Conservative Cowards And Cretins

Conservatism, Intelligence, Political Correctness, Race, Republicans

On May 7, I informed you about the Group of Eight’s 6.3 trillion-dollar amnesty plan. One of its authors, Robert Rector, is a known entity—a familiar and reliable number cruncher on the costs of mass immigration. The other is Jason Richwine, Ph.D., a promising newcomer.

Alas, one is never too young, too bright and too impolitic to fall afoul of conservative cowardice and cretinism.

Heritage has fired Jason Richwine. Writes Pat Buchanan:

Jason Richwine, the young conservative scholar who co-authored the Heritage Foundation report on the long-term costs of the amnesty bill backed by the “Gang of Eight,” is gone from Heritage.
He was purged after the Washington Post unearthed his doctoral dissertation at the JFK School of Government.
Richwine’s thesis:
IQ tests fairly measure mental ability. The average IQ of immigrants is well below that of white Americans. This difference in IQ is likely to persist through several generations.
And the potential consequences of this?
“A lack of socioeconomic assimilation among low IQ immigrant groups, more underclass behavior, less social trust and an increase in the proportion of unskilled workers in the American labor market.”
Richwine defended his 166-page thesis before Harvard’s George Borjas, Richard Zeckhauser and Christopher Jencks, who once edited the New Republic. But while his thesis was acceptable at Harvard – it earned Richwine a Ph.D. – it has scandalized the Potomac priesthood.
Our elites appear unanimous: Richwine’s view that intelligence is not equally distributed among ethnic and racial groups, and is partly inherited, is rankest heresy. Yet no one seems to want to prove him wrong.
Consider Richwine’s contention that differences in mental ability exist and seem to persist among racial and ethnic groups.
In the Wall Street Journal last month, Warren Kozak noted that 28,000 students in America’s citadel of diversity, New York City, took the eighth-grade exam to enter Stuyvesant, the Bronx School of Science and Brooklyn Tech, the city’s most elite high schools. Students are admitted solely on their entrance test scores.
Of the 830 students who will be entering Stuyvesant as freshmen this fall, 1 percent are black, 3 percent are Hispanic, 21 percent are white – and 75 percent are Asian.
Now, blacks and Hispanics far outnumber Asians in New York. But at Stuyvesant, Asians will outnumber blacks and Hispanics together 19-to-1.
Is this the result of racially biased tests at Stuyvesant?

This is so tiresome.

And check out the typically sub-intelligent equivocation coming from the conservative’s male version of S. E. Cupp: Matt K. Lewis.

Isn’t it time for Charles Murray of the Bell Curve fame to come to the defense of the multiple regression analysis, and other perfectly uncontroversial statistical methods?

America in the Age of the Idiot.

An Agency Of Thieves (IRS) Expected To Practice Theft And Intimidation With Fairness

Criminal Injustice, Government, Morality, Political Philosophy, Taxation, The State

“Tea party,” “patriot,” “the Constitution and Bill of Rights”: This is the stuff of the American Revolution. These are also the keywords that cued the rogue Internal Revenue Service (IRS) to target conservative organizations.

We are ruled by a traitor class and we’ve become traitors to our founding.

The Washington Post’s Michael Gerson, characteristically, understates the IRS’s abuse of “police power” as “an intrusive, ideologically targeted federal investigation of a political movement.”

WaPo’s Editorial Board stepped it up, conceding that “Any unequal application of the law based on ideological viewpoint is unpardonable — toxic to the legitimacy of the government’s vast law-enforcement authority.”

A forthcoming Treasury Department inspector general’s report finds that IRS staffers looked for applications for tax-exempt status from groups that used in their names words such as “Tea Party,” “Patriots” and “9/12,” as well as ones that contained expressions of concern about government spending or criticism of how the country is run. One manager worried — with reason — that this targeting might result in “over-inclusion” of applications that needed no such scrutiny. By 2011, IRS staff had set aside more than 100 applications for added review. It wasn’t just a couple of wayward staffers involved but rather a number of IRS agents and managers.
The inspector general also reports that Lois Lerner, the head of the IRS’s tax-exempt organization office, knew about the targeting in 2011; she seemed to say Friday that she learned about it from news reports last year. That inconsistency raises suspicions about the agency’s statements that higher-ups didn’t know about the targeting and that there was no political motivation.

Let us remember that the IRS’s activities are immoral, if not illegal. The IRS’s business is legalized theft. However you slice it, there is no moral difference between a lone burglar who steals stuff he doesn’t own and an “organized society” that does the same. Most of what the federal government does is in fact immoral, but not illegal, as it makes up the laws. After all, those in power determine what’s licit and what’s elicit.

Apparently, we expect an agency of thieves (the IRS) to practice theft and intimidation in an even and fair manner.

In a just society, the moral strictures that apply to the individual must also apply to the collective. A society founded on natural rights must not finesse theft. The Founders intended for government to safeguard man’s natural rights. The 16th Amendment changed that—it gave government a limitless lien on a man’s property and, by extension, on his life. The Amendment turned government into the almighty source – rather than the protector – of man’s rights and Americans into indentured slaves.

No one in the US government ever gets punished or demoted. Pundits, no doubt, will soon turn to the question of suing the IRS. And most will agree about the “wisdom” of “governmental immunity,” intended as it is to “stop people from suing the government and government employees and officials in many cases.“

Indeed, legislators have used their position to pass laws exempting themselves and many others from liability.

The sovereign has immunity. And you call this a republic?

Are You My Mother?

