Should scientists study race and IQ?

The usual Leftist strategy when faced with truths that contradict their simplistic theories: Shut down debate. Everything bad is due to "poverty", don't you know? Everything they do seems to lead to impoverishment so I guess there is some sort of weird consistency there. Report below from one of the "Science blogs"

Just in case anyone has missed it, the pair of duelling essays in the latest issue of Nature is well worth a read. The topic is whether there is any justification for scientific exploration of associations between gender or race and intelligence; Stephen Ceci and Wendy M. Williams from Cornell argue the affirmative, while Steven Rose takes up the opposing case.

The debate continues as a lively discussion on Nature Network, which contains many thoughtful comments from both sides.

I find it pretty hard to stomach the notion that any field of scientific enquiry should be completely off the table, even an area as contentious and politically charged as this one - in fact especially in such an area, since nowhere are solid facts needed as desperately as in a debate driven largely by ideals and emotions. Thus while Rose makes some fair points about the difficulties of defining both race and intelligence, I find his overall argument less than compelling.

In fact this sentence from Rose's final paragraph is downright worrying: "In a society in which racism and sexism were absent, the questions of whether whites or men are more or less intelligent than blacks or women would not merely be meaningless -- they would not even be asked."

This borders on defining anyone who even thinks about group differences in cognition as a bigot. Poisoning the well in this fashion is a highly effective strategy for shutting down debate on a particular topic - but this is a terrible strategy for a scientist to adopt.

Source

I should perhaps mention that the first comment on the blog post reproduced above is a tease. Razib is a geneticist of Bangladeshi origin who is in fact confident that the specific genes for IQ will eventually be identified

******************

Some marvellous news from Italy

Another defeat for media-enabled Leftist lies. Report below by Fiamma Nirenstein, a journalist and some-time resident of Jerusalem. She is a new Member of the Italian Parliament. I like her first name. It is Italian for "flame". I have long had great affection for Italians and the report below certainly reinforces that



We didn't expect what you see in this picture. This is the square of the Italian Parliament in Rome, Piazza Montecitorio: You can see the Palace on top of the square, and in front a lot of Israeli flags. That was last night from 6:30 to 9:30 pm. What you cannot see here, is the extraordinary number of members of Parliament, about 100 from all political sides, that took the stage during this time: for about three hours we were speaking about the role of Israel, its right to self defense, its moral height, its fight on behalf of us all, of our civilization and values, against the wild hate of the Islamic jihad represented by Hamas.

It seems to me that for the first time in the too long history of the Arab/Israeli conflict, apart from a minority of crazy leftists and fascists that took the street with anti-Semitic slogans, we have achieved a huge consensus on one critical point: this is not a local conflict, there is nothing in it that reminds us of a peace theme that has characterized the Palestinian issue. This is an attack against the western world, and Iran is behind it.

What happens today, at least in Italy, is the defeat and fall of the leftist ideologies: ideology that has allowed justification of all the most violent crimes and most disgusting verbal attacks. If Arafat launched the terrorist Intifada, if he promoted the martyrdom of children in public speeches, the ideologists were ready to justify him with the issues of occupation, the Palestinian misery and loss of any hope. Not so with Hamas.

History, in Italy, has brought to a profound crisis the ideology of revolution and the justification of any cruel attack against a so-called unjust imperialist order. That time is over, nobody will see Hamas as the resolution of the problem and not even as the problem itself. I think that the word "peace" has lost that healing meaning that it once had. The new non-ideological point of view sees that there is no peace when one of the contenders doesn't want it, and that even if the world in the short run asks for a truce, in the long run it hopes for the defeat of Hamas.

Last night, many people, Ministers and Members of Parliament, composed a very new, interesting mix of opinions. I think that when you are not overwhelmed by exotic thirdworldism, the images of children educated as hate machines, the speeches of jihad leaders, from Ahmadinejad to Nasrallah, to Haniyeh, that deny the holocaust and promise death to Jewish and Christians alike, you are left only with disgust. Westerners, thank God, can still be disgusted by uncivilized levels of political speech.

But most of all, in the Parliament square, many of the Parliament Members said: "I love Israel". You can't imagine how many.

Source

********************

The Decline of California

They still think they can tax their way out of this one.

If you thought Washington's stimulus debate was depressing, take a look at the long-running budget spectacle in California. The Golden State's deficit has reached $42 billion, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger is threatening to furlough 20,000 state workers (go ahead, make our day), and as we went to press yesterday Democrats who control the legislature had blocked lawmakers from leaving until they finally get a deal.

It's sad to watch. The Golden State -- which a decade ago was the booming technology capital of the world -- has been done in by two decades of chronic overspending, overregulating and a hyperprogressive tax code that exaggerates the impact on state revenues of economic boom and bust. Total state expenditures have grown to $145 billion in 2008 from $104 billion in 2003 and California now has the worst credit rating in the nation -- worse even than Louisiana's. It also has the nation's fourth highest unemployment rate of 9.3% (after Michigan, Rhode Island and South Carolina) and the second highest home foreclosure rate (after Nevada).

Roughly 1.4 million more nonimmigrant Americans have left California than entered over the last decade, according to the American Legislative Exchange Council. California is suffering more than most states from the housing bust, but its politicians also showed less spending restraint during the boom.

To close the current deficit, the pols in Sacramento are nearing a deal that cuts spending by $15 billion and raises $14.2 billion in higher taxes on income, sales, gasoline and cars. Six years ago Mr. Schwarzenegger helped depose Governor Gray Davis by calling him "Car-taxula." Now he's agreed to double the same tax.

Mr. Schwarzenegger has won at least some concessions from Democrats, who run the most liberal legislature this side of Trenton. The budget deal contains a handful of useful tax breaks for job creation and the first public union workplace reforms in a decade; it also creates a new rainy day fund. These taxpayer victories wouldn't have been possible if Republicans in the legislature hadn't held out for them. But the plan is still far short of the radical tax and spending surgery the state needs. It's loaded with short-term gimmicks -- such as $5 billion of borrowing from future lottery receipts and nearly $10 billion in one-time federal stimulus cash. Even proponents concede the plan doesn't balance spending and revenues 18 months from now.

The tax increases will continue to chase even more productive people out of the state. For at least two years, the sales tax would rise by one percentage point to 8.25% and the income tax by 0.3% to a top marginal rate of 10.56%. These will both be the highest statewide rates in the nation (see chart).

Do these taxes hurt business? Ask Hollywood. Film makers are threatening to flee to avoid the state's high costs, so to keep them in Southern California the deal offers $500 million in tax breaks for producers. Rich liberals like Rob Reiner, who love higher taxes on other people, get a sweetheart tax break and everyone else pays more.

Mr. Schwarzenegger is finally getting a constitutional state spending cap that will be on the ballot in the next election, but even that is flawed. This cap would limit spending hikes in any year to a rolling average of the percentage increase of the past 10 years. Nice idea, except that if Californians vote yes, the higher income and sales taxes automatically kick in for three more years. So to get a modicum of spending restraint, the voters have to agree to tax themselves by $25 billion more for three additional years. Californians can be forgiven if they say "no deal."

The tragedy of this gamesmanship is that the political class still won't address the root cause of its financial problems, which is that the state is becoming less economically competitive. California businesses and high-income families already pay a surtax for locating inside the state. The new budget deal raises that tax toll higher still.

It's no surprise that most CEOs we talk to, many of whom live in California, say they'd be foolish to build another plant in the state. California's budget crisis is the inevitable result of runaway liberal governance, and the state's voters will keep paying for it until they reduce their tax burden and adopt more radical spending controls.

Source

**********************

ELSEWHERE

Britain: Race of attackers mentioned for once. I wonder why? "An Australian woman has been subjected to a horrific seven-hour rape ordeal after being snatched from the streets of Edinburgh in broad daylight. Two men grabbed the 24-year old woman and sprayed her in the face with a "noxious substance'' before dragging her into nearby bushes, police say. The woman had been walking through an underpass near the city centre at 3pm on Monday. She was not released until 10pm, after a prolonged assault that has shocked local officers. A police spokeswoman said: "This young woman has been subjected to a terrifying ordeal at the hands of these two men - the trauma she has experienced cannot be underestimated. Police were last night unable to provide further details about the woman, such as which state she was from or whether she was a tourist or resident. The suspects are described as being white, Eastern European, and in their 20s."

