A new denial that Hitler was a socialist

Tim Stanley is an historian so his denial that Hitler was a socialist is not the sheer ignorance that one usually encounters.  The clue to his skepticism lies however early in his article.  He says of Hitler:  "He may well have been anticapitalist, but that does not necessarily mean that his concept of socialism sits within the Marxist tradition".

That sentence is very curious indeed.  How could Hitler be anticapitalist and NOT be socialist? "Anticapitalist" and "socialist" are pretty near synonyms.  (Yes. I know about Bismarck.  That's another story and a fascinating one but I have written on that elsewhere -- e.g. here).  But by the time we get to the end of the sentence we see what is going on.  Stanley's Leftist background is showing.  Like many academic Leftists, socialism is to Stanley synonymous with Marxism.

So Leftist leaders like Tony Blair are not socialists?  Blair is certainly no Marxist but he was one of the most electorally successful leaders the British Labour party has had. So Stanley is saying only that Hitler is not a Marxist.  But who would disagree with that?  Hitler hated Bolshevism.

But some of the great hates in life stem from sibling rivalry and anybody who has spent much time talking to Leftists will know how much sibling rivalry there is among them. It is very common on the Left -- witness the icepick in the head that Trotsky got courtesy of Stalin. Very few of the old Bolsheviks lived for long after the revolution, in fact.

And Lenin was just as bad as Stalin. In a 1920 pamphlet you find a contempt for some of his fellow Leftists that is probably greater than anything he ever wrote about the Tsar. It is in describing his fellow revolutionaries (Kautsky and others) that Lenin spoke swingeingly of "the full depth of their stupidity, pedantry, baseness and betrayal of working-class interests". But Leftism is founded on hate so such hate for fellow Leftists is no surprise.

So Stanley starts out on a very false footing.

Stanley's other objections to the view of Hitler as a socialist boil down to saying that Hitler was hypocritical.  He said one thing to intimates and different things in public.  But surely that just makes him a politician?  He was one.  He fought many elections.  To judge any political figure by what they do in private is rather hilarious in fact.  Fidel Castro surely has earned his stripes as a socialist but he lives the privileged and luxurious of the Hispanic grandee that he is. Tito was similar.  Remember him?

I myself make no judgment about what Hitler really believed.  As  far as one can tell, it was a bit of a hodge-podge, though his antisemitism was probably heartfelt.  Even his antisemitism was Leftist in his days, however.  The founder of Germany's mainstream Leftist party, August Bebel, famously noted that "Antisemitismus ist der Sozialismus des blöden Mannes" -- generally translated as "Antisemitism is the socialism of fools".  Antisemitism was in other words very common among pre-war socialists.  And Lenin himself alluded to the same phenomenon in saying that "it is not the Jews who are the enemies of the working people" but "the capitalists of all countries."  He wanted class-war and saw antisemitism among his fellow Leftists as a distraction from that.

So what is of interest is surely not what Hitler believed in his heart of hearts but rather what he preached to the German public.  What was his appeal?  How did he campaign?  What did he promise in his rise to power?

And there is no doubt about that. Perhaps the most amazing parallel between Hitler and the postwar Left is that for much of the 30s Hitler was actually something of a peacenik. I am putting up below a picture of a Nazi propaganda poster of the 1930s that you won't believe unless you are aware of how readily all Leftists preach one thing and do another. It reads "Mit Hitler gegen den Ruestungswahnsinn der Welt".



And what does that mean? It means "With Hitler against the armaments madness of the world". "Ruestung" could more precisely be translated as "military preparations" but "armaments" is a bit more idiomatic in English.

And how about the poster below? It would be from the March 5, 1933 election when Hitler had become Chancellor but Marshall Hindenburg was still President:



Translated, the poster reads: "The Marshall and the corporal fight alongside us for peace and equal rights"

Can you get a more Leftist slogan than that? "Peace and equal rights"? Modern-day Leftists sometimes try to dismiss Hitler's socialism as something from his early days that he later outgrew. But when this poster was promulgated he was already Reichskanzler (Prime Minister) so it was far from early days.

We can all have our own views about what Hitler actually believed but he campaigned and gained power as a democratic Leftist. The March 5, 1933 election was the last really democratic election prewar Germany had and, in it, Hitler's appeal was Leftist.

There are more such election posters here

Stanley also makes the undoubtedly correct point that Hitler was a nationalist.  Since "Nazi" is a German abbreviation of "National Socialist" that is no news.  But can you be both a nationalist and a socialist?  Hitler showed that you can be.  But he was not original in that.  Napoleon was too.  And who was it who said, "Ask not what your country can do for you.  Ask what you can do for your country"?  It was Pericles actually, but Democrat hero JFK recycled it -- JR

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Little Yazidi children murdered by ISIS



Note that the Yazidis are not Arabs.  They are an ancient Indo-European race, akin to modern-day Europeans

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RULES OF ENGAGEMENT, OBAMA STYLE

Retired US Lieutenant General David Deptula said recently, “The ultimate guidance (regarding air strikes in Iraq) rests with the black guy with his feet on the desk. Over three quarters of pilots leaving Gulf carriers are returning without dropping anything due to delays in decision-making up the chain of command in Obama's War council.”

Sources involved in the air war against ISIS said that, “Strike missions take on average just under an hour from a pilot requesting permission to strike an ISIS target to a weapon leaving the wing so by that time the insurgents have either vanished or we are out of fuel”.

After Obama had changed the rules of engagement (ROE) in Afghanistan in 2011, immediately US combat troop deaths tripled.

Marines complained that they needed to watch through their night-vision goggles as shadowy green figures dug holes in the roadway. “On several occasions we opened fire but at some point, the order came down to ‘Stop shooting at night unless you can positively identify an insurgent’. We knew what they were doing ... burying IEDs for sure, but command instructed us that, ‘You can't be positive. They might be farmers.' It’s ridiculous”, they said.

Also under orders from the Obama Administration, a new military handbook was published for all U.S. troops deployed to the Middle East which contained a list of “taboo conversation topics”. It included:

 *  “Making derogatory comments about the Taliban.”
 *  “Advocating women’s rights.”
 *  “Any criticism of paedophilia.”
 *  “Mentioning homosexuality and homosexual conduct,” or
 *  “Anything related to Islam itself.”

Furthermore, Obama had noted in his handbook that, “The tripling in deadly attacks by Afghan soldiers against US forces was due to Western ignorance of Afghan culture”. Hmmm.

Obama’s revised ROE in Iraq has meant airstrike missions have dropped from a planned 800 per day to 14, through pilots’ inability to engage targets.

The pilot must first determine that no more than 10 per cent of any target would involve civilians and in no case no more than 30 civilians must be at risk at any time. If in any doubt, permission must be sought from higher up the line of command.

Only women can search women, even when a male is suspected of wearing a burkah. No night or surprise searches are allowed. Households have to be warned prior to searches. U.S. soldiers may not fire at the enemy unless the enemy is preparing to fire first.

U.S. forces cannot engage the enemy if civilians are present.
If Iraqi soldiers are present US troops can fire at an insurgent if they see him planting an IED during the day, but not at night and not if insurgents are merely, “walking away from the area where the explosives have been laid”.

The recent fall of Ramadi was anticipated 12 months ago when US intelligence first detected a slow build-up of ISIS forces on the western perimeter, yet targeting of those forces using air strikes was not given clearance by US command.

The ISIS can peruse the revised Obama ROEs on the internet at any time, courtesy of Wikileaks, yet no changes appear to have been made to the rules. So mosques have become weapons caches, male suicide bombers dress in burkahs, ISIS militia will not open fire on US troops unless surrounded by civilians and, as long as they are not shooting at things, convoys of ISIS artillery can move freely on open roadways without fear of being shot at.

Can America sustain 18 more months of the Obama/Kerry twins, with the corrupt Clintons in the wings?

SOURCE

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The Founders’ Model of Welfare Actually Reduced Poverty

Which approach to welfare policy is better for the poor: that of the Founders or that of today’s welfare state?

The more we spend on the poor, the harder it seems for them to attain decent, productive lives in loving families. The federal government has spent $22 trillion on anti-poverty programs since the beginning of the War on Poverty in 1965, but the poverty rate is nearly the same today as in 1969, fluctuating between roughly 11 and 15 percent over that time period.

As I argue in a new essay on “Poverty and Welfare in the American Founding,” these results are bound to continue unless we rethink welfare policy from the perspective of our Founders. Neither the contemporary left nor right in America properly understands their approach.

The left often claims the Founders were indifferent to the poor—suggesting that New Deal America ended callousness and indifference. Indeed, high school and college textbooks frequently espouse this narrative. Many on the right think the Founders advocated only for charitable donations as the means of poverty relief.

