Facing the reality of HiTech

Here is the reality:

"In 2014, tech companies Google, Yahoo!, Facebook, Apple, and others, released corporate transparency reports that offered detailed employee breakdowns. In May, Google said 17% of its tech employees worldwide were women, and, in the U.S., 1% of its tech workers were black and 2% were Hispanic. June 2014 brought reports from Yahoo! and Facebook. Yahoo! said that 15% of its tech jobs were held by women, 2% of its tech employees were black and 4% Hispanic. Facebook reported that 15% of its tech workforce was female, and 3% was Hispanic and 1% was black. In August, Apple reported that 80% of its global tech staff was male and that, in the U.S., 54% of its tech jobs were staffed by Caucasians and 23% by Asians. Soon after, USA Today published an article about Silicon Valley's lack of tech-industry diversity, pointing out that it is largely white or Asian, and male. "Blacks and Hispanics are largely absent," it reported, "and women are underrepresented in Silicon Valley — from giant companies to start-ups to venture capital firms".

It's an unbudgeable gap. The companies concerned are very politically correct and have made great efforts to alter the pattern of their employment -- but with negligible success.  The industry concerned runs on IQ and the level of IQ required is just not generally available outside white and Asian males.

The only way to get more women and minority employees in the sector would be to drop recruitment standards.  And doing that would rapidly hand the entire industry over to China.  China already has an IQ advantage over America so will probably take charge eventually anyway but the innovativeness of American firms is so far keeping America in the lead.  Doing anything to degrade the performance of the sector would be fatal.  My software developer son has been to China three times recently in order to teach computer people there some skills they did not currently have and he has only one word for the Chinese:  "Unbeatable".

What I think outsiders don't get is how complex computer programming is.  It requires the utmost attention to detail and constant creativity to find a way ahead through the task.  For some of us that comes easily but for most people it just cannot be done.  Many years ago, I tried to teach FORTRAN to sociology students at a major university but in the end none of them really "got" it. They were smart but not that smart. And the composition of silicon valley firms is a loud announcement of where the required level of talent is mostly to be found. The Leftist preoccupation with equality is just madness in that sphere.  It could very easily become destructive madness. Reality is unco-operative with Leftist dreams -- JR

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It is a caricature of what happened in Charlottesville to call Trump and his supporters racists

Since Trump’s ascendancy, there have been repeated outbreaks of violence, mostly perpetrated by Antifa against ordinary Republicans and other conservatives, either at pro-Trump rallies or on other public platforms. These people have been either stopped from speaking or physically attacked by Antifa and other left-wing demonstrators.

Such attacks on mainstream conservatives have been ignored, downplayed or even endorsed by Democrats and their media acolytes.

In June the House Republican whip, Steve Scalise, was shot and almost killed by a Bernie Sanders-supporting Democrat who opened fire on a group of Republicans at a baseball practice. A New Jersey Democratic party activist, James Devine, posted on his Facebook page that he had “little sympathy” for Scalise because he opposed gun restriction policies. Another Democratic party official in Nebraska was fired after saying he was “glad” that Scalise had been shot.

The real target is mainstream American values and culture
The Democratic establishment dismisses such people as mavericks with no significance for the left-wing causes they support. Yet a double standard operates against President Trump, who is held to be personally defined by the unacceptable nature of a tiny minority of his supporters.

The fact that the former Ku Klux Klan “grand wizard” David Duke, who was at Charlottesville, claims to support Trump’s agenda (that is, when he’s not in the next breath condemning him) is being used to smear Trump himself as a white supremacist.

It is grotesque to equate Trump’s pledge to “make America great again”, which was endorsed by the 63 million Americans who voted for him, with the bigotry of white supremacism. The former is driven by people wanting to uphold core American values they deeply cherish and share with each other. The latter is driven by loathing of racial and ethnic groups deemed to be inferior.

In last year’s presidential campaign Hillary Clinton was endorsed by Will Quigg, “grand dragon” of the Ku Klux Klan’s California chapter. He claimed she had a “hidden agenda” and that if elected she would come out for gun ownership and sealing America’s borders. Quigg’s support of Clinton was rightly dismissed as either mischief-making or barking mad. Yet when such people support Trump, this is held to define him.

The left’s real target is not the far right but mainstream conservatives who want to uphold American values and culture: the people who brought Trump to power. Defending national identity, however, is denounced by western progressives as white racism.

The result is an unholy alliance between the left and the far right. A white supremacist called Richard Spencer invented the blanket term “alt-right” to associate his ilk with conservatives seeking merely to defend American identity and core values. Through this tactic, Spencer intended to boost the far right and simultaneously smear and thus destroy regular conservatives.

The left has seized upon this smear with unbridled joy, routinely using the “alt-right” term to try to destroy the national identity agenda by bracketing it with white supremacism. The result is a powerful boost for the far right. From deserved obscurity, they suddenly find the left are transmitting their every utterance to the world. The phrase “useful idiots” comes inescapably to mind.

Charlottesville was but the latest front in what has become America’s cultural civil war. It won’t, alas, be the last.

SOURCE

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ObamaCare Is Dumping Millions of Middle Class to Insure More Poor

While Democrats and Republicans fret over millions "losing" coverage to reform, the actual law is taking its toll.

Barack Obama and the Democrats’ “Affordable” Care Act was never really about making the cost of health care more affordable. It was never about giving Americans greater access to health care. ObamaCare was always a scheme designed to give the government greater power to control and redistribute Americans’ wealth, essentially taking from the middle class to give it the poor — and to insurance companies.

While Democrats like to point to the increasing numbers of individuals receiving ObamaCare’s subsidized insurance coverage, they are ignoring a dirty little secret. The number of Americans with unsubsidized individual coverage has decreased precipitously. From March 2016 to March 2017, some 2.6 million fewer people had unsubsidized policies, an overall decrease of 15% in one year alone.

But the unsubsidized coverage bleed is not limited to the individual market. Since 2013, the year before ObamaCare began subsidizing plans, the number of individuals with employment-based coverage has decreased by almost three million.

Doug Badger of National Review describes the issue:

The narrative nevertheless endures. Believing it requires indifference to millions of people who can no longer afford individual policies and to millions more who may forfeit their policies with the next round of rate hikes. For many of them, Obamacare has been a serial nightmare, producing policy cancellations, skyrocketing premiums and deductibles, and a narrowing choice of doctors before finally leaving them uninsured.

Obamacare is insuring more poor people and uninsuring millions of middle-income people. That suits the Democratic party and many congressional Republicans just fine. They measure social progress in the number of people receiving government assistance. Those struggling to pay their own way evoke little sympathy. Lawmakers of both parties, whose consciences were lacerated by CBO’s theory that millions would “lose” coverage under the GOP’s “repeal and replace” legislation (most of those “losses” the result of people voluntarily dropping insurance once the individual mandate was repealed) are unmoved that millions actually have lost coverage under the law they fought to preserve.

Obama was a leftist who was bound and determined to foist his socialism onto the American people. Health care was his means to that end, and so far too many Americans and their representatives in Congress are content to sell their freedom for the mirage of greater security and health.

SOURCE

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Problems with AG Jeff Sessions

The two big issues I have with Sessions are his intention to escalate the so-called war on drugs, and his support for civil asset forfeiture.

The war on drugs is misnamed. It is not a war on inanimate objects, it is a war on American citizens who make choices some people in government don’t like. As for civil asset forfeiture–government’s ability to take people’s property without even accusing them of a crime–I honestly don’t see any defense for it that is compatible with basic principles of due process and liberty.

Sessions seems to have gained a bit of support from Trump for his attack on sanctuary cities, I’m sorry to see. My sorrow here has nothing to do with sanctuary cities and everything to do with the war on drugs and civil asset forfeiture. I don’t feel I’m being extreme in expressing dissatisfaction with an attorney general who has so little respect for individual rights.

SOURCE

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CA: More Costs Flowing from Dam Negligence

National Water Quality Month is turning out rather dry in California, but trouble will soon be washing up in court. Farmers and business owners have filed more than 90 claims against the state government for causing a total of $1.7 billion in losses from the spillway failure at Oroville Dam back in February. Might they have a case?

As we noted, the failure of the spillway prompted the evacuation of 200,000 people, hardly a frivolous move, because if the spillway collapsed it could have caused complete failure of the dam, built in 1968.

As it turned out, government engineers knew for decades that the dirt spillway was unreliable but failed to reinforce it with concrete. As Representative John Garamendi (D–Walnut Grove) famously put it, the dirt spillway “worked fine until it had to be used, in which case it didn’t work so well.” State water bosses also failed to add gates above the spillway, which would have allowed the reservoir to rise another ten feet. Governor Jerry Brown claimed to be unaware of these problems and proclaimed, “stuff happens and we respond.”

SOURCE

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

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

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Should Trump have condemned the "white supremacists" at the Charlottesville fracas?