What's America's backup plan? : "Barney Frank needs to go back to running a whore house and Chris Dodd needs an economic ejumacation to name a few. Nancy Peeelosi needs a math lesson at the very least with her oft repeated 500,000,000 job loss per month (it's on tape more than once). Hey, Nanc, the population of the entire US is only 300,000,000. Or were you using Democratic voter math? Ok, my bad. Oh, and get back on your meds. The whole bunch has a bad case of hubris and at that can't seem to find a direction or logical path. Oops I forgot, they are emotion based decision makers. The stock market is still waiting on what the government will do, not because they think it will help, but so that they know where to invest with the least likelihood of getting burnt. On the bright side, at least the House Republicans showed a little spine in voting against the Porkulus Bill."

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, EYE ON BRITAIN and Paralipomena

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

****************************

The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist" (Nationalsozialist) and the full name of Hitler's political party (translated) was "The National Socialist German Workers' Party" (In German: Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei)

****************************

France guilty of deporting Jews in WWII

France has had something of an undeserved reputation for tolerance since the butchers of the French revolution were the first to declare the emancipation of the Jews. That declaration did not affect basic French attitudes, however -- as the Dreyfus case of the 1890s showed. And we see below some final acceptance of the fact that the French of WWII fully "understood" the Nazi antipathy to Jews. And guess what? French Jews are being forced out of France right now -- with many going to Israel -- because of the failure of the French State to defend them from Muslim attacks. It seems that the French of today "understand" Muslim attitudes too

France's top administrative court ruled today that the state was responsible for the deportation of French Jews during World War Two, but appeared to close the door on major new compensation for victims' families. Some 76,000 Jews were arrested in France between 1942 and 1944 and transported in appalling conditions to Nazi concentration camps such as Auschwitz. Only 3000 returned.

Today's landmark ruling by the Conseil d'Etat court establishes a legal recognition of France's role in the deportations and was welcomed by Jewish organisations. "The Conseil d'Etat recognises the error and responsibility of the state," the court said. "This persecution, in a total break with the values and principles ... enshrined in the declaration of human rights and the traditions of the Republic, inflicted exceptional damage of extreme gravity," it said.

Former President Jacques Chirac was the first French leader to acknowledge state complicity in the deportations in an historic speech in 1995, breaking with past efforts to dissociate France from the collaborationist Vichy regime. His recognition of French involvement opened the way for victims' families to seek compensation and the authorities have since given hundreds of millions of euros to plaintiffs.

The Conseil d'Etat issued its ruling after a minor court sought guidance over the liability of the state in the case brought by daughter of a deportee. The top administrative court said the junior courts could decide on compensation, but added that the state had already met its obligations and respected European norms. "Taken together, these various measures ... have compensated as much as is possible ... the losses suffered as a result of the actions of the state, which collaborated with the deportation," the ruling said.

Serge Klarsfeld, a famous French Nazi hunter whose own father was deported from France, welcomed the ruling. "This ruling is satisfying," he was quoted as saying by Le Figaro newspaper website. "France is now showing itself to be a leader amongst countries facing up to their past." He added that reparations was no longer a major issue. "Those who are currently seeking more compensation have often already received something."

Source

****************

Some more interesting onomastics (Onomastics = the study of names)

The journal abstract is here. Interesting that the finding applied to whites as well as blacks

The authors of Freakonomics, Steven Levitt, an economist at the University of Chicago, and Stephen Dubner, a New York Times journalist, noted that data shows African Americans are far more likely than other racial groups to give their children uncommon names. White people tend to favour more familiar names that formerly were popular with other, more affluent white people (hence the journey of Madison from relative obscurity in 1988, when it was ranked 300th on the Social Security Administration's name database, to its high of No. 2 in 2001 and 2002).

New research out of Shippensburg University in Pennsylvania also looks at what names signify. However, unlike Freakonomics - which maintained that although a name might tell you something about a person's background, it wouldn't predict the outcome of that person's life - the new study purports to show a link between name and outcome: The more unpopular your name, the more likely you are to land in the juvenile justice system.

The Shippensburg researchers first assigned a popularity score to boys' names, based on how often they showed up in birth records in an undisclosed state from 1987 to 1991. Michael, the No. 1 name, had a popular name index score of 100; names such as Malcolm and Preston had index scores of 1. The researchers then assessed names of young men born during that time who landed in the juvenile justice system. They found that only half had a rating higher than 11. By comparison, in the general population, half of the names scored higher than 20. The take-away? "A 10 per cent increase in the popularity of a name is associated with a 3.7 per cent decrease in the number of juvenile delinquents who have that name," they say in the study, to be published in Social Sciences Quarterly.

For the most part, this isn't new territory. That's because we know that boys with uncommon names are more likely to come from a socio-economically deprived background, which means they also are more likely to get involved with crime. The Shippensburg researchers readily admit that it's not a name alone that affects a child's outcome, but rather the circumstance underlying the name.

A lot of baby names in Hollywood these days would have to rate badly. I'm not just talking about marginally weird names given to Gwyneth Paltrow's daughter - Apple - or Sylvester Stallone's son - Sage Moonblood. I'm talking names like Pilot Inspektor (actor Jason Lee's son), Hud and Speck Wildhorse (singer John Mellencamp's sons), and Tu (actor Rob Morrow's daughter; get it? Tu Morrow?). Insofar as such names are often a symptom of a larger problem - parental narcissism and immaturity, anyone? - you can see why some people might want to get the US Congress involved.

And they illuminate the degree to which some parents view kids as accessories. Sure, some odd names may have family significance, but they mostly seem like ads for parents' cleverness and self-congratulatory "individualism". It's not fair saddling a kid with an ad for his folks rather than giving him a name of his own.

Source

*********************

The New Patriotism

"It is worth considering the meaning of patriotism because the question of who is - or is not - a patriot all too often poisons our political debates, in ways that divide us rather than bring us together." -Barack Obama, June 30, 2008

Throughout the Bush years, particularly in the wake of Iraq's liberation, liberals from coast to coast grew increasingly paranoid about patriotism. Virtually anything conservatives said about anything could be twisted and perceived as a dig-subtle or overt-at any given liberal's love of country. Here are some illustrative examples of this phenomenon, circa 2004:

Conservative A: "I support the troops."

Liberal A: "Dissent is patriotic, chicken hawk."

Conservative B: "God Bless America."

Liberal B: "How dare you suggest that I don't want God to bless America! For your information, I hope that he or she blesses America, and every other country for that matter."

Conservative C: "I'm flying American Airlines today."

Liberal C: "Stop questioning my patriotism!"

Suffice it to say, they seemed a tad insecure about the whole thing. Left-leaning pundits and talking heads continually insisted that Republicans, particularly those within the administration, reflexively tarred anyone who dared to deviate from the party line as a traitor. In most cases, these accusations were figments of the Left's collective imagination. Still, to liberals, it was very real and totally outrageous, so America was introduced to a new Golden Rule of politics: Questioning someone else's patriotism is strictly verboten in all circumstances.

A Congressman from Pennsylvania maliciously slanders US Marines by falsely accusing them of murder? Don't bring up the P-word. A former haughty-looking presidential candidate encourages young people to educate themselves, lest they get "stuck" in the military? He won three purple hearts. Bite your tongue. A certain Democratic leader in the Senate prematurely declares an active US military mission "lost" for partisan gain? He loves the troops! He has many friends who are troops!

The lesson, time and again, was that ascribing patriotism (or the lack thereof) based on someone's statements, positions, or actions was out of bounds. To use patriotism as a political badge of honor was an unforgivable-even un-American!-tactic of the warmongering, bloodthirsty Bush/Cheney death machine. In fact, perhaps the purest form of true patriotism, we were told, was the act if dissenting from the creeping fascism promulgated by the neo-con cabal at the helm of Amerikkka's government.

To the astonishment of no one, these once-sacred rules are suddenly vanishing now that the Left has taken power. In fact, three of the most powerful Democrats in America have already gone to the patriotism well to help reinforce support for specific policy preferences.