Neither is correct. America always has had laws providing for the poor. The real difference between the Founders’ welfare policies and today’s is over how, not whether, government should help those in need.

The Founders

Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin believed government has an obligation to help the poor. Both thought welfare policies should support children, the disabled, widows and others who could not work. But any aid policy, they insisted, would include work-requirements for the able-bodied.

Rather than making welfare a generational inheritance, Franklin thought it should assist the poor in overcoming poverty as expediently as possible: “I am for doing good to the poor.…I think the best way of doing good to the poor, is not making them easy in poverty, but leading or driving them out of it.”

Moreover, local, rather than federal, officials administered this welfare, since they were more likely to know the particular needs of recipients and could distinguish between the deserving poor (the disabled and involuntarily unemployed) and the undeserving poor (those capable of work but preferring not to).

The Founders sought to provide aid in a way that would help the deserving poor but minimize incentives for recipients to act irresponsibly. They wanted to protect the rights of taxpayers by preventing corruption and abuses in welfare aid.

Above all, the Founders saw the family and life-long marriage as the primary means of support for everyone, rich and poor alike.

Modern Welfare

By the mid-20th century, intellectual opinion began to peel away the stigma attached to the behavioral aspects of poverty, and progressive politicians increased the benefits and number of welfare recipients.

During the New Deal, despite major expansions of welfare programs, the Founders’ approach remained intact at least to this extent: These programs still distinguished between the deserving and undeserving poor—a distinction based on moral conduct.

Until the mid-1960s, free markets, secure property rights, strong family policy and minimal taxation and regulation supported a culture of work and entrepreneurship. But through the rise of modern liberalism’s redefinition of rights and justice, welfare was officially reconceived as a right that could be demanded by anyone in need, regardless of conduct or circumstances.

Among the most destructive features of the post-1965 welfare regime has been its unintentional dismantling of the family. By making welfare wages higher than working wages, the government essentially replaced fathers with a government check. The state became many families’ primary provider.

Even more perverse, for many single mothers, marrying a working man may actually be a financial burden rather than a support because the marriage can diminish government benefits.

Though modern welfare programs grant more benefits to a greater number of individuals than the Founders ever fathomed, the Founders’ approach to welfare policy was effective in providing for the minimal needs of the poor and dramatically reducing poverty over time. Based on today’s living standards, the poverty rate fell from something like 90 percent in the Founding era to 12 percent by 1969.

If the goal of welfare is to provide for those in need while respecting the rights of all, Americans would do well to ponder the Founders’ outlook on welfare as a limited system, concerned with helping the poor who truly are in need and encouraging those who are able to work to leave their poverty behind as soon as possible.

SOURCE

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For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated) and Coral reef compendium. (Updated as news items come in).  GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten. I also put up occasional updates on my Personal blog and each day I gather together my most substantial current writings on A WESTERN HEART.

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

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Hiding Something? Mosby Blocks Gray Autopsy

“Baltimore State’s Attorney Marilyn Mosby plans to seek a protective order that would block the release of Freddie Gray’s autopsy report and other ‘sensitive’ documents as she prosecutes the six police officers involved in his arrest,” reports The Baltimore Sun. The rationale Mosby gave the paper is understandable enough: That prosecutors “have a duty to ensure a fair and impartial process for all parties involved” and “will not be baited into litigating this case through the media.”

Except that Mosby herself litigated the case in repeated press conferences as events were unfolding, leading to riots in the city. The truth about hiding the autopsy is probably better explained by what an attorney for one of the police officers said: “[T]here is something in that autopsy report that they are trying to hide.”

Given how the autopsy of Michael Brown largely if not completely vindicated Officer Darren Wilson, it wouldn’t be surprising if Mosby was trying to retain some justification for pursuing the six Baltimore officers so harshly — one has been charged with second-degree murder. It wouldn’t be fun for her to lose her case in the media.

SOURCE

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Freedom for Iran's hostages should trump any nuclear deal

by Jeff Jacoby

IN HIS remarks to the White House Correspondents' Dinner in April, President Obama pledged that his administration would work tirelessly for the freedom of Jason Rezaian, the Washington Post reporter who has been held hostage by Iran since last summer on spurious espionage charges.

"Jason has been in prison for nothing more than writing about the hopes and fears of the Iranian people," Obama said. "We will not rest until we bring him home to his family, safe and sound."

Yet just four days later, the president warned Congress that he would veto any bill making approval of a nuclear deal with Iran contingent on the release of Americans in Iranian captivity. Obama may want the mullahs to set their US hostages free. But he wants that nuclear deal more.

On Monday, Obama boasted to a gathering of young Southeast Asian leaders that as a result of his policies, "today, once again, the United States is the most respected country on earth." Could anyone swallow such a risible claim without, as Hillary Clinton might put it, the willing suspension of disbelief? It's hard to think of any nation on the planet that holds America in higher esteem because of the Obama presidency. Iran surely doesn't. Time and again, the White House has bent over backward to "engage" the Islamist regime in Tehran. At every step its overtures have been greeted with scorn.

The seizure of innocent Americans like Rezaian — whose trial, in a closed courtroom, began last week — fits a pattern of hostility that seven years of outreach and indulgence by the Obama administration has failed to soften. "We will extend a hand if you are willing to unclench your fist," entreated the president in his first inaugural address. But Iran's theocratic leaders have not unclenched their fists, not even when it would appear to be in their interest to do so.

The nuclear accord being pushed so fervently by Obama and John Kerry would be a dream come true for the Islamic Republic's rulers — generating tens of billions of dollars in sanctions relief, legitimizing their eventual path to the bomb, and entrenching Iran's malignant regional hegemony. Yet hungry as they are for this deal, they know that Obama is hungrier still. No provocation, no act of aggression, no insult by Iran has been enough to make the White House walk away from the negotiations.

Rezaian isn't the only US hostage in Iranian hands. Saeed Abedini, 35, is a Christian pastor from Idaho who was arrested in 2012 while on a humanitarian trip to Iran to help establish an orphanage. He was convicted in 2013 "undermining the national security of Iran" and sentenced to eight years in prison. Amir Hekmati, a decorated US Marine, was born in Arizona and raised in Michigan. He was seized in 2011 while visiting his grandmother in Iran, accused of spying, and sentenced to death (a sentence later commuted pending a retrial). Robert Levinson, a former FBI agent, vanished during a trip to Iran in 2007. Iran's state-run media reported at the time that he was in the hands of the security services, making him one of the longest-held US hostages ever.

The brazen detention of American citizens is an outrage. The refusal of the White House to call a halt to negotiations until the men are released is a humiliation. Iran has an odious history of abducting guiltless Americans, then using them as bargaining chips to trade for some concession from Washington. You'd think Washington would have learned by now that ransoming hostages only reinforces the incentive to seize more hostages in the future.

It is mind-boggling that the president would threaten to veto a measure making the freedom of the four US citizens the price of any more nuclear talks. Can Obama truly believe that this is the way to make America "the most respected country on earth"?

SOURCE

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The Obama Administration’s Transparency Crisis

By Tom Fitton, president of Judicial Watch

The federal government is bigger than ever, and also the most secretive in recent memory. President Obama famously promised his would be the most transparent administration in history, but federal agencies under his leadership are often black holes in terms of disclosure. I’ll be testifying to the House Government Reform and Oversight Committee today, chaired by Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-UT) on the Obama transparency crisis.

The secrecy at the federal level is pervasive. Judicial Watch has filed nearly 3,000 FOIA requests with the Obama administration and nearly 225 FOIA lawsuits in federal court. Most of these lawsuits are filed just to get a “yes or no” answer from the administration. Agencies have built administrative hurdles and stonewalled even the most basic FOIA requests. The Obama administration’s casual law-breaking when it comes to FOIA is a national disgrace and shows contempt for the American people’s right to know what their government is doing.

Transparency is about self-government. If we don’t know what the government is doing, how can we govern ourselves?

There is a way out. Judicial Watch shows that one citizen group, using the Freedom of Information Act and independent oversight, can help the American people bring their government under control, having obtained numerous, shocking documents that had been denied to Congress.

It was Judicial Watch that uncovered a declassified email showing it was the Obama White House that put out the lie that the Benghazi attack was “rooted in an Internet video, and not a failure of policy,” leading Speaker Boehner to appoint the Select Committee on Benghazi. Judicial Watch has since obtained numerous other Benghazi records which highlight the administration’s extensive cover-up.