He probably should have -- if there were any there.  The only evidence that I have seen put forward so far is that there was a peaceful torchlit procession at another time in another place. I guess we have to call that media logic. No court would convict anybody of anything on such flimsy "evidence".  And can the marchers be collectively condemned for the deeds of one man in a car? I think the difficulties in so doing are obvious.

Nonetheless the media and some RINOs are criticizing Trump's statesmanlike response of condemning all violence from all sides.

But the fact that there was a peaceful torchlit procession through the University of Virginia the night before the fracas proves only one thing and even for that we have to make an unproven assumption.  If the marchers on the two occasions were the same (an assumption), it shows that the marchers were peaceful until attacked by Antifa goons.  Antifa protesters came equipped with bats, sticks, and flame throwers. The marchers were entitled to hit back at the Antifa goons and they did.  It was not they who turned up with violent intent.

And a parade of torches proves nothing. I have some of those torches myself, which I use to light up backyard feasts at night. In a parade, they are just an attention-getting device and have been used by many groups in many places in a perfectly peaceful and non-ideological manner.  Google "torchlit procession" if you doubt it.

And the march was organised to protest the removal of a statue of Confederate General Robert E. Lee. So was probably comprised overwhelmingly of Southern patriots honoring their forefathers  rather than any "racist" cause.

History is written by the victors so most people still believe the propaganda that the North/South war was fought to free the slaves.  Yet, in his famous letter to Horace Greeley, Lincoln himself said that slavery was not the issue.  "The union" was the basic cause.  600,000 young Americans had to die to preserve Yankee dominance over the South.  So Southerners have cause to remember and honor their forebears.

In my view it is the Leftist thugs of Antifa whom Trump should have particularly condemned.  They turned a peaceful march into a violent occasion.

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How the Liberal Media Created Charlottesville

John Hawkins

I wish I could say that it’s a shock that someone died in Charlottesville, but I’ve been predicting just this sort of thing in radio appearances for months. The liberal media is dying to blame it all on Donald Trump, but it should look in the mirror.

To begin with, the liberal media is almost entirely responsible for growing the Alt-Right merger of hate groups and internet trolls. Most people are well aware of the stifling political correctness that reached an apex under Barack Obama. People are sick and tired of being attacked and scolded by the humorless left-wing thought police every time they stray from the latest liberal doctrine. That created a large group of people who enjoyed tweaking social justice warriors and some of them realized the easiest way to do that was with racial slurs.

Every time some doofus leaves a noose on a college campus or says the N-word, it’s treated like a national crisis. If you’re an anonymous troll who enjoys getting people to react to everything you say, that’s a FEATURE, not a bug. All you have to do is say something racially offensive and all these people who studiously try to ignore you will go out of their minds.

That racial element gave the Nazis, white supremacists and KKK mouth-breathers a way to connect with the more socially adept trolls making the Pepe the Frog memes. Of course, the media liberals fueled them as well with their hypocrisy. They painted EVERY white supporter of Donald Trump or the Republican Party as a racist even as they ignored and defended the vicious anti-white rhetoric that has become commonplace on the Left.

Just to give you a quick example of that, there was a hashtag that trended on Twitter after the attack called #ThisIsNotUS. It started out as a way for white liberals to virtue signal, but it quickly turned into an all too typical attack on white people, America and Trump voters. Here are some of the most popular comments from the hashtag…

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

#ThisIsNotUs Then who is it? 63% of white men & 53% of white women voted for KKK-endorsed Trump. The majority of EVERY OTHER ETHNICITY didn’t

If you are white and you are trying to say #ThisIsNotUs you are part of the problem.

If you're earnestly tweeting #ThisIsNotUS, know that the you might as well have been one of the white supremacists walking w/ tiki torches.

Every white person that tweets #ThisIsNotUs is being complicit in not addressing the rampant racism and bigotry that in their community

#ThisIsNotUS? Easy to say so. Unfortunately you can't have the Black, Brown, Asian, Jewish, Muslim or LGTBQ "experience" to know #THISISYOU

Gaga, prime example of a white woman using tag #ThisIsNotUs like this country wasn’t built on slavery & racism. THIS HAS ALWAYS BEEN AmeriKa

#ThisIsNotUs is how white people try to absolve themselves from their complicity in white supremacy; it v much is you, your inaction fuels it

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

The biggest talking point white supremacists have are comments like these. Would that be true if the mainstream media actually treated these comments with the same sort of contempt it has for the Alt-Right?

Nope.

Yet these sort of comments are MAINSTREAM on the Left. Let me repeat that. They are MAINSTREAM on the Left.

On the other hand, white supremacists are nothing on the Right. David Duke is a joke. Richard Spencer? Let me tell you a little story about Richard Spencer. I was walking around CPAC and noticed an enormous gaggle of media surrounding someone I didn’t recognize, who didn’t seem to be drawing a crowd of regular attendees. As it turns out, the massive group of media people weren’t following a big name. They were following Richard Spencer, who was later kicked out of the conference, presumably because the organizers never wanted him there in the first place.

Yet Richard Spencer, like David Duke before him, is treated like some kind of rock star by the media liberals even though he’s a nobody in the conservative movement. Why? Because they don’t care about conservative opinion. They don’t care about conservative views. They care about creating propaganda that paints the Right as a bunch of hood-wearing, Nazi-saluting scumbags. So, they treat Richard Spencer like a rock star.

This creates a sort of Kim Kardashian effect. Ninety five percent of any influence Spencer has comes from the fact that anything he does is a big deal to the media. Why were Spencer and Duke able to gather even 500 Tiki torch-waving idiots in Charlottesville? Because the media would cover everything they did with bated breath. It gave them a chance to feel important, to feel like they were making an impact. In fact, white supremacists have started to believe its own BS because they keep hearing it from the media.

The hardcore racists out there are pariahs everywhere except in the mainstream media, where they’re treated as incredibly important.

On the other hand, the same mainstream media that has elevated the Alt-Right has been silent as violence has increasingly become a mainstay at liberal protests, including the counter-protest of this event. A few shops getting looted or people getting hurt doesn’t stop the media from describing a liberal event as a peaceful protest. Even the counter-protests in Charlottesville were widely described as “peaceful.” Yet, protesters chanted “From the Midwest to the South, punch a Nazi in the mouth,” a female reporter was punched by one of those counter-protesters, the organizer of the rally was hit, and other people were attacked. That’s not peaceful. That’s something LIBERAL POLITICIANS should be asked to condemn.

In other words, Nazi and KKK members are HORRIBLE. The violent liberal counter-protesters are ALSO horrible. James Alex Fields, Jr? Who appears to have marched at the rally before plowing into a crowd? I condemn what he did. I also condemn the Bernie supporter who shot up a congressional Republican softball game.

Additionally, I will condemn the next person on the Left or the Right who kills someone over politics, which seems inevitable when you have opposing sides carrying shields and weapons to political rallies. Those condemnations don’t make a damn bit of difference as long as the liberal media keeps elevating white supremacists and excusing the violence of the Alt-Left. I’m genuinely sorry people are dying at political rallies, but it would be surprising if the death at Charlottesville were the last one. Their blood will be on the hands of the liberal media.

SOURCE

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Rainbow Mafia: Dubious Economics to Further Agenda

Socially conservative laws are labeled as dangerous for business, while leftist prerogatives are an economic boon.

The Texas Association of Business has been a vocal critic of a proposed transgender bathroom bill — one that would restrict the use of public bathrooms to an individual’s biological sex rather than one’s self-declared gender identity. It’s similar to the law that was passed last year in North Carolina. So why would a business advocacy group oppose a common-sense law that protects the vast majority of the population? Because it fears an economic backlash to the tune of an estimated $8.5 billion in lost business should the bill become law.

In Florida, a small-business advocacy group called Florida Competes has been actively and aggressively pushing for the state to make sexual orientation and gender identity a protected class under the Florida Civil Rights Act. The advocacy group maintains that this change would boost Florida’s economy by some $5 billion and add at least 36,000 jobs over the next decade.

What’s driving this connection between business revenue and leftist “social justice”? Call it the Rainbow Mafia’s economic carrot-and-stick approach. Across the country, these single-minded pressure groups have been promoting their agenda by pouring money into a “network of small-business coalitions that routinely make doom-and-gloom economic prognostications about socially conservative legislation.” To put it simply, they find “experts” to study the issue and then declare that any legislation which impedes their agenda is backward, bad for business and harmful for economic growth.

But even lefty PolitiFact rated the Texas Association of Business prognostication as “mostly false.” Politicians seem to be especially susceptible to these dubious doom-and-gloom “studies” because they’re terrified of being blamed for any ill economic effects. Their constituents, however, would be far better served by an adherence to principled and untainted sources of information.

SOURCE

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

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

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Leftist hate never stops


Whom would you pick?

Liberals always complain that Conservatives try to dictate the way women dress. However, ‘feminist’ Joan Walsh did just that. While Ivanka Trump is fighting for women, Walsh is demanding that Ivanka change her clothes because she looks too ‘girly’.

