Exercise doesn't help much

Medical researchers tend to get very excited even when they detect a very small effect of something.  Below is such a case.  When everything was controlled for in their analyses, they found a pathetic .66 hazard ratio ("the adjusted hazard ratios for all-cause mortality were 0.66").  Statisticians don't usually conclude that something real is going on until the ratio exceeds 2.0.  So the lifespan benefits of taking regular exercise are somewhere between tiny and negligible.  Pity that.

What we see below is another example of the failure of theory.  It seems obvious that we are designed for an active life so therefore we should live longer if we are active.  But we don't -- not to any appreciable extent, anyway


Effect of Moderate to Vigorous Physical Activity on All-Cause Mortality in Middle-aged and Older Australians

By Klaus Gebel et al.

ABSTRACT

Importance:  Few studies have examined how different proportions of moderate and vigorous physical activity affect health outcomes.

Objective:  To examine whether the proportion of total moderate to vigorous activity (MVPA) that is achieved through vigorous activity is associated with all-cause mortality independently of the total amount of MVPA.

Design, Setting, and Participants:  We performed a prospective cohort study with activity data linked to all-cause mortality data from February 1, 2006, through June 15, 2014, in 204 542 adults aged 45 through 75 years from the 45 and Up population-based cohort study from New South Wales, Australia (mean [SD] follow-up, 6.52 [1.23] years). Associations between different contributions of vigorous activity to total MVPA and mortality were examined using Cox proportional hazards models, adjusted for total MVPA and sociodemographic and health covariates.

Exposures:  Different proportions of total MVPA as vigorous activity. Physical activity was measured with the Active Australia Survey.

Main Outcomes and Measures:  All-cause mortality during the follow-up period.

Results: During 1 444 927 person-years of follow-up, 7435 deaths were registered. Compared with those who reported no MVPA (crude death rate, 8.34%), the adjusted hazard ratios for all-cause mortality were 0.66 (95% CI, 0.61-0.71; crude death rate, 4.81%), 0.53 (95% CI, 0.48-0.57; crude death rate, 3.17%), and 0.46 (95% CI, 0.43-0.49; crude death rate, 2.64%) for reporting 10 through 149, 150 through 299, and 300 min/wk or more of activity, respectively. Among those who reported any MVPA, the proportion of vigorous activity revealed an inverse dose-response relationship with all-cause mortality: compared with those reporting no vigorous activity (crude death rate, 3.84%) the fully adjusted hazard ratio was 0.91 (95% CI, 0.84-0.98; crude death rate, 2.35%) in those who reported some vigorous activity (but <30% of total activity) and 0.87 (95% CI, 0.81-0.93; crude death rate, 2.08%) among those who reported 30% or more of activity as vigorous. These associations were consistent in men and women, across categories of body mass index and volume of MVPA, and in those with and without existing cardiovascular disease or diabetes mellitus.

Conclusions and Relevance:  Among people reporting any activity, there was an inverse dose-response relationship between proportion of vigorous activity and mortality. Our findings suggest that vigorous activities should be endorsed in clinical and public health activity guidelines to maximize the population benefits of physical activity.

JAMA Intern Med.

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Profit Margins, Public Perception and Progressive Causes

The stigma plaguing today’s Republican Party on matters of economic policy is the result of a craftily orchestrated attack on capitalism. By associating the entrepreneurial free market with “corporate greed,” the Left frames conservatives as being against middle class America.

It’s a strategy that has a long record of success. Recall that in 2009, Democrats approved another massive entitlement program – ObamaCare – in part by rallying behind a false narrative: that millions of Americans were uninsured because “selfish” insurers were swimming in massive profits. In truth, insurers were operating on a 2% profit margin.

Democrats knew their PR stunt was a lie, but they successfully swayed public perception at a pivotal moment. Indeed, every progressive cause has traces of gross distortion, and, similar to how leftists overhauled the health care industry, they’re fabricating the war on corporate America.

The American Enterprise Institute’s Mark J. Perry writes, “When a random sample of American adults were asked the question ‘Just a rough guess, what percent profit on each dollar of sales do you think the average company makes after taxes?’ for the Reason-Rupe poll in May 2013, the average response was 36%!”

The reality? Memo to Occupy Wall Street: “Not surprisingly they are off by a huge margin,” Perry notes. “According to [a] Yahoo!Finance database for 212 different industries, the average profit margin for the most recent quarter was 7.5% and the median profit margin was 6.5%.” If this teaches us anything, it’s that Republicans must dismantle the Left’s big lies. The propaganda machine is not conquered by twiddling thumbs.

SOURCE

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Maya Angelou's quote on USPS stamps is "fake but accurate"‏

A stamp commemorating author and poet Maya Angelou was unveiled Tuesday morning in Washington D.C. And while the ceremony featured addresses by Michelle Obama and Oprah Winfrey, a matter not addressed at the ceremony was the apparent misattribution of the quote on the "Forever" stamp.

Next to a photo of Angelou reads the text, "A bird doesn't sing because it has an answer, it sings because it has a song."

Those words may recall the title of Angelou's 1969 autobiography I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, but they were actually written by Joan Walsh Anglund, 89, in the 1967 book A Cup of Sun, according to the Washington Post.

Living in New York around 2005, I once saw a flyer advertising Maya Angelou's appearance before NYU students that had exactly the same "bird" quote. The flyer was posted at the entrance to one of the left-wing churches around NYU that lends its space to events held by communists and other progressives, including a party to celebrate the release of Lynn Stewart from prison, which I attended undercover with a video camera.

At the time I thought it was a fairly good line coming from a poet, but coming from a prog it leaps into a completely different paradigm. I rephrased it in my head to say, "A prog doesn't talk because he/she/it has an answer, a prog talks because he/she/it has a Party-approved narrative."

It so happened that I was on my way to give a speech to the NYU Young Republicans Club about the People's Cube, so I started my speech by talking about Maya Angelou's flyer I had passed a few doors down the block. I gave them my translation from the prog language - how it would have sounded if Maya Angelou were high on truth serum. This is why I still remember this line almost ten years later.

Most importantly, Maya Angelou was still alive and well then; she must have seen and approved of the flyer with the "fake" quote, or her agent did. That means the line had been attributed to her for many years, she knew about it, and did nothing to stop it.

Putting the quote on a stamp wasn't simply an error on the part of the Postal Service. It has become a logical extension of her disingenuous legacy as a mediocre poet who was promoted and celebrated due to her politics and who is mostly remembered by one line that wasn't even hers.

The symbolic falseness of the stamp makes an appropriate monument to such a legacy - one of the many insignificant and unsightly monuments to progdom in arts that are littering America's artistic graveyard, with the exception that Michelle Obama's and Oprah Winfrey's participation in its unveiling take this symbolism to a whole new level.

SOURCE

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VA Reform: Another Obama 'Success Story'

Eight months ago, President Obama put on a grand show for the troops. Surrounded by new Secretary of Veterans Affairs Bob McDonald, assorted politicians, military leaders and a bevy of TV cameras, the commander in chief signed the "Veterans Access, Choice and Accountability Act." He's good at inking things.

Obama condemned the "inexcusable conduct" at VA hospitals across the country (and under his own watch).

He vowed to "do right by all who served under our proud flag." He promised America's veterans new "reform," "resources," "timely care" and an end to the disgraceful disability backlog.

The bill he signed, in case you'd forgotten, included $10 billion in emergency funding to pay for veterans to go outside the chronically dysfunctional VA system if they are facing long wait times or live 40 miles or more from a VA facility, plus another $6.3 billion to set up 27 new clinics and hire doctors, nurses and other medical staff.

So, how's it all working out? About as well as every other "success story" Obama has signed his name to: abysmally, ineffectually and incompetently.

Take Obama's hyped plan to expand health care access to those who live far from a VA facility. Obtuse federal bureaucrats interpreted "40 miles" in the narrowest way possible, applied an "as the crow flies" distance rule inconsistently, and excluded untold numbers of vets. It took more than a year — and concerted pressure from veterans groups and GOP lawmakers — for the administration to "clarify" its confused eligibility standards just two weeks ago.

What about "accountability"? Obama bragged last August that "we've already taken the first steps to change the way the VA does business. We've held people accountable for misconduct. ... We should have zero tolerance for that." Looks like the VA bosses in Shreveport, La., didn't get the memo. As Tori Richards of Watchdog.org reported last month, a mental health services worker who exposed use of a secret appointment waiting list there was ignored for a year.

Instead of accountability for the wrongdoers, the VA employee who blew the whistle, Army vet Shea Wilkes, became the subject of a criminal investigation.

