The Righteous Mind: Second Principle

The second principle of moral psychology is: There's more to morality than harm and fairness. In support of this claim I described research showing that people who grow up in Western, educated, industrial, rich, and democratic (WEIRD) societies are statistical outliers on many psychological measures, including measures of moral psychology. I [the author] also showed that:

• The WEIRDer you are, the more you perceive a world full of separate objects, rather than relationships.
• Moral pluralism is true descriptively. As a simple matter of anthropological fact, the moral domain varies across cultures.
• The moral domain is unusually narrow in WEIRD cultures, where it is largely limited to the ethic of autonomy (i.e., moral concerns about individuals harming, oppressing, or cheating other individuals). It is broader—including the ethics of community and divinity—in most other societies, and within religious and conservative moral matrices within WEIRD societies.
• Moral matrices bind people together and blind them to the coherence, or even existence, of other matrices. This makes it very difficult for people to consider the possibility that there might really be more than one form of moral truth, or more than one valid framework for judging people or running a society.
• Morality is like taste in many ways—an analogy made long ago by Hume and Mencius.
• Deontology and utilitarianism are “one-receptor” moralities that are likely to appeal most strongly to people who are high on systemizing and low on empathizing.
• Hume’s pluralist, sentimentalist, and naturalist approach to ethics is more promising than utilitarianism or deontology for modern moral psychology. As a first step in resuming Hume’s project, we should try to identify the taste receptors of the righteous mind.
• Modularity can help us think about innate receptors, and how they produce a variety of initial perceptions that get developed in culturally variable ways.
• Five good candidates for being taste receptors of the righteous mind are care, fairness, loyalty, authority, and sanctity.

The "five foundations" image
Five adaptive challenges stood out most clearly: caring for vulnerable children, forming partnerships with non-kin to reap the benefits of reciprocity, forming coalitions to compete with other coalitions, negotiating status hierarchies, and keeping oneself and one’s kin free from parasites and pathogens, which spread quickly when people live in close proximity to each other.
The fifth row lists some of the virtue words that we use to talk about people who trigger a particular moral “taste” in our minds.

The moral foundations are innate. Particular rules and virtues vary across cultures, so you’ll get fooled if you look for universality in the finished books. You won’t find a single paragraph that exists in identical form in every human culture. But if you look for links between evolutionary theory and anthropological observations, you can take some educated guesses about what was in the universal first draft of human nature. I tried to make (and justify) five such guesses:

• The Care/harm foundation evolved in response to the adaptive challenge of caring for vulnerable children. It makes us sensitive to signs of suffering and need; it makes us despise cruelty and want to care for those who are suffering.
• The Fairness/cheating foundation evolved in response to the adaptive challenge of reaping the rewards of cooperation without getting exploited. It makes us sensitive to indications that another person person is likely to be a good (or bad) partner for collaboration and reciprocal altruism. It makes us want to shun or punish cheaters.
• The Loyalty/betrayal foundation evolved in response to the adaptive challenge of forming and maintaining coalitions. It makes us sensitive to signs that another person is (or is not) a team player. It makes us trust and reward such people, and it makes us want to hurt, ostracize, or even kill those who betray us or our group.
• The Authority/subversion foundation evolved in response to the adaptive challenge of forging relationships that will benefit us within social hierarchies. It makes us sensitive to signs of rank or status, and to signs that other people are (or are not) behaving properly, given their position.
• The Sanctity/degradation foundation evolved initially in response to the adaptive challenge of the omnivore’s dilemma, and then to the broader challenge of living in a world of pathogens and parasites. It includes the behavioral immune system, which can make us wary of a diverse array of symbolic objects and threats. It makes it possible for people to invest objects with irrational and extreme values—both positive and negative—which are important for binding groups together.

It appears that the left relies primarily on the Care and Fairness foundations, whereas the right uses all five.

If you think about religion as a set of beliefs about supernatural agents, you’re bound to misunderstand it. You’ll see those beliefs as foolish delusions, perhaps even as parasites that exploit our brains for their own benefit. But if you take a Durkheimian approach to religion (focusing on belonging) and a Darwinian approach to morality (involving multilevel selection), you get a very different picture. You see that religious practices have been binding our ancestors into groups for tens of thousands of years. That binding usually involves some blinding—once any person, book, or principle is declared sacred, then devotees can no longer question it or think clearly about it.

Our ability to believe in supernatural agents may well have begun as an accidental by-product of a hypersensitive agency detection device, but once early humans began believing in such agents, the groups that used them to construct moral communities were the ones that lasted and prospered.

Moral matrixes:

• Liberal- Values from high to low: Care/harm, Liberty/oppression, Fairness/cheating, Tied in 4th place: Loyalty/betrayal, Authority/subversion, Sanctity/degradation.
• Libertarian- Values from high to low: Liberty/oppression, Fairness/cheating, the rest are tied in 3rd place.
• Social conservative- all values are equally important. 

