Altemeyer is still fundamentally confused

At least since 1950, Leftist psychologists have been fascinated by the concept of authoritarianism.  They have good reason to be.  The most authoritarian regimes in recent history have been socialist:  From the Communist Lenin, Stalin and Mao, through the national socialist Hitler to the ghastly Pol Pot.  So authoritarianism is in the bones of Leftists. We also see that orientation in their virtually universal refusal to condemn the gran lider of Cuba ("Great Leader", Fidel Castro) and their unrelenting attempts to fasten the bonds of regulation around  most aspects of life in the USA. And they are always eager to spend your money for you whether you want them to or not.

But authoritarianism is repugnant to most people gripped by it so the Left have a need to deny the authoritarianism which is innate to them.  They need to pretend to be something else.  And they are rather good at that. They pretend to be do-gooders even though most of what they do turns out badly.

Another very useful way of deflecting criticism is simply denial.  If you say often enough that you are not authoritarian, people might believe you.  And a very effective way of reinforcing such denials is of accusing your opponents of what is really true of yourself.  Freud called that "projection".  So Leftist psychologists have made great efforts to prove that conservatives are the authoritarian ones, not themselves.

That merry little scheme started with the work of Marxist theoretician Adorno in 1950 but foundered eventually on the poor evidence for the various Adorno assertions.  I cover that here.

The Adorno work was however refurbished from 1981 on by Robert Altemeyer of the University of Manitoba in Canada and I have pointed out from early on how sloppy Altemeyer's work is (e.g. here and here and here) .

Altemeyer has however continued to write books on authoritarianism and has gained a certain degree of notice outside academe,  particularly through the blog of Jonathan Turley.  Not much about Altemeyer's story has changed over the years but maybe there is by now a case for me to update a little my comments on his work.

Altemeyer has compiled a set of statements (the RWA scale) which in his view reflect "Right Wing Authoritarianism".  But he is very shifty about what he means by "right-wing".  Sometimes he refers to it as meaning conservative and at other times he admits that it is uncorrelated with vote for conservative political parties.

In other words his research is about conservatives who are as likely to vote Democrat as Republican!  A truly odd bunch!  The truth, I suspect, is that Altemeyer would not know a conservative if he fell over one. I have  no doubt that the Psychology Dept. at the University of Manitoba is the standard Leftist bubble that one expects of such Depts so strange beliefs about conservatives and much else could flourish in that environment.

So what the RWA scale really measures is anybody's guess.  I see it as measuring an old fashioned form of extreme conservatism that no longer has political relevance or, indeed, any relevance at all.  So the political relevance of Altemeyer's various research findings exists only in Altemeyer's imagination and need detain nobody for any time at all.

But if Altemeyer is vague about "right wing", he is quite clearly wrong about authoritarianism.  He makes it clear that it is not dictators he is talking about but rather their followers.  He claims that he is measuring a tendency for people to submit to authority.  But there is no such thing.  Nobody just respects authority per se.  Different people respect different authorities.  Altemeyer is convinced that conservatives in the USA are characterized by a respect for conventional authority.  Yet most American conservatives these days almost spit when they talk about the President, Congress and the Supreme Court.  Not much respect for the conventional authorities of America there!

And even the old mainline churches get short shrift among conservatives.  Conservatives tend to respect "rebel" evangelical churches, churches with a strong streak of independence.

Altemeyer has some awareness of the political  irreverence of American conservatives so to save his theory he nominates Rush Limbaugh and his ilk as authorities that conservatives respect.  But Limbaugh is no authority at all.  He is just a radio commentator!  People listen to him because they agree with him, not for any other reason.  In Altemeyer's world, agreeing with anybody is dangerous!

And it is not only in conservative politics that one finds an absence of a general tendency to respect authority.  I set out here some evidence from psychological research which shows that respect for authority in one field does not generalize to respect for authority in other fields.  That being so, Altemeyer is studying a unicorn (or perhaps more specifically, a chimera).

So wherever you look at Altemeyer's theories you find that he is not studying what he thinks he is studying.  He is studying something that exists only in his own imagination.

But a relatively recent work of his really puts the cap on his intellectual confusion.  He has written an extensive history and analysis of the Tea Party movement.  And he does get one thing right.  He notes that a lot of the Tea Partiers are evangelical Christians.

Even Altemeyer cannot avoid noticing however that Libertarians are prominent in the Tea Party movement too. So are Libertarians authoritarian? Good old Altemeyer sticks to his guns and says they are. He calls libertarians "The Other Authoritarian Personality". That people who comprehensively reject authoritative control over our lives are also submissive to authority must be one of the most crosseyed assertions in contemporary politics. Black might as well be white. Again Altemeyer is living in a little world of his own imagination.

Altemeyer also likes the "Social Dominance Orientation" theory of Pratto and Sidanius but I have pointed out the large holes in that some time ago.

Finally, the whole idea that you need to be a particular personality type to support an authoritarian regime is contrary to the evidence. Well-known experiments by both Milgram and Zimbardo showed vividly  that perfectly ordinary people can be conned into supporting extremely authoritarian actions and prewar writers such as Roberts and Heiden agree that by the late 30's Hitler was quite simply the most popular man in Germany. They LIKED his claim that they were a Herrenvolk (Master race)! His support ranged from the intelligentsia to the workers and, contrary to the usual Marxist piffle, the hard-core Nazis (the SA) were predominantly working class -- usually the more rebellious element of society.

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Oops, maybe government is tyrannical

By Marta H. Mossburg



Less than two weeks ago President Obama stood in front of graduates from The Ohio State University and told them to reject those who warn of government tyranny.

“Unfortunately, you’ve grown up hearing voices that incessantly warn of government as nothing more than some separate, sinister entity that’s at the root of all our problems,” he said.

To young, idealistic people his words likely sounded insightful — until last week. That’s when it became officially impossible to deny that the government abuses its power for political gain.

Practically overnight people labeled conspiracy theorists by the elite were proven prescient interpreters of how big government operates when news broke last Friday that the Internal Revenue Service targeted conservative groups for special scrutiny in their tax-exempt applications. The media pile on against the administration is so ferocious Fox News could run live feeds from its competitors without losing a beat.

It should be so because the partisan treatment of hundreds of groups is stunning.

Ginny Rapini saw the IRS in action firsthand. The volunteer coordinator for the NorCal Tea Party applied for 501(c)(4) status for her group in July 2009. In the spring of 2010 the IRS asked for more information. She sent in the information immediately but didn’t hear from the IRS again until January 2012, she said. At that point the agency sent the group a list of 19 questions, including a request for the names of donors, every email the group sent and minutes of each board meeting, with the requirement that everything be returned within two weeks or the agency would consider the application void, she said. She sent the IRS 3,000 pages of information prior to the deadline — but did not include the names of donors. “I think they wanted to intimidate me, but instead they made me mad,” said Rapini.

After Rep. Tom McClintock (R-Calif.) spoke about NorCal’s problems with the IRS on the floor of the House and wrote to the agency, she got a favorable response to her application in the summer of 2012 — three years after the initial request, not unlike many other organizations treated to years of silence in between harassing questions.

What makes the IRS’s actions even worse is that top officials knew about the inappropriate questioning of conservative groups since 2011 but didn’t say anything about it to Congress. Steven Miller, the acting IRS commissioner, was fired earlier this week, and should be the first of a long line of people held accountable for the agency’s flagrant mistreatment of political opponents by one of the most powerful government agencies.

On top of the IRS scandal, the Department of Justice (DOJ) last week admitted to secretly taking records of incoming and outgoing calls on work and personal phones of Associated Press (AP) reporters, its main lines in New York, Washington and Hartford, CT., and for the AP number in the House of Representatives. It took records on more than 20 lines in total in April and May of 2012 — lines used by more than 100 journalists.

Asked by National Public Radio how many other news media phone records the DOJ had taken Attorney General Eric Holder said, “I’m not sure how many of those cases…I have actually signed off on…I take them very seriously.”

So, confidential sources are not confidential if the government wants to know who they are. Whistleblowers beware.

That all of this is happening as the IRS is in the middle of hiring potentially thousands of new employees to write and enforce ObamaCare regulations should make everyone afraid. It is also happening while the IRS is in the middle of creating a giant information center with other federal agencies called the Data Services Hub to assist with rolling out ObamaCare (See here) that will provide one stop shopping on everything but what color underwear someone is wearing for the day.

The government promises, “Protecting the privacy of individuals remains the highest priority.” But after the last week, Americans should know there is no guarantee of personal privacy with the government or impartiality in how their information is used. It should also put Americans on notice that their political party could determine the quality of their health care. Welcome to the real world, Ohio State graduates.

