Labor Day outlook

Today is Labor Day, and that means the unofficial end of summer on a day of celebration of the American worker. The holiday originated in the late 19th century and was born of the labor movement, though many Americans, led by President Grover Cleveland, pushed for and secured a September date to distinguish it from the socialist/communist "International Workers Day," or "May Day," on May 1. Labor Day was made an official federal holiday in 1894.

As we mark the day, let's take a quick look at a few related topics.

First, Hurricane Dorian, currently a Category 5 monster, is heading for Florida, Georgia, and the Carolinas — not exactly a welcome holiday event. The days and weeks ahead with be filled with the extensive labor and massive expense of recovery, but Americans are a resilient lot.

As for the economy, as we've hammered home in recent weeks, the positive outlook is exactly why the Leftmedia is incessantly running reports of economic doom and gloom on the horizon. A good economy is bad news for Democrats. If their prophesies come true, it will be because they succeeded in undermining consumer confidence.

Well, here are the facts: The August jobs report won't be released until this Friday, but the employment picture is largely a good one — even if recent revisions are being used by Democrats and their Leftmedia propagandists to forecast a recession. The unemployment rate stands near a 50-year low of 3.7%, meaning one of the biggest hurdles for increasing employment is that companies are finding it difficult to fill jobs with workers. Manufacturing has taken a hit because of President Donald Trump's tariffs, which are also hurting American consumers with higher prices. But Trump is calculating that the U.S. economy can withstand a needed battle with China that he didn't start.

Third, wages are growing and consumers are generally confident. In fact, The Wall Street Journal reports, "American workers under 35 report being happier with their paychecks than people over 55 for the first time since at least 2011, according to a new report from the Conference Board, a business-research organization that polls U.S. employees about workplace satisfaction. Overall, the share of workers satisfied with their paychecks rose to 46.4% in 2018, from 43% in 2017, an increase that mirrors federal data showing that wage growth accelerated in 2018." Furthermore, "Nearly 54% of U.S. workers said they were satisfied with their jobs in 2018, the highest share reported in more than two decades."

SOURCE 

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Daring to suggest that all cultures aren't equal

The Acting Provost of DePaul University issues a formal censure against me

Jason D. Hill (Who is black)

It is a common canard among the educated cognoscenti that all cultures are equal. Indeed, a few weeks after writing an article in which I declared that not all cultures were equal, the Acting Provost of DePaul University—where I am a full tenured professor of philosophy—issued what I and many others considered to be a formal censure against me. She declared that at her university it is considered an accepted truism that all individuals are valued equally, and that she was truly disheartened that a member of the academic community would assert that “not all cultures are indeed equal.”

I had stated that some cultures are abysmally inferior and regressive based on their comprehensive philosophy and fundamental principles, or, lack thereof—that guide or fail to protect the inalienable rights of their citizens.

Therein lay the category mistake that an educated academic along with countless others commit conflating the individual with the cultural. A culture may be described as a multiplicity of complex systems that include the arts, laws, customs, practices, norms, mores, beliefs, knowledge, and human capabilities acquired by human-beings in society. Culture also includes language, ethical systems, and religious institutions. One can indeed say that all persons are endowed with equal and intrinsic moral worth as human beings which they may corrupt by committing morally egregious acts; but as human beings, they are possessed of inviolable moral worth and dignity.

It is, however, a category mistake to transfer this innate respect and reverence for the individual on to the landscape of culture which is not an indivisible whole, and which possesses none of the requisite attributes of individuals that make them deserving of such unassailable respect. Persons' identities are not reducible to the practices of their cultures. Some cultural practices are downright horrific and evil; some are better than others. Persons in their respective cultures are free to identify themselves with those cultural practices that align themselves with their moral identities, and distances themselves from those they find repulsive.

The Unites States of America is not a perfect civilization; however, as a rights bearing culture in which the inalienability of rights are observed, a country in which civil liberties such as freedom of speech ( for now) is still upheld, freedom of conscience, and freedom of religious association or lack thereof respected, it is vastly superior to barbaric and primitive cultures that have yet to discover the individual and his or her inviolate dignity. The United States is a republic devoted to the inalienability of those rights that are conducive to human survival and flourishing. The United States, through its Constitution and Bill of Rights, is the first political system to discover the direct correlation between the rational nature of man qua man, and the exact political milieu in which that nature has to properly live and function if it is to live rather than perish.

Sudan, Nigeria, Mauritania, Libya and Algeria —all countries which still practice and/or tolerate chattel slavery by Arab and black Muslims against other Muslims and Christians—are not the moral, political or cultural equals of the United States, Israel, Great Britain and, say, France. Those countries are vastly superior to Saudi Arabia or Iran, or North Korea and Gaza, which do not permit religious reciprocity. Its political leaders permit the beheading of homosexuals in the streets, legalize torture, and have some of the most egregious records of gender inequality in the world. In the cases of Iran, Qatar and Saud Arabia, we witness them as sponsors of world-wide terrorism, and of placing restrictions on civil liberties and a free press.

Cannibalistic Aztec culture could never and will never be the cultural equal of any civilized and free culture existing anywhere in the world today. Cultures that permit freedom of association, respect equality for all citizens and legal residents before the law, that uphold gender equality as an unsalable moral axiom, that allow  individuals to cultivate their unique life plans—generally speaking—cultures that have discovered the fact that that an environment in which freedom and liberty are the milieu in which the individual needs to cultivate his or her rational nature qua human being and live an optimal existence, are undoubtedly, superior cultures, morally, spiritually and politically speaking.

It is a mark of sheer cognitive malarkey to claim that all cultures are equal. Just as some cultures are technologically more advanced than others, so some are politically more distinguished in their record on individual rights and the protection of private property and personal liberties than others. Rape cultures, that is, cultures in which rape is sanctioned by law such as in several parts of Pakistan and Afghanistan, are not moral equivalents of any western democratic countries in which rape, though committed by moral deviants, is illegal and punishable by objective law.

Brunei practices a Sharia penal code under Islamic law that allows death or stoning for adultery, homosexuality and even apostasy. Hamas continues to pose an existential threat to Israel by pounding the latter, (unprovoked), with a barrage of deadly rockets so often that one can barely keep track of the war attacks. Hamas routinely arrests and tortures peaceful critics of its totalitarian government with impunity. It is a blatant advocate and practitioner of Jihadism. There is no culture, so to speak, inside Gaza. It is defined, incidentally, by its absence of any significant life and culture. Nevertheless, even countries that lack a significant culture can wreak havoc on the lives of others.  A rich culture is potent because it creates life. One that is an ecological sociopolitical   ballast, or worse, evil, can destroy life.

The question remains, too, of not only how to think about cultures that are unequal to others but: what to do about those that are evil; cultures that exist as moral rogue states that betray the civilizational maturity expected by an international order that protects the well-being of the global commons? We are talking here of morally inverted states that pose a serious threat to the international order; evil cultures that are political sinkholes that lie outside the process of history, and that are reverting to pre-modern ages. The goals of such cultures —among other things—are to eradicate the individual, and practices of freedom and liberty from the earth.

Evil cultures are drainage systems that tax the existential, spiritual and psychological resources of their citizens who must expend a disproportionate amount of energy just to stay alive—let alone flourish.

So, what is the antidote? In a forthcoming article on moral rogue states that pose existential  threats to the global commons, countries that violate the conditions of their own sovereignty which is secured by objective constraints of justice, I will outline and philosophically defend a process of what I call: global incarceration. This involves an ethical defense of placing intolerable, incorrigible and politically inverted countries into a state of political receivership by any free and civilized country willing and able to do so based on criteria of political expediency, and military and technological capability.

Until such time, let us rid ourselves of the simplistic egalitarian idea that all cultures are equal. That some are moral and political sinkholes from which millions seek to flee is obvious. That such escapees or freedom seekers aspire to self-actualize in other cultures that, in their judgments, are better suited to their aspirations, hopes and dreams constitutes enough proof that some cultures are inimical to human well-being, and others better suited for the development and practice of human agency.

SOURCE 

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America’s Poor Fare Better Than Average Persons in Canada, the UK

Sometimes the key to success is being “less worse” than your competitors. So while I’m critical of many bad policies in the United States, it’s worth noting that America nonetheless ranks #6 for overall economic liberty according to the Fraser Institute.

As such, it’s not surprising that America has higher living standards than most other developed nations according to the “actual individual consumption” data from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.

And America’s advantage isn’t trivial. We’re more than 46 percent higher than the average for OECD member nations.

The gap is so large that I’ve wondered how lower-income people in the United States would rank compared to average people in other countries.

Well, the folks at Just Facts have investigated precisely this issue using World Bank data and found some remarkable results.

