Mental Hiccups

Conservatives Happier Than Liberals
By Jeanna Bryner, Senior Writer
posted: 07 May 2008 08:20 am ET

Individuals with conservative ideologies are happier than liberal-leaners, and new research pinpoints the reason: Conservatives rationalize social and economic inequalities.

Regardless of marital status, income or church attendance, right-wing individuals reported greater life satisfaction and well-being than left-wingers, the new study found. Conservatives also scored highest on measures of rationalization, which gauge a person's tendency to justify, or explain away, inequalities.

The rationalization measure included statements such as: "It is not really that big a problem if some people have more of a chance in life than others," and "This country would be better off if we worried less about how equal people are."

...

"There is no reason to think that the effects we have identified here are unique to economic forms of inequality," the researchers write. "Research suggests that highly egalitarian women are less happy in their marriages compared with their more traditional counterparts, apparently because they are more troubled by disparities in domestic labor."

Labels: economics, liberal v. conservative

Paul Weyrich explains why proposed changes to the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB), while good in theory, will ultimately fail.

Most of these proposed new regulations are, in theory, good ideas. The problem is that education was and will remain a local issue in spite of the Federal Government's attempts to micromanage every elementary and secondary school in the country. The variety and quantity of student and teacher needs are too numerous for the Federal Government adequately to address them. In fact, these proposals do little more than shuffle students through a monotonous, homogenous factory. There is no creativity; no focus upon improving the quality of local curricula and teaching; no flexibility for students whose interests may be as diverse as automobile mechanics, ancient history, biology, music or agriculture; and no ability to adapt to the needs of local communities. In short, everything valuable about local control of education is missing. It is what is missing, not what is included, that is necessary to improve American education.

Instead of a one-size-fits-all bureaucratic education plan, what we need are higher standards in the classroom, meaningful discipline, a return to rigorous curricula (including proper grammar instruction, the study of foreign languages and a return to primary sources in history rather than watered-down textbooks), better teachers, more parental and community involvement and greater flexibility to address local needs. These would begin the process of reforming American education. As it stands, it is highly unlikely that that expectations saddled to NCLB will be fulfilled.

The attempt to micromanage education (or most anything) from Washington has always been a non-starter to me. It simply makes no sense to have a small group of politicians whose main goal is to get reelected make policy for a country of 300 million across vastly different demographic, economic, and cultural conditions.

Sadly, I disagree with Weyrich when he says, "The problem is that education was and will remain a local issue in spite of the Federal Government's attempts to micromanage every elementary and secondary school in the country."

Education (and most everything) is increasingly becoming federally managed, and though this is extremely unwise, I see this trend continuing indefinitely. More federal money will be spent, and hence more federal authority demanded.

In spite of all evidence to the contrary, the Left has succeeded in convincing Americans that Big Brother is the solution to everything. When these "solutions" inevitably fail, it's always because we didn't spend enough money on them. The Left seeks equal outcome instead of equal opportunity, and, unfortunately, the Big Government approach delivers, but not in a good way. The end result, as we continue to see in education, is a gravitation toward mediocrity; yes, we are nudging our schools toward equal education for all--equally poor education for all. And no amount of money or increase in federal oversight is going to be enough.

Labels: education, federalism, NCLB

Andy McCarthy has some thoughts on the death penalty I hadn't heard or considered before:

Kathryn, I reluctantly favor the death penalty. It is very reluctantly — I worked in government for a long time, so I am sympathetic to the arguments about the machinery of death in the hands of the same people who design, say, the Department of Motor Vehicles. But my major reluctance lies in something rarely discussed: the paramount role capital punishment has had in the dramatic expansion of due process rights for criminals over the last half-century. It is remarkable how many of the cases that are bad for law-enforcement involve situations where the courts, which are notoriously hostile to the death penalty, couldn't find anything wrong with the death phase of the proceedings; to prevent execution, then, they look for other seeming unfairness (in the guilt phase) as a reason to undo the result. Those precedents, in turn, inure to the benefit not only of capital defendants but all defendants — and once they are on the books, they are steadily expanded by the lower courts.