SOURCE

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Fight the Power

Mona Charen

It's plausible to grant that Obama himself did not know that IRS agents were targeting tea party groups, Jews and other -- one almost wants to write "enemies of the state" -- for audits, harassment and delay. If Obama understood the conservative critique of big government even a little, he would know that his lack of knowledge is expected. In fact, it's part of the problem. As David Axelrod put it, the government is just "too vast" for the president to control. Who would have thought?

Obviously the government has always been too large for any one person to control. But our brilliant founders arranged matters so that power would be diffuse. Interest would counter interest, branch would check branch and transparency would ensure accountability to the voters. As James Madison wrote in Federalist No. 51:

Ambition must be made to counteract ambition. The interest of the man must be connected with the constitutional rights of the place. It may be a reflection on human nature, that such devices should be necessary to control the abuses of government. But what is government itself, but the greatest of all reflections on human nature?

The tea party movement -- those the IRS harassed -- dressed up as Founders, a rich irony. A good progressive, Obama finds Adams, Jefferson and Co. passe. He doesn't recognize the capacity of government to abuse power when in the proper (i.e. Democratic) hands -- or, more likely, doesn't care. His arrogance about his own good intentions for the "middle class" -- odd that he almost never speaks of the poor -- makes him contemptuous of those who agree with Madison that government power must always be carefully constrained.

You needn't believe that Barack Obama personally texted IRS agents and instructed them to harass conservatives to know that he disdains the constitutional order. The evidence is in the legislation he signed. Both the Affordable Care Act and Dodd-Frank create boards with utterly (in the case of Dodd Frank) and nearly (in the case of Obamacare) unreviewable power. Both are the subjects of lawsuits challenging their constitutionality.

Dodd Frank (aka "Dodd Frankenstein") creates at least two panels that are insulated from Congress's power of the purse. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and the Financial Stability Oversight Council derive their funding directly from the Federal Reserve. The president can appoint the director of the CFPB but can remove him only in very limited circumstances. The courts, which can normally overturn agency actions deemed "arbitrary or capricious," have limited review. The president highlighted his contempt for law by illegally naming the current director of CFPB as a "recess appointment" - when the Senate was not in recess.

The FSOC can declare firms "too big to fail" and thus obligate taxpayers for bailouts. The courts will have no say.

Under Obamacare, the Independent Payment Advisory Board (IPAB) is exempted from the notice and comment rules of federal agencies. IPAB dictates automatically become law unless Congress itself intervenes, but Congress has little time to do so and must vote by a three-fifths majority to modify an IPAB decision. The courts are not permitted to review its rulings.

Even abolishing IPAB has been made virtually impossible by the law.

At his Thursday press conference, Obama promised that if "there's a problem in government, we'll fix it." But his overweening signature legislation guarantees that power will be abused. Shielding government agencies from judicial and congressional review is an open invitation to the kind of misuse a wiser person would guard against. Wiser men did. They created our constitution, which Obama and his progressive allies flout.

SOURCE

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Still one of the funniest photos of all time


Vice-President Biden and a very startled official

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

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

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Mentioning the unmentionable again

In my academic career as a psychometrician, I paid some attention to the sociology of knowledge, and, indeed to the psychology of knowledge.

The field is actually a respectable one among Leftists -- dating particularly from Karl Marx's claim that your class position influences how you think.

Unlike Marx and the Leftists, however, I do not extrapolate small facts into vast generalizations.  Because one can descry influences on how people think, I don't jump to the conclusion that there is no such thing as truth.  I think the truth is still knowable even to those who wish that it were not so.

But the thing that fascinates me is the use of censorship, formal and informal.  Why do people wish to censor certain ideas?  Censored ideas are obviously seen as dangerous but WHY are they seen as dangerous?  It cannot be because they are silly.  There are many silly ideas that are not censored.  Nobody tries to censor the widespread claim that George Bush blew up the Twin Towers, for instance.  Silly ideas are allowed to run their course.  They are not censored.

So it is clearly threatening ideas that are censored.  But why are they threatening?  The answer surely is that the censored thought is reality-based.  So religious people who wish to censor expressions of sexual license, reveal by their censorship attempts that there is a real tendency towards sexual licence out there in the population -- a tendency which they do not wish to overwhelm  their own families.  And homosexuals who brand all criticism of homosexuality as "homophobia" reveal that there is a strong tendency out there in the population to find homosexuality at least distasteful if not perverted and immoral.

So ever since I wrote an academic article on the subject in 1972, it has always seemed to me that the idea of IQ is very threatening to those who fulminate against it.  And it is clear why it is threatening:  Because it refers to a fact that has great potential to upset people who are less intellectually able.

But that it the point.  If it were a fantasy as silly as the claim about George Bush and the Twin Towers, nobody would be disturbed by it.  The fact that the idea of IQ is founded in over a century of careful academic research is the problem.  It is arguably the most solid finding ever to come out of psychological research that problem solving ability is highly general across different classes of problem.  And we call that general problem solving ability 'g' or IQ.

But the fact that there really is such a thing as IQ out there in the general population only intensifies the problem.  The findings about IQ are entirely disruptive to the Leftist wish to declare all men equal.  The fury and sweeping denunciations aimed at  people like Jason Richwine are so powerful precisely because the concept of IQ is so accurate.  Although many have tried, the concept of IQ cannot be dismissed academically.  So all that is left is denunciation and persecution of those who proclaim the facts of the matter.

The fact that talk about IQ is so heavily penalized and forbidden is surely one of the most powerful demonstrations there are of how reality-based IQ findings are.  Putting it more generally, the more "forbidden" a statement is, the more likely it is to be true.

So it is mildly amusing how silly the attacks on IQ are -- and the demonstration that blacks on average have markedly lower IQs does of course arouse great steaming eruptions of silliness.  The quite standard response of Leftists is a variation of their ultimate fallback when forced into a corner by the facts.  They resort to some variation on the quite incoherent assertion that "there is no such thing as right and wrong".  In the case of IQ they deny that either IQ or race exists.

I have been reading a fair bit of the Leftist commentaries on the Richwine affair  -- from black writers like Ta Nehisi Coates to the cautious David Weigel.  And they regularly  refer to the concept of IQ as "discredited".  Who discredited it and how they do not say.  They don't want to go there. I think they know that they would be in very deep if they tried.  The various academic assaults on the concept have been easily rebutted  -- e.g. here.

Ta Nehisi Coates is however more empirical than most.  He takes a rather ad hominem approach.  Like the black conservative Tom Sowell, he shows how ideas of racial intelligence have been wrong in the past and arrives at the non sequitur that current ideas of that ilk are also therefore wrong.  It's rather like saying that Hitler liked dogs so love of dogs these days is Fascist.  Ultimately you have to judge the truth of a proposition on the  facts, not on who believes it now or who believed something similar in the past.

And absolutely ALL Leftists deny that such a thing as race exists.  As far as I can tell, ALL Americans can see that it does but when did reality hold up Leftists?  The argument for race non-existence is an old philosophical fallacy that can be applied to almost everything.  I can equally argue, for instance, that dogs do not exist  because some are large, some are small, some have short coats some have long coats, some are white some are black etc.

So some people regarded as American blacks look a lot like whites and some do not.  So the Leftist argument (e.g. by Coates) is that there is therefore no such thing as blacks. Such an asinine argument hardly deserves a reply but Razib Khan (a brown man) has answered it at length anyway  -- pointing out that all taxonomy in the natural world concerns central tendency rather than rigid or simple demarcation lines.  My comment from some years back on the matter is here.

Even many conservatives find the idea of low average IQ among blacks distasteful but, as the old Scots proverb has it:  "Facts are chiels that winna ding" (Facts are guys that you can't knock down).

FOOTNOTE:  It is often pretended that what IQ tests measure is either a mystery or trivial.  So we sometimes hear even from people who should know better the statement:  "IQ is only what IQ tests measure".  It is of course trivially true that IQ tests measure IQ but what IQ tests measure is neither obscure nor trivial.  They measure general problem-solving ability, which is why psychometricians refer to IQ as 'g'.  And that there is such a thing as general problem-solving ability is a momentous discovery with many implications -- which is why high IQ goes with so many desiderata:  from educational success to higher income to better health and longer life.

And pointing out that there are exceptions to that rule is merely sophomoric.  In the life sciences all rules that I can think of have exceptions.  As any gambler can tell you, however, even small departures from randomness can be invaluable. A correlation does not have to be perfect to be useful.