“… after accounting for all income, charity, and non-cash welfare benefits like subsidized housing and Food Stamps—the poorest 20% of Americans consume more goods and services than the national averages for all people in most affluent countries. … In other words, if the U.S. 'poor' were a nation, it would be one of the world’s richest. … The World Bank publishes a comprehensive dataset on consumption that isn’t dependent on the accuracy of household surveys and includes all goods and services, but it only provides the average consumption per person in each nation—not the poorest people in each nation. However, the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis published a study that provides exactly that for 2010. Combined with World Bank data for the same year, these datasets show that the poorest 20% of U.S. households have higher average consumption per person than the averages for all people in most nations of the OECD and Europe … The high consumption of America’s 'poor' doesn’t mean they live better than average people in the nations they outpace, like Spain, Denmark, Japan, Greece, and New Zealand. … Nonetheless, the fact remains that the privilege of living in the U.S. affords poor people with more material resources than the averages for most of the world’s richest nations.”

There are some challenges in putting together this type of comparison, so the folks at Just Facts are very clear in showing their methodology.

They’ve certainly come up with results that make sense, particularly when comparing their results with the OECD AIC numbers.

Here’s one of the charts from the report:



You can see that the bottom 20 percent of Americans do quite well compared to the average person in other developed nations.

By the way, the report from Just Facts also criticizes The New York Times for dishonest analysis of poverty. Since I’ve felt compelled to do the same thing, I can definitely sympathize.

The bottom line is that free markets and limited government are the best way to help lower-income people enjoy more prosperity.

Daniel J. Mitchell is a top expert on tax reform and supply-side tax policy and is Chairman of the Center for Freedom an

SOURCE 

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The hazards of government healthcare: The Veterans Administration failed to stop pathologist who misdiagnosed thousands — and showed up drunk for work

It took more than three thousand misdiagnoses, a dozen or more patient deaths, and multiple alerts before the Veterans Administration caught up with its chief pathologist Robert Morris Levy. The Washington Post offers a lengthy exposé of the VA’s internal inertia as well as the ineffectiveness of its quality controls, all of which took a terrible human cost on thousands. And the worst part is that VA officials got warned repeatedly that Levy was a problem before finally getting fired last year … over a DUI.

On the Fayetteville campus, rated one of VA’s best, Levy’s supervisors failed to heed early warnings that he was endangering patients and then were slow to act, according to internal VA documents, court filings and interviews with 20 congressional officials, veterans and current and former VA employees.

Federal prosecutors charged Levy, 53, last week with three counts of involuntary manslaughter in the deaths of three veterans. VA officials now acknowledge that he botched diagnoses of at least 15 patients who later died and 15 others whose health was seriously harmed.

The number of those affected, however, is much greater, and the full repercussions of Levy’s actions may not be known for years. VA officials say Levy made 3,000 errors or misdiagnoses dating to 2005.

If Levy’s on trial for involuntary manslaughter, others should be charged as accomplices. VA officials got several warnings that Levy was working while intoxicated, records indicate, starting as early as 2012. One incident in 2016 showed Levy with a 0.4% blood alcohol reading, which is five times higher than needed in most states to get a DWI. Rather than put this together with all of the other alerts, the VA paid for a three-month inpatient treatment center and then put Levy back on the job.

It never occurred to anyone, apparently, to double-check Levy’s work after finding out that he showed up to work drunk. Supposedly Levy had a very low incidence of mistakes in his work, but the system used to determine competency was absurdly easy to game. The VA used a peer-review system to sample work by specialists, which meant that Levy’s work was spot-checked by the deputy who reported to him. Levy simply changed the conclusions of his deputy’s reports in order to maintain a very low error rate — and was rewarded with large bonuses based on those ratings.

When Levy began showing up impaired for work in 2017 and 2018, the VA finally did an independent check of his work. It turned up red flags — which the VA ignored until after he got dismissed:

In January 2018, after multiple staff reports that he was still impaired, the hospital’s professional standards board continued Levy’s suspension. Spot checks of his cases showed “no evidence of patient harm,” according to the minutes.

Still, Worley brought in a pa­thol­ogist from VA’s division headquarters for another review of Levy’s work. She found more than a dozen misdiagnoses.

“Dr. Levy’s actions have negatively impacted patient care outcomes,” Worley and the medical director at the time wrote in a memo on Jan. 11, 2018.

It would be six more months before VA began a deeper review of his work.

Even when the VA finally did get around to checking Levy’s work, it initially limited the review to his last year in the system. Only after the inspector general intervened did the VA conduct a full review and find the thousands of misdiagnoses Levy produced. The VA also waited months to alert medical boards in three states to Levy’s incompetence.

Unfortunately, this hardly qualifies as a shock. The VA has had so many scandals surrounding incompetence and corruption that it’s tough to keep track. This episode, as with others, demonstrates the lack of accountability in government-run single-payer systems, and the instincts of government bureaucracies to protect themselves rather than their patients.

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), A Coral reef compendium and an IQ compendium. (Both 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 THE PSYCHOLOGIST.

Email me  here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or  here (Pictorial) or  here  (Personal)

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The Left's "Phantom Recession"



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Newsrooms won't be saved by Bernie Sanders' socialist nostrums

by Jeff Jacoby

WHEN YOUR only tool is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail to be pounded. When you're Bernie Sanders and your only tool is socialism, every problem looks like a capitalist to be bashed.

The septuagenarian senator from Vermont is an unabashed lifelong socialist, whose solutions to most problems involve more government, less freedom, and higher taxes. This week, in a 1,700-word essay published in the Columbia Journalism Review, he proposed a "plan for journalism" involving — can you guess? — more government, less freedom, and higher taxes. The capitalist-bashing begins in the second sentence: "Today's assault on journalism by Wall Street, billionaire businessmen, Silicon Valley, and Donald Trump presents a crisis — and [is] why we must take concrete action."

But Sanders, like Trump, is quick to impugn journalists' motives. And much of the "action" he proposes would interfere with media companies that try to save themselves.

If elected, Sanders says, he would use the power of the federal government to crack down on media mergers that would lead to layoffs, consolidate news outlets under fewer owners, or "adversely affect" women and minorities. He would "reinstate and strengthen" the old cross-ownership rule that blocked TV and radio stations from owning newspapers in the same market. And he would require the Justice Department and Federal Trade Commission to "more stringently" pursue antitrust litigation against Facebook and Google, whose success has come in part at the expense of traditional media outlets.

Sanders also raises the prospect of taxing online ads and using the revenue to fund "nonprofit civic-minded media" and to "substantially increase" government subsidies for public journalism. That won't do anything for struggling private newspapers and magazines, but it will certainly boost the power of PBS and NPR and their decidedly left-wing worldview.

Nothing in Sanders's plan is fresh or novel. How and whether to rein in Big Tech, to expand racial and gender diversity in the media, to tax advertising and Internet services, to underwrite nonprofit media — all of these have been perennial topics of debate when the agenda turns to the ailments of the news business. In his essay, the senator vowed to impose an "immediate moratorium" on corporate media mergers like the proposed combination of Viacom and CBS. But media consolidation has been a left-wing bugbear forever. "Remember back in 2000 when the merger of AOL and Time Warner spelled the absolute doom of an independent press?" asks Nick Gillespie in Reason magazine. "Better yet, can you even remember AOL or Time magazine, once massive presences in media that are now desiccated ruins of their former selves?"

Sanders acknowledges the ravages that the news industry has undergone in recent decades. "Over the past 15 years, more than 1,400 communities across the country have lost newspapers, which are the outlets local television, radio, and digital news sites rely on for reporting," he writes. "Since 2008, we have seen newsrooms lose 28,000 employees — and in the past year alone, 3,200 people in the media industry have been laid off." But Sanders seems far less interested in the plight of journalists than in exploiting their excruciations to score ideological points.

Like so much of what America's best-known socialist says and writes, his media plan drips with hostility for capitalists and capitalism. He repeatedly decries the lack of "real journalism" in America, and blames it on his standard villains: the "forces of greed that are pillaging our economy," the "corporate conglomerates and hedge fund vultures," the "oligarchic business models," the "billionaires who ... use their media empires to punish their critics and shield themselves from scrutiny." Sanders is particularly hostile to Jeff Bezos, the billionaire who owns the Washington Post. He suggested recently that his criticism of Bezos is the reason the Post "doesn't write particularly good articles about me." At times, his attacks on the integrity of publishers and the motives of reporters have been almost indistinguishable from President Trump's.

Lord knows the news business is in dire straits these days, but socialist nostrums aren't going to stop the cataclysmic changes unleashed by the digital revolution. As someone who has worked in newsrooms for more than three decades, I mourn for the lost era when nearly every home subscribed to a newspaper. I wince with vicarious pain at every newspaper shutdown or round of layoffs. But the media aren't in extremis because they weren't regulated enough. If anything, some daily papers might yet be alive if, for example, the cross-ownership rule hadn't deprived them of a potential lifeline.

