What triggered the 2007-2008 financial crisis?

I have not previously heard of this but it does have explanatory power.  I should have guessed that government bungling lay behind it.  We all knew that the pricking of the housing bubble lay behind the financial collapse but what pricked the housing bubble?  The bubble peaked in 2006 and in 2007 the trouble  started, building up to the collapse of Bear Stearns, Merrill Lynch, Lehman Bros. and AIG in 2008

In 2005, Americans who racked up an inconceivable amount of credit card debt realized they could file for bankruptcy to relieve themselves of any obligation to pay back debts.

There were those who exploited the system, of course, spending excessive amounts of money on credit cards, and then filing for bankruptcy the moment any bank started asking questions.

Banks wanted protection from this sort of abuse, so they lobbied for the Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act which made it costly to actually file for bankruptcy.

Everything was great, and smooth sailing after that, right?  Nope.

Turns out that there were people who were actually, you know, bankrupt.   The new law made it to where a large number of people didn't have the money to even file for bankruptcy.  As a result, these people had to default on all their debts, including their mortgages, which the banks had to foreclose.

So, now we have a situation in which all the banks have a bunch of houses they can't do anything with. What are they going to do with houses?  Well, they need to sell them, of course.

As it would turn out, though, all the banks simultaneously realized that the housing market was being flooded with houses from other banks doing the same thing.  Because of supply and demand, housing prices plummeted, causing even more people to default on their mortgages.

This also meant that the value of mortgage-backed securities dropped precipitously as well,  leading to more than $40 billion of writedowns for U.S. financial institutions.

Banks lost so much money that they themselves began filing for bankruptcy, including one of the prominent banks that lobbied for the law in the first place, Washington Mutual.  Nearly everyone lobbying for the law was subsequently punished: Citigroup Chief Executive Officer Charles O. "Chuck" Prince stepped down after losing $11 billion of writedowns on top of more than $6 billion in the third quarter of that year. Stan O'Neal was ousted as CEO of Merrill Lynch & Co., the world's largest brokerage, after an $8.4 billion writedown. Morgan Stanley, the second-biggest securities firm, had subprime losses that cut fourth-quarter earnings that year by $2.5 billion...

SOURCE

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The quintessential liberal




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Is Putin Really Worse Than Stalin?

By Patrick J. Buchanan

In 1933, the Holodomor was playing out in Ukraine.

After the “kulaks,” the independent farmers, had been liquidated in the forced collectivization of Soviet agriculture, a genocidal famine was imposed on Ukraine through seizure of her food production.

Estimates of the dead range from two to nine million souls.

Walter Duranty of the New York Times, who called reports of the famine “malignant propaganda,” won a Pulitzer for his mendacity.

In November 1933, during the Holodomor, the greatest liberal of them all, FDR, invited Foreign Minister Maxim Litvinov to receive official U.S. recognition of his master Stalin’s murderous regime.

On August 1, 1991, just four months before Ukraine declared its independence of Russia, George H. W. Bush warned Kiev’s legislature:

“Americans will not support those who seek independence in order to replace a far-off tyranny with a local despotism. They will not aid those who promote a suicidal nationalism based upon ethnic hatred.”

In short, Ukraine’s independence was never part of America’s agenda. From 1933 to 1991, it was never a U.S. vital interest. Bush I was against it.

When then did this issue of whose flag flies over Donetsk or Crimea become so crucial that we would arm Ukrainians to fight Russian-backed rebels and consider giving a NATO war guarantee to Kiev, potentially bringing us to war with a nuclear-armed Russia?

From FDR on, U.S. presidents have felt that America could not remain isolated from the rulers of the world’s largest nation.

Ike invited Khrushchev to tour the USA after he had drowned the Hungarian Revolution in blood. After Khrushchev put missiles in Cuba, JFK was soon calling for a new detente at American University.

Within weeks of Warsaw Pact armies crushing the Prague Spring in August 1968, LBJ was seeking a summit with Premier Alexei Kosygin.

After excoriating Moscow for the downing of KAL 007 in 1983, that old Cold Warrior Ronald Reagan was fishing for a summit meeting.

The point: Every president from FDR through George H. W. Bush, even after collisions with Moscow far more serious than this clash over Ukraine, sought to re-engage the men in the Kremlin.

Whatever we thought of the Soviet dictators who blockaded Berlin, enslaved Eastern Europe, put rockets in Cuba and armed Arabs to attack Israel, Ike, JFK, LBJ, Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan and Bush 1 all sought to engage Russia’s rulers.

Avoidance of a catastrophic war demanded engagement.

How then can we explain the clamor of today’s U.S. foreign policy elite to confront, isolate, and cripple Russia, and make of Putin a moral and political leper with whom honorable statesmen can never deal?

What has Putin done to rival the forced famine in Ukraine that starved to death millions, the slaughter of the Hungarian rebels or the Warsaw Pact’s crushing of Czechoslovakia?

In Ukraine, Putin responded to a U.S.-backed coup, which ousted a democratically elected political ally of Russia, with a bloodless seizure of the pro-Russian Crimea where Moscow has berthed its Black Sea fleet since the 18th century. This is routine Big Power geopolitics.

And though Putin put an army on Ukraine’s border, he did not order it to invade or occupy Luhansk or Donetsk. Does this really look like a drive to reassemble either the Russian Empire of the Romanovs or the Soviet Empire of Stalin that reached to the Elbe?

As for the downing of the Malaysian airliner, Putin did not order that. Sen. John Cornyn says U.S. intelligence has not yet provided any “smoking gun” that ties the missile-firing to Russia.

Intel intercepts seem to indicate that Ukrainian rebels thought they had hit an Antonov military transport plane.

Yet, today, the leading foreign policy voice of the Republican Party, Sen. John McCain, calls Obama’s White House “cowardly” for not arming the Ukrainians to fight the Russian-backed separatists.

But suppose Putin responded to the arrival of U.S. weapons in Kiev by occupying Eastern Ukraine. What would we do then?

John Bolton has the answer: Bring Ukraine into NATO.

Translation: The U.S. and NATO should go to war with Russia, if necessary, over Luhansk, Donetsk and Crimea, though no U.S. president has ever thought Ukraine itself was worth a war with Russia.

What motivates Putin seems simple and understandable. He wants the respect due a world power. He sees himself as protector of the Russians left behind in his “near abroad.” He relishes playing Big Power politics. History is full of such men.

He allows U.S. overflights to Afghanistan, cooperates in the P5+1 on Iran, helped us rid Syria of chemical weapons, launches our astronauts into orbit, collaborates in the war on terror and disagrees on Crimea and Syria.

But what motivates those on our side who seek every opportunity to restart the Cold War?

Is it not a desperate desire to appear once again Churchillian, once again heroic, once again relevant, as they saw themselves in the Cold War that ended so long ago?

Who is the real problem here?

SOURCE

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Paul Ryan Lays Out the 'Way Forward' on Poverty

House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-WI) introduced a sweeping proposal this week to reform how federal and state governments address the issue of poverty in America. His plan, “Expanding Opportunity in America,” looks into a number of ways to create new programs and bolster some existing federal programs while eliminating others that just don’t work. Ryan is becoming the go-to Republican on poverty policy, which is key for a party that needs a more welcoming message on the subject – to borrow his upcoming book title, “The Way Forward.”

The primary element of Ryan’s plan calls for the creation of Opportunity Grants that would change how the government conducts fighting poverty. This brings together 11 existing streams of federal aid – from food stamps to housing assistance – into block grants that would allow states to tailor aid packages to the poor based on individual need. States would assign a caseworker to each person applying for aid, and together the caseworker and the individual would create a plan based on short- and long-term goals. These goals would form the basis of a contract in which the states would continue to supply aid so long as the person continued to live up to their end of the agreement – whether it be finding or maintaining a job, pursuing an education or remaining drug-free.

Ryan proposes changes to the Earned Income Tax Credit. The EITC is one of the few proven ways the government has to reduce poverty and encourage work, and he wants to simplify the application process. In addition, he wants to make all childless adults over 21 eligible to apply. He suggests adding the EITC to each paycheck throughout the year, rather than distributing it as a one-time payment in each year’s tax refund.

There are a number of fixes to education aid in the proposal, including converting Head Start funding into a block grant to allow states to experiment with different models for early education. A big part of the primary and secondary education component is the consolidation of multiple federal programs into flexible block grants to the states, which allows for more tailored solutions at the community level. The proposal also reforms the accreditation process to allow more institutions and specific courses to gain accreditation, thereby increasing the education options for students seeking federal aid.

Ryan addresses the problem of an exploding prison population and the negative effect incarceration has on upward mobility. He proposes allowing federal judges more flexibility in sentencing non-violent felons who would otherwise be subject to mandatory minimums, and he wants to tailor prison education and rehabilitation programs to those inmates most at risk for recidivism.

