Fish Instead of People, Ideologies without Consequences

Fish Instead of People, Ideologies without Consequences

Posted By Victor Davis Hanson On March 31, 2014 

 

If only people had to live in the world that they dreamed of for others.

Endangered species everywhere are supposed to be at risk — except birds of prey shredded by wind turbine farms ^[1], or reptilian habitats harmed by massive solar farms ^[2]. High-speed rail ^[3] is great for utopian visionaries — except don’t dare start it in the Bay

Area, when there are yokels aplenty down in Hanford to experiment on. Let’s raise power bills to the highest levels in the country with all sorts of green mandates — given that we live in 70-degree year-round temperatures, while “they” who are stupid enough to dwell in 105-degree Bakersfield deserve the resulting high power bills. We need cheap labor, open borders, multiculturalism, and identity politics, but not too near my kids’ Santa Monica or Atherton ^[4] prep schools. I like my beamer in La Jolla and my Mercedes in Menlo Park, but not the fracking that might provide cheaper gas for Juan and Jose who drive a used 10-year-old Yukon 40 miles to work in Mendota.

Appreciate these contradictions of the liberal elite mind and the current California drought is logical rather than aberrant.

In this third year of California drought, perhaps 500,000 acres of farmland will lie idle for lack of water. Hundreds of millions of dollars will be sunk into lowering wells, as the aquifer dives, when too many straws compete for too little water at the bottom of the glass.

There are reasons why a drought threatens existential ruin in the billions of dollars rather than mere hardship. Our forefathers 50 years ago knew well the ancient California equation: a) California’s population always grows; b) 80% of the state wishes to live where 20% of the rain falls; c) therefore, to ensure that the normal cycles of drought do not prove fatal to commerce and agriculture, man must transfer water from the north to the south of the state.

Unlike 1976-77, there are no longer just 23 million Californians, but 40 million. But unlike the past, Californians in the 1970s gave up on completing the state California Water Project and the federal Central Valley Project that had supplemented the earlier Colorado River, Big Creek, and Hetch Hetchy water storage and transference efforts.

At some fateful moment in the 1970s, the other California on the coast, drunk with the globalized wealth that poured into Napa Valley, the Silicon Valley, the great coastal university nexuses at Stanford, Berkeley, UCLA and Caltech, the entertainment industry, the defense industry, and the financial industry decided that they had transcended the old warnings of more Californians needing far more water to survive more droughts. When you are rich, you can afford for the first time in your life to favor a newt with spots on his toes over someone else that lacks your money, clout, and sensitivities.

The once envisioned reservoirs on the Klamath were cancelled. The supplemental lakes on the Sacramento and American were as well.

There was to be no twin wet-year storage lake south of the San Luis Reservoir. No Temperance Flat was to augment Millerton Lake.
Such construction was considered far too 19^th century in it unnatural building and damming and canaling.

Of course, it was. But so was the most unnatural project of them all, Hetch Hetchy, the engineering marvel that brought the purest water in America by the force of gravity over 160 miles into the Bay Area, making the dense corridor of San Francisco to Silicon Valley what it is today.

Had we finished the California Water Project and the Central Valley Project, or had population tapered off at 30 million, or had global warming been real and created a Central and Southern California tropics with 40 inches a year of rain, then we would not be courting ruin. But we grew and stopped building water storage at the same time and the climate remained what it always was.

Yet it was worse than that still. Our mountain reservoirs were intended for four grand purposes: to store water for agriculture, to store water for hydroelectric generation, to store water to prevent flooding below, and to store water for recreation in our newfound 40 or so Sierra and Northern California lakes.

Note what our forefathers did not envision. They did not foresee that this contemporary and far wealthier generation would not just abandon their plans, and thus make it dangerous for California to grow as it had, but also would create a fifth and novel use for our manmade and unnatural lakes: to release precious water to enhance green fantasies about returning to a 19^th century landscape of salmon jumping in our southern rivers from sea to Sierra, and bait fish and minnows in the delta swimming as they had for eons. How odd that naturalists wanted unnatural reservoirs to improve on nature.

The sin of not investing in “infrastructure” to keep up with population growth was compounded by a greater sin still of misappropriating infrastructure. Those who had stopped the building of more unnatural dams — a green movement birthed among the opulence of Northern California that sought exemption from the ramifications of its own ideology — now wanted infrastructure to store the water necessary for its own dreams of replenishing salmon in the rivers.

I say dreams, because the pre-reservoir river landscape of 19^th-century California had been characterized both by too much and too little water. Rivers flooded in the spring (Tulare Lake in the southern San Joaquin Valley was for a few months each spring one of the largest fresh-water lakes west of the Great Lakes), only to grow dry by September as the snowmelt was gone and the new storms had not yet arrived. Only the reservoirs that the environmentalists scolded us about could provide the necessary water for a utopian steady year-round river that had never existed.

The result is that there are now zero water deliveries for agriculture from our vanishing reservoir waters.  Those who stopped the 15-million-acre feet of additional storage space that might have saved the state now tap the last drops that flow from the dams they opposed in pursuance of theories that remain unproven.

The water disaster is not shared by everyone in quite the same way. In a rare irony, the Hetch Hetchy aqueducts cross the San Joaquin
River on their way to the Bay Area. Surely such Bay Area-owned waters might have been diverted to increase the San Joaquin River’s flow to the sea? Could not the Apple executives and the UC professors have showered once a week to save the smelt or to let the poor salmon at least make it to the Tuolumne River?

There is a great sickness in California, home of the greatest number of American billionaires and poor people, land of the highest taxes and about the worst schools and roads in the nation. The illness is a new secular religion ^[5] far more zealous and intolerant than the pre-Reformation zealotry of the Church. Modern elite liberalism is based on the simple creed that one’s affluence and education, one’s coolness and zip code, should shield him from the consequences of one’s bankrupt thoughts that he inflicts on others. We are a state run by dead souls who square the circle of their own privilege, who seek meaning in rather selfish lives, always at someone else’s expense.

It is that simple — that pernicious.

U.S. Citizenship: Just A Political Spoil

Biden Demeans U.S. Citizenship To Just A Political Spoil

Posted 03/28/2014 06:49 PM ET

The Law: In an invitation to voter fraud, Vice President Joe Biden declared illegal aliens in the U.S. actual "citizens." There's no doubt that's an election-year crowd pleaser. But has there ever been a more lawless presidency?

Pandering never reached such heights as when the man sworn to uphold U.S. law as its second in command declared to the

U.S.-Hispanic Chamber of Commerce Thursday that that those who have broken the law to live and take jobs here are "already American citizens."

"These people are just waiting, waiting for a chance to contribute fully. And by that standard, 11 million undocumented aliens are already Americans in my view," Biden said.

Well, no. They are in fact, NOT waiting — the U.S. welfare magnet and its immigrant networks are drawing millions of the Third

World's most indigent to the U.S., a safety valve for lawless governments such as Mexico's to dump their least-educated on the gullible gringos to educate, feed and jail as a matter of state policy.

If that sounds strong, bear in mind that Mexican consulates from Brownsville to Los Angeles are being used to sell ObamaCare and all its subsidies to Mexican nationals with the collusion of ObamaCare organizers, despite the law's explicit claim that illegals are ineligible.

And that brings us back to Biden, a man who, as second to the chief executive, is charged with upholding U.S. law.

In what American Thinker editor Thomas Lifson called a "chilling" undertone, Biden's unilateral declaration that illegals are Americans amounts to an open invitation to voter fraud just as elections beckon.

Just as the law says illegals can't get ObamaCare subsidies, and yet they do, so the declaration of citizenship for non-citizens renders U.S. law meaningless.

And that brings up what Biden's real motive was in his nullification of U.S. law: a naked bid for the Latino vote in a tough election year for Democrats, and more to the point, his own presidential ambitions in 2016.

Biden's unilateral declaration of citizenship was a call for Latino votes regardless of citizenship status.

In arguing his case, Biden showed no recognition of a difference between legal and illegal immigrants, conflating engineering graduate students who are almost always in the U.S. legally but are shut out of green cards by the Obama administration's own quotas, and the benefit-seeking low-skilled workers who mostly are flowing upward from Latin America.

They are responsible for driving down the wages of low-skilled U.S. workers. Last June, the Congressional Budget Office reported that an amnesty as stipulated by the "Gang of Eight" bill passed by Biden's own Senate would not only "dampen" demand for jobs but result in "slightly pushing down the average wage for labor force as a whole, other things being equal."