Trashing the entrepreneurs and investors who are keeping some of the nation's legacy news organizations alive admirably suits Sanders's anti-capitalist shtick, but it will do nothing to save the business of journalism. "We cannot sit by and allow corporations, billionaires, and demagogues to destroy the Fourth Estate," says Sanders. That's the way he always talks — a one-tool politician with the same scapegoat for everything.

SOURCE 

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Trump Supporters Have ALL The Moral High Ground. Don’t Cede One Inch Of It To The Left

Despite the fact that roughly three out of four evangelical Christians support President Donald Trump and most of his policies, the #NeverTrump “right” and the anti-Trump left have somehow managed to fool people into thinking they have at least a solid piece of high ground when it comes to “principles,” “morality” and “values.” I purposefully put those three words in quotes because their mere utterance doesn’t mean the people who pronounce them have an iota of a clue what they really mean. Nevertheless, anti-Trump folks of all political persuations love tossing them around as a way of signaling their “virtue” to the rest of us.

“Muh principles!” bleats the #NeverTrump “Republican,” as if they are some sort of special light shining in a Trumpian-world-gone-mad.

“Muh values!” screeches the open-borders leftist politician, as if letting the entire Third World come to America is the definition of “loving thy neighbor.”

“Muh morality!” shrieks all of them, yet the “New Morality” they espouse has nothing to do with the God of the Bible (its original author) and everything to do with achieving power for the left.

In an age where real virtue is a rarity, yet our leftist would-be rulers love signaling, nay proclaiming theirs from the rooftops, one might be forgiven for being even temporarily fooled by it all. Maybe Nancy Pelosi really IS a good person when she lectures us about border walls being “immoral.” Maybe Saint Pete really does have the hot new take on “values.” Maybe the likes of Joe Walsh, Bill Kristol, George Will, and John Pavlovitz - randomly selected Trump haters all - really DO put the “principles” they supposedly have first, and that’s why they oppose the president at seemingly every turn.

Especially given a leftist-controlled mainstream press all-too-willing to portray the president as a monster and his policies as monstrous, you may be forgiven for thinking all of those things. But the reality, however, is actually the exact opposite of what they would have you believe. In fact, it is Trump’s supporters who truly have every inch of the moral high ground. In fact, it is Trump’s policies that are the very definition of objective principles, morals, and values, even if his presentation at times gives his haters ammunition by seeming to belie that fact.

Consider the three “unalienable rights” the Declaration of Independence acknowledges as having come to humans unconditionally from their Creator - life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness:

Life

It’s a pretty good place to start, especially considering we’re dealing with a literal death cult that relishes the notion of killing as many unborn babies as possible. Start there, and any attempts they make to portray themselves as “good people” fall flat, but there’s oh so much more. Consider communism, you know, the ideology whose adherents gleefully murdered over 100 million people over the last century. Ever hear these would-be paragons of morality condemning communism these days? No? Could that be because they want to give it another try but don’t want to be so obvious about it? Could it be because the socialism they espouse is but a mere step away from the totalitarian kind of communism that slays millions in the name of “equality”?

Every time these jackals politicize mass shootings to call for more gun control, remember that they really don’t care about any of the lives such legislation would save, especially considering they know full well the legislation they espouse wouldn’t actually save any lives. In their unquenchable thirst for control, leftists would happily take away the right to defend oneself against rogue criminals or rogue governments. They cry alligator tears at the deaths of gun victims while ignoring those who successfully defend themselves with guns or the unarmed who die from a senseless home invasion.

And then there’s their relentless calls for unlimited immigration from the Third World, ignoring the plight of the American middle and lower classes, despite the fact that Third Worlders would be better served by helping them there instead of bringing them here. It’s all for power, of course, because they know these folks tend to lean left, but they pretend it’s about “morality.”

Liberty & the Pursuit of Happiness

Whether it’s the liberty to defend yourself, make your own decisions, run your business as you see fit, or even keep most of your own earnings, it’s no secret that leftists want to take it all away (except for certain, leftist-approved “liberties” like “changing” sexes and murdering unborn babies, of course). In other words, the liberty issue is a slam dunk for a belief system that generally believes the fundamental concept of individual liberties. Want to keep a rogue government from running roughshod over and even murdering millions of its own citizens? Allow citizens to own guns. And if you have a problem with this, dear Leftist, what are you afraid of?

The liberty to pursue happiness according to one’s own bent, so long as it doesn’t infringe on the rights of others, is ingrained in our nation’s founding documents, and yet leftists would take all that away if they could.

Bottom line: Those who refuse to support President Trump based on optics alone are completely missing the big picture. Whether you consider some of his tweets and comments “presidential” or not, the policies Trump espouses and helps to implement through executive orders, signed legislation, and appointing judges result in by far the greatest good for the greatest number of people, full stop.

No, there’s no reason why we should ever cede one inch of moral high ground to godless leftists, ever.

SOURCE 

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Top Dem Jerry Nadler Unveils Another Ridiculous Probe Into President Trump

Now that the House Of Representatives has devolved into the old Soviet Politburo under Democrat control, there is yet another investigation into President Trump that will soon be launched.

House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerrold Nadler is looking to jumpstart the ridiculous argument for impeachment under the obscure Emoluments Clause over Trump’s possible invitation to world leaders to host the G7 at his golf resort in Florida.

Following a successful visit with the leaders of the free world in France last week, the gracious POTUS suggested that the next meeting could take place at Trump National Doral in Miami.

In normal times this would be recognized as diplomacy but for Commissar Nadler it is yet one more avenue to settle decades-old scores with his longtime nemesis from New York.

According to Nadler and his fellow neo-Stalinists on the committee, the invite is “only the latest in a troubling pattern of corruption and self-dealing” which means that Dems will spend the next several months pissing away millions of taxpayer dollars on yet another ridiculous probe.

House Democrats derided the move as “only the latest in a troubling pattern of corruption and self-dealing” by the president.

Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee slammed President Donald Trump’s push to host the G-7 summit next year at his Doral resort in Miami, deriding the move as “only the latest in a troubling pattern of corruption and self-dealing” by the president and pledging to consider it as part of their impeachment investigation.

Though Trump has not said that the decision is final, Judiciary Chairman Jerry Nadler (D-N.Y.) and Rep. Steve Cohen (D-Tenn.), who leads the committee’s panel on the Constitution, said in a statement Wednesday that selecting Doral as the host of the next summit would be a potential violation of both the Foreign and Domestic Emoluments clauses in the Constitution, aimed at barring presidents from taking outside gifts.

“More importantly, the Doral decision reflects perhaps the first publicly known instance in which foreign governments would be required to pay President Trump’s private businesses in order to conduct business with the United States,” the pair said, pledging to schedule a hearing on the issue next month.

Nadler and Cohen said that Trump’s comments this week prove the president’s “personal financial interests are clearly shaping decisions about official U.S. government activities,” concluding that “this is precisely the type of risk that the Constitution’s Emoluments Clauses were intended to prevent.”

SOURCE 

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Tough-Talking Leftist Turns into Sniveling Coward When Steven Crowder Finds Him

Antifa members are just interested in fighting fascism. Don’t you get that? They’re looking to fight the rise of fascism in the United States and that’s it. Period.

Oh, and they’re looking to light conservative pundits they don’t disagree with on fire, that too.

As followers of Steven Crowder will know, he enjoys confronting members of the left who make physical threats against him. The latest is a member of antifa who threatened Crowder during a recent trip to Austin, Texas, where he was filming a “Change My Mind” segment at Google headquarters.

The antifa member — who has a criminal history, which includes throwing tomatoes at President Trump and assaulting police officers — gave away Crowder’s location and posted that he hoped people would “milkshake” him. (“Milkshaking,” in antifa vernacular, doesn’t refer to throwing a Shamrock Shake on someone but instead a mixture of cement and other chemicals that can cause burns.)

Furthermore, the individual said, “I hope someone lights Steven Crowder on fire.”

So, Crowder did what any of us would do. He dressed up as the Heat Miser from the 1974 Christmas special “The Year Without a Santa Claus” and goes to a coffee shop to confront the young man:

At first, the man denies sending the messages on Facebook, calling Crowder a “fascist” and walking in and out of the coffee shop to avoid the pundit. Apparently indecisive, he then walks back in.

Eventually, both are kicked out and Crowder has a walk-and-talk with the antifa member.

Crowder wants to talk the whole thing out. The antifa member doesn’t, but he also torpedoes his denials of egging his supporters on to milkshake Crowder and set him on fire by saying he wishes he had said these exact same things or that Crowder deserves it. This isn’t exactly the most convincing denial.

“How do you not see yourself as a fascist when you encourage acts of violence?” Crowder asks at one point in the video.