And how's that new facility construction campaign going? The VA's atrocious complex has been a problem for decades under both Democratic and Republican administrations. Nothing's changed under the era of hope and change.

Here in Colorado, the new Aurora VA hospital has become another in a long line of government spending cesspools. The $600-million 184-bed facility is now estimated to cost at least $1.7 billion after a reckless parade of design changes, cost overruns and mismanagement — and may not be ready until 2017. "Accountability"? Pfffft. The head of the VA's Office of Acquisition, Logistics and Construction responsible for the waste was allowed to resign with a full federal pension and retention of nearly $60,000 in bonuses earned during the fiasco.

In Colorado Springs, a sparkling new "cutting edge" VA outpatient clinic opened last year on the promise of reducing wait times. But according to the Colorado Springs Gazette, "11.5 percent of veteran appointments for care in Colorado Springs are delayed by 30 days or more," which is "up from 7 percent" before the $10-million facility opened.

What's next? You know the drill: more congressional hearings, more grandstanding, another "reform" campaign, more posturing in front of cameras, and more screwed-over vets.

Throwing more money and platitudes at the VA to cover up its deadly scandals is a bipartisan Beltway recipe for failure. Recently retired Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., one of the few to object to last year's kabuki "VA reform," was right. "The culture is one of looking good, protecting those in the VA and not protecting our veterans," he said at the time. "You have to have a bill that fixes that. I don't believe this is going to do it."

Mission not accomplished.

SOURCE

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Obama Admits Iran Won't Be Far From Nukes

Barack Obama may like to insist that his deal ensures Iran will never obtain nuclear weapons, but even he admitted the opposite in an interview with NPR. “Most of [Iran’s] enriched uranium is supposed to be set off to the side and diluted; it may, however, remain inside Iran,” Obama said. “Eventually, the deal expires. Perhaps the uranium is still there, which is why … where the regime changes is a significant question.”

He then said, “They’re not going to have been able to hoard a bunch of uranium that somehow they then convert to weapons-grade uranium. What is a more relevant fear would be that in year 13, 14, 15, they have advanced centrifuges that enrich uranium fairly rapidly, and at that point the breakout times would have shrunk almost down to zero.”

Not to worry, though. He said, “[C]urrently, the breakout times are only about two to three months by our intelligence estimates. So essentially, we’re purchasing for 13, 14, 15 years assurances that the breakout is at least a year … that – that if they decided to break the deal, kick out all the inspectors, break the seals and go for a bomb, we’d have over a year to respond. And we have those assurances for at least well over a decade.” Everything is awesome. But he just put his seal of approval on a future Iranian nuke.

SOURCE

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Economic freedom, not socialism makes you rich

IQ is important too. The very successful East Asian countries all have average  IQs about half a standard deviation above the European norm

Today’s Third World poverty is mostly self-inflicted – indigenously created. The growth-promoting characteristics of the non-poor countries that are all but absent in poor countries are protected private property rights, personal liberty, enforcement of contracts, rule of law and a market-oriented economic system.

A country need not be rich to create these wealth-enhancing institutions. That’s much of the story of the U.S. In 1776, we were a poor nation, but we established the institutional structure to become rich. That institutional structure attracted not only foreign investment but talented, hardworking immigrants, as well. Contrast that with today’s poor countries, whose policies and institutional structure do just the opposite – repel investment and export their most talented and ambitious people to freer and richer countries.

People with limited understanding make the mistake of making a link between economic freedom and democracy. There is no such necessary link. India, for example, politically is a democracy. Economically, it is mostly unfree and poor, ranking 128th on the 2015 Index of Economic Freedom. There are countries much higher on the economic freedom index that do not have much of a history of democracy, such as Chile, now ranking seventh, and Taiwan, 14th, yet these countries are far wealthier than some of their more democratic counterparts. Why? It’s because their economic systems are free or mostly free, something that is not guaranteed by a democratic political system.

The bottom line for why some countries are rich while others are poor is best-explained by the amount of economic freedom.

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. I also put up occasional updates on my Personal blog and each day I gather together my most substantial current writings on A WESTERN HEART.

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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Britain: More anti-democratic Leftist elitism

Tony Blair's dramatic intervention in the election backfired last night after he said the British people could not be trusted to decide if they want to stay in the EU.

The former Prime Minister was widely condemned after saying that membership of the European Union was 'too important' to be put to a public vote.

In a carefully choreographed speech, Mr Blair praised Ed Miliband for showing 'real leadership' in refusing to offer voters a say on the issue.

But Mr Blair did not deign to appear on a stage alongside the Labour leader – about whom he is said to harbour grave doubts – and refused to endorse any of his other policies. His ringing endorsement of the EU also left him at odds with Mr Miliband, who recognises it is hated by millions of voters.

And in highlighting Labour's refusal to offer a referendum, he presented an open goal for the Tories, who are the only party to commit to a vote.

Speaking in his former Sedgefield constituency, Mr Blair said of the EU debate: 'The Prime Minister will be spending more energy, will have more sleepless nights about it, be more focused on it than literally any other issue.  'He knows the vastness of the decision. And, following the Scottish referendum, he knows the perilous fragility of public support for the sensible choice. This issue, touching as it does the country's future, is too important to be traded like this.'

In a furious response, David Cameron said Mr Blair was 'the last person' who should be lecturing the country on Europe. He said Mr Blair had presided over a massive transfer of power from Westminster to Brussels and broken his own promise to hold a referendum.

Mr Cameron told the Mail: 'It is deeply condescending to say that the British people can't be trusted to make a choice. I believe they can be and they should be.

'Tony Blair has just highlighted that there is a choice: there will be no renegotiation, no referendum with Ed Miliband. I have said I want to stay in a reformed EU – but we need to get that referendum and the choice will be for the British people, not for me.'

He pointed out that, as Prime Minister, Mr Blair passed a series of treaties that ceded power to Brussels. Mr Cameron said: 'This is the man who passed the Amsterdam Treaty, the Nice Treaty, who negotiated the EU constitution, promised a referendum and didn't deliver a referendum on the Lisbon Treaty. He is the last person who should be giving this lecture.

'Frankly the British people need a choice. They haven't had one since 1975, and all these treaties have been passed since – including many when Tony Blair was prime minister.

SOURCE

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The Great Worker Shortage

The great conundrum of the U.S. economy today is that we have record numbers of working age people out of the labor force at the same time we have businesses desperately trying to find workers. As an example, the American Transportation Research Institute estimates there are 30,000-35,000 trucker jobs that could be filled tomorrow if workers would take these jobs – a shortage that could rise to 240,000 by 2022.

While the jobs market overall remains weak, demand is high for in certain sectors. For skilled and reliable mechanics, welders, engineers, electricians, plumbers, computer technicians, and nurses, jobs are plentiful; one can often find a job in 48 hours. As Bob Funk, the president of Express Services, which matches almost one-half million temporary workers with employers each year, “If you have a useful skill, we can find you a job. But too many are graduating from high school and college without any skills at all.”

The lesson, to play off of the famous Waylon Jennings song: Momma don’t let your babies grow up to be philosophy majors.

Three years ago the chronic disease of the economy was a shortage of jobs. This shortage persists in many sectors. But two other shortages are now being felt – the shortage of trained employees and of low-skilled employees willing to work. Patrick Doyle, the president of Domino’s Pizza, says that the franchises around the country are having a hard time filling delivery and clerical positions. “It’s a very tight labor market out there now.”

This shortage has an upside for workers because it allows them to bid up wages. When Wal-Mart announced last month that wages for many starter workers would rise to $9 an hour, well above the federal legal minimum, they weren’t being humanitarians. They were responding to a tightening labor market.

The idea that blue collar jobs aren’t a pathway to the middle class and higher is antiquated and wrong. Factory work today is often highly sophisticated and knowledge-based with workers using intricate scientific equipment. After several years honing their skills, welders, mechanics, carpenters, and technicians can, earn upwards of $50,000 a year – which in most years still places a household with two such income earners in the top 25 percent for income. It’s true these aren’t glitzy or cushy jobs, but they do pay a good salary.

So why aren’t workers filling these available jobs – or getting the skills necessary to fill them. I would posit five impediments to putting more Americans back to work:

First, government discourages work. Welfare consists of dozens of different and overlapping federal and state income support programs. A recent Census Bureau study found more than 100 million Americans collecting a government check or benefit each month. The spike in families on food stamps, SSI, disability, public housing, and early Social Security remains very high even 5 years into this recovery. This should come as no surprise given the combination of the scaled back welfare work requirements and the steep phase-out of benefits as a recipient begins earning income.

