Is Obama presidentially-incapacitated by narcissistic rage?

Dr Sellin has got part of the story below but he puts too much weight on narcissism alone.  Obama is undoubtedly narcissistic.  Most Leftists are.  That is why they are so arrogant and insensitive to rational argument.  But Obama is more than narcissistic.  He is psychopathic.  There have been many manifestations of that.  See here

An individual with narcissistic personality disorder exhibits extreme self-importance, has a constant need for attention and admiration, is secretive and controlling, cannot empathize with others, and has a heightened sensitivity to criticism. To get the attention he craves, a narcissist may try to create crises or diversions that return the focus to him. The narcissist feels entitled, that the world owes him, regardless of whether he makes a contribution.

Narcissists are selfish and self-centered people, who are capable only of thinking about their own issues regarding power, prestige, and personal adequacy. They cannot understand the problems of people around them, and are not aware of other peoples' feelings. Although they act superior and confident, this actually hides the fact that they have very fragile egos. They live with the illusion that they are perfectionists and that people revere them. The slightest disrespect or challenge can quickly lead to the development of "Narcissistic Rage," a term coined by Heinz Kohut in his 1972 book "The Analysis of the Self." The fuming rage the narcissist exhibits is different from the anger that people usually feel; it is either irrational or severely blown out of proportion from an insignificant remark or action. According to Kohut, this rage impairs a narcissist's cognition, therefore impairing his judgment.

A narcissist needs to sustain the illusion of being bigger, larger, smarter and more successful than everyone else in order to feel stable. Narcissists need constant admiration, attention and compliments, not to increase their self-esteem, but to prevent a feeling of instability that could lead to dysfunction or breakdown. Narcissistic rage occurs when that core instability is heightened. In essence, the reason narcissists are so self-centered is that their grandiosity-based personality needs to be constantly reinforced to remain stable.

In the present context, narcissistic rage can take two forms:

I. Explosive - The narcissist attacks everyone in his immediate vicinity and is verbally and psychologically abusive.

II. Pernicious or Passive-Aggressive - The narcissist sulks, gives the silent treatment or is vindictive, plotting how to put the transgressors in their proper place. They can sabotage the work of people whom they regard to be the sources of their mounting wrath.

As described by Ernest Istook, Obama's behavior matches the American Psychiatric Association's definition of passive-aggressive behavior, "a habitual pattern of passive resistance to expected work requirements, opposition, stubbornness, and negativistic attitudes in response to requirements for normal performance levels expected of others." Often, such persons see themselves as blameless victims, projecting fault onto others. Commonly, they follow erratic paths and cause constant conflicts.

Obama is cautious and dithers even on perilous issues like confronting the ISIS threat, not as a result of campaign promises, but because to make any decision risks the reassuring adulation of his political base and a fawning media.

And nothing the narcissist says is ever what he means. Language is simply used as a tool for deception, and manipulation. Everything they do is for show, or only meant in the moment. That's why everything around them seems so chaotic and confusing.

Obama's vindictive and illegal use of the IRS results from his perception that critics are enemies, seeing Republicans as a greater threat to him personally than terrorists. When you are a narcissist, the world looks like it should approve, adore, agree and obey you. Anything less than that seems like an assault and a narcissist feels justified in raging back at it.

No one should expect a significant change in Obama's behavior because narcissists demonstrate an enduring pattern of inflexibility that is pervasive across a broad range of personal and social situations.

Nevertheless, even narcissists eventually have to be held accountable for their actions.

SOURCE

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Obama’s Benghazi Narrative Falls Apart!

A groundbreaking claim has been made by the five commandos who were charged with protecting the CIA facility in Benghazi, Libya.

In a book they are authoring together, these five commandos have admitted what we have all suspected for the past two years: that they were ordered to “stand down” and not rescue Ambassador Chris Stevens and the rest of the inhabitants of the Benghazi Consulate.

Words can’t express how groundbreaking this allegation is.

They heard a consular security agent screaming on the radio, pleading for help. “If you guys do not get here, we are going to die,” he pleaded over the radio.

So the Commandos suited up, got their gear, and jumped in the car. They were only one mile away from the Consulate and felt that they could have affected the outcome of the terrorist attack. But they were stopped. They were prohibited from leaving the CIA facility and were allegedly told to “stand down” multiple times by the CIA’s own Station Chief.

The Obama administration and Congress have both released reports claiming that rescue teams were never ordered to ‘stand down.’ Both branches of government have perpetuated the narrative that there was nothing anyone could have done. We now know that is a complete lie!

It really is this simple. We have suspected for years that our boys on the ground were given ‘stand down’ orders. It simply doesn’t make sense for the administration team to claim that it took so long for trained security personnel to travel one mile to the compound!

These men were given the order to stand down and forced to wait.  They sat and did nothing for almost THIRTY minutes before they disregarded their orders and left anyway.

Imagine how things could have changed if these five men were allowed to launch their rescue mission immediately… imagine how many people might still be alive if they weren’t told to stand down…

Now imagine what it would take for the entire federal government to perpetuate a narrative that was a complete lie!

The Obama administration said that a stand down order was never issued… the military said the same… the CIA as well… even Congress perpetuated the narrative that the administration did all it could…

But the five men on the ground know the truth and they are making sure the world knows as well! They know that they were told to ‘stand down’ and that people died as a result! Had it not been for the multiple ‘stand down’ orders given, the Security Annex Team might have been able to save Ambassador Chris Stevens, Sean Smith, and the rest of the staff.

In the next week, the House Select Committee on Benghazi will hold its first public hearing. The Democrats and administration bureaucrats are already mudslinging, making claims that the entire investigation is a farce.

They are doing everything they can to perpetuate the narrative that President Obama and his administration did everything they could on that fateful night… They are doing everything they can to shutdown the Congressional investigation…

SOURCE

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Meet the Left-Wing Extremist Running for U.S. Senate

Amanda Curtis seeks to replace plagiarist Democrat John Walsh.

Did you hear about the Republican candidate for Senate out West who wants to overthrow the entire American economic system? The one who, when asked about his view on the situation on Iraq, said he needed more time? Who said he couldn’t answer questions about the situation at the Mexican border because “only 11 days ago I was painting my storm windows”?

Of course you didn’t. Because he is a she, and a Democrat. Her name is Amanda Curtis.

You certainly would have heard about a Republican candidate like that, though. He would have been banner-headline material on The Huffington Post, Salon, and other liberal redoubts. Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert would have given him the business. Op/ed columnists around the country would have held him up as an example of how radical wingnuts had seized control of the GOP.

After all: Any time some random Republican somewhere says something idiotic, you can pretty much count on it making national news. If he or she says something especially stupid (see: Akin, Todd) it’s likely to launch a national debate, in the sense of “debate” meaning “weeks of discussion in which everyone agrees the comment was heinous and keeps saying so, over and over.”

This happens with such regularity there’s even a term for it (coined by Slate’s David Weigel): the Republican Lawmaker Principle. There is, however, no corresponding Democratic Lawmaker Principle—though not because Democrats never say outrageous things. They do, and the conservative blogosphere delights in raking them over the coals for it.

But the broader media generally don’t pick up on Democratic inanities because, viewed through the filter of unconscious liberal bias, the comments are just unfortunate isolated incidents, rather than what dumb Republican comments are seen as: yet more data points supporting the thesis that Those People Are Swivel-Eyed Lunatics. This is true of every dumb Democratic remark, no matter how many occur.

This brings us back to Curtis, a state lawmaker in Montana. Democrats chose her to run for the Senate after the six-month incumbent, John Walsh, was busted for plagiarism.

Curtis has said some unflattering things about gun rights, and Christians, and her desire to punch other lawmakers in the face—all of them in YouTube diaries she broadcast as commentaries on the Montana legislative session. Nothing terribly far-out there. The far-out part is her association with the Wobblies.

The Wobblies are the Industrial Workers of the World, a hard-left union of historical vintage that let the 20th century pass it by. “The working class and the employing class have nothing in common,” the group proclaims. “Between these two classes a struggle must go on until the workers of the world organize as a class, take possession of the means of production, abolish the wage system, and live in harmony with the Earth.”

Nothing says “modern, forward-thinking progressive” like warmed-over Lenin.

Curtis’ husband is more active in the IWW than she, but her admiration for communist economics doesn’t stop there. Not long ago she replaced her Facebook profile picture with a photo of Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, the former chairwoman of the Communist Party USA.

Question: If a Republican candidate for the U.S. Senate signified his admiration for the president of the American Nazi Party—or even the John Birch Society—do you think the media would find that at all newsworthy? Sure they would. What if a Republican had written for a newsletter of the Ku Klux Klan, as Curtis has written for the IWW? Ditto. Yet on the rare occasions when news outlets have seen fit to mention such details, they have done so in terms of conservatives “pouncing on” them. Man, those critics have some nerve, don’t they?

Curtis might be a fallback candidate, but that did not stop Montana Democrats from nominating her at a convention—just as Virginia Republicans last year nominated E.W. Jackson, a fire-and-brimstone minister, to be the state’s lieutenant governor. Jackson’s off-the-wall ravings about the sickness inherent in homosexuality, the satanic peril of yoga and so forth turned him into an object of national sport—and he wasn’t even seeking national office.

Curtis, however, is. Will she wind up getting the Jackson treatment before November? It’s possible—but don’t sit on a hot stove while you wait.

SOURCE

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A nasty one for vegetarians and other food freaks

Adding soy to your diet could speed up the rate at which breast cancer cells spread, scientists have warned.  Researchers at the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Centre in New York studied 140 women diagnosed with invasive breast cancer.

Half took soy protein powder containing genistein while the other half took a placebo for between seven and 30 days before they had surgery to remove their cancer.