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The umbrella difference




George Bush can hold his own umbrella

President Obama humiliated the marine who he asked to hold his umbrella by making him ‘look like a butler’, a respected military general claimed today.  Thomas McInerney, a former United States Air Force Lieutenant General, said that the President showed a ‘lack of respect’ by making the soldier shelter him from a shower.

He also said that the President has plenty of aides so did not understand why one of them could not have held the umbrella.

The President caused a stir when he summoned over two marines to keep him dry at a press conference in the Rose Garden.  The marines held an umbrella over the President and the Turkish Prime Minister individually as Obama made jokes about the weather.

However, for some the move was not a laughing matter particularly as it is a breach of protocol for marines to hold umbrellas while in uniform.

SOURCE

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Healthcare and the Poor: Why Money Works Better than Waiting

By John C. Goodman

What I call health policy orthodoxy is committed to two propositions: (1) The really important health issue for poor people is access to care, and (2) to ensure access, waiting for care is always better than paying for care. In other words, if you have to ration scarce medical resources somehow, rationing by waiting is always better than rationing by price.

(Let me say parenthetically that the orthodox view is at least plausible. After all, poor people have the same amount of time you and I have, but a lot less money. Also, because their wages are lower than other people’s, the opportunity cost of their time is lower. So if we all have to pay for care with time and not with money, the advantage should go to the poor. This view would be plausible, that is, so long as you ignore tons of data showing that whenever the poor and the non-poor compete for resources in almost any non-price rationing system, the poor always lose out.)

The orthodox view underlies Medicaid’s policy of allowing patients to wait for hours for care in hospital emergency rooms and in community health centers, while denying them the opportunity to obtain less costly care at a walk-in clinic with very little wait at all. The easiest, cheapest way to expand access to care for millions of low-income families is to allow them to do something they cannot now do: add money out of pocket to Medicaid’s fees and pay market prices for care at walk-in clinics, doc-in-the-boxes, surgical centers, and other commercial outlets. Yet, in conventional health policy circles, this idea is considered heresy.

The orthodox view lies behind the obsession with making everyone pay higher premiums so that contraceptive services and a whole long list of screenings and preventive care can be made available with no co-payment or deductible. Yet, this practice will surely encourage overuse and waste and, in the process, likely raise the time prices of these same services.

The orthodox view lies at the core of the hostility toward Health Savings Accounts (HSAs), Health Reimbursement Arrangements (HRAs), and any other kind of account that allows money to be exchanged for medical services. Yet, it is precisely these kinds of accounts that empower low-income families in the medical marketplace, just as food stamps empower them in any grocery store they choose to patronize.

The orthodox view is the reason so many backers of Obamacare think it will expand access to care for millions of people, even though there will be no increase in the supply of doctors. Because they completely ignore the almost certain increase in the time price of care, these enthusiasts have completely missed the possibility that the act may actually decrease access to care for the most vulnerable populations.[1]

The orthodox view is the reason there is so little academic interest in measuring the time price of care and why so much animosity is directed at those who do measure such things. It explains why MIT professor Jonathan Gruber can write a paper on Massachusetts health reform and never once mention that the wait to see a new doctor in Boston is more than two months.[2]

This neglect would matter little if not for one thing: the evidence, as I explain in my book Priceless: Curing the Healthcare Crisis, suggests that the orthodox view is totally wrong.

SOURCE

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Men who are physically strong are more likely to have right wing political views

And I thought that Schwarzenegger was a RINO but, Ah Well

Men who are strong are more likely to take a right-wing stance, while weaker men support the welfare state, researchers claim.

Their study discovered a link between a man’s upper-body strength and their political views.

Scientists from Aarhus University in Denmark collected data on bicep size, socio-economic status and support for economic redistribution from hundreds in America, Argentina and Denmark.

The figures revealed that men with higher upper-body strength were less likely to support left-wing policies on the redistribution of wealth.

But men with low upper-body strength were more likely to put their own self-interest aside and support a welfare state.

The researchers found no link between upper-body strength and redistribution opinions among women.

Professor Michael Petersen said: ‘In all three countries, physically strong males consistently pursued the self-interested position on redistribution.

‘However physically weak males were more reluctant to assert their self-interest – just as if disputes over national policies were a matter of direct physical confrontation between individuals.

‘While many people think of politics as a modern phenomenon, it has, in a sense, always been with our species.  ‘Political views are designed by natural selection to function in the conditions recurrent over human evolutionary history.’

The findings were published in the journal Psychological Science.

Professor Petersen added: ‘Many previous studies have shown that people's political views cannot be predicted by standard economic models.

‘This is among the first studies to show that political views may be rational in another sense, in that they're designed by natural selection to function in the conditions recurrent over human evolutionary history.’

SOURCE.  The journal article is below:

The Ancestral Logic of Politics: Upper-Body Strength Regulates Men’s Assertion of Self-Interest Over Economic Redistribution

Abstract

Over human evolutionary history, upper-body strength has been a major component of fighting ability. Evolutionary models of animal conflict predict that actors with greater fighting ability will more actively attempt to acquire or defend resources than less formidable contestants will. Here, we applied these models to political decision making about redistribution of income and wealth among modern humans. In studies conducted in Argentina, Denmark, and the United States, men with greater upper-body strength more strongly endorsed the self-beneficial position: Among men of lower socioeconomic status (SES), strength predicted increased support for redistribution; among men of higher SES, strength predicted increased opposition to redistribution. Because personal upper-body strength is irrelevant to payoffs from economic policies in modern mass democracies, the continuing role of strength suggests that modern political decision making is shaped by an evolved psychology designed for small-scale groups.

SOURCE

So we see that the findings are not as simple as they were initially presented.  Strong guys still favoured redistribution if they were lower class. The opponents of redistribution were both strong and upper class

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

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

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Truth is no defense: The case of Jason Richwine

Richwine's resignation is emblematic of a corruption that has spread throughout American intellectual discourse, says Charles Murray

On Monday, May 6, Robert Rector and Jason Richwine of the Heritage Foundation published a study of the fiscal effects of immigration amnesty, arguing that the costs would amount to $6.3 trillion. Controversy greeted the report, but of the normal kind, with critics making specific allegations that the costs were calculated using unrealistic assumptions.

On Wednesday, the Washington Post revealed that Richwine’s 2009 Ph.D. dissertation at Harvard’s Kennedy School had said that, on average, Latinos have lower IQs than do non-Latino white Americans and the nation should consider incorporating IQ into immigration decisions. The blogosphere and some elements of the mainstream media erupted in denunciations.

On Friday, the Heritage Foundation announced that Richwine had resigned.

I have a personal interest in this story because Jason Richwine was awarded a fellowship from my employer, the American Enterprise Institute, in 2008–09, and I reviewed the draft of his dissertation. A rereading of the dissertation last weekend confirmed my recollection that Richwine had meticulously assembled and analyzed the test-score data, which showed exactly what he said they showed: mean IQ-score differences between Latinos and non-Latino whites, found consistently across many datasets and across time after taking factors such as language proficiency and cultural bias into account. I had disagreements then and now about his policy recommendations, but not about the empirical accuracy of his research or the scholarly integrity of the interpretations with which I disagreed.

In resigning, Dr. Richwine joins distinguished company. The most famous biologist in the world, James D. Watson, was forced to retire from Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in 2007 because of a factually accurate remark to a British journalist about low IQ scores among African blacks. In 2006, Larry Summers, president of Harvard, had to resign after a series of attacks that began with his empirically well-informed remarks about gender differences. These are just the most visible examples of a corruption that has spread throughout American intellectual discourse: If you take certain positions, you will be cast into outer darkness. Whether your statements are empirically accurate is irrelevant.

In academia, only the tenured can safely write on these topics. Assistant professors know that their chances of getting tenure will be close to zero if they publish politically incorrect findings on climate change, homosexuality, race differences, gender differences, or renewable energy. Their chances will not be much higher if they have published anything with a distinctly conservative perspective of any sort. To borrow George Orwell’s word, they will have proved themselves to be guilty of crimethink.

Everybody who does research in the social sciences or biology is aware how treacherous the environment has become, and so scholars take defensive measures. They bury important findings in obscurely worded technical articles lest they be discovered by reporters and lead to disastrous publicity. A few years ago, a brilliant young evolutionary geneticist publicly announced he would not pursue his work on the evolution of brain size after his preliminary results were attacked as crimethink. Others have deliberately refrained from discussing race or gender differences in works that ordinarily would have called for treating those topics. When I chided the author of a successful book for avoiding some obvious issues involving race, he quite rightly replied that if he had included anything about race, everything else in the book would have been ignored.

