tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-69443074127880672162024-02-22T01:04:59.612-05:00Roman-wordsRomanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07016139270835685661noreply@blogger.comBlogger1527125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6944307412788067216.post-15892893011891191752021-01-12T23:32:00.001-05:002021-01-12T23:32:17.069-05:00Election <p dir="ltr">The present situation has developing  for over 4 years, all the "experts" and pundits told the Hildebeast she had the 2016 election in the bag.  Then, somehow, the smartest woman in the world lost a rigged election to someone who has never held elected office.  Plotting  to rig 2020 started right away.  The dinosaur media, a wholly owned subsidiary of the Democrat party, were fully committed to defeating President Trump.  She, and the Dems/Progs were besides themselves and haven't sobered up since.  Boxed Chardonnay is difficult to find in Chappaqua these days. </p>
Romanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07016139270835685661noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6944307412788067216.post-39806817848280893372020-08-18T02:00:00.001-04:002020-09-18T08:45:19.454-04:00Walter Williams <div align="center" align="center" align="center" align="center" align="center" align="center" align="center" ><p dir="ltr"><br>
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<span style="font-size:1.50em;"><b>Are Today’s Leftists Truly Marxists?</b></span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><a href="https://www.newsbusters.org/author/walter-e-williams">Walter E. Williams</a></p>
<p dir="ltr">August 13th, 2020 3:05 PM</p>
<p dir="ltr">Te</p>
<p dir="ltr">Most people who call themselves Marxists know very little of Karl Marx's life and have never read his three-volume <i>Das Kapital</i>. Volume I was published in 1867, the only volume published before Marx's death in 1883. Volumes II and III were later edited and published in his name by his friend and collaborator Friedrich Engels. Most people who call themselves Marxists have only read his 1848 pamphlet “The Communist Manifesto,” which was written with Engels.<br>
Marx is a hero to many labor union leaders and civil rights organizations, including leftist groups like Black Lives Matter, Antifa, and some Democratic Party leaders. It is easy to be a Marxist if you know little of his life. Marx's predictions about capitalism and the “withering away of the state” turned out to be grossly wrong. What most people do not know is that Marx was a racist and an anti-Semite.<br>
When the U.S. annexed California after the Mexican-American War, Marx wrote: “Without violence nothing is ever accomplished in history.” Then he asked, “Is it a misfortune that magnificent California was seized from the lazy Mexicans who did not know what to do with it?” Friedrich Engels added: “In America we have witnessed the conquest of Mexico and have rejoiced at it. It is to the interest of its own development that Mexico will be placed under the tutelage of the United States.” Many of Marx's racist ideas were reported in <i>Karl Marx, Racist</i>, a book written by Nathaniel Weyl, a former member of the U.S. Communist Party.</p>
<p dir="ltr">In a July 1862 letter to Engels, in reference to his socialist political competitor Ferdinand Lassalle, Marx wrote: “It is now completely clear to me that he, as is proved by his cranial formation and his hair, descends from the Negroes from Egypt, assuming that his mother or grandmother had not interbred with a nigger. Now this union of Judaism and Germanism with a basic Negro substance must produce a peculiar product. The obtrusiveness of the fellow is also nigger-like.”</p>
<p dir="ltr">In 1887, Paul Lafargue, who was Marx's son-in-law, was a candidate for a council seat in a Paris district that contained a zoo. Engels claimed that Paul had “one eighth or one twelfth nigger blood.” In an April 1887 letter to Paul's wife, Engels wrote, “Being in his quality as a nigger, a degree nearer to the rest of the animal kingdom than the rest of us, he is undoubtedly the most appropriate representative of that district.”</p>
<p dir="ltr">Marx's anti-Semitic views were no secret. In 1844, he published an essay titled “On the Jewish Question.” He wrote that the worldly religion of Jews was "huckstering" and that the Jews' god was "money." Marx's view of Jews was that they could only become an emancipated ethnicity or culture when they no longer exist. Just one step short of calling for genocide, Marx said, “The classes and the races, too weak to master the new conditions of life, must give way.”</p>
<p dir="ltr">Marx's philosophical successors shared ugly thoughts on blacks and other minorities. Che Guevara, a hero of the left, was a horrific racist. In his 1952 memoir, <i>The Motorcycle Diaries</i>, Guevara wrote, “The Negro is indolent and lazy and spends his money on frivolities, whereas the European is forward-looking, organized and intelligent.”</p>
<p dir="ltr">British socialist Beatrice Webb griped in <i>The New Statesmen</i> about declining birthrates among so-called higher races, which would lead to “a new social order" that would be created “by one or other of the colored races, the Negro, the Kaffir or the Chinese.” The Soviets espoused the same “Jewish world conspiracy” as the Nazis. Joseph Stalin embarked upon a campaign that led to the deaths of Jewish intellectuals for their apparent lack of patriotism. By the way, the Soviet public was not told that Karl Marx was Jewish. Academics who preach Marxism to their classes fail to tell their students that his ideology has led to the slaughter of tens of millions of people. What's worse, they fail to even feign concern over this fact.</p>
<p dir="ltr">White liberals are useful idiots. BLM, Antifa, and other progressive groups use the plight of poor blacks to organize left-leaning, middle-class, college-educated, guilt-ridden suburbanite whites. These people who topple statues and destroy public and private property care about minorities as much as their racist predecessors. Their goal is the acquisition and concentration of power and Americans have fallen hook, line, and sinker for their phony virtue signaling.<br>
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Romanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07016139270835685661noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6944307412788067216.post-85799231103064836142020-07-03T10:08:00.001-04:002020-07-03T10:08:40.160-04:00Walter Williams <p dir="ltr">Many whites are ashamed, saddened and feel guilty about our history of slavery, Jim Crow and gross racial discrimination. Many black people remain angry over the injustices of the past and what they see as injustices of the present. Both blacks and whites can benefit from a better appreciation of black history.<br>
Often overlooked or ignored is the fact that, as a group, black Americans have made the greatest gains, over some of the highest hurdles, and in a shorter span of time than any other racial group in history.<br>
For example, if one totaled up the earnings and spending of black Americans and considered us as a separate nation with our own gross domestic product, we would rank well within the top 20 richest nations. A black American, Gen. Colin Powell, once headed the world's mightiest military. Black Americans are among the world's most famous personalities, and a few black Americans are among the world's richest people such as investor Robert F. Smith, IT service provider David Steward, Oprah Winfrey, and basketball star Michael Jordan. Plus, there was a black U.S. president.<br>
The significance of these achievements cannot be overstated. When the Civil War ended, neither a slave nor a slave owner would have believed such progress would be possible in less than a century and a half — if ever. As such, it speaks to the intestinal fortitude of a people. Just as important, it speaks to the greatness of a nation in which such gains were possible. Nowhere else on earth could such progress have been achieved except in the United States of America.<br>
The issue that confronts us is how these gains can be extended to about one-quarter of the black population for whom they have proven elusive. The first step is to acknowledge that the civil rights struggle is over and won. At one time, black Americans did not enjoy the constitutional guarantees as everyone else. Now we do. While no one can deny the existence of residual racial discrimination, racial discrimination is not the major problem confronting a large segment of the black community.</p>
<p dir="ltr">A major problem is that some public and private policies reward dependency and irresponsibility. Chief among these policies is the welfare state that has fostered a 75% rate of out of wedlock births and decimated the black family that had survived Jim Crow and racism. Keep in mind that in 1940 the black illegitimacy rate was 11% and most black children were raised in two-parent families. Most poverty, about 25%, is found in female-headed households. The poverty rate among husband-and-wife black families has been in the single digits for more than two decades.<br>
Black people can be thankful that double standards and public and private policies rewarding inferiority and irresponsibility were not a part of the 1920s, '30s, '40s and '50s. If there were, then there would not have been the kind of intellectual excellence and spiritual courage that created the world's most successful civil rights movement. From the late 1800s to 1950, some black schools were models of academic achievement. Black students at Washington's Dunbar High School often outscored white students as early as 1899. Schools such as Frederick Douglass (Baltimore), Booker T. Washington (Atlanta), P.S. 91 (Brooklyn), McDonogh 35 (New Orleans) and others operated at a similar level of excellence.</p>
<p dir="ltr">Self-destructive behavior that has become acceptable, particularly that in predominantly black schools, is nothing less than a gross betrayal of a struggle, paid with blood, sweat and tears by previous generations, to make possible today's educational opportunities that are being routinely squandered. I guarantee that blacks who lived through that struggle and are no longer with us would not have believed such a betrayal possible.<br>
Government should do its job of protecting constitutional rights. After that, black people should be simply left alone as opposed to being smothered by the paternalism inspired by white guilt. On that note, I just cannot resist the temptation to refer readers to my <a href="http://walterewilliams.com/WalterWilliamsAmnestyProclamation.pdf?fbclid=IwAR3wyArkYjHxpsxVtjPLTLtKMqZC7uxa-Q8ei8ioVNVCJR-8m7Ky2iHTk7s">"Proclamation of Amnesty and Pardon," </a>which grants Americans of European ancestry amnesty and pardon for their own grievances and those of their forebears against my people so that they stop feeling guilty and stop acting like fools in their relationship with Americans of African ancestry.<br>
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Romanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07016139270835685661noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6944307412788067216.post-41656522405748623492020-05-28T14:03:00.001-04:002020-05-28T14:03:06.548-04:00Walter Williams <p dir="ltr">y <a href="https://www.newsbusters.org/author/walter-e-williams">Walter E. Williams</a> | May 27, 2020 7:32 PM EDT</p>
<div align="left" ><p dir="ltr">Is it important to have racial or sexual diversity in our fight against the COVID-19 pandemic? Heather Mac Donald suggests that some think it might be in her City Journal article "Should Identity Politics Dictate Vaccine Research?" The funding priorities of the National Institutes of Health and the Centers for Disease Control suggests that they think diversity is an important input in making headway in the fight against the coronavirus. On April 20, NIH and CDC announced the availability of grants to increase the "diversity" of biomedical research labs. For example, academic virology researchers studying respiratory failure could receive hundreds of thousands more taxpayer dollars if they could find a woman or a minority to add to their project. High school students and college students are eligible for the program even though they cannot contribute anything of value. No scientific justification for the new diversity hire is needed. The scientists must promise to mentor the new hire, which will take time away from their research with no offsetting gain.<br>
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</div><p dir="ltr">Mac Donald has written another article on academic insanity "The Therapeutic Campus" bearing the subtitle: "Why are college students seeking mental-health services in record numbers?" Many colleges have created safe spaces where students can be sheltered from reality and not have their feelings hurt by others exercising their free speech rights. Yale University has created a safe space that would be the envy of most other universities. They have named it the Good Life Center. Mac Donald says it has "a sandbox, essential oils, massage, and mental-health workshops," and that "the center unites the most powerful forces in higher education today: the feminization of the university, therapeutic culture, identity politics, and the vast student-services bureaucracy."<br>
George Mason University has a Center for the Advancement of Well-Being, headed by a chief well-being officer. At George Mason, well-being refers to social justice and "building a life of vitality, purpose, resilience, and engagement," the Center's chief well-being officer told The Chronicle of Higher Education. By the way, a George Mason University student can minor in well-being as a part of his college education.<br>
New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, in justifying his draconian coronavirus measures, said during a press conference: "This is about saving lives. If everything we do saves just one life, I'll be happy."<br>