The scientists compared tumour tissues from before and after the operation and found changes in the expressions of certain genes, that are known to promote cell growth, in those women taking the soy supplement.  The findings led them to conclude the soy protein could potentially accelerate the progression of the disease.

The study states: 'These data raise concern that soy may exert a stimulating effect on breast cancer in a sub set of women.'

All those taking part in the study had recently had breast biopsies and were diagnosed with stage one or two breast cancer. They were all scheduled to have a mastectomy or lumpectomy two to three weeks later.

The researchers said it is not yet clear if the effects can be reversed.

Jacqueline Bromberg, co-author of the study, said: 'Although the genes were being expressed, it is not clear that this will translate into actual tumour growth.  'But the concern is that there may be the potential.  'Only 20 per cent of those patients who took the soy had really high levels of the genistein metabolite.'

She said the reasons behind the disparity are unclear, adding that there is no way to predict who would have this reaction after consuming soy.

Of the women with high genistein levels, a few of them experienced changes in a specified set of genes that are known to affect breast cancer cell growth, death, or some aspect of breast cancer pathology, Dr Bromberg, said.

The changes were seen in women who consumed around 51.6 grams of soy - the equivalent of about four cups of soy milk a day.

The researchers concluded those who eat soy regularly could 'reasonably consume that amount' through the course of a day, particularly vegetarians and those who do not eat dairy products.

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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The white liberal fantasy collides head-on with the reality of Islam

by Robert Henderson

NB: The territory taken from Iraq and Syria has gone by various titles: ISIS, ISIL and IS. I shall use ISIS standing for the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria

The present mess in the Middle East and North Africa is largely the creation of the prime political absurdity which lies at the heart of the modern liberal fantasy, namely, that what they call liberal democracy (in truth a politically correct illiberal state) can be manufactured if only the right circumstances are created. This woefully wrongheaded idea reprises today the mistake made during the dissolution of the British Empire. The British withdrawal strategy was simple: for each ex-colony create the formal structures of a parliamentary democracy – parliaments, written constitutions, electoral systems and so on – and then, like a climbing plant covering a trellis, democratic behaviour would grow and wrap itself around the formal structures. It was at best laughably naïve and at worst a cynical fig leaf to cover the unseemly haste with which Britain relinquished control of their colonies.

The reason why the British post-colonial strategy failed is beautifully simple: political systems cannot be self-consciously created. They are organic growths. When it comes to representative government elected on a broad franchise ( a more honest description of the reality than democracy) , such growths are remarkably rare. Look around the world and see how many secure representative political systems there are. The Britain, the USA, Canada, Australia and New Zealand qualify because they have such representative systems and have not experienced violent revolution either at all or for centuries. All are Anglo-Saxon in origin. Who else? Switzerland and Iceland. Being generous we can perhaps add the Scandinavians and Holland. For the rest, including all the major European states, there is not one which has not had governments overthrown by outright violence or unconstitutional means since 1900.

To the rarity of stable and lasting representative government growing organically, can be added the insuperable problem of territories with immense ethnic and racial variety accepting the outcomes of elections with which they disagree. Indeed, such variety is probably the prime reason why representative government is so rare. Such disabling heterogeneity of population was the situation with the colonies Britain freed after 1945 and is the situation with the ethnic, racial and religious kaleidoscope that is the Middle East and North Africa.

A complaint is often made that the European colonial powers caused much of the post-colonial difficulty through their drawing of colonial boundaries which produced territories without a natural national unity. This complaint does not hold water. It is not that the European imperial powers did not draw such boundaries, but rather that it would not have made any general difference where the boundaries were drawn because the same problem would have arisen as a consequence of the exceptionally diverse nature of the lands involved. There were no discrete territories with populations which were large enough and homogeneous enough in race, religion and culture to form a natural nation state.

The fruits of recent Western meddling

The consequences of Western interference since the turn of the century has been uniformly dismal: it has either replaced harsh order with growing chaos or replaced one dictatorship with another. Consider how the present situation in the Middle East and North Africa has come about. First, Bush junior and Blair go gallivanting into Afghanistan and reduce that to a battleground for violent Islam and tribal hatreds and jealousies to play out. From there they decide to meddle in Iraq by invading on the entirely spurious grounds that Saddam Hussein represented a threat to the West because he had weapons of mass destruction. That the UN Weapons inspectors reported they had found no evidence of weapons of mass destruction and asked for more time counted for nothing. Neither did the fact that at the time of the invasion Saddam was being restrained in his behaviour by sanctions and a Western-enforced no-fly zone over the Kurdish areas. Having deposed Saddam and his regime Iraq was placed under a military occupation which went the way of all military occupations, gradual dissolution through the exhaustion of the occupying power.

Then came the miserably entitled Arab Spring, whose fruits have been bitter indeed. Because there are nonatural nation states in the area, the “Arab Spring” was doomed to the failure it has been because the states involved were all fissile territories whose diverse populations were only held in check from internecine fighting by harsh dictators, whether republican or monarchical.

Libya has been reduced to a state of anarchy with rival militias, tribes, gangs – call them what you will- making hay with the weapons made freely available by the overthrow of Gadhafi. With a grim irony Egypt has swapped a covert military dictatorship for an overt military dictatorship, whilst dispensing with an elected if Islamist president on the way. Iraq has lurched into an increasing state of disorder as the US has gradually withdrawn and is now divided between Iraq, Kurdistan and ISIS.

Most gruesomely for Western politicians, the tyrant of Syria Bashir Assad has withstood the attempts, vociferously supported by the West, to destroy him and his regime by the rag-tag and politically indeterminate “Free Syrian Army” and is now through the emergence of ISIS the only plausible obstacle to ISIS ‘ continued existence and expansion. If realpolitik ruled the West would be making common cause with Assad but because they have labelled him a devil they cannot bring themselves to do the sensible thing and make common cause with him so that he can restore some sort of order to Syria.

What can and should be done by the West?

The liberal warmongers are ever more eagerly saying that If the West does not intervene militarily to destroy aggressive Islam then parts of the Middle East will be breeding grounds and safe havens for terrorists to carry their terror into the West.

But if the West does intervene militarily to successfully snuff out ISIS, then the likelihood would be that ISIS members, especially those who come from Western states, would return to their various countries determined to wage terrorist war there. Moreover, the West would be committed to remaining indefinitely in the territory they have taken from ISIS, their very presence being a standing motive for violent Muslims in the West to attack the countries which harbour them.

Nor would the destruction of ISIS in Iraq and Syria be an end of violent Islam creating havens to protect, train and send terrorists into to the West. Afghanistan is ripe to fall to the Taliban once Western military forces are withdrawn. Parts of Pakistan are controlled by violent Islam. Libya is little more than a geographical expression filled with petty warlords and ripe for violent Islam to go to if it is not already there. Deeper into Africa there is the Boko Haram spreading throughout the West. In the East Kenya and Uganda suffer from Muslim terrorist attacks, Ethiopia and Somalia have serious Islamist incursions to deal with while in Sudan violent Islam holds power. It is increasingly difficult to point to parts of Africa which remain untouched by violent Islam.

The plain truth is that even if the West were willing and able to suppress ISIS in Syria and Iraq by force, they could never control violent Islam because violent Islam would simply keep on the move from one accommodating territory to another.

How serious a threat to the West is ISIS?

The potential of ISIS to create a lasting aggressive and powerful Islamic state is grossly overblown. It has taken a great deal of territory very rapidly, but that is unsurprising in a place like the Middle East where there is a good deal of desert and the formal states whose land has been taken were all in some governmental disarray , which is not a recipe for inspiring troops to resolutely fight a determined aggressor such as ISIS. In the case of Iraq the discriminatory behaviour of the Maliki government had seriously alienated the Sunni minority which provided a reason for Iraqi Sunnis to have some fellow feeling with the Sunni ISIS. Moreover, even where there are large numbers of people willing to resist ISIS, as appears to be the case in Kurdistan, that is of little avail if they are equipped with much inferior weaponry and training.

But taking territory is one thing, maintaining control of it quite another. That is particularly the case where the territory conquered has a population which is chronically divided by religion and ethnicity and is spread over several formal states. ISIS need to rapidly show they are up to administering the land they have taken. Easier said than done, especially as they are likely to be engaging in warfare for quite some time to come, both with elements within the territory they have taken and from outside. Terror tactics only take a conqueror go so far. They are not a sufficient basis for ruling.

There is also considerable scope for ISIS to fracture because the land they have captured is exceptionally ethnically and religiously diverse, the ISIS personnel is very cosmopolitan and may come to be resented by even the native Sunnis in the ISIS territory and ISIS will have to fight the remnant of Iraq (with its hostile Shia majority) and Assad’s Syrian Army. There is also the possibility that Iran may join in.

Much has been made of the modern weaponry and auxiliary military equipment ISIS have taken , but the equipment will require considerable expertise to maintain and operate it. Such skills, especially that needed to maintain the equipment, will probably not be available in the quantities needed. Moreover, ISIS will need to buy more modern weaponry, especially munitions, as time goes on and it is not clear who will sell it to them in sufficient quantity and quality.

A ghastly irony for the West, and most particularly the USA, is the fact that they have supplied much of the military equipment which ISIS are using , either because the equipment has been captured from Iraqi forces or because the equipment was supplied by the West to the Syrian rebels fighting Assad, significant numbers of whom share the mentality of ISIS. The fact that ISIS have had the success they have had is unsurprising given the circumstances. Keeping hold of what they have will take up all their energies for the foreseeable future.