Source: The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion (2012) by Jonathan Haidt.

6 Things Every American Should Know About Congress’ Bailout for Select Coal Miners’ Pensions

From The Daily Signal.com (Nov. 8):

Americans lose when Congress is in the business of picking winners and losers.

Just this week, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell signed onto a bill, the Bipartisan American Miners Act of 2019, that would bail out one multiemployer, or union pension plan.

This Senate bill is similar to the combination of two bills in the House—H.R. 934 and H.R. 935, the Health Benefits for Miners Act of 2019 and the Miners Pension Protection Act—that the Energy and Natural Resources Committee recently passed.

There is a lot of misleading and false reporting about what these bills would do.

Here are six things you need to know:

1. This Is a Taxpayer Bailout.  Not one penny will come from the Abandoned Mine Land Reclamation Fund. The United Mine Workers of America already uses up the entirety of the available Abandoned Mine Land Reclamation Fund for its unfunded health benefits.
2. This Does Not Fix the Multiemployer Pension Crisis. The United Mine Workers of America pension plan represents less than 1% of multiemployer plans and participants and its $6.5 billion pension shortfall is roughly 1% of the entire system’s $638 billion deficit. Virtually every multiemployer plan is drastically underfunded and at risk of insolvency, but this bill would only protect benefits for one select and politically powerful group.
3. The U.S. Government Did Not Make a Promise to Coal Miners. The United Mine Workers of America and private coal companies made promises to coal miners, not the federal government. Proponents of a bailout point to the 1946 Krug-Lewis Agreement, which was established after the government stepped in to intervene in a coal strike and helped negotiate a deal between the coal companies and the United Mine Workers of America.
4. This Could Lead to More Bailouts. Unless Congress wants to pick winners and losers—bailing out coal miners and probably truckers, but not steelworkers, police, or firefighters—this bailout signals what Congress will do for the other nearly 1,400 multiemployer pension plans with $638 billion in underfunding. It also signals what it will do for state and local pension plans that have an estimated $4 trillion to $6 trillion in unfunded pension promises. A comprehensive union pension bailout could cost each household in America up to $52,000.
5. One Bailout Is Never Enough. When the United Mine Workers of America first received financial assistance for its health benefits in 1992, it was temporary and limited to interest on the Abandoned Mine Land Reclamation Fund. But that was not enough, so in 2008, Congress made the assistance open-ended and provided taxpayer funds. Then again, in 2017, Congress doubled the size of the bailout to cover about 45,000 retirees. The current proposals would add at least another 13,000 retirees and add to taxpayer costs, which have already totaled nearly $2 billion for the United Mine Workers of America’s unfunded health care benefits. There is a good chance that the $750 million provided in these bills will not be enough and that this bailout would have to be expanded in the future.
6. This Bailout Does Nothing to Fix the Problem. The problems that led to this crisis are pervasive as 96% of workers with multiemployer pensions are in plans that are less than 60% funded. Yet, this bailout does absolutely nothing to fix the issue and make sure that this never happens again.

Congress can help coal miners as well as 10 million other workers who are at risk of losing most of their promised pension benefits by: preserving the solvency of the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corp., fixing the rules so that broken promises do not happen again, and providing tools for plans to minimize pension losses across beneficiaries. [read more]

Yea, Congress shouldn’t be picking winners and losers.

Guns drawn, fired against unarmed Hong Kong protesters

From Free Pressers.com (Nov. 11):

A Chinese state-run media outlet warned the Chinese military could enter Hong Kong “at any time” as the pro-Beijing government in Hong Kong has increased its violent crackdown on pro-democracy activists.

Millions of protesters have been in the streets daily for eight months beginning on March 15.

Addressing Hong Kong police, Hu Xijin, editor of a tabloid published by the state-owned People’s Daily, wrote: "You have the backing of not only the Hong Kong and Chinese people, but also Chinese soldiers and the People's Liberation Army in Hong Kong. They can go into Hong Kong to provide support at any time."

A protester on Monday was badly wounded when he was shot at close range by a police officer in an incident that was shown on Facebook live. He was the third person shot by Hong Kong police since the protests began.

The BBC reported: “Footage posted on Facebook showed the officer drawing his gun before grappling with a man at a roadblock. When another man approached wearing a face mask, the officer fired at him, hitting him in the torso. The officer fired twice more, but there were no injuries. After the shooting, footage showed the 21-year old protester lying with his eyes wide open and with blood around him. He has undergone surgery and remains in a critical condition, a Hospital Authority spokesman told the BBC.”

At a Monday news conference, Hong Kong Chief Executive Carrie Lam referred to pro-democracy activists as enemies of the people. [read more]

It does sound like Berlin Germany in the Soviet days.