Ryan’s plan, which you can read in detail here, is a thoughtful consideration how to address what is wrong with federal aid to the poor. As Ryan notes, “Fifteen percent of Americans live in poverty today – over 46 million people.” In that, he sees opportunity: “There’s a vast amount of untapped potential in our country.” Federal anti-poverty programs have done little to actually reduce poverty ever since Lyndon Johnson began the so-called War on Poverty 50 years ago. Ryan’s plan calls for making aid more effective and more accountable, two goals with which Washington is not familiar.

To be sure, Democrats are already trying to shoot holes in Ryan’s plan. Rep. Chris Van Hollen (D-MD), ranking Democrat on the House Budget Committee, says Ryan loves block grants because they are easier to cut. Van Hollen and other House Democrats also note Ryan has proposed cutting numerous federal programs and therefore cannot be taken seriously. Only a statist would consider cost cutting a negative trait.

The fact is, many of Ryan’s proposals, like prison education and improved education funding, have already seen the light of day as individual legislative proposals that have drawn bipartisan support. Democrats don’t like his plan because it would mean lifting people out of poverty and freeing them from their poverty plantations. Ryan is also a possible 2016 presidential candidate, which makes him a prime target.

Beyond all the policy nitty gritty, the key takeaway from Ryan’s effort is that the GOP needs to do a better job of addressing poverty. Blue collar Americans need to hear that Liberty can work for them. As American Enterprise Institute fellow James Pethokoukis puts it, Ryan “sees low-income Americans as underutilized assets who need to be reintegrated into the work economy so they and America can reach full potential.” This is done, as Benjamin Franklin once said, “not [by] making them easy in poverty, but leading or driving them out of it.”

SOURCE

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Leftists are religious too

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

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

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Another day in the life

by Shani Paluch Simon

This morning I got up and decided to offer Mia (7) to spend the day with me. We were not going to spend the day at my clinic in the hospital, nor were we going to have a fun girly day with mani-pedis and lunch in Tel Aviv. Today was a day to demonstrate support and solidarity - it would be sad, but it was important, and not everything we need to do in life is fun or pleasant.

We started off at the local supermarket and picked up several cartons of drinks, several kilos of baked goods and we set out on our journey.

Our first stop was Neve Yaakov, a suburb in Jerusalem that I had never visited before. I placed an address in my Waze and set off. Next thing I knew I was driving through Kalandiya, along the separation fence, road strewn with rocks and debris from clashes that had taken place between border police and local Palestinian villagers this past week. I checked if I could re-route but the other option was to drive through Shuafat - which did not appear a more appealing option.

Mia asked me about the separation fence. I tried explaining that the fence is a scar on our land, an un-healing, seeping wound on our soul and their soul. That the fence protects us and it hurts us. My heart felt heavy, I wanted the fence to end, I wanted to get to our destination already.

We arrived in Neve Yaakov, a poverty stricken suburb on the outskirts of East Jerusalem. Mia looked around, her beautiful big eyes, even wider than usual. As we made our way, hands laden with the goods we had purchased for the family of the fallen Ethiopian soldier, Moshe Malko z"l, Mia missed no detail - the neglected buildings, the rubbish on the streets, the rusty remains of what once must have been public playground equipment. Jerusalem is one of the poorest, most neglected cities in Israel.

Along with many others, we came to give our support and condolences to the family of a soldier who had lost his life to protect us. We approached Moshe Malko z"l's father - a lone tear streaming down his face, a broken heart, a broken soul - life would never be the same. How many kilometers had he walked in the deserts of Ethiopia to come to this land? What had he dreamed of for his future when he gazed at the stars in the desert skies on his journey to Israel? How much hardship had he and his family endured acclimatizing to life in Israel? And now this. How cruel life can be.

From Neve Yaakov we made our way to the military cemetery at Mount Herzel - us and 30,000 other people, who came to escort and support the family of Max Steinberg z"l on his final journey. Max was a lone-soldier - he had first come to Israel on Birthright - he fell in love with the country, with the people and chose to leave the comforts of Los Angeles, to make aliya and to serve in the army. Max's parents arrived in Israel for the first time in their lives yesterday - to bury their son.

Mia was astounded by the numbers of people attending the funeral, but she was even more astounded by the endless rows of graves. "Mummy, I don't understand - how many soldiers have died for our country? Did they all die young, before they had a chance to marry and have families?"

Too many soldiers Mia - and each soldier that dies has died too young - irrespective of whether they had married or had children.

Too many.

Too young.

This last week alone, 32 more - each a son, a brother, cousin, friend, partner, father.

We listened to the many eulogies, the personal stories of Max's z"l family and friends. We left before the military ceremony of the funeral. The message to Mia had been clear, it was enough for one day. When I considered whether to have Mia spend the day with me - I asked myself if she was too young - yes, she was too young - too young for air-red sirens, for sleeping in a bomb shelter, for hearing loud booms over our heads. Our soldiers are too young - too young to go to war, to bear weapons, to die. In my dialogue with myself I could suddenly hear my grandmother's voice, the words she would say in resignation each time tragedy rudely knocked on the door of our people - אלה הם חיינו - "this is our life".

When I look into the eyes of my children I need to hope that this is not true - I need to hope that the fences will come down, that when I wake -up tomorrow and Gili is suddenly 18 that we will no longer need an army. Some might say that I need to wake-up - today. That my grandmother was right.

 I need to dream and hope a little more. Please.

SOURCE

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What I Don’t Like About Life in the American Police State

By John W. Whitehead of The Rutherford Institute

There’s a lot to love about America and its people: their pioneering spirit, their entrepreneurship, their ability to think outside the box, their passion for the arts, etc.  Increasingly, however, as time goes by, I find the things I don’t like about living in a nation that has long since ceased to be a sanctuary for freedom are beginning to outnumber the things I love.

Here’s what I don’t like about living in the American police state: I don’t like being treated as if my only value to the government is as a source of labor and funds. I don’t like being viewed as a consumer and bits of data. I don’t like being spied on and treated as if I have no right to privacy.

I don’t like government officials who lobby for my vote only to ignore me once elected. I don’t like having representatives incapable of and unwilling to represent me. I don’t like taxation without representation.

I don’t like being subjected to scans, searches, pat downs and other indignities by the TSA. I don’t like VIPR raids on so-called “soft” targets like shopping malls and bus depots by black-clad, Darth Vader look-alikes. I don’t like fusion centers, which represent the combined surveillance efforts of federal, state and local law enforcement.

I don’t like laws that criminalize Americans for otherwise lawful activities such as holding religious studies at home, growing vegetables in their yard, and collecting rainwater. I don’t like the NDAA, which allows the president and the military to arrest and detain American citizens indefinitely. I don’t like the Patriot Act, which opened the door to all manner of government abuses and intrusions on our privacy.

I don’t like the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), which has become America’s standing army. I don’t like military weapons such as armored vehicles, sound cannons and the like being used against the American citizens. I don’t like government agencies such as the DHS, Post Office, Social Security Administration and Wildlife stocking up on hollow-point bullets. And I definitely don’t like the implications of detention centers being built that could house American citizens.

I don’t like the fact that since President Obama took office, police departments across the country “have received tens of thousands of machine guns; nearly 200,000 ammunition magazines; thousands of pieces of camouflage and night-vision equipment; and hundreds of silencers, armored cars and aircraft.”

I don’t like America’s infatuation with locking people up for life for non-violent crimes. There are over 3,000 people in America serving life sentences for non-violent crimes, including theft of a jacket, siphoning gasoline from a truck, stealing tools, and attempting to cash a stolen check. I don’t like paying roughly $29,000 a year per inmate just to keep these nonviolent offenders in prison.

I don’t like the fact that those within a 25-mile range of the border are getting a front row seat to the American police state, as Border Patrol agents are now allowed to search people’s homes, intimately probe their bodies, and rifle through their belongings, all without a warrant.

I don’t like public schools that treat students as if they were prison inmates. I don’t like zero tolerance laws that criminalize childish behavior. I don’t like a public educational system that emphasizes rote memorization and test-taking over learning, synthesizing and critical thinking.

I don’t like police precincts whose primary purpose—whether through the use of asset forfeiture laws, speed traps, or red light cameras—is making a profit at the expense of those they have sworn to protect. I don’t like militarized police and their onerous SWAT team raids.

I don’t like being treated as if I have no rights.

I don’t like cash-strapped states cutting deals with private corporations to run the prisons in exchange for maintaining 90% occupancy rates for at least 20 years. I don’t like the fact that American prisons have become the source of cheap labor for Corporate America.

