Emil O Kierkegaard
What to say about Emil O Kierkegaard? Undoubtedly the world's most "incorrect" man. An initial caution: Don't confuse him with Soren Kierkegaard, the Danish "existential" philosopher. For my sins I read a book by Soren Kierkegaard in my youth and found only meaningless drivel.
Emil Kierkegaard is a very hard-working Danish statistician who subjects to exhaustive analysis any social or demographic database he can get his hands on. He mostly analyses other people's data -- usually data from very mainstream sources. And what he finds in the datasets makes Leftist hair stand on end. They hate it. What he finds is all there in the data: He just puts it on display, warts and all
I can't do any justice to the full body of his work here so I will just mention what he finds about one current huge controversy: black educational and economic under-achievement.
For a long time Leftist educational and social commentators blamed the spectacular educational under-achievement of blacks on the educational system. They were confident that if they got the teaching and the testing right, the "gap" would vanish. After decades of trying everything the human mind could devise however, nothing worked. The gap remained, unbudged
So they did eventually give up on that and recently moved onto something completely different: Critical Race Theory. According to CRT blacks are "down" because whites are racist and hold blacks down. Black failure is the fault of whites. That whites actually make great efforts to lift blacks up via various types of affirmative action is dismissed as tokenism. Whites don't really mean it, apparently
No evidence is normally put forward for CRT. It is just asserted and has become something of a religion in intellectual circles. It has GOT to be true in order to explain black failure, they seem to think. There is simply no other explanation
But there is another explanation -- one that has been known and exemplified for around a hundred years, one that has a mountain of evidence for it: The large gap in average IQ between blacks and whites. Leftists always pooh-pooh IQ tests precisely because of that gap. The tests must be faulty and not measure what they purport to measure, they say. But they overlook the fact that black failure is precise confirmation that the IQ tests are valid. What blacks achieve is precisely what one would predict from their IQ scores. The tests are in fact a spectacular predictive success. It is hard to imagine better validation for them.
And where the real heartburn originates is that IQ is highly hereditary. To put it bluntly, the implication is that blacks are BORN dumb. I have just been cast into outer darkness for saying that.
Leftists are passionately angry about the world they live in and as a result have a compulsion to change it. So telling them that something is unchangeable grates on their very bones. They cannot and will not have it. Black failure must be the fault of white racism. It cannot be the result of unalterable black genetics. The Leftist response is profoundly dogmatic and intellectually nowhere.
But there are some very bright Leftists who think they see a way out of the dilemma. They say that IQ might be hereditarily determined among both blacks and whites but the DIFFERENCE between black and white IQ might not be genetic. That is very unlikely but it is statistically possible so requires some reply. My reply is that it treats blacks and whites as different SPECIES. They are saying that black brains and white brains differ in how they work. That actually contradicts what they are trying to prove: That blacks and whites are really the same.
I think that is an adequate reply but it is a statistical reply that is really needed. And that is where Kierkegaard comes in. He has recently done a big statistical analysis using many different methods which shows that the IQ difference between blacks and whites IS mainly genetic and, as such fundamentally intractable
So what is the response Kierkegaard gets for all his statistical labours? If they mention him at all, the Left simply dismiss him as a "racist". They don't want any of his goddam facts. They KNOW the truth and Kierkegaard is wrong.
https://www.emilkirkegaard.com/p/a-plethora-of-evidence-for-genetic
******************************************Biden’s White House is stabbing Israel in the back. Ending military aid will be the final twist of the knife
TED CRUZ
Tablet magazine’s recent article “End U.S. Aid to Israel” has sparked a badly needed debate over how American administrations, and especially the Biden administration, have used military assistance to coerce Israel and undermine Israeli national security. Because we rely on our Israeli allies for everything from scientific research to intelligence sharing to military cooperation, the Biden administration’s policies are also undermining the security and prosperity of Americans.
The article describes how the Biden administration has tried to distance the United States from our traditional Middle Eastern allies and boost the Iranian regime, and how the pressure they impose on Israel is both part of their campaign to create that distance and a way to keep the Israelis from objecting. As a solution, the article suggests ending American military aid to Israel.
I believe Tablet magazine is one of America’s premier papers of ideas. I deeply appreciate the outlet and its writers, including Liel Leibovitz, who recently wrote a generous profile of me for the magazine describing me as “America’s most Israeli politician,” and who is also one of the two authors of the article.
Nevertheless, Tablet got this one very wrong.
The authors of “End U.S. Aid to Israel,” Leibovitz and Jacob Siegel, are certainly not wrong that the U.S. benefits immeasurably from the aid we provide to Israel. We get back at least 10 times more than what we send. It would take us uncountable billions to recreate some of the military advances and intelligence capabilities that the Israelis provide to us. There are other capabilities we literally could not recreate, for reasons ranging from geography to institutional capacity. The military and intelligence assets that Israel develops and uses protect American lives.
They are also certainly not wrong about the Biden administration’s hostility toward Israel. President Biden and Biden officials are pathologically obsessed with undermining Israel’s security and the U.S.-Israel relationship. From the opening days of the administration, they have pursued a campaign against Israel that is granular, whole-of-government, and often conducted in secret. These policies are also uniting Arab countries with Iran, and driving them to shelter beneath a Chinese umbrella.
The problem with the argument made by the Tablet authors is that it still nevertheless underestimates the breadth, depth, and—most importantly—the mechanics of how the Biden administration has been undermining Israel’s security and the U.S.-Israel alliance. An enormous amount of how the Biden administration attacks Israel has nothing to do with aid or even pressure. If all military aid was immediately ended, the anti-Israel zealots in the administration wouldn’t miss a beat.