That "slightly," of course, is an average. In reality, poor African American workers will be hit hardest.

 But no matter to Biden. He doesn't even seem to know which country he leads. "The persident's basically put me in charge of this hemisphere," he told the Chamber.

Seems the only thing truly foreign to him is rule of law.

ObamaCare Exposes Dems' Lies About the Uninsured

ObamaCare Exposes Dems' Lies About the Uninsured

Posted 03/28/2014 06:54 PM ET

 

Health Care: One good thing about ObamaCare is that it finally laid bare the bogus claims Democrats have been making about the uninsured. Now can we get on with real reforms that will really help those in need?

According to the Congressional Budget Office, ObamaCare was supposed to make a major dent in the uninsured population in its first year — cutting its ranks by 13 million.

The CBO figured that of the 6 million it expected to sign up through an ObamaCare exchange and the 8 million added to Medicaid, 86% would have previously been uninsured.

The prediction looks to be wildly off the mark.

Of those who bought ObamaCare-approved insurance, just 27% came from the ranks of the uninsured, according to a February survey by McKinsey & Co. In the months leading up to February, that figure was just 11%.

Even this could be optimistic, since McKinsey also found that about half of the previously uninsured still hadn't paid their first
ObamaCare premium. Many of them could wind up back in the uninsured pool.

In addition, Medicaid enrollment will likely be lower than predicted, and no one seems to know how many of these had been uninsured.

What's more, surveys consistently find that the uninsured don't like ObamaCare.

The Kaiser Family Foundation's monthly tracking survey found that they actually turned more hostile to the law after the exchanges opened in October.

The share of uninsured who had an unfavorable view of the law jumped from 35% in September to 56% in February. (That number dropped a bit in March, but was still well above the prior year's average.)

The Kaiser survey also found that more than two-thirds of the uninsured hadn't even tried to buy insurance in the past six months, and half said they don't plan to buy an ObamaCare plan.

These results no doubt befuddle liberals, who had convinced themselves that 46 million people desperately wanted insurance but had been "locked out" by greedy insurance companies who wouldn't cover them because they were sick or old.

So how come these people aren't swarming to the exchanges? The truth is that Democrats had been misleading the country about the uninsured for decades, mischaracterizing who they were, exaggerating their plight, and grossly inflating their numbers.

ObamaCare is now exposing this fraud for all to see.

Of the 46 million who supposedly lacked insurance, for example, more than 40% were either eligible for Medicaid, enrolled in Medicaid, or weren't U.S. citizens. ObamaCare helps none of these groups.

Of the rest, they are predominantly young and in good health. Most of their intervals spent without insurance are relatively short and a significant portion have incomes over $50,000, which means they aren't eligible for ObamaCare subsidies.

Meanwhile, just 5% said they were refused insurance because of poor health or age, according to a Kaiser survey. Most cited cost as the barrier.

But while ObamaCare claims to solve the first problem through its guaranteed issue requirement, it largely fails to fix the cost problem.

Even with subsidies, ObamaCare's inflated premiums are still unaffordable for many uninsured.

In fact, the McKinsey survey found that more than half of the uninsured who shopped for an ObamaCare plan cited cost as the reason for not buying one.

There are better, more targeted, and far less expensive ways than ObamaCare to help those who truly need it.

High-risk pools, for example, were already providing backstop coverage in many states to those with high-cost illnesses. Tort reform, interstate insurance sales, health spending accounts and other private-sector reforms would make insurance more competitive and affordable.

But getting these done means first being honest with the public about just who the uninsured really are.

Condi Rice Blasts Obama on Weakness, Leadership

Says we can't afford to be war weary.

Stephen F. Hayes

March 27, 2014 3:45 PM

Former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice accused Barack Obama of dramatically weakening the United States' position in the world, drawing a straight line between Obama’s ever-yielding foreign policy and the increasing troubles around the world.

“Right now, there’s a vacuum,” she told a crowd of more than two thousand attending the National Republican Congressional 

Committee’s annual dinner last night in Washington, D.C. “There’s a vacuum because we’ve decided to lower our voice. We’ve decided to step back. We’ve decided that if we step back and lower our voice, others will lead, other things will fill that vacuum.” Citing Bashar al Assad’s slaughter in Syria, Vladimir Putin’s aggression in Ukraine, al Qaeda’s triumphant return to Fallujah, Iraq, and China’s nationalist fervor, she concluded: “When America steps back and there is a vacuum, trouble will fill that vacuum.”

Rice – measured in tone, but very tough on substance – excoriated Obama administration policies without ever mentioning the president by name. She mocked the naïve hope that “international norms” would fill the vacuum left by U.S. retreat and blasted the president for hiding behind the weariness of the public.

“I fully understand the sense of weariness. I fully understand that we must think: ‘Us, again?’ I know that we’ve been through two wars. I know that we’ve been vigilant against terrorism. I know that it’s hard. But leaders can’t afford to get tired. Leaders can’t afford to be weary.”

Rice’s speech was the highlight of an evening that brought in $15.1 million for House Republicans. The former secretary of state has mostly limited her political appearances since leaving office to major events. She delivered a well-received speech at a donor event that 

Mitt Romney held in Park City, Utah, in 2012 and addressed the Republican National Convention in Tampa that summer. But those familiar with her thinking say she’s determined to help Republicans pick up the Senate and maintain the House heading into the 2016 presidential elections.

House majority whip Kevin McCarthy introduced Rice and raised the prospect that she might become even more involved in politics in two years. After listing various prestigious positions she’s held, he noted, “There’s one thing that’s not on her resume and I want her to put her mind to it to resolve that in 2016.”

Rice has downplayed those suggestions and there’s little reason to believe she’s angling for a run. Still, she has been increasingly active on behalf of her fellow Republicans. Earlier this month, Rice spoke at a Kentucky fundraiser for Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell and the spring convention for the California Republican party. Rice appeared in an ad touting Alaska Senate hopeful and Marine reservist Dan Sullivan, a spot paid for by Karl Rove’s super PAC, American Crossroads. In the coming months, she will make appearances for the National Republican Senatorial Committee.

Rice began her speech Wednesday with something of a civics lesson, praising the wisdom of the framers of the Constitution for the limits they placed on government and noting that Americans, despite being the “most individualistic people on this earth, are also the most philanthropic and communitarian.” Rice trundled through well-worn Republican lines on lower taxes and less regulation before once again touting the American system for its recognition of a “vast private space into which the government should not intrude” and a “personal space, where we respect each others’ choices.”

Before turning to foreign policy, Rice urged the crowd, including many Republican House members, to keep America a “nation of immigrants” and strafed liberals who send their kids to private schools but write New York Times op-eds claiming that school choice will ruin public schools.

But the most powerful part of her speech came when Rice expressed her frustration with Obama on national security. “As Ronald Reagan said: Peace only comes through strength,” she recalled.

“So, what are we doing? What are we doing when our defense budget is so small that our military starts to tell us that we may not be able to carry out all of the requirements put upon it? What are we doing, when a couple of weeks before Russia invades Crimea we announce that we are going to have an Army smaller than at any time since the Revolutionary – I’m sorry, not the Revolutionary War, but World War II. What are we doing? What are we doing? What are we signaling when we say that America is no longer ready to stand in the defense of freedom?”

 

Time to scrap the mortgage interest deduction

By Philip Klein | MARCH 27, 2014 

 

In theory, the mortgage interest deduction is supposed to encourage home ownership. But when...

In the coming weeks, Americans will spend an average of 13 hours and $210 to prepare their federal taxes. Beyond the compliance burden the federal tax code imposes, it also distorts economic activity and discriminates against some taxpayers in favor of others. But one of its most egregiously unfair provisions is also among its most popular — the mortgage interest deduction.

In theory, the mortgage interest deduction is supposed to encourage home ownership, a questionable goal for government to begin with.

The purpose of taxes is to raise money to finance government services, not to manipulate human behavior or economic activity.

When lawmakers tell taxpayers that they can keep more of their money — but only if they spend that money the way politicians want – it’s just as much an exertion of government power as a spending program.

Allowing individuals to deduct mortgage interest payments drives up taxes on other Americans given the need to recoup the lost revenue, or, alternatively, adds to the deficit. The mortgage interest deduction itself drains $100 billion annually from the U.S. Treasury.