I don’t like feeling as if we’ve come full circle back to a pre-Revolutionary era.

I don’t like technology being used as a double-edged sword against us. I don’t like agencies like DARPA developing weapons for the battlefield that get used against Americans back at home. I don’t like the fact that drones will be deployed domestically in 2015, yet the government has yet to establish any civil liberties protocols to prevent them from being used against the citizenry.

Most of all, I don’t like feeling as if there’s no hope for turning things around.

Now there are those who would suggest that if I don’t like things about this country, I should leave and go elsewhere. And there are certainly those among my fellow citizens who are leaving for friendlier shores. However, I happen to come from a long line of people who believe in the virtue of hard work and perseverance and in the principle that nothing worthwhile comes without effort.

So I’m not giving up, at least not anytime soon. But I’m also not waiting around for the government to clean up its act. I’m not making any deals with politicians who care nothing about me and mine. To quote Number Six, the character in the British television series The Prisoner: “I will not be pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, briefed, debriefed, or numbered! My life is my own!”

I plan to keep fighting, writing, speaking up, speaking out, shouting if necessary, filing lawsuits, challenging the status quo, writing letters to the editor, holding my representatives accountable, thinking nationally but acting locally, and generally raising a ruckus anytime the government attempts to undermine the Constitution and ride roughshod over the rights of the citizenry.

As I make clear in my book A Government of Wolves: The Emerging American Police State, we’re at a crisis point in American history. If we don’t get up off our duffs and get involved in the fight for freedom, then up ahead the graveyard beckons. As Martin Luther King Jr. warned, “The hottest places in hell are reserved for those who in a period of moral crisis maintain their neutrality.”

SOURCE

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Scientists discover way to stop malaria parasite in its tracks

The global race to develop the next generation of malaria drugs has been given a boost after Australian scientists discovered how to starve the malaria parasite of nutrients, effectively killing it before it takes hold.

The breakthrough, published in Nature on Thursday, comes at a time when the parasite has developed a resistance to anti-malarial drugs, with researchers and health care workers growing increasingly desperate for replacement treatments.

‘’It’s really exciting because we are on our last drug and when that drug goes, there are no more drugs to treat malaria,’’ Burnet Institute director Brendan Crabb, a microbiologist and co-author of the paper, said.

Parasite resistance to the present drug, artemisinin, has been detected in four countries in south-east Asia: Cambodia, Myanmar, Thailand and Vietnam. The mosquito that carries the parasite has also developed a resistance to at least one insecticide used for malaria control in 64 countries.

Transmitted via infected mosquitoes, the malaria parasite multiplies in the liver and then invades red blood cells.

Once inside a red blood cell, the parasite settles in and starts spreading its proteins through the red blood cell cytoplasm, which helps it survive and absorb nutrients.

‘’There are hundreds and hundreds of proteins that the parasite needs to get across into the red blood cells and this study has shown that there is only one way for all the proteins to get out into the red blood cells,’’ said co-author Tania de Koning-Ward, from Deakin University’s medical school. ’’If we block that pathway, then we kill the parasite.’’

The two collaborating research groups, one from the Burnet Institute and the other from Deakin University, each managed to deny the parasite the proteins it needs to survive but did so using different techniques.

Professor Crabb and colleague Paul Gilson worked with infected human blood cells grown in the incubator at the Burnet Institute, while Associate Professor de Koning-Ward and her team used the parasite that causes malaria in mice to test the efficacy of blocking the proteins from being released.

‘’We basically showed the same results,’’ Associate Professor de Koning-Ward said.

The team first outlined its theory in a 2009 Nature paper but this latest research proves the theory works in practice.

The development is significant as it relies on a new mechanism, which means drugs developed using this novel technique will be unlike the drugs now on the market.

Blocking the release of the parasite’s proteins also appeared particularly potent, killing the parasite within six hours.

The malaria parasite has about 5000 genes. The study used genetically modified parasites, with the gene responsible for transferring proteins manipulated so it could be switched off.

Professor Crabb said the cost of developing new malaria drugs was about half a billion dollars. He said it took five to 10 years for new treatments to reach the market.

According to the World Health Organisation’s 2013 World Malaria Report, released last December, about 207 million cases of malaria were recorded in 2012 with 627,000 deaths. Ninety per cent of all malaria deaths occur in sub-Saharan Africa, particularly Nigeria and the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

SOURCE

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

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

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

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Ten Reasons Why I Am No Longer a Leftist

By Danusha V. Goska

How far left was I? So far left my beloved uncle was a card-carrying member of the Communist Party in a Communist country. When I returned to his Slovak village to buy him a mass card, the priest refused to sell me one. So far left that a self-identified terrorist proposed marriage to me. So far left I was a two-time Peace Corps volunteer and I have a degree from UC Berkeley. So far left that my Teamster mother used to tell anyone who would listen that she voted for Gus Hall, Communist Party chairman, for president. I wore a button saying "Eat the Rich." To me it wasn't a metaphor.

I voted Republican in the last presidential election.

Below are the top ten reasons I am no longer a leftist. This is not a rigorous comparison of theories. This list is idiosyncratic, impressionistic, and intuitive. It's an accounting of the milestones on my herky-jerky journey.

10) Huffiness.

In the late 1990s I was reading Anatomy of the Spirit, a then recent bestseller by Caroline Myss.

Myss described having lunch with a woman named Mary. A man approached Mary and asked her if she were free to do a favor for him on June 8th. No, Mary replied, I absolutely cannot do anything on June 8th because June 8th is my incest survivors' meeting and we never let each other down! They have suffered so much already! I would never betray incest survivors!

Myss was flabbergasted. Mary could have simply said "Yes" or "No."

Reading this anecdote, I felt that I was confronting the signature essence of my social life among leftists. We rushed to cast everyone in one of three roles: victim, victimizer, or champion of the oppressed. We lived our lives in a constant state of outraged indignation. I did not want to live that way anymore. I wanted to cultivate a disposition of gratitude. I wanted to see others, not as victims or victimizers, but as potential friends, as loved creations of God. I wanted to understand the point of view of people with whom I disagreed without immediately demonizing them as enemy oppressors.

I recently attended a training session for professors on a college campus. The presenter was a new hire in a tenure-track position. He opened his talk by telling us that he had received an invitation to share a festive meal with the president of the university. I found this to be an enviable occurrence and I did not understand why he appeared dramatically aggrieved. The invitation had been addressed to "Mr. and Mrs. X." Professor X was a bachelor. He felt slighted. Perhaps the person who had addressed his envelope had disrespected him because he is a member of a minority group.

Rolling his eyes, Prof. X went on to say that he was wary of accepting a position on this lowly commuter campus, with its working-class student body. The disconnect between leftists' announced value of championing the poor and the leftist practice of expressing snobbery for them stung me. Already vulnerable students would be taught by a professor who regarded association with them as a burden, a failure, and a stigma.

Barack Obama is president. Kim and Kanye and Brad and Angelina are members of multiracial households. One might think that professors finally have cause to teach their students to be proud of America for overcoming racism. Not so fast, Professor X warned.  His talk was on microaggression, defined as slights that prove that America is still racist, sexist, homophobic, and ableist, that is, discriminatory against handicapped people.

Professor X projected a series of photographs onto a large screen. In one, commuters in business suits, carrying briefcases, mounted a flight of stairs. This photo was an act of microaggression. After all, Professor X reminded us, handicapped people can't climb stairs.

I appreciate Professor X's desire to champion the downtrodden, but identifying a photograph of commuters on stairs as an act of microaggression and evidence that America is still an oppressive hegemon struck me as someone going out of his way to live his life in a state of high dudgeon. On the other hand, Prof. X could have chosen to speak of his own working-class students with more respect.

Yes, there is a time and a place when it is absolutely necessary for a person to cultivate awareness of his own pain, or of others' pain. Doctors instruct patients to do this -- "Locate the pain exactly; calculate where the pain falls on a scale of one to ten; assess whether the pain is sharp, dull, fleeting, or constant." But doctors do this for a reason. They want the patient to heal, and to move beyond the pain. In the left, I found a desire to be in pain constantly, so as always to have something to protest, from one's history of incest to the inability of handicapped people to mount flights of stairs.

9) Selective Outrage

I was a graduate student. Female genital mutilation came up in class. I stated, without ornamentation, that it is wrong.

A fellow graduate student, one who was fully funded and is now a comfortably tenured professor, sneered at me. "You are so intolerant. Clitoredectomy is just another culture's rite of passage. You Catholics have confirmation."

When Mitt Romney was the 2012 Republican presidential candidate, he mentioned that, as Massachusetts governor, he proactively sought out female candidates for top jobs. He had, he said, "binders full of women." He meant, of course, that he stored resumes of promising female job candidates in three-ring binders.