The enemy within

The real threat to the West comes not from ISIS but the large Muslim populations in the West which the treacherous and deluded liberal internationalists have allowed to settle as they pursued their fatuous dream of a world without borders or nation states. The last UK Census in 2011 shows 2.7 million people identifying themselves as Muslims (4.8 per cent of the population). This is almost certainly substantially less than the real figure because the Census depends on self-reporting and there is a significant minority of the UK population who never complete the Census form because they are either here illegally or have a mentality which makes them think that giving any information about themselves to a government is dangerous.

How does the West protect itself from homicidal Muslims within its own territory? It would be a next to impossible question to find an adequate answer to even in a country which has meaningful border controls because of the number of Muslims born and bred in the West. In a country such as Britain which effectively has open borders the question becomes not merely hideously difficult but absurd.

In Britain the Coalition government has floundered around talking about removing passports from people trying to leave Britain if they are suspected Jihadis, , the banning from Britain of those who have been in Iraq and Syria, the reintroduction of control orders and, most pathetically, the idea that Muslim coming back from fighting for ISIS can be turned into good British citizens through re-education.

Any action by Western politicians is problematic because as a class they have lost the ability to instinctively act in the national interests of the people they are supposed to represent. They ignore the first duty of a politician in a democracy which is to ask what is best for their own people. Instead their calamitous mentality is that described in Jean Raspail’s “Camp of the Saints” where the response of politicians and the liberal elite generally to the passive-aggressive misery of huge numbers of migrants from the Third World arriving in the West overwhelms the needs of their own people.

But Western elites are becoming seriously afraid of both the danger represented by violent Muslims in their countries and the anger of their native populations . As a consequence there are things being said now by public figures which would have been unthinkable only a few short weeks ago. The one-time Shadow Home Secretary David Davis pushes for British Muslims who go to fight with the likes of Isis to be stripped of their British citizenship regardless of whether this leaves them stateless so that their “trip to Syria is no longer a short violent holiday but a life sentence to the lifestyle they claim to espouse, complete with Sharia law and a desert climate”. The Leader of the UK Independence Party Nigel Farage advocates the same thing while the former Archbishop of Canterbury Lord Carey says that “ Multiculturalism has resulted in honour killings, female genital mutilation and rule by Sharia law” and supports the call to remove British citizenship from those who go to join violent Islam. The Mayor London Boris Johnson wants Muslims returning from Syria and Iraq to be considered guilty until proven innocent of terrorist activity, a bald reversal of the ancient right under English law to be considered innocent until proven guilty. .

The journalist Leo McKinstry places the responsibility for the present danger firmly on successive British governments :

“The fact is that extremism has flourished in a climate formed by the twin strategies of mass immigration and multiculturalism. Open borders have led to a phenomenal expansion in Britain’s Muslim population to almost three million, many of the new arrivals hailing from parts of Africa, the Middle East and Asia where Islamic sectarianism is rife.

At the same time the dogma of cultural diversity has become one of the central obsessions of the state. We are constantly told that we must celebrate the vibrant enrichment of our society. But, by its emphasis on cultural differences and its loathing for traditional British values the doctrine of diversity has been a catastrophe for Britain.

In place of integration it has promoted division and separatism. We are a land increasingly without a mutual sense of belonging or shared national identity. It is little wonder that, according to one recent survey, 26 per cent of Muslims here said they feel no loyalty to Britain.”

The problem is that while the public rhetoric is changing nothing significant alters on the ground. The words change but the circumstances remain much the same. The liberal elites are still paralysed by both political correctness and the ghastly fact that dangerous fifth columns now exist because of their mass immigration policies and the consequent need to suppress native British dissent about its effects. In addition through their policy of multiculturalism the liberal elite has encouraged ethnic and racial minorities to both live culturally apart from and behave in a flagrantly provocative manner towards the native population. The upshot of all this is that those with power in the West dare not admit there is a general problem amongst immigrant communities ( which live largely separate lives in their own communities) because to do so would be to admit that the fault lay with them.

In an attempt to circumvent the danger of being held to account, Western politicians and the mainstream media try to peddle the “violent Muslims are only a tiny percentage of Muslims living amongst us; the vast majority are well educated, peace loving, hardworking law abiding citizens”. This is a dubious proposition in itself when the crime, educational attainment, benefit take up and unemployment statistics show Muslims to be more prone to crime, have below average educational attainment and are more likely to be unemployed or on in-work benefits than the population as a whole. But even if none of those things were true the problem of violent Islam in Britain would still be there because many of the Muslims who have been outed as sharing violent Islam’s ideas are not from the lower reaches of society.

The important thing to understand is that it is never the peaceful minority which counts in these circumstances. What matters is the terrorist minority. They drive the terror and enlist the non-violent to aid them in various ways. The Provisional IRA (PIRA) in Ireland probably never had no more than a thousand people actively engaged in terrorism: sanctioning and planning terrorist attacks, making bombs, planting bombs, killing or maiming those thought to untrustworthy or simply disobedient to PIRA’s will. But there were very large numbers who were willing to provide PIRA with safe houses, to store of weapons, to tell PIRA about informers and come out on the streets at the drop of a hat to protest in the PIRA interest. In addition, the existence of a large population with a sense of victimhood (the Irish Catholics) allowed in Mao’s words the PIRA “guerrilla to move amongst the people as a fish swims in the sea. “

But there are terrorist and terrorists. There are two radical differences between PIRA and violent Islam. PIRA were not driven by religious fanaticism (it was a Marxist organisation) and its members were drawn from communities which shared similar moral values to those of the British. This meant that when the time came to make a peace of sorts between Britain and Irish Republicans there was a great deal of cultural similarity between the two parties. The representatives of violent Islam, even those born and bred here, will have little fellow feeling with or understanding of the native British population.

The second and most important difference is that the nature of the PIRA and ISIS end games. For PIRA it was a united Ireland. That was a genuinely possibility because the British government accepted that if Northern Ireland voted for union with the Irish Republic they could have it provided the Republic agreed. Although hardline members of PIRA did not want to make peace, many PIRA members did , together with a majority of ordinary republicans . Crucially, the republicans in favour of peace could see it simply as a stepping stone to the unification of Ireland, not as a defeat for their cause. In addition, the demographics of Northern Ireland were heading towards a Catholic and therefore largely republican majority by the time peace was formally made.

Violent Islam does not have an end game which any Western government could concede either in whole or in part. Its practitioners want the overthrow of Western society and the imposition of Islam. There is no conception of compromise. If Britain existed under the control of such people it would be an unforgiving theocracy. Because violent Islam is implacable, no concession short of outright victory for violent Islam will end the violence. If Western governments make concessions such as granting Sharia courts parity with civil courts violent Islam will simply pocket the bribe and march on towards the final end of total dominance.

Where does this leave the West? It leaves the countries with large Muslim populations at perpetual risk from both terrorism and the likelihood of Western elites attempting to appease Muslims by granting them more and more privileges. These risks will increase because Western Muslims have higher birth rates than native Western populations. In addition, further substantial Muslim immigration will probably occur because Western governments will try to placate Muslims by relaxing entry requirements and border controls are always likely to be ineffective . Western black converts to Islam could also swell the numbers significantly.

Is there a silver lining or two amongst the Islamic clouds? Well, at least the realities of the situation the liberal elite have created are becoming impossible to ignore. Most encouragingly, the concept of treason is suddenly back on the political agenda. This is fundamentally important because patriotism is not an optional extra but the glue which sticks a society together. But the storm cloud which cannot be dispersed is the immoveable fact of millions of Muslims living within Western societies who harbour substantial numbers of people who are unquestioningly hostile to the countries in which they reside. That is what rule by the politically correct devotees to internationalism have brought us. It has been an act of the most fundamental treason.

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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Pictures, pictures!

I have just gone through my blogs for the first half of this year and picked out what I think are the "best" pictures that appeared in that period.  You can access the result here or here.

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Leftist president of France is revealed as an elitist snob – common on the Left 

As well as being a bore, a fornicator and a nincompoop, François Hollande stands accused of being a snob. His former mistress, Valérie Trierweiler, has revealed – along with other peccadilloes too excruciating to recount here – that the man who publicly professes to loathe the rich privately despises the poor. The son of a solidly bourgeois home, Hollande apparently sneered at Miss Trierweiler’s humbler origins, and referred privately to the underprivileged as “les sans-dents”: the toothless.

Miss Trierweiler finds this attitude incongruous in a Leftist politician, which makes me wonder how many Leftist politicians she can have spent time with. Snobbery is a well-established socialist vice. It began with Karl Marx, who could be vicious about the people modern Leftists primly call “the most vulnerable in our society”. The old cadger had no time for such euphemisms.

Alongside decayed roués with dubious means of subsistence and of dubious origin, alongside ruined and adventurous offshoots of the bourgeoisie, were vagabonds, discharged soldiers, discharged jailbirds, escaped galley slaves, swindlers, mountebanks, pickpockets, tricksters, gamblers, pimps, porters, literati, organ grinders, ragpickers, knife grinders, tinkers, beggars — in short, the whole indefinite, disintegrated mass which the French call la bohème.

Not all Leftist politicians are snobs, obviously. Some honourably speak to and for their poorest constituents without ever patronising them – Tony Benn was an outstanding example. But others are clandestinely dismissive of the people they purport to represent. Gordon Brown’s “bigoted woman” remark was a rare – because recorded – glimpse into the way Labour can privately view its core voters.

After a lifetime of observing such hypocrisy, George Orwell – who was a socialist, but no snob – brilliantly portrayed it in Nineteen Eighty-Four. On the one hand, the Party claimed to be on the side of the masses.  But simultaneously, true to the Principles of doublethink, the Party taught that the proles were natural inferiors who must be kept in subjection, like animals, by the application of a few simple rules.