While still a candidate, Vice President Joe Biden faced questions from an ABC News about his ticket's plan to hike taxes for "the rich." The term "rich," incidentally, was defined at the time as households making $250,000 or more-though that figure crept steadily downward as the campaign wore on. These rich Americans, Biden explained, could afford to fork over more of their earnings to Uncle Sam. In fact they should be proud to do so: "It's time to be patriotic," he explained, flashing his patented painted-on grin. (No movement from his forehead, of course). Got that, "rich" folks? You will surrender more of the money you work hard for, and you will do so merrily. Out of patriotism. Why, to even complain would be unacceptable-don't you love your country? Considering this new standard he constructed, one wonders what the Vice President thinks of, say, his administration's current Treasury Secretary. Never mind. One ought not get bogged down with such distractions.

This past week, the President of the United States abandoned his June 2008 position by eagerly expanding the politicization of patriotism. In his efforts to woo public support for his entirely pork-free, catastrophe-preventing, crucially-crucial stimulus package, Obama hoped to enlist some Republicans patsies to help create the mirage of bipartisanship. He succeeded, winning over three whole Republicans out of the 219 in Congress. For those keeping score at home, that's a .014 batting average for the post-partisan healer. According to the New York Times, after the northeastern trio knuckled under, the president called each of them to "applaud them for their patriotism." What a thrill it must have been. After all, it's not every day that one gets the opportunity to condemn future generations to mind-bending piles of debt, all in the name of promoting a non-stimulatory "stimulus" plan that rewards Lefty interest groups and furthers the sweeping policy goals of the party that-technically-represents your opposition.

When the final deal was struck a few days later, Harry Reid echoed the president's kudos, albeit with his renowned cloying charmlessness: "I'm really at a lack of words how to express my admiration and respect for the love of our country, the patriotism, and the courage of three brave senators," Reid said, "Specter from Pennsylvania, Snowe and Collins from Maine. I don't think I need to say more than that." No, he needn't. There's a new patriotism in town. This time around, 98 percent of Congressional Republicans failed to reach the patriotic plateau. Not to worry, though. They'll have three years and 42 more weeks, at least, to redeem themselves and display their genuine love for America by supporting the president and whatever emergency/apocalypse-averting policies he may have in store. God Bless Omerica.

Source

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, EYE ON BRITAIN and Paralipomena

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

****************************

The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist" (Nationalsozialist) and the full name of Hitler's political party (translated) was "The National Socialist German Workers' Party" (In German: Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei)

****************************

Typical socialist lies

The self-described socialist senator from Vermont, Bernard Sanders, is prematurely declaring the teachings of Milton Friedman dead in the fringe publication, In These Times. Many dim bulbs on Capitol Hill think the same way as Sanders does, so if only for that reason it's worthwhile to see what he's thinking.

The senator's beliefs are not merely misguided but evil and profoundly un-American. He and his fellow travellers on the Hill and in the media routinely lie and distort the history and function of markets in this country. Never does it occur to them that government, because it set the rules of the road and provided incentives for perverse behavior, is a primary cause of the current temporary economic downturn. Instead they are adherents of an imported ideology that tolerates no dissent and crushes all freedom. Take this Sanders statement:

My colleagues in the Senate and I are now picking up the pieces of a banking system brought to the edge of collapse by this theory of deregulation and by the insatiable greed of a small number of wealthy financiers playing in the market and engaging in incredibly risky-if not illegal-behavior.

Which deregulation would he, as Congress enslaves future generations by running up debts in the trillions of dollars, be referring to? Sarbanes-Oxley? The Community Reinvestment Act? Ask these people for specifics and you consistently get stammering evasions. Sanders and those like him are just trotting out the same lies that one of America's worst presidents ever, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, used in the 1930s to vilify the market after government intervention helped to push it over the edge.

Source

********************

The Truth about taxes

Stimulus: President Obama, a smart man, says that tax cuts for the wealthy are the main reason we're now in such economic trouble. Someone needs to tell him how utterly - and dangerously - wrong that is.

"We have tried that strategy time and time again," the president said Monday of "tax cuts for the wealthiest few Americans," and "it's only helped lead us to the crisis we face right now."

Well, he's half-right: We have tried it again and again. But rather than create crises, economic growth has been restored. The evidence is pretty much beyond dispute. Since World War I - the start of the modern financial era - we've suffered four major downturns. In three of them, the government cut tax rates. And each time an economic boom ensued. In only one did the government respond by raising taxes, erecting trade barriers and enacting massive new spending programs to get out of the slump. Today, we call that time the Great Depression.

As noted in a recent study by UCLA economists Harold Cole and Lee Ohanian, President Roosevelt's efforts at government direction of the economy likely extended the Depression by seven years. As history shows, lower taxes, not more government, work best:

The 1920s: When the income tax was established in 1913, the rate was 7%. But it quickly soared, especially for the rich, and by 1918 the top rate was 77%. Unfortunately, coming out of the war the economy was a mess, with prices falling, unemployment soaring and nominal GDP dropping by more than 15% in just one year. From 1921 to 1925, under Presidents Harding and Coolidge, tax rates were slashed to 25%, and GDP rose at an annual rate of 3.4% in the four years after the tax cuts vs. 2% before. All told, GDP swelled more than 50% during the 1920s.

All this was undone, however, on a bipartisan basis - first by President Hoover, a Republican, then by the Democrat FDR. Hoover boosted the top income tax rate to 63%. Then, FDR took it to 79%, while also doubling the corporate tax to 24%, imposing a Social Security tax of 2% and raising taxes on stocks and dividends, estates, and "excess" profits. Is it any wonder the economy went nowhere in the 1930s?

The 1960s: President Kennedy, a Democrat, believed strongly that lower taxes meant higher growth, and he was soon proven right. Before he was assassinated, JFK proposed cutting top tax rates from a punitive 91% to 70%. In 1965, his cuts were enacted under President Johnson by a Democratic Congress. Once again, growth took off, along with private investment. Real GNP, which averaged just 2.4% from 1952 to 1960, expanded at 4.5% during the '60s. The expansion that began in 1961 and ended in 1970 was, at the time, the longest ever.

The 1980s: President Reagan took over an economy with a 21% prime interest rate, double-digit unemployment and inflation, slowing productivity and flagging economic growth. But he too was a big tax cutter. His 25% across-the-board rate cuts snapped the economy out of its funk, creating the longest peacetime expansion ever at the time. During Reagan's two terms real GDP growth averaged 3.2% compared with 2.8% in the preceding eight years. After stagnating through most of the 1970s, real median family income grew $4,000 under Reagan. Investment boomed, as did the stock market, business creation and innovation. Some 20 million new jobs were created, due to the increased incentives to work, save and invest resulting from lower tax rates.

We all want our new president to succeed. But to do so, he needs to drop the class-warfare rhetoric on taxes and cut them instead. Like Coolidge. Like Kennedy. Like Reagan.

Source

**********************

ELSEWHERE

The Mysterious Disappearing Tax Cuts in Stimulus Bill : "We have all heard about the debate regarding the percentage of the Obama Stimulus Bill that is tax cuts as opposed to expenditures. Originally, there was discussion that it should be up to 40% of the total of the bill. There were arguments because it had slipped to 33%. In the final package, I don't see much at all in the way of real cuts -- certainly not tax cuts that will stimulate the economy in the near future... For individuals, a large portion of the tax savings is a one-year correction to the tax code to limit tax hitting about 70 million Americans with the Alternative Minimum Tax (AMT). Allowing for the fact that only one person in a back office on the fifth floor of a very large building in Washington actually understands the AMT, how are these 70 million Americans going to know that they saved taxes from a tax they never knew existed? How are they going to quantify how much they are saving? Even if they could figure out what they are saving are they now going to go out and spend this mystery savings? Even if they knew about these savings, they would not happen until March or April 2010. So much for this "tax cut" being a stimulus.