Two things, though, keep me on the pro-side of the fence (aside, of course, from the proposition that it is for the people of the several states, as well as all the American people in federal cases, to decide democratically whether they want capital punishment):

1. Many of the worst criminals operate from jail. Much of the 1993 WTC bombing was plotted in Attica Prison where Sayyid Nosair was confined; al Qaeda founder Mamdouh Mahmud Salim nearly murdered a prison guard during an escape attempt while awaiting trial in the embassy bombing case; Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman issued the fatwa that bin Laden credits for the 9/11 attacks from U.S. prison where he is serving a life sentence (and where he continued to try to run his Egyptian terrorist organization with the help of his lawyer, among others); and there is a long list of mafia dons, drug kingpins, and gang leaders who have plotted and ordered murders and mayhem from their jail cells. Life sentences don't stop these savages from preying on society, and society should have a right to protect itself.

2. I'm convinced that the only reason we have available the sentence of life-imprisonment without possibility of parole is the death penalty. Human rights activists need the life-sentence as a persuasive argument against capital punishment. If there were no capital punishment, they would be arguing that life-imprisonment was cruel and excessive — and the media would be right there with them. (It's exactly the same effect Iraq has on the Democrats' rhetoric about the need to fight the war aggressively in Afghanistan. If there were no Iraq, Afghanistan would go back to being a quagmire.)

Labels: death penalty

Many of our country's problems are self-imposed and could be avoided if congress, the media, and our citizenry at large had even a basic understanding of economics. (I highly recommend Thomas Sowell's Basic Economics.) Without this, we end up chasing our tails, solving "problems" that do not exist, and accepting myth as fact.

Some clarity from the Wall Street Journal:

Exxon's profits are soaring with the recent oil price spike, but the energy industry's earnings aren't as outsized as the politicians seem to think. Thomson Financial calculates that profits from the oil and natural gas industry over the past year were 8.3% of investment, while the all-industry average is 7.8%. And this was a boom year for oil. An analysis by the Cato Institute's Jerry Taylor finds that between 1970 and 2003 (which includes peak and valley years for earnings) the oil and gas business was "less profitable than the rest of the U.S. economy." These are hardly robber barons.

This tiff over gas and oil taxes only highlights the intellectual policy confusion – or perhaps we should say cynicism – of our politicians. They want lower prices but don't want more production to increase supply. They want oil "independence" but they've declared off limits most of the big sources of domestic oil that could replace foreign imports. They want Americans to use less oil to reduce greenhouse gases but they protest higher oil prices that reduce demand. They want more oil company investment but they want to confiscate the profits from that investment. And these folks want to be President?

Late this week, a group of Senate Republicans led by Pete Domenici of New Mexico introduced the "American Energy Production Act of 2008" to expand oil production off the U.S. coasts and in Alaska. It has the potential to increase domestic production enough to keep America running for five years with no foreign imports. With the world price of oil at $116 a barrel, if not now, when? No word yet if Senators Clinton and Obama will take time off from denouncing oil profits to vote for that.

Labels: economics, energy, oil

Matthew Ladner makes the case for moving away from government monopolized education and toward a competitive-based system. He also emphasized the fact that we already have solutions to most of the problems we need to solve, if we will only follow the lead of successful schools.

Labels: education, school choice

I'm very pleased to see that education reformer Jay Greene has started his own blog. I like what I see so far, and I've added it to my list of daily reads.

Labels: education

CBS news director of surveys Kathy Frankovic has an interesting article on the subtleties of polling. It's well known that the way a question is asked can affect the results, but it turns out the order the questions are asked can also make a big difference.

Labels: media bias, polls

[Via QandO]

Labels: climate change, global warming

Schools in California have found yet another way to game the system and avoid the accountability of the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB).

The law says all major demographic groups – categorized by race, income, English fluency and disability status – must meet test score targets that increase over time. If one group doesn't meet the target, the entire school faces the stigma of low performance and a series of consequences.

So where's the loophole this time? It's in a single word: major. If a sub-group isn't large enough to be classified as "major," its results don't count and are deemed "insignificant".

