Blogs For Victory

So says someone who is almost certain to be a liberal – who may even be an atheist, for all we know:

The March issue of the peer-reviewed Social Psychology Quarterly, a journal of the American Sociological Association, will contain an article entitled “Why Liberals and Atheists are More Intelligent.” Though certain to cause some outrage, the investigator has collected some statistically significant IQ evidence that supports his theory.

Satoshi Kanazawa, an evolutionary psychologist at the London School of Economics and Political Science, poses the theory that the more intelligent people are, the more likely it is for them to adopt evolutionarily novel preferences and values in response to the challenges of the times.

Kanazawa says that humans are evolutionarily programmed to be conservative – to care mostly about family and friends, to believe in a supernatural power or God because of their paranoia about what they perceive as “unnatural” phenomenon, and, for men, to be polygamous.

“General intelligence, the ability to think and reason, endowed our ancestors with advantages in solving evolutionarily novel problems for which they did not have innate solutions,” says Kanazawa. “As a result, more intelligent people are more likely to recognize and understand such novel entities and situations than less intelligent people, and some of these entities and situations are preferences, values, and lifestyles.”

Peer reviewed? More like pin-head reviewed. There are two false assumptions which you first have to accept as true before you can even start to think liberals and atheists are smarter:

1. That not believing in God is evidence of advanced thinking.

2. That the solutions proposed by liberals were in actual response to novel circumstances and that the solutions were beneficial.

Not believing in God is does not mean you get to allow your mind free range – you have to constrict your thought in various ways lest an invalid thought about God or anything supernatural upsets the whole atheist apple cart. Not believing in God also cuts a person off from the most widespread human activity – worshiping God and subordinating our personal desires to the service of God and our fellow men.

Now, taking a look at some of the solutions to problems:

Governments getting hidebound and corrupt as time goes on? Not a novel problem – but liberals treated it as such. Solution proposed? Revolution not just overthrowing the government, but the entire social structure (France 1789, Russia 1917, eg), leading directly to massive slaughter, war and crime such as was never seen before.

Overpopulation? Never was a problem, but liberals thought it was…and thought it novel in the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries and still consider it a novel problem in the 21st. Solution? Early on it was to allow poor people to starve – later, as it became known that poor people can vote the concept changed to preventing the poor from having children and murdering the unborn.

Teen pregnancy? Could almost be considered a novel problem in that we used to marry off teenagers but then stopped doing it as more and more people left the farm for the city. Child-bearing and rearing is part of becoming a full adult, and the problem was how to give teens adult responsibilities in a changed environment. The liberal solution? Pretend that teens having sex unmarried in the city in the 1960’s was the same as teens having married sex on the farm in the 1920’s – then teach the kids to have sex at an ever younger age, provide them with birth control and abortion.

A small minority of the people in charge of most business enterprises? While not novel, liberals keep pretending there is an “aha!” moment in this – give them a new set of stats showing this or that alleged disparity between rich and poor, and they go “aha!” and try to convince us this horrible thing, just discovered, must be remedied. Solution? Switch from having a small minority of private individuals running the economic show to having a smaller minority of government individuals. Changing a million mean, old capitalists for a hundred thousand bureaucrats, as it were.

On and on it goes – it either isn’t novel, isn’t a solution or a combination of both…and yet here comes a study purporting to show that liberals are smarter and the evidence for this is their ability to take on novel problems. Just plain and simple stupid.

The world needs more like him:

The son of one of Hamas’s founding members was a spy in the service of Israel for more than a decade, helping to prevent dozens of Islamist suicide bombers from finding their targets, it emerged yesterday.

Codenamed the “Green Prince” by Shin Bet, Israel’s internal security service, Mosab Hassan Yousef, the son of the Hamas co-founder Sheikh Hassan Yousef, supplied key intelligence almost daily from 1996…

…Mr Yousef, 32, a convert to Christianity who now lives in California, has revealed the intrigues of his years as a spy in a new book called Son of Hamas…

The man just painted a huge target on his back – not only betraying the terrorists of Hamas, but becoming an apostate of Islam. People will be displeased – including, no doubt, his former bosses in Shin Bet, given that spy agencies never like it when someone talks, no matter what the reason.

But we need people in this world who can see what is right and what is wrong and then have the courage to act on that conviction. Mr. Yousef is probably not the perfect man, but he is someone who helped to thwart terrorist attacks, even though his own family was involved in them. That takes rare courage – and it may end up costing him his life.