Family, Gender, Kids, Psychology & Pop-Psychology, Relatives

Emily Wilson of the Department of Classical Studies at the University of Pennsylvania begins her review of books that span “three millennia of motherhood” with a charming distillation of Philip Dey Eastman’s classic story for “beginning readers,” Are You My Mother?:

Are You My Mother? starts with a mother bird who realizes that her egg is about to hatch. Being a good, responsible mother, she flies off to get the hatchling something to eat when he emerges. In the meantime, the baby bird pops out of the egg, falls “down, down, down!” from the nest, and finds himself alone in the world, unable to fly or fend for himself. But he can walk, and he decides to look for his mother. Unfortunately, and comically, he does not know what she looks like. So he walks right past her, though the reader sees her, busily engaged on tugging up a nice fat worm. He encounters a series of animals and other objects, and asks each of them in turn, “Are you my mother?”. Finally, a huge power shovel – which, being the largest, seems like the most likely maternal candidate of all – lets out a scary-sounding “SNOOOORT!”, and lifts the baby “up, up, up!”. The illusion is shattered: the baby realizes, “You are not my mother! You are a big scary SNORT!”. But, in yet another thrilling reversal of fortune, the Snort drops the bird back into its own nest. Just then, the mother bird comes home. She asks, “Do you know who I am?”, and the baby bird says, “Yes!”. He knows she is his mother because she is not any of the other creatures he has encountered. He therefore knows that she is a bird, and she is his mother.

One of Wilson’s poignant insights:

“There is a deeply rooted idea in our culture that mothers, far more than fathers, are responsible not just for picking up the toys and changing the nappies, but also for how the child turns out in the end, for good or ill.”

Ms. Wilson’s conclusion:

“Mothers are all different, because they are all human. The good enough mother is one who gives her child what it needs to grow up. The good enough child is one who manages to grow up, and in doing so, is able to recognize her mother’s humanity.”

Happy Mother’s Day.

Blah, Blah, Blah Benghazi

Barack Obama, Bush, Foreign Policy, Iraq

“On the atrocity scale,” I wrote on 11.19.12 “Bush’s badness dwarfed Benghazi-gate.” Any one with a moral compass and a cerebral cortex recognizes that, as scandalous as it is, Benghazi is small scale compared to the immoral, fraudulent invasion of Iraq, and the cost in blood and treasure George W. Bush wrought with that one.

It would be an entirely different matter if Republicans had the intellectual moxie to examine the human toll, for decades to come, of Obama’s “murder by multilateralism” in Libya. For that was what the invasion of Libya amounted to.

But they don’t. To the Republicans, Benghazi-gate amounts to no more that a “procedural mishap.” Namely, finding out “what happened? How did it happen? Who covered it up? And, above all, how do we return to doing what we did before IT happened. ‘IT’ being the Sept. 11 attack on the embassy in Libya that left Ambassador Chris Stevens and ‘three other,’ mostly faceless Americans dead.”

In any event, ABC homes in on the meat of the scandal, tracing it directly to the Obama administration:

…ABC News has obtained 12 different versions of the talking points that show they were extensively edited as they evolved from the drafts first written entirely by the CIA to the final version distributed to Congress and to U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Susan Rice before she appeared on five talk shows the Sunday after that attack.
White House emails reviewed by ABC News suggest the edits were made with extensive input from the State Department. The edits included requests from the State Department that references to the Al Qaeda-affiliated group Ansar al-Sharia be deleted as well references to CIA warnings about terrorist threats in Benghazi in the months preceding the attack. …

The bare-bones of Benghazi is laid out by STEPHEN F. HAYES of the neoconservative Weekly Standard:

….Within 24 hours of the attack, the U.S. government had intercepted communications between two al Qaeda-linked terrorists discussing the attacks in Benghazi. One of the jihadists, a member of Ansar al Sharia, reported to the other that he had participated in the assault on the U.S. diplomatic post. Solid evidence. And there was more. Later that same day, the CIA station chief in Libya had sent a memo back to Washington, reporting that eyewitnesses to the attack said the participants were known jihadists, with ties to al Qaeda.
Before circulating the talking points to administration policymakers in the early evening of Friday, September 14, CIA officials changed “Islamic extremists with ties to al Qaeda” to simply “Islamic extremists.” But elsewhere, they added new contextual references to radical Islamists. They noted that initial press reports pointed to Ansar al Sharia involvement and added a bullet point highlighting the fact that the agency had warned about another potential attack on U.S. diplomatic facilities in the region. “On 10 September we warned of social media reports calling for a demonstration in front of the [Cairo] Embassy and that jihadists were threatening to break into the Embassy.” All told, the draft of the CIA talking points that was sent to top Obama administration officials that Friday evening included more than a half-dozen references to the enemy?—?al Qaeda, Ansar al Sharia, jihadists, Islamic extremists, and so on.
The version Petraeus received in his inbox Saturday, however, had none. The only remaining allusion to the bad guys noted that “extremists” might have participated in “violent demonstrations.”
In an email at 2:44 p.m. to Chip Walter, head of the CIA’s legislative affairs office, Petraeus expressed frustration at the new, scrubbed talking points, noting that they had been stripped of much of the content his agency had provided. Petraeus noted with evident disappointment that the policymakers had even taken out the line about the CIA’s warning on Cairo. The CIA director, long regarded as a team player, declined to pick a fight with the White House and seemed resigned to the propagation of the administration’s preferred narrative. The final decisions about what to tell the American people rest with the national security staff, he reminded Walter, and not with the CIA. …

MORE.

As the always outspoken and interesting Michael Scheuer put it, not so long ago, “Barack Obama is a despicable man.”

Indeed. On par with George Bush.