“I mean, I don’t mean to sound sexist — it can be dangerous to comment on what women wear — but the fact that she sat in for her father in a dress that was so incredibly ornamental was such a contradiction in terms. And I think that what we see is that in patriarchal, authoritarian societies, daughters have great value — they are property,” said Walsh.

“And the message that she is sending about her own value, about her place in the White House, and about the place of women in this administration, I think, are really pretty frightening,” said Walsh.

“So you can’t be a feminist and be girlie at the same time?” asked Thomas Roberts. “You can be a feminist and be girlie. We all have our girlie days, but I think showing up, taking your father’s seat in a pink dress with big bows on the sleeves is really an interesting message,” said Walsh.

SOURCE

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Candidate Set To Be First Female Navy SEAL Quits After A Week Of Training

Reality sets in

A woman who enlisted to become the first ever female Navy SEAL quit after one week of training, reports Task and Purpose.

"The unidentified female candidate dropped out in early August during a three-week course in San Diego that began July 24. It was the first assessment of potential SEAL officers before they can be sent on to more grueling courses, according to the website, which cited 'multiple Naval Special Warfare Command sources,'" reports The Washington Examiner.

Before former President Barack Obama's rule change, which took effect in January of 2016, women were not allowed in United States Military combat roles. "​But there were no female applicants in the 18 months since that historic change until now," reported CNN at the end of July, referring to the enlistment of the unidentified candidate.

There is still one remaining female candidate attempting to join the Navy's special operations teams; this unidentified woman is training for the Special Warfare Combatant-Craft Crewman (SWCC) program.

As previously reported by The Daily Wire, women, generally speaking, are unqualified for combat. Moreover, sex-integrated units have been found to be far less effective and more injury-prone than all-male units.

SOURCE

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THE GOOGLE GULAG

The internet cannot remain in the hands of a corporation that hates free speech.

Let me Google that for you.

James Damore is an FIDE chess master who studied at Princeton, MIT and Harvard. He had been working as a software engineer at Google for four years.

Danielle Brown is the new Vice President of Diversity at Google. She has an MBA from the University of Michigan and campaigned for Hillary.

She had been working at Google for a few weeks.

James Damore wrote a memo suggesting that Google should pursue ideological diversity, end discriminatory efforts to achieve identity politics diversity and be honest about gender differences. Danielle responded by denouncing his paper. “It’s not a viewpoint that I or this company endorses, promotes or encourages.”

Brown and Google CEO Sundar Pichai made some vague noises about free speech. And fired him.

“This has been a very difficult time.” That’s how Pichai began his letter to Google employees. Some might have thought that he was about to discuss a massive data breach, not an employee writing something that he disagreed with.

It was a difficult time because leftists at Google had to confront the horror of an original thinker in their ranks. Some were so traumatized by his intrusion into their safe space that they threatened to quit.

And so Damore was fired for “advancing harmful gender stereotypes”.  What were these stereotypes?

That the gender gap in coding could be explained because women are more interested in people and men are more interested in things. Women were more cooperative and he suggested and that the gender gap could be reduced by making “software engineering more people-oriented with pair programming.”

Google could have disagreed with him. And left it at that. Instead it was, “Off with his head.”

Pichai claimed that some Google employees were “hurting”. Social media accounts were full of bizarre claims that leftist employees were “afraid” to come to work. But the only actual casualty was Damore.

It’s never the oppressed leftists crying to friendly media outlets who suffer. Only their targets.

James Damore is what most people think of when they imagine a Google employee. A brilliant original thinker with interests spread across the scientific and technological spectrum. But Danielle Brown is what Google actually is: a Hillary Clinton supporter who handled diversity at Intel and Google.

Google is a search engine monopoly that makes its money from search ads. It began with a revolutionary idea from young engineers much like Damore. Then the engineers became billionaires. And the company that began in a garage hired a Vice President of Diversity to get rid of the brilliant young engineers.

The idea that made Google some twenty years ago was PageRank. It was ahead of its time in utilizing social technology to rate the relevance of a page. The idea has since been cannibalized as Google’s search algorithm favors its own products. And increasingly it also favors its own political views.

As the company swings left, it isn’t interested in the “wisdom of crowds”, only in its own agenda.

Google has embedded partisan attacks on conservatives into its search and news territories under the guise of “fact checks”. It has fundamentally shifted results for terms such as “Jihad” to reflect Islamist propaganda rather than the work of counterterrorism researchers such as Robert Spencer. And it wasn’t the first time. Google had been previously accused of manipulating search results during Brexit.

Censorship has long been a problem on YouTube. And it will now officially be caging “controversial” videos using a method developed by Jigsaw. Formerly Google Ideas, Jigsaw is Google’s left-wing incubator developing social justice tech.

The Southern Poverty Law Center guided Google’s censorship of Islamic search results. But there’s no reason to think that it will stop there until Google has completely cannibalized PageRank and replaced it with ProgRank in which search results will be dominated by left-wing sites in one category after another. First Autocomplete results and then actual search results will be censored and suppressed.

Google’s treatment of conservative users mirrors its internal treatment of conservative employees.

Internally, Google is a toxic environment where conservatives are threatened, blacklisted and even physically assaulted. Damore’s case went public. Countless other conservatives were forced out of Google and blacklisted by left-wing activists without their cases ever receiving public attention.

Once upon a time, James Damore would have represented what was best about Google. But Google doesn’t need brilliant minds. It needs to find more ways to squeeze ad dollars out of its monopoly. The pretense that it’s a hub of innovation is the meaningless default brand for a Bay Area tech company.

Damore was working on Google’s search infrastructure. And there’s little doubt that he was wasted there. Google’s search has grown more useless even as the company’s search revenues have grown. Google’s goal is to streamline and shape search results for a mobile environment by giving users what it thinks they want rather than what they are actually searching for. Google isn’t just politically left-wing, its product mindset has become all about forcing users to do what it thinks they should be doing.

Google’s efforts to get a foothold in social media have repeatedly failed because of this mindset.

Damore, like so many of us, wasn’t thinking the way that Google thought he should be thinking. And so it dealt with the problem by getting rid of him. When users search for results that Google doesn’t like, it guides them to what it thinks they should be looking for. If they persist, then the results vanish. If they upload videos it doesn’t like, they get censored. That’s the totalitarian left-wing Google model in action.

Google is approaching the ecological dead end of its technological niche. There’s not much else to do except make fringe investments that are little more than disguised advertising and build more free apps to feed into its own ad business while driving traffic to them through its search and Android leverage.

If the business model ever fails or the government takes a closer look at its abuses, then it’s all over.

Meanwhile its Google.org philanthropy can fund pro-crime and anti-police causes. Google Ideas, now known as Jigsaw, can try to get involved in the Syrian Civil War. And the herd of leftists it hired can police internal messaging by spamming angry social justice memes and waiting for an actual engineer to contradict them. That’s what happened to James Damore. It’s happened to plenty of others before him.

When Google fired Damore, it sent a very clear message. The message wasn’t tolerance, but intolerance.

It said that its Vice President of Diversity knows more about biology than a researcher who received his biology degree in the top 3% of his class. It announced that there is no room for original thinking, heterodoxy or genius at Google. And it went even without saying, no room for anyone to the right.

When asked at a shareholder meeting whether conservatives would feel welcome at Google, Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt replied, “The company was founded under the principles of freedom of expression, diversity, inclusiveness.” But freedom of expression no longer comes before diversity. It’s breathing in the toxic fumes of fake inclusiveness and watching diversity vanish down the highway.

“Viewpoint diversity is arguably the most important type of diversity,” James Damore had argued.

But that’s not what the left means by diversity. At Google and everywhere else it means a plurality of people from different backgrounds, races, genders and sexual identities who agree with us.

It’s an artificial consensus that displaces the old democratic values of individualism and freedom. Instead it imposes a system of safe spaces that treat any dissent as an act of violence against the oppressed.

The gates of the internet cannot remain in the hands of a corporation intolerant of free speech. Google’s monopoly doesn’t only threaten the free market. It threatens freedom of expression on the internet.

It’s not just about James Damore. It’s about all of us.

SOURCE

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Jobs

For anybody who has not got it already, Trump's personal Facebook page is here.  The latest announcement is that there have been over 1 million new jobs created since Trump took office. See the video of Aug. 9th..  While the media are  obsessing about Russia, Trump is delivering the miracle he promised.  So who's dumb now?  He knows the important stuff.  The Left don't.  Trump encourages and supports the people who make America tick.  Obama despised them as "bitter clingers". Trump is a great blessing to America.

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

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

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Google Manifesto: Does Biology Explain Gender Disparities in Tech?

An article under the above heading appeared in Live Science, in reply to the claims of James Damore of Google fame.  As one would expect from Left-dominated mainstream academe the answer given is broadly "No".

