Access

I have been having massive problems over the last two days with getting my posts up.  Blogger.com seems to have been overloaded.  With patience I did get everything up but in case I have even bigger problems later today, I may throw in the towel.  So if there is nothing here when it should be blame blogger.com not me.  If I do give up, I will post what would have gone up here on my mirror site

America has always been Leftist

Up until fairly recently, I had always accepted fairly  uncritically the orthodox view of American history.  But as an amateur historian I do have the pesky habit of going back to the original documents behind history.  So a couple of months ago, I actually read through the Declaration of Independence.  What I read there shocked me.  It was an entirely different document from the orthodox account of it.

It has taken me a while to integrate that finding into a broader view but I think I can now present a view of American history that makes much more sense of both America's past and her present.

I was greatly helped in forming a new view by the abhorence I have always felt towards America's two civil wars (Independence and North/South).  As a former member of Australia's armed forces, I am no pacifist but I do feel that wars should be a last resort -- and that applied to neither of America's civil wars.  That was particularly clear to me because I am a citizen of a country which achieved all the objectives of America's civil wars without a shot being fired.  Warring armies have never tramped through the Australian countryside.

But to begin at the beginning:  As most Americans learn around the time of Thanksgiving, America was founded by fanatical communists.  They forbad private ownership of land and insisted that all produce be shared communally.  If that's not communism, nothing is.  They were such fanatics that a third of them had to starve to death before they decided that communism wasn't such a good idea and went back to the way things had always been done in stodgy old England.

So what should we expect of a nation dominated by the descendants of fanatical communists?  What we should expect is exactly what we actually got, I submit.

But before I get to that, let me  ensure complete clarity about what the core of Leftism is.  The content of Leftism changes from time to time.  Before WWII, Leftists world wide were energetic champions of eugenics, for instance.  Leftists now abhor it.  So what is constant in Leftism?  Anger.  Leftists in all eras are so dissatisfied with the society in which they live that they want sweeping changes to it. And they thirst for power to achieve that.  That is Leftism.

So we come back to the Declaration of Independence.  There are a variety of things in it but the centerpiece of it is the complaint that, in good communist style, the New Englanders wanted to pass lots of laws to control their fellow man but the king kept obstructing or disallowing such laws.  Whether by intent or neglect, the king was the libertarian obstructing the control freaks.  And it was over that that the Yankees went to war.  Portraying the declaration as pro-liberty is a joke.  It was pro-liberty for the elite only.  Joe Stalin call your office.

And, in case anyone is not aware of it, the resultant war was at heart a war of the Yankees versus the rest.  New York was firmly on the side of the king, for instance. It was a civil war which Yankee determination won, at the cost of 25,000 Yankee deaths.  But deaths in war never worry Leftists. Change is the thing. So the Yankee hatred of the British-dominated status quo burnt all other considerations.

And Andrew Jackson, founder of the modern Democratic party, certainly wrought big changes in the territory under his control  in the 1830s -- clearing out  American Indians and driving them to the then-far-West:  Ethnic cleansing.

And then we come to the real horror:  The North/South war.  "Only" half a million men died there.  And for what?  EVERY other country on earth abolished slavery without the need for a war.  Does that not tell us something?  It should.  In his famous letter to Horace Greeley, Lincoln himself admitted that slavery was not the main issue.  The issue was the dominance of central government.  V.I. Lenin call your office.  Lincoln didn't call it "dominance of central government", of course.  He called it "the union" but the result is the same.

And just about everythinng Lincoln did was without a shred of constitional justification and in fact breached the constitution.  Hitler at least had the grace to get an "enabling act" passed by the German parliament.  Lincoln just marched on regardless. He destroyed the liberty of the press (there goes your first amendment) and locked up thousands of war opponents (there goes your 4th amendment).  But most centrally, Lincoln's whole enterprise was a defiance of the basic American constitutional dispensation that the states are sovereign, not the federal government.  Lincoln turned that on its head.  The feds now became the main source of power and authority.  There is no doubt that Lincoln talked a good talk.  He even used to persuade me once.  But his deeds reek of Fascism.

A good example of the large gap between his deeds and words is that masterpiece of propaganda, the Gettysburg address.  Goebbels admired it for good reason.  In case anybody hasn't noticed, Lincoln claimed that his war was to ensure "government of the people, by the people, for the people" -- which was exactly what he had just denied to the South!  Only Yankees are people, apparently.  Hitler thought certain groups weren't people too.

And then we have two world wars.  WWI had nothing to do with America but power-mad Democrat President Wilson got America into it any way.  He had such fun influencing the eventual re-arrangement of Europe.

And FDR was worse if anything.  He subjected Japan to crippling sanctions until an attack on America seemed the only way forward to them. Anything else would have been an intolerable loss of "face".  So FDR got his war.  For political purposes he once declared "I hate war" but some at least of his biographers believe that he pined for the publicity and power that a war would give him.

But what about the era of US/Soviet rivalry?  Was America Leftist then?  It was.  Top-rate taxes were enormous, for instance.  But the USSR was even more Leftist.  The Russian peasants who fought for its creation were even angrier -- for good reason -- than the Yankee grandees of George III's time, so the changes in Russia were very sweeping indeed.   And Leftists are very hostile people  -- even to followers of other brands of Leftism.  Note the icepick in the head that Leon Trotsky got from Joe Stalin.

I could go on but does the dominance of political correctness in America today now seem surprising?  It is not.  It is just another of the many forms of Leftism that America has produced and will continue to produce.  And, unfortunately, the rest of the world has followed America, as it often does.  As goes California so goes the whole world eventually.

So what is the secret of America's outstanding success in many fields?  Leftists are usually not much good at producing prosperity so what gives?

It's simple.  America is a huge beneficiary of the fact that it has Federal elections every two years.  So if you get a bungling legislature in power  you soon get the opportunity to boot them out.  Britain, by contrast, has to wait five years to get rid of an incompetent or destructive government.

And Americans are not in fact unusually prosperous.  So many Americans have their knees under government desks that the productive element of the population is much reduced  -- with the result that quite a few countries have per head incomes higher than America.  According to the CIA, there are 13 countries with higher PPP incomes per head than America.  Be that as it may, however, America is by any measure only one of a peleton of high income countries, not the leader.

And the USA is 12th on the Heritage index of economic freedom.  Australia is third.  Our pioneers were villains, not know-all holy Joes.

It is true that America is not exceptionally Leftist by world standards  -- though Mr Obama is working on that  -- but that just shows that there have always been angry people, and some groups   -- e.g. Russian peasants and British miners -- have been even more angry than New Englanders.

I guess that this post will lose me quite a few readers among American patriots but is being patriotic to a historical hoax   really wise?   America has many fine people.  Be loyal to them, not national myths --  JR

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Presbyterian Church USA: Some of Our Best Friends Are Jews

I would normally put up the post below on  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH but I like it so much that I am putting it up here.  Given my own Presbyterian background, hostility to Israel among Presbyterians always galls me greatly

SCOTT OTT

Completing another lap in its race to irrelevance, the Presbyterian Church USA (one of dozens of Presbyterian denominations in the U.S.) has voted to divest itself from three corporations it perceives as helpful to the Israeli “occupation” of Palestinian lands.

Mind you, this vote merely broadcasts the church’s yearning for peace. The measure, approved by a narrow margin (310-303), also called for interfaith dialogue, a two-state solution and positive investment alternatives for the $21 million which the church had invested in Caterpillar, Motorola Solutions and Hewlett-Packard.


The divestment resolution, fabricated by a 65-member committee, also reaffirmed Israel’s right to exist — which is simply going too far, in the eyes of the Palestinians with whom the church empathizes.

Jesus, whom these Presbyterians profess to follow, invested much of his preaching against hypocrites in the organized religion of His day. This action by His purported disciples would have the Master declaiming, “You brood of vipers. You whitewashed tombs” — and perhaps, “You’ve got HOW MUCH MONEY invested in just three companies!?”

Heath Rada, the church’s moderator, who was leading the proceedings, said immediately after the electronic vote count was posted, “In no way is this a reflection of our lack of love for our Jewish sisters and brothers.”

No, I suppose their lack of love for the Jews is expressed in other, more substantive, ways than this symbolic portfolio shuffling. The only thing missing from Mr. Rada’s statement is the obligatory “Some of our best friends are Jews.”

Mr. Rada, the church’s moderator, said at a news conference after the vote, “I don’t believe you could talk to a single commissioner and have any of them say they were doing this as an anti-Jewish issue.

Certainly not. No commissioner would say that…even if she felt it, she wouldn’t say it.

The leader of the Presbyterian Church USA then moves from insincerity and hypocrisy to moral equivalency.

“I think there is a lot of emotion about the unjust treatment on the part of the Israeli government toward the Palestinians, but there is equal upset,” he said, about “terrorist activity that has been undertaken by the Palestinians.”