Snobbery is not confined to any party or faction, of course. What seems far more common on the Left, though, is the need to find some inert, subjugated, grateful mass to champion. At first, that mass was supposed to be the industrialised proletariat. But, when working people were enfranchised, they often turned out to have troublingly conservative opinions. The needy politicians then turned to immigrants and other minorities. Annoyingly for them, some of these groups were equally unwilling to play the part allotted to them.

So Lefties began to cast the net wider, searching for people who could be relied on not to contradict the official line: oppressed colonials, Palestinians, black South Africans. Sadly, these groups, too, refused to be either unconditionally grateful or politically correct.

I sometimes wonder whether political neediness explains the popularity of the animal rights movement: here, finally, is a constituency that can be relied on never to gainsay its self-proclaimed champions. Passive, predictable and in need of protection, animals are the perfect political prop.

As for Hollande, the French saw through him long ago. With 13 per cent approval ratings, he is the most unpopular leader in the history of his country (though, in fairness, there were no opinion polls during Charles X’s reign). Some French people may be toothless, but they’re evidently not mindless. They are on the receiving end of  the Euro-correct socialism that is immiserating France, and they know it. Vivent les sans-dents!

 SOURCE

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American warmongers at work

All Democrats or "progresives"

By Patrick J. Buchanan

About how America became involved in certain wars, many conspiracy theories have been advanced — and some have been proved correct.

When James K. Polk got his declaration of war as Mexico had "shed American blood upon the American soil," Rep. Abraham Lincoln demanded to know the exact spot where it had happened.

And did the Spanish really blow up the battleship Maine in Havana Harbor, the casus belli for the Spanish-American War?

The Gulf of Tonkin Incident, involving U.S. destroyers Maddox and C. Turner Joy, remains in dispute. But charges that North Vietnamese patrol boats had attacked U.S. warships on the high seas led to the 1964 resolution authorizing the war in Vietnam.

In 2003, Americans were stampeded into backing an invasion of Iraq because Saddam Hussein had allegedly been complicit in 9/11, had weapons of mass destruction and was able to douse our East Coast with anthrax.

"(He) lied us into war because he did not have the political courage to lead us into it," said Rep. Clare Luce of Franklin D. Roosevelt, who, according to many historians, made efforts to provoke German subs into attacking U.S. warships and bring us into the European war through the "back door" of a war with Japan.

This week marks the 75th anniversary of World War II, as last month marked the 100th anniversary of World War I.

Thus, it is a good time for Eugene Windchy's "Twelve American Wars: Nine of Them Avoidable." A compelling chapter in this new book, by the author of "Tonkin Gulf," deals with how Winston Churchill, First Lord of the Admiralty, schemed to drag America into Britain's war in 1915.

In 1907, Britain launched the Lusitania, "the greyhound of the sea," the fastest passenger ship afloat. In 1913, Churchill called in the head of Cunard and said Lusitania would have to be refitted for a war he predicted would break out in September 1914.

The Lusitania, writes Windchy, was "refitted as a cargo ship with hidden compartments to hold shells and other munitions. By all accounts there were installed revolving gun mounts."

On Aug. 4, 1914, after war was declared, Lusitania went back into dry dock. More space was provided for cargo, and the vessel was now carried on Cunard's books as "an auxiliary cruiser."

Churchill visited the ship in dry dock and referred to Lusitania as "just another 45,000 tons of live bait."

When war began, German submarine captains, to save torpedoes, would surface and permit the crews of cargo ships to scramble into lifeboats, and then they would plant bombs or use gunfire to sink the vessels.

Churchill's response was to outfit merchant ships with hidden guns, order them to ram submarines, and put out "Q-ships," disguised as merchant ships, which would not expose their guns until submarines surfaced.

German naval commanders began to order submarines to sink merchant ships on sight. First Sea Lord Sir John ("Jackie") Fisher said he would have done the same.

Churchill, seeing an opportunity to bring America into Britain's war, wrote the Board of Trade: "It is most important to attract neutral shipping to our shores, in the hope especially of embroiling the United States with Germany. ... We want the traffic — the more the better — and if some of it gets into trouble, the better still."

Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan wanted to warn Americans not to travel aboard British ships. But President Woodrow Wilson, writes Windchy, "said that American citizens had a right to travel on belligerent ships with impunity, even within a war zone," a defiance of common sense and an absurd interpretation of international law.

On May 1, 1915, Lusitania set sail from New York. As Windchy writes, the ship "secretly carried munitions and Canadian troops in civilian clothes, which legally made it fair game for (German) U-boats.

"After the war, Churchill ... admitted that the Lusitania carried a 'small consignment of rifle ammunition and shrapnel shells weighing 173 tons.' New York Customs Collector Dudley Malone told President Wilson that 'practically all her cargo was contraband of various kinds.'"

Future Secretary of State Robert Lansing knew that British passenger ships carried war materiel. German diplomats in New York warned American passengers they were in danger on the Lusitania. And instead of sailing north of Ireland to Liverpool, the Lusitania sailed to the south, into waters known to be the hunting ground of German submarines.

Lusitania blew up and sank in 18 minutes. Munitions may have caused the secondary explosion when the torpedo hit. Some 1,200 people perished, including 128 Americans. America was on fire, ready for war when the next incidents occurred, as they would in 1917 with the sinking of U.S. merchant ships in similar waters.

Had Wilson publicly warned U.S. citizens not to sail on the ships of belligerent nations and forbidden U.S.-flagged merchant ships to carry contraband to nations at war, America might have stayed out of the war, which might have ended in a truce, not a German defeat.

There might have been no Adolf Hitler and no World War II.

 SOURCE





By the Way, ObamaCare Is Killing Employer-Based Insurance

When then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi infamously declared in 2010 that Congress had to pass ObamaCare in order “to find out what’s in it,” who knew that the contra-factually named Affordable Care Act would be the unwanted gift that just keeps on giving (or, rather, taking)? Well, actually, everyone who opposed the bill knew – and warned against it. But it’s become increasingly obvious that even the ObamaCare-loving Democrats knew. Only they lied about it. And that’s putting it nicely.

According to Ezekiel Emanuel, a former White House special adviser on health policy who was in the inner circle of designing ObamaCare, 80% of employer-provided health coverage will be gone within the next 10 years. And according to research by S&P Capital IQ, that number will be closer to 90%. This isn’t an “oops” side effect of Obama’s health care plan – it was the plan all along.

Of the disappearing health plans, Emanuel said, “It’s going to actually be better for people. They’ll have more choice. Most people who work for an employer and get their coverage through an employer do not have choice.” Of course, what he leaves unsaid is that Barack Obama’s White House firmly believes the government knows what’s “better” for Americans more than Americans do.

Recall, if you will, that Obama criticized a Republican health care proposal during his first campaign, arguing it “would lead to the unraveling of the employer-based health care system. That I don’t think is the kind of change that we need.” Then again, he also repeatedly said, “If you like your plan you can keep you plan.” And we’ve all seen how well that turned out.

Alas, a lot can happen between campaign promises and government takeover. And politicians developing a penchant for truth-telling typically isn’t one of them.

The reason so many employer-based plans will be going the way of Obama’s campaign promises is, under ObamaCare, companies pay a $2,000-per-employee penalty for not providing a government-approved health care plan – far less than the cost of actually providing coverage. But that’s okay, supporters argue, because those who lose their employer-provided coverage will be dumped into the ObamaCare exchange. Of course, that’s exactly where Democrats planned for them to be all along – a government run health care system with “more choices,” as long as those choices are within the limits of what the government deems Americans should want to choose. It’s for your own good.

That truth made it all the more laughable when Obama declared this week, “[P]eople want more control over their lives, not less.” He’s the one taking that control away.

This isn’t to say employer-provided insurance plans are perfect. Written into our tax law for the past seven decades is a provision (born from Word War II wage freezes) that gives tax preference to employer-provided insurance, making the cost of the insurance deductible for employers and not counted as income for employees. The problem, as political analyst Michael Barone points out, is this: “High-earning employees with gold-plated, employer-provided health insurance get deductions that are worth many thousands of dollars. Those without employer-provided health insurance, or low-earners who are among the 40 percent of earners who do not pay income tax, get exactly zero.”

In another column, Barone notes, “A freer market in health insurance means eliminating this tax preference, presumably through a tax credit for those purchasing health insurance on their own.”

This is what Sen. John McCain suggested in 2008 when Obama accused him of yanking the string to unravel employer-based coverage. Which brings us exactly to where we are today thanks to ObamaCare: the unraveling of employer-based coverage, only this time, dishonestly and covertly.

As imperfect as this coverage may be, it’s undoubtedly better than the debacle we are only really beginning to suffer, and eliminating employer coverage is hardly how Obama billed his plan. Then again, his advertising isn’t known for accuracy. Far truer were the warnings that from the beginning ObamaCare was little more than a Trojan horse for a single-payer system. Just watch out. As things on the health care front get even worse, the Left will undoubtedly swoop in with the “real” fix. Forget Greeks bearing gifts. Beware of Democrats bearing promises.

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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Time to Divide Ukraine?

Time to concentrate on ISIS.  Putin could either hinder or help with that.  Guess which way he will go in the present climate of hostility towards him

Michael H. McGee

The United States needs to stay out of the current dispute between Russia and the Ukraine. We should withdraw our sanctions against Russia, and withdraw our threats and rhetoric as well. Let the parties involved work out the solution between themselves. Vladimir Putin is correct that there are a lot of Russian nationalists in eastern Ukraine, and a lot of others who identify themselves as ethnic Russians. Eastern Ukraine probably should be a part of Russia.

Some national borders are not worth fighting over or going to war over, particularly those somewhat arbitrarily established within the last few generations. And particularly when the border fails to take account of the natural loyalties of those encompassed within an arbitrary line drawn on a map.