Cuomo knows that many Americans buy into such a seemingly caring statement that would be easily revealed as utter nonsense if one had just a modicum of economic knowledge. If one looked at only the benefits of an action, he would do anything because everything has a benefit. Prudent decision-making requires one to compare benefits to costs. For example, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration estimates that in 2019 36,120 people died in motor vehicle traffic crashes. Virtually all those lives could have been saved with a mandated 5 mph speed limit. Those saved lives are the benefit. Fortunately, when we consider the costs and inconvenience of setting a 5 mph speed limit, we rightly conclude that saving those 36,120 lives isn't worth it.<br>
There are other news tidbits about politicians drunk with power that we Americans have given them. Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot told city residents who disobeyed her stay-at-home order: "We will arrest you and we will take you to jail. Period. We're not playing games." Meanwhile, in violation of her own stay-at-home order, Lightfoot slipped out and got her hair done. She explained her decision, "I take my personal hygiene very seriously."<br>
Ventura County, California, health director Dr. Robert Levin said that his department would forcibly remove COVID-19 infected people from their own homes and put them "into other kinds of housing that we have available." Facing stiff criticism, Levin later explained: "I either misspoke or it was misinterpreted. I'll take the blame of having misspoke."<br>
The biggest casualty from the COVID-19 pandemic has nothing to do with the disease. It's the power we've given to politicians and bureaucrats. The question is how we recover our freedoms.</p>
Romanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07016139270835685661noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6944307412788067216.post-23854962514736223472020-05-24T19:12:00.001-04:002020-05-24T19:13:42.998-04:00Walter Williams <p dir="ltr">By <a href="https://www.newsbusters.org/author/walter-e-williams">Walter E. Williams</a> | May 21, 2020 3:44 PM EDT</p>
<div align="left" ><p dir="ltr">Black politicians, civil rights leaders and their white liberal advocates have little or no interest in doing anything effective to deal with what's no less than an education crisis among black students. In city after city with large black populations, such as Baltimore, St. Louis, Detroit, Philadelphia and Washington, D.C., less than 10% of students test proficient in reading and math. For example, in 2016, in 13 Baltimore high schools, not a single student tested proficient in math. In six other high schools, only 1% tested proficient in math. Citywide, only 15% of Baltimore students passed the state's English test. Despite these academic deficiencies, about 70% of the students graduate and are conferred a high school diploma.<br>
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</div><p dir="ltr">Ballou High School is in Washington, D.C. Five percent of its students test proficient in reading and 1% test proficient in math. In 2017, all 189 students in Ballou High School's senior class applied to college. All 189 members of the graduating class of 2017 were accepted to universities. In November 2017, an investigation showed that half of Ballou's 2017 graduates had more than three months of unexcused absences. One in five of the graduating class was absent more than present, therefore missing more than 90 days of school.</p>
<p dir="ltr">Examples of academic underachievement can be seen at predominantly black public schools across the nation, but that's only part of the story. The strangest part of this is that poor academic performance is accepted and tolerated by black politicians, civil rights organizations and white liberals. Poor performance is often blamed on finances; however, the poorest performing schools have the highest per pupil spending. New York, Washington, D.C., and Baltimore rank among the nation's highest in per pupil educational spending.</p>
<p dir="ltr">The underachievement story is compounded by the gross dishonesty of colleges that admit many of these students. I cannot imagine that students who are not proficient in reading and math can do real college work. In a futile attempt to make up for 12 years of rotten education, colleges put these students in remedial courses. They also design courses with little or no true academic content. Colleges have their own agendas. They want the money that comes from admitting these students. Also, they want to make their diversity and multiculturalism administrators happy.<br>
Poor black education is not preordained. Dr. Thomas Sowell has examined schools in New York City and student performance on the NY State English Language Arts Test in 2016-17. Thirty percent of Brooklyn's William Floyd elementary school third graders scored well below proficient in English and language arts, but at Success Academy charter school in the same building, only one did. At William Floyd, 36% were below proficient, with 24% being proficient and none testing above proficient. By contrast, at Success Academy, only 17% of third graders were below proficient, with 70% being proficient and 11% being above proficient. Among Success Academy's fourth graders, 51% and 43%, respectively, scored proficient and above proficient, while their William Floyd counterparts scored 23% and 6%, respectively. Similar high performance can be found in some other Manhattan charter schools such as KIPP Infinity Middle School.</p>
<p dir="ltr">Liberals tell us that racial integration is a necessary condition for black academic excellence. Public charter schools such as those mentioned above belie that vision. Sowell points out that only 39% of students in all New York state schools who were recently tested scored at the "proficient" level in math, but 100% of the students at the Crown Heights Success Academy tested proficient where blacks and Hispanics constitute 90% of the student body.</p>
<p dir="ltr">There's little question that many charter schools provide superior educational opportunities for black youngsters. <i>The New York Times </i>wrote, "Over 100,000 students in hundreds of the city's charter schools are doing well on state tests, and tens of thousands of children are on waiting lists for spots." But here's New York Mayor Bill de Blasio's take on charter schools, expressing the interests of the education establishment: "Get away from high-stakes testing, get away from charter schools. No federal funding for charter schools.</p>
<p dir="ltr">Black people cannot afford to buy into any attack on education alternatives. Charter schools across the nation offer a way out of the educational abyss.</p>
Romanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07016139270835685661noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6944307412788067216.post-8406204344906170602020-05-16T17:14:00.001-04:002020-05-16T17:14:36.940-04:00Walter Williams <p dir="ltr">By <a href="https://www.newsbusters.org/author/walter-e-williams">Walter E. Williams</a> | May 13, 2020 10:42 PM EDT<br></p>
<div align="left"><p dir="ltr">Former Barack Obama adviser Rahm Emanuel, during a recent interview, reminded us of his 2008 financial crisis quotation, "Never allow a crisis to go to waste." The COVID-19 pandemic has presented a wonderful opportunity for those of us who want greater control over our lives. Sadly, too many Americans have already taken the bait. We've allowed politicians and bureaucrats to dictate to us what's an essential business and what isn't, who has access to hospitals and who hasn't, and a host of minor and major dictates.<br>
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</div><p dir="ltr">Leftist politicians who want to get into our pocketbooks are beginning to argue that the COVID-19 pandemic is the best argument for a wealth tax. Let's first define a wealth tax. A wealth tax is applicable to and levied on a variety of accumulated assets that include cash, money market funds, real property, trust funds, owner-occupied housing and other wealth accumulations. Assume a taxpayer earns $150,000 a year and falls in the 32% tax bracket. That individual's income tax liability for the year will be 32% x $150,000 or $48,800. Say the taxpayer has a net worth of $500,000 consisting of a business or home and the government imposes a wealth tax of 32%, the person's tax liability is $160,000.</p>
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<p dir="ltr">The problem with most politicians is when they enact a law, they seldom ask, "Then what?" They assume a world of what economists call zero elasticity wherein people behave after a tax is imposed just as they behaved before the tax was imposed and the only difference is that more money comes into the government's tax coffers. The long-term effect of a wealth tax is that people will try to avoid it by not accumulating as much wealth or concealing the wealth they accumulate.</p>
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<p dir="ltr">A wealth tax has become increasingly attractive because it lends itself to demagoguery about the significant wealth disparity in the United States. The Federal Reserve reports that, in 2018, the wealthiest 10% of Americans owned 70% of the country's wealth, and the richest 1% owned 32% of the wealth. That fact gave Democratic presidential contenders such as Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren incentives to propose a wealth tax as a part of their campaign rhetoric. Leftists lament that multibillionaires such as Charles Koch, Warren Buffett, Larry Ellison and Sheldon Adelson have not made charitable efforts to address the coronavirus crisis.</p>
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<p dir="ltr">My questions to these political leeches are: To whom does the billionaire's wealth belong? And how did they accumulate such wealth?<br>
Did they accumulate their great wealth by looting, plundering and enslaving their fellow man, as has been the case throughout most of human history? No, they accumulated great wealth by serving and pleasing their fellow man in the pursuit of profits. Unfortunately, demagoguery and lack of understanding has led to "profit" becoming a dirty word. Profit is a payment to entrepreneurs just as wages are payments to labor, interest to capital and rent to land. In order to earn profits in free markets, entrepreneurs must identify and satisfy human wants in a way that economizes on society's scarce resources.</p>
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<p dir="ltr">Here's a question for you. Which entities produce greater consumer satisfaction: for-profit enterprises such as supermarkets, computer makers and clothing stores, or nonprofit entities such as public schools, post offices and motor vehicle departments? I'm guessing you'll answer the former. Their survival depends on pleasing ordinary people. Public schools, post offices and motor vehicle departments' survival are not strictly tied to pleasing people but rather on politicians and the ability of government to impose taxes.<br>
Some advocates of wealth taxes and other forms of taxation might argue that they are temporary measures to get us over the COVID-19 crisis. Do not buy that argument. The great Nobel Laureate economist Milton Friedman once said, "Nothing is more permanent than a temporary government program." The telephone tax was levied on wealthy Americans with telephones in 1898 to help fund the Spanish-American War. That tax was repealed over 100 years later in 2006. One of the objectives of the World War II withholding tax was to bring faster revenues to fight the war. The withholding of taxes is still with us blinding Americans on the taxes they pay. Let us not allow a crisis to bamboozle us again.</p>
Romanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07016139270835685661noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6944307412788067216.post-25259182025874821992020-05-02T18:33:00.001-04:002020-05-02T18:33:18.089-04:00Walter Williams <div align="left" ><p dir="ltr">Dr. Victor Davis Hanson is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, a military historian and a professor emeritus of classics at California State University, Fresno. He has written two articles relevant to today's society. Last October he published, "Members of Previous Generations Now Seem Like Giants," and he recently wrote, "Is America a Roaring Giant or Crying Baby?"<br>
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</div><div align="left" ><p dir="ltr">In the first article, Hanson starts with some observations and questions regarding the greatness of previous generations compared with today's Americans. He asks: "Does anyone believe that contemporary Americans could build another transcontinental railroad in six years? ... America went to the moon in 1969 with supposedly primitive computers and backward engineering. Does anyone believe we could launch a similar moonshot today?" Hanson observes: "We have been fighting in Afghanistan without result for 18 years. Our forefathers helped to win World War II and defeat the Axis Powers in four years." Keep in mind that the Axis powers (Germany, Japan and Italy) had far greater firepower than the Afghan rebels that we've fought. Hanson also could have asked whether today's Americans could build a 1,700-mile road such as the ALCAN Highway, connecting the lower 48 states to Alaska, whose construction started in March 1942 and was completed in October that year.<br>
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<div align="left" ><p dir="ltr">In terms of learning, Hanson asks whether anyone believes that a 2020 college graduate knows half of what a 1950 graduate knew. In the 1940s, he says, young people read the works of William Faulkner, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Pearl Buck and John Steinbeck. He doubts that today's high school graduates could even finish "The Good Earth" or "The Grapes of Wrath." I attended Benjamin Franklin High School from 1950 to 1954, and our senior English class required reading included Geoffrey Chaucer's "The Canterbury Tales" and William Shakespeare's "Macbeth" and "Julius Caesar." By the way, when I attended Benjamin Franklin High, it was ranked the lowest among Philadelphia's high schools.<br>