These examples are only the visible tip of a much broader problem of self-censorship in the questions that scholars are willing to ask. I am not referring just to scholars who might otherwise engage the taboo topics directly. We can have no idea of the full extent to which important avenues of inquiry in economics, sociology, genetics, and neuroscience that indirectly touch on the taboo topics are also self-censored by scholars who fear becoming pariahs.

But let’s not pretend that the problem is confined to academia or intellectuals. It infects the culture more broadly.

Freedom of expression used to be a big deal in the United States. When the Founders wrote the Bill of Rights, freedom of speech was first on the list. Americans didn’t originate “I disagree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it” (maybe Voltaire said it, maybe not), but it became part of the American credo. The celebration of freedom of expression was still in full flower in the 1950s, when a play based on the Scopes trial, Inherit the Wind, was a Broadway hit. The American Civil Liberties Union of that era was passionately absolutist about freedom of expression, defending the right of free expression for even odious groups such as neo-Nazis and the Ku Klux Klan. The lonely individual saying what he believed in the face of pressure to keep silent was a staple of American films and television drama.

Few remnants of those American themes survive. We too seldom engage our adversaries’ arguments in good faith. Often, we don’t even bother to find out what they are, attacking instead what we want them to be. When we don’t like what someone else thinks, we troll the Internet relentlessly until we find something with which to destroy that person professionally or personally — one is as good as the other. Hollywood still does films about lonely voices standing up against evil corporations or racist sheriffs, but never about lonely voices standing up against intellectual orthodoxy.

I’m sick of it. I also have no idea how to fix it. But we can light candles. Here is what I undertake to do, and I invite you to join me: Look for opportunities to praise people with whom you disagree but who have made an argument that deserves to be taken seriously. Look for opportunities to criticize allies who have used crimethink tactics against your adversaries. Identify yourself not just with those who agree with you, but with all those who stand for something and play fair.

SOURCE

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See below



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The IRS Wants You

The scandal over politicized tax enforcement is growing

President Obama famously joked in a college commencement address in 2009 that he could use the IRS to target political enemies but of course he never would. It appears that people at the Internal Revenue Service didn't think he was joking.

That's become clear since IRS Director of Exempt Organizations Lois Lerner admitted on Friday that the agency targeted conservatives for special tax-exempt scrutiny during the 2012 election season. The story has already blossomed into the latest abuse of government power, as documents show the IRS targeted tea party types and groups that specifically opposed the Obama Administration.

According to an appendix to a forthcoming Treasury Inspector General report obtained by the Journal, in June 2011 the IRS expanded its special attention to groups that met the following criteria:

 * 'Tea Party,' 'Patriots,' or '9/12 Project' is referenced in the case file.

 *  Issues include Government spending, Government debt, or taxes.

 *  Education of the public via advocacy/lobbying to 'make America a better place to live.'

 *  Statements in the case file criticize how the country is being run."

We've also learned that IRS officials knew about this earlier than they have let on. News reports suggest that Ms. Lerner knew about the targeting of conservatives in June 2011, and perhaps as early as 2010. That's a long time before IRS Commissioner Douglas Shulman flatly denied any political targeting when he testified at a House Ways and Means subcommittee hearing in March 2012.

IRS officials are still claiming that the questions weren't meant to intimidate these groups. But the evidence that the inquiries were political is already voluminous.

The IRS sent questionnaires to conservative groups that included requests for everything from the resumes of directors past and present to whether an employee or employee family member had plans to run for public office. Cincinnati Tea Party founder Justin Binik-Thomas wrote in the Washington Examiner recently that one nonprofit received a questionnaire that demanded that it "Provide details regarding your relationship with Justin Binik-Thomas."

According to the American Center for Law and Justice, which represents some of the IRS targets, the IRS letters did not come only from the Cincinnati office (as Ms. Lerner implied on Friday), but also from IRS offices in Laguna Niguel and El Monte in California as well as from Washington D.C. In addition to intrusive questionnaires, the groups were subjected to unusual delays in obtaining tax-exempt status. Of the law center's 27 clients, 15 were approved, two withdrew out of frustration and 10 are still pending.

Some Democrats took to the airwaves on the weekend to suggest that while the IRS shouldn't have been targeting conservatives, no one was harmed.

The harm is in fact real, if hard to measure precisely, because any missive from the IRS is enough to chill political spending and speech. Answering the IRS questionnaires can take hundreds of hours. The Jefferson Area Tea Party dropped its plan to register as a 501(c)(4) to avoid the atmosphere of intimidation.

Asked about the IRS news on Monday, Mr. Obama said that "if in fact IRS personnel" targeted conservatives, that would be "outrageous" and those responsible would be held "accountable." That's nice to hear, but he was making conditional what the IRS has already admitted, which is not as bad as what we are learning it really did.

Our Kimberley Strassel reported last year that Idaho businessman and Mitt Romney donor Frank VanderSloot was first maligned publicly by an Obama campaign website as disreputable, and then was mysteriously targeted by the IRS and the Labor Department for audits. The press corps ignored that ugly coincidence and no one to our knowledge was punished.

In other words, there is a pattern here. Oppose the Obama Administration or liberal priorities, and you too can become an IRS target.

SOURCE

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Obama unmasked

Friday’s bombshell admission that the IRS has been targeting political opponents since 2010 may have been trumped on Monday as it was revealed that the Obama Justice Department used its immense information gathering power against Associated Press reporters.

What a disaster for the Obama administration.

Now more than ever, Obama needs his media partners to rally the wagons against those who are trying to learn whether their failure to act caused the deaths of four Americans in the attack on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi, Libya.

Yet, at this very time of need, Holder's Justice Department may have turned Obama’s media allies against him.

It is one thing when that weird Tea Party kid you don’t like gets bullied. The media can rationalize that he deserved it for having radical pro-constitutional government views. But it is quite another when your buddies get a heavy dose of Obama’s Big Brother government. At that point, something has to be done.

AP President and CEO Gary Pruitt sent a warning to the media that this can happen to you when he called the Obama administration’s actions a, “massive and unprecedented intrusion” into how news organizations gather the news.

Pruitt went on to explain the devastating impact of the Justice Department's actions, writing,

    “There can be no possible justification for such an overbroad collection of the telephone communications of The Associated Press and its reporters. These records potentially reveal communications with confidential sources across all of the newsgathering activities undertaken by the AP during a two-month period, provide a road map to AP’s newsgathering operations and disclose information about AP’s activities and operations that the government has no conceivable right to know.”

A little truth to the formerly complicit Fourth Estate: The actions of the Justice Department are a direct attack on your ability to protect sources, develop stories and have those you speak with have any expectation that their anonymity will be preserved.

If Richard Nixon had Eric Holder doing his bidding at Justice, Deep Throat’s identity would not have remained a secret for more than 30 years, and it is likely few would have ever heard of Woodward and Bernstein.

Every reporter instinctively knows this, and their willingness to turn a blind eye toward Obama’s Chicago way of governing has hopefully been irrevocably shattered.

The first test will not be the IRS story that everyone in D.C. is scrambling to uncover. Instead, it is Benghazi.

Yesterday, the media were subjected to a standard Obama Jedi mind trick when he declared, “There’s no there, there,” referencing the Benghazi hearing in the House last week.

Now the only question is will the media go back to their mesmerized state of awestruck obedience, or will they wake up and do their jobs?

How aggressively they pursue Benghazi will provide the answer. The ball is in the media's court.

SOURCE

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Socialist French President faces fresh pressure as France plunges back into recession

France plunged back into recession last night exactly a year after Francois Hollande took office, piling more misery on the beleaguered socialist president.  Figures showed the single currency’s second largest economy shrank by 0.2 per cent in the first three months of the year.  As it shrank by the same amount in the final three months of 2012, it means France has experienced a double-dip recession – after the economy contracted in 2009 when the banking crisis sparked the deepest global slump since the Second World War.

Mr Hollande is the most unpopular president in French history, according to opinion polls. He has often been criticised for his handling of the economy, ridiculed for attempting and failing to introduce a 75 per cent tax on the wealthiest, and lampooned for his personal life and his relationship with partner Valerie Trierweiler.

Under the tenure of the tax-and-spend Left-winger, the country has seen unemployment soar and business confidence drop. Unemployment in France has reached 3.22 million, or 10.6 per cent, the worst since 1997. Youth unemployment is  25.4 per cent.

SOURCE

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

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

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Progressive Group Admits IRS Gave Them Conservative Groups' Confidential Documents

This goes from bad to worse

Now that the public is fully aware of the IRS’s corrupt practices back in 2012 election cycle, more information is coming to light by the minute. We have now become aware that not only did the IRS scrutinize tea party groups more than others, but they also leaked some of that info to liberal groups. “The progressive-leaning investigative journalism group ProPublica says the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) office that targeted and harassed conservative tax-exempt groups during the 2012 election cycle gave the progressive group nine confidential applications of conservative groups whose tax-exempt status was pending.”