Getting out of the way of the Russians will not harm the United States. Russia is not our enemy. We have much more to gain by retaining friendly relations with Russia than we do by attempting to fight Ukraine’s battles for them. The United States has no defense treaties with Ukraine, and that nation is not a member of NATO.

The Ukraine has only been an independent nation since 1991, and the long history of the area does not support the border as it is currently drawn. For example, in 1686 the area presently known as the Ukraine was provisionally partitioned between Poland and Russia. Russia obtained the areas to the east of the Dnieper River. Poland retained the areas to the west of the Dnieper. After some more changes of ownership, in 1795 even the Polish parts of Ukraine were annexed by Russia. After that time, the Ukraine was always a part of Russia and the Soviet Union until 1991. See here

Of course we do have an obligation to defend our NATO allies in Europe. It’s perfectly appropriate for us to do what we have to do to give both aid and comfort to our NATO allies. To the extent that our rhetoric is intended to reassure Europe that Russia will not threaten their borders, then we need to do just that.

Barack Obama, Joe Biden and John Kerry, though, seem to be going well beyond what is necessary to reassure our NATO allies. They need to STOP IT! RIGHT NOW! Getting involved in a dispute over an arbitrarily established border in an underdeveloped eastern European country will only weaken the United States in the eyes of the world, and will take our focus off the real problems we face. It’s not our fight.

Barack Obama must reestablish an atmosphere of cooperation with Vladimir Putin and seek to help restore a firm sense of security among our NATO allies in Europe. Putin is not going to try to invade Poland or Germany in this lifetime! There is no Threat from the East to our primary European allies. There is no danger to Capitalism and market economies. The fears of our allies are neither justified nor reasonable. Let it go, guys!

Many leaders in Congress and in Western Europe seem to be reacting with the old Cold War mentality, a product of the Twentieth Century, and still want to “crush” the Russian Bear. Even the Obama administration seems to have a low-grade infection of the Cold War disease. Take your antibiotics and let it go, boys and girls.

There is no threat to the United States, whom we love so dearly. Perhaps we are confusing love of our country with a fear of any and all change in the world. Not all change is bad, and some changes, if not good, are merely neutral to the security of both the United States and NATO.

Ukraine is about the same size as the US State of Texas. Below is a map which shows the natural fault-lines in Ukraine. The blue areas are those Oblasts (which are similar to US counties) which in the 2004 election results supported a Russian-leaning candidate. The yellow areas are those Oblasts which in the 2004 elections supported a Western-leaning candidate. There is no overlap in these results. There are no yellow Oblasts scattered among the blue, or blue among the yellow. Yellow is very yellow, and blue is very blue.



The 2004 election results could represent a proxy for a referendum regarding the wishes of the people of the Ukraine. These election results demonstrated the deep divisions between the western and eastern regions of Ukraine. See here

There needs also, though, to be a geographic logic to any division of the country, and Ukraine must retain enough territory to retain its viability as a nation. Russia could annex the eastern part of the country along the physical lines depicted above, and there could be peace.

Draw the new border beginning at the southern and eastern side of the Dnieper River from where it empties into the Black Sea at Kherson. Go up the eastern side of the Dnieper River to near the turn at Dnepropetrovsk, and then follow the eastern side of the Samara Lake. Go from there to the north along the eastern side of Highway M18, to where it ends at the intersection with Highway M03 west of Kharkov. The border could then follow along the eastern side of the railroad tracks from where they meet M18/M03, and push north to the Russian border.

Borders do not need to be a cause for war, conflict or sanctions. Not always.

SOURCE




Where Have the Immigrant Children and Students Gone?

Thomas Jefferson once said, “A country with no border is not a country.” It was true wisdom.

In the 1950s the United States had an immigration policy that maintained national security and unity in a country of peoples with hundreds of different nationalities, races and ethnicities. The system did largely favor immigrants of Western nations, but a nation has an absolute right to decide who immigrates within its borders. If citizens want to change immigration policy, so be it. But what citizens want and what they get are two very different things in Washington, DC.

In 1965 Ted Kennedy arose to do the Democrat thing and fundamentally transform America with his proposed immigration bill. He denied his intentions vigorously: “Under the proposed bill, the present level of immigration remains substantially the same. … [T]he bill will not inundate America with immigrants from any one country or area. … [The] ethnic pattern of immigration is not expected to change as sharply as critics think.”

That bill became the first in a series of immigration “reform” bills that passed and gave us our present rancorous multicultural society.

Sixty-five years later, with a population far more than “substantially” changed, we face critical, urgent problems caused by unrestrained immigration that must be solved soon if we are to remain a nation. We offer two examples.

First, even after the lessons of 9/11, government has failed to sufficiently track student visas, and some recipients simply disappear before or after their visas expire. Last year alone 58,000 failed to leave when required, and of that group, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is trying to find 6,000 considered to be of “heightened concern.”

Between 2003 and 2012 the number of students on visas nearly doubled, climbing from 663,000 to 1.2 million. It now exceeds a million per year. And virtually any kind of school qualifies: beauty school, massage school and, yes, flight school, a third of which have no FAA certification.

One school with four campuses remains in operation even though five top executives have been indicted for visa fraud. The indictment charges that 80% of enrolled foreign students had delinquent attendance, which the school failed to report. The execs pled not guilty.

The ICE official in charge of investigating student visa violations said ICE has no choice but to allow the school to continue facilitating student visas, explaining, “[T]his is the United States of America and everyone has due process.”

Second, where are the thousands of illegal alien children who continue entering our country? Some in the government know, but ABC News could not get an answer. The Department of Health and Human Services website says, “We cannot release information about individual children that could compromise the child’s location or identity.”

Not compromising illegal aliens' identity now takes precedence over not compromising national security. Remember, many of those “children” are in their late teens or early 20s. Some belong to either of the two most dangerous Latino gangs that have been recruiting heavily at detention centers. Plus there’s no way of knowing how many terrorists have infiltrated our nation after Barack Obama’s emasculation of the Border Patrol and the laughable performance of ICE.

Reportedly, more than 100 shelters are spread throughout the country to house children, and more are going up. Additionally, more than 37,000 children have been released to relatives or sponsors. How many of the relatives are here illegally themselves?

One private social welfare organization refused $50 million for housing children to avoid “negative backlash.” Sen. Charles Grassley (R-IA) did the math, and it comes to a cool $166,000 annually per child.

Even members of Congress can’t get information out of the administration, a typical Obama game.

Bottom line: Wherever these kids land, local costs rise immensely. By law they are entitled to health and social services as well as education, meaning bursting hospitals, welfare rolls and classrooms. Adding kids who can’t speak English, and are probably illiterate in their own language, will require more specialized teachers. It’s too bad the full costs won’t hit before November.

Finally, what’s going on at the border now? Certainly the influx of illegals hasn’t ended, but ISIL beheadings and Vladimir Putin’s adventures are front page now. The alien invasion is old news.

We’ve seen much of what Obama meant by “fundamentally transforming” America, but with almost two-and-a-half years remaining in his presidency, it looks like we ain’t seen nothing yet.

SOURCE




Of Racial Delusions and Riots

Last week, as riots in Ferguson, Missouri decrescendoed and the country held its collective breath over the question of the indictment of Officer Darren Wilson in the shooting death of Michael Brown, rappers Diddy (formerly P. Diddy, formerly Puff Daddy, formerly Sean Combs), 2 Chainz, The Game, and Rick Ross, along with 10 of their fellows, released a song: “Don’t Shoot.”

The Game explained why he felt the necessity to record the song: “I am a black man with kids of my own that I love more than anything, and I cannot fathom a horrific tragedy like Michael Brown’s happening to them. This possibility has shaken me to my core.”

The lyrics of the song speak to a perverse view of race in America – a view reinforced day after day by a media dedicated to the proposition that American law enforcement maliciously targets black men at random. To this point, nobody knows the facts of the case in the Brown shooting. Nonetheless, the rappers label the shooting cold-blooded, first-degree murder. Because facts are unnecessary; only feelings are real. “God ain’t put us on the Earth to get murdered, it’s murder,” says one rapper, TGT. Another, The Game, raps, “They killin' teens, they killin' dreams, it’s murder.”

Next, Diddy launches into a listing of various black men killed under controversial circumstances. Some, like Emmett Till, were murdered in acts of pure and evil racism. But Diddy lumps together Till with Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown – and even Ezell Ford. Last week, the Los Angeles Police Department released the identities of the two police officers who shot Ford. One was Asian; the other was Hispanic. The Huffington Post did not even cover their races. The Los Angeles Times buried that relevant fact in paragraph 13 of their comprehensive story. But again, facts do not matter: Only a feeling of persecution matters.

Then Rick Ross sums up the generalized view of America created by media-stoked racial conflagrations like the Michael Brown situation: “Black men, we pay the toll, the price is your life, Uncle Sam want a slice, black dress code now we looting in the night, now we throwing Molotovs in this Holocaust.” A grand total of just under 100 young black men are killed by white police officers each year, according to statistics provided to the FBI by local police. To compare police treatment of young black men to the Holocaust is not only statistically idiotic, but also morally dangerous.

Nonetheless, that is the view of police for many blacks: police as paramilitary white force out to target black men. When I was recently in the CNN green room with former Obama green jobs czar Van Jones, he and I got to talking about the Ferguson situation. I asked him why he believed there was such a racial gap in the interpretation of the situation. His answer: “You’re Jewish, right? Wouldn’t you jump to conclusions if you heard that the Nazis or Hamas had killed a Jew?”

