SOURCE
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Stop Panicking About Bullies
Childhood is safer than ever before, but today's parents need to worry about something. Nick Gillespie on why busybodies and bureaucrats have zeroed in on bullying
Is America really in the midst of a "bullying crisis," as so many now claim?
"When I was younger," a remarkably self-assured, soft-spoken 15-year-old kid named Aaron tells the camera, "I suffered from bullying because of my lips—as you can see, they're kind of unusually large. So I would kind of get [called] 'Fish Lips'—things like that a lot—and my glasses too, I got those at an early age. That contributed. And the fact that my last name is Cheese didn't really help with the matter either. I would get [called] 'Cheeseburger,' 'Cheese Guy'—things like that, that weren't really very flattering. Just kind of making fun of my name—I'm a pretty sensitive kid, so I would have to fight back the tears when I was being called names."
It's hard not to be impressed with—and not to like—young Aaron Cheese. He is one of the kids featured in the new Cartoon Network special "Stop Bullying: Speak Up," which premiered last week and is available online. I myself am a former geekish, bespectacled child whose lips were a bit too full, and my first name (as other kids quickly discovered) rhymes with two of the most-popular slang terms for male genitalia, so I also identified with Mr. Cheese. My younger years were filled with precisely the sort of schoolyard taunts that he recounts; they led ultimately to at least one fistfight and a lot of sour moods on my part.
As the parent now of two school-age boys, I also worry that my own kids will have to deal with such ugly and destructive behavior. And I welcome the common-sense antibullying strategies relayed in "Stop Bullying": Talk to your friends, your parents and your teachers. Recognize that you're not the problem. Don't be a silent witness to bullying.
But is America really in the midst of a "bullying crisis," as so many now claim? I don't see it. I also suspect that our fears about the ubiquity of bullying are just the latest in a long line of well-intentioned yet hyperbolic alarms about how awful it is to be a kid today.
I have no interest in defending the bullies who dominate sandboxes, extort lunch money and use Twitter to taunt their classmates. But there is no growing crisis. Childhood and adolescence in America have never been less brutal. Even as the country's overprotective parents whip themselves up into a moral panic about kid-on-kid cruelty, the numbers don't point to any explosion of abuse. As for the rising wave of laws and regulations designed to combat meanness among students, they are likely to lump together minor slights with major offenses. The antibullying movement is already conflating serious cases of gay-bashing and vicious harassment with things like…a kid named Cheese having a tough time in grade school.
How did we get here? We live in an age of helicopter parents so pushy and overbearing that Colorado Springs banned its annual Easter-egg hunt on account of adults jumping the starter's gun and scooping up treat-filled plastic eggs on behalf of their winsome kids. The Department of Education in New York City—once known as the town too tough for Al Capone—is seeking to ban such words as "dinosaurs," "Halloween" and "dancing" from citywide tests on the grounds that they could "evoke unpleasant emotions in the students," it was reported this week. (Leave aside for the moment that perhaps the whole point of tests is to "evoke unpleasant emotions.")
And it's not only shrinking-violet city boys and girls who are being treated as delicate flowers. Early versions of new labor restrictions still being hashed out in Congress would have barred children under 16 from operating power-driven farm equipment and kept anyone under 18 from working at agricultural co-ops and stockyards (the latest version would let kids keep running machines on their parents' spreads). What was once taken for granted—working the family farm, October tests with jack-o-lantern-themed questions, hunting your own Easter eggs—is being threatened by paternalism run amok.
Now that schools are peanut-free, latex-free and soda-free, parents, administrators and teachers have got to worry about something. Since most kids now have access to cable TV, the Internet, unlimited talk and texting, college and a world of opportunities that was unimaginable even 20 years ago, it seems that adults have responded by becoming ever more overprotective and thin-skinned.
Kids might be fatter than they used to be, but by most standards they are safer and better-behaved than they were when I was growing up in the 1970s and '80s. Infant and adolescent mortality, accidents, sex and drug use—all are down from their levels of a few decades ago. Acceptance of homosexuality is up, especially among younger Americans. But given today's rhetoric about bullying, you could be forgiven for thinking that kids today are not simply reading and watching grim, postapocalyptic fantasies like "The Hunger Games" but actually inhabiting such terrifying terrain, a world where "Lord of the Flies" meets "Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior," presided over by Voldemort.
Even President Barack Obama has placed his stamp of approval on this view of modern childhood. Introducing the Cartoon Network documentary, he solemnly intones: "I care about this issue deeply, not just as the president, but as a dad. ... We've all got more to do. Everyone has to take action against bullying."
The state of New Jersey was well ahead of the president. Last year, in response to the suicide of the 18-year-old gay Rutgers student Tyler Clementi, the state legislature passed "The Anti-Bullying Bill of Rights." The law is widely regarded as the nation's toughest on these matters. It has been called both a "resounding success" by Steve Goldstein, head of the gay-rights group Garden State Equality, and a "bureaucratic nightmare" by James O'Neill, the interim school superintendent of the township of Roxbury. In Congress, New Jersey Sen. Frank Lautenberg and Rep. Rush Holt have introduced the federal Tyler Clementi Higher Education Anti-Harassment Act.
The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education has called the Lautenberg-Holt proposal a threat to free speech because its "definition of harassment is vague, subjective and at odds with Supreme Court precedent." Should it become law, it might well empower colleges to stop some instances of bullying, but it would also cause many of them to be sued for repressing speech. In New Jersey, a school anti-bullying coordinator told the Star-Ledger that "The Anti-Bullying Bill of Rights" has "added a layer of paperwork that actually inhibits us" in dealing with problems. In surveying the effects of the law, the Star-Ledger reports that while it is "widely used and has helped some kids," it has imposed costs of up to $80,000 per school district for training alone and uses about 200 hours per month of staff time in each district, with some educators saying that the additional effort is taking staff "away from things such as substance-abuse prevention and college and career counseling."
One thing seems certain: The focus on bullying will lead to more lawsuits against schools and bullies, many of which will stretch the limits of empathy and patience. Consider, for instance, the current case of 19-year-old Eric Giray, who is suing New York's tony Calhoun School and a former classmate for $1.5 million over abuse that allegedly took place in 2004. Such cases can only become more common.
Which isn't to say that there aren't kids who face terrible cases of bullying. The immensely powerful and highly acclaimed documentary "Bully," whose makers hope to create a nationwide movement against the "bullying crisis," opens in selected theaters this weekend. The film follows the harrowing experiences of a handful of victims of harassment, including two who killed themselves in desperation. It is, above all, a damning indictment of ineffectual and indifferent school officials. No viewer can watch the abuse endured by kids such as Alex, a 13-year-old social misfit in Sioux City, Iowa, or Kelby, a 14-year-old lesbian in small-town Oklahoma, without feeling angry and motivated to change youth culture and the school officials who turn a blind eye.
But is bullying—which the stopbullying.gov website of the Department of Health and Human Services defines as "teasing," "name-calling," "taunting," "leaving someone out on purpose," "telling other children not to be friends with someone," "spreading rumors about someone," "hitting/kicking/pinching," "spitting" and "making mean or rude hand gestures"—really a growing problem in America?
Despite the rare and tragic cases that rightly command our attention and outrage, the data show that things are, in fact, getting better for kids. When it comes to school violence, the numbers are particularly encouraging. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, between 1995 and 2009, the percentage of students who reported "being afraid of attack or harm at school" declined to 4% from 12%. Over the same period, the victimization rate per 1,000 students declined fivefold.
When it comes to bullying numbers, long-term trends are less clear. The makers of "Bully" say that "over 13 million American kids will be bullied this year," and estimates of the percentage of students who are bullied in a given year range from 20% to 70%. NCES changed the way it tabulated bullying incidents in 2005 and cautions against using earlier data. Its biennial reports find that 28% of students ages 12-18 reported being bullied in 2005; that percentage rose to 32% in 2007, before dropping back to 28% in 2009 (the most recent year for which data are available). Such numbers strongly suggest that there is no epidemic afoot (though one wonders if the new anti-bullying laws and media campaigns might lead to more reports going forward).
The most common bullying behaviors reported include being "made fun of, called names, or insulted" (reported by about 19% of victims in 2009) and being made the "subject of rumors" (16%). Nine percent of victims reported being "pushed, shoved, tripped, or spit on," and 6% reported being "threatened with harm." Though it may not be surprising that bullying mostly happens during the school day, it is stunning to learn that the most common locations for bullying are inside classrooms, in hallways and stairwells, and on playgrounds—areas ostensibly patrolled by teachers and administrators.
None of this is to be celebrated, of course, but it hardly paints a picture of contemporary American childhood as an unrestrained Hobbesian nightmare. Before more of our schools' money, time and personnel are diverted away from education in the name of this supposed crisis, we should make an effort to distinguish between the serious abuse suffered by the kids in "Bully" and the sort of lower-level harassment with which the Aaron Cheeses of the world have to deal.
In fact, Mr. Cheese, now a sophomore in high school with hopes of becoming a lawyer, provides a model in dealing with the sort of jerks who will always, unfortunately, be a presence in our schools. At the end of "Stop Bullying," he tells younger kids, "Just talk to somebody and I promise to you, it's going to get better." For Aaron, it plainly has: "It has been turned around actually. I am a generally liked guy. My last name has become something that's a little more liked. I have a friend named Mac and so together we are Mac and Cheese. That's cool."
Indeed, it is cool. And if we take a deep breath, we will realize that there are many more Aaron Cheeses walking the halls of today's schools than there are bullies. Our problem isn't a world where bullies are allowed to run rampant; it's a world where kids like Aaron are convinced that they are powerless victims.
SOURCE
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ELSEWHERE
TN: Bill would outlaw sagging pants at schools: "Lawmakers in Tennessee have passed a bill that would prohibit students from showing underwear or body parts in an indecent manner at school, myFOXmemphis reports. The bill passed overwhelmingly in the Tennessee state Senate and House, and now requires the governor's signature. Unlike a recent Tennessee bill that failed, the enforcement of this bill doesn't require a ruler or carry penalties of up to $250 and community service. ... Instead, this bill allows school districts to decide the punishment."
MN: Cops steal waitress’s tip: "Stacy Knutson, a struggling Minnesota waitress and mother of five, says she was searching for a 'miracle' to help her family with financial problems. But that 'miracle' quickly came and went after police seized a $12,000 tip that was left at her table. Knutson filed a lawsuit in Clay County District Court stating that the money is rightfully hers. Police argue it is drug money."
The tarts and “tards” of Hollywood: "Hollywood had its Golden Age, back when well-written scripts reflected well-developed, multi-faceted characters. Today, Tinseltown is a monolithic, left-liberal automaton, marching in thematic unison and subjecting the viewer to the same impoverished, error-riddled, preachy themes. The evidence is in. Activism and abreaction have replaced acting, and sermons have supplanted stories in the repertoire of the pretty, pea-brained community."
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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)
****************************
In February 2009, President Barack Obama gave this stern warning to bailed-out banks: "You are not going to be able to give out these big bonuses until you've paid taxpayers back," Obama said at a town hall meeting. "You can't get corporate jets, you can't go take a trip to Las Vegas or go down to the Super Bowl on the taxpayers' dime."
He should have added: "... unless you work for the federal government."
Twenty months later, as we all now know, a government agency called the General Services Administration rolled into Vegas on $822,000 worth of taxpayers' dimes so that 300 federal employees could enjoy a luxury spa, a clown show and a mind-reader, among other "over the top" entertainments at a regional training conference.
The revelation, unearthed by an internal inspector general, has resulted in two senior-level firings and the resignation of GSA chief Martha Johnson, while triggering the usual amount of political japery in Washington. But it's worth lingering on the contrast between this incident and Obama's original bank target.
The bailed-out bank that had been planning to send its most valuable employees to Vegas -- as it had been doing for years -- was Wells Fargo. One fact largely overlooked in the national shaming campaign that proved effective enough to derail the trip was that Wells Fargo didn't want the bailout. Or at least said it didn't when then-Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson summoned the nation's top nine private bankers to Washington on October 13, 2008.
Here's how Time magazine described the scene: "[T]he nine bank bosses, assembled in the Treasury's imposing boardroom, were each handed a piece of paper with the terms: $25 billion of preferred shares each from Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase, Wells Fargo and Bank of America. In return for the capital, the U.S. would collect a 5% dividend in the first five years. Although Wells Fargo chairman Richard Kovacevich resisted, Paulson gave the bankers no choice."
Newsweek's Michael Hirsh put it even more explicitly, and presciently: "Richard Kovacevich had a point. Why should his company, Wells Fargo, sign its freedom (and his compensation) away to the U.S. Treasury when, unlike many other banks, it hadn't overloaded itself with risky, mortgage-backed securities? The Wells Fargo chairman eventually agreed Monday to Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson's capital injection plan -- it was, frankly, an offer he couldn't refuse -- but Kovacevich's objections still resonate. Amid the continuing market turmoil, there is a sense that all of us are being asked to assume collective guilt for the large, but still identifiable, group of rogues and villains who got us into this mess. And then we're supposed to just forget about it."
A funny thing about collective shame -- we are happy to administer it on CEOs who get their arms twisted by the feds, yet we shy away from applying it to one of the only truly collective entities we have: taxpayer-funded government.
We love to bash Goldman Sachs for trading exotic mortgage-backed derivatives, but we are far less likely to even point out that the government-sponsored enterprises Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were trailblazers on the derivatives-trading fronts.
It shouldn't be surprising in this climate that federal employees would assume they get to play under different ethical rules and public scrutiny than fat-cat bankers. After all, Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin, D-Illinois, said last month that discretionary spending has been cut "to the limit," and Obama just this week thundered that the House GOP's recently proposed budget -- which, by the way, increases spending from $3.5 trillion to $4.9 trillion over the next decade -- amounts to "social Darwinism" that deliberately guts the middle class.
And let's not forget what the GSA does: As The New York Times puts it, the agency is "essentially the government's personal shopper for big-ticket items, like buying and leasing buildings and cars." These are precisely the people tasked with making sure taxpayer dollars are spent most wisely.
We have a federal government on autopilot, borrowing 40 cents on every dollar, after a decade-plus bipartisan spending binge that has doubled the budget in nominal terms. Washington is a boomtown, gentrifying rapidly as the rest of the country eagerly awaits the appearance of green shoots.
The surprise isn't that a federal agency went wild, or even that it got caught. What remains a genuine stumper is that the rest of the country hasn't quite figured out that the real Sin City has relocated 2,500 miles east.
SOURCE
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Stop Panicking About Bullies
Childhood is safer than ever before, but today's parents need to worry about something. Nick Gillespie on why busybodies and bureaucrats have zeroed in on bullying
Is America really in the midst of a "bullying crisis," as so many now claim?