Eliminating aid would provide momentum to the deeply reckless policies already being pursued by the Biden administration, which have acutely endangered American and Israeli national security.
A crucial and underappreciated benefit of military assistance to Israel is that it provides a framework for American and Israeli officials to discuss our mutual interests and how to pursue them. The article’s authors rightly criticize the 2016 Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) as a gambit by the Obama administration to constrain future Israeli actions. One of the most subtly damaging parts of the MOU—and I discussed this with Prime Minister Netanyahu directly at the time—was that it froze levels of military assistance and explicitly prohibited Israeli officials from engaging Congress on the issue. Many members of Congress tend to be overwhelmingly pro-Israel because the American people are overwhelmingly pro-Israel. The Obama officials who penned the MOU knew what they were trying to accomplish by cutting off American lawmakers from Israeli officials by freezing aid levels, and Siegel and Leibovitz understand it as well. However, eliminating aid would repeat exactly that move.
The hostility that the Biden administration has shown toward Israel makes the Obama-era policies look tame by comparison. Again: They have pursued a campaign against Israel that is granular, whole-of-government, and often conducted in secret. Consider 10 examples:
First, in the opening days of the administration the White House instructed the State Department to stop signaling support for the Abraham Accords. The State Department implemented those instructions by issuing guidance that prohibited even using the phrase “Abraham Accords.” None of these changes was acknowledged publicly.
Second, State Department officials issued verbal guidance that prohibited funding for joint U.S.-Israel science and technology projects in Judea and Samaria, including parts of Jerusalem. The guidance did something America has never done before: unilaterally impose territorial restrictions on U.S. scientific research aid to Israel. The projects which are being targeted are for curing cancer and easing aging. It is simply an antisemitic boycott. Decades ago, the U.S. and Israel bilaterally agreed to such limits against the backdrop of unique regional conditions, but in 2020 both sides rescinded and rejected them as discriminatory. But in June 2023 the State Department began distributing in writing their new guidance to all relevant federal agencies—effectively endorsing and implementing BDS. Tellingly, this guidance was not cleared through the State Department’s own special envoy to monitor and combat antisemitism, and of course administration officials did not formally notify Congress or make the policy public.
Third, the State Department’s Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor issued a $1 million Notice of Funding Opportunity grant offer for work by nongovernmental organizations to delegitimize Israel, which likewise was not cleared by the department’s own antisemitism envoy.
Fourth, the Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs (NEA) quietly changed the name of the bureau that handles Israel from “Israel and Palestinian Affairs” to “Israeli and Palestinian Affairs,” the idea being to level the relationships that the U.S. has with our Israeli allies and with the Palestinians.
Fifth, the Office of Palestinian Affairs gave a Bronze Age Judean relic to the Palestinian Authority as “an example of Palestinian cultural patrimony,” a literal erasure of the ancient Jewish connection to Israel.
Sixth, State Department diplomats at the United Nations rejoined, engaged, and boosted U.N. organizations that promote anti-Israel and antisemitic incitement.
It is worth pausing here and noting a couple things. None of these policies was advanced by leveraging aid to Israel, and none of it would have been hindered if aid to Israel was reduced. And all those policies were just from inside the State Department. The Biden administration’s assault on Israel, of course, has been whole of government.
Seventh, the Department of Defense and the Israeli military held the “Juniper Oak” military exercises. As with the Obama-era MOU, what could have been a way to enhance military cooperation was instead turned into a way to constrain Israel’s ability to defend itself. According to Dan Shapiro, Obama’s former ambassador to Israel who was on the Biden administration team tasked with securing a new nuclear deal with Iran, the U.S.-Israeli exercises were meant to “make it less likely that one acts independently without close coordination with the other”—in other words, designed to tie the hands of Israel’s military.
Eighth, the Department of Justice unleashed the Federal Bureau of Investigation on Israel in response to an incident in which a Palestinian American journalist was killed covering a firefight between Israeli forces and terrorists, even after other parts of the administration had concluded the death was accidental.
Ninth, the Departments of Justice and State worked together to circumvent multiple congressional sanctions targeting the Palestine Liberation Organization, a terrorist group, so they could bring to Washington, D.C., the group’s secretary general for high-level press briefings—while the administration was simultaneously shunning cabinet ministers from Israel’s democratically elected government. Top officials from across the administration publicly told reporters and testified to Congress that such engagement was advancing American national security interests, but in nonpublic notices the State Department expressly confirmed to Congress that the Palestinian Authority continues to pay for acts of terrorism against Israeli and U.S. citizens.
Tenth, despite such terror financing, the State Department and specifically the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) have poured hundreds of millions of dollars into Palestinian controlled areas. Tens of millions of dollars of that funding was incorrectly entered into government databases in ways that prevented public and congressional scrutiny. Roughly $20 million sent to the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip was entered as going elsewhere. In one case a $5 million award to the Gaza Strip was publicly reported with the wrong amount, the wrong location, and deliberately anonymized (had it not been anonymized, it would have been clear the money was going to Gaza). None of these mistakes was made public by the administration.
This list is not comprehensive.
Again, none of these policies would be hampered by reducing military aid to our Israeli allies. Quite the opposite: Eliminating aid would provide momentum to the deeply reckless policies already being pursued by the Biden administration, which have acutely endangered American and Israeli national security.
Now, some people have called the Biden administration’s policy inexplicable. It’s quite explicable. The Biden administration is controlled by fringe progressives who hate Israel. Their policies are controlled by the Squad, and the Squad detests the Jewish state. As one member of the Squad recently asserted—not even bothering to hide her vicious antisemitism— “we have been fighting to make it clear that Israel is a racist state.”