More articles on China:

• Challenging Beijing’s Distortions About Human Rights in China
• China using supercomputers, 5G tech for total control
• How Beijing Controls Chinese Citizens Through Family, Education, and Speech
• China Fires Shot Across Bow With New Aircraft Carrier
• China blocked lived Dem debate when Xinjiang came up
• Before Christian missionaries reached Korea, China was there
• China to rewrite Quran, Bible to fit 'socialist values'
• Co-Opting China’s Churches
• Chinese Pastor Sentenced to 9 Years in Prison Amid Renewed Persecution
• China’s Repression of the Uighurs Merits a Strong Human Rights Response
• Analyst warns of overlooked threats from China, rogue proxies
• Pompeo Warns of China’s Hidden Influence in America
• China’s Coronavirus Response Shows the Weakness of Authoritarianism
• Assessing Beijing’s Power: A Blueprint for the U.S. Response to China over the Next Decades
• China’s Government Is Like Something Out of ‘1984’

Facebook Reveals Another Leak: 100 Developers Had Access to User Data

From Breitbart.com (Nov. 6):

Facebook has revealed yet another data leak, this time stating that up to 100 third party developers still had access to users’ data through private groups.

Business Insider reports that over a year after Facebook cracked down on the amount of user data that third parties could access, the firm has found that some app developers still had access to people’s data through Facebook Groups. Facebook tightened its rules around user data following the Cambridge Analytica scandal, and in 2018, app developers’ access to groups was restricted to content rather than data of individuals belonging to those groups.

Facebook’s director of platform partnerships Konstantinos Papamiltiadis published a blog post this week admitting that the new rule relating to groups had not been uniformly implemented and roughly 100 app developers still had access to group members’ personal data.

Papamiltiadis stated in the blog post that there was “no evidence of abuse” but that at least 11 developers had accessed the data in the last 60 days. [read more]

EXCLUSIVE: This Is How the U.S. Military’s Massive Facial Recognition System Works

From One Zero.medium.com (Nov. 6):

Over the last 15 years, the United States military has developed a new addition to its arsenal. The weapon is deployed around the world, largely invisible, and grows more powerful by the day.

That weapon is a vast database, packed with millions of images of faces, irises, fingerprints, and DNA data — a biometric dragnet of anyone who has come in contact with the U.S. military abroad. The 7.4 million identities in the database range from suspected terrorists in active military zones to allied soldiers training with U.S. forces.

“Denying our adversaries anonymity allows us to focus our lethality. It’s like ripping the camouflage netting off the enemy ammunition dump,” wrote Glenn Krizay, director of the Defense Forensics and Biometrics Agency, in notes obtained by OneZero. The Defense Forensics and Biometrics Agency (DFBA) is tasked with overseeing the database, known officially as the Automated Biometric Information System (ABIS).

DFBA and its ABIS database have received little scrutiny or press given the central role they play in U.S. military’s intelligence operations. But a newly obtained presentation and notes written by the DFBA’s director, Krizay, reveals how the organization functions and how biometric identification has been used to identify non-U.S. citizens on the battlefield thousands of times in the first half of 2019 alone. ABIS also allows military branches to flag individuals of interest, putting them on a so-called “Biometrically Enabled Watch List” (BEWL). Once flagged, these individuals can be identified through surveillance systems on battlefields, near borders around the world, and on military bases. [read more]

The Righteous Mind: First Principle

People reason and people have moral intuitions (including moral emotions), but what is the relationship among these processes? Plato believed that reason could and should be the master; Jefferson believed that the two processes were equal partners (head and heart) ruling a divided empire; Hume believed that reason was (and was only fit to be) the servant of the passions. In this chapter I [the author] tried to show that Hume was right:

• The mind is divided into parts, like a rider (controlled processes) on an elephant (automatic processes). The rider evolved to serve the elephant.
• You can see the rider serving the elephant when people are morally dumbfounded. They have strong gut feelings about what is right and wrong, and they struggle to construct post hoc justifications for those feelings. Even when the servant (reasoning) comes back empty-handed, the master (intuition) doesn't change his judgment.
• The social intuitionist model starts with Hume's model and makes it more social. Moral reasoning is part of our lifelong struggle to win friends and influence people. That's why I say that “intuitions come first, strategic reasoning second.” You'll misunderstand moral reasoning if you think about it as something people do by themselves in order to figure out the truth.
• Therefore, if you want to change someone's mind about a moral or political issue, talk to the elephant first. If you ask people to believe something that violates their intuitions, they will devote their efforts to finding an escape hatch—a reason to doubt your argument or conclusion. They will almost always succeed.