“Equal upset”?

Mr. Rada, would you prefer that I move into your neighborhood and build houses — all the while employing your family members at wages three times what your own people would pay? Or would you prefer that I send my teenage son strapped with a bomb to do the chicken dance at your daughter’s wedding reception?

There is “a lot of emotion” but not a lot of wisdom among your convention delegates — or rather, among the slightly more than half who voted for this pathetic, posturing, pandering resolution.

SOURCE

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Behind the "Redskins" controversy

This week the American people were taught a valuable lesson – never underestimate the willingness of white progressives to be offended on behalf of people who aren’t and to impose their will on those who didn’t ask for it. (What tribe do you suspect these protesters are from?) The U.S. Trade and Patent Office canceled trademarks held by the Washington Redskins because they determined the trademark, issued by the same government that just voided them, was for an offensive term. This decision will be appealed, and Redskins owner Dan Snyder probably will win.

But this case was never about the trademark, it was about publicity for the progressives’ word police to apply pressure on Snyder to change a name they don’t want to exist. They don’t really give a damn, mind you – Snyder is just a convenient high-profile target in their attempt to control our language. If you control the language – what words can be used (Redskins) or their definitions (marriage) – it makes it that much easier to control the people.

This latest charge is being led by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., who took to the floor of the Senate to attack the name and lie about the ramifications of the ruling. Reid said anyone could now start printing their own Redskins merchandise and profit from it, which is a flat-out lie. The common law trademark remains in place no matter what the government does. Harry Reid, a lawmaker and lawyer, was openly advising people they could freely break the law.

But Reid is no fool. He’s quite deliberate in his deception. Whenever he slanders private citizens, such as the Koch brothers, or advises people to break the law he does so on the Senate floor, where he, thanks to the speech and debate clause of the Constitution, enjoys full immunity from any ramifications resulting from anything he says. Any basement silkscreener arrested for making counterfeit Redskins merchandise on the advice of the senate majority leader won’t be able to touch him.

Reid knows this, but he’s counting on most people not to, so as to harm Snyder’s bottom line.

It’s ironic Democrats, who call investigations into the IRS, Benghazi, Fast and Furious, the VA and any other Obama administration scandal you can think of a distraction and waste of valuable time, but they have plenty of time to write letters, give speeches and lead the charge against a sports team’s mascot.

But even more ironic is that Democrats can, with a straight face, claim to be leading this charge in the name of cultural sensitivity to Native Americans. Democrats in every state of the union have an annual fundraising dinner called the Jefferson/Jackson Day Dinner. The Jefferson is Thomas Jefferson, and if progressive college professors taught us anything it’s that Jefferson was a slave owner. But, in the pantheon of progressive sensitivities, he’s a saint compared to Andrew Jackson.

Jackson, a lifelong military man and Democrat, was responsible for untold thousands of Native American deaths. Jackson oversaw the Trail of Tears, where lands were forcibly taken from tribes and they were marched west, many to their deaths. When the Supreme Court ruled the removal of the Cherokee Nation unlawful, Jackson simply ignored them, saying of Chief Justice John Marshall’s ruling, “John Marshall has made his decision; now let him enforce it!”

The Supreme Court has no army, the president does. Jackson simply ignored the ruling and removed the Cherokee anyway.

What’s more offensive: a sports team nickname people have to have explained to them why it’s offensive, or celebrating a genocidal, power-mad narcissist who ignored the Constitution and imposed his will on people? Every year, the Democrats celebrate and fundraise off the genocidal, power-mad narcissist.

SOURCE

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

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

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A conservative vision for social justice

Below is the blurb for a series of talks given by the AEI.  I think it is thoroughly misconceived.  If social justice were justice it would not need the word "social" before it.  And conceptions of justice differ greatly anyway.  Sharia law anyone?

I think all talk of justice in connection with social reform is  pernicious.  Such talk fosters feelings of entitlement in those whom the "Social justice" is supposed to benefit.  The poor (for instance) are told that they are getting a handout not out of generosity but because it is their right, because it is somehow "just" that they should.  But from what system of justice does such a right arise?  There is none.  Help for the needy is simply  asserted as being just, without any context for it in any judicial philosophy.  It is mere propaganda designed to foster grievance, which is meat and drink to destructive Leftists.

Let conservatives talk about HELPING the needy or the oppressed by all means.  There is no need for the slimy Leftist doctrine of "social justice".

And from a libertarian perspective, the whole idea of social justice is laughable.  Forcibly taking away one person's justly earned fruit of his labor and giving it to someone who has done nothing to earn it is INjustice.  It is theft, regardless of any adjective you put in front of it




This is the first event in AEI's exclusive Vision Talks series. Over the course of the coming year, AEI will convene a group of America's leading scholars, thinkers, and practitioners to offer fresh visions in key areas of policy and public debate. These talks will be filmed and disseminated as standalone videos similar to Arthur Brooks's “Secret to Happiness” talk.

What questions must today’s social justice agenda address? What are the tenets of such an agenda?

Conservatives played a central role in the emancipation and civil rights movements in America, and free enterprise has lifted millions out of poverty worldwide. But conservatives have failed to provide a vital vision for how their principles can foster a more just society today. Current government efforts to expand opportunity and reduce poverty show mixed results at best. Is there a fresh vision that engages the social justice questions of today and the future more effectively?

Please join us for three concise talks on why America needs a new social justice agenda, what that agenda must address, and how that agenda plays out in the most important policy debates of our time.

SOURCE

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How Does America Rid Itself of Its First Black President?

by BILL SIEGEL

America was very proud of itself in November of 2008 when it elected its first black (or at least half-black) president, Barack Obama. Liberal media outlets (excuse the redundancy) framed this event as one of our greatest national cathartic exercises of democracy. They worked directly with Obama and his media manipulators to elevate his presidency to Messianic proportions while they displayed an endless parade of people entranced in ecstasy over this supposedly magnanimous accomplishment.

Magnanimous it was. Here was a man who, with virtually no experience relevant to the world’s most important job, walked right in with global support. Here was a man with an endless sequence of non-specific promises read from a teleprompter able to sell himself to a public interested primarily in getting rid of what it had been led to believe was evil and responsible for all the ills of life: President Bush. Here was a man whose background (at least as much as he would permit to be disclosed, discovered, or discussed) gave every indication that he would deeply uproot much of what most Americans hold dear – freedom, responsibility, capitalism, accountability, transparency, limited control over individual lives, and so forth.

And here is a man who, as President, is being considered by rapidly growing numbers of Americans to be a dangerous disaster. And his failures present a troubling dilemma for much of the public: We worked so hard to get on this train and congratulated ourselves so profusely for climbing aboard. How do we get off?

The reasons people voted for Obama are as varied as the ways he is now failing. Nonetheless, for many whites, the relief of “white guilt” was a significant contributing factor. As former black militant Shelby Steele has brilliantly articulated in various books and articles, white guilt is the behavior of whites that attempts to regain a sense of moral authority presumed forfeited in an age of “white supremacy.” It is the behavior (not the emotion) whites utilize to attempt to relieve themselves of the stigma of racism.

Blacks, he maintains, have generally learned two ways to negotiate power from whites using white guilt. Some (“bargainers”) offer a deal in which they promise not to rub the country’s racial past in the face of whites in exchange for power. Others (“challengers”) tend to throw white racial history in the face of whites to extract their share of power. In A Bound Man, Steele claimed that Obama, as a classic bargainer, stood no chance of winning the presidency because the bargainer is required to mask his true nature in order to seal the deal. Steele guessed that the ordeal of the election process would not allow Obama to maintain his mask. Obviously, Steele seems to have guessed wrong.

Obama has described how he learned to navigate in a world of whites. Essentially, he discovered that by acting unthreatening and non-angry, his aura of intelligence would bring whites to him. Perhaps his history was one where he learned early that as long as he played the part he could essentially allow white guilt to propel whites to aggrandize him and comply with his wishes. This is the experience of one to whom few have ever said “no.” And that same expectation of white cooperation has led and followed him both to and within the White House

Yet, not so fast. While Steele may have underestimated Obama’s supreme skill in masking himself during the election, Obama now seems to have met his match in executing the actual office. Much of what Steele predicted in terms of not being able to fool enough of the people is starting to prove correct. For many (not the hardcore devotees – yet), the reckless spending, lack of international leadership, absence of transparency, disregard for climbing national debt, freezing out of cabinet members and others in favor of handpicked yet unelected and unaccountable “czars,” seizure of control of various businesses, appearance of having either no plans or the most naïve of plans on crucial foreign policy issues, improper manipulation of public understanding of the financial crisis, destroying healthcare under the guise of saving it, incoherent energy policy, global warming measures the rest of the world will not undertake, never-ending taxes and taking direct control of the Census are just a few of the clues that the Obama they thought they were electing was not the Obama they put into office. For many, his history, including his relationships with Reverend Wright, William Ayers, Rashid Khalidi and others, his training in Saul Alinsky’s radical community organizing, his record as the most liberal Senator, his curious and difficult to independently verify past were merely insignificant nuances - not the red alert signs they would constitute with virtually any other candidate. The bargainer mask is quickly dissolving.