When other tax policies meant to encourage home ownership are added — including the deductibility of state and local property taxes and the exemption of capital gains taxes from selling a home — that number rises to $175 billion.

But even if one were to accept that boosting home ownership is a worthy goal for government, the interest deduction and accompanying tax benefits for homeowners should be seen as a miserable failure. That's the conclusion of economists Andrew Hanson, Ike Brannon, and Zackary Hawley in a study prepared for the R Street Institute, a right-of-center think tank, and published in National Affairs.

The authors took a detailed look at the distribution of existing tax benefits for home ownership and found that the benefits do more to help wealthier Americans purchase larger homes than they do to encourage lower-income Americans who otherwise would be renting to purchase homes in the first place.

The study found that in Atlanta, Denver, Detroit, Minneapolis, Philadelphia, Phoenix, Seattle and Washington, D.C., 80 percent of taxpayers earning more than $100,000 claimed the deduction, compared with just 25 percent of those earning less.

In monetary terms, the deduction is also significantly more valuable for higher-income households.

The deduction applies to mortgage debt of up to $1 million and debt from second homes can count toward that amount. Furthermore, because high-income earners are taxed at a higher rate, each dollar of earnings they get to deduct from their taxes is worth more.

A family with a household income of $500,000 with $1 million in mortgage debt being financed at 4 percent would generate $16,000 per year in tax savings, according to the authors’ calculations. In contrast, a household earning near the national median income of $51,000 with a home worth $221,000 (the median price), would receive tax savings of one-tenth that amount.

There are several leading objections to scrapping the mortgage interest deduction. One is that it would drive down home prices.

Another is that American homeowners already purchased homes and did tax planning on the assumption that the tax benefit would be in place.

As to the first argument, while it’s true that limiting or eliminating the deduction would reduce the artificially inflated value of homes, that would be true of homes everywhere. That means homes would be cheaper for people shopping for new homes, as well as those hoping to sell their current homes and purchase new ones.

Also, proposals to reform the mortgage interest deduction can be designed to phase in the changes over time, so that homeowners can gradually adjust.

Recently, House Ways and Means Chairman Rep. David Camp, R-Mich., offered a comprehensive tax reform proposal that would allow individuals with existing mortgages to keep the deduction as is, while gradually reducing the cap to $500,000 for new mortgages.

Another idea proposed by the authors is to change the deduction to a flat rate tax credit, to “limit the subsidy provided to upper-income taxpayers while simultaneously expanding it at the lower end of the income distribution.”

My preferred approach would be to slowly phase it out over time as part of a broader tax reform that lowered tax rates for everybody.

 

The new Marxism

The new Marxism

A prominent liberal economist contends capitalism will inevitably increase inequality.

James Pethokoukis | National Review Online

March 24, 2014

Article Highlights
    •    Thomas Piketty thinks the German progenitor of Communism basically got it right. Tweet This
    •    Piketty's arguement: Embedded within the very fabric of capitalism is a powerful force pushing in the direction of rising inequality. Tweet This
    •    Who will make the intellectual case for economic freedom today? Tweet This

‘Karl Marx wasn’t wrong, just early. Pretty much. Sorry, capitalism. #inequalityforevah”

When trying to condense a sweeping, 700-page analysis of the past, present, and possible future of capitalism into an 85-character tweet, you’re bound to miss a few things. But the above Twitter-fication of economist Thomas Piketty’s much-awaited Capital in the Twenty-First Century captures the gist of the author’s argument.

Piketty thinks the German progenitor of Communism basically got it right. It’s only that his essential insight — private capital accumulation inevitably leads to the concentration of wealth into ever-fewer hands — took a hiatus during the middle part of the last century thanks to depression and war hurting the fortunes of the well-to-do. But now Marxism’s fundamental truth is reasserting itself with a vengeance, a reality borne out in both Piketty’s own meticulously gathered data and in business pages replete with stories of skyrocketing wealth for the 0.001 percent and decades of flat wages for everyone else.

And it’s only going to get worse, Piketty concludes. Sure, the productive and innovative capacity of market capitalism will generate enough income growth for the masses to prevent revolution. He concedes Marx got that bit of apocalypticism wrong. But an “endless inegalitarian spiral” will create such wealth bifurcation that “the meritocratic values on which democratic societies are based” will be undermined. The political process will be hopelessly captured by a tiny elite of rent seekers and trust-fund kids. America (and then the other advanced economies) will become what Occupy Wall Street types and Elizabeth Warren think it already is.

Piketty, a left-wing Frenchman who teaches at the Paris School of Economics, is hardly the only economist arguing inequality is headed inexorably higher. Tyler Cowen, a center-right economist and New York Times columnist, contends accelerating technological change will create an America where nearly all of us have stagnant incomes and serve as valets and massage therapists to the STEM-savvy and wealthy geek-ocracy.

Piketty is making a different and broader argument, one that intentionally rises to the level of grand theory: Embedded within the very fabric of capitalism is a powerful force pushing in the direction of rising inequality. The income generated from owning capital (everything from real estate to financial assets to intellectual property) tends to exceed the rate of economic growth. And when wealth grows faster than output — as it did in the 19th century when Marx was writing and as Piketty forecasts it will again in the 21st — inequality moves toward extreme levels since income from capital is outpacing wages from labor. When capital income gets reinvested, inherited wealth also grows faster than the economy. Even worse, from Piketty’s perspective: Not only will capital owners take more and more of national income, but more and more of labor income will go to a small group of “supermanagers” who rig the executive pay system in their favor.

“Will the world of 2050 or 2100,” Piketty asks, “be owned by traders, top managers, and the superrich, or will it belong to the oil producing countries or the Bank of China?” Actually, the answer doesn’t much matter. Whatever the exact makeup of this global plutocracy, democratic capitalism will be replaced by something more like Putin’s or Xi’s cronyist authoritarianism — unless populist progressive forces can implement a global wealth tax ASAP. And if that can’t happen right away, 80 percent top income-tax rates would be a solid first step.

Two observations:

 First, Piketty’s case, though well argued, is far from airtight. He makes a number of contestable assumptions, including

a) output will grow more slowly than the return on capital,

 b) the return on capital will stay high despite slower growth, and

c) skyrocketing corporate pay doesn’t much reflect how technology and globalization have enabled top executives to manage or perform on a larger scale.

Second, Piketty and fellow French economist and University of California, Berkeley, inequality researcher Emmanuel Saez are arguably the most important public intellectuals in the world today. Their research is driving the economic agenda pushed by Washington Democrats and promoted by the mainstream media. The soft Marxism in Capital, if unchallenged, will spread among the clerisy and reshape the political economic landscape on which all future policy battles will be waged. We’ve seen this movie before.

John Maynard Keynes and Friedrich Hayek famously squared off in the 1930s, left versus right. But when Keynes published his revolutionary General Theory in 1936, Hayek went silent. It was a de facto retreat that helped give free rein to anti-market forces — even if that was not what Keynes intended — for decades until Milton Friedman and Anna Schwartz wrote A Monetary History of the United States in 1963 and energized the intellectual fight against statism.

Who will make the intellectual case for economic freedom today?

— James Pethokoukis, a columnist, blogs for the American Enterprise Institute.

It Begin: Censorship of Religion (BBC Leads From Behind)

 

 

Don't Mention Jesus: BBC Bans 'Innocent Lyric' on Radio 2

 

 

by Nick Hallett 16 Mar 201

management banned singer Eliza Doolittle from using the word 'Jesus' in a performance of her love song 'Walking on Water'. She was forced to change the lyric from "Sometimes I wish I was Jesus, I'd get my Air Max on and run across the sea for you" to "Sometimes I wish it was easy..." when she appeared on the Chris Evans Breakfast Show on Radio 2.

Both the singer and the presenter say they are baffled by the decision. The Mail on Sunday quotes the singer as saying: "It was weird because I’m not being blasphemous, I just meant 'I wish I could run across water and see you', but maybe wishing for the power of God was blasphemous enough for them."

Presenter Chris Evans added: "Lyrics and the Beeb have always bamboozled me. We often play Lou Reed's Walk on the Wild Side.

Check out the lyrics in that song." The song in question mentions transexuality, sex acts and drug use.

It remains unclear as to whether the BBC took the decision to avoid upsetting Christians over potential blasphemy, or to avoid upsetting secularists over the mentioning of a religious figure.

The decision has angered former Archbishop of Canterbury Lord Carey, however, who said he was "totally appalled" by the decision:

"I'm not surprised the BBC is behind this because their attitude tends to be to dumb down the Christian message.