So what do you do if, say, your school doesn't meet its NCLB requirements because your African-American students can't read? Easy! Just don't call them African-Americans anymore. Problem solved!

This is what is happening in California (and presumably other states) where schools simply go in, after the fact, and reclassify enough kids so that entire sub-groups fall off the radar. Those are kids that are falling through the cracks and being deemed insignificant.

Via Joanne Jacobs, who asks: "NCLB was designed to spot low achievement by subgroups at schools where the majority of students are doing fine. But why teach ‘em when you can disappear ‘em?"

Labels: education, NCLB

Heather Mac Donald takes on some myths about Black prison rates,.

The favorite culprits for high black prison rates include a biased legal system, draconian drug enforcement and even prison itself. None of these explanations stands up to scrutiny.

...

Racial activists also allege that prosecutors overcharge and judges oversentence blacks. Backing up this bias claim has been the holy grail of criminology for decades — and the prize remains as elusive as ever.

...

Unfair drug policies are an equally popular explanation for black incarceration rates. Legions of pundits, activists and academics charge that the war on drugs is a war on minorities.

After refuting the above, she continues to take apart several other claims about drugs and imprisonment, then concludes:

When prominent figures such as Barack Obama make sweeping claims about racial unfairness in the criminal-justice system, they play with fire. The evidence is clear: Black prison rates result from crime, not racism. The dramatic drop in crime in the 1990s, to which stricter sentencing policies unquestionably contributed, has freed thousands of law-abiding inner-city residents from the bondage of fear.

The continuing search for the chimera of criminal-justice bigotry is a useless distraction that diverts energy and attention from the crucial imperative of helping more inner-city boys stay in school — and out of trouble.

Labels: crime, drugs, Obama, race, stats

In my previous post, I linked to a Pastor Wright claim that "We've got more black men in prison than there are in college." This is probably technically true, but it's misleading. People generally attend college in their late teens and early twenties, while criminals can be of any age. By comparing a narrow age group of black male students to the black male prison population at large Wright is able to advance his racist message. Nothing new there.

Throughout his campaign, however, Barack Obama has echoed an amended version of Wright's misleading claim: "We have more work to do when more young black men languish in prison than attend colleges and universities across America." This is a more meaningful comparison, since uses the same age range on both sides of the comparison. Unfortunately for Obama--though fortunately for young black men--this claim is false. There are, in fact, no where near as many young black men in prison as in college.

My guess is that Obama picked up this "fact" from somewhere--probably from Wright--and accepted it without bothering to check it out. As with Wright, the claim is convenient to Obama's message, and so he incorporated it into his stump speech, narrowing the scope to young black men because it makes a better comparison, no matter that it is demonstrably false. If this sounds cynical, consider that Obama continues to make the claim even after such media sources as the Washington Post pointed out the mistake to his campaign. So, a politician insists on his own set of facts. Again, nothing new there.

What I wish to call attention to here is that, beneath the overt racism and anti-Americanism that have understandably been the focus of the Obama-Wright scandal, there is a more insidious danger. Wright has a pattern of inventing "facts" to support his demagoguery, and these are accepted by his congregants (apparently including people as bright as the Obamas) as truth. As long as this continues, racism, and the problems in the black community, will persist.

If we're truly committed to breaking the cycle of racism, these types of claims need to be challenged publicly and aggressively. Doing so is much more important to our society than that which garners so much media attention. Obama, in particular, is in a unique position to take on this issue. Unfortunately, he's got a campaign to run, and he's apparently decided that engaging blacks on the hatred and propaganda perpetuated in these types of churches and communities will cost him votes in November.

He may be right about that, but I don't believe we'll find the kind of unity Obama speaks of as long as it's acceptable for high-profile "black leaders" to go around indoctrinating Blacks into believing that Whites invented AIDS in order to exterminate Blacks. It's not enough to reject Wright or call him a kook. The false claims must be refuted individually and decisively to set the record straight. Far too many Blacks appear willing to embrace and defend this type of nonsense. These are teaching moments, and we are squandering them.

It will take a new type of black leader to affect change. . . change Blacks can believe in.