The antifa member doesn’t have an answer for this, or what fascism is or, well, pretty much everything.

This isn’t the first “Crowder Confronts” video, for those of you who have followed the kerfuffles of the past. It’s not even the first one involving a member of the left who threatened Crowder with some form of intimidation or physical harm.

In fact, another one happened in Austin when a juice bar barista who threatened to slash Crowder’s tires was confronted:

Both of these instances are object lessons in how members of antifa are vicious in groups and absolute cowards on their own. No matter how you feel about Crowder, these kinds of threats are antithetical to civil political discourse. For right now, it’s mere incivility. When these threats are acted upon, however, they should scare everyone.

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), A Coral reef compendium and an IQ compendium. (Both 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 THE PSYCHOLOGIST.

Email me  here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or  here (Pictorial) or  here  (Personal)

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Christ's last lesson

"Then said Jesus, Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do"

At the very end of his life Jesus said the above.  For him to say that displayed a remarkably insightful heart.  He thought of their motivations as well as their deeds and in thinking of those motivations could not condemn their deeds.  It is a lesson to us all.  We need to forgive because we may not know what was/is driving the other person. Even under the most grievous provocation, we must keep that in mind. It is a most powerful teaching indeed.  Could we have forgiven in his situation?

Forgiveness can be so powerful.  It is particularly good at restoring relationships.  I have been married and divorced four times.  But there has never been any anger in me towards the ladies concerned.  We have remained on good terms to this day.  I didn't consciously forgive any of them anything.  I just did not judge or condemn their motivations at all in the first place.  I accepted that they had a motivation that was right in their eyes.

I gained so much by being forgiving.  And the wonder of it is that it is contagious. Any anger that they had towards me faded away too.  Christian teachings work.

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The hypocrisy of the liberal Left

by Rep. Andy Biggs

The liberal Left is steeped in moral relativism and relies on its Platonic elitism to such a degree that it fails to recognize its blatant hypocrisy.

Leftists such as Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, Joe Biden, and even former President Barack Obama often tell us that the rich are too rich or that some people can have too much. Obama even suggested that "There's only so much you can eat," implying that any more than a full stomach is too rich within the United States.

But all of them are rich by any standard. Elizabeth Warren’s reported average net worth is $8.75 million. Bernie Sanders' net worth might be up to $2.5 million. Joe Biden has acquired almost $15 million in income since leaving office in January 2017. Certainly, to the rest of the world, the aforementioned folks are rich. Even by America’s high standard of living, Warren, Sanders, Biden, and Obama are considered wealthy.

So, why is it that they continually rail against the haves? Why do they insist on pushing an agenda of class warfare?

Their bankrupt political ideology demands division. Their theme is always “us vs. them.” Unity of purpose, culture, nationhood, and citizenship undermine the socialist dogma that permeates their respective interpretations of liberal political ideology.

Their first cause is always tolerance — tolerance of any who agree with them. Because they are elitists after Plato’s model, they believe they know better than anyone else. Plato’s ideal separated the elite, the guardians of society, from the dross below them. That is infused in the hearts and minds of the liberal Left.

Any who disagree are so undermining to the Left’s agenda as to be intolerable. Or, in Hillary Clinton’s vernacular, “deplorable.”

People on the Left are tolerant of only those in agreement with their positions. Their opponents deserve to be persecuted and ostracized. Thus, the justification for enforcing their beliefs through whatever means is born, because failure to conform to theliberal Left’s ideology is subversive and must be defeated at all costs.

This produces Rep. Maxine Waters' calls for verbal and mob attacks on conservatives. To the Left, this justifies Rep. Joaquin Castro’s doxing of Trump donors in order to publicly shame and ostracize them.

Similarly, the political elite of the Left excuse themselves for their hypocritical, do-as-I-say, not-as-I-do actions as acceptable because they are the Platonic guardians. They truly believe that they are better and thus deserving of the special dispensation that Plato afforded his elites.

This inherent failing of the liberal Left is why we see Bernie Sanders demanding an increase in the national minimum wage (that he wasn’t even giving his own campaign staff) but being forced to raise wages and cut hours to pay for it.

Then there's Obama telling the world that a person can have too much, while he and his wife gain a net worth over $100 million and purchase a $15 million mansion in Martha’s Vineyard.

It is why the Left wants to confiscate guns from everyday people while employing armed security guards. They build walls and live in bubbles of security but argue against a border wall.

It is why they argue against a parent having the right to choose the best school for their child while the leftist elites enroll their children in the best schools they can find.

The Left rails against money in political campaigns while raising hundreds of millions of dollars for their campaigns.

That is why Warren, Sanders, Biden, Obama, and others have no problem amassing wealth while demonizing others who are successful. I have no problem with these folks being wealthy or successful. I have a problem with their continued personal use and exploitation of the free market system for themselves, while trying to prevent everyone else from having the same opportunities.

The liberal Left, as evidenced by the modern day leading Democratic voices, is a bankrupt political philosophy that is inherently hypocritical. It claims to be based on tolerance but is only tolerant of those who agree with them. It asserts equality, except when the elites amass huge fortunes. And, in the end, it attempts to, by necessity, compel compliance with its redistributive and intolerant policies.

SOURCE 

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Google discriminates against conservatives and climate skeptics

We must understand how Google does it, why it is wrong and how it hurts America

David Wojick

Several months ago, Google quietly released a 32-page white paper, “How Google Fights Disinformation.” That sound good. The problem is that Google not only controls a whopping 92.2% of all online searches. It is a decidedly left-wing outfit, which views things like skepticism of climate alarmism, and conservative views generally, as “disinformation.” The white paper explains how Google’s search and news algorithms operate, to suppress what Google considers disinformation and wants to keep out of educational and public discussions.

The algorithms clearly favor liberal content when displaying search results. Generally speaking, they rank and present search results based on the use of so-called “authoritative sources.” The problem is, these sources are mostly “mainstream” media, which are almost entirely liberal.

Google’s algorithmic definition of “authoritative” makes liberals the voice of authority. Bigger is better, and the liberals have the most and biggest news outlets. The algorithms are very complex, but the basic idea is that the more other websites link to you, the greater your authority.

It is like saying a newspaper with more subscribers is more trustworthy than one with fewer subscribers. This actually makes no sense, but that is how it works with the news and in other domains. Popularity is not authority, but the algorithm is designed to see it that way.

This explains why the first page of search results for breaking news almost always consists of links to liberal outlets. There is absolutely no balance with conservative news sources. Given that roughly half of Americans are conservatives, Google’s liberal news bias is truly reprehensible.

In the realm of public policies affecting our energy, economy, jobs, national security, living standards and other critical issues, the suppression of alternative or skeptical voices, evidence and perspectives becomes positively dangerous for our nation and world

Last year, I documented an extreme case of this bias the arena of “dangerous manmade global warming” alarmism. My individual searches on prominent skeptics of alarmist claims revealed that Google’s “authoritative source” was an obscure website called DeSmogBlog, whose claim to fame is posting nasty negative dossiers on skeptics, including me and several colleagues.

In each search, several things immediately happened. First, Google linked to DeSmogBlog’s dossier on the skeptic, even though it might be a decade old  and/or wildly inaccurate. Indeed, sometimes this was the first entry in the search results. Second, roughly half of the results were negative attacks – which should not be surprising, since the liberal press often attacks us skeptics.

Third, skeptics are often labeled as “funded by big oil,” whereas funding of alarmists by self-interested government agencies, renewable energy companies, far-left foundations or Tom Steyer (who became a billionaire by financing Asian coal mines) was generally ignored.

In stark contrast, searching for information about prominent climate alarmists yielded nothing but praise. This too is not surprising, since Google’s liberal “authoritative” sources love alarmists.

This algorithm’s bias against skeptics is breathtaking – and it extends to the climate change debate itself. Search results on nearly all climate issues are dominated by alarmist content.

In fact, climate change seems to get special algorithmic attention. Goggle’s special category of climate webpages, hyperbolically called “Your Money or Your Life,” requires even greater “authoritative” control in searches. No matter how well reasoned, articles questioning the dominance of human factors in climate change, the near-apocalyptic effects of predicted climate change, or the value and validity of climate models are routinely ignored by Google’s algorithms.

The algorithm also ignores the fact that our jobs, economy, financial wellbeing, living standards, and freedom to travel and heat or cool our homes would be severely and negatively affected by energy proposals justified in the name of preventing human-caused cataclysmic climate change. The monumental mining and raw material demands of wind turbines, solar panels, biofuels and batteries likewise merit little mention in Google searches. Ditto for the extensive impacts of these supposed “clean, green, renewable, sustainable” technologies on lands, habitats and wildlife.