What they trot out is all old chestnut stuff that basically aims at a straw man.  What psychometricians assert is only a TENDENCY.  There is no claim that men generally are good at tech and women not.  The research finding is that there is a big overlap in male and female abilities. Abilities differ only at the margins. So the various arguments put forward about exceptional female abilities are pointless. In various times and places you can find women who do math and tech well.  And the "No" article is mainly just a trotting out of such examples.

What is of interest is the GENERAL TENDENCY in mental abilities, not a parade of anecdotes about tribes in India etc. And the way to measure a general tendency is to apply a valid and reliable test of problem-solving ability to a representative population sample. And the finding from such studies is that at the top of the IQ range in Western populations, there are always many more men than women. And if we look at mathematical ability only, the gap is even larger. You can theorize yourself blue in the face about why that is so -- "patriarchy" and all the rest -- but there remains there a clear and firm difference in ability that you have to deal with.

It is perfectly reasonable that some populations somewhere have undergone selective pressures which make females better at the top of the range but that does not alter the reality in Western society.

So on the basis of measured facts rather than a lot of speculation, Damore was perfectly right.  You will always get a substantial number of women who are good at tech and mathemstics but they will be greatly outnumbered by men.

In the circumstances, it matters little if the differences are inborn nor not but the way such differences have consistently shown up for around a  hundred years certainly suggest something inborn -- or at least something very resistant to change.   And the various genetic studies -- now including DNA findings -- do show that most of IQ and its component abilities is genetically determined.

So Google's frenetic efforts to introduce "equality" into its workforce were pushing uphill from the beginning. Such efforts were doomed to failure.  Damore's greatest offence may have been to point that failure out.

That despite great efforts Google could not equalize the number of its employees in stat/math applications would seem good confirmation of what the tests show.  Despite its great efforts to  swing the results in the way it wanted, Google ended up finding exactly what the IQ and other tests predicted.  A psychometrician would call Google's experiment good validation of the tests.  Google showed that the tests were right.

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Trump Attacked for N. Korea Remarks, But Liberals, Media Okay With Similar Words by Truman, Clinton

Although Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), Democrat lawmakers, and many members of the media were quick to criticize President Donald Trump’s “fire and fury” remarks towards North Korea, they were wrong to suggest that no other U.S. president had used such tough rhetoric about another country.

For instance, comments made by Democratic President Harry Truman, after the first atomic bomb was dropped on Japan, were arguably much harsher than what Trump said.

On Tuesday, in response to Communist North Korea threatening to bomb the island of Guam where U.S. troops are stationed, President Trump said, “North Korea best not make anymore threats to the United States, they will be met with fire and fury, like the world has never seen.”

“He [Kim Jong-un] has been very threatening, beyond a normal statement,” said Trump.  “And as I said, they will be met with fire, fury, and frankly power - the likes of which the world has never seen before.”

CNN anchor Jake Tapper criticized the president’s statement, saying “this is a time when words should be chosen and measured carefully. The White House sources tell us that the president spoke extemporaneously when he made that statement about ‘fire and fury.’ Perhaps now might not be the best time to improvise.”

Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) also disapproved of Trump’s remarks during an interview on KTAR radio: "I take exception to the president's comments because you gotta’ be able to do what you say you're going to do…. In other words, the old walk softly but carry a big stick, Teddy Roosevelt's saying, which I think is something that should've applied because all it's going to do is bring us closer to a serious confrontation,” said McCain, who is a strong opponent of President Trump.

“I think this is very, very, very serious,” he said. “The great leaders I've seen don't threaten unless they're ready to act and I'm not sure President Trump is ready to act…. It's the classic Trump in that he overstates things.”

In addition, many Democrats attacked the president’s comments. Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) said that, "President Trump is not helping the situation with his bombastic comments,” and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) called Trump’s “fire and fury” quote “reckless rhetoric.”

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) concurred with her Democrat colleagues, going as far as to say that the president’s remarks “demonstrates weakness” and are “recklessly belligerent.”

However, former Democratic Presidents Harry Truman and Bill Clinton have made similar and even stronger comments during times when the security of the United States was being threatened.

In 1993, The New York Times reported: “On his weekend visit to South Korea, President Clinton warned that if North Korea developed and used an atomic weapon, ‘we would quickly and overwhelmingly retaliate.’ ‘It would mean the end of their country as they know it,’” he said.

Democratic President Truman also used harsh language in 1945 when facing the ongoing threat posed by Japan. “It is an atomic bomb. It is a harnessing of the basic power of the universe. The force from which the sun draws its power has been loosed against those who brought war to the Far East,” said Truman in a statement on August 6, 1945, after the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima.  (The second bomb was dropped on Aug. 9, 1945.)

“We are now prepared to obliterate more rapidly and completely every productive enterprise the Japanese have above ground in any city,” said Truman, the only U.S. president to order a nuclear strike on largely civilian targets. “We shall destroy their docks, their factories, and their communications. Let there be no mistake; we shall completely destroy Japan’s power to make war.”

“If they do not accept our terms they may expect a rain of ruin from the air the like of which has never been seen on this earth,” said Truman.  “Behind this air attack will follow sea and land forces in such number and power as they have not yet seen and with the fighting skill of which they are already well aware.”

Neither McCain, Feinstein, Pelosi, Tapper, or other members of the liberal media have said the comments by Clinton and Truman were too harsh or dangerous.

SOURCE

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Union Foolishly Persists, Wasting Time and Resources

In 2011, the United Food and Commercial Workers International Union (UFCW) and its co-conspirators started invading Maryland Walmart stores and harassing customers and staff. Perhaps the UFCW thought it could get away with its outrageous behavior in a union-friendly state or that the federal courts would weigh in on its behalf. But, either way, it was in for a series of surprises.

The UFCW claims that it launched this campaign of harassment to improve working conditions for Walmart employees and that it does not wish to represent Walmart workers itself. Of course, since the UFCW is at least as honest as any unscrupulous used car salesman, its claims may or may not be accurate.

During this campaign, which went on for several years, the UFCW would assemble “flash mobs” to block traffic, block check-out lanes, sing, dance, scream, use bullhorns indoors, litter, confront managers, force their way into management meetings, etc. UFCW protesters would then refuse to leave as they were instructed to do by Walmart managers. The police would be called, and they would order the protesters to leave.

In response to this harassment, Walmart lawyers repeatedly sent cease and desist letters to the UFCW; and the union stubbornly refused to honor them. So, in March of 2013, Walmart filed an unfair labor practice complaint with the National Labor Relations Board accusing the union of coercing Walmart employees to join the union.

In September of 2013, Walmart filed a lawsuit against the UFCW for trespassing and nuisance in Maryland’s Anne Arundel County. The UFCW filed a motion to dismiss the case, which was denied. Walmart requested a preliminary injunction preventing the union from trespassing on company property; the UFCW argued that the state’s trespassing law was preempted by federal labor law. Rejecting the union’s argument, the court issued a preliminary injunction just before Black Friday in 2013 and a permanent injunction in early 2015.

The permanent injunction prohibited UFCW from entering Walmart property in Maryland for the purpose of “picketing, patrolling, parading, demonstrations, chanting, ‘flash mobs,’ handbilling, solicitation, customer disruptions, manager delegations or confrontations, or associate engagement for a non-shopping purpose.” The injunction also prohibited

“Interfering with, obstructing or blocking Walmart’s and its customers’ access to, and use of, easements and/or right-of-ways granted by  Walmart across or upon apron sidewalks and parking lots adjacent to stores for which Walmart has a “building only” lease; and engaging in any nuisance conduct off Walmart’s private property which disrupts and/or interferes with Walmart customers’ or associates’ access to, or ability to move around or exit, Walmart private property…”

Hoping for a more favorable ruling, the UFCW appealed the circuit court’s decision to the Maryland Court of Special Appeals. That court unanimously affirmed the lower court’s ruling.

Still not able to accept that it was wrong, the UFCW appealed to the highest court in the state, the Court of Appeals. Late last month, the court handed down its decision. Once again, the UFCW’s arguments were found to be without merit, and the Court of Appeals unanimously affirmed the ruling of the Court of Special Appeals. In other words, the UFCW’s lawyers could not persuade even one of the seven judges on the Court of Appeals – whether appointed by a Republican or a Democrat – to side with the union.

For over three years, the UFCW spent its members’ money paying lawyers to fight a losing battle with Walmart in Maryland courts, and the union has absolutely nothing to show for it. Of course, the union tried its shenanigans at Walmart stores in a number of other states. And judges from California to Ohio to Florida also told the UFCW to stop trespassing on Walmart property.

SOURCE

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Hopes rise for diabetes patients as trial jab brings the disease to a halt

A twice-monthly injection can stop type 1 diabetes in its tracks, according to an early-stage study that raises hopes of a vaccine for the disease.

Scientists have found the first strong evidence that the previously untreatable disorder can be halted by reining in attacks from the immune system.