Although this is a surprising admission, it is a commendable one from one of our liberal counterparts. The group said:

    "The same IRS office that deliberately targeted conservative groups applying for tax-exempt status in the run-up to the 2012 election released nine pending confidential applications of conservative groups to ProPublica late last year... In response to a request for the applications for 67 different nonprofits last November, the Cincinnati office of the IRS sent ProPublica applications or documentation for 31 groups. Nine of those applications had not yet been approved—meaning they were not supposed to be made public. (We made six of those public, after redacting their financial information, deeming that they were newsworthy.)"

The group also says that they did not receive any information on pending applications for liberal groups during the cycle. ProPublica is a well-known liberal group, with many donors following the Democratic Party lines.

The House Ways and Means Committee is set to have a formal hearing on the IRS conservative targeting scandal next week. Top officials from that organization will be making an appearance to testify.

SOURCE

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The Heretic at Heritage

Pat Buchanan

Jason Richwine, the young conservative scholar who co-authored the Heritage Foundation report on the long-term costs of the amnesty bill backed by the "Gang of Eight," is gone from Heritage.

He was purged after The Washington Post unearthed his doctoral dissertation at the JFK School of Government.

Richwine's thesis:

IQ tests fairly measure mental ability. The average IQ of immigrants is well below that of white Americans. This difference in IQ is likely to persist through several generations.

And the potential consequences of this?

"A lack of socioeconomic assimilation among low IQ immigrant groups, more underclass behavior, less social trust and an increase in the proportion of unskilled workers in the American labor market."

Richwine defended his 166-page thesis before Harvard's George Borjas, Richard Zeckhauser and Christopher Jencks, who once edited The New Republic. But while his thesis was acceptable at Harvard -- it earned Richwine a Ph.D. -- it has scandalized the Potomac priesthood.

Our elites appear unanimous: Richwine's view that intelligence is not equally distributed among ethnic and racial groups, and is partly inherited, is rankest heresy. Yet no one seems to want to prove him wrong.

Consider Richwine's contention that differences in mental ability exist and seem to persist among racial and ethnic groups.

In The Wall Street Journal last month, Warren Kozak noted that 28,000 students in America's citadel of diversity, New York City, took the eighth-grade exam to enter Stuyvesant, the Bronx School of Science and Brooklyn Tech, the city's most elite high schools. Students are admitted solely on their entrance test scores.

Of the 830 students who will be entering Stuyvesant as freshmen this fall, 1 percent are black, 3 percent are Hispanic, 21 percent are white -- and 75 percent are Asian.

Now, blacks and Hispanics far outnumber Asians in New York. But at Stuyvesant, Asians will outnumber blacks and Hispanics together 19-to-1.

Is this the result of racially biased tests at Stuyvesant?

At Berkeley, crown jewel of the California university system, Hispanics, 40 percent of California's population and an even larger share of California's young, are 12 percent of the freshman class. Asians, outnumbered almost 3-to-1 by Hispanics in California, have almost four times as many slots as Hispanics in the freshman class. Another example of racial bias?

The 2009 Programme for International Student Assessment, PISA, which measures the academic ability of 15-year-olds worldwide, found the U.S.A. falling to 17th in reading, 23rd in science, 31st in math.

Yet, Spain aside, not one Hispanic nation, from which a plurality of our immigrants come, was among the top 40 in reading, science or math.

But these folks are going to come here and make us No. 1 again?

Is there greater "underclass behavior" among Hispanics?

The crime rate among Hispanics is about three times that of white Americans, while the Asian crime rate is about a third that of whites.

Among white folks, the recent illegitimacy rate was 28 percent; among Hispanics, 53 percent. According to one study a few years back, Hispanics were 19 times as likely as whites to join gangs.

What about Richwine's point regarding "social trust"?

Six years ago, in "E Pluribus Unum: Diversity and Community in the 21st Century," Robert Putnam, author of "Bowling Alone," wrote that after 30,000 interviews he found that ethnic and racial diversity can be devastating to communities and destructive of community values.

In racially mixed communities, Putnam wrote, not only do people not trust strangers, they do not even trust their own kind.

"People living in ethnically diverse settings appear to 'hunker down,' that is, to pull in like a turtle ... (to) withdraw even from close friends, to expect the worst from their community and its leaders, to volunteer less, give less to charity and work on community projects less often, to register to vote less, to agitate for social reform more but have less faith they can actually make a difference, and to huddle unhappily in front of the television."

With the immigration bill granting amnesty to 12 million illegals, an open door to their dependents and a million new immigrants each year, almost all from the Third World, America in 2040 is going to look like Los Angeles today. Yet, it was in L.A. that Putnam found social capital at its most depleted and exhausted.

If Richwine is right, America in 2040 will be a country with whites and Asians dominating the professions, and 100 million Hispanics concentrated in semiskilled work and manual labor.

The issues Richwine raises go to the question of whether we shall survive as one nation and one people.

If our huge bloc of Hispanics, already America's largest minority at 53 million, is fed by constant new immigration, but fails for a couple of generations to reach the middle-class status that Irish, Germans, Jews, Italians and Poles attained after two generations, what becomes of our "indivisible" nation?

Rather than face this question, better to purge and silence the Harvard extremist who dared to raise it.

SOURCE

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The licensing effect

Green/Left "hypocrisy" explained

Good intentions rarely make good laws. Those who do evil almost always think they are doing good for goodness’ sake. Nobody sees himself as evil. As Will Smith, the American actor, once quipped, “Even Hitler didn’t wake up going, ‘let me do the most evil thing I can do today.’ I think he woke up in the morning and using a twisted, backwards logic, he set out to do what he thought was ‘good.’” Friedrich Hayek took this idea a step further, writing: “It is indeed probable that more harm and misery have been caused by men determined to use coercion to stamp out a moral evil than by men intent on doing evil.”1

There is little to prevent do–gooders and their actions from unexpectedly metamorphosing into holocaustic bloodbaths, especially when considering the “licensing effect.” Under this effect, people can rationalize bad conduct, if they first do something good. Whether in dieting, consumer choice, or politicking, the licensing effect permits people to be wicked after they have performed something deemed good.

According to Dale Miller, a psychology professor at Stanford Business School, “With licensing, the first act doesn’t commit you, it liberates you.” This liberating euphoria permits the human psyche to do what it supposedly is against. Miller’s experiments uncovered business managers who publicly declared their lack of bias in hiring minorities, for instance, but in practice showed a strong prejudice against minorities. Since these managers had declared their support for minorities, they were now free to be extremely biased.2

A major study by a sociologist at the University of Arizona exposed the twisted dilemmas and unintended consequences of the licensing effect. The 2007 study provided clear analytical evidence of the ineffectiveness of involuntary diversity training in the workplace. It would be reasonable to presume that by the late 20th Century, encouraging diversity within the workplace had become an easy sell. But after reviewing 31 years of data from 830 mid–sized and large corporations, sociologist Alexandra Kalev concluded that involuntary diversity training was “ineffective and counterproductive.”

How counterproductive? The figures are shocking. A comprehensive review of data revealed that those businesses’ mandated diversity training exercises for their managerial staff were followed by a “7.5 percent drop in the number of women in management.” For black female managers, the decrease was 10 percent, with a 12 percent drop for black men. “The effect was similar for Latinos and Asians.”3 So what is going on?

This study shows that mandatory enforcements routinely backfire, because they are set up with unrealistic and artificial expectations. Real change comes when people voluntarily modify their opinions. Any other way makes people feel that they have been imposed upon. Professor Kalev confirmed this reality by noting: “When attendance is voluntary, diversity training is followed by an increase in managerial diversity.”4

When companies with government contracts are put under the gun to teach diversity, managers get the impression that, having taken a course, they’ve performed their good–citizen duty. They’ve been trained by experts to be a lean, mean antidiscrimination machine. And yet, the sacrifice they made in taking the compulsory training shouts out for compensation. They have been put upon to do something good. They have spent long, boring hours in the classroom. They can now subconsciously overlook or avoid the hiring of minorities. In Kalev’s words, “Forcing people to go through training creates a backlash against diversity.”5

Many corporations also bring diversity training into the workplace for legal protection. In this case, the training becomes an exercise in public and legal relations, instead of reaching toward true, long–term change. After all, companies understand that their diversity training bestows some legal protection, if later they are hit by a discrimination lawsuit. In short, preventing lawsuits is more important than efficacious training. Bill Vaughn, cofounder of Diversity Training University International, confirms what the study foreshadowed. “If they are doing it for legal protection, they don’t care whether their training is successful.