"When I was younger," a remarkably self-assured, soft-spoken 15-year-old kid named Aaron tells the camera, "I suffered from bullying because of my lips—as you can see, they're kind of unusually large. So I would kind of get [called] 'Fish Lips'—things like that a lot—and my glasses too, I got those at an early age. That contributed. And the fact that my last name is Cheese didn't really help with the matter either. I would get [called] 'Cheeseburger,' 'Cheese Guy'—things like that, that weren't really very flattering. Just kind of making fun of my name—I'm a pretty sensitive kid, so I would have to fight back the tears when I was being called names."
It's hard not to be impressed with—and not to like—young Aaron Cheese. He is one of the kids featured in the new Cartoon Network special "Stop Bullying: Speak Up," which premiered last week and is available online. I myself am a former geekish, bespectacled child whose lips were a bit too full, and my first name (as other kids quickly discovered) rhymes with two of the most-popular slang terms for male genitalia, so I also identified with Mr. Cheese. My younger years were filled with precisely the sort of schoolyard taunts that he recounts; they led ultimately to at least one fistfight and a lot of sour moods on my part.
As the parent now of two school-age boys, I also worry that my own kids will have to deal with such ugly and destructive behavior. And I welcome the common-sense antibullying strategies relayed in "Stop Bullying": Talk to your friends, your parents and your teachers. Recognize that you're not the problem. Don't be a silent witness to bullying.
But is America really in the midst of a "bullying crisis," as so many now claim? I don't see it. I also suspect that our fears about the ubiquity of bullying are just the latest in a long line of well-intentioned yet hyperbolic alarms about how awful it is to be a kid today.
I have no interest in defending the bullies who dominate sandboxes, extort lunch money and use Twitter to taunt their classmates. But there is no growing crisis. Childhood and adolescence in America have never been less brutal. Even as the country's overprotective parents whip themselves up into a moral panic about kid-on-kid cruelty, the numbers don't point to any explosion of abuse. As for the rising wave of laws and regulations designed to combat meanness among students, they are likely to lump together minor slights with major offenses. The antibullying movement is already conflating serious cases of gay-bashing and vicious harassment with things like…a kid named Cheese having a tough time in grade school.
How did we get here? We live in an age of helicopter parents so pushy and overbearing that Colorado Springs banned its annual Easter-egg hunt on account of adults jumping the starter's gun and scooping up treat-filled plastic eggs on behalf of their winsome kids. The Department of Education in New York City—once known as the town too tough for Al Capone—is seeking to ban such words as "dinosaurs," "Halloween" and "dancing" from citywide tests on the grounds that they could "evoke unpleasant emotions in the students," it was reported this week. (Leave aside for the moment that perhaps the whole point of tests is to "evoke unpleasant emotions.")
And it's not only shrinking-violet city boys and girls who are being treated as delicate flowers. Early versions of new labor restrictions still being hashed out in Congress would have barred children under 16 from operating power-driven farm equipment and kept anyone under 18 from working at agricultural co-ops and stockyards (the latest version would let kids keep running machines on their parents' spreads). What was once taken for granted—working the family farm, October tests with jack-o-lantern-themed questions, hunting your own Easter eggs—is being threatened by paternalism run amok.
Now that schools are peanut-free, latex-free and soda-free, parents, administrators and teachers have got to worry about something. Since most kids now have access to cable TV, the Internet, unlimited talk and texting, college and a world of opportunities that was unimaginable even 20 years ago, it seems that adults have responded by becoming ever more overprotective and thin-skinned.
Kids might be fatter than they used to be, but by most standards they are safer and better-behaved than they were when I was growing up in the 1970s and '80s. Infant and adolescent mortality, accidents, sex and drug use—all are down from their levels of a few decades ago. Acceptance of homosexuality is up, especially among younger Americans. But given today's rhetoric about bullying, you could be forgiven for thinking that kids today are not simply reading and watching grim, postapocalyptic fantasies like "The Hunger Games" but actually inhabiting such terrifying terrain, a world where "Lord of the Flies" meets "Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior," presided over by Voldemort.
Even President Barack Obama has placed his stamp of approval on this view of modern childhood. Introducing the Cartoon Network documentary, he solemnly intones: "I care about this issue deeply, not just as the president, but as a dad. ... We've all got more to do. Everyone has to take action against bullying."
The state of New Jersey was well ahead of the president. Last year, in response to the suicide of the 18-year-old gay Rutgers student Tyler Clementi, the state legislature passed "The Anti-Bullying Bill of Rights." The law is widely regarded as the nation's toughest on these matters. It has been called both a "resounding success" by Steve Goldstein, head of the gay-rights group Garden State Equality, and a "bureaucratic nightmare" by James O'Neill, the interim school superintendent of the township of Roxbury. In Congress, New Jersey Sen. Frank Lautenberg and Rep. Rush Holt have introduced the federal Tyler Clementi Higher Education Anti-Harassment Act.
The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education has called the Lautenberg-Holt proposal a threat to free speech because its "definition of harassment is vague, subjective and at odds with Supreme Court precedent." Should it become law, it might well empower colleges to stop some instances of bullying, but it would also cause many of them to be sued for repressing speech. In New Jersey, a school anti-bullying coordinator told the Star-Ledger that "The Anti-Bullying Bill of Rights" has "added a layer of paperwork that actually inhibits us" in dealing with problems. In surveying the effects of the law, the Star-Ledger reports that while it is "widely used and has helped some kids," it has imposed costs of up to $80,000 per school district for training alone and uses about 200 hours per month of staff time in each district, with some educators saying that the additional effort is taking staff "away from things such as substance-abuse prevention and college and career counseling."
One thing seems certain: The focus on bullying will lead to more lawsuits against schools and bullies, many of which will stretch the limits of empathy and patience. Consider, for instance, the current case of 19-year-old Eric Giray, who is suing New York's tony Calhoun School and a former classmate for $1.5 million over abuse that allegedly took place in 2004. Such cases can only become more common.
Which isn't to say that there aren't kids who face terrible cases of bullying. The immensely powerful and highly acclaimed documentary "Bully," whose makers hope to create a nationwide movement against the "bullying crisis," opens in selected theaters this weekend. The film follows the harrowing experiences of a handful of victims of harassment, including two who killed themselves in desperation. It is, above all, a damning indictment of ineffectual and indifferent school officials. No viewer can watch the abuse endured by kids such as Alex, a 13-year-old social misfit in Sioux City, Iowa, or Kelby, a 14-year-old lesbian in small-town Oklahoma, without feeling angry and motivated to change youth culture and the school officials who turn a blind eye.
But is bullying—which the stopbullying.gov website of the Department of Health and Human Services defines as "teasing," "name-calling," "taunting," "leaving someone out on purpose," "telling other children not to be friends with someone," "spreading rumors about someone," "hitting/kicking/pinching," "spitting" and "making mean or rude hand gestures"—really a growing problem in America?
Despite the rare and tragic cases that rightly command our attention and outrage, the data show that things are, in fact, getting better for kids. When it comes to school violence, the numbers are particularly encouraging. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, between 1995 and 2009, the percentage of students who reported "being afraid of attack or harm at school" declined to 4% from 12%. Over the same period, the victimization rate per 1,000 students declined fivefold.
When it comes to bullying numbers, long-term trends are less clear. The makers of "Bully" say that "over 13 million American kids will be bullied this year," and estimates of the percentage of students who are bullied in a given year range from 20% to 70%. NCES changed the way it tabulated bullying incidents in 2005 and cautions against using earlier data. Its biennial reports find that 28% of students ages 12-18 reported being bullied in 2005; that percentage rose to 32% in 2007, before dropping back to 28% in 2009 (the most recent year for which data are available). Such numbers strongly suggest that there is no epidemic afoot (though one wonders if the new anti-bullying laws and media campaigns might lead to more reports going forward).
The most common bullying behaviors reported include being "made fun of, called names, or insulted" (reported by about 19% of victims in 2009) and being made the "subject of rumors" (16%). Nine percent of victims reported being "pushed, shoved, tripped, or spit on," and 6% reported being "threatened with harm." Though it may not be surprising that bullying mostly happens during the school day, it is stunning to learn that the most common locations for bullying are inside classrooms, in hallways and stairwells, and on playgrounds—areas ostensibly patrolled by teachers and administrators.
None of this is to be celebrated, of course, but it hardly paints a picture of contemporary American childhood as an unrestrained Hobbesian nightmare. Before more of our schools' money, time and personnel are diverted away from education in the name of this supposed crisis, we should make an effort to distinguish between the serious abuse suffered by the kids in "Bully" and the sort of lower-level harassment with which the Aaron Cheeses of the world have to deal.
In fact, Mr. Cheese, now a sophomore in high school with hopes of becoming a lawyer, provides a model in dealing with the sort of jerks who will always, unfortunately, be a presence in our schools. At the end of "Stop Bullying," he tells younger kids, "Just talk to somebody and I promise to you, it's going to get better." For Aaron, it plainly has: "It has been turned around actually. I am a generally liked guy. My last name has become something that's a little more liked. I have a friend named Mac and so together we are Mac and Cheese. That's cool."
Indeed, it is cool. And if we take a deep breath, we will realize that there are many more Aaron Cheeses walking the halls of today's schools than there are bullies. Our problem isn't a world where bullies are allowed to run rampant; it's a world where kids like Aaron are convinced that they are powerless victims.
SOURCE
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ELSEWHERE
TN: Bill would outlaw sagging pants at schools: "Lawmakers in Tennessee have passed a bill that would prohibit students from showing underwear or body parts in an indecent manner at school, myFOXmemphis reports. The bill passed overwhelmingly in the Tennessee state Senate and House, and now requires the governor's signature. Unlike a recent Tennessee bill that failed, the enforcement of this bill doesn't require a ruler or carry penalties of up to $250 and community service. ... Instead, this bill allows school districts to decide the punishment."
MN: Cops steal waitress’s tip: "Stacy Knutson, a struggling Minnesota waitress and mother of five, says she was searching for a 'miracle' to help her family with financial problems. But that 'miracle' quickly came and went after police seized a $12,000 tip that was left at her table. Knutson filed a lawsuit in Clay County District Court stating that the money is rightfully hers. Police argue it is drug money."
The tarts and “tards” of Hollywood: "Hollywood had its Golden Age, back when well-written scripts reflected well-developed, multi-faceted characters. Today, Tinseltown is a monolithic, left-liberal automaton, marching in thematic unison and subjecting the viewer to the same impoverished, error-riddled, preachy themes. The evidence is in. Activism and abreaction have replaced acting, and sermons have supplanted stories in the repertoire of the pretty, pea-brained community."
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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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Saturday, April 07, 2012
Ve vill make you happy! Whether you like it or not
This new Green/Left proposal seems faintly reasonable at first. Is not happiness in some sense the bottom line for all of us? The idea that the government can make us happy is the funny bit. All the government departments I know of are much better at provoking rage!
But, aside from that, an even bigger fly in the proto-Fascist ointment is that happiness is largely dispositional. We are pretty much born with a pre-set level of happiness and departures from it are both rare and temporary. A common clinical observation is proof of that: Even people who have suffered catastrophic injuries -- such as paraplegics -- seem to bounce back to their original level of happiness after a couple of years. Some people (mainly conservatives) are born happy and positive and some others (Leftists) are born miseries and whiners.
And if you think I am just making propaganda in saying that, I'm not. Surveys of various sorts always show that conservatives are happier. Just one small example here, for instance.
And the whole concept of happiness is surprisingly suspect anyway. German and English are closely related languages and yet German just has no word for happiness. The nearest they can come is to say that they are "lucky" (gluecklich).
That was borne home to me forcefully many years ago when I was talking to an old Jewish gent who had escaped Hitler and ended up in Australia. He was glad to be alive but missed the vibrant cultural life he had known in prewar Germany. We spoke in English but he was aware that I knew some German so when I asked him a how he felt about his escape to Australia he replied: "Gluecklich I am but happy I am not".
And I would be surprised if other languages did not have similar difficulties of translation. I say more about the considerable body of happiness research here
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Controlling us for our own good
By WALTER E. WILLIAMS
Public misunderstanding, ignorance and possibly contempt for liberty play into the hands of people who want to control our lives. Responses to my recent column "Compliant Americans" brought this home to me. In it, I argued that the anti-tobacco movement became the template and inspiration for other forms of government intrusion, such as bans on restaurants serving foie gras, McDonald's giving Happy Meals with toys and confiscating a child's home-prepared lunch because it didn't meet Department of Agriculture guidelines. A few responses read like this: "Smoking is different because that actually affects other people. We should be living by the notion that you should be able to do whatever you want as long as you don't hurt other people. Smoking hurts other people."
If we banned or restricted all activities that affect, harm or have the possibility of harming other people, it wouldn't be a very nice life.
Let's look at what can affect or harm other people. Non-obese people are harmed by obesity, as they have to pay more for health care, through either higher taxes or higher insurance premiums. That harm could be reduced by a national version of a measure introduced in the Mississippi Legislature in 2008 by state Rep. W.T. Mayhall that in part read, "An act to prohibit certain food establishments from serving food to any person who is obese, based on criteria prescribed by the state Department of Health." The measure would have revoked licenses of food establishments that violated the provisions of the act. Fortunately, the measure never passed, but there's always a next time.
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration reported that in 2010, nearly 33,000 people were killed in auto crashes. That's a lot of harm that could be reduced by lowering the speed limit to 5 or 10 miles an hour. You say, "Williams, that's ridiculous!" What you really mean to say but don't have the courage to is that to save all of those lives by making the speed limit 5 or 10 miles per hour is not worth the inconvenience. Needless to say – or almost so – there are many activities we engage in that either cause harm to others or have the potential for doing so, but we don't ban all of these activities.
One of the least-understood functions of private property rights is that of determining who may harm whom in what ways. In a free society, it is presumed that the air in a person's house, restaurant, hotel, car or place of business is his property. That means that if you own a restaurant and don't want your air polluted by tobacco smoke, it is your right. Most would deem it tyranny if a bunch of smokers had the political power to get the city council to pass an ordinance forcing you to permit smoking. You'd probably deem it more respectful of liberty if those who wanted to smoke sought a restaurant owner who permitted smoking. The identical argument can be made about a restaurant owner who permits smoking in a city where nonsmokers have the political power. The issue is not whether smoking harms others. The issue is the rights associated with property ownership.
The emerging tragedy is our increased willingness to use the coercive powers of government, in the name of health or some other ruse, to forcibly impose our preferences upon others. In the whole scheme of things, the tobacco issue itself is trivial. Far more important is its template for massive government disrespect for private property.
John Adams said, "The moment the idea is admitted into society that property is not as sacred as the laws of God, and that there is not a force of law and public justice to protect it, anarchy and tyranny commence."
SOURCE
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Market Order in War-Torn Iraq
In the course of my deployments to Iraq I learned a great deal about economics, though I didn't realize it at the time. I hadn't yet been introduced to the Austrian School or a Rothbardian view of laissez-faire capitalism. Looking back, however, I can see quite clearly that in several important areas voluntary systems not only existed in that country but thrived.