Combined with advanced blood tests that spot the disease before symptoms appear, the approach has the potential to prevent most of the 16,000 new cases diagnosed in Britain each year.

SOURCE

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

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

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How America Lost Its Mind

There is a looong article in "The Atlantic". Under the above title.  It can however be summarized briefly.  KURT ANDERSEN argues that as many as a majority of Americans have always believed silly things.  From my knowledge of history, I am inclined to agree.  And if you don't know much history, Andersen gives you a grand tour of it.

He attributes this flexibility of belief to the general freedoms that Americans have.  The land of the free is, by extension, the land of freedom to believe anything that you want to.  Again, I think there is something in that.

But towards the end of his article Andersen comes of course to TRUMP.  And you can guess what he thinks of Trump.  Trump has no reality contact at all, according to Andersen. He is mad. Leftist thinking and assumptions and customs and procedures have become so entrenched in public discourse that to blast through it all sounds mad to Andersen -- or at least morally defective.

And from Trump's success he concludes that Americans generally have reached new heights of derangement.  But how to explain that fall? The obvious culprit is the internet, which allows all sorts of craziness to spread without check or hindrance.  And, as a secondary cause, Andersen cherry-picks a few things that some Republicans have said that seem particularly corrupting to the search for truth.  Christianity in particular seems to him a major form of brain-rot.

What he is completely blind to, however, is the total disregard for the truth on the political Left.  And that is not controversial.  The Left themselves tell us that.  They say:  "there is no such thing as right and wrong".  And they live that belief.  Almost any Leftist argument is one big exerise in cherry-picking.  What a Leftist polemicist writes normally sounds right and reasonable  -- until you hear the stuff that the Leftist has omitted from his argument.  Telling only one side of the story is the Leftist specialty.  It is so very common that I get the impression that they can do no other.

Conservative polemic, by contrast, usually START OUT with the Leftist argument and then puts forward contrary information. Conservatives keep trying to refute Leftists with facts -- a quite futile operation.  The fine-honed psychological defence mechanisms of the Left -- denial, projection, compartmentalization etc. -- are only one way that they protect themselves from acknowledging inconvenient facts.

Mostly, they do their best to ensure that they never even hear a conservative presentation in the first place.  I have seen them literally get up and run away from a conservative presentation of facts that Leftists normally omit from their consideration.  And, of course, they make huge efforts to censor or disrupt conservative speech so that they don't have to hear it in the first place.  And if a speaker of conservative arguments can be got at and punished for his speech, they will do that too -- ask James Damore of Google about that.

So the Left do their level best to ensure that the whole truth will never come out.  But that inevitably fails.  There are some channels of communication that let people know how much falsehood there is in Leftist writing. People listen to the mainstream TV channels and mainstram newpapers only to find eventually that none of it could he trusted.  Just one man -- Rupert Murdoch -- has cracked the TV and newspaper bubble.  With Fox news, The New York post and the Wall St Journal, Murdoch has made widely available information that would once not have come to the attention of the general public.  And enough people take in Murdoch's information to use it in everyday discussions.  So even people who themselves absorb no Murdoch input will often hear of it by word of mouth. And there are of course radio talkers and blogs that also evade the Leftist straitjacket on information.

So now that people have a growing awareness that they have been systematically deceived, one must expect a certain cynicism to set in.  People begin to ask the age-old question:  "What is truth?" And the answers to that will often be not very sophisticated.  People will seize on any belief that seems plausible to them. So I agree that we now live in an age of heightened irrationality.  The lying Left have propelled us into it.

And the rise of Trump is explainable in the same way.  His distancing himself from the conventional authorities and calling them a "swamp" coincides very well with how many people have been perceiving all the deception that flow from such authorities.  He offers a way out of the intellectual morass that the Left have created.

And even his manner of speech offers hope.  He speaks  in extremely simple English:  Short sentences using very common words.  He comes across even in his manner of speaking as a plain and simple man -- most unlike the smooth pieties of most media figures.  He really does seem different -- mainly because he is.  And even his famous inattention to detail corresponds with how most Americans operate:  They go for the broad outline with no time for details.

So. Yes.  We do live in times where finding the truth can be a big challenge.  But there is after all a fairly easy way to do it if you have time.  You just have to read both sides of every question.  Do that and you will soon see which side is offering a balanced account of reality.

Also: Reality is the ultimate test of whether your theories are right or wrong.  If they are wrong you will not get the results you expect.  If they are right you may make a big breakthrough, as Trump has done with a couple of hundred thousand new jobs being created every month and a big rise on the stockmarket.  The economy could do with a bit more more "madness" like that.

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Indonesia to bust sanctions on Russia

Indonesia said Tuesday it would trade palm oil, coffee and tea for Russian fighter jets, saying it wanted to capitalise on international sanctions on Moscow as Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov was due to arrive for a visit.

Indonesia and Russia signed a memorandum of understanding to exchange 11 Russian-made Sukhoi fighters for key commodities in Moscow last week, a spokesman for Indonesia's trade ministry said.

"The idea was proposed last year and some people suggested Indonesia should trade the jets with our main commodities," spokesman Marolop Nainggolan told AFP.

The EU and US have targeted Russia with sanctions for alleged meddling in the US presidential election and its annexation of Ukraine's Crimea.

However, Indonesian Trade Minister Enggartiasto Lukita has said the sanctions, which have forced Russia to seek new markets to import from, could be good news for Jakarta.

"It's an opportunity which should not be lost from our grasp," he said in Moscow last week.

The deal, to be carried out between Russia's Rostec and PT Perusahaan Perdagangan Indonesia, could be an opening for a further bilateral trade deal that extended to energy and aviation, Lukita said.

The exact timeframe and value of the exchange were not clear.

Details of the barter came as Lavrov was to begin his two-day visit to Southeast Asia's biggest economy later Tuesday.

SOURCE

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Tillerson Says Not to Worry, Pacific Air Forces Ready to 'Fight Tonight'

I think Tillerson is right.  Kim just wants attention but he will not do anything that will draw a major assault on him

Secretary of State Rex Tillerson addressed reporters on his flight to Guam Wednesday, telling them not to worry about Kim Jong Un's latest threat.

Soon after the United Nations issued new sanctions as punishment for North Korea's newest ballistic missile test, a Washington Post report surfaced revealing that the regime now has the ability to miniaturize nuclear weapons to fit on to ICBMs. President Trump issued a warning to North Korea, telling the nation they would face "fire and fury" should they continue to threaten the U.S. Just a few hours after those remarks, North Korea reportedly issued a threat against Guam.

It is all plenty to concern Americans. Yet, Tillerson said North Korea is only making a knee jerk reaction to the new sanctions and suggested Kim Jong Un is all bark, no bite.

"I think Americans should sleep well at night, have no concerns about this particular rhetoric of the last few days," he said.

In fact, Tillerson concluded the president used the exact right tone in his message for North Korea and succeeded in getting his message across.

"In response to that, North Korea's rhetoric is just ratcheted up, louder and louder and more threatening," Tillerson noted. "So I think the president, what the president is doing is sending a strong message to North Korea in language that Kim Jong Un would understand, because he doesn't seem to understand diplomatic language."

However, should North Korea's threats be more than rhetoric, the Pacific Air Forces said they are "ready to fight tonight."

The secretary of state said he has no plans to take Guam off of his schedule.

SOURCE

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ABC settled 'pink slime' lawsuit for $177 million, leaving the beef company feeling 'vindicated'

Disney paid Beef Products Inc. (BPI) $US177 million to settle the 'pink slime' lawsuit that claimed a story ABC ran in 2012 misled viewers and caused hundreds of layoffs.

On Wednesday, Walt Disney Co's quarterly earnings report revealed that the company spent $US177 million "in connection with the settlement of litigation" last quarter.

The case could have resulted in a verdict of as much as $US5.7 billion if BPI had won. In late June, ABC announced it had reached an "amicable resolution" with BPI.

BPI's attorney, Dan Webb, said the settlement "vindicated" the company and its "lean finely textured beef," the product that ABC dubbed "pink slime" in its 2012 reports, according to Hytrek.

"Although we have concluded that continued litigation of this case is not in the company's interests, we remain committed to the vigorous pursuit of truth and the consumer's right to know about the products they purchase," ABC said in a statement.

Lawyers made their opening arguments less than a month ago in a trial that could have resulted in a verdict of as much as $US5.7 billion if BPI had won.

In the suit, BPI alleged that ABC misled viewers by calling its lean finely textured beef "pink slime." LFTB is a common ingredient in beef products and is safe to eat, which ABC noted in its reports. However, even with assurances that the ingredient, made from the trimmings of a cow and treated with ammonia to kill bacteria, wasn't dangerous, the phrase "pink slime" turned off customers, the lawsuit claimed.

"They ignored the proper name," Webb said in his opening argument, according to The Hollywood Reporter. "When you have a major news organisation that is calling the product 'slime,' witnesses will say they can't imagine anything worse. It connotes something disgusting, inedible."