"I am sorry the lady agreed to this because the sense of the song is lost. Walking on water and Jesus go together."

A BBC spokesman confused the issue even further by saying: "We never ask any artist to change the lyrics to their songs.

"It's the decision of the record company and the artist. We have clear editorial guidelines in place to deal with religious or contentious issues and to avoid causing offence to our audiences regardless of their faith."

This is the second instance of politically correct censorship on the BBC in just one week. On Thursday it was also forced to defend a decision to postpone a discussion on BBC Three's 'Free Speech' show about being gay and Muslim.

The discussion was due to take place in a Birmingham mosque, but had to be suspended after local Muslims raised concerns.

The Hidden Rot in the Jobs Numbers

Hours worked are declining, resulting in the equivalent of a net loss of 100,000 jobs since September.

By

Edward P. Lazear

March 16, 2014 6:29 p.m. ET

Most commentators viewed the February jobs report released on March 7 as good news, indicating that the labor market is on a favorable growth path. A more careful reading shows that employment actually fell—as it has in four out of the past six months and in more than one-third of the months during the past two years.

 

Although it is often overlooked, a key statistic for understanding the labor market is the length of the average workweek. Small changes in the average workweek imply large changes in total hours worked. The average workweek in the U.S. has fallen to 34.2 hours in February from 34.5 hours in September 2013, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. That decline, coupled with mediocre job creation, implies that the total hours of employment have decreased over the period.

Job creation rose from an initial 113,000 in January (later revised to 129,000) to 175,000 in February. The January number frightened many, while the February number was cheered—even though it was below the prior 12-month average of 189,000.

The labor market's strength and economic activity are better measured by the number of total hours worked than by the number of people employed. An employer who replaces 100 40-hour-per-week workers with 120 20-hour-per-week workers is contracting, not expanding operations. The same is true at the national level.

The total hours worked per week is obtained by multiplying the reported average workweek hours by the number of workers employed. The decline in the average workweek for all employees on private nonfarm payrolls by 3/10ths of an hour—offset partially by the increase in the number of people working—means that real labor usage on net, taking into account hours worked, fell by the equivalent of 100,000 jobs since September.

Here's a fuller explanation. The job-equivalence number is computed simply by taking the total decline in hours and dividing by the average workweek. For example, if the average worker was employed for 34.4 hours and total hours worked declined by 344 hours, the 344 hours would be the equivalent of losing 10 workers' worth of labor. Thus, although the U.S. economy added about 900,000 jobs since September, the shortened workweek is equivalent to losing about one million jobs during this same period. The difference between the loss of the equivalent of one million jobs and the gain of 900,000 new jobs yields a net effect of the equivalent of 100,000 lost jobs.

The decline of 1/10th of an hour in the average workweek—say, to 34.2 from 34.3, as occurred between January and February—is like losing about 340,000 private nonfarm jobs, which is approximately 80% greater than the average monthly job gain during the past year. The reverse is also true. In months when the average workweek rises, the jobs numbers understate the amount of labor growth. That did occur earlier in the recovery, with a general upward trend in the average workweek between October 2009 and February 2012.

What accounts for the declining average workweek? In some instances—but not this one—a minor drop could be the result of a statistical fluke caused by rounding. Because the Bureau of Labor Statistics only reports hours to the nearest 1/10th, a small movement, say, to 34.449 hours from 34.450 hours, would be reported as a reduction in hours worked to 34.4 from 34.5, vastly overstating the loss in worked time. But the six-month decline in the workweek, to 34.2 from 34.5 hours, cannot be the consequence of a rounding error.

Was it the harsh winter in much of the United States? One problem with that explanation is that the numbers are already seasonally adjusted.

Imperfections in the adjustment method can result in weather effects, but the magnitude is far from clear, especially given that parts of the West, Midwest and South experienced milder-than-normal weather, with fewer business-reducing storms. Also, the shortening of the workweek began before the winter set in, with declines in hours from September to October.

Another possibility for the declining average workweek is the Affordable Care Act. That law induces businesses with fewer than 50 full-time employees—full-time defined as 30 hours per week—to keep the number of hours low to avoid having to provide health insurance. The jury is still out on this explanation, but research by Luis Garicano, Claire LeLarge and John Van Reenen (National Bureau of Economic Research, February 2013) has shown that laws that can be evaded by keeping firms small or hours low can have significant effects on employment.

The improvement in average weekly hours worked was reason for celebration after the recovery began. The recent decline is cause for concern. It gives us a more accurate but dismal picture of the past two quarters.

 

Mr. Lazear, who was chairman of the president's Council of Economic Advisers from 2006-09, is a professor at Stanford University's Graduate School of Business and a fellow at the Hoover Institution.

Matt Walsh Blog: Respect

Your husband doesn’t have to earn your respect
Posted on February 22, 2014 by The Matt Walsh Blog