After six years of Obama as President, many have become palpably concerned, if not terrified, by the nation’s choice of president. And that terror gives rise to a fascinating dilemma: how does America, if free to so choose, extricate itself from what it has done – as magnificent an accomplishment as we like to think it was?

Some argue that the polls indicate that while many may be beginning to disagree with some of Obama’s policies, they still regard him personally in high esteem. Liberal pundits use this to suggest that there is no buyer’s remorse, only a temporary process of working out the kinks in some courageous policies during some difficult and unchartered times.

Yet something deeper, perhaps, is developing. For those who invested great emotional energy in the “hope” of Obama, waking up to the “reality” of Obama is a painful task. As cognitive dissonance theory would inquire: how does one hold the image of the great savior in the face of the great disaster? How does one explain the exuberance experienced in saying goodbye to everything Bush and Cheney and otherwise “evil” while simultaneously realizing the country is now truly in far more dangerous hands? The fears the left wing media pushed into the minds of the public during the Bush years – that our allies dislike us, that Bush is controlling our lives, that Bush is to blame for Muslim anti-Americanism and jihadism, that the economy was headed in the wrong direction and so forth - look meager when compared to the real dangers that the left wing media now desperately struggles to hide from the public.

Cognitive dissonance would suggest that those disappointed Obama voters will struggle for quite some time to find some explanation as to why they like him and why he is still worthy of the presidency. Distinguishing Obama, as these polls do, from his policies is an understandable first step along these lines.

But what next? The problem with guilt, white or otherwise, is it affords no guidance itself on when enough is enough. Guilt is a tactic in a game made to last. One version has kept the Israelis and Palestinians perpetually locked in dance around the “peace process;” an elaborately disguised vehicle of continual extortion. Anywhere else, the trading of “peace” (or the cessation of violence) for an asset is called extortion and is punishable. Here, under the guise of a morally favorable movement towards the unobjectionable goal of “peace,” it is labeled the “peace process.” Holding together the entire structure of Palestinian “victimization” is the endless force of “guilt.” And as soon as some truly final resolution appears possible, the guilt game dictates a retreat to square one. As long as guilt is the glue, true resolution defeats the purpose. The game must go on.

Guilt is the result of the accusation “you made me this way.” The game of guilt requires the never-ending charge “you made me suffer.” The game supports not just careers, such as those of challengers such as Al Sharpton, Jesse Jackson, Yasser Arafat, Mahmoud Abbas and “scholars” that pervade university campuses in minority and Middle East studies departments. The game is also the foundation of many political movements and parties. Without a villain responsible for all ills and, from whom to extract recompense, many movements would be forced to fold.


White guilt continues to flourish and to propel much of our politics. Democrats stamped out President Bush’s attempts to appoint an Hispanic nominee to the Supreme Court, Miguel Estrada, in a fashion that could never be utilized against Obama’s choice of Sonia Sotomayor. Identity politics and reverse discrimination are simply by-products and tools of the guilt game. Some of Obama’s campaign rhetoric referenced the notion of securing “reparations” for racial injustices of the past while his “tax the rich” and class warfare are further extensions of the guilt game. The fact that Sotomayor can finagle acceptance of her actions in the Ricci case is testimony to just how deeply installed is white guilt in the public’s consciousness. Senator Barbara Boxer’s recent racist episode in demeaning Black Chamber of Commerce leader Harry Alford demonstrated the ridiculous extremes to which some will allow white guilt to take them. Obama, himself, easily includes reference to black responsibility in his speeches. His policies, however, are steeped in manipulating white guilt.

The structure of the use of white guilt, as Steele describes, is to force whites to constantly prove the proposition “I am not a racist.” And this is why the game is programmed never to end as one can never prove a negative, much less for all time. This is precisely what pushed Boxer into the foolish statements she made to Alford as she feebly attempted to demonstrate that she was not a racist. This is what Henry Louis Gates Jr. attempted to provoke from the Cambridge police sergeant James Crowley – to flip the story from a suspected burglary to the “racist” officer. And white guilt was attempting to elicit from Crowley an apology (hoping he would beg that he not be stigmatized as a racist) which he quite boldly resisted. And it is such a deep familiarity with white guilt that led Obama during a nationally televised press conference to declare that the police department acted “stupidly” without knowing any of the facts. While he initially tried to suggest and amplify this as an issue of racial profiling against blacks, in fact, by speaking without facts, it was Obama himself who engaged in a bitterly offensive racial profiling of and against white policemen. And it was Obama who, unable to rid himself of the narrative of white guilt, was also unable to deliver a full and direct apology for his words; opting instead (as did his partner in white guilt manipulation, Sonia Sotomayor) to cowardly obfuscate the issue with “regret” about the “impression” he gave. And it was Obama who continues to reinforce old familiar white guilt adages by infusing “race is still a troubling aspect of our society” into a situation which, for the police, had absolutely nothing to do with race. Far from change, Obama, unmasked, made it quite clear that his years around Wright, Alinsky, and others predictably made him exactly who he continues to be.

And insulating Obama from serious reflection on these matters is another consequence of the guilt game. While President Bush was castigated for a $350 billion stimulus package (recall that he turned over the second $350 billion to Obama), white guilt has kept the country virtually spellbound as Obama more than quadruples the damage. Bush was destroyed for getting us into Iraq and not having a plan to get us out all at the cost of American lives and treasure. Obama is on a similar path in Afghanistan and the liberal media does little more than an occasional CYA story to protect itself for the future. No credible president of the past could have ever sold the notion of partially measuring the economy on the basis of the immeasurable phantasm of “jobs saved.” Such an insult to the intelligence of the American people is simply washed over by the media. Simply put, white guilt continues to be a major factor in protecting Obama.

While we, as a nation, have become comfortable in celebrating the great successes of black men, we have not yet learned how to fully integrate the failures of great black men. It was easy to relish the accomplishments of O.J. Simpson in his heyday; his fall brought tremendous racial strife to the nation. When a black congressman, William Jefferson, was found to have almost one hundred thousand dollars of cash in his freezer, he was given every benefit of the doubt as to his culpability. Congressman Charlie Rangel has an almost unfathomable number of ethics investigations endlessly languishing under Speaker Nancy Pelosi. Many a white man in public service has been thrown out at the barest hint of criminal behavior. Obviously, political party makes a difference as does consistency between one’s acts and political promises. Nonetheless, in a nation which continues to be uneasy with the failure of blacks and unclear as to how to address their fall, Obama is still afforded significant insulation geared to protect him from all that would normally beset a man in his position.

The simple but immensely difficult and painful question America needs to answer is: When has white guilt run its course such that we can truly act in a “post-racial” world and address this presidency appropriately? Put otherwise, we can not be “post-racial” until we are ready to be “post-guilt.”

As Steele points out, discrimination as a legal matter was eliminated decades ago. That does not mean that discrimination does not rear its ugly head any more than the fact that criminal theft or burglary statutes have not fully protected private property. Nonetheless, just as we do (at least for the time being) live in a country built on private property, we also live in one intended to be based upon equality. A “post-racial” world is not one in which no one recognizes the fact that others are of differing backgrounds. Nor can it ever become the utopia where no private judgments of others based on skin color occur (any more than people constantly judge others based on a wide set of often trivial criteria). Rather, a “post-racial” world is one where any such judgments are rendered virtually meaningless and of minimal consequence. It is one in which individuals affirmatively choose not to inject race into the ordinary difficulties of life. It is one in which the solution is not to invite more “conversation” but to refuse in the first place to charge “racism” and to demand whites prove they are not racist where race is irrelevant to the situation. It is one in which the game of white guilt has finally ended.

We are certainly not there yet. White guilt is all around. “Scholars” and professors like Gates and other challengers still banter on about the world of white supremacy while bargainers continue to promise whites protection from the memories of America’s racist past; each of which takes focus off of the present. It is alive within Congress as well. Instead of addressing residual byproducts of past inequality of opportunity, white guilt and Obama pressure Congress to overhaul (some say destroy) our entire healthcare system- likely penalizing hundreds of millions to appear to assist perhaps tens of millions. And ACORN, Obama’s community organizing troops set to be funded with billions of stimulus funds, has mastered the manipulation of white guilt in all of its activities. Obama has plenty of “teachable moments” left of which to take advantage. Perhaps he should teach by example; rewarding those who forego white guilt while coming down hard on those who manipulate it. Unfortunately, Obama’s essence is so intimately entwined with white guilt maneuverings that our best lessons will likely arrive only upon his departure from office.