There is no doubt that as part of their collective antipathy toward Israel, these Biden administration officials have at times leveraged American aid to Israel to advance reckless policies undermining Israeli security and the U.S.-Israel relationship. Eliminating that aid, however, would not counter those policies and would pile on risks.
The obvious, straightforward solution is to continue to provide the military assistance that our Israeli allies need to protect their security and ours—and at the same time, fight to stop the Biden administration’s reckless anti-Israel policies.
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/dead-wrong-ted-cruz
************************************************Public sector staff shortages in ‘hard jobs’ are sparking a wage war as taxpayers feel the consequences of empty positions
At the entrance to Missouri prisons, large signs plead for help: “NOW HIRING” ... “GREAT PAY & BENEFITS."
No experience is necessary. Anyone 18 and older can apply. Long hours are guaranteed.
Though the assertion of “great pay” for prison guards would have seemed dubious in the past, a series of state pay raises prompted by widespread vacancies has finally made a difference. The Missouri Department of Corrections set a record for new applicants last month.
“After we got our raise, we started seeing people come out of the woodwork, people that hadn’t worked in a while,” said Maj. Albin Narvaez, chief of custody at the Fulton Reception and Diagnostic Center, where new prisoners are housed and evaluated.
Public employers across the U.S. have faced similar struggles to fill jobs, leading to one of the largest surges in state government pay raises in 15 years. Many cities, counties and school districts also are hiking wages to try to retain and attract workers amid aggressive competition from private sector employers.
The wage war comes as governments and taxpayers feel the consequences of empty positions.
In Kansas City, Missouri, a shortage of 911 operators doubled the average hold times for people calling in emergencies. In one Florida county, some schoolchildren frequently arrived late as a lack of bus drivers delayed routes. In Arkansas, abused and neglected kids remained longer in foster care because of a caseworker shortage. In various cities and states, vacancies on road crews meant cracks and potholes took longer to fix than many motorists might like.
“A lot of the jobs we’re talking about are hard jobs,” said Leslie Scott Parker, executive director of the National Association of State Personnel Executives.
Lingering vacancies “eventually affects service to the public or response times to needs,” she added.
Workforce shortages worsened across all sorts of jobs due to a wave of retirements and resignations that began during the pandemic. Many businesses, from restaurants to hospitals, responded nimbly with higher wages and incentives to attract employees. But governments by nature are slower to act, requiring pay raises to go through a legislative process that can take months to complete — and then can take months more to kick in.
Meanwhile, vacancies mounted.
In Georgia, state employee turnover hit a high of 25% in 2022. Thousands of workers left the Department of Corrections, pushing its vacancy rate to around 50%. The state began a series of pay raises. This year, all state employees and teachers got at least a $2,000 raise, with corrections officers getting $4,000 and state troopers $6,000.
The Georgia Department of Corrections used an ad agency to bolster recruitment and held an average of 125 job fairs a month. It's starting to pay off. In the first week of July, the department received 318 correctional officer applications — nearly double the weekly norm, said department Public Affairs Director Joan Heath.
Almost 1 in 4 positions — more than 2,500 jobs -- were empty in the Missouri Department of Corrections late last year, which was twice the pre-pandemic vacancy rate in 2019.
Missouri gave state workers a 7.5% pay raise in 2022. This spring, Gov. Mike Parson signed an emergency spending bill with an additional 8.7% raise, plus an extra $2 an hour for people working evening and night shifts at prisons, mental health facilities and other institutions. The vacancy rate for entry level corrections officers now is declining, and the average number of applications for all state positions is up 18% since the start of last year.
At the Fulton prison, where staff shortages have led to a standard 52-hour work week, newly hired employees can earn around $60,000 annually — an amount roughly equal to the state's median household income. The prison also is proposing to provide free child care to correctional officers willing to work nights.
If prison staffing is too low, "it can get dangerous” for both inmates and guards, Narvaez said.
Public safety concerns also have arisen in Kansas City, where a country music fan attacked before a concert last month waited four minutes for a 911 call to be answered and an hour for an ambulance to arrive. About one-quarter of 911 call center positions are vacant — “a huge factor" in the longer wait times to answer calls, said Tamara Bazzle, assistant manager of the communications unit for the Kansas City Police Department.
In Biddeford, Maine, a 15-person roster of 911 dispatchers dipped to just eight employees in July as people quit a “pressure cooker job" for less stress or better pay elsewhere, Police Chief JoAnne Fisk said. The city is now offering fully certified dispatchers $41 an hour to help plug the gaps on a part-time basis — $10 an hour more than comparable new workers normally would earn.
This month, Biddeford also launched a $2,000 bonus for city employees who refer others who get jobs. That comes a year after Biddeford adopted a four-day work week with paid lunch periods to try to make jobs more appealing, said City Manager Jim Bennett.
To attract workers, other governments have dropped college degree requirements and spiced up drab job descriptions.
Nationally, the turnover rate in state and local governments is twice the average of the previous two decades, according federal labor statistics.
Uncompetitive wages were the most common reason for leaving cited in exit interviews, according to a survey of 249 state and local government human resource managers conducted by MissionSquare Research Institute, a Washington, D.C. -based nonprofit. The hardest positions to fill included police and corrections officers, doctors, nurses, engineers and jobs requiring commercial driver's licenses.
Along Florida's east coast, the Brevard County transit system and school district have been competing for bus drivers. On days when drivers are lacking, the transit system has cut the frequency of bus stops on some routes. The school system, meanwhile, has asked some bus drivers to run a second route after dropping children off at school, often resulting in the second busload arriving late.