The licensing effect affords us an explanation for a time–honored way to justify violating principles. For instance, if someone is always condemning greed, he is now entitled to a binge of overt self–indulgence. Having cleared his conscience of any avarice, he can waltz into a Mercedes–Benz showroom and splurge like a rapacious man of wealth. Further, he can brand others as greedy SOBs while taking comfort in the fact that the saintly blood of altruism flows through his own noble veins. For the virtuous, to act self–centered is impossible, as such behavior is unthinkable to the enlightened mind; therefore, narcissistic greed can run wild. Habitually, the greediest are blissfully unaware of their own selfish motives.

In an interesting article in Psychological Science, two researchers argued that people who feel morally virtuous have a tendency to engage in the “licensing (of) selfish and morally questionable behavior,” also known as “moral balancing” or “compensatory ethics.” The researchers, Canadian psychologists Nina Mazar and Chen–Bo Zhong, revealed that when people try to save the planet or do noble deeds, they become less kind to others and more likely to cheat and steal. They wrote: “Virtuous acts can license subsequent asocial and unethical behavior.”

 The licensing effect is also found among public employee unions who act as if they still represent government employees receiving little compensation for their work. For over 150 years, that was true of American civil servants, but no longer. According to economist Chris Edwards, “As of 2008, the average federal salary was $119,982, compared with $59,909 for the average private sector employee. In other words, the average federal bureaucrat makes twice as much as the average working taxpayer.”8 Despite this disparity in pay between the public and private sectors, the political and bureaucratic classes routinely accuse opponents of greed. They condemn tax–averse corporations and taxpayers as selfish pigs obsessed with money. And yet, as columnist Steven Greenhut observed: “there are few things as greedy as running up debt and lobbying for more taxes from the peons so that an elite class can keep retiring earlier with ever–greater pension and other benefits.”

But this greedy disposition is just the tip of a bloating iceberg. Many government and union–operated retirement programs have no qualms about taking big risks in the stock market. Why? Because the political class always holds the winning hand. Applying a Las Vegas metaphor, Greenhut asked: How would you bet if you could keep all your gains at the casino, but dump your losses on someone else? But this is exactly how many of these public retirement systems operate. If a Public Employees’ Retirement System (PERS) fails to make a profit, the taxpaying public is often responsible for making up the deficiencies. So, who are the real greedy profiteers here?

In the electoral politics realm, the licensing effect grants politicos the prerogative to flip–flop their principles. When President Richard Nixon, fervently anticommunist, visited Red China in the 1970s, political pundits came up with a proverbial apothegm: “Only Nixon could go to China.” Fluent in altruistic doublespeak, those in control of command–based systems rely on the fulcrum of well–respected virtues. Since they are public servants—supposedly hired to serve up healthy scoops of community goodwill—they find themselves confronted with a license to act contrary to stated purposes. This situation supplies a politico the license to sabotage principles of good governance by becoming a player in society, instead of a referee.

More HERE

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

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

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Misuse of the IRS  by the Obama administration

IRS also targeted the Freedom Center‏ run by the outspoken David Horowitz.  David comments:

And now, on top of everything else—the appeasement of Islamic terror, Obamacare and other aspects of the "radical transformation" of our domestic society—this White House has turned the IRS loose on Americans it regards as enemies.

While it was too cowardly to confront the terrorists who killed our ambassador and three other Americans in Benghazi, the Obama administration has had no trouble, we now learn, going after conservative non profits with "patriot" and "tea party" in their official names. And just for good measure, the administration has also set the IRS on some Jewish organizations it thinks might be hostile to its anti Israel agenda and on groups that are trying to fight against the spread of big government.

We know how these conservative groups targeted by the White House feel. Our name doesn't include "tea party" or "patriot," but it does have the word "freedom" and maybe that's considered just as dangerous by the White House because we too were recently audited by the IRS.

The Center sailed through, not a mark to our record and we are proud of that. But, as those of you who have been subject to an IRS audit know, it was a time consuming and financially draining process. The IRS bureaucrats demanded reams of paperwork and records; they tried to intimidate us with a generalized interrogation that called to mind the famous comment of Laventri Beria, head of Stalin's secret police: "Bring me the man, and I'll find the crime." But they were never able to tell us exactly why we were being subjected to this treatment.

Perhaps a reason why the IRS was on the Freedom Center's case was that we publish FrontPageMagazine, which has called the President out for appeasing terror, and DiscoverTheNetworks, which has created an encyclopedia of the left showing how the progressive conspiracy that elected the President operates. Perhaps the IRS had taken note of the series of pamphlets we have published critical of the character and agenda of the current administration, most recently David Horowitz's How Obama Betrayed America, a shocking look at our foreign policy has itself become anti American.

That we and other conservative groups were targeted by the goons at the IRS for creating the robust debate about ideas that keeps our nation free should make us all shudder. We thought the days of government "enemies lists" were over. But we were not intimidated and we hope that other conservative organizations weren't either.

The IRS scandal is just beginning, but it has already proved one thing: that this administration is trying to silence exactly those groups who are telling the American people the truth about its sinister policies. If we submit to this coercion, we weaken our country's immune system to despotism.

Via email

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A bit of fun



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The Victorians were smarter than us, study suggests

Reaction times are far from the best measure of IQ but they are important so a decline in them is certainly cause for concern -- JR

The Victorians achieved so much because they were cleverer than us, a new study suggests.

Reaction times – a reliable marker of general intelligence – have declined steadily since the Victorian era from about 183 milliseconds to 250ms in men, and from 187ms to 277ms in women.

The slowing of our reflexes points to a decrease in general intelligence equivalent to 1.23 IQ points per decade since the 1880s or about 14 IQ points overall, researchers said.

Actual IQ scores from different decades cannot be directly compared because people today enjoy better teaching, health and nutrition which would help improve their results, the scientists explained.

But the reaction times signify that the genetic component of general intelligence – which leads to the type of creativity and invention typical of the Victorian era – has been dwindling over the past century.

Dr Michael Woodley, who led the study published in the Intelligence journal this month, identified the trend by comparing reaction times from trials conducted by Victorian scientists against those carried out in recent decades.

Our declining intelligence is most likely down to a "reverse" in the process of natural selection, he explained. The most intelligent people now have fewer children on average than in previous decades, while there are higher survival rates among people with less favourable genes.

"The pressures of modern life, a nine-to-five modern lifestyle, have created all these pressures against very smart people having break-even numbers of children," he said.

SOURCE

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Why health insurance makes no difference to many Americans

John C. Goodman points out that the poor already get healthcare and that government insurance mostly makes it harder to  see a doctor

Within the White House, within the Democratic chambers in Congress and among the (overwhelmingly liberal) health policy community there was considerable anguish last week. The reason: a new study finds that (as far as physical health is concerned) there is no difference between being in Medicaid and being uninsured.

It’s hard to exaggerate what a blow this is to the people who gave us the Affordable Care Act (ObamaCare). Everything about ObamaCare—from the money we are spending to the damage being done to the labor market to the hassles the whole nation is going through—depends on one central idea: that enrolling people in Medicaid will give them access to better health. (Tens of thousands of lives will be saved every year, the president told us.)

It gets worse. Beginning next year, ObamaCare is expected to newly insure about 34 million people. About half of these will enroll in Medicaid. The other half are supposed to get their insurance in health insurance exchanges, where most will qualify for generous premium subsidies paid for by federal taxpayers. If the Massachusetts health reform is precedent, however, these people will be in health plans that pay doctors only about 10 percent morethan what Medicaid pays. Think of these plans as Medicaid Plus.

Yet, if Medicaid doesn’t make people any healthier than they were when they were uninsured, that implies that the entire ObamaCare program could be one huge waste of money.

(Actually, the results weren’t a complete disappointment. There was less depression among the Medicaid enrollees; they reported that they were a tiny bit happier; and among those who had out-of-pocket expenses, they spent about $215 less out of pocket each year. But, remember, we could have reimbursed out-of-pocket spending and spent far less than was actually spent on this program.)

Aaron Carroll and Austin Frakt argue that the study may have been “underpowered”—failing to show significant effects because there were too few people in each disease category. However, as the Wall Street Journal editorial page pointed out, if this were a drug, it would fail to get FDA approval.