Needless to say, over the past decades, the country has made major advances in diminishing the severe racism that used to plague it. More can and will be done. Nonetheless, if Obama were white, there is little doubt that the public discourse would have already included terms such as impeachment, incompetence, criminal recklessness, fraud, liar, con-man, anti-American and so forth. And if anyone named Bush performed a small fraction of the acts Obama has to date, he would no longer be in office.

America must struggle to figure out how it can rid itself of its first black president who is destroying the foundations upon which the country was built. When it can do so without guilt and without challenge, it will have truly earned the glory it thought it achieved in electing Obama. Perhaps one of the many great things about America’s electing Obama is that, finally, America, to rid itself of Obama, will be forced to stand up and rid itself once and for all of white guilt and rid its politics of the game of guilt itself.

SOURCE

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

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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My hand is healing well from surgery and it is my Sabbath tomorrow so I thought I had better put up a few things today -- JR

The political divide



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How the worm turns!



Don Surber comments:  "I never bought this Fat Is Evil bullshit either. Carbon dioxide is good for you too"

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Barry The Red

by L. Neil Smith

Barack Obama grew up surrounded by old-time, CPA card-carrying communists. His maternal grandfather, Stanley Dunham, who filled most of the father-shaped space in his life, was a well-known communist activist, and Soviet operative, and so was his grandmother, Madelyn. Mommy, Stanley Ann Dunham, was a commie. Frank Marshall Davis, another genuine communist whom the radio host believes was his real father, was certainly Obama's intellectual, philosophical, and ideological father. Weather Underground bomber Bill Ayers is Obama's spiritual uncle.

Barry is what's called a "Red-diaper baby".

Knowing that, and understanding that nothing in what we know of his educational background counteracts his Marxist proclivities, what else do we need to know about the convictions and objectives of a man who has deliberately and systematically (with a little help from the Republicans) obliterated the relative peace, freedom, progress, and prosperity of what was once the greatest nation-state the world ever knew?

Acting out of a deep, poisonous class and race hatred, Obama has destroyed the most powerful and benevolent politico-economic system in history, and somehow made off with something like seventeen trillion dollars. People speculate a lot over what Vladimir Putin must think of Obama, a product of what is almost certainly an old, abandoned Soviet deep-espionage program. My guess is that what he feels, mostly, is astonished envy—and perhaps more than a little worry about future competition.

In the 1940s, due to the idiotic blundering and malign stupidity of at least three generations of leaders, perhaps half a million young Americans were sacrificed in an armed conflict with collectivism, German-style. (This may come as news to those of my readers educated in the public school system: Hitler was a socialist, a man of the left; in German, "NAZI" was short for "National Socialist German Workers' Party".

In the 1950s, tens of thousands more were killed in an undeclared (and therefore illegal) war against Korean, Chinese, and Russian communists. (How I know about the Russians is a story for another time.)

In the 1960s, 58,000 Americans were killed in Vietnam, fighting communism.

And now, the very sort of evil that our fathers and grandfathers fought and bled and died to stop is fully in control of the United States Government. Its minions mean to disarm, impoverish, and imprison every one of us—and kill any who resist—and the few politicians opposing them are too cowardly to say or do anything about it.

I hate it when predictions come unbidden to my mind, but I am a science fiction writer, and it's reflexive. The next decade is going to be truly ugly, perhaps the ugliest in human history. Americans will not be put down as easily as our domestic enemies presently expect.

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Some sense from Britain

David Cameron [PM] should abolish corporation tax for small firms so they are better able to compete with large companies, Lord Saatchi has said.

The former Tory chairman said the party should pledge to no longer charge the levy on firms with fewer than 50 employees.

Lord Saatchi, who is chairman of the Centre for Policy Studies (CPS), has also called on the Conservatives to stop imposing capital gains tax on investors in small companies.

The recommendations come in a report celebrating the 40th anniversary of the think tank co-founded by Baroness Thatcher.

Lord Saatchi said getting rid of the £8billion annual corporation tax bill for small business would be a ‘call to arms’ for the Conservatives, which would bring a culture shift on the scale of Right to Buy in the 1980s.

He said the policy would show ‘how the awesome power of taxation can be used to the benefit of everyone’ and allow small firms to ‘challenge cartel capitalism’.

Under the policy, millions of people would ‘enjoy the opportunity to say, “I am the captain of my ship”,’ he added.

The report to be published tomorrow will add: ‘By allowing profitable small companies to retain more of their earnings it will become easier for them to self-finance their own expansion.’

Lord Saatchi boasted that the removal of corporation tax for smaller firms would quicken the economic recovery.

He told the Telegraph: ‘It’s worth remembering that the average UK company has five employees.  The Policy, as I call it, would therefore abolish corporation tax for 90 per cent of UK companies, reduce the deficit faster than predicted by the Office for Budget Responsibility, expand employment faster than it predicts, increase competition, challenge cartel capitalism and let millions of people grow tall.’

In an article for the newspaper, he said that Mrs Thatcher knew that big companies posed as big a ‘threat to freedom’ as big government and that competition made capitalism work.

The CPS report, entitled The Road FROM Serfdom, reports polls for the think tank that show people have a distrust of big government, which Lord Saatch argues is a ‘sorry outcome for all believers in free-market capitalism’.  Lord Saatchi said that socialism became unpopular and now capitalism has also become unpopular.

He said that the tax system has been reduced from being a tool for ‘social engineering’ to being for ‘revenue generation’.

He added: ‘It is on a par, at least, with the NHS or the criminal justice system in its impact on human lives, and its relationship between the government and the people.’

Corporation tax is currently set at 20 per cent of profits for businesses with less than £300,000 profit.

Maurice Saatchi co-founded the advertising agency Saatchi and Saatchi with his brother Charles.

The firm was closely associated with Margaret Thatcher’s three successive election victories and famously came up with the ‘Labour Isn’t Working’ poster during the 1979 election campaign.

He was co-chairman of the Conservative Party from 2003 until 2005.   He stepped down from the role after the party lost the 2005, for which he was responsible for running its election campaign.

Lord Saatchi was created a life peer in the House of Lords by the party in 1996 and under Iain Duncan Smith served as shadow Treasury spokesman in the upper house.

SOURCE

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The coup-free zone

In Tuesday’s post I left readers with a question: Which countries belong to the “coup-free zone”?  By this I mean, which countries have passed the last 50 years as independent nations without a single coup d’état, coup attempt or armed revolution?

I define “coup” broadly, to mean any forceful seizure of central government power.  A coup is a disorderly, unpredictable transfer of power, accomplished through physical force or intimidation.  The term encompasses military coups, violent palace intrigue and street revolutions.  The effort to seize power need not succeed; serious but failed attempts still count.  Finally, the term “coup” embraces an “executive coup,” whereby a constitutional leader radically and forcefully extends his scope of power or term of service, as in Chancellor Hitler’s 1933 hijacking of Germany with Nazi thugs.

This is how it looked by the end of 2010.



SOURCE

The full list:

1. United States of America
2. Canada
3. Mexico
4. Costa Rica
5. Iceland
7. Norway
8. Sweden
9. Denmark
10. Finland
11. Ireland
12 United Kingdom
13. Netherlands
14. Belgium
15. Luxembourg
16. Germany
17. Austria
18. Switzerland
19. Israel
20. Japan
21. Australia
22. New Zealand
23. South Africa

Very "incorrect" for me to notice it but nearly every one is (predominantly) ethnically Northern European.  And the Ashkenazi (Western) influence is dominant in Israel too, and was until recently in South Africa.  India does not appear on the list because of the "Emergency"

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The Economy May Be Improving. Worker Pay Isn’t.

The latest economic data out Tuesday morning was generally good. Home building activity remained above the one million a year rate. Consumer prices rose 0.4 percent in May, such that inflation over the last year is now 2.1 percent, about in line with what the Federal Reserve aims for.

But that inflation news carried with it a depressing side note. Now that the Consumer Price Index for May has been published, it is possible to determine inflation-adjusted hourly earnings for the month. And the number is not good.

Average hourly earnings for private sector American workers rose about 49 cents an hour over the last year, to $24.38 in May. But that wasn’t enough to cover inflation over the year, so in real or inflation-adjusted terms, hourly worker pay fell 0.1 percent over the last 12 months. Weekly pay shows the same story, also falling 0.1 percent in the year ended in May.

Pause for just a second to consider that. Five years after the economic recovery began, American workers have gone the last 12 months without any real increase in what they are paid.

There had been some hints here and there that worker pay was starting to rise in the last few months, including anecdotal reports of employers having to offer raises to recruit or retain workers and a few pieces of data hinting that the trend was taking effect broadly.