Of course, not even Van Jones, Diddy, 2 Chainz, and the rest truly believe what they say about the police. All those who spout about a “Holocaust” by police against blacks would call 911 in approximately 3.5 seconds if their houses were robbed. But if we truly believe that America’s police forces are akin to Nazis or Islamic terrorists, there can be no decent solution. Fighting police would be a moral imperative, not a moral evil.

And therein lies the problem. The only real answer to the antipathy between large segments of the black community and police is threefold: first, taking seriously fact-based allegations of racism against the authorities, and investigating and prosecuting such allegations if well-founded; second, not jumping to conclusions about non-fact-based allegations; and third, lowering crime rates among young black men, thereby lowering interactions between police and young black men.

But those are not solutions backed by the racially delusional. Instead, they suggest an unending and circular “conversation” about race that goes something like this: Police sometimes shoot young black men; that’s because police are racist; therefore, those who resist police are not morally unjustified; rinse, wash, repeat.

Sadly, America’s media backs this second approach. And so we end up with damaging foolishness like “Don’t Shoot” infusing our pop culture and the snarky but empty-headed racial guilting of Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert invading our news. And nothing gets solved. We just get more hate, more rage and more violence.

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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How to squash liberal nonsense

The comments below are part of a larger study  -- introduction here.  It fits in well with my contention that Leftists have large but weak egos so are desperate for praise

Mike Wallace was a Liberal correspondent for the television show 60 Minutes. He was your typical Liberal hack, using every underhanded means to try and portray his subjects as somehow inferior, regardless of whether they were or not. Some depictions of him behind the scenes show an almost psychopathic quality to his nature. There is an article here, showing how he sought to get hours of interview time on an honorable interviewee, in the hopes he could find 60 or 90 seconds of damaging tape to sprinkle through a piece, to ostensibly solidify whatever accusations of impropriety he was leveling. When offered a live interview instead, he declined, and ran his hit piece. He died recently.

I have found that you will often find such abandonment of honesty and rule adherence among extreme Narcissists. I assume this is because the Narcissist desperately wants to be able to assert the inferiority of another, and the superiority of themselves by comparison. By this means, they temporarily assuage their amygdala, and avert the agony of being forced to honestly confront their own damaged nature. See, they are not defective, because this other guy is the real scumbag!

The underlying mechanism by which this behavior is produced, is the Narcissist seeking to shield their fragile amygdala from stimulation by their own knowledge of what they are. Like Nancy Hopkins, the alternative is finding themselves physically ill, and wracked with panic. By drawing attention to the faults in others, they are fortifying their false reality against attack by real reality, and sparing themselves this agony.

However the practical effect of this psychological drive in a sociodynamic environment is a much more complex behavioral strategy. In such a group environment, they are driven, from a practical perspective, towards turning others against an individual they feel is vulnerable to such an attack. If you are the r-type traitor in a group, such an urge can help you to keep everyone’s attention focused upon who you perceive to be vulnerable to ostracization. This will spare you the possible retribution you would otherwise get if everyone were distracted, and looked at you honestly.

Ironically, even as the Narcissist executes such a brilliant strategy perfectly, they are unaware of it, since their whole focus is on establishing a false reality in which everyone else is defective, and they are superior. The more they can make others buy into their false reality, the more they assuage their own amygdala. It is but a coincidence, retained purposely by Darwin of course, that they will also have manipulated things in a way that will be beneficial to them in the group socio-dynamic environment.

In 1988 and 1989 a 10 part series titled Ethics In America aired on PBS. Funded by the Annenburg Corporation for Public Broadcasting, it was organized as a moderated discussion, in which the moderator posed ethical dilemmas to various luminaries from media, academia, the military, government, law, and other areas, then directed discussions of their answers, and conducted probing followups as necessary.

In the episode titled Under Orders, Under Fire (Ethics in the Military, Part II), there was a telling segment, in which two journalists, ABC News Anchor Peter Jennings, and CBS News Correspondent Mike Wallace, took part in a debate on the responsibility of journalists covering a war.

The relevant portion of this video begins at 33 minutes and 30 seconds into the debate. The premise is that the US is involved in a war, similar to Vietnam, in a country called Kosan. We have allied with the South Kosanese, in their war against the North Kosanese. ABC News reporter Peter Jennings has been offered the opportunity to join a North Kosanese Patrol, and videotape what he experiences, for airing on the nightly news.

In this video, Mike Wallace will make the mistake of trying to assert intellectual superiority/dominance over Peter Jennings by asserting that a real reporter would leave a US combat Patrol to be ambushed and killed, so he can get “the story.” Few others on the panel truly believe this to be noble, and many offer spirited logical arguments focusing on the value of soldier’s lives, the morals involved, and other logical arguments. Wallace repels them all, and then becomes even more assertive of his position.

After almost ten minutes of successfully fighting off polite, logical criticisms, Col. George M. Connell, USMC, is asked his opinion. He sneers with disgust and slowly and angrily says,

“I feel utter contempt. Two days later they (the reporters – Jennings and Wallace) are both walking off my hilltop and they’re 200 yards away, and they get ambushed and they’re lying there wounded. And they’re going to expect I’m going to send Marines out there to get them. They’re just journalists. They’re not Americans. Is that a fair reaction? You can’t have it both ways.”

This segment begins at 42 minutes and 30 seconds.

This argument presents several emotional images to the Liberal.

“I feel utter contempt.”

First, Colonel Connell ignores the reasoned, logical debate over the necessity of news reports, the relative value between the reporter’s report, and the soldier’s lives, the importance of the citizenry being informed, and all other logical, reasoned debates related to the issue and it’s morals. Rather, Colonel Connell goes straight for the Liberal jugular, and simply describes his gut emotional reaction to Wallace’s position, and implies it should be every other individual’s response as well.

Second, and even more important, Colonel Connell “out-groups” Mike Wallace. Wallace isn’t in the in-group anymore – he is a traitor on the outside of our group. Liberals are innately programmed to fear this.

Today, we see Liberals promoting the idea that dissent during wartime, as our troops are engaging an enemy, is patriotic. Such is the bizarre lengths Liberals will go to, to shield their amygdala, and avoid being out-grouped. This is probably because in the more primitive environment, if an r-type Liberal got out-grouped, they were dead. Does anybody think Cass Sunstein could make it on his own, in a K-selected state of nature, filled with prehistoric versions of SEAL Teams, where the only way you got food was to fight off groups of others for it? Of course not. This is why Liberals are evolutionarily programmed to be terrified of out-grouping.

As a hard-core Liberal ideologue, Wallace was undoubtedly programmed to betray his in-group, of course. Have no illusions, as a Liberal, he was subconsciously programmed to betray our nation and our people. If a war would benefit us with cheap oil, he would oppose it, saying, “No blood for oil.” If a war had no benefit to us but would kill our troops, he would have no problem sending our military men to some place like the Sudan or Somalia, to die for outsiders who wouldn’t even appreciate their sacrifice. He would have wanted deeply (though he was probably ignorant of the urge’s existence) to betray the US and his fellow in-group members.

Here, he wanted to justify this emotional urge with some complex discussion of the moral requirements of journalism, the necessity of providing the information, the need to get the story, the system by which reporters are embedded with an enemy, etc. And he manages to maintain that line of argument as others argue with him logically. As he maintains his position, he is successfully assuaging his amygdala, leading him to become ever more emboldened, right up until Colonel Connell out-groups him with several short sentences. Game over – amygdala shakked by a Warrior extraordinaire.

Colonel Connell’s delivery is well crafted in several other regards.

“Two days later they (the reporters – Jennings and Wallace) are both walking off my hilltop and they’re 200 yards away, and they get ambushed and they’re lying there wounded. And they’re going to expect I’m going to send Marines out there to get them.”

Here, Colonel Connell presents an image of Wallace as weak, cowardly, and helpless, and he presents it as ancillary to the main argument.

This is devastating to the Narcissist’s necessary self-image of being the superior individual (a similar trait to the Liberal’s need to feel superior to the Conservative in some fashion, despite their laughable patheity). Notice, Colonel Connell presents this with no debate, as almost an irrelevant afterthought to another, more important issue. Most people wouldn’t even register it, but Wallace did, and even worse, he never even got to argue with the portrayal. Deep down, every Liberal ideologue knows they are a psychological pansy in a species which reviles such – and the characterization hurts them far more than we can imagine. Here, it affected his mood and his ability to focus, in a way which a person without such a disorder couldn’t possibly imagine. His false reality was attacked, and he didn’t even get a chance to defend it. Even worse, in his mind, everyone else now accepts that he is inferior, on the word of another. Someone has done to him what he is programmed to do to others. He has been inferior-ized, and the group is now focused on him, his aberrance, and his weakness.

Colonel Connell also reinforced this effect through his use of the word contempt. The words angry, saddened, infuriated, etc all portray to a Narcissist (and a Liberal ideologue) their own power to evoke such emotions in their adversary, as well as their adversary’s ability to be emotionally unbalanced and controlled. This is seen by the Liberal as a sense of subtle power and importance (more on this later). As a result, such evincing of emotion, or use of emotional terminology will provide them with strength.

The word contempt carries a subconscious air of their K-type adversary’s superiority, and the Liberal’s inferiority. Although minor, such aspects of language have profound effect upon Narcissists and Liberals. Always denigrate the Liberal’s importance and power within the social environment, and never imply they are important enough to warrant a real emotion. In the language of Heartiste, this would be referred to as “frame.” You are so awesome, and the Liberal such a pathetic peon, you really could care less about them, beyond a passing feeling of contempt when they cross your radar.