The Left as a Mafia: "Members of the Mafia have to take a vow of silence, and if they break it, they face the very real possibility of winding up dead. Liberals have their own version of the vow. However, instead of having to keep quiet about murder, drug deals and extortion, they must promise not to ridicule their own kind. The price of breaking the code isn't death, it's something far more serious; namely, exile from their social circle. Dare to make fun of Joe Biden's statement that in 1929, President Roosevelt went on TV to reassure his fellow Americans about the Depression, and don't expect to be invited to write for the Huffington Post. Dare to laugh at Nancy Pelosi's contention that 500 million Americans are losing their jobs every month, and you can forget about being invited to brunch at Streisand's or to pitch a movie idea to Tom Hanks or Steven Spielberg. Believe me, for some people, that's a far worse fate than swimming with the fishes. When you remember what a big deal the press and the late night jokesters made out of Dan Quayle's merely misspelling "potato," you get some idea of what partisan hypocrites these people are."

Helping people to see Muslims in a better light: "Orchard Park police are investigating a particularly gruesome killing, the beheading of a woman, after her husband - an influential member of the local Muslim community - reported her death to police Thursday. Police identified the victim as Aasiya Z. Hassan, 37. Detectives have charged her husband, Muzzammil Hassan, 44, with second-degree murder. "He came to the police station at 6:20 p.m. [Thursday] and told us that she was dead," Orchard Park Police Chief Andrew Benz said late this morning. Muzzammil Hassan told police that his wife was at his business, Bridges TV, on Thorn Avenue in the village. Officers went to that location and discovered her body. Muzzammil Hassan is the founder and chief executive officer of Bridges TV, which he launched in 2004, amid hopes that it would help portray Muslims in a more positive light.

Israel: No truce unless soldier freed : "Israel said yesterday that it would not agree to a long-term truce with the Hamas rulers of the Gaza Strip unless an Israeli soldier held by the Islamists was freed. Full opening of the Gaza border crossings has been a Hamas condition for a truce. Israel linked that demand with the release of Gilad Shalit, held captive in Gaza since 2006, when he was kidnapped in a cross-border raid. `The prime minister's position is that Israel will not reach understandings on a truce before the release of Gilad Shalit,' Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's office said in a statement. Palestinian officials had reported significant headway in the indirect talks mediated by Egypt."

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, EYE ON BRITAIN and Paralipomena

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

****************************

The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist" (Nationalsozialist) and the full name of Hitler's political party (translated) was "The National Socialist German Workers' Party" (In German: Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei)

****************************

No excuses if Obama can't fix 'his' recession

So Obama has his stimulus bill, but he has paid a very high price. He now owns the recession

By economist Irwin Stelzer

If, like John Maynard Keynes, you believe that spending, any spending, will revive a flagging economy, the freshly minted, 1,000-page American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, calling for $504 billion in deficit-financed spending, is for you. Well, not quite. It seems that most of the money will not be spent very soon. About 30% won't hit the economy until 2011, and the balance is likely to be tied up in the procurement processes of the federal and state governments until well into 2010, and beyond. Besides, much of the spending will end up boosting other economies - subsidies for wind machines will benefit workers in the other countries in which such machines are manufactured, not our very own horny-handed toilers. And much of the spending will not create jobs for the unemployed: laid-off car workers do not have the skills to design the software to manage the "smart grid" that is the apple of the greens' eye.

If you have not jumped onto the new Keynesian spending bandwagon, but believe with Christina Romer, chairman of Barack Obama's Council of Economic Advisers, that tax cuts are more certain than spending to turn the economy round, you should love this bill, with its $286 billion in tax cuts and credits. Well, not quite. True, individuals earning less than $75,000 a year and families earning less than $150,000 will receive credits of $400 and $800, the earned income-tax credit for working families with three or more children is increased, and there is something for pensioners, disabled veterans, families of college students and a host of others.

Reflection suggests, however, the tax-cut contingent is doomed to disappointment. Much of the money will be saved or used to pay down credit-card balances, not bad things, but not very stimulative. Much will be spent in Wal-Mart, earning Congress the applause of Chinese trainer and t-shirt manufacturers. And much will never be claimed: the specific subsidies for college education are simply too small to have much effect on college enrolments.

If you are a supply-side enthusiast, a reading of this bill will add your personal depression to the national recession. Reforms that might increase employment in the oil and gas industries by removing restrictions on drilling are nowhere to be found. Environmental restrictions on the sorts of cars that Americans want to buy remain in place, consistent with Congress's drive to have the begging-bowls-in-hand car companies produce Schumermobiles, named after the New York senator whose passion is electric vehicles and cars too tiny to need much petrol or to survive in a serious crash. A change in rules that would permit the construction of needed transmission lines without lengthy court reviews initiated by environmental groups remains off the Obama agenda and out of the bill. Most important is the absence of steps to encourage the flow of private capital into toll roads, an alternative to government-financed highways, and into schools free to compete for vouchers, rather than schools built by governments in towns that already have too many classrooms.

The explanation for these omissions was simply stated by the president, responding to those who want even more tax cuts and some supply-side stimulus, "We won." Not very satisfying intellectually, but who needs intellectually satisfying arguments when his party controls the White House, the Senate, and the House of Representatives?

Enough quibbles, though. If, like any sensible person, you're not sure spending will work, but not sure it won't; not sure that the bulk of tax cuts will be spent on US manufacturers, but not sure they won't; and not sure that doing nothing is a good, though tempting idea, this bill is about the best that can be extracted from a Democratic Congress.

So Obama has his stimulus bill, but he has paid a very high price. He now owns the recession. He has asked to be judged by whether this bill and other measures he will propose create or "save" 3.5m-4m jobs, the number lost so far since unemployment turned up. Forget "save" - if unemployment keeps rising, voters are not likely to rally round the slogan "It would be still worse if I hadn't spent your trillions". What the president has done is to promise what he certainly can't deliver in time for the congressional elections next year - a reversal of job destruction, and millions of new jobs. If the voters prove patient in 2010, they are unlikely to remain as forgiving when the presidential election rolls round in 2012. Since employment is what economists call a lagging indicator - employers are not confident enough to start hiring until economic recovery is well under way - Obama will have a lot of explaining to do. Unless, of course, the Republicans find a candidate so inept the president can once again rely on his very attractive persona to see off challengers.

Finally, there is what is now being called the Tim Geithner no-plan. The president used a nationally televised press conference to announce that his Treasury secretary would the very next day reveal to the nation, and indeed to the world, a plan to save the banks and provide relief for troubled homeowners. But Geithner's speech was so lacking in detail the stock market plunged by about 400 points. The administration's economists have not solved the problem of valuing the toxic assets on the banks' balance sheets - pay too much for those assets and the taxpayer gets the bill; pay too little and the banks have to take bankruptcy-producing writedowns.

By the time you read this, Geithner will have met with his G7 colleagues in Rome. Unless he has worked out some effective way of spending the $2 trillion that Washington rumour says new bailouts will cost, a gaggle of finance ministers will head home disappointed. For in between their public attacks on America, they privately say that only America can lead the world out of its current difficulties.

Source

************************

Obama's new deal is the same old blunder

By Dominic Lawson

Here's something new: instead of the customary attempts to put an optimistic gloss on the state of the economy, our governments are doing exactly the opposite. Over here Ed Balls tells us, more or less, that this is the worst recession since dinosaurs roamed the primordial swamps. Meanwhile President Barack Obama declared last week that "if we don't act immediately, our nation will sink into a crisis that at some point we may be unable to reverse". As The Economist commented, with some alarm: "The notion that [America] might never recover was previously entertained only by bearded survivalists stockpiling beans and ammunition in remote log cabins."

Obama's dire assessment was on the surface the more surprising - wasn't he supposed to be the great uplifter of the national mood, in the spirit of Franklin D Roosevelt's "The only thing we have to fear is fear itself"? It seems all the odder because Obama has explicitly drawn on folk memories of FDR's New Deal, telling television viewers to "keep in mind that in 1932, 1933 the unemployment rate was 25%".

Obama is probably right to assume that those same memories have it that the massive state interventionism of the New Deal triumphantly restored America to full employment. That's why he felt comfortable in asserting, on the eve of the launch of a $2 trillion (or so) injection of taxpayers' money, "There is no disagreement that we need . . . a recovery plan that will help to jump-start the economy."