The toothless Ethics Committee has stated the obvious:

Democrat Charles Rangel, the top tax writer in the U.S. Congress, was admonished on Thursday by a congressional ethics committee for taking corporate-funded trips to the Caribbean, a finding he said defied “common sense.”

The House of Representatives ethics committee concluded that Rangel broke the chamber’s gift rules in taking the trips but it did not immediately release its report. Rangel called a news conference after news accounts disclosed the findings.

Quoting from his copy of the report, Rangel said it found he did not know the trips in 2007 and 2008 were underwritten by corporations, but that two of his staffers did.

“Common sense dictates that members of Congress should not be held responsible for what could be the wrongdoing or errors of staff, unless there’s reason to believe that the member knew or should have known — and there’s nothing in the record to indicate the latter,” Rangel told reporters on Capitol Hill.

“I think right now I have to let the general community make its own judgment,” Rangel said.

Rangel now wants to pretend he’s been vindicated – its just his stupid staffers who messed up! Problem is that the people are on to this scam – and the longer barnacles like Rangel hang around, the worse it will be for Democrats, as a whole.

Rangel, himself, is almost certainly going to be re-elected – and re-elected by a rather thumping margin, in to the bargain. But the odor of corruption around the Democrats grows stronger by the day and it is going to poison the well for other Democrats not in such safe districts.

If the Democrats were smart, they’d dump Rangel – force him off Ways and Means and gin up a primary challenger for him, if he refused to quit. They won’t do it, though, because for decades they’ve gotten away with it and think they’ll get away with it, again.

November will come as quite a rude shock…

It was unexpected by the idiots who think the “stimulus” is working:

The number of new claims for unemployment benefits jumped unexpectedly last week as heavy snows caused layoffs to rise.

In addition, many state agencies in the mid-Atlantic and New England regions that process the claims were closed due to the storms and are now clearing out backlogs, a Labor Department analyst said.

The department said Thursday that first-time claims for unemployment insurance rose by 22,000 to a seasonally adjusted 496,000. Wall Street analysts polled by Thomson Reuters expected a drop to 455,000.

Bad weather can cause job losses in construction and other industries sensitive to weather.

Economists closely watch initial claims, which are considered a gauge of the pace of layoffs and an indication of companies’ willingness to hire new workers.

The four-week average, which smooths volatility, rose by 6,000 to 473,750.

Yep, that’s it – blame the snow. Two or three days of snow – in mid-winter – is what caused there to be 41,000 more new claims than expected. In other economic news, Unicorn Ranchers are expecting the new “Cash for Centaurs” program to boost sales in Oz…

Smoke and mirrors, boys and girls; that is all it is…

Only 234 years late, but better late than never:

The inaugural British Tea Party will take place on Saturday in my home town of Brighton, and I’ll be speaking….

Labour has raised more than a trillion pounds in additional taxation since 1997. Yet, unbelievably, Gordon Brown has still managed to run up a deficit of 12.6 per cent of GDP (Greece’s is 12.7 per cent). A far lower level of taxation brought Americans out in spontaneous protest last year.

If you happen to be coming to the Conservative Spring Conference, do please pop in: the Tea Party is five minutes’ walk from the conference venue. It is, however, outside the security zone, and anyone is welcome to come. Oh, and this being England, we’ll be serving actual, you know, tea. I hope to see some of this blog’s readers there.

The Revolution continues to spread – people have had it with government and the pathetic whiners who live off of it.

Its time to clear out the crooks and then get back to work – no more free rides and no more fairy tales from the left telling us how they’ll make it all better…

I don’t know if you are watching the Health Care Reform Summit today…  But, just to show you how much of a sham it is, I’d like to bring up how Obama suggested he cut Republicans “some slack” by allowing  Senator Alexander to apparently go over his allotted time for his opening remarks. Obama said, “Both I and Lamar went a little bit over our original allocated time. I — not wanting to be a hypocrite — wanted to give you some slack.”

Let’s see just how much of a hypocrite Obama is…

Senator Alexander’s opening remarks lasted 13 mins, 10 seconds
Barack Obama’s lasted 14 mins, 36 seconds                        
Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s lasted 7 mins, 57 seconds
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s  lasted 8 mins, 13 seconds

So Democrats’ opening remarks lasted 30 mins, 46 seconds compared to the GOP’s 13 minutes, 10 seconds. Democrats needed more than double the time to grandstand about a bill that the American people don’t want.