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<div align="left" ><p dir="ltr">Hanson's second article asks whether our response to the COVID-19 epidemic will be that of a "roaring giant" or "crying baby." We can awaken, just as we did on Dec. 8, 1941, with massive amounts of fight, ready to get on a war footing. For those who were not around then or do not know our history, in 1941 our nation had seven fleet aircraft carriers and one escort carrier. By 1945, it was deploying 27 fleet and 72 escort carriers. In December 1941, we had 2.2 million service members in the U.S. military. By the war's end, there were more than 12 million Americans in the armed services. That's an astonishing mobilization considering our population was a little over 132 million. What's even more amazing is that our gross domestic product for 1944 exceeded the combined economic output of the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom, Japan, Italy and Germany.<br>
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<div align="left" ><p dir="ltr">Hanson says that our other choice regarding the epidemic is whether to continue the partisan bickering and blaming. We can ignore the importance of the crisis and instead scapegoat and play the blame game. We can talk not of an America in crisis but of the virus's effects on particular groups. We can decide that to hold China responsible for lying about the virus is mean, racist and, at best, xenophobic.<br>
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<div align="left" ><p dir="ltr">In other words, Hanson says, "The choice is ours whether America awakens as a roaring giant or a crying baby." My prediction is that Americans, left to their own tendencies, will roar together as giants and will ignore the political and media crybabies.<br>
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</div>Romanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07016139270835685661noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6944307412788067216.post-25716610835417854112020-04-17T00:01:00.001-04:002020-04-17T00:01:13.653-04:00Walter Williams <div align="left" ><p dir="ltr"><br>
<span style="font-size:1.50em;"><b>Fixing College Corruption</b></span><br>
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<p dir="ltr">By <a href="https://www.newsbusters.org/author/walter-e-williams">Walter E. Williams</a> | April 16, 2020 3:10 PM EDT</p>
<p dir="ltr">America's colleges are rife with corruption. The financial squeeze resulting from COVID-19 offers opportunities for a bit of remediation. Let's first examine what might be the root of academic corruption, suggested by the title of a recent study, "Academic Grievance Studies and the Corruption of Scholarship." The study was done by Areo, an opinion and analysis digital magazine. By the way, Areo is short for Areopagitica, a speech delivered by John Milton in defense of free speech.<br>
Authors Helen Pluckrose, James A. Lindsay and Peter Boghossian say that something has gone drastically wrong in academia, especially within certain fields within the humanities. They call these fields "grievance studies," where scholarship is not so much based upon finding truth but upon attending to social grievances. Grievance scholars bully students, administrators and other departments into adhering to their worldview. The worldview they promote is neither scientific nor rigorous. Grievance studies consist of disciplines such as sociology, anthropology, gender studies, queer, sexuality and critical race studies.<br>
In 2017 and 2018, authors Pluckrose, Lindsay and Boghossian started submitting bogus academic papers to academic journals in cultural, queer, race, gender, fat and sexuality studies to determine if they would pass peer review and be accepted for publication. Acceptance of dubious research that journal editors found sympathetic to their intersectional or postmodern leftist vision of the world proves the problem of low academic standards.</p>
<p dir="ltr">Several of the fake research papers were accepted for publication. The Fat Studies journal published a hoax paper that argued the term bodybuilding was exclusionary and should be replaced with "fat bodybuilding, as a fat-inclusive politicized performance." One reviewer said, "I thoroughly enjoyed reading this article and believe it has an important contribution to make to the field and this journal." "Our Struggle Is My Struggle: Solidarity Feminism as an Intersectional Reply to Neoliberal and Choice Feminism," was accepted for publication by Affilia, a feminist journal for social workers. The paper consisted in part of a rewritten passage from <i>Mein Kampf</i>. Two other hoax papers were published, including "Rape Culture and Queer Performativity at Urban Dog Parks." This paper's subject was dog-on-dog rape. But the dog rape paper eventually forced Boghossian, Pluckrose and Lindsay to prematurely out themselves. A <i>Wall Street Journal</i> writer had figured out what they were doing.<br>
Some papers accepted for publication in academic journals advocated training men like dogs and punishing white male college students for historical slavery by asking them to sit in silence in the floor in chains during class and to be expected to learn from the discomfort. Other papers celebrated morbid obesity as a healthy life choice and advocated treating privately conducted masturbation as a form of sexual violence against women. Typically, academic journal editors send submitted papers out to referees for review. In recommending acceptance for publication, many reviewers gave these papers glowing praise.<br>
Political scientist Zach Goldberg ran certain grievance studies concepts through the Lexis/Nexis database, to see how often they appeared in our press over the years. He found huge increases in the usages of "white privilege," "unconscious bias," "critical race theory" and "whiteness." All of this is being taught to college students, many of whom become primary and secondary school teachers who then indoctrinate our young people.</p>
<p dir="ltr">I doubt whether the coronavirus-caused financial crunch will give college and university administrators, who are a crossbreed between a parrot and jellyfish, the guts and backbone to restore academic respectability. Far too often, they get much of their political support from campus grievance people who are members of the faculty and diversity and multicultural administrative offices. The best hope lies with boards of trustees, though many serve as yes men for the university president. I think that a good start would be to find 1950s or 1960s catalogs. Look at the course offerings at a time when college graduates knew how to read, write and compute, and make them today's curricula. Another helpful tool would be to give careful consideration to eliminating all classes/majors/minors containing the word "studies," such as women, Asian, black or queer studies. I'd bet that by restoring the traditional academic mission to colleges, they would put a serious dent into the COVID-19 budget shortfall.</p>
Romanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07016139270835685661noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6944307412788067216.post-77612100408413483302020-04-04T02:52:00.001-04:002020-04-04T02:52:49.977-04:00Walter Williams <p dir="ltr">By <a href="https://www.newsbusters.org/author/walter-e-williams">Walter E. Williams</a> | April 2, 2020 2:23 PM EDT</p>
<div align="left" ><p dir="ltr">I'm not sure whether COVID-19, first identified in Wuhan, China, in the U.S. qualifies as a true disaster. Putting the disease in perspective, we might look at current influenza illnesses. According to Centers for Disease Control estimates, between Oct. 1, 2019, and March 14, 2020, there have been 390,000 to 710,000 hospitalizations as a result of the flu, 38,000,000 to 54,000,000 flu illnesses and 23,000 to 59,000 flu deaths. That's compared with, as of March 27, a total of 85,356 cases of COVID-19 resulting in the deaths of 1,246 people.<br>
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</div><p dir="ltr">But let's agree that COVID-19 is a disaster and ask what the appropriate steps are to deal with it. One of the first observations about any disaster is that the quantity demanded of many goods greatly exceeds the supply. There is a shortage. The natural market response when there is a shortage is for prices to rise. Rising prices produce several beneficial effects. They reduce the incentive for people to hoard while suppliers, motivated by the prospect of higher profits, are incentivized to produce more of the good in short supply.<br>
Thirty-four states and the District of Columbia have anti-price gouging laws that prohibit "excessive and unjustified" increases in prices of essential consumer goods and services during a federal, state or local declared emergency. Price gouging is legally defined as charging 10 to 25% more for something than you charged for it during the month before an emergency. Sellers convicted of price gouging face stiff fines and perhaps prison terms.</p>
<p dir="ltr">But what about hoarding? Often hoarding creates the shortage. In uncertain times, people may purchase three dozen eggs instead of one dozen. They may want to maintain stockpiles of canned goods and buy up large quantities of cleaners, paper towels and toilet paper. This kind of behavior has left some with overflowing freezers, shelves of sanitizers and garages full of toilet paper while their neighbors are left either wanting for the same items or paying what some call "excessive and unjustified" prices.<br>
While it's difficult to get beyond emotions, the fact is that consumers are not forced to buy products for the higher (gouged) price. If they pay, it is likely because they see themselves as being better off acquiring the good than the alternative - keeping their money in their pocket. Higher prices charged have a couple of unappreciated benefits. First, they get people to economize on the use of the good whose price has risen. That is higher prices reduce demand and encourage conservation. That helps with the disaster.<br>
With higher prices, profit-seeking suppliers know that they can make more money by bringing additional quantities of the goods to the market. This increases the supply of goods, which helps to drive prices back down. Anti-price gouging laws disrupt these two very important functions of the marketplace and enhance and prolong a disaster. In other words, in a disaster, we want people to economize their use of goods and services and we want suppliers of these goods and services to produce more. Rising prices encourage these actions. Anti-price gouging laws stymy those incentives and create the pretense that a disaster does not exist.</p>
<p dir="ltr">Some people might reluctantly agree that allowing prices to rise during a disaster helps allocate resources. But they'll complain that's not the intention of greedy sellers who are out to profit. I say, so what? It's not sellers' intentions that count but what their actions accomplish that's important -- namely, getting people to conserve more and suppliers to produce more.<br>
Many of the problems associated with a disaster would be eliminated if people's buying behavior were the same as it was before the disaster. To get people to behave nicely and consider their neighbors is the ultimate challenge. I think rising prices are the best and most dependable way to get people to be considerate of their fellow man.</p>
Romanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07016139270835685661noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6944307412788067216.post-60781255065981881642020-03-23T08:15:00.001-04:002020-03-23T08:15:40.450-04:00Walter Williams <p dir="ltr"><a href="https://imkfeedback.intermarkets.net/adfeedback/form.htm?Plcmt=13189291&ATFlgt=div_utif_imk728xFlexTop&View=mobile&Refer=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.newsbusters.org%2Fblogs%2Fnb%2Fwalter-e-williams%2F2020%2F03%2F18%2Fsocialisms-past&TID=97155">Ad Feedback</a></p>
<div align="left" ><p dir="ltr"><span style="font-size:1.50em;"><b>Socialism’s Past</b></span><br>
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<p dir="ltr">By <a href="https://www.newsbusters.org/author/walter-e-williams">Walter E. Williams</a> | March 18, 2020 2:22 PM EDT</p>
<p dir="ltr">Senator Bernie Sanders' call for socialism has resonated among many Americans, particularly young Americans. They've fallen prey to the idea of a paradise here on Earth where things are free and there's little want. But socialists never reveal what turns out to be their true agenda. Let's look at the kind of statements they used to gain power. You'll note that all of their slogans before gaining power bore little relation to the facts after they had power.<br>
Vladimir Lenin promised, "Under socialism all will govern in turn and will soon become accustomed to no one governing." That's Friedrich Engel's prediction about "the withering away of the state." Lenin also promised, "Communism is Soviet power plus electrification," and "No amount of political freedom will satisfy the hungry masses." Lenin's successor, Joseph Stalin, said, "Advance towards socialism cannot but cause the exploiting elements to resist the advance, and the resistance of the exploiters cannot but lead to the inevitable sharpening of the class struggle." He also said, "Gaiety is the most outstanding feature of the Soviet Union," and that "Gratitude is a sickness suffered by dogs."</p>
<p dir="ltr">Then there's China's Chairman Mao Zedong, who said: "Socialism must be developed in China, and the route toward such an end is a democratic revolution, which will enable socialist and communist consolidation over a length of time. It is also important to unite with the middle peasants, and educate them on the failings of capitalism." Mao advised: "A communist must be selfless, with the interests of the masses at heart. He must also possess a largeness of mind, as well as a practical, far-sighted mindset."<br>