My first deployment was to Baghdad, that ancient Mesopotamian city positioned on the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. It was there I discovered how, even during the most violent and unstable times, markets can adapt to the needs of consumers and peacefully provide essential services to humanity.
The focus of this article will be on economic provision, rather than the war itself. However, it's important to note that the following free-market solutions have blossomed in spite of being in the heart of a country ravaged by economic sanctions and all but total war. Not only was the US-led war destructive of the physical means to provide such services; it also destroyed the institutions that delivered them, adding to the difficulty in restoring them.
Utility Services
In the United States virtually all utilities are a service provided by government. Whether they are directly controlled by municipal governments or simply regulated to the point of being creatures of those organizations, relatively few cases exist where the market provides utilities unhindered. Baghdad, however, was not so tightly regulated.
Being the capital city, it is home to all of the major government offices and thus has a priority for electrical power; this was true before and after the invasion. However, after a decade of brutal sanctions, followed by a relentless bombing campaign of "shock and awe," the socialized infrastructure was entirely unfit to meet demand. The solution arrived at by the Iraqi people was brilliant.
Taking advantage of economies of scale, residents would pool their resources and either buy a large generator or contract with someone who already owned one. Then a mechanic would be hired to maintain the generator, guarding it against thieves and ensuring it was properly fueled. The more clients a neighborhood had, the lower the consumer cost and higher the profits for the owners.
The one flaw in this system was that fuel was supplied by a centrally planned government agency. As might have been expected, shortages were frequent, leading to power outages. Had fuel been freed from the highly politicized and bureaucratic web of government, there's no doubt an equally innovative and peaceful solution would have arisen to address this need.
Money
Another pocket of freedom that many Iraqis enjoy is in market-based currency, or something similar. After the collapse of Iraq's government, the central bank no longer issued notes for the Iraqi dinar. At this time the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA), which was the US-lead interim government, began a large-scale influx of the US dollar. Between large shipments of currency from the CPA, and the widespread use of the dollar by hundreds of thousands of troops, its supply quickly increased. And while many thought the result would be large-scale abandonment of the dinar, quite the opposite in fact occurred.
B.K. Marcus describes the result here, wherein the dinar actually increased in value and was in many cases the preferred currency by many in the country. One primary reason seems to be that the value of the dinar remained fairly constant, due to its supply being more stable. But other currencies existed, some fiat-based, others springing from the market.
In another account of the market in Iraq, Edward Gonzales described how in the western region of the country, sheep and bottled water acted as money. Their value floated based on the season and relative quantities of one or the other. While I never witnessed trades made with livestock or other commodities, I did see that not just dinars and dollars were used for exchange.
My second deployment was to the Babel province, south of Baghdad, and the Iranian rial was fairly common there. This was particularly true in the Shia towns and neighborhoods, as might have been expected. I was not familiar with the exchange ratios among the currencies, but all were used in trade. It was not uncommon for a man's wallet to contain two or more of a different states' moneys, even all three at times.
Defense Services
Perhaps the state's longest running and most institutionalized monopoly is that of defense. Advocates of limited government will quickly concede that most services ought to be provided in a free market. This provides incentives for firms to compete for market share, thus raising quality while driving down prices. One service that must be provided by the state, according to everyone from socialists to minarchists, is defense of persons and their property.
Even many who claim to believe steadfastly in free enterprise will concede that defense is the sole purview of government. By doing so they implicitly argue that the same economic laws that govern the provision of trash collection are rendered impotent when applied to defending property. This certainly does not hold water theoretically, nor is it true when applied to the market in Iraq.
In most of the country there were multiple layers of government police and military, and martial law had become the norm. Despite (or perhaps because of) the saturation of the market by government defense monopolists, private services were a valuable commodity. In Baghdad, circa 2005, there were 175,000 US troops engaging various guerilla forces. On top of that, the government's police never bothered with the pretense of scruples and corruption was standard fare. Private security quickly became a profitable enterprise.
It is often suggested by advocates of a free society that, theoretically, defense would be an individual endeavor. So long as individuals are free to own property, goes the argument, they'll be able to arm themselves for protection. This is largely how it played out in Iraq. Each adult male was permitted to own one AK-47 rifle, for personal defense, and gun ownership was nearly ubiquitous. (This allowance was expanded later to allow shotguns for hunting).
As an added layer of protection, many neighborhoods employed night watchmen. These were typically middle-aged men who were contracted by their neighbors to patrol the streets and defend against thieves. Their teenage sons would often assist, and we came to know the groups well. Some took employment in the markets, hired by the business owners to protect commercial interests. Others were posted near residential street corners, keeping a watchful eye on their clients' homes through the night.
These were trusted men in the community, who had found a way to earn a living in a ravaged economy by supplying a highly valued service to their fellow man. They did as good or better a job than we did at securing neighborhoods. Recognizing this, we equipped them with infrared lights, indicating they were friendlies, to help protect them from our helicopter gunships and other units passing through the area at night.
Conclusion
In each of these cases, where proponents of the state argue we must have active government involvement, individuals found voluntary, peaceful solutions to their problems. In spite of the failure by both the Iraqi and US governments to provide essential services, such as adequate electrical power and the defense of property, private solutions quickly sprang up among the violence and disorder. Money too was not something that required a government fiat to make trade possible. The market, unhindered by the state, provided a currency by which individuals could exchange with one another.
SOURCE
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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)
****************************
This new Green/Left proposal seems faintly reasonable at first. Is not happiness in some sense the bottom line for all of us? The idea that the government can make us happy is the funny bit. All the government departments I know of are much better at provoking rage!
But, aside from that, an even bigger fly in the proto-Fascist ointment is that happiness is largely dispositional. We are pretty much born with a pre-set level of happiness and departures from it are both rare and temporary. A common clinical observation is proof of that: Even people who have suffered catastrophic injuries -- such as paraplegics -- seem to bounce back to their original level of happiness after a couple of years. Some people (mainly conservatives) are born happy and positive and some others (Leftists) are born miseries and whiners.
And if you think I am just making propaganda in saying that, I'm not. Surveys of various sorts always show that conservatives are happier. Just one small example here, for instance.
And the whole concept of happiness is surprisingly suspect anyway. German and English are closely related languages and yet German just has no word for happiness. The nearest they can come is to say that they are "lucky" (gluecklich).
That was borne home to me forcefully many years ago when I was talking to an old Jewish gent who had escaped Hitler and ended up in Australia. He was glad to be alive but missed the vibrant cultural life he had known in prewar Germany. We spoke in English but he was aware that I knew some German so when I asked him a how he felt about his escape to Australia he replied: "Gluecklich I am but happy I am not".
And I would be surprised if other languages did not have similar difficulties of translation. I say more about the considerable body of happiness research here
Are you happy? Are Canadians happy, or at least happier than the Americans or the French or the Taiwanese? Would you like to be happier?
At the United Nations on Monday, they took a major step toward a global strategy to enhance your happiness status, and the happiness of everybody else in the world. It’s the new role for governments across the planet. If the UN has its way, the state’s major objective will be to boost your sense of well-being and improve how you feel about your life.
It all began in 1972 in the landlocked Himalayan kingdom of Bhutan (pop. 700,000) when King Jigme Singye Wangchuck announced that his Buddhist country (GDP per capita US$5,500) would thereafter pursue economic progress guided not by the harsh and dehumanizing concept of Gross National Product, but by the warm and humanistic principles of Gross National Happiness.
Almost 40 years later in New York on Monday, under the auspices of the Kingdom of the United Nations, the high priests of economic interventionism and wealth redistribution moved one step closer to turning Gross National Happiness into a global paradigm.
They issued a report — the World Happiness Report. They staged a conference — Well-being and Happiness: Defining a New Economic Paradigm. And they fashioned a declaration — Realizing a World of Sustainable Well-being and Happiness.
The declaration is in turn intended to become part of “a long-term reference framework” for the coming Rio +20 Earth Summit, a grand replay in June this year of Maurice Strong’s 1992 Rio Earth Summit.
At Rio +20, the UN activists hope to change the direction of world economic policy-making. Production goals and measures based on dollars and yen are out. Happiness measures are in — even though the concepts, happiness and “subjective well-being,” remain vacuous bits of quasi-religious sophistry.
The opening paragraphs of Monday’s World Happiness Report — written by Jeffrey Sachs of Columbia University’s Earth Institute — set out the transcendental mindset required to deal with the mind-blowing idea of Gross National Happiness or its equivalent.
One of the amazing characteristics of the happiness paradigm as described by Mr. Sachs and others is how remarkably similar its conclusions are to the old interventionism and redistribution policies of the traditional left.
It’s as if the high priests of Occupy the Planet and the Green Apocalypse — having run their old socialist and environmental engines into the ground — have stumbled across a new set of rationalizations and slogans.
To no surprise, with 65/309 as a mandate, the Monday meeting in New York produced a radical declaration calling for the overthrow of the “current economic paradigm” to take into account finite global resource limits and the emerging science of well-being and happiness.
What that means, aside from the same old nitty-gritty policies such as more government job creation, is nothing less than a “redesign of the world economy” and the overthrow of existing economic ideas to be replaced by the pursuit of happiness as defined by the United Nations, not by individuals.
More HERE
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Controlling us for our own good
By WALTER E. WILLIAMS
Public misunderstanding, ignorance and possibly contempt for liberty play into the hands of people who want to control our lives. Responses to my recent column "Compliant Americans" brought this home to me. In it, I argued that the anti-tobacco movement became the template and inspiration for other forms of government intrusion, such as bans on restaurants serving foie gras, McDonald's giving Happy Meals with toys and confiscating a child's home-prepared lunch because it didn't meet Department of Agriculture guidelines. A few responses read like this: "Smoking is different because that actually affects other people. We should be living by the notion that you should be able to do whatever you want as long as you don't hurt other people. Smoking hurts other people."
If we banned or restricted all activities that affect, harm or have the possibility of harming other people, it wouldn't be a very nice life.
Let's look at what can affect or harm other people. Non-obese people are harmed by obesity, as they have to pay more for health care, through either higher taxes or higher insurance premiums. That harm could be reduced by a national version of a measure introduced in the Mississippi Legislature in 2008 by state Rep. W.T. Mayhall that in part read, "An act to prohibit certain food establishments from serving food to any person who is obese, based on criteria prescribed by the state Department of Health." The measure would have revoked licenses of food establishments that violated the provisions of the act. Fortunately, the measure never passed, but there's always a next time.
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration reported that in 2010, nearly 33,000 people were killed in auto crashes. That's a lot of harm that could be reduced by lowering the speed limit to 5 or 10 miles an hour. You say, "Williams, that's ridiculous!" What you really mean to say but don't have the courage to is that to save all of those lives by making the speed limit 5 or 10 miles per hour is not worth the inconvenience. Needless to say – or almost so – there are many activities we engage in that either cause harm to others or have the potential for doing so, but we don't ban all of these activities.
One of the least-understood functions of private property rights is that of determining who may harm whom in what ways. In a free society, it is presumed that the air in a person's house, restaurant, hotel, car or place of business is his property. That means that if you own a restaurant and don't want your air polluted by tobacco smoke, it is your right. Most would deem it tyranny if a bunch of smokers had the political power to get the city council to pass an ordinance forcing you to permit smoking. You'd probably deem it more respectful of liberty if those who wanted to smoke sought a restaurant owner who permitted smoking. The identical argument can be made about a restaurant owner who permits smoking in a city where nonsmokers have the political power. The issue is not whether smoking harms others. The issue is the rights associated with property ownership.
The emerging tragedy is our increased willingness to use the coercive powers of government, in the name of health or some other ruse, to forcibly impose our preferences upon others. In the whole scheme of things, the tobacco issue itself is trivial. Far more important is its template for massive government disrespect for private property.
John Adams said, "The moment the idea is admitted into society that property is not as sacred as the laws of God, and that there is not a force of law and public justice to protect it, anarchy and tyranny commence."
SOURCE
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Market Order in War-Torn Iraq
In the course of my deployments to Iraq I learned a great deal about economics, though I didn't realize it at the time. I hadn't yet been introduced to the Austrian School or a Rothbardian view of laissez-faire capitalism. Looking back, however, I can see quite clearly that in several important areas voluntary systems not only existed in that country but thrived.
My first deployment was to Baghdad, that ancient Mesopotamian city positioned on the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. It was there I discovered how, even during the most violent and unstable times, markets can adapt to the needs of consumers and peacefully provide essential services to humanity.
The focus of this article will be on economic provision, rather than the war itself. However, it's important to note that the following free-market solutions have blossomed in spite of being in the heart of a country ravaged by economic sanctions and all but total war. Not only was the US-led war destructive of the physical means to provide such services; it also destroyed the institutions that delivered them, adding to the difficulty in restoring them.
Utility Services
In the United States virtually all utilities are a service provided by government. Whether they are directly controlled by municipal governments or simply regulated to the point of being creatures of those organizations, relatively few cases exist where the market provides utilities unhindered. Baghdad, however, was not so tightly regulated.
Being the capital city, it is home to all of the major government offices and thus has a priority for electrical power; this was true before and after the invasion. However, after a decade of brutal sanctions, followed by a relentless bombing campaign of "shock and awe," the socialized infrastructure was entirely unfit to meet demand. The solution arrived at by the Iraqi people was brilliant.
Taking advantage of economies of scale, residents would pool their resources and either buy a large generator or contract with someone who already owned one. Then a mechanic would be hired to maintain the generator, guarding it against thieves and ensuring it was properly fueled. The more clients a neighborhood had, the lower the consumer cost and higher the profits for the owners.
The one flaw in this system was that fuel was supplied by a centrally planned government agency. As might have been expected, shortages were frequent, leading to power outages. Had fuel been freed from the highly politicized and bureaucratic web of government, there's no doubt an equally innovative and peaceful solution would have arisen to address this need.
Money
Another pocket of freedom that many Iraqis enjoy is in market-based currency, or something similar. After the collapse of Iraq's government, the central bank no longer issued notes for the Iraqi dinar. At this time the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA), which was the US-lead interim government, began a large-scale influx of the US dollar. Between large shipments of currency from the CPA, and the widespread use of the dollar by hundreds of thousands of troops, its supply quickly increased. And while many thought the result would be large-scale abandonment of the dinar, quite the opposite in fact occurred.
B.K. Marcus describes the result here, wherein the dinar actually increased in value and was in many cases the preferred currency by many in the country. One primary reason seems to be that the value of the dinar remained fairly constant, due to its supply being more stable. But other currencies existed, some fiat-based, others springing from the market.
In another account of the market in Iraq, Edward Gonzales described how in the western region of the country, sheep and bottled water acted as money. Their value floated based on the season and relative quantities of one or the other. While I never witnessed trades made with livestock or other commodities, I did see that not just dinars and dollars were used for exchange.