The first principle of moral psychology is Intuitions come first, strategic reasoning second. In support of this principle, I reviewed six areas of experimental research demonstrating that:

• Brains evaluate instantly and constantly.
• Social and political judgments depend heavily on quick intuitive flashes.
• Our bodily states sometimes influence our moral judgments. Bad smells and tastes can make people more judgmental (as can anything that makes people think about purity and cleanliness).
• Psychopaths reason but don't feel (and are severely deficient morally).
• Babies feel but don't reason (and have the beginnings of morality).
• Affective reactions are in the right place at the right time in the brain.

Putting all six together gives us a pretty clear portrait of the rider and the elephant, and the roles they play in our righteous minds. The elephant (automatic processes) is where most of the action is in moral psychology. Reasoning matters, of course, particularly between people, and particularly when reasons trigger new intuitions. Elephants rule, but they are neither dumb nor despotic. Intuitions can be shaped by reasoning, especially when reasons are embedded in a friendly conversation or an emotionally compelling novel, movie, or news story.

How moral thinking is more like a politician searching for votes than a scientist searching for truth:

• We are obsessively concerned about what others think of us, although much of the concern is unconscious and invisible to us.
• Conscious reasoning functions like a press secretary who automatically justifies any position taken by the president.
• With the help of our press secretary, we are able to lie and cheat often, and then cover it up so effectively that we convince even ourselves.
• Reasoning can take us to almost any conclusion we want to reach, because we ask “Can I believe it?” when we want to believe something, but “Must I believe it?” when we don't want to believe. The answer is almost always yes to the first question and no to the second.
• In moral and political matters we are often groupish, rather than selfish. We deploy our reasoning skills to support our team, and to demonstrate commitment to our team.

I concluded by warning that the worship of reason, which is sometimes found in philosophical and scientific circles, is a delusion. It is an example of faith in something that does not exist. I urged instead a more intuitionist approach to morality and moral education, one that is more humble about the abilities of individuals, and more attuned to the contexts and social systems that enable people to think and act well.

Source: The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion (2012) by Jonathan Haidt.

The Universe Might Be a Giant Loop

From Live Science.com (Nov. 4):

Everything we think we know about the shape of the universe could be wrong. Instead of being flat like a bedsheet, our universe may be curved, like a massive, inflated balloon, according to a new study.

That's the upshot of a new paper published today (Nov. 4) in the journal Nature Astronomy, which looks at data from the cosmic microwave background (CMB), the faint echo of the Big Bang. But not everyone is convinced; the new findings, based on data released in 2018, contradict both years of conventional wisdom and another recent study based on that same CMB data set.

If the universe is curved, according to the new paper, it curves gently. That slow bending isn't important for moving around our lives, or solar system, or even our galaxy. But travel beyond all of that, outside our galactic neighborhood, far into the deep blackness, and eventually — moving in a straight line — you'll loop around and end up right back where you started. Cosmologists call this idea the "closed universe." It's been around for a while, but it doesn't fit with existing theories of how the universe works. So it's been largely rejected in favor of a "flat universe" that extends without boundary in every direction and doesn't loop around on itself. Now, an anomaly in data from the best-ever measurement of the CMB offers solid (but not absolutely conclusive) evidence that the universe is closed after all, according to the authors: University of Manchester cosmologist Eleonora Di Valentino, Sapienza University of Rome cosmologist Alessandro Melchiorri and Johns Hopkins University cosmologist Joseph Silk. [read more]

DEMOCRATS TRY TO PULL A FAST ONE AFTER LOSING IMPEACHMENT, REPUBLICANS SHUTS IT DOWN IMMEDIATELY

From Think America.com (Feb. 7):

After the pitiful failure of the Democrats’ impeachment sham, they tried to pull a last-ditch effort to punish President Trump.

Senator Joe Manchin proposed the idea of censuring President Trump since they failed to convict him in the impeachment trial.

Manchin truly believed that a “bipartisan majority of this body would vote to censure President Trump.” Get real. The Republicans hold firm that President Trump didn’t do anything wrong. There’s no way they’re going to vote to censure him.

Manchin proposed, “Censure would allow this body to unite across party lines and as an equal branch of government to formally denounce the President’s actions and hold him accountable. The most dangerous, the most troubling to me, is the false claim that the President can do no wrong, that he is above the law and if it’s good for the reelection of the President that it’s good for our country. That is simply preposterous.”

…………….

Schumer continued, “I think the reason McConnell doesn’t want to bring it on the floor is our Republican colleagues — so many of them — are so afraid of even saying he was wrong that they don’t want to have a vote on it.”

That is not true Senators Lamar Alexander, Collins, and Murkowski have all said they didn’t agree with how the President handled the situation with Ukraine.

…………….

Republicans have made it clear that there is ZERO chance that the Senate will censure President Trump and therefore this ridiculous last-ditch effort from the Democrats has failed miserably. [read more]

Just like the Dems. I think Pelosi should be censored for ripping up the state of the union speech. That is against House rules specifically 18 USC 2071 rule. According to the rule she should be fined or serve some time which probably won’t happen since the Dems are above the law and they are the House majority.