Op-ed pieces, Jon Stewart's "Daily Show," Twitter, Facebook, and Amazon posts erupted in a feeding frenzy, savaging Romney and the Republican Party for their "war on women."

I was an active leftist for decades. I never witnessed significant leftist outrage over clitoredectomy, child marriage, honor killing, sharia-inspired rape laws, stoning, or acid attacks. Nothing. Zip. Crickets. I'm not saying that that outrage does not exist. I'm saying I never saw it.

The left's selective outrage convinced me that much canonical, left-wing feminism is not so much support for women, as it is a protest against Western, heterosexual men. It's an "I hate" phenomenon, rather than an "I love" phenomenon.

8.) It's the thought that counts

My favorite bumper sticker in ultra-liberal Berkeley, California: "Think Globally; Screw up Locally." In other words, "Love Humanity but Hate People."

It was past midnight, back in the 1980s, in Kathmandu, Nepal. A group of Peace Corps volunteers were drinking moonshine at the Momo Cave. A pretty girl with long blond hair took out her guitar and sang these lyrics, which I remember by heart from that night:

"If you want your dream to be,

Build it slow and surely.

Small beginnings greater ends.

Heartfelt work grows purely."

I just googled these lyrics, thirty years later, and discovered that they are Donovan's San Damiano song, inspired by the life of St. Francis.

Listening to this song that night in the Momo Cave, I thought, that's what we leftists do wrong. That's what we've got to get right.

We focused so hard on our good intentions. Before our deployment overseas, Peace Corps vetted us for our idealism and "tolerance," not for our competence or accomplishments. We all wanted to save the world. What depressingly little we did accomplish was often erased with the next drought, landslide, or insurrection.

Peace Corps did not focus on the "small beginnings" necessary to accomplish its grandiose goals. Schools rarely ran, girls and low caste children did not attend, and widespread corruption guaranteed that all students received passing grades. Those students who did learn had no jobs where they could apply their skills, and if they rose above their station, the hereditary big men would sabotage them. Thanks to cultural relativism, we were forbidden to object to rampant sexism or the caste system. "Only intolerant oppressors judge others' cultures."

I volunteered with the Sisters of Charity. For them, I pumped cold water from a well and washed lice out of homeless people's clothing. The sisters did not want to save the world. Someone already had. The sisters focused on the small things, as their founder, Mother Teresa, advised, "Don't look for big things, just do small things with great love." Delousing homeless people's clothing was one of my few concrete accomplishments.

Back in 1975, after Hillary Rodham had followed Bill Clinton to Arkansas, she helped create the state's first rape crisis hotline. She had her eye on the big picture. What was Hillary like in her one-on-one encounters?

Hillary served as the attorney to a 41-year-old, one of two men accused of raping a 12-year-old girl. The girl, a virgin before the assault, was in a coma for five days afterward. She was injured so badly she was told she'd never have children. In 2014, she is 52 years old, and she has never had children, nor has she married. She reports that she was afraid of men after the rape.

A taped interview with Clinton has recently emerged; on it Clinton makes clear that she thought her client was guilty, and she chuckles when reporting that she was able to set him free.  In a recent interview, the victim said that Hillary Clinton "took me through Hell" and "lied like a dog." "I think she wants to be a role model… but I don’t think she’s a role model at all," the woman said. "If she had have been, she would have helped me at the time, being a 12-year-old girl who was raped by two guys."

Hillary had her eye on the all-caps resume bullet point: FOUNDS RAPE HOTLINE.

Hillary's chuckles when reminiscing about her legal victory suggest that, in her assessment, her contribution to the ruination of the life of a rape victim is of relatively negligible import.

7) Leftists hate my people.

I'm a working-class Bohunk. A hundred years ago, leftists loved us. We worked lousy jobs, company thugs shot us when we went on strike, and leftists saw our discontent as fuel for their fire.

Karl Marx promised the workers' paradise through an inevitable revolution of the proletariat. The proletariat is an industrial working class -- think blue-collar people working in mines, mills, and factories: exactly what immigrants like my parents were doing.

Polish-Americans participated significantly in a great victory, Flint, Michigan's 1937 sit-down strike. Italian-Americans produced Sacco and Vanzetti. Gus Hall was a son of Finnish immigrants.

In the end, though, we didn't show up for the Marxist happily ever after. We believed in God and we were often devout Catholics. Leftists wanted us to slough off our ethnic identities and join in the international proletarian brotherhood -- "Workers of the world, unite!" But we clung to ethnic distinctiveness. Future generations lost their ancestral ties, but they didn't adopt the IWW flag; they flew the stars and stripes. "Property is theft" is a communist motto, but no one is more house-proud than a first generation Pole who has escaped landless peasantry and secured his suburban nest.

Leftists felt that we jilted them at the altar. Leftists turned on us. This isn't just ancient history. In 2004, What's the Matter with Kansas? spent eighteen weeks on the bestseller lists. The premise of the book: working people are too stupid to know what's good for them, and so they vote conservative when they should be voting left. In England, the book was titled, What's the Matter with America?

We became the left's boogeyman: Joe Six-pack, Joe Hardhat. Though we'd been in the U.S. for a few short decades when the demonization began, leftists, in the academy, in media, and in casual speech, blamed working-class ethnics for American crimes, including racism and the "imperialist" war in Vietnam. See films like The Deer Hunter. Watch Archie Bunker on "All in the Family." Listen to a few of the Polack jokes that elitists pelted me with whenever I introduced myself at UC Berkeley.

Leftists freely label poor whites as "redneck," "white trash," "trailer trash," and "hillbilly." At the same time that leftists toss around these racist and classist slurs, they are so sanctimonious they forbid anyone to pronounce the N word when reading Mark Twain aloud. President Bill Clinton's advisor James Carville succinctly summed up leftist contempt for poor whites in his memorable quote, "Drag a hundred-dollar bill through a trailer park, you never know what you'll find."

The left's visceral hatred of poor whites overflowed like a broken sewer when John McCain chose Sarah Palin as his vice presidential running mate in 2008. It would be impossible, and disturbing, to attempt to identify the single most offensive comment that leftists lobbed at Palin. One can report that attacks on Palin were so egregious that leftists themselves publicly begged that they cease; after all, they gave the left a bad name. The Reclusive Leftist blogged in 2009 that it was a "major shock" to discover "the extent to which so many self-described liberals actually despise working people." The Reclusive Leftist focuses on Vanity Fair journalist Henry Rollins. Rollins recommends that leftists "hate-fuck conservative women" and denounces Palin as a "small town hickoid" who can be bought off with a coupon to a meal at a chain restaurant.

Smearing us is not enough. Liberal policies sabotage us. Affirmative action benefits recipients by color, not by income. Even this limited focus fails. In his 2004 Yale University Press study, Thomas Sowell insists that affirmative action helps only wealthier African Americans. Poor blacks do not benefit. In 2009, Princeton sociologists Thomas Espenshade and Alexandria Radford demonstrated that poor, white Christians are underrepresented on elite college campuses. Leftists add insult to injury. A blue-collar white kid, who feels lost and friendless on the alien terrain of a university campus, a campus he has to leave immediately after class so he can get to his fulltime job at MacDonald's, must accept that he is a recipient of "white privilege" – if he wants to get good grades in mandatory classes on racism.

The left is still looking for its proletariat. It supports mass immigration for this reason. Harvard's George Borjas, himself a Cuban immigrant, has been called "America’s leading immigration economist." Borjas points out that mass immigration from Latin America has sabotaged America's working poor.

It's more than a little bit weird that leftists, who describe themselves as the voice of the worker, select workers as their hated other of choice, and targets of their failed social engineering.

6) I believe in God.

Read Marx and discover a mythology that is irreconcilable with any other narrative, including the Bible. Hang out in leftist internet environments, and you will discover a toxic bath of irrational hatred for the Judeo-Christian tradition. You will discover an alternate vocabulary in which Jesus is a "dead Jew on a stick" or a "zombie" and any belief is an arbitrary sham, the equivalent of a recently invented "flying spaghetti monster." You will discover historical revisionism that posits Nazism as a Christian denomination. You will discover a rejection of the Judeo-Christian foundation of Western Civilization and American concepts of individual rights and law. You will discover a nihilist void, the kind of vacuum of meaning that nature abhors and that, all too often, history fills with the worst totalitarian nightmares, the rough beast that slouches toward Bethlehem.

5 & 4) Straw men and "In order to make an omelet you have to break a few eggs."

It astounds me now to reflect on it, but never, in all my years of leftist activism, did I ever hear anyone articulate accurately the position of anyone to our right. In fact, I did not even know those positions when I was a leftist.