BPI said it had to close three plants and lay off 700 workers because of the "pink slime" backlash.

ABC's attorney argued that the "pink slime" reports brought to light that BPI and other ground-beef producers were using a beef product that most customers were unaware they were eating.

SOURCE

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Note:

I noted recently that I have reposted the comprehensive survey of Nazi docrine that I originally wrote in conjunction with Michael Miller.  At that time, I had not completely reinstated the graphics in the chapter dealing with Nazi gun control.  I have however now done that and you can go directly to that chapter by clicking 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),  a Coral reef compendium and an IQ compendium. (Both updated as news items come in).  GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten. I also put up occasional updates on my Personal blog and each day I gather together my most substantial current writings on THE PSYCHOLOGIST.

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

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Socialist paint?

A few excerpts below.  One wonders if the Democratic Socialists of America are as democratic as the Democratic People's Republic of Korea.  But we learn that they have plenty of money and they still think Israel controls Gaza

Things are looking up for the Democratic Socialists of America. With a membership of 25,000, it is now the largest socialist group in America since the Second World War. And last weekend in Chicago, it held its largest convention, by a considerable margin, in its history.

Membership has more than tripled in a year, gaining a large boost from the candidacy of Bernie Sanders and an even bigger one from the election of Donald Trump. Something like 1,500 people joined on Nov. 9, 2016, alone — about average for an entire year before now, Joseph Schwartz, a longtime member of DSA's National Political Committee, told The Week. That sharp surge in new recruits — most of whom are fairly young — has created a fairly stark age bifurcation among members. Somewhat akin to Sanders campaign, there is an old guard of people who have been carrying the left-wing torch for years, and a recent surge of new members radicalized by the recession and the haplessness of the Democratic Party.

There were moments of acrimonious debate over a few topics, but ultimately most of the major proposals were adopted with large majorities. Among other things, delegates voted to create a formal harassment and grievance policy, to endorse the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement (directed at ending the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza), to leave the Socialist International, to create a labor organizing committee, and to endorse Medicare for all as a major priority.

The DSA also took paints to make up for its shortcomings, particularly its demographics. The group is quite a bit more white, male, and educated than America writ large. Convention delegates were about 40 percent female and 20 percent minority, according to DSA statistics — not exactly the "Bernie bros" of the liberal imagination, but neither as diverse as they would like.

Perhaps surprisingly for a socialist organization, there was also an emphasis on money. A presentation on DSA's finances emphasized that while the organization is flush, it will take hard work to keep it that way.

SOURCE

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The entire National Security Council staff should be fired

So, apparently, the President’s conversations with foreign leaders, including the President of Mexico and Prime Minister of Australia, were recorded and/or transcribed by National Security Council staff, subsequently classified and then illegally leaked to the Washington Post.

This might be the straw that breaks the camel’s back. And not for President Donald Trump, who ultimately makes personnel decisions at the White House, but for those who may have finally, simply gone too far.

For goodness’ sake, the President cannot even have a conversation with leaders in Mexico about the wall or Australia about dumping their refugees into the U.S. without it being leaked by his own staff to sabotage the administration’s policies on immigration and refugees.

There is a clear pattern. The leaks are all in the direction of opposing Trump’s agenda.

Under the Constitution, we have one executive for a reason. That includes the conduct of foreign relations. To the extent that the leaks make it more difficult for the President to discharge his constitutional responsibilities dealing with foreign leaders, they undermine national security.

Other examples include attempts to carry on relations and to ratchet down tensions with Russia. Then-incoming National Security Advisor Michael Flynn’s conversation with former Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak was intercepted in December and then leaked to the Washington Post in January.

Some of the content of Trump’s meeting with Kislyak and Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov — including discussion of active global terrorist threats affecting both countries — in the Oval Office was leaked to the Washington Post in May.

Some of the substance of the conversation of Trump’s senior advisor and son-in-law Jared Kushner with Kislyak during the transition period on Nov. 16, 2016 was leaked to the Washington Post from intercepted communications by U.S. intelligence agencies.

These are all clearly designed to sabotage the President’s attempts at détente with Russia, something he campaigned on in 2016. As if Trump was the first president to ever attempt that. You have to basically ignore Eisenhower, Kennedy, Nixon, Carter and Reagan — most of the Cold War — who at various intervals, set the stage for first dialogue, establishing direct lines of communication to deescalate the possibility of nuclear exchange, then limiting strategic arms and finally, reducing them. These used to be heralded as diplomatic accomplishments. Now every well-intentioned overture is treated as collusion and treason.

Incidentally, these three issues, Trump’s positions on the wall with Mexico, refugees and Russia were part of what set him apart on foreign policy from the other candidates who ran in 2016. Here’s the key. Taking those positions, Trump won the majority of the Electoral College in November. Trump deserves the chance to pursue those policies under the Constitution. Instead, he is being undermined by his own staff at the White House. This is unacceptable and inexcusable.

That is why Trump must simply fire the National Security Council staff in its entirety and start from scratch. Nobody can be trusted. There’s just no other way to be certain that the leaks will stop.

In addition, it is long overdue that Trump cut all former presidents and their designees out of the loop of classified information under federal rules and by revising Executive Order 13526, something Americans for Limited Government President Rick Manning called for in early March, saying “They have no need to know.”

The case for doing so now appears all but irrefutable, particularly after it was revealed by Circa.com’s Sara Carter on August 3 that in late April that National Security Advisor H.R. McMaster had granted a continued security clearance to former National Security Advisor Susan Rice — weeks after it was reported by Bloomberg View’s Eli Lake that she was at the heart of the unmasking scandal by the former Obama administration targeting the opposition party during the 2016 election campaign.

Despite the fact that Rice had been fingered in the unmasking scandal weeks earlier, according to Carter, “Trump was not aware of the letter or McMaster’s decision, according to two Senior West Wing officials and an intelligence official, who spoke to Circa on condition that they not be named.”

McMaster cannot keep control of the National Security Council, and Americans for Limited Government’s Manning said that means it’s time for him to go: “The only option President Trump has is to clean house at the National Security Council, starting at the top with General McMaster. The threat posed to the country by the National Security Council leaking requires immediate and swift action.”

This is the part where the American people can hope that perhaps Trump has simply been playing dumb with McMaster, carrying on like he has no clue what’s happening with the leaks or why, and in the meantime has developed a strategy to survive these machinations. Hopefully the gloves are about to come off.

SOURCE

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China bows to Trump pressure, votes against North Korea in U.N.

Under pressure from the Trump administration to rein in its nuclear neighbor, Communist China voted Saturday in favor of a United Nations resolution banning exports from North Korea until Pyongyang ceases its nuclear weapons program.

While Communist China has voted in favor of sanctions on North Korea in the past, China often sides with North Korea in international talks, fearful sanctions will destabilize the regime and create a crisis on its border.

The BBC reports:

China’s foreign minister has told his North Korean counterpart that Pyongyang should stop carrying out nuclear and missile tests, hours after fresh sanctions were agreed by the United Nations Security Council.

Wang Yi said he urged Ri Yong-ho to abide by UN resolutions in a meeting on Sunday in the Philippines.

He did not say how Mr Ri replied.

Saturday’s resolution banning North Korean exports and limiting investments in the country was passed unanimously.

Mr Wang said sanctions were needed, but “are not the final goal”, and he urged dialogue. He said he told North Korea to remain calm, and not provoke the international community with more tests…

…Beijing has often protected Pyongyang from harmful resolutions in the past.

Russia, which the US has also criticised for its economic links with North Korea, also voted for the sanctions.

This new resolution is far more stringent, in the wake of Pyongyang testing new intercontinental ballistic missiles capable of reaching the interior of the United States.  While North Korea is impoverished due to its Marxist government, it is rich in minerals.  Exports of iron, coal and other mined goods to China — banned under the resolution — are largely its only source of income,

Communist China’s support comes after the Trump administration has stepped up U.S. rhetoric critical of Beijing’s international aggression.

SOURCE

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Google should have Googled labor law

Americans for Limited Government President Rick Manning today issued the following statement in reaction to Google’s firing of engineer James Damore after he communicated his views on how the company’s politically correct culture was harming its work environment and products offering:

“Google should have Googled labor law. Section 7 of the National Labor Relations Act gives employees the right to engage in ‘concerted activities for the purpose of … mutual aid or protection’ of fellow employees and under Section 8 it is illegal for an employer to ‘interfere with, restrain, or coerce employees in the exercise of the rights guaranteed.’ James Damore was attempting to improve working conditions at the company he worked at and communicated his views to fellow employees, taking direct aim at what he viewed as Google’s PC culture. By firing James Damore, who apparently had filed a complaint with the National Labor Relations Board, Google may have created significant legal jeopardy for itself.