Nation’s Report Card ‘Must Be America’s Wake-Up Call,’ Betsy DeVos Says

From The Daily Signal.com (Oct. 30):

Education Secretary Betsy DeVos criticized the state of American students’ education Wednesday, saying the United States is in a “student achievement crisis.”

DeVos referred to the 2019 Nation’s Report Card, a national assessment of U.S. students’ academic understandings and abilities released Wednesday. The report found that between 2017 and 2019, reading and mathematics scores lowered for all students, except for mathematics scores for fourth-graders.

“Every American family needs to open the Nation’s Report Card this year and think about what it means for their child and for our country’s future,” DeVos said in a statement provided to The Daily Caller News Foundation.

“The results are, frankly, devastating. This country is in a student achievement crisis, and over the past decade it has continued to worsen, especially for our most vulnerable students.”

DeVos warned that “this must be America’s wake-up call.”

“We cannot abide these poor results any longer,” the secretary of education said. “We can neither excuse them away nor simply throw more money at the problem.”

DeVos said the Trump administration has “a transformational plan” that aims to expand education freedom and help students “break out of the one-size-fits-all system” and “unlock their full potential.”

“They deserve it. Parents demand it. And, it’s the only way to bring about the change our country desperately needs,” she said. [source]

Other articles on education:

• Trump's order limits Washington 'dictates' on K-12 schools
• SCHOOL TEACHER UNDER INVESTIGATION AFTER WHAT SHE TOLD HER STUDENTS
• School Choice Lets Parents Pick Safer Schools

Pelosi Rips Trump’s State of the Union Address

From The Daily Signal.com (Feb. 5):

Immediately after President Donald Trump finished his State of the Union address, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, standing behind him, tore his speech in half while the eyes of the nation watched.

In four separate motions Tuesday night as lawmakers applauded the president, Pelosi tore the pages of her copy of the speech in two.

“Speaker Pelosi just ripped up: One of our last surviving Tuskegee Airmen. The survival of a child born at 21 weeks. The mourning families of Rocky Jones and Kayla Mueller. A service member’s reunion with his family. That’s her legacy,” the White House tweeted.

Pelosi’s demonstration followed Trump’s ignoring her outstretched hand after giving her a copy of his speech as he arrived at the podium in the House chamber about an hour and a half earlier. The speaker, who led House Democrats in impeaching the president, grimaced at this. [read more]

I think her ripping of the speech was a petty and classless act. I also think it was staged for far-Left loonies of her party. She did it slowly and one page at a time. If she was really mad she would have done it quick and ripped all the pages at one time. She might have also ripped the pages again. Asked why she did it Pelosi said “it was the courteous thing to do considering the alternatives.” The alternatives? Hmmm. I think the secret service might want to investigate that remark because that sounds like a threat.

As for President Trump ignoring her outstretched hand, I am not sure he seen it because he was turning around already when she outstretched it. I am giving him the benefit of the doubt.

More articles about the state of the union speech:

• Pelosi Rips Up Her Party’s Chances – Lunch Alert!
• ‘Ripped Our Hearts Out’: SOTU Guest Whose Brother Was Murdered Reacts to Pelosi Ripping Up Speech
• Guests at State of the Union Showcase Americans Behind Policy Debates
• Read Trump’s Full State of the Union Speech
• What You Need to Know About Trump’s Policy Proposals in State of the Union
• Fact-Checking 11 of Trump’s Claims in State of the Union
• Rush Limbaugh Receives The Medal of Freedom And Why That Matters
• Limbaugh: A Genius at Radio
• President Trump’s State of the Union Speech Was Definitely Bold Colors and Not Pale Pastels and Drew Lots of Lines in the Sand
• Trump’s State of the Union Address Affirms Americanism as Nation’s Guiding Ethos

Myths of Serial Killers

Myth: Serial killers are only motivated by sex.

All serial killers are not sexually-based. There are many other motivations for serial killers including anger, thrill, financial gain, and attention seeking. For example, Kermit Gosnell was hugely motivated by financial gain.

Myth: Serial killers are all white male.

Serial killers are from all ethnic groups. For instance, Gosnell is black. Charles Ng is Chinese. He was convicted of killing six men, three women, and two babies in Northern California with his partner, Leonard Lake. Rafael Resendez-Ramirez, also known as the Railroad Killer is a Latino. Was an illegal alien from Mexico and killed at least nine and as many as fifteen people in Kentucky, Texas, Florida and Illinois. There are also female serial killers. For example, Nannie Doss was a black widow who went through five husbands before being caught and charged with a slew of murders including those of her five husbands, a mother-in-law, her sisters, two of their children, and her own mother.

Myth: Serial killers are all dysfunctional loners.