It was Judicial Watch which forced out key info about lost and then “unlost” Lois Lerner emails and how President Obama was lying when he suggested his IRS scandal was the result of boneheaded decisions by low level bureaucrats in Ohio. The documents show the IRS hit on the Tea Party was run out of D.C. and included the Justice Department and FBI.

Of course, these revelations have been surpassed in the media by the Clinton email and financial scandals. Judicial Watch has at least 18 lawsuits, 10 of which are active in federal court, and about 160 Judicial Watch Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests, that could be affected by Mrs. Clinton and her staff’s use of secret email accounts to conduct official government business.

Most recently, Judicial Watch filed a lawsuit against Secretary of State John Kerry to compel him, as an executive agency head, to fulfill his obligation under the Federal Records Act to obtain and provide Clinton’s emails to the American people.

FOIA is a straightforward tool that gives Judicial Watch, the media, and citizens access to the federal courts in order to ensure compliance with lawful records requests.  This is why we get documents that Congress can’t. Liberals running the media won’t do the hard work that our lawyers and investigators do — not because they don’t know how or don’t have the resources – but because independent investigative reporting has been subsumed by the politics of protecting Obama and his “progressivism.”

Truth fears no inquiry. Crafty, corrupt politicians realize that transparency and accountability go hand-in-hand. If the Obama administration truly had nothing to hide, it would not go to such extraordinary lengths to keep vital information from the public.

Renewed congressional interest in reforming FOIA is a positive sign. Reforms must be significant and provide more access to information to the American people. Additionally, Congress should apply the freedom of information concept to itself and the courts, which are both exempt from executive transparency laws.

Our Founders were keenly aware of the need for accountability and transparency in our government. James Madison wrote, “A popular government without popular information, or the means of acquiring it, is but a prologue to a Farce or a Tragedy, or perhaps both.”

We can only hope that members of Congress today take Madison’s warning to heart. Today’s hearing is a start.

SOURCE

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Obamacare’s Muse: The UK’s NHS

As I previously discussed in Townhall Finance, real and sustainable private investment is being held back in large part due to the regime uncertainty caused by such regulations as Dodd-Frank, Obamacare and climate change. In fact, I first pointed this out publicly as one of the guest speakers at a large Tea Party rally on Tax Day 2010 in Appleton WI.

Given the large and rising costs of healthcare in the US (eg 17.9% of GDP in 2014, up 5% from 1999), it is understandable that many Americans voted for reform. But Obamacare will only make the already government-centric American system even worse in terms of costs, prices, quality, innovation and care (including more bureaucratic rationing).

If Obamacare is not repealed and replaced by a more free market style system, then it will over time become more and more like its inspiration or muse of the UK’s National Health Service (NHS) … where each regulatory failure calls forthmore regulation ad infinitum. As a late great economist once pointed out in the context of Hillarycare:

“On the free market, the consumer is ‘king or queen’ and the providers are always trying to make profits and gain customers by serving them well. But when government operates a service, the consumer is transmuted into a ‘pain-in-the-neck’, a ‘wasteful’ user-up of scarce social resources.” – Murray N. Rothbard

It thus seems appropriate to revisit the NHS. In doing this, I not only can offer my perspective as an economist but also as a patient of the NHS in the late 2000s. I have also been a patient of the US health care system in the 2010s, and of the Australian system for many years from the late 1980s. Although all three systems are far from perfect, the UK’s is a distant third place in my experience, including (no doubt surprisingly to most American liberals) the pervasiveness of ‘cold and uncaring’ NHS staff that I encountered from almost day one in the UK.

The NHS has for many years been referred to glowingly by the US liberal elite. One of these admirers of the NHS is former Obama ‘technocrat’ at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), Dr Donald Berwick.

Dr Berwick has described the NHS as: “universal, accessible, excellent, and free at the point of care – a health system that is, at its core, like the world we wish we had: generous, hopeful, confident, joyous, and just.” And he added: “I am romantic about the NHS; I love it.” Perhaps this ‘love affair’ with the NHS is driven by his belief that: “Any health care funding plan that is just, equitable, civilized and humane must redistribute wealth from the richer among us to the poorer and the less fortunate. Excellent health care is by definition, redistributional.”

The NHS has its origins in the rise of western Progressivism (such as UK Fabian Socialism) and Imperial Germany’s mandated health insurance from the 1880s onwards. Again we can see the ‘Bootleggers and Baptists” phenomenon in action, with the ‘Progressives’ and ‘Fabians’ playing the role of the ‘Baptists’ and with the ‘Iron Chancellor of Germany’ and his cronies as the ‘Bootleggers’.

The NHS came into being in the late 1940s, with the express goal of providing the best and most up-to-date health care services available to anyone who wanted it free-of-charge. It was to do this by essentially nationalizing the entire health care sector in the UK. The NHS has since then grown to be the largest employer in Europe, employing more than one million people.

As demand is not constrained by market prices, the NHS has mainly resorted to rationing of services in the face of excess demand, which has resulted in the NHS’ infamous queuing. As Michael Tanner of the Cato Institute has previously highlighted, as many as 750,000 Britons were awaiting admission to NHS hospitals in 2007. Cancer patients, for example, can wait as long as 8 months for treatment resulting in nearly 20% of colon cancer patients, considered treatable when first diagnosed, being incurable by the time treatment is finally offered. The waiting times for many other less urgent procedures have usually been measured in months, with one in eight patients still waiting more than a year.

Less obvious than the quantity of services provided, is the non-stop rising costs to the British taxpayer. Dr Helen Evans of the UK’s Nurses for Reform pointed out that, even in between the 1944 ‘White Paper’ and the 1948 start of the NHS, the budget was already being revised upwards by nearly 75%. In its first year of operation, the NHS actually costed over 230% more than originally estimated. The main driver behind these cost overruns was the assumption that demand would remain roughly constant despite services being delivered ‘free’ at the point-of-use. Nominal charges have been introduced over the years, with negligible impact.

Capital investment in new, expanded and renovated hospitals was minimal until the great ‘Hospital Plan’ of the early 1960s. In fact, a significant proportion of the inherited NHS hospitals predated the First World War and, despite this, not a single new hospital was built during the first decade of the NHS. The ‘Plan’ aimed, over the course of a decade or more, to build 90 new hospitals, drastically remodel 134 more and provide 356 further improvement schemes. Even by the 1990s the ‘Plan’ remained unfulfilled, with only a third of the projects completed and a third not yet started.

Of course, the news headlines are more dominated by quality of service issues. As of 2008 in many NHS hospitals, more than 10% of patients were picking up infections and illnesses they did not have prior to being admitted. And up to 60% of NHS hospital patients could be undernourished during inpatient stays.

All of these worrying themes have continued unabated through to the present. Despite all of this, the NHS is still a ‘sacred cow’ in the UK, and the prospects for even minor free market friendly reforms in the foreseeable future are still very slim indeed.

Given the benchmark of the NHS, the future of Obamacare is perhaps best encapsulated by two former HHS ‘apparatchiks’ who purportedly said:

“National Health Insurance means combining the efficiency of the Postal Service with the compassion of the IRS … and the cost accounting of the Pentagon.” – Dr Louis Sullivan & Constance Horner

SOURCE

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For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated) and Coral reef compendium. (Updated as news items come in).  GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten. I also put up occasional updates on my Personal blog and each day I gather together my most substantial current writings on A WESTERN HEART.

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

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The Media's Worst Liberal Brain Cramps

Journalists are supposed to be the most informed members of society. Nothing is supposed to get past the iron traps in their brains. So which one of these concepts sounds more like a brain cramp?

1. Why would Hillary Clinton avoid taking questions from the press now that she's running for president? She's fantastic at defending herself when the scandals mount.

2. President Obama has run an administration amazingly free of scandal. Not just the president, but also everyone he has chosen to serve has been a pillar of integrity.

These are actual concepts forwarded on television in the last few days.

The first concept came from New York Times reporter Jeremy Peters on June 2 on MSNBC — a channel that warmly welcomes Democratic delusions. "She's really good at answering questions. Like, Hillary is no slouch when it comes to putting her on the defensive. ... I don't understand why the campaign isn't allowing her to showcase her strengths."

USA Today reporter Susan Page espoused the same nonsense, also on MSNBC, on May 19. "She can handle any question you throw at her. It's a mystery to me why she doesn't want to take a couple questions every day so that this is isn't a story, and so she has a chance to respond to negative stories that are out there and to make her case, because she does it very well."

Former Republican press aide Nicolle Wallace quickly underlined for Peters that Hillary's answers weren't always brilliant, like when she told Diane Sawyer that she and Bill were "dead broke" after leaving the White House. "You don't have to explain to anybody how troubling it is for Hillary Clinton — who hasn't driven herself in her own vehicle in 20 years — to call herself flat broke."