By the same measure cited above — average hourly earnings for private sector workers — the year that ended in February showed a strong 2.1 percent gain in pay versus only 1.1 percent inflation, which works out to a 1 percent annual gain in real hourly pay. That was the strongest in five years, and if it had been sustained would have been great news for American workers.

But it was not sustained. The numbers since then suggest two things: The strong gain in hourly pay reported for the 12 months ended in February looks to have been an anomaly. And while inflation has picked up since then, reducing the value of workers’ paychecks, worker pay has only barely kept up with the higher prices.

The latest numbers should give pause to any Federal Reserve officials who see wage pressures as evidence that the economy is overheating. It might have been arguably true earlier in the year. It might prove true later in the year, if workers start successfully demanding wage increases in excess of inflation.

But for right now, the evidence points to more of what we’ve seen for most of the last six years: Employees have little negotiating power to demand higher pay.

SOURCE

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

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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Apology

No posts today.  I have just had surgery on my right hand to remove a small cancer.  So I am supposed to give my hand a rest for a couple of days.  But you can't keep a good blogger down for long so I should be back soon.

Leftist projection never stops

They have been blaming the socialist Hitler on "The Right" for decades so it is no surprise that the Left have a kneejerk tendency to blame aggrieved mass shooters similarly, even though such shooters usually turn out to be from the Left.  The latest notorious shooters are no different.  The  Las Vegas Cop Killers,  Jerad and Amanda Miller were referred to by "Salon" as "Right-wing anger turned deadly".  They were in fact members of  the Far Left "Occupy" Movement.  Conservatives tend to be contented people.  It is the Left who are full of anger



We have been bombarded with the Millers' connection to the Bundy Ranch, Alex Jones and the liberty movement in general. The liberty movement is massive and it does not emcompass only the right-wing. But we were led to believe that the Millers were Tea Party-loving right-wing extremists. That is what the media wants America to believe.

. it will come as no surprise to our readers that the Millers were involved in the "Occupy Movement." Again, the liberty movement is massive but the Occupy Protests tend to be attributed to the left. Bundy Ranch tends to be associated with the right. They are both cases of civil disobedience but obviously the media wants to paint a picture of the Millers as being people who voted for Romney rather than Obama. This is how the media constantly pushes the agenda of the left. Nearly every news publication in America printed something about the associations of the Millers, but very few printed this:

According to CBS Chicago:

While living in Lafayette, Jerad and his wife Amanda took part in last November's "Million Mask March" - a gathering of protesters from the Occupy movement, anarchists, and hacktivists.

Nick Wertz, one of the organizers of the Lafayette march, said it attracted many people upset over a lot of issues.  "Everyone there just seem kind of like normal people. At least they were going to stick up with what they thought was right," he said.

Wertz said he didn't really know the Millers, but weeks after the march, Amanda Miller contacted him. "She was moving to Vegas for whatever reason and they had a dog they couldn't take with - and I was like, `If I can help,'" Wertz said.  But that was the end of it, he said.

The Millers were not alone.  Several #Occupy members were arrested for assault, robbery, vandalism, rape and murder.

SOURCE

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Does democracy  work in Muslim lands?

Even in Muslim countries where there is some democracy -- Turkey, Indonesia, Pakistan -- democracy alternates with military rule.  And Obama is making the situation worse.  Comment from Australia below

When Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait, President George Bush chased him and his "million strong" army out of there. Despite the urgings of the hawks he had the intelligence to stop at the border, refusing to go on and take Baghdad.

When Al Queda attacked New York, President George W Bush felt enough was enough... he had to attack something. But he attacked the wrong something.

Afghanistan and its links with Pakistan was the real threat, Iraq was never a threat to the West. But it is now that America has poked the hornet's nest.

They hung strong man Saddam Hussein high, high enough to decapitate him, yet Saddam was the only person who was holding the dysfunctional State together.

Now he's gone and so is Iraq's stability, along with most of its oil fields, taken over by a bunch of Islamic extremists in utes who call themselves the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS).

These are the worst of the world's worst of Islamic extremists, they are the people who decapitate children, inflict the most heinous and sexually fatal injuries on women and eat male opponents' organs.

These are the people hundreds of Australian Islamic youths have gone to fight alongside.

They have spilled over from their unwinnable Syrian crisis and are now marching south to Baghdad.

    Good luck with getting as far as Baghdad!

Iran is now aligning with its bitter enemy, Iraq, to repel the ISIS while America is preparing to launch drones from its aircraft carriers in the Gulf.

The ISIS rebels are heartened by their ability to take over most of the unguarded oilfields in the north of Iraq, they are selling gas and electricity to Syria to finance their atrocities, while Obama's CIA provides them with weapons and Putin provides Syria's Assad with bigger weapons.

Syria won't fall to the ISIS and it knows it, despite Obama's assistance. It has now turned its sights on a weakened Iraq.

At least Putin has his priorities in order. Incredibly, Obama is about to bomb the very same people he has armed.

North Africa's strong man Gaddafi was holding Libya together before the Americans killed him. America doesn't like strong men, they don't fit plans for its ridiculous aim of democratising the Middle East.

And now Islamic extremists slaughter American diplomats and fire-bomb installations like in Benghazi.

The cause of the current Middle East powder keg is Obama. He created it! He prematurely withdrew his forces for electoral reasons and now he needs to drone-bomb the very people he has armed. They also intend to kill Syria's Assad.

    Good luck with that too!

The ISIS realises just how vulnerable Iraq is now that the Americans have "restructured" its government and armed forces. It is so weak that, when confronted by the ISIS, they showed their innate Islamic cowardice, dropped their guns and ran, leaving their American tanks and materiel for the enemy... despite the fact that they outnumber the ISIS invaders forty to one.

Will President Obama's makeshift Afghanistan government be any different after he withdraws forces there too? Of course not, the Taliban will take over and enforce its Barbaric Sharia law with even greater fervour.

Obama is either as thick as pig shit or he is knowingly encouraging Islamic extremism in the Middle East. That extremism will eventually reach the West in the form of increasingly sophisticated terrorism?

Just look at what this Obama bloke has done!

1. He has defied Congress and the Constitution and sent arms to the Al Queda backed Syrian rebels via the CIA, hoping to kill another strong man, Al-Assad. Those same Al Queda offshoot extremists are supported by hundreds of Islamic Australians who have travelled there to fight in a dirty internal war. It's the perennial Sunni against Shia, and Iraq's Kurds in the north look on for a piece of the pie.

2. Obama has created a humanitarian crisis of over a million refugees who are pouring on to Europe's doorstep, Turkey. Just imagine the horrific result if Damascus fell and Assad with it. At least Putin has imagined it and is trying to stabilise the situation despite Obama's determination to further destabilise it.

3. Obama is releasing Gitmo terrorists and feting army deserters.

4. Obama bent his knee and bowed his head to the Saudi King and his rotten family of crooks who are arming the ISIS right now.

5. Obama has alienated the only democratic country the West has as an ally, that pinprick of donated territory called Israel.

6. Obama encouraged Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood to overthrow its strong man Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, the only autocratic symbol of stability in the Middle East. To Obama's delight Egypt's very first election saw the Brotherhood's Morsi installed as its first elected President. To assist the original founders of terrorism, the Muslim Brotherhood, the Obama Administration ensured them another $1.3 billion shipment of state-of-the-art weaponry. The Brotherhood lasted only months before it was overthrown, marginalising even moderate Islamists. Christian Churches now continue to be burnt down while the new President, Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, looks on.

7. Obama refuses to use the terms "terrorism" and "Islam" in the same sentence.

8. Obama promoted the building of a mosque adjacent to the destroyed World Trade Centre.

9. Obama's State Department found that, "Islam and terrorism are not linked."

10. Obama if not an Islamist, is an apologist for Islam. Islamic terrorism has mushroomed under his watch. On his left hand he has worn a gold ring since he was a teenager. Michelle took it and slipped it on his ring finger when they were married. On it is an Arabic hieroglyphic that says, "There is no god except Allah."

Post Obama, the one lesson America should take from the mess it has created in the Middle East is that it should ignore the grandstanding rhetoric of Middle East strong men, they are speaking to a domestic market, as is North Korea's Kim Jong-un. As was Saddam Hussein and Gaddafi, as was Iran's mad midget, Ahmadinejad and as is Bashar al-Assad.

Leave them be. While they are busy killing each other they aren't killing us. Isolate them, ignore them the moment we no longer need their filthy oil.

They have been killing each other for 2,000 years. They will quickly change sides when it suits, as we are seeing now, and when they get tired of that they will start killing each other again.

They are driven by a Barbaric Islamic culture we should not even try to understand... but we should join Europe in rejecting further Islamic immigration. The UK is proposing to disallow Middle East immigrants receiving social benefits for the first six months after arrival.

Only fools would allow the Middle East's despicable culture of Islam to gain new footholds in the West.