It’s safe to say that climate change is now the world’s biggest single public policy issue. And yet Google simply downgrades and thus “shadow bans” any pages that contain “demonstrably inaccurate content or debunked conspiracy theories.” That is how alarmists describe skepticism about any climate alarm or renewable energy claims. Google does not explain how its algorithm makes these intrinsically subjective determinations as to whether an article is accurate, authoritative and thus posted – or incorrect, questionable and thus consigned to oblivion.

Google’s authority-based search algorithm is also rigged to favor liberal content over virtually all conservative content; it may be especially true for climate and energy topics. This deep liberal bias is fundamentally wrong and un-American, given Google’s central role in our lives.

Google’s creators get wealthy by controlling access to information – and thus thinking, debate, public policy decisions and our future – by using a public internet system that was built by defense and other government agencies, using taxpayer dollars, for the purpose of ensuring the free flow of information and open, robust discussion of vital policy issues. It was never meant to impose liberal-progressive-leftist police state restrictions on who gets to be heard.

According to its “How we fight disinformation” white paper, Google’s separate news search feature gets special algorithmic treatment – meaning that almost all links returned on the first page are to liberal news sources. This blatant bias stands out like a sore thumb in multiple tests. In no case involving the first ten links did I get more than one link to a conservative news source. Sometimes I got none.

For example, my news search on “Biden 2020” returned the following top ten search results, in this order: CNN, the New York Times, Vice, Politico, CNN again, Fortune, Vox, Fox News, The Hill and Politico. The only actual conservative source was Fox News, in eighth position.

Of course conservative content would not be friendly to Mr. Biden. But if Google can prominently post attacks on skeptics and conservatives, why can’t it do so for attacks on Democrats?

The highest conservative content I found was one link in eight or 12 percent. About a third of my sample cases had no conservative sources whatsoever. The average of around 7% measures Google’s dramatic bias in favor of liberal sources, greatly compounding its 92.2% dominance.

The lonely conservative sources are more middle of the road, like Fox News and the Washington Examiner. Google never found or highlighted a truly conservative (what it would call “right wing”) source, like Brietbart, Townhall or the Daily Caller. It just doesn’t happen, and the algorithm clearly knows that, as does Google. As do other information and social media sites.

Of course, I’m not alone in finding or encountering this blatant viewpoint discrimination.

When coupled with the nearly complete takeover of UN, IPCC, World Bank and other global governance institutions by environmentalist and socialist forces – and their near-total exclusion of manmade climate chaos skeptics, free market-oriented economists and anyone who questions the role or impact of renewable energy – the effect on discussion, debate, education and informed decision-making is dictatorial and devastating.

No free, prosperous, modern society can survive under such conditions and restrictions. It’s time for citizens, legislators, regulators and judges to rein in and break up this imperious monopoly.

Via email

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Japan's Naval Counterweight to China

Building up Japan's navy gives the U.S. an ally that can project power in the region.

With all the discussion of the G7 economic summit, there was other news that didn’t receive much attention but has to be causing some heartburn in Beijing. No, not the trade deal, but a United States Naval Institute report that Japan is willing to let the United States Marines operate F-35B Lightnings off Japan’s four “helicopter destroyers.”

Japan has four such vessels, two of which are the 13,500-ton Hyuga-class helicopter destroyers Hyuga and Ise, and two 19,500-ton Izumo-class vessels, Izumo and Kaga. While the reports center on the latter two vessels, the former two can’t be discounted for F-35B operations. It should be noted that vertical/short takeoff and landing (V/STOL) aircraft have operated off ships like the Italian Navy’s 10,100-ton Giuseppe Garibadi that saw combat service in 2002 during the Global War on Terrorism and in the 2011 Libyan intervention.

The Marines operating F-35Bs off these ships could be a preparation for Japan to bring back a fixed-wing carrier arm. Japan’s order of 100 F-35s reportedly includes some of the F-35Bs in the mix. While not as capable as a United States Navy nuclear-powered aircraft carrier, this can still put some real hurt on the People’s Liberation Army Navy.

Now, let’s be honest, Japan’s “helicopter destroyers” are really light aircraft carriers and were intended to be from the start. History has seen Japan play fast and loose with arms-control treaties in the past (its heavy cruisers flaunted the restrictions of the London Naval Treaty), so is it no surprise that euphemisms would be employed to allow the use of aircraft carriers.

What does this mean for America? It gives the United States an ally that can legitimately project power in the region. Given that the United States Navy is desperately short on hulls in the water, this is a good thing — two light carriers can, for instance, keep China off balance in the South China Sea. That’s just the beginning.

Japan is also acquiring the V-22 Osprey — the game-changing tiltrotor that has given the Marine Corps new advantages in combat and non-combat operations. Those will also be able to operate off these ships, as Marine Corps Ospreys already have. Japan has a trio of Osumi-class amphibious ships, which look like carriers but have no hangars; instead, flat decks provide landing platforms for helicopters — and helicopters used on naval ships can handle sea water for a bit.

Japan’s military growth is mostly very good news for the United States. The only hiccup is that neighbors of Japan, particularly South Korea, have been nervous about that, given what happened in World War II. South Korea has made a similar growth as a military power, and the chance that these American allies could have drama akin to that of Greece and Turkey from past decade is a little greater than America would like.

The Beijing regime already had to worry about the way Hong Kong has trapped Chinese President Xi Jinping in a tough spot, and President Donald Trump taking on China’s unfair trade practices with the aid of a militarily stronger Japan doesn’t make things easier for the red commies. So, despite the historic concerns with South Korea, the rise of Japan’s capabilities as a better-armed Asian partner of the United States is all-in-all a good thing.

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), A Coral reef compendium and an IQ compendium. (Both 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 THE PSYCHOLOGIST.

Email me  here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or  here (Pictorial) or  here  (Personal)

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Why Republican Governors Are More Popular

The explanation offered below is that they make fewer promises that they have no way of keeping.  That is certainly part of the story.  It is an entirely political explanation. But, as ever,  the psychological level of explanation is powerful too.  As all the polls show, conservatives are simply happier people and that makes a much more pleasant and attractive personality.  As the proverb goes: "Laugh and the world laughs with you.  Cry and you cry alone"

The classic example of a pleasant conservative personality  was the Gipper. With his sunny personality he got amazing stuff -- including vast tax cuts -- through a Democrat-controlled Congress.  He made them feel good and they wanted to laugh with him.  And you will note that even Trump, who must have the most unlovable personality of any President ever, constantly uses feelgood talk. And he is loved for that, to the total incomprehension of Leftists.

Just two days ago, I put up the following quote from Trump:  "Our movement is built on love… We love our family. We love our faith. We love our flag and we love our freedom, and that’s what it’s about… We love our neighbors and we love our country."  Beat that for positivity!  People can overlook a lot in a man with that attitude.  Among his followers, he has a depth of popularity that other politicians can only envy


WHEN the pollster Morning Consult published its latest round of approval ratings for the nation’s 50 governors in July, it revealed a couple of interesting findings: Eight of the ten least popular governors were Democrats, while the ten most popular governors were all Republicans.

What explains this phenomenon? Clearly it’s not random chance. Does that mean conservative governance is really so much more popular than liberal governance at the state level? There’s something to that, but a closer look reveals the answer is not quite that simple. The ten most popular Republican governors can be separated into three categories: red states, blue states, and purple states. There are five red-state governors whose approval ratings of 57 percent to 59 percent and low disapproval ratings land them spots on Morning Consult’s top-ten list: Greg Abbott of Texas, Doug Burgum of North Dakota, Mark Gordon of Wyoming, Asa Hutchinson of Arkansas, and Bill Lee of Tennessee. They are all conservative governors working with conservative legislatures to give conservative voters what they want on fiscal and social issues.

The blue-state GOP governors succeed not so much by advancing conservatism as by tapping the brakes on their Democratic legislatures.

You might discount the popularity of Republican governors in red states: Is it really a big deal that Republican voters are happy with Republican governors? But then you must also ask: Why aren’t Democratic governors just as popular in blue states? One answer is that states are subject to greater fiscal constraints than the federal government, and those constraints mean that Democratic governors can’t really satisfy their voters the way that Republican governors can. According to the National Council of State Legislatures, “49 states must balance their budgets, with Vermont being the exception.” Even without a balancedbudget requirement, progressive dreams have been shattered in Vermont by cold, hard math. The state’s former Democratic governor signed into law a singlepayer health-care plan in 2011, but he had to abandon it in 2014 when he couldn’t figure out a way to come close to paying for it. The state has had a Republican governor since 2017.

Budget gimmicks are still possible at the state level, but states can’t simply rack up debt the way the federal government can. If schools can’t be funded and roads can’t be built with existing revenues, taxpayers are going to feel it very soon and blame their governors accordingly.