My second deployment was to the Babel province, south of Baghdad, and the Iranian rial was fairly common there. This was particularly true in the Shia towns and neighborhoods, as might have been expected. I was not familiar with the exchange ratios among the currencies, but all were used in trade. It was not uncommon for a man's wallet to contain two or more of a different states' moneys, even all three at times.
Defense Services
Perhaps the state's longest running and most institutionalized monopoly is that of defense. Advocates of limited government will quickly concede that most services ought to be provided in a free market. This provides incentives for firms to compete for market share, thus raising quality while driving down prices. One service that must be provided by the state, according to everyone from socialists to minarchists, is defense of persons and their property.
Even many who claim to believe steadfastly in free enterprise will concede that defense is the sole purview of government. By doing so they implicitly argue that the same economic laws that govern the provision of trash collection are rendered impotent when applied to defending property. This certainly does not hold water theoretically, nor is it true when applied to the market in Iraq.
In most of the country there were multiple layers of government police and military, and martial law had become the norm. Despite (or perhaps because of) the saturation of the market by government defense monopolists, private services were a valuable commodity. In Baghdad, circa 2005, there were 175,000 US troops engaging various guerilla forces. On top of that, the government's police never bothered with the pretense of scruples and corruption was standard fare. Private security quickly became a profitable enterprise.
It is often suggested by advocates of a free society that, theoretically, defense would be an individual endeavor. So long as individuals are free to own property, goes the argument, they'll be able to arm themselves for protection. This is largely how it played out in Iraq. Each adult male was permitted to own one AK-47 rifle, for personal defense, and gun ownership was nearly ubiquitous. (This allowance was expanded later to allow shotguns for hunting).
As an added layer of protection, many neighborhoods employed night watchmen. These were typically middle-aged men who were contracted by their neighbors to patrol the streets and defend against thieves. Their teenage sons would often assist, and we came to know the groups well. Some took employment in the markets, hired by the business owners to protect commercial interests. Others were posted near residential street corners, keeping a watchful eye on their clients' homes through the night.
These were trusted men in the community, who had found a way to earn a living in a ravaged economy by supplying a highly valued service to their fellow man. They did as good or better a job than we did at securing neighborhoods. Recognizing this, we equipped them with infrared lights, indicating they were friendlies, to help protect them from our helicopter gunships and other units passing through the area at night.
Conclusion
In each of these cases, where proponents of the state argue we must have active government involvement, individuals found voluntary, peaceful solutions to their problems. In spite of the failure by both the Iraqi and US governments to provide essential services, such as adequate electrical power and the defense of property, private solutions quickly sprang up among the violence and disorder. Money too was not something that required a government fiat to make trade possible. The market, unhindered by the state, provided a currency by which individuals could exchange with one another.
SOURCE
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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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Friday, April 06, 2012
Chag Pesach kasher ve sameach
OR: "Have a kosher and happy Passover holiday!" to my Jewish readers. An interesting dream below:
Pesach this year coincides with Easter Friday and I will make my usual effort to get along to my old Presbyterian church for the service. It's nice to be back where I began.
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Easter Service
Jackie Gingrich Cushman
Growing up in rural Georgia, Easter meant not only the resurrection of Jesus, but also a new Sunday dress, a hat, gloves and more chocolate than I could eat, at least at one time.
My clearest memory of Easter is not of all the candy that I ate, but of the beauty of the morning as we celebrated Easter during a sunrise service on top of a mountain. I'm not even sure where we were. We had gotten up early and driven a while. It was quite chilly, and I had a sweater wrapped around my shoulders.
The woods surrounded us, and the view was of the valley below. Azaleas were in bloom, and the trees were bright green. As the sun rose, fog came up from the ground, making the cross behind the altar barely visible. The area surrounding the cross was both hazy and bright: hazy from the fog, bright from the sun. The cross became clearer as the sun ascended in the sky and the fog burned off.
As the cross became clearer, the colors of the flowers and trees appeared brighter. The contrast of the cross, the symbol of Jesus' death, and the new growth of the trees and flowers were stark at the time, but now seem a perfect juxtaposition.
As a child, Easter seemed to be more about Jesus' death and his burial. Time was spent wondering during the service: What would a crown of thorns feel like, how would Jesus have been able to carry the cross, how could his mother have borne the loss of her son? Jesus' resurrection was, of course, mentioned, but not focused upon.
As an adult, I find myself spending more time thinking about Jesus' resurrection, what it meant to his disciples and what it means to me. Possibly as the balance of my life becomes shorter, and my eventual demise more evident, it is natural to focus on the life hereafter, rather than focus on death that is coming closer and closer.
More HERE
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Obama is a fake from beginning to end
He must have floated through law school on the basis of his skin color only
After all, someone who graduated from Harvard Law School, edited the Harvard Law Review, and taught constitutional law at the University of Chicago Law School must be familiar with Marbury v. Madison. As Wikipedia explains, it's an important case:
"Marbury v. Madison, 5 U.S. (1 Cranch) 137 (1803) is a landmark case in United States law and in the history of law worldwide. It formed the basis for the exercise of judicial review in the United States under Article III of the Constitution. It was also the first time in Western history a court invalidated a law by declaring it "unconstitutional." The landmark decision helped define the boundary between the constitutionally separate executive and judicial branches of the American form of government."
And yet President Obama yesterday implicitly claimed never to have heard of it, allowing him to say regarding Obamacare that it would be an "unprecedented, extraordinary" step for the Supreme Court to overturn legislation passed by a "strong majority of a democratically elected Congress." The precedents go back 209 years and, as Jonah Goldberg pointed out on "Special Report" last night, the Supreme Court has been overturning acts of Congress ever since, on average every 16 months.
So overturning Obamacare would be about as unprecedented as the sun rising in the east tomorrow morning. Actually the precedents go back even further, as Alexander Hamilton mentioned the power of judicial review in Federalist Paper 78, written in 1788. The last president to seriously challenge the court's power to overturn an act of Congress under the doctrine of judicial review was Andrew Jackson, who famously said after one decision he didn't like, "The court has made its decision; now let it enforce it."
The court has overturned laws based on the Commerce Clause as recently as 1995 (United States v. Lopez) and 2000 (United States v. Morrison). Both of those were relatively minor cases, although significant for putting limits on federal power under the Commerce Clause for the first time since the early New Deal.
But major pieces of legislation have also been overturned. The National Recovery Act of 1933 was the last piece of legislation passed during the "Hundred Days." Its purpose was, essentially, to cartelize the entire United States economy under the direction of the National Recovery Administration (the NRA, whose symbol was the famous blue eagle). Franklin Roosevelt called the legislation "the most important and far-reaching ever enacted by the American Congress." But that didn't stop the Supreme Court from overturning it in May 1935, by a vote of 9-0.
The National Recovery Act passed the House by a large majority and the Senate by 46-39. The "strong majority" mentioned by Obama in the passage of Obamacare did not exist. It passed the Senate 60-39 on Christmas Eve, when the Senate, briefly, had a filibuster-proof majority. But by the time a vote neared in the House, that filibuster-proof majority had vanished with the election of Scott Brown in Massachusetts. So the House had to pass the Senate bill unchanged in order to get it to the President's desk. Only much arm-twisting and deal-making allowed the bill to pass the House with a majority of only seven votes, 219-212. It garnered not a single Republican vote in either house, the first time so important a piece of legislation was passed on a totally partisan basis.
SOURCE
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Is America slowly sinking into Fascism?
I was recently looking into the divisive issue of U.S. Marine Sgt. Gary Stein, whose position has come under threat due to his criticisms of Barack Obama and his founding of the `Armed Forces Tea Party Facebook Page'. What I discovered was a large number of Americans in support of Stein's right to speak as a citizen (even under Marine regulations) against the unconstitutional actions of any president or presidential candidate. I also discovered a considerable number who wanted to see the soldier dishonorably discharged, or even set upon a noose as punishment.
Surely, we can debate over the details of Marine regulations until our ears bleed, and I could point out several facts that the mainstream media did not cover in their hit pieces on Stein (like the fact that he went to his superiors and asked them to advise him in the handling of his political position long before the present charges against him were ever formulated, and the fact that he followed many of their suggestions.), but ultimately, the regulations of the Marines or the Federal Government are irrelevant. Such laws are transitory, and are usually written so broadly that the authorities of the day can execute them however they wish to fit their needs at the moment. The real question here is one of principle, moral compass, and Constitutionality (a document which is a reflection of eternal natural law). We have to set aside the pointless legalese of defense standards in the case of Sgt. Stein and ask ourselves an important question; do U.S. troops have a right to free speech?
If you believe so, then their rights are not limited or exclusive. They are free to say whatever any other American has a right to say. If you believe they do not, then you have relegated the troops to the position of second class citizens, or even property of the state. There is NO in-between. Discipline and military coherence be damned. Either these men and women have First Amendment protections and are full citizens or they are mechanisms of the government whose civil liberties have been erased.
Even though I understand the psychology behind it, I am still shaken with raw electrical astonishment when confronted by those who support the latter notion that American soldiers are indeed property of the state, that their actions must be dictated by the president and not the Constitution, and that this is required for the military to function.
Very few of these absurd multitudes ever ask what "function" such a military, populated by ethical robots who are blindly subservient to the dictates of a single man, would actually serve?
What good is an unprincipled military? An unprincipled government? An unprincipled society? What reason is there for these constructs to exist? The Nuremberg Trials solidified the reality that soldiers will be held accountable for following criminal orders, and still, there are some who claim that our troops must adopt a shoot first pay later methodology.
I bring up the circumstances of Sgt. Stein to illustrate the situation our nation is currently facing; we are on the threshold of total despotism, where the naysayers who shrugged off the threat of rogue government yesterday suddenly embrace it and support it today. When Stewart Rhodes first formed the Oath Keepers organization, the same talking point was consistently used in an attempt to derail it; "The orders you would refuse to obey could never occur in this country."
And yet, many of the warnings of Oath Keepers have come to pass, including the unlawful disarming of peaceful U.S. citizens during the disaster in New Orleans, the institution of government directed assassination programs of U.S. citizens under Bush and Obama, the passing of NDAA legislation which includes provisions for indefinite detainment of Americans without trial, warrantless wiretapping, surveillance, and even home invasion by authorities is becoming common, and the Obama Administration has put into place several executive orders (including the The National Defense Resources Preparedness EO) which pave the way for Martial Law to be declared.
The cold hard reality is, the Oath Keepers were right, and Sgt. Stein is right.
And, now that this is becoming undeniable, the opponents of their tenets are switching gears to fight for the implementation of unconstitutional laws which they used to deny were even possible. Can this situation be any more insane? Oh yes.
There are no limits to the surrealist hell that can be unleashed when dealing with what I like to call the "Slave Mentality". The slave mentality takes many shapes. It is pervasive in times of social distress, and, it can be infectious. The psychologist Carl Jung wrote in his book `The Undiscovered Self' that the cruel sociopathy seen in the populations of Nazi Germany or Stalinist Russia is actually latent in many of us. All it needs is the right set of sociopolitical circumstances and a weak enough will, and the shadows in the hearts of lesser men are given license to come out and play. This is just as true in America, where people now operated on assumptions that the state is an absolute provider in the event of national calamity.
What I have seen in a number of the reactions to the honest activism of Sgt. Gary Stein is a knee-jerk bias that reeks of the slave mentality, but it offers us a window in gauging the leanings of the general public. Now that the once theoretical dangers of federal fascism are breaking the surface of the water and circling the American sinking ship, the great test is to watch closely where the masses place their priorities. Will they take the path of the individual, admit to the laboratory mutation that our government has become, and try to make things right again? Or, will they take the path of the slave, forget their past follies and empty arguments, and jump on the totalitarian bandwagon?
SOURCE
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An uncivil income tax system
by Jeff Jacoby
EACH YEAR in the United States, an estimated 6.1 billion hours are spent complying with the federal tax code. I'm pretty sure at least half of those hours are spent by me.
With less than two weeks remaining before this year's tax returns are due, I've barely made a dent in my stack of forms, receipts, and instructions. Each year the prospect of doing my taxes looms more daunting and dismal than the year before. Each year I wonder where I'll find the time, never mind the patience, to get it done. Each year's tax ordeal seems to require more mental energy, more double-checking of math, more scouring of check registers and credit-card statements and brokerage records. And yet when I finally hit that "Send" button, I'm less certain than ever that I haven't inadvertently screwed something up. And if that's true for someone like me, whose financial arrangements are not especially abstruse, how much more miserable tax season must be for taxpayers whose circumstances are more elaborate.
Some people claim they file their tax returns cheerfully. They approvingly quote Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.'s dictum that "taxes are what we pay for civilized society." I quote instead that eminent commentator Dave Barry: "It's income-tax time again, Americans: time to gather up those receipts, get out those tax forms, sharpen up that pencil and stab yourself in the aorta."
Not surprisingly, the Internal Revenue Service embraces Holmes's words. They are chiseled over the entrance to the IRS headquarters in Washington, DC. Yet I doubt whether Holmes, who retired from the Supreme Court in 1932, would think there was anything civilized about what the federal tax system has turned into, or the burdens, confusions, and complexity it imposes on honest taxpayers.
When Holmes first expressed that sentiment about taxes and civilization in a 1904 speech, the federal income tax didn't even exist. That had changed by 1927, when Holmes's phrase appears in one of his dissenting opinions. But even then, all of federal tax law -- not just the Sixteenth Amendment and Revenue Act of 1913, but the entire corpus of related regulations, rulings, and forms -- took up fewer than 500 pages. Today, the Standard Federal Tax Reporter runs to 73,608 pages in 25 volumes, and consumes nine feet of shelf space.
Is it any wonder, then, that the paperwork, record-keeping, calculations, form-preparation, and filing procedures required to pay federal taxes have become one of the great soul-crushing time sinks in American life? Or that the National Taxpayer Advocate (the independent ombudsman within the IRS) declared flatly last year that "the most serious problem facing taxpayers - and the IRS - is the complexity of the Internal Revenue Code"? Or that the Tax Foundation concluded in 2005 that income-tax compliance costs amounted to a stunning $265.1 billion -- in effect, "a 22-cent . surcharge for every dollar the income tax system collects"?
By now the great majority of individual tax filers has decided that putting together their tax returns without paying for help isn't feasible. According to a 2011 MarketTools study, only 12 percent of US taxpayers still complete their federal income taxes without hiring an accountant, visiting a tax-preparation firm such as H&R Block, or buying tax-preparation software. I gave up trying to prepare my returns by hand years ago; like tens of millions of other Americans, I now put my fate in the hands of TurboTax.
All of which is terrific for the tax-preparation industry, and perhaps April is anything but the cruelest month for those who make their living as a CPA or own stock in Intuit (which makes TurboTax). For the nation as a whole, however, the labyrinthine tortures of our tax system have serious social consequences.