Dr. Elizabeth Yardley, director of the Centre for Applied Criminology at Birmingham City University in the UK, explained in a July 2015 article in Real Crime magazine that “many serial killers look like a pillar of the community on first sight,” something she described as “possibly the scariest trait of all“ among the murderers she has studied. Many people described Gosnell as being nice. Ted Bundy was described as being normal.

Myth: All serial killers are either insane or evil geniuses.

Gosnell is sane but a narcist.

Myth: Serial killers want to be caught.

According to the FBI, “As serial killers continues to offend without being captured, they can become empowered, feeling they will never be identified…they feel that they can’t get caught.”

Source: Gosnell: The Untold Story of America's Most Prolific Serial Killer (2017) by Ann McElhinney and Phelim McAleer.

There were also five serial killers in the Soviet Union which according to the Left was a utopia. So, if capitalism causes crime according to Karl Marx then why did the USSR have any serial killers at all? China had two serial killers. The Ottoman Empire had one serial killer.

Other articles on serial killers:

• 15 Notorious Female Serial Killers
• 7 Myths About Serial Killers
• Persistent Myths about Serial Killers
• 15 Notorious Female Serial Killers

‘Dangerous and Foolish’: How Legal Vote Harvesting Prompts Illegal Conduct by Political Operatives

From The Daily Signal.com (Oct. 24):

In Texas, they are called “politiqueras” and in Florida, they are called “boleteros.” Broadly speaking, these are professional campaign operatives and political activists who have access to absentee ballots and authority to recruit voters.

Such ballot harvesting, allowed in 27 states and the District of Columbia, gained much attention this year when corrupt handling of absentee ballots led to an invalidated U.S. House election in North Carolina. But such controversies are hardly new, as explained in a recent Heritage Foundation report.

Mayor Anthony Grant was elected in Eatonville, Florida, in a close 2015 race thanks to absentee ballots. Grant was convicted on charges of voter fraud in 2017 that included coercing absentee voters to vote for him.

Mayor Ruth Robinson of Martin, Kentucky, was convicted along with family members in 2014 on civil rights and vote fraud-related charges. Prosecutors said Robinson’s conduct included threatening and intimidating poor and disabled residents into casting absentee votes for her in the 2012 mayoral race.

The Heritage report, written by Hans von Spakovsky, manager of the think tank’s Election Law Reform Initiative, says ballot harvesting should be banned in states that now allow it.  [read on]

Vote harvesting is not a good idea.

More articles on voting:

• Vote Harvesting a Recipe for Coercion, Election Fraud
• The Voter-Purge Myth
• CONSERVATIVE WATCHDOG GROUP UNCOVERS MILLIONS OF “EXTRA” VOTERS – WARNS 5 STATES TO CLEAN UP VOTER ROLLS OR FACE A LAWSUIT
• Hundreds of Non-Citizens Registered to Vote in Illinois Due to “Programming Error”

‘Medicare for All’ Actually Isn’t Medicare at All

From The Daily Signal.com (Oct. 28):

Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., was recently on comedian Jimmy Kimmel’s late night show to discuss, among other items on his agenda, his vision for health care in America.

In one interesting statement, Sanders described the rollout of his plan: “I want to expand Medicare to include dental care, hearing aids, and eyeglasses, and then what I want to do is lower the eligibility age the first year from 65 down to 55, then to 45, then to 35, then we cover everybody.”

There is a sleight of hand here.

What Sanders seems to be describing is the gradual expansion of the existing Medicare program, which currently covers Americans 65 and over, to include everyone eventually. In reality, Sanders’ signature bill, “Medicare for All,” is anything but Medicare.

Medicare comes in several forms, including Parts A and B, which pay for inpatient and outpatient visits along a fee schedule with premiums and deductibles, and Part C, also known as Medicare Advantage.

This is the system that covers 60 million Americans and enjoys high satisfaction ratings.

Medicare for All would scrap all of this.

One of the most misleading aspects of Medicare for All is that it is not Medicare at all.

Medicare offers several choices between traditional Medicare and Medicare Advantage, which itself offers a whole marketplace of health plans. In addition, supplemental insurance is available that helps pay for additional costs and services, so beneficiaries are able to tailor coverage to fit their needs.

Medicare for All, however, would replace all of this with a system that is free at the point of care but paid for by taxes. Essentially, this is not Medicare but Medicaid for all.
……………….

Medicare for All would cost over $30 trillion in the next 10 years in ideal conditions, but still require physicians and providers to take a pay cut of up to 40% and continue working with the same productivity. [read more]

Bernie Sanders has no idea how much it will cost and how it will be paid for. And that doesn’t bother him.