Republicans can also become unpopular by taking their own ideology too far: For example, steep tax cuts in Kansas resulted in budget shortfalls; those tax cuts were repealed by a bipartisan supermajority in the legislature in 2017, and the state elected a Democratic governor in 2018.

But overspending is much more typically the cause of a state’s budget woes. “Some states have consistently performed poorly, such as Connecticut, Illinois, and New Jersey,” the Mercatus Center reports in its latest ranking of state fiscal health. “They have experienced ongoing structural deficits, a growing reliance on debt to fund spending, underfunded pensions and other postemployment benefit liabilities, or some combination of these problems.” And, sure enough, the Democratic governors of Connecticut, Illinois, and New Jersey all showed up in Morning Consult’s bottom ten list.

It is, of course, possible to govern a state that is a fiscal mess and still be a very popular chief executive. And that brings us to the three deep-blue states where Republican governors have skyhigh approval ratings: Charlie Baker of Massachusetts (73 percent approval), Larry Hogan of Maryland (70 percent approval), and Phil Scott of Vermont (60 percent approval). These governors have a few things in common. Hillary Clinton won each of these states by 26 to 27 percentage points in 2016. Each governor is a social liberal or, in the case of Hogan, has promised not to alter the status quo on social issues. None of them support the sitting Republican president (Hogan publicly toyed with primarying Trump).

The blue-state GOP governors succeed not so much by advancing conservatism as by tapping the brakes on their Democratic legislatures. In Massachusetts, for example, spending has grown at 3.7 percent per year (down from about 4.5 percent under Baker’s Democratic predecessor), according to Boston Herald columnist Michael Graham. Baker, first elected in 2014, also vetoed a bill providing driver’s licenses for illegal immigrants. Other than that, Graham contends, Baker has pretty much governed as a Democrat. Baker signed an $800 million– a–year payroll-tax hike to fund a paid-family-leave benefit in 2018, and Massachusetts still ranks 47th in terms of fiscal health, according to the Mercatus Center. But Baker’s approach has been good enough to win the support of Democratic and Republican voters.

In Maryland, Hogan described his approach as that of a “goalie” before he was first elected in 2014. “Right now it’s an open net. It’s just every single crazy thing that they want to get in just gets done,” Hogan told the Washington Times. “One major thing we can do is play goalie. There’s not going to be a huge offensive game. We’re going to be able to score here and there and we’re going to stop bad things from happening and continuing to drive our state into the ground.” As governor, Hogan has balanced the budget and used his executive authority to cut tolls, but his plan to cut taxes was blocked by the legislature in 2016. Earlier this year, Hogan vetoed a bill to create a minimum wage of $15 (more than double that of neighboring Virginia). Hogan offered a compromise at $12.10, but Democrats overrode the veto to pass the $15 minimum wage. Playing goalie is a difficult job when the opposing team has the ability to pull you.

In Vermont, Scott was first elected in 2016 and had some success playing goalie during his first two-year term. He issued 14 vetoes, according to the Burlington Free Press. Scott stopped bills to raise property taxes, establish a $15 minimum wage, and raise taxes to enact a paid-family-leave program. In 2018, the same electorate that sent Bernie Sanders back to the U.S. Senate by a 40-point margin reelected Scott by a 15-point margin. The bad news for Scott is that in 2018 Democrats and progressives achieved the supermajority necessary to override Scott’s vetoes.

Perhaps the most interesting popular Republican governors are the ones who have found success in the purple states. In New Hampshire, Chris Sununu’s 65 percent approval rating made him the third most popular governor, according to Morning Consult. The state voted for Hillary Clinton by three-tenths of a percentage point in 2016, when Sununu won his first two-year term by 2.3 points. In 2018, New Hampshire’s legislature flipped to the Democrats, but Sununu was reelected to a second two-year term by a seven-point margin. Sununu’s popularity can be attributed in part to the state’s economic success and his fiscal restraint. “We are the most probusiness state in the Northeast and we brag about that a lot,” Sununu tells NATIONAL REVIEW. “We’re lowering business taxes, we have no sales tax, we have no income tax.”

He says he vetoed the recent Democratic budget because it was structurally imbalanced and would have raised business taxes. He also vetoed a paid-family-leave bill that would have raised taxes and has instead proposed a public–private partnership. New Hampshire’s 2.5 percent unemployment rate is the fourth lowest in the country. Beyond the economy and the budget, another key to Sununu’s success is his accessibility. “I give my cell phone to everybody,” he says. Surely this is some gimmick, right? He must have two cell phones and hands off one to a staffer? Nope. “I have one phone, one number,” he says. “People are actually very respectful of it. Very rarely do I have people who are constantly calling me.”

New Hampshire’s geography and small population (with 1.3 million residents, it has about as many people as the city of Dallas) allows Sununu to operate more like a mayor than a governor. “We’re like the tax-free suburb of Boston,” he says. If Sununu were not pro-choice on abortion, he’d be a plausible GOP presidential candidate. He says the thought of running for president hasn’t crossed his mind.

Florida’s Ron Desantis’s popularity has surprised many observers. He won a bitterly fought first term in 2018 by less than half of one percentage point, but he is the tenth most popular governor on Morning Consult’s list, with 57 percent of Floridians approving and only 20 percent disapproving. “He’s recognized a lot of the challenges Florida takes on the environmental front. I think it surprised a lot of folks from the environmental left,” says Sal Nuzzo of the James Madison Institute, a conservative think tank in Florida. Desantis has taken climate change seriously but also focused on issues unique to Florida, such as blue-green algae and red tide. He’s also appealed to voters by enacting a large expansion of school choice.

Arizona’s Doug Ducey (with a 53 percent approval–29 percent disapproval rating) didn’t make the top-ten list, but given the political aphorism that “the only poll that matters is on Election Day,” his popularity also deserves mention. In 2018, Ducey won a second term when he defeated Democrat David Garcia by 14 percentage points at the same time that Republican Martha Mcsally lost the Arizona Senate race to Democrat Kyrsten Sinema by 2.4 points. “He’s been extremely good on dismantling the administrative state, particularly when it comes to occupational licensing,” says Victor Riches of the conservative Goldwater Institute in Arizona (Riches formerly served on Ducey’s staff). Ducey turned a billion-dollar deficit into a surplus with across-the-board cuts and has benefited from welcoming an influx of tech companies fleeing California’s high taxes and cost of living. He has taken a tough approach on border security but has also developed strong relationships with Mexican-government officials. He won 44 percent of Hispanic voters in 2018, according to exit polls.

All the popular Republican governors are worth watching to see what conservative reforms they can actually accomplish. With gridlock dominating Washington for the foreseeable future, the states are where real innovation may occur. But Ducey, Desantis of Florida, and Abbott of Texas deserve special attention because they are governing states that will be key battlegrounds in future presidential elections and are themselves the sitting governors who are the most plausible future Republican presidential nominees.

SOURCE 

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Comments from a Trump convert

Prof. Budziszewski is a professor of natural law at the University of Texas, Austin

The only excuse for broadcasting how one thinks about the upcoming election is that plenty of other people are probably having the same difficulties.  If this sort of disclosure bears no interest for you, try again next week.

The last presidential election was the first in which I did not support either of the two major candidates.  Low character is a grave disqualification for public trust.  So far as I was concerned, that wiped both of them off the slate.  Although Mrs. Clinton was beyond dreadful, I couldn’t then imagine that Mr. Trump would be better.

Of course character is not the only consideration in voting, especially when the character of both candidates is base.  The strongest reasons for voting for Mr. Trump, had I done so, would have been his promises concerning judicial appointments and regulatory reform – and those would have been very strong reasons indeed.  But he said so many contradictory things to different audiences, and he spoke in such a demagogic way, that I didn’t believe any of his promises.  I expected his style of governance to be as erratic as his campaigning, and I thought -- because of some of his own statements -- that he would try to govern by decree, as his predecessor had.

It turns out that my expectations were wrong.  He has not tried to govern by decree; on the contrary, he revoked many of his predecessor’s decrees.  He has, in fact, nominated the sorts of judges he promised to nominate, a fact which among other things translates into a lot of babies’ lives.  He has vigorously pursued regulatory reform, and it is no surprise that the economy is doing better as a result.  I hope I have not become jaded, but though his manner of speaking still leaves much to be desired, these days it is more often merely juvenile than demagogic, and on rare occasions it even rises to the dignity of his office.  Nobody would describe his way of governing as smooth, but as he has gained experience in choosing compatible advisors and subordinates, it has become a lot smoother.  Though he zig-zags a great deal in negotiations with other countries, some of this appears to be strategic, for there is much to be said for keeping one’s opponents off-balance.  For the chaos at the border with Mexico, there is plenty of blame to go around.  However, considering the reluctance of his opponents to properly fund shelters for the detainees, it seems due less to a desire on his part to keep everyone out, than to a desire on the part of his opponents to abandon even the pretense of border security and let everyone in.