Our tax code's lack of clarity -- and the flood of special-interest giveaways and preferences that make it so cumbersome -- has turned innumerable taxpayers into cynics. Americans conclude that the whole setup is rigged, and that only a sucker doesn't bend the rules in order to pay less or finagle a bigger refund. How many people who wouldn't think of ripping off a local charity or business don't hesitate to cheat on their taxes? In such an environment, it isn't only compliance rates that suffer. Some of the civic virtue so important to a healthy society is lost as well. Jimmy Carter was right in 1976 when he called the US income tax "a disgrace to the human race." Thirty-six years later, it's more disgraceful -- and maddening -- than ever.
SOURCE
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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)
****************************
OR: "Have a kosher and happy Passover holiday!" to my Jewish readers. An interesting dream below:
Pesach this year coincides with Easter Friday and I will make my usual effort to get along to my old Presbyterian church for the service. It's nice to be back where I began.
************************
Easter Service
Jackie Gingrich Cushman
Growing up in rural Georgia, Easter meant not only the resurrection of Jesus, but also a new Sunday dress, a hat, gloves and more chocolate than I could eat, at least at one time.
My clearest memory of Easter is not of all the candy that I ate, but of the beauty of the morning as we celebrated Easter during a sunrise service on top of a mountain. I'm not even sure where we were. We had gotten up early and driven a while. It was quite chilly, and I had a sweater wrapped around my shoulders.
The woods surrounded us, and the view was of the valley below. Azaleas were in bloom, and the trees were bright green. As the sun rose, fog came up from the ground, making the cross behind the altar barely visible. The area surrounding the cross was both hazy and bright: hazy from the fog, bright from the sun. The cross became clearer as the sun ascended in the sky and the fog burned off.
As the cross became clearer, the colors of the flowers and trees appeared brighter. The contrast of the cross, the symbol of Jesus' death, and the new growth of the trees and flowers were stark at the time, but now seem a perfect juxtaposition.
As a child, Easter seemed to be more about Jesus' death and his burial. Time was spent wondering during the service: What would a crown of thorns feel like, how would Jesus have been able to carry the cross, how could his mother have borne the loss of her son? Jesus' resurrection was, of course, mentioned, but not focused upon.
As an adult, I find myself spending more time thinking about Jesus' resurrection, what it meant to his disciples and what it means to me. Possibly as the balance of my life becomes shorter, and my eventual demise more evident, it is natural to focus on the life hereafter, rather than focus on death that is coming closer and closer.
More HERE
************************
Obama is a fake from beginning to end
He must have floated through law school on the basis of his skin color only
After all, someone who graduated from Harvard Law School, edited the Harvard Law Review, and taught constitutional law at the University of Chicago Law School must be familiar with Marbury v. Madison. As Wikipedia explains, it's an important case:
"Marbury v. Madison, 5 U.S. (1 Cranch) 137 (1803) is a landmark case in United States law and in the history of law worldwide. It formed the basis for the exercise of judicial review in the United States under Article III of the Constitution. It was also the first time in Western history a court invalidated a law by declaring it "unconstitutional." The landmark decision helped define the boundary between the constitutionally separate executive and judicial branches of the American form of government."
And yet President Obama yesterday implicitly claimed never to have heard of it, allowing him to say regarding Obamacare that it would be an "unprecedented, extraordinary" step for the Supreme Court to overturn legislation passed by a "strong majority of a democratically elected Congress." The precedents go back 209 years and, as Jonah Goldberg pointed out on "Special Report" last night, the Supreme Court has been overturning acts of Congress ever since, on average every 16 months.
So overturning Obamacare would be about as unprecedented as the sun rising in the east tomorrow morning. Actually the precedents go back even further, as Alexander Hamilton mentioned the power of judicial review in Federalist Paper 78, written in 1788. The last president to seriously challenge the court's power to overturn an act of Congress under the doctrine of judicial review was Andrew Jackson, who famously said after one decision he didn't like, "The court has made its decision; now let it enforce it."
The court has overturned laws based on the Commerce Clause as recently as 1995 (United States v. Lopez) and 2000 (United States v. Morrison). Both of those were relatively minor cases, although significant for putting limits on federal power under the Commerce Clause for the first time since the early New Deal.
But major pieces of legislation have also been overturned. The National Recovery Act of 1933 was the last piece of legislation passed during the "Hundred Days." Its purpose was, essentially, to cartelize the entire United States economy under the direction of the National Recovery Administration (the NRA, whose symbol was the famous blue eagle). Franklin Roosevelt called the legislation "the most important and far-reaching ever enacted by the American Congress." But that didn't stop the Supreme Court from overturning it in May 1935, by a vote of 9-0.
The National Recovery Act passed the House by a large majority and the Senate by 46-39. The "strong majority" mentioned by Obama in the passage of Obamacare did not exist. It passed the Senate 60-39 on Christmas Eve, when the Senate, briefly, had a filibuster-proof majority. But by the time a vote neared in the House, that filibuster-proof majority had vanished with the election of Scott Brown in Massachusetts. So the House had to pass the Senate bill unchanged in order to get it to the President's desk. Only much arm-twisting and deal-making allowed the bill to pass the House with a majority of only seven votes, 219-212. It garnered not a single Republican vote in either house, the first time so important a piece of legislation was passed on a totally partisan basis.
SOURCE
*************************
Is America slowly sinking into Fascism?
I was recently looking into the divisive issue of U.S. Marine Sgt. Gary Stein, whose position has come under threat due to his criticisms of Barack Obama and his founding of the `Armed Forces Tea Party Facebook Page'. What I discovered was a large number of Americans in support of Stein's right to speak as a citizen (even under Marine regulations) against the unconstitutional actions of any president or presidential candidate. I also discovered a considerable number who wanted to see the soldier dishonorably discharged, or even set upon a noose as punishment.
Surely, we can debate over the details of Marine regulations until our ears bleed, and I could point out several facts that the mainstream media did not cover in their hit pieces on Stein (like the fact that he went to his superiors and asked them to advise him in the handling of his political position long before the present charges against him were ever formulated, and the fact that he followed many of their suggestions.), but ultimately, the regulations of the Marines or the Federal Government are irrelevant. Such laws are transitory, and are usually written so broadly that the authorities of the day can execute them however they wish to fit their needs at the moment. The real question here is one of principle, moral compass, and Constitutionality (a document which is a reflection of eternal natural law). We have to set aside the pointless legalese of defense standards in the case of Sgt. Stein and ask ourselves an important question; do U.S. troops have a right to free speech?
If you believe so, then their rights are not limited or exclusive. They are free to say whatever any other American has a right to say. If you believe they do not, then you have relegated the troops to the position of second class citizens, or even property of the state. There is NO in-between. Discipline and military coherence be damned. Either these men and women have First Amendment protections and are full citizens or they are mechanisms of the government whose civil liberties have been erased.
Even though I understand the psychology behind it, I am still shaken with raw electrical astonishment when confronted by those who support the latter notion that American soldiers are indeed property of the state, that their actions must be dictated by the president and not the Constitution, and that this is required for the military to function.
Very few of these absurd multitudes ever ask what "function" such a military, populated by ethical robots who are blindly subservient to the dictates of a single man, would actually serve?
What good is an unprincipled military? An unprincipled government? An unprincipled society? What reason is there for these constructs to exist? The Nuremberg Trials solidified the reality that soldiers will be held accountable for following criminal orders, and still, there are some who claim that our troops must adopt a shoot first pay later methodology.
I bring up the circumstances of Sgt. Stein to illustrate the situation our nation is currently facing; we are on the threshold of total despotism, where the naysayers who shrugged off the threat of rogue government yesterday suddenly embrace it and support it today. When Stewart Rhodes first formed the Oath Keepers organization, the same talking point was consistently used in an attempt to derail it; "The orders you would refuse to obey could never occur in this country."
And yet, many of the warnings of Oath Keepers have come to pass, including the unlawful disarming of peaceful U.S. citizens during the disaster in New Orleans, the institution of government directed assassination programs of U.S. citizens under Bush and Obama, the passing of NDAA legislation which includes provisions for indefinite detainment of Americans without trial, warrantless wiretapping, surveillance, and even home invasion by authorities is becoming common, and the Obama Administration has put into place several executive orders (including the The National Defense Resources Preparedness EO) which pave the way for Martial Law to be declared.
The cold hard reality is, the Oath Keepers were right, and Sgt. Stein is right.
And, now that this is becoming undeniable, the opponents of their tenets are switching gears to fight for the implementation of unconstitutional laws which they used to deny were even possible. Can this situation be any more insane? Oh yes.
There are no limits to the surrealist hell that can be unleashed when dealing with what I like to call the "Slave Mentality". The slave mentality takes many shapes. It is pervasive in times of social distress, and, it can be infectious. The psychologist Carl Jung wrote in his book `The Undiscovered Self' that the cruel sociopathy seen in the populations of Nazi Germany or Stalinist Russia is actually latent in many of us. All it needs is the right set of sociopolitical circumstances and a weak enough will, and the shadows in the hearts of lesser men are given license to come out and play. This is just as true in America, where people now operated on assumptions that the state is an absolute provider in the event of national calamity.
What I have seen in a number of the reactions to the honest activism of Sgt. Gary Stein is a knee-jerk bias that reeks of the slave mentality, but it offers us a window in gauging the leanings of the general public. Now that the once theoretical dangers of federal fascism are breaking the surface of the water and circling the American sinking ship, the great test is to watch closely where the masses place their priorities. Will they take the path of the individual, admit to the laboratory mutation that our government has become, and try to make things right again? Or, will they take the path of the slave, forget their past follies and empty arguments, and jump on the totalitarian bandwagon?
SOURCE
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An uncivil income tax system
by Jeff Jacoby
EACH YEAR in the United States, an estimated 6.1 billion hours are spent complying with the federal tax code. I'm pretty sure at least half of those hours are spent by me.
With less than two weeks remaining before this year's tax returns are due, I've barely made a dent in my stack of forms, receipts, and instructions. Each year the prospect of doing my taxes looms more daunting and dismal than the year before. Each year I wonder where I'll find the time, never mind the patience, to get it done. Each year's tax ordeal seems to require more mental energy, more double-checking of math, more scouring of check registers and credit-card statements and brokerage records. And yet when I finally hit that "Send" button, I'm less certain than ever that I haven't inadvertently screwed something up. And if that's true for someone like me, whose financial arrangements are not especially abstruse, how much more miserable tax season must be for taxpayers whose circumstances are more elaborate.
Some people claim they file their tax returns cheerfully. They approvingly quote Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.'s dictum that "taxes are what we pay for civilized society." I quote instead that eminent commentator Dave Barry: "It's income-tax time again, Americans: time to gather up those receipts, get out those tax forms, sharpen up that pencil and stab yourself in the aorta."
Not surprisingly, the Internal Revenue Service embraces Holmes's words. They are chiseled over the entrance to the IRS headquarters in Washington, DC. Yet I doubt whether Holmes, who retired from the Supreme Court in 1932, would think there was anything civilized about what the federal tax system has turned into, or the burdens, confusions, and complexity it imposes on honest taxpayers.
When Holmes first expressed that sentiment about taxes and civilization in a 1904 speech, the federal income tax didn't even exist. That had changed by 1927, when Holmes's phrase appears in one of his dissenting opinions. But even then, all of federal tax law -- not just the Sixteenth Amendment and Revenue Act of 1913, but the entire corpus of related regulations, rulings, and forms -- took up fewer than 500 pages. Today, the Standard Federal Tax Reporter runs to 73,608 pages in 25 volumes, and consumes nine feet of shelf space.
Is it any wonder, then, that the paperwork, record-keeping, calculations, form-preparation, and filing procedures required to pay federal taxes have become one of the great soul-crushing time sinks in American life? Or that the National Taxpayer Advocate (the independent ombudsman within the IRS) declared flatly last year that "the most serious problem facing taxpayers - and the IRS - is the complexity of the Internal Revenue Code"? Or that the Tax Foundation concluded in 2005 that income-tax compliance costs amounted to a stunning $265.1 billion -- in effect, "a 22-cent . surcharge for every dollar the income tax system collects"?
By now the great majority of individual tax filers has decided that putting together their tax returns without paying for help isn't feasible. According to a 2011 MarketTools study, only 12 percent of US taxpayers still complete their federal income taxes without hiring an accountant, visiting a tax-preparation firm such as H&R Block, or buying tax-preparation software. I gave up trying to prepare my returns by hand years ago; like tens of millions of other Americans, I now put my fate in the hands of TurboTax.
All of which is terrific for the tax-preparation industry, and perhaps April is anything but the cruelest month for those who make their living as a CPA or own stock in Intuit (which makes TurboTax). For the nation as a whole, however, the labyrinthine tortures of our tax system have serious social consequences.
Our tax code's lack of clarity -- and the flood of special-interest giveaways and preferences that make it so cumbersome -- has turned innumerable taxpayers into cynics. Americans conclude that the whole setup is rigged, and that only a sucker doesn't bend the rules in order to pay less or finagle a bigger refund. How many people who wouldn't think of ripping off a local charity or business don't hesitate to cheat on their taxes? In such an environment, it isn't only compliance rates that suffer. Some of the civic virtue so important to a healthy society is lost as well. Jimmy Carter was right in 1976 when he called the US income tax "a disgrace to the human race." Thirty-six years later, it's more disgraceful -- and maddening -- than ever.
SOURCE
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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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Thursday, April 05, 2012
What Left-Wing Law Professors Really Think About You, and the Role of Lawyers
Hans Bader
You’re just a lab rat to be socially re-engineered by activist judges and lawyers — who think they know how to run your life better than you do — or a chump to be fleeced for lawyers’ enrichment. That’s the message some law professors apparently instill in students at Howard University: “At Howard, they tell us as soon as we get there, ‘If you’re going to be a lawyer, you’re either a social engineer or a parasite on society,’” a student at Howard declared. “That’s how I think about life, is to be a social engineer.” (Although Howard University is nominally “private” and thus not accountable to taxpayers, it is directly “funded by the U.S. Government, which gives approximately $235 million annually” to it in special appropriations.)
Promoting social engineering by lawyers (through “institutional-reform” lawsuits brought by left-wing lawyers and law-school clinics) is a bad idea. Left-wing law professors are a bossy lot: some want to ban conservative or politically-incorrect speech as “hostile-environment harassment,” control what you eat and drink, control your sex life (they view heterosexual sex as patriarchal and thus “consensual rape”), raise your taxes through state-court decrees ordering increased funding of government programs, and take away your property (and your children, if you home-school them). They also often lack common sense, or a grasp of certain basic realities of life. One of my professors at Harvard Law School was notorious among his colleagues for behaving as if on drugs. Another of my professors, the radical Duncan Kennedy, who was so prominent and respected among law professors that he was called the “Pope” of the “Critical Legal Studies” movement, advocated rotating the law professors and the janitors into each others’ jobs. (The janitors liked the idea of being paid like law professors, but had no interest in teaching law, and thought Kennedy’s idea was flaky. Kennedy himself was married to a wealthy heiress, and did not need a law professor’s handsome salary to live on. America would be better off being run by Harvard Law School’s modest, hard-working janitors than by its mostly left-wing law professors.)