I can’t tell you where I was or who was there or when it happened. I don’t want to add to this guy’s humiliation, so I am keeping this vague and generic. I can simply tell you that, some time ago, I found myself in the same vicinity as another married couple.
I certainly can’t read their minds, and I don’t know what goes on behind the scenes, all I know is that the husband couldn’t seem to utter a single phrase that wouldn’t provoke exaggerated eye-rolling from his wife.
She disagreed with everything he said.
She contradicted nearly every statement.
She even nagged him.
She brought up a “funny” story that made him out to be incompetent and foolish. He laughed, but he was embarrassed.
She was gutting him right in front of us. Emasculating him. Neutering him. Damaging him.
It was excruciating.
It was tragic.
It also was, or is becoming, pretty par-for-the-course.
The respect deficiency in our culture has reached crisis levels.
I’ve discussed at length how men should treat women. I’ve written about the lessons I plan to teach my son; lessons about how he should love, honor, respect, serve, and protect the women in his life. Indeed, men need to respect women, and we, as men, are far from perfect in that regard.
Those posts — the ones where I call on us men to improve the way we treat women — tend to be very popular. They’re popular when I write them or when anyone writes them. Proclaim that women, mothers, and wives should be respected, and a chorus will shout ‘amen.’ Every day on Facebook brings us another viral post excoriating men and supporting women. I’ve written a few of them myself.
But I’ve noticed that the corollary – a message about the respect women must give men, a message challenging wives and encouraging husbands – isn’t quite so palatable for many people. Disrespect for men has become standard practice. That scene I witnessed was sad but unremarkable; we’ve all watched that kind of thing play out a thousand times over. Men are disrespected by their wives – they’re disrespected publicly, they’re disrespected privately, they’re disrespected and then told that they have no right to be upset about it because they aren’t worthy of respect in the first place.
Disrespect for men is a joke to us now. A little while ago I stopped on the way home from work to buy my wife some flowers. As she rang me up, the cashier quipped: “Uh-oh, what’d you do?” I wasn’t particularly amused, but I chuckled. She continued. “I don’t know if this will be enough to get you off the couch tonight!”
Ah, yes, the old “husband is punished by his wife and sent to the couch” meme. I’m not sure if this actually happens in real life, or if it’s an invention of 90′s “all men are fat, witless, oafs” sitcoms, but the popularity of the stereotype is telling. Is this how we see husbands now? A man gets “in trouble” with his wife, she scolds him and puts him in time-out on the couch. Now he has to placate his alpha-bride by showering her with flowers and jewelry.
Men are painted like children or dogs. They can be shooed off of their own beds by their wives and sent to cower in the living room until she permits him to return. This is only slightly less offensive than the cliché of the sadistic wife who punitively withholds sex from her husband. “You didn’t clean the garage like I told you. No sex for you, mister! Next time, follow my instructions!”
Did you ever see this Samsung ad from several months ago?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u9HMhSvnbmk
A worthless, grunting, Neanderthal of a husband instantly “evolves” when his wife plugs a  contraption into his back. The ad caused a slight dust up when they released it, but nothing — NOTHING — like it would have if the husband and wife had switched roles in this charming piece of viral marketing.
But with men on the receiving end, a few people complained, some angry Youtube comments were posted, Samsung sales were unscathed, and everyone quickly moved on with their lives.
That’s because disrespect for men isn’t exactly a trendy outrage.
These cultural messages aren’t harmful because they hurt my manly feelings; they’re harmful because of what they do to young girls. Society tells our daughters that men are boorish dolts who need to be herded like goats and lectured like school boys. Then they grow up and enter into marriage wholly unprepared and unwilling to accept the Biblical notion that “wives should submit to their husbands” because “the husband is the head of the wife.” [Ephesians 5]
It is a fatal problem, because the one thing that is consistently withheld from men and husbands — respect — is the one thing we need the most.
Yes, need. We need respect, and that need is so deeply ingrained that a marriage cannot possibly survive if the man is deprived of it.
Often, people will say that a husband should only be respected if he “earns” it. This attitude is precisely the problem. A wife ought to respect her husband because he is her husband, just as he ought to love and honor her because she is his wife. Your husband might “deserve” it when you mock him, berate him, belittle him, and nag him, but you don’t marry someone in order to give them what they deserve. In marriage, you give them what you’ve promised them, even when they aren’t holding up their end of the bargain.
This doesn’t mean that a man has a license to be lazy, or abusive, or uncaring. He is challenged to live up to the respect his wife affords him. If his wife parcels out her respect on some sort of reward system basis, the husband has nothing for which to strive. As the respect diminishes, so too does his motivation to behave respectably. Respect is wielded like a ransom against him, and he grows more isolated and distant all the while.
They both swirl in circles around the drain. He fails, so she gives him no respect, and then he continues to fail because he feels disrespected, and she continues to give him no respect because he continues to fail. And so on, and so on, and so on, all the way to the divorce attorney.
The same thing happens with love. If love is unconditional, then the light of love always shines in your marriage, even in its darkest times. But if your love is given in direct proportion to your spouse’s ability to “earn” it, then it will inevitably diminish and fade over time.
Love in a marriage is, as people often point out, a choice. But it’s also a duty. So is respect. I love my wife because I choose to love her. I choose to love her because that is the vow I made; it is my charge, my warrant. Luckily, it’s usually pretty easy to love my wife because she’s kind, warmhearted, and beautiful. But if she becomes less kind, and I withdraw my love because of it, then my love was never love to begin with. It was just a pleasant feeling; a natural response to her nicer tendencies.
This is not to say that women should tolerate a man who fails in his duties, but that her intolerance for his failures can only be constructive if it is rooted in respect. Sadly, many women will approach their husbands and say: “You need to stop doing such and such or start doing such and such, because you’re a failure and I don’t respect you.”
She might not explicitly state this, but it is the message she implicitly sends. There is zero chance that this message will help to heal the damage; it only plunges another dagger into the already gaping wound.
A few months ago I wrote a post about pornography. I stand by every word I typed, but I feel like I could add another couple thousand sentences to the end of it. Ever since I published that piece, I have heard from hundreds and hundreds of men and women on both sides of the porn problem.
Men emailed to tell me that they developed a porn habit and it did great damage to their marriage. But they told me that they resorted to porn after years of being disrespected, shunned and belittled by their wives. They weren’t making an excuse — only offering some perspective and context.
And hundreds of women told me that their husbands developed a porn habit and it caused them to lose all respect for them. This inability to respect their husbands nearly, or in some cases completely, wrecked their marriage.
A vicious cycle. The men didn’t want to fight for a marriage if they weren’t respected, and the women didn’t want to respect men who wouldn’t fight for their marriage. He withholds his love, she withholds her respect. They’ve both set fire to the thing that needs to be fixed.
Respect is our language. If it isn’t said with respect, we can’t hear it. This is why nagging is ineffective and self defeating. This is why statements made in sarcastic tones, or with rolling eyes, will never be received well. We have a filter in our brains, and a statement made in disrespect will be filtered out like the poison it is.
Men are notoriously reluctant to share feelings or display vulnerability. Many times, we keep those inner thoughts locked away — our feelings guarded and hidden — because we know we are not respected. A man will never be vulnerable to someone who doesn’t respect him. Never.
A man isn’t satisfied or content if he isn’t respected. If he can’t find respect where he is, he will seek it somewhere else. This can have disastrous implications for a relationship, but it applies in other areas of life as well. A man is much more likely to stay in a low paying job, a physically demanding job, a dangerous job, or a tedious job, than a job where he isn’t respected.
I’m only emphasizing this because I think it might actually be news to some people. Society does not permit men to be vocal about their need for respect, so the need is often ignored.
I could sit here all day adding “yes, but husbands also need to…” disclaimers. I won’t, because I’ve probably written a dozen or more times on that subject. Every once in a while, I think we should talk about what wives need to do. And here it is. This, above all else. Respect your husbands. Even when he doesn’t deserve it.

Republican Roulette

Henninger: Republican Roulette
The GOP presidential slate looks like a chaotic casino of ideas.
By
Daniel Henninger
March 12, 2014 7:18 p.m. ET

At the conclave of conservative activists in Washington last weekend, Paul Ryan dropped a metaphor on the Republican Party's clan feud: "I'm Irish. That's my idea of a family reunion."

As someone who has spent a lifetime among the Irish, let me add that there are Irish feuds . . . and there are Irish feuds. Some get settled over the casket of the deceased. "Jimmy, you know I loved you when you were alive. God rest."

Let me offer an alternative metaphor. The nonstop appearances before the CPAC conference of presidential candidates past and present makes the Republican Party look like a roulette wheel in a casino.

Cruz, Paul, Perry, Ryan, Christie, Rubio, Jindal, Huckabee, Carson, Santorum, Palin. The party seems to believe that if it spins the wheel often enough, lady luck will deliver a winning candidate. Sen. Rand Paul hit the CPAC jackpot for the second year in a row, winning the attendees' straw vote, though not 10 people can agree on what he stands for. Now there's a lucky fella.

An obligatory conceit of all the players at the Republican presidential table is to assert what "we" stand for.

We? I believe that's "me."

It's obvious by now that most of these nominally Republican presidential candidates are political free agents for whom the party is largely a legal necessity. The eventual campaign has about as much attachment to the institutional Republican Party as Carmelo Anthony does to the New York Knicks.

Politics as a game of freelancing high-rollers like Sens. Cruz and Paul, running arcane strategies to fill auditoriums, is fun, even exciting. It's also producing Republican candidates who don't quite make the sale.

Watching Republicans run for the presidency is an exhausting crapshoot. When election day arrives, there's no there there. The voters who provide the margin of victory never get the Republican Party and its candidate into focus. There's a hodgepodge of fine "principles," but what is your party actually going to do if we let you run the country?

Martin Kozlowski

A Democrat can only love this spectacle. While Republicans stage the Irish family reunion that never ends, Democrats stay united around policies dating to 1964. Tax, spend and pander. You keep looking for anything resembling an interesting revision of their entitlement-state steam engine, but it never comes.

Ah, but it did come, just last month. A crack opened in the Democratic status quo big enough to drive the whole GOP through. On Feb. 4 a Congressional Budget Office report said that by 2024, ObamaCare would eliminate or reduce full-time jobs for some 2.5 million Americans, more than the 800,000 estimated in 2010.

This was like Toto pulling the curtain away from the great Oz. Oh dear, Democratic entitlements are supposed to help people, not hurt them.

Within hours, the White House countered with the lunacy that the CBO number meant ObamaCare would actually liberate people from jobs they disliked. The liberal pundit chorus sang the same loony tune: We're freeing people from bad work! Sing along everyone: "We're off to see the Wizard!"

The private citizen who revealed a key structural flaw beneath the ObamaCare entitlement—and indeed much of the Entitlement State—was University of Chicago economist Casey Mulligan.

Prof. Mulligan had been sharing with the CBO numbers he'd crunched around ObamaCare's subsidy system. Under the law, if a person's income from work rises (a better job, a raise), their ObamaCare insurance subsidy gets smaller. The rational way to capture the biggest health-insurance subsidy is to stay poor, underemployed or even jobless. The same perverse entitlement incentive to stay poor is elaborated in Paul Ryan's recent report, "The War on Poverty 50 Years Later."

Prof. Mulligan says he knows little about Washington politics. That may be. But you'd think the Republican presidential candidates would want to rally en masse around what he knows about the rotting foundation beneath their opponents' politics.
One imagines GOP presidential dreamers spending weekends sifting polls, phrases, principles and personal obsessions to shape a unique campaign message. Great. But how much greater it would be if just once they gave voters a coherent, consistent Republican message connected to something real.

The Entitlement State isn't a bumper sticker. It is a multi-trillion-dollar edifice of laws meticulously expanded for decades by Democrats in Congress. The Great Society wasn't a speech. Lyndon Johnson politicked it into existence.
Republicans once did this, too. The Reagan tax cut of 1986 didn't pass because the Gipper gave grand speeches. It took years of legislative politicking to transform his ideas into law.