Cuban dictator Fidel Castro said: "Capitalism has neither the capacity, nor the morality, nor the ethics to solve the problems of poverty. We must establish a new world order based on justice, on equity, and on peace." He added, "I find capitalism repugnant. It is filthy, it is gross, it is alienating... because it causes war, hypocrisy and competition."<br>
Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez promised: "I am going to do my best to try to create a country in which children are not living in poverty, in which kids can go to college, in which old people have health care. Will I succeed? I can't guarantee you that, but I can tell you that from a human point of view it is better to show up than to give up." Adding, "I am convinced that the path to a new, better and possible world is not capitalism, the path is socialism."</p>
<p dir="ltr">His successor Nicolas Maduro said: "Fidel Castro represents the dignity of the South American continent against empires. He's a living legend: an icon of independence and freedom across the continent."<br>
Bernie Sanders' statements are not that different from those of Lenin, Stalin, Castro, Chavez and other tyrants. Sanders says, "Let us wage a moral and political war against the billionaires and corporate leaders, on Wall Street and elsewhere, whose policies and greed are destroying the middle class of America," and "We need to change the power structure in America, we need to end the political oligarchy."<br>
Stalin's campaign didn't mention that he would enact policies that would lead to the slaughter of 62 million people in the Soviet Union between 1917 to 1987. Mao Zedong didn't mention that his People's Republic of China would engage in brutal acts that would lead to the loss of 76 million lives at the hands of the government from 1949 to 1987. The late Professor Rudolph J. Rummel of the University of Hawaii documented this tragedy in his book "Death by Government: Genocide and Mass Murder Since 1900."<br>
Because socialism is a fight against basic human nature, it requires brute force in the attempt to reach its goals. The best warning about socialism comes from Aesop, who said, "Those who voluntarily put power into the hands of a tyrant ... must not wonder if it be at last turned against themselves." We shouldn't ignore Martin Luther King Jr.'s warning, "Never forget that everything Hitler did in Germany was legal."</p>
Romanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07016139270835685661noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6944307412788067216.post-50013045975903231762020-03-18T23:27:00.001-04:002020-03-18T23:27:13.995-04:00Walter Williams <p dir="ltr">By <a href="https://www.newsbusters.org/author/walter-e-williams">Walter E. Williams</a> | March 18, 2020 2:22 PM EDT</p>
<div align="left" ><p dir="ltr">Senator Bernie Sanders' call for socialism has resonated among many Americans, particularly young Americans. They've fallen prey to the idea of a paradise here on Earth where things are free and there's little want. But socialists never reveal what turns out to be their true agenda. Let's look at the kind of statements they used to gain power. You'll note that all of their slogans before gaining power bore little relation to the facts after they had power.<br>
</p>
</div><p dir="ltr">Vladimir Lenin promised, "Under socialism all will govern in turn and will soon become accustomed to no one governing." That's Friedrich Engel's prediction about "the withering away of the state." Lenin also promised, "Communism is Soviet power plus electrification," and "No amount of political freedom will satisfy the hungry masses." Lenin's successor, Joseph Stalin, said, "Advance towards socialism cannot but cause the exploiting elements to resist the advance, and the resistance of the exploiters cannot but lead to the inevitable sharpening of the class struggle." He also said, "Gaiety is the most outstanding feature of the Soviet Union," and that "Gratitude is a sickness suffered by dogs."</p>
<p dir="ltr">Then there's China's Chairman Mao Zedong, who said: "Socialism must be developed in China, and the route toward such an end is a democratic revolution, which will enable socialist and communist consolidation over a length of time. It is also important to unite with the middle peasants, and educate them on the failings of capitalism." Mao advised: "A communist must be selfless, with the interests of the masses at heart. He must also possess a largeness of mind, as well as a practical, far-sighted mindset."<br>
Cuban dictator Fidel Castro said: "Capitalism has neither the capacity, nor the morality, nor the ethics to solve the problems of poverty. We must establish a new world order based on justice, on equity, and on peace." He added, "I find capitalism repugnant. It is filthy, it is gross, it is alienating... because it causes war, hypocrisy and competition."<br>
Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez promised: "I am going to do my best to try to create a country in which children are not living in poverty, in which kids can go to college, in which old people have health care. Will I succeed? I can't guarantee you that, but I can tell you that from a human point of view it is better to show up than to give up." Adding, "I am convinced that the path to a new, better and possible world is not capitalism, the path is socialism."</p>
<p dir="ltr">His successor Nicolas Maduro said: "Fidel Castro represents the dignity of the South American continent against empires. He's a living legend: an icon of independence and freedom across the continent."<br>
Bernie Sanders' statements are not that different from those of Lenin, Stalin, Castro, Chavez and other tyrants. Sanders says, "Let us wage a moral and political war against the billionaires and corporate leaders, on Wall Street and elsewhere, whose policies and greed are destroying the middle class of America," and "We need to change the power structure in America, we need to end the political oligarchy."<br>
Stalin's campaign didn't mention that he would enact policies that would lead to the slaughter of 62 million people in the Soviet Union between 1917 to 1987. Mao Zedong didn't mention that his People's Republic of China would engage in brutal acts that would lead to the loss of 76 million lives at the hands of the government from 1949 to 1987. The late Professor Rudolph J. Rummel of the University of Hawaii documented this tragedy in his book "Death by Government: Genocide and Mass Murder Since 1900."<br>
Because socialism is a fight against basic human nature, it requires brute force in the attempt to reach its goals. The best warning about socialism comes from Aesop, who said, "Those who voluntarily put power into the hands of a tyrant ... must not wonder if it be at last turned against themselves." We shouldn't ignore Martin Luther King Jr.'s warning, "Never forget that everything Hitler did in Germany was legal."</p>
Romanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07016139270835685661noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6944307412788067216.post-8269115191184293452020-03-06T14:26:00.001-05:002020-03-06T14:26:36.680-05:00Walter Williams <p dir="ltr">By <a href="https://www.newsbusters.org/author/walter-e-williams">Walter E. Williams</a> | March 4, 2020 1:56 AM EST</p>
<div align="left" ><p dir="ltr">Here are a few headlines about an African tragedy: “Africa’s Worst Locust Plague in Decades Threatens Millions” (<i>The Wall Street Journal</i>), “‘Unprecedented’ Locust Invasion Approaches Full-Blown Crisis” (Scientific American), “Somalia Declares Locust Outbreak a ‘National Emergency’” (The National) and “UN Calls for International Action on East Africa Locust Outbreak” (Bloomberg Green). This ongoing tragedy is mostly man-made, according to an analysis by Paul Driessen, who is a senior policy adviser with the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow (CFACT) and the Center for the Defense of Free Enterprise.<br>
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</div><p dir="ltr">Driessen says that billions of desert locusts have attacked the eastern Africa nations of Kenya, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Djibouti and Somalia. According to the U.N., the locust attack in Kenya is the worst in 70 years and the worst in 25 years for other east African nations. Locusts are destroying crops and threatening tens of millions of Africans with lost livelihoods and starvation. These locust swarms can blanket 460 square miles at a time and consume more than 400 million pounds of vegetation daily. They reproduce fast, too, meaning locust swarms could be 500 times bigger in six months.</p>
<p dir="ltr">Africa’s locust plague is man-made. Economic development organizations and activist nongovernmental organizations have foisted “agroecology” on the poorest nations — an organic-style agriculture. They promote the virtues of peasant farming. So how do these poor farmers fight the locust plague? Driessen says: “Desperate Africans are responding with ‘time-tested’ methods: whistling and shouting loudly, banging on metal buckets, waving blankets and sticks, crushing the bugs perhaps even roasting and eating them, under UN-approved nutrition programs. In Eritrea, they are using ‘more advanced’ methods: hand-held and truck-mounted sprayers. In Kenya, police are firing machine guns and tear gas into the swarms!”<br>
Antonio Guterres of Portugal, the U.N. secretary-general, claimed global warming as a cause of the problem. He said there is a link between climate change and the unprecedented locust crisis plaguing Ethiopia and East Africa. Guterres said: “Warmer seas mean more cyclones generating the perfect breeding ground for locusts. Today the swarms are as big as major cities and it is getting worse by the day.”<br>
Guterres’ suggestion that global warming is the cause of today’s plague is sheer nonsense. Locust infestations have been feared and revered throughout mankind’s history. Devastating locust attacks in Egypt around 1446 B.C. were mentioned in the Book of Exodus in the Bible. “The Iliad” describes locusts taking flight to escape fire. Plagues of locusts are also mentioned in the Quran.<br>
Driessen concludes: “A primary reason this plague of locusts has overwhelmed East Africa — indeed, perhaps THE primary reason — is that the UN Food and Agricultural Organization, other UN agencies and multiple environmentalist NGOs have been extolling and imposing ‘agroecology’ on Africa. This highly politicized ‘movement’ rabidly opposes hybrid seeds, synthetic insecticides and fertilizers, biotechnology, and even mechanized equipment like tractors! Acceptance of its tenets and restrictions has become a condition for poor farmers getting seeds and other assistance, and their countries and local communities getting development loans and food aid.”</p>
<p dir="ltr">By the way, locusts are not only a threat to crops; they threaten people in another way. In early January, a Boeing 737 on final landing approach to Dire Dawa, Ethiopia, found itself in the midst of a massive cloud of locusts swarming above the airport. The insects were sucked into the plane’s engines. Their bodies were splattered across the windshield blinding the pilots to the runway ahead. The Boeing 737 climbed above the swarm. The pilot depressurized the cabin so he could open the side window and reach around to clear the windshield by hand. Diverting to Addis Ababa Bole International Airport, the pilot was able to land the plane safely.</p>
Romanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07016139270835685661noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6944307412788067216.post-24098956365717509952020-02-21T02:15:00.001-05:002020-02-21T02:15:14.082-05:00Walter Williams <p dir="ltr">By <a href="https://www.newsbusters.org/author/walter-e-williams">Walter E. Williams</a> | February 20, 2020 4:20 PM EST</p>
<div align="left" ><p dir="ltr">A recent Pew Research Center survey finds that only half of American adults think colleges and universities are having a positive effect on our nation. The leftward political bias, held by faculty members affiliated with the Democratic Party, at most institutions of higher education explains a lot of that disappointment. Professors Mitchell Langbert and Sean Stevens document this bias in “Partisan Registration and Contributions of Faculty in Flagship Colleges.”<br>
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</div><p dir="ltr">Langbert and Stevens conducted a new study of the political affiliation of 12,372 professors in the two leading private and two leading public colleges in 31 states. For party registration, they found a Democratic to Republican (D:R) ratio of 8.5:1, which varied by rank of institution and region. For donations to political candidates (using the Federal Election Commission database), they found a D:R ratio of 95:1, with only 22 Republican donors, compared with 2,081 Democratic donors.<br>
Several consistent findings have emerged from Langbert and Stevens' study. The ratio of faculty who identify as or are registered as Democratic versus Republican almost always favors the Democratic Party. Democratic professors outnumber their Republican counterparts most in the humanities and social sciences, compared with the natural sciences and engineering. The ratio is 42:1 in anthropology, 27:1 in sociology and 27:1 in English. In the social sciences, Democratic registered faculty outnumber their Republican counterparts the least in economics 3:1. The partisan political slant is most extreme at the most highly rated institutions.</p>