As I noted earlier, much of what law schools teach their students is useless drivel, and law schools routinely exaggerate their students’ job prospects. Thus, there is no reason to require people to attend law school before sitting for the bar exam. As law professor Paul Campos notes, legal education is often a rip-off, since the typical law professor has virtually no real-world experience practicing law, and “knows nothing about being a lawyer.” But since most states require people to attend law school before sitting for the bar exam, law schools have been able to increase tuition by nearly 1,000 percent in real terms.
A New York Times article last year described how law-school educations for newly-hired corporate lawyers were so worthless that they didn’t know the basics, such as what a merger is, and how to draft the simplest legal forms needed for a merger, even though they’d spent up to $150,000 for a legal “education” at law school.
As I noted earlier in the Times,
Law schools routinely sacrifice common sense to left-wing ideology: a classic example is Tulane’s decision to give a convicted murderer a scholarship to attend its law school, even though he most likely could never be admitted to the Bar given his criminal record.
Many state-funded law-school clinics effectively sue state taxpayers, both by suing businesses in their home state (thus killing jobs), and by suing their state governments to demand increases in government spending on various programs — something discussed at length in Walter Olson’s recent book Schools for Misrule.
Earlier generations of lawyers were more leery about the cost to society of lawsuits. They also had a more favorable view of lawyers’ role in defending property rights, and in helping people reach mutually-agreeable settlements. They rejected the idea that lawyers should be parasites who profit from legal strife. Abraham Lincoln was a prominent lawyer for the Illinois Central Railroad. He did not view lawsuits as the way to fix the world, much less as a form of social engineering. As he once advised,
SOURCE
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Did Barack Obama Campaign Threaten Life of Chelsea Clinton to Keep Parents Silent on Obama’s Ineligibility?
I am not sure what to make of the story below. I think it needs corroboration. On the other hand, I wouldn't put anything past Obama and his minions. Leftists constantly tell us that "There's no such thing as right and wrong" so it should not surprise us if they act in accordance with that belief -- JR
Most people in the US, especially Democrats, believe that the Obama Birther Movement was started by Republicans and or the Tea Party. They believe it is a smear campaign aimed to tarnish the image of their hero of change. But they may be shocked to learn that the Birther Movement was actually started by former President Bill Clinton and Hillary back in 2008.
Bettina Viviano was a vice president with Amblin Enterntainment, Steven Spielberg’s company, before launching her own film production company in 1990. In 2008, Viviano was asked to produce a documentary about voter fraud within the Democratic Party. At the time, she says she was not a Democrat or a Republican and in fact had never voted in an election. She went into the project with the sole purpose of producing the best and most accurate documentary possible.
During the documentary process, Viviano says that she quickly became aware of just how dangerous and insidious the Obama campaign was. A number of the Democrats she interviewed refused to appear on camera and told her that their lives and property had been threatened by people working with the Obama campaign.
She also heard former President Bill Clinton say that Obama was not eligible to be president because of his lack of birth records. In fact, she said it was common knowledge around many top Democrats. Bill Clinton has often said that he would go public with the information when the time was right.
Before that could happen, his close friend and head of the Arkansas Democratic Party, Bill Gwatney was murdered in his office and then someone told Bill that he was next if he said anything about Obama’s eligibility. In the video below, she said that Clinton was not intimidated until someone associated with the Obama campaign told him that his daughter Chelsea would be next if he opened his mouth. From that point on, the Clinton’s remained silent about Obama’s birth certificate or lack thereof.
This is a powerful video from a lady that has nothing to gain and probably everything to lose by coming forward with her information. It could well ruin her career in Hollywood as so many of the film industry are flaming liberals. It could also cost her her life.
I took note of how she described the Obama campaign’s reign of terror and intimidation and how well coordinated it was. I thought to myself that if they were bold enough to threaten the life of the Clinton’s daughter then have they made similar threats to all of the leading Republicans in both the House and Senate? Is this why Congress has remained so silent ever since Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s March 1st news conference where he provided the American people with the evidence that Obama’s birth certificate and Selective Service Cards are forgeries?
When you see how blatantly Obama has defied the US Constitution and federal law without any apology or excuses, it’s not hard to believe that he, like every other dictator in history, obtained his position by intimidation, threats and outright violence. Knowing he is capable of this has to make every single American extremely fearful if Obama gets re-elected.
And if the voter fraud will be as prevalent in November as it was in 2008, it seems a sure thing that he will be re-elected. Obama has had the DOJ strike down every voter ID law and any other measure taken, to reduce the chance of voter fraud. They have set the stage for an old fashioned Chicago style election with padded and illegal votes. Wait a minute, he is a Chicago politician, so guess he’s just following local history at a national level.
SOURCE
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Americans Want More Control Over Their Own Health Care
ObamaCare's popular provisions lose their appeal once Americans are confronted with the consequences
With the three-day ObamaCare circus at the Supreme Court behind us, let’s fast-forward to June. Suppose that five justices find their constitutional bearings and do what a majority of Americans want them to do: Scrap the individual mandate, the key provision without which the law will collapse. What then?
Will that mean that our current system can just lumber along as is? No. America’s health care system is wasteful, inefficient and way too expensive: The U.S. retail price for an MRI, excluding professional fees, exceeds $4,000—about 20 times more than in Japan and France. This makes it extremely hard for Americans without coverage to spring for their own care, creating a system of medical haves and have-nots. It is not surprising, therefore, that a Kaiser Family Foundation tracking poll earlier this month found that six out of 10 Americans want lawmakers to keep searching for workable reforms even if the Supreme Court eventually kills the president’s reform law.
But any reform has to be based on the correct diagnosis of the problem. The administration's main argument for ObamaCare's mandate—that unless every freeloader is forced to buy coverage, we won’t be able to control spiraling health care costs—is a total red herring. The cost of uncompensated emergency care in America adds up to only about $40.7 billion annually, less than 3 percent of the country’s total health care spending. Arguably, even if hospitals were not legally required to treat uninsured patients, they would provide that amount of care pro bono—just as they do in India, a far poorer country. Many private, for-profit hospitals I queried during a previous visit reported treating up to 10 percent of their patients for free. American law firms, by comparison, aim to offer 3 to 5 percent of their billable hours in pro bono services.
But the question remains: What kind of reforms do Americans want? The Obama administration completely misread the public mood when it based its decision to craft a 2,700-page, Rube Goldberg-style makeover of literally one-sixth of our economy on polls suggesting that Americans would be willing to pay higher taxes for universal coverage. Worse, a joint Reason-Rupe poll released last week found that the misnamed Affordable Care Act—a.k.a. ObamaCare—imposed trade-offs that Americans were simply unwilling to accept. The act’s supporters insist that even though a majority of Americans view the overall law unfavorably, many of its specific provisions are quite popular. But the problem is that most polls pose questions in a vacuum, without actually confronting Americans with the consequences of their choices. The Reason-Rupe poll was among the few to do so systematically, and it found that although Americans do want equity and coverage for all, they want control, choice and quality for themselves even more.
Like other polls, it found that Americans don’t want the government forcing them to buy coverage, although they were more amenable to employers being forced to provide coverage to employees, even if that means job losses and pay cuts. Indeed, 56 percent of respondents said they were fine with an employer mandate, compared to the 39 percent who said they were not.
Americans like the idea of giving everyone the same access to health care, regardless of medical status—except if it means sacrificing affordability or quality. Fifty-two percent approved of the community rating provision in the law, which would ban insurance companies from charging higher premiums based on medical history, compared to 39 percent who opposed it. But this support drops precipitously if the provision’s side effects include longer wait times for doctors (41 percent) or higher premiums (38 percent) or higher taxes (37 percent) or lower-quality care (15 percent).
But what was truly revealing was how eager Americans are to control their own health care dollars. Forty-eight percent said they’d prefer it if their employers gave them the money to purchase their own coverage, compared to 41 percent who would not. Even more remarkably, 65 percent of Americans want Medicare payouts in the form of a credit for use toward a private health plan, compared to 24 percent who don’t. This is good news for Rep. Paul Ryan’s “premium support” proposal for Medicare reform.
All of this makes perfect sense in light of another finding. When asked to rate how much they trust various entities in “addressing their health care needs,” 61 percent said they have a “great deal of trust” in themselves—but only 15 percent said that of their employers, and 5 percent of the government.
What’s more, Americans want to make their own coverage decisions. Almost 70 percent said they want the same ability to shop around for “a less expensive or better [health] insurance policy” as they have for their auto insurance.
So what are the implications of all this for health care reform? Americans are not dogmatically opposed to government intervention in health care markets. But their intuitions are more in line with advocates of consumer-based medicine who believe that the best way to control spiraling costs—the key to improving access—is to give patients more control over their medical dollars and inject a modicum of price sensitivity into our health care system.
If the Supreme Court relegates ObamaCare to the dustbin of history, Congress ought to bear that in mind when it crafts a revised bill. The last thing the country needs is another failed reform effort.
SOURCE
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ELSEWHERE
"Married" homosexuals sue for immigration rights: "Immigration advocates have filed a lawsuit on behalf of several married gay couples, alleging a federal law violates their constitutional rights by preventing them from sponsoring their spouses for green cards. The complaint, which challenges the federal Defense of Marriage Act, was filed in federal court in Brooklyn by Immigration Equality, an advocacy group."
WA: Court says employer can’t fire mentally ill worker: "In his time at Cottonwood Financial, Sean Reilly had overcome much. He had risen the company ranks from assistant to head store manager, and even won performance awards in spite of his bipolar disorder. Yet he claims that when he requested leave in 2007 to give him time to adjust to a new medication, he was fired. Reilly filed suit, alleging employment discrimination under federal disability law, and on Thursday, the District Court for Eastern Washington ordered the financial services company to pay Reilly a total of $56,500 in damages."
Why Does Department Of Homeland Security Need 450 MILLION Hollow Point Bullets?: "Somebody out there has decided that the Department of Homeland Security needs a whole lot of ammunition. Recently it was announced that ATK was awarded a contract to provide up to 450 MILLION hollow point bullets to the Department of Homeland Security over the next five years. Is it just me, or does that sound incredibly excessive? What in the world is the DHS going to do with 450 million rounds? What possible event would ever require that much ammunition? If the United States were ever invaded, it would be the job of the U.S. military to defend the country, so that can't be it. So what are all of those bullets for? Who does the Department of Homeland Security plan to be shooting at?"
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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)
****************************
Hans Bader
You’re just a lab rat to be socially re-engineered by activist judges and lawyers — who think they know how to run your life better than you do — or a chump to be fleeced for lawyers’ enrichment. That’s the message some law professors apparently instill in students at Howard University: “At Howard, they tell us as soon as we get there, ‘If you’re going to be a lawyer, you’re either a social engineer or a parasite on society,’” a student at Howard declared. “That’s how I think about life, is to be a social engineer.” (Although Howard University is nominally “private” and thus not accountable to taxpayers, it is directly “funded by the U.S. Government, which gives approximately $235 million annually” to it in special appropriations.)
Promoting social engineering by lawyers (through “institutional-reform” lawsuits brought by left-wing lawyers and law-school clinics) is a bad idea. Left-wing law professors are a bossy lot: some want to ban conservative or politically-incorrect speech as “hostile-environment harassment,” control what you eat and drink, control your sex life (they view heterosexual sex as patriarchal and thus “consensual rape”), raise your taxes through state-court decrees ordering increased funding of government programs, and take away your property (and your children, if you home-school them). They also often lack common sense, or a grasp of certain basic realities of life. One of my professors at Harvard Law School was notorious among his colleagues for behaving as if on drugs. Another of my professors, the radical Duncan Kennedy, who was so prominent and respected among law professors that he was called the “Pope” of the “Critical Legal Studies” movement, advocated rotating the law professors and the janitors into each others’ jobs. (The janitors liked the idea of being paid like law professors, but had no interest in teaching law, and thought Kennedy’s idea was flaky. Kennedy himself was married to a wealthy heiress, and did not need a law professor’s handsome salary to live on. America would be better off being run by Harvard Law School’s modest, hard-working janitors than by its mostly left-wing law professors.)
As I noted earlier, much of what law schools teach their students is useless drivel, and law schools routinely exaggerate their students’ job prospects. Thus, there is no reason to require people to attend law school before sitting for the bar exam. As law professor Paul Campos notes, legal education is often a rip-off, since the typical law professor has virtually no real-world experience practicing law, and “knows nothing about being a lawyer.” But since most states require people to attend law school before sitting for the bar exam, law schools have been able to increase tuition by nearly 1,000 percent in real terms.
A New York Times article last year described how law-school educations for newly-hired corporate lawyers were so worthless that they didn’t know the basics, such as what a merger is, and how to draft the simplest legal forms needed for a merger, even though they’d spent up to $150,000 for a legal “education” at law school.
As I noted earlier in the Times,
I learned about trendy ideological fads and feminist and Marxist legal theory while at Harvard Law School. But I did not learn many basic legal principles, such as in contract law and real estate law, until I took a commercial bar-exam preparation course after law school. Getting rid of the requirement that students attend law school before taking the bar exam would save many students a fortune in student loan debt. It would also force law schools to improve their courses to attract students who now have no choice but to attend.
Law schools routinely sacrifice common sense to left-wing ideology: a classic example is Tulane’s decision to give a convicted murderer a scholarship to attend its law school, even though he most likely could never be admitted to the Bar given his criminal record.
Many state-funded law-school clinics effectively sue state taxpayers, both by suing businesses in their home state (thus killing jobs), and by suing their state governments to demand increases in government spending on various programs — something discussed at length in Walter Olson’s recent book Schools for Misrule.
Earlier generations of lawyers were more leery about the cost to society of lawsuits. They also had a more favorable view of lawyers’ role in defending property rights, and in helping people reach mutually-agreeable settlements. They rejected the idea that lawyers should be parasites who profit from legal strife. Abraham Lincoln was a prominent lawyer for the Illinois Central Railroad. He did not view lawsuits as the way to fix the world, much less as a form of social engineering. As he once advised,
Discourage litigation. Persuade your neighbors to compromise whenever you can. Point out to them how the nominal winner is often a real loser — in fees, expenses, and waste of time. As a peacemaker the lawyer has a superior opportunity of being a good man. There will still be business enough.
Never stir up litigation. A worse man can scarcely be found than one who does this. . .A moral tone ought to be infused into the profession which should drive such men out of it.
SOURCE
**************************
Did Barack Obama Campaign Threaten Life of Chelsea Clinton to Keep Parents Silent on Obama’s Ineligibility?