"Truth is that which serves the party." The capital-R revolution was such a good, it could eliminate all that was bad, that manipulating facts was not even a venial sin; it was a good. If you want to make an omelet, you have to break a few eggs. One of those eggs was objective truth.

Ron Kuby is a left-wing radio talk show host on New York's WABC. He plays the straw man card hourly. If someone phones in to question affirmative action – shouldn't such programs benefit recipients by income, rather than by skin color? – Kuby opens the fire hydrant. He is shrill. He is bombastic. He accuses the caller of being a member of the KKK. He paints graphic word pictures of the horrors of lynching and the death of Emmett Till and asks, "And you support that?"

Well of course THE CALLER did not support that, but it is easier to orchestrate a mob in a familiar rendition of righteous rage against a sensationalized straw man than it is to produce a reasoned argument against a reasonable opponent.

On June 16, 2014, Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank published a column alleging that a peaceful Muslim was nearly verbally lynched by violent Islamophobes at a Heritage Foundation-hosted panel. What Milbank described was despicable. Unfortunately for Milbank and the Washington Post's credibility, someone filmed the event and posted the film on YouTube. Panel discussants, including Frank Gaffney and Brigitte Gabriel, made important points in a courteous manner. Saba Ahmed, the peaceful Muslim, is a "family friend" of a bombing plotter who expressed a specific desire to murder children. It soon became clear that Milbank was, as one blogger put it, "making stuff up."

Milbank slanders anyone who might attempt analysis of jihad, a force that is currently cited in the murder of innocents -- including Muslims -- from Nigeria to the Philippines. The leftist strategy of slandering those who speak uncomfortable facts suppresses discourse and has a devastating impact on confrontations with truth in journalism and on college campuses.

2 & 3) It doesn't work.  Other approaches work better.

I went to hear David Horowitz speak in 2004. My intention was to heckle him. Horowitz said something that interrupted my flow of thought. He pointed out that Camden, Paterson, and Newark had decades of Democratic leadership.

Ouch.

I grew up among "Greatest Generation" Americans who had helped build these cities. One older woman told me, "As soon as I got my weekly paycheck, I rushed to Main Ave in Paterson, and my entire paycheck ended up on my back, in a new outfit." In the 1950s and 60s, my parents and my friends' parents fled deadly violence in Newark and Paterson.

Within a few short decades, Paterson, Camden, and Newark devolved into unlivable slums, with shooting deaths, drug deals, and garbage-strewn streets. The pain that New Jerseyans express about these failed cities is our state's open wound.

I live in Paterson. I teach its young. My students are hogtied by ignorance. I find myself speaking to young people born in the U.S. in a truncated pidgin I would use with a train station chai wallah in Calcutta.

Many of my students lack awareness of a lot more than vocabulary. They don't know about believing in themselves, or stick-to-itiveness. They don't realize that the people who exercise power over them have faced and overcome obstacles. I know they don't know these things because they tell me. One student confessed that when she realized that one of her teachers had overcome setbacks it changed her own life.

My students do know -- because they have been taught this -- that America is run by all-powerful racists who will never let them win. My students know -- because they have been drilled in this -- that the only way they can get ahead is to locate and cultivate those few white liberals who will pity them and scatter crumbs on their supplicant, bowed heads and into their outstretched palms. My students have learned to focus on the worst thing that ever happened to them, assume that it happened because America is unjust, and to recite that story, dirge-like, to whomever is in charge, from the welfare board to college professors, and to await receipt of largesse.

As Shelby Steele so brilliantly points out in his book White Guilt, the star of the sob story my students tell in exchange for favors is very much not the black aid recipient. The star of this story, still, just as before the Civil Rights Movement that was meant to change who got to take the lead in American productions, was the white man. The generous white liberal still gets top billing.

In Dominque La Pierre's 1985 novel City of Joy, a young American doctor, Max Loeb, confesses that serving the poor in a slum has changed his mind forever about what might actually improve their lot. "In a slum an exploiter is better than a Santa Claus… An exploiter forces you to react, whereas a Santa Claus demobilizes you."

That one stray comment from David Horowitz, a man I regarded as the enemy, sparked the slow but steady realization that my ideals, the ideals I had lived by all my life, were poisoning my students and Paterson, my city.

After I realized that our approaches don't work, I started reading about other approaches. I had another Aha! moment while listening to a two minute twenty-three second YouTube video of Milton Friedman responding to Phil Donahue's castigation of greed. The only rational response to Friedman is "My God, he's right."

1) Hate.

If hate were the only reason, I'd stop being a leftist for this reason alone.

Almost twenty years ago, when I could not conceive of ever being anything but a leftist, I joined a left-wing online discussion forum.

Before that I'd had twenty years of face-to-face participation in leftist politics: marching, organizing, socializing.

In this online forum, suddenly my only contact with others was the words those others typed onto a screen. That limited and focused means of contact revealed something.

If you took all the words typed into the forum every day and arranged them according to what part of speech they were, you'd quickly notice that nouns expressing the emotions of anger, aggression, and disgust, and verbs speaking of destruction, punishing, and wreaking vengeance, outnumbered any other class of words.

One topic thread was entitled "What do you view as disgusting about modern America?" The thread was begun in 2002. Almost eight thousand posts later, the thread was still going strong in June, 2014.

Those posting messages in this left-wing forum publicly announced that they did what they did every day, from voting to attending a rally to planning a life, because they wanted to destroy something, and because they hated someone, rather than because they wanted to build something, or because they loved someone. You went to an anti-war rally because you hated Bush, not because you loved peace. Thus, when Obama bombed, you didn't hold any anti-war rally, because you didn't hate Obama.

I experienced powerful cognitive dissonance when I recognized the hate. The rightest of my right-wing acquaintances -- I had no right-wing friends -- expressed nothing like this. My right-wing acquaintances talked about loving: God, their family, their community. I'm not saying that the right-wingers I knew were better people; I don't know that they were. I'm speaking here, merely, about language.

In 1995 I developed a crippling illness. I couldn't work, lost my life savings, and traveled through three states, from surgery to surgery.

A left-wing friend, Pete, sent me emails raging against Republicans like George Bush, whom he referred to as "Bushitler." The Republicans were to blame because they opposed socialized medicine. In fact it's not at all certain that socialized medicine would have helped; the condition I had is not common and there was no guaranteed treatment.

I visited online discussion forums for others with the same affliction. One of my fellow sufferers, who identified himself as a successful corporate executive in New Jersey, publicly announced that the symptoms were so hideous, and his helpless slide into poverty was so much not what his wife had bargained for when she married him, that he planned to take his own life. He stopped posting after that announcement, though I responded to his post and requested a reply. It is possible that he committed suicide, exactly as he said he would -- car exhaust in the garage. I suddenly realized that my "eat the rich" lapel button was a sin premised on a lie.

In any case, at the time I was diagnosed, Bush wasn't president; Clinton was. And, as I pointed out to Pete, his unceasing and vehement expressions of hatred against Republicans did nothing for me.

I had a friend, a nun, Mary Montgomery, one of the Sisters of Providence, who took me out to lunch every six months or so, and gave me twenty-dollar Target gift cards on Christmas. Her gestures to support someone, rather than expressions of hate against someone -- even though these gestures were miniscule and did nothing to restore me to health -- meant a great deal to me.

Recently, I was trying to explain this aspect of why I stopped being a leftist to a left-wing friend, Julie. She replied, "No, I'm not an unpleasant person. I try to be nice to everybody."

"Julie," I said, "You are an active member of the Occupy Movement. You could spend your days teaching children to read, or visiting the elderly in nursing homes, or organizing cleanup crews in a garbage-strewn slum. You don't. You spend your time protesting and trying to destroy something -- capitalism."

"Yes, but I'm very nice about it," she insisted. "I always protest with a smile."

Pete is now a Facebook friend and his feed overflows with the anger that I'm sure he assesses as righteous. He protests against homophobic Christians, American imperialists, and Monsanto. I don't know if Pete ever donates to an organization he believes in, or a person suffering from a disease, or if he ever says comforting things to afflicted intimates. I know he hates.

I do have right-wing friends now and they do get angry and they do express that anger. But when I encounter unhinged, stratospheric vituperation, when I encounter detailed revenge fantasies in scatological and sadistic language, I know I've stumbled upon a left-wing website.

Given that the left prides itself on being the liberator of women, homosexuals, and on being "sex positive," one of the weirder and most obvious aspects of left-wing hate is how often, and how virulently, it is expressed in terms that are misogynist, homophobic, and in the distinctive anti-sex voice of a sexually frustrated high-school misfit. Haters are aware enough of how uncool it would be to use a slur like "fag," so they sprinkle their discourse with terms indicating anal rape like "butt hurt." Leftists taunt right-wingers as "tea baggers." The implication is that the target of their slur is either a woman or a gay man being orally penetrated by a man, and is, therefore, inferior, and despicable.