Had Colonel Connell operated on the opposite end of the emotional spectrum, and become legitimately enraged, and shown a profound emotional outburst, Wallace would have drawn strength from that, perhaps even using it to argue to others that his enemy was unbalanced, thereby out-grouping Colonel Connell. Had Colonel Connell used emotional wording which conveyed power on the Liberal, such as hurt, angry, enraged, incensed, etc, the Liberal would have gained strength as well, just not as much.

Instead, Colonel Connell evoked an air of uncaring, unemotional contempt for Wallace, diminishing Wallace’s stature in the eyes of everyone present, and forcing Wallace’s amygdala to confront his own actual patheity and unimportance.

Colonel Connell’s use of the phrases “my hilltop” and “they’re lying there wounded. And … going to expect I’m going to send Marines out there,” similarly reduces Wallace to but an infinitesimal peon, prone to injury and helplessness, in a real man’s world. Together the effects on Wallace’s psyche were priceless, and added to the shock of his out-grouping.

“They’re just journalists. They’re not Americans. Is that a fair reaction? You can’t have it both ways.”

Many have noted that Narcissists are like children. Offer them two options to explain their behavior, both bad, and those are the only two options they will see. “Either you are [bad option one] or you are [bad option two]? Which is it?” Whatever it is about their personality quirk, this will trip them up quite reliably, especially if you offer some fact, however tenuous, supporting the idea that one of the two bad options must be true. I have used it, and it is incredible how they will limit their thought processes to the two options, and panic if neither is acceptable. They actually do not have the ability in the midst of debate to find their way to a third option which would rescue them from their conundrum.

Here, Wallace hears two options. Either he continues to maintain he is a journalist, and therefore allowed to betray his nation, in which case he is firmly out-grouped as a traitor, or he admits he is wrong, and he is an American, but a particularly stupid one who was prone to believe he could betray, and he is again on the way to being out-grouped. Neither is particularly attractive, and Wallace knows this. This “bad option two-fer” debate technique completely disabled Wallace’s ability to backtrack back to the use of logic or reason, however tortured to support his position.

“You can’t have it both ways”

The Coup de Grace. The subconscious goal of every Liberal ideologue in matters of group conflict is to have it both ways. Betray their in-group to gain the favor of the out-group, while maintaining they cannot be attacked by the in-group they betrayed due to the warrior’s loyalty to in-group. If the in-group wins, they protest they are a part of the in-group, and shouldn’t be killed by their own people. If the out-group wins, then they plead that they helped the out-group and should benefit from favoritism.

If a cop shoots a criminal, then take the side of the criminal, since the cop can’t shoot you, but the criminal can. If it’s a war against Saddam, take Saddam’s side, since the Marines can’t kill you legally and Saddam can. Viet Cong, Communists, whoever. Liberalism in group competition is just a strategy of using intellectualism to justify treason to in-group for personal self-interest. The most amazing aspect is, Liberals can blind themselves to this reality, right up until you find a way to unarguably call them out on it.

Here, Wallace is called out on this, and told, by a man who kills other men for a living, you can’t have it both ways. Never underestimate the power of calling the Liberal out on the exact nature of their strategy openly. Single mom-hood arises from diminished concern for quality child-rearing. Sex ed facilitates the r-strategy of earlier onset of sexual behavior in youth, and Liberals don’t oppose that because they are r-strategists. High taxes are about creating the r-selected environment of free resources for all, including the losers. And treason in group competition is a selfish, cowardly survival strategy born of r-selection.

The visceral, desperate protestations that Liberals launch into when so confronted, are evidence of the Liberal’s fear of, and susceptibility to, this type of attack. In my experience with Narcissists, the more vicious their counterattack to a statement, the more that statement traumatizes them, and savages their amygdala. The aggressiveness of their response is a direct attempt to assuage their wounded amygdala, and make you stop targeting it. I have no doubt it is the same with Liberals.

Thus the more the Liberal protests, the harder you press, unemotionally, and contemptuously. “Dissent is patriotic?” In War? Ever hear of the definition of treason? What are you an idiot?” “Collateral damage is wrong.” Better our own soldiers die? Typical Liberal Traitor. What a disloyal scumbag! These are out-grouping techniques which can alter the tone of a debate quite quickly, and put an end to Liberal advocacy.

Of course, Colonel Connell’s’ delivery, totally unemotional, with slit thin eyes delivering a death stare of hatred, was perfect. It even carried just the right amount of a subconscious air of violent conflict. Not so much Wallace could portray Colonel Connell as an extremist who might kill him, but enough Wallace knew that a battlefield execution for such disloyalty might be a possibility in Colonel Connell’s world. There is nothing like the threat of K-selection to make the r-type bunny rabbits scurry.

At the end, Colonel Connell looks directly into Mike Wallace’s eyes, as Mike Wallace avoids eye contact by staring ahead. This is interesting, since it is established that those with amygdala damage cannot make eye contact, or even examine the areas around another person’s eyes to gather emotional cues. Here, Wallace assiduously avoids any eye contact.

I have seen this myself on a couple of occasions, especially in my primary Narcissistic guinea pig. After a marathon session tripping his amygdala in conversation, he actually compulsively looked at the floor when talking to me, despite there being no intimation of physical threat on my part. This trait was actually identical to what one would see in an extremely autistic child, and was much different from his normal countenance. I was fascinated, and thought it might indicate an increased desire to avoid any amygdala stimulation resulting from the subtle stress of direct eye contact.

Based upon several instances I have observed, I suspect that humans have evolved an innate tendency to avoid eye contact when the amygdala has been overwhelmed. In individuals facing a superior threat (for which the amygdala cannot find a solution to quiet itself, and is overwhelmed), this probably serves as an unconscious threat avoidance behavior. It might speak to the utility of forcing direct eye contact in debate with Liberals, as you stimulate their amygdala while maintaining a totally unconcerned, domineering frame.

This interview is interesting in the context of our national debate over politics in that it highlights two different styles of debate with Liberals. For the first seven and a half minutes, debaters treat Mike Wallace as a reasonable equal, and seek to sway his opinion with logic. In response, Wallace becomes ever more forceful in his treasonous assertions, even as he trips himself up with his own arguments. Of course, this is exactly what our reasonable and respectful treatment of Liberals in our national political debates has gotten us today, on the national stage.

After seven and a half minutes, one man utters a few contemptuous sentences, reducing Mike Wallace to a traitor whom everyone should ignore. And Mike Wallace’s response to this contemptuous dismissal of his views?

A chastened, hand-wringing coward, saying, “It’s a fair reaction,” followed by a complete cessation of his traitorous Liberal assertions. If you examine the video at 42 minutes and 57 seconds, Mike Wallace’s face actually contorts into a micro-expression of extreme agony. Pause the video, and it is astonishing. I have seen that expression in real life myself – this was not a once in a lifetime event. All Liberal ideologues have that pain inside them. In a state of nature, that force within their brain probably kept them alive, by forcing them to swallow their pride, and avoid confrontations at all cost. Today, it lays there within them dormant, waiting for a Conservative, with sufficient testicular fortitude, to step up to the debate, and use it to modify their behavior, and train them to not espouse Liberalism.

Of course the most important aspect of Colonel Connell’s response is that in arguing with emotion and crushing the Liberal, he has just set the course for the Lemmings within the group. Not a single individual on that panel will even begin to support Mike Wallace’s position at that point. Indeed, the issue would not even be raised again.

In this debate, Colonel Connell could have chosen to try and debate Mike Wallace logically, and convert him to a more Conservative position using facts, logic, and reasoned argument. The result would have been a recalcitrant Mike Wallace, a Liberal convert in Peter Jennings, and a whole panel of Lemmings, unsure of who to follow, at best. Instead Colonel Connell abandoned logic, crushed Mike Wallace emotionally as an example to the crowd, and on seeing the example, the Lemmings immediately fell in behind Colonel Connell.

That, ladies and gentlemen, is how you debate a Liberal, and lead a movement. The Liberal is the example waiting to be made, not an equal. The Liberal is deserving of nothing more than passing contempt.

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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Paul Ryan's Way Forward

To take the measure of this uncommonly interesting public man, begin with two related facts about him. Paul Ryan has at least 67 cousins in his Wisconsin hometown of Janesville, where there are six Ryan households within eight blocks of his home. And in his new book, “The Way Forward: Renewing the American Idea,” he says something few politicians say, which is why so many are neither trusted nor respected. Ryan says he was wrong.

At a Wisconsin 4-H fair in 2012, Ryan encountered a Democrat who objected to what then was one of Ryan’s signature rhetorical tropes – his distinction between “makers” and “takers,” the latter being persons who receive more in government spending than they pay in taxes. He had been struck by a report that 60 percent of Americans were already – this was before Obamacare – “net receivers.” But his encounter at the fair reminded him that, for a while, he and many people he cared about had been takers, too.

The morning after a night “working the Quarter Pounder grill at McDonald’s,” Ryan, 16, found his father, who had been troubled by alcohol, dead in bed. Janesville’s strong sinews of community sustained Ryan and his mother; so did Social Security survivor benefits. When GM’s Janesville assembly plant closed, draining about $220 million of annual payroll from a town of 60,000, many relatives, friends and constituents needed the social safety net – unemployment compensation, job training, etc.

“At the fair that day, I realized I’d been careless with my language,” he writes. “The phrase gave insult where none was intended.” He has changed his language and his mind somewhat but thinks the fundamental things still apply.

“Society,” Ryan writes, “functions through institutions that operate in the space between the individual and the state,” and “government exists to protect the space where all of these great things occur.” Hence government has a “supporting role” as “the enabler of other institutions.” Progressive government, however, works, sometimes inadvertently but often deliberately, to subordinate or supplant those institutions. This depletion of social capital is comprehensively injurious to the culture. And “all the tax cuts in the world don’t matter much if you don’t get the culture right.”