“An adverse ruling by the NLRB that Google engaged in an unfair labor practice could result in its entire diversity-driven, politically correct inquisition to now be subjected to federal oversight, potentially being ordered to end the unfair practice and to revise company policies as a remedy. There is a lot we do not know. There could be hundreds of witnesses who if they had similar findings as Damore could tear the underbelly of Silicon Valley’s left-wing bias wide open for the nation to see. This would provide the impetus for opening up Google’s personnel policies and how they are creating a hostile working environment for those who don’t toe the left-wing company line.”

SOURCE

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

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

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Women beware: President Trump and the promise of violence (?)

Angela McRobbie, a Professor of Communications writes below.  She has a vivid imagination and no balance at all.  She intuits a promise of violence from Trump while ignoring the actual violence that Leftists repeatedly dish out to Trump supporters.

And her claim that Trump is authoritarian shows scant awareness of the meaning of words.  Which is authoritarian, to impose lot of regulations on what people can do or to abolish a lot of such regulations?  To anybody except a professor of communications and other people similarly handicapped, it would be obvious that the Left are the authoritarians and Trump is the liberator.  Or is she simply so poorly informed that she is unaware of how many regulations Trump has abolished?  However you look at it she is not much of a professor of anything


When Emily Maitlis of BBC Newsnight landed her first (and possibly as it transpired, her last) interview with the then-incoming Head of Communications for the White House, Anthony “the Mooch” Scaramucci, she could have had little idea beyond her briefing notes what to expect. What viewers actually saw and heard wasn’t just a bad omen of things to come, but an exercise in that peculiar blend of undisguised contempt and ferocious masculine-driven competition that has become a decisive marker of the violent underpinnings of Donald Trump and his administration. Women beware.

Scaramucci rose to the occasion of having a well-trained and well-mannered BBC female journalist in front of him by attempting to cut her down to size. He repeatedly pointed and stabbed his finger at Maitlis. He seemed to want to pat her on the arm, perhaps intending to infantilise her as ‘just a girl.’ Eventually he did touch her on the hand, thereby breaking all the normal etiquette and disarming her for a moment. Successful working women like Maitlis might have gotten to the top, but she still needed to be reminded of the ‘natural’ pecking order.......

Trump’s particular brand of authoritarianism relies on the popularity of various media genres to give it legitimacy, even in adversity, and even when the White House is struggling to meet any of its policy objectives.

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A Convention of States to Restore the American Tradition

Hundreds of articles and blog posts since the COS movement emerged a few years ago deal with the impossibility of reform from those who profit so well from DC corruption. Other posts, like those scattered about this ArticleVBlog, examined the historic foundations of free government from the 17th century English philosophers down to our Revolution and Constitution.

When taken together, all the events and ideas which shaped the American psyche since publication of the King James Bible in 1611 may be grouped together by the term, ‘Tradition’. Today, I appeal to that which gets little attention, but is so necessary to our survival – the American Tradition. The spark for this squib is F.A. Hayek’s The Fatal Conceit (1988). Tradition, as related by Hayek, resides between instinct and reason. Instinct and reason are distinct from tradition. No amount of reason can produce tradition.

Why is tradition so important? Tradition, customs, and norms of behavior called morals enable and are necessary to the continued existence of the civil society. Unlike totalitarian regimes, republics rest on the common, shared attitudes of the people toward that personal sphere of movement unhindered by anyone else, which we call liberty.

Tradition isn’t genetically passed on to us. We weren’t born with it. Neither can reason alone create tradition. Traditions are the societal, shared notions of right and wrong, of acceptable and unacceptable behavior. These unwritten laws are mostly the ‘thou shalt nots’ which tame the primitive instincts in everyone. If citizens, families, and their organic associations outside of government comprise society, civil society is one in which tradition guides and directs their peaceful and productive lives. An American Tradition left unmolested by the Left, particularly the Supreme Court, limits violence and assaults on our persons and freedom far more effectively than statutory laws.

Civil society is orderly because the rules of human conduct, such as those dealing with property, honesty, contract, exchange, trade, competition, gain and privacy are observed, not in fear of police arrest for violation, but because tradition commands obedience. The source for these evolved norms are time-out-of-mind. They are neither instinctive nor derived from reason. 1
Even though the individual depends on these constraints for his life, he usually doesn’t understand how they function or how they benefit him. He desires so much of what he sees, but is not permitted to grasp. Disliking these constraints so much, we can hardly be said to have selected them; rather, these constraints selected us; they enabled us to survive. 2

The American Tradition and its resulting extended order did not arise all at once; these rules of civil and personal conduct did not spread because men understood them, but simply because they enabled us to prosper more successfully than other cultures.3 Learning how to behave is more the source than the result of insight, reason, and understanding. Man must be taught to be wise, rational and good. He wasn’t born that way. Intellect did not create our morals, but rather human interactions governed by our morals make possible the growth of reason and those capabilities associated with it.4 Is it any wonder the majority of prison inmates grew up in fatherless homes?

In the final chapter, an agnostic Hayek relates why religion is the guardian of tradition. Custom and tradition are more likely to guide society when supported by religious beliefs, the main function of which is to restrain our animal impulses. Acceptance of supernatural beings that could punish transgressions led to observance of the restraints. The belief in some religions that ancestors watched over and would judge the actions of the living is a powerful inducement to follow traditional and religious norms. 5

We owe it partly to mystical and religious beliefs, (particularly to Christianity) that beneficial traditions have been preserved and transmitted at least long enough to enable those groups following them to grow, and to have the opportunity to spread by natural selection. This means that, like it or not we owe the persistence of certain practices and the civilization that resulted from them, in part to support from beliefs which are not verifiable, testable, or the result of rational argumentation.

Regardless of one’s views, even agnostics and atheists should recognize the harm done by the loss of nonfactual beliefs. This loss has deprived mankind of a powerful support in the long development of the extended order. The religious view that morals were determined by processes incomprehensible to many of us is truer than the rationalist delusion that man, by exercising his intelligence, invented morals that gave him the power to achieve more than he could ever foresee. 6

Learning societal norms begins with the family. In their demented way, Islamic families do just that. While despotic rulers in Islamic societies crush liberty, they leave families to patriarchal absolutism. From their religion and customs, fathers are tyrants and may kill their children without fear of civil penalty. It is why muslims are typically far more attached to their traditions than we Americans are to ours. The American Tradition recognizes the distinction between religion and state; Islam doesn’t. The Islamic culture renders its adherents incapable of absorbing the American Tradition. Islam and the American Tradition are mutually exclusive.

While the goals of a COS are to reduce the size and scope of government, the essence of the state-driven amendment process is restoration of the American tradition, in which self-evident truths are made real once again through re-federalization of our national government. Restoration of the American Tradition, the real exercise of unalienable rights, supported along the way by Christianity, are only possible when the states return to the senate, AND have appellate review of supreme court decisions. (See Mark Levin’s Liberty Amendments.)

Conversely, without a COS, what remains of the American Tradition, and with it, the republic, are doomed to destruction by two enemies. First is the spread of the Islamic Tradition, Sharia. Sharia has no place in the West, not just because it is brutal, degenerate, and disgusting; if allowed to expand, it will displace and overwhelm free government Traditions everywhere.

Second, home-grown enemies also threaten the American Tradition. Last week I called out Obama’s Army, Organizing for America (OFA). They exist to reverse the American Revolution, to overturn the American Tradition. OFA believes they can supplant the American Tradition with the conclusions of Leftist ‘reason’: social justice.

Listen to the shudder you feel when singing the Star Spangled Banner or standing at attention when Boy Scouts parade the colors. It is the American Tradition calling out for salvation. We are the many; our oppressors are the few. Government is the playground of politicians, but the Constitution is ours. Be proactive. Restore the American Tradition. Join Convention of States.

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Another prophet who is so blinded by his theories that he fails to see reality

David Stockman headed the Office of Management and Budget under Ronald Reagan but he shows below that he has no understanding of Trump.  By conventional theories, the Trump economy should be tanking.  But it is not.  Employment and all sorts of positive indices are up under Trump,  He is already a big success and that should feed on itself and grow.  Doom is not yet

What will be the trigger that finally sends the establishment after Trump?

Ultimately, the hammer of fiscal crisis and a crashing stock market will break any remaining loyalty of the GOP elders as they smell the 2018 elections turning into a replay of the rout of 1974.

And then the Donald will be gone, and well before August 2018, too. I told an audience in Vancouver last Friday that it could happen by February.

The bottom line is that the Swamp is so undrainable that it will end up making mincemeat of Donald Trump.

Needless to say, the ultimate causes of his demise are anchored deep in the failing status quo.

America is so addicted to war, debt and central bank driven false prosperity that even the most resourceful and focused challenger would be taken down by its sheer inertia.

But the Donald is so undisciplined, naïve, out-of-touch, thin-skinned, unfocused and megalomaniacal that he is making it far easier for the Swamp critters than they deserve. To a very considerable extent, in fact, he is filling out his own bill of indictment.

Moreover, he is totally clueless about how to manage his presidency or cope with the circling long knives of the Deep State which are hell bent on removing him from office.