Since 2022, the county has twice raised bus driver wages to a current rate of $17.47 an hour. The school board recently countered with a $5 increase to a minimum $20 an hour for the upcoming school year. The goal is to hire enough drivers to regularly get kids to class on time, said school system communications director Russell Bruhn.
In Arkansas, the goal is to get foster kids into permanent homes in less than a year. But during the first three months of this year, the state met that target for just 32% of foster children — well below the national standard of over 40%. More than one-fifth of the roughly 1,400 positions in the Arkansas Division of Children and Family Services are vacant.
Many new employees leave in less than two years because of heavy caseloads and the “very difficult, emotionally tolling work,” Mischa Martin, the Department of Human Services' deputy secretary of youth and families, told lawmakers last month.
“If we had a knowledgeable, experienced workforce," she said, "they would be able to work cases in a better way to get kids home quicker.”
*************************************************
The Will to Power
Total power is not something people of strong character feel a need to possess; it is the provenance of the weak: mediocre, unfulfilled individuals of extreme arrogance, who have few moral scruples, and almost no capacity to control their actions, their emotions, their lusts, and their passions—the most dangerous human beings imaginable.
Power consumes those whose vanity and narcissism motivate them to fanciful and never-ending delusions of superiority. Within the human breast, power has its own organic life, worse than the most malignant cancer, ever-growing, never shrinking, with no medicine for its cure, constantly needing to be fed, and that only with more and more of its own kind—the insatiable monster who can never be satisfied, even at the cost of mountains of human skulls. It becomes a disease, an interminable, incurable malady that may not end even at death—it is often passed on to disciples. It is more intoxicating than alcohol or the most addictive drug known to man. Like the hopeless druggie, those craving and possessing power must constantly have their “fix,” and the drug must be increasingly more potent, more costly, and more destructive, to themselves and to others.
When conquered by the will to power, a person convinces themselves they are omnipotent, that only they possess certainty, everybody else is inferior, that they alone have the answers, that the noble ends they seek justify whatever means they deem necessary to obtain them, because, in their high-minded vain egotism, only they have the betterment of mankind in view, and that the world simply cannot survive without their guidance. Those who oppose them are opposing Truth, the Only Truth, the True Progress of Humanity, and thus are evil, and must be silenced by any means necessary. And after extinguishing countless human hopes, dreams, and lives, they sit atop the pile, congratulating themselves on the “utopia” they have built, but ever vigilant for more dragons who need slaying. That is power. That isn’t strength, that is uncontrolled human weakness to its most malevolent extreme. It is the story of human history.
Down through the ages, very few politicians have demonstrated the ability to control the will to power that lurks within the human heart. America’s Founding Fathers understood that perfectly, which is why they wrote a constitution specifically defining and thus restricting the powers national government officials could exercise over other Americans. It’s also why James Madison said we should never trust anybody who has power. The Founders didn’t establish term limits for Congressmen, Senators, or Presidents, and perhaps they should have. But they thought frequent elections would be sufficient. Such hasn’t proven to be so. Our Founders were brilliant men, but no humans are endowed with infinite wisdom.
But their fear of power is not only evident in historical events that took place before and during their lifetime, but are equally evident since they died, especially in the last 100 years. Consider those who had power in the 20th century and how they finally relinquished it. Vladimir Lenin died as the head of Russia. So did Joseph Stalin. Adolf Hitler died in power. As did Mao Zedong, two North Korean Kims, and a host of other megalomaniacs. That is the intoxicating nature of power. Once obtained, only death conquers the craving. These are weak people who cannot control themselves so they must control others.
American politicians aren’t immune to this yearning, this will to power. They are somewhat restrained by our Constitution. Somewhat, but not enough, and many would love to abolish it entirely. Joe Biden is 80 years old. What is he doing still in Washington, D.C.? He has been there for 50 years. Why doesn’t he go home? The reason is simple. He is a very inferior man who covets power, whose power-disease has convinced him that he knows better how to run your life than you do, and, because he has the power, he is going to do everything he can to make you submit to the mythical utopia that delusions his mind. 80 years old, and he wants another four years of power. He is the last person in the country who should have it.
Well, maybe demented Diane Feinstein is his equal. Grassley. McConnell. Pelosi. How many other septua- and octogenarians exist in Washington who have plagued the nation for most of their adult lives? On both sides of the aisle, not just Democrats. They aren’t serving the people, they are inflating themselves in their own eyes. And destroying the country in the process. They want one thing—glory in their vision of themselves. They are no wiser than most Americans, they are only more conceited. Look at the mess they have created in Washington and around the country. Could any other group of people have done any worse?
Americans have given power to inadequate incompetents of mediocre ability, non-existent wisdom because of their ungodly character, but who ache to preserve it--for the reasons mentioned at the beginning of this column. It’s a disease, a cancer inside them, ever-growing, never, never satiated, always thinking their Utopia is just around the corner, one vote away, and “I must be here to cast that vote.” But their Utopia never arrives, and it never will. Only the dunghill grows deeper.
Term limits might be a partial answer, but electing better people, humble people, people who truly understand the dangers of power, people who mind their own business except for national necessities—that would be a superior solution. But those kinds of people are not the busybodies who salivate to control others. The sort of people needed are those whose character would largely forbid them from accepting the job.
So, we get Joe Biden for 50 years. And look at the results.
https://townhall.com/columnists/marklewis/2023/07/29/the-will-to-power-n2626380
****************************************My other blogs. Main ones below:
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
*****************************************
Emil O Kierkegaard
What to say about Emil O Kierkegaard? Undoubtedly the world's most "incorrect" man. An initial caution: Don't confuse him with Soren Kierkegaard, the Danish "existential" philosopher. For my sins I read a book by Soren Kierkegaard in my youth and found only meaningless drivel.