Other articles on health care:

• Seven Big Problems with Universal Health Care No One Wants to Address
• Health Care Doom on the Horizon
• The Cost of Sacrificing Public, Private Health Insurance for ‘Medicare for All’
• The ‘Public Option’: Government-Run Health Care on the Installment Plan

New Book Reveals Trump Has Watched Christian Television Since the 1980s

From CNS News.com (Oct. 25):

In best selling author Doug Wead's forthcoming book, Inside Trump's White House: The Real Story of His Presidency, it is revealed that President Donald Trump has been a devoted viewer of Christian television, and evangelical preachers, since the 1980s.

President Trump's good friend Paula White told Wead, "He had watched hours of Christian television [since the 1980s]. And not just watched it, but really listened to the messages. He had retained what he had heard. He could bring it back and repeat it to me. He would say what it meant to him.”

"Trump had watched the Billy Graham telecasts as a boy and had later watched Jimmy Swaggart in the 1980’s," states Wead in the book. "But he especially loved the positive preacher, Norman Vincent Peale. Trump found televangelist Paula White while channel surfing on a Sunday morning in Trump Tower."

"Political writers were always puzzled by his connection to evangelical supporters but it had actually begun early," said Wead. [read more]

Have read the book yet, but it sounds interesting.

Pompeo: Obama ‘Invited’ the Russians – Pretending to be Chemical Weapons Inspectors – Into Syria

From CNS News.com (Oct. 25):

(CNS News.com) – Secretary of State Mike Pompeo on Thursday accused the Obama administration of having “invited” the Russians to intervene militarily in the Syrian civil war, by having “them come in and pretend to be chemical weapons inspectors.”

Asked during an interview with the Wichita Eagle whether the Russians have “been able to fill the power vacuum that was created by the withdrawal of U.S. troops in Syria” in recent weeks, Pompeo drew attention to the previous administration’s Syria policies.

“I remember who invited the Russians into Syria: It was President Barack Obama,” he said. “I mean, he didn’t just let them come in. He invited them in. He had them come in and pretend to be chemical weapons inspectors. He, he actively worked with the Russian leadership, said ‘no, come on in, come on into Syria.’”

Pompeo was later asked whether President Trump’s withdrawal of troops from northeastern Syria – ahead of a Turkish military offensive against Syrian Kurdish fighters allied to the U.S. – had “undercut U.S. credibility.”

After describing the premise as “insane,” he asserted that “the word of the United States is much more respected today than it was just two-and-a-half years ago.” [read more]

I thought Russia was our enemy? I don’t trust them but according to the Dems they could attack America with nuclear warheads at anytime. So, I guess they were okay back then when a democrat was president.

The Mind-Gut Connection

The gut and the brain are closely linked through bidirectional signaling pathways that include nerves, hormones, and inflammatory molecules. Rich sensory information generated in the gut reaches the brain (gut sensations), and the brain sends signals back to the gut to adjust its functions (gut reactions). The close interactions of these pathways play a crucial rule in the generation of emotions and in optimal gut function. The two are intricately linked.

The diversity and abundance of gut microbes vary war the lifetime of an individual. It is low during the first three years of life when a stable gut microbiome is being established, reaches its maximum during adult life, and decreases as we grow older. The early period of low diversity coincides with the vulnerability window for neurodevelopmental disorders such as autism and anxiety, while the late period of low diversity coincides with the development of neurodegenerative disorders such is Parkinson’s and Alzheimer's disease. One may speculate that these low diversity states are risk factors for developing such diseases.

Emotions are closely reflected in a person's facial expressions. A similar expression of our emotions occurs in the different regions of the gastrointestinal tract, which is influenced by nerve signals generated in the limbic system. Signals to the upper and lower GI tract can be synchronous or go in opposite directions. For example, when a person is fearful the signals go in opposite directions: downward from the upper track and upward from the lower track. When a person is angry, both signals in the tracks travel upward. Sadness makes signals in both tracks move downward.

The Caltech investigators found that the young mice exhibited changes in their gut and the gut microbiota: an imbalanced mix of gut microbes, a leakier intestine, and greater engagement of the gut-based immune system. The investigators identified a particular gut microbial metabolite that was closely related to a metabolite that had previously been identified in the urine of children with ASD. When they gave this metabolite to healthy mice born to mothers whose immune system had not been activated, those mice had the same behavioral abnormalities as mice born to mothers whose immune systems had. Most intriguing, when they transplanted the stool of the abnormal mice into germ-free mice that behaved normally, the transplanted animals behaved abnormally. This strongly suggested that transplanted stool from the affected animals produced a metabolite that could reach the brain and alter the behavior of healthy mice. Most important for people with autism spectrum disorders, they could make several (though not all) of the autism-like behaviors disappear by treating the affected mice with human intestinal bacteria called Bacteroides fragilis.