Unfortunately Obama ain't the only fool in the West

SOURCE

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VA Whistleblowers Faced Retaliation For Speaking Out

Last week, we reported on the Veterans Affairs Department's internal audit that determined that more than 100,000 US veterans are either presently languishing on medical wait lists, or never received an appointment at all over the last decade. The probe comes in the wake of revelations that VA bureaucrats across the country engaged in "systemic" manipulation of official wait-time statistics in order to conceal the true extent of the problem, and to protect their own performance-based bonuses. Whistleblowers have emerged from coast to coast, shining the spotlight on the fraudulent practices, malpractice, outrageous care, and "crime syndicate" culture. Given the breadth of dysfunction and corruption at the agency, some may wonder why these sources didn't step forward sooner. The answer is twofold: First, some did sound the alarm. Red flags were raised, investigated, and ignored for years. Second, the VA bureaucracy clamped down hard on people who spoke out of school. The New York Times reports:

"Staff members at dozens of Department of Veterans Affairs hospitals across the country have objected for years to falsified patient appointment schedules and other improper practices, only to be rebuffed, disciplined or even fired after speaking up, according to interviews with current and former staff members and internal documents...In interviews with The New York Times, a half-dozen current and former staff members - four doctors, a nurse and an office manager in Delaware, Pennsylvania and Alaska - said they faced retaliation for reporting systemic problems. Their accounts, some corroborated by internal documents, portray a culture of silence and intimidation within the department and echo experiences detailed by other V.A. personnel in court filings, government investigations and congressional testimony, much of it largely unnoticed until now."

The culture of cover-up and muzzling is pervasive and dates back many years:

"The federal Office of Special Counsel, which investigates whistle-blower complaints, is examining 37 claims of retaliation by V.A. employees in 19 states, and recently persuaded the V.A. to drop the disciplining of three staff members who had spoken out. Together with reports to other watchdog agencies and the Times interviews, the accounts by V.A. whistle-blowers cover several dozen hospitals, with complaints dating back seven years or longer...The number of claims of retaliation by V.A. whistle-blowers is among the highest of any federal agency, said Carolyn Lerner, who runs the Office of Special Counsel, and have been documented by Congress going back at least two decades. In 1992, a congressional report concluded that the V.A. discouraged employees from reporting problems by "harassing whistle-blowers or firing them." In 1999, a House subcommittee hearing on "Whistleblowing and Retaliation in the Department of Veterans Affairs" found little had changed. Today V.A. employees and whistle-blower lawyers say the problem has only gotten worse."

Click through to read individual cases of VA doctors, nurses and other officials being reprimanded, put on administrative leave, and even escorted out of the building by security for raising objections to fraudulent practices. When one doctor refused to cease and desist writing up formal complaints, he was deemed "disruptive" by the apparatchiks and fired. A pyschologist's performance reviews suddenly grew hostile and negative after she spoke out against certain policies. And then there's this:

"In Pittsburgh, two V.A. doctors specializing in Legionnaires' disease, Dr. Janet Stout and Dr. Victor Yu, said they were forced out after complaining about budget and salary matters in 2006. The V.A. then closed their lab and destroyed their specimens - decisions the doctors contend contributed to a 2011 outbreak of Legionnaires' at the Pittsburgh hospital that killed six people. "The V.A. isn't a place where you speak out," Dr. Stout said in an interview."

Each and every story detailed in the article is outrageous. Incredibly, the VA has frequently used supposed violations of doctor-patient confidentiality as a pretext for sacking problematic employees, arguing that reporting misconduct is tantamount to breaching protocols. This is what unaccountable, government-run, bureaucrat-administered healthcare looks like.

SOURCE

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

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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Lois Lerner, the IRS and the "lost" emails about targeted tea party groups

I put up yesterday one of the many criticisms of the preposterous claim that a whole swag of Obama administration emails had been lost.  Even if they have, is that the end of the matter?  The Snowden revelations lead us too believe that the NSA has copies of just about every email ever sent. Why can we not recover the emails from them?

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Exaggerated claims of racism

Last Friday I discussed the crow-calls of "racism" that are always emanating from the Left and pointed out that such calls are mostly projection.  The practising racists (as in "affirmative action", antisemitism etc) are in fact on the Left.  The article below was written for an Australian audience and it too points out how minor are the things that Leftists pick on to distract attention from their own obsessive racism

So who’s a racist? Not you, of course. Certainly not me. Hey, maybe none of us.

No, that’s not what people were saying this week as the sports commentator Warren Ryan quit his job over an on-air quote from Gone with the Wind that included the word "darky".

Here was another controversy, depressingly fresh on the heels of last year's furore over indigenous AFL player Adam Goodes being called an ape by a young spectator.

It may pay to look at the bigger picture. After all, aren’t we living in a era when evil is an outmoded concept, when there are no bad people, only bad acts? On that basis it seems counter-intuitive and frankly crazy to label people racist on the basis on one or two remarks.

Yes, of course, "the standard I walk past is the standard I accept", to quote another example of vogue reasoning. Sorry but I have walked past it plenty.

I walked past it when a man in Spain told me he was "working like a black", when an old girlfriend asked whether I still "smoke like a Turk" and when a fella in country NSW offered me his ultimate accolade: "Thanks mate, you’re a white man."

Hey, I also walked past it when people assert that Australia is a uniquely wicked racist country. Get real.

Yes, Australian country towns once banned Aborigines from swimming pools. From this came the Freedom Rides led by Charlie Perkins. And the treatment of indigenous Australians by white settlers and government authorities remains unfinished business.

But how many people alive today are honest to god racist? You know, willing to stand at the school gates like a southern US governor in the 1950s and ’60s and say non-white children will not pass? Refuse to shake the hand of a non-white person? Oddly, when Iran’s President Hassan Rouhani failed to offer his hand to European Union High Representative Catherine Ashton, there was not a glimmer of protest. (Rouhani saw fit to shake hands with Russian President Vladimir Putin).

Are white South African migrants to Australia racist? Are black Zimbabwean leaders racist for pushing whites off farms? Considering the hierarchy of oppression that is so fashionable now, are any non-white people racist at all?

Certainly it is much easier then to turn on some middle-aged white bloke for saying something, well, stupid.

For seemingly endless days in May, CNN’s television coverage was obsessed with the Donald Sterling controversy. The billionaire owner of the US basketball team the Los Angeles Clippers was rightly denounced in all quarters for moronic comments about black people. He now has to sell the franchise and will end his days as a pariah. Isn’t that enough? Not for CNN, though that network was not alone. Its anchors weighed every nuance, parsing comments by his wife that Sterling had dementia, interviewing each other endlessly.

For what? Only because there are dollars at stake did Sterling even matter. Otherwise that old man’s thoughts are irrelevant to everyone but him and the nurse with the bedpan. I’d rather ask how healthy it is for any sporting team to be owned by a single plutocrat.

My contention is that people can say racist things because they are afflicted, temporarily or permanently, with stupidity, but that doesn’t make them a racist. Why? Because I don’t believe there are that many true racists. These would be people obsessed with the supremacy of their race to the exclusion of any other topic. Sure they are out there. But their numbers are negligible. And if the best frontman they can present is still Jim Saleam, as John Safran found in Good Weekend last Saturday, they ain’t growing the brand. Pauline Hanson? Sorry. Seriously, no.

I’d wager that the overwhelming majority of us, no matter the colour, are roughly as "racist" as each other. In other words, not really racist at all. It’s just that we sometimes say the stupidest things.

SOURCE

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One of the world's major subnational units has just had an election

Ontario has renewed its trust in a corrupt, big spending  Lesbian liberal.  Below Ezra Levant  gives his evaluation of the event in his normal reserved and nuanced way



Put aside the scandals and corruption and police investigations into the Ontario Liberal Party. That’s just morality and ethics stuff, and Ontarians are apparently fine with that.

But what about the economy created by the Liberals, happily accepted by voters last Thursday?

For seven years running, Ontario has had a higher unemployment rate than the national average. Ontario is a have-not province, now subsidized by others, including Saskatchewan and Newfoundland, two new have provinces.

Stop and let that sink in.

Ontario’s taxes are high, and about to grow higher: Premier Kathleen Wynne’s campaign centrepiece was a new payroll tax for a provincial pension plan, deducted from every employee’s paycheque.  In other words, a job tax.

There will be other taxes too, including on Pearson Airport, the airport already saddled with the highest user fees in the world.

And Ontario’s disastrous experiment with wind turbines and solar panels will continue for decades — that’s the length of time Ontario will force residents and companies to buy power at inflated rates to subsidize their green schemes.

Even as power prices fall in other provinces and competitor states in the U.S. It’s surely a coincidence that the former president of the Liberal Party is a wind turbine executive.

That’s what’s so dispiriting.