Economist Peter Ferrara argues in his new book “Power to the People,” that if “ we simply required work for all able-bodied welfare recipients, the number on public assistance would fall dramatically. This is what happened after the work for welfare requirements in 1996.”

Second, our public school systems often fail to teach kids basic skills. Whatever happened to shop classes? We have schools that now concentrate more on ethnic studies and tolerance training than teaching kids how to use a lathe or a graphic design tool. Charter schools can help remedy this. Universities are even more negligent. Kids commonly graduate from four year colleges with $100,000 of debt and little vocational training. A liberal arts education is valuable, but it should come paired with some practical skills.

Third, negative attitudes toward “blue collar” work. I’ve talked to parents who say they are disappointed if their kids want to become a craftsman – instead of going to college. This attitude discourages kids from learning how to make things, which contributes to sector-specific worker shortages. Meanwhile, too many people who want to go into the talking professions: lawyers, media, clergy, professors, and so on. Those who can’t “do,” become attorneys and sociology professors.

Fourth, a cultural bias against young adults working. The labor force participation rate is falling fastest among workers under 30 (see chart). Anytime a state tries to change laws to make it easier for teenagers to earn money, the left throws a tantrum about repealing child labor laws. The move to raise minimum wages in states and at the federal level could hardly be more destructive to young people. My own research finds that the higher the minimum wage in a state, the lower the labor force participation rate among teenagers.

Anecdotally, I’ve always been struck by how many successful people I have met who grew up on farms and started working – milking cows, building fences, cleaning out the barn – at the age of 10 or 11. They learn a work ethic at a young age and this pays big dividends in the future. Many studies document this to be true.

Fifth, higher education has become an excuse to delay entry into the workforce. I always cringe when I talk to 22 year olds who will graduate from college and who tell me their next step is to go to graduate school. Maybe by the time they are 26 or 27 they will start working. Here’s an idea: Colleges could encourage kids to have one or two years of work experience before they enroll.

Here’s an even better idea: Abolish federal student loans and replace the free government dollars with privately sponsored college work programs. For instance, schools like College of the Ozarks require kids to work 15 hours a week to pay their tuition. It’s hardly a violation of human rights if a 21 year old works to fund for their own education – and they will probably get more out of their classes if they do work. Anything easily attained is lightly valued. This would drive down tuition costs too, because students would start demanding more financial accountability and less waste. After all, federal subsidies have increased college costs.

These may seem like old-fashioned and even outmoded ideas. But the decline in work among the young bodes ill for the future. Many European nations have removed the young from the workforce and the repercussion appears to be lower lifetime earnings. A renewed focus on working would also help erode the entitlement mentality ingrained in so many millennials. Instead of more benefits and handouts, this generation needs to get a job.

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One small step against tyranny

The tide is turning against asset forfeiture and Loretta Lynch

Do you think the government should be able to seize your property if you have not been convicted of any crime? Most people are not aware that one of the most odious activities of federal, state and local tax and police authorities is that of “asset forfeiture.” Asset forfeiture laws allow law enforcement to seize and keep property of individuals and businesses without a criminal conviction.

The practice has been rife with abuse by law enforcement officials, often using seized property of innocent individuals for their own use. As a result of the outcries about the abuse, there was a unanimous vote by both Republicans and Democrats in the House and Senate in New Mexico to end the practice of civil asset forfeiture in the state. The bill now awaits the signature of Gov. Susana Martinez. An unlikely coalition supported the measure to repeal asset forfeiture, ranging from the left-leaning American Civil Liberties Union of New Mexico to the libertarian-leaning Institute for Justice. Former federal prosecutor and director of the Justice Department’s Asset Forfeiture Office, Brad Cates, now a resident of New Mexico, is one of the leading advocates of repeal of asset forfeiture laws at both the state and federal levels. Mr. Cates and the first director of the federal Asset Forfeiture Office, Judge John Yoder, in an article in The Washington Post last September, wrote: “We find it particularly painful to watch as the heavy hand of government goes amok. The program began with good intentions but now, having failed in both purpose and execution, it should be abolished.”

Many states and the federal government still allow asset forfeiture, even though they appear to fly in the face of the Fifth and 14th Amendments to the Constitution, which clearly protect any person from being deprived of property without due process. Where are the judges who are supposed to protect us from unconstitutional abuses?

It is particularly troubling that President Obama’s nominee for attorney general, Loretta Lynch, the current U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of New York, strongly defended civil asset forfeiture during her Senate confirmation hearings, despite major abuses by her own office. One case is described by my Cato colleague and attorney, Alan Bates: “In May of 2012 the Hirsch brothers, joint owners of Bi-County Distributors of Long Island, had their entire bank account [of $446,651.11] drained by the Internal Revenue Service working in conjunction with Lynch’s office without so much as a criminal charge.” Ms. Lynch’s office simply sat on the money for more than two years. The Institute for Justice, acting on behalf of the Hirsch brothers, was finally able to get the money returned earlier this year, after Ms. Lynch’s office admitted there was no evidence of wrongdoing.

In January, Republican Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky, and Republican Rep. Tim Walberg of Michigan reintroduced the “Fifth Amendment Integrity Restoration (FAIR) Act, which would revise the federal civil forfeiture law to give property owners more protection and reduce the profit incentive that encourages law enforcement to seize assets.” The provisions in this proposed legislation would go some distance toward stopping many of the worst abuses even though, in my judgment, it does not go nearly far enough in ending asset forfeitures. Nonetheless, support for this legislation should be a no-brainer for members of Congress from both parties.

Loretta Lynch’s office has, by her own admission, confiscated over $100 million from people who have not been charged or convicted of anything. Mr. Paul has announced that he will oppose her confirmation because he doesn’t “think she’s shown any compassion, or understanding of the law, but particularly compassion for people who are victims of civil forfeiture. People who are victims of civil forfeiture are often poor, African-American or Hispanic, and people who can’t afford an attorney to try to get the money that’s taken by the government.”

It is rather basic, “Thou shall not steal.” Most people understand that commandment, and it doesn’t matter if it is the government doing the stealing or just a common miscreant. It is very troubling that Ms. Lynch and many others in law enforcement, particularly at the IRS, seem to have so little understanding of the Constitution and the basis of a civil society. To confirm Ms. Lynch for attorney general, without passing serious reform of the asset forfeiture law as Mr. Paul has proposed, will endanger the property and even the liberty of many Americans.

Former federal prosecutor Brad Cates and Judge John Yoder said it best: “Civil asset forfeiture and money-laundering laws are gross perversions of the status of government amid a free citizenry. The individual is the font of sovereignty in our constitutional republic, and it is unacceptable that a citizen should have to ‘prove’ anything to the government. If the government has probable cause of a violation of law, then let a warrant be issued. And if the government has proof beyond a reasonable doubt of guilt, let that guilt be proclaimed by 12 peers.”

SOURCE

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Obama Won't Say Murdered Kenyans Were Christians

Last week, Islamic militants murdered 150 Christians in Kenya, explicitly because of their faith. According to the Associated Press, “The attackers separated Christian students from Muslim ones and massacred the Christians.” But Barack Obama couldn’t be bothered to mention faith at all. The White House statement denounced “terrorist atrocities” against “men and women” and “students,” but there was nary a peep about “Muslims” or “Christians.” Likewise, Obama neglected to mention the 21 Egyptian Christians beheaded by ISIL earlier this year were anything but “citizens.” It would seem the only time Obama doesn’t mind mentioning Christians is when he’s lecturing them about the Crusades.

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. I also put up occasional updates on my Personal blog and each day I gather together my most substantial current writings on A WESTERN HEART.

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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Etiquette Versus Annihilation

By Thomas Sowell

Recent statements from United Nations officials, that Iran is already blocking their existing efforts to keep track of what is going on in their nuclear program, should tell anyone who does not already know it that any agreement with Iran will be utterly worthless in practice. It doesn’t matter what the terms of the agreement are, if Iran can cheat.

It is amazing – indeed, staggering – that so few Americans are talking about what it would mean for the world’s biggest sponsor of international terrorism, Iran, to have nuclear bombs, and to be developing intercontinental missiles that can deliver them far beyond the Middle East.

Back during the years of the nuclear stand-off between the Soviet Union and the United States, contemplating what a nuclear war would be like was called “thinking the unthinkable.” But surely the Nazi Holocaust during World War II should tell us that what is beyond the imagination of decent people is by no means impossible for people who, as Churchill warned of Hitler before the war, had “currents of hatred so intense as to sear the souls of those who swim upon them.”

Have we not already seen that kind of hatred in the Middle East? Have we not seen it in suicide bombings there and in suicide attacks against America by people willing to sacrifice their own lives by flying planes into massive buildings, to vent their unbridled hatred?