There are Hillary's politically inept answers ... and then there are Hillary's smear answers, like a "vast right-wing conspiracy" somehow made Monica Lewinsky tempt her husband into adultery, and then have him lie under oath.

What Peters and Page might be implying in code is: "Why wouldn't you talk to us? We love you. We voted for you. We'll explain away any criticism of your answers."

Hillary has every reason to avoid questions. She might be forced to provide real answers. Bill and Hillary's complete evisceration of weak State Department rules of disclosure about their foundation donors? The bumbling of Benghazi? Both issues are political TNT.

The second concept has been around a long time, and it only gets more delusional as the Obama presidency elapses. David Brooks, the so-called conservative or Republican "leaner" on the "PBS NewsHour," responded to the indictment of former House Speaker Dennis Hastert by claiming "President Obama has run an amazingly scandal-free administration, not only he himself, but the people around him. He's chosen people who have been pretty scandal-free."

So forget Operation Fast and Furious and Solyndra, the IRS targeting conservatives and the Veteran Administration's lies and treatment delays. Forget about all the false Obamacare promises, Benghazi and the Bowe Bergdahl-terrorist swap. Delusional journalists still pretend on national television that Obama & Co. have succeeded in the boast that they're the most ethical and transparent administration in our history.

Perhaps the most embarrassing scandal avoidance for journalists is avoiding the scandal of the Obama administration's treatment of reporters — utter contempt, along with more leak investigations than any other in history. For a journalist to call the man "scandal-free" is to surrender his own professional self-respect. But this is nothing new for most journalists. They've done it for years.

SOURCE

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Socialist 'Justice'

Protestors demand “social justice.” I hate their chant. If I oppose their cause, then I’m for social “injustice”? Nonsense.

The protesters usually want to punish capitalism. “Spread those resources,” says Hillary Clinton.

Even capitalists often make the mistake of talking about “social justice” as if it’s the opposite of free markets or a reason to rein in markets with more regulations or redistribution of wealth. But there’s nothing “just” about the leftist protesters' claimed solution: more big government.

Oliver Stone, Sean Penn and Harry Belafonte praised Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez for his socialist revolution. Chavez then proceeded to destroy much of his country.

Even after his death, his portrait remains on walls everywhere and his policies live on. They haven’t produced social justice, unless your idea of “justice” is privileges for government officials and shortages of basics like food and toilet paper for ordinary people.

Only socialism could take an oil-rich nation and turn it into one where people wait in line for hours for survival rations.

The left-wing Guardian newspaper quotes a Venezuelan farmer saying that Chavez’s policies left Venezuela with “no one to explain why a rich country has no food.”

Not many people in Venezuela give such explanations — the government censors its critics — but free-market economists can explain.

Goods don’t get matched to consumer needs by anyone’s burning desire for justice. The amazing coordination of the marketplace happens because sellers and buyers are free. Sellers can sell whatever they choose at prices they choose. Buyers decide whether to pay. That flexibility — and chance to make a profit — is what persuades people to create what customers want and risk their own money and safety to stock it in a store.

Without the free market setting prices and allocating resources, all the cries of “justice” in the world don’t help anyone. You can’t eat justice. You can’t use it as toilet paper.

Intellectuals, activists and government alike love it when politicians take “tough,” decisive action — usually meaning sudden interference in the marketplace. A year and a half ago, Venezuelan government used the military to seize control of Daka, one of the country’s largest retailers, in order to force the chain to charge “fair” prices. Punish those rich, greedy store-owners!

Surprise! That didn’t work. The chain is now collapsing as looters take what they want.

Socialists say capitalists just want to make a quick buck, but it’s government that can’t plan for the long haul.

Instead of thinking in terms of returns on investment and sustainable business models, socialists think only of today: They see people who need stuff and stores full of stuff. Take the stuff and give it to people, and then tomorrow — well, those capitalists will always bring in more stuff, I guess.

Calling it “social justice” doesn’t make it work.

Sometimes activists admit they aren’t very interested in economics. What they really want is a more “tolerant” world with less sexism and racism. They act as if capitalism is an obstacle to that.

But it isn’t. Capitalist societies are less racist and less sexist than non-capitalist ones.

In America, white people often take for granted the advantages that being white sometimes provides. But compare America to China, where one ethnic group, the Han, dominates politics and openly looks down on minorities — and where even scientists have tried to show that the Han are a distinctive race that does not trace its ancestry to Africa like the rest of us.

The autocratic nation of Saudi Arabia doesn’t let women drive cars or open their own bank accounts.

Markets, in which individuals, not just rulers, have property rights, give people options. Businesses have an incentive to serve as many people as possible, regardless of gender or ethnic group. They also have an incentive to be nice — customers are more likely to trade with people who treat them fairly. Everyone gets to choose his own path. That’s what I call justice.

Injustice is telling people that they must wait to see what their rulers decide is fair.

SOURCE

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The Intellectual Dishonesty of Barack H. Obama

By Walter E. Williams

President Barack Obama's stance, expressed in his 2014 State of the Union address, is that the debate is settled and climate change is a fact. Obama is by no means unique in that view. Former Vice President Al Gore declared that "the science is settled." This "settled science" vision about climate is held by many, including those in academia.

To call any science settled is sheer idiocy. Had mankind acted as though any science could possibly be settled, we'd be living in caves, as opposed to having the standard of living we enjoy today. That higher standard of living stems from challenges to what might have been seen as "scientific fact."

According to mathematician Samuel Arbesman's book, "The Half-Life of Facts: Why Everything We Know Has an Expiration Date," many ideas taken as facts today will be shown to be wrong as early as five years from now. Arbesman argues that a study published in a physics journal will lose half its value in 10 years.

Many academics know that to call any science settled is nonsense. But their leftist political sentiments and lack of academic integrity prevent them from criticizing public officials and the media for misleading a gullible public about global warming.

The concept of white privilege, along with diversity and multiculturalism, is part of today's campus craze. Millions of dollars are spent on conferences and other forums teaching students about the horrors of white privilege. A Vanderbilt University sociology professor said white privilege is to blame for the Baltimore riots and looting.

I wonder how one goes about determining whether a person is privileged. White privilege can't be based on median income. Why? It turns out that Asian-American households had the highest median income ($68,636) in 2012. Median income for white households was $57,000. Maybe our academic elite should condemn Asian privilege instead of white privilege. But there's another problem. My income puts me in America's top 5 percent.

If those who condemn white privilege could not see my dark brown skin color, they would also condemn me for white privilege. The bottom line to this campus nonsense is that "privilege" has become the new word for "personal achievement."

President Obama has often said the wealthiest Americans must make sacrifices to better the lives of poor people. At Georgetown University's May 12 poverty summit, Obama said, "If we can't ask from society's lottery winners to just make that modest investment, then really this conversation is for show." Let's look at this "lottery winner" nonsense.

A lottery is defined by Oxford Dictionaries as "a process or thing whose success or outcome is governed by chance." The question before us is whether wealth is something that is obtained by chance. Did Bill Gates acquire his wealth by luck or chance? Or did he produce something that benefited his fellow man, causing people to voluntarily reach in their pockets to pay?

Gayle Cook and her late husband, William Cook, founded a medical device company using a spare bedroom in their apartment as a factory. Their company specializes in stents and antibiotic catheters. Now Gayle Cook has a net worth in the billions of dollars. Was she a winner in the lottery of life, or did she have to do something like serve her fellow man?

Are those who work hard, take risks, make life better for others and become wealthy in the process the people who should be held up to ridicule and scorn? And should we make mascots out of social parasites?

Obama talked about asking "from society's lottery winners to just make that modest investment." Congress doesn't ask people for money. Through intimidation, threats and coercion, it takes people's earnings. If people don't comply, the agents of Congress will imprison them.

Most instructive for us is that Obama's remarks were made at a university. Not a single professor has said anything about his suggestion that people accumulate great wealth by winning life's lottery. That is just more evidence about the level of corruption among today's academics.

SOURCE

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An important Difference Between Left and Right

The Left believes that the way to a better world is almost always through doing battle with society’s moral defects (real and/or as perceived by the Left). Thus, in America, the Left defines the good person as the one who fights the sexism, racism, intolerance, xenophobia, homophobia, Islamophobia and other evils that the Left believes permeate American society.

Conservatives not only have no interest in fundamentally transforming the United States, but they are passionately opposed to doing so. Fundamentally transforming any but the worst society — not to mention transforming what is probably the most decent society in history — can only make the society worse. Of course, conservatives believe that America can be improved, but not transformed, let alone fundamentally transformed.