Emil Kierkegaard is a very hard-working Danish statistician who subjects to exhaustive analysis any social or demographic database he can get his hands on. He mostly analyses other people's data -- usually data from very mainstream sources. And what he finds in the datasets makes Leftist hair stand on end. They hate it. What he finds is all there in the data: He just puts it on display, warts and all
I can't do any justice to the full body of his work here so I will just mention what he finds about one current huge controversy: black educational and economic under-achievement.
For a long time Leftist educational and social commentators blamed the spectacular educational under-achievement of blacks on the educational system. They were confident that if they got the teaching and the testing right, the "gap" would vanish. After decades of trying everything the human mind could devise however, nothing worked. The gap remained, unbudged
So they did eventually give up on that and recently moved onto something completely different: Critical Race Theory. According to CRT blacks are "down" because whites are racist and hold blacks down. Black failure is the fault of whites. That whites actually make great efforts to lift blacks up via various types of affirmative action is dismissed as tokenism. Whites don't really mean it, apparently
No evidence is normally put forward for CRT. It is just asserted and has become something of a religion in intellectual circles. It has GOT to be true in order to explain black failure, they seem to think. There is simply no other explanation
But there is another explanation -- one that has been known and exemplified for around a hundred years, one that has a mountain of evidence for it: The large gap in average IQ between blacks and whites. Leftists always pooh-pooh IQ tests precisely because of that gap. The tests must be faulty and not measure what they purport to measure, they say. But they overlook the fact that black failure is precise confirmation that the IQ tests are valid. What blacks achieve is precisely what one would predict from their IQ scores. The tests are in fact a spectacular predictive success. It is hard to imagine better validation for them.
And where the real heartburn originates is that IQ is highly hereditary. To put it bluntly, the implication is that blacks are BORN dumb. I have just been cast into outer darkness for saying that.
Leftists are passionately angry about the world they live in and as a result have a compulsion to change it. So telling them that something is unchangeable grates on their very bones. They cannot and will not have it. Black failure must be the fault of white racism. It cannot be the result of unalterable black genetics. The Leftist response is profoundly dogmatic and intellectually nowhere.
But there are some very bright Leftists who think they see a way out of the dilemma. They say that IQ might be hereditarily determined among both blacks and whites but the DIFFERENCE between black and white IQ might not be genetic. That is very unlikely but it is statistically possible so requires some reply. My reply is that it treats blacks and whites as different SPECIES. They are saying that black brains and white brains differ in how they work. That actually contradicts what they are trying to prove: That blacks and whites are really the same.
I think that is an adequate reply but it is a statistical reply that is really needed. And that is where Kierkegaard comes in. He has recently done a big statistical analysis using many different methods which shows that the IQ difference between blacks and whites IS mainly genetic and, as such fundamentally intractable
So what is the response Kierkegaard gets for all his statistical labours? If they mention him at all, the Left simply dismiss him as a "racist". They don't want any of his goddam facts. They KNOW the truth and Kierkegaard is wrong.
https://www.emilkirkegaard.com/p/a-plethora-of-evidence-for-genetic
******************************************Biden’s White House is stabbing Israel in the back. Ending military aid will be the final twist of the knife
TED CRUZ
Tablet magazine’s recent article “End U.S. Aid to Israel” has sparked a badly needed debate over how American administrations, and especially the Biden administration, have used military assistance to coerce Israel and undermine Israeli national security. Because we rely on our Israeli allies for everything from scientific research to intelligence sharing to military cooperation, the Biden administration’s policies are also undermining the security and prosperity of Americans.
The article describes how the Biden administration has tried to distance the United States from our traditional Middle Eastern allies and boost the Iranian regime, and how the pressure they impose on Israel is both part of their campaign to create that distance and a way to keep the Israelis from objecting. As a solution, the article suggests ending American military aid to Israel.
I believe Tablet magazine is one of America’s premier papers of ideas. I deeply appreciate the outlet and its writers, including Liel Leibovitz, who recently wrote a generous profile of me for the magazine describing me as “America’s most Israeli politician,” and who is also one of the two authors of the article.
Nevertheless, Tablet got this one very wrong.
The authors of “End U.S. Aid to Israel,” Leibovitz and Jacob Siegel, are certainly not wrong that the U.S. benefits immeasurably from the aid we provide to Israel. We get back at least 10 times more than what we send. It would take us uncountable billions to recreate some of the military advances and intelligence capabilities that the Israelis provide to us. There are other capabilities we literally could not recreate, for reasons ranging from geography to institutional capacity. The military and intelligence assets that Israel develops and uses protect American lives.
They are also certainly not wrong about the Biden administration’s hostility toward Israel. President Biden and Biden officials are pathologically obsessed with undermining Israel’s security and the U.S.-Israel relationship. From the opening days of the administration, they have pursued a campaign against Israel that is granular, whole-of-government, and often conducted in secret. These policies are also uniting Arab countries with Iran, and driving them to shelter beneath a Chinese umbrella.
The problem with the argument made by the Tablet authors is that it still nevertheless underestimates the breadth, depth, and—most importantly—the mechanics of how the Biden administration has been undermining Israel’s security and the U.S.-Israel alliance. An enormous amount of how the Biden administration attacks Israel has nothing to do with aid or even pressure. If all military aid was immediately ended, the anti-Israel zealots in the administration wouldn’t miss a beat.