Accordingly, the single most important thing to know about the present risk environment is that it is extreme and unprecedented.

In essence, the Donald is the ultimate bull in an exceedingly fragile China shop — and an already badly wounded one at that.

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Another book showing that the Nazis were Leftist

The Left loves accusing the right of being fascists — but the Nazis, the National Socialists, were left-wing, not right-wing! Dinesh D’Souza is back to destroy the Democrat Party in his latest book, The Big Lie: Exposing The Nazi Roots of the American Left.

The Conservative Book Club’s Editor in Chief, Christopher Malagisi, interviewed D’Souza about the American Left and how much of their tactics can be traced to the Nazis, based on D’Souza’s research.

SOURCE

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

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

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Principles over Personalities

Terry Paulson puts an argument below that I mostly agree with but his comments on free trade are naive.  There are three reasons why Trump's restrictive attitudes to trade are right

1). He's got the voters behind him.  So opposing him on that would be an electoral disaster.  He largely won office on his skepticism about the "exporting" of jobs.  He has a degree in economics and he has held his view on trade from long before he ran for political office.  So his views are well-considered and of long standing.  One must consider that he is on to something.

2).  The major argument in favour of free trade is its economic efficiency:  It delivers lowest prices.  But there are also non-economic arguments to be considered. Economics is not everything.   Economists have long recognized a variety of those arguments: The infant industry argument, the national security argument and the "Australian" case.  None of those arguments are at issue in the present case but the lesson should be learned that economics-only arguments have long been recognized as too simplistic even by economists. In Trump's case, he is arguing that social stability is being risked by too-rapid industrial change and that change should therefore be reined in and partially reversed.  And if a conservative cannot oppose change and argue for stability, who can?

3). Even the economic argument is shaky and may only apply when all other things are equal.  The strongest argument there is the 19th century experience.  During the 19th century, America prospered mightily behind HIGH trade walls.  There was nothing approaching free trade then. Might not a similar prospering happen again under Trump?  Given the surge in employment that has already taken place since his election, it looks like that is in fact already happening.  How embarrassing to many it will be if Trump's "dumb" policies deliver a win-win:  Prosperity plus stability!


With Republicans in control of the executive and legislative branch, critical things can and should get done. Should Republican principles be more important than presidents in guiding our policy priorities in Washington? Certainly.

US Senator Jeff Flake from Arizona has just published a controversial new book, Conscience of a Conservative: A Rejection of Destructive Politics and a Return to Principles. Although some question Flake’s own priorities and voting record, he calls for putting principles ahead of personalities. Losers don’t legislate, but legislation must serve a purpose. He writes, “If this was our Faustian bargain, then it was not worth it. If ultimately our principles were so malleable as to no longer be principles, then what was the point of political victories in the first place?”

Like many conservatives, Flake believes that Trump appointed an exceptional Supreme Court justice. His positions on cutting regulations and initiating a tax policy that lowers rates and broadens the base are easy to embrace and support. But Flake feels that Trump strays from conservative principles on curtailing free trade. Free trade serves our citizens, our businesses, and keeps important allies in our trade orbit in an expanding global economy.

Republicans have lost in elections when they stray from the principles that guide them. In 2001, President George W. Bush came into the Presidency and pushed for “No child left behind” and a prescription drug entitlement plan. He promoted his “caring conservative” version of bigger, better government, and the principle of smaller government was pushed aside. In the mid-term elections, the GOP lost the Senate.

Our Founding Fathers wisely built checks and balances into our Constitutional structure. It’s time for Republicans in Congress to assert their role and let Republican principles be their primary guide. They should support and work with Trump whenever they can. They should work with Democrats willing to build on common ground, but they should not follow Trump where he departs from what we stand for. Winners legislate; it’s time they assert their priorities.

In the coming months, I will focus on the six primary principles that California Republicans have said unites them: smaller government and less government regulations; lower taxes on small businesses and individuals; a strong military and homeland security; sustain the American Dream through personal freedom and responsibility; promote educational excellence through school choice; and support a free-enterprise, free-trade economy. It’s time Congress and President Trump get busy delivering on what matters most.

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Network denies axing Tim Allen’s popular sitcom over Trump support

US television network ABC has denied that it cancelled comedian Tim Allen’s popular sitcom Last Man Standing due to its conservative politics.

Fans of the show — and Allen himself — were angered when ABC announced in May that one of its most-watched scripted series, a solid ratings draw, was being brought to an end.

Allen’s character, an outspoken conservative, echoed the political positions of the 64-year-old actor, a Republican who attended President Donald Trump’s inauguration.

The announcement sparked a firestorm of criticism on social media, with Allen tweeting that he had been “stunned and blindsided” by Disney-owned ABC’s decision.

Meanwhile a petition on Change.org that attracted more than 300,000 signatures claimed the comedy was cancelled because it was the only entertainment program that was not constantly shoving “liberal ideals down the throats of the viewers.”

“Politics had absolutely nothing to do with it,” ABC Entertainment president Channing Dungey told the Television Critics Association press tour in Los Angeles.
Tim Allen and Nancy Travis in a scene from Last Man Standing.

Tim Allen and Nancy Travis in a scene from Last Man Standing.Source:Supplied

“We have actors on our shows who have all sorts of political views. Tim Allen is a valuable part of the Disney family and has been for a very long time.” She described Last Man Standing as a “high quality show” but added that the network had not been able to find room in the schedules for a seventh season.

A month before the cancellation Allen had spoken about Trump’s inauguration on late-night talk show Jimmy Kimmel Live, saying that he was “almost afraid” to say he had been at the event.

“You gotta be real careful around here,” Allen said. “You get beat up if you don’t believe what everybody else believes. This is like ’30s Germany.”

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Hostility toward religion is on the rise in the United States, according to a new report

The report, recently released by the Family Research Council, shows an increase in the number of incidents involving “religious freedom violations” since the first report was released in July 2014. The original report spanned over a decade and contained 90 incidents. In the past three years, 69 new incidents have been added.

“The recent spike in government-driven religious hostility is sadly not surprising, especially considering the Obama administration’s antagonism toward biblical Christianity,” said Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council, in a statement. “The report underscores the legitimacy of the actions taken by the Trump administration to end the policies and practices in federal agencies that fan the flames of this religious intolerance.”

Perkins added the report’s findings also show “the growing courage of Christians, especially young Christians, to defend both their faith and their freedoms.”

The report found that antagonism toward religious beliefs on sexuality was fueling much of the increase:

Hostility to religious beliefs on natural marriage and human sexuality … [included] 42 incidents in the report’s first edition. In the time since then, 48 new incidents have been added to these sections. Thus, the number of these religious freedom violations more than doubled …

In the introduction to the report, the Family Research Council writes that the attacks on religious teaching on marriage and sexuality “is the product of more insidious forces which ultimately will erode civil liberties for all Americans, even if they hold a different viewpoint than our own.”

Included in the religious liberty violations listed in the report was one about a survey distributed by a major financial firm.

In 2014, JPMorgan Chase, a vocal advocate of LGBT rights, sent out a survey to its employees asking a number of questions. The survey asked if the employee was “disabled, had family members that were disabled, if they were LGBT, or if they were allies of the LGBT movement.” Employees that answered negatively the final question could be interpreted as being at odds with the beliefs of the firm.

In February 2016, Edie and David Delorme received death threats after declining to make a cake for a same-sex wedding. The Delormes, who are devout Baptists, have previously refused to create cakes that go against their religious convictions, including those “that support alcohol, tobacco, gambling, or convey sexually inappropriate images,” according to the report.

Rather than accepting a list of nearby bakeries that would create the same-sex wedding cake instead, the couple complained to the media, bringing on harsh attacks against the Delormes.

“The bakery received threats of violence on social media and Yelp,” the Family Research Council wrote. “Though the bakery was never threatened with a lawsuit, they remain a target of criticism by LGBT activists.”

Another area of extreme hostility concerns Catholic churches, schools, and hospitals who have been operating in accordance with the Catholic Church’s teaching.

One example occurred in September 2016 when Kate Drumgoole, a guidance counselor and coach at a Catholic high school in New Jersey, was fired when the administration learned that she was in a same-sex relationship.

Drumgoole, citing discrimination, sued the archdiocese and Paramus Catholic High School despite having previously signed the archdiocese’s “Policies on Professional and Ministerial Conduct.” By signing it, teachers acknowledge the requirement that they “act in accordance with the ‘discipline, norms and teachings of the Catholic Church.’”

“Religious liberty is the exercise of our inherent, natural rights. It is not limited to freedom to worship, rather, it means that we are free to live consistently with our beliefs in the public square,” says Melanie Israel, a research associate in the DeVos Center for Religion and Civil Society at The Heritage Foundation.

“Individuals and organizations should be able to maintain their ability to abide by their religious convictions when they carry out their work, including serving the poor, educating the next generation, or running a business.”

SOURCE

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

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

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