The Founders all understood that the transformation that every generation must work on is the moral transformation of each citizen. Thus, character development was at the core of both childrearing and of young people’s education at school.

As John Adams said: “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”  And in the words of Benjamin Franklin: “Only a virtuous people are capable of freedom.”

Why is that? Because freedom requires self-control. Otherwise, external controls — which means an ever more powerful government — would have to be imposed.

At the same time, as a professor of philosophy wrote in The New York Times, fewer and fewer young Americans believe there are any moral truths.

Meanwhile, at home, fathers and religion, historically the two primary conveyors of moral truths and moral self-discipline, are often nonexistent.

As a result of all this, we are producing — indeed, we have produced since World War II — vast numbers of Americans who are passionate about carbon emissions and fighting sexism and “white privilege” who are also cheating on tests at unprecedentedly high levels.

More HERE

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For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated) and Coral reef compendium. (Updated as news items come in).  GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten. I also put up occasional updates on my Personal blog and each day I gather together my most substantial current writings on A WESTERN HEART.

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

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Gross hypocrisy and Leftist bias in Wikipedia: Altemeyer

I put up some information on the Wikipedia page for Bob Altemeyer.  Altemeyer is a particularly witless Leftist psychologist who made large and derogatory claims  about conservatives that he later had to retract.  But there was nothing on his Wikipedia page about that retraction.  So I put up a brief account of that.  What I put up was wholly scholarly and fully referenced -- just what Wikipedia says it wants.  But criticism of Leftists is not allowed of course, so my contribution was deleted after only a few days.

I imagine that they will find some quibble to justify their deletion of my entry but I am pretty sure that the outcome would have been different had  I praised brainless Bob.  Anyway, after a couple of run-ins with them,  I have no confidence in being able to navigate my way onto Wikipedia again -- so I am putting up below what I originally submitted to Wikipedia.  Altemeyer is an unusual name so a Google search on that name should still find my comments, whether the Wikipedians like it or not:

A major problem with Altemeyer's work is revealed when we find that his RWA measuring instrument identifies the Communists of the old Soviet Union as right-wing.  But if they are right-wing who is left wing? His confusion arises from his apparent  definition of conservatism as "opposed to change".  That definition is however politically naive.  Conservatives from Burke onward have never been opposed to change as such but rather opposed to changes desired and enacted by Leftists.  The current Left/Right polarity is between conservatives who want less government control and Leftists who want more of that.  Altemeyer seems to be unaware of that so his work has no current political relevance.

In detail: The decline and fall of Communist regimes in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe enabled use of his RWA scale there. Studies in the East such as those by Altemeyer & Kamenshikov (1991), McFarland, Ageyev and Abalakina-Paap (1992) and Hamilton, Sanders & McKearney (1995) showed that high RWA scores were associated with support for Communism!! So an alleged "Rightist" scale went from being non-political to being a measure of Leftism! If you took it at face-value, it showed Communists were Rightists!

After that, Altemeyer more or less gave up his original claim and engaged in a bit of historical revisionism. He said (Altemeyer, 1996, p. 218) that when he "began talking about right-wing authoritarianism, I was (brazenly) inventing a new sense, a social psychological sense that denotes submission to the perceived established authorities in one's life". It is true that he did originally define what he was measuring in something like that way (in detail, he defined it as a combination of three elements: submissiveness to established authority, adherence to social conventions and general aggressiveness) but what was new, unusual or "brazen" about such a conceptualization defies imagination. The concept of submission to established authority was, for instance, part of the old Adorno et al (1950) work. What WAS brazen was Altemeyer's claim that what he was measuring was characteristic of the political Right. But it is precisely the "Right-wing" claim that he now seems to have dropped and the RWA scale is now said to measure simply submission to authority. See:

Adorno,T.W., Frenkel-Brunswik, E., Levinson, D.J. & Sanford, R.N. (1950). The authoritarian personality. New York: Harper.

Altemeyer, R. (1996). The Authoritarian Specter. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Altemeyer, R. & Kamenshikov, A. (1991) Impressions of American and Soviet behaviour: RWA changes in a mirror. South African J. Psychology 21, 255-260.

Hamilton, V. L., Sanders, J., & McKearney, S. J. (1995). Orientations toward authority in an authoritarian state: Moscow in 1990. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 21, 356-365

McFarland, S. G., Ageyev, V. S., & Abalakina-Paap, M. A. (1992). Authoritarianism in the former Soviet Union. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 63, 1004-1010

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An Obama Crime Wave Spreads Across America

Fueled by this president's anti-police policies and race-baiting rhetoric, thugs are attacking cops and terrorizing major cities. Horrible violence is breaking out all over. We are witnessing a national crime wave.

Law enforcement expects to see an escalation in criminal activity over the summer. Already we've seen a disturbing trend in May, including:

* The deadliest month Baltimore has seen in more than 15 years, with almost 30 shootings and nine deaths just over the holiday weekend. That makes well over 100 murders this year, compared with 71 at this time last year, the fastest the city has reached 100 homicides since 2007.

* Any time Baltimore officers respond to calls on the city's west side, scene of the Freddie Gray riots, as many as 50 people threaten them, Police Chief Anthony Batts says. "We have to send out multiple units just to do basic police work," he said. "It makes it very difficult to follow up on violence that takes place there."

* In Melbourne, Fla., likewise, police have reported mobs surrounding and striking cops trying to handcuff suspects in two separate cases in the past two weeks.

* A similar spike in violence was reported in Chicago, where 12 people were killed and at least 44 — including a 4-year-old girl — wounded in mostly gang-related shootings over the Memorial Day weekend.

* In Manhattan, 16 people have been murdered this year, a 45% jump over the same period last year, while the number of shooting victims nearly doubled, from 33 to 61. That doesn't include a rash of Central Park muggings, subway assaults and vandalism.

* In the nation's capital, the so-called "D.C. Mansion Murders" have gripped the city, which is suffering a similar surge in homicides.

V In Omaha, Neb., a white female police officer was shot and killed by a black gang member as she tried to serve him a felony arrest warrant.

* A New Orleans housing authority cop, also white, was gunned down as he sat in his patrol car — the first on-duty death in the department's history.

* In Rio Rancho, N.M., another white police officer was gunned down after pulling over a gang member during a traffic stop — the first officer shot and killed in the line of duty in the department's 34-year history.

Victims can blame the crime surge on politicians who give criminals "space" to break the law. Who order cops to stop "stop and frisks." Who tie their hands while giving thugs license to loot and kill.

SOURCE

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It's socialism, not deodorant, that starves the poor

by Jeff Jacoby

WHAT THIS country needs, says Bernie Sanders, is less deodorant.

The 73-year-old senator from Vermont, now running for the Democratic presidential nomination, told CNBC's John Harwood in an interview on Tuesday that because American consumers can choose from so many brands of personal-care products, kids are going to bed with empty bellies.

Will this deodorant aisle be history when Bernie Sanders is president?

"You don't necessarily need a choice of 23 underarm spray deodorants or of 18 different pairs of sneakers when children are hungry in this country," Sanders lamented. He didn't explain exactly how the profusion of toiletries and athletic footwear leads to childhood hunger, but for the only self-described socialist in Congress, it is no doubt a matter of faith that the abundance of capitalism must generate poverty and undernourishment.

In the real world, the opposite is true: Hunger and deprivation are rarest where markets and trade are freest. Food in America couldn't possibly be more plentiful; no one starves because too many economic resources are being channeled into marketing Old Spice instead of oatmeal. But in the socialist delusion, centralized control is always preferable to voluntary enterprise. Better that government czars should decide what is produced, and impose their plan from above. After all, when buyers and sellers are left free to choose for themselves, grocery and department store aisles fill up with "too many" goods that consumers desire to buy. And that's not the worst of it: In the process of fulfilling those desires, some capitalists may be getting wealthy.

Sanders's suggestion that more kids would eat if only deodorant came in fewer varieties was roundly mocked. Wherever his collectivist ideology has been enforced, however, the consequences — shortages, rationing, bare shelves, long lines, grinding austerity — are anything but funny.

Unlike John F. Kennedy, who argued that a rising tide lifts all boats, socialist true believers care far less about growing the economy than about decreasing the gap between rich and poor. "If the changes that you envision ... were to result in a more equitable distribution of income but less economic growth," Sanders was asked in the CNBC interview, "is that trade-off worth making?" Yes, he said at once. "The whole size of the economy and the GDP doesn't matter if people continue to work longer hours for low wages.... You can't just continue growth for the sake of growth in a world in which we are struggling with climate change and all kinds of environmental problems."