I am not sure what to make of the story below. I think it needs corroboration. On the other hand, I wouldn't put anything past Obama and his minions. Leftists constantly tell us that "There's no such thing as right and wrong" so it should not surprise us if they act in accordance with that belief -- JR
Most people in the US, especially Democrats, believe that the Obama Birther Movement was started by Republicans and or the Tea Party. They believe it is a smear campaign aimed to tarnish the image of their hero of change. But they may be shocked to learn that the Birther Movement was actually started by former President Bill Clinton and Hillary back in 2008.
Bettina Viviano was a vice president with Amblin Enterntainment, Steven Spielberg’s company, before launching her own film production company in 1990. In 2008, Viviano was asked to produce a documentary about voter fraud within the Democratic Party. At the time, she says she was not a Democrat or a Republican and in fact had never voted in an election. She went into the project with the sole purpose of producing the best and most accurate documentary possible.
During the documentary process, Viviano says that she quickly became aware of just how dangerous and insidious the Obama campaign was. A number of the Democrats she interviewed refused to appear on camera and told her that their lives and property had been threatened by people working with the Obama campaign.
She also heard former President Bill Clinton say that Obama was not eligible to be president because of his lack of birth records. In fact, she said it was common knowledge around many top Democrats. Bill Clinton has often said that he would go public with the information when the time was right.
Before that could happen, his close friend and head of the Arkansas Democratic Party, Bill Gwatney was murdered in his office and then someone told Bill that he was next if he said anything about Obama’s eligibility. In the video below, she said that Clinton was not intimidated until someone associated with the Obama campaign told him that his daughter Chelsea would be next if he opened his mouth. From that point on, the Clinton’s remained silent about Obama’s birth certificate or lack thereof.
This is a powerful video from a lady that has nothing to gain and probably everything to lose by coming forward with her information. It could well ruin her career in Hollywood as so many of the film industry are flaming liberals. It could also cost her her life.
I took note of how she described the Obama campaign’s reign of terror and intimidation and how well coordinated it was. I thought to myself that if they were bold enough to threaten the life of the Clinton’s daughter then have they made similar threats to all of the leading Republicans in both the House and Senate? Is this why Congress has remained so silent ever since Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s March 1st news conference where he provided the American people with the evidence that Obama’s birth certificate and Selective Service Cards are forgeries?
When you see how blatantly Obama has defied the US Constitution and federal law without any apology or excuses, it’s not hard to believe that he, like every other dictator in history, obtained his position by intimidation, threats and outright violence. Knowing he is capable of this has to make every single American extremely fearful if Obama gets re-elected.
And if the voter fraud will be as prevalent in November as it was in 2008, it seems a sure thing that he will be re-elected. Obama has had the DOJ strike down every voter ID law and any other measure taken, to reduce the chance of voter fraud. They have set the stage for an old fashioned Chicago style election with padded and illegal votes. Wait a minute, he is a Chicago politician, so guess he’s just following local history at a national level.
SOURCE
************************
Americans Want More Control Over Their Own Health Care
ObamaCare's popular provisions lose their appeal once Americans are confronted with the consequences
With the three-day ObamaCare circus at the Supreme Court behind us, let’s fast-forward to June. Suppose that five justices find their constitutional bearings and do what a majority of Americans want them to do: Scrap the individual mandate, the key provision without which the law will collapse. What then?
Will that mean that our current system can just lumber along as is? No. America’s health care system is wasteful, inefficient and way too expensive: The U.S. retail price for an MRI, excluding professional fees, exceeds $4,000—about 20 times more than in Japan and France. This makes it extremely hard for Americans without coverage to spring for their own care, creating a system of medical haves and have-nots. It is not surprising, therefore, that a Kaiser Family Foundation tracking poll earlier this month found that six out of 10 Americans want lawmakers to keep searching for workable reforms even if the Supreme Court eventually kills the president’s reform law.
But any reform has to be based on the correct diagnosis of the problem. The administration's main argument for ObamaCare's mandate—that unless every freeloader is forced to buy coverage, we won’t be able to control spiraling health care costs—is a total red herring. The cost of uncompensated emergency care in America adds up to only about $40.7 billion annually, less than 3 percent of the country’s total health care spending. Arguably, even if hospitals were not legally required to treat uninsured patients, they would provide that amount of care pro bono—just as they do in India, a far poorer country. Many private, for-profit hospitals I queried during a previous visit reported treating up to 10 percent of their patients for free. American law firms, by comparison, aim to offer 3 to 5 percent of their billable hours in pro bono services.
But the question remains: What kind of reforms do Americans want? The Obama administration completely misread the public mood when it based its decision to craft a 2,700-page, Rube Goldberg-style makeover of literally one-sixth of our economy on polls suggesting that Americans would be willing to pay higher taxes for universal coverage. Worse, a joint Reason-Rupe poll released last week found that the misnamed Affordable Care Act—a.k.a. ObamaCare—imposed trade-offs that Americans were simply unwilling to accept. The act’s supporters insist that even though a majority of Americans view the overall law unfavorably, many of its specific provisions are quite popular. But the problem is that most polls pose questions in a vacuum, without actually confronting Americans with the consequences of their choices. The Reason-Rupe poll was among the few to do so systematically, and it found that although Americans do want equity and coverage for all, they want control, choice and quality for themselves even more.
Like other polls, it found that Americans don’t want the government forcing them to buy coverage, although they were more amenable to employers being forced to provide coverage to employees, even if that means job losses and pay cuts. Indeed, 56 percent of respondents said they were fine with an employer mandate, compared to the 39 percent who said they were not.
Americans like the idea of giving everyone the same access to health care, regardless of medical status—except if it means sacrificing affordability or quality. Fifty-two percent approved of the community rating provision in the law, which would ban insurance companies from charging higher premiums based on medical history, compared to 39 percent who opposed it. But this support drops precipitously if the provision’s side effects include longer wait times for doctors (41 percent) or higher premiums (38 percent) or higher taxes (37 percent) or lower-quality care (15 percent).
But what was truly revealing was how eager Americans are to control their own health care dollars. Forty-eight percent said they’d prefer it if their employers gave them the money to purchase their own coverage, compared to 41 percent who would not. Even more remarkably, 65 percent of Americans want Medicare payouts in the form of a credit for use toward a private health plan, compared to 24 percent who don’t. This is good news for Rep. Paul Ryan’s “premium support” proposal for Medicare reform.
All of this makes perfect sense in light of another finding. When asked to rate how much they trust various entities in “addressing their health care needs,” 61 percent said they have a “great deal of trust” in themselves—but only 15 percent said that of their employers, and 5 percent of the government.
What’s more, Americans want to make their own coverage decisions. Almost 70 percent said they want the same ability to shop around for “a less expensive or better [health] insurance policy” as they have for their auto insurance.
So what are the implications of all this for health care reform? Americans are not dogmatically opposed to government intervention in health care markets. But their intuitions are more in line with advocates of consumer-based medicine who believe that the best way to control spiraling costs—the key to improving access—is to give patients more control over their medical dollars and inject a modicum of price sensitivity into our health care system.
If the Supreme Court relegates ObamaCare to the dustbin of history, Congress ought to bear that in mind when it crafts a revised bill. The last thing the country needs is another failed reform effort.
SOURCE
****************************
ELSEWHERE
"Married" homosexuals sue for immigration rights: "Immigration advocates have filed a lawsuit on behalf of several married gay couples, alleging a federal law violates their constitutional rights by preventing them from sponsoring their spouses for green cards. The complaint, which challenges the federal Defense of Marriage Act, was filed in federal court in Brooklyn by Immigration Equality, an advocacy group."
WA: Court says employer can’t fire mentally ill worker: "In his time at Cottonwood Financial, Sean Reilly had overcome much. He had risen the company ranks from assistant to head store manager, and even won performance awards in spite of his bipolar disorder. Yet he claims that when he requested leave in 2007 to give him time to adjust to a new medication, he was fired. Reilly filed suit, alleging employment discrimination under federal disability law, and on Thursday, the District Court for Eastern Washington ordered the financial services company to pay Reilly a total of $56,500 in damages."
Why Does Department Of Homeland Security Need 450 MILLION Hollow Point Bullets?: "Somebody out there has decided that the Department of Homeland Security needs a whole lot of ammunition. Recently it was announced that ATK was awarded a contract to provide up to 450 MILLION hollow point bullets to the Department of Homeland Security over the next five years. Is it just me, or does that sound incredibly excessive? What in the world is the DHS going to do with 450 million rounds? What possible event would ever require that much ammunition? If the United States were ever invaded, it would be the job of the U.S. military to defend the country, so that can't be it. So what are all of those bullets for? Who does the Department of Homeland Security plan to be shooting at?"
*****************************
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)
****************************
Wednesday, April 04, 2012
Media distortion bears fruit as Harvard academic laps it up without checking
The following paragraph was written by Nancy Gertner, a retired US District Court judge, and a professor at Harvard Law School:
She's accepted uncritically the relevance of all those pretty media pictures showing Martin when he was about 12 years old. She really thinks that Zimmerman was the tall one -- when in fact Martin was 6" taller than Zimmerman.
What a clown she is! If that's what passes for proper judicial scrutiny at Harvard, we are all in big trouble. Anybody who appeared before when she was a judge and lost his case should take a screenshot of her original article above and use it to petition for a re-opening of his case.
I've got a question for the learned lady. What would she feel if she found the guy in the photo below looking down on her on a dark night?
Because that's a picture of the 17 year old 6'3" Trayvon Martin that Zimmerman encountered. And don't forget that it is she, not I who said that height is important.
The first time I saw the media pictures of Martin and then read his age I smelt a rat. Blind Freddy would know that a normal black male would be at or near full physical maturity at age 17 -- as Martin indeed was -- so why were they showing pictures of what looked like a 12-year-old kid? Easy answer: The whole thing is a media beatup designed to sell newspapers. And people lacking in critical thinking ability -- such as Harvard faculty -- fell for it hook line and sinker.
And if you think it's not a beatup consider the two cases below for contrast:
Shawn Tyson (above) was sentenced this week for murdering two white British tourists in Florida. No rallies against violence and no charges of racism. Tyson even referred to his victims as "crackers" so it was a clear hate crime.
Terry Moore, 32, was beaten this week by a mob of black males. Again, no rallies against racism; no public outpouring of support for the victim. Such black-on-White violence is the norm and only rarely makes it to anything but local headlines.
QED
**********************
The Invincible Dogma
Thomas Sowell
A long-standing legal charade was played out again recently, when Federal Express paid $3 million to settle an employment discrimination case brought by the U.S. Department of Labor.
Federal Express was accused of both racial discrimination and sex discrimination. FedEx denied it.
Why then did they pay the $3 million? Because it can cost a lot more than $3 million to fight a discrimination case. Years ago, the Sears department store chain spent $20 million fighting a sex discrimination charge that took 15 years to make its way through the legal labyrinth. In the end, Sears won -- if spending $20 million and getting nothing in return can be called winning.
Federal Express was apparently not prepared to spend that kind of money and that kind of time fighting a discrimination case. The net result is that the government and much of the media can now claim that race, sex and other discrimination are rampant, considering how many anti-discrimination cases have been "won."
At the heart of these legal charades is the prevailing dogma that statistical disparities in employment -- or mortgage lending, or anything else -- show discrimination. In both the Federal Express case and the earlier Sears case, statistical differences between the mix of the workforce and the population mix were the key evidence presented to show discrimination.
In the Sears case, there was not even one woman who worked in any of the company's 900 stores who claimed to have been discriminated against. It was all a matter of statistics -- and of the arbitrary dogma that statistical disparities show discrimination.
Once statistical disparities have been demonstrated, the burden of proof shifts to the employer to prove his innocence, contrary to centuries of legal tradition that the burden of proof in on the accuser.
No burden of proof whatever is put on those who argue as if there would be a random distribution of racial and other groups in the absence of discrimination.
Happenstances may be random but performances seldom are. Most people are right-handed but, among major league hitters with lifetime batting averages of .330 and up, there have been 15 left-handed batters and only 5 right-handed batters since the beginning of the 20th century. All the best-selling beers in the United States were created by people of German ancestry. Anyone who follows professional basketball knows that most of the leading stars are black.
Some years ago, a study of National Merit Scholarship finalists found that more than half were first-born children, even in five-child families. Jews are less than one percent of the world's population but they won 14 percent of the Nobel Prizes in literature and the sciences during the first half of the 20th century, and 29 percent during the second half.
It would be no problem at all to fill this whole column -- or this entire page -- with examples from around the world of gross statistical disparities in outcomes, in situations where discrimination was not involved. But those who take the opposite view -- that numbers show discrimination -- do not have to produce one speck of evidence to back up that sweeping conclusion.
Human beings are not random events. Individuals and groups have different histories, cultures, skills and attitudes. Why would anyone expect them to be distributed anywhere in a pattern based on statistical theories of random events? Much less make the absence of such a pattern become a basis for multimillion dollar lawsuits?
However little evidence or logic there may be behind the belief that an absence of random distribution shows discrimination, there are nevertheless strong incentives for some people to cling to that belief anyway. Those who lag behind -- whether educationally, economically or otherwise -- have every incentive to think of themselves as victims of those who are more successful.
Those who want their votes have every incentive to go along, or even to actively promote that idea. So do those who want to see issues as moral melodramas, starring themselves on the side of the angels against the forces of evil. The net result is an invincible dogma -- and a polarized country.
SOURCE
**************************
They Don’t Know Us
Dennis Prager
Apparently, many liberals were disappointed in the administration’s performance before the Supreme Court. They felt that the government’s lawyer, Solicitor General Donald Verrilli, did not respond effectively to the challenges of some of the conservative justices.
The editor of Commentary, John Podhoretz, offered an explanation on his magazine’s blog. “American liberals,” he wrote, “know their own language, but they don’t know the language of their ideological and partisan opposite numbers. ... Conservatives speak liberal, but for liberals in the United States, conservatism might as well be Esperanto.”
I have argued this point for many years. In my book to be published later this month ("Still the Best Hope: Why the World Needs American Values to Triumph"), I argue that the left is a victim of its own brainwash. How could they not be? All they hear, see and read from childhood on, from elementary school through graduate school, on TV and in the movies, are leftist ideas.
Yet this is not true for conservatives. One would have to grow up in a silent monastery not to be regularly exposed to liberal and leftist ideas.
For 30 years, I have had leading left-wing thinkers on my radio show, and I continue to be shocked at their lack of awareness of conservative arguments. About two years ago, for example, I asked one of the most powerful Democratic members of Congress -- a major force behind every tax increase -- what tax rate he thought might be too high. He replied that he had not given it thought. I asked a leading liberal writer who maintained that all American wars since World War II had been imperialist if he thought the Korean War was also imperialistic. He replied that he didn’t know enough about that war to respond.
After interviewing leftists, liberal listeners frequently ask me why I don’t invite the best liberals on to my show.
The answer is that I have had some of the best liberals on my show. They just don’t tend to do well when challenged by thoughtful conservatives.