<p dir="ltr">The leftist bias at our colleges and universities has many harmful effects. Let's look at a few. At University of California, Davis, last month, a mathematics professor faced considerable backlash over her opposition to the requirement for faculty “diversity statements.” University of California, San Diego, requires job applicants to admit to the “barriers” preventing women and minorities from full participation in campus life. At American University, a history professor recently wrote a book in which he advocates repealing the Second Amendment. A Rutgers University professor said, “Watching the Iowa Caucus is a sickening display of the over-representation of whiteness.” University of California, Berkeley, professor and former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich chimed in to say: “Think about this: Iowa is 90.7% white. Iowa is now the only state with a lifetime voting ban for people with a felony conviction. Black people make up 4% of Iowa’s population but 26% of the prison population. How is this representative of our electorate?” A Williams College professor said he would advocate for social justice to be included in math textbooks. Students at Wayne State University no longer have to take a single math course to graduate; however, they may soon be required to take a diversity course.<br>
Then there's a question about loyalty to our nation. Charles Lieber, former chairman of the Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology at Harvard, was arrested earlier this year on accusations that he made a materially false, fictitious and fraudulent statement about work he did for a program run by the Chinese government that seeks to lure American talent to China. He was paid $50,000 a month and up to $158,000 in living expenses for his work, which involved cultivating young teachers and students, according to court documents. According to the Department of Justice, Lieber helped China “cultivate high-level scientific talent in furtherance of China's scientific development, economic prosperity and national security.”</p>
<p dir="ltr">It's not just Harvard professors. Newly found court records reveal that Emory University neuroscientist Li Xiao-Jiang was fired in late 2019 after being charged with lying about his own ties to China. Li was part of the same Chinese program as Lieber. A jury found a University of California, Los Angeles, professor guilty of exporting stolen U.S. military technology to China. Newsweek reported that he was convicted June 26 on 18 federal charges. Meanwhile, NBC reported that federal prosecutors say that University of Texas professor Bo Mao attempted to steal U.S. technology by using his position as a professor to obtain access to protected circuitry and then handing it over to the Chinese telecommunications giant, Huawei.<br>
The true tragedy is that so many Americans are blind to the fact that today's colleges and universities pose a threat on several fronts to the well-being of our nation.</p>
Romanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07016139270835685661noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6944307412788067216.post-46180597320800265312020-01-31T09:42:00.001-05:002020-01-31T09:42:32.099-05:00Walter Williams <p dir="ltr">By <a href="https://www.newsbusters.org/author/walter-e-williams">Walter E. Williams</a> | January 29, 2020 10:43 PM EST</p>
<div align="left" ><p dir="ltr">During President Donald J. Trump's impeachment trial, we'll hear a lot of talk about our rules for governing. One frequent claim is that our nation is a democracy. If we've become a democracy, it would represent a deep betrayal of our founders, who saw democracy as another form of tyranny. In fact, the word democracy appears nowhere in our nation's two most fundamental documents, the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution. The founders laid the ground rules for a republic as written in the Constitution's Article IV, Section 4, which guarantees “to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government.”<br>
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</div><p dir="ltr">John Adams captured the essence of the difference between a democracy and republic when he said, “You have rights antecedent to all earthly governments; rights that cannot be repealed or restrained by human laws; rights derived from the Great Legislator of the Universe.” Contrast the framers' vision of a republic with that of a democracy. In a democracy, the majority rules either directly or through its elected representatives. As in a monarchy, the law is whatever the government determines it to be. Laws do not represent reason. They represent power. The restraint is upon the individual instead of the government. Unlike that envisioned under a republican form of government, rights are seen as privileges and permissions that are granted by government and can be rescinded by government.</p>
<div align="center" ><p dir="ltr">ADVERTISING<br>
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Here are a few quotations that demonstrate the contempt that our founders held for a democracy. James Madison, in Federalist Paper No. 10, wrote that in a pure democracy, “there is nothing to check the inducement to sacrifice the weaker party or the obnoxious individual.”<br>
At the 1787 Constitutional Convention, Edmund Randolph said that “in tracing these evils to their origin every man had found it in the turbulence and follies of democracy.” Alexander Hamilton agreed, saying: “We are now forming a republican government. (Liberty) is found not in "the extremes of democracy but in moderate governments. ... If we incline too much to democracy, we shall soon shoot into a monarchy.”<br>
John Adams reminded us: “Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There was never a democracy yet that did not commit suicide.”<br>
John Marshall, the highly respected fourth chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court observed, “Between a balanced republic and a democracy, the difference is like that between order and chaos.”<br>
Thomas Paine said, “A Democracy is the vilest form of Government there is.”<br>
The framers gave us a Constitution replete with undemocratic mechanisms. One constitutional provision that has come in for recent criticism is the Electoral College. In their wisdom, the framers gave us the Electoral College as a means of deciding presidential elections. That means heavily populated states can't run roughshod over small, less-populated states. <br>
Were we to choose the president and vice president under a popular vote, the outcome of presidential races would always be decided by a few highly populated states, namely California, Texas, Florida, New York, Illinois and Pennsylvania, which contain 134.3 million people, or 41% of our population. Presidential candidates could safely ignore the interests of the citizens of Wyoming, Alaska, Vermont, North Dakota, South Dakota, Montana and Delaware. Why? They have only 5.58 million Americans, or 1.7% of the U.S. population. We would no longer be a government “of the people.” Instead, our government would be put in power by and accountable to the leaders and citizens of a few highly populated states. It would be the kind of tyranny the framers feared.</p>
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It's Congress that poses the greatest threat to our liberties. The framers’ distrust is seen in the negative language of our Bill of Rights such as: Congress "shall not abridge, infringe, deny, disparage, and shall not be violated, nor be denied." When we die and if at our next destination we see anything like a Bill of Rights, we know that we're in hell because a Bill of Rights in heaven would suggest that God couldn't be trusted. </p>
Romanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07016139270835685661noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6944307412788067216.post-34630182425340290682020-01-16T14:05:00.001-05:002020-01-16T14:05:02.168-05:00Walter Williams <p dir="ltr">By <a href="https://www.newsbusters.org/author/walter-e-williams">Walter E. Williams</a> | January 15, 2020 5:07 PM EST</p>
<div align="left" ><p dir="ltr">Criminal activity imposes huge costs on black residents in low-income neighborhoods of cities such as Chicago, Baltimore, Detroit, St. Louis, Philadelphia and many others. Thousands of black Americans were murdered in 2019. Over 90% of the time, the perpetrator was also black. Leftists and social justice warriors charge that what blacks have to fear most is being shot and killed by police, but the numbers don't add up. For several years, <i>The Washington Post</i> has been documenting police shootings in America. Last year, 933 people were shot and killed by police. Twenty-three percent (212) of people shot and killed were black; 35% (331) were white; 16% (155) were Hispanic and 201 were of other or unknown races. The high homicide rate within the black community doesn't begin to tell the full tragedy.<br>
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</div><p dir="ltr">Crime imposes a hefty tax on people who can least afford it. They are the law-abiding residents of black neighborhoods. Residents must bear the time cost and other costs of having to shop outside of their neighborhoods. Supermarkets that are abundant in low-crime neighborhoods are absent or scarce in high-crime, low-income neighborhoods. Because of the paucity of supermarkets and other big-box stores in these neighborhoods, some "experts" and academicians have labeled them as “food deserts.” That's the ridiculous suggestion that white supermarket merchants and big-box store owners don't like green dollars coming out of black hands. The true villains of the piece are the criminals who make some businesses unprofitable. By the way, these are equal opportunity criminals. They will victimize a black-owned business just as they would victimize a white-owned business. The high crime rates in many black neighborhoods have the effect of outlawing economic growth and opportunities.</p>
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In low-crime neighborhoods, FedEx, UPS and other delivery companies routinely leave packages containing valuable merchandise on a doorstep if no one is home. That saves the expense of redelivery and saves recipients the expense of having to go pick up the packages. In high-crime neighborhoods, delivery companies leaving packages at the door or supermarkets leaving goods outside unattended would be equivalent to economic suicide. Fearing robberies, taxi drivers, including black drivers, often refuse to accept telephone calls for home pickups and frequently pass prospective black customers who hail them on the street. Plus, there's the insult associated with not being able to receive pizzas or other deliveries on the same terms as people in other neighborhoods.<br>
Another often-overlooked impact of crime is lower property values. Homes that wouldn't fetch $10,000, $20,000 or $40,000 suddenly fetch hundreds of thousands when large numbers of middle- and upper-income people purchase formerly run-down properties and fix them up. This is called gentrification, where wealthier, predominantly white, people bid higher rental prices thus forcing out low-income residents. As a result of gentrification, there is greater police protection and other neighborhood amenities increase.<br>
Many make the erroneous assumption that black people don't care about crime. But black people strongly disapprove of the day-to-day violence that's all too common in their communities. What compounds that problem is a deep mistrust of police in poor black neighborhoods. This distrust, along with fear of reprisals by black criminals, causes an atmosphere of noncooperation with the police. It creates the “stop snitching” principle. This principle of snitches being worse than criminals themselves only exacerbates the crime problem in black communities by giving aid and comfort to the true enemies of the community — those who prey on the community and have little fear of being brought to justice. In some cities, less than 10% of murderers are ever charged.</p>
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For decades, the problems of blacks could be laid at the feet of racial discrimination. Our ancestors started a civil rights struggle and won. Today, the most devastating problems of blacks are entirely self-inflicted such as high illegitimacy, family breakdown and unsafe communities. These problems have little to do with civil rights. But as long as blacks buy into the notion that white racism is the source of their problems, the solutions will be elusive forever</p>
Romanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07016139270835685661noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6944307412788067216.post-45489044804569002412019-10-10T23:01:00.001-04:002019-10-10T23:01:42.558-04:00Idiototic Environmental Predictions Walter Williams <div align="left" ><p dir="ltr">The Competitive Enterprise Institute has published a new paper, “Wrong Again: 50 Years of Failed Eco-pocalyptic Predictions.” Keep in mind that many of the grossly wrong environmentalist predictions were made by respected scientists and government officials. My question for you is: If you were around at the time, how many government restrictions and taxes would you have urged to avoid the predicted calamity?<br>
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</div><div align="left" ><p dir="ltr">As reported in <i>The New York Times </i>(Aug. 1969) Stanford University biologist Dr. Paul Erhlich warned: “”The trouble with almost all environmental problems is that by the time we have enough evidence to convince people, you're dead. We must realize that unless we're extremely lucky, everybody will disappear in a cloud of blue steam in 20 years.”<br>
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</div><div align="left" ><p dir="ltr">In 2000, Dr. David Viner, a senior research scientist at University of East Anglia's climate research unit, predicted that in a few years winter snowfall would become "a very rare and exciting event. Children just aren't going to know what snow is." In 2004, the U.S. Pentagon warned President George W. Bush that major European cities would be beneath rising seas. Britain will be plunged into a Siberian climate by 2020. In 2008, Al Gore predicted that the polar ice cap would be gone in a mere 10 years. A U.S. Department of Energy study led by the U.S. Navy predicted the Arctic Ocean would experience an ice-free summer by 2016.<br>