Labels: Obama, Pastor Wright, politics, race

I've always held as ridiculous Obama's claim that he listened to Pastor Wright's sermons for over 20 years and had no clue of the man's racist, anti-American rantings. I've been meaning to look up the Rolling Stone article that Obama cited as his reason for disinviting Wright from his announcement to run for president.

Betsy summarizes the issue and provides a link to a partial transcript of the sermon discussed in the Rolling Stone article. The Wright found here is just as repugnant as the one seen in the now-famous video clips that appear in the nightly news. And Obama can't claim he was unaware of these remarks, since he cited the Rolling Stone article himself. An excerpt from what I believe is the article in question:

Wright takes the pulpit here one Sunday and solemnly, sonorously declares that he will recite ten essential facts about the United States. "Fact number one: We've got more black men in prison than there are in college," he intones. "Fact number two: Racism is how this country was founded and how this country is still run!" There is thumping applause; Wright has a cadence and power that make Obama sound like John Kerry. Now the reverend begins to preach. "We are deeply involved in the importing of drugs, the exporting of guns and the training of professional KILLERS. . . . We believe in white supremacy and black inferiority and believe it more than we believe in God. . . . We conducted radiation experiments on our own people. . . . We care nothing about human life if the ends justify the means!" The crowd whoops and amens as Wright builds to his climax: "And. And. And! GAWD! Has GOT! To be SICK! OF THIS SHIT!"

Labels: Obama, Pastor Wright

A Manhattan Institute study provides empirical evidence that public school performance improves in response to the introduction of school vouchers.

This paper is the first empirical evaluation of the impact of exposure to a voucher program designed to allow students with disabilities to enroll in schools other than their local public schools on the achievement of disabled students who remain in their local public schools. Vouchers for disabled students are the fastest-growing type in the United States. Programs similar to McKay [Scholarship Program for Students with Disabilities] are currently operating in Ohio, Georgia, and Utah and have been recently considered by other states.

Highlights of the study include:

* Public school students with relatively mild disabilities made statistically significant test score improvements in both math and reading as more nearby private schools began participation in the McKay program. That is, contrary to the hypothesis that school choice harms students who remain in public schools, this study finds that students eligible for vouchers who remained in the public schools made greater academic improvements as their school choices increased.

* Disabled public school students’ largest gains as exposure to McKay increased were made by those diagnosed as having the mildest learning disabilities. The largest category of students enjoying the greatest gains, known as Specific Learning Disability, accounts for 61.2% of disabled students and 8.5% of all students in Florida.

* The academic proficiency of students diagnosed with relatively severe disabilities was neither helped nor harmed by increased exposure to the McKay program.

Labels: education, school choice

Here's a short excerpt from a comment posted at Back Talk. It regards WMD and Bush's justifications for going to war in Iraq. I've long since tired of responding to the whole "Bush lied" variety of attacks. They are easily refuted, yet no amount of logic will appeal to anyone who makes such an attack, so it's not only useless, but boring, to engage them.

The attacks made here, however, are of a softer variety. Instead of claiming that Bush lied, the poster takes a calmer, more reasonable sounding tack. In fact, this approach is no more substantive than the "Bush lied" variety, but it sounds more thoughtful and reasonable because the language isn't as charged.

This type of argument, then, is much more dangerous, simply because it is more subtle and can't be rejected on its face. Yet it misstates facts and builds its case on false premises which, if not challenged, slowly evolve into accepted "facts."

I'm not really interested in engaging the poster directly (or fully) on these issues. We won't change each other's minds. But beating back the false crux of these arguments every once in a while seems worthwhile.

So, you are President. You have some information that you want to use to justify a war. The correctness of that information is hotly disuputed (sic). It is your responsibility to make certain that the information is correct. You can't just rely on the conclusions of your intel people -- because other people are coming to different conclusions. Which conclusion is correct? What are the sources, methods, and evidence of the two sides? The President needs to find someone who can reliably get into the details -- or to do so personally.