Misogynist speech has a long tradition on the left. In 1964, Stokely Carmichael said that the only position for women in the Civil Rights Movement was "prone." Carmichael's misogyny is all the more outrageous given the very real role of women like Rosa Parks, Viola Liuzzo, and Fannie Lou Hamer.

In 2012 atheist bloggers Jennifer McCreight and Natalie Reed exposed the degree to which misogyny dominates the New Atheist movement. McCreight quoted a prominent atheist's reply to a woman critic. "I will make you a rape victim if you don't fuck off... I think we should give the guy who raped you a medal. I hope you fucking drown in rape semen, you ugly, mean-spirited cow… Is that kind of like the way that rapists dick went in your pussy? Or did he use your asshole… I'm going to rape you with my fist."

A high-profile example of leftist invective was delivered by MSNBC's Martin Bashir in late 2013. Bashir said, on air and in a rehearsed performance, not as part of a moment's loss of control, something so vile about Sarah Palin that I won't repeat it here. Extreme as it is, Bashir's comment is fairly representative of a good percentage of what I read on left-wing websites.

I could say as much about a truly frightening phenomenon, left-wing anti-Semitism, but I'll leave the topic to others better qualified. I can say that when I first encountered it, at a PLO fundraising party in Marin County, I felt as if I had time-traveled to pre-war Berlin.

I needed to leave the left, I realized, when I decided that I wanted to spend time with people building, cultivating, and establishing, something that they loved.

 SOURCE

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

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

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Flights to Israel OK'd

The U.S. flight ban to Tel Aviv has been lifted, giving Israel a needed reprieve from a misguided decision. When the FAA banned all U.S. flights to Tel Aviv earlier this week, it handed Hamas a huge win.

As fighting continues, Israel has lost more than 30 soldiers, while Hamas has sacrificed more than 700 Palestinian lives for propaganda purposes. It’s working. Reuters reports, “UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay said there was ‘a strong possibility’ that Israel was committing war crimes in Gaza.”

Pressure on Israel is growing from all sides, though Barack Obama repeatedly professes his “unshakeable commitment” to our ally. Why does our support then always seem so shakeable?

SOURCE

Navi Pillay is an ass with a long record of being an ass

Socialists Are Cheaters, Says New Study

"The longer individuals were exposed to socialism, the more likely they were to cheat on our task," according to a new study, "The (True) Legacy of Two Really Existing Economic Systems," from Duke University and the University of Munich. The team of researchers concluded this after working with 259 participants from Berlin who grew up on opposite sides of the infamous wall.

When playing a dice game that could earn them €6 ($8), subjects originally from the East, which was for four decades under socialist rule, were more likely than their market economy counterparts in West to lie about how they fared. The Economist explains the task:

The game was simple enough. Each participant was asked to throw a die 40 times and record each roll on a piece of paper. A higher overall tally earned a bigger payoff. Before each roll, players had to commit themselves to write down the number that was on either the top or the bottom side of the die. However, they did not have to tell anyone which side they had chosen, which made it easy to cheat by rolling the die first and then pretending that they had selected the side with the highest number. If they picked the top and then rolled a two, for example, they would have an incentive to claim—falsely—that they had chosen the bottom, which would be a five.

The results were that "East Germans cheated twice as much as West Germans overall," leaving the researchers to conclude the "the political regime of socialism has a lasting impact on citizens' basic morality."

The paper discusses some potentially related reasons for the outcome, such as the fact that

socialist systems have been characterized by extensive scarcity, which ultimately led to the collapse of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) in East Germany. In many instances, socialism pressured or forced people to work around official laws. For instance, in East Germany stealing a load of building materials in order to trade it for a television set might have been the only way for a driver of gravel loads to connect to the outside world. Moreover, socialist systems have been characterized by a high degree of infiltration by the intelligence apparatus.

The Duke-Munich team positions their work against a 2013 study, "Of Morals, Markets and Mice," which concluded "that market economies decay morals" but "compared decisions in bilateral and multilateral market settings to individual decisions rather than an alternative economic allocation mechanism." The new research finds that "political and economic regimes such as socialism might have an even more detrimental effect on individuals’ behavior."

In another aspect of the study, the researchers note that "we did not observe an overall difference between East and West Germans in pro-social behavior," such as donating to hospitals, the capitalist-influenced demographic does, in fact, donate marginally more.

SOURCE

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EU calls on Hamas, Islamic Jihad to disarm

The EU does something right for a change: 28-country bloc defends Israel’s right to fight, says indiscriminate rocket fire from Gaza is ‘criminal and unjustifiable’

The European Union on Tuesday called on Hamas and other Gaza terror groups to disarm, taking a strikingly pro-Israel stance and supporting the country’s “legitimate right to defend itself.”

The union’s 28 foreign ministers issued a joint statement after a meeting of the European Council, calling for an end to Hamas rocket attacks and an immediate ceasefire.  “The EU calls on Hamas to immediately put an end to these acts and to renounce violence. All terrorist groups in Gaza must disarm,” it said.

It also condemned the rocket fire at Israel from the Gaza Strip as “criminal and unjustifiable acts,” but said Israel must do more to prevent civilian casualties.

“While recognizing Israel’s legitimate right to defend itself against any attacks, the EU underlines that the Israeli military operation must be proportionate and in line with international humanitarian law,” it said.

The statement came as the Israeli and Palestinian death tolls climbed steadily, with some 30 Israelis killed since the operation began, and more than 600 Palestinians, many of them civilians, according to Palestinian officials in Hamas-run Gaza.

The EU, which is often stridently critical of Israeli policies, also decried Hamas’s “calls on the civilian population of Gaza to provide themselves as human shields.”

It said it was “extremely concerned” about the situation, and reiterated its call for an immediate ceasefire.

The EU also appealed for the open of crossings to transfer humanitarian aid to the Gaza Strip, and emphasized that the current campaign pointed to “the unsustainable nature of the status quo” in the coastal enclave.

Earlier in the day, UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon also condemned Hamas rocket fire and called on the group to stop using civilian sites for military purposes. He also called for a ceasefire.

Responding to the EU statement, Foreign Minister Avigdor Liberman said the statement proved “that the free world is united with Israel against Hamas terror, and Israel has the full right to protect itself.”

SOURCE

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The sacredness of a baby

An Israeli man instantly used his body to protect a baby




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Another Law-Abiding Citizen Arrested!

As you know, every state has its own gun laws. Even though the Second Amendment says that the “right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed” and the Supreme Court ruled in McDonald v. Chicago that this applies to the states, there are a number of gun control states that completely trample on your constitutional rights.

The People’s Republik of New Jersey is one of those states.

In the State of New Jersey, firearms are banned except for certain exemptions. It is illegal to possess a firearm unless you jump through hoops to receive an exemption.

For law-abiding citizens, that means they have to apply for a Firearms Purchaser Identification Card. The law says that police have 30-days to process these applications, but few towns even bother to meet that deadline.

Even still, an FPID only allows you to possess a gun within your home or in a locked case on the way to a gun range. If you take a gun outside of your property, you are instantly a felon.

The only way to legally take a gun outside your home in these gun control states is to obtain a License to Carry a Firearm, something that is often statistically impossible for about 26% of all Americans.

Studies have found that approximately 11.1 million Americans possess a concealed carry permit. That’s up from 4.6 million in 2007. That is significant growth. And while the number of states issuing concealed weapons permits has increased, there is still a minority of states that completely restrict concealed carry.

Approximately 3.5% of all Americans possess a concealed weapons permit. These people are certified by their home states and deemed trustworthy enough to carry a gun in public. But in many cases, states refuse to recognize the legitimacy of these permits and law-abiding citizens end up in prison over it!

But for Shaneen Allen, a licensed concealed carrier in Pennsylvania, her Second Amendment rights end at the state-line. This is an absolutely tragic story. This woman, unfortunately, wrongly assumed that her concealed weapons permit would be accepted everywhere, kind of like a drivers license. So, when she was pulled over by a New Jersey Police Officer, she wanted to be honest with him. So she told him she was a licensed concealed carrier.



Shaneen Allen was pulled over for a minor traffic violation. The police officer alleges that she improperly changed lanes. But, because she handed her concealed weapons permit to the officer along with her driver’s license, she now faces a MINIMUM of three years in prison!

The aptly named Graves Act requires that first time gun offenders receive a minimum three-year prison sentence in New Jersey.