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<div align="left" ><p dir="ltr">In May 2014, French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius declared during a joint appearance with Secretary of State John Kerry that “we have 500 days to avoid climate chaos.”<br>
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</div><div align="left" ><p dir="ltr">Peter Gunter, professor at North Texas State University, predicted in the spring 1970 issue of The Living Wilderness: “Demographers agree almost unanimously on the following grim timetable: by 1975 widespread famines will begin in India; these will spread by 1990 to include all of India, Pakistan, China and the Near East, Africa. By the year 2000, or conceivably sooner, South and Central America will exist under famine conditions. ... By the year 2000, thirty years from now, the entire world, with the exception of Western Europe, North America, and Australia, will be in famine.:<br>
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</div><div align="left" ><p dir="ltr">Ecologist Kenneth Watt's 1970 prediction was, “If present trends continue, the world will be about four degrees colder for the global mean temperature in 1990, but eleven degrees colder in the year 2000.” He added, “This is about twice what it would take to put us into an ice age.”<br>
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</div><div align="left" ><p dir="ltr">Mark J. Perry, scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and professor of economics and finance at the University of Michigan's Flint campus, cites 18 spectacularly wrong predictions made around the time of first Earth Day in 1970. This time it's not about weather. Harrison Brown, a scientist at the National Academy of Sciences, published a chart in Scientific American that looked at metal reserves and estimated that humanity would run out of copper shortly after 2000. Lead, zinc, tin, gold and silver would be gone before 1990. Kenneth Watt said, “By the year 2000, if present trends continue, we will be using up crude oil at such a rate ... that there won't be any more crude oil.”<br>
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<div align="left" ><p dir="ltr">There were grossly wild predictions well before the first Earth Day, too. In 1939, the U.S. Department of the Interior predicted that American oil supplies would last for only another 13 years. In 1949, the secretary of the interior said the end of U.S. oil supplies was in sight. Having learned nothing from its earlier erroneous energy claims, in 1974, the U.S. Geological Survey said that the U.S. had only a 10-year supply of natural gas. However, the U.S. Energy Information Administration estimated that as of Jan. 1, 2017, there were about 2,459 trillion cubic feet of dry natural gas in the United States. That's enough to last us for nearly a century. The United States is the largest producer of natural gas worldwide.<br>
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</div><div align="left" ><p dir="ltr">Today's wild predictions about climate doom are likely to be just as true as yesteryear's. The major difference is today's Americans are far more gullible and more likely to spend trillions fighting global warming. And the only result is that we'll be much poorer and less free.<br>
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</div>Romanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07016139270835685661noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6944307412788067216.post-54160551241638415812019-09-16T01:05:00.001-04:002019-09-16T01:07:05.866-04:00Academic Stupidity and Brainwashing <div align="left"><p dir="ltr"><br>
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</div><div align="left"><p dir="ltr"><span style="font-size:1.50em;"><b>Aademic Stupidity and Brainwashing</b></span></p>
<p dir="ltr">Just when we thought colleges could not spout loonier ideas, we have a new one from American University. They hired a professor to teach other professors to grade students based on their “labor” rather than their writing ability. The professor that American University hired to teach that nonsense is Asao B. Inoue, who is a professor at the University of Washington in Tacoma in interdisciplinary arts and sciences. He is also the director of the university's writing center. Inoue believes that a person's writing ability should not be assessed, in order to promote “anti-racist” objectives. Inoue taught American University's faculty members that their previous practices of grading writing promoted white language supremacy. Inoue thinks that students should be graded on the effort they put into a project.<br>
The idea to bring such a professor to American University, where parents and students fork over $48,459 a year in tuition charges, could not have been something thought up by saner members of its academic community. Instead, it was probably the result of deep thinking by the university's diversity and campus life officials. Inoue's views are not simply extreme but possibly hostile to the academic mission of most universities. Forgiving and ignoring a students' writing ability would mostly affect black students. White students' speaking and writing would be judged against the King's English, defined as standard, pure or correct English grammar.</p>
<p dir="ltr">Professor Noam Chomsky, called the father of modern linguistics, formulated the generative theory of language. According to his theory, the most basic form of language is a set of syntactic rules that is universal for all humans and that underlies the grammar of all human languages. We analyze and interpret our environment with words and sentences in a structured language. Oral and written language provides a set of rules that enables us to organize thoughts and construct logical meaning with our thoughts.<br>
Not holding students accountable to proper grammar does a disservice to those students who overall show poor writing abilities. When or if these students graduate from college, they are not going to be evaluated in their careers by Inoue's tailored standards. They will be judged according to their objective abilities, and it probably follows that if they fail to meet those objective standards, the standards themselves will be labeled as racist.<br>
There's another very dangerous bit of academic nonsense happening, this time at the K-12 level of education. One America News Network anchor interviewed Mary Clare Amselem, education specialist at the Heritage Foundation, about the California Department of Education's proposed ethnic studies curriculum. The proposed ethnic studies curriculum would teach children that capitalism and father figures are racist.<br>
The Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum also includes gross anti-Israel bias and teaches about a Palestinian-led anti-Israel initiative called Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions. The curriculum also has students study issues of police brutality and asks teachers to find incidents of bias by police in their own communities. According to an article by Shelby Talcott in The Stream, California's proposed curriculum called for students to study lawmakers such as Democratic Minnesota Rep. Ilhan Omar and Democratic Michigan Rep. Rashida Tlaib, both of whom have supported the BDS movement and have been accused of anti-Semitic rhetoric.</p>
<p dir="ltr">The proposed ethnic studies proposal has been removed from the California Department of Education website. House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., said, “While I am relieved that California made the obvious decision to revisit this wholly misguided proposal, we need to know why and how a blatantly anti-Semitic, anti-Israel, factually inaccurate curriculum made its way through the ranks of California's Department of Education.” He added, “This was not simply an oversight — the California Department of Education's attempt to institutionalize anti-Semitism is not only discriminatory and intolerant, it's dangerous.”<br>
Brainwashing our youngsters is a serious matter. The people responsible for the California Department of Education's proposal ought to be summarily fired.<br>
<i>Walter E. Williams is a professor of economics at George Mason University.</i></p>
</div>Romanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07016139270835685661noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6944307412788067216.post-28687425704515148292019-09-05T12:16:00.001-04:002019-09-05T12:16:56.659-04:00Walter Williams <p dir="ltr">September 4, 2019 4:59 PM EDT</p>
<div align="left" ><p dir="ltr">John Paul Wright, professor at University of Cincinnati, and Matthew DeLisi professor at Iowa State University have penned a powerful article titled “What Criminologists Don't Say, and Why,” in City Journal, Summer 2017. There is significant bias among criminologists. The reason for that bias is that political leanings of academic criminologists are liberal. Liberal criminologists outnumber their conservative counterparts by a ratio of 30-to-1. Ideology almost perfectly predicts the position of criminologists on issues from gun control to capital punishment too harsh sentencing. Liberal criminologists march in step for gun control, oppose punitive prison sentences and are vehemently against the death penalty.<br>
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</div><p dir="ltr">In 2012, the National Academy of Sciences commissioned a study on the growth of incarceration. It showed that from 1928 until 1960, crime rates rose slowly each year. After the 1960s, crime rates exploded to unprecedented levels of violence until the 1990s. Prior to 1980, only 40% of individuals arrested for murder were sentenced to prison and those that were served an average of five years. In 1981, less than 10% of those arrested for sexual assault was sentenced to prison. Those who were sentenced served an average of 3.4 years. Liberal criminologists probably believe that light sentencing for murderers and rapists is just.</p>
<p dir="ltr">If criminologists have the guts to even talk about a race-crime connection, it's behind closed doors and in guarded language. Any discussion about race and crime sets one up for accusations of racism and that can mean the destruction of one's professional career. Wright and DeLisi say that liberal criminologists avoid discussing even explicit racist examples of black-on-white crime such as flash-mob assaults, “polar bear hunting” and the “knockout game.” These are cases where black youth seek out white people to physically attack.<br>
According to Wright and DeLisi: "Disproportionate black involvement in violent crime represents the elephant in the room amid the current controversy over policing in the United States. Homicide numbers from the Federal Bureau of Investigation Supplementary Homicide Reports, 1976-2005 indicate that young African-American males account for homicide victims at levels that are ten to 20 times greater than their proportion of the population and account for homicide offenders at levels that are 15 to 35 times greater than their proportion of the population. The black-white gap in armed-robbery offending has historically ranged between ten to one and 15 to one. For all racial groups, violent crime is strongly intraracial, and the intraracial dynamic is most pronounced among blacks." That means the primary victims of black crime are other black people. In more than 90% of homicides, for example, both the victim and the perpetrator are black.<br>
Between 1991 and 2017, the nationwide violent crime rate fell from 758 cases to 382 cases per 100,000 people. Despite the evidence that higher incarceration reduces crime rates, many criminologists argue that “mass incarceration” has actually “took minority men out of their neighborhoods, stripped them of voting rights, destabilized families, and sapped already-paltry economic resources from struggling communities.” Wright and DeLisi say that “Such claims could seem plausible only if one believes — contrary to evidence and common sense — that career criminals contribute positively to their neighborhoods, enjoy stable and functional families, vote, and work. What they did, in reality, was to prey on their neighbors.”</p>
<p dir="ltr">Crime is a major problem for the black community. But in addition to incarcerating those who prey on the black community, what can be done? The answer is easy, though implementation poses a challenge. We should re-adopt the values and practices of our ancestors. Black families of yesteryear were mainly two-parent and stable, even during slavery. Black people didn't tolerate property destruction. There were few school fights. Disrespect and assaults on teachers were virtually unknown. These are now all too common. The strong character of black people is responsible for the great progress made from emancipation to today. Find a 70-, 80- or 90-year-old black person and ask him whether today's conduct among black youth would have been tolerated yesteryear. I guarantee you that no will be their answer.</p>
Romanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07016139270835685661noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6944307412788067216.post-69050972251606439922019-08-26T13:05:00.001-04:002019-08-26T13:05:45.268-04:00Global Warming Hoax<p dir="ltr"></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span style="font-size:1.40em;"><b>Sunday, August 25, 2019</b></span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span style="font-size:1.30em;"><b>The Iconic Image of the Global Warming Movement Is a Fraud</b></span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><b>Global warming alarmist Dr. Michael Mann of Penn State University has lost his multimillion dollar libel suit in British Columbia. Not only did he lose, the suit was thrown out </b><i><b>and</b></i><b> Mann was ordered to pay defendant Dr. Tim Ball's legal costs.</b> The judge threw out the case "with prejudice" meaning Mann cannot not refile it. Details <b><span style="color:#FF0000;"><a href="https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2019/08/michael-mann-refuses-to-produce-data-loses-case.php">here</a></span></b>.</p>