Source: The Mind-Gut Connection: How the Hidden Conversation Within Our Bodies Impacts Our Mood, Our Choices, and Our Overall Health (2016) by Emeran Mayer, MD

Obama's FSA called 'the new ISIS'

From Free Pressers.com (Oct. 23):

The Free Syrian Army, which was regarded as a strong ally by the Obama administration, is in reality “the new ISIS” and is committing atrocities against civilians in Syria, the president of the Syrian Democratic Council (SDC) told a group of U.S. congressional representatives on Oct. 21.

Ilham Ahmed pleaded with Congress members and President Donald Trump to call on Turkey to stop its “massacre” and “ethnic cleansing” of Syrian Kurds. She also pointed to a new threat from the Free Syrian Army (FSA) which was supported by the Obama administration.

Ahmed said “a new ISIS is emerging” from among Turkey’s FSA allies and said the group is filled with “jihadists” and “former members of ISIS,” according to a Breitbart News report.

The SDC is the political wing of the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF). The Kurdish-led SDF is a military alliance that was a key U.S. ally in the fight to destroy the Islamic State (ISIS) caliphate.

The SDF is also linked to the Kurdish militia known as the People’s Protection Units (YPG/YPJ) – which Turkey regards as an arm of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), a Kurdish separatist insurgency that is classified as a terrorist organization by the United States and NATO. [read more]

It’s good that President Trump has taken the fight to ISIS and destroyed most of the members.

Other articles about ISIS and the Muslim Brotherhood:

• ISIS Tells Followers to Set Forest Fires in U.S., Europe
• 5 Things to Watch in Tracking the Future of ISIS
• Trump Moves To Designate Muslim Brotherhood As Terror Group
• ISIS claims responsibility for London stabbing attack that left 3 injured

Should We Abolish All Prisons?

From Break Point.org:

Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez successfully grabbed another headline last week by tweeting that Americans should have a “real conversation” about abolishing prisons. Though she did later walk back this bone-toss to her far-left supporters, the prison abolition movement isn’t as niche as you’d think.

At their annual meeting this year, the Democratic Socialists of America passed a resolution to start a working group on the topic. In April, the ACLU told the New York Times it wants to defund the prison system.

The idea behind this radical proposal is this: If we could just get our systems right - our healthcare system, our education system, our welfare system - we wouldn’t need any prisons. If everyone just had proper healthcare, great teachers, and all the money they could want or need, no one would commit any crimes.

It’s a bit like suggesting we should abolish doctors; because if all had equal access to leafy greens and the flu shot, no one would ever get sick.

Obviously, part of the prison abolition movement’s strategy is to shock and turn heads toward these other issues. But such a proposal is also a particularly obtuse expression of Utopianism.

Chuck Colson defined Utopianism as “the myth that human nature can be perfected by government.” Utopianism has at least two core flaws: First, it completely misunderstands the human condition. Because human beings are corrupted by sin, we gravitate toward greed, selfishness, and pride without the redirection of the Holy Spirit. In fact, we do this without help of any kind… our sin is not society’s fault or caused by poverty. You can’t educate us out of our sinful natures. [read more]

Yea, abolishing prisons is a crazy idea.

This E-Cigarette Tax Could Be Hazardous to Your Health

From Daily Signal.com (Oct. 21):

Sin taxes of all types have unintended consequences.

A new proposal in the House Ways and Means Committee to tax electronic cigarettes could harm the health of Americans—and could even be deadly.

The tax will slow the decline in traditional smoking-related health complications as fewer adults switch to smokeless alternatives that research has demonstrated to be less harmful.

The tax will also stimulate the black market and move the sale of otherwise legal products outside the reach of law enforcement and health officials.

The health risks of traditional tobacco cigarettes are well-known. Cigarette use “is the leading preventable cause of death in the United States,” according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

New products such as e-cigarettes are able to deliver nicotine without the chemicals and tar that are most destructive to the human body. Nicotine alone does not cause cancer.  [read more]

University dumps professor who found polar bears thriving despite climate change

From Washington Times.com (Oct. 20):

Nobody has done more to sink the claim that climate change is endangering polar bears than zoologist Susan Crockford — and she may have paid for it with her job.

After 15 years as an adjunct assistant professor, Ms. Crockford said the University of Victoria rejected without explanation in May her renewal application, despite her high profile as a speaker and author stemming from her widely cited research on polar bears and dog domestication.

Ms. Crockford accused officials at the Canadian university of bowing to “outside pressure,” the result of her research showing that polar bear populations are stable and even thriving, not plummeting as a result of shrinking Arctic sea ice, defying claims of the climate change movement. [read more]

Oops! The assistant professor found something that didn’t fit the Leftist global warming narrative. That something being the truth.

Other environmental articles:

• The Green New Deal Isn’t Just Expensive. It’s Also Bad Environmental Policy.
• Increased Antarctic sea ice may have contributed to past ice ages
• Faulty Assumptions Lead to Fake News About Climate Change