The study released last week is not the first to find that enrollees in Medicaid do no better than the uninsured. In fact there are studies that show that Medicaid enrollees find it more difficult to get a doctor’s appointment and have worse outcomes than the uninsured. Each of these studies has been subjected to a lot of nitpicking on various grounds, however, and a fair-minded person would probably have to say that how much difference Medicaid makes is an open question.

Until now. Thanks to a budget crunch in Oregon, scholars had the ability to do a double-blind study (the gold standard for researchers) and it came out very, very badly for the supporters of the new health reform law.

The study doesn’t speculate on the reasons for its findings, but I will.

The uninsured in this country have access to a patch work system of free care when they are unable to pay for it out of their own pockets. In Dallas, Texas, where I live, for example, the entire county is part of a health district which makes indigent health care available to needy families. It covers people up to 250% of the poverty level, with sliding scale co-payments, based on family income. Parkland Memorial Hospital and its satellite clinics is the primary provider.

You could argue that uninsured, low-income families in Dallas are actually “insured” in this way, although they face the problems of rationing by waiting and other non-price barriers to care. Officially, they are counted as “uninsured,” however. When these very same individuals enroll in Medicaid, they enter another system of patchwork care and are classified as “insured.” However, a third of the doctors aren’t taking any new Medicaid patients. There is rationing by waiting in Medicaid along with its non-price barriers to care. Often, the uninsured and Medicaid enrollees are getting the same care from the same doctors at the same facilities—even though one group is labeled “insured” and the other “uninsured.”

Here is what I wrote in the Handbook on State Health Reform:

    "Consider the case of Parkland Memorial Hospital in Dallas, Texas. Both uninsured and Medicaid patients enter the same emergency room door and see the same doctors. The hospital rooms are the same, the beds are the same and the care is the same.

    As a result, patients have no reason to fill out the lengthy forms and answer the intrusive questions that Medicaid enrollment so often requires. Furthermore, the doctors and nurses who treat these patients are paid the same, regardless of patients’ enrollment in an insurance plan. Therefore, they tend to be indifferent about who is insured by whom, or if they’re even insured at all. In fact, the only people concerned about who is or is not enrolled in what plan are hospital administrators, who worry about who will pay the bills.

    At Children’s Medical Center, next door to Parkland, a similar exercise takes place. Medicaid, S-CHIP and uninsured children all enter the same emergency room door; they all see the same doctors and receive the same care.

    Interestingly, at both institutions, paid staffers make a heroic effort to enroll people in public programs — even as patients wait in the emergency room for medical care. Yet they apparently fail to enroll eligible patients more than half the time! After patients are admitted, staffers valiantly go from room to room to continue this bureaucratic exercise. But even among those in hospital beds, the failure-to-enroll rate is significant — apparently because it has no impact on the care they receive [or the financial burden they incur]."

If what happens in Dallas is similar to other cities, “insuring the uninsured” is not going to make a great deal of difference anywhere.

For the country as a whole, one third of all people who are eligible for Medicaid have not bothered to enroll, indicating that millions of potential beneficiaries do not view the program as very valuable. In Oregon, the situation is even more dramatic. As Avik Roy explains:

    "Of the 35,169 Oregonians who “won” the lottery to gain enrollment in Medicaid, only about 30 percent actually enrolled. Indeed, only 60 percent of those who were selected bothered to fill out the forms necessary to sign up for the benefits — which tells you a bit about how uninsured Oregonians perceive the Medicaid program.

Consider Massachusetts. RomneyCare cut the official “uninsurance” rate in half. But it created no new doctors or nurses or clinics. As far as I can tell, the same people are going to the same places and getting pretty much the same care that they got before. Hospital emergency room traffic is higher than ever. The traffic to the community health centers has changed very little.

But since they have expanded health insurance in Massachusetts, the demand for care has grown, even as the supply has remained unchanged. As a result, the time price of care has increased. The wait to see a new doctor in Boston is two months ― the longest waiting time in the entire country. People are getting the same care they got before, but they are paying a higher “price” for it.

I expect to see the Massachusetts results replicated nationwide.

In the developed world, the health policy community is excessively focused on health insurance, even to the point of ignoring health care. In fact, studies of waiting times and inability to get care are often derided as right wing attempts to undermine the concept of social insurance. The less developed world has the opposite vision. Almost all the countries south of our border generally offer free care to the general population. But they don’t go around handing everyone an insurance card.

I believe this difference in vision is partly explained by the difference in income and wealth. Middle- and upper-middle income families need insurance to protect their assets. Poor families don’t have assets. They don’t need insurance. They may need health care, however.

ObamaCare was designed by middle- and upper-middle income people. They chose for poor people the same thing they would want for themselves. They didn’t think about access to care because they have never had a personal problem with it.

C’est la vie.

SOURCE

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Memo to Christian Troops: ‘We’ve Got Your Back’

President Obama’s Pentagon recently released a statement threatening military personnel: “Religious proselytization is not permitted within the Department of Defense … Court Martials and nonjudicial punishments are decided on a case-by-case basis.”

Although the Pentagon has walked back its new anti-Christian “proselytizing” policy within the realm of public relations (a policy drafted in concert with foul-mouthed atheist and anti-Christian bigot Mikey Weinstein) the DoD has yet to offer evidence that it intends to walk it back within the realm of application.

And so, to any member of the armed services who is harassed, demeaned, reprimanded or charged by this Obama Pentagon with obeying Jesus – with endeavoring to “recruit or convert” others to His exclusive saving grace – we at Liberty Counsel are delighted to say, “We’ve Got your back!” Free of charge. Pro bono legal defense.

How are we able to do this? Through the generous financial and prayer support of more than 1.2 million Liberty Counsel donors and supporters.

SOURCE

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

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

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The doctor is in, America: Get with the Estonian program

Don’t let the optimism surrounding last month’s job numbers fool you. The unemployment rate’s decline from 7.6 percent in March to 7.5 percent in April is more statistical artifact than progress.  Like that of our Western European neighbors—and the U.K. in particular—the U.S. economy is stuck in a rut. Why? The answer is simple. Government profligacy overburdens the economy while propping up private inefficiencies, as I explain in Investors Business Daily.

    Since 2008, Washington policymakers have been pacing around the doctor’s office too afraid to take the bitter but effective pill America needs: slash federal spending and end the U.S. Fed’s life support for zombie banks.

    Economically stagnant Britain shows us where this continued procrastination leads. Instead of dashing after our tea-drinking transatlantic neighbors, American policymakers should look to Estonia, which took its austerity meds and quickly returned to prosperity.

Although media relentlessly talks of supposed “austerity” in the U.K. and the rest of Europe, cuts to spending and taxation are starkly absent in budget data. That is, of course, until looking to Estonia.

    In the four quarters following the British government’s announcement of austerity in June 2010, general government spending increased by 4.3%, a rate of growth that has increased since then.  Some “austerity.”

    Whitehall also has been squeezing more taxes out of British citizens, with revenues increasing by 7.8% the first year and the rate of growth shooting up into double digits the next two.

    And the Bank of England’s balance sheet has grown 334% since September 2008, as it’s tried to prop up bad assets held at London banks.

    For a better way forward, let’s look at Estonia, which took its medicine as soon as the global financial crisis broke. It cut government spending relative to its pre-crisis level drastically — 2.8% in 2009 and 9.5% in 2010 — and is now one of Europe’s fastest growing economies.

    Tax revenues fell, too. Moreover, Estonia’s central bank refused to prop up banks that shipwrecked on the rocks of a real estate bubble.

Unsurprisingly, Estonia has had greater net economic gains since 2008 and is set to outpace the U.K. into the future.

Austerity works, but as the case of Estonia shows, it must be real austerity. In order to facilitate the natural market process of resources moving to their most efficient use, the public sector must shrink as the private endures recession. Government must not continue to gorge itself on a smarting private economy while simultaneously propping up its inefficiencies.

SOURCE

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The Mecca Metric -- keeping track of what is being preached to Muslims is important

How to protect Americans from jihadist violence

All around America, people are waking up to the fact that Islam can inspire Muslims to kill civilians. Examples:

 *  Bill Maher: “I mean there’s only one faith, for example, that kills you or wants to kill you if you draw a bad cartoon of the Prophet. There’s only one faith that kills you or wants to kill you if you renounce the faith. [...] Now, obviously, most Muslim people are not terrorists. But ask most Muslim people in the world — if you insult the Prophet, do you have what’s coming to you? It’s more than just a fringe element.”

 *  Andrew Sullivan: “[Boston bomber] Tamerlan’s brain was damaged by religious fanaticism and fundamentalism.”

 *  The Associated Press: “BOSTON BOMB SUSPECT CHARGED; RELIGIOUS MOTIVE SEEN.”