For Lamar Alexander’s remarks, see the extended entry: Continue reading →

The sad truth of government health care:

Patients ‘routinely neglected’ at NHS hospital where hundreds died in squalor

Not a single official has been disciplined over the worst-ever NHS hospital scandal, it emerged last night.

Up to 1,200 people lost their lives needlessly because Mid-Staffordshire NHS Trust put government targets and cost-cutting ahead of patient care.

But none of the doctors, nurses and managers who failed them has suffered any formal sanction…

…The inquiry found that:

• Patients were left unwashed in their own filth for up to a month as nurses ignored their requests to use the toilet or change their sheets;

• Four members of one family. including a new-born baby girl. died within 18 months after of blunders at the hospital;

• Medics discharged patients hastily out of fear they risked being sacked for delaying;

• Wards were left filthy with blood, discarded needles and used dressings while bullying managers made whistleblowers too frightened to come forward.

I’ll try to explain this to you liberals one more time:

A national health care system is going to be run by regular folks – not by a collection of saints willing to sacrifice themselves for the comfort of others.

Now, if you get your ultimate wish – which is some sort of single-payer program; with ObamaCare just being a down payment – you’ll have our hospitals run by government bureaucrats who simply won’t be able to devote full effort to patient care. It will be a matter of choosing between patient care and giving a pay raise to that annoying union always threatening a strike – as the patients aren’t dying in the bureaucrat’s office, while the union rep is there all the time, it is a natural thing that the patients will get it in the shorts.

Meanwhile, at the front end of health care, the actual workers can use self-sacrificial zeal in treating everyone who walks through the door, or they can realize that they’ll get paid the same no matter if they see one patient or one hundred in a day. So, guess how many they’ll see? As few as possible, of course. And, needless to say, where is the upside on keeping conditions good for the patients – you won’t get extra pay for doing it, and its not like you’ll be fired if you don’t.

Each socialized medicine scheme breaks down upon the rock of human nature. It doesn’t matter how much thought you give to it or how much money you lavish upon it, the thing won’t work. The only way to make for a good health care service is to have that service dependent upon providing good care in order to attract and retain customers – and that means a private system.

UPDATE: And here’s a video collection of Democrats from Obama on down denouncing GOP efforts to circumvent the filibuster back when. There is no bottom for them – no matter how low they are in the gutter, they always manage to find one more step down.

Per Rasmussen:

Voter unhappiness with Congress has reached the highest level ever recorded by Rasmussen Reports as 71% now say the legislature is doing a poor job.

That’s up ten points from the previous high of 61% reached a month ago.

Only 10% of voters say Congress is doing a good or excellent job.

I just can’t believe that 10% really think its doing a good or excellent job – its got to be some sort of goof on the part of Rasmussen.

Can’t you just feel that Obama recovery?

Sales of new homes in the U.S. unexpectedly fell in January to the lowest level on record, a sign that an extension of a government tax credit may not be enough to rekindle demand.

Purchases declined 11 percent to an annual pace of 309,000, below the lowest forecast in a Bloomberg News survey of economists, figures from the Commerce Department showed today in Washington. The median sales price dropped 2.4 percent from January 2009 and the supply of unsold homes increased.

Its happening because a tax credit to get people to buy homes just advances the purchase date a little bit. People who were thinking about buying a home went ahead and did it to cash in on the tax credit – and that is fine and good for them. But that doesn’t increase actual demand – and it leads, inevitably, to a big slump in sales because the demand for the future is now reduced. Cash for clunkers did the same thing for auto sales.

We can’t increase aggregate demand until we increase wealth and we can’t increase wealth until we start making, mining and growing more things here in the United States. The only way to pry the necessary funds out of investors hands and put it to work in such enterprises is to make such investments highly lucrative – by cutting capital gains taxes; by cutting business taxes; by cutting corporate income taxes; by reducing or eliminating regulations which put a huge burden on starting up or expanding a factory, farm or mine.

There is no other solution to our economic problem. We can’t print our way out of this. We can’t borrow our way out of this. We can’t tax our way out of this. We can’t pick and choose from on high who gets government goodies our way out of this. We can only work our way out of it.