Shaneen Allen is a black, single mother of two young children. She has no prior criminal record. Before she was arrested, she worked as a licensed phlebologist. When she was robbed two-times in just one year, she made the decision to purchase a gun to protect herself and her family. She went through the process to become a licensed concealed carrier in the State of Pennsylvania. There is zero evidence that Shaneen Allen intended to use the gun for any malicious purpose. Yet, she was still arrested. She spent a whopping FORTY days in jail before she was actually released on bail and even now, she’s facing a felony charge that, if convicted, would bring a three-year mandatory minimum prison term.

This woman made a mistake… She admits to that. But while actual criminals cop plea deals to get less prison time, the prosecutor refuses to show Shaneen Allen any leniency!

This is a textbook example of why we need National Concealed Carry Reciprocity! But when Republicans tried to insert reciprocity into a Senate bill this month, Harry Reid shot it down!

Innocent Americans are being tripped up and having their lives ruined by these ridiculous and unconstitutional concealed carry laws.

The Second Amendment is clear… It says our right to bear arms “shall not be infringed.” Yet in states like New Jersey, New York, Connecticut, Massachusetts, California, Maryland, Hawaii, Rhode Island, and Washington DC, the state does just that!

And for those who happen to travel through these gun control states, they are forced to decide between disarming and putting their families in danger or defying the law entirely.

There shouldn’t even be a law to defy! In 1986, Congress passed the Firearm Owner Protection Act (FOPA). The goal of this was to ensure that people could travel across state lines with their locked firearms without becoming felons. This law MUST be extended to concealed weapons permit holders!

There is absolutely no reason that a law-abiding citizen like Shaneen Allen should face the prospect of a felony conviction and prison time for exercising his or her constitutional rights! There is no reason that Americans should have to disarm while traveling through the most dangerous states!

The answer is simple. We must demand National Concealed Carry Reciprocity now!

SOURCE

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Living on the Fumes of Greatness

Only men over sixty have ever been subject to the military draft in America. Knowing you could be forced by government to fight in a war focuses one's attention on what's happening in the wider world beyond the peaceful shores of the Unites States. Today, however, our military is all volunteer. Fewer than 1% of Americans serve now and that's been true for decades. If you don't want to, you don't have to. Is that a good thing? I'm not so sure.

Americans under sixty have led a remarkably pampered life by world historical standards. They've grown up in the most powerful country the world has ever seen and have never been forced to seriously consider how brutal other humans can be when they're allowed. The vast majority of people who lived out their lives on this planet did so in walled cities or constantly looking over their shoulders as they moved about with weapons close at hand.

Some of us, though, have paid attention to what goes on outside our borders. Some have studied history and have come to understand that the Pax Americana we've known all our lives is more the exception than the rule. Most, however, never consider Orwell's observance that: "People sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf." We don't appreciate how fortunate we are to have been born in late-20th-century America. We still have rough men ready to do violence on our behalf, but we don't have a government that either appreciates them or knows how to use them properly.

I hate to point this out, but we're not just getting fat, dumb, and lazy; we're already here, and have been for some time. Obesity is epidemic. We don't know much about history, geography, civics, or anything else, and more than 90 million of us have dropped out of the workforce. The evidence is overwhelming that our citizenry is in serious decline. Consequently, so is our nation. More and more of us are dependent on government entitlements and, due to our ignorance of simple arithmetic, we are unaware that those expensive programs are mathematically unsustainable. Bankruptcy looms, but we keep on spending as if it weren't.

We keep reelecting a government that is a reflection of us. Paradoxically however, opinion polls indicate that we don't approve of the government for which we keep voting. Why do we continue to reelect congressmen, senators and a president we dislike? Is it because they tell us what we want to hear? Perhaps the lyric in the Sheryl Crow number applies to us: "Lie to me. I promise, I'll believe," she sang. How long can this continue though? When I ponder that, something columnist Mark Steyn wrote comes to mind: "Sometimes societies become too stupid to survive."

Peggy Noonan, former Reagan speechwriter and Wall Street Journal columnist, penned something last week that also haunts me. Commenting about the illegal alien crisis on the Mexican border, she observed: "America is the house that is both falling apart and under new stress. Those living within it, those most upset by what they're seeing, know America has big problems-unemployment, low workforce participation, a rickety physical infrastructure, an unsound culture, poor public education. And of course discord of all sorts... They know America can't pay its bills. They fear we're living on the fumes of greatness. They want us to be strong again."

"Living on the fumes of greatness." Yes. That is indeed what we're doing.

Noonan was describing Americans who do pay attention, who understand history, who know we cannot go on doing what we're doing. But I'm afraid such people are in the minority now. Remember: 52% of us reelected Barack Obama two years ago in spite of what he did in his first term. The Wednesday morning after that sad election day I was forced to realize that yes, the America in which I grew up has fundamentally changed.

First generation immigrant Dinesh D'Souza just released a movie titled, "America: Imagine The World Without Her." I haven't seen it yet, but I know what's in it. He sees what I see. I have been imagining such a world and it isn't a pretty one, because I know there are brutal people out there who ponder it gleefully. They smell American decline and they extend their probes further and further to see what they can get away with. How far will that be? I'm afraid to think.

I still choose to believe in spite of mounting evidence to the contrary that it's not too late, that enough Americans are beginning to understand we simply must turn things around.

SOURCE

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

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

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British Airways continues to fly to Israel despite European and US airlines cancelling flights

British budget airline easyJet has joined European and American operators in scrapping flights to Israel after a Hamas rocket landed close to its Ben Gurion airport.

Air France, KLM and Germany's Lufthansa have also suspended flights to the war-torn country, as have US airlines Delta, United Airlines, and US Airways under orders from the US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA).

But a spokesman for British Airways said it was still continuing its twice-daily London Heathrow to Tel Aviv services, while 'monitoring the situation closely'.

SOURCE

MH17: no link to Kremlin in plane downing - US intelligence officials say no evidence of direct Russian government involvement

The report below is probably the best informed yet and should go some way towards damping down the hysteria about President Putin.  The plane was clearly shot down by Ukrainians -- Russian speaking ones.  Given that Ukraine has resisted their demands for independence and attacked them instead (have we forgotten that Americans also once fought for their independence?), they were clearly entitled to shoot back, and, equally clearly that was what they thought they were doing in attacking the plane.  The launcher appears to have been an early model, a BUK 1 so all they may have seen on their radar was a blip that could have been Ukrainian.  As far as I can see, the only guilt lies with the Malaysian managers who sent their plane into airspace where planes were already being shot down

Senior US intelligence officials have said that Russia was responsible for "creating the conditions" that led to the shooting down of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17, but they offered no evidence of direct Russian government involvement.

The intelligence officials were cautious in their assessment, noting that while the Russians have been arming separatists in eastern Ukraine, the U.S. had no direct evidence that the missile used to shoot down the passenger jet came from Russia.

The officials briefed reporters on Tuesday under ground rules that their names not be used in discussing intelligence related to last week's air disaster, which killed 298 people.

The plane was likely shot down by an SA-11 surface-to-air missile fired by Russian-backed separatists in eastern Ukraine, the intelligence officials said, citing intercepts, satellite photos and social media postings by separatists, some of which have been authenticated by U.S. experts.

But the officials said they did not know who fired the missile or whether any Russian operatives were present at the missile launch. They were not certain that the missile crew was trained in Russia, although they described a stepped-up campaign in recent weeks by Russia to arm and train the rebels, which they say has continued even after the downing of the commercial jetliner.

In terms of who fired the missile, "we don't know a name, we don't know a rank and we're not even 100 percent sure of a nationality," one official said, adding at another point, "There is not going to be a Perry Mason moment here," a reference to a fictional detective who solved mysteries.

White House deputy national security adviser Ben Rhodes said the U.S. was still working to determine whether the missile launch had a "direct link" to Russia, including whether there were Russians on the ground during the attack and the degree to which Russians may have trained the separatists to launch such a strike.

"We do think President Putin and the Russian government bears responsibility for the support they provided to these separatists, the arms they provided to these separatists, the training they provided as well and the general unstable environment in eastern Ukraine," Rhodes said in an interview with CNN.

He added that heavy weaponry continues to flow into Ukraine from Russia following the downing of the plane.

The intelligence officials said the most likely explanation for the downing was that the rebels made a mistake. Separatists previously had shot down 12 Ukrainian military airplanes, the officials said.

The officials made clear they were relying in part on social media postings and videos made public in recent days by the Ukrainian government, even though they have not been able to authenticate all of it. For example, they cited a video of a missile launcher said to have been crossing the Russian border after the launch, appearing to be missing a missile.

But later, under questioning, the officials acknowledged they had not yet verified that the video was exactly what it purported to be.