Progressivism aims to place individuals in unmediated dependency on a government that can proclaim, as Barack Obama does: “If you’ve got a business, you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen.” Meaning, people depend on government for what they are and have.

Few of today’s progressives are acquainted with their doctrine’s intellectual pedigree or its consistent agenda. Progressivism’s founders, however, considered it essential that the nation make progress, as they understood this, beyond the Founders' natural rights philosophy, which limits government by saying (in the Declaration of Independence) that it is “instituted” to “secure” these rights.

Hence Woodrow Wilson, a progressive who understood his doctrine’s premises, urged Americans to “not repeat the [Declaration’s] preface.” Progressivism preaches that rights do not pre-exist government, that they are dispensed and respected by government as it sees fit and to fit its purposes. Those purposes grow unconstrained by the Constitution that progressives construe as a “living” – meaning infinitely elastic – document.

Since 1999, when he became its second-youngest member, Ryan has been an intellectual ornament to the House of Representatives – and a headache for risk-averse Republican Party operatives. They pay lip service to electing conservatives who will make the choices necessary to stabilize the architecture of the entitlement system and unleash the economic growth that must finance the system’s promises. But they want to let voters remain oblivious about the choices required by that architecture’s rickety condition.

Such Republicans are complicit with Obama, who demonstrated the self-destructive nature of his now-evaporating presidency by his contemptuous, and contemptible, treatment of Ryan on April 13, 2011. After he loftily aspired to teach Washington civility, the White House invited Ryan to sit in the front row at a speech in which Obama gave an implacably hostile and mendacious depiction of Ryan’s suggestions for entitlement reforms. Obama thereby repeated his tawdry performance in his 2010 State of the Union address, when, with Supreme Court justices in the front row of the House chamber, he castigated them for the Citizens United decision, which he misrepresented.

Both times, Obama’s behavior bespoke the insecurity of someone who, surrounded by sycophants, shuns disputations with people who can reply. Ryan, however, has replied with a book that demonstrates Obama’s wisdom in not arguing with a man who has a better mind and better manners.

SOURCE

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Eric Holder as a cry-baby & Obama as a perpetual adolescent

ATTORNEY GENERAL and all around scum-bucket Eric Holder felt it imperative to rush off to Ferguson, MO, to toss in his two cents worth of gas on a burning fire. He could have pointed out that the reason there is 50% unemployment among the black males in town, men who have nothing better to do than cause mischief for the benefit of the TV cameras, was because three-quarters of them never even finish high school. Instead, he took the opportunity to let them know he shared their grievances against the police because twice in his younger days, he, too, had been – oh, the humanity! -- stopped by traffic cops.

The odd thing is that I am a white man roughly 10 years older than Holder, and I was stopped by cops about a dozen times between the ages of 13 and 21. The first couple of times, I was stopped by Beverly Hills cops because we lived in an apartment just outside the city border, and, so, if I were spotted walking or riding my bike at dusk, on my way home from the playground or on my way to a book store, I would find myself being questioned by the guys in blue. Nobody, they would explain, exaggerating only slightly, walked or rode a bicycle in Beverly Hills after sunset.

Once I began driving, I was stopped on a regular basis even by L.A. cops because I looked too young to be driving legally. Finally, by the time I was going to UCLA, and work on the Daily Bruin would occasionally keep me on campus until late at night, I was often stopped and questioned by those same Beverly Hills cops on my way home. But now it was because, as they pointed out, nobody rode a motorcycle before or after dusk in Beverly Hills.

Whether or not Mr. Holder believes me, I never took it amiss. I did not think they were picking on me because I was young or short or Jewish. I believed they stopped me because I looked suspicious to them, and I figured they were just earning their salaries, and that if I had their job, I, too, would be stopping me and asking a few questions.

What Holder doesn’t mention is that, as a young man, he had been an Afro-haired college activist who had been part of a student uprising at Columbia University that took over and held an ROTC building for five days in 1970. Because even back then, college administrators were a gaggle of cowards, he wasn’t booted out on his butt, but allowed to hang around and get a law degree.

Only someone as race-fixated as Barack Obama would have appointed Holder in the first place or stood by while his attorney general refused to indict the Black Panthers for intimidating white voters in Philadelphia.

Speaking of Obama, the thing I have come to understand about him is that in addition to being a leftist with a scary agenda, a bigot and a narcissist, he is an adolescent. That’s why he’s so lazy. Sometimes, students are bored because they’re very bright and grasp a subject so quickly that they tend to doze off while waiting for their fellow classmates to catch up. Other times, students are bored because they are those other classmates and simply can’t grasp the lesson.

And sometimes, as I believe is the case with Obama, it’s because their minds are so lazy and self-absorbed that the only things they can manage to focus on for any length of time are those amusements such as golf and basketball or attending galas, that simply don’t call for mental discipline.

SOURCE

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NLRB goes rogue against small business

Labor Day provides the opportunity to evaluate those government agencies that impact the workplace, and gauge if they are helping or hurting the employment situation in America.

In the six Labor Days since President Obama took office, his appointees have gone to outrageous lengths to compel the 93 percent of the private-sector workforce who don't belong to an organized labor union to become dues-paying members.

While the Labor Department and the National Mediation Board have each pushed hard to create rules that overwhelmingly favor union organizers over those employees who oppose unionization, it is the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) which has taken the most outlandish actions in their attempt to tip the balance toward primary Democratic Party funders in Big Labor.

Few need to be reminded of the NLRB's general counsel's failed attempt to compel Boeing Corp. to remain in union-friendly Washington state, rather than relocating to South Carolina. After garnering national headlines and sending Congress into a frenzy, the NLRB backed down from their attempt to stop the aircraft manufacturer's move to the right-to-work state. But the audacity displayed by the agency — that they believed they could dictate company relocation or expansion decisions — made this obscure entity a national talking point of big government gone wrong.

The general counsel, at the same time, filed a lawsuit against two states whose voters had affirmed the right to secret ballots in union elections through their state constitutional amendment processes. The uproar in the states being sued was real, but this NLRB threat largely faded away as Big Labor's attempt to do away with secret elections through congressional action failed.

Now, the NLRB is going off the rails again. They have decided to destroy business franchise/franchisee agreements by allowing the corporations that spin out thousands of small businesses using their name, business model and products to be sued over the alleged actions of a few of the small, independent business.

This strikes at the heart of the independence of almost 1 million locally owned franchise businesses. If the actions of a few franchises can drag the corporate partner into legal action, then the cost of operating this small business model rapidly escalates, and the advantages of splitting profits with local, independent store operators rapidly disintegrate.

If the left wants to change the franchise laws, that is their prerogative. They need to go to Congress and seek to change the law, not go to the rogue, Big Labor-controlled NLRB to rewrite the law.

It's three strikes and you're out for the NLRB's ability to play investigator, prosecutor, judge, jury and executioner when it comes to our nation's labor laws. Legislation by Rep. Austin Scott (R-Ga.) that would rein in the NLRB's outrageous, one-sided behavior by stripping away the NLRB's adjudicatory authority, returning it to the federal justice system where it belongs.

It is time to rip the power over our nation's labor laws from this rogue body's grip and give it back to Congress and the federal court system. It is time for the House of Representatives to pass Austin Scott's Protecting American Jobs Act.

SOURCE

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Price transparency lowers healthcare costs

A study recently published in Health Affairs describes how price transparency drove down the cost of MRIs by almost twenty percent from 2010 to 2012. Compared to patients who did not have the advantage of transparent pricing, patients who knew what their MRI procedure would cost saw a cost reduction of $220 per procedure. Further, price transparency was associated with a significant shift from hospitals to outpatient facilities.

This result is just the beginning. It was not a result of true consumer-driven health policy, but an intervention by an insurer. When a physician referred a patient for an MRI, the insurer required prior authorization before paying for it. When the patient called for prior authorization, the customer-service rep was able to give the patient the choice of a lower-cost provider in the same area. Importantly, the insurer’s rep was able to tell the patient how much he or she would save by using the lower-cost provider.

This is something that healthcare providers resist mightily—for obvious reasons. As a consequence, more expensive providers, especially hospitals, dropped their fees significantly. This resulted in a 30 percent compression of prices.

It is a step in the right direction. The Health Affairs article notes that government dictating price transparency has no effect—as discussed previously at this blog. Nevertheless, there is a lot further to go. For example, one-third of the patients had zero co-pay or deductible, and so were completely insensitive to price. Also, it still requires too much bureaucratic intervention. Why should a patient have to call the insurer to figure out the best price for the service?

For reducing costs, imaging is probably low-hanging fruit. Nevertheless, this experience teaches valuable lessons. Prior authorization alone (when an insurer simply makes a yes or no decision on whether it will pay for a procedure) is a cause of irresolvable conflict between payers and providers. Because the patient remains insensitive to price, if the physician decides to do the paperwork for prior authorization, it does not reduce costs. This was confirmed for Medicare in a Congressional Budget Office estimate in 2013.
However, introducing price sensitivity to prior authorization “softens up” the decision for both patient and insurer: The patient understands that the insurer is trying to get the best bang for the buck, not just prevent access to diagnosis.

What are the next steps?

    Private insurers can make prices of credentialed providers even more transparent, by posting fees on their websites and clearly informing patients about how much money they will save by going to low-cost providers.

    Private insurers can design ways to financially reward patients who have no co-pays or deductibles to make price-conscious decisions also.

    Medicare can also design ways to reward beneficiaries for making cost-saving imaging decisions (likely through Medigap plans, which often cover beneficiaries’ co-pays).

This is still a long way from consumer-driven health care. However, like reference pricing for surgery, this experience should motivate insurers to continue experimenting with letting patients know, understand and respond to the prices of medical care.

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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