The question is often asked, “What percentage of Muslims wish to carry out, or condone violence against civilians in the name of Islam?” A frequent assumption behind the question is that because an unknown percentage of Muslims does not do so, it would of course be wrong to deport all Muslims, and therefore — and this is the key point — nothing can be done to protect the U.S. from Islamic jihadists.

We Americans are used to thinking in terms of a single new law or a single new policy to take action for the public good.  But to protect Americans from Islamic jihadists will take a different approach. It will not be a single new law or a single new policy that achieves this goal. It will be a marathon, over a number of years, of new laws and new policies, new awareness and new attitudes, that will do so.

New awareness and attitudes often come before legislation. Before we even begin to consider specific new laws, it may be helpful to begin with awareness, attitudes, and policies that do not require the force of law.

One possible place to begin is with public naming and shaming of mosques that encourage Muslims to support, condone, and pursue violent jihad. Investor’s Business Daily provides an example with the article “Bombers’ Mosque In Boston A Factory For Terrorists.” USA Today provides another example with the article “Mosque that Boston suspects attended has radical ties.” Fox News has an article stating, “The mosque where at least one of the two suspected Boston Marathon bombers prayed has a controversial history, with ties to the Muslim Brotherhood, terror funding and frequent fiery sermons, according to a group that has long monitored the house of worship.”

Another possible place to begin would be to rigorously quantify and analyze relevant information. One example would be to examine what might be called the Mecca Metric. This is a measurement of what imams at mosques preach to congregations of Muslims gathered there for religious guidance:

 *  What percentage of these imams preach that Islam is a peaceful religion?

 *  What percentage of these imams preach that the September 11 hijackers violated Islam and did not go to Islamic paradise?

 *  What percentage of these imams preach that Major Nidal Hasan, who killed 13 fellow soldiers at Fort Hood, violated Islam?

 *  What percentage of these imams preach that the Boston Marathon bombers violated Islam?

 *  How many imams will accept a challenge to include such a message every single time they preach?

 *  How many imams will assist by releasing video of their weekly preaching? If imams will not do so at this time, when 30 of the FBI’s 31 most wanted terrorists are Muslim, why not?

The Mecca Metric is relevant because an Internet search for what imams say at mosques currently reveals imams preaching hatred, killing, jihad, and death to congregations of Muslims who gather at mosques for religious guidance. Conversely, an Internet search currently reveals few if any instances of imams preaching peace. I have yet to discover any imams preaching at mosques that the September 11 hijackers, or Major Nidal Hasan, or the Boston bombers violated Islam.

Note that the Mecca Metric does not include statements made to the press, at interfaith events, or otherwise to the non-Islamic public by imams or by organizations such as CAIR or MPAC. Such statements are made explicitly for PR purposes. Islam apologists often take refuge behind such statements. But these PR statements mean nothing if they aren’t repeated day after day, week after week, month after month by imams at mosques to congregations of Muslims.

Establishing the Mecca Metric can help evaluate the degree to which Islam in America is in fact peaceful. A higher percentage of imams preaching peace would indicate a higher degree of peacefulness.

Those are just two suggestions for ways to begin. There are doubtless many more. Protecting Americans from jihadist violence will be a marathon, not a sprint.

SOURCE

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Grave robbers: Anti-competitive regulations for the dead

The monks of St. Joseph Abbey in Covington, Louisiana leave this world in the same simple way as they live in it.

And when public interest in their basic, handmade wooden caskets grew, the monks proved to have a shrewd business sense too. They opened a woodworking shop in 2005 to produce caskets that they sell for about $2,000 each, far below the average price for a casket in the state.

But where the monks saw an opportunity, a state cartel of funeral home owners and funeral directors saw unwanted competition.

In 2007, the Louisiana State Board of Embalmers and Funeral Directors—eight of the nine members of which are licensed funeral directors—voted to ban the abbey from selling their caskets, because under state law only licensed funeral directors are allowed to sell caskets, and they are only allowed to do so from state-licensed funeral homes.

Those two simple requirements buried the monks in a tangle of red tape.

To get a license, St. Joseph Abbey would have to build a funeral parlor with room for 30 people, a display room for at least six caskets, an arrangement room and an embalming room. They also would have had to hire a funeral director and pay him a full-time salary.

The monks launched a petition to the state legislature to change the regulations. When that failed, they took the board to court.

In March, a panel of federal judges upheld a lower court ruling in the monks’ favor. In a scathing rebuke to the state board, the judges of the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals wrote that “funeral homes, not independent sellers, have been the problem for consumers with their bundling of product and markups of caskets.”

The casket-selling laws in Louisiana are unique, but there are regulations on the books in almost every state designed to protect funeral homes from competition and lower prices.

Joshua Slocum is the executive director of the Funeral Consumers Alliance, a Vermont-based organization that favors a more open market for funeral providers and customers. He says the funeral industry is unlike most other businesses in two key ways.

“For one, there are no repeat customers,” Slocum says glibly. “I have but one life to give to my funeral director.”

No repeat customers mean little in way of competition for the best services. And since literally everyone has one life to give, there is no shortage of customers.

There is also little market pressure on the establishments because it is rare for anyone to “shop around” for a funeral home in the way they might seek the best deal for a cruise or any other once-in-a-lifetime purchase.

This is partially psychological—we have a natural aversion to thinking or talking about the inevitable end of our lives, and cost is rarely in the front of mourning family members’ minds.

But does a dead body’s final moments above ground or a family’s last good-byes to loved ones require a three-story Victorian home, a $30,000 embalming room, a Mercedes hearse and a $4,000 casket?  In most places, you’d have a hard time finding an alternative.

That is slowly starting to change, thanks to entrepreneurs like Verlin Stoll, who believe there is an untapped market for affordable, no-frills funerals that would appeal to those with modest means.

Stoll opened Crescent Tides funeral home in St. Paul, Minn., in 2006. He offers low-cost funerals in a nondescript building in an office park that does not have a viewing chapel or other amenities. The basic package at Crescent Tides starts at $250, about 10 percent of the average Twin Cities funeral.

SOURCE

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Can how well we read and count at seven REALLY predict how successful we will be in later life?

Another proof that all men are not equal and that kids who are born smart get most of the prizes in life

How well we count and read aged seven can influence how successful we will be, researchers have claimed.

Edinburgh researchers analysed data from over 17,000 people in England, Scotland, and Wales over a span of about 50 years.

They found the abilities at seven predict socioeconomic status in adulthood over and above associations with intelligence, education, and socioeconomic status in childhood.

Stuart Ritchie and Timothy Bates of the University of Edinburgh said they wanted to investigate whether early math and reading skills might have effects that go beyond the classroom.

'We wanted to test whether being better at math or reading in childhood would be linked with a rise through the social ranks: a better job, better housing, and higher income as an adult,' they said.

The researchers explored these relationships using data from the National Child Development Study, a large, nationally representative study that followed over 17,000 people in England, Scotland, and Wales over a span of about 50 years, from when they were born in 1958 to present day.

The data revealed that childhood reading and math skills really do matter.  Ritchie and Bates found that participants' reading and math ability at age 7 were linked to their social class a full 35 years later.

Participants who had higher reading and math skills as children ended up having higher incomes, better housing, and better jobs in adulthood.

The data suggest, for example, that going up one reading level at age 7 was associated with a £5,000, or roughly $7,750, increase in income at age 42.

The long-term associations held even after the researchers took other common factors into account.

'These findings imply that basic childhood skills, independent of how smart you are, how long you stay in school, or the social class you started off in, will be important throughout your life,' say Ritchie and Bates.

The researchers believe that genes may play a role.  'Genes underlie many of the differences among children on all the variables we've looked at here,' they said.

'The genetically-controlled study using twins that we're conducting now should allow us to separate out genetic and environmental effects.'

The researchers hope that the twin study will illuminate the extent to which environmental interventions might strengthen the links they've identified in their current research.

SOURCE

The academic journal article is "Enduring Links From Childhood Mathematics and Reading Achievement to Adult Socioeconomic Status"

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

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

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No description of the New Orleans shooters?

Police were accompanying the parade and saw the three offenders run off and yet the reports give no whiff of a description of the perps.   I have read through every report of the shooting that Google news threw up.

I surmised that the reason for the silence might be that any reasonable attempt at description would include the word "black".   And I was right.  CBS, of all people, have breached the wall of silence.  They couldn't bear to mention the B-word but they went close. We read from them:  "Police are looking for three suspects, one of which was described the suspect as a dark skin male, 18-22 years old with short hair, a white shirt and blue jeans."  Poor grammar but real information.

I am guessing that reporting of this crime will rapidly fade away.