Not that Ontarians are fine with a corrupt political class.

But that Ontarians are fine with economic decline and that more and more economic “success stories” aren’t entrepreneurs, but rather crony capitalists with ties to the government.

Ontarians, for more than a century the economic engine of Canada, are fine now being an economic brake. The decline first brought on by Dalton McGuinty is no longer a blip. It’s a trend.

It seems unthinkable that Ontario could ever be anything other than the biggest and strongest province. But it surely felt that way in Montreal, too, for the longest time.

But take the story of the Bank of Montreal to see how things don’t last forever.

The Bank of Montreal is Canada’s oldest bank, founded in 1817. And for 160 years, it was headquartered in — obviously — Montreal. But in 1970, politics brought risk and cost to Quebec in a way not seen before.

The FLQ crisis brought terrorism and martial law. In 1976, the Parti Quebecois won the election. So in 1977, the Bank of Montreal moved its head office operations to Toronto.

For two lifetimes it was unthinkable that the Bank of Montreal would leave Montreal. But in the course of 20 years it happened.

Politics matters.

Ontarians just renewed their bonds with a party that deliberately campaigned to the left of the NDP; a party that has overtly joined the cause of government workers unions, against the interests of taxpayers.

Ontario’s so-called Sunshine List — the annual publication of government workers earning more than $100,000 — used to be a source of embarrassment. Now it’s the government’s base of support.

Ontario has chosen the takers against the makers. Thirtynine percent of Ontarians were fine with that and voted Liberal. And most of the 24% who voted for the NDP were fine with it too.

The day after the election was instructive. Mere hours after the election, Joe Fontana, the Liberal mayor of London, was convicted of fraud. But Wynne happily met with Fontana earlier this year, while he was before the courts — and merely by associating with him, gave him her political stamp of approval.

At exactly the same time, banks from around the world issued credit warnings about Ontario’s debt, and the province’s cost to borrow jumped the most it had in six months.

An official credit downgrade is imminent, though some banks say they’re waiting for the provincial budget, to make it official.

Corruption and debt.  Can they really bring down Canada’s economic colossus?

Ask Detroit — for decades, the highest-paid, most industrialized city in America. After two generations of Democratic rule, it’s an impoverished ghost town.

Oh, this is just the beginning.  Let’s see what new taxes and rules Toronto’s next mayor, socialist Olivia Chow, will bring with her.

Anyone want to bet on when the Bank of Montreal moves to Calgary?

SOURCE

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Flag day

Back when Democrats were patriotic, Woody Wilson said this:

"I therefore suggest and request that throughout the nation and if possible in every community the fourteenth day of June be observed as FLAG DAY with special patriotic exercises, at which means shall be taken to give significant expression to our thoughtful love of America, our comprehension of the great mission of liberty and justice to which we have devoted ourselves as a people, our pride in the history and our enthusiasm for the political programme of the nation, our determination to make it greater and purer with each generation, and our resolution to demonstrate to all the world its, vital union in sentiment and purpose, accepting only those as true compatriots who feel as we do the compulsion of this supreme allegiance."

The official Twitter account of the Democrat party, @TheDemocrats, sent out this tweet yesterday to mark their celebration of Flag Day:

"Happy flag day"



In accord with their modern priorities, the child was the "correct" color but that is not a correct picture of an American flag.  At best it's bunting.  While the flag has changed considerably throughout the years, there has never been a version that included a blue stripe as opposed to a blue field.  The American flag looks like this:



SOURCE

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In the media's America, “Mainstream” Means Left

Just when Tea Party obituaries were being sounded around the country, Washington fixture of 42 years, Mississippi Senator Thad Cochran, loses to upstart Tea Party candidate Chris McDaniel.

And one week later, House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, in the blockbuster of this year’s political season, is booted out of office in the Virginia Republican primary by an economics professor from Randolph-Macon College, total undergraduate enrollment - 1,312 students.

Turns out that reports of the death of the Tea Party are greatly exaggerated.

According to the New York Times editorial page, writing about Cantor’s defeat, the Tea Party is “producing candidates who are light-years from the mainstream.”

But if mainstream means not clearly on one side of the political spectrum or the other, a new report from Pew Research shows that what is supposedly mainstream today is not mainstream at all. The report, “Political Polarization in the American Republic,” shows that it is now the minority of Americans who are not clearly on the left or the right.

Only 39 percent of Americans define themselves in the middle, as a mixed bag of liberal and conservative values. The majority of Americans, the other 61 percent, see themselves as on the liberal left or the conservative right. Thirty four percent say they are mostly or consistently liberal and 27 percent say they are mostly or consistently conservative.

Just ten years ago 49 percent – ten percentage points more – defined themselves in the mixed middle.

The New York Times would like us to believe that there is a “mainstream” in America today because what “mainstream” means is status quo – don’t rock the boat. Because of the massive growth of government over recent years, today’s status quo means acceptance of a great lurch leftward, which has already occurred.

It sounds so measured and sober to call a candidate “mainstream.”  But “mainstream” is not measured and sober.

It means shrugging your shoulders at $17 trillion in federal debt, $4 trillion in federal spending, and a tax code of over 73,000 pages.

In polling reported by Gallup, for 45 years from 1952 to 1997, over 80 percent of Americans said there is “plenty of opportunity” in the country. By last year this was down to 52 percent.

The Tea Party is not an ideological movement. It is a movement of decent, hard-working Americans from quiet communities who are no longer willing to accept freedom and opportunity disappearing as result of the massive growth of government and a power-satiated political class in Washington.

America has no center today. You either accept a left-wing status quo or you are fighting against it.

SOURCE

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

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

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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I, playwright

In my own personal view of myself I have always thought of myself as primarily a literary type.  In my early years I read huge amounts of classical fiction and have always enjoyed poetry.  Out of a class of 1,000 students I got the highest mark awarded for the poetry paper in my first-year English course at the University of Qld many years ago and to this day it does not take much to provoke me into reciting large slabs of Chaucer in the original Middle English.

But it always seemed clear to me that literature was no way to make a living so I concentrated my studies on the social sciences instead.

My son seems to be much the same.  He wrote his first story when he was 9 but obviously concluded he had to study more practical things at university.  So he took a B.Sc. degree with first class honours in Mathematics.  He then started on a study program for a Ph.D. in mathematics.  But he has just abandoned that program and has started to write fiction instead.  He has decided to follow his natural bent no matter how impractical it may be.

I think he is wiser than I was.  So at age 70 I have decided to write a few plays.  They are just trifles for home performance but in case anybody is interested, you can access them here

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Are Conservatives Dumber Than Liberals?

It depends on how you define "conservative." The research shows that libertarian conservatives are smartest of all

Ronald Bailey

Conservatives exhibit less cognitive ability than liberals do. Or that's what it says in the social science literature, anyway. A 2010 study using data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health, for example, found that the IQs of young adults who described themselves as "very liberal" averaged 106.42, whereas the mean of those who identified as "very conservative" was 94.82. Similarly, when a 2009 study correlated cognitive capacity with political beliefs among 1,254 community college students and 1,600 foreign students seeking entry to U.S. universities, it found that conservatism is "related to low performance on cognitive ability tests." In 2012, a paper reported that people endorse more conservative views when drunk or under cognitive pressure; it concluded that "political conservatism may be a process consequence of low-effort thought."

So have social scientists really proved that conservatives are dumber than liberals? It depends crucially on how you define "conservative."

For an inkling of what some social scientists think conservatives believe, parse a 2008 study by the University of Nevada at Reno sociologist Markus Kemmelmeier. To probe the political and social beliefs of nearly 7,000 undergraduates at an elite university, Kemmelmeier devised a set of six questions asking whether abortion, same-sex marriage, and gay sex should be legal, whether handguns and racist/sexist speech on campus should be banned, and whether higher taxes should be imposed on the wealthy. The first three were supposed to measure the students' views of "conservative gender roles," and the second set was supposed to gauge their "anti-regulation" beliefs. Kemmelmeier clearly thought that "liberals" would tend to be OK with legal abortion, same-sex marriage, and gay sex, and would opt to ban handguns and offensive speech and to tax the rich. Conservatives would supposedly hold the opposite views.

Savvy readers may recognize a problem with using these questions to sort people into just two ideological categories. And sure enough, Kemmelmeier got some results that puzzled him. He found that students who held more traditional views on gender and sex roles averaged lower on their verbal SAT and Achievement Test scores. "Surprisingly," he continued, this was not true of students with anti-regulation attitudes. With them, "all else being equal, more conservative respondents scored higher than more liberal respondents." Kemmelmeier ruefully notes that "this result was not anticipated" and "diametrically contradicts" the hypothesis that conservatism is linked to lower cognitive ability. Kemmelmeier is so evidently lost in the intellectual fog of contemporary progressivism that he does not realize that his questionnaire is impeccably designed to identify classical liberals, a.k.a. libertarians, who endorse liberty in both the social and economic realms.