The Soviet Union was never suicidal, so the fact that we could annihilate their cities if they attacked ours was a sufficient deterrent to a nuclear attack from them. But will that deter fanatics with an apocalyptic vision? Should we bet the lives of millions of Americans on our ability to deter nuclear war with Iran?

It is now nearly 70 years since nuclear bombs were used in war. Long periods of safety in that respect have apparently led many to feel as if the danger is not real. But the dangers are even greater now and the nuclear bombs more devastating.

Clearing the way for Iran to get nuclear bombs may – probably will – be the most catastrophic decision in human history. And it can certainly change human history, irrevocably, for the worse.

Against that grim background, it is almost incomprehensible how some people can be preoccupied with the question whether having Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu address Congress, warning against the proposed agreement, without the prior approval of President Obama, was a breach of protocol.

Against the background of the Obama administration’s negotiating what can turn out to be the most catastrophic international agreement in the nation’s history, to complain about protocol is to put questions of etiquette above questions of annihilation.

Why is Barack Obama so anxious to have an international agreement that will have no legal standing under the Constitution just two years from now, since it will be just a presidential agreement, rather than a treaty requiring the “advice and consent” of the Senate?

There are at least two reasons. One reason is that such an agreement will serve as a fig leaf to cover his failure to do anything that has any serious chance of stopping Iran from going nuclear. Such an agreement will protect Obama politically, despite however much it exposes the American people to unprecedented dangers.

The other reason is that, by going to the United Nations for its blessing on his agreement with Iran, he can get a bigger fig leaf to cover his complicity in the nuclear arming of America’s most dangerous enemy. In Obama’s vision, as a citizen of the world, there may be no reason why Iran should not have nuclear weapons when other nations have them.

Politically, President Obama could not just come right out and say such a thing. But he can get the same end result by pretending to have ended the dangers by reaching an agreement with Iran. There have long been people in the Western democracies who hail every international agreement that claims to reduce the dangers of war.

The road to World War II was strewn with arms control agreements on paper that aggressor nations ignored in practice. But those agreements lulled the democracies into a false sense of security that led them to cut back on military spending while their enemies were building up the military forces to attack them.

SOURCE

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The Green-Card Racket for Beltway Cronies

By Michelle Malkin

Can we stop putting America up for sale to the most politically connected bidders yet? Where is our self-respect?

Since 2001, I've warned about the systemic and bipartisan corruption of America's EB-5 immigrant investor visa program. The latest report from the Department of Homeland Security's inspector general — which outlines the meddling and pandering of No. 2 DHS official Alejandro Mayorkas, Nevada Sen. Harry Reid, Democratic bagman Terry McAuliffe, Hillary Clinton's brother Tony Rodham, former Pennsylvania. Gov. Ed Rendell and former Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour, to name a few — provides yet more sordid evidence that the green cards-for-sale scheme should be completely scrapped.

Created under an obscure section of the expansionist 1990 Immigration Act, EB-5 promised bountiful economic development for the U.S. in exchange for granting permanent residency (and eventual American citizenship) to foreign investors. A few years later, Congress conjured up the idea of EB-5 "regional centers" — government-sanctioned business groups and corporate entities acting as middlemen to administer the immigrant investments and facilitate the visa peddling.

Beltway cronyism was embedded in EB-5's DNA from the get-go. The original Democratic House sponsor and his spokesman went on to establish for-profit companies that marketed the program and provided consulting services. Former federal immigration officials from the George H.W. Bush administration formed lucrative limited partnerships to cash in on their access and EB-5 expertise. An entire side industry of economic book-cookers arose to supply analyses of the "job creation" benefits of EB-5 projects and to gerrymander Census employment data to fit the program's definition of "targeted employment areas" in order to qualify for lower investment thresholds (as was done in New York City's Atlantic Yards/Pacific Park EB-5 deal).

Think Solyndra and federal stimulus math on steroids.

Since the program's inception, rank-and-file adjudicators have tried to enforce the investment standards. But senior managers leaned on them to reverse EB-5 rejections when wealthy donors, law firm pals and political hacks complained.

Fast-forward to 2015. The blood pressure-spiking DHS IG report released last week confirmed what whistleblowers have been telling Capitol Hill for years.

Behind the scenes, the IG found, Dirty Harry Reid pressured Deputy DHS Secretary Mayorkas to overturn his agency's rejection of expedited EB-5 visa applications for Chinese investors in a Las Vegas casino hotel, which just happened to be represented by Reid's lawyer son Rory. Adjudicators balked at the preferential treatment. Mayorkas steamrolled the dissenters, who reported on shouting matches over the cases. Reid's staffers received special briefings from Mayorkas to update them on the project's progress.

One underling called it "a whole new phase of yuck."

Meanwhile, in the words of one DHS official at the Immigration and Customs Enforcement bureau, Mayorkas "absolutely gave special treatment" to electric car racket GreenTech, which zealously sought EB-5 visas for another group of deep-pocketed Chinese investors. McAuliffe helmed the company after it was spun off from a Chinese venture. He plugged in Rodham as president of Gulf Coast Funds Management, which won designation as an EB-5 regional center certified to invest foreign capital in federally approved commercial ventures in Louisiana and Mississippi, including GreenTech. Louisiana GOP Gov. Bobby Jindal and former Mississippi GOP Gov. Haley Barbour both signed letters urging DHS to approve Gulf Coast as a regional center.

After adjudicators dismissed the company's job claims as "ridiculous," "flawed" and "not approvable," McAuliffe personally leaned on then-DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano, "complaining about the denial of the Gulf Coast amendment and requesting her assistance to get the amendment approved and to expedite more than 200 investor petitions."

In violation of recordkeeping and disclosure rules, Mayorkas met with McAuliffe in February 2011 after USCIS denied GreenTech's requests. Mayorkas mysteriously took no notes and could not recall just exactly how many phone calls he took from McAuliffe and what exactly they discussed, though he did remember the "caustic" Democrat yelling "expletives at high volume." Mayorkas met personally with senior staff to urge the agency to reverse its denials and give McAuliffe and company what they wanted and even offered to write the reversals himself.

On a third front, Mayorkas intervened on behalf of EB-5 petitioners seeking green cards by investing in Hollywood studios such as Sony Pictures and Time Warner. He had received pressure from the L.A. mayor's office, where an aide helpfully mentioned she knew a mutual acquaintance of his from his old law firm, O'Melveny and Myers, and from Rendell, a paid consultant to the EB-5 regional center representing the foreign investors. Mayorkas reversed his staff's rejections of more than 200 suspect EB-5 applications and set up a special "deference review board" to bow to Hollywood.

Two decades ago, when the program's failures were first exposed, Rep. John W. Bryant, a Texas Democrat, protested on the House floor: "This provision is an unbelievable departure from our tradition of cherishing our most precious birthright as Americans."

How much more evidence do you need that this foreign investor pay-for-play swindle makes an irremediable mockery of the American Dream? The only effective way to "reform" this abomination is to kill it.

SOURCE

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The Next Bubble

By John Stossel

When the last housing bubble burst, politicians blamed “greedy banks.” They said mortgage companies lent money recklessly, making loans to people with dubious credit, for down payments as low as 3 percent.

“It will work out,” said the optimistic bankers. Regulators didn’t disagree. Everyone said, “Home prices will keep going up.” And home prices did – until they didn’t.

The bubble popped in 2007. Lots of people were hurt, and politicians took more of your tax money to bail out Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac along with reckless banks. They also gave the Federal Housing Administration a $2 billion bailout.

Then the politicians said, “We’ll fix this so it doesn’t happen again.” Congress passed Dodd-Frank and a thousand new regulations. The complex rules slowed lending, all right. It’s one reason this post-recession recovery has been abnormally slow.

But – April Fools'! – the new rules didn’t solve the problem of reckless lending, and it’s happening again.

Because our government subsidizes home purchases, recklessness is invited. Somehow, Americans buy cars, clothing, computers, etc. without government guarantees, but politicians think housing is different.

Both parties support the subsidies.

The left wants government to help struggling families, and the right thinks home ownership sends a wholesome cultural message. Both parties have cozy connections to home-builders and lenders.

At the time of the housing crash, most high-risk loans were guaranteed by the government. Those banks wouldn’t have been as reckless if they had their own money on the line.

But they knew they could grant a mortgage to most anyone and the FHA would back it or government-sponsored companies Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac would buy it. That fueled the frenzy of lending.