Eliminating aid would provide momentum to the deeply reckless policies already being pursued by the Biden administration, which have acutely endangered American and Israeli national security.
A crucial and underappreciated benefit of military assistance to Israel is that it provides a framework for American and Israeli officials to discuss our mutual interests and how to pursue them. The article’s authors rightly criticize the 2016 Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) as a gambit by the Obama administration to constrain future Israeli actions. One of the most subtly damaging parts of the MOU—and I discussed this with Prime Minister Netanyahu directly at the time—was that it froze levels of military assistance and explicitly prohibited Israeli officials from engaging Congress on the issue. Many members of Congress tend to be overwhelmingly pro-Israel because the American people are overwhelmingly pro-Israel. The Obama officials who penned the MOU knew what they were trying to accomplish by cutting off American lawmakers from Israeli officials by freezing aid levels, and Siegel and Leibovitz understand it as well. However, eliminating aid would repeat exactly that move.
The hostility that the Biden administration has shown toward Israel makes the Obama-era policies look tame by comparison. Again: They have pursued a campaign against Israel that is granular, whole-of-government, and often conducted in secret. Consider 10 examples:
First, in the opening days of the administration the White House instructed the State Department to stop signaling support for the Abraham Accords. The State Department implemented those instructions by issuing guidance that prohibited even using the phrase “Abraham Accords.” None of these changes was acknowledged publicly.
Second, State Department officials issued verbal guidance that prohibited funding for joint U.S.-Israel science and technology projects in Judea and Samaria, including parts of Jerusalem. The guidance did something America has never done before: unilaterally impose territorial restrictions on U.S. scientific research aid to Israel. The projects which are being targeted are for curing cancer and easing aging. It is simply an antisemitic boycott. Decades ago, the U.S. and Israel bilaterally agreed to such limits against the backdrop of unique regional conditions, but in 2020 both sides rescinded and rejected them as discriminatory. But in June 2023 the State Department began distributing in writing their new guidance to all relevant federal agencies—effectively endorsing and implementing BDS. Tellingly, this guidance was not cleared through the State Department’s own special envoy to monitor and combat antisemitism, and of course administration officials did not formally notify Congress or make the policy public.
Third, the State Department’s Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor issued a $1 million Notice of Funding Opportunity grant offer for work by nongovernmental organizations to delegitimize Israel, which likewise was not cleared by the department’s own antisemitism envoy.
Fourth, the Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs (NEA) quietly changed the name of the bureau that handles Israel from “Israel and Palestinian Affairs” to “Israeli and Palestinian Affairs,” the idea being to level the relationships that the U.S. has with our Israeli allies and with the Palestinians.
Fifth, the Office of Palestinian Affairs gave a Bronze Age Judean relic to the Palestinian Authority as “an example of Palestinian cultural patrimony,” a literal erasure of the ancient Jewish connection to Israel.
Sixth, State Department diplomats at the United Nations rejoined, engaged, and boosted U.N. organizations that promote anti-Israel and antisemitic incitement.
It is worth pausing here and noting a couple things. None of these policies was advanced by leveraging aid to Israel, and none of it would have been hindered if aid to Israel was reduced. And all those policies were just from inside the State Department. The Biden administration’s assault on Israel, of course, has been whole of government.
Seventh, the Department of Defense and the Israeli military held the “Juniper Oak” military exercises. As with the Obama-era MOU, what could have been a way to enhance military cooperation was instead turned into a way to constrain Israel’s ability to defend itself. According to Dan Shapiro, Obama’s former ambassador to Israel who was on the Biden administration team tasked with securing a new nuclear deal with Iran, the U.S.-Israeli exercises were meant to “make it less likely that one acts independently without close coordination with the other”—in other words, designed to tie the hands of Israel’s military.
Eighth, the Department of Justice unleashed the Federal Bureau of Investigation on Israel in response to an incident in which a Palestinian American journalist was killed covering a firefight between Israeli forces and terrorists, even after other parts of the administration had concluded the death was accidental.
Ninth, the Departments of Justice and State worked together to circumvent multiple congressional sanctions targeting the Palestine Liberation Organization, a terrorist group, so they could bring to Washington, D.C., the group’s secretary general for high-level press briefings—while the administration was simultaneously shunning cabinet ministers from Israel’s democratically elected government. Top officials from across the administration publicly told reporters and testified to Congress that such engagement was advancing American national security interests, but in nonpublic notices the State Department expressly confirmed to Congress that the Palestinian Authority continues to pay for acts of terrorism against Israeli and U.S. citizens.
Tenth, despite such terror financing, the State Department and specifically the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) have poured hundreds of millions of dollars into Palestinian controlled areas. Tens of millions of dollars of that funding was incorrectly entered into government databases in ways that prevented public and congressional scrutiny. Roughly $20 million sent to the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip was entered as going elsewhere. In one case a $5 million award to the Gaza Strip was publicly reported with the wrong amount, the wrong location, and deliberately anonymized (had it not been anonymized, it would have been clear the money was going to Gaza). None of these mistakes was made public by the administration.
This list is not comprehensive.
Again, none of these policies would be hampered by reducing military aid to our Israeli allies. Quite the opposite: Eliminating aid would provide momentum to the deeply reckless policies already being pursued by the Biden administration, which have acutely endangered American and Israeli national security.
Now, some people have called the Biden administration’s policy inexplicable. It’s quite explicable. The Biden administration is controlled by fringe progressives who hate Israel. Their policies are controlled by the Squad, and the Squad detests the Jewish state. As one member of the Squad recently asserted—not even bothering to hide her vicious antisemitism— “we have been fighting to make it clear that Israel is a racist state.”