He might, therefore, have been surprised to see an advertisement in the national papers, signed by more than 200 eminent economists, which declared: "With all due respect, Mr President, that is not true. Notwithstanding reports that all economists are now Keynesians . . . we the undersigned do not believe that more government spending is a way to improve economic performance. More government spending by Hoover and Roosevelt did not pull the United States economy out of the Great Depression in the 1930s." The sorry facts bear this out. The unemployment rate in the US was still 19% in 1939. Over the following four years the number of unemployed workers declined dramatically, by more than 7m. This had a very particular reason: the number of men in military service rose by 8.6m.

More here

************************

ELSEWHERE

A good man, once a clergyman, needs help to care for his seriously ill sister. See here

There is now online a complete transcription of a classic expose on John Maynard Keynes entitled Keynes At Harvard: Economic Deception as a Political Credo. It's been out of print for 40 years. It was originally published by a group of disaffected Harvard alumni led by Theodore Roosevelt's youngest son Archibald. The thesis is that Keynes was a Fabian Socialist whose economic "theories" were calculated to push countries into socialism behind a facade of "saving capitalism from itself." The book also looks at Keynes's perverted sexuality (sodomite and pedophile) as a Bloomsberry--not to be read on a full stomach."

Monkeys have a sense of morality, say scientists: "Monkeys and apes have a sense of morality and the rudimentary ability to tell right from wrong, according to new research. In a series of studies scientists have found that monkeys and apes can make judgments about fairness, offer altruistic help and empathise when a fellow animal is ill or in difficulties. They even appear to have consciences and the ability to remember obligations. The research implies that morality is not a uniquely human quality and suggests it arose through evolution. That could mean the strength of our consciences is partly determined by our genes. The scientists say, however, that the evidence is clear. "I am not arguing that non-human primates are moral beings but there is enough evidence for the following of social rules to agree that some of the stepping stones towards human morality can be found in other animals," said Frans de Waal, professor of psychology at Emory University in Georgia in the United States. In papers at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) this weekend de Waal described experiments on monkeys and apes to see if they understood the idea of fairness. [It sounds like monkeys are smarter than the Leftist philosophers who say that "There is no such thing as right and wrong"]

Primogeniture lives: "Wealthy parents are making their first-born the focus of family ambition, giving them a disproportionate share of time, care and attention, according to research. Younger siblings, by contrast, are being held back in their lives by a relative lack of attention. The findings show affluent modern couples are aping the upper-class tradition of primogeniture. Although poor families also show some extra favour to the oldest child, this practice is far more pronounced among those who are richer - despite there being more resources to share with younger offspring. "Traditionally, aristocratic families tended to give the first heir more wealth," said David Lawson, a behavioural ecologist with the human evolutionary ecology group at University College London, who led the research. "That impulse may be culturally ingrained. Richer families have more time and money to afford surplus benefits for their kids like a good diet, helping with homework and time to read to them at night. These benefits are diluted sharply as more children are born.... In the royal family and, since Norman times, the aristocracy, the system of primogeniture has formalised the practice of favouring the oldest child. This has enabled families to pass power and wealth down the generations by bequeathing estates intact to the oldest son rather than, as in much of Europe, breaking them up by distributing them evenly among siblings."

The latest British bungle: "A new billion-pound fleet of spy planes able to spot the roadside bombs that kill troops in Afghanistan will be out of action until at least the middle of next year because the RAF has failed to train enough crew. Two Sentinel R1 aircraft were deployed to a Gulf base at the end of last year to fly over Afghanistan, conducting trials with their stand-off radar (Astor). The aircraft had an immediate impact - commanders were delighted by its ability to provide high-definition video footage of an area 200 miles long and 200 miles wide, day or night. Astor can detect any movement and even record the speed of a car from more than 200 miles away in almost any weather. It flies seven miles up, far out of sight of guerrillas. It will allow commanders to spot Taliban planting the bombs that David Miliband, the foreign secretary, said last week had led to "strategic stalemate" in Afghanistan. A total of 37 troops have been killed by explosions caused by roadside bombs and mines since the Taliban started using them in the current attacks, which started in August 2007. A further 32 soldiers have died from other causes during the same period. The failure to train sufficient crew and imagery analysts means the RAF will not be able to deploy a Sentinel full-time until 2010. Two crews a plane, making a total of 50 personnel, are required to operate the five aircraft. Ten have been trained".

Failed radio host says Says GOPers Are A**holes: "Are you a conservative? Then you're a d***, and there's something wrong with your brain. At least that's what "24" actress and comedienne Janeane Garofalo believes. According to the former Air America radio host, a conservative starts out an “a**hole,” and the politics come later. She asserted, “The reason a person is a conservative republican (sic) is because something is wrong with them...It really is neuroscience.” In this February 12 interview with the environmentalist celebrity blog Ecorazzi, Garofalo also claimed the “irrational” emotion center of the brain, the limbic system, is what creates conservatives: "The reason a person is a conservative republican is because something is wrong with them. Again, that’s science – that’s neuroscience. You cannot be well adjusted, open-minded, pluralistic, enlightened and be a republican. It’s counter-intuitive. And they revel in their anti-intellectualism. They revel in their cruelty." ... Maybe a 9/11 conspiracy theorist who is fond of angry, vitriolic outbursts should take a look at the limbic system in her own brain for the excessive emotion and fright that she attributes to the right."

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, EYE ON BRITAIN and Paralipomena

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

****************************

The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist" (Nationalsozialist) and the full name of Hitler's political party (translated) was "The National Socialist German Workers' Party" (In German: Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei)

****************************

Will the stimulus actually stimulate? Economists say no

The compromise economic stimulus plan agreed to by negotiators from the House of Representatives and the Senate is short on incentives to get consumers spending again and long on social goals that won't stimulate economic activity, according to a range of respected economists. "I think (doing) nothing would have been better," said Ed Yardeni, an investment analyst who's usually an optimist, in an interview with McClatchy. He argued that the plan fails to provide the right incentives to spur spending. "It's unfocused. That is my problem. It is a lot of money for a lot of nickel-and- dime programs. I would have rather had a lot of money for (promoting purchase of) housing and autos . . . . Most of this plan is really, I think, aimed at stabilizing the situation and helping people get through the recession, rather than getting us out of the recession. They are actually providing less short-term stimulus by cutting back, from what I understand, some of the tax credits."

Another reason that some analysts frown on the stimulus is the social spending it includes on things such as the Head Start program for disadvantaged children and aid to NASA for climate-change research. Both may be worthy efforts, but they aren't aimed at delivering short-term boosts to economic activity. "All this is 25 years of government expansion jammed into one bill and sold as stimulus," said Brian Riedl, the director of budget analysis for the Heritage Foundation, a conservative policy research group.

The view wasn't much more supportive on the other side of the political spectrum. In a brief on the stimulus compromise, William Galston, a senior fellow at the center-left Brookings Institution and a former Clinton White House adviser, warned Thursday that a bank-rescue plan being finalized will make the $789 billion look like "pocket change." "While the stimulus bill is a necessary condition for economic stabilization and recovery, it is hardly sufficient," Galston wrote. "As the lesson of Japan in the 1990s shows, fiscal stimulus without financial rescue yields stagnation - at best." " . . . Serious observers believe that recovery cannot begin until we acknowledge that losses in the financial system amount to some trillions of dollars, rendering many institutions insolvent. The temptation will be to muddle along, hoping that these institutions can gradually regain strength without putting massive amounts of taxpayers' money at risk. If we go down that road, we are likely to end up with zombie banks whose balance sheets are riddled with near-worthless investments - banks that cannot lend to credit-worthy customers and who cannot trust one another," Galston wrote.

Even some proponents of a stimulus are disappointed, however. Harvard University economist Martin Feldstein, a former adviser to President Ronald Reagan, was an early supporter. He said that government is now the only engine left to spark economic activity, but he said that the compromise falls short of what's needed. "If the choice is between the current bill and an improved bill, I would say wait and improve the bill," Feldstein told CNBC on Wednesday after the compromise was announced. "I am disappointed with the structure of this bill." Like Yardeni and other analysts, Feldstein wanted more incentives for consumers to make big purchases that have ripple effects across the economy. When a car is purchased, it helps not only the carmaker, but its suppliers, the trucking companies and railroads that transport cars, the states that issue license plates and so on.