Let's break this down:

"You have some information that you want to use to justify a war": This premise commits the logical fallacy of begging the question. The poster starts from the conclusion that Bush was looking for a way to justify a war in order to "prove" that Bush was looking for a way to justify the war. While many people do believe this, there is no evidence of it, and only a desire to think the worst of Bush accounts for an uncritical acceptance of this premise.

"The correctness of that information is hotly disputed": This is simply a misstatement of fact. The presence of WMD in Iraq was not hotly disputed. In fact, there was overwhelming agreement from a variety of U.S. and allied sources that Iraq possessed WMD. It's true that some of the inspectors stated that they didn't have direct evidence of WMD in Iraq, but they also cited a long history of evasion and obstruction by Saddam Hussein and direct evidence of his having other illegal weapons.

"It is your responsibility to make certain that the information is correct": This is an opinion and, I think, an unreasonable one. A president does not gather intelligence; that's the job of the CIA and other agencies. The president's job is to use the evidence provided him to make policy decisions. As to "making certain the information is correct," well, that's just not possible. The bad guys have a vested interest in keeping secrets. Intel agencies do the best they can to learn those secrets, then pass them along to the president, along with an indication of how confident they are about their conclusions. In this case, the Director of the CIA is said to have told Bush that it was a "slam dunk" that Iraq had WMD. This isn't all that surprising a conclusion given that we now know that Saddam Hussein was actively trying to convince the world that it was so.


"You can't just rely on the conclusions of your intel people -- because other people are coming to different conclusions": Actually, you can and should rely on the conclusions of your intel people. Especially when they tell you that WMDs in Iraq are a "slam dunk." Especially when intel agencies of countries throughout the world are saying the same thing. Especially coming on the heals of the 9/11 attacks, attacks which Iraq openly celebrated. Especially when Iraq had declared open war on the U.S. and had been firing at our military in the "no fly zone" on a daily basis.


"Which conclusion is correct? What are the sources, methods, and evidence of the two sides?": Lacking any evidence to the contrary, it's reasonable to assume that these are exactly the questions that were asked by the president, the CIA, and the other agencies of the U.S. and our allies. Again, it's not possible to be 100% certain on intel matters. But the conclusions , with high confidence, of the best minds in the world were that Iraq had WMD. You go with the best info available, and given the consequences of not acting, it would have been highly irresponsible to have done nothing.

"The President needs to find someone who can reliably get into the details -- or to do so personally": That "someone" would be the CIA and other sources, both domestic and foreign, that were used. This idea that we can know everything there is to know, or that we can never act until we do know everything is absurd. We'd never be able to act on any threat if this were the standard. We can never know every secret of the enemy. And even if we could, we wouldn't have any way of knowing we knew everything.

These types of arguments are based on hindsight and the assumption that we live in a perfect world where everything can be known and that every action will produce perfect results. It ignores the fact that our enemies have their own plans and are willing to hide them and change them to thwart us.

We will never have perfect intel. Or perfect presidents. Or perfect wars. Those who demand perfection after the fact are either foolish or acting on their own agendas. We must be wary of them, and when they distort the facts, no matter how subtly, to advance their agendas, we must make the effort to correct the record.

One last point: There is an implied assumption in these "Bush lied" arguments that WMD were the only reason given for going to war in Iraq. In fact, if you go back and read Bush's State of the Union address, or Congress' authorization to go to war, you'll find that WMD was only one of dozens of reasons cited to justify the war. The mere fact that WMD is so often cited as the reason given for going to war is, itself, an attempt to distort the record.

Labels: Iraq, WMD

McQ at QandA eyes something familiar in Michelle Obama's rhetoric:

So are we to ignore what the spouse is saying out there on the campaign trail (Bill Clinton wouldn't appreciate that, would he) and pretend it really isn't an indicator of what the candidate believes?

"If we don't wake up as a nation with a new kind of leadership ... for how we want this country to work, then we won't get universal health care," she said.

"The truth is, in order to get things like universal health care and a revamped education system, then someone is going to have to give up a piece of their pie so that someone else can have more."

Let me restate that for you.

"From each according to his ability, to each according to his need".

Sound familiar?

Yep. Straight out of the Marxist Playbook.