How easy it is to pooh-pooh "growth for the sake of growth" when you're an American politician who makes a good salary and never has to worry about where his next meal will come from. But for the world's destitute — for those who struggle daily just to hold body and soul together — economic growth spells salvation. Sanders has spent decades railing against the rich and bewailing the plight of the poor. Yet for lifting hungry and needy people out of poverty, no force on earth comes close to the growth fueled by free markets and trade.

On Wednesday, one day after Sanders kicked off his White House campaign, the United Nations reported that hunger still afflicts about 795 million people around the globe, or about one out of every nine human beings. As great a challenge as that is, it represents an amazing decrease in the number of undernourished people over the past 25 years. Even though the world's population has grown by 1.9 billion since 1990, there are 216 million fewer men, women, and children threatened by hunger today than there were then. For the first time, we can realistically envision the end of starvation as a global scourge.

Thanks to advances in agricultural science — especially the famous "Green Revolution" for which the American biologist Norman Borlaug was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize — it is possible to grow enough food to feed a world with 7 billion people. But it takes the dynamism and productivity of markets, and the prosperity ignited by trade, to make that food available and affordable to the great majority of the human family.

Perhaps Sanders doesn't grasp that, but the UN agency most concerned with feeding the hungry does.

"Economic growth is necessary for alleviating poverty and reducing hunger and malnutrition," emphasizes the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) in the new hunger report. "Countries that become richer are less susceptible to food insecurity."

Blasting greedy billionaires and sneering at the multiplicity of deodorant brands "when children are hungry" appeals to a slice of the electorate. But populist rhetoric from a "humorless aging hippie peacenik Socialist" (as Sanders was once described in a New York Times Magazine profile) doesn't fill empty food bowls. Market economies do.

"Markets that function well are important for promoting food security and nutrition," the UN report says. "Markets ... ensure food availability."

From China to Tanzania, from North Korea to the Soviet Union, socialism over the past century condemned countless children — and their parents — to hunger, malnutrition, and famine. Deodorant never hurt a soul.

SOURCE

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Federal land management bureaucrats warned

Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-Texas) told two federal land officials, “I come bearing good news. I think if your employees keep up the arrogance, keep denying access to the land then very soon we’ll be able to dramatically cut your employees back and start turning those powers over to the states.”

Gohmert’s comments came during a Joint Legislative Hearing "To protect and enhance opportunities for recreational hunting, fishing, and shooting, and for other purposes” in late May.

Deputy Director of Operations for the Bureau of Land Management (BLM), Steve Ellis and Deputy Chief of the U.S. Forest Service, Leslie Weldon testified at the hearing and heard complaints about denial of access onto National Forest Service and BLM land from sportsmen and law enforcement.

“Today, I wanted to take advantage of your presence here by letting you know things I’ve been hearing,” Gohmert said. “About the arrogance of people on U.S. Forest Service land and (Dept. of) Interior land – national forests - even from law enforcement, they say it’s just gotten tougher and tougher to deal with arrogant people on the national forests. Not getting access when they need it, not working with local law enforcement. And that’s been really helpful to me.”

“Some of us have been pushing for a while- let’s just dramatically cut back the U.S. Forest Service, the BLM, the Department of Interior and let each state manage the federal land within it’s boundaries.”

Gohmert later added, “I guess maybe from your standpoint it might be seen as a warning, from my standpoint it’s really good news that the arrogance of both of your employees are ultimately going to allow us to get the next president, Republican or Democrat, to end up eventually signing legislation that lets our states  - they’ll do a much better job at managing your land then your departments have been doing.”

SOURCE

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For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated) and Coral reef compendium. (Updated as news items come in).  GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten. I also put up occasional updates on my Personal blog and each day I gather together my most substantial current writings on A WESTERN HEART.

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

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More on a liking for order

I have said something about this quite recently.  An abiding theme in social psychology is that conservatives suffer from personality defects.  But proving that claim has been kinda difficult. The fact that conservatives are regularly found to be happier than Leftists is a bitch.  Think of all the fault you could find with conservatives if they were more miserable!  You could definitely say they were "maladjusted" then.

So Leftist psychologists have to scratch around a fair bit to find what is wrong with conservatives.  The best they can do is to say that conservatives are said to be less "open" and more "intolerant of ambiguity", for instance. An easy conservative retort would be that conservatives are less scatterbrained and like order more.  You just give the same behaviour a different label.

But that retort doesn't disturb Leftists much.  They are quite happy to find fault with a desire for order. It is "rigid" etc. to them.  So I was rather amused to read an interview given by the daughter of Obersturmbannführer Rudolf Höss, the Nazi commander of  Auschwitz concentration camp, where over a million of humanity's best and brightest were killed.  The daughter is now an old lady but had fond memories of her father and, along the way, described something about his personality.  See below:

"Her father had an obsession with order, something she inherited, and she also talked of a strict upbringing.

'If I see a picture hung wrong on the wall, I have to get up and straighten it. I get high blood pressure,' she said, adding that she also has a need to force her obsession with order on to others.

'Dad was strict when it came to etiquette,' says Ingebrigitt.

'At the dining table, the children were allowed to speak only if they were asked. But he was never angry."

SOURCE

But as a prominent Nazi, Höss was a Leftist.  If you doubt the Leftist nature of Nazism, just start reading this assembly of historical facts.  You won't read for long before you accept that reality.  So once again we see that good ol' Leftist projection at work  -- ascribing to others what is really true of themselves.  It is Leftists who are rigid and intolerant of ambiguity -- as we see in their intolerance of debate and reliance on authority whenever global warming comes up for discussion.

So the Nazis too were socialists who definitely liked order.  You actually had only to watch Triumph des Willens by Leni Riefenstahl to see that, even if you don't understand German.  Just think of all those cool Nazi uniforms! (If I may be a little sarcastic).

There is of course nothing wrong with a desire for order.  Life would be impossible without it.  It is when it becomes an obsession that it is dubious. It clearly was something of an obsession for Höss.

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They Never Stop, They Never Sleep, They Never Quit

Via "health care," the totalitarian Left is on the march once more

The hallmark of all Fascist systems is their relentlessness. Like the Terminator, they cannot be satisfied, they cannot be negotiated with, they cannot be persuaded of the evil of their cause (in fact, that’s a feature, not a bug). They just keep coming until either they are destroyed — or they destroy you. Case in point:

"A different health care issue has emerged for Democrats, in sync with the party’s pitch to workers and middle-class voters ahead of next year’s elections. It’s not the uninsured, but rather the problem of high out-of-pocket costs for people already covered. Democrats call it “underinsurance.”

After paying premiums, many low- and middle-income patients still face high costs when trying to use their coverage. There’s growing concern that the value of a health insurance card is being eaten away by rising deductibles, the amount of actual medical costs that patients pay each year before coverage kicks in. ”I think it’s going to be the next big problem,” said Rep. Jim McDermott, D-Wash., a congressional leader on health care.

“We’ve got some 17 million more people covered … but they can’t access the care they seem to be entitled to,” McDermott said. “It costs too much to use the care. That’s the deceptive part about it.” Since virtually all U.S. residents are now required to have health insurance by President Barack Obama’s health care law, McDermott said Democrats have a responsibility to make sure coverage translates to meaningful benefits."

In other words, having achieved their thug victory with Obamacare, they’re now ready to move on to the “next big problem,” because for these people there is always a next big problem — another expansion of government, another bite at your freedom. Now they’ve come up with the word “underinsurance” as they discover that their magic bullet of Obamacare is — wait for it — flawed and, with a brutish hack like McDermott in the lead, needs to be “fixed.”

But this is always the way things are on the Left: there is nothing wrong with “reform” that more “reform” won’t cure, until the thing or institution being “reformed” bears absolutely no resemblance to what it once was. None of this has anything to do with “health care,” of course; rather it is simply another way to expand government and subordinate the people using the bogus Leftist “virtue” of “compassion” — an expansion of the federal governments powers far beyond those enumerated in the Constitution. It is therefore unconstitutional and, worse, un-American.

And right behind them is the amen choir of Leftist stooges, media flunkies, bought-and-paid-for think tanks and all the other structurally Marxist people and organizations who have plighted their troth to the Democrats:

"Several liberal-leaning organizations have recently focused on the issue.

—A Commonwealth Fund study found that 31 million adults were underinsured last year. Half of them had problems with medical bills or medical debt. Seven million were underinsured due to high deductibles alone. “The steady growth in the proliferation and size of deductibles threatens to increase underinsurance in the years ahead,” the study concluded.