Neither achievement happened without broad party agreement about the goal.

Republicans obviously are not allergic to policy seriousness, notably in the states. The core of Ways and Means Chairman Dave Camp's tax reform—simplification and rate reduction—should be a common endpoint. But because the party hardly ever displays a critical mass around an idea that could become law, voters (and donors) never quite figure out what "GOP" stands for.

Roulette's fun. But ultimately it's just wheel-spinning.

How King Barrack Foils the Constitution - BMB YAB

Chairman: Obama ‘Punked’ the House by Holding Up Senate Bill So He Could Sign Order

Posted By Bridget Johnson On March 11, 201 

A House Natural Resources subcommittee chairman is charging that President Obama delayed a Senate vote on a national monument designation so he could give the impression that he’s moving stalled legislation by executive action.

A bill from Rep. Jared Huffman (D-Calif.) expanding the California Coastal National Monument to include more than 1,600 acres of Mendocino shoreline in the Point Arena-Stornetta Unit passed the House by voice vote last summer and was sitting in the Senate.

But Obama whipped out his pen today and used the 1906 Antiquities Act to declare the coastline protected land, proclaiming that he needed to use his executive authority to do so.

“In my State of the Union address, I said that I would use my authority to protect more of our pristine federal lands for future generations,” Obama said in a statement. “Our country is blessed with some of the most beautiful landscapes in the world. It’s up to us to protect them, so our children’s children can experience them, too. That’s what today is about.”

House Natural Resources Public Lands and Environmental Regulation Subcommittee Chairman Rob Bishop (R-Utah), though, said today was about nothing but showmanship.

“The president’s use of the Antiquities Act to expand the Coastal California National Monument is disappointing to say the least. It is also purely political and undermines sincere efforts to reach consensus on questions of conservation,” Bishop said.

“The House passed legislation to incorporate these public lands into the national monument with bipartisan support — both at the committee level and on the House floor. The fact that this bill hasn’t yet been considered in the Senate is not an oversight, it was intentional. The legislation was held up in the Senate so the president could usurp the congressional process. In other words, the House was punked by the president.”

Bishop stressed there was “no immediate urgency to make this a national monument,” either.

“Had the Senate done its job, the bill would have been considered and passed under regular order. There was broad support for the measure,” the congressman said. “The president seems to view the legislative process as relevant only when it is politically convenient. Unfortunately, that is not how our founding fathers intended for the federal government to operate.”

“I am troubled by the way President Obama and Harry Reid misuse the powers entrusted to them by the American people. This only hurts our country as we move forward tackling some of the biggest issues facing the American people.”

The Point Arena-Stornetta Unit becomes the first shoreline addition to the California Coastal National Monument, established by President Clinton in 2000 to protect islands, rocks and reefs within 12 nautical miles of the Golden State’s shores.

It’s not the first time Obama has used the Teddy Roosevelt-era law to bypass Congress, either: in 2012, he invoked the Antiquities Act to establish the César E. Chávez National Monument.

“Instead of using imperial powers, the President should pick up the phone and call upon Senate Democrats to take action,” Natural Resources Committee Chairman Doc Hastings (R-Wash.) said. “The House has already passed legislation, sponsored by a California Democrat, to expand the California Coastal National Monument by adding these lands. There is no inherent danger to this area or compelling reason for the president to take unilateral action now.”

The president's foreign policy is puzzling

By Charles Krauthammer

Published: Sunday, March 9 2014 12:00 a.m. MST

WASHINGTON — Vladimir Putin is a lucky man. And he's got three more years of luck to come.

He takes Crimea, and President Obama says it's not in Russia's interest, not even strategically clever. Indeed, it's a sign of weakness.

Really? Crimea belonged to Moscow for 200 years. Russia conquered it 20 years before the U.S. acquired Louisiana and lost it in the humiliation of the 1990s. Putin got it back in about three days without firing a shot.

Now Russia looms over the rest of eastern and southern Ukraine. Putin can take that anytime he wants — if he wants. He has already destabilized the nationalist government in Kiev. Ukraine is now truncated and on the life support of U.S. and European money (much of which — cash for gas — will end up in Putin's treasury anyway).

Obama says Putin is on the wrong side of history and
Secretary of State John Kerry says Putin's is "really 19th-century behavior in the 21st century."

This must mean that seeking national power, territory, dominion — the driving impulse of nations since Thucydides — is obsolete. As if a calendar change caused a revolution in human nature that transformed the international arena from a Hobbesian struggle for power into a gentleman's club where violations of territorial integrity just don't happen.

"That is not 21st-century, G-8, major-nation behavior," says Kerry. Makes invasion sound like a breach of etiquette — like using the wrong fork at a Beacon Hill dinner party.

How to figure out Obama's foreign policy? In his first U.N. speech, he says: "No one nation can or should try to dominate another nation." On what planet? Followed by the assertion that "alignments of nations rooted in the cleavages of a long-gone Cold War" — like NATO? — "make no sense in an interconnected world."

Putin's more cynical advisers might have thought such adolescent universalism to be a ruse. But Obama coupled these amazing words with even more amazing actions.

(1) Upon coming into office, he initiated the famous "reset" to undo the "drift" in relations that had occurred during the George W. Bush years. But that drift was largely due to the freezing of relations Bush imposed after Russia's invasion of Georgia. Obama undid that pushback and wiped the slate clean — demanding nothing in return.

(2) Canceled missile-defense agreements with Poland and the Czech Republic. Without even consulting them. A huge concession to Putin's threats — while again asking nothing in return. And sending a message that, while Eastern Europe may think it achieved post-Cold War independence, in reality it remains in play, subject to Russian influence and interests.

(3) In 2012, Obama assured Dmitry Medvedev that he would be even more flexible with Putin on missile defense as soon as he got past the election.

(4) The Syria debacle. Obama painted himself into a corner on chemical weapons — threatening to bomb and then backing down — and allowed Putin to rescue him with a promise to get rid of Syria's stockpiles. Obama hailed this as a great win-win, when both knew — or did Obama really not know? — that he had just conferred priceless legitimacy on Bashar al-Assad and made Russia the major regional arbiter for the first time in 40 years.

(5) Obama keeps cutting defense spending. His latest budget will reduce it to 3 percent of GDP by 2016 and cut the Army to pre-Pearl Harbor size — just as Russia is rebuilding, as Iran is going nuclear and as China announces yet another 12-plus percent increase in military spending.

Puzzling. There is no U.S. financial emergency, no budgetary collapse. Obama declares an end to austerity — for every government department except the military.

Can Putin be faulted for believing that if he bites off Crimea and threatens Kiev, Obama's response will be minimal and his ability to lead the Europeans even less so?

Would Putin have lunged for Ukraine if he didn't have such a clueless adversary? No one can say for sure. But it certainly made Putin's decision easier.

Russia will get kicked out of the G-8 — if Obama can get Angela Merkel to go along. Big deal. Putin does care about financial sanctions, but the Europeans are already divided and squabbling among themselves.

Next weekend's Crimean referendum will ask if it should be returned to Mother Russia. Can Putin refuse? He can already see the history textbooks: Catherine the Great conquered Crimea, Vlad (the Great?) won it back. Not bad for a 19th-century man.

Islamic Jihad and the Doctrine of Abrogation

March 6, 2014 10:57 am / victorhanson

by Raymond Ibrahim // RaymondIbrahim.com 

 

While other scriptures contain contradictions, the Koran is the only holy book whose commentators have evolved a doctrine to account for the very visible shifts which occur from one injunction to another. No careful reader will remain unaware of the many contradictory verses in the Koran, most specifically the way in which peaceful and tolerant verses lie almost side by side with violent and intolerant ones. The ulema were initially baffled as to which verses to codify into the Shari’a worldview—the one that states there is no coercion in religion (2:256), or the ones that command believers to fight all non-Muslims till they either convert, or at least submit, to Islam (8:39, 9:5, 9:29). To get out of this quandary, the commentators developed the doctrine of abrogation, which essentially maintains that verses revealed later in Muhammad’s career take precedence over earlier ones whenever there is a discrepancy. In order to document which verses abrogated which, a religious science devoted to the chronology of the Koran’s verses evolved (known as an-Nasikh wa’l Mansukh, the abrogater and the abrogated).