Although I never expected to have sympathy for this president, that changed when his opponents set in motion plans for impeachment before he had even taken office.  Their attempt to use fraudulent evidence to frame him -- with the connivance of justice officials, intelligence officials, and even the intelligence agencies of other countries -- is an existential threat to self-government.  So are the more mundane aspects of how his opponents play the political game.  Today, a public figure who is not a so-called progressive can expect to face not just political criticism, but attempts to destroy the lives of his wife, his children, his associates, his supporters, and even people who merely know him.

And how have we got to the point where asking one’s lawyer what the law permits is classified as a crime, on grounds that the questioner must have been thinking of doing something wrong?

One might wish that free government had more attractive representatives, but one cannot always have what one wants.  I still do not like Mr. Trump, but unless things change radically, the next time around I will vote for him.

For several months each year I live in a high-government dependency, high-drug addiction, high-family disorder region of Appalachia.

Yes, there are jobs.  At present the unemployment rate here is only a little higher than what economists call full employment.  Just like everyplace, lots of folk work hard to make a living and raise their kids, God bless them.

Lots of others don’t.  They don’t show up in the unemployment figures because they aren’t looking for jobs.

The rate of opioid abuse is sky-high.  Everyone, including the police, knows where the dealers live.  Everyone also knows that it isn’t a good idea to inform on them.  Your house may be burned down.

Observation of my neighbors suggests that many of those who do use opioids use them because they are bored and have no hope.  They are bored and have no hope because they don't work.  They don't work because getting on the dole is more attractive, or so it seems.

Getting on the dole?  How is that possible?  “Everyone knows” that in 1996, welfare was reformed by the abolition of the government program called Aid to Families with Dependent Children.  From now on only genuinely needy people would receive aid, and there would be work requirements.

In this case, what “everyone knows” is false.  The abolition of AFDC accomplished nothing but to shift monetary handouts from one government program to another.  In the name of helping the poor, multigenerational AFDC dependency has been replaced by multigenerational Social Security Disability dependency.

You genuinely disabled people, I am not writing about you.  Many of you live bravely under stupendous disadvantages.

But a great number who claim disability are not disabled.

In my Appalachian neighborhood, quite a few people go through life with no higher aspiration than to convince the government that either they or their children are disabled.  This is easier than you might think, because many of the bureaucrats want to be convinced, and their lawyers are eager to help.  One of my neighbors got her children signed up for disability payments on grounds that they all had strabismus, which means crossed eyes.  Although Medicaid would pay for corrective surgery, which is fairly simple, she didn’t want their condition corrected.  Then the checks would stop – checks, mind you, which were supposed to be used for the children but which the parents used as their source of family income.  Why work if you don’t have to?  The shame of it was that failure to correct strabismus early in life can lead to permanent vision loss.

The fraud associated with the program is spectacular.  You may have heard of the scandal associated with attorney Eric C. Conn, who was sentenced to 27 years in prison for defrauding the government of over $72 million by submitting false documentation to support clients' claims of disability.  Conn -- whose "law complex," a set of three double-wide trailers, was just down the road from us – is reported to have paid more than $600,000 in kickbacks to David B. Daugherty, an administrative law judge who for years approved over 95 percent of the applications from Conn's clients.  The national average is about 60%, but Daugherty’s rate of approval was not unusual.  What Mr. Conn, Judge Daugherty, and cooperating doctors were up to was common knowledge.  The government paid attention only when extremely persistent whistleblowers within the agency made it impossible to continue ignoring it.

I don't mind the fraud so much.  The government is always defrauding us.

I do mind the destruction of ambition, the uprooting of meaning in life, and the generation of perverse incentives that undermine families and ruin lives.

And I especially mind the lie that this is the meaning of compassion for the poor.  A better word for the attitude would be 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), A Coral reef compendium and an IQ compendium. (Both 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 THE PSYCHOLOGIST.

Email me  here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or  here (Pictorial) or  here  (Personal)

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California's homeless crisis engulfs its capital as Sacramento's business owners tell how they confront naked junkies and streets covered in feces, urine and syringes - with no solution in sight

The visible results of Democrat "compassion".  Their loony ideas just create chaos

Carlisle is part of California's growing homeless emergency. The state has around 130,000 people without a roof over their heads. But she is not in downtown Los Angeles where Skid Row is a symbol of the national crisis or San Francisco where nearly one person in every hundred lives on the streets.

Instead, Carlisle and her fiancé Brian Workman are in Sacramento, the state capital, where homelessness has shot up by a shocking 19 per cent in the past two years, putting the problem squarely on the doorstep of Gavin Newsom, the state's Democratic governor.

Last week, salon owner Liz Novak brought the nation's attention to the problem when she announced to great fanfare that she was shutting up shop because she could not deal with the needles, the human waste, and the general aggravation that comes with having a business in the city.

'I just want to tell you what happens when I get to work. I have to clean up the poop and the pee off of my doorstep. I have to clean-up the syringes. I have to politely ask the people who I care for, I care for these people that are homeless, to move their tents out of the way of the door to my business,' she said in a video posted on Twitter, which gained the attention of Fox News and other national media outlets.

'I am angry about it. I wouldn't be relocating if it wasn't for this issue,' Novak added. 

Every few days, workers from the California Department of Transportation backed by Highway Patrol officers clean up under the freeways.

They post notices, giving three days' notice and announcing exactly when they are coming and they trash any unattended items.

Carlisle and Workman — and many others — merely move their possessions out from the limited protection the highway gives them from the elements to the corner of the street, which is city land.

Within a few minutes they move back again. 'It's a game of cat and mouse,' said Workman. 'But moving my stuff keeps me in shape. I'm in pretty good shape really.'

Highway Patrol Officer Caleb Howard, whose work includes backing up the CalTrans clean-up crew, said they rarely junk stuff that the homeless want.

'If they abandon it, they don't want it,' he told DailyMail.com. 'They know when we are coming.'

Over the last two years, the rate of homelessness  in Sacramento has risen by 19 per cent.

More than a tenth of that number, 688, were children, and 70 per cent were living without shelter. 

According to the US Interagency Council on Homelessness, California has the largest homeless population in the country, with 129,972 people living on the streets as of 2018.

The issue has long plagued Los Angeles, which has seen its homeless population rise by a staggering 75 per cent in the last six years.

A report released in June this year revealed there are 59,000 people living on the streets across Los Angeles County - a 12 per cent increase from 2018 - while the city has seen a 16 per cent rise with 36,300. 

By comparison, Sacramento, which has an estimated population of 1.5million, seems to have a significantly smaller homeless population, with 5,570, but the problem appears to be growing.

Many of Sacramento's homeless are expected to leave town in the next couple of months. 'They're migratory,' antique shop owner Steve Sylvester told DailyMail.com. 'When the weather gets cooler they'll head down toward San Diego.'

Sylvester's store is just across the street from Novak's salon. He has sympathy for his fellow business-owner but says he would never close up just because of the homeless.

'I understand it is more intimidating for her, she worked alone,' said Sylvester, a Londoner who has run his store in Sacramento for 20 years. But he recognizes the problem. 'We've had two major incidents in the past six weeks,' he said.

'We had a young man come in 95 per cent naked — he had underpants on but below where they mattered. I asked him to leave and he asked why. I said he was upsetting my customers and he wasn't really dressed for shopping.

'As he left, he held out his arm and wiped out a whole china dinner service, worth $300-$400. 'He was a drug addict. He didn't know what he was doing. He was on Planet Zog.'

In the second incident a man threw a rock through Sylvester's window at four in the morning. He clambered through the shattered plate glass, found his way to the outdoor area and fell asleep. That's where cops found him.

'The problem has gotten noticeably worse in the past 18 months because Sacramento is the place where people are told you can get a quick fix with cheap drugs,' said Sylvester.

'Sacramento is a wonderful place, great weather, with nice, accommodating people who give the homeless money, which unfortunately too often goes to drugs. This area has 30 or so restaurants so there is always food to be had.'

But he says there is another problem. 'I know homeless people are being given bus tickets here from both Davis and Reno because they are told Sacramento will look after them,' he said.

That allegation — that other cities give one-way tickets to Sacramento to get them out of town — is a common claim around town.

Officer Howard of the Highway Patrol told DailyMail.com he knew of people getting tickets from Oregon.

City of Sacramento spokesman Tim Swanson said a Sacramento Bee article from 2013 found that Nevada was busing the homeless away from Las Vegas and one high-profile case had ended in Sacramento, but he did not address the specific allegations.

But he said a recent survey showed 93 per cent of Sacramento's homeless either grew up in the city or had lived there long-term before hitting the streets. 'This statistic contradicts the notion that people are coming to Sacramento specifically for services.'