<div align="center"><p dir="ltr"><b>This is a huge victory for honesty and ethics in science.</b><br>
</p>
</div><p dir="ltr"></p>
<p dir="ltr">Unfortunately, it is highly unlikely the MSM will cover Dr. Mann's loss in court and its implications for the global warming movement. So, I have put together this background posting to explain what this means. It will be the lead story on the blog the rest of today and Monday.</p>
<p dir="ltr">Dr. Ball was sued because he said, of Dr. Mann's seminal "hockey stick" work, "he belongs in the state pen, not Penn State." While <b><a href="https://cliscep.com/2019/07/31/hockey-stick-groundhog-day/">others came to the same conclusion about the hockey stick</a></b>, Mann sued Ball for libel. After <i>eight years,</i> Mann refused to provide a single document under the court-ordered discovery. It is now reasonable to conclude "the hockey stick" (HS) was a fraud. This is vitally important because it was the HS that directly led to the Nobel Prize for Al Gore and United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). One of the major tenets of the catastrophic global movement has been falsified.</p>
<p dir="ltr">Here is the backstory...</p>
<p dir="ltr">In 1999, the world was stunned when the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change published on the cover of its then-latest report the illustration below. It came to be <br>
<img src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhGsnvlya6x9ynZ3lI9pf5XKZZHcjNsrYLbTgBw5x4GUscRMp_gnAsC33xyQN0exN1OGNyJIyHlzvBUP76lcBbvwkaKRY-qnki751oIi1948Gvo9HETjuqjR2yy_qFlGQvSSOzy2HFMq_L2/s280/IPCC+hockey+stick.png"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhGsnvlya6x9ynZ3lI9pf5XKZZHcjNsrYLbTgBw5x4GUscRMp_gnAsC33xyQN0exN1OGNyJIyHlzvBUP76lcBbvwkaKRY-qnki751oIi1948Gvo9HETjuqjR2yy_qFlGQvSSOzy2HFMq_L2/s1600/IPCC+hockey+stick.png"></a>Mann's graph from the ilustration from the<br>
cover of the 1999 IPCC Reportknown as "the hockey stick." It was a breathtaking piece of science: it showed there was no <b><span style="color:#0000FF;"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medieval_Warm_Period">Medieval Warm Period</a></span></b> (~900-1300 AD) and that contemporary temperatures are far higher than anything mankind has previously experienced.</p>
<p dir="ltr">The hockey stick was featured in just about every newspaper, on every newscast, in Al Gore's <i>An Inconvenient Truth,</i> and throughout the scientific community.</p>
<div align="center"><p dir="ltr"><b>It was almost certainly a fraud. </b><br>
</p>
</div><p dir="ltr"></p>
<p dir="ltr">And, it was scientifically wrong in two ways:</p>
<p dir="ltr">1) The temperature reconstruction for the period from 1000 AD to about 1890 AD was based on tree bark from a number of bristlecone pines that, according to Mann, accurately reflected the temperatures experienced by the tree (a questionable assumption but I will not go into that here). But, there was a huge problem: <i>the bristlecones showed world temperatures declining in the 20th Century!</i></p>
<p dir="ltr">As Steve McIntyre tirelessly labored to <b><span style="color:#FF0000;"><a href="https://climateaudit.org/2009/11/20/mike%E2%80%99s-nature-trick/">demonstrate</a></span></b> (and, he is the person that deserves a Nobel Prize!), Mann's (and Keith Briffa's) data showed temperatures declining in the 20th Century.<br>
<img src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiwq-ON_5S9rXqMna5x9V6l96YF9beJbkBjkqB0FfMmCC5Ko6Zw3Zo6qAFItTQittC943MEBkGi_PV12oahyphenhypheneZlSD4aaH8rlx21A9QYZLXc4Gpw8jySvsEgMh7OIhIAUDugUwjD2sGXHVpc/s320/Screen+Shot+2019-08-25+at+10.09.37+AM.png"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiwq-ON_5S9rXqMna5x9V6l96YF9beJbkBjkqB0FfMmCC5Ko6Zw3Zo6qAFItTQittC943MEBkGi_PV12oahyphenhypheneZlSD4aaH8rlx21A9QYZLXc4Gpw8jySvsEgMh7OIhIAUDugUwjD2sGXHVpc/s1600/Screen+Shot+2019-08-25+at+10.09.37+AM.png"></a>Orange line shows 20th Century temperatures declining<br>
in the bristlecone bark data.<br>
From: climateaudit.orgOf course, we had thermometers in the 20th Century and it wouldn't do for the bristlecone data's (BD) credibility to show falling temperatures during the period when global warming activists wanted to show a rapid rise. So, Mann used a "trick" where he decided to "hide the [bristlecone data] decline." He did so by splicing the contemporary thermometer data onto the bristlecone data and deleting the BD after the vertex. Below is one of the key Climategate emails. "Nature" refers to Mann's paper published in <i>Nature.</i><br>
<img src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEia81IBu-dOL34xkEGwdoBSallQk78iU8Cy6kwnKxcxOW3OuYWVr4-HlLofKfbtA56P23mPQxXaVa2wxe3QW8Q3R5I78BbJZkXXUnpr-c12WqixJhHHTafNF7QokNsbKPjggkf1ImFQ2nx_/s280/email%252C+the+trick.png"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEia81IBu-dOL34xkEGwdoBSallQk78iU8Cy6kwnKxcxOW3OuYWVr4-HlLofKfbtA56P23mPQxXaVa2wxe3QW8Q3R5I78BbJZkXXUnpr-c12WqixJhHHTafNF7QokNsbKPjggkf1ImFQ2nx_/s1600/email%252C+the+trick.png"></a>One of the key Climategate emailsFrom <b><span style="color:#FF00FF;"><a href="https://climateaudit.org/2011/03/29/keiths-science-trick-mikes-nature-trick-and-phils-combo/">Mcintyre</a></span></b>, here is a reconstruction of <i>all</i> of the pertinent data. The BD is pink. Mann deleted the bristlecone data around</p>
<div align="center"><p dir="ltr"><img src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgvJjZd7NrV44kw6ZWIVLPOvhC1EnH2csai3neqRe2TVeoF6vSQMd_AQ1JiLdSOJkfVpzXJ0wcSeczohJuB5C6ZTRK9i93_Zr3M6LJycfPTK7ATXU-X3XoRkWYzNMRFq36scZXRakqYcjsc/s280/Screen+Shot+2019-08-25+at+10.33.35+AM.png"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgvJjZd7NrV44kw6ZWIVLPOvhC1EnH2csai3neqRe2TVeoF6vSQMd_AQ1JiLdSOJkfVpzXJ0wcSeczohJuB5C6ZTRK9i93_Zr3M6LJycfPTK7ATXU-X3XoRkWYzNMRFq36scZXRakqYcjsc/s1600/Screen+Shot+2019-08-25+at+10.33.35+AM.png"></a><br>
</p>
</div><p dir="ltr"><br>
year 1500 and the most recent data showing the declining temperatures. In place of the declining contemporary temperatures, he spliced in (in black) the thermometer record. This was known as "hiding the decline."</p>
<p dir="ltr">2) When one fed even <b><a href="https://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/08/23/make-your-own-mannian-hockey-stick-at-home/">random data into Mann's Excel program</a></b>:<br>
...a couple of Canadian researchers, <a href="http://climateaudit.org/">McIntyre and McKitrick</a>, found that when they ran simulations of “red noise” random principal components data into Mann’s reconstruction model, 99% of the time it produced the <a href="http://www.uoguelph.ca/~rmckitri/research/MM-W05-background.pdf">same hockey stick pattern</a>. </p>
<p dir="ltr">Not only did Mann create this scientific fraud, Climategate revealed him conspiring with Britain's Dr. Phil Jones to reject meritorious papers that cast doubt on catastrophic global warming so as to keep those papers out of the scientific journals. A quote from the Climategate emails:</p>
<p dir="ltr">We <i><a href="http://www.anelegantchaos.org/cru/emails.php?eid=419&filename=1089318616.txt">“will keep them </a></i><span style="color:#000000;"><a href="http://www.anelegantchaos.org/cru/emails.php?eid=419&filename=1089318616.txt">[papers with differing conclusions]</a></span><a href="http://www.anelegantchaos.org/cru/emails.php?eid=419&filename=1089318616.txt"> </a><i><a href="http://www.anelegantchaos.org/cru/emails.php?eid=419&filename=1089318616.txt">out somehow — even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is!”</a></i></p>
<p dir="ltr">Which is why global warming alarmists always ask the question, "Has [whomever] published in the peer-reviewed climate journals?" They know they have gamed the process and it is highly unlikely radically opposing viewpoints will be published. Renowned climate scientist, Dr. Judith Curry, recently had a paper rejected. One of the reviewers <b><a href="https://judithcurry.com/2019/08/22/climate-change-whats-the-worst-case/#more-25104">wrote</a></b>:</p>
<p dir="ltr"><i>“Overall, there is the danger that the paper is used by unscrupulous people to create confusion or to discredit climate or sea-level science. Hence, I suggest that the author reconsiders the essence of its contribution to the scientific debate on climate and sea-level science.”</i></p>
<p dir="ltr">Please note: the above rejection had nothing to do with the scientific merit of the paper. It had to do with -- gasp -- casting doubt on the "consensus." Remember: The huge monies that flow into climate study only continue to flow if there is a real or manufactured catastrophe.</p>
<p dir="ltr"><b>So, where are we?</b></p>
<p dir="ltr">The hockey stick was <i>the</i> major piece of evidence that current temperatures are unprecedented in human history. They likely are not. Temperatures today appear to be similar during the Medieval Warm Period and even warmer during the Roman Optimum (when Jesus walked the earth).</p>
<p dir="ltr">Because those periods were equal to or warmer than today, it calls into question just how much of today's warming is due to CO2 emissions. Mother Nature is apparently able to create current temperature levels on her own.</p>
<p dir="ltr">Still,</p>
<p dir="ltr">There is no question temperatures are significantly warmer today than they were 100 years ago or even 40 years ago. <br>
</p>
<p dir="ltr"><br>
</p>
<p dir="ltr">Sea level will continue to rise (if temperatures continue to rise). That will, over decades, eventually flood low-lying coastal areas and will worsen the storm surge from major storms. <br>
</p>
<p dir="ltr"><br>
</p>
<p dir="ltr">While warming eventually may be a (net) plus as parts of Canada and Russia open for farming, there will be some agricultural disruption due to changing temperature patterns.<br>
</p>
<p dir="ltr"><br>
</p>
<p dir="ltr">It makes sense to move to second and third generation nuclear (along with nuclear fusion, if and when available) for power generation. That will lessen emissions of greenhouse gas while allowing inexpensive energy to continue to lift the poor out of poverty. <br>
</p>
<p dir="ltr"><br>
</p>
<p dir="ltr">In other ways, when it makes economic sense, we should cut greenhouse gases. <br>
</p>
<p dir="ltr"><br>
<b>So, while global warming is real and a problem, the scientific case for </b><i><b>catastrophic </b></i><b>global warming continues to weaken </b>(see new paper, <b><a href="https://arxiv.org/pdf/1907.00165.pdf">here</a></b>).</p>
<p dir="ltr">ADDITION, 1:50p Sunday:<br>
To clarify the Medieval Warm Period (MWP) issue, here are the two versions of the climate history of the last thousand years.</p>
<div align="center"><p dir="ltr"><img src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhAF-LHb2TvwSx7vdh2SGvs-Q4McyxqwrRJ6vAID5FIrzNU_paDk-93lMzZptXJTF6XQBDPbEl_p_ivTRF3Z28TgXeAqBrR_eJ75p-nYEni561dsHkJ_GVaUBsFccY9r6lvaJiaKg361Lpi/s280/Screen+Shot+2019-08-25+at+1.43.57+PM.png"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhAF-LHb2TvwSx7vdh2SGvs-Q4McyxqwrRJ6vAID5FIrzNU_paDk-93lMzZptXJTF6XQBDPbEl_p_ivTRF3Z28TgXeAqBrR_eJ75p-nYEni561dsHkJ_GVaUBsFccY9r6lvaJiaKg361Lpi/s1600/Screen+Shot+2019-08-25+at+1.43.57+PM.png"></a><br>
</p>
</div><div align="center"><p dir="ltr"><br>
Until the hockey stick, the MWP was generally accepted science. The HS is wrong not only because of it eliminating the warm period, it also does not show the Little Ice Age which obviously occurred. As one climate scientist was quoted as saying, "<b><a href="https://climateaudit.org/2010/04/08/dealing-a-mortal-blow-to-the-mwp/">We have to get rid of the Medieval Warm Period</a></b>." The HS certainly accomplished that goal. </p>
</div>Romanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07016139270835685661noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6944307412788067216.post-66484047508935413532019-08-04T22:41:00.001-04:002019-08-04T22:41:52.650-04:00Mass Shootings <p dir="ltr">1. Minimize gun free zones. Over 95% of mass shootings in the United States are in gun free zones. </p>
<p dir="ltr">2. The whole of “mental health professionals” and their schools should be class actioned for inflicting all of the nutso whack jobs on the rest of us. Most of the mass shooters have histories of mental illnesses. These nuts cannot be drugged into sanity. They are put into society by shrinks with little if any supervision and everyone is so suprised that they snap and kill groups of citizens.</p>
Romanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07016139270835685661noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6944307412788067216.post-23442713425568115422019-06-27T22:32:00.001-04:002019-06-27T22:32:28.047-04:00Reparations<p dir="ltr">By <a href="https://www.newsbusters.org/author/walter-e-williams">Walter E. Williams</a> | June 27, 2019 9:43 PM EDT</p>
<div align="left" ><p dir="ltr">Several Democratic presidential hopefuls are calling for Americans to make reparations for slavery. On June 19, the House judiciary subcommittee on the constitution, civil rights, and civil liberties held a hearing. Its stated purpose was “to examine, through open and constructive discourse, the legacy of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade, its continuing impact on the community and the path to restorative justice.”<br>
</p>
</div><div align="left" ><p dir="ltr">Slavery was a gross violation of human rights. Justice demands that all participants in the Trans-Atlantic slave trade make compensatory reparation payments to slaves. However, there is no way that Europeans could have captured millions of Africans. That means compensation would have to be paid by Africans and Arabs who captured and sold slaves to Europeans in addition to the people who bought and used slaves. Since slaves and slave traders and owners are no longer with us, compensation is beyond our reach and it's a matter that will have to be settled in hell or heaven.<br>