Despite the fuzziness of some details, however, the intelligence officials said the case that the separatists were responsible for shooting down the plane was solid. Other scenarios - such as that the Ukrainian military shot down the plane - are implausible, they said. No Ukrainian surface-to-air missile system was in range.

From satellites, sensors and other intelligence gathering, officials said, they know where the missile originated - in separatist-held territory - and what its flight path was. But if they possess satellite or other imagery of the missile being fired, they did not release it Tuesday. A graphic they made public depicts their estimation of the missile's flight path with a green line. The jet's flight path was available from air traffic control data.

In the weeks before the plane was shot down, Russia had stepped up its arming and training of the separatists after the Ukrainian government won a string of battlefield victories. The working theory is that the SA-11 missile came from Russia, although the U.S. doesn't have proof of that, the officials said.

U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Samantha Powers said last week that "because of the technical complexity of the SA-11, it is unlikely that the separatists could effectively operate the system without assistance from knowledgeable personnel. Thus, we cannot rule out technical assistance from Russian personnel in operating the systems," she said.

Asked about evidence, one of the senior U.S. intelligence officials said it was conceivable that Russian paramilitary troops are operating in eastern Ukraine, but that there was no direct link from them to the missile launch.

Asked why civilian airline companies were not warned about a possible threat, the officials said they did not know the rebels possessed SA-11 missiles until after the Malaysian airliner was shot down.

SOURCE

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Israel's shoes



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How to Control Soaring Health Costs

The US healthcare system is in crisis and everything points in the wrong direction. The population is rapidly aging and will thus consume ever larger amounts of healthcare while the tax base supporting these benefits shrinks. Meanwhile the definition of "medical problem" expands so tribulations once judged moral failings. e.g., alcoholism, are legally treatable illnesses.

And let's not forget the growing tide of gender disorders that might require state-paid wienerectomies and the influx of illegals, many who are already sick, happy to use "free" ER's and hospitals. Modern medicine has also shown a knack for uncovering new problems that were once judged normal, for example, Attention Deficit Disorder. Further add Obamacare and similar insurance measures encouraging the over-use of medicine for self-inflicted problems like obesity. Then there are the modern plagues of AIDS, SARS and various super-bug illnesses. Conceivably, Washington may eventually become little more than a health provider.            

Alas, no solutions exist on today's agenda. Forget about rationing-unthinkable politically ("death panels"). Nor will technological fixes suffice-too costly-while future bargain basement medical breakthroughs are pure fantasy.        

Fortunately, there is a cost effective, politically popular solution to our healthcare woes. Just reinvigorate medical practices that do not entail scientific medicine. We are speaking of what is often called "alternative medicine" and the advantages here are immense.

Most important, compared to science-based practices, the "alternative" options are always cheaper. No need to spend years and huge sums training practitioners, conducting tedious laboratory research, funding million dollar FDA trials or building high-tech facilities. I probably could sample every elixir in my local Chinese herb shop for less than a single overnight stay at Mt. Sinai Hospital.  All and all, these non-traditional interventions will save billions, lighten the caseloads of doctors and hospitals while simultaneously allowing Washington to address other issues such as a stronger military. The only fly in the ointment is expanding their use but compared to all the other cost-saving measures, obstacles here are minor.

Promoting alternative medicine is not all that difficult. Dr. Paul Offit's Do You Believe in Magic? reveals the great allure of non-scientific treatments. Why not? Given a choice of making an appointment, visiting the doctor, waiting for an hour or so, forced to strip prior to being examined, shipped off to multiple invasive tests, anxiously awaiting the telephone call ("the doctor would like to see you again...no I can't say why") and then navigating all the resulting paperwork, a web search for some inexpensive magic pill ("that Big Pharma doesn't want you to know about") is less time- consuming and far more pleasant.

Moreover, "folksy" approaches are already appreciated regardless of what the men in the white coats say. One survey found that 88% of the public agreed that "...there are some good ways of treating sickness that medical science does not recognize."  Belief in miracles abound. Steve Jobs, hardly Mr. Stupid and a man who could pay for the best modern medicine money could buy, put off surgery that would have successfully treated his cancer in favor of nine months of acupuncture, fruit juices, bowel cleansing, and various herbs.

Add some seductive verbiage about the putative cures being rooted in ancient Egyptian wisdom, cures favored by disease-free Amazon jungle Indians, or remedies endorsed by sundry mystical swamis. It's hard to imagine why any man would schedule a hospital visit for a potentially risky prostate biopsy when a half dozen or more "improve prostate health" pills are available at Walgreens, all endorsed by the 18 year-old clerk. Then there's homeopathy, naturopathy, aroma therapy and energy medicine (magnets). Or maybe try crystal therapy or just wearing a copper bracelet or religious options-prayer, lighting candles, visiting holy shrines, holy water, and on-the-spot cures from faith healers. It is not that these remedies are useless-perhaps some do perform as advertised-but it is the cost that concerns us here.

Now for the good news. "Alternative medicine" is on the rise. The federal government's The National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine is now part of the National Institute of Health. Its research has shown, for example, the benefits of mindfulness meditation in reducing suicide. The world famous Cleveland Clinic now has a center for Integrative Medicine that is exploring acupuncture, massage therapy and Chinese herbs. Many medical schools and hospitals now teach alternative medicine. Medical marijuana is quickly becoming legal everywhere and the cost is trivial compared to what Big Pharma can offer.

So, what is to be done to push yet more people away from budget-busting science-based medicine? The first step is to enhance legitimacy and let me suggest wrapping it in multiculturalism. Now, for example, the Afro-Caribbean Santería ceremonies to drive out the devils, even if it demands sacrificing a chicken or two, should be viewed as no different from seeing a doctor. And, with official recognition as a "valid cultural expression," government money will arrive just as it funds culturally diverse art exhibitions, theater groups and similar celebrate-our- differences activities.

These more culturally attuned healthcare programs should be ongoing 24/7 and be conveniently located to help the sick, no different than current expensive neighborhood convenient care clinics. Surely many inner-city churches would gladly rent their basements to Sharmans and Voodoo priests to work their magic on those suspicious of regular doctors. Upscale neighborhoods would now have $5.00 co-pay centers for transcendental meditation, multiple therapeutic yoga's, deep breathing, macrobiotic body cleansing regimens and the ancient Tibetan medicinal Ggso ba rig pa.  Muslims would of course have their own alternatives. Again, it is a matter of cost, not efficacy per se.

Now for the bottom line: let Washington pay for it, every last secret potion and animal sacrifice of it. I'd guess that each of these alternative medical treatments would cost one-tenth of what the average Medicare- paid doctor visit costs. A brilliant bi-partisan political ploy, to boot-it saves tons of money while giving millions just what they want. Just what the doctor ordered.    

SOURCE

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Does your race determine your biological age? Controversial research claims black people age more quickly - and are up to THREE YEARS older in health terms

Africans mature earlier too, by about two years

Black people age more quickly than white people, a controversial new study has claimed.

Researchers say that the researcher could shed new light on higher mortality rates in black people.  They say the biological age differences by race increase up until ages 60-69, and then decline.

The current study uses data on 7,644 black and white participants, ages 30 and above, from the third National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey.

The researchers calculated each participant’s 'biological age' by looking at 10 biomarkers that have been linked to aging, including C-reactive protein, serum creatinine, glycosylated hemoglobin, systolic blood pressure, and total cholesterol.

The team compared then compared biological ages of blacks and whites as indicated from the biomarkers.

'Our results showed that, on average, blacks tend to be more than three years older biologically than whites,' Morgan Levine and Eileen Crimmins of the University of Southern California’s Davis School of Gerontology. wrote in the journal Social Science and Medicine.

'Blacks experience morbidity and mortality earlier in the life course compared to whites.'  'This is consistent with findings from previous studies reporting that blacks tend to have levels of biological risk factors that are indicative of someone significantly older chronologically.'  'Such premature declines in health may be indicative of an acceleration of the aging process.'

The researchers calculated each participant’s 'biological age' by looking at 10 biomarkers that have been linked to aging, including C-reactive protein, serum creatinine, glycosylated hemoglobin, systolic blood pressure, and total cholesterol.

The study uses data on 7,644 black and white participants, ages 30 and above, from the third National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey.

'On average, the biological age for blacks was 53.16 years,' compared to 49.84 years for whites, the researchers report.

The team say the cause could be stress-related.

'Everyday stressors associated with being black may negatively impact physiological functioning and, under chronic exposure, accumulate over the lifespan and contribute to growing disparities in biological risk,' the authors wrote.

'Furthermore, if such environmental, behavioral, and mental factors contribute to an acceleration of the aging process, we would expect that persons who are aging the fastest should have the highest risk of mortality, and thus (have a) lower life expectancy.'

SOURCE

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

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

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