After the bubble popped, I assumed the political class would learn a lesson, but they haven’t. Today, even more American mortgages are guaranteed by government. More than 90 percent of new loans are backed by taxpayers. After the crash, Fannie and Freddie did raise their minimum down payment – to a measly 5 percent – but a few months ago, they lowered it again to 3 percent!

Are they crazy? A sensible congressman, Rep. Jeb Hensarling (R-TX), tried to get an answer from the administration’s new mortgage regulator, asking in a hearing, “All things being equal, is a 3 percent down riskier to the taxpayer than a 10 percent down loan?”

A pretty basic question – but one that director Mel Watt still dodged, responding, “Mr. Chairman, that is generally true. But when you pair the down payment with compensating factors … look at other considerations … you can ensure that a 3 percent loan is just as safe.”

What? That’s nonsense. This is what happens when pandering politicians get to dispense your money. Watt is among the worst. When he was a congressman, he pushed for mortgage subsidies for welfare recipients who made down payments as low as $1,000.

Edward Pinto, who studies housing risk for the American Enterprise Institute, says policies like this put us on the way to another bubble: “The government is once again … saying, let’s loosen credit, give loans to people that potentially can’t afford them, and everything will be fine because house prices will go up.”

On my show, former FHA commissioner David Stevens, who did improve lending standards a bit after the crash (before Watt and his cronies weakened them), responded that this time the government has new regulations that will prevent things falling apart: “I think in the effort, post-recession, to make sure we never go down this path again, we have created more rules than ever existed in the history of this country.”

But more rules aren’t a solution. Government’s regulators didn’t foresee the problems last time. Fannie and Freddie got a clean bill of health right up until the collapse.

The solution is less government involvement. Canada doesn’t have a Fannie, Freddie or FHA. Canada didn’t have the trauma of a housing bubble. In Canada, lenders and homeowners risk their own money.

Does that mean Canadians cannot afford homes? No! Without all that government help, Canada’s homeownership rate is higher than ours.

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. I also put up occasional updates on my Personal blog and each day I gather together my most substantial current writings on A WESTERN HEART.

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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Political Correctness Is Destroying the American Dream

People are defined by their deeds, not their words. And yet, our words both reflect and reinforce cultural norms. In other words, how we communicate has the power to change human behavior on an enormous scale.

Consider the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution. They are just words. But those words played an enormous role in the creation of a great nation. They defined the behavior of a culture that changed the world.

Words incite action. When words and the ideals they represent gain traction, they can change the trajectory of an entire society for better or worse. There is no more visible sign of where we’re heading than the growing pervasiveness of political correctness.

On the surface, the idea of filtering our communication so as not to exclude or offend anyone seems fairly benign, almost Pollyannaish. Maybe that explains how it has so insidiously crept into every aspect of our culture, but its effect has been anything but benign.

Political correctness has had a powerful influence on how we interact with each other, teach our kids, and manage our companies. It’s an existential threat to the meritocracy and personal accountability at the heart of free market capitalism. It’s toxic to the performance and competitiveness of our people, our companies and our economy.

You see, human behavior is all about incentives. All things being equal, people will do what’s in their own best interest.

If people believe that rewards are based solely on their own merits – that the sky’s the limit and how far they go in life rests solely on their shoulders – that’s an incentive to be self-reliant and reach for the stars. And they will generally reach the highest levels of achievement their capabilities and circumstances permit.

There’s proof of that. Those are, in fact, the principles that built America. Everyone gets life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. The rest is up to the individual. That simple mechanism is responsible for creating the entrepreneurs, innovators and business leaders of the free world. That’s what created the American Dream.

But if you remove the incentive, all that changes.

If people believe it makes no difference how they perform – that everyone’s the same, competition is bad, everyone’s a winner, and exceptional qualities will not be rewarded or even recognized – they’re left with nothing to strive for. Stripped of the will to achieve, they’ll settle into a life of dependency and mediocrity.

Again, it’s all about incentives. All things being equal, people will do what they’re incentivized to do.

So we can all agree that political correctness levels the playing field, removes incentives to excel, and diminishes meritocracy and personal accountability. Well, that has a ripple effect on team performance and effectiveness. We have a term for the resultant state of organizational malaise and mediocrity. It’s called bureaucracy.

While the word conjures up images of mindless drones shuffling around like real-life zombies under the sickly hued fluorescent lights of the local planning department, state Department of Motor Vehicles, or U.S. Postal Service, bureaucracy can creep into any business or company.

It’s simple, really. Just add political correctness to any organization and watch the bureaucratic behavior take over. Think about it.

Bureaucrats do only what they’re programmed to do because there’s no incentive to do more. And since there are no incentives to excel, they’ll do as little as they have to do to skate by. They follow rigid process because that’s how things are done. They’re the keepers of the status quo that stifles innovation and creativity.

You can trace all sorts of chronic business ills to bureaucratic behavior.

Besides reduced company performance and effectiveness, it leads to ever-increasing organizational bloat and complexity. Bureaucratic leaders are always looking for clever ways to increase their budget, grow their organization, and expand their power base.

It leads to dysfunctional behavior that resists change, improvement, initiative, transparency, and anything resembling personal responsibility. It leads to a whole slew of corporate maladies including cronyism, nepotism and the Peter Principle – the promotion of incompetent people.

Bureaucratic managers won’t give employees genuine feedback for fear of being sued or accused of harassment, discrimination, being a bully, or creating a hostile work environment. And they certainly can’t publicly praise anyone – that might make others feel inadequate. The result is a culture wrought with fear and loathing.

There’s a famous quote, “All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.” It’s often attributed to Edmund Burke, but many great thinkers, from Plato and Tolstoy to John Stuart Mill and Albert Einstein have made similar observations.

What I find particularly disturbing about the political correctness epidemic is the way so many CEOs and business leaders who are paid the big bucks to act on behalf of their companies are instead behaving like scared little bureaucrats and allowing the spread of this scourge on their watch.

I expect that sort of behavior from politicians and administrators, not from corporate executives and business leaders. After all, if they don’t have the courage to do what’s right, stand up for the meritocracy that made our nation great and carry the torch for the American Dream, who will?

SOURCE

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States Suffer from ObamaCare Regulations

ObamaCare was supposed to reduce the cost of insurance, hence the Affordable Care Act. But is this really what it did? States with less regulations before the law was enacted had more affordable health care costs. Take, for example, North Carolina and Nevada. They saw individual premiums for people in their twenties rise over 150 percent after the law was enacted.

In North Carolina, a twenty-seven year old man, let's call him Peter, would have paid $80 per month on average for his health insurance. After ObamaCare, Peter is paying $217 per month for that same health care coverage. That is an increase of $137 per month, or $1,644 per year. Poor Peter :(.

Peter has a similar situation in other states that had less regulations before ObamaCare was enacted. In Nevada, for example, Peter would have paid $71 per month for his health insurance, but is now paying $276 per month, or $3,312 per year.

The average income in Nevada is $37,361, and people in their twenties almost always make less than the average income. For someone like Peter making around $30,000 per year, having health insurance costs that are more than 10% of that income is totally unaffordable. Prior to the Affordable Care Act, that person would have been paying just $852 per year in health insurance premiums -- less than $1,000, and less than 3% of their total income.

Meanwhile, states like New York and New Jersey, which were heavily regulated to begin with, saw decreases in health insurance premiums. These extreme differences in the price of health insurance before ObamaCare are indicative of states’ priorities. and New York and New Jersey heavily regulated health care, and their citizens paid the price for it.

In North Carolina and Nevada, citizens should not be forced to pay higher premiums just to subsidize the people in states like New York and New Jersey. States should be able to decide their own regulations, and then people can chose where they want to live.

SOURCE

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Civil Forfeiture Violates Property Rights and Freedom

For 38 years, Carole Hinders has owned Mrs. Lady’s Mexican Food in Spirit Lake, Iowa. Mrs. Lady’s only accepts cash payments. In August 2013, the Federal government seized Carole Hinders’ entire bank account of $33,000 because she had a cash-only business. In the best of scenarios, the Federal government merely surmised Hinders was hiding illegal activity. In the worse case, it was simply a shakedown to confiscate her money, and put more money away for the Federal government.

In 2014, the Institute for Justice (IJ) began defending Carole Hinders. With the help of the IJ, Carole Hinders subjected herself to a deposition by Federal prosecutors, which was sworn testimony that could be used against her in a court of law. In time, the Federal government asked the judge to dismiss their lawsuit, and Carole Hinders had her money returned...nearly two years later!

Property rights and the Rule of Law are absolutely essential for our, personal freedoms. George Mason appreciated the importance of acquiring and possessing property when he wrote the Virginia Declaration Rights in 1776.