There is no doubt that as part of their collective antipathy toward Israel, these Biden administration officials have at times leveraged American aid to Israel to advance reckless policies undermining Israeli security and the U.S.-Israel relationship. Eliminating that aid, however, would not counter those policies and would pile on risks.
The obvious, straightforward solution is to continue to provide the military assistance that our Israeli allies need to protect their security and ours—and at the same time, fight to stop the Biden administration’s reckless anti-Israel policies.
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/dead-wrong-ted-cruz
************************************************Public sector staff shortages in ‘hard jobs’ are sparking a wage war as taxpayers feel the consequences of empty positions
At the entrance to Missouri prisons, large signs plead for help: “NOW HIRING” ... “GREAT PAY & BENEFITS."
No experience is necessary. Anyone 18 and older can apply. Long hours are guaranteed.
Though the assertion of “great pay” for prison guards would have seemed dubious in the past, a series of state pay raises prompted by widespread vacancies has finally made a difference. The Missouri Department of Corrections set a record for new applicants last month.
“After we got our raise, we started seeing people come out of the woodwork, people that hadn’t worked in a while,” said Maj. Albin Narvaez, chief of custody at the Fulton Reception and Diagnostic Center, where new prisoners are housed and evaluated.
Public employers across the U.S. have faced similar struggles to fill jobs, leading to one of the largest surges in state government pay raises in 15 years. Many cities, counties and school districts also are hiking wages to try to retain and attract workers amid aggressive competition from private sector employers.
The wage war comes as governments and taxpayers feel the consequences of empty positions.
In Kansas City, Missouri, a shortage of 911 operators doubled the average hold times for people calling in emergencies. In one Florida county, some schoolchildren frequently arrived late as a lack of bus drivers delayed routes. In Arkansas, abused and neglected kids remained longer in foster care because of a caseworker shortage. In various cities and states, vacancies on road crews meant cracks and potholes took longer to fix than many motorists might like.
“A lot of the jobs we’re talking about are hard jobs,” said Leslie Scott Parker, executive director of the National Association of State Personnel Executives.
Lingering vacancies “eventually affects service to the public or response times to needs,” she added.
Workforce shortages worsened across all sorts of jobs due to a wave of retirements and resignations that began during the pandemic. Many businesses, from restaurants to hospitals, responded nimbly with higher wages and incentives to attract employees. But governments by nature are slower to act, requiring pay raises to go through a legislative process that can take months to complete — and then can take months more to kick in.
Meanwhile, vacancies mounted.
In Georgia, state employee turnover hit a high of 25% in 2022. Thousands of workers left the Department of Corrections, pushing its vacancy rate to around 50%. The state began a series of pay raises. This year, all state employees and teachers got at least a $2,000 raise, with corrections officers getting $4,000 and state troopers $6,000.
The Georgia Department of Corrections used an ad agency to bolster recruitment and held an average of 125 job fairs a month. It's starting to pay off. In the first week of July, the department received 318 correctional officer applications — nearly double the weekly norm, said department Public Affairs Director Joan Heath.
Almost 1 in 4 positions — more than 2,500 jobs -- were empty in the Missouri Department of Corrections late last year, which was twice the pre-pandemic vacancy rate in 2019.
Missouri gave state workers a 7.5% pay raise in 2022. This spring, Gov. Mike Parson signed an emergency spending bill with an additional 8.7% raise, plus an extra $2 an hour for people working evening and night shifts at prisons, mental health facilities and other institutions. The vacancy rate for entry level corrections officers now is declining, and the average number of applications for all state positions is up 18% since the start of last year.
At the Fulton prison, where staff shortages have led to a standard 52-hour work week, newly hired employees can earn around $60,000 annually — an amount roughly equal to the state's median household income. The prison also is proposing to provide free child care to correctional officers willing to work nights.
If prison staffing is too low, "it can get dangerous” for both inmates and guards, Narvaez said.
Public safety concerns also have arisen in Kansas City, where a country music fan attacked before a concert last month waited four minutes for a 911 call to be answered and an hour for an ambulance to arrive. About one-quarter of 911 call center positions are vacant — “a huge factor" in the longer wait times to answer calls, said Tamara Bazzle, assistant manager of the communications unit for the Kansas City Police Department.
In Biddeford, Maine, a 15-person roster of 911 dispatchers dipped to just eight employees in July as people quit a “pressure cooker job" for less stress or better pay elsewhere, Police Chief JoAnne Fisk said. The city is now offering fully certified dispatchers $41 an hour to help plug the gaps on a part-time basis — $10 an hour more than comparable new workers normally would earn.
This month, Biddeford also launched a $2,000 bonus for city employees who refer others who get jobs. That comes a year after Biddeford adopted a four-day work week with paid lunch periods to try to make jobs more appealing, said City Manager Jim Bennett.
To attract workers, other governments have dropped college degree requirements and spiced up drab job descriptions.
Nationally, the turnover rate in state and local governments is twice the average of the previous two decades, according federal labor statistics.
Uncompetitive wages were the most common reason for leaving cited in exit interviews, according to a survey of 249 state and local government human resource managers conducted by MissionSquare Research Institute, a Washington, D.C. -based nonprofit. The hardest positions to fill included police and corrections officers, doctors, nurses, engineers and jobs requiring commercial driver's licenses.
Along Florida's east coast, the Brevard County transit system and school district have been competing for bus drivers. On days when drivers are lacking, the transit system has cut the frequency of bus stops on some routes. The school system, meanwhile, has asked some bus drivers to run a second route after dropping children off at school, often resulting in the second busload arriving late.