But why the contradiction in the first place? The standard view is that in the early years of Islam, since Muhammad and his community were far outnumbered by their infidel competitors while living next to them in Mecca, a message of peace and coexistence was in order.

However, after the Muslims migrated to Medina in 622 and grew in military strength, verses inciting them to go on the offensive were slowly “revealed”—in principle, sent down from Allah—always commensurate with Islam’s growing capabilities. In juridical texts, these are categorized in stages: passivity vis-á-vis aggression; permission to fight back against aggressors; commands to fight aggressors; commands to fight all non-Muslims, whether the latter begin aggressions or not.[1] Growing Muslim might is the only variable that explains this progressive change in policy.

Other scholars put a gloss on this by arguing that over a twenty-two year period, the Koran was revealed piecemeal, from passive and spiritual verses to legal prescriptions and injunctions to spread the faith through jihad and conquest, simply to acclimate early Muslim converts to the duties of Islam, lest they be discouraged at the outset by the dramatic obligations that would appear in later verses.[2] Verses revealed towards the end of Muhammad’s career—such as, “Warfare is prescribed for you though you hate it”[3]—would have been out of place when warfare was actually out of the question.

However interpreted, the standard view on Koranic abrogation concerning war and peace verses is that when Muslims are weak and in a minority position, they should preach and behave according to the ethos of the Meccan verses (peace and tolerance); when strong, however, they should go on the offensive on the basis of what is commanded in the Medinan verses (war and conquest). The vicissitudes of Islamic history are a testimony to this dichotomy, best captured by the popular Muslim notion, based on a hadith, that, if possible, jihad should be performed by the hand (force), if not, then by the tongue (through preaching); and, if that is not possible, then with the heart or one’s intentions.[4]

That Islam legitimizes deceit during war is, of course, not all that astonishing; after all, as the Elizabethan writer John Lyly put it, “All’s fair in love and war.”[5] Other non-Muslim philosophers and strategists—such as Sun Tzu, Machiavelli, and Thomas Hobbes—justified deceit in warfare. Deception of the enemy during war is only common sense. The crucial difference in Islam, however, is that war against the infidel is a perpetual affair—until, in the words of the Koran, “all chaos ceases, and all religion belongs to Allah.”[6] In his entry on jihad from the Encyclopaedia of Islam, Emile Tyan states: “The duty of the jihad exists as long as the universal domination of Islam has not been attained. Peace with non-Muslim nations is, therefore, a provisional state of affairs only; the chance of circumstances alone can justify it temporarily.”[7]

Moreover, going back to the doctrine of abrogation, Muslim scholars such as Ibn Salama (d. 1020) agree that Koran 9:5, known as ayat as-sayf or the sword verse, has abrogated some 124 of the more peaceful Meccan verses, including “every other verse in the Koran, which commands or implies anything less than a total offensive against the nonbelievers.”[8] In fact, all four schools of Sunni jurisprudence agree that “jihad is when Muslims wage war on infidels, after having called on them to embrace Islam or at least pay tribute [jizya] and live in submission, and the infidels refuse.”[9]

Obligatory jihad is best expressed by Islam’s dichotomized worldview that pits the realm of Islam against the realm of war. The first, dar al-Islam, is the “realm of submission,” the world where Shari’a governs; the second, dar al-Harb (the realm of war), is the non-Islamic world. A struggle continues until the realm of Islam subsumes the non-Islamic world—a perpetual affair that continues to the present day. The renowned Muslim historian and philosopher Ibn Khaldun (d. 1406) clearly articulates this division:

In the Muslim community, jihad is a religious duty because of the universalism of the Muslim mission and the obligation to convert everybody to Islam either by persuasion or by force. The other religious groups did not have a universal mission, and the jihad was not a religious duty for them, save only for purposes of defense. But Islam is under obligation to gain power over other nations.[10]

Science is ignored when it doesn’t support politically correct policy.

The Anti-Empirical Left

March 6, 2014 10:29 am / victorhanson

Science is ignored when it doesn’t support politically correct policy.

by Victor Davis Hanson // National Review Online


President Obama entered office promising to restore the sanctity of science. Instead, a fresh war against science, statistics, and reason is being waged on behalf of politically correct politics.

After the Sandy Hook tragedy, the president attempted to convert national outrage into new gun-control legislation. Specifically, he focused on curtailing semi-automatic “assault” rifles. But there is no statistical evidence that such guns — semi-automatic rifles that have mostly cosmetic changes to appear similar to banned military-style fully automatic assault weapons — lead to increased gun-related crimes.

The promiscuous availability of illegal handguns does. Handguns are used in the vast majority of all gun related violent crime — and in such cases they are often obtained illegally. Yet the day-to-day enforcement of existing handgun statutes is far more difficult than the widely publicized passing of new laws.

Late-term abortions used to be justified in part by an argument dating back to the 1970s that fetuses were not yet “human.” But emerging science has allowed premature babies five months old or younger to survive outside the womb. Brain waves of fetuses can be monitored at just six weeks after conception. Such facts may be unwelcome to many, given the political controversy over abortion. Yet the idea that fetuses are not viable humans until birth is simply unscientific.

The president still talks of “settled science” in the global-warming debate. He recently flew to California to attribute the near-record drought there to human-induced global warming.

There is no scientific basis for the president’s assertion about the drought. Periodic droughts are characteristic of California’s climate, both in the distant past and over a century and a half of modern record-keeping. If the president were empirical rather than political, he would instead have cited the logical reasons for the fact that this drought is far more serious than those of the late 1970s.

California has not built additional major mountain storage reservoirs to capture Sierra Nevada runoff in decades. The population of the state’s water consumers has almost doubled since the last severe drought. Several million acre-feet of stored fresh water have been in recent years diverted to the sea — on the dubious science that the endangered delta smelt suffers mostly from irrigation-related water diversions rather than pollutants, and that year-round river flows for salmon, from the mountains to the sea, existed before the reserve water storage available from the construction of mountain reservoirs.

The administration has delayed construction of the proposed Keystone XL pipeline, citing concern about climate change. Yet a recent State Department environmental report found that the proposed pipeline would not increase carbon dioxide emissions enough to affect atmospheric temperatures. There is no scientific basis from which to cancel the Keystone, but a variety of logical reasons to build it — such as moving toward North American energy independence and protecting ourselves against energy blackmailers and cartels abroad.
Science is rarely “settled.” Instead, orthodoxy is constantly challenged. A theory survives not by politics, but only if it can offer the best logical explanations for a set of circumstances backed by hard statistical data.

“Global warming” that begat “climate change” is no exception. All the good politics in the world of blaming most bad weather on too much carbon dioxide cannot make it true if unquestioned climate data cannot support the notion of recent temperature increases’ being directly attributable to rising man-caused carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere.

In recent years, “settled science” with regard to the causes of peptic ulcers, the health benefits of Vitamin D, the need for annual mammograms, and the prognostic value of the prostate-specific antigen test have all been turned upside down by dissident scientists offering new theories to interpret fresh data.

Yet for the new anti-empirical Left, science becomes an ally only when refuting absurd religious theories that the Earth is 5,000 years old. Otherwise, it can prove irrelevant when it does not support pet causes.

V

ictor Davis Hanson is a classicist and historian at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University. His latest book is The Savior Generals, published this spring by Bloomsbury Books. You can reach him by e-mailing author@victorhanson.com.

© 2014 Tribune Media Services, Inc.

Obamanomics Is Ticking Time Bomb For Millennial Generation

Obamanomics Is Ticking Time Bomb For Millennial Generation

By SALVATOR J. LAMASTRA V
Posted 03/11/2014 06:52 PM ET

My generation — 80 million strong — is experiencing economic distress as a direct result of the failed leadership and policies of the Obama administration.

The economic purgatory into which millennials have been cast by Father Government is one of constant turmoil and statistical roadblock.

The unemployment rate for all Americans ticked up to 6.7% in February. But when it comes to millennials, the jobless numbers are far different. Youth unemployment now stands at a staggering 15.8%, and this doesn't even give the whole picture.

According to the Department of Labor, some 1.7 million young adults have given up and are not actively seeking employment. Being in your mid-20s, having no job and no hope for a job is demoralizing. My generation is losing hope, and fast. In fact, the economy is so debilitating that some 22.6% of us still live with our parents.

The youth misery index, which figures in youth unemployment, average graduating student-loan debt and the national per-capita debt, is at a record 98.6, showing how desperate we are for leaders who will help revitalize the economy.