—A study by the advocacy group Families USA found that one-quarter of the people with individual health insurance policies went without care in 2014 because they could not afford the out-of-pocket costs. The study singled out high deductibles.

—The Center for American Progress, a think tank often aligned with the White House, found that employers have been shifting a disproportionate burden of health care costs onto workers. As a result, the report said, employees and their families have not shared in the benefits of a prolonged lull in medical inflation. The group recommended several policy changes, including rebates for workers under certain conditions."

Given the complete lack of coherent opposition to the Democrats in Congress, look for the “underinsurance” chant to be picked up by the junior wing of the Permanent Bipartisan Fusion Party as well — a group of feeble-minded weaklings who are already scrambling to propose “fixes” to Obamacare should the Supreme Court find that the IRS-determined “subsidies” to consumers who bought their Obamacare plans via the federal exchanges are unconstitutional.

And once the “problem” of “underinsurance” is “solved,” another problem will quickly arise, as the Left continues its war on truth, justice and the American Way.

This never would be happening if the Republican Party were still alive.

SOURCE

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How Dishonest Is Barack Obama?

A week ago Friday was an unusual day for the editorial page of The New York Times. An unsigned editorial in the paper lashed out at the president for his public statements about reengaging in Iraq. A Paul Krugman column attacked the administration’s defense of the new trade agreement. Both pieces said the administration was being … (how shall we say it?) … dishonest.

Granted, this was nothing like the language Krugman and the Times typically use to describe Republicans. A few days earlier, Krugman accused Jeb Bush of “cowardice and vileness” with respect to his statements about Iraq. In a column on Jeb’s brother and the original invasion of Iraq, Krugman wrote “We were lied into war.” “It was worse than a mistake,” he added, “it was a crime.”

Still, Krugman and the Times are normally the most visible and reliable apologists for the Obama administration. On “The Escalation of Unauthorized Wars,” the Times doesn’t accuse President Obama of “lying” or committing “crimes,” but it comes close:

On the president’s promise that “I will not allow the United States to be dragged into another war in Iraq,” the Times writes “Those words were suspect then. They seem preposterous now.”

On the administration’s claim that its authority to drop bombs in Iraq and Syria stems from a decade-old congressional resolution, the Times writes, “That claim was flimsy then. It, too, seems preposterous now.”

In his claim that the administration is being dishonest in defense of its trade policies, Krugman tries to sugar coat his attack with this kind of rhetoric:

“One of the Obama administration’s underrated virtues is its intellectual honesty…. In the policy areas I follow, the White House has been remarkably clear and straight forward about what it is doing and why.”

Wow. How quickly memories fade. Everyone knows that Krugman follows health care, for example. Does he really not remember, “If you like the health plan you have, you can keep it”? Or, “If you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor”? We now know from insider reports that the White House knew these statements were false at the time the president was making them.

The federal budget is another matter Krugman follows and right now Congress and the president are wrangling over the sequester (across-the-board spending cuts) they agreed to a few years back. How many times has the president and his spokespeople tried to blame the sequester on the congressional Republicans? Yet it is incontrovertible that the idea first came from the White House.

Sometimes when it isn’t clear whether the word “dishonest” applies, the context is suggestive. The other day, the President told a group of Coast Guard graduates that global warming is a threat to our national security. It was a controversial claim made at a controversial time and place. So a lot of thought must have gone into the speech. Yet only a few days earlier the President approved Shell Oil’s request to drill for oil in the Arctic Ocean.

Certainly these actions are inconsistent. Lots of people are inconsistent. Or, is more involved? Did the president really believe that carbon fuel is a threat to our security when he was speaking to the graduates? Did he have that same belief when he approved off shore drilling?

One of the president’s finest moments was his appointment of Alan Simpson and Erskine Bowles to lead a bi-partisan commission to recommend ways to curtail runaway entitlement spending. This reflected a position he took as far back as the 2008 Democratic primary and he promised both gentlemen that they had his full backing — regardless of their recommendations. Yet when the Simpson/Bowles report was released the president acted as though he had never heard of either one of them.

Okay. That’s a broken promise. Or, is it more than that? Did the president really believe the promise when he made it?

In 2008, candidate Obama promised to heal wounds, end partisan rancor and pull the nation together. “Yes, We Can” was a promise to unite the American people and members of both parties behind common goals.

Yet President Obama has turned out to be the most partisan and the most polarizing president in our life time. And, yes, it really is his fault. Granted, Republicans have given tit for tat. But the president promised to lead.

In his first State of the Union address he gratuitously insulted the members of the Supreme Court, who were sitting in the front row honoring him. He invited Paul Ryan to a gathering and proceeded to humiliate him on national TV. For the most part, the president doesn’t socialize with Republicans or even talk to them. But he doesn’t talk to Democrats either. He hasn’t done anything to bring about togetherness on either side of the aisle.

Think back to the 2008 campaign. Did the president really mean what he said about bringing people together?

SOURCE

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Patriot Act Expires After Last-Minute Senate Fight

The Senate allowed the Patriot Act to expire Sunday after opposition, led by Rand Paul, derailed the efforts of Majority Leader Mitch McConnell to renew the act and endorse the NSA’s mass metadata collection efforts. The chamber did, however, vote 77-17 to take up the House-passed USA Freedom Act, which would revise the Patriot Act to specifically prohibit the NSA’s domestic spying program — a program ruled illegal by a federal court.

Unfortunately, congressional efficiency being what it is, leadership waited too late to bring either bill up for debate, almost ensuring unnecessary drama. That means the good of the Patriot Act was thrown out with the bad. Yet as Reuters reports, “Intelligence experts say a lapse of only a few days would have little immediate effect. The government is allowed to continue collecting information related to any foreign intelligence investigation that began before the deadline.”

Fighting terrorists is critical, but collecting data from every American to create the proverbial haystack doesn’t strike us as an efficient or trustworthy way to go about doing that. And it’s time Congress took its national security responsibly more seriously than leaving important work to the last minute.

SOURCE

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Some probable thoughts



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For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated) and Coral reef compendium. (Updated as news items come in).  GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten. I also put up occasional updates on my Personal blog and each day I gather together my most substantial current writings on A WESTERN HEART.

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

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Napoleon

Napoleon is something of a puzzle.  Almost every family in France lost a son in his wars -- and for what?  What did France gain for all that blood?  Nothing.  He was as bad for France as Hitler was for Germany.

And yet Napoleon is still a hero in France while Hitler is decried in Germany.  Why?  They both lost so it can't be that.  And there was a lot about Napoleon that one might normally dislike.  He ran a police state, for instance.  Dissent from his rule was swiftly  dealt with.  It was Napoleon who invented Fascism, not Mussolini.  Mussolini just supplied the word for it.  And like later fascists (including Hitler), Napoleon built up a personality cult around himself.  Like later Communist dictators, he also circulated heroic images of himself.



But unlike Hitler, Napoleon was not much of a patriot. Hitler undoubtedly was a fervent German patriot and lover of his people but Napoleon was not.  Largely because he was Corsican and not French, he spoke quite ill of France and the French -- at least in his early days.  He shut up about that later on however.

Arthur Silber has put up some excerpts from the  biography of Napoleon by Paul Johnson that show how very Fascist Napoleon indeed was:

"The [French] Revolution was a lesson in the power of evil to replace idealism, and Bonaparte was its ideal pupil. Moreover, the Revolution left behind itself a huge engine: administrative and legal machinery to repress the individual such as the monarchs of the ancien regime never dreamed of; a centralized power to organize national resources that no previous state had ever possessed; an absolute concentration of authority, first in a parliament, then in a committee, finally in a single tyrant, that had never been known before; and a universal teaching that such concentration expressed the general will of a united people, as laid down in due constitutional form, approved by referendum. 

In effect, then, the Revolution created the modern totalitarian state, in all essentials, if on an experimental basis, more than a century before it came to its full and horrible fruition in the twentieth century."

And another of Bonaparte's policies shows him as a forerunner even in the racist aspects of Fascism:

"In Le Crime de Napoleon the historian Claude Ribbe recalls that the emperor brought back slavery in the French empire in 1802, a decade after it had been abolished by the Revolution. The decision led to brutal fighting in France's Caribbean colonies in which thousands died. Less well known, according to the book, is his imposition of racial laws in metropolitan France, which led to the internment of blacks and the forced break-up of inter-racial marriages".

And Napoleon was as brutal and unscrupulous as any other Far-Leftist (whether Fascist or Communist).  We read:

In 1799 Napoleon was in the Middle east. He took 2,000 prisoners in Gaza. At Jaffa 3,000 defenders surrendered to the French on condition that their lives would be spared.  Once in possession of Jaffa, Napoleon ordered the execution of all the prisoners from Jaffa and most of those from Gaza.  To save bullets and gunpowder, Napoleon ordered his men to bayonet or drown the prisoners. There were reports of soldiers wading out to sea to finish off terrified women and children.