Liberals continue to view the economy as a zero-sum game. To them, it's not fair that those who actually baked the pie (the "evil rich") get a bigger piece than the rest of us. So, they want to steal pie from the bakers and pass it around so everyone gets a "fair" share.

What liberals don't understand is that if you allow the bakers to keep what they've earned, they'll keep right on baking. Being the evil, greedy bastards they are, they'll take their "obscene" profits and use them to expand their businesses, so they can pad their fat wallets even more. This way, the pie doesn't stay the same size; it gets bigger and bigger.

And the thing is, an expanding businesses needs workers: lawyers and real estate agents, builders and contractors, salesmen and support staff, and on and on. Each of them benefits, earning a slice of the ever expanding pie. It's true that this is a slightly smaller percentage of the pie than Michelle Obama promises them, but because the pie is so much bigger, everyone ends up with a bigger slice. And best of all, no one feels slighted by having what they've earned taken from them and given to someone else.

Labels: economics, Obama

Much of our recent foreclosure problems are being blamed on "predatory lenders, but Steven Malanga explains how borrower fraud deserves a lot more of the blame than it's getting.

By one estimate, total losses from fraudulent mortgage applications were estimated to be about $3 billion annually—and growing. The deception was clearly widespread, including false statements on mortgage applications about family income and current levels of indebtedness, submission of phony documents, and lying about the intended uses of the property that was being purchased.

Sen. Clinton’s speech and the mortgage industry report, coming within days of each other, illustrate the two separate and often mutually exclusive tracks that the discussion of the subprime crisis is taking these days. On the one hand, remedies proposed separately by Senators Clinton and Obama, as well as the bailout package agreed to by both Republicans and Democrats in Congress last week, essentially treat many subprime borrowers as victims of seedy mortgage brokers, opportunistic lenders and aggressive Wall Street houses. Under this narrative many borrowers were ‘lured” (in a term used by both Sen. Obama and the New York Times) into mortgages they couldn’t afford, and the Bush administration’s rescue plan--which involves urging borrowers and lenders to work out new loan terms individually--amounts to too little help at too laborious a pace to make a difference.

And yet the more time that passes the clearer we begin to see the extent to which many borrowers themselves may have participated in creating the mess from which we are preparing to rescue them. As more mortgages go bad and enter foreclosure, their details are coming under scrutiny, and the facts are not always pretty. They suggest that while lenders became too careless and some brokers were clearly swindlers, many borrowers were more than simply naïve or overly optimistic; a good many were probably cheating. Any federal legislation package that provides the financing to rework millions of thousands of subprime mortgages quickly is likely to reward quite a few of these chiselers.

Labels: economics

It’s the Politics, Stupid:

Comparing Labor Market Data in 1996 and 2008

Democrats on the Economy in 1996:

“Our economy is the healthiest it has been in three decades.” (President Bill Clinton, State of the Union Address, January 23, 1996)

Democrats on the Economy in 2008:

“The bottom line is that this administration is the owner of the worst jobs record since Herbert Hoover." (Senator Charles Schumer, Press Release, March 7, 2008)

Key Labor Market Statistics in 1996 and 2008
	March 1996	March 2008
1. U.S. Unemployment Rate	5.5%	5.1%
2. Number of Long-Term Unemployed	1.33 million	1.28 million
3. Average Weeks Unemployed	17.3 weeks	16.2 weeks
4. Median Weeks Unemployed	8.3 weeks	8.1 weeks
5. Not in Labor Force because discouraged over job prospects	451,000	401,000
6. Democrats calling for Extended Unemployment Benefits?	No	Yes
7. President’s Party Affiliation	Democrat	Republican

[Via The Corner]

Labels: economics, liberal v. conservative

Okay, I'm convinced. We must do something now about global warming before its too late.

Scientist: Climate Change to Impact Beer Production
April 8, 2008

The price of beer is likely to rise in coming decades because climate change will hamper the production of a key grain needed for the brew - especially in Australia, a scientist warned Tuesday.

...

"It will mean either there will be pubs without beer or the cost of beer will go up," Salinger told the Institute of Brewing and Distilling convention.

Labels: climate change, global warming, humor