Unfortunately, the Obama administration is implementing policies such as ObamaCare that are destroying the incentive for individuals to work and companies to hire.

The Congressional Budget Office has stated that the subsidies and taxes in ObamaCare "create a disincentive for people to work."

Destroying incentives for the largest generation in U.S. history is a horrific failure on Washington's part.

Furthermore, Pew Research Center found 51% of millennials now believe that Social Security will be gone by the time they're ready to retire. This accurate forecast increases the perception of a fading American dream and a lifetime of economic struggle.

Imagine the most educated generation in U.S. history also having the distinction of being the most unemployed in four decades.

The average millennial is carrying around a record $30,000 in student-loan debt, collectors of which have been given broader authority than credit-card lenders. The regulations are so strict that the debt cannot even be shed in bankruptcy.

Those just entering college find it hard to justify spending four years earning a degree and accumulating sky-high debt for a job that isn't there anymore. In fact, the cost of education has increased three times as much as transportation, energy and housing since the 1980s.

Total outstanding student loan debt topped $1 trillion in 2010. It does not take a Harvard economics professor to see the similarities to the housing crisis. A trillion dollars in outstanding student loans to millennials who do not have jobs and cannot find jobs is a recipe for disaster.

As a product of the dot-com meltdown and 2008 financial crisis, millennials are very cautious when it comes to investing and purchasing. In fact, we're the most financially conservative generation since the one that experienced the Great Depression. Young adults refuse to take financial gambles and keep most of their portfolios — 52% — in cash.

Millennials turned out in strong support for President Obama because he promised the most transparent administration in history.

Blunders such as ObamaCare and NSA surveillance have instilled distrust for those in Washington and their ability to oversee a fair economic playing field.

This distrust has dimmed the prospect of young adults' becoming future buyers and investors. If they do not shed their zeitgeist of frugal spending and investment habits, it could spell trouble for the retail and stock markets.

ObamaCare has been the most recent and perhaps final nail in millennials' economic coffin. They now disapprove of the law by a whopping 57%, with 40% believing it will decrease the quality of their health care, according to a Harvard poll.

A report by NerdWallet says the average millennial who enters the exchanges will spend around $1,700 a year out of pocket while those who forgo insurance and take the penalty will spend an estimated $348. Such numbers simply point to the advantage of not enrolling.

If there's one thing baby boomers taught us, it's that a big generation can bring big change. And with millennials that change will be epic.

We experienced it with the election and re-election of President Obama and will experience it again come 2016. According to Pew, half of millennials are not affiliated with a political party, increasing the viability of an eventual third-party candidate to shake up America's politics and economy.

Barack Obama has let down millennials economically in every way possible: high unemployment, sickening health care reform, skyrocketing living and energy costs, staggeringly high student-loan debt and a national debt of $52,948 per capita.

Plainly, the many challenges facing my generation are culminating in an economic and generational time bomb.

• LaMastra, a dental student, is a political author and commentator specializing in millennials.

Attkisson's CBS Departure Shows Big Media's Bias

Attkisson's CBS Departure Shows Big Media's Bias

 
Media Bias: How does CBS News thank its star reporter on the current presidency? By questioning her ideology and integrity and forcing her to leave. That's rich, coming from the RatherGate network.
CBS Goodbye

Renowned investigative reporter Sharyl Attkisson was the beam in the CBS Eye. Now, her persecutors running CBS News are no doubt euphoric she finally is leaving.

It's a textbook case of the major media's liberal slant to devalue a versatile winner of five Emmys on everything from bank bailouts to Republican congressional fundraising to mismanagement at the Red Cross, apparently because she's too tough on the biggest power grabber in the history of the U.S. presidency.

Life can imitate art. In the satirical comedy "Network," Ned Beatty's corporate CEO complains to the TV news anchorman played by Peter Finch that "you get up on your little 21-inch screen and howl about America and democracy. There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only IBM and ITT and AT&T and DuPont, Dow, Union Carbide and Exxon."

Politico reports Attkisson had grown frustrated not just with CBS' bias, but also with "an outsize influence by the network's corporate partners and a lack of dedication to investigative reporting, several sources said."

Dan Rather didn't worry about CBS' "corporate partners" when, just before the 2004 presidential election, he used forged documents to call into question President George W. Bush's Air National Guard service.

Attkisson is nearly alone within the broadcast media in pursuing Obama scandals, like the Benghazi attacks that killed a U.S. ambassador and three other Americans; the Fast and Furious gunrunning scandal that left U.S. Border Patrol agent Brian Terry dead; and the Solyndra scandal that wasted over a half-billion dollars of taxpayer money on a failed solar-panel maker. Last year, her computer was mysteriously hacked.

Whether it's network corporate sponsors who don't want to anger President Obama, or news editors who love Obama's agenda, we're all in trouble if investigative reporting focusing on the president is persecuted into marginality.

HHS quietly repeals the individual purchase rule for two more years.

ObamaCare's Secret Mandate Exemption

HHS quietly repeals the individual purchase rule for two more years.

March 11, 2014 7:15 p.m. ET

ObamaCare's implementers continue to roam the battlefield and shoot their own wounded, and the latest casualty is the core of the Affordable Care Act—the individual mandate. To wit, last week the 

Administration quietly excused millions of people from the requirement to purchase health insurance or else pay a tax penalty.

This latest political reconstruction has received zero media notice, and the Health and Human Services Department didn't think the details were worth discussing in a conference call, press materials or fact sheet. 

Instead, the mandate suspension was buried in an unrelated rule that was meant to preserve some health plans that don't comply with ObamaCare benefit and redistribution mandates. Our sources only noticed the change this week.

That seven-page technical bulletin includes a paragraph and footnote that casually mention that a rule in a separate December 2013 bulletin would be extended for two more years, until 2016. Lo and behold, it turns out this second rule, which was supposed to last for only a year, allows Americans whose coverage was cancelled to opt out of the mandate altogether.

In 2013, HHS decided that ObamaCare's wave of policy terminations qualified as a "hardship" that entitled people to a special type of coverage designed for people under age 30 or a mandate exemption. HHS originally defined and reserved hardship exemptions for the truly down and out such as battered women, the evicted and bankrupts.

But amid the post-rollout political backlash, last week the agency created a new category: Now all you need to do is fill out a form attesting that your plan was cancelled and that you "believe that the plan options available in the [ObamaCare] Marketplace in your area are more expensive than your cancelled health insurance policy" or "you consider other available policies unaffordable."

This lax standard—no formula or hard test beyond a person's belief—at least ostensibly requires proof such as an insurer termination notice. But people can also qualify for hardships for the unspecified nonreason that "you experienced another hardship in obtaining health insurance," which only requires "documentation if possible." And yet another waiver is available to those who say they are merely unable to afford coverage, regardless of their prior insurance. In a word, these shifting legal benchmarks offer an exemption to everyone who conceivably wants one.

Keep in mind that the White House argued at the Supreme Court that the individual mandate to buy insurance was indispensable to the law's success, and President Obama continues to say he'd veto the bipartisan bills that would delay or repeal it. So why are ObamaCare liberals silently gutting their own creation now?

The answers are the implementation fiasco and politics. HHS revealed Tuesday that only 940,000 people signed up for an ObamaCare plan in February, bringing the total to about 4.2 million, well below the original 5.7 million projection. The predicted "surge" of young beneficiaries isn't materializing even as the end-of-March deadline approaches, and enrollment decelerated in February.

Meanwhile, a McKinsey & Company survey reports that a mere 27% of people joining the exchanges were previously uninsured through February. The survey also found that about half of people who shopped for a plan but did not enroll said premiums were too expensive, even though 80% of this group qualify for subsidies. Some substantial share of the people ObamaCare is supposed to help say it is a bad financial value. You might even call it a hardship.

HHS is also trying to pre-empt the inevitable political blowback from the nasty 2015 tax surprise of fining the uninsured for being uninsured, which could help reopen ObamaCare if voters elect a Republican Senate this November. Keeping its mandate waiver secret for now is an attempt get past November and in the meantime sign up as many people as possible for government-subsidized health care. Our sources in the insurance industry are worried the regulatory loophole sets a mandate non-enforcement precedent, and they're probably right. The longer it is not enforced, the less likely any President will enforce it.

The larger point is that there have been so many unilateral executive waivers and delays that ObamaCare must be unrecognizable to its drafters, to the extent they ever knew what the law contained.