That all Men (People) are born equally free and independent, and have certain inherent natural Right…; among which are the Enjoyment of Life and Liberty, with the Means of acquiring and possessing Property, and pursuing and obtaining Happiness and Safety.

Tragically, Carole Hinders is not an isolated case. Do you know about a Federal, highway, interdiction program has had 61,000 warrantless seizures amounting to $2.5 billion.

To protect people from governmental abuse, Senator Rand Paul (R-KY), and Congressman Tim Walberg (R-MI) introduced the Fifth Amendment Integrity Restoration (FAIR) Act. The FAIR Act requires:

A court hearing within 14 days to establish probable cause or the property is returned to the owner.

The property seized was instrumental in the commission of a crime.

The government produces clear and compelling evidence before assets are forfeited.

Proceeds from forfeited goods goes to the General Fund instead of the Attorney General’s Asset Forfeiture Fund.

The FAIR Act will effectively halt the very, predatory abuses by the Federal government, and will restore our property rights as well as the Rule of Law. Through the FAIR Act, our personal freedom will be significantly enhanced in America, so it's important to tell your Senator and Member of Congress to support the FAIR Act.

SOURCE

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No wonder the Left shield Muslims

Both deny the most blatant reality with the greatest of ease

On April 1, the Jerusalem Post had a glaring front page story about a borderless, undemocratic, questionably lawless entity known as ‘Palestine' becoming a member of the International Criminal Court.

The PLO was quoted as saying that "It is war crimes and war criminals that undermine peace efforts." The PLO also said that the decision to join the ICC "reflects Palestine's unwavering commitment to peace, universal values, and determination to provide protection for its people and hold those responsible for the crimes they have committed."

Most Israelis must have been scratching their heads and wondering if this was an April Fools trick being perpetrated by the paper on its readers.  Could a Palestinian Authority guilty of decades of incitement, violence, terrorism, that left thousands of Israelis dead or injured, have decided to join the world criminal court to bring charges against itself?

Maybe, in a fit of moral clarity, they had decided the only way to peace was a complete reform of their violent terroristic tendencies and had thrown themselves on the mercy of the ICC to investigate their war and human rights crimes, both against innocent Israelis and their own people?

But no. Despite the repeated rockets and mortars, over ten thousand in number, against Israeli civilian targets, despite launching terror attacks against Israeli civilians by multiple and uniquely gruesome methods and seemingly oblivious to the heinous crimes they commit they, instead, target the target of their violence, hate, and terror with their application to join this global legal chamber.

And so we turned to page two of the same edition of the Jerusalem Post to read that the Shurat HaDin NGO had filed war crimes charges against Hamas on behalf of 26 Americans for their deliberate firing of rockets at Ben Gurion Airport during the 2014 Hamas-initiated Gaza conflict.

One piece of evidence that, hopefully, will convict Hamas on these charges was the statement of their spokesman, Sami Abu Zuhri, who had triumphantly admitted that "the success of Hamas in closing Israeli air space is a great victory for the resistance, and is a crown of Israel's failure."

Like a sick joke, the Palestinian Authority and the PLO became members of the ICC in The Hague on April 1. But the Palestinian Authority and the PLO were found guilty on terrorism charges in a New York court on February 23 in a class action suit brought by the families of ten Americans killed by them in a series of deadly attacks that killed 33 people and wounded more than 400 others in Israel.

So much for a Palestinian "unwavering commitment to peace and universal values." As with all their commitments, it's all smoke and mirrors.  But it really is Palestinian war crimes and war criminals that undermine peace efforts, and it is time that the international community opened its eyes to this truth.

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. I also put up occasional updates on my Personal blog and each day I gather together my most substantial current writings on A WESTERN HEART.

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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There are TWO elephants in Acemoglu's bedroom

Why are some countries rich while others are poor?  The answer to that is not far to seek.  With apologies for the army expression, the major differentiating factors stand out "like dog's balls".  The factors concerned, however, challenge basic Leftist beliefs so Leftists do their usual trick of ignoring the elephant in the room -- seeking more politically acceptable explanations.  So the theses put up by the absurd Leftist economist Daren Acemoglu have been eagerly seized on by the Left. Sadly, however, Acemoglu's theories are as full of holes as a Swiss cheese -- as I have already pointed out.  I would have failed his thesis as a Ph.D. dissertation.  There is however a saying that bad theories are driven out only by better theories so  I think it is incumbent on me to spell out what the obvious factors are.  I attempt that below

Acemoglu has addressed the "geography hypothesis", which points to the rather striking fact that poverty mostly seems to  be concentrated in the tropics and their immediately adjacent area.  So is climate the key to wealth and poverty?  Having myself been born and bred in the tropics, I hope not.  Acemoglu rejects the hypothesis in favour of his own tale about governmental institutions but makes a pretty thin argument of it.

His chief counter-argument is the prosperity of the Inca and Aztec civilizations prior to the Conquistadores.  And it is certainly notable that those civilizations were in the warmer parts of the Americas.  One swallow doesn't make a summer however and no statistician would let pass a generalization based on a sample size of one.

Furthermore, I think that what actually went on is fairly clear.  The areas where the meso-American civilizations arose are very fertile agriculturally and easily produced the food  surpluses that are needed for civilization to arise.  Whereas in what is today the USA and Canada, European farming technology was needed before large agricultural surpluses could be produced.

So I think the geography hypothesis is pretty good.  It fits almost all the examples.  Though we could argue about Tasmania, I suppose. But the interesting question is why.  How come that climate makes such a difference?  My answer to that is a very old one.  To oversimplify, in the tropics you just have to pick fruit off a tree to survive whereas in the cold climates you have to lay up food months in advance if you are to survive the winter.  Putting it generally, survival is much harder in cold climates so you need to be smarter to do so.  You have to use a mental model of the future for a start, and that sort of abstract thinking is what lies behind a higher IQ.

So IQ is the first elephant in Acemoglu's bedroom.  You need information about IQ in order to understand relative wealth and poverty. It is high average IQ that produces wealth-creating behaviour.  Even within modern countries, there is a correlation between low IQ and relative poverty. And, as is now I think well-known, Lynn and Vanhanen have shown a strong correlation between average national IQ and national prosperity.  The catastrophically low average IQ of Africans corresponds closely with the pervasive  dysfunction of African societies -- and indeed of African populations everywhere.  If you want evidence that IQ tests measure what they purport to measure, Africa is very strong evidence that they do.

BUT:  IQ is not the sole foundation of national prosperity.  It suits Leftists like Acemoglu to use simplistic single-factor explanations for everything but most of the world is more complex than that.  China is the obvious counter-example.  The average Chinese IQ appears to be very high (though studies of IQ in China have mostly been confined to coastal areas) and China has long been very poor.

My favourite example however is South India.  South India is very warm and yet the average IQ there appears to be high.  It was South Indian mathematicians and engineers who were behind India's recent remarkable Mars shot. In one bound India leapt to near parity with other space-exploring nations.  And South India is well and truly in the tropics.

How South Indians got so smart I will have to leave for another day but the continuity of civilization there has to have a lot to do with it.  Tamil Nadu claims to be the only place where a classical civilization has survived into modern times. And the constant wars between South Indian states probably also had a eugenic effect.

The interesting question, then, is why, like China, South India has long been poor.  And in both cases the answer is blindingly clear:  Socialism.  It is particularly clear in South India, which is the land of envy. All the States have been very socialist for a long time and Kerala for a while even had the distinction of having the world's only freely elected Communist government.  Even the present government is very Leftist.

And the same of course goes for China.  It was the virtual relinquishment of socialism under the leadership of Deng Xiaoping  that allowed the recent breakout into prosperity by China.  No matter how smart the people of a country are, socialism will impoverish them.  We saw that also in Russia.  Russia has made great strides since it abandoned Communism. And even India's recent surge was fired up by the big attack on the "Regulation Raj" in the 1990s.

There are of course numerous other examples of the economic benefits of winding back socialism:  Margaret Thatcher's privatizations and Ronald Reagan's tax cuts both ushered in long booms, for instance.  But let me mention another example that might otherwise go largely unheeded:  New Zealand.

New Zealand had some pretty socialistic governments during the 20th century (even the nominally conservative Muldoon regime was a big government regime) while Australia had long periods of conservative rule (including the market-oriented but nominally Leftist Hawke regime).  And that meant that New Zealand was always a poorer country than Australia. Recently however New Zealand has almost completely caught up.  Why?  Australia recently had 6 years of a vastly wasteful socialist government (the Rudd/Gillard regime) whose only notable legacy was a mountain of debt -- while New Zealand has now for over five years been under the prudent premiership of the conservative John Key.  The results were predictable.