There's also the problem of time. Much of the stimulus is to be spread over a two-year period or longer - and 2009 looks increasingly bleak. A Wall Street Journal survey of 52 mainstream economic forecasters published Thursday found that while most forecasters still think there could be slow growth by the second half of the year, that won't offset steeper-than-projected declines in the first half of 2009. That means this is essentially a lost year for the economy. Most scenarios envision the economy picking back up again next year.

More here

***********************

The Mice that Roared

There's an old saying that, "If you give a mouse a cookie, it'll ask for a glass of milk." Well, it appears that the salt marsh harvest mouse may receive more than just a cookie. Thanks to house Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), up to $30 million has been allocated in the so-called economic "stimulus" bill, for wetlands restoration-surprise, surprise-Ms. Pelosi's home district in order to accommodate the creature comforts of the harvest mouse.

While the stated purpose of the $789 billion spending bill-$1.1 trillion after interest-is to promote job growth and thereby stimulate the economy, the bill has turned into special-interest funding heaven, with billions of non-existent taxpayer dollars going to fund legislators' pet projects. And yet the politicians have no qualms about promoting it as the best-laid plans of mice and men. As the bill, almost universally opposed by Republicans-as well as 69 percent of Americans who lack confidence that Congress knows what it is doing when it comes to addressing the country's current economic problems-entered the final stages of negotiation between House and Senate, Democratic leaders engaged in a game of cat and mouse with the American people, claiming that the bill has no earmarks. And they based that transparent obfuscation on the fact that that the billions in pork was added via a different method than the usual way earmarks are traditionally handled.

And yet, spending $30 million on wetlands in the district of the Speaker of the House can hardly be called anything but an earmark-especially given the fact that Ms. Pelosi has pushed for funding of the mouse's wetlands in past sessions. This cheesy earmark is, and represents, a tipping point in this trillion dollar total spending extravaganza that compels the American people to demand that the bill be recalled and redrawn.

The fact that the full amount will have to be paid by future taxpayers-with interest-means that future generations will be left as poor as, well, a church mouse. As Senator Tom Coburn (R-OK) pointed out, the average American family will be saddled with an additional $10,800 as a result of this bill. But Democrats have been as careful as possible to avoid any discussion of the full cost of this measure. Despite the many times they loudly objected to "passing the bill to future generations" when the Republicans were in power, they have been strangely silent as to the costs of their own measures. And with good cause.

More here

**********************

Iraq's Quiet Transformation

by Charles Krauthammer

Preoccupied as it was poring through Tom Daschle's tax returns, Washington hardly noticed a near-miracle abroad. Iraq held provincial elections. There was no Election Day violence. Security was handled by Iraqi forces with little U.S. involvement. A fabulous bazaar of 14,400 candidates representing 400 parties participated, yielding results highly favorable to both Iraq and the United States. Iraq moved away from religious sectarianism toward more secular nationalism. "All the parties that had the words 'Islamic' or 'Arab' in their names lost," noted Middle East expert Amir Taheri. "By contrast, all those that had the words 'Iraq' or 'Iraqi' gained."

Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki went from leader of a small Islamic party to leader of the "State of the Law Party," campaigning on security and secular nationalism. He won a smashing victory. His chief rival, a more sectarian and pro-Iranian Shiite religious party, was devastated. Another major Islamic party, the pro-Iranian Sadr faction, went from 11 percent of the vote to 3 percent, losing badly in its stronghold of Baghdad. The Islamic Fadhila party that had dominated Basra was almost wiped out. The once-dominant Sunni party affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood and the erstwhile insurgency was badly set back. New grass-roots tribal ("Awakening") and secular Sunni leaders emerged.

All this barely pierced the consciousness of official Washington. After all, it fundamentally contradicts the general establishment/media narrative of Iraq as "fiasco."

But in the intervening years, while the critics washed their hands of Iraq, it began developing the sinews of civil society: a vibrant free press, a plethora of parties, the habits of negotiation and coalition-building. Reflecting these new realities, Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani this time purposely and publicly backed no party, strongly signaling a return -- contra Iran -- to the Iraqi tradition of secular governance.

The big strategic winner here is the United States. The big loser is Iran. The parties Tehran backed are in retreat. The prime minister who staked his career on a strategic cooperation agreement with the United States emerged victorious. Moreover, this realignment from enemy state to emerging democratic ally, unlike Egypt's flip from Soviet to U.S. ally in the 1970s, is not the work of a single autocrat (like Anwar Sadat), but a reflection of national opinion expressed in a democratic election.

More here

**************************

ELSEWHERE

Time to scrap Britain's banking watchdog: "So ex-HBOS banker Sir James Crosby has quit his job at the UK's bank regulator, the Financial Services Authority. It happened just 30 minutes before Gordon Brown faced questions in Parliament, so I guess he was pushed. But the surprising thing is that Brown appointed him to the FSA in the first place. The Authority is now saying that it had been concerned about HBOS's risky investments since 2002. And then Brown makes it's head poacher into one of the gamekeepers! Absolutely bizarre. The Financial Services Authority is no good and should be closed down."

British PM vows to 'claw back' bonuses amid backlash against the bankers: "Gordon Brown promised moves to "claw back" bonuses from bank executives yesterday, as a poll showed a big public backlash against the banks. The Prime Minister foreshadowed changes to the bonus system that would ensure it was no longer a "one-way bet". Banks should be able to recover bonuses from staff who ended up losing them money, he said. The public will clearly back such moves. According to a Populus poll for The Times, executives responsible for the near-collapse of rescued banks should be forced to repay the bonuses they have received in previous years." [Hard to disagree with that]

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, EYE ON BRITAIN and Paralipomena

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

****************************

The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist" (Nationalsozialist) and the full name of Hitler's political party (translated) was "The National Socialist German Workers' Party" (In German: Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei)

****************************

IQ rediscovered -- including its heritability and its link to social class

Charles Murray documented all this years ago. Vocabulary is the best single predictor of IQ. Including gestures in vocabulary does however give the new study some originality.

Children who communicate using a wide variety of gestures at the age of 14 months have a much larger vocabulary at age four-and-a-half, and fare much better in school, a study said. [Something that IQ studies told us long ago]

Researchers from the University of Chicago worked with 50 Chicago-area families with different social backgrounds, filming children and their careers during ordinary activities at home for 90-minute sessions. The study, published in the journal Science, found that "differences in child gesture could be traced to differences in parent gesture."

On top of that, psychologist Meredith Rowe said the study found that socioeconomic status differences are clearly evident in the initial stages of language learning. Fourteen-month-old children from "high-income, well-educated families used gesture to convey an average of 24 different meanings," said the researchers in a statement. Same-aged children from lower-income families conveyed only 13 different meaningful gestures. The differences continued on into the child's command of vocabulary in school, the study said.

"Child gesture could play an indirect role in word learning by eliciting timely speech from parents, for example, in response to her child's point at a doll, mother might say 'yes, that's a doll,' thus providing a word for the object that is the focus of the child's attention," the authors wrote in the report. Vocabulary is a "key predictor of school success and is a primary reason why children from low-income families enter school at a greater risk of failure than their peers from advantaged families," said co-author Susan Goldin-Meadow.

Source

The irrational Leftist obsession with their "All men are equal" myth has led to IQ becoming a banished topic -- so the authors above may in fact have been simply unaware that what they had rediscovered was IQ. Certainly, anyone familiar with the IQ research would have predicted all of their findings.

The ban on even thinking about IQ does lead to a lot of follies, particularly in the education field. Vast efforts are made, for instance, to get average black educational achievement up to white levels. But no matter what bright ideas the educators try, the gap stubbornly remains. Again, anybody familiar with average black IQ scores would have predicted that result and told the educators to stop wasting time and money and direct their efforts in more profitable directions. If your theory is wrong, you won't get the results you expect and the results that the educators get certainly falsify their theories regularly -- while the same results validate the IQ concept.

Another folly -- this time in research about secondhand smoke -- that was brought on by ignoring IQ is set out on my FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC blog today.