That may be why the majority of influential liberals refuse to go on conservative talk radio or to debate conservatives.
More HERE
**************************
Economic “Recovery” Is Slow and Weak Due to Obama Administration Policies
Usually, after the economy suffers an unusually severe recession, it bounces back in an unusually rapid recovery — what some economists and others refer to as the “rubber-band effect.” But not now. Despite the huge worldwide fall in GDP in 2008-09, the economy has experienced only a weak recovery, with fewer people employed in America today than when President Obama took office. “At this point in the typical post-World War II recovery, the economy was growing at an average pace of nearly 5 percent. The Obama recovery has managed just over 2 percent.” As James Pethokoukis notes in the New York Post,
Obama administration policies are preventing more jobs from being created. Obamacare is causing layoffs in the medical device industry, and is preventing some employers from hiring and from making the investments needed for new jobs and expanded operations. The Dodd-Frank law backed by President Obama has also wiped out jobs and driven thousands of jobs overseas. Recent EPA rules will wipe out hundreds of thousands of jobs. Andrew Stiles describes ten job-destroying regulations from the Obama Administration.
Another job-killing regulation is the Obama administration’s recent demand that trucking companies employ alcoholics as truckers rather than assigning them to less safety-sensitive positions — a demand that will lead to costly lawsuits against trucking companies by accident victims, and thus may discourage people from setting up new trucking companies. Another impediment to hiring is the Obama EEOC’s current practice of suing some employers who consider applicants’ arrest records and criminal convictions in hiring. If you were thinking of starting a new business, wouldn’t you be less likely to do so if you thought you would have no freedom as to whom you could hire, and no freedom to consider someone’s dangerousness or the content of their character before hiring them? (Economists say that requiring employers to ignore criminal convictions actually increases minority unemployment). The EEOC is also stepping up its attacks on certain employers who use merit-based criteria for hiring, like requiring a high-school diploma. And it is seeking to impose hiring quotas based on disability on the 200,000 employers who receive federal contracts — that is, the nation’s principal employers.
Contrary to his campaign promise of a “net spending cut,” Obama has substantially increased government spending. Legislation passed under the Obama administration has also required states to increase their spending, and incur large unfunded mandates that will lead either to increased state budget deficits or substantial state tax increases. The $800 billion stimulus package contained so-called “green jobs” funding, 79 percent of which went to foreign firms, effectively replacing American jobs with foreign green jobs. A recent biofuel program actually wiped out jobs rather than creating them as intended, while costing taxpayers a lot of money.
As Terry Catchpole noted earlier in The New York Times, Obama administration policies have wiped out jobs at companies like his:
SOURCE
*************************
ELSEWHERE
SCOTUS approves strip searches for minor offenses: "The routine strip search of those accused of minor offenses does not violate the Fourth Amendment’s ban on unreasonable searches and seizures whenever the detainee is to be housed within a general jail population, the US Supreme Court ruled on Monday. In a 5-to-4 decision, the high court said that officials at a jail or prison facility do not need individualized suspicion that a detainee is concealing a weapon or contraband before conducting a visual inspection of the most private areas of a person’s body." [The Bill of Rights takes another beating]
CA: Federal court upholds ban on racial, gender discrimination: "California’s ban on using race or gender as a factor in college admissions survived another legal challenge Monday when a federal appeals court upheld the law passed by state voters more than 15 years ago. ... In October, the U.S. Supreme Court is set to rule on whether race-based affirmative action programs are legal."
*****************************
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 following paragraph was written by Nancy Gertner, a retired US District Court judge, and a professor at Harvard Law School:
"Nothing prevents the Sanford police from critically evaluating Zimmerman’s account, as police do in so many situations, and concluding that it was contradicted by the girlfriend’s account, by 911 tapes of other bystanders shortly before the killing, that it makes no sense for Martin to start a fight since Zimmerman obviously had a gun in a holster, was substantially larger than Martin, since the encounter took place close to where Martin was staying and he was moments away from safety."
She's accepted uncritically the relevance of all those pretty media pictures showing Martin when he was about 12 years old. She really thinks that Zimmerman was the tall one -- when in fact Martin was 6" taller than Zimmerman.
What a clown she is! If that's what passes for proper judicial scrutiny at Harvard, we are all in big trouble. Anybody who appeared before when she was a judge and lost his case should take a screenshot of her original article above and use it to petition for a re-opening of his case.
I've got a question for the learned lady. What would she feel if she found the guy in the photo below looking down on her on a dark night?
Because that's a picture of the 17 year old 6'3" Trayvon Martin that Zimmerman encountered. And don't forget that it is she, not I who said that height is important.
The first time I saw the media pictures of Martin and then read his age I smelt a rat. Blind Freddy would know that a normal black male would be at or near full physical maturity at age 17 -- as Martin indeed was -- so why were they showing pictures of what looked like a 12-year-old kid? Easy answer: The whole thing is a media beatup designed to sell newspapers. And people lacking in critical thinking ability -- such as Harvard faculty -- fell for it hook line and sinker.
And if you think it's not a beatup consider the two cases below for contrast:
Shawn Tyson (above) was sentenced this week for murdering two white British tourists in Florida. No rallies against violence and no charges of racism. Tyson even referred to his victims as "crackers" so it was a clear hate crime.
Terry Moore, 32, was beaten this week by a mob of black males. Again, no rallies against racism; no public outpouring of support for the victim. Such black-on-White violence is the norm and only rarely makes it to anything but local headlines.
QED
**********************
The Invincible Dogma
Thomas Sowell
A long-standing legal charade was played out again recently, when Federal Express paid $3 million to settle an employment discrimination case brought by the U.S. Department of Labor.
Federal Express was accused of both racial discrimination and sex discrimination. FedEx denied it.
Why then did they pay the $3 million? Because it can cost a lot more than $3 million to fight a discrimination case. Years ago, the Sears department store chain spent $20 million fighting a sex discrimination charge that took 15 years to make its way through the legal labyrinth. In the end, Sears won -- if spending $20 million and getting nothing in return can be called winning.
Federal Express was apparently not prepared to spend that kind of money and that kind of time fighting a discrimination case. The net result is that the government and much of the media can now claim that race, sex and other discrimination are rampant, considering how many anti-discrimination cases have been "won."
At the heart of these legal charades is the prevailing dogma that statistical disparities in employment -- or mortgage lending, or anything else -- show discrimination. In both the Federal Express case and the earlier Sears case, statistical differences between the mix of the workforce and the population mix were the key evidence presented to show discrimination.
In the Sears case, there was not even one woman who worked in any of the company's 900 stores who claimed to have been discriminated against. It was all a matter of statistics -- and of the arbitrary dogma that statistical disparities show discrimination.
Once statistical disparities have been demonstrated, the burden of proof shifts to the employer to prove his innocence, contrary to centuries of legal tradition that the burden of proof in on the accuser.
No burden of proof whatever is put on those who argue as if there would be a random distribution of racial and other groups in the absence of discrimination.
Happenstances may be random but performances seldom are. Most people are right-handed but, among major league hitters with lifetime batting averages of .330 and up, there have been 15 left-handed batters and only 5 right-handed batters since the beginning of the 20th century. All the best-selling beers in the United States were created by people of German ancestry. Anyone who follows professional basketball knows that most of the leading stars are black.
Some years ago, a study of National Merit Scholarship finalists found that more than half were first-born children, even in five-child families. Jews are less than one percent of the world's population but they won 14 percent of the Nobel Prizes in literature and the sciences during the first half of the 20th century, and 29 percent during the second half.
It would be no problem at all to fill this whole column -- or this entire page -- with examples from around the world of gross statistical disparities in outcomes, in situations where discrimination was not involved. But those who take the opposite view -- that numbers show discrimination -- do not have to produce one speck of evidence to back up that sweeping conclusion.
Human beings are not random events. Individuals and groups have different histories, cultures, skills and attitudes. Why would anyone expect them to be distributed anywhere in a pattern based on statistical theories of random events? Much less make the absence of such a pattern become a basis for multimillion dollar lawsuits?
However little evidence or logic there may be behind the belief that an absence of random distribution shows discrimination, there are nevertheless strong incentives for some people to cling to that belief anyway. Those who lag behind -- whether educationally, economically or otherwise -- have every incentive to think of themselves as victims of those who are more successful.
Those who want their votes have every incentive to go along, or even to actively promote that idea. So do those who want to see issues as moral melodramas, starring themselves on the side of the angels against the forces of evil. The net result is an invincible dogma -- and a polarized country.
SOURCE
**************************
They Don’t Know Us
Dennis Prager
Apparently, many liberals were disappointed in the administration’s performance before the Supreme Court. They felt that the government’s lawyer, Solicitor General Donald Verrilli, did not respond effectively to the challenges of some of the conservative justices.
The editor of Commentary, John Podhoretz, offered an explanation on his magazine’s blog. “American liberals,” he wrote, “know their own language, but they don’t know the language of their ideological and partisan opposite numbers. ... Conservatives speak liberal, but for liberals in the United States, conservatism might as well be Esperanto.”
I have argued this point for many years. In my book to be published later this month ("Still the Best Hope: Why the World Needs American Values to Triumph"), I argue that the left is a victim of its own brainwash. How could they not be? All they hear, see and read from childhood on, from elementary school through graduate school, on TV and in the movies, are leftist ideas.
Yet this is not true for conservatives. One would have to grow up in a silent monastery not to be regularly exposed to liberal and leftist ideas.
For 30 years, I have had leading left-wing thinkers on my radio show, and I continue to be shocked at their lack of awareness of conservative arguments. About two years ago, for example, I asked one of the most powerful Democratic members of Congress -- a major force behind every tax increase -- what tax rate he thought might be too high. He replied that he had not given it thought. I asked a leading liberal writer who maintained that all American wars since World War II had been imperialist if he thought the Korean War was also imperialistic. He replied that he didn’t know enough about that war to respond.
After interviewing leftists, liberal listeners frequently ask me why I don’t invite the best liberals on to my show.
The answer is that I have had some of the best liberals on my show. They just don’t tend to do well when challenged by thoughtful conservatives.
That may be why the majority of influential liberals refuse to go on conservative talk radio or to debate conservatives.
More HERE
**************************
Economic “Recovery” Is Slow and Weak Due to Obama Administration Policies
Usually, after the economy suffers an unusually severe recession, it bounces back in an unusually rapid recovery — what some economists and others refer to as the “rubber-band effect.” But not now. Despite the huge worldwide fall in GDP in 2008-09, the economy has experienced only a weak recovery, with fewer people employed in America today than when President Obama took office. “At this point in the typical post-World War II recovery, the economy was growing at an average pace of nearly 5 percent. The Obama recovery has managed just over 2 percent.” As James Pethokoukis notes in the New York Post,
A Federal Reserve study from late last year looked at the behavior of recoveries from recessions across 59 advanced and emerging market economies during the last 40 years. The Fed found, to no great surprise, that recoveries “tend to be faster” after severe recessions, such as the one we just had. . .The deeper the downturn, the more robust the rebound — unless government messes things up.
For example, during the 1981-82 recession, output fell by 2.7 percent and then rose by 15.9 percent over the next 10 quarters (at an average pace of 6.0 percent). During the Great Recession, output fell even more, by 5.1 percent. But during the 10 quarters since, total economic output is up only a paltry 6.2 percent. Score one for Reaganomics.
But what about the depressing effect of Wall Street’s near-death experience back in 2008 and 2009? Well, that same Fed study found that bank or other financial crises “do not affect the strength” of subsequent recoveries. . .[What] might explain half of the Obama recovery’s underperformance versus the Reagan recovery. . .? Maybe we can attribute that to policy differences.
While one president cut long-term marginal tax rates, the other tried a massive burst of federal spending. One empowered private enterprise; the other empowered government.
Obama administration policies are preventing more jobs from being created. Obamacare is causing layoffs in the medical device industry, and is preventing some employers from hiring and from making the investments needed for new jobs and expanded operations. The Dodd-Frank law backed by President Obama has also wiped out jobs and driven thousands of jobs overseas. Recent EPA rules will wipe out hundreds of thousands of jobs. Andrew Stiles describes ten job-destroying regulations from the Obama Administration.
Another job-killing regulation is the Obama administration’s recent demand that trucking companies employ alcoholics as truckers rather than assigning them to less safety-sensitive positions — a demand that will lead to costly lawsuits against trucking companies by accident victims, and thus may discourage people from setting up new trucking companies. Another impediment to hiring is the Obama EEOC’s current practice of suing some employers who consider applicants’ arrest records and criminal convictions in hiring. If you were thinking of starting a new business, wouldn’t you be less likely to do so if you thought you would have no freedom as to whom you could hire, and no freedom to consider someone’s dangerousness or the content of their character before hiring them? (Economists say that requiring employers to ignore criminal convictions actually increases minority unemployment). The EEOC is also stepping up its attacks on certain employers who use merit-based criteria for hiring, like requiring a high-school diploma. And it is seeking to impose hiring quotas based on disability on the 200,000 employers who receive federal contracts — that is, the nation’s principal employers.
Contrary to his campaign promise of a “net spending cut,” Obama has substantially increased government spending. Legislation passed under the Obama administration has also required states to increase their spending, and incur large unfunded mandates that will lead either to increased state budget deficits or substantial state tax increases. The $800 billion stimulus package contained so-called “green jobs” funding, 79 percent of which went to foreign firms, effectively replacing American jobs with foreign green jobs. A recent biofuel program actually wiped out jobs rather than creating them as intended, while costing taxpayers a lot of money.
As Terry Catchpole noted earlier in The New York Times, Obama administration policies have wiped out jobs at companies like his:
Two years ago our executive communications company had 17 employees. Today it has seven . . . like many small businesses, we are dependent on big businesses as customers. And the big businesses that we would ordinarily depend on to become clients are sitting on their cash, because they are deathly afraid of an Obama administration that has been hostile to business . . . They have no idea where the administration’s next attack is coming from, and how much it is going to cost them to defend. So businesses do not spend money; they do not hire my company; and we cannot hire back those 10 good people we had to let go.
SOURCE
*************************
ELSEWHERE
SCOTUS approves strip searches for minor offenses: "The routine strip search of those accused of minor offenses does not violate the Fourth Amendment’s ban on unreasonable searches and seizures whenever the detainee is to be housed within a general jail population, the US Supreme Court ruled on Monday. In a 5-to-4 decision, the high court said that officials at a jail or prison facility do not need individualized suspicion that a detainee is concealing a weapon or contraband before conducting a visual inspection of the most private areas of a person’s body." [The Bill of Rights takes another beating]
CA: Federal court upholds ban on racial, gender discrimination: "California’s ban on using race or gender as a factor in college admissions survived another legal challenge Monday when a federal appeals court upheld the law passed by state voters more than 15 years ago. ... In October, the U.S. Supreme Court is set to rule on whether race-based affirmative action programs are legal."
*****************************
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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