So that is the second -- and presumably most unwelcome -- elephant in Acemoglu's bedroom:  Socialism.  High IQ makes you rich and socialism makes you poor.  You need the right combination of those two factors to have prosperity  -- JR.


John Key. It's rarely mentioned but Key is New Zealand's third Jewish Prime Minister. He is apparently not religious, however

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Let's Recognize Who the Real Haters Are

By David Limbaugh

One may reasonably wonder whether the militant left in this country is solely dedicated to manufacturing issues to keep the nation in a constant state of uproar, angst and disharmony. We're seeing lots of negativity and intolerance from those so concerned that we all love one another.

Their most recent cause for hysterical urgency is Indiana's Religious Freedom Restoration Act. The left has gone absolutely bonkers attempting to paint that legislation as a license for Christians to discriminate against gays for sport and is smearing anyone who supports it as a reactionary bigot.

Don't you long for those days when words had meaning? Now we have propagandists whose principal job is to deceitfully distort word meanings to promote their causes.

A few examples in the context of the issue at hand are "hate," "homophobe," "discrimination" and "anti-." People who oppose same-sex marriage do not fear or hate people who are gay. They are not advocating discrimination against them, and they are not against them.

These calculated distortions have had an enormous impact on our culture, infecting even people who should know better. Now enshrined in our popular culture, these misrepresentations affect the way people think (which is the whole point, of course) and lead to imputed motives with no basis in fact.

Consider U.S. Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy's unfortunate language in his opinion in the Windsor case, in which the court struck down the Defense of Marriage Act as unconstitutional.

Kennedy said the government's refusal to recognize same-sex marriages imposed a "stigma," codified a "separate status" into law and "humiliate(d)" a certain group of people. He said, "The principal purpose and the necessary effect of this law are to demean those persons who are in a lawful same-sex marriage."

Those were grossly unwarranted accusations. In fact, Kennedy's reckless language could cause the exact harm he professed to be condemning, for he flagrantly stigmatized, humiliated and demeaned proponents of DOMA in presumptuously imputing motives to them they don't possess.

Somewhat similarly, Indiana Gov. Mike Pence, in walking back his position on Indiana's law, said, "No one should be harassed or mistreated because of who they are, who they love or what they believe."

That was a profoundly regrettable choice of words that only lends credence to the dishonest activists who are attempting to vilify people who support a law that protects one of this nation's most basic and sacred freedoms, the freedom of religion. Under no reasonable construction of language can business owners' refusal to perform services or sell products for events that celebrate causes that violate their religious beliefs be considered harassment.

The only people being harassed on this issue are the business owners, because of their religious beliefs.

The Indiana law doesn't authorize businesses to deny services to gay people at will. Neither the federal Religious Freedom Restoration Act nor any of the state RFRAs have been used as a license for merchants to refuse to do business with gays. But there is a qualitative difference between refusing to serve gays in general and declining to provide services for the very event that solemnizes their legal marriage.

We should expect better from Kennedy and Pence, but not White House press secretary Josh Earnest, who said the Indiana law "could reasonably be used to try to justify discriminating against somebody because of who they love." That incendiary language completely distorts the motive of those who don't want to service same-sex marriage ceremonies, and he knows it.

Leftists also want to marginalize Christians who support such legislation as hateful kooks and outliers, but the truth is that Christianity sanctifies marriage as between one man and one woman, and that is not only in the Old Testament. Those who claim that Jesus never condemned homosexuality should know that he did affirm marriage as between a man and a woman. Reciting Genesis, he said, "Have you not read that he who created them from the beginning made them male and female, and said, 'Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh'?" (Matthew 19:4-5).

Let's not forget what the federal and state RFRAs, as construed by the courts, do. They seek to balance sometimes-conflicting interests. They say the government can't force people to violate their sincerely held religious beliefs unless it can prove it has a compelling interest in doing so, and only then if it does so by the least restrictive means.

Again, RFRAs recognize potential disagreements and provide for a reasonable balancing of those interests. But the ugly truth is that opponents of RFRAs don't want there to be a balancing test. They don't believe that the religious convictions of Christians on same-sex marriage deserve any protection. They are the extremists in this conflict, not the Christian merchants who choose to respectfully decline performing services for a very minute fraction of transactions involving gays.

What people should keep in mind is that any real hatred involved in this latest hot-button issue is emanating from the people who are falsely claiming to be victimized by hate. The nasty, mean-spirited rhetoric, the desire to harm people for exercising their religion and the efforts to smear a certain group of people are coming from leftist activists against Christians, not Christians against gays. Those are the facts.

The question is, will our Republican politicians have the backbone to stand up for what is right on this issue and vindicate religious liberty?

SOURCE

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Huckabee on Indiana Law: 'This Is a Manufactured Crisis by the Left'

 The furor over Indiana's Religious Freedom Restoration Act "is a manufactured crisis by the Left," former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee (R) told Fox News's Megyn Kelly Wednesday night.

"If they manufactured as many products as they do crises like this one, which is an utterly phony attempt to create some kind of division, 92 million Americans who are jobless would have jobs.

"I've never seen anything so utterly off the mark in my life as trying to pretend that the RFRA law is actually discrimination. It is most certainly not. It simply gives you access to the court. And there's no guarantee that you're going to win when you go."

Huckabee spoke one day after Arkansas, the state he once governed, also passed a Religious Freedom Restoration Act, which the current governor wants to change. Gov. Asa Hutchinson (R) wants the state law to precisely mirror the federal RFRA signed in 1993 by then-President Bill Clinton.

Indiana Gov. Mike Pence (R) also has asked the Indiana State Legislature to make changes, following an "avalanche" of criticism that the Indiana law is a license to discriminate against homosexuals.

"There's nothing in the RFRA that in anyway says a thing about homosexuality, gay marriage," Huckabee told "The Kelly File" on Wednesday.

He said it's important to differentiate between discrimination and discretion: "Discrimination is if when someone comes into the pizza place, they're turned away because they're black or because they're female or because they're gay, although I don't honestly know how you would know someone is gay just because they walked in and ordered a pepperoni pizza.

"But discretion is something that every American should have the right to exercise. Which is that if you come to my place and order cupcakes or a donut, I'll serve you. If you want me to show up and deliver a cake with two men on top of it, because I'm a Christian, because I believe the biblical definition of marriage, then I'm not going to be able to do that. That's not discrimination. That's discretion. And there's a difference."

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. I also put up occasional updates on my Personal blog and each day I gather together my most substantial current writings on A WESTERN HEART.

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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Are American young men nogoodniks?

In 2011 Kay Hymowitz wrote an article for the WSJ under the heading "Where Have The Good Men Gone?", which basically said that college-educated American  men in their 20s are nogoodniks.  They still behave like adolescents and are no good to young women -- who are far more mature.  And she put forward a number of reasons why that should be so.

Hymowitz herself is a broadly conservative and married New York Jewish lady born in 1948.  So it would not be inaccurate to refer to her as an old lady.  So is she just lost in the era of her youth (which is roughly also mine) or is there something in what she said?

The article has got a lot of attention.  Google has over 17,000 references to it, and most that I have read agreed with it to some degree -- with feminism getting a lot of blame for the problem.  I am not an American and my stays in America were not long enough to allow me to make any judgments about that particular demographic category.  I think however there are two things I can say about the debate that need to be said:

1). "The men are no good" is an old cry.  Women who have not paired up by age 30 have been singing that song for a long time. The men they met in their 20s were not good enough for them and they somehow think the men they meet in their 30s should be better!  One example from my own life I always find amusing:  I was at a singles party and knew an attractive lady there.  We were chatting and she said to me:  "Where are all the men?".  I pointed out that there were in fact a slight preponderance of men in the room.  She replied: "Not THOSE men".  She had standards much higher than what was available.  So it may be that Hymowitz too has unrealistically high standards when she evaluates young American men.

2).  Value judgments aside, it is incontrovertible that young people these days are not marrying nearly as much as they used to.   Why is that?   I think all the reasons advanced by Hymowitz and others have a part to play but who can doubt that young men have noticed the traumatic divorce cases that regularly feature in the papers?  So often a divorce is reported as disastrous for the man financially and sometimes disastrous in other ways too.  Who would wish that on themselves? And the sure way of avoiding such damage is not to marry in the first place.  Feminism has turned many women into women of easy virtue so sexual deprivation is not a problem.  So if any woman complains that the men she meets "won't commit", just refer her  to the divorce laws in her State.  A man has to be slightly insane to marry these days.  The laws are largely feminist inspired but conspire heavily against what many women want.  Feminists are good at conspiring against the interests of normal women.