**********************

ELSEWHERE

Bipartisan "stimulus" nonsense: "The cynicism and shallowness of politics have been abundantly on display throughout the debate over the 'stimulus' bill. The Democrats insult the intelligence of the American people by peddling the following sophistry: Republicans were big spenders when they controlled the government. Republican criticism of Democrats for being big spenders is hypocrisy. Therefore, arguments against big government spending are invalid."

Obama "bipartisanhip" sinks without trace: "Obama is not having a good start to his presidency..... all in all it is clear that Obama is not succeeding in allaying people's fears about the economy, reforming ethics standards, or changing the "tone" in Washington. He's failing to deliver the change he campaigned on. I was unwilling to say this before, but Judd Gregg's withdrawal has really changed the equation. The stimulus bill has become a political fiasco. He has too many poorly vetted appointees. And as bad as only receiving three Republican votes for the stimulus bill in both houses of Congress was for signifying a new tone of bipartisanship, it doesn't compare to the crippling embarrassment of Republican Judd Gregg withdrawing his nomination as commerce Secretary. I'm giving Obama a single setback today for Gregg's withdrawl, but really it should count as more. It signals that there is little remaining hope for a new, bipartisan tone in Washington, and it is a profound and symbolic denouncement of Obama's stimulus bill." [Background on the Gregg withdrawal here]

Prosperity in a crisis: "What is most remarkable about the public debate about the stimulus bill is not the partisan bickering or even the astonishing price tag of the bill's congressional pet projects. Rather, it is the lack of an open debate among policymakers about what kinds of activity a 'stimulus' bill is supposed to, well, stimulate. We are on the verge of committing more than three-quarters of a trillion dollars to "stimulate" the economy with very little explanation by the nation's political leaders about how the bill will jump-start much of anything. At its current price tag, if the bill were divided equally as cash payments among American households, each family would get approximately $6000. Without a clear idea of what needs 'stimulating,' one cannot say why a healthy rebate check for each family is any less of a good idea than spending vast sums on projects whose dubious relationship to economic recovery members of Congress would rather have us ignore."

Free market bashing: "Since the inception of the current downturn, free market capitalism has taken quite the bashing. Supporters of significant government involvement in the economy deride the horrors of `unfettered capitalism' and a `free market run amuck.' Frequently, deregulation of capital markets is singled out as the most dastardly culprit, to which Pres. Obama seems to be alluding when he blames `relying on the worn-out dogmas of the past,' and `too little regulatory scrutiny.' Yet, after the last eight years in which we witnessed Sarbanes-Oxley, No Child Left Behind, Medicare Part D, and numerous attempts to reign in Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac shoved aside by legislators, evidence of unregulated economic activity being the source of our crisis seems rather scant."

Free markets are, sadly, a myth: "In today's fiasco there is a lot [of] consternation about whether the free or the regulated market produced the mess. But there has not been a free market in place anywhere for many decades and even before then it has had only a limited scope in the economies of most countries. Politicians always took it for granted that they may manipulate the market, regiment market agents, both in small localities where they passed blue laws and curfews, and in the larger community where they passed protectionist laws and subsidies for faltering industries. Many other examples could be listed but the main point is that no free market has ever existed, not under Lincoln, nor Wilson, nor Hoover, certainly not FDR, or Eisenhower, Reagan or Bush. And it certainly isn't likely to exist under Barack Obama."

Bills would limit use of "state secrets": "House and Senate committees yesterday introduced bills that would sharply curtail the government's use of the 'state secrets' privilege, a policy used by President Bush to argue that a lawsuit involving allegations of torture should be dismissed - and a position that the Obama administration has now adopted. . The move surprised the court, angered the American Civil Liberties Union, which brought the case, and caused some legal observers to question why President Obama - who entered office vowing an open, transparent government that would reject harsh interrogations - would adopt Bush's position in a high-profile case alleging torture."

Obama's regulatory chief believes in paternalistic government: "The old joke runs, `I'm from the government and I'm here to help.' Most Americans are appropriately skeptical of such a claim, just as they are skeptical when told that they've won $10 million in a Nigerian lottery. But President Obama's selection of Harvard Law professor Cass Sunstein to direct the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs threatens to turn this joke into grim reality. Sunstein is most famous for his approach to government regulation known as `libertarian paternalism,' detailed in his book Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness (co-authored with Richard Thaler). The basic premise of libertarian paternalism is that the government should use its power to `nudge' people into acting in their best interest, while leaving them the choice to `opt out.'"

Ending welfare reform as we knew it: "Pres. Barack Obama vowed to correct the mistakes of the Bush administration but instead is determined to undo one of the great successes of the Clinton years: welfare reform. Democrats have inserted provisions into the catch-all stimulus bill that will reverse Clinton-era welfare reform, re-establishing the wasteful, incentive-killing system whose transformation was the bipartisan pride of the 1990s."

The conservative-libertarian alliance: "The conservative-libertarian alliance is as fundamental as it is often troubling. There are three ways in which libertarians and conservatives are ultimately the same (and in which conservatives and libertarians differ radically from progressives): (1) Libertarians and conservatives agree on what kind of thing government is. (2) They agree on what humans are. (3) They experience themselves in the same way. That is, the basic libertarian and conservative positions are consonant with respect to (1) the ontology of government, (2) anthropology, and (3) personality. . Government is a physical power. Progressives, on the other hand, experience governmental power as being economic. Starting from the progressive view of government, you come to see government as a potential partner or donor. Starting from the libertarian/conservative view, however, you come to see government as a potential threat, whose only virtue is that it can minimize other threats."

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, EYE ON BRITAIN and Paralipomena

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

****************************

The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist" (Nationalsozialist) and the full name of Hitler's political party (translated) was "The National Socialist German Workers' Party" (In German: Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei)

****************************

Goodbye, America! It was fun while it lasted

By Ann Coulter

All Americans who work for a living, or who plan to work for a living sometime in the next century, are about to be stuck with a trillion-dollar bill to fund yet more oppressive government bureaucracies. Or as I call it, a trillion dollars and change. The stimulus bill isn't as bad as we had expected - it's much worse. Instead of merely creating useless, make-work jobs digging ditches - or "shovel-ready," in the Democrats' felicitous phrase - the "stimulus" bill will create an endless army of government bureaucrats aggressively intervening in our lives. Instead of digging ditches, American taxpayers will be digging our own graves. There are hundreds of examples in the 800-page "stimulus" bill, but here are just two.

First, the welfare bureaucrats are coming back. For half a century, the welfare establishment had the bright idea to pay women to have children out of wedlock. Following the iron laws of economics - subsidize something, you get more of it; tax it, you get less of it - the number of children being born out of wedlock skyrocketed. The 1996 Welfare Reform bill marked the first time any government entitlement had ever been rolled back. Despite liberal howling and foot-stomping, not subsidizing illegitimacy led, like night into day, to less illegitimacy. Welfare recipients got jobs, as the hard-core unemployables were coaxed away from their TV sets and into the workforce. For the first time in decades, the ever-increasing illegitimacy rate stopped spiraling upward. As proof that that welfare reform was a smashing success, a few years later, Bill Clinton started claiming full credit for the bill.

Well, that's over. The stimulus bill goes a long way toward repealing the work requirement of the 1996 Republican Welfare Reform bill and rewards states that increase their welfare caseloads by paying unwed mothers to sit home doing nothing.

Second, bureaucrats at Health and Human Services will electronically collect every citizen's complete medical records and determine appropriate medical care. Judging by the care the State Department took with private visa records last year, that the Ohio government took with Joe the Plumber's government records, that the Pentagon took with Linda Tripp's employment records in 1998, and that the FBI took with thousands of top secret "raw" background files in President Clinton's first term, the bright side is: We'll finally be able to find out if Bill Clinton has syphilis - all thanks to the stimulus bill!

HHS bureaucrats will soon be empowered to overrule your doctor. Doctors who don't comply with the government's treatment protocols will be fined. That's right: Instead of your treatment being determined by your doctor, it will be settled on by some narcoleptic half-wit in Washington who couldn't get a job in the private sector. And a brand-new set of bureaucrats in the newly created office of "National Coordinator of Health Information Technology" will be empowered to cut off treatments that merely prolong life. Sorry, Mom and Pop, Big Brother said it's time to go.