</p>
</div><p dir="ltr"><br>
</p>
<div align="center" ><p dir="ltr">ADVERTISING<br>
</p>
</div><p dir="ltr"><br>
</p>
<div align="left" ><p dir="ltr">Let's pretend for a moment that the reparations issue makes a modicum of sense. There's the question of responsibility. More explicitly, should we compensate a black person of today by punishing a white person of today, by taking his money, for what a white person of yesteryear did to a black person of yesteryear? If we believe in individual accountability, we should find that doing so is unjust. In other words, are the tens millions of Europeans, Asian, and Latin Americans who immigrated to the United States in the late 19th and 20th centuries responsible for slavery, and should they be forced to cough up reparations? What about descendants of Northern whites who fought and died in the name of freeing slaves? Should they pay reparations to black Americans? What about non-slave-owning Southern whites -- who were a majority of Southern whites -- should their descendants be made to pay reparations?<br>
</p>
</div><div align="left" ><p dir="ltr">Reparations advocates make the unchallenged pronouncement that the United States became rich on the backs of free black labor. That's utter nonsense. While some slave owners became rich, slavery doesn't have a good record of producing wealth. Slavery existed in the southern states and outlawed in most of the northern states. Buying into the reparations argument suggests that the antebellum South was rich and the slave-starved North was poor. The truth is just the opposite. In fact, the poorest states and regions of our country were places where slavery flourished: Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia. And the richest states and regions were those where slavery was absent: Pennsylvania, New York, and Massachusetts.<br>
</p>
</div><div align="left" ><p dir="ltr">The reparations movement would be an amusing sideshow were it not for its damaging distractions. It grossly misallocates resources that could be better spent elsewhere. According to the state Department of Education, 75% of black California boys cannot meet state reading standards. In 2016, in 13 of Baltimore's 39 high schools, not a single student scored proficient on the state's mathematics exam. In six other high schools, only 1% tested proficient in math. The same story of low education outcomes can be told about most cities with large black populations. I'd like to see lawyers bring class-action suits against public school systems in cities like Philadelphia, Baltimore, Washington, Detroit, and Los Angeles for conferring fraudulent high school diplomas. Such diplomas attest a 12th-grade level of academic achievement when in fact those youngsters often cannot perform at sixth- or seventh-grade levels.<br>
</p>
</div><p dir="ltr"><br>
</p>
Romanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07016139270835685661noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6944307412788067216.post-16462307266905207552019-06-06T03:24:00.000-04:002019-06-06T03:27:39.439-04:00D Day<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span style="font-size: large;"> As a young Airman in 1966 I was honored to accompany the Color Guard for D Day commemoration services at the resting places for some of the Americans that lost their lives that day. It was a moving and life changing experience.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">May they find comfort in the arms of Angels... </span></div>
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Romanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07016139270835685661noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6944307412788067216.post-41008887505758744752019-04-04T03:23:00.001-04:002019-04-04T03:23:24.711-04:00Wise Manhttps://youtu.be/MRpEV2tmYz4Romanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07016139270835685661noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6944307412788067216.post-82871846164455947852019-03-10T18:50:00.001-04:002019-03-10T18:50:10.726-04:00Earth is not Fragile <p dir="ltr"> <a href="https://api.addthis.com/oexchange/0.8/forward/twitter/offer?url=https://www.newsbusters.org/blogs/nb/walter-e-williams/2019/03/06/our-planet-not-fragile&title=Our%20Planet%20Is%20Not%20Fragile&pubid=ra-5310064579a0620a&shortener=bitly"> Tweet</a> <a href="https://www.newsbusters.org/blogs/nb/walter-e-williams/2019/03/06/our-planet-not-fragile#disqus_thread">31</a></p>
<p dir="ltr">By <a href="https://www.newsbusters.org/author/walter-e-williams">Walter E. Williams</a> | March 6, 2019 12:59 PM EST</p>
<div align="left" ><p dir="ltr">Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez claims that “the world is going to end in 12 years if we don't address climate change.” The people at the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change agree, saying that to avoid some of the most devastating impacts of climate change, the world must slash carbon emissions by 45 percent by 2030 and completely decarbonize by 2050.<br>
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</div><p dir="ltr">Such dire warnings are not new. In 1970, Harvard University biology professor George Wald, a Nobel laureate, predicted, “Civilization will end within 15 or 30 years unless immediate action is taken against problems facing mankind.” Also in 1970, Paul Ehrlich, a Stanford University biologist, predicted in an article for The Progressive, “The death rate will increase until at least 100-200 million people per year will be starving to death during the next ten years.” The year before, he had warned, “If I were a gambler, I would take even money that England will not exist in the year 2000.” Despite such harebrained predictions, Ehrlich has won no fewer than 16 awards, including the 1990 Crafoord Prize, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences' highest award.</p>
<p dir="ltr">Leftists constantly preach such nonsense as “The world that we live in is beautiful but fragile.” “The 3rd rock from the sun is a fragile oasis.” “Remember that Earth needs to be saved every single day.” These and many other statements, along with apocalyptic predictions, are stock in trade for environmentalists. Worse yet, this fragile-earth indoctrination is fed to the nation's youth from kindergarten through college. That's why many millennials support Rep. Ocasio-Cortez.<br>
Let's examine just a few cataclysmic events that exceed any destructive power of mankind and then ask how our purportedly fragile planet could survive. The 1883 eruption of the Krakatoa volcano, in present-day Indonesia, had the force of 200 megatons of TNT. That's the equivalent of 13,300 15-kiloton atomic bombs, the kind that destroyed Hiroshima in World War II. Before that was the 1815 Tambora eruption, the largest known volcanic eruption. It spewed so much debris into the atmosphere that 1816 became known as the "Year Without a Summer." It led to crop failures and livestock death in the Northern Hemisphere, producing the worst famine of the 19th century. The A.D. 535 Krakatoa eruption had such force that it blotted out much of the light and heat of the sun for 18 months and is said to have led to the Dark Ages. Geophysicists estimate that just three volcanic eruptions — Indonesia (1883), Alaska (1912) and Iceland (1947) — spewed more carbon dioxide and sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere than all of mankind's activities during our entire history.<br>
Our so-called fragile earth survived other catastrophic events, such as the floods in China in 1887, which took an estimated 1 million to 2 million lives, followed by floods there in 1931, which took an estimated 1 million to 4 million lives. What about the impact of earthquakes on our fragile earth? Chile's 1960 Valdivia earthquake was 9.5 on the Richter scale. It created a force equivalent to 1,000 atomic bombs going off at the same time. The deadly 1556 earthquake in China's Shaanxi province devastated an area of 520 miles.<br>
Our so-called fragile earth faces outer space terror. Two billion years ago, an asteroid hit earth, creating the Vredefort crater in South Africa, which has a diameter of 190 miles. In Ontario, there's the Sudbury Basin, resulting from a meteor strike 1.8 billion years ago. At 39 miles long, 19 miles wide and 9 miles deep, it's the second-largest impact structure on earth. Virginia's Chesapeake Bay crater is a bit smaller, about 53 miles wide. Then there's the famous but puny Meteor Crater in Arizona, which is not even a mile wide.</p>
<p dir="ltr">My question is: Which of these powers of nature could be duplicated by mankind? For example, could mankind even come close to duplicating the polluting effects of the 1815 Tambora volcanic eruption? It is the height of arrogance to think that mankind can make significant parametric changes in the earth or can match nature's destructive forces. Our planet is not fragile.<br>
Occasionally, environmentalists spill the beans and reveal their true agenda. Barry Commoner said, “Capitalism is the earth's number one enemy.” Amherst College professor Leo Marx said, “On ecological grounds, the case for world government is beyond argument.”</p>
Romanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07016139270835685661noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6944307412788067216.post-16774910237496470322019-02-13T09:10:00.001-05:002019-02-13T09:10:56.979-05:00Reality <p dir="ltr">By <a href="https://www.newsbusters.org/author/walter-e-williams">Walter E. Williams</a> | February 6, 2019 6:20 PM EST</p>
<div align="left" ><p dir="ltr">Suppose I declare that I am a king. Should you be required to address me as “Your Majesty”? You say, “Williams, that's lunacy! You can't prove such nonsense.” You're wrong. It's proved by my declaration. It's no different from a person born with XY chromosomes declaring that he is a woman. The XY sex determination system is the sex determination system found in humans and most other mammals. Females typically have two of the same kind of sex chromosome (XX) and are called the homogametic sex. Males typically have two different kinds of sex chromosomes (XY) and are called the heterogametic sex. <br>
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</div><p dir="ltr">Governments are beginning to ignore biology and permit people to make their sex optional. Sex can be changed on one's birth certificate, passport, Social Security card and driver's license. In New York, intentional or repeated refusal to use an individual's preferred name, pronoun or title is a violation of the New York City Human Rights Law. If a person born with XY chromosomes asserts that he is a woman, then repeatedly addressing the person by the name on his birth certificate, referring to the person as “him” or addressing him as “Mister” violates the law and subjects the villain to heavy penalties. The law requires acknowledgment that sex is optional rather than a biological determination.<br>
Do the people who support the optionality of sex also support the optionality of age? My birth certificate shows 1936 as my year of birth. Age cutoffs exclude me from many jobs, such as police officer, service member and firefighter. If one can change his sex on his birth certificate according to how he feels, why not his age? I think I'll petition to change my year of birth to 1972.</p>
<p dir="ltr">Super Bowl LIII made history. For the first time, there were two male dancers working out with a cheerleading squad -- in this case, with the Los Angeles Rams' squad. Men being on the field with female squads is not new. They've helped the women with stunts. But Quinton Peron and Napoleon Jinnies danced with the female cheerleaders and performed all the same moves. It's nice to see cheerleader barriers fall, but there's another form of rampant cheerleader discrimination that needs to be addressed. I don't think I've ever seen a full-figured older female cheerleader for any professional sports team. Most appear to be younger than 30 and don't look as if they weigh more than 120 pounds.<br>
There are other forms of discrimination in sports. There's a sensible argument that can be made for segregating sexes in football, boxing, basketball and ice hockey. Men are typically stronger and bigger than women, so integrating sports such as football, boxing, basketball and ice hockey would lead to disproportionate injury and possibly death to women. But what about sports in which there's no contact, such as tennis, bowling, billiards and swimming? Why should there be men's teams and women's teams? Why aren't feminists protesting against this kind of sports segregation? After all, feminists have ignored the huge strength, aggressiveness and competitiveness differences between men and women in their demands that women be assigned to military combat units.</p>
<p dir="ltr">Refusing to acknowledge chromosomal differences and giving people the right to declare their sex can lead to opportunities heretofore nonexistent. For example, the men's fastest 100-meter speed is 9.58 seconds. The women's record is 10.49 seconds. What if a male sprinter with 10-second speed claimed womanhood, ran in the women's event and won the gold? A lower bar to achieving fame and fortune exists in women's basketball. It would take only a few tall men who claim they are women to dominate the game.<br>
Suppose a college honored the right of its students to free themselves from biological determinism and allowed those with XY chromosomes to play on teams formerly designated as XX teams. What if an “unenlightened” women's basketball team refused to play against a team with a starting five consisting of 6-foot-6-inch, 200-plus-pound XYers? The NCAA should have a rule stating that refusal to play a mixed-chromosome team leads to forfeiture of the game. It's no different from a team of white players refusing to play another because it has black players.</p>
Romanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07016139270835685661noreply@blogger.com0