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Easter

For Christians, six or so weeks of penance, atonement and self-denial come to a close this weekend. Time to hang up those horse-hair undergarments, unlock the fridge and indulge. Or at least that used to be what happened with the end of Lent.

But several high-powered Anglican bishops, who are urging the Church of England to prove its commitment to battling climate change, want the spirit of Lent to be extended indefinitely. And they are not alone. From lifestyle cops obsessed with our waistlines to the greens obessessed with the contents of our bin liners, too many seem to think life-long self-denial is the way forward. So, here’s an alternative Easter message: buck the miserablism and enjoy yourselves!

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Free Fall in the Middle East

As bombs fall on Yemen and a sectarian war between the Middle East’s leading powers becomes more likely by the day, the Obama Administration seems to feel it might have some spinning to do about the success of its Middle East policy. But as President Ahab glances around his deck, few of his shipmates are manning their posts—in fact, most seem to be scrambling for the lifeboats. Oh well, there’s always that trusty tar, Unnamed State Department Official, to rely on for a friendly quote in Politico:

“There’s a sense that the only view worth having on the Middle East is the long view. […] We’ve painfully seen that good can turn to bad and bad can turn to good in an instant, which might be a sobriety worth holding on to at moments like this. The truth is, you can dwell on Yemen, or you can recognize that we’re one agreement away from a game-changing, legacy-setting nuclear accord on Iran that tackles what every one agrees is the biggest threat to the region.”

But among those who are willing to give their names, there is less philosophizing. James Jeffrey, Obama’s former Ambassador to Iraq, cuts through the commentary on U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East with a certain pithiness:

“We’re in a goddamn free fall here.”

Meanwhile, over at the New York Times, writers are doing their tortured best to say something other than that a catastrophic breakdown of the President’s foreign policy is taking place in the Middle East—but the defense is less than effective. What can you do, the world is just a mess, seems to be their take:

"Few disagree that the continuing tumult in the Middle East has scrambled American priorities there. This has led many to argue that the Obama administration’s policy for the region is adrift — without core principles to anchor it.

But amid the confusion, some experts said that there cannot be an overarching American policy in the Middle East at the moment. The best the White House can do, they said, is tailor policies according to individual crises as they flare up."

If we had a Republican President and the Middle East were in this much of a mess, and the Administration had been repeatedly exposed as having fundamentally misjudged major developments (calling ISIS the “jayvee team,” Yemen a success, Erdogan a reliable partner, etc. etc.), the NYT would be calling for impeachment and howling about the end of the world. As it is, the newspaper of record reflects philosophically on the complexity of the world, and suggests that nobody could really do anything given the problems around us.

Nobody should be surprised by this, but nobody should miss the most important point here: even the President’s ideological fellow travelers can no longer mount a cogent defense of his Middle East policy. The MSM will still do all it can to avoid connecting the dots or drawing attention to the stark isolation in which the White House now finds itself as ally after ally drops away. It still doesn’t want to admit that the “smart diplomacy” crowd has been about as effective at making a foreign policy as the famous emperor’s smooth-talking tailors were at making a new suit of clothes. But it’s getting harder and harder to find anybody willing to gush about how snazzy the President looks in the sharp foreign policy outfit that he’s sporting around town. The shocked silence of the foreign policy establishment, the absence of any statements of support from European or Asian allies about our Middle East course, the evidence that the President and the “senior officials” whom he trusts continue to be blindsided by major developments they didn’t expect and haven’t provided for: all of this tells us that our Middle East policy is indeed in free fall.

 SOURCE

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The Tricks Obama Is Trying to Play with the Iran Announcement

If you look at what happened today between the U.S. and Iran through the lens of domestic American politics, Barack Obama has made a very clever play here—because what might be called “the agreement of the framework of the possibility of a potential deal” gives him new leverage in his ongoing battle with the Senate to limit its ability to play a role in the most critical foreign-policy matter of the decade.

The “framework” codifies the Obama administration’s cave-ins but casts them as thrilling reductions in Iran’s capacities rather than what they are—a pie-in-the-sky effort to use inspections as the means by which the West can “manage” the speed with which Iran becomes a nuclear power.

Obama’s tone of triumph this afternoon was mixed with sharp reminders that the deal is actually not yet done—and that is entirely the point of this exercise from a domestic standpoint. the triumph signals his troops and apologists that the time has come for them to stand with him, praise the deal sheet and pretend it’s a deal, declare it historic, and generally act as though the world has been delivered from a dreadful confrontation by Obama and Kerry.

But since the deal is not yet done, it could still be derailed. And that is where Obama’s truly Machiavellian play here comes in: He may have found a way to put the Senate in a box and keep Democrats from melting away from him on Iran and voting not only for legislation he doesn’t want but also to override the veto he has promised.

The Senate has two provisions at the ready with which it could go ahead any time. One, called Kirk-Menendez, imposes new sanctions on Iran. Obama promised a veto of this bill should it pass, and after today, one ought to presume that it’s dead.

The other, Corker-Menendez, requires the administration to submit any deal to the Senate within 60 days of its signing. This is a key provision because, of course, what the Iranians want—and what they said today they got—was the lifting of all sanctions. The president, in his statement, vowed to lift the “nuclear” sanctions (there are others involving human rights) if the Iranians comply by the terms of the deal.

Existing sanctions legislation features waivers the president can arguably use to do that. But those sanctions were put into place specifically to make it incredibly painful for Iran to retain any nuclear-weapons capability—not as a means of acceding to Iran’s retention of a nuclear capability.

For this reason, and for the reason that the president is essentially negotiating an arms-control treaty with Iran, the Senate should approve any final deal. Obama disagrees and claims this is merely a nuclear-agreement, not a treaty, and therefore Congress has no role.

That’s a very nervy argument. It is not only disrespectful of the Senate but it misrepresents the nature of what’s being negotiated. And that’s why it’s an argument it appeared the president would lose—that senators would not only vote for Corker-Menendez but would override his veto of it.

Which is why the deal-that’s-not-yet-a-deal works in his favor. Talks are now to continue until the end of June. Obama can and will argue to Democrats that they owe it to him, to their base, and to their governing ideology to give him all the room he needs to get to June 30.

Of course, if the legislation does not pass by June 30 and Obama signs a final deal, the game is up; the Senate can’t retroactively insist in July he bring it to them for a vote.

Will there be a deal by June 30? Maybe, maybe not; maybe they’ll finish, maybe they won’t; maybe the Iranians will say they didn’t agree to this or that and blow up the whole thing; who knows. Probably the total collapse, after all this, would bring the Kirk-Menendez sanctions back to life. Which is why there will never be a total collapse—because these talks can simply go on….

 SOURCE

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Sanctions against Russia backfire

Boost Russian exports; depress Australian and Indonesian exports

Russia is starting to erode the dominance of Australia and Indonesia in the Pacific thermal coal market thanks to the steep depreciation of the rouble over the past 12 months, according to energy consultancy Wood Mackenzie.

Coal exports from Russia to the Pacific have already increased by about 8 million tonnes and the country is making inroads into the market share of the leading suppliers, said Kiah Wei Giam, senior Asia-Pacific region analyst for the firm.

Under cost conditions of 12 months ago, Russian production would have made up about 17 per cent of the first 200 million tonnes of supply to Pacific buyers. But with the depreciation of the rouble, combined with the impact of lower prices, its share jumps to 35 per cent.

"With even closer proximity to the north Asian market, which are typically heavy coal consumers, Russian coal can potentially displace the Australian and Indonesian tonnes," Mr Giam said in a media briefing.

"It is Russia which tops the list of benefactors" with the rouble falling 70 per cent against the US dollar, Mr Giam said.

SOURCE

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Some Indiana Interrogatories

The whole Indiana RFRA controversy prompts a few interrogatories.  Such as:

 *  If a member of the Westboro Baptist Church asks for a bakery to create a cake with their motto “God hates fags,” will the baker be charged with discrimination if she refuses?

 *  If a baker agrees to bake a cake for a gay wedding, but as matter of practice includes the slogan “God hates fags” in, say, Aramaic script on the side of the cake, wouldn’t this be protected speech and/or “expression” under the First Amendment?

 *  Just curious: why hasn’t anyone been to a Muslim bakery to press this newfound frontier of anti-discrimination?  Ah—Steven Crowder has.  Will the Human Rights Campaign Fund descend upon Dearborn, Michigan, tomorrow about this outrageous injustice?  I’m not holding my breath. Short video at link.

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. I also put up occasional updates on my Personal blog and each day I gather together my most substantial current writings on A WESTERN HEART.

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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