And more from Ribbe:

A French historian has caused uproar by claiming Napoleon provided the model for Hitler's Final Solution with the slaughter of more than 100,000 Caribbean slaves.

In The Crime of Napoleon, Claude Ribbe accuses the emperor of genocide, gassing rebellious blacks more than a century before the Nazis' extermination of the Jews.

His accusations refer to the extreme methods used to put down a ferocious uprising in Haiti at the start of the 19th century. Then known as San Domingo, the colony was considered a jewel of the French empire and to save it troops launched a campaign to kill all blacks aged over 12.

"In simple terms, Napoleon ordered the killing of as many blacks as possible in Haiti and Guadeloupe to be replaced by new, docile slaves from Africa," Ribbe said yesterday.

He said he had found accounts from officers who refused to take part in the massacres, especially the use of sulphur dioxide to kill slaves held in ships' holds.

Since Napoleon is still a French national hero, it is no wonder that the Nazis found it relatively easy to get the French to "collaborate" in World War II.

So what is it, then, that the French still like about Napoleon?  There can be only one answer:  He gave a string of victories to a nation much more accustomed to defeats.  At Crecy, Poitiers and Agincourt the English gave France a hard time in the late medieval era and, much later, even the Sun King could not prevail against the first Duke of Marlborough.  And we won't mention the humiliation at Sedan or Von Manstein's Blitzkrieg. The idolization of Napoleon is then rather pathetic: Clinging to the memory of a very bad man simply because French military victories are so rare.

And was he a military genius?  Not really.  The French revolution had produced a Volksturm (the whole nation at war) long before Hitler thought of it and the enthusiasm of such troops for a while swept all old-fashioned armies before it.  And his disastrous  invasion of Russia was plainly hubris, not genius.  Even his acclaimed victory at Austerlitz was enabled by a very old stratagem.  He secretly  brought up fresh troops overnight so surprised his adversaries next morning.  Using secrecy to surprise your enemy is of course as old as Hannibal at Trasimene and even Hannibal was not the first to think of it.

And his half-day hesitation at Waterloo gave the Prussians time to come up and turn the tide against him.  The military genius in that affair was Gneisenau, the Prussian strategist.

So Napoleon is very much an idol with feet of clay.  The continued high regard for him in France bespeaks a very flawed national morality.  Americans go into spasms of indignation over just a word -- "nigger" -- but to the French a genocidal tyrant is a cool guy.  And they think of themselves as a civilized people!  They have considerable claims of cultural excellence. It's a pity that they can't be satisfied with that

UPDATE:  Some amusing info about Napoleon's personal life here.  And for the French view of Napoleon, see here

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Why Doctors Quit

By Charles Krauthammer

About a decade ago, a doctor friend was lamenting the increasingly frustrating conditions of clinical practice. “How did you know to get out of medicine in 1978?” he asked with a smile.

“I didn’t,” I replied. “I had no idea what was coming. I just felt I’d chosen the wrong vocation.”

I was reminded of this exchange upon receiving my med-school class’s 40th-reunion report and reading some of the entries. In general, my classmates felt fulfilled by family, friends and the considerable achievements of their professional lives. But there was an undercurrent of deep disappointment, almost demoralization, with what medical practice had become.

The complaint was not financial but vocational — an incessant interference with their work, a deep erosion of their autonomy and authority, a transformation from physician to “provider.”

As one of them wrote, “My colleagues who have already left practice all say they still love patient care, being a doctor. They just couldn’t stand everything else.” By which he meant “a never-ending attack on the profession from government, insurance companies, and lawyers … progressively intrusive and usually unproductive rules and regulations,” topped by an electronic health records (EHR) mandate that produces nothing more than “billing and legal documents” — and degraded medicine.

I hear this everywhere. Virtually every doctor and doctors' group I speak to cites the same litany, with particular bitterness about the EHR mandate. As another classmate wrote, “The introduction of the electronic medical record into our office has created so much more need for documentation that I can only see about three-quarters of the patients I could before, and has prompted me to seriously consider leaving for the first time.”

You may have zero sympathy for doctors, but think about the extraordinary loss to society — and maybe to you, one day — of driving away 40 years of irreplaceable clinical experience.

And for what? The newly elected Barack Obama told the nation in 2009 that “it just won’t save billions of dollars” — $77 billion a year, promised the administration — “and thousands of jobs, it will save lives.” He then threw a cool $27 billion at going paperless by 2015.

It’s 2015 and what have we achieved? The $27 billion is gone, of course. The $77 billion in savings became a joke. Indeed, reported the Health and Human Services inspector general in 2014, “EHR technology can make it easier to commit fraud,” as in Medicare fraud, the copy-and-paste function allowing the instant filling of vast data fields, facilitating billing inflation.

That’s just the beginning of the losses. Consider the myriad small practices that, facing ruinous transition costs in equipment, software, training and time, have closed shop, gone bankrupt or been swallowed by some larger entity.

This hardly stays the long arm of the health care police, however. As of Jan. 1, 2015, if you haven’t gone electronic, your Medicare payments will be cut, by 1 percent this year, rising to 3 percent (potentially 5 percent) in subsequent years.

Then there is the toll on doctors' time and patient care. One study in the American Journal of Emergency Medicine found that emergency-room doctors spend 43 percent of their time entering electronic records information, 28 percent with patients. Another study found that family-practice physicians spend on average 48 minutes a day just entering clinical data.

Forget the numbers. Think just of your own doctor’s visits, of how much less listening, examining, even eye contact goes on, given the need for scrolling, clicking and box checking.

The geniuses who rammed this through undoubtedly thought they were rationalizing health care. After all, banking went electronic. Why not medicine?

Because banks deal with nothing but data. They don’t listen to your heart or examine your groin. Clicking boxes on an endless electronic form turns the patient into a data machine and cancels out the subtlety of a doctor’s unique feel and judgment.

Why did all this happen? Because liberals in a hurry refuse to trust the self-interested wisdom of individual practictioners, who were already adopting EHR on their own, but gradually, organically, as the technology became ripe and the costs tolerable. Instead, Washington picked a date out of a hat and decreed: Digital by 2015.

The results are not pretty. EHR is health care’s Solyndra. Many, no doubt, feasted nicely on the $27 billion, but the rest is waste: money squandered, patient care degraded, good physicians demoralized.

Like my old classmates who signed up for patient care — which they still love — and now do data entry.

SOURCE

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Chartmanship and the jug man

Leftist economist Krugman is well know for being able to find somewhere support for most Leftist causes.  Below we see he uses a well known chartmanship technique: carefully choosing the beginning and endpoints of a series.  You can "prove" almost anything that way. It's a technique much loved by Warmists

Someone sent me an email this evening with some details on the Paul Krugman response to James Montier which I discussed here. I had previously stated that the Krugman response was lacking meat. But it’s actually worse than that. It’s actually highly misleading and appears intentionally so.

In the post Dr. Krugman tries to show how much interest rates matter by comparing the Fed Funds Rate with Housing Starts. He shows a chart and declares that there appears to be a strong correlation. Except, as this emailer notes, he appears to have shifted the chart to make it appear as though there’s a correlation where there isn’t one. Here’s the Krugman chart:



And here’s the version that would have originally shown up when the data is pulled from FRED:



See what was done there? The period in the early 1960’s was removed and so was the period from 2000 on. In other words, out of a 55 year time period Dr. Krugman decided to remove 20 years worth of data because it fit his argument better. For those keeping track that’s removing almost 40% of an entire data set just because the data didn’t fit the narrative. And when you add those years back in you get a result that shows a very weak correlation

I can understand why he might remove the period from 2008 on. But why remove the 1960’s data and the early 2000’s? After all, the 2000’s were the period of Alan Greenspan’s famous “conundrum” where interest rates appeared to have no correlation with the housing market.  That’s not just an important part of this discussion, it’s a critical part given that it includes the housing bubble and is outside of the mythical Liquidity Trap era….

This is why people often complain about economics. When economists take a data set and just blatantly alter it to fit their argument it doesn’t do much to help build credibility for their work. Especially when you do it within a post that basically declares economists are smarter than everyone else who says they might not have the whole world figured out.

SOURCE. ("Krug" is German/Yiddish for "jug")

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

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For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated) and Coral reef compendium. (Updated as news items come in).  GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten. I also put up occasional updates on my Personal blog and each day I gather together my most substantial current writings on A WESTERN HEART.

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

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