At every other workplace in the nation - even Wal-Mart! - workers are being laid off. But no one at any of the bloated government bureaucracies ever need fear receiving a pink slip. All 64,750 employees at the department of Health and Human Services are apparently absolutely crucial to the smooth functioning of the department. With the stimulus bill, liberals plan to move unfirable government workers into every activity in America, where they will superintend all aspects of our lives.

Also, thanks to the stimulus bill, the private sector will gradually shrivel and die. According to the Congressional Budget Office, the cost of servicing the bill's nearly trillion-dollar debt will shrink the economy within a decade. Robert Kennedy famously said: "There are those who look at things the way they are and ask, 'Why?' I dream of things that never were and ask, 'Why not?'" The new liberal version is: There are those who look at things and ask, "Why on earth should the government be paying for that?" I dream of things that never were funded by the government and ask, "Why not?"

Source

***********************

A useless bill

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid touts a whopping 58 percent of the bill as job-creating. No doubt that number is inflated. Even so, what's the argument for the other 42 percent? For instance, why is an emergency spending bill weighted down with an authorization for $198 million in payments to Filipino World War II veterans, many of whom live in the Philippines? We owe them the money, but how does sending millions to Manila fend off the American "catastrophe" that Obama says is the price of inaction?

Principled liberals defend the bill while conceding that roughly half the discretionary "emergency" spending won't even start until two years from now. (Funny coincidence: That's right around the time Obama's re-election campaign will kick off.) Good social policy is good social policy, no matter how you get it enacted, they say.

Putting aside the question of whether the ornaments dangling from every branch of this legislative Christmas tree amount to good policy, there's still the matter of why Democrats are afraid of the normal process. Sneaking into the package hundreds of millions for, say, sex education, the National Endowment for the Arts and sod for the National Mall doesn't suggest a lot of confidence that Americans support such liberal priorities. But that's OK. As the president is so fond of pointing out, the Democrats won. They're in the driver's seat. To govern is to choose, and these are the choices they've made.

The Democrats have shown no desire to craft real bipartisan legislation, which is their right, even if it contradicts Obama's campaign promises. And the vast majority of Republicans have shown little desire to back legislation that violates their principles simply for the sake of "doing something." The moderate mooncalves, who expect Republicans to sign on essentially for signing-on's sake, really want Republicans to stop being Republicans. "I am supporting the economic stimulus package for one simple reason," Specter wrote in the Post. "The country cannot afford not to take action." Such thinking is the purest nonsense. Sure, if your house is burning down, you can't afford not to take action. That doesn't mean any action is better than no action. Grabbing a fire hose is good. Grabbing a jerrycan of gasoline and dancing the Macarena, not so much.

More here

***********************

Asia's Jewish myths

A Chinese bestseller titled "The Currency War" describes how Jews are planning to rule the world by manipulating the international financial system. The book is reportedly read in the highest government circles. If so, this does not bode well for the international financial system, which relies on well-informed Chinese to help it recover from the present crisis.

Such conspiracy theories are not rare in Asia. Japanese readers have shown a healthy appetite over the years for books such as To Watch Jews is to See the World Clearly, The Next Ten Years: How to Get an Inside View of the Jewish Protocols and I'd Like to Apologise to the Japanese - A Jewish Elder's Confession (written by a Japanese author, of course, under the made-up name of Mordecai Mose). All these books are variations of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the Russian forgery first published in 1903, which the Japanese came across after defeating the tsar's army in 1905.

The Chinese picked up many modern Western ideas from the Japanese. Perhaps this is how Jewish conspiracy theories were passed on as well. But Southeast Asians are not immune to this kind of nonsense either. Former Malaysian prime minister Mahathir Mohamed has said that "the Jews rule the world by proxy. They get others to fight and die for them." And a recent article in a leading business magazine in The Philippines explained how Jews had always controlled the countries they lived in, including the US today.

So what explains the remarkable appeal of Jewish conspiracy theories in Asia? The answer must be partly political. Conspiracy theories thrive in relatively closed societies, where free access to news is limited and freedom of inquiry curtailed. Japan is no longer such a closed society, yet even people with a short history of democracy are prone to believe that they are victims of unseen forces. Precisely because Jews are relatively unknown, therefore mysterious, and in some way associated with the West, they become an obvious fixture of anti-Western paranoia.

Such paranoia is widespread in Asia, where almost every country was at the mercy of Western powers for several hundred years. Japan was never formally colonised, but it too felt the West's dominance, at least since the 1850s, when American ships laden with heavy guns forced the country to open its borders on Western terms.

The common conflation of the US with Jews goes back to the late 19th century, when European reactionaries loathed America for being a rootless society based only on financial greed. This perfectly matched the stereotype of the rootless cosmopolitan Jewish moneygrubber. Hence the idea that Jews run America.

More here

****************************

ELSEWHERE

Galluping Past Bad Polls: "Some of President Obama's policies are not faring well in public opinion, but will anyone be told? On Feb. 2, a Gallup poll found that Obama's executive order "allowing U.S. funding for overseas family planning organizations that provide abortion" was decidedly unpopular: Only 35 percent approved, while 58 percent disapproved. You didn't know this? You're not alone: A Nexis survey finds none of the television networks, cable or broadcast, noticed these results, either.

Why Obama's new handout will fail to rescue the banks: "The new plan seems to make sense if and only if the principal problem is illiquidity. Offering guarantees and buying some portion of the toxic assets, while limiting new capital injections to less than the $350bn left in the Tarp, cannot deal with the insolvency problem identified by informed observers. Indeed, any toxic asset purchase or guarantee programme must be an ineffective, inefficient and inequitable way to rescue inadequately capitalised financial institutions: ineffective, because the government must buy vast amounts of doubtful assets at excessive prices or provide over-generous guarantees, to render insolvent banks solvent; inefficient, because big capital injections or conversion of debt into equity are better ways to recapitalise banks; and inequitable, because big subsidies would go to failed institutions and private buyers of bad assets.... The correct advice remains the one the US gave the Japanese and others during the 1990s: admit reality, restructure banks and, above all, slay zombie institutions at once."

How Europe's companies are feeding Iran's bomb: "While the U.S. has ratcheted up its efforts to prevent Iran from obtaining nuclear arms, the Islamic Republic is reaping a windfall from European companies. These firms' deals aid a regime that is bent on developing nuclear weapons and which financially supports the terror organizations Hamas and Hezbollah... Yet because of the sheer volume of its trade with Iran, Germany, the economic engine of Europe, is uniquely positioned to pressure Tehran. Still, the obvious danger of a nuclear-armed Iran has not stopped Germany from rewarding the country with a roughly 4 billion trade relationship in 2008, thereby remaining Iran's most important European trade partner. In the period of January to November 2008, German exports to Iran grew by 10.5% over the same period in 2007. That booming trade last year included 39 "dual-use" contracts with Iran, according to Germany's export-control office. Dual-use equipment and technology can be used for both military and civilian purposes. One example of Germany's dysfunctional Iran policy is the energy and engineering giant Siemens. The company acknowledged last week at its annual stockholder meeting in Munich, which I attended, that it conducted 438 million euros in trade with Iran in 2008, and that its 290 Iran-based employees will remain active in the gas, oil, infrastructure and communications sectors.

The Messiah is with us: "President Obama is back in messianic campaign mode. It is unbecoming. When he's not snarling at conservative opponents of his endless spending programs, he's pandering to supporters as the nation's community organizer-in-chief. At a stimulus rally in Ft. Myers, Florida on Tuesday, a woman named Henrietta Hughes stood up to decry the mortgage crisis and ask Obama for his personal help. Choking back tears, she implored: "I have an urgent need.We need a home, our own kitchen, our own bathroom." If she had more time, she probably would have remembered to ask Obama to fill up her gas tank, too. The soul-fixer dutifully asked her name, gave her a hug, and ordered his staff to meet with her. Supporters cried "Amen!" and "Yes!" A young McDonald's worker named Julio bolted out of his seat and exclaimed: "It is such a blessing to see you. Oh! Gracious God, thank you so much! Ungh!"

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, EYE ON BRITAIN and Paralipomena

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

****************************

The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist" (Nationalsozialist) and the full name of Hitler's political party (translated) was "The National Socialist German Workers' Party" (In German: Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei)

****************************