Police officers and transportation authority employees remove homeless encampments under the freeway. Officer Howard says they rarely junk stuff that the homeless want

Swanson said the city has allocated $15.7million to sheltering the homes this year with another $1million for women, families, and children.

Last year, Mayor Darrell Steinberg asked each of the eight council members to identify a possible area for a shelter within their districts.

In four days that DailyMail.com spent in Sacramento, not one homeless person was seen on Novak's property. But the problem is clearly real.

Across the street at Pancake Circus diner, 70-year-old waitress Terri — she would not give her last name or agree to be photographed — starts every working day at 4.15am 'cleaning up needles and poop and washing down urine,' and shooing the homeless from the property.

'They'll strip their clothes off. I often find them out front completely naked,' she said. 'Heroin is a huge problem, it's not just Oxycontin and other opioids, it's heroin.'

Terri says she tries not to call police. 'I'm not going to call if they are just panhandling, but if they are spitting at me or throwing their defecation, then that's different.'

She says she lets the homeless use the diner's bathroom — 'everyone should have that dignity.' 'But I tell them if you pick up what you have in your hand and smear it on the walls and I have to clean it off, then you're not coming in again.'

SOURCE 

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Why Bernie Sanders Is Wrong About Sweden

What is socialism? Some of its advocates have trouble defining the ideology. “Being a socialist means different things to different people,” a leftist podcast host told actress Cynthia Nixon last year. “For some, it is a Nordic-style welfare state. For others, it is the liquidation of the capitalist class and the democratization of the means of production.” The host asked a flustered Ms. Nixon, then a candidate for New York governor, where she came down.

“Being a socialist, um, I, I, I would say is—I am more in, I am more in line with the Nordic model myself,” she replied. When the alternatives are Cuba, China and Venezuela, everyone becomes “more in line” with Sweden, the classic Nordic example.

The ‘Nordic model’ of socialism, which he and other leftists tout, is more like ‘ruthless capitalism.’

Trouble is, most Swedes aren’t in line with American socialists like Ms. Nixon, Sen. Bernie Sanders and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. “All of their models that they could point to, given a couple of years, they end up in famine and killing,” Swedish author and historian Johan Norberg tells me. “So they always come back to Scandinavia in the end.” True, Sweden has a significant welfare state, but Mr. Norberg says it’s underpinned by “ruthless capitalism.”

Mr. Norberg studied the history of ideas at Stockholm University. After graduating he joined Timbro, a Stockholm-based free-market think tank, where he researched and wrote books about Swedish history and economics. An important lesson from his academic training: “Many of the great disasters that have befallen on us have come because people have changed their interpretation of the world economy.”

Ideas can produce prosperity too. By the mid-19th century Sweden had legalized emigration, he says, “which resulted in most people just wanting to leave Sweden immediately for the U.S.” Back then, Swedish politicians and intellectuals looked to America as a model. Between roughly 1840 and 1870, classical liberals took power. “They basically did everything: save property rights, open business, free trade, beginning to open up for religious freedom, freedom of the press.”

Sweden was one of the world’s fastest-growing economies for nearly a century. But by the 1960s, the country began to take its wealth-creating prowess for granted. I tell Mr. Norberg about New York Mayor Bill de Blasio’s assertion: “There’s plenty of money in this world, it’s just in the wrong hands.” In 1960s Sweden, Mr. Norberg replies, “that’s almost verbatim what they said back then: ‘Now we’re this rich. Shouldn’t we just distribute it, and give it to the people and the places we like?’ ” Such thinking overtook the country’s dominant center-left Social Democratic Party.

“We thought we could do anything, and we had all of those other preconditions: the work ethic, some sort of social pressure, which meant that people were doing the right things, and they wouldn’t want to live on the dole,” Mr. Norberg says. “And then for 20 years, from 1960 to 1980, we doubled the size of the government spending as a percentage of GDP. That’s the aberration in Swedish history.” The Swedish welfare state first was a safety net for the needy. Over time the political class moved to “socialize the lives of the middle classes as well.” The plan: “Increase their taxes, and their benefits, and then they will buy into this system.”

The consequences were predictable. “It resulted in less work, people preferring to stay at home and paint the house rather than hiring someone to do it, general lack of getting the kind of education that matters. It led to entrepreneurs leaving Sweden.” Private sector employment declined from the 1970s to the ’90s, while disposable- income and economic growth was relatively slow. Some of the country’s best companies and brightest minds fled an onerous inheritance tax.

Plenty of economists knew Sweden needed reform, but undoing the damage would take years. A critical figure was Prime Minister Carl Bildt of the center-right Moderate Party. He came to power in 1991, as the rigid Swedish economy struggled to cope with an economic crisis. Mr. Norberg calls the former prime minister “an ideas politician” who understood free-market principles. Mr. Bildt’s coalition government cut capital-gains and corporate taxes, while the top marginal income- tax rate shrank to 50% from around 90%. Sweden deregulated the telecom and energy industries while introducing school vouchers and other market-oriented reforms. The Social Democrats retook the government in 1994, but the trend toward economic liberty continued for another quarter-century.

“One thing the left gets wrong is that they think that Sweden has this sort of warm, friendly, fuzzy capitalist thing—no layoffs, no fierce competition, protecting the old companies and so on. And it’s really the total opposite,” Mr. Norberg says. “It’s more deregulated. The product markets are much fiercer competition, much more free trade. All of the companies know that they have to be world champions or they will be destroyed.”

American leftists, even those who shy away from the “socialist” label, generally call for higher taxes on “the rich” to support an expanded welfare and entitlement state. That, too, misapprehends the Swedish example. “We have much higher taxes on the poor and the middle classes than you do,” Mr. Norberg says. “And this is the dirty little secret that no one in the American left wants to talk about.” Nonprogressive taxes on consumption, social security and payroll are 27% of Swedish gross domestic product, 16 points higher than in the U.S.

Assumptions about Swedish health care often are wrong too: “Lots of Americans think it’s a Medicare for All thing. But it’s not even a national system. It’s a regional system.” Largely funded by a flat tax, the system isn’t all government- run: “We had a problem with productivity and investment in the health-care sector. So now we have more freedom of choice and more competition in the provision of health care.” Whereas American Democrats aspire to abolish private insurance, “one of the biggest hospitals in Stockholm was privatized, and you can go to private providers. And the first line of health-care defense, in a way, is often private clinics.”

Mr. Norberg acknowledges there’s some truth to the socialist stereotype. Heavy labor-market regulations and powerful unions survived the socialist era and strain the economy. The country has no official minimum wage, but its de facto rate is high. “For a while, that looked good in Sweden, because it meant that all of the less productive companies were destroyed.” While this worked with “a homogenous workforce with very high education and experiences in the Swedish language,” large-scale, low-skill migration has upended the model. With a massive influx of Middle Eastern refugees in recent years, “Sweden is becoming a normal European country, in a way, with a big anti-immigrant party.” To keep the far-right Sweden Democrats out of power, the Social Democrats currently lead a broad coalition government. Mr. Norberg says that reducing taxes on the rich, deregulating the labor market and liberalizing housing are at the top of the agenda.

If Sweden fails as a socialist model, what about its Scandinavian neighbors? “Denmark is far from a socialist planned economy,” then-Prime Minister Lars Løkke Rasmussen said in response to unwelcome praise from Mr. Sanders in 2015. “Denmark is a market economy.” Not long after lunch with Mr. Norberg, I asked Finnish President Sauli Niinistö if he leads a socialist country. His answer: “No, God bless.” Norway is similar, and a major producer of fossil fuels to boot.

Mr. Norberg does think his country has lessons for America— but they’re free-market ones. Whereas U.S. entitlement spending is on a path of uncontrollable growth, “our politicians basically said, from the left to the right, this is not sustainable. Our social-security system will collapse if we don’t reform it,” he says. Americans who talk up the Swedish model “would have to reform social security, and change it from defined benefits to defined contributions. And reduce social-security pension payments when the economy is doing worse.”

He understands Americans’ disdain for politicians. “Obama was going to stop the oceans from rising, and then Trump is going to get the old jobs back, and ‘I alone can fix everything. The world’s a mess, but I can do it.’ That kind of sets you up for some disappointment in the end.” Yet he sees much to admire across the Atlantic: “No matter how far to the left you are, if things go wrong in Sweden, yeah, if you can find a second career in the U.S. and move there in some way, that’s where you want to go.”

A couple of days after our interview, Mr. Norberg emailed a warning for Americans: The most dangerous place to be is top of the world, think you have it all made and can afford to experiment with socialism or protectionism, because you have plenty of room for mistakes before you hurt yourself,” he wrote. “That’s where Sweden was in 1970. It almost destroyed us, and it took some heroic efforts to get back on track.”

SOURCE 

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