Since 2022, the county has twice raised bus driver wages to a current rate of $17.47 an hour. The school board recently countered with a $5 increase to a minimum $20 an hour for the upcoming school year. The goal is to hire enough drivers to regularly get kids to class on time, said school system communications director Russell Bruhn.
In Arkansas, the goal is to get foster kids into permanent homes in less than a year. But during the first three months of this year, the state met that target for just 32% of foster children — well below the national standard of over 40%. More than one-fifth of the roughly 1,400 positions in the Arkansas Division of Children and Family Services are vacant.
Many new employees leave in less than two years because of heavy caseloads and the “very difficult, emotionally tolling work,” Mischa Martin, the Department of Human Services' deputy secretary of youth and families, told lawmakers last month.
“If we had a knowledgeable, experienced workforce," she said, "they would be able to work cases in a better way to get kids home quicker.”
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The Will to Power
Total power is not something people of strong character feel a need to possess; it is the provenance of the weak: mediocre, unfulfilled individuals of extreme arrogance, who have few moral scruples, and almost no capacity to control their actions, their emotions, their lusts, and their passions—the most dangerous human beings imaginable.
Power consumes those whose vanity and narcissism motivate them to fanciful and never-ending delusions of superiority. Within the human breast, power has its own organic life, worse than the most malignant cancer, ever-growing, never shrinking, with no medicine for its cure, constantly needing to be fed, and that only with more and more of its own kind—the insatiable monster who can never be satisfied, even at the cost of mountains of human skulls. It becomes a disease, an interminable, incurable malady that may not end even at death—it is often passed on to disciples. It is more intoxicating than alcohol or the most addictive drug known to man. Like the hopeless druggie, those craving and possessing power must constantly have their “fix,” and the drug must be increasingly more potent, more costly, and more destructive, to themselves and to others.
When conquered by the will to power, a person convinces themselves they are omnipotent, that only they possess certainty, everybody else is inferior, that they alone have the answers, that the noble ends they seek justify whatever means they deem necessary to obtain them, because, in their high-minded vain egotism, only they have the betterment of mankind in view, and that the world simply cannot survive without their guidance. Those who oppose them are opposing Truth, the Only Truth, the True Progress of Humanity, and thus are evil, and must be silenced by any means necessary. And after extinguishing countless human hopes, dreams, and lives, they sit atop the pile, congratulating themselves on the “utopia” they have built, but ever vigilant for more dragons who need slaying. That is power. That isn’t strength, that is uncontrolled human weakness to its most malevolent extreme. It is the story of human history.
Down through the ages, very few politicians have demonstrated the ability to control the will to power that lurks within the human heart. America’s Founding Fathers understood that perfectly, which is why they wrote a constitution specifically defining and thus restricting the powers national government officials could exercise over other Americans. It’s also why James Madison said we should never trust anybody who has power. The Founders didn’t establish term limits for Congressmen, Senators, or Presidents, and perhaps they should have. But they thought frequent elections would be sufficient. Such hasn’t proven to be so. Our Founders were brilliant men, but no humans are endowed with infinite wisdom.
But their fear of power is not only evident in historical events that took place before and during their lifetime, but are equally evident since they died, especially in the last 100 years. Consider those who had power in the 20th century and how they finally relinquished it. Vladimir Lenin died as the head of Russia. So did Joseph Stalin. Adolf Hitler died in power. As did Mao Zedong, two North Korean Kims, and a host of other megalomaniacs. That is the intoxicating nature of power. Once obtained, only death conquers the craving. These are weak people who cannot control themselves so they must control others.
American politicians aren’t immune to this yearning, this will to power. They are somewhat restrained by our Constitution. Somewhat, but not enough, and many would love to abolish it entirely. Joe Biden is 80 years old. What is he doing still in Washington, D.C.? He has been there for 50 years. Why doesn’t he go home? The reason is simple. He is a very inferior man who covets power, whose power-disease has convinced him that he knows better how to run your life than you do, and, because he has the power, he is going to do everything he can to make you submit to the mythical utopia that delusions his mind. 80 years old, and he wants another four years of power. He is the last person in the country who should have it.
Well, maybe demented Diane Feinstein is his equal. Grassley. McConnell. Pelosi. How many other septua- and octogenarians exist in Washington who have plagued the nation for most of their adult lives? On both sides of the aisle, not just Democrats. They aren’t serving the people, they are inflating themselves in their own eyes. And destroying the country in the process. They want one thing—glory in their vision of themselves. They are no wiser than most Americans, they are only more conceited. Look at the mess they have created in Washington and around the country. Could any other group of people have done any worse?
Americans have given power to inadequate incompetents of mediocre ability, non-existent wisdom because of their ungodly character, but who ache to preserve it--for the reasons mentioned at the beginning of this column. It’s a disease, a cancer inside them, ever-growing, never, never satiated, always thinking their Utopia is just around the corner, one vote away, and “I must be here to cast that vote.” But their Utopia never arrives, and it never will. Only the dunghill grows deeper.
Term limits might be a partial answer, but electing better people, humble people, people who truly understand the dangers of power, people who mind their own business except for national necessities—that would be a superior solution. But those kinds of people are not the busybodies who salivate to control others. The sort of people needed are those whose character would largely forbid them from accepting the job.
So, we get Joe Biden for 50 years. And look at the results.
https://townhall.com/columnists/marklewis/2023/07/29/the-will-to-power-n2626380
****************************************My other blogs. Main ones below:
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
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Kristina Pimenova, once said to be the most beautiful girl in the world. Note blue eyes and blonde hair
Bliss: What every woman wants: to feel safe and secure in the arms of her man. Robert Irwin and Rorie Buckey. See