So how smart are libertarians compared to liberals and conservatives? In a May 2014 study in the journal Intelligence, the Oxford sociologist Noah Carl attempts to answer to that question. Because research has "consistently shown that intelligence is positively correlated with socially liberal beliefs and negatively correlated with religious beliefs," Carl suggests that in the American political context, social scientists would expect Republicans to be less intelligent than Democrats. Instead, Republicans have slightly higher verbal intelligence scores (2–5 IQ points) than Democrats. How could that be?

Carl begins by pointing out that there is data suggesting that a segment of the American population holding classical liberal beliefs tends to vote Republican. Classical liberals, Carl notes, believe that an individual should be free to make his own lifestyle choices and to enjoy the profits derived from voluntary transactions with others. He proposes that intelligence actually correlates with classically liberal beliefs.

To test this hypothesis, Carl uses data on political attitudes and intelligence derived from the General Social Survey, which has been administered to representative samples of American adults every couple of years since 1972. Using GSS data, respondents are classified on a continuum ranging from strong Republican through independent to strong Democrat. Carl then creates a measure of socially liberal beliefs based on respondents' attitudes toward homosexuality, marijuana consumption, abortion, and free speech for communists, racists, and advocates for military dictatorship. He similarly probes liberal economic views, with an assessment of attitudes toward government provision of jobs, industry subsidies, income redistribution, price controls, labor unions, and military spending. Verbal Intelligence is evaluated using the GSS WORDSUM test results.

Comparing strong Republicans with strong Democrats, Carl finds that Republicans have a 5.48 IQ point advantage over Democrats. Broadening party affiliation to include moderate to merely leaning respondents still results in a Republican advantage of 3.47 IQ points and 2.47 IQ points respectively. Carl reconciles his findings with the social science literature that reports that liberals are more intelligent than conservatives by proposing that Americans with classically liberal beliefs are even smarter. Carl further reports that those who endorse both social conservatism and economic statism also have lower verbal IQ scores.

"Overall, my findings suggest that higher intelligence among classically liberal Republicans compensates for lower intelligence among socially conservative Republicans," concludes Carl. If the dumb, I mean socially conservative, Republicans keep disrespecting us classical liberals, we'll take our IQ points and go home.

As gratifying as Carl's research findings are, it is still a deep puzzle to me why it apparently takes high intelligence to understand that the government should stay out of both the bedroom and the boardroom.

SOURCE

Bailey covers the issues pretty well above but could have emphasized even more strongly that it all depends on how you define conservative.  Most of the relevant research has been done by Leftists and thanks to their general lack of contact with reality, most of them have not got a blind clue about what conservatism is.  All they know is what they have picked up from their fellow Leftists.  So they define conservatism very narrowly and miss out that the central issue for conservatives is  individual liberty.

One result of that is that their lists of questions that are supposed to index conservatism usually show no correlation with vote!  Many of the people who are critical of homosexuality, for instance, are Democrat voters, not Republicans.  Blacks, for instance, are often religious and are also conservative on many social issues so a low average score on IQ for religious conservatives could simply reflect the low average IQ score of blacks while telling us nothing about whites

Just to give you the feel of black attitudes, a common Caribbean word for a homosexual is "Poopman"

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IRS “Loses” Lois Lerner Emails!

The IRS has fought tooth and nail to stall and hold out on surrendering Lois Lerner's emails to Congressional committees.

First, the IRS told Congress that it would take years to access and, if necessary, redact Lois Lerner's emails. Then, the administration tried to tell Congress what emails it could and couldn't have.

Throughout the administration's stonewalling, real Conservatives in Congress (yes, they really exist) stood strong and demanded that the IRS obey the lawful Congressional subpoena for ALL of Lois Lerner's emails.

Well, after exhausting all options of stopping the investigation into the IRS scandal, the Obama administration has decided to try a new tactic: they are claiming that a "computer crash" has destroyed Lois Lerner's emails!

The so-called "crash" didn't destroy all of Ms. Lerner's emails. Any in-department emails between Lerner and other IRS employees are still accessible. However, all of the emails between Ms. Lerner and the White House, FEC, DOJ, and Congressional Democrats have now been destroyed!

They think you are an idiot! They think that they can destroy evidence connecting Lois Lerner and the White House and that you won't figure out what is going on!

At least Richard Nixon admitted to withholding the Watergate tapes and ordering them to be destroyed. The Obama administration thinks they can stop the investigation into the IRS scandal by claiming that almost all of Lois Lerner's emails were "accidentally" destroyed!

It is almost comical how the administration expects us to believe that all emails connecting Lois Lerner with the Obama White House have been tragically and accidentally lost.

We are supposed to just sit back and accept the fact that all the evidence was destroyed that connected Lois Lerner's targeting program with the White House, DOJ, FEC, and House Democrats…

We know for a FACT that Lois Lerner communicated with Democrats in Congress, such as Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-MD). That is undeniable! We know that these Democrat lawmakers reached out to the IRS and asked them to target their political opponents. Now, the administration has apparently destroyed all evidence of these communications.

We know for a FACT that Lois Lerner reached out to Eric Holder's Justice Department about prosecuting conservative non-profit groups. That is undeniable! Now, the administration has apparently "lost" all evidence of these communications as well.

We know for a FACT that Lois Lerner was regularly communicating with Federal Election Commission bureaucrats in her pursuit to undermine the Supreme Court's Citizens United ruling. Again, we are being told that those emails have conveniently been destroyed.

Do they understand how the Internet works? Even if there was a crash or if a catastrophic virus did infect Lois Lerner's computer — conveniently during a criminal investigation — are we really supposed to believe that this same crash/virus has affected all of the recipients of these emails as well?!

Anyone who has used the Internet knows that when an email is sent, there isn't just one record of it. The sender and recipient both have copies of the communication.

But, we are being told that basic Internet logic doesn't apply here and that all records of Lois Lerner's crimes have been destroyed. How convenient for the President and his administration…

What did the White House find in these emails that was so damning that they had to be destroyed? Who else was Lois Lerner conspiring with to silence conservative groups and to stop them from participating in the 2012 election?

Every time that Congress gets close to uncovering the truth about the IRS scandal, the administration does something to try to stop the investigation in its tracks.

Now, the administration has begun destroying documents… I mean, the administration had a convenient "computer crash."

Enough is enough! Lois Lerner is a criminal who must be thrown in jail, and whoever in the Obama administration conspired to destroy this evidence must also be thrown behind bars!

Congress has the power to do all of this, but they will only use this authority to jail these criminals if YOU tell them to!

SOURCE

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It doesn’t seem to be true that inequality damages the economy

We're all aware of the mobs of screaming harpies telling us that inequality is damaging to the economy, nay to the very life of the nation. We even had a whole book about it, The Spirit Level, which manipulated (and badly) every statistic it could to try and convince us of this point. The problem for the thesis is that if this were true, if inequality were bad for the economy, then we would see the economies of places which are more unequal doing worse than the economies of places which were more equal. And, to be frank about it, this isn't what we see:

When we talk about competitiveness, we don’t talk much about fairness. Fairness is more a moral issue. If you look at the top countries on our list, they are not the equal countries, with the exception of Sweden. The U.S., Switzerland, Hong Kong and Singapore are countries where income inequality tends to be high. If you look at our data, there is a U-shaped relationship when it comes to income inequality. Countries that are very competitive or not competitive at all tend to be very unequal. The two extremes are the U.S. and Venezuela. Both countries are quite unequal. The countries where economic inequality is quite low, rank high but they are certainly not on the top. There is a price to pay in order to promote or guarantee a certain level of equality and that comes at the expense of competitiveness.

As we've noted around here before, Venezuela's problems do not stem from the inequality in that country, rather from the silly, even pig ignorant, methods they've tried to use to reduce that inequality. Similarly Sweden is both more equal and competitive because they do two things right. Firstly, underneath the tax burden, they run an intensely classically liberal economy and secondly, they raise that monstrous amount of tax revenues by taxing consumption, not capital or corporations.

Which leads us to two observations: the first being that we don't actually have any evidence that inequality harms the growth prospects of the economy. The second is that even if it does whether reducing that inequality will reduce the performance of the economy depends upon precisely how we reduce the inequality. We might try price controls, rationing, import substitution, nationalisation, the Venezuelan route, or we might try a properly free market economy with a high VAT to give us the money to redistribute, the Swedish way. That latter works, in that the country is more equal (if that's something you want to worry about and we don't) and also remains competitive. The former doesn't work in either sense: but sadly if we look around UK politics we see those concerned with inequality arguing for those Venezuelan policies rather than those Swedish ones.

Which end of the political spectrum is said to be the evidence based one again?

SOURCE

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

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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